If you found a great way to do something or maybe found a feature that you didn’t know existed, share it!

OK – I bought a CRM, now where do I start?

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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 could not 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 do not 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 is 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 not 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 is a big job. It is HUGE. It is 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 is most important, so you need to figure it out yourself. This is how you will do it.

  1. List what you want to accomplish, as above
  2. Prioritize it
  3. 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 different post :-)

The Value of ‘Canned’ content in CRM’s

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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 water when 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.

Don’t make assumptions, when it comes to evaluating CRM’s

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Finding the right CRM (Customer Relationship Management – often called “Contact Management”) solution, is getting more and more difficult all the time. There are literally dozens of choices. It takes hours to evaluate each one, to get only a cursory sense of how closely it matches your needs.

The biggest mistake I see people make on a regular basis, which ends up costing them more time in the long run, is to evaluate too many, too quickly. Because looking at one after another is so time consuming, people tend to discount each one too quickly if they don’t see what they need right away. Some solutions are more intuitive (easier to understand and learn) than others. While that is an attribute, it is not necessarily the only factor to take into consideration. In some cases, some solutions are less intuitive, but contain more of the other attributes you require. Intuitive or not, it’s very easy to ‘assume’ it does not do what you need, simply because you don’t see it. Rather than eliminating one as a possible solution, and moving on to the next one, make a list of the things you want it to do, that you don’t see, and send it to the provider, or me. That way you don’t pass one by, that could actually be your best choice.

Once you find one that feels right, and has many of the attributes you need, spend more time with it, and give it a chance. And remember, if you have a great many needs, it’s very unlikely you will find one solution which will do everything. One thing I hear from many people is that they have to have CMA capability, and the ability to interface with the MLS. Most CRM solutions do not have those capabilities, so most agents use their MLS’ CMA feature, or a third party service such as Lightning CMA;  Toolkit CMA; or Expert CMA.

Backing up? Ignorance is NOT bliss!

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By ignorant, I mean someone who has never “gotten burned” by not having a backup. You will never find a more devoted “backer-upperer” than someone who has lost hundreds of hours of work, and/or their “people inventory” – their contacts. It’s one of the most painful lessons you will ever learn in your life. In this article, I hope to save a few people from having to learn it the hard way.

I’ve been using a product called EazyBackup for years now, and it has saved my bacon a couple times, as well as made transitioning from one computer to the next, nice and easy.

Some people copy the entire contents of their computer’s hard drive onto another drive, as a backup. I decided some time ago that I did not want to back up my entire hard drive. When I get a new computer, I don’t want to dump everything from my old computer, onto my new one. My existing computer has developed it’s own little problems throughout it’s use, and I don’t want to bring them onto the new one. Also, my old computer ends up with software that I no longer use, and those programs I don’t want on my new computer. I just want my data, for the programs I do still use.

There are 3 sets of data I am concerned with. One that I want is everything in my “My Documents” folder. ALL my data, including photos, music, Publisher Files, Word, Access, Excel, Power Point, and the like is in my “My Documents” folder.

The other set of data is all the separate programs that have their own backup utilities, like Outlook, Agent Office, Quickbooks, etc. With those, you can back up each program individually using their own utility. I can “point” those individual backups to store their data in my My Documents folder for some of them, but not all. And that’s time consuming getting them all done individually! So the other option is to back up each of those program’s data files, without using their individual internal utilities.

The third set of data is one that I hadn’t even considered before I started using this program, which admittedly was many yeras ago. That is:

Desktop – Automatically save files and links on your Desktop
Internet Explorer – Preserve the Favorites, Cookies and other critical data from Internet Explorer
Windows Common Files – Backup and restore the miscellaneous common files (e.g., Address Book and Dictionaries).

 

Historically, backup programs assume that the user has intimate knowledge of (a) what data to backup, and (b) where to find the data. The average backup program supplies the user with some type of list of all of the files available on the PC and the user then has to figure out which ones to back up. For instance, many people back up the “.PST” file and think they now have a complete backup for Outlook. Not true. The .PST file does not include your “Message Rules’ (filters), or “Signature Files” as well as some other things you definitely want backed up from Outlook.

