I have a confession to make: CRM isn’t as complicated as people tend to make it. Take a look at an app like Salesforce and they purposely build the interface to look like you’re piloting a 747 jet when in reality all you’re looking to do is deepen a few hundred relationships and organize your life. We CRM experts like to try and look a lot smarter than we actually are.
Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share some easy action items that will make managing your database a snap. WARNING: I’M FLORIDA EDUCATED SO I TEND TO KEEP THINGS AT A 7TH GRADE LEVEL. GREG SWANN: INITIATE LOBOTOMY NOW.
Lesson #1: Paint the Fence
Remember when Mr. Miyagi made poor Daniel Son paint the fence? And wash the car? And paint the fence again? If we’re gonna make you a black belt database manager, you’re going to have to suck it up too. One must not deliver kick to opponent family jewel without proper training.
The most common problem I notice when consulting with mortgage/real estate professionals: the quality of your data sucks.
- Lazy Data Entry: If you’re populating data from an internet form, expect respondents to take as little time as possible getting to the goodies you’re dangling. No less than 50% of your data will come in with capitalization, punctuation and other grammatical errors. There are some automated ways to help clean this data, and I’ll leave that for another day. But in the meantime, I’m asking you to make a habit of cleaning data as you go.
- Incomplete Data: For the belly-to-belly folks: I have my salespeople take the extra 120 seconds to visit a new prospect’s website as they enter data into our CRM system. When I find records with just a name and email address, I get pissed. When you take the extra time to dig for granular data on a contact, you’re in essence learning more of their story in the process. Did my prospect give me a fake phone number (easy to learn if the the phone number on their website is different than the one they gave you!)? How Read more