There are mistakes that all real estate agents make when selecting the “next great real estate CRM.” Unfortunately, with something that takes as much money and dedication as a CRM, this means that these mistakes are costing us hundreds of wasted hours and thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
Avoid making these mistakes so you can choose the right CRM to take you to the next level in your career!
7 Mistakes To Avoid When Choosing a Real Estate CRM
If you want to avoid making mistakes, you need to know what they are. Here are the top 7 mistakes I see agents making and how you can avoid them to get the right real estate CRM for your business.
1. Not Establishing Needs
Have you ever wanted to hire a virtual assistant because you hear about it everywhere? You probably hear “leverage this” and “leverage that” and assume that you MUST get a virtual assistant and start leveraging or you won’t save time or money.
Then, when you think it’s time to pull the trigger, you do…and find yourself wasting hours of time and tons of money trying to train an assistant without any clear direction on which way you’re going.
Your mistake here was choosing an assistant before you had clarified what you need assistance with. Before hiring someone, you need to decide what tasks you want help with and how you want those tasks accomplished so you can set up some Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and get REAL help.
The same holds true when trying to get a CRM. Establish your NEEDS from a CRM before you purchase one so you don’t end up wasting your money.
- List your non-negotiables and your ‘nice to haves.’
- Do you need IDX?
- Or an email autoresponder?
- How about landing pages?
Decide what you need and research a real estate CRM that actually HAS all those services. Don’t just grab the cheapest or the one that everyone else says is “the best.”
2. Not Researching
We all love a shortcut, right? I know I do. But when we take a shortcut for a CRM, we are probably just heading out to our social media pages and asking the most asked question on FB groups today: “What’s the best CRM?”
Instead of just asking for others’ recommendations, you need to research and know what each CRM ACTUALLY offers. When you get recs, go to the CRM website, schedule a demo, and ask questions! For example,
- “Do you report email open rate?”
- “How does the CRM manage activities (appointments, etc.)?”
- “What kind of security does this software have?”
- “What support do you offer?”
- “Is the CRM scalable?”
3. Skipping the Introduction
Every CRM will come with some sort of introduction, orientation, demo, setup call, etc. DON’T skip this.
I understand it’s hard—we feel we can’t be bothered to read! Think about the last time you bought something from Amazon that needed set up (a chair, desk, shelf, etc.). Did you read the instructions? Or did you pull everything out, look at the pictures, and try to build it from there?
If you did, chances are you ran into trouble partway in. The SAME thing will happen if you skip the orientation for your new CRM. If your CRM doesn’t offer an orientation, well, be sure to take a good look around at the tools available before starting to use it.
4. Overcomplicating It
Listen, we all know that it’s not complicated to be excellent at something. We just have to do the same simple things consistently, over and over, for an extraordinary amount of time, until we become excellent.
And yet, we STILL choose to overcomplicate things! We add needless tasks to our day that are often mere distractions from the main thing we know we SHOULD be doing.
The principle is the same with a CRM. Do not over-complicate your process by setting up extra tagging of leads, excessive automation, etc. Just because the CRM offers it doesn’t mean you have to use it.
There are literally paid optimizers out there earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform this type of task, and that’s just for creating the optimizations and tags! These people aren’t out there selling real estate.
It’s not wise to imagine that you can do ALL that AND be an effective real estate agent. Complexity is the enemy of execution.
5. Hiding Behind It
Real estate is a contact sport. You cannot avoid in-person calls and meetings. If you’re hiding behind email and text campaigns thinking those are your follow-up…well, you’re wrong.
If you were sending coupons for shoes or something, you might get away with this type of marketing and advertising. But what we are selling is hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of real estate per pop! It’s WAY more important—and costly—than typical store merchandise.
Use your CRM as leverage to help you with initial follow-ups or to remind you to reach out. But remember that your database is your only major asset in the real estate business. DO NOT pass on the entire task of reaching out to your software. As the human in this business, that job is yours.
6. Being Countercultural
I get it…it’s cool and unique to be different than everyone else. And in most cases, that’s fine! But when it comes to choosing your CRM, it’s okay to follow the herd. You want lots of users and vendors doing the “stress testing” to ensure that this CRM actually works. You want people who can help you make the right choice.
In this instance, you don’t want to be the thought leader unless you’re specifically monetizing them. Trust me, I get the attraction. I went out there doing all kinds of masterminds, calls, demo tests, etc. with all kinds of platforms (kvCORE, LionDesk, Remine…). But how much have I made from these platforms? $0!
This could have been a point all by itself, but SUPPORT is mandatory with these larger platforms. Most of the larger platforms
7. Using a Closed CRM
Honestly, CRMs that do not integrate with other platforms are a waste of your money Closed off CRMs that don’t play nice with other software will drain your pockets. Get a CRM that integrates directly with the other software/platforms you’re using—or at least one that has a connection to Zapier or APINation to give you operational options.
If you can’t connect with any other software out there, you’ll end up with way more time and money wasted than you can even imagine. Don’t spend your precious resources managing a real estate CRM when you should be connecting with leads and closing transactions.