There’s always something to howl about.

Category: CRM (page 1 of 2)

Google discovers what computing is actually for: “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”

Across all products is important. Across all devices is vital.

Drudge and the privacy geeks are going typically apeshit, but Google is playing my tune:

“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering wrote in a blog post.

How might that work?

For instance, a user who has watched YouTube videos of the Washington Wizards might suddenly see basketball ticket ads appear in his or her Gmail accounts.

That person may also be reminded of a business trip to Washington on Google Calendar and asked whether he or she wants to notify friends who live in the area, information Google would cull from online contacts or its social network Google+.

Hell, yeah! Those are the kinds of jobs I want from Sarah, your software secretary, but I can show you a very cool Constance the Connector connection here, as well.

How about I start a music service that seeks to sell you music that you will probably like and don’t already own. “Don’t already own” is an easy database from iTunes or whatever. But “will probably like” requires analysis — algorithm as art — and that’s what makes my business model work. To you-as-end-user, it feels like I know you, like we’re high-school buddies whose friendship is built around grooving to the same tunes.

How could I do that? Let me see your YouTube history, not just what you picked but how many times your replayed particular songs. Let me see your Amazon.com shopping history — especially the things you come back to again and again but don’t buy. I don’t need to know you. You already know you better than anyone else ever could.

That’s what we’re actually talking about, you collecting facts about yourself for future reference. Like a bad comic, Google can make anything sound dirty, but there is nothing wrong with you getting more of what you want — better, faster and cheaper.

Do you understand? Your fears, assuming they are real, are misplaced. The U.S. Government now has the lawful authority to assassinate you at will in Read more

Product idea: Constance the Connector.

It’s been a few weeks since I started talking about Constance, and since then I’ve come up with a completely different way of thinking about operating systems. There are three players who could profit from my thinking — Apple, Google and Amazon — and I would be more than happy to share my thoughts to the first one of those three who salutes.

Meanwhile, I give you Constance, which is in some ways the logical counterpart to Heidi, the self-maintaining CRM system I started talking about last August. Constance the Connector is a server-based service that maintains your handle — a topic we have discussed before.

So: Here are ways you can know of me:

  • By name
  • By street address
  • By phone number
  • By email address
  • By Twitter handle
  • By social media profile
  • etc.

For now, if you want to address me by one of those means, you have to know the specific proper noun to be used — my actual name or my current email address. You are responsible for maintaining that information, and everyone who wants to make contact with me must do the same redundant and error-prone maintenance.

A Heidi-like CRM can do some of the maintenance by means of assiduous, arduous data-base mining. But if I don’t make my new street address public somewhere, your of-course-I-haven’t-forgotten-about-you greeting card is going to bounce.

There’s more: The way things work now, I have no control over who addresses me or how. I’m not just bitching about spam. I want cold-calling salespeople to go straight to voicemail — and when I have determined that I don’t want to hear from a particular caller again, I want never to hear from that person ever again.

So think of me this way, instead: @gswann. That’s my handle: @gswann. Sending em an email? Send it to @gswann. Want to try to get me on the phone? Dial @gswann. Snailmail? Send it to @gswann, you dinosaur. Want to pull my LinkedIn profile? It’s @gswann.

That much is just the handle idea — but with a twist. What we’re doing with the handle @gswann is sending a request to the Constance server for the current mission-critical contact information associated Read more

Product (category) idea: Antoinette the anticipator.

I first thought of the idea of an anticipator as hardware, I kid you not. The early 1980s? Software was dear in those days, but early computer-on-a-chip chips were cheap and abundant. There still would have been a software component to an anticipator, of course, but not much.

Here’s what I thought about then: Anything that could be monitored by signal processing — as, for example, the communication between a micro-computer and its peripheral devices — could have an anticipator in-line, monitoring all the signal traffic back and fourth. By maintaining a probabilistic database of past events, the anticipator could, over time, evolve strategies for anticipating resources likely to be called for in the near future, and, using otherwise dead time on the computer’s data bus, cache that data in advance, eliminating time lost on fetch requests made in real time.

