by Justin Colby July 27, 2017

How to Successfully Utilize Podio

No business can survive if it doesn’t have clearly defined workflows that the entire team can follow. Workflows are what enable everyone to be on the same page and take action on the multiple steps it takes to process a new lead. This session is aimed at helping you see how Pat’s company does all of that and more using Podio. It’s an amazing system that is very user-friendly and easy to learn. Find out how to use it for your business, on this episode.

If you can use Facebook, you can use Podio. Click To Tweet

Almost everyone who has internet access has spent some time on Facebook. That’s part of what makes Podio so great. Its interface and use are very much like Facebook so it makes the learning curve very simple. You can use the system to do everything from receiving incoming calls and leads to closing a deal, including the attachment and use of all your paperwork and contacts. It’s simple, streamlined, and powerful. Find out how to use it on this coaching session.

Everything starts as an incoming call. Click To Tweet

In every real estate wholesaling company the deal flow begins with an incoming call. Whether it came from a Craigslist ad or a bandit sign or a mailer – when a person calls in they need to go directly into the workflow so someone on the team can follow up. In this coaching call, Pat explains how his Podio system is set up and integrated with a service called Zapier to take the information from every incoming call into the Podio workflow so team members can begin to act on it. It’s a flawless, easy way to ensure every person who contacts you gets a returned phone call quickly. Find out more by watching.

Step by step the connections are made so the entire team is able to work on a lead. Click To Tweet

Once a prospective seller is in the system the team goes into action. Podio is set up so that team assignments are made automatically – or manually when needed – to ensure that a step by step process is followed every single time. That way nothing gets overlooked, nobody misses a step, and the entire process goes from lead to close, flawlessly. It’s an amazing system with Podio at the heart of it. Find out how to use it, on this coaching call.

You can get the exact setup for your Podio system that Pat’s team uses. Click To Tweet

After using Podio for a while, Pat and his team realized that they needed some very specific tweaks made to their system in order to make it work exactly as they needed it to work. So Pat found a programmer who could make those tweaks for him and now everything is seamless and powerful. Pat wants you to succeed so he’s offering you the contact information of the programmer who will make the same tweaks to your system for a very low cost. Find out how to connect with this programmer to setup your Podio system by watching this coaching session.

Outline of this great episode

[0:01] The overview of the Podio interface – very user friendly.
[1:16] The calendar function and how it connects to other systems.
[1:40] The use of the task bar and how to use it.
[2:46] How to use the Direct Messaging system.
[3:45] The use of the feed, tagging, and following workflows.
[4:20] Everything starts as an incoming call using Zapier.
[7:25] The workflow followed to process an incoming call.
[11:00] Easily add pictures, make notes, include inspections, etc.
[14:44] The Deal Board is all about closing properties.
[16:33] How you can get the exact Podio setup Pat uses with his team.
[18:13] What is Zapier and why is it part of the system?

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

Podio
Zapier
Ring Central
Call Rail
Andrea@reww.com – get your setup like Pat’s system.

The Monday Mindset & Wednesday Wisdom calls are group coaching calls included in the REWW Academy. These live calls are hosted bi-weekly by Justin Colby and Pat Precourt and cover a specific topic each session – ending with live Q&A at the end of each call.

These calls are designed to empower students to be effective entrepreneurs, creating business that thrive and make money through real estate investing. Students are encouraged to attend the calls and bring any struggles or questions they have about business or real estate.

The REWW Academy program combines our complete suite of software applications with our personalized coaching and a community of like-minded entrepreneurs to provide you with the most comprehensive real estate investing program available.

If you would like to learn more about the REWW Academy, attending these calls live, or learning fast effective ways to get involved in real estate investing.

Below is the full transcription of the Step 10 in the REI Sales System Wednesday Wisdom call with Justin Colby.

Justin Colby:

Alright alright, so here we are in one of our many workspaces [inaudible 00:00:06] PWB, that is my company, Phoenix Wealth Builders. This is the Podio workspace and, as you can see, it has a little bit of a feel to like a Facebook, right. Where you have an activity feed that you can scroll down, these are all things that are happening live time. As you can see notes are being made three hours ago on this property, a new lead, Tim Vaughn, came in three days ago. You know three hours ago a new lead, Rebecca Lindstrom, came in. Dave’s calling him now; he left a voicemail.

