The Most Powerful Tool A Real Estate Agent Can Use: The Right CRM

Do you want to get more done in less time? Maybe you never want to miss a contract deadline. Again, maybe you want your leads to stop slipping through your fingers, or you want to get everything that’s in your head, especially in this market with everything going on so quickly, you want to get what’s in your head and all of the contracts on deadlines and all the to-do’s off of your plate, out of your head and into a system you want to keep track and keep in touch with all of your leads, all of your sphere and all of your past clients with ease in a way that’s very personal to them. And doesn’t require a lot of time from you. Welcome to and today’s episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. I’m talking about The Most Powerful Tool a Real Estate agent can have in their arsenal to grow their business and really create a very client-driven, relationship-driven real estate business. And that is choosing the right CRM. Welcome to this episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. I’m your host, Jennifer Myers, listen in, as I share exactly what I did to go from not being able to sell a house for years to becoming one of the top 1% of agents in the US or even opening my own brokerage full of agents helped me serve all the clients that were coming my way. I taught those agents the same strategies I use and date two became top producing agents. Now through this podcast and agentgradschool.com, I’m sharing those same modern marketing and business strategies with you. Most of which I learned from looking outside the real estate industry, no fluff, no theory, no outdated sales techniques or paying for leads, just the exact steps to get you the real estate business you’ve always wanted. And the life outside your business, you’ve always wanted to let’s make it happen. And dive into today’s episode. Having The Right CRM and your real estate business is a total game-changer. Total time saver, total sanity savior, and can do so much for your business. I still remember the, I can still remember the, it was August I’d own. Exactly. Remember the year, I think it was somewhere around 2004, 2005. I can still remember the home office I was working in. And I spent that August because that’s when it kind of slows down in my market. And I made the decision to finally have a CRM in my business. And for me, it marked this time and my business when I was going from flying by the seat of my pants, kind of being a real estate agent that like thought that things would just come to me, and I’d be able to handle it all to the moment when I decided to really run a business. And I know if I was running a business that I had to have a system in place, I had to have a database in place and I needed to have a CRM that those two things work together so that I could really perform at a high level and an amazing experience for my clients. Plus, I started having so much business come my way that I knew that I couldn’t handle it all on my own. And I knew that I needed systems and get things out of my head. And one day eventually delegate a lot of the administrative tasks, but I knew at the time I needed to first create a system before I could delegate it. And that is what my CRM did for me. So, on today’s episode, I’m going to talk about what, what a CRM is and why every real estate agent needs. One, why it’s so important to your business when the right time is to get a CRM for your business, how to know which CRM is the best option for you and spoiler alert. It’s usually not the free one that you get with your broker or the team that you aren’t you’re on. There are risks to that. And we talk about what those are also What mistakes to avoid when choosing and using a CRM and so much for my favorite CRM. And the one that I use now is real Volve. And I asked the COO of Realvolve Dale Warner to join me and answering these questions that I get most often from our students and from you listeners about CRMs. So, listen in as Dale and I talk through all these questions when it comes to CRM, why you need one when the right time is to get one, how to know which one is the best for you. And yes, I am biased. It is Realvolve and how our students can actually get all of my workflows if you are a Realvolve customer as well. So listen in to this episode, as we dig in about how a CRM can help your business grow and save you a ton of time and help you get more done in less time. Hey Dale, thank you so much for being here. I’m so excited to talk about theory and Realvolve with you. And thanks for being here. Glad to be here. Well, let’s just dive in because I know we both have a lot to say on this topic of CRM in our businesses for real estate agents. So, let’s just dive in and start with, by the way, these are questions that I get most frequently from our students and from you guys emailing in. So, thank you guys for asking these questions and then Dale and I will both share kind of our answers to them. So, first question, what’s your take? Why do real estate agents need a CRM? And maybe we should start with what is the CRM? Yeah, I mean, a CRM, my definition of a CRM is obviously the acronym stands for a customer relationship management tool. And what it actually is, is just, it’s a system to help agents stay organized with, with their contacts, keep their people, the contractors that they work with, the title agents that they work with, their clients, past clients, keep them all organized and understand what’s going on with them and what to do next. That’s the basic functionality of a CRM and why, an agent needs a CRM. I have, I have this thesis that like 95% of all salespeople, right? And, and CRMs are ubiquitous. Every sales organization, major big organizations, especially have invested a lot into their CRM. There are big ones out there. Salesforce HubSpot, these massive, massive technology companies and individual customers of theirs invest hundreds of thousands of dollars a year into the systems. But they’re designed with the business in mind with the sales manager in mind and the