Real estate data is the fuel for your marketing campaigns . This you already know. On a daily basis, in your agency or within your network, you therefore try to apply a simple rule: we go to glean information, we collect as much data as possible, and we enter it into a dedicated tool so that we can then acquire contacts . and generate appointments , which themselves will lead to transactions.
But there you go, there’s a problem: you’re running out of raw data . Because your collaborators do not understand them .
They haven’t gotten into that habit, and to be honest, you’re afraid they never will. At Facilogi, we see that only 10% of the data collected is actually entered by the real estate negotiators ( figures from Transellis ) – this is little, too little, when we know that the database is an essential lever for generating mandates .
In short, your real estate data is as many nuggets of gold that you let pass through your sieves. They go back into the torrent… and are very likely to be collected and then used by your competitors – who will become rich at your expense.
How do you motivate your employees to enter their data?
So how do you motivate your employees to enter their data and feed your marketing machine?
That’s what we’re going to see.
First try to understand why your employees do not enter their data
Before proposing a treatment, it is necessary to make a diagnosis . What’s wrong?
Why don’t your negotiators make this seemingly very simple gesture, which consists of transferring information from their own media to a computer file or to a digital tool?
In short, why is this data not entered?
It’s about shedding light on this mystery. But rest assured: real estate agencies and agent networks are far from being the only companies affected by this concern.
Salespeople on all sides struggle to get into the habit of entering data gleaned during their prospecting sessions or their visits to customers.
But every problem has its solution. Provided you understand what is blocking.
So don’t hesitate to take your negotiators between four eyes and question them – informally: you are not in a court trying to convince a jury.
Ask them concrete questions :
- Why are your real estate data not entered?
- Are you missing something?
- Do you encounter obstacles that prevent you from doing so?
- What are your issues?
Chances are high that much of the problem comes from the manual aspect of typing . In essence, it is often the fact of having to manually enter information into a dedicated tool that is the source of most data entry hassles in companies.
Futhermore, there are two issues to consider:
- The time it takes to type . Once the information has been noted in prospecting, you have to go back to the office, open the computer and the file concerned, enter them…
- So many operations, certainly simple, but which take a lot of time and which encroach on other tasks that may seem more important (and more rewarding).
- The risk of error . Manual entry leads to errors that are due as much to the lack of expertise as to the poor quality of the tools used during data collection (notebook, loose sheets, “notepad” application on a telephone, or even simple memorization), without even talk about the off-putting side of exercise.
- Because of these errors – missing or truncated data, duplicates – the information is not usable, and the negotiators feel that this work was useless.
However, these two problems have origins that are easy to trace:
- Your employees don’t understand the purpose of data entry , and don’t see why they should spend time on it.
- They don’t have the right tools , which is why they make mistakes that demotivate them even more.
- They don’t even know how to do it , for lack of an example to follow.
It is on these three points that you must work to motivate your negotiators to enter this data . And, to do well, we are going to take them out of order: show the example, provide a suitable tool, then give meaning to the collection/entry.
Set an example by entering your real estate data yourself
In management, the notion of exemplarity is based on a simple idea: it is a question of applying to one’s own person what one expects of others.
What we could translate by: becoming a model to follow . This exemplarity is inseparable from managerial activity and consists of not asking your employees to do one thing while showing that you are doing exactly the opposite.
In short, the “do as I say, but not as I do” approach gives poor results in management. And it is easy to know why.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that employees can be motivated to perform a task that their manager, or at least their line manager, is reluctant to perform himself. And it’s the same for real estate data entry.
For this reason, it is essential to take charge as the leader of the agency or network, and to show your collaborators how important it is to collect and enter data.
In short: do it yourself first, then organize demonstrations of the chosen tool ( we’ll come back to this below ) to highlight its many possibilities.
If your negotiators see you doing it, chances are they’ll feel more committed to doing it themselves.
First, because they will have a model to follow .
Then, because they will know concretely how to do it – which was perhaps not the case before.
Adopt a relevant marketing tool in which to enter your data
Often what employees lack to feel comfortable with data entry is the right tool .
This is far from being a negligible problem, because the lack of a software solution is the source of the two problems mentioned above.
