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today I'm going to share with you how I use pipedrive to manage my real estate business specifically we're going to get into the reasons why I chose pipedrive over some other crms why I believe you should invest in your own CRM versus using your brokerages what pipedrive looks like when you first begin that trial and then I'm going to peel back the curtain and let you see exactly how I customize pipedrive and use it on a daily basis I'm also going to share with you a few Integrations that I set up and a couple other Integrations that I think some of you might find helpful I'm going to chat a little bit about where are some areas that I believe pipedrive falls short and then we're going to end on some options and what you can expect if you wanted to customize your own instant pipedrive or if you like what I created we have a few options for you to leverage that as well so my name is Nick Chambers I'm a realtor out of the greater Seattle area I've been doing this full time since 2018. prior to this I was in the tech World specifically with startups where I was kind of leading and building different operations and sales teams which is actually how I came across pipedrive and part of which I think is what makes pack drive so unique and that pipedrive is not designed for any one specific industry rather pipedrive is really designed to make life easier it's to help you automate really get better management and insight into your sales processes so when I first went into real estate I knew I needed a CRM to manage all the different transactions that I would be working on making sure that nothing were to slip through the cracks and then also how am I staying in touch with my database how am I growing my database I needed insight and I needed data into that and so I knew right up off the bat from what I know in Tech I'm going to need a CRM so I evaluated about nine of them and the first one that I chose actually wasn't pipedrive it was one that had all the different features and a ton of functionality way more than I ever needed here or even knew it existed at the time but I thought it could be something I can grow into well upon kind of signing on the dotted line I got my calendar of events from everything what it's going to look like from implementation to the training process and it was going to take almost two months that was my first red flag but I thought you know what I'm pretty techy maybe these guys are just awesome with customer support let's keep going but after my first training I couldn't tell you probably half the stuff that I learned I had probably like six or seven pages worth of notes and just realized this is this is way too much and not where I actually want to be spending and focusing my time and so I took a couple steps back and just kind of outline what is it that I really need and it's it's simple it's really two different things I want a way to track and make sure that every single transaction that I work on nothing falls through the cracks and when and if I grow out team I want to be able to bring them on board so they can understand my process the way that I operate and make sure that everybody is reading from the same script so we all have one single source of Truth the other page or the other one is that I need a great way to manage my database I want to know exactly who's in there is there contact information up to date when's the last time I was in touch with them and how am I adding value to them right so those were the two big things now there's a whole lot more that other people might need and that's that's great pipedrive may or may not solve that there's a ton of crms out there but for me personally those are the two big things that I wanted now the reason why I didn't go with my brokerage is CRM and I'm going to say I love my brokerage I have absolutely no plans on leaving it but the reason why I didn't choose it was really quite simple is I have no idea what the future holds meaning somebody can come around tomorrow and Acquire The Brokerage maybe The Brokerage gets new management and I just don't share the same vision that the new owners have maybe there's a reason in which I need to move this brokerage no longer actually makes sense so for me there's just a lot of what ifs and if I think about what's painful in a move specifically with a company or a brokerage is resetting up all of your tools and all of your applications for really where you want to focus is on the clients and on the deals themselves making sure everything is running smoothly there and so for me I thought it would be a huge value add in Time Savings for me to own my CRM to own my website and to own my email those are the three ways well two ways in which people get in touch with me but three things that I'll always always manage and never rely on a brokerage to do that just in that case where something happens and I need to move a really interesting use case and I wish I could take credit for this but another agent in my office came to me and said you know this is really interesting in what you're building I'm thinking about retiring in the next 10 years and what I don't like is that I've been doing this job for about 30 years and at the end of my retirement what's going to happen is I might have a past client reach out to me and ask for help in finding a new agent of course I'm going to connect them with someone who I feel is a great fit and can serve them well and then on the other side then I will get a referral fee that's my retirement for this amazing business that I created but what if I were to create something like what I've done here which is I've implemented and built out my entire sales process my entire operations exactly how I've been marketing and exactly how I run my business and how I make sure that every deal goes through as smoothly as possible there might be a way in which I can slowly bring on another agent and introduce them into my sphere to connect them and kind of let them know this is going to be the person who I'm going to recommend you work with upon my retirement