Where are your contacts? If you are anything like we were when we started, they’re all over the place. In your phone, on your email, your social channels, a shoebox of business cards and you might even still rock a Filofax like me!

Step 3: Centralise your contacts

Somewhere in that melee of contacts is your next potential property investor, but how do you know which business card or email lead it is? That’s the difference between leads and contacts.

Leads are the rocket fuel for any business; they are also what we call ‘noise’. You need to qualify your leads vs contacts; only then can you establish which ones matter that are people of value to your business.

You need to separate your leads and contacts, so they don’t get mixed up. Why? Well, you wouldn’t put diesel into a petrol engine, would you? What would happen?

Have you noticed how your business and personal contacts merge? You don’t want that – it’s just adding to the ‘noise’. Your contacts will include vendors, investors, potential joint venture partners and more. Can you honestly say that you can easily separate them out?

Your CRM will make it super easy for you to qualify leads consistently, giving you your ‘one version of truth’. But, you need to consolidate and clean up your contacts before you put them into your CRM. Why? Simply, if you put rubbish in, you’re going to get rubbish back out.

This is how we did it, and we have to warn you – it was painful! But trust us, you do not want to fill your brand spanking new CRM with dirty, broken data.

First, you need to bring all your contacts together in one big master spreadsheet. This will mean importing them from your phone, email, social channels, Filofax and your business cards. You might want to enlist the help of your VA at this point.

Now they’re all in one place can you give them a good clean; that’s removing all the duplicates and filling in any missing details.

Only when you have completed this can you upload them to your CRM.

Finally, thank yourself for the love you’re giving your CRM right now; it deserves it – this is going to be the heart (and intelligence) of your business very soon.

I’ve cleaned up my act – what do I do now?
Read Step 4: Create templates

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About the author

Steven Lai is a property investor, founder of Super Developments and creator of CRM for Property Success. He is a CRM expert with over 12 years commercial experience of managing sales teams.

Join the CRM for Property Success Facebook Group to ask him anything (about CRM, property or 80's trivia!).