What’s New in Sisu, March 2021 | Message Center, Vendor Portal and Other Updates
The big updates to the Sisu platform over the last month or so stem around a few key ideas:
- That Sisu contains all the key data for your transactions.
- With that data you can streamline not only the tasks that need to occur inside a transaction, but also the communication that happens inside a transaction—including communication with your vendors and agents.
- That all of this creates a virtuous cycle where your best system for reporting, accountability and growth is also your system for operations.
Let’s dig into the specific updates that play into these key ideas 🙏
Sisu messaging and notifications center makes communication easier inside of Sisu
When you log into the platform, you’ll notice an additional menu item across the top of your screen. It’s the little alarm bell pictured below:
Which brings out a nice, concise view of both your messages and notifications:
Inside of the message center, you’ll be able to:
Stay on top of the high-level with each transaction. Each transaction has a “comments” thread where you can leave general notes, ideas, and pertinent communications around a transaction. You can leave a copy of important messages from your clients as well as @tag people who need to be notified of important events surrounding a transaction.
You’ll be able to go deeper with specific tasks. There is also a comment section on individual tasks, where you can collaborate in-depth on tasks surrounding a transaction or tasks where multiple parties are involved.
Use it as a cadence for accountability with your one-on-one meetings. There is actually a new “team chat” feature (explained a little later in this article) which will allow you to drop coaching notes on a weekly cadence, meaning you can use the message center to document your accountability meetings and calls.
Highlight performance, achievement and key transactional events. By switching from messages to notifications with the top toggle bar, you can jump over to system-generated notifications. For example, you might use admin>notifications to create a “Boo-ya! New Listing Signed!” notification that goes out to the entire team whenever someone takes a new listing. This would be highlighted here.
Of course, any @mention will still go into your inbox so that you don’t miss a beat—however, managing this communication inside of Sisu will prove to be a huge advantage for you.
Why?
It’s similar to the teams who have heavily adopted the tasks and transaction management elements inside of Sisu. Not only are they massively cutting down on duplicate data entry, but they’re also cutting down on “dead data”—meaning, data that cannot be reported on.
You have to cross your t’s and dot your i’s somewhere. When you do it inside of Sisu, you just get the side effect of amazing reporting, accountability and competition without really putting in extra effort or data entry.
Brand New Vendor Portal (Beta)!
There’s alway been an element of Sisu that helps you work closer with your vendors—mainly, this is reporting that helps you see exactly how much business you’re sending them (useful for negotiating partnerships and MSAs) and forms with transaction data and documents that can quickly and easily be sent to different parties on a transaction.
The new vendor portal actually invites your key vendor partners into the transaction, meaning you can:
- Assign them tasks
- Mention them and communicate with them via the messaging center above
- Offer them a level of reporting on how much business you’re sending them and a breakdown of which agents are sending that business.
The vendor portal is actually a separate login that your vendor would pay for that would give them access to any transactions you or any other team on Sisu assigns them.
Mortgage companies who want to go further with the product can actually purchase an account similar to our real estate platform, where they can set goals, hold contests, and run reporting very similar to what is available in your Sisu platform today.
The overall theme we're seeing here is this: teams who are able to get their preferred vendor partners into Sisu are able to offer a much tighter experience to their clients while also saving time and effort that would otherwise be wasted on duplicate entry or inefficient communication.
Currently we are testing the new vendor portal with only mortgage, escrow, title, and your attorney vendors. Reach out to coordinate a discussion with you and your key vendors to eliminate texting, emailing, and phone calls with in-Sisu collaboration.
Use team chat for non-transactional notes (i.e coaching notes) and accountability messaging
Ever have a great one-on-one with a team member and wish you could just pick up where you left off the next week?
That’s one great application for our new “team chat” features.
Previously, all communication was tied either to one transaction or one task. This made it tough to leave little coaching notes in the system, create a log of accountability, jab a friend about an ongoing contest, etc.
Team chat is pretty simple. Just click on the message bubble towards the top of the message center:
And you’ll open up a place to @mention anyone, about anything, like this:
Add key dates and vendors to your kanban transaction cards
Most Sisu clients find a ton of operational value in the visual, kanban style approach to managing transactions:
We’ve added some flexibility into deciding what goes onto these cards. You can now head over to admin>team settings>card preferences to add additional dates to the cards, as well as toggle if you’d like your key vendors to show up on them.
As a reminder, you can customize these stages and tags from admin>tasks>transaction stages or admin>tasks>transaction tags.
Find dates quicker with dynamic dates and the new date range selector
Reporting in Sisu means sifting through a lot of different dates and reports to get exactly the data you’re looking for.
We’ve made this easier by adding a new, quick-grab date selector with dynamic date ranges.
You can select a custom range, like always, but you can also refer quickly to date ranges like “this month” or “this week”, “last month” or “last week”, etc.
Where this gets especially helpful is in creating your transaction filters. Rather than creating saved filters that need to be updated frequently, you could create a filter with date ranges that are constantly updating. For example, “closed” and “last month” would give you a report for the transactions that closed in the prior month. And when the month changes, it will update to the month that you’re currently in (or the prior month, if you choose “last month”, etc).
What next?
If you’re wanting to get started with Sisu or take your existing Sisu account to the next level, we have all kinds of options.
Our knowledge base has in-depth articles and videos on just about every topic you can imagine in the system.
Our Facebook Mastermind Group is where you can celebrate success, ask questions, and join our weekly mastermind calls on Wednesdays at 10:00 Mountain Time.
We have an implementation coaching and white-glove implementation team that you can pay for services to help set up your Sisu account. Chat with a team member about it for free here.
If you’re just getting started with Sisu, book a call with our sales team here.
Have any other feedback or questions? Drop them in the chat box on the bottom right hand corner of the website.
Thanks being the best community out there and watch for more updates to come from us!