now to that agent that's coming in do you think that's a value add do you think that might be something that they would pay for in my opinion yeah absolutely I I 100 think so if someone were to approach me with that I would very seriously consider it so that again all different reasons why I believe you should invest in your own CRM versus using your brokerage so now let's get into pipedrive I'm going to start with taking a look and showing you what pipe Drive looks like when you first begin your trial and then I'm going to show you another instance that I've completely customized and how I use it on a daily basis okay so when you begin your trial using pipedrive for Real Estate this is the template that pipedrive has created now this is the one pipeline here called real estate and within this pipeline they have these seven different stages the way you want to think about stays stages is that it's a period of time in which a number of tasks need to happen in order to move on to the next stage for me personally I really don't like the way that these are labeled especially ending with under contract in my opinion once you go under contract with a client there is a lot of tasks that need to be completed a lot of due diligence and in order to get your client to have a successful closing and even thereafter there's still a lot of follow-up that you might want to do in order to make sure that they're happy with the transaction itself and to stay in touch with that client as well the good news is is that this is all highly customizable and it's very easy to do now when we take a look at the data fields within the transaction there's a lot to be desired within this template pipe Drive has created just a basic level of info this contact information the person who you're representing what company they work for in the title if you want to track those things what's the value of this deal and then when is the expected close date for me personally I want to track everything with regard to the transaction meaning I want to know when does the appraisal due when are all my contingencies to who was the other agent on the other side what brokerage do they work with who did we use for title who are we using for escrow so on and so forth I feel the more data the better so this way I can very easily and make this deal accessible to my team so everybody can see who it is that's working on this deal and when are each of these contingencies and tasks do again the good news is that this is all highly customizable so now let's switch and move over to the instance that I created and to show you how I feel is a better way to use pipe drug all right so now I'm going to show you how I've customized pipedrive and use it to manage my real estate business all of the data that you see in here is just sample data it's not real it's just something to know so I've created a number of different pipelines to manage different areas of my business first one is listing pipeline so all the listings that I'm managing um have coming on the market currently under contract are all under the listing one buyers so anyone that's interested in buying a home I manage under my buyer pipeline referral pipeline so if a client comes to me a friend whoever and says hey I'm moving to a different state than Washington in this case do I know a good real estate agent that I can connect them with I'm always sure yeah I will find one for you and so this is a way for me to kind of help track how that process is going for them stay in touch stay in flow with them the next one is future prospects so this is for more so for someone who we just might have in a conversation like hey my wife and I are thinking about buying a vacation home in the next year or two or I'm thinking about buying an investment property next year this those kind of conversations that you just want to kind of keep in the back your mind but still very easy place where you're not going to forget it it's just something that you can look at it's again ways to stay and flow ways to stay in touch with your clients unsolicited CMAs so this is a value-added touch point that I do for all my clients uh once a year so right usually around their home anniversary for most of them I'll send them a CMA that gives them a new idea of what their homes value is and I do this the same time every year and for me this is just a nice easy way to visualize it where at the beginning of February for example I'm looking at okay here's all the different CMAs that I need to send out this month are there any new clients that closed in February that I also need to add to this list and now I'm going to find a date on which I can kind of probably bulk and do all of these together and then send them out so they get it right around their home anniversary time and then when the next year comes around I'm doing the same thing over and over and over again so they almost can expect that hey Nick's going to be sending me that CMA every single year so kind of the same thing as the unsolicited CMA I look at this at the beginning of every month and figure out you know how do I want to get in touch with each of these clients is it a card is it something more is it just a stop by what what am I doing for each of these clients and who do I want to reach out to this month and so again I'm a very visual person so this just helps me visualize everything that I have coming up for that month and just helps me keep good tabs on it so let's go back to the listing pipeline we're going to dive a little bit deeper here so for me the way that I structured it is I also have seven different stages like the pipedrive template but mine are set up a little bit differently and I'll walk you through how how mine works so Prospect that's someone that seems like they're probably going in this case list their in the next probably four to five months and so I'm putting them here I'm getting ready for it I'm reaching out setting up calls you know just kind of prepping them going through the things that we're gonna probably need to do when they're ready to start making start doing all of these