The Power of CRM Systems to Skyrocket Your Real Estate Business

Jennifer Staats (00:00)
It’s not just the automated email on their birthday, right? Which you can do, but there’s so many layers to that where you can add more value.

Scott Bursey (01:40)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros Podcast, dedicated to giving you, the real estate professional, the actionable strategies you need to dominate your market. I’m your host, Scott Bursey, and today we’re diving deep into the critical area of client communication and follow-up. This is where deals are won and lost and where lifelong clients are made.

Joining us today is Jennifer Staats, the visionary behind SureSend, a company that is radically changing how real estate pros connect with their leads and their clients. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Staats (02:14)
Thanks for having me, I’m really excited about this.

Scott Bursey (02:16)
Yes, this is wonderful having you here and for our listeners who may not be familiar with your journey, please fill us in on how your career began and what your main focus is right now.

Jennifer Staats (02:26)
Yeah. So I got my real estate license when I was 20 and I don’t know why I got my license then. A bunch of people asked me that and I have no idea what made me make that decision. But I started selling and I had the opportunity to start running offices and decided that operations was by far like where I needed to be. So I sold and I ran a few different brokerage offices in California for a couple of years and

decided that we were going to move to Colorado from California and decided to start my company called StaatsSolutions, which runs operations virtually for brokerages and teams nationwide. That’s been open for about eight years.

It’s doubled in size every single year. It’s really fun, a fun business to grow. And then as of January 1st, I accepted a full-time position on top of running StaatsSolutions as Chief of Staff of Easy Home Search in SureSend So that’s kind of been my focus for the last couple of months and it’s been really exciting.

Scott Bursey (03:27)
and I’m excited for you. That’s awesome. Let’s jump right in. Real estate is all about speed and consistency. Jennifer, what is the single biggest mistake you see agents make in new lead follow-up? And how does that sure send correct that?

Jennifer Staats (03:30)
it.

Yeah, I mean, I just don’t see enough people have a system around it, right? Depending on where you’re at in your business journey, whether you are just starting out or you’re getting really busy, right? There’s two, there’s almost like the same issue there is that we’re going into it. We don’t have a really serious system. We might see a lead come into our inbox. We might call them, but we have no way of tracking that, right? And so in the beginning, you might be worried about

don’t have enough contacts, right? You don’t know where your contacts even lie and usually I’ll help coach a lot of our clients on you do have a list of contacts, you just don’t have them organized yet. And then the other side of it is busy agents, right? You already have a bunch of deals coming in and sometimes you end up with the exact same problem. You’re out there doing these deals and you kind of forget about these new leads or even worse our past clients, right? So really

what SureSend is doing to solve that is a really robust CRM that you can put all of your contacts in, you can utilize SmartList, you can utilize AI to tell you the next couple of people that you need to reach out to. So if you’re in the beginning of your journey, it’s going to tell you where to start. And if you are a really busy agent, it’s going to tell you where your best time is going to be spent.

Scott Bursey (05:53)
Those are some fantastic points. And the key as I see it isn’t just sending something, but sending the right thing at the right time to nurture that lead. Which I imagine is where your platform’s intelligence really shines.

Jennifer Staats (06:06)
Yeah, it really does. There’s a lot of different, we have a lot of different integrations that are being built that can integrate with your website or integrate with the tools you’re already using. So instead of just going through and being like, hey, you need to spend two hours prospecting every day. Okay, yes, you still, I still want you to do that, but who are the best people to reach out to? And it’s gonna give you some smart data points that you know those top people where you’re going to be like actually making money. You’re not just a shot in the dark.

Scott Bursey (06:34)
There you go. And Jennifer, how does SureSend help agents maintain meaningful long-term relationships with past clients for repeat and referral business?