Eazy Backup is a departure from the traditional backup program. Eazy Backup has built in logic to backup and restore various software applications (e.g., Microsoft® Outlook). That is, Eazy Backup knows where the critical data is located and knows what data must be included to make an effective backup for an application. This relieves the user from having to figure out which data to back up (and wondering if the selection is correct). Equally importantly, Eazy Backup also knows how to restore to the proper location. Restoring data is often more difficult than making the backup – especially when restoring to a machine with a different version of Windows.

The reason I like this backup utility is that this software knows where to get the files for those programs you SHOULD be backing up frequently. Instead of having to go into each of the following individual software programs, and do THEIR backup, or having to know which files to back up for each of those programs, this will do them all in one shot.  Oh yeah, and you can schedule it, and have it write to a CD, DVD, external drive, or any other device which you have the capability of doing a ‘direct write’ to.  What programs does it already know which files to back up?

Outlook – Outlook 2003, 2002 (XP), 2000, and 98
NEO – Nelson Email Organizer versions 2.x and 3.x
Outlook Express – Outlook Express 5.x, 5.5 and 6.x email
Eudora – Eudora Mail versions 4.x, 5.x, 6.x and 7.x
Netscape – Netscape version 4.x, 6.x and 7.x
Thunderbird – Mozilla Thunderbird
FireFox – Mozilla FireFox
IncrediMail – IncrediMail – free and paid versions.
MSN – MSN 8, MSN 8.5, and MSN 9.0
QuickBooks – QuickBooks 2000+
Quicken – Intuit Quicken
Money – Microsoft Money
ACT! – ACT pim/data base.
Palm – Palm Desktop Database
MailWasher Pro – MailWasher Pro Database
Dragon – Dragon Naturally Speaking
4T REM – 4t Calendar Reminder MP3.
RoboForm – Siber Systems AI Roboform.
Expensable – Expensable Time &. Expense
Chaos 32 – Time and Chaos 5.x and 6.x
ClipMate Pro – ClipMate Pro
Darn! Passwords! – Darn! Passwords!
TurboNote+ – TurboNote+

 

And if it doesn’t work on one of your programs – they may add it for you! They are constantly adding programs requested by users.

The other thing is that it is EASY to use. It brings up a window that lists all of the above programs that you have on your computer, and asks if you want to back them up. You just uncheck any you do NOT want to back up, and away it goes! It doesn’t get much easier.

Last, but far from least, is the companies excellent tech-support. If you’re having problems getting it set up, they’ll help. But you probably won’t need it!

$49.95 is the price!

To download a free trial version – click here. , or visit my site athttp://GaryDavidHall.com/eazybackup.htm for more information.

 

Trans-Plans WorkFlows/Activity Plans/Action Plans

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As you hopefully know, I am a reseller Top Producer 8i, Agent Office, Active Agent for Outlook, and many other Contact Management/CRM solutions,and a trainer for Agent Office. Just in case you are unaware, I am also the guy that created Trans-Plans. Trans-Plans are available for Top Producer, Agent Office, and Active Agent for Outlook. ‘In Agent Office and Active Agent for Outlook, they are called Activity Plans’.  In Top Producer 7i they are called ‘Action Plans’.

These plans and letters import into the program you’re using, and included in the plans are drip mail/email campaigns to thank referrers, keep your clients informed and therefore calmed down, always asking for referrals at the same time.

What will Trans-Plans do for you?

  • Reduce your overall stress level more than ANY other single action you can take
  • Stop the details from “falling through the cracks”
  • Save you approximately 150 – 200 hours by not having to create and key in the plans yourself
  • Keep you in touch with automated letters or e-mails, for your buyers and sellers throughout the listing and closing process
  • Give you a comprehensive “Action List” to present to buyers and sellers in your initial presentations with them
  • Significantly reduce the learning curve for new agents
  • Significantly reduce the time necessary to train a new assistant, or give your assistant a comprehensive list of their responsibilities. One that you can track!
  • Give you new ideas to differentiate you from your competition
  • Enable you to create and maintain a detailed history of your transaction for future reference
  • Provide an instant to-do list for someone helping you out while you’re on vacation
  • Enable you to provide detailed “Client Reports” for your buyers and sellers
  • Get FAR more paperless
  • If you have a team, everyone is assigned their individual tasks, which appear on their calendar – not yours!
  • If you have a team – you will stop playing “Who has the file?”