management in mind to help make decisions about the business. And so what ends up happening is that the sales reps, 95% of them end up hating and despising their CRM because it feels like a tyrant that they are just having to update all the time and they don’t necessarily see the true value of the CRM and the management team does. So I think about my own journey as a professional salesperson, I started out in the mortgage sales or the phone book. That was my, that was my training, you know, and, and so I know what it’s like to, to just start calling people and keep notepads and sticky notes and things like that. And you can get by for a certain amount of time on that. And a lot of people do, and some people are better at it than others, but it really took me probably five or 10 years to start understanding the value of a CRM. So was a really personal question when you asked why I am very, very passionate about this. And I started working for a guy named Darren Dawson, who then later went on to co-found BombBomb. And I worked with Darren at a couple of different ventures, and he taught me how valuable these systems can be. I really learned the value of systems when I start growing my own sales team. And we were really serious about improvement. They called me Dale’s force at BombBomb because I was so passionate about CRM. So this is dating back to before I started working for a CRM, I really began to understand that CRMs are an opportunity for a team to track things for agents and teams to track things that helps them get better. And it also is a tool that you can kind of dump things out of your brain. So you don’t have to juggle them all the time. And it really is truly freeing. It’s the opposite of a tyrant. It’s actually freedom. So I could probably spend another 30 minutes on why a real estate agent needs a CRM, because it is the most important thing. I think you need to know how to use your MLS and you need to know how to use the CRM in my book. Those are the top two things that you just have to know, like a plumber needs to know how to use a wrench, real estate agent needs to know how to use the CRM. Yeah. It’s one of those crucial tools to a real estate business. I think one question I get a lot is when like, should real estate agents get one out of the gate on day one. And if not, then when is that magic moment for, what’s your take on this question when they should actually have one for their business? Like when did the sticky notes not work anymore? Yeah. So I have strong opinions on this, but I’ve also heard a lot of other people’s strong opinions on this. I think you should get one on day one, but again, it’s, it’s difficult because without really understanding, right, as a real estate agent, we get kicked in the teeth at some point. And without really understanding some of the pains, it’s difficult to stay motivated to update a CRM. And of course we have a CRM and we’re not using it. It’s worthless. So I will say day one with that asterisk that if you’re not going to use it, you might, you’re just extending this, this, this hate that you have for the CRM. Like I said, 95% of sales agents do. And so I think it’s, it’s, it’s important to properly educate yourself before you get one and really understand what you’re going to do with it. But if it were me talking to a really close friend, that’s starting real estate tomorrow, I would say, what CRM are you going to use? And how are you going to use it? And it needs to be a part of the first couple of steps. Yeah. I think one pushback. I can hear people saying it already is like, it’s so expensive to be a newer real estate agent or those real estate agents who maybe are struggling and don’t have the income that they thought they would have after so many years. And so how, like, I think that’s the question is like, when do I invest this amount of money and what am I going to get that return on investment? Like, what’s your take on that return-on-investment piece? I mean, the CRM was about the same price for an individual agent just getting started. It’s about the same price of your cell phone bill. And so, I mean, I know that there’s all kinds of things that get that get piled on, and everybody’s going to tell new agents to just buy, oh, you’re going to need to buy this. And you’re going to need to buy that. Well again, number one, and number two in my book or mols and CRM. And so there is so many things you can get done. If you have a decent CRM, there’s a lot that you can do with putting sweat equity into the CRM and the systems yourself. Now, of course, there’s lots of different programs out there. There’s really expensive CRMs, right? We have some CRMs in the real estate industry that are $1,500 a month. Now I have no doubt that for certain teams that are wanting certain things out of it, that it’s worth every penny and it, and it delivers an ROI for them, but just find something that is going to be, like I said, about the price of your cell phone bill and make the sacrifice and put in all the time to think through what it’s going to get for you. Because I would tell you this probably pretty definitively one, if you only had one lead that you were trying to follow up with your odds of converting that person into a client are going to go up, if you’re properly tracking it. And I’ve seen very few people do that effectively with a spreadsheet or with a notepad. It’s, you know, if you get one new lead a week after 10 weeks, you have 10 people that you’re following up with things just start to get lost. And even if you’re starting out that slow, I think that CRM is, is just crucial. It helps you move faster. Totally. Yeah. And so I think, again, one stumbling block, cause people are like, okay, I get, I need a CRM. I keep hearing CRM; how do I know how to use it? What to use it for? And then therefore, how do I know what to look for in a CRM? Because there’s so many choices out there right now. So what are some words of advice that you have on how to find the right one for their business? It’s really like ice cream flavors. In my opinion, you know, my, my favorite ice