Prospecting for Sellers, Buyers and Investors the Follow Up Campaign.
Are you one of the 90% investors who could improve your profits by utilizing better database follow up systems, but hate to learn Act, Access, Oracle etc.. ? Are you using mail merge, export and automatic printing and shipping? Prospecting for sellers, buyers and investors – the follow up campaign.
By Dan Stojadinovic
As we all know, the fortunes are in the follow-up, but 90% of investors simply can’t get organized enough to perform an effective follow up campaign. Lets talk about this problem. First lets assume you have figured out how to launch an effective marketing campaign, and the leads are coming in. So you, your staff, web site or an answering service are collecting the leads. You identify potential motivated sellers, and you call, but no deal is made. The lead is motivated enough to warrant a follow up. Now what? So you have your seller questionnaire on paper, you file it, and if you have more leads piling up, odds are, you will not remember in 30 days to call back. Most investors go out and get a database system such as Access, Act and so on. Then they just give up learning the complex system. What you need is an easy web based system to enter your leads, so you know when to follow up, and the system reminds you to do it. Also so you can see the priority level and the history of the deal. And in the past couple of years a number of companies have developed systems for investors such as Super Smart Web Sites, Street Smart Web Sites (Lou Brown) , www.Prospectizer.com and many more. With systems like this you can access your leads from anywhere in the world, and your partners and bird-dogs can enter the leads on the web. You can delegate the work, and run your real estate business. Some of the systems now have an easy to manage web site where you can also test your marketing message, and change it on the fly without ever paying a webmaster or having any knowledge of programming.
There are 2 great benefits that technology has brought with these prospecting systems for real estate investors:
1. Mail merge. Since you are now collecting data into a database, you can programmatically generate personalized marketing campaigns (email, postcards, letters etc..).
2. You can now export data. Why would you want to export your data? You can use very inexpensive services like www.usps.com which will take your excel or access files and print, mail merge and send your marketing campaign. Yes, with clicks only, you can now follow up with pre-foreclosures, absentee owners, expired listings etc.. You can even generate programmatically letters of intent and fax blast them. The options are limitless.
After reading this article, we hope you will take the time to re-evaluate your follow-up prospecting campaign, and see if you can improve on it and increase your profits. Also as a member of a REIA organization part of the National REIA network, one of your benefits is a deeply discounted access to prospecting systems.
Dan Stojadinovic is a former Silicon Valley programmer and database administrator turned Real Estate Technology Consultant and Speaker, who now develops software for real estate investors such as Prospectizer. He has worked on making all products affordable for new investors who don’t have a huge budget to get started, but don’t want to sacrifice the features expensive software has to offer.
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