Daniel Poston: [00:00:00] Awesome. All right. I think we’re about ready to get started. All right. So we’re going to be going over today how to optimize your Follow Up Boss account. Follow Up Boss is by far the best platform in best CRM in real estate. There are some issues that need to be addressed in Follow Up Boss. It’s the best in real estate, but at the same time, it’s still super far behind Salesforce or HubSpot or any of the, like the big CRMs.

And so we have some cool tools to, help alleviate that. So from the entire team here at InterFace, I really appreciate you being here. I think a lot of you are existing users, but there are also some new people here. So we really appreciate your [00:01:00] time. So what you’re going to learn on this call, how to set up Follow Up Boss smart lists, so agents always know which leads to Follow up with and how to automate holding them accountable, how so no lead slip the cracks, but we’re also going to go over the most efficient way to collect data from agents.

So at each stage of the transaction, you need to collect data from your agents. Typically, that’s not a fun process. We have some cool new ways of doing it and how to measure performance of your agents and lead sources in Follow Up Boss. So before we start, information will help you regardless of whether you’re an InterFace customer or whether you’re going to be an InterFace customer.

If you decide to become an InterFace customer, we have some exciting bonuses for you when you sign up and existing customers can also get those bonuses. So stick around. So how this will work. We have probably take about. 45 to [00:02:00] 60 minutes to get through may go a little longer. If there are a bunch of questions at the end, go ahead and type your questions in as you think of them.

Get your notepad out. I’m getting messages. The chat is disabled.

We’re going to try and get the chat up and running.

I do see questions coming in. Taylor. You see some of them, able to chat getting some texts that chat isn’t working. We’re working on that right now. All right. Awesome. So Q and a definitely is working. So go ahead and type your questions into Q and a. We’re going to try and get chat up and running, but in the meantime, Q [00:03:00] and A does appear to be working.

All right. Okay. Why am I here? Why do I have anything to do with real estate or Follow Up Boss? So I started my career as a real estate agent in 2007, best time ever to get into real estate. So I did multifamily properties in the Los Angeles area. Not too long after I started the market collapsed.

So I played online poker professionally for several years. You can see on the right, my office overlooking the Pacific. That was a great experience. And oddly enough, poker, online poker requires very similar skillset to data science and analytics. So as you can see on the right, I played about 20, 24 tables at a time.

That would be about 500 to 600 hands per hour. In order to play that many hands per hour, you have to automate a lot of the playing process and you need to [00:04:00] consume the data of your opponents to analyze them statistically. To make decisions on, what’s the best move. So what I do now is automate as much of the real estate sales process as possible and analyze how agents are performing.

So you can make data driven decisions and real estate the same way that I did playing poker. So I started InterFace transition to data science and analytics. After playing poker, I was hired in 2017 as a database manager, and I was quickly promoted to chief data officer at Reef Point Realty, which was the top selling real estate team in San Diego at the time.

They did 320 transactions the first year I was there. A couple of years later, my last year, they did 460. And after Reef Point Realty, I started InterFace as an automation and integration solution for Follow Up Boss. So what does [00:05:00] InterFace do? So we started off as a integration as a service platform, primarily connecting Follow Up Boss and Open to Close and SISU.

We focus on keeping agents in Follow Up Boss. And preventing them from messing everything up because they’re really good at that. A lot of our focus is agent proofing our system. And we recently partnered with Kyle Whissel of the Whissel Realty Group, which is the current top selling team in San Diego to add analytics to our automation platform.

So if you’re ready to learn how to optimize your Follow Up Boss account, go ahead and type or go ahead and react with an emoji. Awesome. Taylor, how are we looking on chat?

Taylor Jessup: We figured that out. Yeah, I think chat’s up and Q and A’s should be working.

Daniel Poston: All right. Awesome. Okay. So yeah, if you’re ready to get started, go ahead and [00:06:00] type yes into the chat.

Taylor Jessup: No, somebody’s saying it’s still disabled there. So not sure why.

Daniel Poston: I think panelists, I think it’s working for panelists.

Taylor Jessup: Yeah. It’s not going to change any settings. There you go.

Daniel Poston: Does anybody see what I just typed in chat?

All right. Moving on.

