Hello hello and welcome back to the Women Rocking Real Estate show. Over the last month, I have been diving into all of the core areas of your business – operations, marketing and sales and I have been sharing all of my recommendations for systems and tools to help you in those areas of your business. In the first episode I shared systems related to the kind of foundational systems needed for the operations of your business. In the next episode I talked about the systems and tools you need to market your business with the hopes of generating consistent leads without using outdated tactics and then last week I covered the system’s needed in the sales process of buying and selling real estate.

So If you’re new to this 4-part series and haven’t listened to those episodes, I’d highly recommend you go back to the beginning and listen in order. It will help it all make sense! Also there is a free toolkit available with links to all of the programs I recommend in these episodes, plus a bunch more I haven’t talked about. There’s also some great discount codes included as well, so if you’d like that free tool, You can find it in the show notes or on my website at
womenrockingrealestate/tools.

Alright this week I’m going to be covering all the systems and tools I recommend under the umbrella of Scaling your business. Your long term goal in real estate should not be to continue buying and selling houses into your 70s. Agents that do really well in this business will ALL tell you that they either currently or at one stage in their career hit a point where they had NO LIFE.

When agents get to this place in their career, one of two things happens:

1) the agent continues to burn the candle at both ends and in the process
neglects their health, family & friends or
2) they recognize that the way they’ve been doing things is not healthy or sustainable and that they need to make some changes to leverage people, systems and processes to free up more of their time and get back more of their life.

I have always been of the belief that success comes from some basic principles and one of those principles is to start as you wish to go on. So just because you may be brand new to real estate or not ready to start scaling your business, you need to have a plan now for when you will be ready and you need to start your business with that end goal in mind. So even if you’re new, this episode is important for you too, so you can start planning for your future in real estate and setting up systems, tools, processes and habits that will allow you to scale your business more easily in the future. When an agent has been in the business for a decade but hasn’t set up the systems and processes they need to scale, it becomes a massive and very overwhelming project to undertake. The problem, is that they’re usually already really busy and don’t have TIME to invest in setting all of the systems and tools needed to scale your business, so it’s a catch 22. They need the systems to be able to slow down, but they don’t have the time to build them and that is where that saying ‘ you need to slow down, to speed up’ comes from. It is so much easier to scale your business, when you’ve planned for it and have been preparing for it earlier on in your business when you’re not as busy.

If you’ve never done any of the prep work, sometimes the only way to find time to set up everything to scale, is to start saying no to new business or referring it to another agent, because if you know what you’re currently doing is not sustainable and your personal life is suffering, you don’t have a choice. Nothing is going to magically change unless YOU change it. In fact it will probably get worse and you will wake up one day and have missed your kids lives, gotten divorced or received an upsetting health diagnosis and you will look back and see with total clarity that it wasn’t worth it. Giving your life away to a real estate career is NEVER worth it, so decide today that whether you’re brand new and would kill to be that busy or you’re listening to this and thinking – that’s me, that you’re going to start setting up the systems and tools that you need to scale your business. That’ll be one day for some of you and today for others.

If this isn’t resonating for you and you need a wake up call, make sure you listen to episode 42 and you can hear about the wake up call I got when my youngest son got sick. I’m super passionate about helping women build businesses so that they can take care of themselves, but I’m even more passionate about making sure they do it with balance and boundaries.

So the first system you need when you are ready to scale your business and leverage people is a system for process documentation. Whether you are bringing on your very first virtual assistant or a licensed assistant or a buyer’s agent or you’re growing a whole team or maybe even opening a brokerage. There is one really important thing you need to be prepared for and that is turnover. Although some people get lucky and find people to join their teams that are amazing and are happy to stay with you forever, expecting to find that or even hoping to find that, is like searching for a unicorn. Most really great people are great for a reason and it’s only a matter of time before they realize how awesome they are and that there’s probably bigger and better opportunities out there for them somewhere else – number one being building their own real estate business. So you’ve got to go into your scaling journey with the expectation that you will likely lose everyone you bring on at some point or another. It’s normal. It doesn’t usually mean anything about you, but obviously that should be kept in mind if you hear recurring themes on exit interviews.

Same thing goes for growing a team and growing a brokerage. Agents will always believe the grass is greener somewhere else – it’s human nature. But if you want to keep good people, you do need to make sure the grass is not in fact greener everywhere else. What you offer should be at least competitive with others in your trading area, but ideally it should be better. It doesn’t mean you start everyone at that level, but if you discover you’ve got a gem on your team, be prepared to keep them happy and reward them to stay, otherwise it is just a matter of time before they will get poached by either someone else offering bigger and better or they’ll decide to smartly bet on themselves and go out on their own.

When scaling your business, you’ll also probably get loads of agents come through your doors that think they’re better than they are, that don’t appreciate what you’ve done for them and that think they’re entitled to leads and commissions that they had no role in generating and then they will bitch about you to anyone and everyone that will listen. Those people are toxic and the sooner you recognize them and remove them from your life the better. The reality is, there will be toxic team leads, toxic brokerage owners and toxic agents.

The usual suspects are everywhere, but there’s also awesomeness everywhere if you look for them, either way. expect a lot of turnover of people at all levels when scaling your business. With repeated turnover, comes a lot of repeated work if you don’t have systems set up to accommodate for it. Whenever you are training new team members, it is your job to set them up for success and one of the first ways to do this is by being clear about how you do things. Everyone had different processes for doing things, they take different approaches to things and they have different steps set up. People can’t read your mind and just because you do something one way, don’t assume other people will do it the same way or that they can read your mind. If you want things done a certain way, You will always have to be explicitly clear about that by creating what are called standard operating procedures. You will want an SOP they’re called for short about all the processes and things you do in your business.