cream flavor is Ben and Jerry’s fish food. And I could sit here and try to convince everybody that that’s the best ice cream flavor on the planet because it is. Yeah. Well, wait, I like Tonight Show, I like Ben and Jerry’s Tonight Show, won’t turn my nose up to that one either. But I would say it has to start first and foremost with your goals. And again, this is another really big question that deserves a lot of time and, and we do spend time talking about that and some of our videos and things like that on our website, because it’s complicated, there is no easy solution to say, look, this is the CRM that fits every business. No matter what you’re trying to do, I will say this, there are, there are really inexpensive CRMs out there. And there are some that are not specifically designed for real estate, and you might be able to use that for two or three or four years and, you know, get some really good results and, and be happy using it. Our CRM Realvolve was specifically designed for residential real estate, and it’s designed so that people don’t outgrow it and we have individuals using it. And we have big teams using it, doing hundreds and hundreds of transactions every year. And so I like ours because of the flexibility. It is so customizable. And I think personally if I’m looking for a CRM, I want the customization ability. Now, it doesn’t mean I’m going to on day one, spend, you know, three months or something, configuring everything and getting it all customized and getting it all set up to perfection. That’s definitely not what I would do. If I was starting out, I would have a very singular focus on new leads coming into the business. And I would think about designing a process for myself within that CRM so that I could get as many people in my pipeline as possible that have the potential to do business with me. And again, Realvolve, we have so much flexibility. That’s pretty easy to do in our system and we’re relatively inexpensive. So I think we, we think a lot about new agents and it’s a really good, it’s a good option, but, you know, take a couple of demos, right? Talk to a couple of different people, do a little bit of research, which one do you like the look and feel? And it’s something that you should be logging into every day. And so you got to be happy with the way it looks and feels and how it clicks. And again, it’s like an ice cream flavor, so whatever it tastes good to you and the moment as long as you’re doing the research. And then I think, you know, pick what feels right. Right. Yeah. And I would add to that. I agree with everything you said, but I would also add to that, that the way I look at our real estate businesses, there’s five pieces. There’s five parts to it. There’s how you get clients and the door, that’s your marketing, right. And the getting leads in the door. So your CRM needs to handle that influx of leads. And for some of you that also might include your sphere. We hear about sphere marketing and all that stuff. Right. So, you know, putting people in the CRM right. And step one, but then when you have a lead, right, the second part of any real estate business is turning that lead into a client and an agent grad school. I teach a whole initial consultation sequence where when a lead comes in and you do this, and then two days later you do this. And then three days later you do this so that they don’t get kind of like slip through your fingers, and you don’t have to like, have it in your memory. I always call my theory and my boss, and that’s a negative connotation, but I’m like, it literally tells me what to do. So I don’t have to rely on myself, and I don’t have to have it in my headspace. Right. So you need to stay around the contract, the leads and everyone, you know, and all, all of that convert, those leads for you and a systematic way. Then once they’re an actual client, keep you on track for like, you know, when you have a new listing, all of the 90 things or 120 things or whatever it is that we do as agents, there’s no way that you can keep that all up there. Right? So it’s like, you need it. And you need a CRM to track where you are with every client in their journey. You also, and this is where I feel like CRM is totally shine is in an under-contract phase, right? Because it’s those tasks that a, we can get out of our head be we don’t miss deadlines. And then see, eventually, we can delegate to somebody else. I think so often I see real estate agents jumping straight to the transaction coordinator and I’m like, wait, only your CRM with like 75 bucks a month or whatever your cell phone is, it’s way cheaper than jumping to a transaction coordinator. Right. So think of it that way. And then last but not least, and this is so crucial in that after phase, after the transaction, keeping in touch with clients in a way that adds value to their slot to their lives, you know, tells you when to follow up with certain things and creating that system for your business. I mean, for me and the CRM is like, how do you do real estate without one? Because you need to do all those things. And every single person is in a different spot. Right? Yeah. And those, those five stages that you mentioned, you know, the, there are lots of CRMs in real estate that only focus on those first three things that you said, and they completely ignore steps four and five that you just went through. That’s certainly a really key component of the customer relationship. And I would say most, most CRMs in real estate are really just lead managers. They can help you generate leads, nurture those leads, convert leads. Once they’re a client, there’s not a lot that you do with the CRM. And so, yeah, Realvolve, we’ve really focused on that because we don’t want the experience for the client where you’re talking to them every couple of days, you’re sending them emails and communications when they’re a lead. And then all of a sudden when they become a client, there’s not a process. Yeah. There’s not a yeah. And so frequently, right? Like you’re so focused on getting leads, but then you have no journey or no experience that