So, as you can see, it’s very very user friendly and it really can be very advantageous; especially when you’re trying to track what you’re doing with your leads, right? And what notes, and where your notes are going, and all of that kind of stuff.

So this is one of our workspaces, we have, gosh … All of these workspaces are workspaces that we use for our marketing, but this just happens to be one of them. And so what I want to do is I want to walk through with you how to effectively use this, right? And so there is a calendar associated with Podio, it is right here, right? So you have your calendar right here. You can open up your calender, it absolutely connects to your Google calendars, it connects to anything by simply clicking this and then you can actually invite people’s calendars in here. Okay? So very very simple to do. Make sense?

So now, if I just go back to the activity, I also utilize the task bar quite frequently. Like if I wanna create a task for my acquisition manager, you can say call so and so and then I can pick a person to task. Let’s say I want Dave Rosefield, it’ll automatically populate him. When is it gonna be due? It needs to be due today. At what time? Let’s say 5:00 p.m.

Boom.

And then here I can give a little bit of notes, and I can create a task, and what that does, it automatically goes over here to his notifications and remains in here under tasks. So, as you can see, the notification part, you can, you know, anytime something’s happening you can see what’s going on in there. Okay? So this is very useful.

If you wanna direct message people, IM people, you can IM people in here. Right? So, again, you can- you know, you guys don’t have a team the size of mine. Most of you wouldn’t. But there’s a lot of great ways to communicate via this tool, right? Via this tool.

So, let’s go back to the workspace that I was just showing you guys, and see if we can close this real quick. So, as you can see, obviously it has a feed like that. Now, I talked to you about the calendar already, obviously here’s the tasks I just talked to you about the tasks. Some of these need to be cleaned up obviously, but then you have notifications also when a task is given to you, you get a notification, and then you can put it right in your calendar.

So very very easy to use. This is a feed, just like Facebook. You can type anything in, you can tag people, Anthony, right? Now, whatever I just wrote, I share that and it’s gonna tag them; the same way it would in Facebook, right? So, again, you can attach a file, if you wanna attach a file, a document, a picture. Very very simple to use, especially those who are familiar with the Facebook or the how to use a Facebook, right?

So, very simple.

You know, what I wanna start doing now, is I wanna jump into the actual usefulness of where everything happens. Everything starts as an incoming call. Now, as I click on this, you’re gonna see these are all the incoming calls. Now what we have is we have a third party, like a … it’s called Zapier, right? And Zapier, what Zapier does, is it pushes this call, automatically it pushes it from an incoming call into a seller lead. Okay? So I never really go into incoming calls [inaudible 00:04:54] but it needs to be there, cause that’s where all of the incoming calls come to. But Zapier actually pushes that automatically into a seller lead.

Now, as you can see, calls that are coming in today, some of them haven’t even been reached yet, right? So there’s no name yet because we don’t have contact with them yet. So if you take a look at this one, this is how it shows up. Okay?

Seller’s name is 7072493490. Well, we would call the seller back, the seller would say her name is Jessica, or his name is John. We then populate that and start filling out some of the information: the property address, the email, the phone number, right? And then single family home, condo, town home. All of these things as you click them start to populate the marketing … Excuse me, marketing campaign is PWB Owner Occupied, that’s the list we sent it to. So that is the marketing campaign.

If it came into a different marketing campaign, and you have multiple … That’s not where I wanted to go. But, if you have multiple, then that’s where it’d go, right? So, as I go back in here, all of the notes are said right here. So Dave did contact this person. Said take me off list. Bummer, I was excited to call the 707 number. That’s his note. You type in your notes here on the right hand side, you click add, and it will add another note here. And it will say that you wrote the note, right?

So it really is helpful for accountability, note taking, you know staging a lead. This one happened to be a take me off list, next action is to opt them out, no so on, right? But if you got more information about the home, you’d put in bed bath, you’d put in the size, the year built; you’re really able to- now the seller lead. You’re able to give a lot of information about the property, right? As much as you possibly can, okay?

The nice part about Podio is it actually- That person did leave a voicemail and it automatically, like I told you, the incoming call automatically pushes to seller lead. Well it attaches the voicemail along side of it and you actually can play this voicemail right here, right? So very very useful.

