| Profile: |
Dotti Smith |
| Home: |
Asheville, North Carolina |
| Age: |
Boomer |
| Profession: |
Development Resources, consulting and training for real estate developers, and The Thoms Estate |
| Favorite Quote: |
"A goal without a plan is just a wish."
— Author Antoine de Saint-Exupery |
Her challenge
"Sales and marketing is challenging in a real estate market this slow. You have to manage your prospective buyers better than your competition. A lot depends on your database and your ability to both store buyer information and then retrieve it with maximum efficiency, at a number of different levels. There’s a need to easily track every communication with one individual buyer, and to store an individual customer’s history. It’s equally important to be able to profile all your buyers - and to be able to call up multiple buyers who have something in common. Before BrightDoor, no one CRM database could do it all."
On efficiency and productivity
"Efficiency-wise, I can tell you BrightDoor is the best system because I’ve compared all of them. I have a whole room full of people using it who agree. Over more than 15 years, I have worked with and compared systems. Some have a lot of what you need — except for features that are key to real estate. One of the things is being able to have a phone conversation with a customer, email them, and then being able to send the email right to the history file. BrightBase does that. That was a really, really big item because it saved so much time. It allows people to get twice as much work done.
"There is another system that also saves emails to history, but you would have to have someone write a tremendous amount of software to have it accommodate real estate to the degree that BrightDoor does already."
On advising developers
"I do consulting work for a lot of companies. In addition to The Thoms Estate in Asheville, I recommended that BrightDoor be put in both Canyon Ridge in Chama, New Mexico and Derbyshire, near Tryon, NC. I said if you want the best system, go with this system, because the efficiencies are so much greater for the assistant or the sales agent."
On ROI
"It goes back to the efficiencies. When you can do something in half the time because the software does a lot of work for you, then you can accomplish considerably more in a day’s time — more phone calls, more emails, more history. For example, say a sales agent has a database of six or seven hundred people. All the systems will let you calendar everything, but some won’t let you separate out the customers’ interests. So you can calendar somebody to come back up six months from now. And you know that person is interested in a specific thing, such as a 2,500 square-foot townhouse. But if you get that product sooner than you think, with some systems, you can’t go back and pull out just those people interested in town homes. BrightDoor allows you to pull up people by a particular interest."
On interactive presentations and competitiveness
"Customers form a different opinion of who you are when you use high tech. It tells them that you are on the cutting edge. And I think it sets up a different feeling between them and the development, because they know you’re on top of things. It carries you to another level, above other companies. More than anything, it’s just the feeling that a customer has when you go to that length to give them information efficiently."
On BrightDoor
"They are a very progressive company with a dedicated, pro-active team of senior management, programmers, and account managers. The bring both quality and innovation to the real estate field."
For more, please visit www.thethomsestate.com
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