These SOPs should be documented using a consistent template that is easy to follow and understand and includes both written explanations of the procedure or process, as well as video when applicable. The goal here is that if someone needed to complete a task and you weren’t available, that they would be able to refer to the SOP and have a pretty good idea of what is required and how to do it.

Now taking the time to do this may seem like a low priority for a brand new agent, I get that. There’s a lot of other things you need to set up that should take higher priority. However as soon as you feel like you’ve got your feet under you and all of your basic business systems are set up, I recommend revisiting this as one of your annual projects. Creating these SOPs before your business is ready to scale, will make scaling so much easier and so much less time consuming and therefore more likely that you’ll actually do it.

If you’re creating these before you need them, it doesn’t have to be done all at once. Instead this can be an ongoing project that you just work on here and there, bit by bit.

The tool that I recommend you use to do this is once again…..can you guess it? Yup Notion. You would create a page called Standard Operating Procedures and then you would have a database inside of that page with all of your procedures documented. Each procedure can have it’s own page that includes anything relevant from text instructions to photos to video trainings using the free software program Loom. Every time you add a new person to
your team, all you have to do is grant them access to your Notion page and they can review all of those procedures and processes anytime they need to.

Yes it will take you time to build it all, but once you’ve done it once, it’s done and there is no repeated work each time someone new joins your team – which let me remind you, will be often.

So creating Standard Operating Procedures about all aspects of how you run your business will save you hundreds of hours when it comes to the next system you need in your business and that is a system for hiring and training new team members. I do not recommend that you hire anyone to do anything UNLESS you already have all of your processes documented and you have a system for onboarding and training someone.

Why? Because learn from me. You’ll get all excited about bringing someone on and start dreaming about how amazing it’s going to be and how it’ll just be a matter of time before your sippin’ margaritas on a beach basking in all this free time you now have.

Trust me, this is not how it will go down if you’re not well prepared. What will happen is that all of the sudden you’ll have this person waiting for you to train them and it will always happen right when your business is going bananas and you don’t have TIME for them. So they end up sitting around doing nothing and then you start feeling guilty that you’re spending this money so you start giving them random projects to do, without properly training them and then either something goes wrong or they do it totally wrong and not like you wanted and you think to yourself “oh forget it, it’s faster or safer or better for me to just do it myself than it is to spend the time and train them.’ Sound familiar? So now you’re spending money & wasting even more of the time you were already short on.

Before you ever hire anyone, you should have a month’s worth of training set up for them to do independently. I’m not saying you shouldn’t spend one on one time with them in that month, but that you have training available for them to work through, without your involvement and that means that you’ve developed a training and onboarding plan before you begin hiring.

When it comes to hiring people, I legitimately cannot provide any advice worth taking. I have a long history of making terrible hiring choices. Any of the good ones I made along the way were a fluke where I got lucky but it had nothing to do with me. I don’t know what my problem is, but I was lacking this skill well before I ever even got into real estate. I’ve seriously made so many bad decisions that my husband has forbidden me from hiring anyone ever again. Meanwhile I secretly hired someone just over a month ago and didn’t tell him and so far so good. She’s my dirty little secret and so far I love her, but shhhh. Don’t tell him.

So you’re going to have to go to someone else for any advice about making hiring decisions, but I have figured out the training thing a bit more with some trial and error under my belt. Mostly error, but some success and one of the best pieces of advice I was given was when hiring someone to take full and complete responsibility for their success. This can be really hard to do, but when we take full and complete responsibility that means that we can’t blame the hire for ANYTHING unless we thoroughly prepared them and trained them. If anything does go wrong and a mistake is made, it’s taking full responsibility for the mistake. What could YOU have done differently to prevent it.

Until you can get to a place where there is truly NOTHING more you could have done AND the hire would agree with that, only then is it time to consider letting someone go. Up until that point, it’s your job to set your hires up for success and until you’re ready to truly take responsibility for that, you may very often ended up being disappointed with your hires……unless of course you’re just naturally really good at leading and developing and training people. But usually those types of people don’t end up in real estate – they end up in different roles.

Alright before we get off training systems, the last thing I’ll leave you with is that when you are bringing on any new hire to your business, you’re going to want to dedicate at least an hour every single day to work with them one on one and as per usual if you haven’t planned for this and actually scheduled it in your calendar, it’s not going to happen and I can guarantee you it won’t work out. You’ve got to invest time into any new hire, you’ve got to have a plan and you’ve got to be prepared before they arrive on scene.

Ok the next system you need when it comes to scaling your business is a project management system with team communication functionality. One of the biggest benefits of scaling your business is freeing up your time by delegating tasks to others. Now if you are a control freak like I am, this will be really hard to do. Like really hard. Not only am I a control freak, but I am also really particular about how I like things done and I have a hard time accepting that there are multiple fine ways to do something.

I know that my way is not the only way, but my way has worked for me in the past so I find it really hard to let go and not get stuck in patterns of perfectionism. Because perfectionism doesn’t only mean it has to be actually perfect. It can also just mean that I’m wanting something to be done perfectly the way I’d do it too. I can freely admit that I was not a good team lead when it came to other people working with my personal clients. I can lead and coach people with their own clients, but when it came to mine, I turned into a crazy person, with stupid high expectations that were almost impossible to meet.

Over time I learned how to get better, but it never came easily or naturally. The only thing that made it easier was having systems to try and predict and prevent things from going wrong. Proper training will help you predict what could go wrong and prevent it and a project management system will help prevent critical tasks from being missed. When there is a centralized place (like Notion) with all of the tasks that have to be completed in the course of working with your clients and those tasks can be assigned to team members so that everyone is on the same page and knows what has and hasn’t been completed, it can prevent nightmares. If you’re trying to delegate tasks without a central project management and team communication system, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

In addition to training and project management systems, you’ll also want to ensure you’ve got processes set up to ensure there is a culture conducive to open and honest dialogue about what’s going well and where there are opportunities for improvement. In any corporate environment, these types of systems and processes are so ingrained in the culture that we don’t question them. But when it comes to building a real estate business, most agents put this type of stuff at the bottom of their priority list or they don’t even have it on the list at all. But if you want to run a successful business and scale it effectively, building your leadership skills and learning how to help develop people is really important. If this is something you’re interested in getting better at, I highly recommend reading the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott. In fact everyone on your team should read it and all agree to practice the principles.

