What is your favorite CRM? Any good free ones for starting out?

Question

I’m just starting out in investing. Looking for a good CRM so I can stay organized and create flow.

Bryce DeCora · Answer

I'm an ex software developer for Boeing.  I used Podio for about 2 years with my own custom automations.  What @Calvin Ozanick said about your CRM not mattering is partly true.  What matters most to closing deals is that you are consistent, hustle and stay organized.  However, the quantity of deals closed is throttled by your organization, even if you have all of the hustle and consistency in the world.

This is where CRMs come into play.  They allow you to widen the bottleneck that is a consequence of your own human organization abilities.  So I would argue that to be a full time investor or agent, CRMs are unimportant.  But to be a highly successful one, it is extremely important.

I couldn't find one that did everything I wanted on a national scale, so I created one.  It automates text and mail campaigns with a sleek and simple user interface.  If you want to learn more about it, shoot me a message.  Not here to pitch my product (it's in beta with me alone).  I just like talking systems and software.

Peter Forrest · Answer

@Danny Johnson and @Cameron Mello I am in the same boat. Any ideas for something really simple, list of leads, follow-up reminders, etc - just one step above excel?

Bryce DeCora · Answer

@Duane Alexander FYI I'm now averaging 94% deliverability.  Around 1k outbound text messages daily.

Bryce DeCora · Answer

@Duane Alexander nope I worked in Everett, WA.  Thanks for the offer!  It's been a long development journey, but has allowed me to contact way more people than I was with my old Podio system.  I'm contacting about 75 correct phone number home owners daily now with an average of 85% delivery rate.  There are more things I'm working on to improve my deliverability.  The goal is 95%

Duane Alexander · Answer

Lol  the joy of being a software developer, getting to write your own solutions just for you by you (I am a developer as well). If you ever need another beta tester I’d be willing to help.

Batch leads allows you to purchase however many you want but I think you need 20 for every 1000 messages you send (I may be misremembering this though).

You also said you worked at Boeing. Did you  work in St. Louis? I was born and raised there.

Bryce DeCora · Answer

@Duane Alexander for the volume I go through (about 8,000 properties per month), I need to carry about 60 phone numbers.

I don’t use STOP messages, but I would if I were offering my CRM as a service to others for compliance.

Duane Alexander · Answer

Batchleads does similar things. You get 20 numbers to send from and they make you have at least 10 texts to rotate during each campaign. They include a "spinner" to help generate these different messages. Their delivery rates are great. The only thing I do not like about them is that for a couple of the major carriers, they will append an opt out message in the text ie "Text STOP to stop receiving these messages" for compliance reasons. This takes away the humanistic aspect and appears spammy, which decreases your positive response rate. Does your service do the same?

Bryce DeCora · Answer

@Duane Alexander

1) my system automatically purchases and uses new numbers when old phone numbers reach a certain threshold of “overuse”. I leave the old numbers to “cool off” for several months before throwing them back into production.

2) each of my canned responses and automated texts come in 10-15 different wordings. Each time it’s used, a random one is selected so I highly reduce the number of similar-looking outbound messages.

3) text messages are throttled if my system sees that numbers I send are getting marked as spam. Not only will it try to resend these spam-marked numbers at a later time, it’ll wait to send new text messages until it’s safe to do so.

As far as I know, no company does all of these things off the shelf. If they do, please let me know.

Duane Alexander · Answer

Just curious, how are able to get around Spam Filters? What do you think of Batch Lead's SMS?

Bryce DeCora · Answer

@Spence Kal Podio custom automations with GlobiFlow got out of hand.  Even when optimized, it wasn't able to automate my tasks consistently enough at scale.  As my company grew (because of the amount of automations I had) the system was starting to skip automations.  I wanted to build my own because I believe there's a gap in the market of companies who are able to do SMS marketing well.  This is compounded by the fact that carriers are now getting very good at filtering spam texts.  I'm able to get around the spam filters while many others are not.

What is your favorite CRM? Any good free ones for starting out?

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