Having to work across many different systems is a necessary evil in the real estate business.
Whether it’s using the software mandated by our brokerage for transactions, trying to test and embrace many different lead sources, or managing your business accounting, many different systems is a reality we all need to deal with.
The biggest challenge with this is it often comes with the duplication of efforts around one of the lowest-value tasks in your business...data entry.
By handling data entry between systems, not only are you having to spend the very limited, and often very expensive resources of your key team members, you’re also putting these at a much higher risk of embarrassing and costly mistakes happening when they’re the responsibility of a busy team member.
And that’s where Zapier comes in.
Best described by my friend Barry Jenkins as his ‘Digital Duct Tape’, Zapier is what’s referred to as ‘Middleware’ which is fancy speak for a system designed to connect 2 systems together.
So while Follow Up Boss has a huge list of direct integrations to other platforms you’re using, Zapier opens your options up to thousands of more tools who are also integrated with Zapier.
The goal of implementing Zapier in your business is to free your key people up, like your sales agents for example, to focus their limited time (and attention spans 😜) on the highest value, revenue-generating activities for the business.
It’s also to completely cut the mistakes that get made in the manual data entry process.
To get you started right away and have you creating your very first Zap and automating a workflow within the next 10 minutes, here are a couple of the most common ways Follow Up Boss customers are using Zapier, and the recent enhancements we made to our integration with them, to make their business more efficient.
First, here’s a list of all the ‘Triggers’ and 'Actions' you can use in your workflows:
We've even added support for Custom Fields so now you can automate the updating of your custom fields to save more time and give you more options for filtering and prioritizing your contacts.
And here are some automations the recent improvements can help you do
And this is scratching the surface. Once you’ve started to create your first Zap or two, you’ll see the options are endless!
You can even automate other workflows within Follow Up Boss.
So if you’re not already, I’d recommend you start automating some of your repetitive workflows with Zapier.
If you’re like a more step-by-step rundown on setting up your first Zap, our support team has recently updated our Zapier article, and you can see a list of the most common products customers are integrating with.
If you need a hand setting any of this up, as always, just let us know!