What Follow Up Boss Is
A CRM built for real estate rather than adapted to it. Leads arrive from every source into one inbox, get routed by rules, and sit in pipeline stages with automations chasing them. Calling and texting happen inside the platform so the whole history stays on the contact record.
For investors the draw is lead routing and speed to lead. Sellers contact several buyers; whoever responds first usually wins the conversation. Follow Up Boss is what makes a five-minute response the default rather than something you manage by willpower.
What I Build
- Pipeline stages that match how you actually buy, from new lead through to closed
- Lead routing rules, round-robin and ponds so every lead has an owner within seconds
- Up to 15 smart lists so the daily dashboard tells your team who to call today
- Action plans and nurture sequences, including long-term follow-up for sellers who are not ready yet
- Automated tasks and stop rules so sequences end when a human replies
- Custom fields, segmentation and original source tracking kept intact
- Full database cleanup and de-duplication before anything goes live
- Deal, GCI and source-to-revenue tracking so you can see which marketing paid
- Email and texting configured and tested, then a complete walkthrough with your team
Follow Up Boss Integrations I Set Up
The integrations are where most setups fall down — leads arrive but land in the wrong place, or arrive twice, or silently stop. These are the connections I build and monitor:
- Smarter Contact and Launch Control — SMS leads and replies into the CRM automatically
- Slybroadcast — ringless voicemail drops logged against the contact
- Gravity Forms, Google Forms and website forms — straight in, source tagged
- Calendly — booked calls appear as appointments, not as something to copy over
- Mailchimp and Constant Contact — email engagement visible on the record
- Google Contacts — two-way sync so the phone matches the CRM
- Dialers and call tracking, so recordings and outcomes log themselves
- Zapier and webhooks for anything without a native connector
Where no native integration exists, it gets built with Zapier or webhooks. More on that on my Follow Up Boss Zapier integrations page.
Action Plans, Smart Lists and the Parts People Never Finish
Most accounts I inherit have Follow Up Boss installed and barely configured. Leads land, nothing happens, and the owner concludes the CRM does not work.
- Action plans — what actually happens when a lead arrives at 11pm and nobody is awake
- Smart lists — the daily working view: new leads, overdue follow-ups, going cold, under contract
- Automations — task creation, stage movement and notifications that do not depend on anyone remembering
- Reporting — which source produced contracts, not just which produced conversations
- Training — the system only works if the team uses it the way it was built
Already Using Follow Up Boss?
If the account is in reasonable shape, skip setup and go straight to management at $200 a month. If it is not, I quote only the missing work rather than charging for a rebuild you do not need. Either way nothing is deleted or disconnected without your approval, you keep ownership of the account, and I work inside it as a user.
The Pipeline I Build
Default Follow Up Boss stages are written for agents chasing listings. Investors buy differently, so the stages get rebuilt around how a deal actually moves:
- New Lead — arrived, not yet contacted
- Contacted — conversation started, not yet qualified
- Qualified — motivation, timeline and condition established
- Appointment / Offer Made — a number is on the table
- Under Contract — signed, in diligence
- Closed or Dead — with a reason recorded, because dead leads are a recycle list
Stages are deliberately few. Every extra stage is another thing a team forgets to update, and a pipeline nobody maintains tells you nothing.
What a Rebuild Typically Fixes
Most accounts I inherit have the same handful of problems. If several of these sound familiar, the CRM is not your problem — the configuration is:
- Leads arriving with no source, making marketing spend unmeasurable
- Duplicate contacts, so one seller appears three times and gets messaged three times
- Action plans that never stop, still sending after someone replied
- Integrations that broke months ago and nobody noticed
- Fifteen pipeline stages nobody updates, or three that do not match how you buy
- Smart lists that return everything, so the team ignores them