Lots of CRM's overpromise and underdeliver. The problem is it takes many months and tens of thousands of dollars to find out if you made a good selection.
Here is my brief guide to selecting a CRM.
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Make a list of the features you require. Prioritize by importance. -
Ask your successful Realtor friends what CRM they use, what they like and don't like about their system. Modify your requirements list, if needed. -
Create a product comparison sheet, listing your required features and a place to document how well your candidate CRM's deliver. This is easy. Go to Google Images and search for "Product Comparision Sheet" and you'll get hundreds of sample formats. Recreate a format you like in a simple spreadsheet. No need for paralysis by analysis. -
Schedule in-depth demos with your top five choices. -
It's OK to email your list of required features to your sales rep. That will keep the demo structured and focused, rather than rely solely on their canned sales pitch. -
Have them prove to you that what they claim to do, actually exists in their system. -
Don't make your decision based on their promises of future enhancements. Those "the development team has it on their list" features will probably take years. And, by the time they catch up with their competing CRM's, the competition will have achieved new heights.
Be careful of shiny new objects. Be brutally honest with your evaluation. The cost of hopping from one CRM to another is too high. These costs include;
• Data migration to a new CRM is complicated, time consuming, and you risk losing important searchable data and history.
• Training - much managerial time, agent time and admin time is required to get trained on a new CRM.
• Experimentation - It takes weeks or months to find out the limits of the CRM. You have to experience the full life-cycle of leads from inception to post-closing. You have to test how well the drip campaigns interact with each other. How tasks get triggered, how user-friendly is the reporting system, and much more.
• Achieving mastery level - The real benefits of a CRM are harvested when you reach mastery level. You don't want to be frustrated with a CRM that puts brick walls on your path to mastery. Those brick walls are usually critical features that are undeveloped or underdeveloped.
• You don't want to come to the sickening realization that you wasted on your CRM six months or a year and tens of thousands of dollars of CRM fees, lost managerial time, lost lead gen time, lost salaried admin time, and more.
Happy CRM hunting!
Dave Halpern, Realtor
Keller Williams Realty Louisville East
(502) 664-7827
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