Sales Productivity – Your key to staying ahead of the curve!

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The pandemic has thrown a curveball our way, but that does not mean there is no room for regional investments during this time.

In Singapore, the residential property market enjoyed an uptick in transaction volumes following the economy’s reopening since June 2020. Data from the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) showed that Singapore’s private home prices rose by 2.1% in Q4 of 2020 amid the recession, driven by the purchase of landed homes and properties in the city fringes. According to experts, this is the steepest quarterly increase since Q4 of 2018.

In light of COVID-19, many long-term investors are turning to real estate as a means of repositioning their wealth to more stable and secure assets.

Vietnam is seeing a similar trend, with seasoned property buyers continuing their investments encouraged by the prediction of market recovery post-pandemic. It was noted that investors who did their research during previous crises were able to find lucrative opportunities with trustworthy developers.

Meanwhile, Southeast Asian countries remain an appealing prospect for foreign investors, and not just because of the attractive returns.

Thailand, for example, is appealing because of how well the government handled the COVID-19 situation. The country also offers high-ranked healthcare services, quality children’s education, and low cost of living. Indonesia is already set on relaxing property rules to make it easier for foreigners to own homes in the country.

In order to make the most out of these developments, real estate developers need to re-evaluate their operations and find areas where they can optimise efficiency to best capture and convert interested investors.

Sales productivity is key with effective lead management.

What is sales productivity?

Sales productivity in real-estate is closely linked to effective lead management. Without leads—or potential clients—there would be no revenue for real estate developers.

With developers increasingly adopting a multi-channel marketing approach to promote their projects, a lead can come from virtually anywhere, including referrals, social media, listings, and physical or virtual events. Each of these leads will be at different stages of the sales funnel, meaning they can range from customers who are just browsing and have no real intent to purchase a property (yet) to customers who are ready to buy.

This is why lead generation and customer acquisition have become exceptionally important for developers seeking to close more sales. Once a lead shows interest, it then becomes all about nurturing that lead until he or she makes a purchase.

While this sounds simple enough, there are a few challenges that real estate developers face in optimising their sales productivity.

Selling a property is a long and complex process involving multiple stakeholders. Inconsistency in sales materials and disorganised processes can easily put off customers and redirect them elsewhere. Since leads come from different sources and vary in their expectations and level of interest, it is easy to lose track of what they want.

A lack of efficient systems also leads to lost opportunities. For example, developers that do not have real-time visibility into their inventory run the risk of double booking and miss the chance to convert a customer who is already willing to purchase. Research has shown that the odds of qualifying a lead are 21 times higher if called in five minutes, as compared to doing so after 30 minutes. This odds continue to decrease by over six times in the first hour.

Lastly, effective lead management requires in-depth insights into your leads—whether they are “hot” or “cold” or have specific requirements. Using manual reporting methods to gather insights is both time-consuming and prone to human error. By the time you have realized that a certain property would be a good fit for a lead, it might be too late.

This is where technology comes in.

How can PropTech help?

Property Technology or PropTech is the application of technology to innovate the real estate market. It can be applied to different segments of real estate to drive customer engagement.

According to the 2019 PropTech survey by KPMG, more real estate companies are investing in digital technologies and PropTech due to a need for improved efficiencies (65%), cost reduction (47%), and enhanced decision-making (44%). These companies embrace the tech revolution not just to improve their operations, but also to enhance the experience of their customers.

In the case of sales productivity and lead management, one PropTech innovation that can greatly improve your operations is a lead management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system.

A lead management SaaS system gives you a centralised place to store your information across the board, monitor sales, and manage leads. All that data, collected within just one database, can be processed or analysed with algorithms and turned into reports that support better decision-making—crucial during this period.

Not to mention it saves time, cuts costs, and scales with your business.

The end result is better, faster, and more efficient lead management, which can shorten sales cycles, convert more leads, and boost sales.

PropertyGuru FastKey solutions unlocks a world of possibilities

If you are looking for a cloud-based lead management SaaS system, PropertyGuru FastKey is the trusted platform in the market.

Backed by the region’s leading PropTech company, PropertyGuru FastKey is a lead management SaaS system that automates the full project sales cycle, from launch to close of sale. It is an intuitive, holistic sales management solution that ensures data security, ease of access, information access control, and enterprise application integration. Accessible anywhere, agents can download the app through the App Store or Google Play — it is also fully usable through any web browser.

Developers and agencies can even take the opportunity to brand the app in their own corporate colours and logo, making it their own exclusive app.

For sales productivity, PropertyGuru FastKey’s dedicated Lead Management features allow you to capture leads online, straight from marketing platforms such as your website or social media platforms. It can then assign leads to the next available salesperson on a rotation basis, so your team’s never too busy to answer a query.

If a lead is initially drawn to one property, but later found that another of your developments might be a better fit, you can even redirect them to other projects within the same platform. Meanwhile, the real-time reporting feature allows you to make quick decision-making at both group and individual sales levels and gain a deeper understanding of the drivers and metrics across your entire project portfolio.

PropertyGuru FastKey also offers a branded customer experience to property seekers through the SalesKit feature. All client-facing sales presentation information is also updated in real-time, packaged impressively, and allows for easy sharing with clients. There is no longer a need for constant back-and-forth and no delays in giving the customer the information he or she wants.

Support for immersive online galleries with virtual tours is natively built into PropertyGuru FastKey so even remote investors can see the property firsthand without ever having to step out of their homes—perfect for the current situation where travel restrictions are largely still in place.

With Kiosk Mode, you can even embed your galleries on PropertyGuru FastKey as an iFrame on your website, so that property seekers will be able to view them without the need for any app download. When physical events resume in the near future, it can also be set up on mobile standing kiosks easily, without any technical knowledge required.

The benefits of the platform does not end here. As the leading PropTech company in Southeast Asia, PropetyGuru enables FastKey platform to go beyond PropTech with an International Marketplace. Projects on PropertyGuru FastKey are listed by default in the regional portal to maximise and extend your agent outreach to more than 45,000 real estate developers across Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

PropertyGuru FastKey empowers you to do much more and be more productive, so that you can focus on closing more sales, faster. If you want to learn more about the platform, get in touch with us at [email protected] and we look forward to getting in touch with you soon.