different various tasks once they are ready to go they go into active listing prep now out of all my pipelines and all my stages this one has the most tasks I believe there's probably around like I can't remember if it's like 70 or 90 tasks associated with just this one stage so there is a ton that goes into listing preparation now not all tasks are going to be relevant for that specific transaction that deal for example not everyone's part of an HOA everyone might not have a septic or might not be on a well or might not have ccnr it's like various things so I'll get into this but you can quickly eliminate those and just focus on the tasks that are important the next stage is live listings and once I publish the the listing in the ml unless this is just you know things to remind me to do to check on keep the client up to date with all the activity and so on and so forth and then once we accept an offer then I have a number of different tasks that need to happen I have to send in for example paperwork to the office set up title set up escrow and what's nice I have a transaction coordinator and so all of these tasks are automatically then assigned to either myself or to her and so you can quickly and easily see who's doing what and when should they be doing that the next one is contingencies so this is moving through everything that needs to happen in order to see a successful close so you're talking about inspections you're talking about financing all the various different things the due diligence that needs to happen in order to get to closing and within a week of closing there's usually a number of tasks that need to happen right there are there signing appointments has the lender send out the docs all those different things are then associated within this and then after they close right how do you want to stay and flow with your clients for me that one month after I'm checking in a couple days after a week after at the end of the month and so on and so forth so let's take a look open up one of these deals so you can kind of see what that looks like in a little bit more detail so these are the tasks right here that kind of automatically populate now these ones are automatic right here so whenever I move them from stage to Stage to Stage new tasks automatically appear and if you have multiple people on your team you can set it up so that person is if they are always responsible for a specific task it's always assigned to them so for example maybe someone on your team is always responsible for managing the staging managing the photography turning in the mutual paperwork to the office whatever that might be maybe you're always responsible for creating the CMA and then at sometimes maybe if you have multiple agents on your team the team lead is going to always be responsible for that task so it just there's a lot of flexibility there on how you can set up each and all of these tasks and once you're done you simply just check it off and moves it down to this done column right underneath here so anything that's been done you can see all the past tasks now the next part is is within the transaction there are a lot of details that you can track or maybe you don't want to track them however you want to set that up but it's really simple to create a customized field which is what these are over here to track all the information or as much as information as you'd like within this transaction so for example this person is buying and selling a home this is what their price range is for when they go to purchase their home what's the address if they have a garage code whatever that might look like I like to keep that there it's just a nice easy place to find rather than having to dig through text messages or an email what is their target list date and then once you go live and your contract is accepted then you can kind of start populating the rest of these fields here what how much is the earnest money when is it due well when's the inspection date when's the inspection response due we have a paragraph W if you're in Washington you might be familiar with that if you're out of Washington you may not be but the good news is is all of this is customizable so it can fit your process on how you like to manage each and every single deal this is also another real great feature is let's say I need to make a phone call to the lender I'm not going to search through my email trying to figure out what was that lender's phone number I can simply just click on their contact and I got their phone numbers their email where's their office located kind of all that great information there same thing with the other agent who's the title and Escrow Company what's the title number you can track your GCI as well as the percentage here and then if you're marketing to them in certain ways and you just want to make sure that is set up again the sky's the limit on how many fields you want to track here it's completely and all customizable now what else is pretty nice is that once you get off the phone with someone what I like to do is is type up notes within pipedrive specifically I actually open up the app that pipedrive has created I hit the microphone and I talk to add all the notes and so whenever I need to go back and reference them maybe I have my next call coming up and I wanted to take a look at hey what were the last things that we talked about I can easily go back to this reference them and pick right back up where I started so it's a great place to kind of keep track of that and when you're managing you know more than two three four five deals this is extremely extremely helpful the next piece that also can save you a lot of time is by creating email templates and so there are certain emails that you find yourself kind of sending over and over again maybe sometimes there are some small tweaks that you add but for the most part it's it's generally kind of this the same verbiage and so here you can create an email template by syncing pipedrive up with your email integrating that and then going in here and then making small customizations however you see fit to