This week on The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, Heidi Schroeder of ECI Software Solutions joins Greg and Kevin to discuss how effective lead management tools can help home builders facilitate customer relationships, increase customer satisfaction, and promote business growth.
One of the most significant tasks home builders encounter with lead management tools is being able to keep them up-to-date on a regular basis. Heidi says,
“Mostly what I see is the challenge of consistency. Your database needs to be consistently updated with the right ratings, the right projects and communities entered into the system, I see that as the biggest challenge that people have. Being able to really understand how to clean that data and set aside time to maintain that consistently great program is the biggest challenge for everybody.”
An effective customer relationship management system will permit home builders to quickly and easily update them so that digital marketers, salespeople, and potential customers all experience accurate and timely data. Heidi explains,
“A real CRM really should be able to automatically integrate your leads from your website or from other sources and allow you to set up dedicated follow-up processes, allow you to send marketing emails through your database, allow you to get great data. So, a CRM of a Post-it note doesn’t allow for any of those things. A CRM of remembering in your brain where you’re waking up at 4 o’clock in the morning, remembering you forgot to call somebody 2 weeks ago, that’s not a real CRM.”
During day-to-day tasks, it’s important for home builder sales and marketing teams to constantly maintain the perspective of creating a customer journey that is as smooth and as simple as possible. Heidi says,
“Just keep your eye on the big picture. I think that it’s so easy to get really deep into our work. Whether we’re on the sales side or the marketing side, it’s easy to get really deep into the details of our work and we forget that we have a very, very important job. So, each part of our business should be aligned with making a new home easier to buy or build…Keep that high-level view every day of how can we make this easier and make sure that our entire team is aligned with that path that we have in place to make this easier. Our customers already think it’s too hard to buy a home. The news that they hear every day, don’t give them the excuse to make that the truth.”
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about how home builders can benefit from the proper use of lead management systems.
About the Guest:
In her current role as Senior Consultant for ECI Software’s Lasso CRM product, Heidi helps builders throughout North America understand how to leverage technology to scale their business and improve the home buying experience for their customers. She empathizes with today’s home buyer and aims to drive the industry make buying and building a new home a painless experience. Heidi lives in Washington State with her husband and two sons.