LeadStreet Beeflaboration…

by Ryan Hartman

Retechulous...

Author website

In my post yesterday I mentioned

“how badly the super well intentioned but grossly unusable “Lead Street” back-end has been ignored over the past few years…”

RE/MAX hasn’t responded to the post  but a few guys from Eneighborhoods took the time to ask me for some elaboration on my beefs with LeadStreet. It was really cool of them to reach out, and I was going to email them back privately, but  figured it’d be nice to post a response here since some other RE/MAX folks might like to include items I’m missing from the list below. (Plus, I think this may help continue the intention Greg’s recent CRM posts.)

A Starter LeadStreet Wish List:

• Gimme Firefox! Come on guys, really? Internet Exploder only?
• The Activity Plan and Drip Email Campaign features are actually pretty solid functionally, but if they’re hard for me to access and figure out, you’ll likely never get most agents to adopt. And it seems that creating campaigns and activity series still need to be controlled from the broker level?  Why not give agents the power to customize these features so they can stop paying vendors like Top Producer and Rainmaker for their services?  Plus it’d be great if Drip Email and Activity Plans could all be created under one template like in Heap.
• Where’s the pop/imap email? Yep I said it. GTD Gimme one container for everything!  I wanna be able to check my pop/imap gmail from directly within an email client provided by my IDXCRM suite.  And when I open my email, I want to be able to turn the sender into a contact and/or log the interaction in the sender’s contact record. (Oprius and a host of others (even TP) do this well if you’d like inspiration..)
• Need Web Forms:  A lot of us are nichy bloggers who like to generate targeted lead capture articles and pages on the fly. Why not allow us create customizable web forms that feed our LeadStreet database. And while you’re at it, please make sure that when the database is fed, we can set the forms to trigger activity plan or drip email series.
• For the IDX Front-End Registration Options — Need more flexibility on when registration is prompted, but this isn’t a big deal.  (I framed the LeadStreet Idx module into a couple of highly trafficked sites as tests and was surprised to find that it actually out-converts  Diverse Solutions and seems on par with the solid (but sorry I just can’t linklove) Realtygenerator/MarketLeader search module.
• Give us wide ranging syndication…or… the ability to “deep link” based on MLS number so that syndication services like ListHub can refer traffic from Trulia/Zillow back to Remax.com listing pages.
• Want easier setup of contacts for auto-email listing updates. The current process is plain and simply  a slow pain in the arse. This is really pretty key.  I can say with confidence that if there’s one practice any one agent can adopt to significantly to boost their bottom line, it’s setting anyone and everyone they meet up for property updates of some form. (Send your grandma 2 million dollar condos for the heck of it, she’ll refer you her bridge partners.)
• Need ability to see what properties users view and what searches they perform, not just those that the visitor inquires about. I know this can be sorta accomplished from the reports tab, but this info should be available from within the contact record.
• Which reminds me..the “Reports” function has to be sped up! I recently initiated a “Contacts with Website Activity History” query,  took a shower, called Philadelphia Water Company, and showed 18 tenant occupied properties before the  page loaded.  Ok, it’s not that bad, but it’s bad. Why even bother teasing us with all that juicy data if it’s barely accessible?

I guess that’s about it from me for now, but others will no doubt have some juicy beefs for the comments?

(And thanks again Eneighborhoods guys for showing interest in feedback. Definitely puts you way ahead of most of your competition…)