3 Simple Lead Management CRM Processes To Close More Deals

Are you tired of running your business off of spreadsheets and notepads?

Running your business this way can be tiresome and messy.

Your spreadsheets quickly become outdated, notepads can easily be lost, and trying to track interactions with your contacts can be difficult.

A lead management CRM is a powerful tool that should be used in your business.

It will allow you to build and maintain  strong relationships with your contacts.

In this post, you're going to learn how using a CRM will help you better manage your contacts and leads so you can close more deals from the leads that you're already generating.

Specifically, we're going to show you three ways using a CRM helped one of our users go from sporadically closing deals every once in a while to consistently closing two to four deals every month and how you can replicate her success.

Josh Arras, the Marketing Director at REI BlackBook, shot a short video explaining what we are going to discuss in this post.

So check out the video below, or keep scrolling if reading is more your learning style.

Before we jump into the ways a CRM will help you, let's talk about what a CRM is. 

CRM stands for contact relationship management.

Technically speaking, when people use the term CRM, they're usually talking about a piece of software or a tool, but really it's a way to run your business.

It's the ability to manage the relationships with your contacts.

You can do this a number of different ways.

Most folks that are running sales operations, most real estate investors choose to use a CRM so they can put all of their contacts in one place and manage the relationship from there.

So you can think about it as your digital Rolodex, if you will.

It's where all of the people that you come in contact with, whether they're leads, real estate agents, or appraisers, they're all going to be held in your CRM. You can go in there to take notes, review the activity that you've had with that individual, or you can assign tasks to yourself.

3 key ways a lead management CRM is going to help you grow your business

1. Create Repeatable Lead Management Processes

With that said, the first one is the ability to create repeatable processes when a new lead is captured.

Leads can be captured a number of different ways.

Now, people could text in, you could meet someone while you're out at a networking event, but the majority of the time, someone's either going to call you, you're going to be making outbound calls, or someone's going to come to your website and fill out a form. 

No matter how you're capturing your leads, you need to have a systematic and streamlined way of getting them into your business. You want to get them into your contact management tool of choice. 

In doing this, it will allow you to make sure that no leads fall through the cracks. 

As an example, if every single time someone's coming to your website, and they fill out a form, that lead will go into your CRM. Then most CRMs will allow you to automatically assign tasks to people on your team or yourself. Once a task is assigned that person is going to reach out and talk to that lead.

So when a new lead is captured, a task is assigned, then people on your team or you are notified, this gives you the ability to reach out and contact that person right away.

The ability to have a systematic approach to capturing leads, regardless of if they come in from a phone call, they come to your website, somebody texts in, or you meet them at a networking event, you need to have a way of entering their information into your CRM or your contact management system.

2. Segmenting Your Sales Leads

A good CRM is also going to allow you to tag and source leads as they come in. So that's number two, the ability to segment your contacts.

As you're capturing leads, wouldn't it be nice to know where that lead came from? 

You can segment your contacts a few different ways. You could do it by lead source, so did this lead come in from direct mail? Did it come in from a radio ad, a billboard, or a pay per click campaign that you’re running on Google?

Is this lead a seller lead? Are they a cash buyer lead?

This is all really important information that you're going to want to know.

If you're running your business from spreadsheets or Excel documents, it's really difficult to segment your list.

Why would you want to segment your list?

A perfect example would be if you've been marketing for six months, and if you're doing this properly you're capturing all of your leads and putting them into a contact management system, into a CRM, you're going to have a list of let's just say, motivated seller leads.

So over the last six months you've generated 400 motivated seller leads, but you've only closed maybe 15 or 20 deals out of those 400 leads. That means there are 380 or so leads that at some point expressed interest in selling their property but for whatever reason, that lead fizzled out. 

They went cold on you. A lot of people just categorize these as dead leads. 

If you're properly segmenting your list, you could go run a very simple search to find all of your seller leads that you’ve captured in the last six months that have not converted into a closed deal. Then you could turn around and  follow up with those leads. 

You could send them emails, text messages, ringless voicemail, or you could reach out and actually call them. 

Whatever it is, you now have the ability to go find those people, and you can follow up.

That's how you're going to start converting your “dead leads” into deals. 

You don't have to spend any extra money to do that and that's the beauty of it. 

You've already spent the dollars generating that lead, now all you have to do is follow up. You can do this manually or there's automated ways to do it as well.

With a tool like REI Blackbook, you could send out automated ringless voicemails or drip campaigns via email and text message and let the system do the heavy lifting.

And when somebody is ready, they'll pick up the phone and reply, and now that dead lead is now a hot lead because they're ready to actually entertain your offer.

Having the ability to segment your list is huge.

3. Taking Notes And Assigning Next Steps

The third way having a CRM will help grow your business is the ability to take detailed notes and assign next steps. 

When a lead comes in, ideally they're being automatically added to your contact management system. They're automatically being tagged and sourced so you know what type of lead they are, you know where they came from. 

Now you pick up the phone, you give them a call, let's say they don't answer. 

Well, you can go into your CRM, take a detailed note inside their contact record and say, “Hey, I called John Smith about the property at 123 Main Street. He didn't answer. I left a voicemail.” Then you can assign, yourself or somebody on your team, a task to follow up with them after seven days. 

You could also trigger an automated marketing campaign that would do some of the heavy lifting for you like we talked about. You could trigger a 10-day follow up campaign that would reach out and send them text messages, emails, and ringless voicemails on your behalf.

The fact of the matter is you have the ability to take detailed notes, so when you do talk to that individual again, you can go back and recall the conversation you had with them. Then you can also set next steps, so none of these leads fall through the cracks. 

So now that you know the importance of having a process in place for capturing leads, what happens when a lead goes cold on you? Do you just mark it dead, or do you actually follow up?

If you're marking it dead, then you're leaving a ton of money on the table. 

We created a simple framework that you can follow step by step to help you build a system to convert your dead leads into deals. It's called The Seller Acquisition Map, and you can check it out here.

With a lead management CRM, spreadsheets and notepads will be a thing of the past!