Insights Every Real Estate Professional Needs to Know from Inman Connect NYC 2019

real estate, crm, mobile, call tags, call notes, call sharing, call flags, call search, 

The sub-zero temperatures in New York City didn’t stop the more than 4,000 real estate leaders from around the globe from gathering at the annual Inman Connect Conference held at the Marriott Marquis in Time Square. Team iovox was among the lucky few with a position in Start-Up Alley showcasing our app alongside other disruptive technologies.

Couldn’t make it to this year’s Inman Connect? Below are some of our top takeaways:

We probably didn’t need to travel all the way to New York to hear this familiar refrain;

“The mobile phone is central to closing deals, but…”

We hear this sentence repeatedly at trade shows and at this year’s Inman Connect NYC19 it was no different. After speaking with hundreds of real estate professionals that stopped by our booth, it was once again made crystal clear to us that the mobile phone is a centerpiece of making money and closing deals but that it also has frustrating limitations.

Realtors and brokers use their phones all day every day but we know that by the time they’re on their sixth call of the day, they often can’t easily remember what they said on their last call, let alone the first, or what they were supposed to do after the second call was over.

So they end up scrolling through the call history on their phones hoping to recall who they spoke to, and they tell us that sometimes they even end up calling the wrong person back since the contact wasn’t labeled properly.

Talk about a frustrating experience!

Everyone can relate to this scenario in their own lives at one point or another, even if they’re not in the real estate business.

Talking through this sequence of events with our booth visitors at Inman, they repeatedly told us “that literally happens to me multiple times a day.”

We want you to know you can rest easy, friends. The iovox app, which runs on both Android and iOS is free (yes, FREE! more on that later) and once installed, gives you the ability to quickly and easily put context around every call, either while the call is happening or immediately after it ends.

Here is one example:

You’re in line at your favorite coffee shop, the phone rings with someone unknown to you who explains that in four months’ time they are relocating to your city and are looking for a three bedroom house within 15 miles of their new work location.

While on the call or immediately after the call, you can use the iovox apps call tags feature to tag this caller with “buyer” “relo” “3BD” or any other label that will help you remember who they are and what you spoke about. In addition, you can take notes on the call, either by typing or by transcribing notes through your phone’s microphone into text, and automatically having a complete searchable summary of the call as well as what you were supposed to do after.

Whenever we share this one simple use of the app, the response is always overwhelmingly positive. And at Inman NYC19 we particularly enjoyed hearing “I love this and I’m going to get my whole office on it.”

So, “The mobile phone is central to closing deals, but…”

It’s also a source of frustration for those who are making and receiving dozens of calls every day. Implementing the free iovox app is a simple change that can help you close deals without the frustration.

Real estate professionals have a love-hate relationship with CRM systems

In a prior blog post, we featured 11 top CRM systems serving the real estate market.

The market for CRM systems is quite active, yet booth visitors at Inman seemed to either love or hate the systems used by their firm, despite the clear-cut benefits.

Benefits of CRM’s include tracking interactions from the first contact all the way through completion of a deal, as well as nurturing the relationship long after the buyer has moved into the new home.

The problem lies in getting everyone onboard with using the CRM systems the way they are intended to be used because of the time it takes to input data manually.

If you’re like most agents, you are busy. You are in and out of a car and on the phone all day.

The last thing you want to do at the end of the day is fire up your laptop and attempt to recreate your day of client interactions and then type everything into your CRM system. No wonder true adoption percentages of CRM’s are low…it’s really a lot of manual work.

We know this pain point is universally true among field sales teams whether they are selling pharmaceuticals, software, tractors, or homes.

Here’s how iovox can make your CRM life incredibly easy

The iovox app includes a “share” button which enables you to share call details (time, duration, call notes, any relevant tags) with another party, OR directly into your CRM system. Imagine that – your call ends, you select a few memorable labels (tags), quickly type or transcribe from the voice recording your notes of the call and with one-click, it all goes from your phone into your CRM system. That’s it. All vital information is inputted into your CRM seconds after the call is completed and the hours of manual data entry are now obsolete.

At iovox, we’re partnering with Zoho to enable any Zoho CRM user to benefit from these new features, but we know there are many great CRMs out there used by real estate professionals the world over and we’re looking to support as many of these as we can.

ICNY participants were amazingly generous with their time and knowledge

This was team iovox’s second appearance at an Inman event in the U.S.A. We’ve been in the UK market for years, but we’re still learning the U.S. market so we try to listen twice as much as we speak.

At this year’s Inman, so many talented professionals came by to say hello and share their wisdom with us ranging from how to think about the market size opportunity as well as how to best bring our product to the market. These conversations bring us so much insight, we truly appreciate it and look forward to seeing you all again at future Inman events.

The iovox app, which runs on both Android and iOS is free, yes, FREE!

As part of these awesome discussions at Inman, many professionals asked about our business model and how we make money if our app is free? It really is free to use the basic model which includes all the features we’ve listed (tags, flags, notes, recordings, call details) but we do however charge when more storage is needed, when you want to connect to a CRM system, or, for Android users- if you want to transcribe your recorded calls for easy search.

Privacy note: For privacy reasons we only record your side of the conversation, so if you want something recorded so that you can transcribe it for easy search, make sure YOU say it or repeat it back. Also, as our founder and CEO has indicated in a prior blog post, iovox never has and never will, sell any of your data. It belongs to you and we prefer to keep it that way.

At iovox, we’re just getting started on our journey of serving the real estate market and we’re grateful for every interaction we have because we always learn something new. Thank you for teaching us and we look forward to seeing you at the next event on the road or talking to you as customers, if we’re fortunate enough to earn your business.

Special shout out to Inman for the hospitality and supporting us along the way.