Maximizing your property sales and boosting referrals

89% of homeowners sell their property through an estate agent, which means that agents need to be at the top of their game in order to attract and retain clients amongst stiff competition.

Combine that with the fact that only half of the sellers said they were satisfied with the selling process, and you have a lot of dissatisfied customers.

Whilst this shows the real estate market in a surprisingly negative light, it can also be seized as an opportunity to stand out from other agents. If you could provide a high-quality service and an efficient method to guide your client through the property sale process, referrals will soon be replacing customer dissatisfaction.

‘Make sure everyone who works with you or for you, feels the need to tell others about the incredible experience’ – Chris Murray

Clear processes help you continuously improve your services by optimizing the tasks you do every day, week, or month. With concrete instructions for your team and opportunities to automate time-wasting data entry, you can concentrate on the bigger picture and maximize property sales.

To help your services stand out, we here at Process Street have compiled 8 real estate checklists for estate agents to either use themselves or recommend to their clients. They include a comprehensive guide to the property sales process in addition to everything from a home inspection, cleaning, staging, and listing.

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Building an initial sales approach is something loads of us have attempted to do at some point or other.

Sales ends up being one of the key ways companies grow and scale. We all know this.

But there’s a big difference between doing effective outreach for your startup on a high-touch basis where you’re still understanding customer needs and figuring out approaches, and turning this knowledge into a sales machine with a full sales team that can operate in a financially efficient way.

Understanding yourself in the market and growing to be the company you want to be require different slightly strategies.

This growth from tiny solopreneur kind of structures to managing teams with effective documented practices is what this article will be all about!

In this Process Street article, we’re going to take a look into some expert insights from Close.io‘s recent webinar with their CEO Steli Efti, Process Street’s CEO Vinay Patankar, PandaDoc‘s Director of Inside Sales Mike Paladino, and Groove‘s VP of Sales Mike Sutherland.

We’re going to pull out the key questions to help scale your sales in a way that works:

• What do you want to scale?
• Is now a good time to scale?
• How do you build a process for scaling?
• How do you get a sales teams to follow the process?
• When and how do I add people to a sales team?

And finally, we’ll give you 10 free process templates for different areas of sales for you to start using in your business today.

You can watch the whole webinar here: How to build a scalable sales process (Q&A webinar)

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If you look at the Wikipedia definition of a workflow, you’re probably going to get confused as I did:

“A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of business activity enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person or group, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.”

Let’s put this simply…

Workflows are the way people get work done, and can be illustrated as series of steps that need to be completed sequentially in a diagram or checklist.

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There’s a growing need for process documentation in real estate

Managing properties isn’t just about real estate — it’s just as much about relationships.

You have to track conversations and deal statuses across multiple landlords, tenants, and applicants in addition to managing the properties themselves. It’s high-touch, high-urgency, and high-stress work.

Especially if you don’t have the first clue about processes.

If you take a peek at the numbers, you’ll see the BPM in real estate market is expected to grow at a rate of 24.8% between 2016 and 2021.

Property management firms are beginning to place a greater focus on improving business efficiency because that enables them to deliver their clients a superior service.

To turn your disorganized business around, creating a modern, automated system for documenting processes is an absolute must.

“A habit of highly successful property managers is creating step-by-step playbooks and standardized processes for everything. This documentation not only ensures consistency and operational efficiency but also shortens the amount of time required to train up new staff.” – Silvia Liu, 7 Habits of Highly Succesful Property Managers

Market research analysis conducted by Research N Reports drives this message home by claiming that the increasing need for accurate process documentation is a key driver of property management software adoption.

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Throughout a customer lifecycle, it is important to take opportunities when they present themselves.

One aspect which many SaaS companies will be familiar with is the ongoing attempt to upgrade customers to the next level of billing.

The core method of achieving this is to add features and improve your product.

This provides provides greater value for the client and gives them more reasons to consider purchasing your services – resulting in an upsell which works for both parties.

I imagine most of you reading have bought something from Amazon at some point in time. Yet when Amazon offer a more premium delivery service with access to films and television shows many of you will have gone from occasionally using Amazon for purchases to being fully fledged Prime users!

Amazon offered greater value and you thought it was worth paying for. You were upsold.

But importantly, both you and Amazon came out of the deal as winners!

In this article, we’ll look at how different companies have utilized upselling to drive their business forward, and try to learn a little something from each.

Then we’ll take a more in depth look at how Process Street upsells its customers, and the importance of seeing this as a company wide effort rather than small aspect of sales.

At the end of the article, we’ll give you a free Process Street process template you can use in your business for upselling customers. This process is geared to be run by a member of the sales team to try to upsell a valuable client, and close the deal.

Checkout the snapshot below!

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As we build businesses, we strive to make them successful in what they do and efficient in the way they carry that out.

Six Sigma is framework with dual American and Japanese origins which helps companies achieve both of these aims.

We want to take company processes and make them better, smoother, faster, easier – it’s what Process Street does. But having a complex process optimized to the highest degree, as Six Sigma advocates, is tough.

