I’m working on all my favorites first and IXACT Contact is right up there. With the addition of free responsive WordPress web sites on top of some of their other popular features, they’re without doubt one of the best values out there. Check out my new video review!
If you’re interested in trialing IXACT Contact I offer an extended 60 day trial. Just click here.
It turned out to be quite long but hey, if you’re doing your due diligence. this should help a lot.
OK not earth shattering news but for those of you using Top Producer and not noticing it, here are a couple changes made recently. Apparently ther users have been asking for some additional export options so they added them. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Another sensible change. The Follow-Up Coach has been changed such that “Everyone Else” no longer includes Inactive Contacts.
And lastly, they’ve added Inactive to the Pipeline Report.
If you’re considering trialing or purchasing Top Producer or would like to learn more, just click here!
OK I made up the acronym but it wasn’t too difficult. LES – Lead Enhancement System. How often does a lead come in with the only information being an email address? Or maybe you get a name too. But those bare minimum amount of information leads can be a pain. Not too long ago WiseAgent added the ability to find any social media related data to automatically add to their contact record. Now they’ve set it up to happen automatically when a new lead comes in. Very nice! I’ll let them explain it:
“How valuable are the current internet leads you are purchasing? Would it make a difference if the leads had a full name, picture, and even interests and favorite sports teams listed when they come in? How about links to all of their social media?
Wise Agent is very excited to announce the release of our new lead enhancement system. Now as soon as your leads automatically drop into Wise Agent from any source, our lead system immediately scours the internet in search of any social media linked to the lead’s primary email address. Many times, the search will return full names, company, job title, photos, social profile links, and more. You may have paid for a partial lead, but because you are a Wise Agent member, we turn your partial lead into a full lead with this new technology. This makes it much easier for you to turn that lead into a relationship.
Check out this video demonstrating how it works.
You can enhance any existing contact as well, from the Social Media tab at the bottom of the Contact Summary page. You can enhance the first hundred contacts for free, and if you want to enhance more you must purchase more credits. The more you buy, the cheaper they are!”
If you would like to trial or purchase WiseAgent, I offer my Trans-Plans Emails free when you do it through my site here.
I am proud to announce that I am the first reseller for Referral Maker CRM from Buffini & Company. They have been using and marketing it primarily to their existing coaching clients for a couple years but now they are ready to let everyone take advantage of their unique CRM.
You can tell from the start that Referral Maker is different. They don’t call them contacts. They call them relationships. Referral Maker is all about knowing your contacts inside and out and working them to increase referrals. Or you can just hope for new business all the time, something Buffini refers to as Transactional. Which one is more desirable? It goes well beyond categorizing people as buyers, sellers, prospects, suspects, past clients, etc. You rate their propensity to refer you. You can record their hobbies, favorite restaurants, sports teams and many other data points that enable you to do much more personalized marketing than just sending out another email drip campaign.
So this CRM is geared towards capitalizing on your existing relationships vs focusing on Internet leads. So if you are very much into the latter, this one may not be for you. It is also not, currently, for someone who wants to use their CRM for transaction management in great detail. I often have agents tell me that they really just want their CRM to track their people and keep them following up in an organized way. That’s this one to a “T”.
There used to be a few software applications whose only objective was to help you set goals and track them. Referral Maker ties that kind of thinking into a CRM to actually track and prompt those goals you have set. If you need a CRM and you like goal setting, Referral Maker is unique in its approach and should definitely be on your short list, at the top.
Around June 2015 I contacted the Buffini organization to inquire about affiliating with them to re-sell Referral Maker. It was a pleasant surprise when I eventually ended up talking to Brian Wildermuth who is now their VP of Business Development. I know Brian from 2008 when he owned Sharper Agent and we were affiliated for resales. Brian suggested I join them in Philly for the Success Tour last week and I’m very glad he did.
I started in real estate in 1987. There was no internet that provided a plethora of free training information like there is now, so I spent a small fortune on seminars, books, tapes and more. I read so many books and listened to hundreds of hours of Tommy Hopkins, Denis Waitley, Steve Stewart, Zig Ziglar and so many more. I even did the Firewalk with Tony Robbins. That was something I’ll never forget!
But yesterday I witnessed first hand why I have heard so many positive comments over the years for Buffini and Company. Wow what an impressive production and just a great overall experience. I now have a much better perspective with which to view their Referral Maker CRM.