“I would like to offer a non-solicited plug for Gary’s ‘Trans Plans’ action plans that he sells on his web site. I purchased them several months ago, and have been slowly modifying them to my way of doing business. I feel without his plans, I would not have been able to keep up my current 2007 production of 40+ transaction sides with no assistant.

To take your business to the next level, or just simplify your existing business, take a close look at what he has to offer. Thanks! ”

Randy Eide

…Finally I broke down and took a class from Gary David Hall. WOW! That was money Well Spent!  Gary knows his programs and is a good teacher. I learned a whole lot and was able to put it to good use.

…Another point: Listing Plans come with the program. Gary Hall wrote a set called Trans-Plans. They are VERY Thorough. I was surprised at some of the things he came up with to remind me to do. Some are not relevant to my practice but most are and it is very easy to delete the ones you don’t need.

Brent Link

A Real Talk Post:

Question:

Has anyone yet used the Trans-Plans for Top Producer? Are their any recommendations for this?  It sounds great but $200 is a large investment?  I would like to see recommendations first.

Answer:

Amy – I use these action plans in Agent Office – same plans. They are great action plans because they are so complete. There are a couple of big challenges with any contact management program and the biggest one, imnho, is the follow-up action plans. First, you have to create them, then you have to launch them and use them, and then you have to update them (or do you???).

We had more than 100 action plans in our system before these came along. We can’t delete the old action plans because of how the system works, however, we use these new plans now, customized to our business which is now at 7 on our team, on the way to 9 before the end of the year.

Before these action plans came along, we were actually at the point where we were going to bring in the creator of TransPlans  (Gary David Hall) for a couple of days to re-write all of our plans. There are not a lot of options out there for this type of action plan, and these are very good and definitely worth the small cost.

Chris Newell

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

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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.

A History & Partial Listing of Contact Management Tools in Real Estate – Part 2 of 3

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What else is out there? In the RES (Real Estate Specific) arena, there are 2 programs that are based inFileMaker, which is a highly respected database platform.  Agent Business Builder is one of them, that started in 1995, and has a fairly significant user base as a result. Then there is REST, a relative newcomer with what I think to be some very good potential. Based in Filemaker, these two have some flexibility with respect to report generation, using a readily available group of programmers as a third party to generate them for you. Another interesting thing about them is that they are MAC compatible. Yet another with REST, is that with an additional license, it can be accessed remotely over the Internet, on it’s own port, increasing speed, and without a monthly fee. Like all the other’s, it has it’s own idiosyncrasies, making it more suitable for some agents than others.  Most notably, they are not yet capable of ‘receiving’ email directly into them, yet.  The workaround being to copy and paste the emails into the notes field.

Someone vying to compete with Top Producer Is 360Agent. It has the potential to be Top Producer on steroids.  But as they are also new kids on the block, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Speaking of new kids on the block, that’s the state of the industry. More Contact Management tools keep popping up all the time. One called AOSstarted out as an online listing appointment tracking solution, and has morphed somewhat into a Contact Management solution as well. I am not exaggerating when I say I have someone contact me at least every other month, wanting to pick my brain about the what would make a good product. Most of them are programmers without Real Estate experience, which puts them at significant disadvantage to begin with.

Another called Realty Juggler is strictly for use on Palms.

“All Client’s” niche is for those that are very seriously into intricate referral tracking.

THEN we get into the ‘Add-ons’.  Creating add-on software to enhance the capabilities of Outlook has been getting popular for the last several years. ‘Active Agent for Outlook‘ is the one that most resembles good ol’ Outlook, and it makes doing mail merges, and using activity plans, among other things, easier. Obviously it integrates with Microsoft products, which appeals to some. It’s still not as easy as RES software to do the daily tasks that agents have to do on a daily basis, but there are a good many agents that are tired of dealing with ‘proprietary’ software, which is basically ‘my way or the highway stuff’, and lacks the ‘power’ of MS products.

The other two most popular Outlook add-ons are Pat Zaby’s Respond, and another called RealeSeller. The former boasting volumes of letters and publisher pieces; the latter trying to put a friendlier face on Outlook.

