284 Mail-Right Show Special Guest Christopher Anuszewski

We Discuss all the leading Real Estate Agent CRMs & Does Your Data Belong To You?

Robert Newman: Ladies and gentlemen, it is episode number 284 of the Mail-Right Show. We’re here once again, the third time in a row we’re here with Christopher Anuszewski and we’re super excited to have him back. The reason that we’re excited to have him back as obviously, Jonathan and I are just so thrilled when we get to talk to somebody who has actually boots on the ground experience with all the operational sides of lead generation.

Christopher Anuszewski: Yeah, that’s one of the big things.

Robert Newman: I’m going to jump in, I’m going to cut you off from the interview. I’m going to listen, man, I got to jump in because of my first question, and yes, I probably do want you to get into 30,000 with them. If you’re a team, you are most likely spending hundreds of thousands, if you’re a team most likely.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I just want to quickly add, it also applies to when you’re starting out. When you’re offered that free CRM from your broker and I’m not throwing them under the bus, no. One that’s become very aggressive is KV Core. And they become very aggressive about offering it to brokers and those brokers can offer it at a special rate to their agents. But there’s a problem, so if you leave that agency, even though you’ve formally signed an agreement that because you’ve used the brokers supplied CRM, which is KV core. They own that data, you don’t own that data as the agent, even though you put it all in and you got all those leads, it’s actually owned part of the brokerage and that’s just what I wanted to add Robert.

Robert Newman: Well, that is true, holy cow guys, but we’re going to get back to that. That is true, if you’re a team member your broker owns your data. But here’s the question that I’ve got for you is that I want to know what the data fields were that you were hoping to export that you realized were instantaneous. Because if I’m not mistaken BoomTown does give you a basic exportability, but a guy likes you, as you said, there was a whole bunch of data points that you looked at and you said, holy shit, I can’t get my data points. What was it that first raised the red flag that you were looking at in terms of data that you couldn’t export without doing this trick, which we’ll talk about?

Christopher Anuszewski: So they give us the basic data and say, I want their name, I want their phone number. I want their contact details, their email, and stuff like that, okay, great. Alright, well that’s all good and well, and that’s the kind of the basic structure of a lead, right? But then all of the hours that you’ve worked to add in notes, none of that stuff comes with it. You don’t get there, I don’t know, It depends on where you go activity, timeline. Any of those data, you get none of that, none of the phones calls you’ve made. So it says if, when you go to this new CRM, whatever it may be, you’re starting scratch from day one with this lead. You don’t know if this was an active, hot lead, that’s ready to go in the next 90 days and you just talked to them yesterday, or is this a lead that you haven’t talked to in four months. And now it’s time for you to follow up with them and they were cold, any of those points, did you have follow-up appointments scheduled? Too bad, it’s not going to show up on your new calendar because it doesn’t come with it. So all of the things that go along with the accessory data, I guess if you will, is really the important part of the data in the CRM and you don’t get any of that stuff. And the point I was going to add is what John had said a minute ago, pointing out KV core. I did some testing now with my current because I’m with the XP, they offered KV core and I briefly tested it out and used it. I tested doing an export there and one of their things is when you go to export, I’ll read it to you, it says timeline activity will not be included in this export. So all of those data points that you’ve added and spent your time adding you don’t get.

Robert Newman: Which is pretty incredible, so you figured out a workaround for Boomtown. What was the workaround?

Christopher Anuszewski: So the workaround with BoomTown, and I don’t know if this will work with anybody else. I just got it because a lot of people switch from BoomTown to Follow up Boss, which is ultimately where I’ve gotten the answer from was the Follow up Boss experts, was you have to reach out to support as the admin or the owner of the account. And you have to say, hey, we’re doing some external data analysis. And we happen to have a data analyst on our team, not a lot of teams have that, but we happen to pay for one and it was very helpful. But hey, he is doing some data analysis and we need access to be able to import these into a dashboard that he’s building. And we can’t do that unless we export, we have to have all of these data points. And they say, oh, okay, great, never say that you’re leaving the CRM and that’s going to lock you down. They’re going to know the jig is up, but that’s how we got around, you have to say, you want a deep export, it’s a deep export, right? Because all that data’s in there, it’s in their databases. And then We just had to kind of play a little, a cat and mouse game of, oh yeah, we’re doing a data analysis through a separate system and it doesn’t connect with BoomTown because BoomTown is locked off. And we need to be able to do that in there, the dashboards you guys have just aren’t good enough for what we need. We need to really get a drill down. Okay, great, we’ll have our support team prep that for you and that’s what did it. That’s what got it done now, how successful, if you’re looking to lead, I would say, and you’re listening to this podcast. You better be one of the first ones because once they get a load of these requests, they’re going to go something’s up.

