That Real Estate Tech Guy

Episode 4 - CRM chat: John Whitfield from InvestorFuse

September 28, 2022 Jordan Samuel Fleming
Episode 4 - CRM chat: John Whitfield from InvestorFuse
That Real Estate Tech Guy
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That Real Estate Tech Guy
Episode 4 - CRM chat: John Whitfield from InvestorFuse
Sep 28, 2022
Jordan Samuel Fleming

In the fourth installment of That Real Estate Tech Guy host Jordan Samuel Fleming talks with John Whitfield, CEO of InvestorFuse. John tells us the story of his beginnings with Podio, and his reasons for building his own CRM software. He also describes why real estate investors need a CRM, the concept of “no lead left behind”, and how to use the action based system of InvestorFuse to infinitely scale your real estate investor business. 

“Get a business phone. Do not let anybody that works for you call from their personal cell phone. Ever. It's most important that you control that communication method.” - John Whitfield

John stresses the importance of separating business from personal with your team. Getting business emails and phone numbers are key in setting up your real estate investing business for success. Divide your leads into groups, assign roles to users, set viewing permissions all at the click of a button. John has designed InvestorFuse to combine multiple actions into one situation. Usability is the foundation of the action based system and allows for users to improve efficiency through simplicity.

In the episode you’ll learn why every successful real estate investment business reaches a point where scaling is the only logical next step. From the beginning, John created InvestorFuse with a vision for infinite scalability capabilities: if your business increases in volume, performance remains unhindered. Furthermore, One of the most important aspects of a CRM for real estate investors is that your team finds the system easy to use. John describes why InvestorFuse prioritized streamlined functionality and usability when building their CRM for real estate investors.  

About John Whitfield

John Whitfield has a background in business consulting services starting at Apple back in 2011 doing full IT consulting. Fast forward almost ten years later, and John has made a name for himself in the CRM software industry as the CEO and co-founder of InvestorFuse. Founded in 2015 InvestorFuse is a CRM, built off of the cloud database tool Podio. It is designed to help real estate investors manage their leads, manage their team, and close deals with simplicity. 

Find John on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/johndwhitfield/

Find InvestorFuse on their: 

About That Real Estate Tech Guy Podcast

That Real Estate Tech Guy is the only podcast focused on helping Real Estate Investors make better technology decisions to close more deals and make more money. It is your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Informed by decades of REI and technology experience, Jordan gets into the details with seasoned tech and real estate industry leaders to bring you the lessons you need to get ahead. Learn from guest successes and failures, get the inside scoop on the next big trends, and always walk away with actionable ideas to build faster, better, and more profitably.

Interested in being a guest? Head to thatrealestatetechguy.com and let us know!

For more information about smrtPhone, the only all-in-one CRM phone system check out https://www.smrtphone.io/ 




Show Notes Transcript

In the fourth installment of That Real Estate Tech Guy host Jordan Samuel Fleming talks with John Whitfield, CEO of InvestorFuse. John tells us the story of his beginnings with Podio, and his reasons for building his own CRM software. He also describes why real estate investors need a CRM, the concept of “no lead left behind”, and how to use the action based system of InvestorFuse to infinitely scale your real estate investor business. 

“Get a business phone. Do not let anybody that works for you call from their personal cell phone. Ever. It's most important that you control that communication method.” - John Whitfield

John stresses the importance of separating business from personal with your team. Getting business emails and phone numbers are key in setting up your real estate investing business for success. Divide your leads into groups, assign roles to users, set viewing permissions all at the click of a button. John has designed InvestorFuse to combine multiple actions into one situation. Usability is the foundation of the action based system and allows for users to improve efficiency through simplicity.

In the episode you’ll learn why every successful real estate investment business reaches a point where scaling is the only logical next step. From the beginning, John created InvestorFuse with a vision for infinite scalability capabilities: if your business increases in volume, performance remains unhindered. Furthermore, One of the most important aspects of a CRM for real estate investors is that your team finds the system easy to use. John describes why InvestorFuse prioritized streamlined functionality and usability when building their CRM for real estate investors.  

About John Whitfield

John Whitfield has a background in business consulting services starting at Apple back in 2011 doing full IT consulting. Fast forward almost ten years later, and John has made a name for himself in the CRM software industry as the CEO and co-founder of InvestorFuse. Founded in 2015 InvestorFuse is a CRM, built off of the cloud database tool Podio. It is designed to help real estate investors manage their leads, manage their team, and close deals with simplicity. 

