What Makes a Great CRM?

The following is an excerpt from RE Technology's latest Success Guide:

When looking for a CRM for the first time, we recommend developing a checklist of features and a ranking system for each of those features.

Try this criterion:

• Feature
• Importance to Me
• Ease of Use

Here's a brief walkthrough of how you might rank a feature.

Feature: Contact Record

Every CRM has a contact record feature. Look at the details of the contact record to see what information can be stored. For example, does the contact record support sales stage, reference to spouse or children, field for where you met, etc.? When you are looking at the contact detail page, pay close attention to the fields. You may want to ask about your ability to add additional fields, etc.

Importance to Me

Obviously the contact record is important to you. You may want to score this feature as Very Important. However, your contact record may have integration with social media. If you are an agent who does not like social media, this feature may not be very important to you. Perhaps you are a person that likes to build business through telemarketing. The ability to click to call a customer from inside the contact record may be very important to you.

Ease of Use

This is your impression. A contact record in the CRM that integrates with the contacts on your phone is super helpful because you do not need to enter the contact record into your phone, your computer, and your CRM. A CRM that syncs those records may be very easy to use.

If you need to download contact records into a spreadsheet, load them and de-dupe the records; the syncing feature may be inconvenient and cumbersome for you.

As you go through the demonstration, be sure to write down the features, their importance to you, and your measure of how easy it is to perform tasks that are vital to your success relative to your style as an agent.

Want to learn more about selecting a CRM? Check out our Success Guide: CRM!