Get More Real Estate Agent Referrals by Cleaning Up

If you ask any salesperson at a home improvement store, they’ll tell you that every week there’s at least one customer who buys the same tool twice. Often, the customer will say something like, “Darn it, I thought I owned a number two Phillips. But I can’t find it.” So, they end up purchasing a new one.

This happens regularly with people who don’t keep their tools neat and organized — which is probably 80% of homeowners! The toolbox becomes so cluttered and messy that no one even wants to rummage for anything in it.

What does this have to do with real estate agent success?

Well, a similar thing can happen with your real estate CRM. If you don’t keep it organized and updated, it can become so outdated and such a mess that it is almost unusable. In fact, you might even begin to ignore it.

That’s bad news because there’s gold in your CRM contact database. Studies repeatedly show that your past clients can be a fruitful source of referrals, so long as you keep in touch with them and build loyalty. The same is also true of your business-to-business contacts, such as contractors and movers.

So, how do you keep your CRM clean and current?

The first step is to make sure you’re using the right real estate CRM. The system you choose should have the following characteristics:

• Designed for real estate agents.
• Cloud-based, so it can be accessed anywhere, from any device.
• Automatically syncs across all devices.
• Real estate-specific features, such as managing Active Buyers & Sellers, Business Directory, etc.
• Special business-building tools, such as Email Marketing and Goal Setting & Tracking.
• Features that enable you to manage your important marketing tasks.
• Easy to set up and use.

The next step is to get in the habit of scrubbing and updating your database each month. Depending on your level of activity, this can take less than an hour. During this monthly clean-up, you want to update contact profiles (address, occupations, lead status, birthdays, etc.), add new contacts, and delete those contacts that, for whatever reason, should no longer be in your database.

If you use real estate direct mail — which is a smart idea — you should also review and update who is on that list. Direct mail is a powerful relationship-building tool, and you want to send it to only your best past clients, hot prospects and your targeted geographic farm contacts.

Cleaning up your database each week may seem like an administrative task. But it’s really an income-building opportunity. The more up-to-date your real estate CRM is, the more real estate agent referrals you’ll likely get.

Isn’t that worth an hour a month?