Alright as I said back in episode one of this series, if I had tried to go through all of the systems and tools I recommend in one episode, it would have been a few hours long. So hopefully you’ve enjoyed having it broken down into smaller bite sized chunks. If so, I’d so appreciate you leaving me a review.

Also, if you haven’t downloaded the free toolkit, there’s lots of goodies in there that I recommend you check out. Also, there’s been a lot of agents that have been asking if I sell my Notion templates separately outside of Foundations of Success and right now I don’t only because there are tons of templates in there that are all connected to each other and there are loads of videos that explain how to use them, so trying to separate them out is tough. However I am looking into simplifying the templates so that I can sell them as a pack, so if that’s something of interest for you, send me a DM on Instagram and let me know!

That’s it for now and remember the more you learn the more you’ll earn but only if you implement what you’re learning.

Until next time.

Well hello there, Jen Percival here.

Welcome back to the Women Rocking Real estate show. Over the last few weeks, I have been sharing all of my recommendations for systems and tools in your real estate business. In the last episode, I shared my recommendations for all of the lead generation systems and tools that you need to grow your business if you want to do that without using traditional methods like door knocking, cold calling, hounding your database, or buying low-quality online leads. The week before I shared operational systems and tools, so if you haven’t listened to those episodes, make sure you check them out first.

If you’re new to this 4-part series, you can also download a free toolkit with links to all of the programs I recommend in these episodes, plus a bunch more. There’s some great discount codes included as well, so if you’d like that free tool, You can find it in the show notes or on my website at womenrockingrealestate/tools.

This week we’re going to be diving into all of the systems I recommend for managing sales in your business and that includes tools for contact management and staying in touch with your database, tools for transaction management and making sure you’re not missing important tasks and that you’re gathering the information you need in the course of buying and selling real estate. We’ll also be looking at tools for client communication and making sure you’re communicating everything you need to, when you need to, in order to keep your clients happy and informed and also protect yourself in the process.

Contact Management

The first system every Realtor needs in their business is probably the most important one and that is a contact management system. Now when I say that, most of you probably think I’m referring to a fancy CRM system and I’m going to bet that there’s a big lot of ya that pay for an expensive CRM every month and aren’t using it. Raise your hand if that’s you? I hear this all the time. Agents buy these programs thinking there’s some sort of magical way they’re going to generate leads for them and sadly a lot of the companies tell you that in their sales material. So let’s clear up some misconceptions around CRMS and set the record straight.

For starters CRM stands for customer relationship management. It is a tool to help you manage relationships with your clients and potential leads and the data associated with them. But it doesn’t generate leads for you, it just gives you a tool to house contacts, keep data about those contacts and tell you when you need to communicate with those contacts to stay top of mind and establish loyalty. Some of them also include an email component that actually sends drip campaigns automatically to people as well as newsletters. However the emails created inside CRM programs tend to be very generic looking. They are usually just text based and don’t allow the ability to add images, videos, text formatting, etc. and it’s those things that can really improve the likelihood of someone actually reading your emails. Lastly the deliverability can be a challenge because the CRM systems are not classified as email service providers and therefore they end up in people’s junk folders more often than not.….but I’m getting off topic here, because as we were talking about CRMS and lead generation.

If you’re looking into a CRM and it claims anything about lead generation, look into exactly what that means. How is it going to generate leads? Most of the ones that claim this are actually just selling you online leads and taking a cut of your commissions, They then provide a CRM system to house and nurture those leads. So a CRM program is separate from lead generation. It’s just the tool that helps you stay in touch with leads, but on its own, it doesn’t generate them.

Given that, a CRM is only going to work for you, if you’re using it. If you put all of your contacts from your sphere and clients and prospects into your CRM, but they’re just sitting there and you’re not using it to make sure you’re staying in touch with people and following up with them on key dates, etc. then there’s zero point to having a CRM.

It’s not a tool that you need to pay for, if you’re not going to use it properly and because the vast majority of agents don’t, I don’t recommend you start paying for one, until you’ve developed a HABIT of using a free one first. Only after you’ve been using a free CRM tool consistently for at least a year, should you consider investing in a paid program. This also goes back to money management. Either start using tools that you’re paying for or stop paying for them until you’ve developed a habit around using a free version first.

So when it comes to contact management, at its basic core, this is just a centralized place to store everyone’s name, email, phone number and address from your sphere of influence and client base. In terms of tools available for this you could easily just use Google sheets, but just having a spreadsheet of contacts isn’t going to do anything to help you grow your business. As we’ve said, the real purpose of a CRM, is to help you stay in touch with people in your database, based on pre-defined dates or statuses.

The most common mistake many agents make that causes them to miss out on thousands in lost commissions, is not staying in touch with past clients and prospects. They’re great with their current clients, but the number one reason consumers choose a different realtor for their next transaction, is because they didn’t hear from their last realtor after they bought or sold. So staying in touch with past clients is critical for a successful, long-term career. Remember, you may believe they won’t be buying or selling again in the near future, but you don’t know that and past clients will always be a source of referrals, provided they were happy with your services.

