Unlocking the Power of CRM, Notes, and Assertiveness to Accelerate Your Sales Pipeline
Updated: Oct 2, 2023 6:50 PM
Known as a “sales ninja” I often get asked about lead follow up best practices. And if you’ve read my other blogs you know this is a big key to my success. It’s important to build a strong follow up process to convert leads, especially if you feel you’re not the most persuasive person.
A salesperson with determination and follow up skills will often out pace a salesperson relying on persuasion alone. Continue to hone both, and you’ll be consistently on top. Look out world!
Sort your way to success with a CRM
First thing to do is use a CRM or customer retention management system. Having all your leads up in the cloud and easy to sort and keep track of the sales process for each will save you endless hours of administrative work so you can get back to the business of selling.
Working with a CRM is not just inputting leads, it’s creating tags and/or fields for sorting and setting tasks for follow up. It’s important to do this in the beginning with each lead because it’s too time consuming to go back and do later.
Capture Customer Notes | No detail is too small!
One of the most crucial pieces of inputting lead is the NOTES. I can’t stress this enough! Leave meticulous notes, especially the first note from the discovery conversation. My first notes can be a bit extra.
They are long and contain every bit of info I could gather from my targeted questions. But there’s also a lot of miscellaneous details. If they mentioned where they recently went on vacation, I put that down. If we talked about a certain restaurant in the area we like I’ll include that. If their dog barked in the background I probably asked about it and got it’s name and breed, I wrote that down. Why? Because the details can be good ice breakers in the future and also help me remember who this person is besides they have a nice property.
Build a comprehensive Lead summary
Remembering things in 3’s is one of my quirks and you are welcome to adopt it. I want to know about a lead’s past, present and future. Have they rented the home before, why and why not? What are they doing with the home now? What do they want to do with it in the future?
A summary of that might look like this: Never rented before, never had a desire to, currently doing some upgrades to the kitchen, retiring in the near future and need the extra money.
It’ll save you time!
Notes are especially useful and important when more than one person is on a sales team or a manager will need to see how things are going and what the sales pipeline looks like. If your lead calls while you are not available or even on vacation your teammates can read your notes and be up to speed quickly and save both the lead and themselves time and confusion. And of course you’ll want to communicate with the lead through the CRM so there are no missing pieces like emails, texts and phone calls to cut and paste. Who needs all that extra admin work anyway?!
Plan out your next steps ahead of time, make an appointment, and close!
It's important to have next steps worked out. Once you have a lead you’ll need to convert it, and the best way to do that besides follow up is creating a pipeline of next steps. A sales pipeline needs to be moving forward as swiftly as possible and it’s up to you to apply the water pressure with your actions.
Capture the lead, input the lead and follow up. Easy as 1, 2, 3, right? Well if you are waiting for someone to “get back to you” you’ll be waiting probably forever. So, propose next steps with a property walkthrough appointment or an income projection appointment. Don’t just email the income projection because that’s where most ghosting happens. Make an appointment to go over the details together and then find out what their objections are to signing up and address them. If it’s a walkthrough, bring the contract and start explaining it at the end of the tour and go for the close.
Be assertive!
Remember that if you are not assertive enough other agents will be and you’re up against them. Feel the lead out and go as far as you can with them without turning them off. It’s a skill that takes practice, but build rapport by finding common ground and it will help to earn their trust and win them over.
Call first, and set aside time for accelerating your sales pipeline
If a lead says they’ll, “call you back” do give them a call anyway because people are busy and you can save them time by calling first. Generally people don’t mind if you use a pleasant tone and say you know how busy they are and wanted to spare them the task.
When I do follow up I make a task for myself in the CRM. If I really want to be sure to call them at a specific time I put it on my calendar. And I put an hour or 2 block on my calendar on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, as these are proven to be the best days of week to reach people. Then stick to it! Dedicate that time to highly focused attention on your sales pipeline and looking at each task and lead and do what you can to push it forward.
Work quickly!
Alternate between calls and emails, if you call and leave a message one day, email or text the next. Do it in the CRM so you can keep track of the exact time you reached out so the next time you reach out you can try a different time of day. Don’t let more than a few days go by when working a lead. Time kills all deals and the person might be shopping around or sidetracked by other projects.
My secret for long term leads
Long term nurture is necessary for some leads. If a lead is doing renovations, is a buyer or has some other situation you’ll not want to bug them too much (everyone else is fair game ;) Make a regular habit to browse recents articles relevant to owners of vacation homes and send them those articles with a quick note, “Thought you might like this article,” and you’ll be top of mind when they are ready. Call them maybe once a month to say hi and ask if they liked any of the articles.
Drip campaign = efficiency!
A CRM that has plenty of automation will be a great way to stay ahead of follow up and minimize the time you spend on it. A drip campaign that has the articles loaded already and is set to trickle out at a set time is a great asset. You can simply drop leads into the campaign or others you created and get back to the business of selling.
You can do it yourself, or try Vintory’s tailored CRM system: created for your success!
After using and customizing other CRMs we found that none were the right fit or price for us or our partners. As a solution, Vintory has created the only CRM system designed specifically for property managers and their business development representatives for the purpose of owner acquisition. Check out a demo today or sign up! Join the many other property managers nationwide that use our software. You can subscribe to just the CRM and add other sales and marketing services as needed. Including virtual sales coaching sessions with yours truly.