Tracking buyers, sellers, prospects, houses and deals is tricky business, which is why people working in real estate are the biggest buyers of tools and tech. According to a 2018 study by Software Advice, for example, 21% of people who buy customer relationship management software are in the real estate market.
One of the biggest benefits of good CRM software is that you can hook it up to many other tools, so that your sales, marketing and even invoicing processes are all connected and streamlined.
There’s some software that suits real estates better than the rest, though. Here, we’ve listed the most useful tools, which all work seamlessly together, to help you get started automating your process. The ideal Sales Stack will be different for each customer, and the great thing about the apps presented here is that they can all be trialed, so customers can easily decide which tools work best for their business.
JustCall
You need to do more than phone your prospects. You need to be able to keep track of your conversation to keep the deal moving down your sales funnel.
JustCall is a cloud phone system for sales and support teams that allows your agents to make, receive and track calls and text messages directly from your CRM. Apart from basic call center software features, JustCall also provides you with a suite of automation tools and features around Predictive Dialer, SMS, Scheduler, fax and more.
With JustCall integrated, teams using Pipedrive can easily make, receive and track phone calls and text messages directly from their Pipedrive account. The integration also provides managers with analytics around calling and texting activities—JustCall not only helps you increase your team’s productivity, but also helps you train your reps.
“After trying multiple IVR phone services, we found our Real Estate needs expanding beyond traditional services. That’s where JustCall comes in,” says Dillion Record of The Belter Group. “Not only did they help us acquire new numbers, but they also helped port in our beloved existing lines to use within their system.
“JustCall helped us sync our call data straight into our Pipedrive contacts. Other great features we utilize include SMS Campaigns and click-to-call buttons on email signatures. As both inbound and outbound users, we rely on JustCall to help in our everyday business. We’re able to count on the customer service from the team at JustCall to help us every step of the way.”
Read our article on cold calling for real estate scripts to help you sell more properties.
Autopilot
Working in real estate is tough. You’re often dealing with volatile market conditions, while constantly trying to foster great communication and manage your relationships with customers—be they prospects, buyers or sellers—to stay ahead of the competition.
With Autopilot, you can capture, qualify and convert new leads, and then send personalized communications to your contacts and create powerful customer journeys. Autopilot makes it easy for you to build an effective real estate sales process with your CRM and ultimately sell more.
By integrating Pipedrive and Autopilot, you get all the benefits of easy-to-use real estate CRM and marketing automation solutions, allowing you to organize all aspects of your sales process, including contact management, relationship building, and lead tracking and nurturing.
If someone completes a form on your website (for example, a request to view an apartment), they’ll expect to hear back from you quickly. But all too often, businesses don’t respond, don’t respond expediently, or have no way to identify the best real estate prospects to respond to. Usually, it’s because they don’t have the right process in place.
Using the Pipedrive and Autopilot integration, you can set up a trigger that automatically organizes a follow up for leads that meet certain profile or engagement criteria. Here’s what will happen: When someone fills out that form, Autopilot immediately assigns that lead to a salesperson through Pipedrive and adds a new deal in the pipeline, prompting an action such as an automatic, personalized email being sent from that salesperson with a link to their calendar.
Slack
Slack is the instant messaging app of choice for businesses worldwide. It allows for real-time file sharing, inter-department connectivity and chat rooms to be set up.
Realtors and agents can upload Slack to their desktops and their phones, so they can communicate with colleagues on the move and continue conversations when they leave their desks.
Need to share a few images of a new property so someone back at the office can add them to the company records? Just access the camera directly from your direct messages and share the images you take.
There are a number of ways you can integrate Slack with Pipedrive, including through the Dealbot for Slack, Zapier and other integration specialists.
Read our case study on real estate agency PropriLib to find out how they use Slack and Pipedrive to keep track of all their deals and files, and how the integration helps them to get quick answers to client and their own questions from agents.
LiveChat
Every realtor knows how important a role human interaction plays in real estate. Helping potential buyers to set up meetings and reassuring customers that they’re buying the best offer helps you achieve success, even now when over 50% of homebuyers find properties to purchase online.
