Welcome to our new monthly blog series showcasing expert advice from smrtPhone partners. Our first guest post is written by Mihaela Rosu from REIvolution, an all-in-one data-driven platform for real estate investors.
5 Reasons to Use an All-in-One Real Estate Solution
Real estate investors know that harnessing the power of technology helps their businesses grow faster, more efficiently, and more profitably. But how much technology is too much?
Recent studies have shown that, on average, companies with less than 50 employees use 16 SaaS applications. As employee counts grow the number of SaaS applications can double, triple, or even quadruple quickly. Business owners can get lost in the golden promises of the next shiny new application and focus on only the potential – not fully recognizing the downside of the wasted time and lost productivity from switching between applications, misaligned or siloed data, and opaque processes. Instead of using the applications to manage your business, you become consumed with managing the applications themselves.
Forget the reputation of all-in-one systems being rigid and inflexible. Out of the box solutions that bring all of your data together in one spot can power greater innovation by giving you insight and clear direction on how to manage and grow your business more effectively. They bring order to chaos and shine spotlights on what works well and what might not be working as well as you think.
Turnkey solutions are rarely set in stone.They get you up and running faster, and they provide a centralized starting point for you to gain the knowledge you need to make wiser decisions. You can build from a solid foundation to fuel the business growth you’ve always wanted.
Here are the Top 5 Benefits of an All-in-one System
1. Save Time
The most obvious benefit of an all-in-one system is that it saves your team a lot of time by keeping all communications in one place. Whether it’s phone calls, text messages, voicemails or email, an all-in-one system will give you a complete picture of the communications with a contact, written or verbal. This is a very good way to keep communications organized and gives you the opportunity to act fast and make important decisions quickly.
And, it’s not just about external communications. An all-in-one platform makes it easier to communicate internally. If somebody for your team needs approval regarding a specific lead, they can tag you and message you directly from the lead. You can respond in the same place and keep track of decisions, rather than in a separate email or messaging system like Slack where you might have to copy/paste internal communications into your CRM to be able to track everything.
As your team sets appointments they can easily update lead information every step of the process. Or, if you are using a power dialer, your team can perform the established follow-ups with all valuable information quickly – making it easier to close the deal. In this way, the system makes everybody on the team accountable for their work and no one has to waste time checking between systems to get the full picture.
2. Better Manage Your Team
Having a single, centralized system means you can easily monitor your team’s activity. No one can hide to shirk responsibility or run off-script and damage your reputation. You can identify opportunities where more training is needed and also easily identify your top performers to recognize and reward them.
When it comes to communications and phone calls, when you have an all-in-one system that integrates with smrtPhone, you can easily keep track of the activity of your entire team by listening to the recording of their conversations or monitoring them live through the Call Monitoring tools. When you are monitoring your team’s progress in that way, you can help them improve their conversational skills, identify and close deals more efficiently, and make sure they are following proper procedures.
But not all work is on the phone, which is why it was important for us at REIvolution to create a system where you can monitor the other types of work your team is producing. We built a specially designed task management system, through which you can create, manage and track tasks for the entire team. You can see who and when completes the tasks, who has pending or even past due tasks. Having all of the information in one place makes it easy for you to understand if your team is all moving in the right direction toward success.
3. Take Advantage of Automation
The promise of business technology is to provide extra power to accelerate your business. The right system will save human hours and automate as many processes as possible. Leads come automatically to your system according to your marketing tracking, and based on automations you can send text messages, emails, and or set a task to make a call. All of this gives your team the time to connect more with sellers, refine their negotiation skills, and become more aware of the sellers’ needs. Less time is spent on clerical tasks and more time is spent focused on closing deals.
With the right all-in-one system, you can set appointments, create contracts and send them to the seller to be digitally signed. Once you purchase the deal and when it’s ready for sale, you can turn around and let the buyers in your system know that you have a property for sale by sending a text mass message through smrtPhone. At the end of the process you can add and track the net profit you made directly in the same system. This is how an all-in-one system can comprise the entire ecosystem needed to buy and sell houses in one place.
4. Customization
You read that right: a big benefit of using a good all-in-one system is customization. Customization can be even more powerful in a pre-built system because you are spending the time building customizations that truly matter for your unique business, rather than reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch.
In most cases, customization for an all-in-one means integrating another SaaS system and incorporating data. This can be a valid and valuable way to get exactly what you need all in one spot. Most businesses can’t expect there to be one solution that fits their business perfectly. You are unique, you serve a unique market, and you should be able to run your business the way you want.
Avoid rigid all-in-one systems that would force you to change your business to match the software. Find a solution that covers the most important elements out of the box and has your automations prebuilt for you, and also allows you to seamlessly add on what you need. You can have the best of both worlds: you can get up and running quickly with a turnkey solution that you can evolve and refine over time. This is the biggest win you can get in business management software, and it all starts with an all-in-one system.
5. Data not drama
At the end of the day, no matter how you have added on to your out of the box system, it should become the central command center for your real estate business. And what does any good command center have? A dashboard.
We saved the most powerful benefit for last: gaining unprecedented insight into how your business is running because all of your data is in one, dependable, accurate place. When you have high confidence in your stats, you enter the state of nirvana we call: data not drama.
With the proper dashboard, you can see the overall big picture of your business. Based on the KPIs, you can track your marketing results, the efforts of your team, see who went to the most appointments, who closed the most deals – constantly check the entire process. Based on what the dashboard shows, you have the ability to adjust in real-time to ensure the greatest success for your business. You can put more resources behind successful calling campaigns and cut off ones that are not producing results. You can identify the tactics that accelerate the sales process and share them with your team, providing professional education and improvement. You can reallocate the budget that you spent on the marketing campaigns to invest more in the campaign that brings more leads, improve the process and procedures of your team, and ensure you’ll close more deals.
In the end, the right all-in-one system allows you to work on your business and not in your business. It gives you greater confidence and frees you up to focus on revenue generating activities, close more deals, and maximize profitability.
About REIvolution
REIvolution is a data-driven platform that empowers you to scale your real estate investment business. With REIvolution you get the best lead management system and make sure there are no leads left behind, to not just meet but exceed your goals.The entire investment process from the beginning to the end happens in the same place: lead generation, appointment creation, automatic text and email follow up, closing the contract, rehab the property and in the end sell it. On top of that, the dashboard offers you real time overview of your business and your team activity enabling you to make the quick, well-informed decisions, wherever you are. For more information check out www.reivolution.io
