Real Estate Tools & Technology By realistiQ http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/blogid/d8f8e3dc-19b9-f916-adbd4f442dbfa88f/categoryname/Our Product Information/title/Real Estate Tools & Technology By realistiQ.htm Lead Tracking With iQ Office

LEAD MANAGEMENT

“Lead Management is a term used in general business practice to describe methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety of marketing techniques. For management teams with a solid foundation in lead management principles, the process should create increased efficiency and accountability between marketing and sales activities. The increasing technological foundation of lead and sales management practices provides a number of "closed loop" data circuits, tracking the overall effectiveness of everything from lead generation, to prioritization, to distribution, to final disposition, and then back again to re-calibrate the process.” Source: Wikipedia.org | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_management

 

LEAD TRACKING USING IQ OFFICE

Lead Tracking is the methodologies of utilizing a system to analyze data with the end goal of increasing efficiency and conversion. Lead tracking starts with capturing the source of where a lead was generated. In iQ Office Lead management, you can set up unlimited lead sources, have emailed leads routed by iQ Office Lead Management and even use our Application Program Interface (API) for use by 3rd party vendors to populate iQ Office Lead Management. Once a lead reaches iQ Office, it is then tracked by the system and routed according to the company’s business rules. (See Figure 1A).

FIGURE 1A: SNAPSHOT OF LEAD SOURCE DETAIL

After a lead is routed and lead tracking begins, the lead will be displayed on the “New Leads” gage within the main dashboard of iQ Office (see Figure 2A). The “New Leads” gage shows the lead source, the name of the associate the lead has been routed to, the status of the lead and provides the ability to take action or delete the lead.

FIGURE 2A: SNAPSHOT OF NEW LEADS GAGE ON MAIN DASHBOARD

If the user clicks the check mark within the “Actions” field, they are then brought into the individual lead dashboard where in-depth information pertaining to the lead is displayed. Figure 3A shows the Contact Information and history of the lead.

FIGURE 3A: SNAPSHOT INDIVIDUAL LEAD DASHBOARD GAGE 1

Figure 3B shows the “Lead Sources”, “Tasks” and “Notes” panels also located on the individual lead dashboard. By using the set of tabs located at the top of the individual lead dashboard shown in Figure 3C, the user can view lead contact information as well as other details, edit / add notes, add attachments, view the entire history of a lead, view the different lead source(s) of each lead, view the different drip marketing campaigns each lead is assigned to and manage predefined tasks set by the company.

FIGURE 3B: SNAPSHOT OF INDIVIDUAL LEAD DASHBOARD GAGE 2

FIGURE 3C: SNAPSHOT OF INDIVIDUAL LEAD DASHBOARD TAB MENU SYSTEM

A status based “Task” allows a company to track and manage their agents’ follow up performance and processes (along with the agent performance report located at the end of this document). The company can also increase efficiency by setting automated tasks per status to limit a user’s access to new leads until they perform the necessary tasks for leads already received. Business rule configuration per lead source can be set by clicking on the “details” tab for an individual source as seen in Figure 4A. These tasks are different from user defined tasks and are controlled by the administrator.

FIGURE 4A: SNAPSHOT OF STATUS BASED TASKS

When monitoring overall efficiency of the agent body, the ability to look at company’s leads from a high level is essential. The iQ Office Leads Dashboard gives a company a snapshot of where their company currently is with regard to Lead Management. Figure 5A includes the “Lead Distribution (Next Up)” panel that shows who is next in line to receive a lead by each source. Figure 5A also includes a list of users currently “Not in a Lead Group” which could mean they are not receiving leads.

FIGURE 5A: SNAPSHOT OF LEAD DISTRUBUTION (NEXT UP) AND NOT IN LEADS GROUP PANELS ON LEAD DASHBOARD

Figure 5B shows statistics on the type of contact information that is gathered most by lead sources on the “Contact Information Provided” tab, as well as the top “Leads Received” by type and source. This information is also located on the lead dashboard as well.

FIGURE 5B: SNAPSHOT OF MOST CONTACT INFORMATION PROVIDED AND CURRENT LEADS RECEIVED BY SOURCE & STATUS

Figure 5C Shows users that are halted from lead routing due to overdue tasks, lead acceptance statistics as well as lead activity. These panels finish out the lead dashboard and are great for giving a company a general understanding of their agents’ overall performance as a whole.

FIGURE 5C: LEAD ROUTING HALTED, ACCEPTANCE STATISTICS AND LEAD ACTIVITY PANELS WITHIN THE LEAD DASHBOARD

In iQ Office, all of a company’s leads can be seen by clicking on “Leads” under “Lead Management” within “Customer Relations” which will give you a list of every lead (as seen in figure 6A). This list includes the agent that is assigned to each lead, the status of the lead which is great for understanding where in the process agents are with certain leads, and the lead source. This list can be sorted by clicking on the header for each column and there is a search feature located above the list (see figure 6B).

