Buffini Referral Maker CRM Review 2024: Pricing, Pros & Cons
The Buffini and Company Referral Maker CRM is widely regarded by realtors, real estate agents, and real estate professionals as the best real estate CRM around. But how true is this? .
In this detailed Referral Maker CRM review, we’ll find out. Below you’ll find an app overview and list of features. We also get into the pros and cons and aggregate user reviews to see how the app is being received out there in the real world.
Buffini & Company Referral Maker CRM review 2024: Is Referral Maker any good?
The Buffini and Company Referral Maker CRM does a great job of organizing, automating and tracking a lot of business processes. With its industry-leading algorithm, it also automates decision-making processes, allowing you to prioritize your goals, and use data-driven activities to achieve them.
Although the Referral Maker CRM is considered to be a top-notch real estate CRM software, it faces stiff competition from alternatives like Realtyjuggler CRM and IXACT contacts. You can take a look at our top real estate CRM article to get a sense of said competition (and, of course, to do that all-important comparison shopping).
Buffini Referral Maker CRM pricing plans
First of all, how much does the Buffini and Company Referral Maker CRM cost? Let’s take a look at its prices:
*Add-on plan, requires subscription
Are there any Buffini Referral Maker promo codes or discount coupons?
There are sometimes Referral Maker CRM coupons and promo codes online, but the situation changes all the time. We recommend checking Referal Maker’s pricing page and social media for updates on any discounts they might have running.
Referral Maker overview: What is Referral Maker CRM?
The Referral Maker CRM is an all-in-one, high quality yet user-friendly real estate customer relationship management tool that is offered by the self-proclaimed “North America's largest real estate coaching and training company”, Buffini and Company.
With its headquarters in Carlsbad, California, Buffini and Company is a real estate school that is known for its coaching classes, and its management tools that are specifically tailored towards realtors and other real estate professionals. The Referral Maker CRM is one such tool. âReferral Maker is their foray into the world of CRM. The app is positioned as a high-quality yet user-friendly real estate customer relationship management system that can meet all your needs.
This platform, as noted, is among the top CRM software for realtors. It’s available on both Windows and Mac, and provides the necessary tools for generating a steady stream of referrals, leads, and ultimately customers in the real estate space. It also has a host of functions all of which are geared towards lead conversion and lead management. Referral Maker CRM also has a mobile app version that’s available for Android devices, and iPhones albeit it is significantly limited when compared to its desktop variants.
Referral Maker Real Estate CRM features list
The main features of Referral Maker CRM are
Activity Dashboard
Priority Action Center
Relationship Management
Customizable Reports
Email Marketing
Lead Management
Analytics
Goal Setting
1. Activity Dashboard
At a glance, the activity dashboard allows users or teams to view the most important tasks for the day, week or month, and it's the first thing that a user sees when they log in. It presents the tasks for the day in three sections; phone calls, notes and pop bys or visits. The dashboard has multiple sections and also features daily and weekly goals and a meter measuring progress.
The activity dashboard also has a To-Do list that shows important tasks, customer birthdays and routine follow-up reminders. The database section of the dashboard allows users to visualize the ranking of relationships that have been added to the database.
2. Priority Action Center
This is where the follow-up happens. Based on how you rank your relationships, the Referral Maker CRM automatically prioritizes follow-up calls, notes or visits for each client. Clients with a higher ranking will be scheduled more frequently at 30 to 60-day intervals versus lower-ranked clients set at 90 to 120-day intervals. The activity dashboard and priority action center are both updated in real-time to reflect completed tasks.
3. Relationship Management
The relationship management feature of Referral Maker CRM allows you to upload contacts to the CRM using a simple CSV file, Google contacts or Outlook contacts. You can create detailed relationship profiles for each contact which can capture more than just their name, phone number and address.
Referral Maker allows you to add birthdays, information on their careers and business, favourite sports and activities, property preferences, and history of communications with each contact.
Relationships imported into the CRM can be ranked and qualified based on how often they use your service, how often they refer and whether or not they are willing to refer or use your service. The ranks are simple grades from an A+ to a D.