each and and all these templates one recommendation I would have as you can see right here I just added a few buyer ones so these are email templates specifically that go out to the buyers I labeled it buyers so it's easier to find because some of them might sound the same timeline to closing for example I have one that's more tailored towards buyers and I have another one that's more tailored towards listings and so I just like to put the buyer or the seller label here first so it's just nice easy way to take a look at that similarly I do that also on the tasks so for example inspection and finance where for us we're now back in the days where people are doing inspections again if they weren't or we fast rewind this you know four five six months ago and people are waiving inspections I would automatically just delete these because I know that it's waived I don't need to do that anymore financing right if we have a cash buyer I'm not going to do any of the financing tasks so it's just a nice simple way to kind of clearly see you know what tasks need to be done which ones can you get rid of to be honest this isn't the view that I I look at when I'm working through transactions but it's a great way if you need to drill down into any specific deal where I'm actually looking is in this activity icon right here here this opens up all the different tasks associated with each and every transaction or or deal as pipedrive likes to put it so now I can see everything that I have to do everything that's behind which is highlighted in red what's due today is in green and what's in black is what's coming up and so what's what's pretty nice about this is I like operating off the screen when I'm done I just hit the done bar if there's something I need to change maybe I need to move the dates for Kylie and Eric let's say these get pushed out I can go on over into here select due date edit current value and then let's say I'm going to switch it all out to the 21st I hit save confirm and now I can just edit those three tasks and now they're all populated to go on the 21st so it's just a nice easy way to manage it and again once you move your deal from stage to Stage not every task is relevant so for example let's say this guy he waived inspection and they are a cash buyer so none of these make sense I just come in here and I delete it all right I delete them they're not important because we waived them and they are a cash buyer so it's just a nice simple easy way to do it now all of these specific Fields up here again are completely customizable you can drag and drop if you want to have it viewed in a certain way you can add other fields in here as well if you want to track something you can easily do that as well these are all activities so the next piece let's dive on into contact information and before I do that let's actually go back into one of these deals so you can see what the contact information looks like within inside each specific deal so all I did here is I just kind of opened up this transaction which is the one we were looking at earlier and I scrolled down to the person involved so there's their name first name last name phone email I track kids names as well current address when is their home anniversary birthday warm and hot list if that's something you do this is a great way to track it and then subscriptions how am I marketing to this person how am I staying in flow with this person right this is all information that I want to check off here as well and so another way to view this and again I don't I rarely ever go into this view this is more once we go Mutual I'm here and also when the deal is first added into the pipeline I'm usually here but most the time I'm either spinning to this again activity section that we just covered or I'm in my contacts page contacts page first thing that that I do is I'm looking at who's on my warm list who's on my hot list right when was the last time I was in touch with them what do I need to do to stay and flow with them um are there any follow-up tasks what's that looking like I also have different labels clients that are a B's and C's things that I'm looking to do here as well is how do I move everybody up to an a client for me A C client is for an example if I saw him in a grocery store it might be somebody like oh hey kind of wave and you go about your very business right or that's just someone who's a c not necessarily a client what or someone that's an a if I saw them in a grocery store I'm like hey what's going on maybe a hug you know something like that more engaging in conversation because you just have a better connection other people structure it as A's are their VIPs those are the VIP clients and so they Market to them differently they host events for these clients differently whatever that might be you can completely customize this on however you want to group and track all of your clients same thing going back into subscriptions for me it's how my marketing to these people how am I staying in flow with them when is their birthday right that's another big one you send out birthday cards what does that look like home anniversaries going back to the kids names and a variety of different other things that you can be in here and tracking you can create any field which is great and it's nice and easy to sort you can also export all this information very easily so if you have a different system that you want to put it into maybe you use the postable to send out cards you can export all your contact information to a CSV Excel whatever that might be and send it on out to whatever you want to do there so in this demo it's not quite set up because again it's just full of sample data but I'll kind of give you just a quick look at it this is a really neat functionality that pipedrive has um again because it's sample data there hasn't really gone through time to really kind of measure various different parts of this business but you can track you know how long are your deals staying in certain stages which months are you busiest which months are you adding the most deals what do your sales look like