If I go back to seller leads … I’m gonna chose one that did answer and we did get, so Rebecca. Same thing happened, she called in; but as you can see, they called the phone number, got her name as Rebecca, put in her address, right? No contact made. As you can see on the right hand side, he said he left a voicemail. So then he’s gonna do a follow up contact and choose a follow up time. He put a Zillow link in when he was doing just a quick analysis, so to speak, just going and finding the home, looking at the home. He put the link in and he will then … You know, again, the voicemail is in there; but he will do a follow up and he will task himself. As you can see on the right hand side here, he added a task to try Rebecca again. No contact, right? So he’s gonna task himself another call later on in the future.

Wanna try to get one that possibly was filled out a little bit more. Okay. So, name, address, owner on tax record is John, blah blah blah, he definitely put some more notes in here, obviously. And, as you can see as we go down, the marketing campaign was Absentee Owner PWB, initial contact was made, appointment was set, go on appointment. He updated the Zillow, he put that it’s a two bedroom, one bath, 962 square feet, year built 1939, which is really old for Phoenix. He put the comps in that he ran, he put his notes in here, ARV range is $109 to square foot to $166 a square foot; but given an active underwriting, multiple offers, or under contract, multiple offers in a few days.

So he thinks 145,000 is the ARV. If a rehaber puts this at 80 and puts 30 grand into it, resold at 145, they can make a 15%. We try to underwrite at 10%, so a 15% would be great. ARV’s a 145, repairs, all of this, right? Remember, we’re still in just seller leads. We haven’t even started going through the next transition. Right? Voicemails attached and away we go.

Now and then he’s set an appointment, rit? So an appointment has been set and that went to the calendar. Again, very very useful stuff. So, if we just go back to the workspace, now, as you see, the seller lead went into an appointment. So, he set an appointment. This is again appointments [inaudible 00:10:08] calender, so Tim Vaughn. There you see it, right there. They have an appointment on the 1st at noon, which is an hour and fifteen minutes ago, right? So he had an appointment, he might even still be at that appointment, as you can see.

But then next would be an inspection. So he’s on the appointment, which would be the inspection. And so, likely what he is going to be doing here, as we … there we go. He will be going on the inspection, then he will be filling out inspection. So what I can do, is I can add an inspection, I can say Tim Vaughn, right, and all of a sudden it’s gonna populate, right? So he is on it, it’s gonna be Tim Vaughn, and now we have the property address sitting right there.

I can also put it in here, I can put more notes in underwriting; but then I go through my inspection. What condition was everything in? Good, fair, poor, missing, not applicable. Right? And then he will be putting his notes in here for the exterior, the neighborhood notes, he will put in here, right? Type of condition of flooring, he’ll put his notes in here, and it’s just like email, right? You have a way to write.

And then, what he will do, is he will attach pictures, by choosing attach file. He will have the pictures on his laptop, or desktop, and he will attach the pictures, right? So again, very very easy stuff to do.

Now, let’s take a look at what it looks at the end, when you have a deal board. This is where deals are getting closed, or in contract. We’ve done our inspections. So let’s look at 66. See if I can go down here … So, as you can see, everyone’s making notes to the right. Let’s see if I can go down and get my inspection tab.

[inaudible 00:12:04] so again, deal board, you fill this out. You know, the contract dates, when the inspections over, actual close date, property description, what title company lockbox, buy price, marketed price, who the buyer is, right? [inaudible 00:12:22] freedom achievers, [inaudible 00:12:24] when … again, campaign, Justin Colby campaign. Here are the files. Here’s the purchase contract. Here’s the AMD, the assignment, tags … Darn it, I wanted to be able to show you the inspection, so maybe … This wasn’t the one I wanted. So let’s go here.

So let’s do an inspection, what it should look like, right? So, something a little bit older. But as you can see, all of these connect to each other as you start to fill out at an inspection. So let’s look at Cortes. This is what a filled out inspection would look like, right? And then we even put a Dropbox link of all the pictures in there. But he fills it out, puts in any additional notes that he might have. As you can see, here are the pictures of Cortes, right? So you have it all in one place. You don’t have to go to different places, right? And so the nice part about that is you can do new inspection, you can modify the template, you can do, you know, print, clone, email this item, download all the files. You can really be interactive here, right? And adding an inspections very simple. As I just showed you, right? We did the Tim Vaughn. Very very simple.

