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. 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.

The information you use now, without a CRM, does not allow you to do very much at all.

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. Even if you have all your information digitized in a spreadsheet, while it does make it easier to find things, 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?

Article 4 of a series: 

Article 1: Why Is It so Difficult to Stay With a CRM?
Article 2: How Long Does it Take to Learn a CRM?
Article 3: The Pain of Growth 
Article 4: Mobility With Your CRM