There was a developer and homebuilder that came to us complaining that they didn’t have visibility into their sales team’s efforts, and their sales team wasn’t reporting any data on homebuyer leads, true prospects, etc. Sometimes that’s because they don’t want to report up but often because they don’t know how. or it’s cumbersome. That’s where a great Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) comes in!
When prioritizing your corporate new home sales website, several things must be considered for the user: your messaging, calls to action, imagery and more. If successful, your potential buyer is ready to seal the deal, and even if they’re not, we want you to be equipped with the tools to ensure the relationship continues and a sale is made and you to understand where each prospect stands. Sales funnel tracking and lead management is essential in learning more about your buyer and improving your sales process.
We’re fortunate enough to work with two stellar platforms for new home builder sales funnel management: SharpSpring and Lasso. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t have a favorite, but let’s cover the basics of both and you can decide for yourself which may be the best fit for your organization.
SharpSpring
The SharpSpring CRM tool makes marketing automation a breeze. Not only are we using this product to maintain leads for our homebuilders and single-family real estate development clients, we use it to manage our own client relationships and outreach!
Just a few things we love about SharpSpring are below:
- User-Friendly: We all know that the more options you have, the more complex a CRM can be (Hello, Salesforce). SharpSpring has organized its tools in a logical, meaningful way, making it easy for your sales team to discover valuable lead information and manage outreach. You don’t have to spend $20K on configuring a custom system with SharpSpring – Yellow Duck will work with Sharpspring to set you up.
- Life of the Lead: How many times has this lead looked at the website or emails? What pages are your buyers most interested in? Does one floorplan get more attention than others? Not only can this information be vital in serving your buyers with the content they’re most interested in, it allows you to customize your website, email and social content to be the most engaging. You can also see the lifeline of correspondence/calls between each lead and the sales team.
- Triggers: Some people call it stalking, we call it smarter selling at the right time. You can set up triggers such as “if a prospects downloads a floorplan PDF from the website, email sales agent to call homebuyer.”
- All Things Email: Work smarter, not harder. SharpSpring has a vast number of possibilities when it comes to email marketing. Set up drip campaigns to keep your product top of mind with your potential buyers, segment lists based on engagement or demographics, and use their easy drag-and-drop email builder to make sure every email looks professional and polished.
We’ve only skimmed the surface on all the things we love about SharpSpring CRM that we’ve figured out how to customize for master planned communities, developers and homebuilders. Contact us to set up a one-on-one demo of the online CRM and marketing automation platform.
Lasso
While the Lasso CRM may be less beautiful on the interior, it packs a lot of power. Specifically designed for new home sales, Lasso allows homebuilder sales teams to track email correspondence and user engagement, and optimize conversions.
- Custom Dashboards – In larger sales teams, sales associates may be assigned to specific properties. The custom dashboard function allows Lasso to be customized for each sales team member so they can be most efficient with converting sales.
- Instant Notifications – Rather than frequently logging in and out, Lasso offers an instant online notifier to allow sales representatives to know when website users are currently online. Knowing they are actively considering your product or company allows your team to tailor the message to their specific interests.
- Customized Sales Funnel Messaging: Your sales team can customize the follow-up process for each buyer based on their position within your sales funnel. This allows you to efficiently convey information one way to a 45-day-close buyer and another way to your 150-day-close buyer, saving time for your sales team so they can continue building relationships with new buyers.
There are SO many more things to love about each CRM and while our team is fluent in both, we feel that SharpSpring seamlessly fits the needs of our clients and has the most efficient onboarding and setup process between the two platforms. Contact us to learn more about marketing automation for new homes and schedule a demo for your homebuilder sales team today!
