What Is A CRM
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the most important tool you can have as a real estate agent. You should know your CRM so much that you could easily teach some else how to use it. If you're not on appointments you should be inside of your CRM. Sending texts, writing emails, logging calls, writing blog posts, managing your website, transaction management, taking notes etc. You should be spending most of your day in your CRM.
It is impossible to run a successful real estate business without a great CRM. It acts a personal assistant for you. As someone who heavily invest in Facebook leads, I might be on an appointment and get 3 leads by the time I get out. Well the way my CRM is set up is those leads will receive an automated text message, automated email and will get automatically set up on a specific drip campaign, depending on which lead source it came from. When properly set up, your CRM will become your most important tool and money maker.
Once you've been in the business for so long you will have thousands and thousand of leads inside your CRM. There is no way to keep up with without a good CRM.
What To Look For
A CRM is much more than just a way to text and email people, at least a good one is. Some other features you should be considering are Drip Campaigns, Website Features, Transaction Management, Ease of Use, Email and Texting limitations etc.
A lot of CRM's will offer you the same features, but it's important to know what to look for besides just the features they list. They pretty much all offer texting, but do they put a limit of how many you can send out? Do they put a limit of how many emails you can send daily, weekly, monthly? How easy it their CRM to use, learn, navigate? Do they offer training? I believe all of them offer some sort of email and texting campaigns, but how well are they written? Do they convert? Most of your CRM's will also have a front end website, but how customizable is it? Do they offer blogging, SEO etc? Does the CRM offer Transaction Management? This is huge for allowing yourself and your client to not only keep up to date with everything, but also make sure you don't miss any important dates. And then some other features come in handy, like sharing notes, with lenders, title, agents etc.
CRM's
Here are the one's that I have used and can speak on:
When I first got into real estate Boomtown was probably considered the juggernaut and was a great selling tool for brokerages that offered it. They were a great CRM with everything you needed as well as great customer service. They were basically the Google of CRM's as far as culture. They became this CRM that had a really cool culture and work environment. I went to a couple of their annual conferences and is was just a giant party. Their headquarters was set up with ping pong tables, pool tables, bars and all kinds of fun things to do. Over the years though they just became pretty expensive and a lot of other CRM's caught up to them. Earlier this year they were bought out by Inside Real Estate, which is KvCore.
I would say the biggest con with Boomtown is the price. I believe the cheapest plan you can get with Boomtown is $1,000 a month, and it goes up from there. Compare that to WiseAgent, which is $50 a month. As someone who has used both, I'd go with WiseAgent. Honestly, if price was the same I might even go with WiseAgent over Boomtown.
Now that we've mentioned Wise Agent, lets go over it. WiseAgent was a great CRM, for the price. If you're looking for a cheap CRM that has everything you need, I'd give Wise Agent a look. This one is owned by Grant Wise, who is a very knowledgeable real estate agent, team leader and is highly respected in the Real Estate community. Great CRM for Facebook leads, because that's how Grant built out his personal business. Another great thing about Wise Agent is Grant Wise does a lot of coaching and when he goes through his trainings, he's obviously going to be doing it through the CRM he owns, so it makes it easy to follow along with.
As mentioned above it's very reasonably priced, at $50 a month, has everything you need, and you aren't going to see much of a difference in your more higher priced CRM's. Wise Agent does have a lime on daily emails, 2500, but does give you the option to buy more credits. Wise Agent also doesn't come with texting, which is $11 a month to add on.
As a new agent that's wanting to keep expenses low, Wise Agent is a great CRM to start out with.
When I started out at Keller Williams they had E Edge as their CRM, which was basically the equivalent of an excel spreadsheet. Throughout the years there was always talk about KW Command coming out. KW Command pretty much became a meme when I was there because it was just nothing but problems. To be fair though, i've heard they have sorted a lot of it out, so hopefully it's a lot better now. KW has always wanted a CRM that they own and control, which I totally get. I also feel though that they took this too far. I truly believe this is why EXP and others were able to come along so quickly, because instead of working on a CRM they just partnered with other CRM providers.
Just talking to other agents at KW the cons i've heard are that the websites, aren't customizable, no blog feature and no SEO options. I don't want to talk too bad on Command though as I haven't used it in a few years. I know the goal was to concentrate on social media, which is good. From what i've seen they've tried to make running facebook ads and campaigns easier for the agent. Personally, I don't like running Facebook Ads through a CRM provider, because it's basically the equivalent of hitting boost on your Facebook posts, and you won't see as good of results as running those through your Facebook ads manager. That being said though, it is better than doing nothing and gives agents the opportunity to run ads without having to really learn how.
