Building a team is a challenging and dynamic effort

It may be possible to keep everyone long term, but it’s not likely. When you add your first team member it’s not exactly rocket surgery. The question of who is wearing what hats (who is responsible for which role) is pretty straight forward. You do what you do and give the rest to the assistant. Hats/roles are pretty easy. From the beginning though, roles on your team are something that you want to put some thought to define roles in workflows for your team. 

If your long term plan is to add more than one more person, you’ll want to define your roles up front.

This will of course keep you on track whether your business is on paper or you are using a CRM. The issue here is that if you use a CRM that enables roles, it’s much easier to deal with personnel changes and procedural changes.

When you use a CRM to organize your business, the better ones have the ability to create Activity Plans or Workflows. These plans or workflows consist of any number of individual activities!. Each activity has the option of assigning it to someone. The purpose is that when you start the activity plan, those activities are assigned to each person automatically and added to their to-do list. They are the only activities that person will see on their to-do list. Everyone on your team knows what they have to do as soon as that plan is launched. 

If you assign all of the tasks to your assistant by name, what happens if that person leaves?
You have to go back to all of those activities and re-assign them to the new person.

When you are creating these plans, some of the CRMs have the option of assigning those activities to a role in lieu of assigning them to an individual. This is huge! Consider that you may have only one assistant and they are doing all of your listing and closing admin. Then you hire another person. Now you’ll probably have one be the listing and marketing coordinator, and the other would be the transaction coordinator. Let’s say you have all of the tasks for both assigned to Judy. Since you now have two people splitting those tasks, you would need to go back through all of the activities and re-assign some of them to the new person, John. If you have several activity plans/workflows of 50 or more activities, that’s a lot of work.

Alternatively, if you create your activity plans/workflows with the roles in mind, you can assign each activity to a role such as Listing Coordinator or Transaction Coordinator. This way, while you are still a two person team, you would still start the activity plans, but the plans would be assigned to roles. When you start it, it asks you who the Marketing Coordinator is, and you tell it it’s Judy. When you hire John and it asks you who the Transaction Coordinator is, you select John. No need to re-assign anything. You’ve already established that John will be the Transaction Coordinator and you’ve assigned the activities to the appropriate roles. If you create all of your activity plans/workflows with roles from the start, you’ll never have to go back and re-assign everything.

Without doing a live demo what I’m saying here could be difficult to understand. If your plans include developing a team, let me help! Free half hour call here!

Easy answer! Your CRM’s Calendar!

You use your CRM’s calendar exclusively to originate activities and calendar items. Why? Because it’s the only way to build a consistent, cohesive history of your interactions with your contacts and properties. You can view them anywhere you like, but you need to originate them in the CRM.

One of the most important aspects of a CRM is that you are building a relational database. What that means is that contacts, properties, appointments, To-Do’s, emails, notes and more, have relationships with each other. The goal is to have all of your information on a contact, listing or transaction in one place. This makes retrieval, dissemination, and reporting easy and fast. In most cases, the state requires that you retain all your emails, notes, correspondence, and other information with regards to a transaction. Do you? If so, how many places would you have to go to get it? Can you find it all?

The information in your relationships is built over time.

It starts when you add the contact information. Then you get your first email from them and you store it in their contact record. Eventually you make a note in their record about a conversation you had with them. Hopefully at some point you sell a house to them or for them and that creates a whole new set of information. That information is stored in the Transaction or Property record. but is also stored or linked with the contact record.

Let’s look at other kinds of activities. A To-Do reminder comes up on your To-Do list in your CRM. Because you cited this transaction and contact in the activity when you created the activity, it will automatically be stored with them. Note the ability to relate the Contact and Property or Transaction on the left. It’s the same every time you create a calendar activity in your CRM and associate it with something. It is automatically stored. It will be in the associated contacts and properties for future reference and reporting. By contrast, every time you create that calendar activity on your existing calendar, that’s as far as it goes. That appointment never displays as completed. It doesn’t get stored or associated with anything else in your CRM. It just sits there providing pretty much no help for future reference. 

This is the point of the whole post.

If you use Google, MAC or Outlook calendars versus your CRM’s calendar to create your appointments, they will not be associated with the contact or transaction. That ability does not exist in those calendars because that is not what they were created for. You always want to originate the CRM’s calendar activities.

Most people are very accustomed to adding their appointments and reminders to their existing Calendar. You’ll need to get into the habit of creating the activities in your CRM.

