Here’s a stat that probably hits closer to home than you’d like. Salesforce’s State of Sales report — and follow-up Inman coverage — both pegged CRM adoption failures at roughly seven out of ten teams. Translation: most brokerages that buy a CRM never get full agent buy-in. I’ve watched this play out across two brokerages […]
A number landed on my desk last quarter and honestly, it stopped me cold. NAR’s Technology Survey reported that most Realtors say their CRM isn’t fully set up. The top reason wasn’t price of the software. It was the price and headache of getting it live. I’ve spent years in US real estate tech. Two
A broker-owner I worked with in Tampa lost thousands of contacts overnight last August. Her on-prem CRM — a relic running on a server her IT guy hadn’t patched in years — finally gave up. The backup? Months stale. The “cloud sync” feature her vendor sold her back in the day? Never actually worked. By
Last spring, a team leader in Scottsdale called me late on a Tuesday night, almost in tears. She’d just dropped a serious chunk of money on a “fully customized” Follow Up Boss build from a freelancer she found on Upwork. The result? Half her buyer leads were routing to a teammate who’d left the brokerage
A couple summers back, a broker-owner I work with in Charlotte wrote a six-figure check to a “boutique CRM strategy firm” she’d met at an Inman Connect afterparty. The pitch was slick. The slides? Beautiful. The deliverable? A glossy PDF and a Salesforce instance her agents flat-out refused to log into. Months later her team
So last spring, I got a panicked text from a team leader in Scottsdale. Eight tools running. Follow Up Boss, BombBomb, dotloop, Mojo Dialer, an IDX website, Zillow Premier Agent, realtor.com leads, and a custom AI for real estate agents stapled on the side. None of them talked to each other. His ops manager was
So last June, a broker buddy of mine in Tampa decided he’d switch his 18-agent team off an aging Wise Agent setup and onto Follow Up Boss. Over one weekend. By Monday morning? 1,400 duplicate contact records, 67 active buyer leads with no source tag, and three deals quietly vanished from the under-contract column. He
A team leader in Sarasota emailed me last spring asking why her brand-new HubSpot account had cost her a mid-five-figure check and still wasn’t routing a single buyer lead correctly. She’d hired a generic HubSpot partner agency someone tagged her in on a Lab Coat Agents thread. Looked legit on paper. A few months later,
A broker-owner in Scottsdale called me last fall in a full panic. He’d signed a high-five-figure contract with a Salesforce implementation consultant who came highly recommended by another broker at a Tom Ferry event. Looked great on paper. A few months into the rollout, the consultant had built a beautiful Salesforce org that handled zero
A team leader in Sacramento hired the cheapest CRM implementation services firm he could find last spring. A flat-rate budget fee. A mid-size team. He figured how hard could it be? A few weeks in, the consultant ghosted. Past the month mark, his lead routing was so broken his ISA was manually forwarding Zillow Premier