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well hello and happy Valentine's Day and thanks everyone to joining us today we're going to focus on improving the prospecting and nurturing process in commercial real estate using both best practices and available technologies and will also highlight those tried-and-true nurture techniques that keep you top of mind our host for today are Duke Leung and West now many of you know Duke from his blog his willingness to speak out on the state of technology and commercial real estate has filled those looking to disrupt CRE and West no has been CEO of the cynics for over 20 years I miss Enix has spent the past eleven years focused on the commercial real estate vertical and creating solutions that brokers can use to streamline their business throughout the webinar you can ask your questions using the GoToWebinar panel and there's a Q&A section there and my team will make sure that those questions get answered at the end of the call and with that I'll hand it off to once all right thanks Camille and happy Valentine's Day to everyone thanks for joining us you've got some great dates here with Duke and I so let's get into this I've got a real quick overview of the agenda and I promise that most of the structured conversation is going to be probably thirty minutes in duration and then we'll leave plenty of time for some QA on the backend so let's go through this quick agenda here and we'll get into the discussion so I'm gonna start off by interviewing if you will Duke with regards to his individual perspective of prospecting and the commercial real estate sector we'll follow that on with some prospecting trends and drivers that we're seeing out in the marketplace along with some best practices as always we want to leave you with some take away some actionable steps and so we'll go through some of these prospecting takeaways that we see and then lead into a primer on some of the tools that the marketplace as a whole are using to leverage and accelerate and scale their prospecting efforts and then lastly we'll show evidence of one of those tools that we find to be quite powerful in more in prospecting that is market intelligence integration with CRM and then we'll look close out with QA and so with that said let's go ahead and get into the discussion so Duke we've been talking about this day for a while and I'm glad that it's finally come to pass let's let's let's share some of the the wisdom that you and I talked about on sidebar conversations and with regards to prospecting why don't you start off by you know as high-level giving us your thoughts on the importance of prospecting in today's hyper-competitive commercial real estate marketplace well thanks les since I've known you since you were you know 10 years old so your only weapon now huh okay quite a while what I see right now specifically in the market that were in that it's a lot about discovery and which I think everybody thinks it's that way but it's also what I see in the prospecting parts it's an important way for me to help understand how the deals get created and get started and with that what I'm seeing a lot of is people are starting to understand what I call what triggers are triggers are what triggers are things that help you think okay this is what I can help to get a deal started then there may be many different parts of that but the prospecting part and the database part is what helps you help understand and define what that is great right so let me let me hit you with another question here you obviously are leading the charge in some disruptive thoughts on leveraging technology out in the commercial real estate marketplace from all the research that you've done and reviewed clearly there are some tools from a prospecting perspective you've run across that you could maybe share with the group here you know what are you personally using to stay on top of relationships that you're trying to influence as prospects you know it's not so much that I'm using right now it's specific little bitty tool I think I would kind of refer to the online tools that are out there access that are out there a first one to think about for a lot of us is LinkedIn what a great amazing resource it's lean right in front of your face every day that you can get a hold of and then there's other sources that I look at like crunch base which has a base of all the companies within it matter mark I use Google Alerts I also think about Twitter and some other things as way of sourcing what's going on locally so those are the types of tools that you'd had no access to you know in the past and think about how you can define those databases and those are timely databases that you can kind of mine for a little bit lack of a better term that you never have really a source of in the past yeah great thank you as far as you know your tenure in this commercial real estate space I'm sure things have changed with regards to prospecting you know maybe share a little bit of what you did then versus what you're doing now and the importance of embracing change along the way all right well and I'm gonna start with again I started in commercial real estate when I was ten years old just like Wes so back in the day I had a three and a half disc right remember yes area starting that thing in your little spreadsheet so you know date me on that one but I think we're now to the level of going from that part of that and creating your own database to having data sources that you've never had before and having access to those data sources and I also think that something that's going on now that a lot of people don't understand even if it's happening for them is the automation of those data sources and that is spectacular those data sources are updated by someone else even for you so to me that's where we went from three and a half disk and I put it all into myself too and what data did I put in there good data and good data out everybody says that too now I have access to all the tools that I just mentioned before well LinkedIn matter mark or whatever one other quick tip that I I kind of forgot there for a second that I want to give everybody think about all the companies that you're sourcing for deals where where who knows when they're going to move and usually the people who are providing them money be it VCS or bankers or whatever when they're going to move they know when these companies are going to move and that's always been a really good source for me so even now I can database those online and those