The fast-paced digitization is changing the traditional sales process. Due to this, real estate agents may feel out of place and encounter difficulty with their day-to-day functions. How can you address their concerns as you work on improving your real estate agent productivity and property sales? Here are 15 handy tips for real estate agents and developers that’ll help:
15 tips for real estate agents and developers to increase property sales
1. Hire the right people
If you want your team to be more productive, focus on hiring the right talent. Hiring agents with previous real estate work experience or understanding of the industry gives you an additional boost towards enabling productivity.
Having a productive workforce will help you achieve more with fewer resources. Moreover, agents with prior real estate sales experience can add value to your training process as they know the real estate business.
Tip for real estate agents: You can make up for your lack of experience through deep research about the industry.
2. Sales Training
After hiring the right people, your first step towards improving sales productivity should be enabling agent training. You must set a standardized operating procedure (SOP) for all agents. You can also set the process based on various factors like:
- Property type
- Location
- Customer profile
An SOP will help you create a streamlined process. You will also be able to understand the bottlenecks in your process whenever they arise. Give your agents a data bank that contains all relevant materials for reference. A flexible sales training module will go a long way in increasing real estate agent productivity.
You must also update the training method, content, and all documentation from time to time. To remove tech-related confusions, hands-on training is a must for tools like:
- IVRs
- FoS application
- CRMs
- ERP
- Chatbots
- Email tools
A buddy system is another way of improving the training experience. Here new agents work with designated sales professionals. These buddies are responsible for agent performance and assisting them whenever required.
Tip for real estate agents: Do attend the training sessions to get clarity into the business process.
3. Set smaller goals and achieve them consistently
Meeting sales targets can be daunting for some agents. Hence, the final goal can be fragmented and made into smaller realistic pieces which are easier to tackle.
Consistently achieving smaller targets will induce confidence amongst the agents and will lead to higher agent productivity. An example of such a goal is lowering the “days-on-market” (DOM) metric to the average DOM in real estate.
4. Practice Routine
Building a routine into your daily operations can help you create a streamlined process for your various teams. For example, schedule all your calls in the first half, reach out to the customers before the visit, create a task list, and more. These routine activities will also enable you to identify which part of your process is hampering your performance.
You can also experiment different routines to find the optimal process for your agents. Once you understand the process that works best for your agents, you can standardize it across teams.
Tip for real estate agents: Do keep experimenting by adding and removing activities from your routine. This may help you increase your productivity.
5. Define a process workflow
Apart from a routine, a robust yet flexible workflow can allow you to restructure the process more effectively. For example, your agent may receive a property request where they need to coordinate with another department. But if they are not in direct touch with the respective team, valuable time could be lost in finding the right contact to transfer such an inquiry. That is why you must have a defined flow for internal processes. This will ensure that all the different teams are on the same page, and the process works like clockwork.
In case your strategy requires more efficient handling of incoming leads, you must be able to organize teams, operations, resources and plan the outcomes.
A compartmentalized process workflow can also help you organize data and audit it if you want to understand how you can further improve your real estate agent productivity.
6. Do regular workload analysis
Having too many tasks in their buckets can hamper an agent’s productivity. A workload analysis can help you understand why some agents are not able to deliver their best results.
An effective task distribution system will ensure that the workload is distributed equally among the agents. And it is applicable across properties/projects as well.
For example, your workload analysis can show you underutilized manual resources in your project. Using this data, you can reallocate those resources and thus increase your property sales. Doing this analysis frequently will generate data, which can help you with better resource allocation in future projects.
7. Smart Lead Gen
When we say smart lead generation, we mean investing in the most profitable sources of lead generation. Real estate firms are now more tuned towards the source attribution of leads because it requires a constant investment of money.
While identifying the right sources, one must account for many factors such as geography, regional language, property type, and so on. For example, if you are a developer in the luxury properties segment, your lead gen channels, and target audience will be different from a developer in the affordable housing segment. Similarly, the population in a micro-market may respond positively to local newspaper ads in contrast to digital ads.
Hence, you must identify which channels work best for you. The effort you put into good leads sources will bring you qualified leads. This way, your sales agents will not have to chase after low-quality leads and hence, save time and effort.
Apart from this, an omnichannel communication strategy that complements all lead gen sources will go a long way. All these efforts will bring both velocity and quality into the funnel, consequently increasing real estate agent productivity.
8. Prioritize leads
Whom to approach first has always been a challenge for real estate agents. In the pool of customer inquiries, agents often do not know the right opportunities to approach and end up spending a lot of time chasing after the wrong leads. Efficient sales is all about listening to the signals coming from an opportunity and being proactive. Identifying these signals will allow more quality leads to enter the funnel. But how do you identify these signals?
The answer is simple. Use real estate CRM software to identify sales opportunities and notify your agents. And whenever there is an opportunity, prioritize follow-ups with them. A CRM tool can track all lead interactions, such as:
- Website visits
- Call back requests
- Interaction with social posts
More number of interactions or higher engagement levels indicates that the lead is more interested in your property. In other words, the lead has a higher buying intent and may close soon.
Lead Prioritization is crucial especially in the initial stages of the homebuyer journey. It decides the quality of leads going into your sales funnel. Here, the homebuyer is trying to form opinions and understand their property requirements. Agents must reach out to these opportunities fast and show a proactive approach.