So staying in touch with past clients is one purpose for your CRM, but the other purpose is for nurturing your database. Now notice I didn’t say hounding your database, I said nurturing it. There’s a huge difference. When you make calls to your database daily asking if they know anyone thinking of moving, or you’re trying to set up an appointment with them, you’re contacting them for the purpose of getting something from them (ie business or referrals). If you were on the receiving end of those calls from a friend, how would it make you feel? I don’t know about you, but it would make me feel used. Like the only reason you’re reaching out to me is to try to get business from me. That would repel me, not attract me.

Before I got into real estate, I was in a book club with a group of women in my neighbourhood, but if we’re being honest, it was really just a wine club under the disguise of a bookclub. Anyway, one of the women in the group was a real estate agent and what I loved about her, was that she never brought up real estate and she never asked me if we were planning to move or asked for referrals. What she did do, was anytime a property got listed on my street, she’d just send me the listing with a quick message to let me know about it, what it sold for and how my house compared. Super helpful and valuable, nothing pushy about it at all. If I hadn’t decided to get my license and become partners with her, I definitely would have used her as my Realtor because I really appreciated her approach. So when you stay in touch with people and nurture for the purpose of giving something of value instead of trying to get something, not only will you feel good instead of gross, but sales will be the natural side effect.

So to properly nurture your sphere, prospects and past clients, you really need a tool that has database functionality and not just a spreadsheet and this is where Notion comes back into play as the tool I recommend. It allows you to have a contact database and the ability to add any customized fields you wish for those contacts to help you stay in touch with them, plus custom checklists and reminders on pre-determined dates, etc. You can also link your contacts to a separate transaction database in notion so that you can manage all of the details related to your transactions and it’s connected to the client, but more on that in a bit. You can also integrate Notion with your Email service provider to automatically subscribe them and segment them to receive relevant drip campaigns AND lastly if you get a free CRM system through your brokerage, you can easily integrate it with Notion, so that any contacts that get added, also go into your free Notion database that you own and can take with you wherever you go. This is why I don’t recommend using a free CRM provided by your brokerage or a team you work on, because if you leave, they will keep those contacts. You may get a copy of it or you may not, it depends on the brokerage or team, but either way, they will keep the list as well and try to keep them.

Now Paid CRM programs obviously do all of the things I just talked about and more to be honest, but they really only make sense when your business is at a more advanced level. Until then, you can get all the basics you need for free (however you will need a paid email service provider).

If you are interested in using Notion and don’t want to start from scratch creating everything, you will get a copy of all of my pre-built Notion templates, in my Foundations of Success program. Otherwise you can get in there, play around with it and build your own templates. As I mentioned before, it is a more advanced tool than some out there and that’s because it can be customized to work however you want it to, but it’s not really a plug & play tool, so don’t get an account and expect it to be. If you’re not going to get pre-built templates, you’ll have to invest some time in learning how to build them yourself.

Once you have developed a daily habit around nurturing your database and your business is ready for a much more sophisticated CRM system, I recommend upgrading to a program called Realvolve. Now to get the full benefit out of a tool like Realvolve, you have to be ready to invest some serious time into setting it up properly and let me be clear, this is a major project. If you’re just going to use the same features that you already had access to in a free program like Notion, there is zero benefit to upgrading. You have to be ready to take optimizing your business to the next level. When you are ready to do that, Realvolve has features that can be game changing for automating your business and thereby getting back more of your time in the long run. Now Realvolve does have a service to set everything up for you, but it’s quite expensive and only makes sense for agents with teams and those doing a lot of transactions every year.

Transaction Management System

Alright the next system that you need in your business is a Transaction Management System. When it comes to your transactions, there are a number of reasons why you need a system around them.

The first reason goes back to something we talked about in Part 1 of this series and that is having a goal setting system and a way to track your progress. If I were to ask you right now, what is your freedom metric for this year (ie. what is your goal for gross commission income) and how many transactions is that going to require? Could you tell me that right now if I asked you? What if I asked you if you’re on track to meet that goal right now? Do you know? If not, you should. At any given time, you should be able to say I’m 50% towards my year-end goals and on track to reach them. But the only way for anyone to be able to know this, is to track it, update it and look at it regularly – like daily.

I use Notion for this as well, in the Business Dashboard template I created, there is a section where you put in your commission goals, transactions required to get there and then break it down even further into what that means in terms of purchases, listings and rentals.

Then there’s a table right below it where you add all of your transactions for the year and you can quickly see all of the important metrics at a glance. So the ability to track your transactions as it relates to reaching your goals is the first reason why you need a transaction management system.

The second reason relates to task management. I covered this topic in depth in Part 1 of this series, but to recap at a high level….. If you don’t have a digital task management system that you use consistently or if you have notebooks all over the place with things you need to remember scribbled down related to your clients and transactions, it’s just a matter of time before you get yourself in trouble.

When you’re new, you might be able to get by with what you’ve been doing when you only have a few clients and transactions. But there will come a time when all of the sudden you’re going to be juggling more than you can handle and that is when important things fall through the cracks. So having automated task lists guiding you through each step that needs to be taken, in the process of working with clients, can keep you out of hot water both legally and in terms of your client’s satisfaction with your services.

So having a system that allows you to create projects around transactions, with pre-built task lists that cover every single detail that need to be completed when you’re working with buyers, sellers and renters is critical.

Forms

Alright the next system that you need in your real estate business that falls under the bucket of managing the sales in your business, is a system for gathering required and relevant information about your clients and the properties that they are buying, selling or renting. This system is most relevant for your listings, but can also be used for purchases.