Wow! How kludgey our world used to be! In the bad old days, there were pre-fetch routines built into operating systems, but they were a brute-force solution to a vast array of very small, fussy problems. An anticipator would strive to be optimally efficient and mission critical by dealing only with the specific data most likely to be requested.

An example? If a font required for a document is not stored on your printer, the printer must fetch the outline data from your hard disk. It’s a small job, on its own, but you could maximize your productivity from the printer if those fetch calls in real-time were ameliorated by intelligent pre-fetching. The anticipator could both maintain the most-often used outlines in the printer’s memory as well as anticipating exceptions to the everyday rules — for example, by keeping the boss’s favorite Christmas font on the printer from Thanksgiving through Christmas. That implies real secretarial smarts, but it’s simply probabilistic database mining being perfected over time.

So what about now?

Antoinette the anticipator harkens back to Heidi and Sarah, and to Constance, which I haven’t gotten to yet.

Imagine an anticipator function in Sarah that, when Sarah figures out that you are going to be late for a meeting, sends out all the appropriate notices, all Read more

Product idea: Sarah, Heidi’s helper in the real world.

The big buzz in the mobile computing biz is augmented reality, your phone or tablet takes in a scene and then echoes back to you what it can infer from an image and its GPS coordinates, compass direction, etc. This may be cool, or it may be cool like a QR-code, an idea whose time will never come.

Augmented reality will be that much cooler when it’s like Arnold-the-Terminator’s eyes, but that illustrates the key defects of the idea, as it is currently implemented:

Augmented reality is not done continuously but only on demand, and only in static and affected ways.

And, in consequence, it’s not doing anything terribly useful, except possibly in vertical market applications.

But reflect that an iPad can run continuously for 10 hours without recharging. Next year’s models may double that number. Soon you will get reminders to plug in, or your devices will find ways to provide for themselves while you’re asleep.

So instead of a truly amazing augmented reality presentation on the Black Hills of Dakota, how about a piece of software that watches you and your life all the time, and augments your activities however it can.

This harkens back to an idea I’ve brought up before, a hypothetical self-maintaining CRM called Heidi:

An email comes in over the transom. The spambot says it’s not spam and the sender is not already in your CRM database, so let’s extract as much information as we can from the email. With a name and an email address we can probably get the sender’s full contact information, and possibly a whole lot more.

Make that first contact a phone call instead. Caller ID is lame, but Google is not. From the phone number, can you get back to a name? A location? From those, can we effect the same kind of searches discussed above?

There’s more: Once your CRM knows a name, it should be watching for any changes in publicly-available databases that should be reflected in your private CRM database. That is to say, your CRM should be maintaining itself.

Sarah’s going to monitor every phone call, of course. She or Heidi should be doing all Read more

Let’s Be Clear About Social Media

I keep thinking I’m going to stop posting here.  I keep thinking that I’m going to get sucked into the vortex of rancor that BHB can be.   And then we get these gems of conversation from Brian, Jeff, Al & Greg.  And I’m drawn right back in.   Nothing’s perfect, everybody’s crazy, right?  Life goes on, and the closest I will get to a rebuttal of Greg’s impractical rancor is that it’s wallet-foolish to criticize someone that competes for some of the same business you do. Saving my rancor for when it matters has doubled my income. Your milage may vary.

I digress. Circling back to my take on Facebook.   I post there often, it’s in my opening tabs as I start my computer.  I look around and peruse.  I make some money from it, mostly in the form of the zombies.

Zombies?  These are the strangers that add me randomly on Facebook.  I consider that an “opt in”, so I add them back and put them on a “social media” list in Heap.

And then I send my new pseudo-friends a torrent of spam and calls.  They cry uncle with an Amex.   They are mostly realtors.