are the things that I think we've jump from the three and a half to this in this day and age excellent excellent you're touching on some things that I want to drill into here in just a moment before we go there though talk to me a little bit about the prospecting is it is it something that is necessary across the board with regards to commercial state professionals or does it apply more to one line of business than another say for instance Tennant rap versus agency leasing to investment sales in your opinion is there one more heavily weighted in terms of importance of this idea of prospecting than another well the obvious one I think is tenant tenant reppin I mean you've got to go out and source that that potential tenant when they're gonna move what they're going to do that's the most obvious one from a sales or the other part that's a longer cycle the retail part in the tenant part I think is a little bit easier I would also think that when you get into these areas of prospecting you've got some of all offer across lines it's a little bit about the debt again the data sets and some of the things that they're acquiring and then sourcing those deals and the potential for those deals that's kind of where I think it's done yeah okay well appreciate you sharing why don't we go ahead and move on to our next topic here and receive well let me jump in here okay you know you're not there all kinds of conversations over the past years and I'd like to see if you could talk to me a little bit about what some of the trends and the drivers that you see because you're out there every day talking to potential you know firms and people are out there prospecting get these things that turns and drivers that you see and some of the feedback that you get every day yeah so I I think we might start conversation today with three primary topics here and the first of which is the aging out of the baby boomers secondly ubiquitous access to information and thirdly this consumerization of technology for the commercial real estate industry starting off the aging out of the baby boomers what I'm seeing in having been calling in the space for 22 years the last 12 of which in the seer commercial real estate space I'm absolutely seeing a trend where the decision makers that I'm speaking to are starting to become more like my age 30 wink-wink but in all honesty the baby boomers are are leaving some of the leather chairs and they're getting replaced by the Gen X and Gen wires folks who have been brought up on technology they know no world that we're a PC did not exist and they they embraced technology at an early age and as a result of that they are bringing those those aspirations and those ideals into the organizations that they're they're leading and so why why is that important for people on this call fact is if you're not investing in technology either you're going to be left behind or you're going to be left outside of the loop of the organization that you're working for it's no longer a a an option it's really a necessity and as we go into these firms we see some that are still working off of spreadsheets and flip phones and I can tell you without a doubt going into a firm where they've Trump properly leveraged and embraced technology that an individual who's done that could gain somewhere between one maybe two hours of efficiency over and above the individual who still kind of going through manual means and so that's that's an important trend and a driver to changing behavior with regards to prospecting secondly ubiquitous access to information this goes both ways we as a brokerage company and actually knowledge workers have access to more information than ever we're one Google search away but so too is the case for the people that we're trying to sell to they have access to more information than ever they're more informed they're more educated why does that matter well we've got to approach them differently no longer are we in an educational mode when we first start to nurture that relationship with them but we're having to seek other ways to add incremental value and differentiate ourselves from the pack knowing that they're there they're never more educated than they are today so we've got to be aware of this ubiquitous access to information and make sure that we're taking the best advantage of harnessing that information for our for our good and not our bad and then the third thing that I would share with you is this consumerization of Technology especially for the commercial realistic real estate industry 22 years ago and we started selling CRM and 12 that when we started selling it specifically to the commercial real estate space we really were dealing with the larger firms they were there were the only ones that could truly afford some of these high-octane high-horsepower industrial-strength tools but with the advent of the cloud and in just the evolution of tools today those tools that were candidly financially unviable to start out with are now very very affordable and quite they're easy to deploy as well what took months to deploy and perhaps sometimes multiple years can now actually harness that same type of horsepower and get it deployed in a matter of weeks for nothing more than a cellphone payment a month per user and so that brings a whole nother realm of possibility and to go in there and leverage this technology and so those are those are the three things that I see as trends and drivers out there in the marketplace OS you know you've taught again obviously you're out there day talking to a lot of people and you not talked about this in the past what type of mindset does it take I mean it's not just technology for technology 6 but but tell me you know can you share with the group the mindset that you think that it takes to embrace some of these technologies and yeah absolutely so we've been selling serum for 22 years and some of the fundamentals that are at play with any sales rep apply to a commercial real estate broker selling in many ways is consistent across the board and so some of the concepts that I want to share with you today aren't what I'll call Mindbenders or wow that was a new and novel idea but rather a refresher and sometimes just going back to the basics and having a refresher can be a really good exercise and so first thing that I'll share with you is this concept of the rule of the harvest the fundamental need to close business today it oftentimes D prioritizes our activities to prepare for closing this in the future we get so busy on closing deal XY