Why choose Follow Up Boss? The top 6 ways we're different

Before putting this article together, we asked ourselves: 'Is this going to be another one of those blog posts every software company uses as an excuse to wax poetic about how great they are?'

We've been producing content for a while now, but promotional content for its own sake has never been our style. Adding another generic blog article to the real estate CRM echo chamber would only fuel the info overwhelm for our readers.

On the other hand, trying to figure out which real estate CRM makes the most sense for where you are in your business today — and where you want to take your business tomorrow — is an increasingly difficult task.

You have a ton of choices about which tools belong in your tech stack, and each one claims to be better than the next. That’s why we’ve decided that every item on this list must be backed up by actual experiences from our customers, or we simply won’t write it down.

So, without further ado, here are a few of the things we're most proud of at Follow Up Boss.

#1. Our technology drives wealth for our customers

Tech has turned the real estate industry on its head.

Not long ago, agents were poring through yellow pages and Rolodexes — but today, some of the highest-grossing multi-million-dollar agencies operate entirely on the Internet. 

But making technology work for you isn't as simple as setting up an IDX-integrated website.

In fact, according to 2019 research from the NAR, 46% of the real estate firms surveyed said keeping up with technology was one of the biggest challenges they expected to face in the next two years. 

Because the truth is, while most real estate tech companies offer solutions that may bring millions to their clients — many just don't walk the walk. In fact, some of today's leading tech investors predict that 95% of the currently active real estate tech startups won't even be around five years from now.

Follow Up Boss walks the walk because we help solo agents and team leaders cut through the noise and develop a sales solution they can scale.

For tech-confident business owners, using Follow Up Boss almost always results in more wealth.

Wealth of confidence. Wealth of time. Wealth of profit.

That's why we're the only real estate CRM that enables truly independent tracking, no matter which website provider you use or how many sites you have.

With Follow Up Boss's unique sales method, agents know exactly what action to take each and every day to close more deals.

Unlike other real estate CRMs, we have no financial interest in what website tools you use. From the very beginning, our growth model at Follow Up Boss was to invest in integration capabilities, not proprietary tools.

Rather than trying to sell our users on a suite of software products, our central mission is to make sure Follow Up Boss works like a dream with the other systems you already use and love.

The result?

11 of the 50 top real estate teams in North America are using Follow Up Boss to close multiple millions of dollars in transactions year after year.

The reason for this is simple. When you and your agents use tech that you actually like, you'll finally let go of your inefficient patchwork system for managing leads and actually, well... use the tool you like. 

And as every successful Realtor knows, consistent action is the only sure way to get results.

"We invest a lot in online lead generation here in the Calgary market. We have about 16 different lead sources. One of the challenges we used to have before we came to Follow Up Boss was that we had a CRM in the backend of every single website that we were operating." ‍— Justin Havre, Justin Havre & Associates

With the help of Follow Up Boss, Justin took his "lead rich, systems poor" real estate business to a whole new level — including a more supportive team culture and a much lower agent turnover rate. Today, he's the leader of the #1 RE/MAX team in Canada.

With one central, independent CRM, brokers like Justin also get better visibility into their true ROI. 

And it's just the beginning.

In January 2020, we put our money where our mouth is and launched the Follow Up Boss Pixel which gives our users complete visibility into which websites and lead sources are generating the most ROI for their business.

You can learn all about it right here in our latest webinar.

‍

Have you seen our latest customer stories?

How to Build a 20-Agent Dream Team and Hit $96 Million per Year

Not a Brokerage: How to Reach $265 Million with 40% Repeat Referrals Using a Team-First Approach

How to Build a Consistently High-Performing Real Estate Team and 5X Your Sales in 4 Years

#2. Speed to lead has always been our top priority

You already know this, but we're going to say it anyway:

Conversion rates for new leads decrease by 90% if the response time is over 5 minutes. 

Not only that, 78% of new business goes to the first agent that contacts the lead. 

Follow Up Boss was the first Real Estate CRM to launch a robust API supporting IDX events, which, along with supporting more than 200 online lead sources, enables our clients to follow up on their leads from virtually anywhere within seconds. 

“We know what the customer is doing at that time. They’re engaged in real estate when they’re on the website,” says Jeff Funk, team leader of The Funk Collection, the #2 eXp Realty team globally in the 5 to 9 agents category.

"When a new lead comes in, it’s immediately flagged and distributed to the right team member so they can get them on the phone ASAP."— Jeff Funk, The Funk Collection

Together with his wife Renee, Jeff used Follow Up Boss to double his transaction volume in just one year. A big part of their success is down to the fact that their agents always aim to call new leads in less than 90 seconds. “If you can get it in less than 5 minutes you’re golden, but if you can do it the first 90 seconds—score!” says Renee.

From the very beginning, we designed Follow Up Boss to enable agents to be the most responsive in their area, without keeping them chained to their inboxes. As the only real estate CRM with fully integrated calling, texting and emailing, agents can contact all their leads in one central place and team leaders get better insight into true speed to lead.

