Putting the Puzzle together – CRM with Tina

My experience with Tina continues.

She decided to try a few products, web based and attached to Outlook. A couple of key revelations along the way:

Changing habits is a hard thing to do. Period.

I have heard countless times that you need to do something at least 21 times before it becomes a habit, and that is pretty hard, unless you are driven. As an adult learner, we also learned that Tina wanted to understand how the whole product worked right out of the box and because that is NOT possible, more frustration.

A product needs to be intuitive, but at the same time, training is required. An acquaintance of mine is a sales manager for a pharmaceutical firm and when her company rolls out any new software, all the sales people have to fly to a week long training and spend some $dollar$ to get trained. No questions asked. But in real estate we don’t seem to take think this is necessary. We just want it to WORK. And open the manual? Yikes. We have DLRM Syndrome! (Don’t Like Reading Manual).

We have decided that a product on the computer that works with Outlook would be better, As Loren Nason mentioned, if you use a hosted exchange account your Outlook is now web based and everything syncs with your hand held.

We also decided on our top ten needs list:

1. Customizable check lists
2. Drip Marketing options
3. Recurring appointments
4. Transaction management capability
5. Works with Outlook
6. Syncs with mobile device
7. Can also be web based
8. Intuitive, easy to learn
9. Training available
10. Cost reasonable

I put a message out to Mr. Hardy. If he would like to get his product into the mix and offer Tina an overview we would enjoy that.

Next . . . a detailed explanation of what we chose and why