In real estate, if you need to place information about the building, you will use real estate platforms, as well as developer’s websites. But how do you know that ads placed on these platforms are driving your clients? We at Ringostat helped M2Realt real estate agency to find answers to all these questions.
Project details
M2Realt is a real estate agency with a quite interesting history. The founder, Yaroslav Pavlyuk, back in 2013 had a negative experience of cooperation with a real estate agent. The same thing happened to other members of the future M2Realt team. After analyzing “the wrong side of this business”, Yaroslav and his colleagues decided to create an agency with the right approach to clients and buildings.
The M2Realt team says: “Each of us faced careless real estate agents, so we all knew how the service should look like and why people prefer to get and pay for professional services.”
The agency works according to the following scheme:
- scouts, also called researchers are looking for apartments on advertising platforms that fit certain criteria;
- among all the available buildings, a sales rep chooses the most promising ones and promote them on real estate platforms by placing an ad there;
- a specific employee is responsible for development projects in each district of Kyiv;
- sales reps communicate with clients who click on certain ads and call a company afterward;
- if there are people who want to see the building, sales reps assign tasks to dedicated sales representatives that work outside the office and show projects offline;
- if necessary, the sales rep contacts the developer for specific negotiations;
- after the client decides to make a purchase, the legal coordinator or senior sales rep prepares the documents — he also coordinates the work with the notary part and fixes the commission.
Throughout this long journey, the client and the agency communicate by phone. This situation is absolutely typical of the real estate industry. When a person makes such a large purchase, he wants to make sure he is contacting a reliable company.
The agency also makes quite a lot of outbound calls. This is due to one of the pitfalls of such a business. Homeowners usually do not inform the agency that the apartment has already been sold. Therefore, M2Realt managers have to make calls from time to time and find out this information from real estate sellers.
One more thing. Buyers do not always understand the value of the service that the agency provides. Therefore, it is important for sales reps to explain to the client what he pays for and what benefits he will receive. And the management has to make sure that employees correctly explain this to home buyers.
The main promotion channels for M2Realt are the most popular Ukrainian real estate platforms:
- LUN;
- Dom.ria.
The convenience of cooperation with these platforms is that there is a minimum of manual work. Due to API technology, information about apartments is automatically driven to the site, and an advertisement is created based on that. For sure, placing ads there is not free, so the company needs to understand whether it makes sense to promote a specific building on LUN or dom.ria. And the more buildings you have, the more important it is to know whether this promotion will pay off. Otherwise, the agency will take a loss.
Thus, the company started to think about how to track the advertising sources of the call. And, of course, provide itself with a high-quality connection. After all, all communication with clients takes place by phone.
Reasons for a client to choose Ringostat
Before contacting us, M2Realt used another telephony and call tracking service. However, it didn’t fit the needs of the company.
We also needed the integration with Pipedrive — the CRM that we use. But Binotel did not have the opportunity to configure such a connection. Without this integration, we did not see in the CRM advertisements that bring us profit. Therefore, we decided to look for another telephony and call tracking platform.”
Since Yaroslav has been working in the real estate market for a long time and knows all the top tools, he decided to work with Ringostat. We were able to offer an option on how to track calls for specific areas and buildings. And the final argument was that Ringostat has a ready-made integration with Pipedrive. As Yaroslav said:
“The main advantage of Ringostat for us is the integration with the CRM that we use. And we were immediately bribed by excellent customer service and fast technical support. Moreover, the sales process itself in Ringostat has a very high level.“
Call analytics setup
As we said before, it is important for M2Realt to understand a few points:
- which site is the best to promote a particular facility;
- is there a demand for a specific apartment;
- which housing estates are more likely to be popular on dom.ria and LUN.
Based on these tasks, we offered the client to enable static call tracking. This is a type of call tracking that assigns a separate phone number to each ad source. Static call tracking is also used for the second project of this client — Optimum Estate. In total, we connected 20 substituted numbers for M2Realt. When a client sees an apartment on dom.ria or LUN, he sees a substituted number there.
When a user calls, Ringostat matches the substituted number and its source. Thus, realtors see that the buyer called, for example, from the LUN platform, from a certain ad. In the call tracking reports, it looks as shown below. There you can also listen to the audio recording of the conversation for each call:
Work with calls
Although the company’s back office has quite a lot of employees, only three people answer the calls. These are two M2Realt sales reps and one that is responsible for the Optimum Estate project. Each of them accepts requests for their housing estates.
Moreover, sales reps are also ready to answer calls on weekends, as real estate buyers often call after hours. For example, on Saturday or on Sunday, when people have more time to choose an apartment. Therefore, on weekends, employees have work shifts. When a customer calls, his call is automatically transferred to the employee’s mobile phone. This allows a company not to miss customers, even if the sales rep is absent.
The management carefully monitors how employees communicate with customers. Here M2Realt uses records of conversations made by Ringostat.