over time are there certain clients that would be considered a loss a loss might be someone that maybe you listed their home and sat on the market for 120 days and they're like you know what I'm not going to lower my price I'm just not going to sell anymore technically a loss or a buyer that just decided that hey they don't want to buy anymore right so how are you tracking those sort of things as well maybe they're listing appointments they decided to go with another agent so for me again being the data guy I want to track everything I possibly can um so I'm I think pipedrive has a great way to do it on this this insights page here now other applications that you can use with pipedrive this one's kind of new that they just came out with but if you send marketing campaigns use different companies for that you can do that now in pipedrive as well so you can send out and create different email templates and it's a nice clean and easy way to do that another application that it just came out with was projects so projects is essentially a project management tool so you can track the status of certain projects that you're working on I got really excited about this at first because I was hoping that when I was thinking about using it for for listing prep and I was hoping that I could assign certain tasks within a project to a client without having to give them a license so that way we can see exactly where each of us are at in terms of getting their home ready to put on the market but unfortunately pipedrive requires that you have a license and furthermore there's not really a way to only give them access to projects they would see the rest of your pipe drive as well so that could be a feature that changes down the road I I hope it is but we shall see and then in here in marketplace pipedrive integrates with a ton of different applications you can connect it to your Dropbox you can connect it to zoom you can connect it to Google Drive a whole list of other applications they also have a lot of Integrations with zapierre which is an IFTTT solution which what that means is it's an application that you know if this happens then do that so an example of that would be if I check off this task then send an email to that client and so there's a little bit of automations and things like that that you can do there as well all right so now let's talk about a few areas of pipedrive where I feel it falls short in terms of using it for real estate and also a few areas that I wish were a little bit more customizable um the first one's a little bit more nitpicky but the toolbar on the side here with the different icons I wish was customizable so I can get rid of certain bookmarks icons that I don't use for example I would get rid of projects and campaigns that's not something I'm using today and then I'd rearrange these in a way where I have my most heavily traveled Bookmark at the top and then kind of work my way down from there again it's more nitpicky but that is something that I wish I could customize the next one has to do with the date fields within the transaction so for example when you go to enter a date field in this case let's do earnest money due date you pick the date in which it's due and you hit save and it's great there's a nice record here you can see exactly when it's due but I wish there was a way to take it one step further where pipedrive would then ask do you want to be notified of this date and when do you want to be notified of this date the day of the day four two days before whatever that might be and then it can automatically create a task for you now I think that would be a great workflow but there is a workaround for it where you can create an activity or a task for yourself so in this case we'll call it earnest money do it's due on November 17th to sign that to me I hit save and now I have my task in there so again work around but it would be nice if you could do that within date these date fields within the transaction as well as the date fields at a contact level so be a note of being able to set up notifications for home anniversaries and birth dates kind of on the fly when you go to enter these dates in those fields now the next one has to do more with the settings side um it's this kind of things that I've learned through trial and error the first one is contexting so I don't recommend doing contact sync and the reason for this is you probably get a lot of emails from people whose contact information you don't want in your pipedrive well if you have contact sync set up anybody that emails you then becomes a contact in your pipedrive account and so that could lead to just a lot of cleanup and a lot of contacts that you probably really don't care to track or stay in flow with so I don't recommend turning that on the other one is calendar sync so the way in which I have this set up is whenever I move a deal or a transaction from stage to Stage a number of tasks automatically populate for that day for that deal and then I go in and I kind of edit the due date based on the contract for when those tasks are due get rid of stuff that's not applicable however if you have calendar sync set up all of those tasks that then populate when you move that deal to that stage then push out and create an event in your calendar and so an example of this could be a very busy one is when you go to move a deal into listing prep I have like I can't remember if it's like 70 to 90 different tasks well that would have 70 to 90 different events than created in my calendar for that day and furthermore when you go to edit the date in which that's due that task is due in pipedrive it doesn't automatically update in the calendar itself so again I personally wouldn't recommend turning on calendar sync and that that's really it for kind of the nitpicky and more customizable things within pipedrive now I feel we have just scratched the surface with what is capable and possible within pipedrive but as I mentioned earlier originally when it's starting out on pipedrive I wanted to keep it very simple managing my contacts managing every transaction making sure