All right. So I don’t know if anyone else is familiar with John Wooden. He was the coach UCLA Bruins back in the early back in the sixties when they won, I believe it was 10 straight championships or eight straight. So he had a pyramid of success. So we’re going to have our data pyramid of profit.

So the first layer of our [00:07:00] pyramid is our data agenda. So each day your agents need to know, what leads to Follow up with. Now the way most CRMs typically handle this is with task lists. And if you’ve ever used tasks as your means of keeping track of who to Follow up with, you know that, it doesn’t take long before you have 300 tasks built up.

And you just don’t know which are important and which aren’t. And then following up with the appropriate person becomes virtually impossible. So what Follow Up Boss has done is created their smart lists and with smart lists, it’s it eliminates the create task, check task off, create new task, nightmare, and essentially bubbles to the top who you need to Follow up with.

You Follow up with them. They drop off the smart lists. And then when you need to Follow up with them again, they show back up on the smart list, but there’s a lot of confusion on the best practices for creating these smart lists. So the way the Whissel team does it is [00:08:00] first, you need to define your communication stages.

So these are your contact stages and Follow Up Boss. A good approach to do that is you have your hot leads. So people who need to. Are transacting the next 90 days. You want to reach out to them on a weekly basis. Your warm leads are people who are transacting the next three to six months. So you want to Follow up with them monthly.

You have your cold people who aren’t transacting in the near future. You have your active clients. You have your past clients and then you have trash and sphere. So you obviously can change these depending on what your process is. But what you don’t want to do is have your contact stages and Follow up Up Boss be the exact same as your deal stages.

You want to use your contact stages for communication. How often you want to Follow up and use the deal stage for tracking what stage of the sales process are in. So next, after you’ve defined your communication stages, you want to define [00:09:00] your smart list. Your new contacts that need to be followed up with immediately.

You have your hot and active. So these are all of your active clients or hot that need to be followed up with weekly. Then you have your warm, your cold and your past clients. You may want to mix in some other stuff, depending on what your sales process is. But this is a good base to get started.

And then finally you want to set up your smart list. So where you set up your smart list, you go to the people tab and Follow up on us. And you create each of the smart lists with the appropriate filter. And then what you’re going to want to do is make sure each agent has their Follow up smart list as the first list in their account.

And so all they need to do each day is focus on zeroing out these lists. Now one thing you can do to simplify holding your agents accountable is create accountability lists. So what I used to [00:10:00] do when I was working at Reef Point, we had like a weekly list and then So I would have my weekly accountability list set to have contacts appear after 10 or 11 days.

So that way, if if somebody who’s supposed to be followed up with weekly is still hasn’t been followed up with after 10, 11 days. Now, that’s something that, there’s an issue there and setting up your accountability list means you don’t have to go into each agent’s smart list.

Every day you can have a simpler way of tracking it, but our system simplifies it further and we’ll go over, how we can help with smart lists later. And some of the issues with smart lists are activity parameters. And Follow ups, you have last call, you have last communication, but that doesn’t differentiate who made the call.

And the issue with that is if your ISA or your lender calls somebody, it’s going to drop that person off your assigned agent smart list. [00:11:00] So that leads to leads slipping through the cracks. So a lot of teams don’t understand this aspect of smart list. But our system allows you to create more granular parameters like last call by assigned agent or last call by ISA so you can build better smart lists where leads aren’t going to slip through the cracks.

So, the next. Layer of our data pyramid of profit is data accumulation. So at each stage of the real estate transaction, you got to collect data from your agents. Now, when I started a reef point, the way that they collected data from their ISAs at the appointment was the ISA would set an appointment.

They would. Write all the info down on a piece of paper. Then the ISA would take the piece of paper to the admin team and the admin team would individually enter that data manually into the different CRM platforms that they were using at the time. And they hired me to implement CTE [00:12:00] on top of that. And really it was a nightmare.

So we built something much better. The other way that teams are collecting data from agents is email. So if somebody gets a listing, they’ll send, like a List of data points to the transaction coordinator, and then it’s like a back and forth email chain to get the info and then the other way teams are collecting data from agents is directing Follow Up Boss.

But the issue with that is, you have just these big lists of fields. There’s no way of displaying what fields. Need to be populated at which stages. So there’s no way of requiring certain fields be entered at certain stages. So it’s really challenging for agents to remember what they need to do and win.