If you don’t have a system for gathering the necessary information to list a property, you’re constantly going to be trying to remember WHAT information you need and one of three things is going to happen. 1) you’re going to have to keep going back to your clients asking for more information about their property and I assure you, doing that makes you look unprepared, disorganized and like an amateur or 2) if you don’t remember to include something important in the listing and the client notices it first, that is not going to look good either and sets them up to start questioning their confidence in you. Once that happens, they start viewing every thing you do under that lens and it’s really hard to recover from that. Lastly 3) if you miss putting something important in the listing AND your client doesn’t notice, but it becomes an issue in the future…..the responsibility will always fall on you. Not only will you have to rectify the situation, but it could also lead to fines and disciplinary action by your legislative body. Not worth it.

So the easiest way to make sure you’re gathering the right information and to ensure you don’t ever forget anything is through the use of online forms. When I first started in real estate, I would book an appointment with my seller to go by there house and start asking them all the questions I needed to list their property and without fail, they’d ‘forget’ to tell me about a chattel or fixture they wanted excluded and when it came up on closing, they’d swear they told me. If anything can ever become a he said / she said, you will lose every time. When it comes to real estate, always get everything in writing. I learned my lesson after having to buy a new furnace for buyers because my sellers failed to tell me it was a rental and so I didn’t include that in the listing and then the buyers demanded a new furnace. Who rents a furnace??

After that mistake, I decided to create online forms that asked sellers every question you can possibly imagine about their property. It got tweaked over the years anytime something new came up that caused me grief and I can’t tell you how many times that form has kept me out of trouble and also saved me from having to pay for something that wasn’t my fault.

Not only that, but it saved me tons of hours because there was no real need to meet in person to gather this information. It can be done at a time that is convenient for the sellers and it allowed me to be spending my time doing something more productive. When things are in writing like this and it’s the seller themselves filling out the information, it leaves no room for misinterpretations or he said / she saids.

There’s two tools I recommend you use for this – the first one is Google Forms and although it’s free, you ideally would want to integrate the form submission with your contact & transaction management tool so that everything is kept in one place. To do that you’ll need a program called Zapier and although it’s free, you only get a limited number of zaps on the free version.

The second option if you’ve decided to use Notion for your Contact and Transaction management, is to use Notion Forms. It integrates seamlessly with all of your notion databases and can import the form details so that they are connected and easily accessed through your client or the transaction databases in Notion. There is a free version of Notion forms, but it does have some limitations that are useful. The paid version is $19 a month and it allows you to upload files to your forms – this can be helpful for sellers to upload important documents that you need to verify and that you need a copy of. Things like property taxes, surveys, ownership documents, etc. Google forms will allow you to do this as well.

Client Communication System

Alright the last system that you need in your business under the bucket of Sales is a system for client communication. I’m going to break this down into two categories.

Category one is a system for communicating with your clients day to day. Now obviously you’re going to be using a variety of tools for this like email, phone and text. However there is one tool I highly recommend called Voxer. It is a free walkie talkie type app for your phone that allows you to leave voice messages in real time. For one using a tool like this is so much more efficient than texting as you don’t have to type anything. You just hold the button down and talk and they receive your voice message and it’s important to know this isn’t a voice to text tool, it leaves actual messages.

It’s not only faster and more efficient but if you’re ever communicating anything that could have a perceived tone to it, we all know that texts and emails can be read wrong and go sideways. So using voxer allows you to send voice messages with the intended tone, but it also allows you to think about what you want to say before saying it, unlike a live conversation. Cause those can go wrong too sometimes and once again, can be come a he said/ she said situation.

I also loved separating work communication from my text messages. It just helped a little more in the work / life balance struggle.

Ok before we move on the next category of client communication, I will re-iterate that everything important always needs to be communicated in writing. You can always have a conversation, but if there is any opportunity for something to go wrong, always follow up live conversations with an email re-iterating whatever you talked live about. I cannot stress this enough. Almost every single problem I have gotten into or any of the agents that were in my brokerage could have been prevented if conversations were put in writing so that everyone was on the same page.

Alright the second category of client communication is having a system for communicating everything that your clients need to know in the process of buying, selling or renting real estate. It is your job to make sure your clients know everything they need to know to make informed decisions and protect themselves. There is a lot of information that should be communicated and it’s always better to over communicate than under communicate and once again when it comes to communicating important things, it always has to be in writing, because people will only remember what they want to remember, whether or not it’s true.

The easiest way to do this, is by creating automated drip campaigns through either your email service provider or your CRM tool if have one. In order to do this effectively, you need to have your contacts segmented by buyers, sellers and renters and then you need to be able to create workflows that send templated emails based on where someone is in their buying or selling journey. For instance with a seller, when we subscribed them to our drip campaign they would get a series of emails that explained everything they needed to know about preparing their home for sale. Once the property was on the market, they’d get another series of emails that explained everything they needed to know about what to expect while their house was listed. Once the property sold, they’d get their final sequence which included checklists for moving and everything they needed for closing.

Now it’s important to realize that people won’t read things that they don’t think are important, so it’s really important that you let your clients know they’re going to be receiving these emails and that they contain really important information and that it’s in their best interest that they read them entirely. I actually went so far as to make them sign off that they agreed to read everything. Once again, can’t tell you how many times those emails saved my arse when a client would claim I never told them something important. It’s kind of hard to argue when you’ve set a system up this way. Now obviously creating all these email sequences for buyers and sellers is a very time consuming project – but so well worth the effort and once you’ve done it once, it’s done. You’ll obviously add things to the sequences as problems come up, but the majority of the work is done up front.

Ok so just to recap, in this episode we talked about having a system for contact management and system to stay in touch with your database by providing value. For this I recommend using Notion integrated with FloDesk if you’re newer in your career or haven’t used a CRM system consistently. Once you’ve developed a habit and your business is ready to scale, I recommend using Realvolve as your CRM.

Next we talked about a system for transaction management and I recommend Notion for this until you’re ready for Realvolve.

Next was a system for gathering information using Forms and for this I recommend Google Forms or Notion Forms.