Robert Newman: I totally agree though and I think that the reason that we’re doing this show because this has always been, I have three blog posts on my website that rarely get read, guys. But I’ve done a deep dive into this three separate times because when you sign up with BoomTown or one of these other services there is a subsection line in there in all of them, not just BoomTown, by the way, KV core, BoomTown. And what that line kind of says is effective that anything you enter into our platform is actually owned by us. Now the language is a little bit more legal and it’s a little murkier than that. But if you’re going to sit here and say, and I think that a lot of our listeners are probably thinking to themselves, but I own the information, how can they do that? I even said that I did that when I realized that this was a problem. And the thing is, yeah you might own the data, but guess what? They own the platform and all you’re doing is adding something into their platform, they legally have the right to do whatever the hell they want with it. This is a problem f you think about it, and this is one of those prime cases where that comes up. Because if you press them if everybody listens to the show and calls them at once and they start to push back, ultimately, they can just tell you to go take a long walk on a short pier and smell you later. There’s nothing you can do about it; you have no recourse. So no court, no legal case, no threats, it does not matter, you signed a contract that said that you understood that there was their platform.

Jonathan Denwood: Just to interrupt Robert we need to go for a break, we can continue the discussion.

Robert Newman: We’ll hear Chris’s response, sorry. So thank you for listening everybody, we’re going to go to our break and we come back we’re going to hear Chris’s response. I’m going to actually wait, John, I’m going to break the format knowingly and say, how do you get in touch with everybody at the end of the show, okay. With that, we see you in a bit.

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Robert Newman: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen, it’s episode number 284. God, can you believe that? Anyway, we’re still here with Christopher and we’re talking about the importance of owning your data. He gave us a great tip in the first section of the show where he was talking about how he managed to get his data, all of his data, including his notes out of BoomTown, and import them into Follow Up Boss. And he was in the midst of answering a question and we had to go to the break. So Chris why don’t you tee up your answer here?

Christopher Anuszewski: Yeah, so in response to what you were saying a second ago about they own all your data when you go in and you’re signing their terms of service and their user your agreements. And saying, yeah, I’m using your platform, you can do whatever you can or will or want with my data that I’m entering in there. This is obviously a bigger discussion, but it just kind of goes to Facebook, right? It’s like, hey, we’re all signing on using social media platforms, we’re giving away our data for free. And we’re literally saying, yeah, we’re going to sign on the dotted line, you can market to us, you can do what you want. So it’s a common practice nowadays, so it shouldn’t be a surprise. But it is something that you should be cognizant of when you are going into these platforms. And it goes back to the last show that we did together, talking about CRMs in my mind. Which is truly before you commit your heart and soul and money and data to one platform, make sure you’ve done your research. That it’s the one that’s going to serve you, not right now, not in six months from now, but in years from now, or at least a year from now a long-term goal of, am I going to outgrow this? Because if you do outgrow it, you will be starting from scratch with the new CRM and that is not fun. I can tell you when you’ve got a hundred leads, okay, when you’ve got 5,000 leads in your database and you have no notes or activity to go along with them, that can be very debilitating.

Jonathan Denwood: So may I ask, obviously you’ve had this experience, so you’ve moved to Follow Up Boss. So what is their position and what was the difference between Follow Up Boss’s position, then BoomTown’s position on this?

Christopher Anuszewski: So they’re actually part of the reason why I went with them is that number one; when you go in here and you want to export your data in Follow Up Boss there’s really an option that says export all columns and data, and it will let you take everything. So your notes, your last call, all of that stuff, I mean, depending on how big your database, it could be a massive load. But they let you take all of that with you, which is great. And they’re so open, they’re one of the most open CRMs in terms of connectivity with third-party systems. So you may even be able to have like a zap from Xavier that can zap your data out of there, I don’t know, I haven’t done it. But I’m assuming that you can, because I know we’ve interacted with other third-party systems before. So that’s something else to be cognizant of is you may not even have to do a manual export. You can just kind of zap the data out if you need to.

