The below is a great blog post from Jennifer Allan-Hagedorn, author of Sell With Soul. This blog post was written following a real estate contact management webinar that we did with Jennifer Allan geared towards existing IXACT Contact subscribers and what they should do after they upload their contacts into their real estate CRM.
Although Jennifer suggests printing everything to paper, we want you to note that this is not vital as you can easily go through and clean your database using IXACT Contact’s List View feature. Do whichever is easiest for you.
Jennifer’s article is below:
Last week we did a show-n-tell webinar with the SWS Virtual Studio about contact management – specifically what to DO with your contacts once they’re loaded. Because, as nice as it is to have a place to safely store your precious sphere of influcence contact details, having them in storage certainly isn’t enough to justify either the effort it took to get them there or the cost you’ll incur to keep them there.
If you’d like to watch the video from the show, you can do that here: www.sellwithsoul.com/cms-contacts. It’s a long one – nearly 90 minutes, but there’s some good stuff there if I do say so me-self!
If you don’t have the patience to sit through a 90-minute tutorial (I know I don’t), here’s the Cliff’s Notes version…
Step One: Print out a report of all your contacts, including their spouse’s name, home address, email address, phone number and birthday.
Step Two: Go through the list with a highlighter and identify any missing bits of information. Don’t DO anything with the missing bits just yet – just identify them.
Step Three: Go through the list again and identify your Group Ones (the people you’d feel comfortable asking out for coffee; i.e. your social network). Put a “1” next to your Group Ones.
Step Four: If you imported your contacts from an old database, identify anyone on that list that you don’t know with an “IDK” (I Don’t Know). These might be old web leads or people you met at open houses five years ago, for example.
Step Five: Everyone else on the list, who isn’t a Group One or an IDK should be a Group Two (people you know, but who aren’t in your social network).
Step Six: Go BACK through the list (yet again) and identify members any sub-groups that you see – for example – family, service providers, dog-lovers, fellow bikers or hikers, little-league parents, members of your church, high school or college friends, etc.
INTERLUDE
All this printing and highlighting and scribbling may sound a little low-tech for today’s world, eh? Surely there’s a faster, more efficient way to do these things without expending all this manual effort?
Yes, of course there is and most contact management systems will allow you to do most of these steps directly online, without printing and highlighting and scribbling.
BUT
I believe there is something magical about “touching” the names and contact profilesin your database on a regular basis. When you print out the list and go through it, name by name and really think about each person and who they “are” to you, good things happen. First, you’ll likely be inspired to reconnect with many of the people on that list, and second (as airy-fairy as this may sound), when you think about someone, I believe you send out a vibe to them, and if you’re thinking good thoughts (!), I believe they’ll feel it… and might be inspired to reconnect with YOU! I think every real estate agent should go through their database, name by name, at least every six months.
The original blog post by Jennifer Allan-Hagedorn can be found here. Part 2, what to do NEXT after you’ve printed out and scribbled up your list, can be found here.
Have you done this with your contacts already? Do you have another tip or idea that you’d like to share? We want to hear from you!