Have suggestions for products that you’d like to see reviewed by our real estate technology expert? Email Craig Rowe.
Verse is an automated lead engagement and nurturing service.
Platforms: Browser
Ideal for: Brokerages, teams, and individual agents
Top selling points:
- Any lead source
- Auto and human lead interaction
- Lead distribution mirrors in-house rules
- Integrates with any CRM
- Scalability
Top concerns:
A lot of exiting CRM and marketing systems already do what Verse does, but since Verse is stand-alone, it can tolerate brokerage-wide CRM changes.
What you should know
I tend to favor software solutions that promise to do one thing well and stick to that promise.
When they grow, they grow only to make themselves better at that one thing. Verse, at one time Agentology, has now expanded into lead nurturing for multiple industries, which can only benefit the way they serve real estate agents.
Verse is stand-alone software that launches omni-channel lead engagement campaigns. Regardless of how your lead is acquired, whether website landing page, text, social media, or bought from a portal, Verse can deploy a custom script to engage them. When the time is right, they’ll pass the lead to you.
The solution is both bot and human-powered, and two-way, meaning that conversations held in Verse will also end up back in that lead’s profile in your CRM. They use Zapier for that.
The software works like TripIt, a favorite travel app of mine. It scrapes your inbox for notifications and pulls them into its dashboard, parsing and sorting the names and details. It then launches the appropriate follow-up campaign.
Initial outreach involves asking the person directly if they prefer to be contacted by phone or text.
Verse attempts 10 touches within the first five days, then backs down to a less frequent cadence for at least six months, after which it considers the lead unresponsive. Fair enough.
There’s a live-transfer feature that Verse uses for immediate needs. In this case, an actual team member calls or texts the agent to jump right in.
Internally, Verse employees have their own CRM that tracks clients’ scripts, allowing them to know what to execute based on notes and source parameters. They’re not licensed agents, so their interaction can only go so far.
Another good thing about Verse is that it isn’t really a daily login. If users are responding to the leads as they react to a campaign, and all is moving along smoothly, it can be relatively hands-off.
But, if you want to jump in there, expect to find a clean, concise user experience that makes conversation tracking intuitive and settings easy to manage. This is where you can arrange teams and review scripts and so forth.
I like that Verse makes it known that lead generation is not in its business plan. They center their model on quick follow-up and cultivation, and their process should reveal the lead’s eventual worth.
Cost is on a per-lead basis, and there’s a “platform” fee.
You could argue that this pricing model increases cost per lead, but I would counter that with the cost saved by not having to spend more time ensuring that lead is able to act.
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.