One way to pick a tool is to evaluate what kind of ‘user’ you will be.  I’ve worked with thousands of agents over the years, in the context of CRM.  Agents fall into two categories in the following respect:

1)  You are capable of, meaning you have a deep enough understanding of, how software works and interacts.  You pick up software very easily and enjoy ‘playing’ with it.  You have the imagination to be creative with it.  You will enjoy investing the time into tailoring the program to be just the way you want it.

2)  You should really have something that may not be quite as flexible, but that lesser flexibility makes it easier to learn because it comes already tailored to the needs of the vast majority of users.

My experience tells me that the vast majority of agents fall into the latter category.

While none of these can be so easily pigeonholed into one type, and it is certainly not my intent to say any of them are totally inflexible, the above solutions tend to be more for category number 2 people.  The following solutions fit more into category number 1:

We can’t finish the list without letting ACT!, which I personally used for a year myself, get into the ‘act’. There have been several add-ons created for it, but unfortunately I’ve yet to hear a kind word spoken of them. Then ACT! itself came out with ‘ACT! for Real Estate’. I haven’t personally looked at it yet, but the general consensus from the dozen or so people I’ve spoken with that used it, is that it is a lackluster effort, falling short in true functionality. In case you’re considering hiring someone to customize ACT! to fit your needs, you may want to know this. I’ve had far and away more people purchase RES software from me that had just given up doing just that, than any other CRM tool in my experience. They had spent many hours, and a lot of money having it customized, and eventually gave up, because they got tired of dealing with it. Before you ACT! users, and I know there are a number category ones out there, start crucifying me, I didn’t say ALL, simply more, than any other program.  Some other comments…

GoldMine! There are definitely some die-hard GoldMine users that have downloaded the add-on for that, and swear it’s the best thing since sliced bread. We are talking POWER now though. GoldMine is industrial strength, and not for the average Real Estate agent, who is being dragged kicking and screaming into using a Contact Management tool to begin with.

Another one I just recently took a hard look at is Maximizer.  This is a powerful tool along the lines of GoldMine and ACT!, but in some respects has even more.  It interfaces directly with Outlook and MS Word as do GoldMine and ACT!, which will pique many people’s interest. It is very flexible in and of itself.  A Real Estate add-on is available, but, as with many add-ons, for the most part all it does is label many of the user defined fields with Real Estate terms, add some letter templates and checklists, and add seven “Action Plans”.  The program itself I definitely like.  The add-on does make it more Real Estate specific, but is really just OK.

Part 3 in a bit – Considerations when choosing a CRM Solution/Contact Management Solution

A History & Partial Listing of Contact Management Tools in Real Estate – Part 1 of 3

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This article is an ongoing work-in-progress on my site – click here!

They’re coming out of the woodwork! It all started back in the mid ’80’s with Howard & Friends. I know many of you loved it, but waiting for “Blinky to gather my contacts” was a tad too silly for this transplant from computer operations to Real Estate guy…

During Howard & Friends tenuous tenure, another Real Estate Specific (RES) program came out called, interestingly enough, RES – Real Estate Specialist. I loved that program, but it never made it to Windows. As reticent as agents are now to invest the time into learning Contact Management or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, can you imagine how small the market was back in the late ’80’s?!

Then along came Top Producer in 1989 and Online Agent in 1992, later to be renamed Agent Office in 2002. Agent Office has also been ‘branded’ by various franchises over the years as ‘RE/MAX Agent 2000’, ‘Agent Office for RE/MAX’, ‘Century 21 Power Pack’, and Realty Executives’ ‘Executive Agent’. They were exactly the same program, except that the franchise logo was displayed in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Those two were pretty much the only games in town for years, in the context of market share, and boast the lion’s share to this day. Top Producer was always far heavier into marketing than was Agent Office, hence the leading market share for Top Producer.

The two continued to expand and improve over the years, but the first big change came about in 2003. Top Producer went online with Version 7i. Version 6i was the last offline version to be produced by Top Producer, and is now no longer available, and support will end in May of 2007. Agent Office remains an ‘offline’ solution, meaning it is software you load on your computer, as opposed to being available online with any Internet connection, as is Top Producer 7i. While there are third party solutions available, such as eServer, that enable Agent Office to be ‘served’ or accessed, ‘online’, it does not have some of the same functionality as does Top Producer 7i. That said, if you are already using Agent Office, there is much to be said for not having to go through a whole new learning curve, and migrating only a part of your database to a new system.

