By adopting a top-notch Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, you’re not only opening doors to acquiring new customers and nurturing existing relationships but also transforming the way you operate. Beyond its core function of customer management, a CRM can unleash a wave of positive change, transforming your decision-making, accelerating your operations, and turbocharging your revenue pipeline.
After gathering insights and feedback from thousands of our customers, we’ve identified seven key benefits that await you on your CRM journey.
1. Build a prospect database and grow your business
New customers are a key ingredient of continued growth, but they are not easy, or cheap, to come by. That is exactly why you need a system that helps you build your prospects and make the most out of every lead that comes your way.
According to Forrester Research, a properly implemented CRM can generate a 245% ROI for your business.
A feature-rich CRM will empower you to register new vendors, market your properties both online and off, register and action next steps with your buyer applicants, and accelerate sales and tenancy progression, all while delivering a personalised sales journey for each and every customer to help you close business faster and deliver higher revenue.
2. Generate new business by mining your customer database
According to Zendesk, 30% of marketers say having disparate data sources is a main reason why they can’t glean useful insights from customer data.
Which is why your CRM should be more than just a platform for tracking existing business. A great CRM will store all your data in a single, centralised database that you can mine intelligently with search features that funnel relevant data from across all your businesses and offer smart cross-referencing, from sales and lettings to property management, so you can maximise your investments and grow your prospect list.
3. Deliver targeted and personalised marketing
Deloitte research found that 85% of businesses agree that efficient data management is crucial to customised communication.
Winning new business becomes much easier with a CRM that is able to segment your data whilst intelligently matching buyers and properties, ensuring that you market the right content to the right audience at the right time.
4. Gain greater insights
Nucleus Research found that data accessibility for salespeople shortens their sales cycles by 8-14%.
Linking reporting with outcomes is a crucial aspect of a high-performing CRM. A good CRM will not only provide static reports, but it will also allow agents to customise their data with greater flexibility, providing greater insights that can improve conversion rates and drive revenue growth.
By leveraging powerful analytical capabilities, you can shorten your sales cycles and gain a competitive edge in the market. You can use your CRM to discover areas in high demand, keep a close eye on your current instructions, identify those at risk of withdrawal, and track your conversion-to-instruction performance. A high-performing CRM will enable you to make effective insight-driven decisions, capturing every opportunity and increasing productivity. By drawing property data from multiple sources and using an integrated suite of property analytics tools to track, report, and act on key performance insights critical to your business, you can improve your conversion rates and drive revenue growth.
Companies whose decision-making is data-driven are more productive and up to 6% more profitable than those that don’t rely on data (Harvard Business)
5. Improve customer experiences
Research from the Rockefeller Corporation into why customers leave showed that 68% of customers leave because they feel that companies do not care about them.
A powerful CRM will turn hundreds of manual processes into automated ones, including support processes. Leverage your CRM to move to omnichannel, automated service offerings (phone, web, social) with 24/7 access so that your customers can engage with you all hours of the day and night.
Most of the important and time-critical customer service requirements of your agency can be entirely automated within a CRM, leaving your agents with more time to personalise and interact directly with customers.
6. Increase productivity and drive cost savings
A CRM can help align your teams with actionable reports and insights; streamline workflows and task plans so you follow-up, nurture and re-engage customers at optimum times.
Furthermore, according to SuperOffice, 52% of companies say CRMs could reduce the silos in customer data, which helps to ensure that data collection is quick, easy, and automated where possible so that no opportunities are missed.
7. Meet the demands of today and tomorrow
Data from strategic marketing planners DMI Target Media Inc. reveals that Generation Z – people born loosely between 1995 and 2010 – would reach up to 40% of all consumers by 2020, and according to BofA Global Research, this growing consumer segment will surpass millennials in spending power by 2031.
Your future customers are digital natives, having grown up in a world of digital content and online commercial interactions, and they will have different expectations of how customer engagements take place than you are currently used to. With the competition adopting more advanced CRM solutions, agencies with an underperforming system in place, or without a CRM entirely, risk being left behind. In short, your agency will underperform and so will your bottom line.
That’s a risky place to be, as agencies in this sphere run the risk of becoming obsolete as customers are lured by ever-available, ever-attentive competitors, incrementally leading to a gradual reduction in profit and cash flow.
Find out more in the Estate Agency CRM Buyer’s Guide (2023 Edition)
Looking for the perfect CRM for your agency? We’ve got you covered. For over 25 years, Reapit has been helping estate and lettings agents all around the world put growth on repeat. Download your free copy of the Ultimate Estate Agency CRM Buyer’s Guide (2023 Edition) today for a no-nonsense, jargon-free resource designed to answer all of your questions about what to look for in a CRM.