you’re creating, but a CRM can create that experience for you. Yeah. I was just talking to a CR or one of our pay-per-click experts in-house that manages pay-per-click campaigns for folks. And, you know, he was joking with me and said, you know, everybody wants seller leads. The only real way to get seller leads consistently is to have had and converted. A lot of buyer leads about five to seven years ago. And so, and that’s where the CRM can, can come into, into place. I have one quick story. So one of my really good friends, I won’t mention his name, but he’s in the mortgage industry now in Denver. And he used to be a big, promoter for four national speakers. And, and one of the guys that he worked with the most was Tom Hopkins, who wrote how to master the art of sales, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for like 20 years or something like that for, for sales books. I think it’s still in the top 10 sales books on Amazon. So how to master the art of selling Tom Hopkins, my close friend would go around all the country and help him book out shows with real estate agents. And so he knew thousands and thousands of real estate agents all around. Well, he ended up retiring Tom Hopkins, getting older, and not traveling as much. So my buddy retired from that side of the business and said, I want to get into mortgages. Well, again, he had thousands and thousands of real estate agents that he has worked with over the years. He has no record of who those people are. None. He’s got no business cards. He doesn’t have a box of business cards. He doesn’t have a spreadsheet and he doesn’t have a CRM where all of those people reside, and people forget how valuable that could be. Just the ability to send out an email to your clients or a text message or something like that. I’m doing a client appreciation event saying happy birthday, the ability to do that is so valuable. People underestimate all the time and not just do it but do it in an automated way. And whether it’s automated to the client or what I like to do is automate it to me, which I love, like you need a CRM. That’s flexible. So when people, when real estate agents who are the word automated, I think they think like not personal, you know, it goes straight to the client or like kind of scary, but I automate me. And then every day I’m like, what’s my boss telling me I need to do today. Oh, I got to send a birthday card to this person. Oh, I got to call this person. Right. And so when I walk into the office, I feel completely clean. Right? Like my mind is clean. It’s like, and then I’m just, I just have to go to one place login one place. It tells me everything I have to do. So I think that’s one kind of misnomer. I think that people, that real estate agents have about CRM is it doesn’t make it impersonal. It actually can make it much more personal. Yeah. I can’t hear the word. Automated is, is scary to some people. And one example, I was in California at a real estate event and I was standing in the back of the room next to one of our, our clients. And she does, she has a phenomenal business and she and her team close a lot of listings. They do a lot of listings and I’m standing there in the back of the room next door, and we’re listening to the audience. And she pulls out her phone and shows me, she had just gotten a text message. And it said, you know, that they, Dale Warner and Stephanie Warner’s listing just went and, you know, or, or whatever, just when active, give them a call and let them know that it’s active. And so she’d just click on the phone numbers from the text messages that she got from Realvolve and it sends a little text message, hey, I’m at a conference, but I wanted to let you know, blah, blah, blah. And then five minutes later, she waves at me. Again, she got another alert on her phone and it was again from her assistant, just checking boxes. And Realvolve triggered an alert to her that says, hey, it’s so-and-so’s birthday, send them a BombBomb video saying happy birthday. So then she shoots a little quick BombBomb video. And then five minutes later, she shows me, and it says so-and-so’s offer was just accepted. And so again, she just clicks on the number, calls him, congratulations, your offer, or just accepted that’s all automation. And because she’s not having to juggle all of that, she doesn’t have to think about it. She’s sitting there paying attention. But when she got the alert, she could just quickly in two minutes, give it such a personal touch to her clients. And they don’t know that it’s automated. I didn’t know that it was triggered by automation or that she was reminded by automation. But the workload to the actual agent is so small compared to trying to juggle all of that yourself without automation. Yeah. And I think you’re touching on such an important point that I always tell our agents, which is you’ve got to automate before you delegate. So the only way that happened was because she was able to automate her process, know what her process is, so that then she could, when she started to scale her business and grow her business, the first seat you Phil, and my opinion is the admin and the admin’s job is to run your CRM, run your, those things. So that there’s somebody behind the scenes checking the boxes so that we, as kind of the front and center agent can stay front and center with our clients, right? Like that’s the whole, that’s the power is as your business grows that your CRM can do for you and can free up so much for your time. