I just left the NAA Education Conference in San Francisco where I’ve been learning and sharing with thousands of my fellow colleagues in the industry. I also attended the MTEC Conference for the first time which is a really great place to see where technology is heading in our industry.

Three things stood out to me:

1. The sharing economy is here to stay. I wish I could predict how market forces, regulatory decisions and industry policy will resolve themselves. But like file sharing in the '90s and rating sites in the ‘00s, it’s generally a fool’s errand to try to stop technological and sociological macro forces. There were several short-term stay sharing companies I ran into, and also a few looking at sharing other resources. The most intriguing, at least for urban markets, is parking spot sharing. The bottom line is that sharing is going on, so I continue to advocate that we figure out how to leverage this trend rather than resist it.

2. The sales conversation I’ve been advocating we start for at least the past two years might just be beginning. The panel I moderated, “How the Zero Moment of Truth Requires Us to Change Sales,” was standing room only (maybe as many as 350). More important than the attendee count was the quality of the conversation. We filled a full 20 minutes of Q&A without me having to go to any of my “back up questions.” Thanks again to my panelists, Joanne Chapman-Reps of Effective Leadership Solutions and Jason Whittington of the Gene B. Glick Company. If you’re interested, you can get the slides, showing the results Glick got here.

3. I think I’ve talked about this before, but the age of CRM is finally upon us. New entrants from a year ago like LeaseHawk and Showpro (full disclosure: I am an investor in AnyoneHome which developed and sells Showpro) are now much more mature and branching out their capabilities. Rainmaker’s Intelligent Lead Management (ILM) CRM is about to hit the market (full disclosure: Rainmaker is a client of mine though I do not currently have any scope involving the design and development of ILM). And RealPage presented a panel on lead scoring that I believe has more implications for understanding prospect behavior and thus informing CRM than for anything else.

Bonus fourth takeaway: Data continues to be more and more important to every operator's success. From the aforementioned attempts at lead scoring based on “big data” principles, to the data-driven reasons for changing our approach to sales, to the session on managing and getting the most from BI; data continues to take front stage. If you don’t have a good business-driven data strategy, you’re falling behind.

So here’s to getting the most out of the second half of the year, and I’ll report back on the fall series of conferences. Thanks again to Doug Culkin, Clark Ebbert, Sarah Laws and everyone at NAA who made this possible. Also a shout out to Steve Lefkovits, Keeley Drever and the crew at Linnell Taylor Marketing for making MTEC as impactful as it was.