I’ve taken three calls in the last three days from Agent Officer users.

In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a desktop real estate CRM. The last upgrade was in 2006. They had been using it for many years but operating system upgrades will eventually make it unusable if not already. Frankly, it’s amazing to me that it has worked as long as it has. The last agent was referred to me, thinking I would recommend another desktop real estate CRM. He hasn’t paid anything for his continued use of Agent Office for many years. When people find out there is no such thing as a real estate CRM that is a desktop product any more, they they tend to be, shall we say, not real happy. I had to tell them they don’t exist any more. They were not expecting that. That’s why I’m writing this. If you have an ancient desktop real estate CRM, you’ll want to read on. 

The thing that most people liked about desktop software is that it was a one time fee.

For a few hundred dollars, you could purchase the software for permanent use. Support and updates were an additional cost, but a small percentage would opt to pay for them. That meant that the CRM developer had to keep up a significant continuous flow of sales to new customers. That’s where it got difficult. It just isn’t a viable business model, which is why it no longer exists. If there are any real estate desktop CRMs left, I am unaware of them. If you find one, I would caution you that it is very likely that the product will not survive. Real estate agents are too small of a market compared to products that have many millions of potential users. 

When you’re looking at real estate CRMs, a big question used to be SAAS versus Desktop CRM.

In other words, one that you access only in the cloud, or one that’s only available on your computer. The latter is software you actually install on the computer. That’s the first downside to it being desktop versus SAAS. With SAAS, you can access it from any computer anywhere. With a desktop CRM, you could only use it on the device upon which it was installed, and the number of devices was often limited. 

One of the benefits of using a SAAS versus Desktop CRM is that you can access it anywhere. All you need is their URL. You go to the site, log in, and you’re good to go. Because you’re paying monthly, all the updates and support are included in that fee. The variables from CRM to CRM are many, so the pricing can vary a lot. Typical SAAS CRM pricing can be as low as $19/mo., up to hundreds per month. For one of the more popular CRMs you can expect to pay in a range of $40 to $60 per month. No startup fees. No other charges.

There is such a thing as additional fees, but they are not for the CRM.

Some people have a tendency to take issue with any additional fees at all. They see it as an extra fee that the CRM is charging. That’s not normally the case at all. You can expect a CRM to provide certain features. Storing your contact information, screens for listings and closings, automated lead population, and email template mailings are common CRM features. Different ones have different features. But some of them affiliate with other software so they can provide additional features that they themselves do not yet, or never will have. Although Top Producer deserved different criticisms over the years, that was one they didn’t deserve. People used to say they nickel and dimed you to death. That was simply not true. They offered more additional affiliates than anyone for a while there. And rather than it being seen as a good thing, they were chastised.

At this point, SAAS is the only way to go.

The number of benefits they have over desktop software are too many to count. The days of paying a few hundred bucks for a product you could use for years are gone. The need for technology makes It a lot more expensive to be in real estate sales then it was when I got in in 1987. But it makes us more efficient, we’re making twice as much as we did then, so…

Need help? It’s what I do. Contact me here!

There are many concepts and rules that you should consider when entering data into and using a CRM.

The features agents use and the way they use them vary widely, but these four things are suggestions that apply to everyone. These four basic CRM rules are really not optional if you want to make good use of it. They are basic tenets that everyone wants to do all the time.

Your CRM is a database. It’s not a phone book

with scribbled entries that make perfect sense, as long as you’re the one looking at it. You will be searching for people and information in your CRM, so your information needs to conform to certain rules. If it doesn’t, the computer can’t make up for the data you failed to provide. You won’t get accurate results and/or mailings will go out to people with their names wrong. One thing that so many people do not do well is making sure you have both a first and last name for a contact. When doing a search by last name, if there is no last name, then you get inappropriate results. The same goes for the first name. Lastly, if you have it, use the middle initial. It doesn’t happen often, but you will eventually wind up with one or more contacts with the same first and last name. Having the middle initial will usually allow you to distinguish between the two. 

Every contact must have at least one Category/Contact Type/Group

or whatever your CRM calls them. Chances are that you will have a number of different groups that each contact belongs to. They are a method by which you categorize people such that you can find them in many different ways. Typical categories can include, Buyer, Seller, Past, Pending, Active, Prospect, Closed 20XX, Investor, Land, Residential, Commercial, Lender, Title, Home Inspector, etc. If you want to do a bulk email to all of your Active Buyers, you can just do a search based on you having labeled them as such. 

When you enter a new contact,

one of the four basic CRM rules is that you make sure to enter a note about the contact. Most CRMs allow you to search the contents of the notes. This is an excellent way to find someone years later. You want to add key words that are relevant to that person, or an event with that person. You might reference where you met them, such as Doylestown Country Club. When you are adding a note, make sure to get the spelling of the keywords correct. You won’t find them if you spell it wrong. 

