Does the person building your CRM need to have done deals, or just know the software?

I'm on the fence about which side of this industry I belong on, so this thread is useful to me for selfish reasons. But the version I've seen fail was platform-only. Guy knew the tool inside out, built eleven pipeline stages, and the agent using it couldn't tell you what stage a lead was in without opening two tabs. Nobody asked what a day looked like before building.

Property management side here and my answer is workflow, but not investing workflow. The person who set ours up had never owned a rental. Didn't matter. What mattered was that he sat with our leasing coordinator for three hours and watched her actually work. That's a skill, and it isn't the same skill as having done deals.

Working through licensing now and the brokerage CRM I've been handed is a good argument for the platform side, honestly. It was clearly built by someone who understood real estate and did not understand the software. Duplicate contacts everywhere because they never set up dedupe rules, and two automations that both send a welcome text. So new leads get texted twice in ninety seconds. Great first impression.

@trellis that's the answer I keep circling. Watching the work is the transferable part.

Trying to build a service business around this so I've thought about it more than is healthy. What I've settled on is that platform depth is what gets you hired and workflow knowledge is what gets you renewed. The first call is always the client asking can you do X in this tool. Then month four is them asking why their conversion didn't move, and if you can't talk about follow-up cadence and who owns which stage, you have nothing to say. @halyard the double-text thing is so common it's almost a tell.