Summary

Jim Miller shares practical strategies for managing client relationships through effective CRM practices, focusing on top-tier clients and maintaining consistent communication to foster trust and referrals. This episode came straight out of your questions. Who are my Platinum clients? I have too many people on my lists, so where do I start? I do not have a hundred people, so does this even apply to me? How often should I be reaching out, and at what point am I annoying them? I have been getting these same questions for years, so I took this episode to answer them one at a time. It also picks up right where last week left off, with the client care fund, where you set aside 10% of the commissions that come from your network and hold that money as an investment back into those relationships instead of letting it disappear into an operations account.

Platinum is the top 20% of your top 100. These are the people who do business with you regularly. Developers, investors, connectors, the ones who saw your value immediately and say your name when you are not in the room. The standard is roughly ten touches a year, four to five of them phone calls if you are not seeing that person in person, and you cannot go more than 90 days without reaching out. Gold is the next 30% down. They love you and they refer to you, sometimes without ever having transacted with you. Same 90 day cadence, same anchored dates, the spend is just a little different.

Two dates anchor the entire year. The birthday and the home purchase anniversary. My biggest return on investment when I was selling was my birthday card program, and the people highest up the food chain are the ones getting the least attention on that day. The home anniversary is your natural window for the annual property review. Silver is the bottom 50%, good relationships with low engagement, worth an occasional touch and your marketing but never at the expense of platinum and gold. Fringe lives on your email and your social media. Platinum and Gold are also on your holiday list, and the ideal drop is the Monday or Tuesday right after Thanksgiving, which means that project starts in September, not in November.

Then you hold it with a system. One person I work with runs the whole thing on a printed spreadsheet. Name, category, quarterly columns, birthday, home anniversary, notes, last contact date. Their director of operations prints it every quarter and they mark it off by hand. Their production has doubled and is on its way to tripling. Your clients do not care what CRM you use. They care that you remember them. If a hundred names feels like too much, start with 25, run them the right way, then add five at a time. And when you make the call, understand what the call is. You are not selling and you are not pursuing. You are asking how they are doing as a person. That is the whole job, and it is almost not fair how well it works.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and episode overview
00:29 Jim's purpose and approach to teaching
01:27 Client fund and relationship investment
02:23 Managing different client types and communication
05:21 Defining platinum clients and their importance
07:11 Frequency of contact with top clients
08:39 Recognizing clients on special days
10:37 Home anniversary and annual reviews
13:29 Gold clients and their management
14:29 Silver clients and low-engagement strategies
16:24 Holiday gifting and client appreciation
17:52 Focusing on top clients and managing overwhelm
20:14 Cadence and management systems
22:09 Simplifying processes for consistency
23:06 Relationship building over selling
24:09 Final thoughts and call to action

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