As Top Producer 7i and Agent Office own the lion’s share of the market, it’s been interesting to see my client’s migration from one to the other, and the reasoning being given as to why. I have a steady stream of agents purchasing Agent Office from me, who are Top Producer 6i users. The three most common justifications being given:

“I don’t want my database online. If the company goes out of business, I could lose my database”

“I don’t want my database at risk of being compromised.”

“I have enough monthly bills. I don’t want another one”

Responding to the first; you have the capability of exporting the vast majority of the fields, and the export is done very quickly and easily. Importing that data into another CRM tool can be somewhat tricky if you have no clue what you’re doing with databases. I have articles to help on my Agent Office Tips & Top Producer Tips pages.

A far as “If the company goes out of business…”, Top Producer is more likely to stay in business than ANY other Real Estate specific CRM solution on the market today.

Be very aware that once you get into ANY CRM program, if you leave it to go to another one, things like your contact’s record of e-mails, to-do’s, appointments, phone calls, etc., will not be exportable, or importable into another program. The way these records are kept is unique to each and every program, so they will not transfer from one to another. The same can even be said of Outlook. Another thing that does not export from these tools is the letter library, without significant intervention. If you use merge fields in ANY program, including MS Word, they are different for each program. So no matter which one you use, they will not be usable in another program without editing all the merge fields. The only way to have ANY universality with e-mails or letters is to stay with Microsoft products. But then you lose all the benefits of the other programs, and they are MANY. There are more and more companies out there promoting the use of Microsoft Office suite, but compared to the relatively rapid expansion of the Real Estate specific CRM tools, you will be missing a great deal. More and more of them are interfacing with products like Zip Forms, SureClose, Relay, ArchTel, and many template Web sites. Those relationships do not exist with MS products, with rare exceptions. Active Agent for Outlook is one of them, as it interfaces with Settlement Room.

To the second; Consider that the company with whom you have your database generates their entire income from their product. To allow the data to be compromised would be financial suicide. Could it happen? Never say never, but I don’t see it being very likely at all.

Lastly; What can be said? It’s more costly right? Or is it? If you take the initial cost of an ‘offline’ software as the only cost, you’re not looking at the whole picture. After the initial cost comes the cost of the upgrades, IF you choose to buy them. Note that with Agent Office, you can skip as many upgrades as you want, then buy the current upgrade, and it will include all the ones you skipped, for the same price. There is also the cost of tech-support on an annual basis. The online solutions usually include upgrades and tech-support in the monthly cost. Long term, yes online solutions will be more costly than offline, but you do need to take the whole picture into consideration to best evaluate them both. When the cost becomes the biggest issue with the monthly solutions, is when you are a team, and growing, and you need more and more “licenses”. Then the cost can get to be significant. That said, if you are doing that well, the additional cost simply becomes a factor of doing business on that scale.

Then there are the people that are coming to me that have Agent Office, and buy Top Producer. Their needs are such that they need to be online. There are an ever increasing number of agents that have assistants, or buyer agents, who are not in the same physical location, and need remote/Internet access to their Contact Management tool. As previously stated, Agent Office can be ‘served’ online, but it’s analogous to using a Real Estate specific add-on; it improves the capabilities, but falls short of a tool designed specifically for that use.

Next time – Part 2 – What else is out there? A significant, yet still partial list of other leading CRM solutions that lend them themselves to use by real Estate agents.

Transaction Management Platforms

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It is inevitable that Online Transaction Management Platforms will be pervasive in the Real Estate industry at some point in the relatively near future. I’ve heard numbers from agents saying that it saves them 30% of their time per transaction. It saves agents, ancillary service providers, and consumers, time. That said, more players are jumping into the game…

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon your point of view, that means more choices, and more research to determine which one best suits you. A comment was made to my last post asking me to help “understand our options better”. Would that it were that easy!

