Do you get the most out of your LARGEST ASSET in your real estate business?

In this video, we're going to talk about what I believe is the most important asset that your business has. My name is Chance Brown. I'm the broker owner of CB&A Realtors and I want to talk about your CRM. Now, wait a second. Before you stop watching because you don't want to sit here and listen to a long video about CRM, I really want to go back to what I just said, which is the asset that your company owns. your CRM, your database that's inside that CRM is the one and only asset you have in your real estate business. And I think that if you thought about it that way and think about the future, it might change your perspective on how you use your CRM. I like to talk about my Realtor before I was a Realtor. At the time of this recording, it's April. My birthday is in April. I have been a real estate agent for a really long time. I have gotten recommendations from my old agent for agents to come work at our brokerage, but I'm still going to get a birthday card from them because they've got such great systems and processes built out of their CRM that when they wake up on January 1st every year, they already know that they're going to make X number of dollars because of how well they've created their business systems around their CRM. When it comes time for them to retire, that is an asset that they can sell. You aren't going to get rich in real estate when you go to retire trying to sell your lock boxes or sell your sign frames. But if you've got a,000 people or 2,000 people or whatever it is in your database and that spits off a certain amount of revenue year in and year out, you can create a transition plan that pays you into retirement for that book of business.

And that's what the CRM creates an asset. Now, the other big thing I want to talk about when it comes to the CRM is what I like to call a minimum level of service. You walk into McDonald's, whether it's in Kansas or Tokyo, and you're going to get the same French fries, you're going to get the same whatever. You walk into a Four Seasons, on the other hand, much higher scale, you're going to get the same level of service in every four seasons in the world. Why is your business not that way? And the CRM allows for that to happen. It allows for the person maybe you don't want to hang out with the most to get the same level of service as your best friend. Now, you may enhance that service for your best friend, but everybody's going to get this. And you get to decide what that is and run through it through your CRM. I like to tell the story about my dad owned a sales corporation. And he walked in, and this is way before the time of computers and things like that. He walked into a sales meeting one day and he had all of his sales people close their three- ring binder because that's how we organize things for all you kids out there before we had computers and laptops and iPhones. He had everybody close their three- ring binder and he took out a piece of paper and he had all of them write down their top 10 clients. He said, "Okay, I'm going to take these, analyze it. I'll be back next week at your next sales meeting." So, he goes back to his office, gets his CFO, and they start looking at these lists. 12 salespeople in the room, every one of them listing their top 10 clients. The most that anybody got right was three, but they cross-referenced that list with their expense account and a whole lot more were correct then. They didn't know who their best clients were. They just entertained the people that they like to hang out with. And we as agents oftent times fall into that same trap. It's sort of this path of least resistance thing, right? Some of my best friends in the world who I love hanging out with are not very good referers. But my two best referers in the history of my business aren't people that I particularly want to go and grab a beer with either. But because I use my CRM to make sure that I'm tracking my business and I know where it's coming from, these people are getting the attention that they deserve as opposed to if I was just flying by the seat of my pants and following that path of least resistance.

And so when we look at the CRM, yes, it's our asset. Yes, it's the way that we create a minimum level of service. And then there's the obvious, right? The obvious is it's going to help us market. It's going to leverage time. It's going to deliver consistent brand messaging. If I could go back and change one thing from when I started in real estate, I was too damn cheap to pay $45 for Top Producer, which back then was basically the only CRM. And I waited about 18 months. And in that 18 months, I probably just calculating on what happened after I started using the CRM, I probably left 10 or $15,000 on the table. And I didn't want to pay $45 a month. How dumb is that? And let's not forget about the basic value of a CRM, which is it's the easiest, cheapest way to lead generate that exists. It will tell you, you need to call these people.