In this business, there’s a lot of talk about the importance of a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), but more often than not, we wait too long to decide which one to use—or worse, we have one that we don’t use to its full potential.

The longer you wait, the more likely you are to experience one (or both) of the following.

First, you get busy showing homes, prospecting your neighborhood and attending training sessions, which means that working on your database gets booted from your task list.

Second, folks within your sphere buy or sell a home and don’t use you. You want to blame them, but ultimately, you only have yourself to blame. They weren’t on your radar, so why would you be on theirs?

If you began putting just five people’s names on a spreadsheet every single day, you’d have over 1,000 contacts by the end of the year—even if you skipped the weekends. Don’t overlook these people. They are the folks you know or interact with on a daily basis.

Once you have a CRM, be sure to track every lead, every client, every property. It will make prospecting leads easier, track key dates throughout the transaction and set the appropriate follow up to keep in touch with the client after the sale. Ultimately, the time you spend setting up your CRM will be paid back to you many times over.

When talking with top-performing agents or teams, more often than not, they will speak to the importance of having a CRM. In fact, Management Consultant Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Without having data and metrics in place, you’re always playing the guessing game.

Without tracking key metrics, you’re essentially buying a lottery ticket and hoping for a winner. Your CRM will allow you to answer questions such as, “What’s my ROI from each of my lead sources?” “What percentage of the people I meet do I sell a home to?” “How many seller leads do I get that I actually sell their listing?”

Properly using your CRM will allow you to see where deals are falling off along the way. What percentage of buyers who contact you do you speak with on the phone? What tools does your CRM offer, or allow you to partner with, to help you increase those numbers?

Once the sale is closed, the CRM’s work is not complete. This is the point at which it can ensure that the client will use you again. As the Pareto principle tells us, 80% of your referrals will come from 20% of your past clients. Keeping track of this data will allow you to focus your resources and time to maximize this source of business.

Dave Karoly is vice president of sales at Lamacchia Realty and REAL Training and Systems, and has trained thousands of agents on how to grow their business. To learn more about Lamacchia Realty, visit www.LamacchiaRealty.com.