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What is a CRM? It’s a Customer Relationship Management tool. Should you use one? The answer is YES! But what if you are just starting out and you think you can remember everyone you need to reach out to and know? The answer is still YES! You should start one and you should do it now, here’s why.
Over the course of my career, I have been around and managing companies’ CRMs for the past 6 years. The biggest mistake I see is that agents wait way too long to start a CRM. You don’t get into the real estate business to not grow your business. When you are in growth mode that is when you need a CRM the most. I don’t care how good your memory is or how many to-do lists you make, you just cannot remember everything about everyone.
As an agent, the most critical part to growing your business are to make connections and add value to them. A CRM provides 1 place where you can note everything about your clients & prospects: kids, hobbies, birthdays, anniversaries, addresses & emails. It is the starting place for all marketing automation, which is an easy way to stay top of mind to your clients and prospects while providing valuable content to them.
Don’t Wait.
Many new agents fall into the trap of saying “it’s too early” or “I don’t need that right now”. What happens is that eventually they come to accept that they need a system, but by that time it’s just too big of a task and it never gets done. The idea of sitting down for hours and putting everyone they know into a computer is too “administrative” and time consuming. I agree with you… and it sounds miserable.
3 Steps To A Rock Solid CRM
One.
Start now! No matter where you are in your career just start now. Take 20 minutes every day for 2 weeks and start gathering all your contacts and enter them into your CRM system.
Two.
Group. Tag. Categorize. Most CRM systems have a way to mark or group contacts into marketing lists. As you are entering your contacts, make sure you are tagging or grouping them into meaningful marketing lists like “Buyer Prospects”, “Listing Prospects”, “Past Buyers”, and “Past Sellers”. This will give you the framework to send pointed and valued content in future email campaigns to your database of clients.
Three.
Commit to taking time every week to put all the new people you meet into the CRM. And I mean obsessively commit to doing this every week. Most weeks should really take 5 or 10 minutes.
Then suddenly you have this thing that can be a huge asset that will allow you to create meaningful email campaigns and help you connect with the right people at the right time. The possibilities are endless but you have to do it. IT WILL BE WORTH IT!