FIGURE 6A: SNAP SHOT OF LEAD LIST IN IQ OFFICE

FIGURE 6B: SNAPSHOT OF LEAD SEARCH IN IQ OFFICE

iQ Office also enables companies to generate summary reports based on agent performance, leads by status and leads by source (Snapshots of these reports can be seen in Figuers 7A-7C respectively). These reports are best for understanding companywide performance.

FIGURE 7A: SNAP SHOTS OF AGENT PERFORMANCE REPORT

Agent Performance Report continued...

FIGURE 7B: SNAPSHOT OF LEADS BY STATUS REPORT
Note: This is a companywide report which can summarize any specified date range. The “Leads By Status Report” includes the total number of leads, the total number of leads per status, the percentage of leads per status, the highest and lowest number of leads per status and the average number of leads per status.
 

FIGURE 7C: SNAP SHOT OF LEADS BY SOURCE REPORT
Note: This is a companywide report which can summarize any specified date range. The Leads By Source Report includes the total number of leads, the total number of leads per source, the percentage of total leads each lead source generates, the highest and lowest number of leads generated by a lead source and the average number of leads generated across all lead sources.

If a company wishes to track a particular lead in detail, iQ Office Lead Management logs the entire history of a lead which can be accessed by clicking on a particular lead from the leads list screen and then clicking on the “history” tab (See Figure 8A).

There is a report for analyzing leads in detail as well. You can generate a lead history report which includes detailed information per lead that came into the system within a set time frame (See Figure 8B). Detailed information includes the source name, the current status code, the date and time the lead was generated, and all lead information pertaining to the lead entered into the system. The lead history report can be generated by accessing the agent’s detail information on the company roster within user management and then click on the lead history report.

FIGURE 8A: SNAPSHOT OF LEAD HISTORY

FIGURE 8B: SNAPSHOT OF LEAD HISTORY REPORT

You may also generate a general report specific to each user that shows a list of all leads by source and their status within the Lead Administration of the system administration area in iQ Office. This report is good for a quick glance and understanding of how much a user is working their leads. If very few have closed over time, or there is very few status changes, the user may not be utilizing the appropriately. Figure 9A is a snapshot of Debra Altergot’s lead report who was one of the more active users in the agent performance report  which a snapshot of is shown in Figure 6A.

