The real estate industry has witnessed a significant transformation in recent years due to rapid technological advances that have enabled agents to improve their workflow and close deals. At the heart of this change is the access to an increasingly vast amount of qualifiable data that supports essential daily functions, from accurately matching clients with properties to personalizing marketing content. Successfully adopting a data-driven sales approach unlocks many advantages, allowing you to stand out from the crowd and propel conversion rates.
Before we delve into how to achieve a digital transformation and the benefits associated, it is essential to understand what ‘data-driven’ means. Fundamentally, being data-driven ensures that all decisions are made based on facts and insights derived from statistics, instead of other factors like gut feelings, instincts, or emotions. This makes judgments more analytical and reflective of the actual patterns and behaviors that we see from clients, leads and even agents themselves, leading to more effective and strategic actions.
Read on for The Importance of Data: Why It Matters and How to Leverage It for Success in Real Estate.
Why Is Data Important?
Using data offers a plethora of opportunities. For example, data can help automate due diligence for customer or building records and improve its generated reliability, or it can identify the right target audience for your marketing campaigns. Now more than ever, it is essential for real estate professionals to understand demographic, psychographic, and geographic information of their target audiences. Obtaining such intel enhances collaboration with leads through more personalized interactions and boosts your overall reputation.
Besides, strategies become more accurate, improving performance and productivity and reducing wasted resources. For example, suppose data suggests that a lead has young children. In that case, the agent can impress the potential client by finding properties with children’s facilities or within a good school district and save time on sharing unsuitable residences.
Moreover, data analysis can lead to identifying areas for improvement. For example, an agent launching her listings on social media organically may find that engagement is low. This could suggest finding alternative content ideas or updating her posting schedule to more popular timeframes to boost activity. Data can also highlight areas that need improvement internally – managers can analyze conversion rates of agents at different stages of the sales process, thereby identify potential issues, and provide the right tools and incentives for improvement and further training.
How Can You Leverage Data for Success?
Organizations can make more accurate and confident decisions faster and more reliable when using real-time data. But for this approach to be successful, it is vital to cultivate a data-focused culture and mindset amongst your sales force to support the transition and reap the benefits.
Introducing a data-driven sales strategy to your team requires a transformative approach to ensure the initiative’s success. Here are our three key tips on how to do so:
Tip 1: Choose the Right Technology
It is crucial to make sure you invest in technologies that are directly applicable and valuable for your business goals. With a large variety of software available on the market, it can be challenging to narrow down your options and choose one. Make sure to ask for a demo to visualize the platform and check out the onboarding and training offered to understand what will help your employees become equipped to handle the new technology.
Tip 2: Get Everyone On Board
Developing a company-wide digital culture is crucial for a successful digital transformation. Implementing a drastic change suddenly can be intimidating for your team members who may be unfamiliar with new technologies. To avoid uncertainty and potential resistance, organizations must consider how they can actively involve agents throughout the strategic transition process. Encouraging teams to contribute ideas during the earlier planning phase will help you identify ways to digitize existing workflows and enhance your team’s understanding of the need for the new implementation, plus make them feel valued.
Tip 3: Continue to Adjust and Improve
Kaizen, a Japanese business term meaning “continuous improvement” is the perfect reference for our last tip. The philosophy emphasizes a gradual and systematic process is a key strategic factor for success. Once your data-driven approach is employed, the data collected can be used to identify how you can continue to improve workflows and push boundaries even further. For example, data can provide insight into an agent’s current performance and which part of the sales funnel they lose the most leads. Having this information allows your agents to focus on improving these flagged areas. Additionally, data can be utilized to understand how agents respond to the new digital culture and outline any further training – doing so can yield up to 50% higher net sales per sales rep!
Implement A Data-Driven Culture Now
Real estate agents tend to become overloaded with information from countless sources and inputting these details across various spreadsheets can become extremely taxing. A one-stop, data-driven software, such as Property Raptor, can centralize data, automate workflows, and help agents get on board with technological change.
Data is one of the most valuable assets you can introduce to your decision-making process. It will help you to pinpoint meaningful patterns and relationships and make informed and strategic decisions. For the property industry, data can provide a competitive advantage if used effectively, especially in the day-to-day business of property management to improve performance and profitability.