and Z and then when we get that done successfully then we look and we go with all the coverage of air we don't have even the the foggiest notion of where we're gonna go and get our next piece of business and so I like to look at in this this rule of the harvest concept I like to look at prospecting as farming I actually have a farm out in West Texas and found the best way to think about prospecting is to think about your various constituencies whether they're clients partners or prospects or reps that you're trying to influence and build relationships with as your crops as a farmer would and you're responsible for planning and feeding and nourishing those and in time hopefully if you've done everything right harvesting you know that fruit for your labor you know we know in the reason why this metaphor is so strong is that you know crops don't grow overnight nor do relationships they require time and attention over there growing or buying cycle moreover each of these crops or constituencies or people you're trying to influence or slightly different and it cannot be treated the same way or cared for in the exact same manner now they require different cadence of communication and interaction depending on the relationship type you wouldn't talk to an investor the same way you would a prospective tenant and perhaps not even in the frequency to the point you made earlier elongated sales cycles for investment brokers versus tenant represented ifferent cadence with regards to the crops again the same metaphor it'd be daunting there'd be a daunting task for a farmer to have to think about going out for each of those seeds that they planted in those multiple crops that they planted and individually water and and nurture those those plants one by one hand by hand and so you know not too long ago you know some ingenious farmer went out there and developed an automated process like a drip irrigation system and now can do in one day what would have taken weeks to do in the past I think we need to think about that same concept with regards to prospecting out there in the commercial real estate space and really to scale our efforts we must think of ways to automate such manual tasks that are involved in prospect we just have to it's a non-negotiable otherwise the reason why we don't do prospecting much is because it is this mammoth task and it's just daunting and we just choose not to do it at all because of them so long and short of it practicing the fundamentals of farming and your prospecting efforts by exercising patience and persistence for the relationship growth cycle can bear great fruit and so I would just leave you with that metaphor as it relates to prospecting I'd also say a second point here is it's a numbers game and again this is fundamental of sales carrying the ferret the farming metaphor out a bit more you know prospecting and farming it's a numbers game not all seeds planted or harvested so too is the case with prospecting whether we have a loosely defined in our head or come up with some conversion rate based on hard exponential data we all know that X number of meetings turns into X number of prospects which then turns into if we're lucky business pursuits that we closed a portion of and if we're we're not honest about those conversion rates and we're not allowing that to motivate the amount of raw materials or leads and prospects that we're doing or prospecting that we're doing at the top of the funnel will never bear the fruit and close the business that we we need to to to feed us and so it's we've got to know our conversion rate we've got to know our numbers and allow that to motivate us to do the appropriate prospecting which takes me to the next topic which is being intentional being intentional with your prospecting hope is not a strategy oftentimes we use it and think well hopefully tomorrow I'll get a new lead a quote I heard years ago I think applies here you can either take action or you can hold back and hope for a miracle unfortunately miracles are great but they're so unpredictable so being intentional it means being consistent persistent as I've mentioned you'll hear some themes here but it also means caring enough to have something meaningful to say in value add to say when you do reach out to someone being mindful to provide value before you start pitching them or selling them on that note you know I think it's also a valuable way to look at an approach relationship building is to look at it as a relationship bank account you want to make sure that you have enough deposits in the account to have a balanced sufficient enough to make it withdrawal now think withdrawal to be equivalent to asking for their business ask yourself how many times you've overdrawn on an account based on that mindset right and then the last thing I'll say with regards to some best practices and in thoughts to take away is the buying cycle selling cycle we all as salespeople have a selling cycle and it just so happens that every time we bump into a prospect probably not matching up with their buying cycle we need to recognize that there is a time for us to plant there's a time for us to harvest and we need to recognize there's a gap between that and we could possibly get lucky enough to meet someone and there is that's their absolute moment to buy and we we can act on that but by and large I'd say 85 to 90 percent of the people that we come in contact with they don't yet have a need for our service just yet and so what are we going to do to stay top of mind between the time in which we've gotten in touch with them and the time it is for them to buy I call that the nurture gap and you have a decision to you know fall off after one or two follow-ups knowing that hey I just I don't have the tenacity and the endurance to stay with them and build that relationship or you can buckle down put an intentional plan together automate it and stay top of mind with them until that time to buy comes in I can't tell you how many times I personally have educated someone gotten them smart on a need and the fact that there's a service out there that can solve that need only to have not stuck with them and had someone else get the business and so let's not have that happen to others here on the phone and so as mentioned earlier I wanted to leave you with some practical prospecting takeaways and I've kind of sprinkled those in throughout this this particular segment here but let's just start with the first one and that is defining your targets setting up an organizational system in