While celebrating the start of the 35th year of FIRST IN, I get asked what I consider to be the biggest factor that kept us going. It always comes back to research and tracking “everything”. It amazes me that the majority of business people do not keep track of meetings, conversations, and what I call “findings”. They are not monitoring what is going on around them, ranging from proposals and opportunities to the community they are focused on.
In my case, tracking my efforts goes back before we had computers and the internet running our lives. It all led to the tracking skills that helped make my team and I ‘first in’ on many wonderful clients and opportunities. When founded in 1992, we took over the “Real Estate Buyers Hotline” phone service (featuring recorded descriptions of properties for sale and connecting potential buyers to the listing agent). Part of my responsibility was keeping track of weekly open house lists, needing to have correct days/times open in addition to the address, price, and amenities of each property. Some weeks we had as many as 250 open houses to keep track of.
At that time, there were no computers, phones in our pockets, CRMs, or anything else to rely on. Yet, I was responsible for having hundreds of listings each week with additions and subtractions and it had to all be correct. My solution was to use small pads of paper with different color pads. It was something like green was the south side, blue for west side, and so on. I would sort them by color, then by price, and so on. There was room on each sheet for additions or changes. When a property was still on my list after a few weeks, it warranted a new sheet to be easier to read.
There were weeks of having to call up to 100 different agents about renewing, updating, removing, or placing property ads for the coming week. It had to be completely organized to not risk losing a client or something like not having a price change or coming off market. I created charts to track who was talked to, not reached, and so on. Little did I know it would teach me to do what today would be my own CRM.
Meanwhile, since the late 80s I had kept a “log” notebook, writing down daily activity including business phone calls, proposals finished and sent, and tasks at hand. I would sometimes color code for easier tracking of long-time clients. There was already a system in place.
A lot of that habit still holds true today. Having documentation of things I said and did 10, 20, and even 30 years ago has brought many advantages over the years that have left competitors in the dust. It is what inspires me to coach and teach valued clients and connections how to track and utilize information to their advantage. Next, another aspect of tracking data to become ‘first in’ on greater success!