Speaking of EXP and others, KvCore is the CRM offered by almost every brokerage out there right now. As a brokerage owner at 1st Class I actually get the opportunity to get this for FREE, but yet I refuse to. I'm not a fan of KvCore at all. Their websites are very outdated and not much you can do as far as customizing. Their CRM itself i'm just not a fan of the layout, it reminds me of logging onto AOL. Their customer service is absolutely terrible. And I'm just not a fan of them always trying to sell you on using their services to run ads etc, instead of just showing you how to.
During COVID a lot of brokerages started looking for ways to decrease expenses, so KvCore started going after Brokerage owners instead of individual agents, which was very smart on their part, and why so many brokerages are using it. KvCore does have everything you need as an agent. You get unlimited texting and emailing. If you aren't the primary account holder though, you won't get access to transaction management or any customizing of your website, besides being able to put your name and photo on the main page.
Brivity is owned by Ben Kinney, who is a great agent and team leader/brokerage owner at KW. If you ever see a team Powered By Place, this is just a white labeled Brivity site and CRM. Brivity offers a bunch of amazing products and are currently adding a few more pretty cool tools right now. There were only a few things I didn't like with Brivity. The front end website on Brivity is awesome, if you're the main account holder. For the agents there isn't much you can customize. The customer service is OK, not great. It used to be a lot better but as they grow it continues to decline. Hopefully that changes but it was hard getting a hold of them at the end. They offer so many great tools, but their CRM itself is so hard to use and confusing.
Brivity has so many tools, it's overwhelming. As a brokerage owner I really liked it, but I just knew most of my agents would not, based on ease of use. A CRM shouldn't be as complicated to use as Brivity was. That being said, if I was a single agent, i'd probably take another look at Brivity.
Follow Up Boss is one that I just never understood. I talk to so many Top Producing agent and they love FUB. The one thing that they all had in common though was they all had a ton of systems and their monthly ad and tech spend was insane. So the selling point of FUB is it is the best CRM when it comes to integrations. Integrating other platforms into Follow Up Boss is easy and that's how they sell it. So say you're buying Zillow leads, running FB ads, you have a blog site, a website, other CRM's, like Salesforce and you want to them all to integrate with each other FUB does that. Personally i'm always trying to condense my systems down, so FUB never made sense for me.
FUB is basically just an emailing and texting platform, you have to add a website and any other platforms you want to it. So it's not an all in one platform like the others. But like I said, I talk to a lot of people who love it, so if you have a lot of different systems that you use, maybe reach out to a top producer who's using it or schedule a demo with them.
I would crush it as a salesman working at Perfect Storm based on how much I love it! Perfect Storm is the CRM that I have decided to use here at 1st Class Real Estate STL. The customer service is not only the best out of any CRM out there, their customer service is the best I have ever experienced with any company ever. Their home page says they have a 26 minute average response time. I don't think i've ever waited that long. Compare that to KvCore or Brivity, you're looking at days. I absolutely love the layout and simplicity of Perfect Storm.
Like Wise Agent and Brivity, Perfect Storm was created by a Top Producing agent. Joshua Smith created Perfect Storm because he couldn't find a CRM that had everything he needed. His business was built and continues to rely heavily on Facebook Ads. Perfect Storm is designed to convert them at a high level. Not only facebook ads though. There are over 20 pre built out drip campaigns inside Perfect Storm that Joshua Smith has personally written. These are the best drip campaigns that I have ever seen and some of these are built out to go over a 1000 day period.
Let's take Facebook Ads as an example. I love FB Ads because besides Open Houses, Facebook Ads will give you the best ROI there is.
1. Lead is automatically entered inside Perfect Storm with their name, phone number and email.
2. Lead is automatically put on the appropriate drip campaign. In this case a 1000 day online lead drip
3. Lead automatically gets a text and an email.
4. Then from there your CRM will task you not only what to do each day, but it will tell you exactly what to say to that lead based on the lead source.
Just do the tasks your CRM tells you to do everyday and you will absolutely crush it in Real Estate.
Other great features of Perfect Storm. Very customizable website, transaction management, SEO, Blogging, Tracking, Training, ease of use, unlimited texts and emails etc, unlimited document storage, ability to share notes, which allow you to communicate with agent and lenders inside your CRM and a ton more. If you ever need help they have a Support Ticket button right there on your CRM with a very quick response time, plus Joshua Smith has a weekly call to where you can ask him anything about Perfect Storm or any other business related questions.
If you're looking to shop CRM's I'd take a look at Perfect Storm. www.perfectstormnow.com
If you're looking to shop brokerages, I'd love to chat, Perfect Storm is just one of many advantages we have here at 1st Class!