your technology of choice whether it be a contact manager spreadsheet wouldn't advise it or a CRM tool and in grouping those so that you can go out there in segments market and moreover as you're defining those targets and organizing them making sure that the data that you have is accurate if you've had held on to a piece of information whether it be in a read sheet of serum system what have you there's a distinct likelihood that twenty to forty percent of that data is already out of date data stales out at about twenty percent a year and so before you go out there and spend a lot of energy and get real busy I'd hate for you to get busy and not be very effective and so that'd be step one again these are not earth-shattering Mindbenders but rather just back to the basics secondly to find an intentional plan of attack for those people as I mentioned earlier not everybody gets communicated with the same way and so take those groupings and put a plan in place to touch base with them over the long haul that buying cycle right and mix up things on email we're all very much in love with email since because it's easy the reality though is that everybody else is doing it so I'm not saying abandon email I'm saying you might want to consider mixing it up a little bit perhaps an occasional piece of mail like for instance a handwritten note be amazed at how many people have strayed away from the direct mail world and now if you were to just submit a couple of handwritten notes on occasion how much more of an impression you might make more over than say ten emails so just think about that in this intentional plan of attack thirdly for those who have a assirram platform already you know seek ways to automate these touch points so you can really scale your individual operation like the farmer did when they invented the drip irrigation system and so it's easy to think about how that might work where you you just hook up the system and you turn the hose on and next thing you know you're watering all of those constituents with one action for those who don't have a CRM system a real low-tech approach would be simply to set up call blocks or dedicated prospecting blocks in your calendar the reality is if it's not scheduled it's not going to get done it just isn't going to get done and then the last thing I would say is persist know that relationships are not built overnight remember the law of the harvest and that relationship bank account and just be mindful of that as you go about your prospect efforts so we're going to be putting this slide online and obviously for those who want to go back and reference and I know it's fun through those a bit but those are some of the tangible takeaways that I wanted to provide on this call so yes yeah you've brought up some some different types of tools that kind of have helped and we had talked about the old school the new school bring some efficiencies to the table that maybe weren't there before into the area prospecting could you maybe highlight some of what those are with a group here yeah so hey let's be honest for those who have ever heard me talk you know full well that you know one of the things that we do is CRM and we do a serum solutions for the commercial state in the name of a syndics re Duke thanks for that shameless plug there with your Yeti cut there so fundamentally you know you have to have a place to house all your furniture and that's in my mind a serum tool and I'm not here to sell serum but to just educate you today on on what is available out there and you know syndics is built on both dynamics and sales force but ultimately what do these tools do those that I mentioned and others like them they're managing their relationships and allowing you to with with the latest and greatest technology to go out there and you know leverage technology so that you can do more with less so you know CRM fundamentals marketing automation I'm going to show you something here in a bit with regards to how you can automate some of these plans but you know whether it's a serum tool that has a baked in marketing automation component or third-party add-ons there is an abundance of tools out there that can really turn you into a marketing juggernaut and a prospecting juggernaut and have you feeling as if you've got 15 people doing prospecting when in fact it's just you properly taking advantage of the technology that's available out there and today and then the last item that maybe not as familiar to some of you are market intelligence services like inside view and Hoover's and dun & bradstreet where these are service providers that have spent there and they're their business model is to go out there and aggregate a company and contact information and research those companies and contacts and bundle them all up into an accessible data Mart that you can consume and in some cases actually consume within the context of your CRM system so that while you're prospecting and you're warming up the call and trying to get prepared for a very intellectual conversation with that prospective tenant or investor what had you can learn a bit more about them and not show up with a hey what have I done for you lately conversation so there's a number of tools out there and actually that segues into what I want to show you and that is an example of how one example of how you can use marketing intelligence to help you with your prospecting and so I'm going to jump into the syndic sorry for salesforce here for those of you or Salesforce users this is somewhat familiar I am adding you know as we mentioned you know step one is is organizing your data and in this scenario we are going to start the process of entering in a new company and contact record into my CRM system one of the things that I've learned along the way of selling serum is that most people whether they're brokers or just salespeople in general do not really like the task of data entry and that's a fundamental underpinning of a successful CRM system that data actually be inside of CRM and so we've looked at ways to speed up that process of data entry and while while we were on that journey we found disintegrate this provider inside you a market leader in market intelligence and had a wonderful open integration architecture and we actually built a bridge between CRM and inside view to not only speed up the process of data entry but as a prospector as you can see here when I've entered in Cisco it's found a match in the inside view database that when clicked on unveils a great deal of information that I