If you want to become a successful dealmaker, you not only need to provide a unique service, but also connect with prospects before your competitors do it. And it’s worth it: almost 78% of buyers stick with the agent who answers them first.
LiveChat help desk software lets you place a chat widget on your site and communicate with multiple website visitors in real time. Agents can strike while the iron’s hot to recommend offers, engage future customers and answer pressing questions.
You can also reach out to leads proactively with automated invitations to chat. They pop up when particular conditions are met: when a person spends a specific amount of time on a given page, for example. According to LiveChat’s data, visitors invited to chat are six times more likely to make a purchase than those who don’t chat with an agent.
LiveChat also takes care of potential homebuyers when you’re offline. The Ticketing System lets you set up an offline form on your pages where visitors can leave questions and contact details if you can’t accept the chat. All you need to do is to contact your leads once you go back to work.
With the Pipedrive integration, contacts gathered via LiveChat and chat transcripts from concurrent or archived chats are automatically added to Pipedrive. What’s more, if a person chatting with you is already in your Pipedrive CRM, LiveChat will display their details, enabling you to personalize your chat service.
Xero
Manage your accounting on the go with the Xero app.
Bookkeeping can take up a lot of time in real estate, but with the Xero app you can stay in touch with your accountant, colleagues and staff so that all receipts and invoices are filed automatically.
As you don’t have to worry too much about managing your finances, you can spend more time on building relationships with clients, finding prospects and closing deals.
Xero becomes even more powerful when integrated with your CRM, as it enables you to track the monies exchanged when deals close. The status of invoices created from Pipedrive will be frequently updated, so you can see when they are approved, paid or overdue.
With the Pipedrive–Xero integration you can also create invoices from the deal details view without having to send emails to your accountants or copy/paste data between Pipedrive and Xero.
Asana
Although Pipedrive is the ideal place to track your leads and prospects, you could track non-sales-related real estate tasks in Asana.
You can also set tasks to a date in the future, allowing you to postpone any that are waiting on other dependencies. When the day of the task arrives, it will pop right up to the top of your list.
Here are some of the tasks you could add to Asana.
- Set up an inspection for a new property
- Order show furniture for a shoot or open house
- Hire a photographer
- Order new business cards
- Attend a conference or mixer
A successful sale doesn’t end in your sales pipeline. In fact, many departments within an organization can affect the relationship you have with your customer long after a deal has been closed. That’s why information exchange between sales and the teams that take over the customer lifecycle post-purchase is crucial to long term success.
Thankfully, you can integrate Asana and Pipedrive so your sales team can keep other departments up to date and vice versa.
Pipedrive
CRM (customer relationship management) tool Pipedrive not only integrates with all the tools above, but it also has many of its own powerful features that can help estate agents manage their customers, their time and their workload.
With Pipedrive, you can track your prospects and leads through your sales funnel so that you never miss an opportunity to convert them into a customer.
Some of the biggest benefits a CRM like Pipedrive has for real estate companies are:
- You can organize large amounts of information all at once
- You can see when clients and landlords have contacted you and respond immediately
- While you’re on the go you can use the Pipedrive app
- You can more easily stay in contact with former clients to boost relationships
- You can use Pipedrive’s analytics to identify what is working and what is not
You can read more about these benefits, and discover even more, in our guide to Real Estate CRM.
Lead management software
LeadBooster is a Pipedrive add-on that includes a conversational Chatbot with Live Chat functionality, enabling your business to automatically qualify more leads, book more meetings and close deals faster. You can personalize Chatbot with your brand colors, logo, tone of voice and the name of your choice.
Add Chatbot to any page of your website to automatically start engaging with visitors, qualifying leads and sending them to the right people in your team.
For example, a visitor navigates to the property’s ‘for sale’ page of your website. Your Chatbot window appears and asks them where they would like to live.
Based on their answer, Chatbot shows a link to a page showing properties in that area and tells then that you are holding an open house at one of those properties in the next week.
They express interest, and Chatbot offers to put them in touch with the realtor managing the open house, who will share more information with them. Use Live Chat at this point to enable your realtors to enter the chat and start talking to the lead in real time.
The visitor shares their name and email address and your realtor gets a hot lead!
