We need a CRM solution, and it’s making me crazy that we don’t have one. We wrestled with REST for a couple of years, but we never got it cranking on all cylinders, and it lacks features I don’t want to live without. Chris Johnson raves about Heap, but I’m not sure it’s everything we need.
I need help, it’s true enough.
What I want:
- Cloud-based. I don’t want any proprietary apps running on dedicated hardware. I want to be able to do my CRM business from any web-enabled computer and any iPhone anywhere.
- iPhone empowered, therefore, of course. Needs to integrate with Contacts, iCal, etc., and it needs to sync periodically through the cloud.
- Email-based data entry. Heap can do at least some of this. What I would like is to be able to have a form on a web page produce an email that is mailed to my CRM, with that email initiating a sequence of events: Create client record and initiate a particular set of sequences of follow-up contacts. These should be selectable by the email received: Investors should be subscribed to different campaigns from sellers or first-time home buyers.
- Jott-able. Heap does some of this, also.
- As tightly-integrated with Google Apps as possible. For example, I want the calendar to be the Google Apps calendar.
- Action scripts or event scripts or whatever, as automated as possible, ideally already scripted with the text already written. By now we’re talking about the “33 touches” idea from The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, but I want as much of this as possible to happen automatically and hands-free. As above, there will be different “8×8” scripts for new clients, and possibly also different “33 touches” scripts, but, once these are assigned, I want for them to proceed “untouched by human hands.” Agent 360 seems to be well-equipped in this regard.
- Action scripts that require real live human action should create to-do lists for the affected team members.
- We own our own data. That means we have the ability to move our data off in a usable format whenever we want, and our data is never shared with anyone else.
- Simple to use, with no time-sinks. A CRM that require a full-time staffer to implement is a CRM that won’t be used. We already own some of those.
- I’d like for it to be affordable.
So what products should I be looking at? Does anything like this even exist?
Further notice:
If you are signing up for Heap, I’d appreciate if you would use this link. I will get credit in Heap’s affiliate program. We’ll donate the affiliate fees to charity, but with each new sign-up, I will gain clout with the developer. As always, I’ll be sharing every new idea I come up with, but if we can demonstrate that wired real estate professionals are a significant portion of the user base, we stand a much better chance of getting needed product upgrades in a sprightly fashion.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Benjamin Ficker says:
It may be too much to ask, but the ability to sync with whatever IDX solution you are using (DiverseSolutions Here). There is nothing more annoying then having to deal with 5 database systems (Gmail Apps, Diverse Solutions, Altos Research, Top Producer, BlackBerry) to get what I want.
February 7, 2009 — 3:19 pm
Michael Wurzer says:
Heap looks to be amazingly close to what you want. It doesn’t have the scripts written, but the scripts you’d write yourself would be best.
Given that Heap hits on nearly all of your other requirements, it seems worth a shot.
February 7, 2009 — 3:27 pm
Greg Swann says:
I don’t see any way to add scripts to Heap, other than one-off events. Am I missing something? What I would want would be a sequence of emails, snailmails and to-dos, all saved as a group, each one scheduled to occur a set number of days out from the initiation of the sequence. I don’t see that that’s doable in Heap.
February 7, 2009 — 3:33 pm
Greg Swann says:
No, maybe it can…
February 7, 2009 — 3:45 pm
Benjamin Ficker says:
The ability to assign a set of action items (to a new lead, a listing, a new buyer, whatever) is the only thing keeping me using Top Producer. It seems like such a simple concept, you wonder why it is not standard on every solution out there.
February 7, 2009 — 3:36 pm
Rocky says:
Greg – The software you need is called Infusion ( http://www.infusionsoft.com/ )
This software is incredible. It’s power lies in what’s called ‘trip-wire’ marketing. (User actions assign and remove them from campaigns w/o any work on your part). Automated campaigns include broadcast telephone calls, emails, direct mail and more. I believe info and physical product delivery is built in too…meaning it could send a hard copy of your listing packet out in the mail for you. You’d only know if you were watching your reports.