may or may not have that available to me the industry that they're in their physical address these things oftentimes are on a business card and they're something that we may or may not type in but other things that are not on a business card and as a result probably are not typed in are things like the number of employees the annual revenue and the si si code and so these details can help you in your market segmentation and also educating you and informing you on how to prepare for a prospecting call and so in addition to making you smarter it also makes you more efficient by allowing you to quickly take that data and populate this form that in the past I would have had to type in on my own I'm now bringing all that data in and so my prospecting efforts have sped up exponentially with that one element there moreover we know that we do business with accounts but we talk to people and so while we may have known a couple of people one of which might have been the name on the business card that you started this whole data entry process for we know that we we don't really establish deepen meaningful relationships with prospects with just one contact but rather try to establish a deep and wide relationship with any company that we're going to spend meaningful time with and so in this integration and having access to these contacts with a simple click of a couple of checkboxes three checkboxes I can hit the Save button and immediately have access to all of that data regarding Cisco Corporation and the corresponding contacts that I've just flagged here and so we see the phone number the website all the details that were once inside the InsideView database have now populated my CRM system and moreover I go to the related area and I can see the contact here all of which I didn't actually type one character in and so it really speeds up the prospecting part of you know the top of the funnel here call preparation and so forth and moreover with this integration with inside view in addition to facilitating the entry of data and expanding your relationship footprint there's also an opportunity to leverage their research panel now this is another offering that we have with the inside view product called inside view for sales and it allows you to gain access to the research that they've aggregated in their data service and so here we see an overview of the corporation you know things that we saw earlier with regards to their physical address and so forth but we see some other business business events here like bankruptcy and restructuring company presentations and alike and so if we go down from top to bottom here we see other details the firma graphics industry profile what are the challenges these are all wonderful call preparation details that allow us to approach them with a sensitivity to where they are in their business cycles to the financials if they're a public company family trees allowing us to traverse up and down that and then moreover looking at various other people and decision makers in that space along with any social elements Duke you mentioned Twitter and Facebook and such and so this is just one one way that go in there and consume and aggregate all of that data here we see tweets Facebook posts as well as blog entries as as a new website real quick something to think about that I pay attention to on some of these social things when you click on those you'd be amazed at who some of your competition are or even people within your own industry or following those people so they're also paying attention so it gives you a little market intelligence absolutely simple absolutely so this just a small piece of evidence of what's possible out there in terms of as Duke mentioned at the top of the hour you know the information is abundant out there how are you harvesting it and CRM combined with these market intelligence tool really equip you at a at a fairly low price point to go out there and be be dangerous with the current regards to prospecting such so with that said we promised that we would leave some time for Q&A and we are almost spot-on with regards to the 30 minute time frame here so I hope that I didn't go so fast as to not have that make sense for you but I did want to make sure that we had an abundance of time for the Q&A so we'll a DDD yeah I understand appreciate that in full in full so that was one of the reasons I cut thirty of the slides out for your instruction so that said I'm gonna hand it back over to to Camille and see if she can maybe field or at least give us some of the questions that might have popped up throughout the the presentation so Camille yeah I have one here it says does yours um have a mobile-friendly app not so much about data amp but yeah yeah yeah I mean that's a it's a bit of a non-negotiable now we we all realize that sales folks are not chain two desks anymore they're out about certainly in the commercial real estate sector and the need for the information does not does not stop once they leave the office chair they need it out in the field and and so mobile solutions are abundant out there and they come in different shapes and sizes one is I'm using octo so do I have to change just and it sorry to get these tools no the the data am product is not something that necessitates that you have an ax syndics re product if you've got a Salesforce instance whether it be app dough or just a generic salesforce instance the data am product works with with no issue there so you don't have to be an existing ass index re customer to benefit from it it says is inside view part of the ascend X package or is it an add-on inside you comes in two flavors there's the data amp product which is largely a data data entry facilitation tool and the inside view for sales research panel that you saw is an additional solution as well so for those that are interested I could actually break that down for you a bit more I don't know that we have the time and I certainly didn't prepare any pricing information for this webinar but if you've got interest I certainly follow back up with you but they are sold separately just as a quick answer to that question well with less I got a quick question I get asked every day and I say this and I get emails and something I wrote was the top five serums that I think that are out there obviously you guys are one I get asked every day what should I use how should I use it whatever I guess the question I'm asking is how do you differentiate yourself what what is the syndics uniqueness that that you feel that you provide