Industry: Digital Marketing
Location: Rochester, NY
Employees: 33
CRM: Zoho
About Real Estate Nexus
Getting into meaningful conversations over the phone with inbound leads is a top priority for the sales team at Real Estate Nexus. At their headquarters in upstate New York, Senior Director Hailee Holloman leads a team of six Business Development Specialists (BDS). Their main objective is to connect with prospects on the phone and set them up with an appointment for further consultation.
As a digital marketing firm focused on helping real estate agents and teams reach more clients through online marketing and lead generation support, the team at Real Estate Nexus has a well-thought-out internal lead generation and nurturing strategy. After receiving inbound leads from webinars and other digital marketing tactics, the BDS team follows up with these prospects via phone and text. Once they become clients, Real Estate Nexus is also proud to offer daily 1-1 office hours and top-notch support.
That being said, Real Estate Nexus needed a phone system that would not only support their lead follow-up plan and help them reach more potential customers, but would also offer them quality support when needed.
The Challenge
Before switching to Kixie, the Real Estate Nexus sales team used GoTo Connect as their business phone system. However, they started noticing that their pickup rates were dropping significantly due to spam numbers. In other words, their business phone numbers would show up as spam on caller ID — meaning leads were reluctant to answer their calls.
On a normal day, the BDS’ on Hailee’s sales team each make 150 calls or more. With GoTo Connect, each BDS was getting only 1-2 pickups per day. The problem of unanswered outbound calls had such a negative effect on their sales that Hailee decided to look for a new solution.
She did some research and, after eliminating other companies that did not meet her standards for customer service, landed on Kixie.
The Solution
The sales team at Real Estate Nexus decided to switch to Kixie, and within 10 days they were completely up and running, trained, and dialing with Kixie PowerCall. Hailee was impressed with the increase in connection rate that occurred for her team almost immediately. She noted, “ConnectionBoost was one of the biggest things that I needed. It skyrocketed our pickup rate immediately.”
With Kixie’s ConnectionBoost, which enables local presence dialing and automatically detects and rotates out phone numbers that have been flagged as spam, each of the BDS’ on the Real Estate Nexus team was able to get into 10-15 phone conversations per day. Hailee estimates that their productivity on the phones increased by 50% as compared to using GoTo Connect.
Hailee shared, “From GoTo, it’s 50% better!..and I would say overall, [the BDS team] production is probably somewhere in the 15-20% range better.” That additional 15-20% boost in productivity is thanks to the custom integration between Kixie and Zoho CRM.
Thanks to the customized integration set up by the Kixie team, the fields inside of the Kixie PowerDialer match up with fields in Zoho (so the team can stay in the PowerDialer and not go back and forth between it and the CRM). Another bonus for Hailee was that the integration automatically updates the ‘last contact to date’ field in Zoho based on the information dialer (i.e. inbound and outbound calls and SMS). This has made her data and reporting process much more streamlined and accurate.
The Results
In the 6 months since switching to Kixie, Hailee Holloman and the BDS team at Real Estate Nexus have seen a huge improvement in phone call connections and meaningful conversations. Every day, the BDS team is able to have 60-90 conversations, and are able to convert more inbound leads into booked appointments with account closers.
What’s more, Hailee has saved time and energy on the back end of the CRM due to the custom Zoho integration set up for her team. She’s able to accurately and confidently track when a lead was last contacted thanks to the automatically updated data from the dialer. Hailee remarked, “I was also very surprised with the custom integration, how open and willing you guys were to just do a custom integration like that for me.”
Another benefit of working with Kixie is the timely and helpful customer support. Hailee explained, “If I have an issue, if I have something going on, I can immediately send an email and I hear back very quickly. So I have to say, support is definitely there as well, where it wasn’t with GoTo. It was almost impossible to get ahold of anybody.”
She continued, “I not only enjoy the platform, but I do enjoy the people that work there. Everybody I’ve ever talked to was very helpful, knew what they were talking about, and I never got the run-around. […] You always ask what suggestions I could have…and I’ve actually seen suggestions of mine come to life. So, that’s really cool that you really get the input. I was very shocked…[the Kixie team] actually listen[s], they actually want us to like using [Kixie]. I love that.”
Hailee also had great things to say about some of the tools on the Kixie platform, especially the Live Leaderboards for keeping her team motivated. She noted, “There are some tools that I really enjoy that I didn’t see with any other platforms that I looked into. I like the leaderboard, that was really cool.
“I project it onto the wall on our sales floor, and if the projector shuts off or anything like that, [the BDS Team] is like, ‘Oh my God, Hailee, we need to see the leaderboard. We have to know where everyone is at.’ They’re obsessed with it.”
When asked to summarize her experience with Kixie so far, Hailee said, “Overall it’s a pretty positive experience, we’ve had some hiccups here and there, but hey, it’s to be expected…overall I’m pretty happy with my experience with Kixie so far. I’m excited to see where you guys go.”
