Based on many conversations I continue to have where certain issues keep coming up, I think it's time to re-visit a few points about trying to find, and learning how to use, Contact Management and CRM Solutions.
1) Don't judge a CRM by its graphics alone. There are several products available that may not appeal to the eye aesthetically, but if you look past the graphical appearance, you might be surprised. There is one product I have in mind in particular that definitely looks dated, but in actuality it has been improved more frequently based on user suggestions, and for a longer time, than any other product of which I am aware. They have a Catch 22 going on. This particular product puts user suggestions higher in priority than the appearance of the product, and they end up with people passing their product by based only on its dated look. I keep encouraging them to put a higher priority on giving it an updated look, but it's still on the list. Be aware of the 'Shallow Hal' tendency in yourself with CRM's if you have it.
2) Don't spend too little time evaluating a product. Don't rush through 10 of them. You need to narrow it down to 2 or 3, and then spend the time necessary to evaluate them well. On a regular basis I see people discount a product because they think it does not do what they want. That's because they haven't taken enough time to properly evaluate it. The interesting thing is that even after I point out that it does do that function; ofttimes they have already talked themselves out of the product due to those falsely inferred negative feelings! So don't let yourself count out a product for lack of doing something you want it to, until you confirm with the company or myself, that it does not do it.
3) Stay with a technical problem until it is solved, rather than a few minutes here and there when it's convenient, frustrating yourself and the support people. Sometimes support is bad and non-responsive, but other times it's the user's fault for only being available during a small window of time once every few days. Recognize if you are the cause of the problem, because blaming the vendor may make you feel absolved, but it doesn't get the problem solved. Sometimes you may have to wait for hours or even until the next day for a response from a support person. What I see very often is that someone will have a problem but not make the time to deal with it. Rather they will wait until they get the time to deal with it. They then make a call or submit a support ticket, and then wait for a response. If the response does not come in fifteen minutes or an hour, and they have moved onto something else, they then miss the phone call, or don't answer support's e-mail for days. They then get time to deal with it again, respond to the call or the ticket, move on to something else, and get back into the same vicious cycle. That happens 3 or 4 times, and then they say "I've had this problem for 8 days and it's unresolved! The reality of it is that they've only actually been working on it for a matter of minutes! Their next step is to berate the support team and flee that product, blaming the support. Now you're into the cost of a new product, and worse, a whole new learning curve. Talk to me before you throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'll be honest and tell you whether or not you should try to stick it out with your current product, or move on to another. It depends upon many factors. What is best in the long run; a product that does most everything you want, but can sometimes be tough to get support from; or a product that does less of what you want, but has great support? The obvious answer is - I want both! Well again - your needs determine if you can have both.
4) Don't let the normal initial frustration of getting your old database into your new database, and getting used to the software, get you to the point of dumping it for something else, assuming the next product will not have the same issues. Starting something new, or changing to something new, is very likely to be painful for any number of reasons. Deal with it. Certain things are going to require your time no matter which one you choose. Then again, maybe this product that you chose is having problems it should not have right up front. Does that mean you've made the wrong choice? Not necessarily. None of these products is perfect. Maybe this particular product's imperfections are right up front. After that maybe it will be great most of the time. All these factors are just that. They are factors. Each product has a very long list of pros and cons. The one with the most pros, and the least cons, for your needs, is the one for you.
All in all - if you spent a fair amount of time determining that this one does more of what you want it to do than all the others you looked at, give it time. Give it a chance. Don't be so quick to jump the gun. You may be glad you did.
It's hard to know when you are right to be upset with a product/company, if you have little or no experience with which to form a perspective, compared to similar products. What is normal? What is fair to expect? Are you even interpreting the problem correctly? Again - call me, and I'll tell you what I think.