The fact that your CRM is an online service means that they have your data backed up at least once. In theory that sounds like there would be no need for you to have to back up your data. This is actually not exactly true for several reasons. That’s another subject in and of itself, so I covered it in this post. Suffice it to say that at least once a month, you should do an export of all the data your CRM has to offer. This way you have your own copy, no matter what happens to the CRM company.

Software takes time to learn, and the more complicated it is, the more nuances there are. If you would like to reduce the amount of time it takes to learn your CRM and learn it right the first time, contact me. That’s what I do!

The first real estate contact manager was created in 1982 by Howard Sanderson.

It was called Howard and Friends and agents loved it. It was the first of dozens of software tools to help real estate agents do a better job of organizing their business. Unfortunately there were a relative few people who even knew about it. Those who did buy it, did so because they recognized a need for more help with their business. Everyone else just kept using what they knew – Outlook! That was called a “Contact Manager” which is a much more apt name than CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) because it did/does so little. Are simple CRMs a good thing? No. If you go too simple, don’t bother. Stay with Outlook. 

The problem with Outlook was that all it did was track your people…

…and let you make appointments on the calendar. That was pretty much it. It was essentially a glorified Rolodex That’s enough for some people, but not enough to really get the job done right. What was missing? The ability to create “activity plans”; to be able to string together a list of things you want to do with the timing you need.  That and the ability to “complete” an activity. These capabilities are necessary to be truly organized.

When agents started to realize what they needed…

…they started looking for alternative solutions. After Howard and Friends in 1982 came Real Estate Specialist a few years later. After that came Top Producer in 1989 and Agent Office in 1992. Now the tools existed to really help. The issue then became, was there something better. More and more CRMs for real estate came out and they kept getting more and more complex. Then something different happened. People started losing sight of what they needed in the first place and they started complaining that the CRMs were too complicated. 

The result was that some real estate CRMs started dumbing themselves down.

It got to the point where some of them were not much more powerful than Outlook. Are simple CRMs a good thing?

Now what we have is over 30 real estate specific CRMs of many varieties that have many different strengths and weaknesses, as well as levels of complexity. You can now get CRMs that are extremely basic. The question you want to ask yourself is this; “Do I want to get better and faster and more efficient, or do I simply want a glorified Rolodex? If it’s the former, don’t let the allure of simplicity fool you. The more simple the CRM is, the less it does. Do your due diligence and find a CRM that suits your needs. Just remember that you’re getting it to serve a purpose, not just to pacify someone who said you should have a CRM. There’s no point in investing the time and money into one if it’s not going to help much. 

If you need help finding the right solution, contact me. That’s what I do!

This is one of the most common questions I hear.

Many CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) solutions have fairly good training materials. Some have great materials. Some have none. But what none of them really excel at, is a tutorial to take you through the basics, in a “Where do I start” format. Maybe I can propose a bit of a solution for how learn a CRM.

One of the issues making a starter tutorial problematic is that different people consider different things to be the basics, and the CRM’s themselves can be quite varied as to what it is they are capable of doing for you in the first place. So how about teaching yourself how to get started?

The very first thing you do is actually a no-brainer.

In any of them, you get all your contact information in. Names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc. Always have both a first and a last name for every contact. If all you know is Margaret, put that as both her first and last name until you get her last name. Which contacts go into it? ALL of them. I have seen some people recommend using one program for business, and one for personal, such as Top Producer for the former, and Google for the latter. My personal opinion is that I could not disagree more. I have been using, teaching, and reviewing CRMs in the real estate industry for over 20 years, and I just do not see any benefit to that line of thinking. Why have your contact information and scheduling information in two places? It makes for duplication of effort, and confusion having to reference two sources for everything, not to mention that business and personal sometimes overlap anyway. I have my business contacts, my friends, my Christmas list, my neighbors, and I even have my daughter’s dog in my contacts. Why? Because I can track his birthday that way! I have a contact – First Name: Computer; Last Name: Tips. In the notes for that contact, I have various things I want to remember about little tricks I’ve learned over the years, and I even have them at my fingertips in my handheld, because the notes sync!

Remember the cardinal rule for contacts; 

always have a contact in at least one category. Otherwise, you end up years from now with contacts for whom you have no clue whatsoever what they are. If you are using a CRM, and you are using Activity Plans of some sort, I recommend the following nine categories for a start:

• Buyer – Prospect
• Buyer – Active
• Buyer – Pending
• Buyer – Past
• Seller – Prospect
• Seller – Active
• Seller – Pending
• Seller – Past
• Closed – 20xx (x’s being the year they closed escrow)

After that, a question I get a lot is, Should I key in my past transactions?”.