Jennifer Staats (06:45)
Mm-hmm. I think that’s really important and I think it’s probably one of the most overlooked portions of us as agents, right? You get to the closing table and you have no system for that because you’re like, my gosh, everyone tells me that my prospecting is that I’ve got to go do all of these calls to the leads, right? Well…

you’re probably forgetting about the people that have referred you business, have closed deals with you, right? So there’s various things that you can set up in the CRM to do some of the work for you, but like in short, smart lists. So you can set up a cadence, okay? How often do you wanna?

follow up with these past clients. I recommend starting with like 90 days to six months and if you can repeatably do that, then stay with that. If you’re not clearing out your smart list, then we might wanna lengthen a little bit. you smart lists of communication to me can mean a various thing, right? It doesn’t have to be phone call. It could be call, text, email, social media, right? You can go in there and clear out some of your communication on the way that makes sense for you.

And then if you want to set up things, you know, like action plans and you want things to go out either automatically or maybe you just want a task to show up once a year that you’re going to send them a card or you’re going to send them a basket or whatever you want. We can set that up in the CRM to do whatever you want. And then as your business grows, you can edit some of those plans. So it makes sense for your business.

Scott Bursey (08:14)
I couldn’t agree anymore. Referrals are the lifeblood of this industry. Yet so many agents, Jennifer, they treat past clients like a mailing list instead of a relationship. It’s not about the annual holiday card anymore. It’s about providing ongoing personalized value.

Jennifer Staats (08:26)
Okay.

Scott Bursey (08:32)
Agents need a system that prompts them to reach out to on anniversaries or with relevant marketing updates things of that variety and I’m eager for our listeners to hear how your solution simplifies that that crucial step

Jennifer Staats (08:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we have some really cool stuff being released and so I’m really excited for what that’s going to do for our agents because it’s not…

It’s not just the automated email on their birthday, right? Which you can do, but there’s so many layers to that where you can add more value.

We actually have a connector that we’re launching with AI that you can build more customized things. So if you want like a market report to go out to them once a year, that’s fully customized to their property, you can do that.

Think of all the things you can do with AI. We can set that up in the CRM for you to be very, very customized. It could be branded. It’s gonna have their name in it, it have their property. mean, you can dig really, really deep into it. I’ve been having fun playing with it, but there’s a lot of different customization. then we’re also, a lot of our marketplace vendors are also building integrations. So there’s gonna be things like letters that can go out.

postcards that can come out that are all customizable to the database that you have in there. So really as deep as you want to go into some of these, you know, customizations, you can do that inside of SureSend.

Scott Bursey (09:57)
The personal touch, the paradox of technology, right?

Jennifer Staats (10:01)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Bursey (10:35)
Jennifer, if you could walk us through what features does SureSend offer to ensure agents remain compliant with data privacy and communication regulations?

Jennifer Staats (10:45)
Mm-hmm. So it’s a fun thing that I’ve actually been going through is we have, we are, we either have or we’re working on a ton of certifications to make sure that everything that’s put in the CRM is very, very highly regulated. So we’re doing a lot of things on the backend to where your data and your privacy are really important to us. And

That way we can have more lenders in there. We really want to make it secure for all of our users. So we’re going to be fully certified probably by the end of the year.

Scott Bursey (11:15)
important. That’s a serious concern, especially with the volume of sensitive data real estate professionals handle. And a simple mistake in compliance can lead to major headaches.

Jennifer Staats (11:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. Yep.

Scott Bursey (11:27)
Jennifer,

what is the core difference that makes SureSend necessary for an agent to outperform the competition, let’s say?

Jennifer Staats (11:35)
I think it’s on the on a basic level, like if we’re not talking about digging into all the crazy integrations, I think it’s just consistency. They’re going to have a place that they can log in every single day and remain consistent. We have something called win the day, which you can set up on the team level for your team. And it basically tells you how many, you know, what are you supposed to be doing every day? How many conversations, et cetera? You can also set up personal things for yourself. So, you know, have you worked out to

today,

have you drink enough water and you can check all those things off and then what ends up happening is that you’ve won, if you check everything off and you do all the things, you’ve won the day. But the basis of it is we want agents to have a

consistent workflow that they can follow every single day and that way after a period of time they can go back and track. Is this consistency affecting my business in a positive way? I’m going to tell you I absolutely guarantee it will, but you can tweak things either on the team lead side or the agent side to say, okay.