I process my queue about once a month and I wind up with 75-80 “leads”.  This generates about $3500 in new business.  $50 bucks a friend, y’all can add me all day long.

This is what most Realtors that are hustling do on Facebook. At least there’s effort here, which is more than I can say for those that strive to monetize whatever should flit across their subconscious.

 

Anyhow, enjoy.

Facebook Works If You Work It. If You Won’t Work It, Just Play Farmville

Let me restate my case about Facebook; if you’re not using Facebook as a prospecting tool, you are most likely wasting your time and engaging in the ultimate procrastination scheme.  I don’t begrudge folks fun and Facebook can provide much joy.  You can reconnect with old friends and make interesting new friends there but if you plan to use it for business, you’ll most likely end up wasting hours that could have been better spent standing in front of a supermarket, handing out your business card.

Like this, from Agent Genius:

You don’t need a business page.  In fact, a business page is just one more time suck.  People rarely go to a business page to learn about real estate on Facebook; look at the metrics offered to prove that.   The author’s offered advice is just plain wrong:

You shouldn’t be using your personal profile page to promote business. It is against the guidelines on Facebook and just rude, regardless. I will share with you how you CAN use your profile effectively, but blasting out your market reports and new listings is a big NO-NO on your personal profile.

Huh?  I have no idea where the author found the “rule” about doing business on personal pages but can tell you, from a few years experience on Facebook, that telling your audience about your business is not only desirable but effective.   Posting listings isn’t rude, it’s your stock-in-trade.  If you’re only posting listings on your Facebook page, you’re likely to be branded as boring but listings are real estate porn, designed to slow down the gawkers and encourage a reaction from them.  Your “friends” will most likely be gawking at your listings if you’re interesting enough to be in their Facebook stream.

I have what I think is a low key way of occasionally including real estate into my status without it being obvious. I share parts of my day that include real estate in a personal light. For example: last winter I was showing REO property and put as my status update: “Showing Read more

Prospecting Your Way To Prosperity With Social Media

Most real estate agents and mortgage loan originators don’t know how to find business.  I fear that some of the social media strategies I’ve shared have morphed into a  “build it and they will come” approach to business development.  Greg Swann did a nice job of identifying this problem when he said that time spent on social media marketing is wasteful:

“Marketing” by social media is a huge waste of time. Selling is one-on-one, focused, time-consuming and goal-directed. Marketing, done properly, is broadcast, diffuse, time-efficient and passive and long-term in its goal-pursuit.

He’s absolutely correct.  The time investment required, to keep your social media current, never pencils out if you want to make six figures annually.  You will get some results but trust me when I tell you that you could have equaled or bested those results by handing out business cards at the swap mart (and yes, I’ve done that, too).  Here’s where his opinion gets a bit murky, though:

Even if you are really doing your best to market your services on-line, if you are doing it by engaging people one-on-one in fleeting media like Twitter or Facebook, you are almost certainly wasting your time.

That, I can tell you from experience, is only partly true.  Using social media to prospect can be exponentially more effective than cold-calling or handing out business cards at a swap mart because of the rich information users provide.  People buy from people they trust and connections help to build trust more quickly.    I’ll come back to this later but it helps to understand the difference between marketing and prospecting as lead generation tools.

Greg’s working definition of marketing (op. sit.) is a good one.   The long-term benefit of marketing is that it is scalable.   Online marketing, especially blogging, can be a workhorse, which generates inquiries from prospects for as long as the information is relevant.  The hour investment in a well-written blog post can attract tons of inquiries over time (I have a few blog posts that perform that well).  Likewise, a consistent display advertisement in the town’s weekly newspaper can trigger you to “top of Read more

CFORMS->Heap + Aweber = Finally, The Perfect Real Estate CRM Smashup?

Heap CRM’s recent announcement that you can now fire off Event templates from an email got me jizzing a little.

Here’s why:

I’ve played a lot with the CForms wordpress plugin and knew that it allowed for 2 interesting things to happen after a form submission.