Amazing example of what it can do. Say you send a blast email out telling people about your open house and giving them a link. The software generates a new link for each contact, so you know who is interested. Boom, they are on a new campaign. Or say, you want to do a teleconference…everyone gets their own link to click if they would like to attend. No clicking a link, filling out a form with your name. It knows who you are. It sends them a confirmation email with the reminder info right away.
The costs sucks. Cost is $3,500 setup, if you catch them during special – or $5,000 normally. Then $300/mo for the first 5-ish users.
I know you would like something more off the shelf but it ain’t going to happen with what you need. You’ll work with their consultants for a couple weeks getting everything online.
Most people I talk to can’t appreciate this as they haven’t maxed out their current system yet. But maybe you can.
I can’t afford it now. But someday! Someday! I don’t believe anyone in Real Estate has it yet.
Ryan Rockwood
February 7, 2009 — 3:44 pm
Michael Wurzer says:
Yeah, sorry about that, I just cruised through it too quickly and thought the Event Templates did that but now that I look closer it doesn’t seem to be as robust as you’re talking about. You likely could get it to do what you want with the Javascript API but that’s a headache.
For what it might be worth, I’d be interested in working with you to add some or all of this functionality to flexmls Web contact management. We’re just in the final stages of wrapping up the ability for users to create and manage their IDX links as well as lead management functionality, and we could then devote resources to doing the action scripts. We haven’t had a ton of demand for it (probably because people are already doing it in other applications outside of IDX/MLS), but I think it would be cool for us to have it.
February 7, 2009 — 4:08 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I’d be interested in working with you to add some or all of this functionality to flexmls Web contact management.
Definitely interested. Benjamin is right: The more of this stuff under one roof, the better.
Here’s a feature request, if you’re in the mood: I would love to have an email every time a client enters a portal, just as a way of keeping any eye on what they’re doing.
February 7, 2009 — 4:26 pm
Michael Wurzer says:
Ah, yes, that’s a good catch. It seemed odd that they would have event templates but not hook them up to the email capability. Nice that they have. The app looks quite nice, really.
February 7, 2009 — 4:17 pm
Michael Wurzer says:
We can do that. Would you want it for all customers or should it be an option per customer?
February 7, 2009 — 4:45 pm
Greg Swann says:
My vote would be optional, defaulting to “on.” It’s a good measure of motivation. I’m auto-emailing listings only to myself, with everyone else getting portals. There’s no sense sending emails day after day to someone who is not really motivated. I watch portal access manually, right now, to see who’s really looking at homes and who just said they wanted to.
FWIW, I’m mostly defining subdivisions by map now. Too many lost houses if I depend on the agents to know where their listings are.
February 7, 2009 — 4:54 pm
David G says:
Greg, I would love to see what you would do with salesforce.com. It’s in the cloud & infinitely customizable/extensible. API’s for everything and a good developer ecosystem. For agents, I’ve always thought that their custom embedable web-forms which are directly integrated to workflow would be awesome for buyer & seller lead capture and automation. I find salesforce spendy for casual use (reporting etc.) but I think that a daily user of it’s lead and account management applications gets more than their money’s worth – especially of you need custom forms and workflow.
February 7, 2009 — 10:05 pm
Bear says:
eNoteFile notetaking and filing is worth a shot.
You can use your own templates and email clients while you’re with them.
The standard version is free.
Bear
February 8, 2009 — 1:22 am
Ryan hartman says:
Greg,
I think realfuturecrm might come close to being what you’re looking for. Good email/ iPhone integration, action plans etc?
Oprius is also deceptively feature rich- I especially like the way action plans are triggered by placing contacts in groups or when web form responses are received. iPhone integration is on its way I think…
Heap does allow you to mix emails and todos in activity series I’m pretty sure…and is really google friendly, but I’ve never been able to adopt it as a task manager.
Thanks for bringing up this topic…here’s to hoping the guys at a progressive idx solution like Diverse Solutions pick up this thread and make the tweaks necessary to finally give us the 2.0 all-in-one we’re all craving. (ds is really close, I wonder if they know it?)
