Commercial real estate dealmakers have long relied on instinct and rolodex memory to match properties with buyers. With a buyer pool of a dozen to a few hundred investors, an algorithm on consolidated data surfaces patterns of interest. The future of dealmaking will not be written by instinct alone.
Personalization lets companies track buying patterns and learn preferences, but it has also opened the door to inappropriate uses of data. Used well, CRM and other data can create Deep Customer Insights. That matters most to companies for which understanding customers is important.
Over 90% of companies with dedicated sales teams have licensed a CRM, yet far fewer believe it is strategic. Adoption depends on leadership as much as on IT. C-suite leaders must set the stage and nurture a culture in which the team will want to use it.
