Not to undermine Chris Johnson’s message about salesmanship, which is spot-on and very-much-needed, but Ian Greenleigh of DriveBuy Technologies, in agreeing with Chris, demonstrated the value of social media marketing to the sales process.
How?
By posting a comment to Chris’ post, he drew attention to his product — a product we have been actively shopping for.
SMS promotion is next on my radar. I want to be able to add SMS marketing to our signs: “For more information about this property, text HOUND7 to 88000.” We got this from SmarterAgent for our MLS client (text HOUND to 87778), and we knew at once that it would be wicked cool to have as a tool for promoting our listings.
As with our signs, we knew what we wanted before we knew it even existed. Over the weekend, I web-shopped some generic SMS marketing vendors, but I hadn’t moved beyond the window-shopping stage.
And then today Ian posted his comment. And the product is precisely what we need, precisely the way we want it. The price is sweet — eight bucks a month per ad-code — and the codes are reusable. We’ll start tomorrow with five ad-codes, then grow as the business grows. For $40 a month, paid monthly, I’ll have something way better than IVR that delivers tons of value to our listing clients and to our buyer prospects. That totally rocks, and it’s a nice proof of the Bawldguy technique of comment-based marketing.
I have a feature request, of course: We’re moving to SalesForce.com as our CRM — probably next month — and I would love it if DriveBuy would devote some attention to direct integration with SalesForce. They’re already there with TopProducer.
Ian Greenleigh works on commission, just like us. If you buy his product, reward his enterprise by buying from him. The link at the start of this paragraph is his email address. His direct phone number is 512-410-0282.
(As a matter of disclosure, I have no financial stake in promoting DriveBuy. But they’re doing a job I want done, so I want to help them and Ian make more money. If you bristle at the term “vendorslut,” you might reflect on what BloodhoundBlog can do for you, should you focus your attention on delivering value to respected clients instead of quarrying for more boobs to hustle out of their money — and more stooges to bribe for phony endorsements.)
I have other great products that I’ve been meaning to write about, but DriveBuy is going to be an important tool for us, so I’m delighted to talk about it today.
Further notice: Text HOUND7 to 88000 as indicated above. Ian built a demo out of one of our listings. I have an iPhone and a Palm Centro, and it looks great on both.
Sybil says:
We’ve just announced SMS to our Agents using DriveBuyTech.com as well! Ian has been fabulous in helping us launch the product. After looking at several other products – DriveBuy has the best presentation, custom branding, and knowledgeable tech support in Ian. Others may (or may not) be cheaper – but you get what you pay for.
August 19, 2009 — 12:49 pm
Greg Swann says:
Further notice: Text HOUND7 to 88000 as indicated above. Ian built a demo out of one of our listings. I have an iPhone and a Palm Centro, and it looks great on both.
August 19, 2009 — 2:35 pm
Thomas Johnson says:
$500/year vs The Realogy solution(TXTERA) we get in the royalty package looks.
To see a listing of mine, text 2729131 to TXTERA(898372) I haven’t figured out how to embed links(probably unavailable), but the basic info is presented and it pings me while they are looking at my sign. Basic, but it starts a dialog in real time. And the price is right.
August 19, 2009 — 8:30 pm
Robert Worthington says:
Greg, might I recommend http://www.100mphmarketing.com which is a brand new crm custom built by a Realtor named Mitch Ribak. You have to check this out. I currently use it, I am the first in the nation to use this besides Mitch’s real estate company. http://Www.Melbournehomesearch.com and give him a call…ask him for a quick demo…I’ve never looked back. I love the texting idea…I will sign up shortly to demo that.
August 20, 2009 — 5:23 am
Ron Ares says:
Moving to SalesForce? HeapCRM didn’t fit the bill? I’m just curious, looking to settle on something myself by fall.
August 20, 2009 — 9:42 am
Greg Swann says:
> Moving to SalesForce? HeapCRM didn’t fit the bill? I’m just curious, looking to settle on something myself by fall.
There’s too much that I want from Heap that I’m not getting. I’m sure I’ll have caveats about SalesForce, too, but there is a vast developer universe for SalesForce. And “the rest of the story” matters to us more and more: We’re four Macs, four Windows boxes, two iPhones, one Palm Centro and two or three other cell phones. I want every device in our business, plus any computer I happen to log in from, to have full, up-to-date access to our CRM DB. On top of that, other products we are building into our work-flows — notably DocuSign — are hooking up with SalesForce via API.
Here’s the deal: The best CRM is the one you actually use. We’re adding a lot of new stuff — in no small part because I am going to have to work more and more from the road, from kitchen counters and from the front seat of my car. The whole idea of deferring chores until you get back to the office — or off-loading scut-work to clericals — is history. We need instant-on, available-everywhere, constant-sync data. SalesForce looks like our best bet.
I’ll be as public as I can be about what we do and how things shake out.
August 20, 2009 — 9:59 am
Greg Swann says:
Here’s an example of what I’m looking for. Right now I have a rule in my Mail client on my iMac — my primary email computer — that says this: If the sender is in my address book, forward the email to my iPhone. That’s plain vanilla white-listing. I don’t block spam at the door, because spam-filters kick up too many false positives, and most new clients come to us as strangers. But I want to make sure that only mission-critical mail gets through to my phone, so that I can deal with what matters without having to sift through all my spam. What I want from SalesForce is the same kind of rule, but company wide: Incoming mail on all devices is compared to the CRM DB, and the mail that is not filtered is echoed intelligently.
August 20, 2009 — 10:25 am