From spreadsheet to CRM in a week

Most brokerages do not fail to adopt a CRM. They half-adopt one, keep the spreadsheet running beside it, and end up maintaining both. The second system is always the one that dies, and it is usually the good one.

Here is a week that avoids that.

Day one: decide what a lead is

Before importing anything, agree on the vocabulary. What counts as a lead — every enquiry, or only the ones somebody spoke to? What are your stages, in order? What makes a lead hot rather than warm?

This sounds like a workshop and takes about forty minutes. Skipping it is why imports produce a database nobody trusts.

Day two: import the live ones only

The temptation is to bring in everything since 2019. Resist it. Import the leads that are actually open, plus anything won in the last six months for reporting. Dead leads from three years ago add weight and no value, and they make every count on every screen wrong.

Check three things after the import: - Do the phone numbers look like phone numbers. - Did duplicates get flagged rather than merged silently. - Is every lead assigned to somebody who still works there.

Day three: put the team in, with the right roles

Not everyone should see everything. An agent needs their own leads and their own listings. A telecaller needs a calling queue. A manager needs the pipeline. Give people the role that matches their job and the screens follow.

Invite them by email rather than creating accounts and distributing passwords. People who set their own password on their own device tend to be people who actually sign in.

Day four: run one real day

Pick a day and put everything through the system. Every call logged, every enquiry entered, every visit booked. Not a pilot with two people — the whole team, one day.

You will find three things that do not fit your business. Write them down. Two of them will turn out to be habits worth changing; one will be a genuine gap.

Day five: turn the spreadsheet off

This is the step people skip, and it is the only one that matters. As long as the spreadsheet exists, it is the fallback, and the fallback always wins under pressure.

Make it read-only. Announce a date. Keep it accessible for reference for a month, then archive it.

The week after

Do not measure adoption by logins. Measure it by whether the questions people ask each other have changed. When somebody says "what's the status on the Rajbagh enquiry" and the answer is "look it up" rather than "let me check with Bilal", the migration has actually happened.

One warning

Do not customise anything in the first month. Every team believes their process is unusual; almost every team discovers that the default is fine once they have used it for three weeks. Customisation before that point is just your old spreadsheet, rebuilt at greater expense.