That’s why we’re going to look at Design for Six Sigma.

This will take the Six Sigma lessons and apply them to creating new processes or products. Importantly, it will help us set up these processes or products in a way which makes them ready from the start for further Six Sigma-inspired analysis.

According to Quality-One:

…[U]tilizing Design for Six Sigma methodologies, companies have reduced their time to market by 25 to 40 percent while providing a high quality product that meets the customer’s requirements.

In this article, we’ll look at:

• What is Six Sigma?
• What is Design for Six Sigma?
• What is DMADV?
• What is the difference between DMAIC and DFSS

We’ll run through the best practices of creating new products and processes in a way that they can be improved and optimized from the very beginning.

Don’t waste your time with poor processes. Start right and continue properly.

Read on to see how it works!

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Here at Process Street, we’re always advocating for companies to use data to help in making important decisions.

But data on its own is not massively useful.

I could run an experiment right now and gather loads of data. But if that experiment was run poorly then my data will be poor. Which means any readings of that data will be poor too, leading to poor decisions.

Alternatively, I could run a really well structured piece of research and gather some great data, but if I don’t know how to properly analyze that data then my conclusions won’t be very good.

Simply having large data sets is not enough.

We need to structure our research well and then be able to interpret the results with a degree of rigour. Fortunately, having a good working knowledge of P-Values can help us iron out some alarmingly common mistakes. It can teach us:

1. How to set up an experiment for meaningful data
2. The importance of measuring your existing hypothesis against an alternative
3. When results really are statistically significant, instead of just looking good

This knowledge will help us make better decisions and lead to greater success.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at 4 key areas:

• What are P-Values?
• How do you calculate P-Values?
• Examples of P-Values in practice – A/B testing
• Why you need to set up a research process

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The following is a guest post by professional copywriter and freelance writer Michael Schultheiss, owner of Inkwell Freelance.

Imagine if your support staff had no set guidelines for handling a ticket.

It would be like you pulled in a group of random people from the street, sat them down at the helpdesk, and expected to see a job well done.

Instead of a job well done, it’d probably look more like this:

That’s essentially what you’re allowing when you fail to standardize processes. Your company’s operations consist of tasks that must be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis to ensure that it runs smoothly. But if these processes aren’t standardized, you’re inviting chaos.

These could be core processes like dealing with a customer support request, or tasks that recur less often like SSL certificate renewal.

Every task — regardless of how often you do it — requires rules that define the scope, quality, and methods to be followed. If you don’t standardize these rules, you can’t have visibility over whether you’re ensuring quality and reducing human error.

In short, running your business will be an operational nightmare.

To help you avoid that, in this article we’ll look at process standardization as follows:

• What is process standardization?
• The benefits of standardization
• Common concerns about standardization
• How Process Street can help you standardize

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Effective user onboarding can make or break your business.

Poor onboarding of new users will mean a high number of users unsure how to use your product or how to get maximum value out of it.

This leads to churn, and lots of it.

According to TechCrunch, one in four mobile apps are abandoned after the first launch while Andrew Chen tells us that 77% of users drop an app just 72 hours after download.

In order to run a sustainable business, you need to make sure that the potential new users who sign up for your service are able to quickly and clearly understand why they should keep using your product.

We need to keep users active and increase the proportion of users who are paying customers. Then we can start driving the business forward!

But how do we do this?

Experiment. No one on the internet will be able to tell you exactly what you need to do to make your product a success. You have to find out for yourself. You need to test and iterate, gather data and analyze. This is your route to building a brilliant product.

With all this in mind, this Process Street article is going to cover:

• Why user onboarding is super important
• The key user onboarding approaches different businesses use
• Sujan Patel’s 6 onboarding experiments for ContentMarketer.io
• Kevin Dewalt’s 4 steps to implement concierge onboarding
• The 3 steps Process Street has taken to improve user onboarding
• AND 9 tools to help you experiment with your user onboarding

Don’t say we don’t treat you!

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The app market is booming and revenue is soaring.

According to TechCrunch, citing a report from AppAnnie:

Global app downloads topped 175 billion and consumer spending exceeded $86 billion in 2017, thanks to growth in emerging markets including China, India, Brazil and Russia…

One of the benefits of targeting this huge and growing market is that the Appstore and PlayStore are largely closed ecosystems. You can promote your apps directly to potential users in the one marketplace they are using to access apps.

The AppAnnie report also notes that app usage is up, with the average user spending 3 hours a day within apps on their phone. This means your app, once downloaded, is competing with the other apps on a user’s phone rather than countless other websites across the web.

So how do we get these downloads?

According to another report co-authored by AppAnnie and Adjust, titled The Complete Guide to Mobile App Marketing: App Store Optimisation, two thirds of all app downloads are organic. This means the app has been found in the store as a result of a user’s search, rather than being directed there by adverts on Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

To harness these downloads and drive consistent traffic to your app, you need to have a strategy for app store optimization: ASO.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is ASO?
• How to build a process for keyword optimization
• What are the best platforms to help you drive downloads?

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