Hi, Kendyl Young here. I’m the owner/broker of DIGGS, a real estate team in Glendale, California. On May 16th, I teamed up with Realvolve in a webinar explaining the game-changing reasons why you need to consider using workflows in your real estate CRM. Below are the five key insights I shared with hundreds of attendees.
Get ready to learn why workflows are going to rock your world!
1) Workflows automate the minutia.
Filling out sales forms. Getting the second set of initials on the contract. Checking in with your clients once a week. Reminding everyone of the upcoming inspection. These small details keep a transaction moving forward on time, keep your broker happy, delight your clients, and eventually lead to referrals. But the minutia sure is a drag.
What if you could automate the minutia? Just imagine:
- What if you could click a button and set into motion a series of actions that would take you from the start of a transaction all the way to close?
- What if every email you needed to send happened automatically?
- What if every phone call you needed to make was displayed on a dashboard when you opened up your real estate CRM?
- What if you only had to type everything ONCE and then you could use it over and over again, whether it’s the contact information of your buyer agent or the important dates for a new transaction?
It’s all possible with workflows!
2) Workflows ensure that the right stuff happens at the right time.
If you’re working off of paper To Do lists and sticky notes, things are going to fall through the cracks. Real estate success depends on process—and sticking to that process. Missed steps could result in panic and chaos, wasted time, and unhappy clients.
Workflows allow you to stay on process by ensuring that the right stuff happens at the right time. And they allow anyone to run your daily operations, so you can hire an administrative assistant or delegate tasks to your team and free up YOUR time for face-to-face interactions with clients, leads, and prospects.
Most importantly, you can get things done in your business exactly as YOU would do them. Every time. Even when someone else is responsible. Your employees don’t have to have thousands of transaction experience; they just need to learn the CRM, and then they can follow your workflows.
Here’s why it works:
- You create a workflow for every step of your process. My workflows include Lead Gen Door Knocking, Listing Marketing, Buyer Escrow, 2 Weeks After Close, etc.
- Within each workflow, everything needed to complete each activity is already there—contact information, prewritten emails and texts (that will auto-fill with the correct names, dates, etc.), and instructions on what to do.
- It’s easy to delegate tasks and monitor accountability. Different activities can be automatically assigned to different people on your team.
- You can ensure that each activity happens at the right time by setting computed dates. For instance, in California, the initial deposit is due three business days after the ratification of the contract. So in my workflow to confirm deposit (pictured below), I have an email set to send out four days from the ratification date. (And the really cool thing is that these computed dates will adjust as transaction dates or deadlines change!)
3) Workflows keep fires in the fireplace (not in your hair).
In The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People (a book you MUST read), Stephen Covey points out two types of tasks we see in every business transaction: urgent vs. non-urgent.
When you’re constantly consumed by urgent tasks, you become the agent running around with her hair on fire. You’re rushing to get paperwork in before a deadline, remembering at the last minute to remind everyone about the inspection, and frantically scheduling the termite work so you can close on time.
You don’t want to be that agent. You want to be the calm, cool, collected agent who’s on top of everything. And you CAN be that agent...by putting important non-urgent tasks into workflows and handling them before they become urgent.
Here's how I've done this:
For years, I was constantly leaving the fumigation tent scheduling to the last minute. Inevitably, the fume guys weren't available or the seller couldn’t get out for three days, so we couldn't get the clearance certificate in time to hit our close date. It became a crazy, urgent situation...but it didn’t have to. Now I have a reminder set up in a workflow to schedule fumigation far in advance.
Another activity I have set up in a workflow is an email that sends to the listing agent and seller to confirm inspection preparedness. I realized I needed this in a workflow after an incident where the inspection couldn’t be completed on a home because one door was padlocked.
As you do more and more transactions, you’ll experience mishaps and hiccups—it’s bound to happen. But the good news is you can build those missed tasks into your workflows so you never become the crazy hair-on-fire agent again.
4) Workflows allow you to improve (vs. invent).
At some point early in your career, you sat down with pen and paper and listed out everything you have to do to put a house on the market. Then you patted yourself on the back and stuck that list in a drawer. You or your administrator pull it out every time you start a transaction.
It’s a good checklist. But here’s the problem: it’s the SAME checklist every time.
Wouldn’t it be great if it was super easy to continually tweak and improve that checklist? In every transaction you do, you’re going to discover something new (or make a mistake that you never want to make again).
Workflows can be improved incrementally every time you do a transaction. Here are a few examples:
- You want to make a better first impression, so you tweak your introductory email to sound more personable.
- Your dealings with the seller’s escrow company went sideways and you need to add some steps to your workflow to ensure you don’t repeat mistakes next time.
- You did your first price reduction and you need to add an entirely new workflow for that into your system, because you know it’s going to come up again.
Having your process completely mapped out, templated, and automated through workflows allows you to be constantly improving rather than reinventing the wheel every time.
5) Workflows create loyalty forever.
Referrals are the holy grail of our business. And workflows can help us create those referrals. Here’s how:
One of the things we all know we should do (but hardly any of us actually do it) is the weekly phone call to the client.
It’s a pretty simple call—I always start with “Hi, it’s Kendyl, this is your afternoon phone call!” Then, I go over what happened last week and what will be happening this week. What’s great about this phone call is that it becomes a routine that your client expects. It creates trust, as well as a perception of your great expertise and value.
So, where do workflows fit into the picture?
I never did this until I put it into a workflow. It just didn't happen. But now, every Monday on my Realvolve dashboard, I see my list of people that I need to call. The workflow doesn’t let me forget, so I’m building loyalty forever. And my referral business has increased drastically.
[Webinar Replay] 5 Game-Changing Reasons To Use CRM Workflows
So, are you convinced yet that workflows are going to rock your world?
As someone who was in the business for many years before workflows were available—and who has now fully embraced the wonderful world of automated tasks and reminders—I can say with complete confidence that workflows are a game-changer.
To learn more about how workflows can automate process, save precious time, and allow you to scale your real estate business, check out the full webinar: 5 Game-Changing Reasons To Use CRM Workflows.
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