And so what that leads to. Essentially is a process of data collection. That looks something like this.[00:13:00]

If there are any transaction coordinators on the call they’ll definitely let you know how much they hate collecting data from agents after a offer has been accepted. So one of the things a lot of high level teams are doing is. Utilizing web forms for collecting data. So web forms are a great way of letting the agent know what data they need to enter, what data is required to be entered, what fields are relevant to what stages and, our 1.0 system actually utilize Wufoo to collect data from agents, but there are some challenges with using web forms. So one of the challenges is. Agents don’t know where the web forms are. You tell them to bookmark the appointment form or the listing form, and they don’t, and now they’re [00:14:00] reaching out to your admin team to figure out where the right form is that they need to fill out now that they have a listing.

Getting the form entry data into Follow Up Boss is either a time consuming manual process. Or it’s an automated process that’s complicated or expensive to implement. And if you’re using Zapier or make to implement that automation, really it’s not a reliable process. So the next layer of our pyramid of profit is analytics or analyzing the team.

So building a profitable team requires your agents to efficiently move clients through each stage of the sales process. World famous. Management guru, Peter Drucker says, what gets measured gets managed. Now, Follow Up Boss is a great CRM, but there’s no CRM that has great analytics. Even Salesforce has [00:15:00] insufficient reporting.

A lot of teams might be familiar with the sales funnel. This is a little bit different funnel than you’re probably familiar with. It’s popular in the software industry. It’s called the bow tie funnel. So it’s a model that focuses on the client journey from client acquisition to transaction management and relationship management throughout the entire client lifecycle.

So the left side of the model is representing client acquisition. The right side of the model represents a transaction and relationship management. So the first set of metrics that’s important to track is your volume metrics. So how many leads do you have? How many appointments have you set or has your team set?

How many of those appointments actually happened? How many agreements were signed? [00:16:00] How many of those went pending? How many of those closed? And then the last layer is how many repeat clients do you have or referrals or essentially additional revenue from a client who transacted. Now, the next set of metrics you need to track are conversion metrics.

So, how is your team converting from one stage to the next? Now, most of you are probably familiar with those two sets of metrics, but one thing that I don’t hear really at all in the real estate industry are time metrics. So how efficient is your team at moving from one stage to the next? How long does it take to get a lead to an appointment?

How long does it take to get a, met appointment to a signed agreement or to an accepted offer? If you track time metrics, you can have an additional layer [00:17:00] of information to figure out, why someone’s conversion ratios look or, why aren’t they, why are they not on pace to hit their goals this quarter?

So, this is all great, but, how do you track it? So the challenge with bow tie metrics is they’re extremely important to building an efficient sales team. But accurately tracking that and Follow Up Boss is not possible. And the reality is there’s not a third party system yet that accurately tracks all of those metrics in a simple streamlined way.

So InterFace 1. 0 was a, great platform to get you where you wanted to go, but it really wasn’t sufficient to. To tackle, those challenges that we just went over. So InterFace 2. 0, we believe is going to be data superpowers for your real estate [00:18:00] sales team. So who’s excited to see how InterFace can help optimize your Follow Up Boss account.

If the chat’s working, go ahead and type it in the chat. Otherwise do a reaction. All right.

How do we address the smart list challenges? So we’ve essentially built an automation platform similar to Zapier. You can see over on the left, you can create a step by step process. Currently, the triggers are calls, emails, texts, notes, and deals. We’re also going to be building in triggers for when specific fields on a person are updated.

If stages [00:19:00] update dated, if a relationship is updated, tasks, appointments, marketing events, like emails that are clicked or website pages that are viewed, if a date is a certain number of days out, we can do cron timers where the automation runs. Every day or every hour, and the actions are populating data to custom fields and applying tags.

What does that actually mean? If you can trigger automation from calls, emails, texts, and you populate data to a custom field, now you can track, when was the last call by my assigned agent, or when was the last call by my ISA or my group of ISAs. Or my lender. And now if you could track those fields and Follow Up Boss, you can also build smart lists off of them.

So you can create smart lists based off of last call by assigned agent and smart lists based off of last call by ISA. And now you have granular smart lists for each different type of user. [00:20:00] And when one of your users calls the contact, it’s not going to drop that contact off your other user’s smart list, causing it to slip through the cracks.