This wastes a lot of negotiators’ time while causing errors that cause them to lose sight of the meaning of this entry operation.
For example, the fact of focusing all your efforts on a banal Excel file is very likely not to solve the problem… or even to aggravate it.
Make no mistake: Excel is a great tool in so many ways. But we cannot say that it is very intuitive (how many users have broken their teeth on formulas and macros?), nor sufficiently “mobile” to support negotiators in the field.
After Excel – or any equivalent spreadsheet – you will probably have the reflex to move towards CRM software: a customer relationship management tool.
Some are indeed very powerful and constitute real toolboxes. But they are also insufficient most of the time, failing to offer functionalities to animate the data you have entered .
It is better to prefer, to the CRM, a marketing software dedicated to your field of activity (you will find a detailed comparison on this page ). That is to say, a tool designed to simultaneously collect, enter, segment and animate real estate data .
The combination of these two stages of collection and entry is at the heart of the problem.
We saw above that employees not only waste time entering their real estate data when they return to the office, but that this delayed entry is also the source of a large number of errors. This gives great importance to the way of collecting data in the field .
And that’s where the right marketing tool changes everything. Associated with a mobile application , it allows negotiators to enter information directly in the field – a guarantee of time saving and comfort.
In short, a tool like Prospeneo which also makes it possible to animate this data, to use it to generate appointments: by sending email sequences, by launching marketing campaigns, by automating tasks…
Which brings us to the third point: giving meaning to the entry of real estate data.
Give meaning to the input work of your employees
The data entry process is time consuming (which traders prefer to spend on actions that are a priori more interesting and more profitable) and causes too many errors. Under these conditions, it is natural for your employees to lack motivation… especially when they fail to understand the interest.
And the whole problem is there: we are not motivated to do something whose meaning we do not see .
If someone tells you, tomorrow, to go climb the mountain that dominates your region, like that, just for fun – will you go?
On the other hand, if the same person explains to you that there is a reward at stake, for example: “if you climb to the top of this mountain, you will see the most beautiful panorama of your life”, this could motivate you to do it.
This means that we must always give meaning to the actions we undertake , and a fortiori to the actions we want others to undertake.
It’s exactly the same thing in management and in marketing. There is no strategy without viable objectives .
If you want to motivate your negotiators to enter their real estate data , show them why it’s important and what rewards they’re likely to get for doing it. It works at all levels: when you send them out prospecting, you must also give them objectives.
Otherwise, it comes down to going shopping without having a list, with the risk of returning empty-handed, or worse: arms full of useless things that have cost a lot.
You must therefore start by answering this question, for the benefit of your employees: what is the point of entering data?
This is where the tool is important. Because data is never more than the fuel to power marketing software. It is automated, of course, and can therefore work alone, but before being autonomous it needs to be told what to do and provided with the elements to get there .
In this sense, you must explain to your collaborators what this data can produce as concrete results:
- Qualify the contacts (sellers, buyers or others) to smooth the rest of the relationship, including those who seem more improbable (enter “immovable” contacts to reference the various goods likely to be placed on the market).
- Create links and maintain them over the long term , in order to return mandates on a continuous basis.
- Enter better quality mandates (because the prospects have been following you for a while and they trust you).
- Automate marketing actions from “tags” assigned to contacts (for example: email sequences ).
- Transform freelancing, traditionally unprofitable, into appointments – with exclusives at stake (read here ).
- Measure the results of your marketing campaigns.
Do not hesitate to make concrete demonstrations of your marketing tool in front of your negotiators: this will allow them to clearly visualize the operation of the software and to really see the results obtained.
This will have two positive consequences:
- They will no longer have the impression of wasting time, on the contrary, since the tens of minutes devoted each day to data entry and their segmentation will allow them, later, to launch relevant marketing actions, with results to the key.
- They will no longer be paralyzed by this fear of making mistakes, since they will be able to enter their real estate data directly into a mobile application, in the field.
Of course, we know that it is not easy to give meaning to actions, nor to explain the benefits that can be drawn from them.
Especially when using a new tool or when the procedures in question contrast with the habits of employees. It is therefore a question of demonstrating pedagogy and working hand in hand with your negotiators , in order to ensure that everyone is going in the same direction.