The kvCORE platform is described by the vendor, Inside Real Estate in Draper, as a next-gen solution for modern brokerages and enterprises to run their entire business on one platform.
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Sales Engine Media (discontinued)
Score9 out of 10
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Sales Engine International was the company resulting from the merger of Manticore and Sales Engine in 2012. Their product had email marketing and landing page functionality. The product provides connectors to both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. Primary customers were SMBs.
The product is discontinued.
I think if you have a very large brokerage and can afford to pay for a fully customized set up then it may be worthwhile. I would make sure you have a dedicated support team, not an account manager. In my opinion, the account managers are worthless and will not respond most of the time. We are on our second account manager in 9 months of using the system and cannot get in touch with him. In my experience, the account managers have no knowledge of how the system works or how anyone in real estate would want it to work. Obviously, I can only say this for the two managers we have had so far. I would steer clear of this system unless you want to spend a few thousand a month for a system that, I feel, will impede your business rather than improve it.
We used the Manticore Marketing Automation solution for almost/just over 2 years, and initially, it was a great solution. Everything just seemed to work. When Manticore Technology, Inc. and Sales Engine International merged on May 31st of 2012, the overall product quality began to decline. As browsers and other programs (like our CRM environment) went through updates and new releases, Manticore just didn't keep up. Parts of the program became incompatible with certain browsers, forcing us to change where and how we logged into the back-end of the system. It was a silly workaround, but not the end of the world. When we learned that other client-facing portions didn't work with certain browsers, we brought it to their attention, and were told that we needed to find some way to work with it, and that the changes to the system were not possible. We ended up having to change our 200+ landing pages/forms, and could no longer have the State/Province field as a required field for registrations. That is just one example of our experience, and there have been others that are just as troublesome.
It sends unwanted canned responses to potential clients that you haven't approved. You must figure out how to use it to make them stop. This was day 1.
If you like to learn using many many different videos to learn a product, then this maybe for you.
Their support is good, but wait times can be long. They want you to use their chat, but then when you ask your question, it can be a several hour wait time between responses. The people are nice and resolve your issue. But I think chat is for quick back and forth communication, not something with a long delay. Also, you can only really do it effectively on your computer, not on your phone.
It's proving very tough to track leads from campaigns we are running ourselves. If your website converts a lead, it really just gives you the website source, and even that only some of the time. It would be great to create custom sources and have kvCORE track that traffic and lead via some sort of UTM tag or URL parameter.
Some of the load times aren't great. When I load up my database, it takes a while to actually display. Also, when a lead is claimed in a pond, you have to refresh to be able to contact them. Then once you add a campaign, you have to refresh again to see the tasks that fire. This is a bit clunky.
The app is great, but there is still some limited functionality. It would be great to access and claim leads from a pond on the mobile app. Also if you could get push notifications when new leads are added. Our time to lead sucks, and that's because kvCORE doesn't alert you super quickly.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
List Building for Resends - I like to resend my email campaigns to non-openers and there is no easy way to pull this list within Manticore (If did not open this email is not an option). Typically I pull the report for the campaign, then re-import my list of non-openers to create a new list.
I've been incredibly pleased with Manticore/SEI and have selected them at several companies now. It's worked in a variety of different business environments, both big and small, and everyone on both the sales and marketing side have been extremely pleased with the results
It doesn't deserve a zero because you can access contacts and get reminders to contact them. In my experience, you can not use the system for proper communication with both prospects and their spouses.
Some of the actions require you to be in a specific section before actions are available to you, like adding a list. You first have to navigate to that section for options to be available to you
Email campaigns are deployed instantly when you launch, unlike other Marketing Automation tools I've used in the past that queue emails in batches and can take hours to complete a send
I love kvCORE's support. Having the little chat feature in the bottom right of my screen the whole time I'm working takes away any stress or worry about using it. When I first started using it, I learned its features by clicking and trying things, and more than once I had to go into the chat support and ask how to undo or fix what I had done. I don't think I've ever waited more than 5 minutes to get a reply back and it being almost instant and right there on my screen allowed me to continue working and know immediately when my question had been answered.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Training was done online, but was one-on-one, giving me a lot of time to ask very specific product questions. They also walk you through setting up a test campaign, email, and landing page
It was the easiest integration and implementation that I've ever experienced. I've implemented other CRM integrated services before that provided the same services as Manticore that were extremely technical and expensive to integrate with Salesforce.com or Microsoft CRM Dynamics, or just plain couldn't integrate
Konversion and BoomTown are the only two I have used. Both have their things to recommend. Since I used Konversion, using kvCORE was simpler and I was able to upload my contacts seamlessly. This made adopting a new system easier and less likely to have a gap in contacting customers.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We migrated to Marketo approximately 6 months ago, and were extremely happy with the change. Besides the higher sticker price and the "everything's a sales pitch" communications from Marketo, we can't find any fault.
Sales Engine International - Manticore (commonly referred to as Manti-beast internally) created many problems for us. And while they did integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics environment, the software quickly ate through our purchased storage and forced us to constantly purchase more. That alone cost us many hundreds of dollars in Microsoft Dynamics CRM storage every year. And, when confronted about it, Manticore support flat out lied about how much storage their activities were taking up in our system. So, while it integrates, it's a very poor integration.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