Buffini made some great points in the context of Internet Leads versus nurturing your database for referrals. If you’re like me, if you haven’t experienced it yourself you’ve heard many disparaging words about internet leads. Namely, that they are either bad leads, or that there are too many, with few that result in a closing. Buffini’s teaching is that it is far less time consuming and much less expensive to work your database than it is to always go after new business using lead generation solutions and social media. And that is the thought behind the CRM. It’s about nurturing your database and that’s how it is set up.
But what makes it unique is that with all the other CRMs, you are pretty much on your own unless you want to pay someone like me to coach you how to best take advantage of your CRM. With Referral Maker, you can buy just the CRM, or you can buy into a whole philosophy and be coached all along the way to make the best use of it. If you have been trying to use a CRM but keep failing, this may be an alternative worth considering.
For more information, a trial, or to purchase referral Maker, please click here.
It’s here! Time will tell but it looks like Realvolve may have one of, if not the most intelligent/informative dashboards in the industry. I received an email today telling me that my dashboard will be different. It said:
“When you login to your Realvolve account today you will notice the dashboard has changed. There will be a few widgets and gadgets to show information…. Hang tight… It’s learning… We’ve started the process of analyzing the explicit data in your database so it can extract out the implicit data “intelligent” data. It will be in a learning mode for a couple weeks and the more it grows in knowledge, the more information will be available.
We will also be holding a training on it next week (email to follow). “
Just the fact that it will be learning is something I have never seen before. Is it just marketing? It doesn’t look like it. It looks like something that can actually help you run your business like a business and be more intelligent about how you run it.
Unfortunately my account is not in actual use so I won’t be able to see how it works. I have a request for those of you who are using it. Will you let me know how you like it? Reply here or better yet – on the forum I have for them here.
For more information or to trial orpurchase Realvolve, click here. By the way – you get my Trans-Plans Emails for free when you sign up here!
This one is strictly for agents in Australia because much of the terminology is unique to Australia and North American agents would not find it comfortable for them. The process is pretty much the same but the terminology is all different. The first step in getting a listing is getting an appraisal which we would call doing a CMA. Customers are called vendors. There are always attorneys involved which are referred to as solicitors. I’m not saying that a North American agent could not use it. I’m just saying that others are better suited to our needs.
That said, Australian agents, I really like the way this is laid out. It’s very process oriented with specific follow-up plans for each step of the listing, closing, and post closing. It has a unique look which is readily seen on the home page/desktop.
But more than anything, it’s very simple to use.
If you’re in Australia and you’ve been looking at all these CRMs for Europe and North America, I would strongly recommend you take a look at this one here.
Talk about great value in a CRM! IXACT Contact now includes a mobile friendly WordPress web site in your CRM subscription. These are for real customizable sites that feed the leads directly into the CRM. But it doesn’t stop with just the site. The site includes a blog and they provide blog content for you too. IDX is not included for free but can be secured through IXACT and they have several different levels of service in that regard. They have many templates to choose from and you modify them if you like. For more information or a 60 day trial of IXACT Contact – click here!
I’m honored to have been one of the people interviewed in a recent article for RealtorMag Online by Michael Antoniak entitled 2015 CRM Solutions: Is Simpler Better? Hope you enjoy it.
IXACT Contact is one of the very few Real Estate CRMs that include blast email campaign reporting statistics incorporated right in to it. The primary benefit to this is that you don’t have to use a third party to see how your mailings are doing. And the statistics displays in IXACT Contact are specifically for real estate agents rather than a generic reporting system. It’s an incredibly useful and powerful feature and now it’s gotten better.
It’s important to distinguish between different types of emails. IXACT Contact allows you to send 
an unlimited number of day to day emails one at a time, and also allows unlimited emails when they are being sent as a result of an email drip campaign. Then you have blast, mass or bulk emails. Those are the ones you are sending to large groups of people all at once.
To date, IXACT Contact allowed you to send a maximum of 1,000 of these types of emails per month for free. After that number you paid a nominal competitive rate. Now they have increased that to 2,500 per month. That’s one heck of an increase! So the bottom line is that if the number of people you are sending to is less than 2,500 per month, it’s all free. The emails themselves, and the reporting.
If you would like to trial or purchase IXACT Contact, click here for more information.