Change! We do tend to have a problem with change in our daily habits don’t we? If you have, or are planning on getting a CRM, you want to be aware of this. It’s really not that bad. You just get used to a new habit. If you want to use a CRM, there is really no point in continuing to use your other calendar. If you want to continue to use your calendar to view your day, that’s no problem. It’s likely that once you get used to your CRM’s calendar, you’ll realize that if you have no need to share your calendar with others outside the CRM, there is no need to continue using it. The one in your CRM will do just fine.

If you have a team, that adds twists to this whole topic. If you’re interested, contact me!

1) Why is it so difficult to stay with a CRM?

2) How long will it take to learn?

3) The pain of growth

4) Mobility with your CRM

5) Efficiency with organization and consolidation of data

6) Which calendar should I use?

Where is your business’s information stored? If it takes time to find it, time is money!

Before I got a CRM I had a Daytimers, Post-its (lotsa Post-its), envelopes, a desktop calendar blotter, napkins,  a notebook, an address book, etc. That was in the early 90’s! Now it’s even worse! Now you also have information on your phone, maybe Google or Outlook contacts, Google or Outlook calendar, the MLS, lead capture sites, spread sheets, and who knows where else!

As discussed briefly in an earlier segment, it can take a little longer to enter your contact information into a CRM versus on paper. That’s pretty much the only downside, such as it is.

Where is your business’s information stored?

Fortunately, you can enter it into your CRM on your phone, Google Contacts or Outlook Contacts so you do not have to be in front of your computer. Everything is available everywhere, but you only have to maintain one database, in your CRM! Part of the extra time is also because you’re adding information you wouldn’t normally add. When you add a contact to your phone or address book, you’re not able to use tags or notes or anything else to find them. It’s all dependent upon your memory. When you digitize your information in a CRM, you can find everything quickly, in many ways. Just a few are:

• Tags, Categories, Groups: You wouldn’t add these to your address book on paper because It would serve no purpose. In a CRM, you can use these tags to accomplish a myriad of things you couldn’t do. For you and anyone on your team, this opens up an entire toolbox. It’s one full of ways you can market to and follow up with people that you wouldn’t be able to do easily, when they are in disparate places. 
• Hobbies: You see an ad about a discount at Bucks County Country Club for greens fees for the summer. If you have hobbies associated with someone, like golf, you can do a quick email to your golf peeps about it in about two minutes. Personalized marketing is the creme de la creme of marketing!
• Transaction Status: Track where your listings and closings are because they are in a system that enables you to monitor them based on other information you have added to the contact record.
• Document retrieval: Have everything in one place, associated with contacts, listings or transactions. Now you don’t have to find the file for the docs because they are in your CRM, already associated with the transaction/listing.
• Notes: Your notes are searchable, so when you list that horse farm, you can find the person that wanted one by searching the notes.

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The information you use now, without a CRM, does not allow you to do very much at all. Where is your business’s information stored?

When you add it to a CRM, everything can be found faster and easier, forever. it increases speed of recovery making you more efficient. That efficiency reduces your costs. All of the previous insure higher quality and more consistent service out of you and/or your team.

Another benefit – the information continues to build. Your emails, text messages, property associations, appointments, and calls, are all recorded in one place for ready access and statistics evaluation.

You can schedule a drip campaign to individuals or groups with automated emails going out without you having to do anything, all based on how you have Tagged them. You can follow the status of their progress and so much more. 

As an individual agent, all of this makes you far more efficient and organized than on paper. If you have all your information digitized in a spreadsheet, it does make it easier to find things. That said, you still have to move them to something to take action on that information. Whether it’s an email blast utility like MailChimp, or an online transaction management platform such as DotLoop, you have to do additional work. The bottom line is that it forces you to maintain redundant databases in multiple places. The more you can get away from that, the better off you are for many reasons. Primarily, it’s an easily avoidable waste of time.

If you have a team, The efficiencies are far greater. Different team members have need of information on a daily basis. Very often at the same time. Without a CRM, much of the time it’s about playing that age old favorite game, “Who’s got the file?” When your information is all in one place in a CRM, the paper file becomes something that you keep for legal reasons. On a day to day basis, with everything easily retrievable by everyone at the same time, with no searching for files, that is a game changer! 