Recently I received an order for an Agent Office upgrade, which in and of itself is nothing unusual. But this order was different. One detail one must provide when ordering the upgrade is the serial number of the software. Well I looked at this order and saw that the serial number was A000001 ! The very first one! The man's name is Bruce Hackel, and he's been using Agent Office since the very beginning! I spoke with him a little, and he first got it in 1992, and has been a happy camper for over 17 years. I'm not saying this to tell you it's the very best solution out there for everyone. Different solutions are better for different agents. I just thought it was noteworthy.
When I placed the order for him I suggested to them (Emphasys Software) that we should do something special for him. Emphasys took me up on it, and we are celebrating his number one status by giving him free support for a year which normally costs $295. Mind you it's not a new Ferrari, but hats off to Emphasys Software for a token of appreciation for so many years of loyalty, despite the fact that they only just recently acquired Agent Office.
I would also like to thank you Bruce for choosing me to make the purchase of the upgrade through. It's kind of an honor! Hope you have many more years of productive use of Agent Office! It will be exciting to see where Emphasys Software takes the product. My conversations with them have me optimistic, anticipating good things in the future.
Hello all. Just wanted to get the following information out there. I just received it from Emphasys Software.
"We just ran several scenarios on installing AgentOffice v10.0 on to a 64bit version of Windows Vista and determined that AgentOffice is compatible with Windows 64 bit Vista...The customer needs to make sure that they have installed both the latest updates for Windows x64 SP1 AND .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. Below are the 2 links that will provide the updates needed to be installed, prior to installing AgentOffice v10.0.
When installing AgentOffice v10.0, it will be sufficient to "Save" the download onto the user's Desktop and run it from Desktop after download is complete.
Hope this clears any concerns regarding AgentOffice's compatibility with Windows Vista x64."
After almost 6 months of research, interviews and design, the Matrix is ready! It started as a way for me to be able to answer all of your questions when you called to ask about the various features of each. After mentioning it to some people and hearing the interest it generated, I decided to make it available to the public, along with some of what I know on the subject, in the form of a glossary
The Matrix allows you to compare any of currently 29 products side-by-side, across 350 features/topics/categories. Equally as important as being able to compare the product features, there is a 15,000+ word glossary to which they link, which will teach you every capability in virtually all of the products available on the market today.
There were/are 40 Real Estate specific Contact Manager and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions in all. Currently there are 29 products in the Matrix. I am affiliated with 22 of them as a reseller, and will soon be affiliated with the other 7 as well. There are 5 more which have recently come onto the market which I am in the process of adding to the Matrix with which I am discussing affiliation. There are 3 in product development which will eventually be added. There are 3 that have gone out of business since I started. One of the 40 has opted not to participate in the Matrix, or to affiliate.
Gathering the data on each product started with a 3 - 5 hour GoToMeeting interview between myself and, in all but 3 cases, the CEO of the companies, to complete the initial raw Matrix. All the vendors now have 24/7 password protected access to the data in their product in order to edit it and keep it up to date. There is a field which contains the last date they revised the data.
Most products are targeted at North American residential resale agents. Some combine that with BPO's; REO's; Long Term Rentals; Short Term Rentals; International Sales; or Commercial Real Estate. Some are focused on marketing materials and light on CRM. Some are relatively simple, while some are seriously powerful. None of them are perfect, and none of them have it all, but some come pretty close, depending upon your needs.
This exercise has been an invaluable ongoing education, and is giving me a tremendous insight into the entire RE CRM industry. It is a pleasure getting to know the people behind the CRM's. Each and every CRM comes to the market with a different perspective about what is most important.
"...comprehensive, unbiased,........aspects of making a decision on CRM I never even thought of.........far and away the best article of it's kind I've ever seen on the Internet..."
Different vendors have different ideas of what Tech-Support means. What I call Tech-Support,as defined in my Matrix, is "If it's broke, we'll help you fix it". In other words, if their software is not working; it's not doing something it's supposed to do; or it is doing something it's not supposed to do, they will help you fix it. A different kind of support would be if you call and ask how to do a mail merge. Tech-Support will USUALLY refer you to a user's manual or training videos. What I call Help-Desk is a policy whereby they will help you fix problems, but will also walk you through how to do something, as a normal part of their service.