We also can do automated lead reassignment. Oops. So if a new lead comes in and your agent doesn’t reach out to them, we can use our system to automatically reassign that agent back to a pond or back to another agent. So you don’t have leads that are coming in and just sitting there and not being worked.

And in addition to those two use cases, really the possibilities are endless. There isn’t a good way of triggering automation from calls, emails, texts, or any of those activities in Zapier or in FollowPass. So any automation that you want to run that triggers off those things, our platform is a great solution for it.

So one of the things that we’re going to include if you [00:21:00] move forward today is. the smart lists that the Whissel realty team is building with our platform. So we’re going to have the exact communication stages. They use the exact smart lists that they’ve set up and all the filters, the exact automation that they’re using in our system to populate the.

Custom fields that they’re using in their smart list, step by step instructions for setting all of this stuff up so you can really level up your smart list game and Follow Up Boss as well as it could possibly be set up going into 2024. We’re also going to include a case study from the brand realty.

So we have automated reassignment. automated accountability setup. So when they have a lead coming in, if they haven’t had any activity in a certain timeframe, it will automatically [00:22:00] reassign the lead to a pond. So we’re going to have step by step instructions on setting up the automation in our system.

They utilize Zapier for a piece of this automation. So we’re going to have the exact setup instructions for Zapier, how you could also set it up in Follow Up Boss. Follow Up Boss has some limitations. That Zapier doesn’t have, but we’ll have step by step instructions on how you can set up similar automation and Follow Up Boss and detailed instructions on, setting up automated agent accountability.

So now, web form challenges, we mentioned before. The way that we’re getting over that is we have a drag and drop form system that we built where you can set up your forms however you want and the forms live in the Follow Up Boss embedded app. So no more agents trying to figure out where to find the forms.

They’re directly in the Follow Up Boss lead [00:23:00] record. If you’re one of our existing Web form users. You won’t have to come to us anymore to make the updates on the forums. You’ll be able to make them yourself. You can map the data to fields and Follow Up Boss. You’ll also be able to map the data if you’re using Sisu or open to close.

And then later next year, we’ll be adding a bunch of new systems to connect to. So if you’re using platforms like Brokerment or Dotloop or anything along those lines, you’ll be able to use our form system within the lead record and Follow Up Boss. to collect data from agents and populate Follow Up Boss and any other platforms you’re using.

You’ll also be able to trigger a bunch of automation from the forms. So if you’re using an appointment form, you’ll be able to trigger the Follow Up Boss appointment and the Follow Up Boss deal. So instead of training your agents to do all these different things in Follow Up Boss at each stage of a transaction, you can set up our forms to automate all of that stuff.

And [00:24:00] then the training for agents becomes, just fill out the form, got set an appointment and fill out the appointment form, got a listing, fill out the listing form. Everything gets done for them. Super simple.

So also. Add on that will be included is the exact forms that the Whissel realty group uses. So a template within our form system, we’ll have their appointment form, their disposition form. So what they’re collecting after an appointment agreement, sign pending and closed, see exactly what data they’re collecting.

They’re doing close to 700 transactions this year. One thing that’ll stick out is how much data they collect from their agents. It’s really.

Very close relationship between how many transactions one of our users does each year and how much data they collect from their agents at each stage. The [00:25:00] teams that aren’t doing a lot of transactions try and make it as easy as possible for agents. And then they get into that back and forth nightmare.

The teams that are really being efficient and doing a lot of transactions, they have a long form that asks all the different questions that they need at that stage. And they require their agents fill out all that info before their admin team will start doing the work. And so you’ll be surprised to see how much data the Whissel team’s collecting.

And it’s why they’re able to be so efficient and do six, 700 transactions a year. Now for bowtie metrics challenges, how are we going to track bowtie metrics? So we’re building analytics into our platform. So all the data that’s entered into our forms will be sent into our analytics database. You’ll be able to log into our system, utilize it to make sure the data is accurate.

Did your, one of your agents create a duplicate transaction? What? How many transactions are [00:26:00] within each client? Did somebody forget to create a seller when it’s a buyer seller? Essentially there’ll be a separate place to manage the data where agents can’t mess it up. And having that separate place to manage the data allows you to build really accurate reports.