February 8, 2009 — 7:01 am
Ben Smith says:
@Michael + Greg
You can mix e-mails along with other tasks in event templates. If you aren’t seeing an option to select an e-mail template in the event template view that means that you haven’t setup the SMTP settings under your user settings (under the user tab).
This is because if you don’t have the SMTP setup, Heap has no way to send the e-mail out. Thus it prevents you from setting up tasks involving SMTP until you have it setup.
February 8, 2009 — 11:10 am
Greg Swann says:
I got this to work this morning. I had the SMTP issue last night, then got manual email in and out to work. I was expecting my event template to work, but it did not because I had applied the event to a lead first and only then went back and added the email. I read that as a design defect: If I build elaborate event templates, I’m going to end up revising them all the time. I will need for all uncompleted events to reflect the changes. Otherwise, I would have to go back and edit hundreds or thousands of contacts.
I’m interested in playing with Heap if you’re interested in playing along. Heap is not everything I need now, but it’s strong in all the areas I’m most concerned about. If you can work with us, we can show you what we need to do to make a CRM robust enough for real estate. As you can infer from David’s comment above, if you can handle real estate, you can handle anything.
February 8, 2009 — 11:25 am
Ben Smith says:
@Greg –
That’s not how the event templates work. When you fire the event template it creates the events and associates them to the appropriate prospect. The advantage to this approach is that you can fire multiple event templates against a single prospect.
Changing to system where an event template is associated to the prospect would result only a single event template being able to be used. Obviously, that isn’t ideal.
Of course, we listen to our customers in regards to feature request. But priorities are determined based on how much demand is demonstrated from the entire user base (based on our quarterly surveys).
February 8, 2009 — 11:38 am
Greg Swann says:
> That’s not how the event templates work.
I understand. It happened to me last night.
> The advantage to this approach is that you can fire multiple event templates against a single prospect.
> Changing to system where an event template is associated to the prospect would result only a single event template being able to be used.
I’m not asking for the event template to be associated to the prospect. I’m asking that if event templates are revised, the uncompleted events in those templates be applied to the prospect, rather than those already assigned from the previous revision of the event template.
We’re working from ideas found in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, especially pp. 136-149.
Let’s set up a 33-touches campaign for rental property investors. Right now, prices are low, tenants are scarce, cash flow is very good but appreciation is entirely negative. Six months from now, prices could be rising, tenants plentiful, cash flow thin to negative but appreciation could be on the upswing.
If that happens, I need to revise that campaign to reflect the changed conditions. What I want is to be able to revise any extant event template and to have those revised events deployed instead of those specified in the previous revision of the template.
Does that make sense?
Inlookers, am I expressing an unlikely or unreasonable expectation?
I think that all of us want to be able to set up event templates that we can deploy over long spans of time with minimal piecemeal intervention. I know that’s what I want. A labor-intensive CRM is a CRM that won’t get used.
On that point: I need for some event templates to be perennial, with events sequenced not just by days from zero but also by weeks on the day by months on the date. IOW, I want fro my email on the monthly market stats to go out on the 10th day of every month. I want for my weekly newspaper column to go out every Tuesday.
February 8, 2009 — 12:04 pm
Joshua Hanoud says:
Would love to get your thoughts on BusyAgentPro.com – I was looking into it when I first got into the business but never really put enough time into using it (or top producer)…
It seems like it would do pretty much everything you’re looking for.
February 8, 2009 — 6:50 pm
Eric Blackwell says:
OK, there is about a TON of work for me in here…@Greg- thanks for bringing this one up. You and I must be on parallel thought patterns…at least in seeing the need for a solid CMS.
I will be look through all the different options listed and seeing what appeals to the needs of the folks here at the office.
Lots of good ideas and takes on what is needed.
Thanks for that.
Eric
February 10, 2009 — 7:22 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I will be look through all the different options listed and seeing what appeals to the needs of the folks here at the office.