Lastly we talked about systems for client communication and for this I recommend Voxer for day to day communication and Flodesk for drip campaigns if you’re early in your career, or Realvolve if your business is more advanced.
Don’t forget to download the free toolkit that includes all of these recommendations as well as some discount codes. You can find it in the show notes or by visiting my website at womenrockingrealestate.com/tools

Alright next week is the last episode in this series and I’m going to be covering all the systems and tools I recommend under the umbrella of Scaling. When you are ready to hire your first VA or start to build a team your success will depend on the systems you have in place BEFORE your first hire.

You’re not going to want to miss it, so make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast so that you’re notified when new episodes drop.

I’ll see you next week and remember the more you learn the more you’ll earn, but only if you’re implementing what you lean.

Until next time.

Well hey there, Jen Percival here. You’re listening to the women rocking real estate show and this particular episode is part of a 4-part series is all about the business systems and tools available for agents to start, grow and scale a real estate business you’re proud of. As I said in last week’s episode, you cannot run a viable business, any business without systems.

However systems will only work for you if you actually use them, so in this series I’m going to be recommending not just the tools I recommend, but I’m going to be focusing on how you can use the ‘start low and go slow’ principle where you only invest in paid tools AFTER you’ve built healthy habits using free tools wherever possible. Because I’m pretty sure everyone listening is currently paying for at least one tool, that they are not using, right?

So You need systems and you need systems you’re actually going to use and that is what this series is all about. I’m going to be diving into what I believe are all of the systems every agent on this planet needs, whether you’re brand new to real estate or have been doing this for decades – everyone needs the same systems. What may be different, is the TOOL you use for that system and we’re going to unpack all of that as well.

Last week I shared my recommendations for all of the systems you need that fall under the umbrella of the operations of your business and that included systems for money management, systems for goal setting, business planning and business tracking, systems for task and project management, systems for file management and lastly systems for time & calendar management. Now I included links to even more tools in the free toolkit that I created to go along with this series, so if you have’t downloaded it, be sure to check it out. You can find it in the show notes or on my website at womenrockingrealestate/tools. Many of the programs I recommend are free and for those that are paid, I’ve got some discount codes included with the download, so be sure to check it out.

This week we’re going to be diving into all of the systems I recommend for marketing your business and I’ll be sharing lots of tools available to help you do that.

Lead Generation System

So the first system that every agent needs under marketing, whether you’re brand new or whether you’ve been doing this for years and are scaling your business and building a team, is a lead generation system. This is a systematic process, that everyone needs to do daily, without fail, to generate leads. The tool that you use for lead gen is what differs. I won’t mention brokerages names, but anyone that works for one of them knows that they have a very specific system and systematic framework for lead generation and it involves making calls to your database daily to book appointments, cold calling and door knocking as well. Although I personally don’t like this system and never used it, let me be clear that it works. For those who work it. However for many, many agents, it doesn’t work and that’s because they simply won’t do it.

The problem, is that you can’t opt-out of using those lead generation systems and not replace them with a different system and unfortunately this is what happens for a lot of realtors. They don’t want to use those traditional lead gen tools, but they don’t have an alternative lead get system that they use just as consistently and unfortunately they find their business is either non-existent or inconsistent.

So because I don’t subscribe to those methodologies, I will not be covering systems or tools for them. Instead I’ll be sharing all of the lead generation systems and tools that I personally used to build my business and that I have taught to hundreds of of other agents.

So in this episode I’m going to be going through all of the tools I used for lead generation, but it’s important to realize that without a system for implementing these tools consistently, they won’t work. The reason the more traditional systems work is not because of the tools they use (ie. door knocking and cold calling, etc.), it’s because of the rigid structure that is taught around using those tools consistently every day and tracking your use. When planning your days and scheduling activities in your calendar, you need a system for scheduling time for lead gen every single day and sticking with it consistently. So you should be setting aside at least an hour every day, some people say closer to 3 hours, but at least one hour every day where you are focusing exclusively on lead gen. What tool you use during that hour will change, but you need to schedule it and you need to track it. Again, notion is the perfect tool to manage this.

So what are the tools you can use for lead gen if you don’t want to door knock and cold call? Well I’m going to be sharing the entire set of tools I used and it’s important to also realize that you can’t pick and choose which of these you decide to use consistently. For it to work, you need to use them all.

Tool #1 – Networking

So the first tool I used for my lead gen system and this is not ground breaking by any stretch, is Networking. The size of your net worth will equal the size of your network. But I am not talking about going to networking events and handing out your business card to anyone within reach. Don’t do that. I’m talking about you having a system to grow who you know, build a relationship with them, demonstrate your authority, stay top of mind and provide value. It uses the acronym GRASP to help you remember. There was one really important word I used in there and it was system. Too many people think they’re ‘networking’ but most don’t usually have a plan that they execute daily, let alone a mechanism to track it. Both are needed for the lead gen tool of networking to work.

How, when and where are you going to constantly meet more people?
How are you going to build a relationship and connection with them?
How are you going to consistently demonstrate your authority in real estate with them?
How are you going to stay top of mind?
How are you going to provide value consistently over time?

For you to grow who you know, nurture and reap a harvest, you need a system and a plan and you need to track it every single day. You should be aiming to meet a new person every single day and you should practice your skills of building rapport and connection with people. It’s super easy even if you’re introverted and not outgoing. Just take a genuine interest in people’s lives. Ask questions about their families, their occupation, their recreation and their motivations and then genuinely and actively listen to their answers and find areas in common where possible. Steer clear of politics and religion. You can build a connection with almost everyone if you take a genuine interest in them, ask genuine questions and then actively listen. If your conversation gets interrupted, remember what they were talking about and circle back to it. People just want to be seen and heard and feel like they’re important. It’s not rocket science.