1. Cforms will show a custom thank you message directly after form submission and this message will take html.
2. Cforms will fire off a custom message to any admin email address of your choosing.

So, starting with the latter…

Knowing that Heap allows a series of events to be scheduled based on some code inserted into an email, I created a CFORM and got to tweaking a custom email message that would be sent to my heap dropbox address for creating a new lead.

You’ll see in the example below that the Subject of the admin email is configured to display the “Name” field entered by the visitor. And the body of the email is configured to include Heap’s code for firing off an event template (along with some other variables, of which there are delightfully many to choose from!)

So in this example, a new lead is created in Heap and a follow up series of events that I’ve pre-configured is kicked off, along with the scheduling of any number of email messages.

The lead could have also been auto assigned to a teammate based on the short code, which might be a nice feature for any broker considering building a multi agent contributor, multi niche focused blogsite. (Imagine embedding a different agent branded cform for on pages created for each neighborhood in your market area. Then consider reaching out to a prospective recruit and promising them that all leads from that page will be routed into the custom CRM solution you’re going to be giving them. [at the whopping cost of an additional $5/month!]

And Then… the Lead Gets Subscribed to an RSS Based Blog Broadcast!

At this point there were already excitement streaks in my undies, but then I realized that I’d also want all of these “leads” to be subscribed to Read more

Taking the Genius of Brian Brady to the Next Level: How to Pipe Linked In Network Updates Into Your Feed Reader

In the spirit of my #1 Bloodhound Blog Unchained takeaway, here’s a 70% ready-to-roll video.  Brian Brady was kind enough to teach me his brilliant way of leveraging Linked In to establish new relationships.  I haven’t been executing the Brady Principles consistently enough.  Check out a little something-something I stumbled upon (no pun intended) today:

Here are some related links if you’d like to learn more about Brian Brady’s Linked In techniques or Google Reader:

Brian Brady Training on Linked In (awesome webinar we recorded in March)

Google Reader vs. Twitter Lists (why I disagree with a recent article Scoble wrote vs. Google Reader)

Introduction to Google Reader (great article by Mark Madsen, fellow BHB contributor)

Digital Access Pass: A Membership Site/CRM

I have–as a lot of people know–been searching high and low for a workable CRM for my business. I miss desperately the easy fun that was ACT 6.0, and hated every version after that.

I tried Highrise, but it lacked “activity serieses” at the time, schedule once, do often.   I tried HEAP, and while it has suitable features, a great developer and a good ethos, the interface was not one I could think of.

Infusionsoft was an utter rip-off.  Staffed by the same types that brought Option Arms to all of the west with nonchalance, Infusionsoft was expensive, it has a bad interface, and worst of all, you have to adopt to it.  In 20 months of being self employed, Infusionsoft was the only thing that made me feel like somebody’s bitch.  The sales staff lied about its capacity “out of the box,” and the employees that ran it wanted to teach me something about being an entreprenuer, condescendingly selling me coaching.

Still, I think that the $700 I spent was worth it just to learn some slight of hand.  The marketing was so good, so emotionally connecting that I believed, despite evidence to the contrary that they cared.   So, the lesson learned was hire a copywriter so good that you feel happy to have been ripped off, and hopeful despite evidence to the contrary.

I’ve been playing with a lot of membership site software.  And, on Twitter, a tweet about WP-Wishlist got a clever guy following me, the developer of a piece of software called Digital Access Pass. DAP is not without its flaws.  It’s not yet perfect.   But, the structure and the thought behind it is, and it’s going to power a large bit of my customer service for the foreseeable future.

Dap sees things as “product” oriented.  Each product has a group of files and emails that are sequentially released to the customer at an arbitrary interval.  Day 1, email one, file one.  Day 2, email 2, file two.  Etc.

