Commercial Real Estate CRM Solutions
Wes Snow recently had the opportunity to have a “fireside chat” with Duke Long regarding CRM and getting back to the basics on how to turn this tool from an electronic rolodex to a powerful differentiator that actually helps drive revenue. This recorded podcast acts as a great “primer” for a webinar we are holding on the 26th of September with Mike Lipsey
Date: Tuesday, September 26th, 2017
Time: 9:30 PM – 10:30 PM EEST
Join us for this exciting webinar full of ideas that you can execute on immediately. Mike Lipsey of The Lipsey Company is teaming up with Wes Snow of Ascendix Technologies to combine Mike’s best practices with the latest in commercial real estate based CRM technology.
This webinar is focused on breaking down the concept of CRM into real life CRE use cases that you can take away from the session and implement immediately to effect change in your business development efforts.
While we often focus on highlighting the commercial real estate features of our CRM offerings (which have their place), sometimes the core CRM features are lost in the shuffle. At the end of the day, I believe the originating motivator for using CRM tools is to help brokers make more money by increasing the efficiencies and effectiveness of various tasks necessary to get business done using automation.
We demo fancy dashboards and deal pipeline graphs and charts, but what goes on before you get to that stage is of equal, if not more, importance.
Being persistent in your business development activities is critical. I had a recent conversation with the “all world CRE trainer and consultant” Mike Lipsey who teaches commercial real estate brokers that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Setting goals and objectives for your outreach to the various constituents you are trying to positively influence is critical when prospecting with intention. Measuring your progress against those goals should not be considered optional and should be made easy to monitor and track. Alongside that dashboard of deal flow should be an ever-present graph of activities and tasks completed against those goals that are the prerequisites to a healthy pipeline.
Note: You can register here for a joint webinar on September 26th at 1:30 PM CST with Mike Lipsey & Wes Snow. They will review how to get the most out of your CRM solution.
To that end, task management and tracking can be perceived as a burden to some having to track all those activities in your jam-packed day. Using the power of automation built into most CRM tools today can help alleviate, if not remove, that burden altogether and allow you to communicate more efficiently. It has been said (and I’ve seen it with my own eyes) that if set up properly, a single broker can generate the deal flow of 4 brokers who are still using manual methods for business development.
For instance, take the simple practice of sending follow up emails to your prospects and clients after each meeting. Can you honestly say you stick to this best practice for every meeting? Probably not. And not because you don’t see the value, but it’s one more thing to remember. It also doesn’t provide “instant gratification” and makes it easy to conveniently forego.
What are you doing to stay in touch with those who you are in a slow sales cycles with; those that you can clearly help but will be a series of months, if not quarters, before that time comes? If you are like most, you begin with great intentions, but your efforts fade out after two or three follow up calls.
We’ve recently crafted several follow up email nurture plans internally that are designed specifically to bridge the gap between the positive first impression to closing the deal. With a simple click of a button, those prospects are receiving value add communications over the course of time on my behalf, while I am busy trying to find and close business that is more near term.
These are just a few examples of how the fundamentals of CRM can generate efficiencies for you as a commercial real estate broker. There are more ways than one to scale your business. You can work harder, hire additional resources, or you can invest a little time in tools that allow you to work smarter and at greater margins.
Before even demonstrating an Ascendix solution, let’s review what you’re using today, what’s working, what isn’t and what tools can streamline your data and workflow. There is more than one way to find efficiency and what works for someone else might not be the best approach for you. Contact us today!
Wes Snow is co-founder and President of Ascendix Technologies based in Dallas, Texas with international offices located in Kharkiv, Ukraine and Minsk, Belarus. Along with products that have been brought to market for the commercial real estate industry, Ascendix also provides an offshoring/outsourcing offering in their Ascendix Managed Services solutions which leverage the investments and experience obtained over the 10-year history of working with these partners.
Contact info:
Wes Snow
President|Co-Founder
Ascendix Technologies
e: wsnow@ascendix.com
As a consultant in the CRM space for over 22 years, I remember the excitement when I first learned that SalesLogix (an initial market leader in the early maturation of the CRM space) was building an integration with Outlook. This integration would finally marry the two systems that most, if not every, client used to conduct business on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, their attempt, along with others (including Microsoft and Salesforce), was less than perfect and, candidly, quickly became a real sore spot for most of the implementations we have been involved with…until now.