And then, really you deal with the deal board. This is where you’re basically gonna close. Now all of these other ones … RingCentral is in there, but that basically just pushed- it gets pushed to incoming calls, moves forward. You can have your buyers list here. You can have your offers, the deals that you’ve made offers on, that may or may not be open. You can have your marketing campaigns, if we open this it’ll show marketing campaigns that we have going. We have 24 different campaigns going. On going, live drop, happening now, right? That’s why we have so many different workspaces. So there are the, you know, campaigns we have.

We have MLS offers, mail stats. You know, so we have a lot of different stuff here; but really what you want to be looking at is: your incoming calls should automatically be pushed to seller leads. Seller leads should be scheduling an appointment, then going on an inspection. And then you have your deal board. And again, your deal board is all about closing the deal, the marketing the deal, right? So we’ll go in here real quick and look at Oregon, I think Oregon closes tomorrow, right?

So here’s the deal board. Buyer [inaudible 00:15:10] close of escrow, will be tomorrow. That is a note Eddy made an hour ago at Fidelity. Found a buyer. So under contract and then, if we didn’t have a buyer yet, this would be clicked and you’d be out to go find a buyer. Contract was accepted January 25th 1017, inspection ends on the 15th of February, actual close date will be the 2nd of March. We bought it at 109, market it, and final sales price at 121.5, right? Profit to be 12.5, which is great. Happy about it. And then you can put earnest money received? Yes. Marketing checklist? Yes. Notes, any notes you wanna have in here. Here’s obviously the holiday campaign. What campaign it came from.

Obviously the files are all gonna be here. Any tags need to be given. And that, guys, is the whole flow of Podio. Again, you can talk to people over here, direct chat. You can- when you tag people, they get notifications. This is very very easy to use. On the left you have certain stats that can be collected, and the best part about this guys is, Podio, in and of itself, is free. Now, I paid a guy money to build it out the way that I want it. If you guys want my exact Podio, you will have to pay him. It will not be very expensive, I think it’s only $100; but he is actually gonna have to go and build it out. So this is not … I’m not selling anything. It’s really a cost that I’ve paid to him and that you guys have to pay. I paid a lot more, right? I’ve spent a lot, spent thousands of dollars with him building this out; but if you just wanna replicate it, he can replicate it for you for $100.

And you can have the exact same layout here. You’re gonna need to have phone service, like RingCentral, or CallRail. You are gonna likely wanna have a product called Zapier that you’ll need; which is what makes things push automatically between here. And you know there’s a lot you can do. I have friends that have built this out so big and robust and you can send out offers from here. You can send out text messages, and chats, and you can call people from here. I didn’t build it out that big because I want- I believe simple is better.

But guys, this is very very useful, and hopefully that was good content for you guys to learn how to use Podio. So, with that said, any questions on Podio? How to use it? Anything at all before we wrap it up?

What’s up Dave Miller? Curtis Guy? Joe [inaudible 00:18:09]?

Debra says, “What did you say? Zackview?”

Oh, Zapier. Z-A-P-I-E-R. I think it’s like $19 a month and Zapier is what connects all of these tabs, right? And so that’s what pushes them automatically the way I was showing you.

Thank you, Nelson, I appreciate it. You got it Debra, my pleasure. What up Dave? What up Robert, how are you? Yes, Robert, if you email Andrea, at REWWW.com, she will get you direction with Joseph, who will set up a Podio account for you just like mine. Again, you will need Zapier for those pushes, and obviously you’ll need to have a phone line set up, whether it’s RingCentral, CallRail, or any of those.

This is recorded and will be on the membership site, yes [inaudible 00:19:16] absolutely. Under Weekly Wednesday Wisdoms.

Paul Knight, right on buddy.

All right, all right, seems like there’s not too many questions. You’re very welcome, Debra. Right on. All right guys, we’re gonna wrap up. Happy Wednesday, go have a killer week, and I will see you guys next week on our Weekly Wednesday Wisdoms.

Peace.

You’re welcome, Robert. Really appreciate it. See you guys.