Robert Newman: So for everybody, who’s listening to this show, one of the reasons that this question about data. So I’ve talked to a lot of teams and you both know that some teams don’t care about this issue. And it’s funny because the teams that I find that don’t care about this issue tend to be churn and burn kind of teams. They’re not really looking at the overall long-term value of the data in the first place. Like if you’re going to say, do I have a post-sale process? And John, this is one of the reasons that I got super excited to have Chris on the show because we were talking from a sales prospect conversation to start with. He was looking at us along with many other people in his research process. But when we were talking about the post-sale process, I was just incredibly impressed because the way they, Chris had built up his personal business, did not only did he have a process for nurturing a lead. He has a process in place to nurture people that you sold homes to. And from his perspective, at that time, the way he was expressing it, to me, it felt like that was more important to him or just as important to him as any other part of all of his processes. So he sells them something and now these people go into another like custom-crafted email, nurturing thing where he’s staying in touch with that person. So he can stand in front of them and his sphere of influence business has been growing tremendously. So he takes a piece of information from someplace else that he bought basically, but then he owns it because he nurtures them and stays in touch with him and has conversations and builds value to the relationship. And he doesn’t all of that after the sale occurs, if this is a thing that you wanted to do, all of a sudden, I think owning your information and controlling your information would be much more important to you. What do you think Jonathan?

Jonathan Denwood: Well, then you’re going to have this problem and I do think you got to be aware of it. Not that you’re not aware of what you’re getting involved in, it’s fine if you’re not too fussy about this, but then we can put this on a much bigger, on steroids because this row is in the website now. This row in a website that you’re spending a lot of time putting content on it and ACO and making it searchable when doing all the things that we’ve talked about for the past 18 months, Robert. And then you want to move away from that particular company, because you’re no longer happy with what you’re gating and you can’t export any of these posts, any of this content, and you’ve just got a website that you spent a fair bit of money on. And you just got a manual transfer of all the content and depending on the size of the website that can be quite a thing to do, could it Robert?

Robert Newman: It really could be and I think that there’s a lot of people that are… I’m going to guess. Chris, what would you say? I want to hear your thoughts, but I’m thinking there’s a tremendous amount of very smart agents and brokers who understand full well that they signed up with a platform that they gave up the rights to their information. And if they’re not moving around, if they’re not looking at the problem closely, I think it’s because they’re thinking that it’s a huge hassle to do it. What do you think?

Christopher Anuszewski: Oh, I agree. It definitely creates a huge barrier. A barrier to exit or a barrier to entry into another, maybe a better system or a system that’s better suited for them. I mean, goodness, that was the exact thing that plagued our last team that I was a part of and it was okay, how are we going to do this? If we do this, these are all the things that are affected. One of the biggest things was, we are a part of the BoomTown ecosystem, which they have built-in IDX searches already set up for each lead. So now when we go, we’re going to have to manually set up, even if we next port all of our data. So cool, we did the super-secret trick and we’ve got all of our data. But now, we have 50,000 leads in our database that don’t have home searches set up and now we have to manually go do that. Well, thankfully the system that we moved to, they have a way to make that happen. But that may not always be the case, so it creates this huge barrier of someone going, oh my goodness. I mean, that was a big stopping point for us, we had to stop and really think, okay, should we do this, is it going to cost us more time and effort and hours than we are willing to give up just to move to something that maybe is better? We don’t know, is the grass just green sort of situation. But yeah, I can a hundred percent see that’s the big thing that stops a lot of teams or agents moving because to restart back up to create those searches, which initially took a few seconds, but you multiply that out by, even if it takes two minutes, you’ve got 50,000 leads in your database. Good Lord, you’re going to be setting up home searches for here till next year.

Robert Newman: Great. I’m going to ask you what the solution was that you moved to. We’re hoping as usual, that you’re going to be willing to stay on and do a little bit of video bonus content with us and that I think would be a good tee up. Would you agree, John?

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, we got enough for five minutes, we can wrap up things, and then we can go on to bonus content.

Christopher Anuszewski: Yeah, and I’d love to also throw in if you can’t get all of your data unless you say you’re in the worst-case scenario with the CRM. And they will not export, you can’t do some secret trick, you can’t get all of your data and you say, I’ve got to have these data points. How do I get them out? There are solutions out there where you’re not manually going in and copying and pasting notes yourself. So we can talk about that in the bonus content too if you’d like.

Robert Newman: I would like, sorry go ahead, John.