Find John on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/johndwhitfield/

Find InvestorFuse on their: 

About That Real Estate Tech Guy Podcast

That Real Estate Tech Guy is the only podcast focused on helping Real Estate Investors make better technology decisions to close more deals and make more money. It is your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Informed by decades of REI and technology experience, Jordan gets into the details with seasoned tech and real estate industry leaders to bring you the lessons you need to get ahead. Learn from guest successes and failures, get the inside scoop on the next big trends, and always walk away with actionable ideas to build faster, better, and more profitably.

Interested in being a guest? Head to thatrealestatetechguy.com and let us know!

For more information about smrtPhone, the only all-in-one CRM phone system check out https://www.smrtphone.io/ 




Jordan Fleming:

I can tell you one thing. Technology is the single most important aspect of every business that has successfully scaled.

Narrator:

It's time for That Real Estate Tech Guy! It's your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Each week, you'll hear from real estate investors who have been there and done that and find out their favorite technology tips. Listen in as Jordan speaks with tech companies and learns about new technologies and new ideas that will help you scale your business. And now join your host Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of smrtPhone for this week's episode.

Jordan Fleming:

Okay, let's kick off with this episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy. My co-pilot for this episode is John Whitfield, CEO of InvestorFuse. Really excited to have him on the show. John, why don't you give us a little rundown of you? And of course, InvestorFuse?

John Whitfield:

Absolutely. So yeah, my name is John, the CEO and co-founder here at InvestorFuse, we've been around for about six years now, we've gone through several iterations of our product, but it ultimately is a CRM, for real estate investors to help them manage their leads, manage their team, we've kind of been through the whole ride of Podio, and then decided to build our own software. So really kind of a deep experience into how do you you know, create a product that people love? And then keep building upon that? So that you absolutely you create, you know, a great piece of software.

Jordan Fleming:

Yeah, I'm really excited to get into this, actually. Because, you know, there are so many different CRMs out there, so many different options for people. You mentioned Podio. And there's, you know, there's, there's, there's a myriad of different options out there. And I always like to explore, you know, I think, I think there's no one size fits all. And I think there are people who, you know, who match up well, in how they work with some systems, or the where they are in their journey sometimes works out really well, if we're gonna kind of if we're gonna like capture a little bit about how you see InvestorFuse fitting in to that kind of overall CRM landscape. What is what is the sort of what are the things that set you guys apart? And the type of people who really benefit from it?

John Whitfield:

Yeah so, I mean, I'll answer the second part of that first. I mean, we, you know, until recently, kind of really aimed for the, you know, moderately to experienced investor, just now we do have a plan for kind of the beginning investor, and we're, you have a lot of people on that plan and finding a lot of success. But we always kind of figured out that people find a need for us when they are generating leads. So that's always our first question to people are you generating leads? If they're not generating leads somewhere, then they're gonna be like, Why do I have this piece of software? So that's kind of the characteristic there, and, and our software is divided up into three plans. And so we go from, like the beginning, you know, one person team all the way up to you know, I got 5, 10 employees, and I need to be able to manage them. And there's features that that kind of span across all of those, those periods of time, but yeah, that's always kind of our deal. Like, a lot of people come into the real estate investing world excited about the concept of it. And you know, they'll kind of run down a checklist of applications that they should be having in the CRM seems to be on that. But until the point where they're actually generating leads, there's really not a point to have one because you Motorcycle, yeah.

Jordan Fleming:

Yeah. What are you fucking managing? I mean, don't have anything. Yeah, I had it. And then UK left the European the leads, like, let's, let's fix the problem. You know, I mean, get your license before you buy the car. I say that I usually only semi--. I'm in the middle of trying to re get my bike license, I had it years ago, Union and all sorts of shit happened. And now I'm in the European Union, and I gotta redo it all again. So I'm in the process of doing that and buying a bike at the same time. And it's like, what do I do first? It's been a while, but I mean, go back to the like, for me, like, I think, I think CRM like people, everybody talks about CRM, everybody. It's like, just, it's like what people say is just like, they just talk CRM, they say CRM, but I don't think a lot of people deeply understand why they need like, why is it so important? And what should you really be trying to focus in on with it? Right, because I think I think that sometimes it's like a catch all for everything. Yeah. And yeah, it's so what are your thoughts on like, what are your thoughts on that? Because I think I think people get it wrong a lot of times.