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see real estate agents make when it comes to A CRM? Hmm. I think people, don’t, the number one biggest thing is easy. Most people don’t take the time to learn the system. And a lot of us feel like we shouldn’t have to learn the technology. It should just be easy because we’re used to, you know, our I-phones and our Google phones, or really easy to use. Google docs feels very similar to the Microsoft office suite. So if you know how to use Word, you know, how to use the Google docs. I mean, so were used to the certain technologies operating systems, and we forget that like a CRM, this is a different animal, right? That’s a totally different thing from what you might be used to. And there are just nuances there that need to be learned if you want to use the tool effectively. And there are videos and articles again, not just Realvolve, but all of our competitors and all of the other CRMs out there have resources to be able to learn. Now, I think what we’ve done is the best. We have lots of different layers. We’ve got a manual, we’ve got a simple video series and a more in-depth video series. We have classes that you can join group classes. We have one-on-one coaching and an accelerated setup for the system. And then we have ongoing, where we have hundreds of our clients just pay an additional fee every month so that they can meet with us regularly and continue to tweak because these are teams a lot of times doing 100 plus transactions a year, anywhere from two agents, all the way up on the 1520 agents on the team meeting with us all the time to continue to refine. And this goes on for years. Sometimes. Now there’s plenty of room in there to pick your style of learning. And again, if you’re new, you’ve got to put the sweat equity in to get up to speed and learn the technology. Just like a plumber should learn how to use their ranch. It’s one of the tools that is just the most crucial. So that’s number one. The mistake is not understanding that it’s going to take a commitment to learn it so that you can use it effectively. Now, there are some things in CRMs, ours included that are just kind of click it and send it and run it that are really out of the box, easy to use, but that’s not where the real value of a CRM comes from. You’re going to get a little value out of the 100% automated stuff. I’m going to download a campaign, drop a few people in there, hit send. You’re going to get a value out of that, but really understanding how it works. And what you’re trying to accomplish is, is, is, is crucial. It’s like Stephen R Covey, the author of the seven habits of highly effective people, something he said all the time was begin with the end in mind. So that’s what I always try to counsel people to do. Don’t make the mistake of getting a CRM, not knowing what you want to do with it. What are your goals? How many transactions do you want to do? I’m going to go right or work with somebody like Jennifer to establish this before you turn away from the CRM or give up on it. That’s a big mistake. We see people doing that all the time. And I have conversations with people all the time, Jennifer, that are at their wit’s end saying, I want to give up on this because it’s just not doing anything for me. And once we have a conversation, a lot of times it’s very obvious that they just don’t even know what the thing can do. Right. They just don’t even know what’s capable and don’t know where to start. So I would say, make sure that the company you’re partnering with has a good option for the training, the ongoing training to support the resources that you need because none of us are software experts. We’re real estate experts, software secondary, but it is a part of, of the job in my opinion. Yeah. And doing your job to the best of your ability. I think that’s one reason why I’m for me, my journey to a CRM a little bit later in my career, only because I think I would like many agents like I tried certain ones that it will remain nameless. And I was like, I don’t get it. I don’t know how to use it. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing anything for me. It seemed complicated. And so for me, I started with a very basic one. And this was before like the internet was the internet. I S I think it was like in 2005. And I think this was when I had to download it on my computer. And, in the beginning, it was purely like housing data. So it was like, hu. And what kind of like the contracts and stuff. And then I searched high and like for a really good CRM, this was before we Realvolve existed. Or, at least I knew about Realvolve. And so what I did was I spent a year creating a CRM with Salesforce using my cause at that point in my career, I had my own system that I created. And how many of the CRM is out there, or at least when I was looking, this was probably 2010 ish, maybe 12 ish, somewhere around in there. They didn’t have that flexibility. Right. They were like, you can do this. And only that sounds like, but I want to do it this way. Right. So I was like, screw this. I’m going to just make one for myself. So I spent a full year creating one out of, out of Salesforce, but inserting my workflows into it. Right. And then it got clunky. And I just didn’t know, I couldn’t kind of keep up with Salesforce and it just kind of just wasn’t working. Right. And that’s when a couple of years ago, and it was 2019. And I said, okay, I got to find this right CRM. And that’s what I love so much about real Bob is because not only do you have that flexibility to serve single agents and big teams and as people grow, but because I was able to put in my own workflows, I am now able, like all of our age and grad school students have access to my exact work workflows, 127, or is it, and it’s 27 templates, 127, no, 27 work-flows and 127 template word for word would I use. Right. So I think that the other piece is this the C or do not rely on your CRM to do everything for you. You have to think of it as a tool and you have to use it the way that you want. So find a CRM. That’s one of the biggest mistakes I see is like finding the CRM and expecting it to like work magic. It’s like, no, you have to like to put yourself in there also. So that’s your business, you know? Yeah. And it does take, I mean, I like what you said there because you didn’t expect it to just take two months and then everything was going to be done. And you’re just going to use it forever. There are iterations that, that a good process requires. And we always counsel people to continue to make it an eternal evolution in your business that you’re just always evaluating. What campaigns, what automation you’re using, how are