And whatever you do, don’t pick and choose who you try to build connections with, based on what you think you can get from them. For starters that’s beyond gross and I guarantee you’ll build a reputation for it quickly and it will ruin your career long-term anyway. But you have no idea what you might be missing out on. People have lead some really interesting lives and have stories that could captivate you for day if you just take the time to get to know them. So don’t judge anyone about anything and just grow who you know and get to know them. Your life will be more enriched for it and sales will be a natural side effect.

Ok so the first tool you need for your lead gen system is Networking, but again you need a plan for how you’re going to grow who you know and you need to track that you’re actually doing it. The tool I recommend for this, is once again Notion. You can use notion to house your contact database and I’m going to be talking all about that in next week’s episode, but you can add any field or property you wish to your contacts. My Notion Dashboard Templates that you get in my Foundations of Success program automatically includes a column for the date the contact was added, so that you can track how many new names you’re adding to your database. Now sometimes you’ll just be adding a name and a reference of where or how you met them, but may not have an email or address or phone number and that’s ok. When appropriate, see if you can find them on social media and connect with them there.

Tool #2 – A Website

After networking, the next tool you need for your lead gen system is a website.

I did a big deep dive into everything websites related in episode 55, so if you haven’t listened to it, make sure you check out the episode. There’s a number of reasons why your website is a very important system in your business, but the two biggest reasons are:

Potential clients and those referrals will want to check you out. We recently conducted a survey and found that a whopping 93% said they would not hire a realtor or refer a realtor that didn’t have a website. So you need one. Thinking you can build a consistent real estate business on social media alone, is misguided.
The second reason you need a website is because it is the easiest and cheapest form of lead generation available to you. Instead of hunting around for people who might be buying or selling, just focus on getting found by those who are already actively in the market and searching for a realtor. Why on earth would you ignore them and focus your energy on trying to find random leads instead? Where are people actively searching for a realtor? On search engines like Google. Getting found on google means having a website.

So what type of website should you have. Well I went into detail in episode 55 about why agents are making a huge mistake when they use the website provided by their brokerage or the rent an expensive IDX site that isn’t actually generating any leads or they build a site on Squarespace or when they hire an expensive developer to build a custom website, which isn’t needed. So if your website falls into one of those buckets, I recommend you listen to the episode.

What I do recommend for your website is that you personally own the domain and the hosting so that it doesn’t matter if you change brokerages or change teams. You need your own website and I recommend you build it on WordPress.org. Not dot com. Those are two different things.

In terms of website hosting, there are only 3 companies endorsed by WordPress themselves and the one we recommend is linked in the FREE toolkit that you can download for this episode.

Once you’ve got a wordpress.org website, the next thing you need is a real estate specific theme. If you want to generate leads on your website, the best way to do that is with your own personal listings. Your website must have the ability for you to add your own properties, not IDX or MLS listings – you may want those too, but it MUST have your own listings if you want it to generate leads for you. So in order to add properties, your website needs a real estate theme and the tool I recommend for that is called Houzez. Again you’ll find a link to it in the free toolkit.

If you do want to include IDX or MLS listings on your website, there are lots of companies that provide wordpress plugins to allow you to do this. Not every company services every real estate board, but they are all different in terms of how they’re built and how good they are in terms of search engine optimization. Some will do absolutely nothing for lead generation, but there is one company that if you’re lucky enough to be in a market they serve, their IDX solution is amazing. Again I link to it in the free toolkit.

In terms of designing your wordpress website, I recommend a free drag & drop pagebuilder called Elementor that allows you endless design options for your website.

Now if this entire website system intimidates you and you just want a simple solution to get you up and running, I do have a Websites Made Simple program for only $49 that teaches you step by step exactly how to do everything.

Alright the last tool related to your website and this one is super important is to make sure your website content is search engine optimized. If your content isn’t optimized for search engines to find it, your site won’t rank in the search results, so no one will find it and you won’t generate any leads from it.

The SEO tool I recommend is called YoastSEO and it’s a free plugin for wordpress websites. It walks you through each page of your website and teaches you exactly how to optimize the content you’ve got on it, so that those pages will rank higher in the search results. It even scores each page, so you know where to focus your efforts.

Tool #3 – A Content Plan

HERE!!! Alright moving along, the next system your business needs under the marketing umbrella, also falls under lead generation, but it probably feels more loosely connected and that is content marketing. If you don’t think of content marketing as lead generation, I want you to start shifting your perspective about it and realizing it is just as closely tied to lead generation as door knocking or cold calling. However instead of pursuing people, you’re attracting them with valuable content that is relevant to them.

When you create valuable video content and blog content and social media content, you are accomplishing everything you need to convert leads in clients. You’re getting found and growing who knows you, you’re building connection – especially with video content, you’re demonstrating your authority in real estate as a community market expert, you’re staying top of mind with your sphere when you share that content and you’re providing value. All of that helps you build know, like and trust and people will only work with and refer people, to those that they know, like and trust.

So you need a content marketing system and there are loads of tools that you can use to help you research, plan & implement a content marketing strategy.

Research Tools

Let’s start with tools for researching content ideas. One really common mistake that agents make when creating content, is they come up with content ideas without researching whether it is content that people are actually searching for or care about. Not all content is equal. If you’re looking to use your content for generating leads, then you need to be strategic about the type of content you create, because content creation is a time consuming process. So you ideally want to focus on creating content that 1) has a high search volume and 2) has low competition, meaning there’s not already a ton of content out there already about the topic. There are two tools that I recommend you use to conduct this research. One is for researching YouTube video content ideas and the other is for researching website blog content ideas. Both of these tools are invaluable and will make the time you invest in creating content worth it.

