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Top Producer is a proptech stalwart, around long before we started calling it “proptech.”
The Move.com-owned customer relationship management software, that in many ways help set standards for its own category, has for a year been rolling out its most ambitious overhaul to date: Top Producer X.
A year in beta, the new version has been getting introduced to users in soft stages, as opposed to one day letting them log into a whole new product.
Along the way, the company was careful to balance user feedback with what’s best for the end product. However, it remains loyal to the system’s Feedback button and active Facebook user groups.
Top Producer X has upped its integrations, but without resorting to surface-level efficiencies, such as Zapier, a common method for connecting functionalities between software products. Top Producer X chose to directly integrate, which requires more work but results in faster, more stable data exchanges.
Also, the entire system has been moved from a local Windows-backed server to React in the cloud, boosting performance, security and reliability. It also aids in integration efforts with third-party APIs.
The new user experience looks great, designed in modern themes and intended to produce results in a hurry.
A traditional, but quickly customizable, spreadsheet view of contacts still exists, but individual contacts can be viewed, updated and contacted using a series of tabulated detail cards.
Every action needed is available from within each contact’s digital dossier, ranging from email and texts to Property Insights, a new feature that summarizes a contact’s history of interest in different properties.
The company has relationships with more than 300 multiple listing services, thus covering about 85 percent of all practicing agents, according to General Manager Vicki Cunningham. This enables Top Producer to take in a great deal of market data.
Apparently, command speed is a popular feature request these days because, like I saw in Compass CRM, things move quickly in Top Producer X.
The icon-based Contact Status definitions help users quickly label where a lead stands, and the “Last Touch” label succinctly dates the last time you interacted.
Field nomenclature matters because software needs to keep users moving, and it’s these subtle touches, along with speed, that contribute greatly to user experience.
Top Producer X scrapes social profiles and pulls in LinkedIn profile photos if available.
And, with email accounts now resting within Top Producer X (as opposed to being routed through their native hosts), email campaigns and marketing sends will be faster and see better delivery rates, less likely to end up in spam folders.
Also, upon setup, a user’s entire email history with each contact is imported, ensuring smooth transitions and reducing (possibly even eliminating) the need to jump back and forth between Gmail and the CRM for legacy messages — because emails should never be used for document search and storage.
Texting is now integrated, as is Top Producer’s Market Snapshot, a popular outreach feature that used to exist in its own space. It sends out localized sales information and reports.
Cunningham, who presented Top Producer X along with Principal Product Manager Warren Cree and Director of Broker Solutions Keith Hockin, said that Snapshot emails see a 39 percent open rate.
FiveStreet was acquired by Move back in 2013, and its lead parsing talents are put to use here, too. More than 150 sources can be integrated, and it automatically links every lead to the listing that got their attention.
Follow-up Coach is new. This Buffini-inspired feature reveals five leads or contacts most in need of contact, both new and aging.
Cree discussed a rather intriguing new feature not yet available, but in the works. Top Producer X is testing “sentiment analysis,” a tool that proactively monitors terms and phrases within a contact’s communications to gauge their general level of satisfaction. The data returned will help agents know how to better handle an unhappy client and make the Follow-up Coach feature that much more powerful.
This CRM was one of the earliest products reviewed in this column, back in 2015, so I was as interested to see what was next for TopProducer as likely many of its users. The wait appears to have been well worth it.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
