How a CRM Can Help You Sell More Homes

The path to purchase in the home-building journey is long and when a potential customer first reaches out to you, it could be one to two years before they are ready to sign off. They are most likely about to make the biggest investment in their life, so it’s important to nurture your relationship with them throughout the decision-making process.

While customers are exploring the market, it’s important that you do your groundwork and continue building a relationship with them. However, it can be difficult to keep up with every single lead when demand is high. That’s why having a customer relationship management (CRM) system is essential.

What is a CRM?

A CRM is a software system that helps business owners manage their customer relationships. Once a lead enquires about your business, the CRM helps you track and nurture your ongoing relationship with them.

Why Do I Need a CRM?

When you’re too busy to even think about tomorrow, a CRM will help you nurture relationships with every lead so that you’re able to sign deals, become more profitable, and ensure that you have enough work flowing in within one to two years’ time. If you want to scale up your business, then it’s important to have a CRM.

How Can I Use a CRM to Sell More Homes?

1. Understand Your Customers

As soon as a lead fills out a contact form on your website, their details will be stored in your CRM and you will be able to see information about how they found your website. If a lead calls your sales team or visits your display home, their details can be easily added to the CRM.

A CRM will help you get all of that information about every customer out of your head and on record for future reference. The lead’s contact record will become a central source of truth, with contact details and any information you have gathered from your conversations safely saved away. Recording every interaction ensures that you’re able to walk into every follow-up conversation with the right context and ensure that you’re meeting their needs. It’s the experience and attention that your customer deserves, especially when they have so many options out on the table in front of them.

If you or any other salesperson in your business is able to consult with the customer and then remember every distinct need that they express, you’re far more likely to be able to build trust, deliver a quote that will meet their needs, win the work, and make the home building process far more rewarding for everyone involved.

2. Solve Their Problems

For many people, building a home is a once-in-a-lifetime experience and there is a lot to learn along the way. If you’re able to proactively guide leads throughout the process, you’re far more likely to earn their trust.

A CRM will help you to follow up with timely and relevant prompts. You can set up reminders so that you can reach out to them again at the right time, as well as automated nurturing mechanisms, such as an email series and remarketing campaigns that keep your business front of mind. You can follow up with any information that you like, as long as it’s helpful and valuable.

There are so many details that have to come together in order to build a beautiful home. From the layout to the door handles, it’s a lot for a customer to work through. If you’re always one step ahead of your customer, you can become their home-building guide and solve their problems with minimal additional effort. It’s that level of expertise and attentiveness that will help you to charge what you’re worth and win more work.

The fortune is in the follow-up, especially when the path to purchase is long. So, it’s essential to have a CRM system that helps you to stay in touch with every customer.

3. Set Your Targets and Hit Them

CRMs have a variety of out-of-the-box reports that will keep your sales and marketing efforts on track. Building is a cash flow business and the industry has its own ups and downs. Just because you have leads today, doesn’t mean that you will have a steady flow of business tomorrow.

A CRM will help you to look at how many leads you have in your sales pipeline, and use historical data to understand how many are likely to convert. It’s also easy to calculate your average deal size, close rate, and time to close so that you can forecast how much work you’re likely to have in the future.

With that kind of insight in front of you, a CRM will help you to plan forward, stay profitable, and scale.

A CRM Will Help You Become Customer-Centric

It’s getting harder and harder for builders to deliver the types of experiences that customers expect. That’s why you need the right technology in place. In a project-based industry where customers have multiple options, it’s important that you can use a CRM to build relationships, personalise the experience, and set yourself apart on something other than the lowest price.