FIGURE 9A: SNAPSHOT OF LIST BY USER REPORT

 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/54d96193-bba9-6b9d-4404b328a1858ee9.htm Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:30:23 -0800 Understanding A Few Technologies That Can Help You Grow Your Real Estate Business
What is Drip Email Marketing & How Does It Work?
Drip email marketing is typically referred to as drip marketing, but drip marketing theoretically doesn’t have to be in email format. They call it drip marketing because it is a method of marketing made up multiple pieces, scheduled to reach the intended audience at strategically determined points in time. So, essentially, you could set up a drip marketing campaign made of tweets. With that said, email marketing is one of the highest regarded marketing methods by marketers today because of its proven effectiveness. It is especially popular in the real estate industry and that is why we chose to include a drip marketing system in our intranet solution, iQ Office. However, agents often spend too much time with drip marketing programs, and that is why we have created a “set it and forget it” capability that allows agents to simply add their contacts to a campaign and let the company and the system do the rest.
What is a Blog & How Does It Work?
“Blog” is short for “web log”. A blog is a “log” of content posted on the internet often for other users to share, borrow or comment on. Google has however, changed its algorithm to penalize blogs that are standalone logs of other people’s content. Blogs can be standalone or they can be a part of a web site. The latter of the two is more effective if your end goal is to drive your audience to your web site and not simply to your blog for two reasons:
1)      The search engines will eat up the fresh keyword rich content you post to your blog
2)      If your “followers” (some like to refer to your blog followers as your audience or passive pipeline) like what they read, they can simply click on a link to access what you are offering through your web site. They will be less likely to do so if the link takes them away from the window they are currently in.
What is Social Media Networking & How Does It Work?
Some people use the term “social media” interchangeably with the term “social networking”. They are different actually. Social Media is a term used to describe a tool used for social networking. The most accurate terminology that encompasses “social networking”, as we know it today, is social media networking.
The effectiveness of social media is often still debated. Real estate companies are doing very well at using their pages and their agents’ networks as recruiting tools. Agents however, are more likely to generate buyer or seller customers through using social media. Where agents are more commonly less successful than they could be is using social media strategically to build a passive pipeline for future business and continued growth of their Social Media Network. That is where a company can assist it,s agents, as you can supply all of your agents with valuable content while they focus on closing the business you help them generate.
What is Lead Management & How Does it Work?
Lead management ends at the point transaction management begins. Lead management can be broken down into five phases:
  • Lead Generation – The interest in your product or service and the potential to do business is established.
  • Lead Capture – The lead’s information has been submitted and is captured by your system.
  • Lead Distribution – The lead’s information is then sent to the appropriate person per business rules.
  • Lead Scrubbing – The recipient of the lead engages the lead to heighten interest in product or service.
  • Lead Conversion – The lead decides they want an agent with your company to represent them.
It is vital to your conversion rate and overall efficiency to have a strategy in place that consists of:
1)      The proper tools, configuration, automation, content and personnel in place to manage each lead.
2)      A task based action plan based on the tools accessible to you and your agents.
3)      Properly trained agents that know what to do and how to do it.
What is a CRM & How Does it Work?
A CRM used to be a digital rolodex. Then it became a digital rolodex on steroids. Now, a CRM can do so much more. iQ Office offers features for querying your database, organizing your leads/contacts, storing lead information, marketing to and interacting with your leads and much more. What makes our CRM so special is that it is a part of iQ Office and it is tied in with most of the marketing tools you and your agents will need to run your business at an optimum level.
What is Mail Merge & How Does it Work?
Mail merge is actually a feature of most CRMs, but it deserves to be highlighted. Mail Merge is an excellent way to quickly establish an individual effort to market to one or more of your leads or contacts via email. You can also use a similar feature called label merge with our system for creating a printable document of multiple mailing labels for direct mail or some other type of print marketing.
If you use the mail merge tool for sending out emails, you also can save email templates for future use. Additionally, with our system, you can copy the “promote” source code from the promote tab on each of your listings that is also used for creating Craig’s list adds. However, you can click the “source button” on the email editor, past the source code and send out a mass email to a specific contact type through mail merge that contains agent and property information along with clickable lead capture sources. A great example for using this feature is when you want to quickly promote a new listing to existing agents.
 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/514ae528-9b21-f804-bd9d28eb45e80158.htm Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:55:53 -0800 How To Add More Value To Your Real Estate Business Using Technology
Agents spend way too much time creating exposure for themselves. If you want to increase the bottom line, you may want to consider what you can do internally or with outsourcing, to help your agents increase their leads while allowing them to focus on signing customers and closing deals.
While the list of features of iQ Web & iQ Office is growing, brokers can currently manage numerous facets of their agents’ businesses by using our solution effectively. You MAY get a little pushback from your agents, but you should consider applying the following ideas to your business and so should they.


Content Creation & Provision

 
Company Driven Content: Drip Email Marketing
While iQ Office, our intranet solution, allows the technologically advanced agents to create and manage their own drip email marketing campaigns, it also allows companies to drive their agents’ drip email marketing efforts through company campaigns.
All the agents have to do is add their recipients to the company campaigns. That can be a done through a very simple process realistiQ calls “Set It & Forget It”. The emails go out to the agents’ recipients from the agent with the agent’s information. All emails include unsubscribe options, so the agents do not have to manage a Do Not Send list either.
Company Driven Content: Website Content & Blog Posts
Every agent receives an auto-generated web site with iQ Web that has an agent blog associated with it. The agent web site alone is a time and money saver for the agent, because it is included in our offerings and the web site doesn’t take any time to set up. If the agents wish to point their existing domain names at their website, they can. If they want to build onto the site, we offer a Content Management System that exists inside iQ Office that offers a lot of flexibility. New and fresh content is important and your company should offer content pages like, area information pages, or even videos, that your agents can borrow and integrate into their own sites.
Blogging will also help agents to establish a passive pipeline and steady stream of traffic to their web site. While iQ Office, our intranet solution, allows the technologically advanced agents to create and manage their own blog, it also allows them to easily import company blog entries into their own blog. Essentially, agents can have their own blog, without ever writing a single entry. They can also have a hybrid blog with some company content, and some personal content. Again, if they wish to have their own content on their blog, they can do that too.
Company Driven Content: Social Media Networking
Companies may want to consider pulling their agents’ time away from social media networking and allowing them to focus on closing deals. This does not mean companies should encourage agents to abandon their social networking strategy. It means they should play a heavier role in it.
There are some free and rather inexpensive tools out there today that can help you get more involved. If you are blogging as a company, you are already creating valuable content for your agents to share on social media that will help them to establish themselves as knowledgeable agents. So, for now, let’s use the idea of pushing blog entries to your agents’ social networks as a company.
Two tools your agents probably are not already using are Ping.FM (It’s Free) and Hootsuite (It’s free, but you will want to get the paid version which allows you to manage multiple accounts). If they are using it, the alternative steps to the following steps will be obvious.
For those who do not already use Ping.FM, you will want to schedule a couple hours out of a day for the setup of your agents’ Ping.FM accounts.  During that session, you will ask your agents to sign up for Ping.FM, connect their existing social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) to their Ping.FM accounts and then to provide you with their login information to their Ping.FM account. Then you can connect your agents’ Ping.FM accounts with your company Hootsuite account and publish tweets, status updates, and blog posts to every one of your agents’ social media accounts with one post.
This does NOT mean you will have access to their Social Media, other than posting relevant content to their pages. If they are sensitive to this, they may want to create separate business social media accounts and give you access to those. Then you could post only to those business accounts and work together with your agents’ additional efforts on their personal accounts to create more business. If the company does its part successfully, agents may gain trust and relinquish their efforts to you and focus more on closing deals.
One of the catches here will be whether or not you want to post a link to your company blog or directly to the agents’ blog. If you wish to drive people to your agents’ blogs, any admin could handle this responsibility with ease, and the effectiveness of your company efforts will increase as it will keep your agents’ audience within their view. Hootsuite allows you to connect multiple RSS feeds to selected social media accounts. This means by simply taking the time to write a company blog post, your agents can automate their blogs to import your material, you can automate your hootsuite to pull in an RSS feed from their blog and distribute the link to every social network they have connected to their ping.FM account.

