How To Build Long-Term Relationships With A Modern CRM Infrastructure

Home builders invest an extensive amount of their budget and resources on sales and marketing efforts. Unlike manufacturers of consumable consumer products, when your products are homes, you don’t generate regular repeat sales from every customer. Filling your funnel with inbound leads and then turning those leads into buyers can seem like a constant uphill battle. However, there are ways to manage your customer relations and sales path that ultimately make the process easier and more effective. 

Following The Traditional Sales Funnel Approach 

Most CRM products today follow the traditional sales funnel approach. They are designed to assist and track your salespeople in gathering a group of inbound leads, moving them down the line to become Ranked Prospects and then pushing them through the process until they, hopefully, sign on the dotted line and purchase a home. Each prospect goes through the same relatively straightforward process. However, relying on a traditional funnel approach to selling your homes means focusing on immediate gains (sales) rather than long-term relationships and, in today’s marketplace, this may not be the best approach. 

Not Enough Focus on Nurturing Long-Term Relationships 

The funnel approach is so ingrained in popular concepts of how to sell — and in most available CRM tools — that few firms question its effectiveness. But there are several issues with using this traditional system in a modern sales environment. The world has changed; consumers are highly connected and social. On the Internet, they have more access to information on you and your competitors than ever before, so they need and want something different from your team than force-fed information. They also have daily access to platforms on which to spread the good news — and bad — about their experience with you to all their friends, followers and future potential customers.

Most current CRM tools put the focus on the sales agent and their process. Today’s customers expect more personalized service focused on them. Traditional CRM encourages agents to apply pressure to push customers through the funnel as quickly as possible, making the relationship more like a Tinder swipe (immediate gratification) than an eHarmony connection (long-term compatibility). This can be off-putting for many prospects, especially when they are making a decision on a purchase as major and important to their lifestyle as a home. How many people really enjoy high-pressure sales? Unhappy customers will quickly spread the word.

In addition, from a practical business standpoint, traditional CRM puts a burden on Marketing to constantly refill the top of the funnel with new leads. Not only can this be a source of stress for your team but if anything — like a pandemic — ever occurs to slow the influx of cold leads, it can create serious business problems. 

That said, funnels are not bad; they are simply not the whole story. Yes, at some point your customer is going to have to “swipe right” and move through the process. But there should be more to fuel the relationship than a selfie and list of your best qualities.

Build Long-Term Relationships With A Modern CRM 

Hyphen CRM was designed from the ground up, not only to be home builder specific and employ the newest technology but also to take advantage of the most up-to-date methodologies in sales and marketing, designed to help you connect and develop positive relationships with today’s homebuyers. Instead of being based on the traditional funnel model, Hyphen CRM uses the Flywheel model. In a Flywheel, multiple people engage, attract and delight the customer in an ongoing loop. All of this energy feeds the relationship and keeps it moving, like a wheel. This represents a critical path where different departments interact with the customer and help move them along in their journey. The result of a positive continuous relationship — as opposed to a quick swipe, push and move on — is repeat business and referrals (remember how social your consumers are), relieving the pressure on your Marketing team to feed that funnel. A well-designed flywheel is more efficient than a funnel, and that’s what Hyphen CRM aims to be. 

Hyphen CRM is rich in features that enable users to:

• Automatically pull customer contact information from your website 
• Create notes, send emails, log calls and manage tasks in one place
• Easily view and visualize the sales process and adapt it for new prospects
• Generate and manage marketing drip campaigns
• Create personalized newsletters
• Track campaign and task results

Also, Hyphen CRM, unlike most CRM systems on the market today, is built for both customers AND real estate agents. This builder-specific software solution keeps these groups separate but allows connections between the two. Since 88% of all transactions involve a broker/realtor, realtor relationships are critical to successful builders. You connect with brokers because they have connections with buyers, and your CRM system should be able to track all of these relationships. 

Improve Your Relationships With Hyphen CRM Software 

Home builders have never been more connected to buyers and real estate agents than with Hyphen CRM — a powerful suite of tools, built specifically for home builders, that optimizes customer acquisition and increases sales cycle efficiency.

We have designed our CRM to work for the potential home buyer sales cycle, as well as real estate agent communications and promotions. Hyphen CRM is an easy-to-use platform that brings together all the data you need at-a-glance. 

Learn more about Hyphen’s CRM by watching our webinar or schedule a demo today.