Transparent reporting allows brokers to align their agents around key performance metrics.

#3. Follow Up Boss is fun to use

Speed to lead, advanced lead tracking, and referral management aren't just buzzwords to us. 

They're the core criteria that separate the top-performing real estate teams from the rest.

That's why, apart from knowing which features help drive more business for our customers, it’s equally important to know which features don't. Why?

Because feature bloat is real.

Rather than risk user experience just to create an impression of ongoing updates, our day one mission at Follow Up Boss was to build a dynamic real estate sales platform that would reflect a winning real estate sales strategy — robust, focused and distraction-free.

With our super-responsive iPhone app, agents can keep their lead follow up organized even when they're out on appointments. 

Since the early days, we've prided ourselves in having a very short, almost instinctual, learning curve. From then on, we’ve made it our mission to evolve Follow Up Boss as a tool that would continue to be not only easy to use, but would also help engage and energize users throughout the sales process. 

When faced with the decision to add new capabilities, it always comes down to one determining factor:

Each new feature must bring real value to our customers.

Hours spent learning and re-learning complicated software accumulate into days, which accumulate into thousands or even millions of dollars in wasted time and resources.

Combine that with high agent turnover rates (as much as 28% in some teams) and you've got a recipe for a failing real estate business.

But with a solid agent onboarding system, brokers like Michael Smith, CEO of Bluefield Realty Group, was able to decrease his turnover rate to just 3% — saving him countless time and money recruiting and training new agents.

"The thing I like about Follow Up Boss is that it’s so visually simple and easy. I feel like the learning curve is so short. When I onboard someone, it's just intuitive. It's easy to understand, it's very, very user-friendly," says Michael.

"I've seen a lot of other platforms out there that are just so complicated and visually hard to understand, but they still can't do half the things Follow Up Boss does." — Michael Smith, CEO of Bluefield Realty Group

At Follow Up Boss, we extensively test new features with our customers and power users until we reach true proof of concept. The result is a tool that's simple, powerful and so user-friendly, your agents will actually use it.

We're constantly checking in with our customers to find out, step-by-step how they use Follow Up Boss to close more deals. Access our entire library of Customer Interviews here!

#4. We are (and always will be) an open platform

Follow Up Boss is not a closed all-in-on system.

We won’t do everything from building websites to running your ads. Instead, we focus on doing one thing well.

With an open API, we can maintain our commitment to being a robust, scalable sales solution while empowering our users to create their own bespoke workflows based on their choice of business and marketing integrations.

Because the truth is, no two real estate businesses are the same. 

In fact, your real estate business today probably looks very different than it did last year. In today’s fast-changing market, it just doesn’t make sense to stay locked into a fixed CRM. You need to be able to evolve your systems as fast as you evolve your business.

“I didn’t like any of the CRMs we had tried and I knew Follow Up Boss integrated well with Curaytor, which I knew I wanted to use. I did some research online and decided to go for it. I started filtering all my own leads into Follow Up Boss and it worked so well that the entire team ended up switching their whole system to Follow Up Boss, too. So from day 1 at Homeway, we’ve all used Follow Up Boss.”

With a killer combo of Sierra Interactive, Curaytor, BombBomb and Follow Up Boss, Alex and his team have daily access to relevant, automated touchpoints for every single lead.

Curious about who else we integrate with? Access the full list of integrations here.

#5. Real support from real people, anytime you need it

Tools, processes, systems — it's all crucial to a thriving real estate business.

Still, we always put people first.

Nine years ago, we started to build our team from scratch. Since then, we've remained a completely self-funded company and continued to grow organically.

Without any external influences, we've never had to follow someone else’s corporate agenda. That's just one reason why we've been able to keep an unwavering focus on superior customer support for our users.

Ready to switch CRMs? Find out how we make it chaos-free!

Our US-based customer support team is here seven days a week — and you don't have to go through a robot to reach them.

As a self-funded team, we succeed when our clients succeed. We have no other option but to make sure that Follow Up Boss works.

Most software companies are quick to automate their customer support — they'll hoist their customers to a chatbot, knowledge hub, or ticketed CS system. At Follow Up Boss, we have a professional team of conversion experts (who, by the way are 100% human) that will help you get the most out of our product at every stage of the process and ensure that every agent can start to benefit from Follow Up Boss from their very first day using it.

Our clients' success is our success. There’s no middleman in this equation. 

#6. We're not just a CRM, we're a business platform

The value of community in the real estate industry can’t be overstated. 

With the help of our private success community, product webinars, interviews, mega-guides and more, your team always knows exactly which actions to take each and every day to convert more leads and grow your real estate business.

And because we stay close to our customers in everything we do, we're able to provide exact blueprints for how Follow Up Boss can be used to its full potential based on the unique size, shape and focus of your business.

But please don't take our word for it. There's a reason all our reviews are made public. Check them out, then decide for yourself if Follow Up Boss is the right CRM for you. Because while our software absolutely gets the job done, it’s really the people using it who do all the hard work.