Need more leads? Here's how to use your database to find more opportunities image

Usherpa Blog - Need more leads? Here's how to use your database to find more opportunities

9/12/2018 - by Amanda McCombs in CRM Essentials

Does it feel like you’re always hunting for fresh new leads? You’re certainly not alone. When you work in the mortgage and real estate business, you have to be constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. Luckily, you may not have to look as far as you thought for those potential future successes: There could be plenty of missed opportunities right there in your CRM database.

Your Database Contains Buried Treasure

Every contact in your database is a result of work you’ve already done. But if you never connect with those people again, that work may never pay off. Studies show that acquiring a new customer can be up to25% more expensive than retaining an existing one. So why are you dedicating so much time and energy to digging up new leads, but neglecting a database full of less costly opportunities that you already have a foot in the door with?

For every contact in your database, you already have some information. Whether that information is in-depth or superficial, it can still contain signs that indicate that they are a good prospect for a sale. By identifying these signs, you can in turn identify which contacts are ready to be courted with timely, relevant offers. There are plenty of reasons you may not have made a sale with each contact when you first added them to your database:

They weren’t ready. Maybe when you first connected with this person, they weren’t in a good position to close. It’s been a while… might they be in the right position now?
You weren’t ready. Over time, you make changes to better serve your customers. Just because you didn’t have what that contact needed when you first met doesn’t mean you don’t have it now.
You made the wrong moves. Not everyone responds to the same content, questions, or offers the same way. Why not try again with a different tactic?

And of course, your database is also full of opportunities that you did make the sale to, and business partners who can connect you with potential sales. Past customers can become repeat customers. Plus, both past customers and business partners can send you referrals. Since referrals have been recommended to you by friends or family, they already trust you more than any cold lead will. Of course, those past customers and business partners can only recommend you if they remember that you exist! Dig for that buried treasure in your data and you may find that you’ve been sitting on plenty of opportunities without even realizing it.

Want More Sales? Maintain a Clean Database

Of course, finding those opportunities can be a time-consuming and frustrating undertaking if your database isn’t clean. The cleaner and more organized your CRM database is, the easier it will be to find and connect with those missed opportunities.

Keeping your database clean means keeping it organized, up-to-date, and accurate. Bad data can waste your time, kill the effectiveness of your marketing, and even make you lose sales. Staying on top of your database is key to ensuring it’s a useful tool instead of a messy timesink.

To have a well-managed database, you need to conduct regular maintenance on it. Imagine that you have a closet into which you shove all your clothes, shoes, and accessories in a messy pile. Finding a specific garment would be frustrating and time-consuming, and if you decided to clean out the whole closet once a year, it would take a full day of work. But if you hung all your clothes up as soon as they came out of the dryer, not only would it be easy to find that favorite shirt, but you’d never have to spend that annual day doing an exhausting, thorough deep clean. The same is true of your contact database. Make sure that you’re entering data accurately and updating it as soon as things change, so you don’t have to lose hours into straightening it out a few times a year.

And of course, checking in with your database regularly will keep you familiar with your contacts, making it easier to form those personal relationships that build trust and ultimately lead to more sales and referrals. The right CRM will make this process easy — or even automated. Inaccurate data can sabotage even the best marketing campaigns, so banishing it from your database needs to be step one to finding and connecting with those missed opportunities.

You’ve Found Them — Now What?

Okay, you’ve found the missed opportunities and potential leads in your existing database. Now how do you connect with them and get the ball rolling?

First of all, it’s imperative that you do everything you can to stay top-of-mind for everyone in your database, even those who may not be ready for the next step yet. You should be staying in touch withall your contacts on a regular basis. Automated campaigns can help them remember you, particularly if you provide the kind of emails or direct mail they won’t want to delete or throw away: Valuable, interesting, personalized content that betters their lives, their business, or both. Nobody likes receiving spam, or filler content weakly disguised as valuable content. In order to truly build a meaningful connection with your contacts, you need to make sure your automated content doesn’t feel automated.

Segmentation can keep that automated content targeted and prevent it from coming off as canned. But in order to perform segmentation effectively, you need to understand each segment of your list: What they want, where they are in the sales funnel, and how to get them to engage with you. Chances are, even if you’re already using segmentation to reach leads and business partners, you aren’t reaching all of them as well as you could be. Identifying which of your contacts are being neglected allows you to build new campaigns to address their needs, and improve your existing programs to better suit them. For all you know, some of those neglected contacts are ready to close — but only if someone sends them the right email or makes the right call. Make sure you’re that someone.

You never know when somebody is going to be ready to take the next step. By using the right campaigns and staying in regular contact with everyone in your database, they’re more likely to think of you when that time arrives.

The Right Database Can Always Deliver

Mining your database for missed opportunities or opportunities that have developed over time is a great way to take advantage of the work you’ve already done connecting with those contacts. Automated marketing can be a time-saver and a useful way to stay top-of-mind with your leads, past customers, and business partners, but it’s not enough on its own. You need to cement those relationships by reaching out to the contacts that have been primed by your automated marketing and forming a real connection. Your email and direct mail campaigns can’t build relationships on their own, but they can be a strong foundation on which to do so.

The right mortgage CRM won’t just keep your contacts organized and automatically push out email campaigns. The right CRM will facilitate that personal level of relationship building, too. You shouldn’t have to worry about doing the day-to-day legwork of maintaining a clean database, or handcrafting the content to go out to each of your segments. After all, your job isn’t marketing! With the right CRM, all the basics will be effortless. That way, you have the time to go the extra mile and form those personal connections that so many other mortgage and real estate professionals are too overworked to find time for. With the right CRM and a little more time and effort, you can get more referrals, build more trust, and ultimately make more sales from the contacts that are already in your database.

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