I would say that other than this year’s and possibly last year’s, I would not bother. It’s time consuming and more often than not, that time could be put to better use, such as learning howe to use 

So what’s next? Create a list of what it was you wanted to accomplish with your CRM when you were originally selecting it If you don’t have that list, create one now. It should contain things such as; Print Labels to ‘Sphere of Influence’; Export names and addresses for mailing, for calendar company; print ‘Just Listed’ post cards to geographic farm; Create activity plan to remind me to follow up with Internet leads

A good CRM will have some kind of training available

to learn how to do each of these basic things. Your issue is that you don’t know where to start. It’s a big job. It’s HUGE. It is an elephant! Get over it! How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. No one is going to tell you where to start, or what is most important, so you need to figure it out yourself. This is how you will do it.

1. List what you want to accomplish, as above
2. Prioritize it
3. Use the available training to learn each of those things.

It really can be that simple! Now you have your start. Do you your list. Add things to it as you go. By that time, you’ll be getting a handle on the software, and the rest will naturally follow.

Now some people will do what I just said, and that will be the end of it. That’s fine! If that’s all you want out of it, then you stop there. Others of you though, want to see what else this CRM can do for you. The only way you’re going to get a good feel for your CRM is by playing with it. When you’re in a screen, click on the menu items, and follow them. You can’t hurt it, and it can’t hurt you.

The most important thing to know about learning a CRM is that you need to use it at least daily for an hour first thing in the morning, until you are using it to run your business on a daily business. Spend the time and you’ll get where you want to go.

Making the time to learn it!

Note the use of the word making as opposed to getting the time. It is so very important to understand that this one point can make all the difference in the world. You can be someone who implements the CRM and reaps the benefits, or someone who eventually simply regrets spending the money, and blames it on the CRM. Maybe you have heard the time management axiom that a meeting takes as long as the time you allot to it. The same goes for your real estate day. You can’t keep putting off learning your CRM until the time that you need to spend with it presents itself. For many of us, that time just does not come. When you put one hour into learning your new CRM first thing in the morning, before you answer any calls or e-mails, you get it done! Then, you somehow miraculously manage to get everything else you need to get done that day, done! Of course if you can devote larger blocks of time up front to get comfortable with it, all the better.

DO NOT BUY A CRM…

unless you are committed to learning to use it as more than just a glorified Rolodex. If that is all you are going to use it for, stick with Google or Outlook or some other contact manager.

As a real estate licensee, we wear many hats. No one likes them all, and learning software is one that many distinctly dislike. There are those who will tell you that the reason most agents do not use a CRM is because they are too complex and they need to be easier. An entire generation of real estate specific CRM’s was born in 2006. There was a theme emerging and that was to make them easier to learn. What it turned out to be in some cases though, was that CRM’s were being dumbed down to the point where they were no longer CRM’s. They were contact managers. An overly basic CRM is essentially a contact manager. A CRM is far more robust than a contact manager, so regardless of how well it is presented, or how intuitive it is, you still need to take a good bit of time to learn it. You learned how to use Google or Outlook, MS Word, and maybe MS Publisher or MS Excel too. You spent hour after hour playing with them with no support and no training, until you got a handle on them, and never complained because you had no choice. What is so different about learning a CRM? If you want to profit by what a good powerful CRM does, then you need to invest the time to learn it.

You do not have to like the time you invest into becoming proficient with a good CRM.

But if you want to grow your business, while having more of a life, with less stress, with less mistakes, with better service, with less staff, with more compliments, with more referrals, then you need it.

Make that determination right here and now. In order to accomplish the above, you must make a commitment to investing the time to learn how to use a CRM. You then must either create, or purchase and tweak pre-written e-mails and letters, fliers, post cards, prospect follow-up campaigns, etc. This does not have to be done all at once! It’s an elephant. Eat it one bite at a time!

Note that at no point so far has the financial investment been mentioned. That was done purposefully to illustrate just how inconsequential the dollar investment is, in contrast to the investment of time. It is easy for the person not spending the money to say, but none-the-less it is very true.

To address cost, they are all over the board.

You can get very basic desktop CRM’s that are actually closer to contact mangers than they are CRM’s, for free, For true real estate CRMs, they start for as little as $179/yr. or as much as hundreds of dollars per month for SAAS products for teams. The most important thing that can be said of cost is to bear in mind that you should never start with a less expensive one, planning to move to a more expensive one later. You will lose the difference in cost many times over.  The time wasted on a new learning curve alone makes it a bad choice. Another significant loss is the data itself. When moving from one real estate CRM to another, you will very rarely be able to move anything but your contact data. All the other information such as transaction history, email templates, fliers and the like don’t transfer. There are very few real estate CRMs that export that information. Then the issue is that very few real estate CRMs are capable of importing those things. Try to get the right one the first time! It’s a heck of a lot better in the long run. 

I can tell you which ones import and export which data. If you have questions, I have answers!