Why the two different policies? Revenue streams. Income. Tech-Support/Help-Desk is one of, if not the biggest expense software vendors have. Web based products have an ongoing stream of income. They get paid thousands of dollars by thousands of people every month. That's many thousands of dollars every month, whether they get any new customers/users or not. That pays for a larger support staff. If they're big enough, they can answer the phone directly, much if not most of the time.
Desktop solutions on the other hand are paid only once, up front, when you purchase the product. They will then provide you with Tech-Support and with some products Help-Desk support for anywhere from 30 days to 1 year. After that you must pay for it, with some exceptions. What percentage of people pay for it after the 30 days or one year? Very few. which makes for a much smaller support staff, longer response times, and a narrower scope of what they will help with. If they have a large user base, and were to attempt to provide significantly more, most would simply end up going out of business. Typical response times for desktop software varies, but can be as much as 24 hours. Longer than that should be unacceptable.
Am I saying that desktop solutions are a bad idea? Absolutely not! I use one myself. The point is that I wanted to speak up for desktop solutions that are getting a bad rap about tech support. Too many people expect too much for too little.
Another tendency (not a hard and fast rule) I've seen with desktop solutions is that the more users there are, the more questions there are, and the more of a demand that's placed on support. As the company sells more product, it's a cart and horse thing dealing with increased sales, generating more of a demand on support, and being able to grow the support staff commensurately. Obviously, the better the product, the less of a need for support. But there are still a good percentage of users that want hand holding, so again the more users, the more demand for support.
Be aware that NO RE CRM company TRULY offers 24/7 support, by phone or by e-mail that they will commit to. Some do go the extra mile when they can, and some offer extended hours via e-mail, but virtually none work on weekends, again, that they will commit to.
So income is the primary reason for the two different policies. It makes sense, and if you're objective about it, it's also quite fair.
What I hear very often is that people do not want to pay for a Web based product, because they want to own the software, and not pay for it monthly. BUT - they then want to have Tech-Support, and many expect Help-Desk support as well. Sorry to disappoint, but an old adage come to mind. "You can't have your cake and eat it too." You can say "I paid for the software and I should get support for that money too", and you do, to a point. But again, that one time fee just doesn't last very long. If you want ongoing quickly answered phone support, more often than not, you have to pay an ongoing fee.
The questions then become; if the product is stable, and they have a good training tutorial library available, how much do you need in the way of support after the initial setup? Do they have a "per incident" fee for support? Might that be sufficient for relatively rare future needs?
I would like to take a moment to ease some concerns about data loss that are either outright wrong, or simply overstated. They are: 1) Your data may not be safe with a Web based solution 2) Desktop solutions make your data vulnerable due to inconsistent backups
1) There are actually two sub-categories here. Some people are afraid that the web based provider may steal their contact database, and sell it.
There was an instance back in the 90's when a major franchise provided a Web based solution for its agents, and unbeknownst to the agents, their contact database was suddenly being deluged with e-mail and postal mail, soliciting the franchise's mortgage company, title company, insurance company, etc. In that case, the franchise claimed a right to the data. Whether or not the franchise was entitled to use that database was debatable, but it is quite different than a third party vendor doing it. Maybe that event is where this, what I consider to be irrational fear, came from.
That scenario is considerably different than a Web based CRM provider actually compromising their user's databases by selling the database, or soliciting to it. If they did that - their business would be over!It's that pure and simple. They would be found out in short order, and their business would be done. For what? For a few measly dollars that they could get for the sale of that data. I'm sorry - I just don't see it. Is it possible? Sure. Is it probable? Most certainly not. It takes a great deal of time and effort to develop and market a CRM solution. To then sacrifice all of that for such a minimal gain would be sheer lunacy.
