CRE Tech & App Review – ClientLook and Today’s Big Announcement

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In January of this year, I wrote a post on why you should use a Simple and Cloud-Based CRM System.  In that post, I profiled ClientLook.  I’m not going to rehash what I wrote before.  I do want to give you an update and discuss their excited announcement today.

clientlook logo

Update on My Previous Beefs

Speed – I mentioned in my previous post that my main beef with ClientLook was the speed.  That is no longer an issue.  ClientLook has made numerous upgrades in this department and it cooks.  Very fast.  Thank you!

Property Database – ClientLook is now in development of a property database.  Today, I got to see a screenshot of it.  This will make ClientLook a complete solution for me.

Upgrades

Email – One thing that is difficult to track, quantify, and report on is email.  ClientLook makes it very easy to automatically attach emails to specific projects and contacts.  Each project or contact in your database has a specific email addresses generated for it.  All you have to do is include that email address in an email, and that email will be recorded in the correct project and/or contact in ClientLook.

The big win with this is with reporting.  You should be reporting to your clients on a monthly basis.  Most of us track who we spoke with, how many property tours, how many offers, etc.  What gets lost is all the time and work that happens via email.  ClientLook solves this for you.

A best practice for this functionality is creating a contact in your email program with the project email address.  For example, create a contact for your listing 123 Main St.  Now you don’t have to remember the email address.  You just put 123 Main St in the bcc line.  Piece of cake.

Search – I griped a little before about the search capability of ClientLook.  They have taken large strides in this area.  It is now much easier to navigate through 1000’s of contacts quickly.  You can also search and quickly find notes in a contact or project file.

Today’s Announcement (Sept. 26th, 2013)

On a webinar today, Michael Griffin announced that ClientLook has formed a strategic alliance with xceligent.com.  I have known about this for some months, so it is good to be able to talk about it.  I think this is a big with for the Commercial Real Estate industry.

logo_xceligent_hires

xcelligent.com’s answer to Loopnet is the newly launched – and very free – CommercialSearch.com.  Most of the national CRE firms have their listings populated on CommercialSearch.  I am working right now with Michael Griffin to get all of Sperry Van Ness’s listings on there as well.  It may have already reached critical mass.  Your listings should be on there.

Michael’s announcement today centered around 4 things.

  1. Automated Lead Generation – A prospect is on CommercialSearch and is looking at your listing.  When they click to get more information, CommercialSearch captures their information.  It then checks to see if the prospect is already in your ClientLook database.  If not, it creates the new contact, including all contact information, and notifies you of a new lead.  Pretty sweet.  They are also developing a plugin to do the same on your website.
  2. Automatic Activity Reporting – Some of you will run a report on a monthly basis from Loopnet and give it to your listing client showing online activity.  Wouldn’t it be nice if Loopnet automatically put that in your CRM for you – and in the right place?  CommercialSearch does that for ClientLook.  All that data in one place makes me “happy, happy, happy!”
  3. Property Marketing – The information will also flow the other way.  A new listing in ClientLook will automatically be placed on CommercialSearch for you.  Efficiency is a beautiful thing.
  4. Real-Time Embedded Research – This is cool.  If xcelligent.com covers your market and you subscribe, you can run reports.  Say you want a list of all the attorneys in town using over 15,000 sf of office space.  You can import that list automatically into ClientLook.  The exciting part is any time xcelligent.com updates the contact information for one of those attorneys, it will update in your ClientLook account.

I’m excited to see how this shakes out and if CommercialSearch.com can reach critical mass so that these integrations can be of great value.  I am confident that it will.

Question: What do you think about the partnership between ClientLook and xcelligent.com? What new functions and products would you like to see come out of the partnership? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

 

 

 

 

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Categories: Productivity, Technology

Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.

  • Lowell Peabody

    The four features highlighted sound great on the surface, but of course much more needs to be understood about the inner workings and the new workflow.

    I think there are several broader questions regarding the alliance of ClientLook and Xceligent and the platform that has been created. Clearly there is great potential for the relationship between a CRM/project management platform and a property/market data platform. The potential to slice and dice the data and wrap it into new and comprehensive services is intriguing, but how open a system will it be? What are the costs? Does it work for management to help strengthen brokerage businesses as well as make the people on the front lines do what they do even better? Is Clientlook now under the wing on Xceligent or will it remain a stand alone service with ongoing improvements to its CRM and project management capabilities?

    My sense is more is needed to understand as people may be wary of a sole provider of information for all their CRM and property/market data. I am looking forward to watching this all unfold and hope it works for a lot of us!

    • Hey Lowell! Good questions. I believe they remain two separate companies. I’m not sure about the rest of your questions, but I’ll see if I can get the ClientLook CEO to address it.

    • ClientLook

      Lowell, we have lots of big plans for ClientLook. You’ll continue to see rapid innovation in our CRM features in addition to all the Xceligent integration.

      ClientLook will definitely be a tool for both the broker and management. All of our plans will be unfolding over the next few months.

      ClientLook and Xceligent remain separate companies, but are closely aligned. As you may know I’ve accepted the position of Chief Product Officer at Xceligent (in addition to my duties at ClientLook) to manage the ClientLook integration as well as all future customer products from both companies. It’s an incredible opportunity to create a lot of change technology-wise in our industry.

      I don’t plan to do this in a vacuum and would welcome any input. Feel free to contact me directly with any suggestions or ideas. Thanks a lot for using ClientLook too Lowell. I’ll be in New York in a couple of weeks so I hope to see you there.

      Michael Griffin

  • Lowell Peabody

    Thanks Bo. I am in touch with Michael already and looking forward to learning more. I get the idea that there is much yet to sort out. Curious, within SVN what is the level of acceptance with Clientlook?

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