for your customers so I'll answer it this way we've been doing serum for 22 years you'd imagine and we learn a few lessons that some of which are about the technology but some of which are about probably the best practices of what it takes to truly get up take on rollout of CRM and you'd be you might be surprised to know that uptake of serum has very little to do with the technology but more to do with other things like the people and the processes that you're trying to automate and how you roll it out and just attention to detail and the cadence and speed of the rollout so those are lessons that we've learned over 22 years that apply not only to you know generic implementations but certainly to the commercial real estate sector have been doing commercial real estate CRM for 12 years we've also been able to truly understand the marketplace in and evolve our product with respect respect and reflecting the questions that have been asked and the requests that have been made candidly starting off with the dynamic CRM solution we found ourselves saying no to very few things and backed away and said you know if we ever a chance to kind of hit a reboot we might choose to go at serum a bit differently and so now we've got both Dynamics CRM and Salesforce we're kind of positioning the Salesforce solution as a more streamlined physically fit version if you will of a syndics re that really focuses on that feedback that we've got on what and the lessons learned on what is being used and what's not being used and take that which is used make it part of the product and that which while it clearly is a commercial real estate feature and functionality but it's never used discard it it's just it's just noise and so we've learned those lessons so those are some things that I would say differentiate us it's it's the technology but also the experience you have with us with regards to the best practices and what makes theorem successful I would also say that some of these advances that we've made in third-party products integrations like data amp help you to when you join the ascend xru family you've got some native integrations and we're showing you one today which is data amp but there are a variety of other tools that are coming out on the app exchange that we're going to be plugging you into the product as well so those are just some fundamentals to answer that question I'm rolling in so I'm going to try to get through them pretty cool we Wes it says you you mentioned that both buyer and seller have same info so how it is it that we approach it differently or harness this info to bring and I think that was to what Duke you had you had mentioned previously as well I'm not sure I understand the full intent of that question Duke had mentioned that both buyer and seller have the same information so like every you know everybody's got access that he's asking how do we approach it differently or harness this information I didn't like in a new way yeah well Duke I'll certainly let you respond but I'll say this is that we should all walk into every deal assuming that the information that we have yeah there's a high likelihood that the individual on the other end of the transaction has that as well or soon will have it and we should not use that as a differentiator but table stakes and we should look for other places like service level promptness and other other areas to differentiate ourselves other than an information advantage Duke I'll let you chime in as well and I'm thinking of a classic example of somebody I know out in the Orange County where the actual tenant went out and did their own survey of some of the of the availability of property out there and then the actual brokers kind of called them and got upset with him because they were out looking for their own stuff and I just can't imagine where and in foreign consumers not a good thing getting back to the information part of it again differentiating yourself from your service level and all those things so assume they're going to have it and assume they're smart enough to figure it all out that you know holding that data in and keeping it I'm not sure that does anybody any good right okay next one was are there any marketing automation systems you recommend that will work well with the syndics so you know before you just jump out there and and assume that a marketing automation tool is necessary it might be worthwhile and again you know syndics is on both Dynamics CRM by Microsoft and Salesforce it might be worth a lot of based on the need look inward at the tool itself there are a number of workflow tools that exist there that can allow you to do an abundance of automated processes so I'd start there first thank you thanks Duke for taking a picture picture of myself taking picture myself perfect perfect so there are a number of tools that are inside of serum but in both dynamics and in the sales force maybe much so in the sales force there are there's this ecosystem of apps called the app exchange where there are no shortage of add-ons that can allow you to maybe go beyond what is available for you inside of the serum tool so but I wouldn't assume that that's where you have to go initially you might actually be able to do a fair amount of automation just with the tools inside of the serum that you've already invested in what is the future of CRM systems and do you both think that it will be a one place to do all CRE functions with so we do have CRM and then multiple add-ons what that's well I'll tell you there's been a pendulum swing in terms of school of thought here there have been some call it the front office back office continuum and ideally and intellectually that seems like a great idea to have a 360-degree view of the relationship of the customer what I have found is that most of the people that are in sales and marketing they just they don't care as much as they as as would need to be a place to justify that kind of an effort we started off and actually considered joining a firm that was a back office firm because of the promise of this front office back office integration only to find out that most of the folks that we were selling to as CRM and Salesforce automation practitioners could care less about the integration hey I'm going after the next deal in the next deal the next deal I've got a report away from getting the information I need in the back office so we see that pendulum swing and I'm already starting to see it swing back to where no no it's important for a data mining perspective and for business