You see, most of the integration strategies were designed to take place on the client side creating a dependency on the end user’s involvement and a proper configuration file stored on their machine. For instance, with client side sync’ing, the end user had to be logged into their laptop for the synchronization to fire off which caused significant delays in data moving from one system to the other.
As a professional services and product provider for both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, I can finally say I am excited again about the integration between CRM platforms and Outlook!
Both providers have recently come out with what is called “server side synchronization” which takes the dependency of the end user and client side configurations out of the equation.
Furthermore, the setup of this integration is far more streamlined, is centrally administered, available on both PC’s and Mac’s and, mobile phones, and within Dynamics 365.
While the approaches for client-side Outlook integration differ a bit between Salesforce and Dynamics365, they are amazingly similar with server-side integration.
From an email integration perspective, not only is the tracking of inbound and outbound emails very intuitive, both SFDC and D365 allow for the streamlined creation of new contact records within the Outlook client. This means it allows you to create new records with ease in cases where there are no matching contact records for the email sender in the CRM database.
With the simple click of a button, both systems parse the first name, last name and email addresses from the senders email into an entry form and even allows you to relate the contact to an existing account (and the ability to create a new account if it doesn’t exist either). Talk about powerful and efficient!
If you’ve been underwhelmed in the past as a user or as a consultant with Outlook integration, it’s time to come back to the table.
Wes Snow is co-founder and President of Ascendix Technologies based in Dallas, Texas with international offices located in Kharkiv, Ukraine and Minsk, Belarus. Along with products that have been brought to market for the commercial real estate industry, Ascendix also provides an offshoring/outsourcing offering in their Ascendix Managed Services solutions which leverage the investments and experience obtained over the 10-year history of working with these partners.
Contact info:
Wes Snow
President|Co-Founder
Ascendix Technologies
e: wsnow@ascendix.com
On June 20th, Wes Snow provided a tour of Ascendix’s new app for Salesforce. Ascendix Search began as a feature within Ascendix’s Top Tier CRM solutions. After multiple requests, Ascendix decided to turn “Quick Search” into the app now known as Ascendix Search!
Ascendix Search features include Search Templates, Multi-Conditional Search, Expanded Search Operators, Search Analysis, Export to Excel, Map Search and More.
Watch the webinar recording and see how Search is filling the gaps, especially for Salesforce end users, when it comes to advanced searching options and more.
Follow the Ascendix Blog to receive updates on Search. Or contact us today at sales@ascendix.com to request a demonstration or trial for you and/or your team.
Ever found yourself wanting to search for data using address information for accounts and contacts in Salesforce.com and being frustrated by the exercise to build criteria around zip codes, area codes and city/state combinations?
It is frustrating and laborious to build meaningful groups in this manner and, in some cases, impossible to get the set of data you really need.
As a company that has focused on helping companies in the real estate industry with their Salesforce implementations, we were thrust into solving for a more elegant way in which to search for records (like accounts, contacts and property records) by their LOCATION.
Without powerful data mining tools, the ability to obtain valuable insight into the datasets contained within Salesforce.com is limited. Yes, there are list views and reports that can be built, but these are not dynamic enough to support what I would refer to as “What-If” analysis.
For those who are handy with Excel, you may be aware of the concept as defined below:
What-If Analysis is the process of changing the values in cells to see how those changes will affect the outcome of formulas on the worksheet.
“What if” you had the ability to enter values into various search fields within Salesforce to see how that affects the result sets of data contained within the database?
Although Salesforce.com has a great global search facility, there are several limitations when it comes to more advanced searches. There may be some workarounds to get the list views you need, but that usually requires extra effort that is too complex for the average user.
Ascendix Search bridges this gap and allows any Salesforce.com user to search their CRM with ease while seeing meaningful views of their data.
I’ve been using CRM tools for over 20 years and each have their different approach to solving for the searching and mining of data. The best tools are those that provide expansive and powerful search capabilities but not at the expense of complexity. It is hard to achieve that balance.
With the CRM tools that are available on the market today, organizations are leveraging them to track a wide variety of data that is interconnected to their client, prospect, customer, etc. With that growing data set, there is an increased need to be able to mine that data; without complexity.
Ever spent time creating the perfect view of data in Salesforce only to realize you have to recreate the criteria within a report in order to export it to Excel?
It’s doable, but the creation of a report for the average user is a bigger ask.
Assuming you still want to move forward with building the report, the user better hope the appropriate report type is available; otherwise the task becomes a bit trickier. Incredibly frustrating, especially if all you wanted to do was simply mine some data and send it to Excel. [Read more…]