Content Planning tools

Once you have validated the content ideas you’ve come up with, the next tool you need in your content system is for planning your content across your website, YouTube and social media platforms. If you’re just randomly creating content without a PLAN, you don’t have a system and your efforts will be inconsistent at best and non-existent at worst. So ideally once a quarter or at minimum once a month, sit down and plan out your content for the entire month. Once again, I recommend Notion as the tool for this. You can create free content calendars so that you can plan out everything in advance, with checklists, automated tasks and due dates that you can then schedule in your calendar. Because once again if you don’t schedule it, it won’t happen. You can also attach files in notion and even include links to your canva design templates.

Having a monthly content calendar helps you see your entire content plan for the month at a glance and it will make sure you’re changing up your content and adding variety across content pillars. For example, you don’t want to always be making promotional-type posts on instagram. You need to mix up your content so that your audience doesn’t get fatigued and unfollow you. A content calendar can help you make sure this doesn’t happen.

As a bonus, when you don’t have to THINK about what to post, because you’ve already planned it, you’re like 100 times more likely to stay consistent with your content than you are if you just create on the fly.

Content Creation Tools

The next tool that you need for your content system is a way to actually create the content – specifically graphic content and video content. There are tons of tools available for you to create your content online. Everyone knows about Canva – it’s really the only graphic design tool you need to create all your social media posts, thumbnails, buyer and seller guides and ads. When it comes to video creation, I recommend an online tool called InVideo. You can use it to create all your videos for YouTube and your website, as well as videos formatted for Instagram reels and stories. In the free toolkit, I have a discount code for 30% off, so be sure to check that out if you’re looking for a video editing tool.

Publishing Tools

When it comes to publishing your content on social media, I personally recommend you use Facebook’s native tool called Creator Studio to schedule and auto publish your posts on both Facebook and Instagram. Let’s face it, the algorithms just prefer you use their tools, so it just makes sense to and they’re free, so bonus points for that.

Alright moving along, the next tool that you need to market your business effectively and generate leads is a….

Tool #4 – List Building & Email Marketing Tool

Never ever make the mistake of relying on platforms that you don’t own for lead generation. I know of so many people recently that have had their Facebook or instagram accounts shut down and they’ve lost all of their followers. That is legitimately catastrophic for your business, so a huge priority for everybody needs to be growing your email list, so that you own your ability to connect with people off of social media.

One of the easiest ways to do this is through the use of lead magnets. For these to be effective however, they really should be unique (meaning every agent doesn’t already offer it) and they absolutely need to be loaded with value. The topic has to be enticing, compelling and click-worthy enough for someone to want to opt-in and give up their email address to you.

Once you get that email address, you need to treat it very carefully. If you start harassing people on your list with emails that don’t provide specific value that is relevant to the particular subscriber, you will lose them just as fast as you gained them.

The tool that I recommend to create the landing page for this this opt-in, the automated delivery of your lead magnet, segmenting your subscribers and the email marketing system to nurture them is called FloDesk. This program allows you to create beautiful landing pages, opt-in forms and stunning graphic emails. Although it is a paid tool, in the freebie I have available you’ll get 50% off. When compared with a free tool like Mailchimp, in my opinion it doesn’t compare and Mailchimp’s free version doesn’t allow you to automate lead magnet delivery, so the free version doesn’t work anyway.

I do teach how to set up your entire list building system and email marketing strategy including what types of lead magnets to create, how to set them up and then exactly how to nurture your subscribers with segmented and automated drip campaigns in my Convert Accelerator, but that program is only available to agents that have completed the Attract Accelerator because you have to have a system for attracting leads first, before you can convert anyone. So you won’t be able to find anything about this program on my website.

Tool #5 – Paid Online Ads

Alright last but probably the most important tool for your lead generation system is the one that gets missed the most. If you implement all of the tools I’ve talked about in this episode – you’ve got a website, you’ve got a content marketing strategy and you’ve got a list building strategy, but you try to just use organic methods to promote and share your content, it either won’t work at all or it won’t work fast enough and you’ll give up. Unless you have a huge database and social media following, you will HAVE to invest in paid ads for you to expand your exposure and reach more people outside of your sphere. If you try to rely on a small database and a small social following, the numbers just won’t be there.

I talked a lot about this in Episodes 48 and 50, so if you haven’t listened to them make sure you do, but you can expand your reach from less than 100 people seeing your content every month, to thousands and thousands. Most of the agents in my Attract program (depending on the size of their market) are reaching close to 50,000 people who are watching enough of their content to be able to know who they are and recall them and they’re doing it very affordably. Do you know how many doors you’d have to knock on to get that much exposure? It’s not possible.

Now you can blow through that budget very quickly if you’re not strategic about what types of ads you’re running and how you set them up. But when you know how to target leads based on the right interests and more importantly when you re-target a warm audience who already has been exposed to you, the results are really impressive. If you want a step by step roadmap of exactly how to do this, I teach it in the Attract Accelerator and doors will be open again for it soon, so if you’re not on the waitlist get on it now. There will be an early bird offer that’s only available for those on the waitlist, so don’t miss out on that if you’re interested.

Alright so just to summarize this episode. Everyone needs a lead generation system that they use every day and that they also track so that you stay consistent with your efforts. If you’re not generating consistent leads, you’re probably not taking consistent action. The tool I recommend for that is Notion.

The tools that I recommend for lead generation and you need to use them all together for it to work are networking, a website, a content marketing plan – this includes video content, blog content and social media content, a list building and email marketing plan and finally paid ads to promote and share all of your content and your lead magnets.

Alright next week, I’m going to be covering all the systems and tools I recommend under the umbrella of Sales your business. This includes…..database management, CRMS, transaction management, client communication systems and tools and so much more.

You’re not going to want to miss it, so make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast so that you’re notified when new episodes drop.

I’ll see you next week and remember the more you learn the more you’ll earn, but only if you’re implementing what you lean.

Until next time.