Company Driven Content: SLWS vs. Virtual Tours
Our single listing web sites (SLWs) can save your agents time and money and they serve the purpose professionally. If your agents adopt our SLWs, they no longer will have to purchase virtual tours for each property. Agents who purchase domain names with the street address of each property included will no longer have to pay for the domain names either. While the cost for each of these items is relatively small, it can add up over time. But time is the big money saver here.  
Our Single Listing Websites, included in iQ Web, prevent agents from having to spend the time setting up virtual tours and their domain names. Every one of their listings has an auto-generated SLW and domain name for it that includes the street address. Our company web sites and agent web sites automatically generate a link to the SLW, the SLW includes social media sharing, it includes lead sources tied into the lead management system which funnels all leads from the SLW straight into your agent’s iQ Office intranet account, there is a branded and unbranded version of every SLW, the SLWs include lists of schools and businesses and their information and the SLW has a mobile version and their standard versions are quick loading because they do not use Flash technology.
Company Driven Content: Online Document Storage & Sharing
No longer should agents need to come into the office to get a copy of a document that is readily available for everyone in person. iQ Office offers secure, unlimited online document storage and sharing for both the agent and the company. Companies can share documents with staff and agents and all users can share documents externally. Our document library also includes a search tool that allows you to search the text within all of your text documents, not just the titles of the documents themselves.


Assistance with Lead Generation & Lead Management:


Lead Management: What Can You Do To Help With Driving Leads?
We have already talked about supplying your agents with website, blog, social media and drip marketing content with the intention of saving them time. But another area where supplying content can help agents' businesses is how these efforts will also assist their marketing efforts, and in turn, drive leads to your agents.
Every blog or social media post can work individually and create an immediate response, but they also work to create a long term effect with constant benefits. Agents’ sites will not only improve in organic search results by improving their page rank, but your individual efforts will remain online, so the number of tentacles out there for developing a long-term passive pipeline will continue to increase and work for your agents.
Lead Management: Nurturing Leads
There are different ways you can use lead management systems. We are hearing about high conversion rates from our customers using the hybrid approach. The hybrid approach allows agents to nurture their own leads, while allowing the company to scrub company leads as opposed to routing them off to agents. This has proven to be highly effective because the company can oversee, develop and refine its response process to general leads that come into the system and continue to warm the lead up before the agent even touches them.
The alternative is to allow your agents to receive these leads that are generated by the company web site that would otherwise be scrubbed by the company. You can configure the system to keep track of the agent as well. The success of this approach lies HEAVILY in training and internal marketing and understanding of the system you are asking your agents to learn.

Agent & Staff Training:



A system like iQ Web / iQ Office offers a tremendous amount of features. Knowing when, why and how to implement them is essential in increasing the efficiency. So, is the understanding of these factors from top to bottom. Learn the tools you are providing your agents. Get your staff involved. Then train agents how to work together with your staff to operate their business at their full potential. This training should come to them internally. You and your staff know your business better than anyone, and engagement is a huge key to success. But it is hard to engage your agents if you cannot speak the language you are asking them to learn. Proper knowledge of the ins and outs of your agents = one of the greatest values you can offer your agents.

Below are a few examples of features we encourage our customers to train their agents on, in order for them to understand and use our system to their advantage.

 http://www.realistiq.com/default.cfm/page/blog/cat/entrydisplay/entryid/4bfd2b99-f484-af79-69a2ff4aae915a15.htm Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:12:53 -0800