Identifying the correct leads and prioritizing them will help you increase your property sales.
9. Manage prospect relationships
The year 2020 ushered in much-needed digital innovation and adoption. One technology that is fast getting attention from realtors for their customer-facing operations is CRM or customer relationship management. CRM has been used in the real estate market for some time now. However, in the past year, their adoption in the real estate market has increased drastically.
Developers are transitioning from Excel and Google sheets to CRM for effective data management. With Real Estate CRM, developers have experienced an explosion in their real estate agent productivity.
For example, a leading real estate developer in India improved their team efficiency by 30% and increased their property sales by 40% using LeadSquared. You can read about it here!
Using such tools, your agents can perform several activities such as:
- Capturing leads from various channels like social media, organic, offline sources, partner agencies, and more
- Prioritizing these leads based on their engagements and other related attributes
- Automated distribution of inquiries and tasks
- Visualizing the entire homebuyer journey
- Reminders for follow-up, notifications whenever there is an activity from a lead
- Scheduling visits and automated communication
CRMs also allow you to draw customized agent productivity reports and flag underperformance. This way, you can take timely actions, address their challenges, and help them perform better.
Tip for real estate agents: Use the activity tracking feature of CRM tools to understand the lead’s buying intent and accordingly prepare your pitch.
10. Use Marketing Automation
A Marketing Automation tool can automate marketing and lead nurturing activities. It can help capture leads from landing pages, create targeted campaigns, nurture existing leads, and more.
For example, during the first quarter of 2020, many leads who were keen on buying property changed their decision due to financial uncertainty. While these leads had intent, it was not the right time for them to buy a property. Using marketing automation, you can segment such leads from the rest (cold leads or invalid leads) and send them specific nurturing campaigns.
Marketing automation tools do the heavy lifting and segment leads automatically based on their behavioral data. Moreover, once you have set the automated workflows, these tools send nurturing communications to leads from time to time. This way, agents do not have to pursue all the leads individually and can focus more on priority leads first.
11. Use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Tools
Adopting Interactive Voice Response or IVR Tools is another step towards real estate agent productivity. IVR tools enable you to centralize your calling and capture all incoming opportunities.
When integrated with your CRM, IVR tools can help you:
- Track conversations between your agents and a potential homebuyer
- Record calls for QA purposes
- Route all such inquiries to agents based on customer requirements
IVRs are also handy during peak hours of customer traffic. If an agent is unavailable, IVR tools can deliver automated responses and route calls to available agents. Some IVRs like Ozonetel can also automate customer calls. It is useful for customers who have requested a callback.
Tip for real estate agents: Use click-to-call feature of IVRs and save the hassle of manually dialing a number.
12. Use Mobility Solutions
Site visits are the key to a successful closure. The experience your agents deliver at this stage makes an important impression on the potential homebuyer. During the pandemic, visitations had become the biggest bottleneck for property closures. It happened because traditional real estate sales involved higher degrees of interpersonal interactions. Developers were able to solve this problem by equipping their on-site agents with mobility solutions.
Tools such as the LeadSquared Mobility Solution allows real estate agents:
- Capture any data related to sales on the go
- Conduct online walkthroughs with Zoom integration
- Connect with their cloud telephony IVRs and call potential home buyers from the app itself
- Create customized buckets of prioritized leads
- Access home buyer data and schedule future site visits
- Create data banks for any documentation related to property sales.
It helps developers understand the agent routines and extract insightful data. This data can help drive agent productivity.
Tip for real estate agents: Understand the features of the tools you/your team use. Request training sessions if you feel that there is a gap in your/your team’s knowledge.
13. Keep a track of inventory
Inventory management (IM) is an intrinsic component of real estate sales. The real estate agent productivity also relies on their understanding of the offerings.
So how does one enable their agents with such inventory-related insights?
Many IM tools in the tech market can integrate with desktop as well as mobility solutions. They help agents understand the status of available units as per the homebuyer’s requirements.
14. Plan incentives for your agents
You can also improve agent productivity through incentivization. Now incentives are not restricted to financial compensation for more property sales. It can also be through simple recognitions and appreciations. According to Semos Cloud, 54% of employees prefer a verbal acknowledgment of their day-to-day achievements. Embedding such incentives into the process can increase job satisfaction among agents. Higher satisfaction equals higher ownership of the job, which translates to higher sales.
Apart from the regular financial incentives, developers can create referral bonuses for agents to encourage property referrals. It will also create another inquiry channel, thereby increasing your property sales.
15. Request feedback from customers and agents
You can also record customer feedback. It allows you to measure the performance of your agent and identify problems.
Also, your agents know the internal processes a lot better than anyone else. They also know the bottlenecks that hamper their performance. So, you should also request feedbacks to understand prevailing sales challenges and devise strategies to overcome them. Feedback from both customers and your sales agents is crucial to achieving higher property sales.
It will also improve customer experience and agent accountability, thereby improving productivity.
Tip for real estate agents: Ask customers for any relevant feedback. This will help you improve your pitch and improve the customer experience from your side.
Conclusion
Developers take several steps to improve real estate agent productivity. But most do it without enough visibility into the process. Such opaqueness into the agent performance can do more harm than good to your sales pipeline. Hence, you must take every measure to track and enhance your agent’s productivity.
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