CRM Best Practices - Sources of business - 06/18/10 11:20 AM
A good CRM allows you to record essentially two sets of ways someone who did business with you, found you. One set is that they were a personal referral, made by an individual, such as another agent, or by a non-agent such as someone in your sphere of influence. If they came from one of these two sources, you should record that persons name in the contact's record. A good CRM will give you a specific place to store that information so you can look at someones contact record and clearly see how many people they referred to you, and if that person should be treated especially well if they have bee … (0 comments)

CRM Best Practices - Categories - 06/11/10 08:35 AM
How do you best organize your contacts? Each software has it's own term for how they group the contacts. One of the primary functions of a CRM is to be able to select a certain group of contacts with which to work. You may want to contact a certain group of people to call them to follow up, send a form letter or e-mail to that group, a post card, etc. In order to accomplish that, the contacts need to be categorized or grouped.

After about 12 years of trial and error, some of the categories I recommend to my clients … (3 comments)

CRM Best Practices - The "Name" field - 06/09/10 05:40 PM
It may sound trivial but it is absolutely not. You should always, without exception, have both a first name and last name in every contact. When you have it, use a middle initial too, to distinguish between two people with the same name.
If all you have is the first name of John, and you have no last name, you should just put John, or maybe TBD (To Be Determined) in the last name field too.  This enables you to order your contacts by last name, and see for whom you need a last name.
Why? If you do not, you will eventually end up … (2 comments)