Secondly - people are concerned that their online database will simply be hacked, and marketed to. Is this possible? Sure. Is it probable? With no statistical data to support this supposition whatsoever, my guess would be that it's about as likely as your personal hard drive being hacked, and having your database stolen from it. Verylow odds. Getting hit by lightening also comes to mind. Also consider that Top Producer would be a perfect, well known target, and it has not happened to them since they went online with their data in 2003.
With regards to an online solution simply losing your data; they always have at least one redundant set of servers - a backup. That said, my advice has always been to do a monthly export of your data from a Web based solution. This leaves nothing to chance. While that export will not be a copy of all your data, it will be all or most of your contact data, normally including names, phone numbers, addresses, notes, categories, etc.
There is actually another topic that bears discussion here. That is the heavilyblown out of proportion, and just plain misrepresented, topic of contact managers/CRM solutions who "hold your data hostage". EACH SOLUTION IS VERY DIFFERENT WITH REGARDS TO HOW MUCH DATA THEY MAKE AVAILABLE FOR EXPORT. My apologies for shouting, but this is one of the most overblown misconceptions in the industry. The answer to quelling that fear is simply to find out, before you decide on a solution, exactly which, and how many, fields are available for export from your chosen solution. Also consider weighting what data is most important to you. As long as you have the primary contact information, you have your inventory. As long as you have your sphere of influence's names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, you have far and away the most important information. Everything beyond that may seem absolutely necessary, but if you think about it, not having it would be a nuisance, but it would not put you back to square one, as losing your inventory would.
2) Having a desktop solution means putting your database at risk, as many agents are bad/inconsistent at backing up.
While this is a valid concern, it used to be true more than it is now. One of the reasons is that a significant number of agents have now been burned - lost their data. You have never seen more religious backer-uppers than those who have at one time lost their data ;-)
The next reason is that if you pick the right solution now, there are very often at least two copies of the data in two different locations. Consider that a significant percentage of agents have both a desktop computer, and a laptop/tablet PC, or simply two desktops. One at 'the office', and one at the home office. If that is the case, then the database is being shared between the two, hence two copies, and no need for a backup. For two of the contact management/CRM desktop solutions I sell, the "Master Database" may be stored on a thumb drive, which is used to transfer the changes back and forth between the computers, while each computer also has it's own copy of the database. This means there are three copies of the database. If you have two or more computers, backing up is not an issue. Those same two solutions offer to "host" your master database, making it available to be shared by any number of remote users/computers. This of course, once again, makes backing up a non-issue, as the master would be the third copy of the database.
For those agents who have only one computer, which is certainly still a significant percentage of agents who use a contact management database, there are better and easier methods of backing up coming out all the time. There are automated online services which back up your computer "in the background" with no effort from you whatsoever, other than the original setup. My personal preference fro backing up all my data can be found on my home page. But if you still do not back up consistently, then you will be in trouble some day. For those of you who know you will not back up consistently - get a Web based solution! This will be a safer solution for you.
Once you have finally realized that you must have some kind of method to track and maintain a relationship with your sphere of influence, without a doubt, keeping that sphere of influence (your inventory) safe, is of paramount importance. Proper research and planning will ensure that it is given the attention it deserves.
Well it's official! While Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions (FNRES) is still "taking care of business" until everything is transitioned over, as of October 29th, Emphasys Software is now at the helm of Agent Office! Emphasys is a Real Estate management, financial and compliance software solutions company. It offers a long list of Real Estate related software solutions.
Personally, I'm happy about the potential for this move, obviously pending seeing what happens. Emphasys is a Software company, as opposed to a Title company. Their interest in having Agent Office is to actually make money by making the product better, and selling it. Without getting into specifics, I'll just say that FNRES has not exactly been the best thing that ever happened to the Agent Office software application. If you have followed events during their tenure of ownership, you have an idea what I'm talking about.
Moving forward, having spoken with a representative from Emphasys, I'm optimistic that this will be a good thing. They have plans to make significant improvements to the product, which will be a long overdue development when it happens.
Agent Office has been around since 1992, and this will now be it's 4th owner. For those of you who have it, the road ahead should be interesting, and probably better.