John Whitfield:

Yeah. You know, there's a phrase that people often talk about and certainly other CRMs and even us to a point will mark it, it's the 'no lead left behind.' That's like the slug line, right? Like, you know, no lead falling through the cracks? And, you know, we could dive into that. And I think our number one feature solves that problem for people. But what the way that I really think about it is it's insurance on your marketing spend, you're spending money to generate leads, how do you ensure that you are processing those leads correctly, or your team is processing those leads correctly to the point where you can get a deal under contract and then close it? Too often, people are just like, I need a place to put my leads. Okay, well, great, you know, you could put your leads in a spreadsheet, does that help you stay on top of your promises to every conversation that you have with a seller. And so our system is what we call an action based system. As far as I know, it's the only thing out there like this. And that is that every single lead in the system only ever has one action at a time. That's how you should yeah, and that's how you change the status. So oftentimes, you'll go into a CRM and you got like the ability to put tasks on it, right. And then so your task is like, I gotta call the seller next week. And then once you do that, you can complete the task, but you got to remember to go update the deal stage, which is like a separate field that you got to change. We combine that all into one situation where when you go in, and you have a follow up action, and it's due next week, or let's say it's due today, and I go to complete it, it walks me through inputting information around that follow up, and then it will say, what are you going to do next, you could follow up again, and that often, you know, is the case, right? You're touching base with them constantly seeing that their opinion has changed. But let's say it moves to an appointment. So you set the appointment in that action flow, and it will then update the deal stage of the opportunity. And it you know, our customers love that because it's so easy to train people on it, like every but like you just bring somebody into the system. It's like literally just go on your action page and do exactly what it says it's a whole like walkthrough. It's like a wizard that walks you through exactly what to do. And then nothing, you know, it really doesn't fall through the cracks. Because if you have an overdue action, then that is a promise you made to a seller that you are not delivering it. Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Fleming:

And so you can then simplify, like, because I do I love I remember when we first talked about this, you sort of first gave me the understanding of of this kind of single point, the single action, right, because I think so many times people overcomplicate things, and you know, the actual process of for instance, wholesaling is pretty fucking simple. It's it's not a complex process. And you can overcomplicate it, and when you're working a lead, what's the point of looking six months down the line? If the next action is next week, like, Who gives a shit? I mean, like, who cares? So I've always liked that. So does that mean that essentially if I'm like, let's look at it two ways, then. Because, you know, as you say, if you're starting out, and you don't have leads who what does it matter? Yeah, but the you know, if you then do have leads a CRM, like InvestorFuse becomes important. But then there's the scaling of the business, right? And scaling, all of us who have scaled a business, I mean, you me, and everyone we've done it know that, that it's the the scalings that where the hard part is, and where the systems really come into their own. So how does it like, how does the system like InvestorFuse? You know, I understand how it helps me as a guy working leads. But how does it help me as an owner, building a team of like three acquisitions people and transaction coordinator and a dispo specialist?

John Whitfield:

Yeah, absolutely. So that's the fun part about the system is it does actually like scale with you as you start to grow up. So there's several features that we have in play that help you bring on more people. The first one is called groups. So it's a way to divide up your leads into certain groups. And so you know, we've found that once you get to that point where I'm bringing on multiple people, you start to put them in roles, right, like Junior acquisitions or follow up specialist, and you want to divide your leads, you want to be able to say these leads are the most important leads, and so like, let's say PPC leads, right? They need to go to my top person, I need to assign them to that, while you're in the campaign. You can say these leads need to specifically assigned to my top group, which includes my top closers. And then they go into that group. They're the only ones that can see it. They're the only ones who can grab leads from it, where, you know, maybe your direct mail bucket

Jordan Fleming:

So it's a specific bucket where any of your top people can go and grab a lead.

John Whitfield:

Yeah, it's it's grab, I mean, so you can do it multiple ways, but leaving them unassigned, we have found is like the best thing because it encourages competition into your team. So it sits there, everybody receives a notification, hey, there's a new... first person to it. That's the one that gets it. And then you can restrict access. So you can say that the only thing that people can see in your entire system are the leads that they have grabbed and own, they can't see a single lead anywhere else that anybody else has on their plate. And there's rules to like, let's say they didn't complete an action, in three days, you could have that released back to the group. And now somebody else can go so

Jordan Fleming:

so you so essentially, because I one thing, I've always like, you know, you know, my background, I used to build CRMs, inside of Podio. And I remember, you know, we would always when we got into a situation where you would have a bucket like this, the first question the owner, the guys who are getting asked to build the system would be, how do I stop guys just taking leads? Or how do I tell you? How do I stop these guys just just go in and take them out? And I my answer was usually, well, you're gonna see that, and they're not gonna do a good job at them, and you're gonna get fucking rid of them. But what do you think from a system point of view? Like, how does is that the same principle you guys use? It's like, you'll see that and you're gonna get rid of these guys.