Secondly, this is how the management can control how sales reps communicate with customers. How polite they are, whether they correctly describe the pros of the facility, whether they work with objections or easily let the buyer go.
And thirdly, this is proof that we have discussed all the important points with the buyers. For example, a client may say that he was not warned about something and therefore will not pay for services. We can always find the audio recording of the conversation to confirm that such moments were discussed and the client initially agreed.”
Audio recordings of calls play an important role in the training of employees. They help to understand the progress of a certain sales rep during the development program and whether he is ready to move to the next step. For example, an employee starts working in the company as an assistant to more experienced colleagues.
After that, the employee becomes more skilled. He answers calls and customer questions. At this stage, the management is already listening to the sales rep’s calls in order to understand his progress and whether they can give him more complex tasks. And only then the employee becomes a sales rep who already drives the leads. Here the management controls the call processing even more closely. That’s because the revenue of the company directly depends on the professionalism of the employees.
While listening to calls, M2Realt top managers pay attention to the skills of the sales rep, as it is impossible to sell an apartment over the phone. Also, the management very closely monitors whether the employee is working with the client’s objections.
For example, there is such a “fashionable” request from buyers: “I want a second-story flat.” At the same time, a person often does not realize that such housing is more difficult to heat, and the repair will cost about 30% more. In this case, we make sure that the sales rep explains all these things to the buyer and finds out if he is ready for such disadvantages. And if not, then he offers a good standard apartment. And not just let the client go, by saying: “We don’t have this option now, I’m sorry.”
Or many people don’t like the first and last floors. Let’s say they are afraid that thieves can get in through the window or the roof will leak. It is also important to work with objections here. For example, if the apartment is on the last floor, you need to tell that there is a technical floor above it or that the house was checked and fixed, so there will be no leaks. If the flat is on the ground floor, then you need to ask the buyer if there are elderly people in the family. The first floor suits them better. If the elevator breaks down, the older person will not have to climb up the stairs.
Simply saying, you need not only to follow the script but to understand well the person’s request. Understand what he really wants, how much he can afford. And only then offer suitable options based on the market reality.”
Listening to calls and feedback from sales reps helped to understand how to change scripts. The company already had quite effective conversation scenarios, but it turned out that customers often build a dialogue in a different way. For example, they immediately start attacking employees with certain questions. And they can often say goodbye without even waiting for an answer. Therefore, now the sales rep, after the greeting, asks himself a series of security questions. This allows him to immediately lead the conversation in a constructive way and get basic information about the client.
Pipedrive integration
But why was the CRM integration so important to the client in the first place? There are at least three reasons for this.
- Serious time savings for the sales department. Each call is automatically recorded in CRM along with the customer’s phone number. The sales rep does not need to be distracted to enter information manually. Moreover, this way the company does not risk losing a lead, for example, if the sales rep made a mistake in the phone number.
- Automation of work processes. Deals, tasks, and contacts are created after each call and driven to Pipedrive — this happens automatically. For example, if an employee missed a call, a task with a deadline “to call a customer back” will be created. All this allows the sales department to work perfectly.
- Understanding how ads are converted into leads and sales. Ringostat drives to CRM not only calls but also their advertising sources. For example, in the customer card, you can see that he came from an advertisement on the LUN. Sales reps then analyze which facilities are the best selling and can then select more promising options for promotion.
- Control of the sales department. Management can listen to calls for specific transactions right in the CRM to understand how they are progressing.
M2Realt created separate sales funnels for each sales rep. Thus, the management understands the number of deals in work and their progress. Ringostat allows creating deals after a call immediately in the desired funnel. Our platform understands in which funnel to create deals, using the phone number that a client used to reach the company.
Results
Knowing the number of calls, we can calculate the cost of each call and a specific stage of the funnel. Based on the latter, we decide on the distribution of the budget for the day. We, in fact, buy the volume of leads on LUN and Dom.ria — and in order to understand how much to spend, we focus on conversions. Including, viewing the announcement to the call.”
M2Realt knows what percentage of conversion from ad view and call to a closed deal. Based on this, they understand how much traffic is needed to “fill” the funnel and provide themselves with closed deals for a month. To do so, the company’s management analyzes the total number of calls per day, week, month. And plans how many requests from LUN and dom.ria they need in order to make the plan taking into account the seasonality.
The company also takes into account that the number of calls can vary greatly depending on the day of the week. For example, from Monday to Wednesday they receive the most calls, and very few calls on Thursday and Friday. It is also considered that offline views may be canceled due to bad weather. And in summer there are few of them due to the fact that people often go on vacation.
Based on the data on conversion into a call and a closed deal, the agency allocates a budget for the promotion of facilities. Managers regularly analyze the current cost of a call. And only after that, they decide whether it is possible to increase the budget for the promotion. Sites can provide approximately 30,000 clicks on advertising. But if there is a lot of call requests, then the rate can be increased to receive 50-60,000 clicks. So, knowing what return to expect from advertising in a specific area and on a specific site, the agency can correctly distribute the budget.