The list of Online Transaction Management Platforms(let’s call them OTMP’s) actually was far greater several years ago, but among other reasons, the business models were poor for many, and they failed. Another reason being it was simply too soon for the industry to embrace them. Now the list has started to grow again. Some are; SettlementRoom (one that was there years ago and continues to be strong), a new player – NAR’s ‘Relay’, Fidelity’s ‘Transaction Point’ (which they are in the process of making a major push with), Stewart Title’s ‘Sureclose‘, Gurunet, and there are others.

Let me make it clear that my forte is Contact Management, and Transaction Management within those tools. I’ll try to make that more clear in what follows. As Contact Management Software/Services (also known as CRM’s – Customer Relationship Management) and OTMP’s become more and more intertwined, I continue to invest time expanding my expertise on the latter topic.

One point I would like to make before talking about OTMP’s is not to confuse them with CRM’s. While they are merging more all the time, generally speaking, the latter deals primarily with tracking contacts, lead generation and follow-up, while the former is more geared towards dealing with those contacts from the point of listing the home and/or from the executory agreement of sale date.

While most Real Estate specific CRM tools, such as Top Producer, Agent Office, REST, Active Agent for Outlook, and others, provide very good Transaction Management tools, the primary differences of OTMP’s are the inherent advantages of being online, and the sharing and distribution of documents.

Until relatively recently, OTMP’s have not focused on integrating a truly robust CRM tool with their platforms, and CRM tools, have not integrated a viable online solution to enable sharing of documents. That has been changing. I think it’s simply been a matter of each trying to become the best at what they do, before taking on the momentous task of trying to be both.

That said, the integration of the two has been moving forward to greater and lesser degrees with different products. I am most certainly not familiar with all the OTMP’s, so I am undoubtedly leaving some out, and more than likely short-changing some with respect to their advancements in CRM.

Two of which I am aware that are making moves towards integration are:

SettlementRoom is one of the OTMP’s that has been around the longest, and is now integrated with Sonoma Enterprise’s Active Agent for Outlook – known as SR Producer. The two are also very close to a product that will provide integration for Outlook (independent of the Active Agent for Outlook add-in) with SR. (As it is not yet ready I can’t put up the link. If you would like me to provide you with information when it becomes available, just e-mail me.)

Transaction Point has limited sharing with Agent Office, with further integration possible down the road.

If you’re trying to decide which product, or which combination of products is best for you, you need to determine what your CRM needs are, and if any of the OTMP’s will provide enough in that respect. Some agents don’t do all that much networking; lead generation & follow-up; and mail merging. As those functions are typically the strength of the CRM tools, maybe you lean towards an OTMP with sufficient CRM strength. If you need the CRM strengths, maybe you you don’t have too long of a wait to find an OTMP with strong CRM tools. Maybe it’s out there now. If you are using one, please by all means, share it with us here!

So whatever happened to just listing and selling Real Estate the good ol’ fashioned way, without having to do so much research to find good tools? I guess the same thing that happened to being able to pick out a pair of jeans in 5 minutes?

Now affiliated with Top Producer & seven others

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I’ve been getting very good feedback for some time now, from my sphere of influence, list-servs, forums, and many others. That’s one of the many reasons I am now affiliated with Top Producer. I’ve been advising people that call me about Contact Management solutions to take a look at TP too many times in the last year or so, not to affiliate with them.

Many of you know me as the ‘Agent Office’ (AO) guy for many years now. I am still affiliated with AO, and still think their product fills a need for many agents. That said, we clearly have a need in this industry for online CRM. Those needs are not currently supported in the same way by AO as they are by TP. While AO can be served online, it is not the same thing. There are obviously other pro’s and con’s for each one. The point is, they are both quality products, but different products, filling different needs for different agents.

I am also affiliated with Real Estate Success Tools (REST), Active Agent for Outlook, AOS, 360 Agent,Realty Juggler, and All Clients. Why did I affiliate with so many different CRM tools? Because I wanted agents that call me for advice about which one to use, to feel comfortable that I can and will advise them as to which one best suits their needs, without bias. I’m affiliated with most of the more popular ones now, and will be with all of them very soon, for that reason. Do you care which house someone buys? No – because you’ll be paid no matter which one they buy! That’s why you can be unbiased about houses, and why I can be unbiased about Contact Management solutions.