And so we’re going to have really granular conversion ratio reports where you can track what your conversion ratio is from one stage to the next. These are actual conversion ratios. A lot of other platforms out there, they’ll filter by a six month period and show you, how many appointments did you have in that six months, how many appointments met, how many signed.

But some of those signed agreements may come from an appointment that happened outside that six month window. And if that’s how the conversion ratios are being created, they’re not real conversion ratios. What you want to do is measure, how many appointments did we set in the last six months and of those appointments, what are those, how many of those were met.

And of those met, how many of those were signed and then [00:27:00] you’re getting actual conversion ratios. And then you’ll be able to filter by lead source or location or price point. And so then you can really figure out, which one of my agents are doing good with Zillow. Which one of my agents are, some agents might do well if the property is really close to them, but they ignore stuff that’s further away.

So they have a lower conversion ratio on stuff. That’s not in their areas and stop giving them stuff. That’s not in their area, great ways of, if somebody has a low conversion rate from agreement signed, depending, and you can see that it’s taking them twice as long to go from agreement signed, depending as the rest of your agents But then, they need to speed up that process and that’s what’s causing them to have a lower conversion ratio.

And it’ll be very customizable in terms of what you can track, what conversion ratios, what stages. And there’s really nothing else like this that connects to Follow Up Boss right now. So [00:28:00] in addition to conversion ratios, we’re going to do, customizable exportable report engines. You can create whatever reports you want, share them, export them.

You’ll be able to set up goals. You’ll be able to set up challenges. We’re going to have nested challenges. Sometimes you want to set up a challenge for calls and emails and, appointments set, but you also want to combine all of that into one like master challenge. So we’re gonna have the ability to do that leaderboards and lead source return on investment reports.

So the last level of our data pyramid of profit is AI. So AI is revolutionizing the real estate industry. So this, these next things that I’m going to show our plan for later in 2024. So you won’t be getting this right away, probably Q3 or Q4, but. This is AI lead source attribution model. So we’re going to build an AI [00:29:00] process.

It’ll read through the notes and Follow Up Boss to figure out what was the actual lead source that created the contact. And what was the lead source that Created the opportunity, sometimes a Zillow lead will come in and sit there for a year and then they’ll start being retargeted by YLOPO and, now all of a sudden you have an appointment because they saw a YLOPO ad on their Facebook feed.

So you really want to track that to figure out what are the lead sources that are actually generating the opportunities. We’re gonna have an automated AI process to do that for you. So you don’t have to deal with that time consuming. work. The next thing we’re going to have is an AI chart builder. So most of the people on this call and in the real estate industry don’t understand, what they need to put on the x axis and what they need to put on the y axis.

To create the report they want. So we’re going to have a process where you can query your data. How many appointments did my agent set in [00:30:00] Q1? And it’ll figure out what’s the best report to display this data. And then it’ll render the report using your data from Follow Up Boss. So you can get, all the info you need in the best way to get it without having to know how to set this stuff up.

And then last we’re going to have, we’re in the initial stages. Of an AI appointment assistant. So one of the times where it’s really frustrating collecting data from agents is after an appointment, especially if you’re an ISA, I used to be an ISA when you’re calling. And a hundred, 200 people every day set an appointment for an agent.

Last thing you want to have to do, and it’s the bane of every ISA’s existence, is chasing after that agent to figure out what happened on the appointment. And so what we’re working on is an AI app where the agent, when they get to the appointment, they could tell the client, hey, do you mind if my AI assistant takes notes, they turn it on, and the AI assistant listens.[00:31:00]

To the meeting and collects all the necessary data. And so we can start pulling out data from this call. You’re going to just, if you get a listing on that appointment, you’re going to discuss when the open house date is you’re going to discuss, when the sign needs to be put on the yard.

You’re going to discuss all these dates and things that typically right now. Would require an agent to go fill out a form after or send an email. The process we’re building is the AI will capture all of that data and enter it directly into Follow ups or into one of our forms. So it’ll be a pre populated form that the agent can.

Check the data on at the additional fields and submit and then it goes into the system. So we’re really trying to make it as simple as possible to collect data from agents because it’s such a challenging time consuming thing to do. All right, I think we’re going to shut this down if anyone, there are any last minute questions. If you do have a question that [00:32:00] comes to mind, just go to InterFace. re and use the chat widget or send an email to support@InterFace.Re.