Maybe I need to up my conversations. Maybe I need more appointments. Maybe I need to work out more. Whatever that looks like, I want them to remain consistent on a daily basis.

Scott Bursey (12:44)
consistency is such a huge huge priority and now let’s get to the exciting part the million dollar question where do you see the company sure sent in the next ⁓ let’s say five to ten years.

Jennifer Staats (12:58)
Yeah.

That’s what’s exciting is that, ⁓ you know, Preston Guyton, which is the owner of SureSend, he has a heavy real estate and mortgage background. I’m also in the real estate industry. The majority of the team that’s building it has some sort of real estate experience. So that’s really where we focus was on the real estate and the mortgage side. But where we see it over the next couple of years is we’re really building it to be an industry agnostic CRM, meaning that everything is fully customizable. So it doesn’t have to be

based off real estate, all of these stages, all the workflows are really meant to be able to run a business however you want it to run, right? We’re all in real estate. We know that everybody runs their teams and their business is completely different. So we wanted to start there where people can customize things and then we’ll be opening it up to other industries very soon. One of the most exciting things that we are also releasing probably in the next week or so is a referral section. know, lenders and agents

can refer people clients, know, obviously choosing which data to share between people and then we can open that up to like roofers, flooring people, right? How many times have we all been like, hey, Mr. Roofer, I need you to call my client and schedule this.

you can schedule all of that stuff and share that information right between the app. And then for no respo violations here, but for those relationships that do allow for a referral fee, you can actually attach the agreement there. So agent to agent, you can find who’s in a local market very easily, and then you can track everything there. So you can track what’s happening with them. You can get updates. This has been like an industry wide thing that I’ve seen issues with. Like, how do I track referrals? I’m a heavy

referral business agent that’s going to give you that solution there.

Scott Bursey (14:45)
That’s exciting. And relationships are everything. They really are. What additional opportunities do you see down the road here as well?

Jennifer Staats (15:35)
Yeah, I mean, I see a lot of different opportunities. The fact that we have an open API really opens it up that we can work with any company.

our goal and where we want to see it is that you would no longer need 50 tabs open to run your business. You would go into SureSend and be able to do the majority of everything that you need to do right in one dashboard, which all of us as agents know that’s not how we run our business right now. I mean, my husband’s in construction and he’s like, how do you function? You get here in the morning and you open a million tabs and you’ve got LastPass open and you’re logging into all

these things to do one real estate transaction. I’m like that’s just how this works right now and we’re really hoping to solve that.

Scott Bursey (16:20)
That’s awesome. And Jennifer, we love fostering connections here at Real Estate Pros. For the listeners who want to follow your journey or collaborate with you, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Jennifer Staats (16:30)
Yeah, if you want to check out SureSend, you can go to SureSend.ai. You can check out all of our various features. You can schedule a demo, all of that fun stuff. If you want to connect with me personally and just either learn about SureSend or just connect with me and maybe you need help with your business, it’s pretty easy to find me. You can find me anywhere online. Jennifer Staats, pretty unique name. Or Instagram, I’m jennifertherealtor. You can message me. We can always schedule some time to chat.

Scott Bursey (16:56)
outstanding any additional advice you’d like to give our listeners today?

Jennifer Staats (17:00)
I think if you are growing your business, make sure that you have a really solid CRM and that can be the basis of a lot of your SOPs and lot of your checklists that you’re probably living in your head.

Scott Bursey (17:13)
There we go, some great words of wisdom. Jennifer, thank you for joining us today.

Jennifer Staats (17:18)
Thanks for having me.

Scott Bursey (17:19)
This has been a pleasure. And for our listeners, we appreciate you. If you got value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We have more conversations coming up with exceptional operators, just like Jennifer. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you in the next episode, everyone.