Jonathan Denwood: Well this problem because I got another business and this problem is a regular one that I come across in my other business. So it’s just not so only affects the real estate industry, my other business we’re involved in Trimming websites, well, there’s a number of SAS players in that. But they tend to provide any manual way of exporting when people signed up. And the actual courses and all the Siri content, they normally don’t offer any automated way of exporting all that. It has to be done over manly or you find workarounds and you have to code up scripts that will suck out that they match that field with that field. And sometimes normally there are some companies that we work with that have built these scripts for these educational platforms that we regularly get asked. Can we move away from this SAS platform into WordPress? And we’ve built relationships with a couple of companies that built these scripts and is exactly the same problem as what we’re discussing here, Robert.

Robert Newman: And that was going to lead me to my wrap-up. So, ladies and gentlemen, there isn’t an easy answer to this. What we’re hoping is that for the small handful of you that have already not made a decision, and most of you have you’re in bed with these guys already. You’re in bed with KV Core, you’re in bed with BoomTown. You’re already steering the challenge in the face, so us sitting here on the show telling you there is a challenge. I don’t think that a lot of you are going to be surprised by that. Here’s what I’m going to say to those of you listening to the show today. You want to do your best to have a guy like Chris in your relationship bucket. If he’s willing to accept an email from you, send him an email because this is not easy to discuss or dialogue like dissect challenge. So as a consultant, I can tell you that guy like Chris, a guy like me, we’ve got to have a couple of conversations with you before we can even quote you a price for service. So this isn’t a sales pitch, this is literally, hey, maybe he’ll do you a favor and send you in the right direction. You got to have a data kind of analyst as he already said, probably come on board and try to help you move your data from one place to the next. If you’re already dealing with the problem, and it could be the solution that Jonathan said, will you have somebody that maybe write a custom script and help you do? It could be the solution that Chris said earlier, where maybe you have a specific data person who’s dealt with the challenge for your specific platform in the past and has a trick or two up their sleeve to help you get it all moved. At the end of the day though, my advice to those who follow my advice is that if you’ve moved past the point where you have 10 to 20,000 contacts at that point the data has millions and millions of dollars of value. It doesn’t matter what market that you’re in, it just doesn’t. So in gross sales and hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission, which means that spending five or 10,000, whatever the number is to get it moved from one place to the next and control it from there on, in. It’s an excellent investment in my opinion. So without any further, due guys we’re going to wrap up the podcast section of the show. Chris, if you were interested in having somebody reach out to you, how would they do that?

Christopher Anuszewski: You can reach out to me on my social handles under my team name, which is and this is on Instagram, it’s on Facebook at Homes of CFL for Central Florida. So cftl@homesofcfl.com or you can always email me at chris@homesofcfl.com.

Robert Newman: And for those of you who are listening to the show. Listen, I’m going to give you a piece of advice, please take it. Chris is a brilliant resource, and he’s in the beginning stages of opening his own company. Once he gets it up and off the ground, he will not have time to do any of these side requests, I guarantee it. Because I own my own company and I know how I got started. Right now, he’s probably still in the place where he needs some extra capital to do the stuff that he’s doing. And so if you do need some help, maybe there’s a good relationship there, but it’s not going to be around forever, that opportunity, I guarantee you. So if anybody’s interested in that, you should listen to the show and reach out now for him. Jonathan, so I’ve got my other brilliant co-host, who’s always hone this thing, he runs the thing, he does all the outreach. He schedules with the clients, he deals with me for getting the show number, he handles my madness, he’s an amazing guy. So Jonathan, if somebody would want to reach out to you, how would they do that?

Jonathan Denwood: Simple just go to the Mail-Right website and the phone number, the email. And you can contact, set up a free demo where I just go through for half-hour and I’ll show you the basics of Mail-Right. And we’ve been onboarding some new clients recently, and they’ve just been blown up away with what’s inside Mail-Right and the value it offers. So it’s really simple, over to you Robert.

Robert Newman: And of course, my name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound Real Estate Marketing, Inbound REM. We are the only company in the US that is doing inbound, SEO-based websites that you own. I give a lot of information away on my website, I rarely press it because trust me, when I tell you for people looking for this solution, they find me automatically. Chris, how findable am I on Google?

Christopher Anuszewski: You’re there, you’re out there and on YouTube big time.

Robert Newman: There we go, so if you want to find me, you can probably just search any of the systems that we’re talking about, you’ll already know who I am, you’ll come across me. But if you want to reach out to me, go to inboundrem.com. And with that, gentlemen we’re going to wrap this up and we’re going to go over to the video.

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