Having a CRM is all about being more efficient and organized. You can do it all without a CRM, it just takes much much longer to do what you do on a daily basis. So what are you waiting for? 

1) Why is it so difficult to stay with a CRM?

2) How long will it take to learn?

3) The pain of growth

4) Mobility with your CRM

5) Efficiency with organization and consolidation of data

6) Which calendar should I use?

It seems that by and large, nothing significant is accomplished without the pain of stepping outside your comfort zone. It’s no different with CRMs. You currently have methods and procedures in place and they work for you. You’ve reached a level of efficiency, you know what you’re doing and things flow well. But, given that you’re looking at CRMs, you know that what you have is not good enough. It works, but it’s slow compared to what a CRM can do versus your paper lists.

This transition forces you to change those procedures. That makes anyone uncomfortable, but more importantly it slows you down and that makes it even more frustrating. Be aware that in the beginning, it will cost you time you don’t feel you have and it will throw everyone into a sense of losing control. You want to be ready for this so you can take it in stride. You’re making this decision after careful consideration. Stick to your guns when the going gets rough and trust that you will come out on the other side after you get over the hump in the learning curve.

When first learning a CRM you’ll notice that in some cases, that initial entry of the data takes longer than just writing it down in a paper address book, or popping it into your phone. This confuses people into thinking using a CRM requires more work than paper and it’s easy at that point to re-consider. It does take longer, but one reason it does is because you are typically putting more than just the name, email address and phone number in, as you probably would if you’re using paper. What you may not realize though, is that although the initial act of inputting the data may take a few seconds longer, it will now be far faster to find information, and there will be more to find. You’ll be able to group people for mailings, search notes made in the contact record, do quick bulk emails or bulk postal mailing labels, have the contact info ready for when they sell or buy, and on and on. The efficiencies are woven into everything you do in the CRM. It’s called a relational database for a reason. It ties everything together for you to make it possible to do a host of things you can’t do on paper, such as easily sharing information with your team members without having to play find the file.

When I started doing this in 1999, it was a topic of debate whether you needed a CRM. Now pretty much everyone agrees that it is necessary and helps your business in more ways than can be counted. The dollar price is what people tend to focus on, but the investment of time and effort is the real cost. The question is whether you’re willing to pay it.

Next:

1) Why is it so difficult to stay with a CRM?

2) How long will it take to learn?

3) The pain of growth

4) Mobility with your CRM

5) Where is your business’s information stored?

6) Which calendar should I use?

First and foremost is that you need to make CRM a habit.

That’s the part where most people fail right from the get go.

It’s 32 years that I’ve been in this business and 20 years of selling and coaching people on CRM. I’ve found that there are some consistent reasons why people don’t stick with their CRM. Here is the first and most important reason of six.

What doesn’t work is spending hours with it on one day and none the next, and the next. What does work, is to use it every day without fail, until you are in the habit of using it every day.

Now the question is how to do it.

What does not work for the vast majority of people is to schedule time at varying times throughout each day to spend with your CRM. In this business, we get distracted by every day issues and keeping that appointment with yourself to learn your CRM usually loses. I’ve found what worked for me personally and for hundreds. Work on your CRM for at least one hour every day, first thing in the morning before you get into your email and voice mail. If you start answering those first, what will happen? You’ll end up blowing it off.

Spending a lot of time on it for a day or two or three is a great way to start, as long as you don’t let that be the only day that week. You have to use it every day so you don’t forget what you learned the day before. When you are learning new software, It’s very difficult to remember what you’ve learned if you don’t build on it every day. It’s all too new and unorganized in your mind. Once you get that foundation and perspective going consistently, you’ll start to internalize it and then you’re making progress.

What does this mean? That you have to spend the first hour of every day for the rest of your life learning your CRM?

Not at all. Eventually you’ll be using your CRM to run your business. Once you learn it enough, you’ll be in it every day because it will be the hub of your business for staying touch with your people and tracking your transactions.

When I started doing this many years ago, the average agent was not concerned about organizing their business with a CRM. Now it’s widely accepted that to not have one means to simply run a sub-par business, wasting a great deal of time that is unnecessary. If you’re one that has put it off, this is the first step to finally implementing a CRM. The next thoughts for consideration are:

1) Why is it so difficult to stay with a CRM?

2) How long will it take to learn?

3) The pain of growth

4) Mobility with your CRM

5) Efficiency with organization and consolidation of data

6) Which calendar should I use?