I emailed Ravi, and suggested one feature: that the “emails” that go out can be sent to an arbitrary address, defined on each Read more

“The 10 (Real Estate Website) Must-Haves” – Top Producer’s List Isn’t Bad, But…

Just got this in me inbox from Top Producer…It’s interesting, and makes a lot of sense that they’ve branched out from being just a crm over the past few years.

picture-39

I don’t think it’s a bad list, but at a glance I think it’s missing 2 things? :

  • 1. Your Lead Capture proposition should be to offer something of value that’s both pretty darn interesting while being something visitors can’t find on your competitor’s sites. Software can’t do this, of course, so I guess it makes sense that it’s not on TP’s list.
  • 2. And hey! No mention of social media integration?

Is anyone out there developing a CRM / Lead Management system that includes these last two? Is it even possible?

Number 1:Actually seems like a software company could possibly deliver this if said company hired an in house USP thinker-upper-executer? Sorta blend the software with initial/ongoing guidance as a way to attract/retain customers?

Number: Will Twitter/Facebook apps/api’s allow for contacts to be imported and assigned to activity series/follow up plans automatically? Just seems our Twitter/Facebook connections should be part of our pipeline, and should be incubated as such, even if they’re way further down that pipeline than actual folks we’ve met or talked to on the phone…

Thoughts? Is TP missing anything else?

Why We Should Rename It SMP (Social Media Prospecting)

I asked if SMM were dead as a precursor to our session with the Phoenix Association of REALTORs.   A few of y’all mentioned that social media was helpful as a lead generation tool.  I suggested this yesterday and  I want to be perfectly clear about the utility of social sites as lead generation pools.

Serially creating overly commercial, spammy messages on your Facebook status bar is never going to be effective.  Kelley Koelher once said in my Unchained session that you’re supposed to be SOCIAL on social media.

I don’t disagree.  I often liken your behavior on social media like a party, wedding, or community event.  If you showed up to cousin Fred’s wedding and handed out your business card, you should be tossed out on your ear.  If  bride Wilma’s sister asks you “What’s the market doing ?”, it makes sense for you to get her number and reconnect with her a week later.

Now, more than ever, prospecting is paramount to success as a REALTOR.  Consider this video of Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, discussing the shift from marketing to prospecting.

Here are my takeaways:

  1. the 8 X 8 is about cementing a relationship.  These can be phone calls, interactive comments on social media sites, e-mails, and postcards.  I think 3-4 different forms of media touches hardens the relationship cement quickly
  2. the 33 touch is about saturation.  I can’t stress enough that you must have permission to continue this saturation strategy on a prospective client
  3. The monthly newsletter is a non-threatening way to buy brain cells.  My yellow postcard might only be read for the 8 seconds it takes to go from the mailbox to the wastepaper basket but it does get read.  I get calls from it.
  4. The principles of direct marketing are more important now than ever. This means that you should ask people questions…directly (eg- do you know any teachers looking to buy their first home?)

How do social media play into this strategy? Here’s a Facebook tactic:

  1. Call everyone on your “friends list”
  2. Ask them who their REALTOR is in (your town)
  3. If they have one, politely move on.  If they don’t, ask if you Read more

What’s the End Goal To be?

I’ve been migrating all of my data to Infusionsoft  lately.   A little at a time.  Easy does it.  One list, suck it in, de dupe it, and on with the next.  Tag it.   Infusionsoft is powerful stuff.  A good tool.  I hate the counterintuitive interface.  I hate the fact that you can’t ‘tag’ people at account creation without saving.  I hate the fact that the Usability Team was likely ignored.  And I hate their customer service, which is of the same ethos as big boiler room refi shops from 2004.   That’s all I’m gonna say.  There are things to hate about it, just like there are things to hate about ACT!, Heap, and whatever CRM Mark Green whips out.

But, all that aside, Infusionsoft does a lot right.  It combines an auto-responder, some analytics, a project manager and a goal tracker in the same spot.  It tells you what to do, step by step.   And you can set up smart workflows for different things.  Right now, I’m underusing it.