I’ve demoed a tone of software in the past few days. In terms of bang for the buck, Heap keeps coming out on top. David is right that the Salesforce universe is cool, but the cost of entry is $65 per chair per month. I spent this evening setting up a complicated mail-merge in Heap, with a round-trip to scrub the data, but it seems to have hung up at the moment of truth. Two emails at once was no problem, but 200 in a batch has taken more than an hour so far.
The upside is that I can program in, to, through and around Heap, so I can set up forms that will capture contact information, create the contact in the DB and assign an email follow-up campaign, all untouched by human hands.
Look at this:
mail ("lead+demoacct@crmondemand.biz", "$name", "[category: Investors]\r [phone: $homephone]\r [mobile: $cellphone]\r [fax: $faxphone]\r [email: $email]\r [template: Investor]\r $address\r $city, $state $zip\r", "From: GregSwann@BloodhoundRealty.com");That’s just mail sent from a PHP form, but it’s mail sent to Heap. Line by line, we’re creating a brand new record from the form data, plugging it into a category and assigning an action template to the new record. That much is wicked slick.
There are things I can’t do, or can’t do as elegantly as I would want, but there’s a lot of power here.
February 10, 2009 — 11:24 pm
Ben Smith says:
Greg –
While what you did there works, the e-mail stuff is really more intended for e-mail clients sending data in.
For better website integration, take a look at the simple API here:
http://heap.wbpsystems.com/api.php
In fact I have a sample script in PHP that I recently posted on my personal blog here:
http://ben.wbpsystems.com/2009/01/15/follow-up-events-through-heaps-simple-api/
February 11, 2009 — 9:50 am
John Wake says:
Greg, We’re on the same time consuming crusade… and apparently crossing paths.
I’m just finishing setting up REST. I finished copying the action plans from Top Producer this evening.
REST has some fabulous things but has some real deficiencies as well.
What didn’t you like about it? (I hope they are all faults that I’ve already discovered!)
@Michael said, “We’re just in the final stages of wrapping up the ability for users to create and manage their IDX links as well as lead management functionality.” I love the “manage their IDX links” part… I think. At a minimum, I want links to my individual listings that do not expire so I can include permanent links to my listings on my blog and in agent feedback request emails. (If you built functionality similar to postlets.com for my listings, you would be a very popular man, and I don’t think it would be that hard to do.)
I’m skeptical about the “lead management functionality” part. The current lead management functionality was obviously designed by programmers, not real estate agents. It’s not in the realm, at least for me. Surprise me, but I think improving it is like updating the Ford Taurus. Michael, I love your product, I just won’t use it for lead management.
Speaking of lead management, Diverse Solutions is a totally great product but their back end, lead management system is primitive. They should shift some of their huge talent toward a complete makeover of the lead management part. They could hardly improve the front end anymore, it’s nearly perfect for me.
February 13, 2009 — 12:34 am
Matthew Hardy says:
@ John Wake
Hi John — Thank you for your kind comments about REST. I did an inquiry on our end to understand what you might mean as deficiencies. The only item I’ve surmised may have related to being able to rename the REST data file in order to host it at FMGateway. It turns out we were inaccurate regarding that at the time – you CAN host your REST data file at any number of the many companies that host FileMaker data files. What’s very cool (and very different) about hosting a FileMaker/REST file at a FileMaker hosting company, is that they don’t even need to know your REST name and password to host the file.
For more information on this…
@ Greg
Hi Greg — We’re working on updates to both REST and our iPhone/iPod Touch products and will let you know when we’re closer to knowing the actual release date (shooting for early March). In the meantime, here’s a video of our new interface showing REST running a single data file with simultaneous remote access from two (2) operating systems and four (4) browsers.
February 13, 2009 — 1:15 pm
Michael Wurzer says:
John, my reference to changes for IDX link and lead management was for those using our IDX system.
February 14, 2009 — 12:59 pm
John Wake says:
Michael, Whoops! Never mind.
February 14, 2009 — 2:56 pm