A History & Partial Listing of Contact Management Tools in Real Estate – Part 3 of 3

Believe it or not, there are many more out there! I spend much of my time asking people specific questions to determine their needs, and then recommending the solution that best suits their needs. Let me please make one thing clear.  There is NO one program/application that is THE BEST!  Which one is the best depends upon you. I have my opinions about which ones are the best, generally speaking, for most agents, but I don’t believe any one of them is clearly ‘the best’.  It all depends upon your level of comfort with technology, your current needs, and your future needs.  When listening to opinions from others, be aware that many people ‘love the one they’re with’, or if they don’t love it, they’ll still tell you it’s the best  one.  My question is, ‘How can they say that if  they have not used more than one program, in depth, for a good length of time?”  No one has USED all of the major ones out there.  Some people have used several of them, but those individuals are far and few between.  Remember that when someone is telling you that one is better, ask them how long they have USED the other one. Reviewing it, studying it, or doing a trial period is far from having used both.

I just had someone buy Agent Office, and he hated doing it. He had been using a product that he absolutely loved. (I won’t mention the name here, because I don’t like to knock companies in public. It can be devastating to a company, and by the time you read this, they could have turned their act around. That is not to say I will not share my honest opinions about all products with you one-on-one.) He had been through many of the Contact Management tools I mentioned here, and loved this one. He bought Agent Office because he considered it to be the next best one for him after this one that he loved. Why the move? As great as it was, he was spending 4 – 5 hours a week with tech-support, resolving problems. He simply couldn’t afford to continue investing that kind of time.

Where is it going? It’s anyone’s guess. There are one heckuva lot of Real Estate agents out there, and more and more are beginning to realize that SOME kind of Contact Management tool has become a necessity. There are a lot ice cream flavors available, and while some are certainly more popular than others, the less popular ones still have a market.  Will the smaller markets be able to support so many different kinds of Contact Management tools? Time will tell.

In the interim, how do you choose? One consideration is how much pain you’re willing to go through. If you go with one of the market leaders, you’re less likely to have to switch down the road.  Then again, there are some solutions out there now that are very interesting, and if they last, could turn out to be a terrific solution; but will they last? If not, that’s where the pain comes in. The pain of learning one, having it go down the tubes, and then having to switch to another and endure a new learning curve. That process can be worth it, but if you’re going to take that risk, I would advise that you take it with a product that easily exports a great many fields. That way at least, you won’t lose a lot of your data in the transition.

Another consideration. All of these Contact Management tools have many things in common, one of them being the goal of eliminating the need to enter information more than once, by using ‘merge fields’. By that I mean creating a contact record, and then being able to simply click on ‘Write’, ‘Letter’, and that person’s name and address, is automatically put into the letter. With the advent of ‘Online Transaction Management Platforms’ (OTMP’s – see one of my other posts), CRM’s and OTMP’s are currently mostly two separate programs. This makes duplication of data entry necessary. It may be that some of the players that will grow the most, will be the ones that merge the two best.

One of the age old problems with using technology in Real Estate has been that there is no ‘Silver Bullet’. There is no single program that does everything you need it to do. On the surface, it would seem that if there were, that would be the one everyone would gravitate towards. Not likely. Why? Because it would be an incredibly complex program with a huge learning curve, one which the majority of agents would neither be capable of, nor willing to embrace.  The trick is to find the one that does the most things you need it to, and live with what it will not do.

No matter which one you choose, go into it with your eyes wide open.  It takes a serious investment of your time to truly benefit from these tools.  How many of us have spent literally many hundreds of hours USING, and thereby learning, Outlook and MS Word, and getting a little bit better, and learning a little more all the time.  We accept as a matter of course that we need to learn it, and we spend the time to do so.  How long have we spent playing with, and learning MS Publisher and Power Point, Excel, etc.  MS Office is a “Suite” that is incredibly robust, and takes a great deal of time to learn.  The sophisticated CRM tools that we use are also “Suites”.  Top Producer is a powerful and extensive program which by definition makes it time consuming to learn.  So are Agent Office, and most of the other full featured CRM tools out there.  A very significant number of people buying them do not understand the investment of time required to become proficient with them, and often are not willing to spend the time to learn how to use them.  They then throw up their hands in frustration, saying it’s the software’s fault. It  is NOT the fault of the provider.  It is a lack of commitment.  When I bought Quickbooks, I paid someone to teach me how to use it, and then invested the time necessary to learn it.  That’s what it takes.  I ALWAYS advise people NOT to buy these programs unless they are willing to invest the time necessary to benefit from the money investment.  I advise that people commit to one hour a day, 5 days a week, FIRST thing in the morning, before your day gets into crisis mode, for at LEAST 2 to 4 weeks, depending upon the person’s aptitude for software. That should get you a healthy start.  Then you need to continue using it regularly, and you will continue to learn more and more of it’s uses.  Is that unreasonable? No. Difficult – yes.  But not impossible if you make a commitment and stick with it. I was an agent doing 40 some sides a year. I had the same problem with making the time as anybody would, but I did. It’s not a matter of ‘getting the time’, it’s a matter of ‘making the time’.

So what’s left? Resign yourself to the fact that this ongoing menagerie of technology solutions will never end. Decide what you want to accomplish with the help of technology. Make a list. Prioritize the list. Start eating the elephant one bite at a time.