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Cyrano Navigate is an automated sales coaching and lead intelligence solution.
Platforms: Browser
Ideal for: Brokers, team leads, and tenured agents
Top selling points:
- Zoom integration
- Open API for CRM integration
- Categorization of prospect priorities
- Lead communication reports
- Deal-stage specific game plans
Top concern:
The API is an insightful feature to offer, as the success of the follow-up recommended by this software will depend heavily on how agents execute it. It may require users to adjust existing response automations.
I’m also intrigued by how well this solution can divulge tips from conversations and notes previously documented before its install.
What you should know
Navigate by Cyrano is a conversation analysis tool that extracts lead personality traits and communication styles from Gmail threads and Zoom video conversations. The intent is to develop follow-up tactics and personalized sales strategies for agents.
This is an ideal match for those agents who don’t live deal to deal and have time to build long-term rapport and fortify their referral networks.
Natural language processing, or NLP, is most commonly used to easily translate dictated messaging or to help people finish typing a sentence. A company called Agently uses NLP to assemble listing descriptions from selected keywords.
Well, Navigate uses it to “listen” to your email threads and video presentations, a use-case that I don’t doubt will gain significant traction in the very near future.
Companies like Birdeye and Auctm aren’t far off in their strategic concepts, but they’re using other data sources to stimulate conversations and offer coaching, such as agent-by-agent lead reaction times and marketing content interaction.
Navigate uses what it learns from phrases, answers and speaking styles, among other written and spoken data points, to categorize people according to Priorities and Learning Styles.
For example, does the individual prioritize Process and Order or Community and Relationships? Or are they driven by Facts and Data or Instinct and Ego?
A person’s learning styles can be defined as visual, auditory or kinesthetic.
With a profile created, Navigate offers the user a Game Plan on recommended next steps sorted by common deal milestones, such as Showings, Listing Presentations, Resolving Problems, Negotiation or Buyer Consulting, among other stages.
There’s also a First Impressions summary, but I feel that’s kind of superfluous, given the more compelling data waiting for the user in the individual’s full profile. I don’t want to see the trailer for the movie I’m about to watch.
The software stores more than 2,000 lines of at-the-ready advice to deploy as the relationship evolves. These aren’t exactly word-for-word scripts, in case that’s what you’re looking for, they’re more like directions. For example, “When they start talking about a specific home, don’t interrupt them” and “Compliment them on their ability to solve problems with consistency.”
I like that Navigate requires the agent to make the advice into a real response, eschewing robotic snippets or canned terminology. This is a solution more about personality analysis than automated response.
An Alignment and Empathy heat map, rating how well you the user “connects” with a contact, can be applied to each person in your database.
And again, speaking of databases, I think it’s critical that Navigate work bi-directionally with your existing CRM because you’ll no doubt be updating that with notes from how a person responds to an email or phone call.
However, Navigate costs around $50 per month, justifying it as a tool for only your best prospects, an “all-star” database.
Navigate delivers a clean but granular report that visually expounds on each relationship and offers the user a useful reference tool throughout the relationship.
Most of the industry’s technology offerings rely heavily on agents knowing how, why and when to use them. In the same way a real estate licensing class doesn’t teach people how to sell, and neither do some of the industry’s most coveted CRM and marketing solutions. Even those with built-in coaching and performance metrics remain largely tactical in nature.
Please note, that’s not a dig at your CRM — far from it. They’re designed to be business support tools, not business providers.
However, all of your landing page builders and drip campaigns and lead nurture tools can be even better when honed specifically to appeal to each person they reach.
This is how Navigate can fit into your business, by combining its personality intelligence with the sophisticated outreach methodologies provided by many of today’s high-end technology providers. This is why I continue to stress that the more dialed-in they have their CRM API, the more value the industry will receive.
Nevertheless, as it stands, Cyrano’s Navigate is a smart, strategic bolt-on for any agent on the cusp of top-producer status. This is a tool Sisyphus would have really appreciated.
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.
