After 32 years 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 five.

First and foremost is that you need to make it a habit. That’s the part where most people fail right from the get go.

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. What I’ve found worked for me personally and for hundreds that I’ve coached, is to 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 because 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?