Relationships can also be classified based on customizable metrics. This can help plan campaigns or follow-ups.
4. Customizable Reports
Referral Maker CRM allows you to create and customize reports on referrals, leads, activities, emails or birthdays. It also generates up to six different statistical reports that can be used to measure your progress towards your goals and track the efficiency of your operations.
Each report is generated within minutes with the option to instantly share among team members.
Referral Maker CRM also automatically generates a monthly report to track your transactions and monitor your referral ratios on the business dashboard. This will show your progress against your goals and how effective you are at receiving and closing referrals.
5. Marketing
Referral Maker CRM has email marketing capabilities, and It also has features for physical letters with custom letterheads, labels and handwritten notes. It can help you plan marketing campaigns weeks or months ahead with customizable emails and groups. You can also create outbound email campaigns from your company email or Gmail and track the bounce and open rates of the emails you send.
6. Lead Management
Referral Maker integrates with a few other CRMs and lead generation software to collect campaign data. Although most leads have to be entered manually, it allows you to classify leads based on different metrics.
You can save time and energy on converting hundreds or thousands of leads through the automation of marketing campaigns. You can also improve your workflow by assigning prospecting leads to team members to be nurtured. This is especially helpful for leads that are at the final stage of your marketing funnel.
7. Analytics
Referral Maker CRM allows you to view your analytics, daily, weekly or monthly based on easy-to-understand graphs and charts.
8. Goal Setting
A very key feature of the Referral Maker CRM is the business and income goals. With this feature, you can enter your target annual income after tax and the tax percentage deductible and a gross income goal is calculated for you.
Based on this income goal and the activity of other businesses within the Buffini Referral Maker network that have hit this goal, an action plan is set up for you with daily, weekly and monthly activity goals.
Although activity goals are customizable, if you are stuck on how many calls to schedule daily or weekly, you can have their algorithm run the numbers for you until you get more comfortable with setting your own goals.
Referral Maker CRM pros and cons
Here are the advantages and disadvantages of referral maker CRM:
Referral Maker CRM advantages
With Referral Maker CRM, you can develop and nurture relationships with your customers easily. Relationships can also be easily ranked from grades A+ to D to help you prioritize follow-up calls and visits. Referral Maker CRM also allows you to create and automate email marketing campaigns while providing the necessary analytics to measure its effectiveness.
Referral Maker CRM disadvantages
Leads, contacts and relationships have to be added and updated manually because Referral Maker CRM may not integrate with social media or leads generated on your website, and you need to already have a large customer base to truly take advantage of its features.
Referral Maker CRM complaints & praise (info from real Referral Maker CRM customer reviews)
After going through a couple of reviews of the Buffini and Company Referral maker CRM we can definitely say that most Users found it easy to use and helpful in tracking daily activities and goals. Other users also deemed it a perfect tool for automating some basic client management tasks, and everyone loved its amazing customer support.
However, it was mostly preferred because of how it helps businesses keep tabs on clients,set daily or weekly achievable and measurable milestones, and build solid relationships with clients.
The reviews weren’t all good though as many users complained that if you were new to business, and your client database wasn’t large enough, you couldn’t fully take advantage of its features.
On Capterra.com, Referral Maker CRM had an overall rating of 4.3 out of 5, and on G2.com, Referral Maker CRM got a score of 4.5 out of 5.
Review of Referral Maker support
The Referral Maker CRM provides phone, email and live chat support to users. Customer service on Capterra was rated at 4.7 over 5. One user Amanda stated that, although customer support had never heard of her issue before, they helped her handle it pretty quickly.
Is Referral Maker CRM worth it? Our conclusion
The Referral Maker CRM is definitely worth your time; if you’re a medium or large real estate business with a large customer base. Its plethora of functionality just makes it easy to reach out to all your customers and maintain a healthy relationship. But if you’re relatively new to real estate, or your business is still small-scale, you might find the system pricey, and you might find some of its features overwhelming.
In the end, the answer to whether the Referral Maker CRM is worth it depends on the size of your customer base, and the time you’re willing to dedicate to get familiar with the software. The good news is there’s a free version, so you can always give that a whirl and come to an enlightened decision.