intelligence this artificial telogen really it's hard to do that if you don't everything have everything aggregated into one data store and so we'll probably see several iterations of thought and prevailing thinking on on that but do what are you seeing well without getting too far out there certainly AI the artificial intelligence part I've seen pieces of it and I've heard pieces of it I wish I had demonstrations for it one of the things that I think about that though is do they does when you when you create that AI or that possibility of the AI prospecting or helping you prospect who's actually teaching or showing what that needs to be in the data that goes in there so again the data that's there and how you're utilizing it is still important even though you may automatically having someone or having the computer respond to something there's still the other personal aspect of it I certainly see that and especially in residential it's already starting quite a bit so that piece of it is there how do you how do you harness that part of it and then still you say well it has to be a personal asset a relationship thing I certainly get that but maybe you're also not thinking about how you can really utilize some of these tools to help you gain those deals in the first place that's yeah I think that's what I'm you're well I'll circle back to the this one theme and it's been terribly consistent that is if it's not easy to use I won't use it and I would rather have easy to use and limit my amount of information than to have too much information and and it ingests the form and ingest my user experience and so we've aired on that side and found that most resonate more with that and perhaps it's a it's a journey that you have to take them on where you start off with a very easy to use and simple template of data and then once they've understood that their paradigm may shift and allow them to accept maybe the complexities of having a larger data set which represents the back office and the front office information together but I'll tell you as a starting place that's a very difficult place to get liftoff for most of these folks and that they just simply want to do some fun than that also and we may have beaten that horse to death on that one but anything else nuke on that well again you can have all that technology in the world but you're the one who's deciding what what it should be and how it should going there's a lot of people epicenter the computer will figure out better or faster maybe so maybe so but you know I don't know that's kind of sounds fantastic but you still gotta go out and look the deal together so you can simplifying it I think is the smartest thing that's what we're talking about put it in there okay so I think this is an inside view question less about their data how often is the corporate data updated for reasons of accuracy yeah so probably the best way to answer that is is to kind of give you a background or on how the data is actually harvested you know there are certainly sources of data that there are what I'll call list purchases but a vast majority of the updates come from those that are publicly out there on the on the web and are able to be you know that data is those updates are being able to be harvested and then that is used update using algorithms and human effort so you know the initial purchase but that's really just the baseline of the data and then for those that are highly visible and in the news that data actually serves as the change agent to actually update the data then it's validated using a process that they call triangulation and then also looking look that a oversight with human eyeballs and so there are multiple layers there that ensure the accuracy but also the frequency of that so there's not a one answer for well they update all of the company and contact information on a weekly basis or what have you it actually comes in based on triggered events that are largely being consumed and and grabbed from the internet as a whole now this question came in after the discussion on CRM and he said really great description of things in general Thanks and it says could you mention some main region specific options that should be taken into account and I believe that's around the collection of data and information in regions with serum and market intelligence tools you know regional I guess that we need to take into account I may I'll let do speak to his perspective certainly from a company and contact data perspective I think you'll find that inside you and other tools like that are somewhat nationwide so from a domestic perspective you're going to find that most of those regions are consumed and included in those nationwide data Mart's with regards to data outside of company and contact ie property listings and so forth obviously you've got the usual suspects co-star loop net and so forth but then you deal with you know some of the challenges of integrating legally if you will do what are your thoughts on regionalised datasets that may or may not know company contact data and I can use you know just an entire state as an examples for the most part most of the brokers that you know though they'll aggregate their data in some way shape or form that has some kind of localized board for lack of a better term but then you get into the other deeper dive stuff that gets into you've got all these companies that say we'll sell you certain data sets and most of these brokers already know a lot of these sets I'm not sure they're integrating them into their CRM and when I say that you know permits construction all those different things that most brokers think about naturally that helps them trigger that are they integrating that into their systems you've got divorce records you've got all these different types of things that again trigger a deal what I see is a lot of these tech companies go out and hey we're doing every possible economic development it's great and we're gonna sell it to you well if you're a good broker you pretty much know a lot of that in the first place that's my opinion and if you don't you're gonna you're gonna pay to get that information sent to you maybe that's okay so I think the CRM has a good possibility of putting that together and somebody had asked before is it gonna be all in everything uh-huh that's a question for Wes I think because it are you all can you be all in everything do you become what where do you stop because I think if you've got five different brokers you're gonna have five different uses even in