[Video] Building + Managing Relationships that Fuel Business

Every agent is managing three key relationship stages at all times: new relationships with leads and prospects, meeting the needs of current clients, and maintaining long term connections with former clients. No relationship stays in one stage forever, and being able to manage them throughout the home buying cycle is the secret of a lot of successful agents and teams.

Those agents and teams owe much of that success to the tools they leverage to manage their relationships--in most cases, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. In a webinar last week, we took a look at one CRM tool, Top Producer, and learned how two top agents use it to organize their contacts, follow-up with leads, and stay connected with their sphere.

If you were unable to attend the webinar, don't worry. You can watch the full recorded event in the video below. For webinar notes, please click through to the next page.

During the webinar, we talked to two Realtors with different perspectives on managing relationships.

Managing Relationships as a Single Agent

George Belleville hails from Ellicott City, MD near Baltimore. He's a single agent who's been using Top Producer for nearly a decade. George's secret for staying on top of all his relationships is categorizing each of his contacts, noting who's most likely to refer business to him, and how soon each contact is planning to buy or sell a home. That's why he's a fan of the new contact categories in Top Producer.

"It's a very quick and easy way for someone to categorize their clients," he says. "That way, if you're busy and things are sort of starting to get frazzled, you can always go to Top Producer and look at your Active list, scroll through it, and make sure you're not forgetting anybody."

George uses the Active list to make sure he's keeping in touch with everyone he needs to. "It's just a numbers game," he says. "If you didn't have [a CRM], you wouldn't ever be able to remember what you need to do to reach each one of those people."

When it comes to responding to new leads, George leverages Top Producer to consolidate leads from multiple sources. Leads that flow into the system are automatically assigned to an Action Plan depending on the source of that lead, and immediately sent two follow-up emails.

George's favorite way of marketing to prospects is with Market Snapshot, a market analytics tool that works with Top Producer to easily share local market information with clients and leads. "If I had to give up every other thing I use in this business, that would be the last thing I give up," he says. "Everyone who owns a house cares very much about the value of their home. It's just human nature. People want to know about the value of their home; they're nosy and want to know the value of their neighbor's homes."

Market Snapshot is one way he spots warm leads, too. "When you're looking in your prospects in Top Producer and you have Market Snapshot, you can see when people have clicked on it recently. Sometimes you'll see when somebody has clicked on Market Snapshot three times on the same snapshot. That means either they're looking at it over and over or they're forwarding it somebody, so it's an easy flag to call that person and find out why they are looking at it so intently."

How One Team Manages Their Contacts

Thomas Scott is the Operations Manager for a team of 10 in Oviedo, FL, near Orlando. Though his team just started using Top Producer last winter, they've already successfully integrated it into their workflow. Like George, the team categorizes their contacts to manage them better. This task is mainly the responsibility of their lead coordinator.

Keeping in touch with contacts is the whole team's job, however. "We want everyone on our team to contact people they know every 90 days, so those come up in Follow-up Coach," he says. Follow-up Coach is available in the mobile version of Top Producer. It helps you take advantage of downtime. It gives users five people every day that you can connect with right from your phone, via text, call, or sending a Market Snapshot or email.

Some teams also leverage a tool called FiveStreet that incorporates competition into your lead distribution to help optimize the response rate. When a lead come in, FiveStreet sends the lead to multiple agents. The first agent who claims that lead is assigned that lead and their information flows into agent's Top Producer system.

For more on how Thomas and his team manage their relationships, view the full webinar. To learn more about Top Producer, visit their website.