Don’t use a CRM for your property business in 2019 (until you’ve read this).

Over the course of 2018 we did a lot of research.

The question “Which is the best CRM for my property business?” or some flavour of it was asked over 100 times in Facebook groups – and that’s just the ones we’re members of.

The answers given while well meaning, were ultimately unhelpful:

“I use Zoho”
“Pipedrive”
“I’ve been trying Insightly”
“Agile CRM”
“Try Less Annoying or Hubspot”

Asking which CRM should I use is a bit like asking which car should I drive?

“I drive a VW Golf”
“Tesla Model S”
“Jeep Wrangler”
“Mini Cooper’s are great fun”

The real answer is, it depends on your needs.

It’s not just a case of choosing the best CRM software, it’s about choosing the best software for YOU and YOUR property business.

To help you make the best decision for 2019 let’s start at the beginning…

CRM (customer relationship management) is not just an elaborate contacts book; it enables you to understand your contacts, develop relationships, keep track of your progress and guide you towards successful outcomes.

CRM is all your business relationships in one place, keeping track of all your emails, phone calls, meeting notes and documents relating to specific people or organisations.

CRM is the brain of your business, it’s where all your business intelligence lives.

Until now you’ve probably been working with tools you are familiar with, email, spreadsheets and documents, to run your business.

The problem is, your increasingly finding it difficult to keep track of everything.

Searching for email threads, digging out meeting notes, organising business cards and generally keeping track of how far you have progressed is becoming time-consuming and inconsistent.

Now you are wondering whether there is a better way?

Yes, a CRM will help you:

Manage your relationships

Centralising your contacts and giving you the ability to track developments and progress. Improving your team collaboration.

Network better

Giving you a process to follow every time you make a new contact to build better and more beneficial relationships.

Keep track of your deals

So you know what to focus on and when.

Save you time!

By streamlining how you work.

If you’re running a business with the intent to scale up and keep growing, implementing a CRM system is a no-brainer.

In Property investment, it’s not just about qualifying and converting leads into contacts; developing trust and building deeper relationships that may lead to working together is key.

Knowing as much about people as possible, delivering rapid responses to their inquiries, solving problems quickly, and establishing a personalised correspondence.

This is what CRM software will let you do, and it is key to your success.

Now you have a clearer idea of why your business needs CRM software, but we’re not finished yet.

Conducting a simple feature and price CRM comparison is not a great way to make a decision, nor is just buying off the shelf.  

Choosing an off-the-shelf CRM software product might suit some, but you shouldn’t have to change how you work to fit the software you use. Choosing the software that checks the most boxes will only get you so far, you need to ask whether it can deliver tangible solutions to make your property business run more efficiently.

Choosing the wrong system can often cause more problems than it solves. Your CRM software needs to be configured for your industry, your business and for property if it’s going to truly add value to your business.

These are the things we would encourage you to consider:

Price

There are free CRMs out there, but they don’t offer the ability to customise them for your property business.

A free plan is usually a limited off the shelf solution, which means you can’t experience the real benefits of CRM for property.

Decide what a realistic investment is for your business, and how much a bespoke CRM for property is worth to you.

Functionality

Does your CRM need to integrate with other systems you use e.g. Outlook, Evernote, Quickbooks, Gmail, Xero, MailChimp etc?

Does it need to be used by a team?

Will it do everything you need it to do e.g. email tracking, workflow, deal analysis etc. or will it need to be customised?

If it doesn’t do what you need it to do, then it’s not going to improve your business.

Support and training

Are you a bit of a technophobe and just want to be able to get on with it, rather than learning how to configure a new system?

How much training and support will you need to make full use of your CRM?

Future-proofing

Do you need a scalable CRM solution that can grow and change with your business?

In our opinion, Insightly CRM was the best choice for 2018 and remains the best choice for 2019.

We spent a lot of time researching different CRMs like Hubspot, Pipedrive, Agile CRM, Less Annoying CRM, Infusionsoft and Zoho CRM.

We chose Insightly CRM because it’s simply the best CRM for small and micro property businesses based on all the considerations we mentioned.

Your CRM software should support your daily business activities, improving how you work, not create more processes and more work.

Insightly CRM can do this when it is expertly configured as a CRM for Property Success.

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!).