the similar market so what is that data is that that are really important from a retail standpoint from a consumer standpoint some of the stuff I'm seeing now is that a lot of these tech companies are starting to what they call source or crowdsource the consumer to say okay hey Eck's people on Twitter are saying they think it'd be great if we had a Whole Foods on this corner is that five people does that make that viable so they're using that type of data sense and is that something you integrated into your CRM down the road you know I don't know that's again that's a question for Wes maybe I don't know how much value is there and how do you know what that's good data or not another basic stuff a purpose anyway yeah I read an article in Duke actually it was it may have been an interview that you'd conducted with someone I forgotten where she was from but she made a great point and I resonated with it and that is that while we attempt to try and automate and homogenized commercial real estate it's actually not on the surface it may look like you know commercial real estate is a simple game but when you think about all the walks of life and the different transaction tracks that happen tenant rep has a slightly different interest and they're gonna walk with a different cadence and use different data triggers than say someone and investment sales and and when you think about trying to solve all that in one CRM system while it's certainly technically possible ultimately the end user suffers because of the congestion of all of those those problems being solved in one solution so it ultimately comes that the question comes - is there enough value in sharing a similar database to have all these users there and congest that experience for them at the same time and what I'm finding is that most are saying you know what we probably ought to divide and conquer while there is some corporate value and visibility across geographies and even lines of business it's not worth the pain of that we have to go through from an end-user adoption perspective so I know that we can sample real quick everybody says look I just want one spot I want to go in I want to load it up and everything's there and I do this I'm like we're look you got you don't have any problem punching any button on this phone to get wherever you need but when you want to go to work you want to pull up one platform and it does it all for you right there all your prospects all your properties all your listings everything right there for $12 a month or something like that and that's just not even real yeah I'm not even realistic do you really want all that so again how much of this phone do I actually use ten percent maybe probably and there's certain things that I've used more than anyone else or less I don't use Facebook ever so that's me is one of the things we want it all in one spot probably not probably or not and everyone says it's siloed and it is but maybe that's not a bad thing okay and I'll make this the last question we went a little longer than we expected which is great and I am a small company which is for users and they can't afford to have all these different tools and applications what would you suggest they do or where should they begin you know based on what your yeah sure they get what you pay for and as Duke just mentioned twelve bucks does not the entry point there but nor nor does it have to be a hundred and fifty dollars and so I would tell you that there are solutions and I'll just you know shamelessly plug our foundations addition of a syndics re which is $49 per user per month that's probably about as inexpensive as you're going to get for an adequate level serum platform there and so small users good news is you could start off with one try before you buy it and even trial it before you even spend one dollar and then at that point hopefully it would justify itself and you can expand that out to for users of course if if you don't if that's still beyond your budget there are some other solutions you know outlook pea and unfortunately have to be the place that you start with but there's a contact manager Outlook a small business contact manager or something like that that Microsoft has come out with that's even a lower price point but with those lower price point tools you'll have limitations and there'll be some restrictions that you have but you have to deal with your your realistic constraints there but those would be my initial thoughts there but like I said at the outset the financial barrier to entry has come down considerably and you'd be amazed at what you can do with that $49 expenditure and I'll jump in here yes all the different presentations that I have I asked people to raise your hand if you're using the CRM and if there's a hundred people in a room one or two people will raise their hands so I blame us for that for my job is getting but but the point is if you're in this business and you say I absolutely have to have access to property information and listings I get that how about handling the actual deals of the people who are going to do those deals the prospects themself so I think it's an underutilized tool and the cost is minimal if you say well if I do X deals everyone says that but how are you not managing the actual prospects that you're gonna do the deals with I just can't it's very underutilized my opinion and always has been of course I was an early early adopter but still you know how much is that a month how much how much you spent by DIRECTV it's like a hundred fifty brass a month I don't watch anything anymore so anyway I just think it's very own elute utilized and could be a really quality way to compete against some of the people in your marketplace well Camille any other questions no I think that's all we've got for today most of it also will share a few handouts that I promised to send during a Q&A session I'm just on some basics of how much they are costs and some just different feature and functionality so we'll share that as well in the takeaways that Wes mentioned here we have those in a separate handout that you'll be receiving as well post webinar so I want to thank both of you guys for taking the time to share and of course I recognize you know where to find ooh candles right there and so I think you guys for your time great thanks Camille thank you guys for getting me on here and teaching me even more I appreciate it yeah appreciate it all right thanks everyone and with that all right it's a wrap see you later all right see you Duke I don't see it