you, you know, taking care of your clients? Is there something extra that you can do to wow them? And if you’re doing something a couple of times, we always say, Realvolve it. And if you’re doing it twice or, or more, you should probably have some process in your team or with yourself where you’re saying, look, I sent this email or on the last three deals or what the last three leads or whatever it is, I should probably just toss this into a workflow. So if you have that base-level knowledge of how the systems work, you should be always adding and improving and tweaking things. And let me give a perfect example of what you’re saying. So for example, you know, how, and when somebody is under our contract and you want to tell them to, okay, now it’s time to set up your utilities and, you know, that rather than have to type that out every time figure out, you know, at least where I, my market is Maryland, DC and Virginia. So I can have a patron, Maryland page. Like I can have a different template and only I have to do and be like, oh, this one’s for Virginia, that we’re buying and in Arlington County, and it’s already done so that instead of having to like, figure it out and taking an hour, it takes me literally three clicks. Now it did take me an hour to set up the first time, but I’ve saved every hour since. So I guess the other thing I see a lot of real estate agents doing is they take whatever CRM is being offered to them for free at their brokerage, or, oh, geez, don’t get me started. The students have already heard my rants about that. So what’s your perspective because I think they think that I’m just trying to get them to use real Bob or something. And I’m like, no, and right. I mean, It’s, it’s, I, I almost feel like when I start having this discussion, I should go get a tinfoil hat and put it on because I think that’s what other people think of folks like you and I, when we start talking this way, because there are lots of different considerations there. One of the things that people don’t think about and are not afraid of, and they should be is what happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, what happens to your data? What happens to your customers? What happens when that technology company gets sold or acquired or whatever, or the brokerage gets merged with somebody else, or you decide you want to take your business somewhere else? What happens with all of your client data, with your home, with your whole entire business, all your processes, all your client, everything is just gone. And I can’t even tell you how many times we’ve heard about lawsuits. They’re not very publicized, but they happen all the time. And we deal with them, right? Because somebody is some team leader is paying the bill and an agent wants to leave and then take all their stuff with them. Well, in that case, I’ll start with the team leader, like the team that was buying the leads, they were paying for the CRM. But what people don’t realize is that happens at the brokerage level all the time two, and it happens at the brand level, and it happens across the industry. And so just ask questions, get curious, find out what’s going to happen. If they decide to drop technology and change to another one, what happens when they all of a sudden want to say that they’re going to be passing leads around to other people? It’s just like so many problems that I’ve heard of. And they all sound like conspiracy theories, but I can tell you that we see them happening at the time all the time. And not only that there is a more immediate consequence. So the more immediate consequence is what’s your customer service, what’s your level of customer service? So I have sat in round tables with other co-founders of technology companies and a lot of times they have these big deals with a company where there’s thousands of licenses or whatever, and they get a lesser amount of service. It’s not necessarily clear to the end, the end-user, which is the real estate agent that’s actually using the software. They don’t know, but there’s a different phone number for them than there is for everybody else may be. And, and the other thing is sometimes there’s no support, because the support is expected to happen at the brokerage or at that, at that national company or whatever. And you’re supposed to go to your internal resource. And I mean, and again, I could go on and on here, just ask questions, get curious. It might be a good solution to get what’s free. Maybe free doesn’t necessarily mean terrible, but just make sure you understand what’s going on with the data who owns it. What are the plans for keeping that system? Am I going to have to change? What happens if I move to a different company or a different team or a different brand ask all those questions? That’s what I would say. Yeah. And we were talking about this on one of our classes today, inside agent grad school. And, and one of the agents said, the thing that she didn’t realize she changed brokerages. And so she went from free thing to free thing. And she’s like, it took me so long to like, get my contacts out because the past broker she was with was very nice and gave her all her contacts. But she said, then I had to learn a whole new system. I had to upload my contacts. It took, it slowed me down. And for that reason alone, I want to be, even if they will let me have the contacts, it’s just hard to learn a whole new system. So, right. I mean, think about what if, what if I took away your Facebook account, your cell phone and all your contacts, your email account, your, your contact list on your computer. What if I took all of that away? How long is it going to take you just to get your friends right away? And I don’t know how many close friends you have, but most people have, I don’t know, like five or 10 people that they stay in touch with, that they’re really close friends with. I have a big family, you know, long. It would take me just to gather up. I mean, it’s like I got all these text message threads, all these phone numbers, emails, addresses just my family members. It would be such a hassle. And