that nothing falls through the cracks But as time passes I am starting to integrate a lot more features functionality and third-party Integrations My Hope by now is that you've been able to determine if pipedrive could be a good fit for you in terms of helping you manage your real estate business or not if it is looking like it could be something that you're interested in deploying there's a couple options for you on how to get started with this the first one is building it out on your own I'm going to chat a little bit more about you know how much time that's probably going to take you to build I also have a pro tip for you and a bonus item to help you get started or if you like what I've created here but may want to add some subtle tweaks we have an option for that as well which I'll talk about too so the first part is building pipedrive out on your own now when I first created this there was a couple of other people in my office that wanted an instance so I figured I'd give one a go and kind of recreate what I've already done just to kind of test out what that might look like and it took me about 25 hours in doing so now I won't say that I'm an expert in pipedrive but I'm pretty Savvy with it and so knowing that all that I know and exactly how to do it took me 25 hours in terms of a learning curve and everything that I essentially created here which means you know learning how to build out pipelines data fields tasks automated tasks all that good stuff I would probably add on another three to five hours just depending on your comfort level with learning new software products so overall I don't think it's hard but it can be very tedious especially the the task bed now a pro tip for you if you do want to build this out is before you even start your trial account map out exactly how you want to design your instance of pipedrive now what I mean by this are what are the different pipelines that you want to create within each pipeline what are the different different stages you want to create within each stage what are the tasks associated with each stage as well as the details within each transaction and the contact fields in which you want to create as a bonus maybe dive in through your emails and look for some emails that you more commonly send out but might need a couple subtle tweaks in here to create your email templates now once you have all of that mapped out and you've read it over a few times making sure you didn't miss anything or there's nothing more that you want to add that's when I would start your trial with pipedrive as a bonus I have I'll put a link down below for a free 30-day trial account uh pipedrive right off their website just offers a two-week account so this will give you a couple of extra weeks so hopefully that helps there now the second option is if you liked everything that we have created here but maybe you want to make some subtle tweaks to it in whatever way is possible or maybe you have multiple people on your team and you want to make sure that no matter who the lead is on this transaction that maybe certain people are always assigned that specific task an example could be maybe you have someone on your team that's always responsible for setting up photography for setting up staging for turning in paperwork to the office whatever that might be we have a way to where that person will always have that task so it's great if you have a transaction coordinator or an assistant or maybe a buyer's agents you know whatever that might look like so we can we can get pretty creative there now for us we can duplicate this instance using a third-party piece of software and it only takes us about an hour to do so once complete we look through it make sure that everything is working and functioning properly and then we'll set up a time with you to train you walk you through it answer any questions so on and so forth and then we're always available if there's needs to be any like tweaks or you have questions a little bit later down the road in terms of investment so a few different parts to this so let's go to pipedrive for billing so right it recommends professional personally I don't think you guys need that I don't think most agents need that um so let's just start with each one essential is unfortunately it's not going to work if you have a lot of tasks you're very they limit you in the number of tasks here um Advanced I think will work for for most uh Brokers I'm on Advanced myself now it's 34.90 if you pay per month uh however if you pay for a pipedrive up front and an annual one annual payment it's basically 24.90 but Advanced should work for most that's what I'm running off of you may have to upgrade if you have even more more tasks than about 250 300 can't remember exactly how many I have within this template but something like that and then professional Enterprise tasks aside I think it's just a lot more than what most teams need keep in mind that pipedrive is not designed for any specific industry but for a sales process and for sales operations and these are more tailored towards larger companies that have a much larger sales Fleet you know the 10 15 200 or maybe even a 1000 sales people those are what these are more designed for in terms of the cost for us to duplicate pipedrive itself I haven't finalized the numbers yet but essentially what it's going to be made up of is there's going to be an implementation cost which is everything for us to get you up and running and then there'll be an annual renewal fee and the reason for the annual renewal fee is that is the application that we're using to not only duplicate the instance of pipedrive that we created here but also to constantly manage and monitor it and so there's a fee that we have to pay for every instance to that and so we're essentially kind of passing that on if you have any more questions please feel free to reach out always happy to help or just talk through pipedrive I can be again reached very easily through email and that is Nick just Nic at Chambers NW like northwest.com thanks so much for watching and I hope this was helpful talk to you soon