What it taught me was a fundamental weakness in my business.  Before I can sell, before I can scale, I have to create a coherent, robust & predictable customer experience.  Meaning this: when I send people to a web page, or offer, Infusionsoft strongly suggests I know what happens next.  And in my nascent business, selling blogs and social media propagation, I don’t know what happens next.   I haven’t engineered a good enough customer experience to throw a bunch of customers at it.  Yet.  I’m tons closer today than I was yesterday, and this weekend was “what I want to happen time.”

But there’s the rub: most CRMs fill a leaking bucket.  You throw some autoresponders and newsletters at people, and yeah, they’ll perform.  The efficiency loss is never addressed:  what happens when you make a sale.

And the other one: most people, especially D’s hate to be scripted.  They hate to feel like they’re on some assembly line that they do not control.   I lose time, personally, not in my ability to sell and market but because I have so many points that need to Read more

If You Will Not Assist Us With the Shrubbery, We Will Be Forced To Say “MORTGAGE!!”

Oh, what sad times are these when loan originators can say such words as “Free” and “Mortgage” at will to their contact database?!?!

For if thou doest seek thine Holy Grail, or at least a decent shrubber, ye shalt best consult thy Book of Armaments here before lobbing thine Holy Hand Grenade of Drip Email upon thy database.

In Addition to Nee, Pang and Nuuuwon, Ye Shalt Also Avoid:

Okay, enough of the silly talk.  I’ve got actual work to do.

1)  Free + ________: Permission Marketing proponents love giving free stuff away.  Make it a point to avoid this evil word your email subject lines.

2)  Mortgage: Perhaps the evilest word of them all!  How do you avoid this one if you’re a loan originator?  I guess you could substitute nuuuwon.  Or you can just make it a habit to check your subject lines for keyword spam infractions before sending.  Either will do.

3)  Low Interest Rates: Not that we have a problem with that right now.  So I’m announcing a temporary hunger strike until rates drop back below 5%.  Or at least until dinner.

carrot-top-steroids1Hey, you’ve been a great audience.  Now I’ll turn the stage over to not a good friend of mine who definitely has not been doing any steroids or performance enhancing drugs.  His jokes sucked before he looked like this too.

Show Me “Paint the Fence”

I have a confession to make:  CRM isn’t as complicated as people tend to make it.  Take a look at an app like Salesforce and they purposely build the interface to look like you’re piloting a 747 jet when in reality all you’re looking to do is deepen a few hundred relationships and organize your life.  We CRM experts like to try and look a lot smarter than we actually are.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share some easy action items that will make managing your database a snap.  WARNING: I’M FLORIDA EDUCATED SO I TEND TO KEEP THINGS AT A 7TH GRADE LEVEL.  GREG SWANN: INITIATE LOBOTOMY NOW.

Lesson #1:  Paint the Fence

Remember when Mr. Miyagi made poor Daniel Son paint the fence?  And wash the car?  And paint the fence again?  If we’re gonna make you a black belt database manager, you’re going to have to suck it up too.  One must not deliver kick to opponent family jewel without proper training.

The most common problem I notice when consulting with mortgage/real estate professionals:  the quality of your data sucks.

  1. Lazy Data Entry:  If you’re populating data from an internet form, expect respondents to take as little time as possible getting to the goodies you’re dangling.  No less than 50% of your data will come in with capitalization, punctuation and other grammatical errors.  There are some automated ways to help clean this data, and I’ll leave that for another day.  But in the meantime, I’m asking you to make a habit of cleaning data as you go.
  2. Incomplete Data:  For the belly-to-belly folks:  I have my salespeople take the extra 120 seconds to visit a new prospect’s website as they enter data into our CRM system.  When I find records with just a name and email address, I get pissed.  When you take the extra time to dig for granular data on a contact, you’re in essence learning more of their story in the process.  Did my prospect give me a fake phone number (easy to learn if the the phone number on their website is different than the one they gave you!)?  How Read more