thinking about five, 10 years of my business, just kind of disappearing to me, not worth the cost of a cell phone bill every month, but yeah, just at least if you’re going to do, if you’re going to go that route, make sure to ask those questions. So I want to move on to why I love real Realvolve and kind of you tell us what makes Realvolve different because you kind of look at it from a different thing. And I want everybody to know, listening to this, whether you use robot or not, these conversations about CRM are not to persuade you to use one particular, but, but, but I am going to share why I chose Realvolve, but all these general CRM questions can be applied to any CRM you choose. So let’s talk about what makes Realvolve different in your mind. I know that you kind of take this really fair global look at like real estate CRM in general. And so where do you feel like Realvolve fits? Like one of the questions I always tell our students is you have to answer, why should somebody choose you? So I’m going to ask you the same question. Why should somebody choose Realvolve of all the other CRM out there? And then, I mean, I’ve heard other competitors in the industry saying this same kind of a thing before, but we really have on our founding team where we all come from the industry. I mentioned earlier, I started the mortgages. I was at BombBomb. I’ve been doing like the real estate industry for the vast majority of my career. And our CEO, Dave crumby was a real estate agent and, and a team leader for a long time. The people that we brought on early on to help us in the early stage, all of us we’re in the trenches, in the real estate industry. And then last year we acquired Firepoint and it’s the same thing. It was started by a group of teams that got together to build their own CRM. And initially, they found a technology guy and there was this founder’s circle of, of busy real estate teams that were getting together every week and every month and brainstorming how the system should work. So both our products fall into that category of kind of built by people that understood the industry. But it’s more than that. It’s about the passion that all of us have in Realvolve for real estate agents and understanding what it actually takes to be a real estate agent. And I think something that real estate agents don’t understand or don’t even think about sometimes is that there are people disintermediating with technology, right? There are industries being appended by technology. And we certainly feel some of that in our industry and, and have over the last 15 years, big players coming in and Zillow and others, and it’s changed the way we do business. Well, we don’t think about is there actually those companies see real estate agents as the middleman. Yeah. And they want to remove the middleman and they phase the technology is going to be more efficient than this middleman. Well, that’s not reality. The reality is that those other technology companies are the middleman and they’re trying to insert themselves where they didn’t necessarily need to be because they’re fulfilling a short-term desire that the consumers had the desire that consumers wanted, the data accessible, etc. Right. And so time to cut short or what I’m getting at agents are the ones that understand the families in the neighborhood and understand the community and are part of the community and pay attention to what’s going on with the events and the challenges. And they make the American dream possible. They help people find homes and that is extremely important. They’re changing lives and they’re at that ground floor, the ground level of changing people’s lives and all of us should be thinking about our place in the world and how we’re enabling that. And there’s some very troubling things going on. There are these massive insurance companies and big private equity companies buying up homes by the thousands. And that’s going to have lasting consequences on the American family and on families across the world because it’s happening everywhere and Canada and in the United States, it’s a troubling trend. So at Realvolve, we’re always thinking about what we can do to more firmly establish real estate agents and real estate teams in their community. And it’s controversial to say, but I don’t care about the national brands. Consumers care less and less about a brand. They want to work with people, and I want to work with people and I want to help real estate agents create their dream and find freedom because it’s all about freedom. It might be money, but the money is a means to an end. It’s about freedom to make the decisions that you want live, where you want to be able to do what you want. And so again, everything that we do and everything that we’re thinking about and everything that we’re trying to build is with that goal in mind, and to have more firmly established real estate agents and teams to be independent, to be free, to not be reliant on their brokerage as much, again, this is controversial. I don’t care. I think it’s the right thing to do. And I think teams and individual agents are the future and that families really do care about that. And they don’t care about, they don’t care about Zillow. They don’t care about brands. They don’t care about any of that other stuff. It’s all about the relationships, Man. Hallelujah. That was like a Thurman. Thank you. Love it. And it’s still true. And like, you know, my whole rant on that topic is sverything like yes to everything you said, but B the whole reason Zillow is because real estate agents do not know how to get their own leads. That’s right. And, and it’s the same thing with CRMs, right? And the CRMs are a part of that same conversation. In my opinion, what happened with Zillow? Lack it or not was the, the rest of the industry sleeping at the wheel. Right. And not, not necessarily giving the consumers what they want it. And so what do consumers want today? They want an automated, personalized experience. They actually want it to be powered by technology, their trust technology. And so we need to create that for