What are Investors using for CRM, lead generation and data base solutions? I attended a phone teleseminar about 2 months ago with Richard Roop and Jeff Adams with RealEstateWebProfits.com where they discuss the power of websites and CRM solutions and how it can benefit your business. He started out by talking about how he started off and how he lost deals thru not following up with sellers for offers and being so disorganized with his marketing campaigns. For my company even though we’re a startup I want to be completely prepared from the beginning so when opportunities come we close and we close big. After our preliminary organization and development process we looked into a few solutions to integrate web leads, marketing leads and also our network partners so we can keep track, follow up and maintain. Studying business in school its definately crucuial for any business especially real estate investment companies. We looked around several weeks for a suite that basically handled all of these needs that we had and found a few.
First one was the solution presented by Jeff Adams which bundles a websites with a lead generation tool were you can drive your sellers and have it inputed to a backend system that you can use to followup, calculate offers, create mailing campaigns and some other features. Pretty good system but pretty costly and for a startup company that was out of the question.
The other good one also highly recommended by alot of investors is Supersmartwebprofits.com with Mike Barnes. I took a online tour with this a by far for what it provides, its one the most robust as far as the website, CRM and marketing features, but the cons is its really expensive, requires monthly hosting fees and pricey add-ons which makes it way out of our budget. Debating to create my own with Microsoft excel and outlook I remembered a CRM solution called Salesforce.com which focused solely on Marketing and CRM. Salesforce you are able to modify the hosted suite for your own personal use, so since we’re all real estate we need follow up features, mail campaign tracking and merging, network contact relationship management, web lead integration, out bound marketing tracking, buyers list management and property list management as well as other things to develop and maintain the business.
I took the 30 day trial and modified my fields to my needs and its been working great so far. It is hosted and requires a internet connection and if you also office if your going to use outlook, word, excel and access. So far I was able to imput all my network contacts do a mail campaign and a out bound mailing thru this with ease. Another good thing is it can be integrated into a website for lead generation like I mentioned before with automatic reply templates and information input. The price is pretty good compared to the other two solutions and definately affordable for the startup investor looking for a complete suite. Along with that, salesforce.com offers a whole line of 3rd party additions from other companies that can be installed into the existing host like budget and marketing tools etc. If anyone trys it out let me know what you think. www.salesforce.com
If their is anything else others are using please let me know I would definately like to explore. Looking for the best possible solutions for the begginner investor
Cheers
Dwaine Clarke
Clarke Real Estate Group, LLC
