Written by ajsantiago Introduction
Carrot CRM/InvestorFuse is a seller-lead CRM for real estate investors doing direct-to-seller marketing. Our process starts with connecting to your marketing and lead generation tools and ensuring those leads are assigned to the correct people on your team to manage them. This guide will go through the features that are useful to set up early on with the intent of maximizing InvestorFuse potential. Some features might not be available depending on the plan you have, we will notate if a feature is locked to a specific plan.
Notifications
The first thing to set up when you log into the system is your notifications. This ensures that you are immediately notified when certain things happen inside the system. There are numerous alerts available so turn on the ones that apply to you or your role. For example, Lead Managers would want to turn on the notification called “New Opportunities Created and Assigned to Anyone” so they get an alert for every new Opportunity that they need to work on.
This is a personal setting so each user will have to go to their own profile and turn on their notifications.
Signatures
On the topic of setting up your profile, you can also set up your email and text signatures. The text signature has to go out, at the very least, the first time you message the seller due to regulations around text messaging and it has to state your Name and the company you are representing.
Campaigns/Integrations
Another way to maximize the system is to make sure that you have all of the tools that you are using to generate leads integrated into IF3. This ensures that all of the interested sellers you come across are pushed into the system from where you can start your follow-up process. We help you integrate your lead sources so reach out to support if you want to connect something.
Assignments
The next thing you might want to set up is your Assignments so that your opportunities are being assigned to the correct people which makes for an efficient process. This will tell the system to whom the new opportunities will be assigned when they come in. You can assign your opportunities to an individual user or round robin to a group if you have multiple Lead Managers or Acquisition persons. Now if you are the only one in the system then you do not have to worry about this setting.
You can also change the assignment of each campaign you have if, for instance, you want your website leads to go to Lead Manager A and you want your cold calling leads to go to Lead Manager B.
smrtPhone Integration & Setup
smrtPhone is the best VoIP system for InvestorFuse because of native support and deep integration. Properly setting this up will leverage your follow-ups and KPIs. smrtPhone lets you do click-to-call or send text from your computer or phone all the while having all of the communications tracked inside of the Opportunities. This integration also gives you additional KPIs like # of inbound/outbound calls, talk time, etc. Below are the steps to get this fully dialed in.
- The first step is to integrate smrtPhone into the system and download their extension. If this is a new account, you want to set up your Call flows and SMS flows in smrtPhone.
- Create campaigns for your tracking numbers. This will integrate the number into the system, creating new Opportunities for initial calls/texts. Typically, this would be marketing numbers like the one on your website, postcards, etc. that are integrated.
- (Pro and Premium plan) Configure your Communication Assignments. This will let you assign a smrtPhone number to a specific user which will track their on-the-phone KPIs and display it in their mini dashboard.
KPIs and Campaign Costs
Leverage your KPIs by entering campaign costs. Entering costs to marketing channel campaigns like Cold calling, texting, direct mail, etc., will automatically calculate the following data points: cost per opportunity, cost per contract, cost per deal, and campaign profit. This will give you an idea of which campaigns are working and which ones are not.
Sequences
Go through the default sequence templates and read the messages so you understand which situation they apply. You can make adjustments to the default templates or make your own one from scratch. You can also duplicate a template if you want to make different variations of it. The options you have in the Sequences are sending a text, email, voicemail, direct mail, and assigning a task to a team member.
Contracts Integration
Integrating your contracts into the system will make it easier for you and your team to make offers and send them to sellers. We can have fields in your contracts pre-populated with information available in the opportunity like the seller name, address, email, etc. This integration will have 2 components – First is your e-signature tool like DocuSign, and the Second is a way for us to connect with the e-signature tool using either Formstack Documents or DocuPilot. Every team will get 2 included contracts that we set up for free and additional ones will be $50/contract.
Dead Reasons
Setting up your Dead Reasons in advance will let you understand why your opportunities are not working out later on. You can always add more reasons as you encounter them which helps you develop an action plan for the most common reason you see. This will also tie into another feature in this list.
Labels
Labels is basically tags and is a good way to have more filter options in the Opportunities or Actions section. An example of this would be adding the county as a label which lets you filter properties within that county. There is also the Campaign Labels where you add a label to a campaign with an integration behind it and anytime an opportunity is created through it, the label is immediately applied.
Sharing Opportunities
This feature is handy if you have Opportunities that you want to share with someone outside of IF3. They will be able to log in to your system and see the Opportunities you shared with them for them to view. They will not be able to make any changes or updates except for adding a comment in the activity log. You can use this, for example, if you are doing a JV deal and you want the other person to access the Opportunity to see the details and communication.
Another use case is if you have a marketing company sending you leads, you can automatically share them so they can see the quality of the leads, etc.
Automated Seller Response
NOTE: Automated Seller Response is only available to Pro and Premium teams.
Automated Seller Response or Autoresponder is an automatic message that is sent to a new Opportunity that is created from a campaign or an integration. This is especially handy for hotter leads like the ones coming from your website, so you can immediately send them a text or an email right after they fill out your lead form.
Templates
NOTE: Templates is only available to Pro and Premium teams.
Save the custom actions/tasks that you create every time or the text/email messages that you send to your sellers. This makes it easier for your team to send a canned response or create a custom action/task to Opportunities.
Resurfacing
NOTE: Resurfacing is only available to Pro and Premium teams.
A good way to maximize your opportunities in the system is to revive or resurface dead ones that might still be worth following up on in the future. This ties into the Dead Reasons feature where you can create a rule to resurface Opportunities depending on the reason they were marked dead. An example would be if a seller says they are not interested right now, you can create a dead reason that says ‘Seller Not Interested’ and create a rule for it to resurface opportunities 6 months from when you mark them dead.
Segment Opportunities by groups
NOTE: Groups are only available to Pro and Premium teams.
You can organize your opportunities using groups and segment them to your liking. This will create different group tabs in the Opportunities menu which you and your team can use to focus on specific lists of Opportunities. You can create groups for each job role i.e Lead Managers, Acquisitions, Follow-up Specialists, etc, and have your employees be in their respective groups. This will also help you blind leads if you don’t want everyone to see each other’s bucket by restricting your Acquisitions group’s access, for example. This way, they cannot see the Opportunities that are assigned to the Lead Managers group or the ones assigned to other Acquisition persons.
This is a super flexible functionality so you can get creative with how you apply this in your process. Another example is if you are in multiple markets. You can create a group for each one and have the Opportunities go to their respective market. And if you have specific agents working on each market, you can restrict their access so they only see the opportunities that they need to work on.
Push To
NOTE: Push To is only available to Premium teams.
Push To is basically creating a shortcut for your team members so they don’t have to worry about selecting the action from the drop-down, moving the opportunity to a different group, or assigning it to a specific team member. You can preset this for your team which will greatly increase efficiency and ease of use.