our own clients because I tell you what, there there’s like a dry-cleaning service. And in San Francisco that I used, and I went on an app and I said, I needed my shirt washed. And the guy came by in the car and picked it up and I got updates. And, and like, if I can get that for my dry cleaner, I sure better get that from my real estate agent. And that’s the kind of thing that technology can provide. So it helps with all the details. I always say the CRM and particular Realvolve can make you efficient with your things so that you can be effective with people, your, the relationship, where are the efficiency and trying to be efficient with people at the relationship level doesn’t work. And so you need technology to take care of all the things. So you have more time to spend with the people. And that’s why I think Realvolve is the best solution for most people. Right? Yeah. And you need the technology that supports you and your business, not technology necessarily. That’s going to skip you and go straight to the consumer. Right. And don’t invest in technology that thinks you’re the middleman and is trying to kill you and your livelihood that’s what’s should be a no-brainer Yeah. Use technology for your business, not against your business. One of the reasons I love real robots so much is all the different features that are in it. So we’re going to do a screen share. So if you’re a part of The Agent Grad School and our circle, you’ve got this email or you’re going to see the inside of Realvolve. If you’re not an agent grad school, inner circle member, it’s totally free to join. And you won’t miss these kinds of inside looks like this inside of the Realvolve dashboard that I sent to our inner circle member. So you can always join. It’s totally free agent grad school.com forward slash inner circle. And I share more than I can share on the podcast, just like this. So many different features like as I was comparing, and I spent a year comparing I’m slow. So it takes me a long time and I want to see all the things and then I want to make the right choice. And so I compare it to every CRM out there for its flexibility, what it offered, the support, how they grow like so many features of Realvolve and me, it was how it looked the flexibility, the ability to grow the pricing, you were all support. And the fact that you guys supported my business as well, which is the fact that you allowed me to share my workflows and templates with my agents at age and grad school was so huge. And the reason that I did that is because as you well know, starting a CRM is a time suck of a commitment. And it’s so overwhelming. And I said, how can I remove that obstacle? And you guys were so wonderful, disable, like share your workflows. And so for any agent grad school student, it doesn’t cost you any more money. If you’re an agent grad school student and you have a real Bob account with one click of a button, I give you all my workflows. And so it eliminates that like need to figure it out and give you nine videos that show you how I set up mine. And then of course you have robot support, which I usually send people to. Cause I don’t know, I’m not a tech nerd. I just like, I know how to use it in the way I want to use it. You know? So, so, so as far as for people who are listening to the podcast, we’re going to say goodbye now, but, but just know that I am partnering with Realvolve in a three-part series called three steps to scale your, your business to 1 million without a tool, The three steps to 1 million without a team. So what that is the three steps I took to get my yearly income, a yearly GCI to over 1 million without growing a team the traditional way. So, if you’re interested in that and by the way, the way that I did that, where it all started was with my CRM. So, I could create a system, create my workflows, create a database that then I could delegate to the support team I put around me so that I could be front and center with my clients, which is where I like to be. All right. So, if you’re interested in learning, when that webinar starts, it’s going to be a three-part series. I’m still working with Realvolve on dates, but it’s coming up in a few weeks. So, if you’re an inner circle member, you will, you will always be the first to know you’re my peeps. So good agent grad school.com forward slash inner circle to get notified about that. If you are an agent grad school student, you get my workflows. If you’re interested in enrolling in agent grad school, you can go to agent grad, school.com forward slash and roll. And for those of you who are inner circle members, you are getting in your email, check your email. If you haven’t, if you’re listening to this on an app and you didn’t check your email, just know that you have the inside look of the Realvolve dashboard and kind of Dale and I walking through our favorite parts of it. So, like just, you know, beginning of the, of what it does, but just showing you a little, a little bit around so that I don’t know about you, but like, I like to see the tool. I like to see the technology. I like to see what I’m getting before I actually sign up for something. So, your ability to do that is in your email, if you were an inner circle member before the dates that this went live, thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. We purposely keep this podcast sponsor and commercial-free. So, we can focus solely on providing real estate agents with the content that will help them grow the real estate business. And how about life? They love outside the business too, but we need your help to get this podcast in the hands of other real estate agents. So please, if you liked this episode, leave a review on iTunes or wherever you’re listening, and also tell your agent friends to listen in to thank you so much for supporting the show for being a listener and supporting other agents along your way to success. That’s what this is all about. See you next time. On another episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. And until then come hang with me over agentgradschool.com. I’ll see you there.