Wise Agent Reporting Dashboard now Live!

You can now track the effectiveness of your marketing, the productivity of yourself and your team, and the source of your leads and closings.  You will notice a dashboard icon to the left of the Welcome button – just click there to see the available reports.  If you would like a personal 5 min webinar to see a quick demo of the new features, just contact me!

WiseAgent Dashboard Reporting

IDX feeds into CRMs are Trending

CRMs are all about making us more efficient in what we do. The more you can do from within it, without having to go out to other programs, the more efficient you are.

So we’re clear, let’s define what an IDX feed is. It is part of your MLS database being fed to your web site. It is what enables your web site visitors to search for listings. There are many IDX providers but if you have property search capability on your own site, odds are that it is provided using an IDX feed. Traditionally your web site is the only place that IDX feeds to.

But you do your searches and automated follow-up with buyers in your MLS. You get a buyer, you add their criteria, set up an automated search, and they get any new listings that become available.  If you are in your CRM and you get a call from your buyer, you have to go into your MLS, find that buyer and look up what you’ve sent them. Typically it does not show you what you actually showed them. How long does it take to do that? Not long but…

Historically, we:

  • Get a buyer prospect
  • Add them and their preferences to our CRM
  • Go into the MLS and add those same preferences and set them up on an automated search
  • We then show them some homes and record what we showed them in the CRM, manually.

Anything wrong with this picture? It’s the back and forth between the CRM and the MLS. Not a big deal but wouldn’t it be sweet if you could do almost everything MLS related right in your CRM instead? No more back and forth? And have more features and options to choose from than your MLS?

That’s exactly what has been happening lately. Some CRMs are having the IDX feed directly into the CRM. When you view a buyer in your CRM you see what you’ve shown them, what you’ve sent them, and much more. If you get a new listing, you can do a quick search for buyers in your CRM that may be interested in that listing and send it out to them, branded to you, not your MLS! This is something that agents have been asking me for for years. It addresses one of the last major inefficiencies when having to use multiple programs to do our jobs.

It seems to me that in the relatively near future all the better CRMs will be going this way. It’s long overdue and more than welcome. So who has it so far? Masterdigm, Propertybase and Tribus. So far, out of the three, Masterdigm is far and away the most cost effective and it will be interesting to see what new CRMs coming in with this feature will charge. If you’re happy with your current CRM, then this one feature should not typically be enough to change CRMs. But if you’re already sniffing around for a new one this can be very interesting.

Agentdesks adds a few new features

Agentdesks keeps getting better. They announced today that the following features have been added and more to come!

1) Documentation – Agents can now add documents to their account and choose to associate them to a certain number of Active clients / Send it to them.
2) In the mobile app, they have added the notes section where agents can add notes to each client. This will be displayed both on web and mobile.
3) Profile pages – Every agent will have profile pages that displays their contact information and properties that they choose to display on there. Every property will have two statuses – Public and Private. “Public” properties will be displayed on the profile page. So, new leads will be generated from there.

WiseAgent Recent Updates

Just a quick note to let you know some of the more recent improvements to WiseAgent. If you looked at it  a little while ago but did not move forward with it for any of the below reasons, you may want to take another look right here!

  • Mobile – Just added full month view to your calendar on the mobile web app
  • Letters – Emailing letters is now even easier using the Action buttons on the Letter List
  • Transaction Checklist – Select a “parent checklist” to link multiple checklists together (e.g. dual agency or multiple offer situations)
  • Checklist – A source field has been added to the checklists to allow tracking the source of each transaction for the upcoming reports
  • Call List – Now when you complete a call, you can mark that call as completed to record that information for your reports that are coming soon.
  • Status – A status drop-down field has been added to the contact summary page just under the image that will allow you to set the status of each lead / contact. This was added in preparation for the new dashboard and reports coming soon.

Top Producer Announces Mac Compatibility

Top Producer announced yesterday that Mac users are now able to edit letters. It has been capable of editing emails, but not letters, post cards, fliers, or presentations such as CMA’s. So you’ve been able to edit email, now you can edit letters, and the rest is still on the honey-do list.

My first thought was that it was a shame that you still can’t edit the rest. My second thought was that none of the other good CRMs provide a desktop publisher at all, let alone Mac friendly. So basically this puts them even with the rest of the competition on that note, where it was once a con on the pro and  con comparison list.

So from what I’ve seen there is no editor to install as there is for Windows users, so it should be seamless. Apparently the editor for the letters is the same one you use for emails so it should be a piece of cake!

So it’s brand new and all I know at this point is what I have been told. Have anything to add?

IXACT Contact Gets Facelift, Synchs with Google

I’ve been anxiously awaiting this and happy to announce that it is here! You can see more screen shots of the new look on my review page here. It’s still the same great CRM but now it has a new look. Sometimes when a CRM improves it’s User Interface/UI, it also changes the buttons around and you have to re-learn where everything is. It’s like your favorite super market changing where their products are. It can be frustrating and time consuming. That is not the case here. It is virtually identical, but has a nice new clean look. If you passed on IXACT Contact before, primarily because of the aesthetics, you might want to take another look!

IXACT Contact Desktop

They have also announced that they now have a synch with Google. It now “allows you to easily establish an automatic 3-way synchronization between IXACT Contact, your Google apps and your other computing devices, including your smartphone, iPad/tablet, MS Outlook, and applicable Mac applications.”