Just wanted to reach out and see if anyone has used Infusionsoft in this capacity and what worked and what didn’t.
Essentially, we are a real estate company and we represent our contacts through the buying/selling process. This requires knowing a lot of information that can be constantly updating and changing and being able to communicate that information both internally and externally as soon as possible.
What I’d like to do, is create in the contact record a tab that has the whole sales process start to finish. I will include custom fields, some will be date fields, some will be radio button, etc - and then build automated task reminders behind it.
For example, if I input the projected list date of 11/30/17 into a custom date field, I want to have automation that says - if we are within 5 days of this date and the custom date field for “Photography Scheduled” is empty - create a critical task reminder for whoever is responsible for ensuring photography is completed.
Has anyone done anything like this before? Did you find it more valuable than automation by stage movement? Maybe a mixture of both? Or maybe you have better luck with using the opportunity to track the progress?
Any feedback would be appreciated!
Thanks!
Hm… I wanted to at least start the discussion. If you created a tab of custom fields, maybe you could utilize an internal form. If you create an ‘internal form’ in a campaign, and then head to the contact records form section, the internal form should pre-populate with any existing data from the fields that are on it. Allowing you to see existing info for that contact and make changes / add info and submit to update the contact’s record. Some of our other community members may have some other ideas to help with this, but I at least wanted to get the idea ball rolling.
So our experience with the real estate industry has shown that the problem for that industry isn’t so much ‘if’ information can be stored in infusionsoft but rather that a single contact my be involved in multiple property interests. This presents the need to have individual work flow and followup regarding each for a single contact. While opportunities are well geared to managing individual workflows, the design of the UI makes it difficult to manage multiple opportunities on a single contact without great effort. For this we have implemented a code solution that allows for many opportunities (representing each property interest on a contact individually) automatically through campaigns rather than the single, manual limitations otherwise seen. To my knowledge and from my experience, that is the only practical solution for this industry specifically.
That is definitely something that we have experienced before in the way we use Infusionsoft now. So I could see us running into this in a big way if we try to manage the operational workflow through Infusionsoft. Especially in automating client communication based on input in custom fields - we would essentially have to erase everything from the previous transaction and start new. We could do a checklist in opportunities and have multiple but then we would lose campaign automation - like sending an email out with a deadline to the client based on a custom field because you can’t do that for opportunities - does that thought process make sense?
That’d be a great way to start with it initially - I could make an internal form for each stage of the process and it could send the information over to the custom field. The big question is, does it make sense to use Infusionsoft in a project management capacity like this? Is it possible…yeah probably with extensive building, but when you think Infusionsoft, do you think of it as a tool for maintaining an operational work flow?
I have this same issue. It is problematic that the opportunities pipeline and the client campaign section are separate. I’m a lawyer and have a certain process/checklist that I follow for each client, but there is not an effective way to track this type of process in Infusionsoft. It is a huge gap in the software.