All Forum Posts by: Scott Costello

I'm using Investor Carrot and have been seeing 30+ leads per month from them and growing.  Took 9 plus months to get decent lead numbers but has been well worth it!  Just had a deal close from my site that netted 15k.  

I haven't used Lead Propeller but hear it's good as well.

I'm with @Tim Herndon.  Podio is awesome once you get past the initial feeling of being overwhelmed by it.  It really is simple, but there is a learning curve for sure.  

I also use Globiflow and have leveraged it to completely automate some previously annoying processes like referring leads to my partner wholesalers.

Podio is definitely a great tool.  You can make one heck of a CRM out of it for sure.  I recommend it to most people looking for a CRM.  There are some downsides to it though...

• It's not turnkey.  Meaning you can't just sign up and start entering your leads into this thing.  You have to either create your own Apps (which is easy) or learn how to use (and tweak) a prebuilt CRM that you can get from their App Market.  None of this is difficult, but takes time to figure out. 
• Podio in itself is dead simple and powerful.  However to really get the most out of what podio can do, you'll need to use third party tools like Zapier, Globiflow and others.  These other tools help you create and automate your workflows.  They make Podio truly amazing, but again take time to figure out.

There is no doubt Podio is great, but it's not for everyone.  If you have NO time or are completely tech adverse, I'd either recommend hiring someone to create your Podio CRM or try and find a ready to go system.  

Podio is basically free though. If you need advance workflows, or multi user abilities then you'll probably have to fork over some cash though, but it's not expensive at all.  All those ready build systems are always expensive it seems, so I'd give Podio a try.

Hope that gives you some perspective about Podio.  I love it!

David,

To do what you want in Podio, you'd probably have to bring in a podio extension called Globiflow.  Using globiflow you can setup a workflow that emails you a report of your "do today" tasks daily. 

I did run into the issues you talked about with my field mappings.  Because I used Zapier before hand, and Zapier doesn't support contact fields I had setup my Podio Apps with regular text fields for Contact Name, Email and Phone.  This of course works against me when now trying to hook up carrot with podio directly. 

I'm sure I could make it work but i would then have to make adjustments to my other workflows that use the individual Name, Email and Phone fields and switch them to use the contact field. Tough to justify the effort right now considering my current process works very well.

I would definitely like the ability to determine myself which fields can map to where.  There are some issues with that (Text fields being mapped to Number fields would be a problem) I know. 

I'll be happy to help you guys with anything you need testing wise.

What is the purpose of doing this for free?  You'll spend so much of your valuable time trying to make a free solution work, look good and be effective that spending $30 for a wordpress template is so very much worth it!

If you want something free, just learn how to do some HTML and CSS and you can create any look you want.  

 I've been looking for this as well Ibrahim.  Webmerge was an option, but the cost per month to print the amount of letters needed was crazy expensive!  I was thinking of writing something myself to hook into Podio's API but I'm not sure about that yet.  Would be a killer service though.  

I've heard of people using google docs (somehow), globiflow, click2mail all in some capacity to do the mail merging and mailing of the letters.

@Nettles Mason

I'm glad some of my podio videos have helped you out!  You sound like you've got this Podio thing figured out and on your way to a great system.

regarding Investor Carrot and Podio.  I just got them to activate the Podio integration on my account yesterday and will be testing it out over the next few days to see how it works. Would be great to be able to remove Zapier from the equation.  Not that Zapier is bad, it actually has worked flawlessly, but one less link in the chain is always better.

Anything else I could help you out with just let me know.  I may not know the answer but two heads are better then one when trying to figure something out.

I've been doing a lot of research about citation building over the past few weeks as well.  Yext was an option, but there are concerns about what happens to your citations if you ever decide to stop using Yext.  Some of claimed your citations go back to what they were before Yext.  Not sure I want to marry myself to a service like that.

I will say they are very aggressive interms of getting you to sign up for services and stuff.  I created an account with them accidently because they were linked up with another site (forget the name of it now) and I got 4 phone calls + multiple emails over the following week trying to sell me on their service.  

What I ended up doing was just creating citations when ever I had some free time.  I keep a google doc with all my information (website address, phone number, mailing address, business description, tags, etc..) so I can just cut and past the info into each site.  It also helps keep things consistent.

Services like Yext are great if you are changing business information fairly often (maybe for marketing purposes).  Then you only have to go to one spot and make the update.  My information shouldn't change so I'm fine setting them up myself.

Hope that helps you out.

I'd look into Podio because you can customize what you record (multiple addresses) very easily.  Then you can create a workflow with Podio or Globiflow to send off your reminders or autocreating tasks