Agent Office is currently in Version 10. It is still available through my Web site at a discounted price, in it's current version, new. If you want to upgrade from an older version, I can still do that for you as well. There will be no interruption in my ability to provide Agent Office software to you, as I will continue to be a reseller for it, when Emphasys takes over.
As always, if you have any questions about Real Estate specific contact management or CRM software, that is what I do. I am a broker/reseller for 32 different Real Estate specific Contact Management & CRM solutions.
This is one of the most common questions I hear. Some Contact Managers and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions have fairly good training materials. Some have great materials. Some have none. But what none of them really excel at, is a tutorial to take you through the basics, in a "Where do I start" format. Maybe I can propose a bit of a solution.
One of the issues making a starter tutorial problematic is that different people consider different things to be the basics, and the CRM's themselves can be quite varied as to what it is they are capable of doing for you in the first place. So how about teaching yourself how to get started?
The very first thing you do is actually a no-brainer. In any of them, you get all your contact information in. Names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc. Always have both a first and a last name for every contact. If all you know is Margeret, put that as both her first and last name until you get her last name. Which contacts go into it? ALL of them. I have seen some people recommend using one program for business, and one for personal, such as Top Producer for the former, and Outlook for the latter. My personal opinion is that I couldn't disagree more. I have been using, teaching, and reviewing Contact Management and CRM in the Real Estate industry for over 20 years, and I just don't see any benefit to that line of thinking. Why have those details of your life; contact information and scheduling information; in two places? It makes for duplication of effort, and confusion having to reference two sources for everything, not to mention that business and personal ofttimes overlap anyway. I have my business contacts; my friends; my Christmas list; my neighbors; I even have my daughter's dog in my contacts. Why? Because I can track his birthday that way! I have a contact - First Name: Computer; Last Name: Tips. In the notes for that contact, I have various things I want to remember about little tricks I've learned over the years, and I even have them at my fingertips in my Blackberry, because the notes synch!
Remember the cardinal rule for contacts; always have a contact in at least one category. Otherwise, you end up with contacts for whom you have no clue whatsoever what they are, down the road. If you are using a CRM, and you are using Activity Plans of some sort, I recommend the following nine categories for a start:
Buyer - Prospect
Buyer - Active
Buyer - Pending
Buyer - Past
Seller - Prospect
Seller - Active
Seller - Pending
Seller - Past
Closed - 20xx (x's being the year they closed escrow)
So what's next? If you had seen my Power Point Presentation on selecting a CRM, you would have created a list of what it was you wanted to accomplish with your CRM, in order to determine which one you wanted to invest your money, and more importantly - your time in. If you don't have that list, create one now. It should contain things such as; Print Labels to ‘Sphere of Influence'; Export names and addresses for mailing, for calendar company; print ‘Just Listed' post cards to geographic farm; Create activity plan to remind me to follow up with Internet leads; etc.
A good CRM will have some kind of training available to learn how to do each of these basic things. Your issue is that you don't know where to start. OK - it's a big job. It's HUGE. It's an elephant! Get over it! How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. No one is going to tell you where to start, or what's most important, so you need to figure it out yourself. This is how you will do it.
List what you want to accomplish, as above
Prioritize it
Use the available training to learn each of those things.
It really can be that simple! Now you have your start. Do you your list. Add things to it as you go. By that time, you will be getting a handle on the software, and the rest will naturally follow.
Now some people will do what I just said, and that will be the end of it. That's OK! If that's all you want out of it, fine. Others of you though, want to see what else this CRM can do for you. The only way you're going to get a good feel for your CRM is by ‘playing' with it. When you're in a screen, click on the menu items, and follow them. You can't hurt it, as long as you are backing up every day, and it can't hurt you. If you are NOT backing up every day - you need to start. My choice for that is actually twofold - EazyBackup for a local copy, and Carbonite for a Web based copy. Both have their pros and cons. Fodder for a differnt post :-)
For more information about choosing a Contact Manager or CRM, you may want to check out:
I'm getting a 1st gen iPhone as a gift from my brother and am very excited to get going with it. Before I jump in I'm looking for suggestions, tips & ideas from the iPhone users out there:
1) What CRM solution are you using & how does it work with your iPhone?
This person may have no choice. She's getting the iPhone as a gift. What I've been running into a LOT lately, is people going out and getting an iPhone, and THEN asking me what CRM to get, that works with an iPhone. That's backwards. OK - I get it that the iPhone is the great new toy, but when it comes to which phone/PDA you should get, THAT choice SHOULD come AFTER you get your CRM solution. Your CRM solution is a far more important, complex, and long term choice than your PDA.
If all you're using is Outlook, go for it. iPhone will do just fine with it. If all you're using is Outlook however, you're going to have a much harder time doing well in this market, because you're not doing the kind of consistent follow-up, in volume, that you need to do in this market. Doing well in my mind is not doing 15 or 20 sides. You can do that kind of volume by simply working a lot of hours and doing a lot of manual follow-up - the hard way. I feel comfortable making that statement, because I not only survived, but prospered doing 40 - 50 sides, in the same kind of market, from 1988 through 1993. I know for a fact with myself, that the reason I prospered was because I had a program called "Real Estate Specialist" which allowed me to launch follow-up campaigns, which kept me on track with a large volume of "suspects".
There are 25 different CRM solutions out there. Frankly, many of them are too new, or have too many holes (usually a function of being too new) to be the best choice, but out of 17 of them that I have interviewed and/or used, 5 of them will work with an iPhone, all of which require extra software to do it. Top Producer doesn't. Agent Office doesn't. Mark-It Advantage Xi only does if you first synch it with Outlook. Active Agent for Outlook does with additional software, as will All Clients. Many Web based solutions will be quick to jump and say they will work with it by going online with it. Sure, but you may as well open your laptop and do it that way. It's not truly practical.
My point - if you see both a new PDA and a new CRM solution decision in your near future, pick your CRM FIRST, and make what it will synch with part of your choice. Not a big part; just a part.
On a fairly regular basis, I hear people comment that this person’s or that program’s form letters or fliers are bad/not for their market/hokey, you-fill-in-the-blank.
The value in ‘canned’ content is not necessarily in that you can take them as they are, and start using them. While it is true that there are some things, some times, that can be good they way they are, or pretty close, it is rare. The value is in the fact that the content, the concept, is already there for you, and pretty much done. What is left for you to do is to tweak it to your personality, and/or your market. The value is in not having to start from scratch. Starting form scratch takes a great deal of time. That’s where the value is; the time savings.
It’s literally impossible to create a body of letters, fliers, post cards, or activity plans, that are perfect, for everyone in every market. Different people have different ways of communicating, with different personalities. And the difference in markets is vast in some ways from one to another, with regards to terminology and procedure.
The point here is that once again, there is too much of a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath waterwhen searching for a CRM solution. People hear; “Oh the form letters in that program are terrible”, and they discount the software on that basis alone. That’s a mistake. The form letters in all CRM solutions need to be tweaked. Granted, some more than others, but it’s necessary in all of them, for the reasons stated.
I liken CRM software to the purchase of a home, in that when purchasing a home, you are actually purchasing a parcel of land, and the improvements on it, the house. The lot can not be changed. It is where it is. It can’t be changed to any significant degree. The home however, can be added to, or raised for that matter, and built anew. CRM software also has two parts; the program itself, and the content. The program, for all intents and purposes, cannot be changed, whereas the content, can be added to, deleted, or modified.
When looking for a CRM solution, one of your decisions is which is more important for your needs. Is it the content, or is it a complete system to track prospects, track your history with those prospects, schedule to-do’s and reminders, create reports, manage your listings and closings, create mailing lists from the way you have categorized your contacts, and manage drip email campaigns. In my opinion, there is not one single CRM solution out there, that has the best of both, so keep this in mind when conducting your search.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
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