John Whitfield:

I mean, yeah, so we actually report it into we have a scorecard element for an employee scorecard. So your entire team is tracked. And one of the elements on there is how many opportunities were automatically released from them. And that means that they left an action overdue for too long, and then that opportunity got released for somebody else to go grab that. So it shows up on their scorecard. And you can see, oh, my gosh, this person had 30 leads last week, they got automatically released, something's wrong. So yeah, it does show in that, and it is a conversation that a manager needs to have. But we all know like, especially nowadays with how many people are in this marketplace, like speed is of the essence. So the system will automatically remove it from their plate, you know, somebody else can go grab it, take care of that lead. And then the next week, when you look at the last week's results, you can be like, this employee needs to have a conversation. Because this is not right.

Jordan Fleming:

And, you know, another another thing I wanted to you know, that I think when people the two things that I usually get asked about the most when people ask me about CRMs and they say, What do I think the most two most important parts of CRM are? Number one I say is the follow up. Is is not letting anything slip. And I think you talked eloquently about that element. And the second is kind of, is tracking communication and, and getting all those conversations in there. So you know, I mean, did those two chime as at least towards the top of the things that you would say are important from a CRM point of view?

John Whitfield:

Yeah, absolutely. I think simplicity is a another part of that, that, you know, if you don't have a product, a CRM that you're using, that your team finds simple to use, easy to understand, because oftentimes, it's just I don't even know why the rule the world is salespeople, maybe not the best tech savvy. I love it when I find that tech savvy salesperson, but there's such a rare breed. And so you need to make sure that what you have is easy for people to use, and easy to understand. And we had this problem with Podio. You know, our first version of a CRM for real estate investors was built on Podio. And we would have conversations with customers and they'd be like, Man, I love your system, it helps me keep track of everything. But it took three months for my salespeople to fully understand what to do, where to go and how to use it. And that is what encouraged us to go build our own software because we wanted to make something so simple that anybody could log in and within one to two days understand how to use the system and be adept in following up with those leads and and that based off of the the surveys and the conversations that we have with customers is definitely what we have now. But yeah, going back to the ability to track the communication so I mean, we have a great integration with smrtPhone we have you know, we pride ourselves on integrating because we want to be the hub of your business we want to be able to take any place that you're generating leads any place that you have communication and bring it in together and each opportunity has its own like mini dashboard so it will show you when was it created how many touches Have you done it when was the last touch you did it and then it will give dates through the process. So when was the first appointment? When was the first verbal offer? When was the first contract? When did it get under contract? When did it get closed? And you'll see all that dates in the timeline and then same thing for communication using smrtPhone, you'll be able to see how many inbound outbound calls how many calls over a minute how many calls over five minutes and total talk time just for that opportunity are right there on the dashboard. So that you can open that up and be like alright, I feel confident like the last touch was two days ago I see the total talk time with the sellers 20 minutes, I feel like we are you know this this person who's in charge of this opportunity is effectively communicating to this person you know our position and what we can do to help solve their pain.

Jordan Fleming:

I like that, I like that. I like that knowledge, you know being able to for maybe from an even management perspective, being able to see, you know, is, you know, is this lead is this lead actually being taken care of, because so often you don't find out until it's way too late. And I think if you've got that kind of more real time metrics on your lead, you probably have the ability to understand that a lot earlier in the cycle and catch it before anything disastrous happens.

John Whitfield:

Yeah, I mean, we've had it like, just in our own business, right? Like, something, there's a red flag, and then you, you know, fire an employee or whatever. And then you go back and look at that work. And you're like, oh, this was not good. Like, there were many things back there that I should have seen. And so we're trying to provide that same early warning that same visibility into key metrics for your salespeople.

Jordan Fleming:

And that's fantastic. And I think, you know, another thing, you know, from my point of view, you know, just the takeaway of, of how important, a simple step forward, you can, you know, that you need to take, if you're gonna get serious about your business, I talk, whenever I talk to people, and they asked me questions about technology, and, you know, I owe, you know, there are 400 things you can do, I try and distill things down into very, very small amounts of, you know, small actions. Because if you look at 50,000 things, you're never going to get anywhere. And I think what I like about your you know, that the InvestorFuse methodology is this sort of streamlined, simple approach. And, and, you know, where, you know, this is my next step. Yeah. And that, that, to me is a really an important part about it. I think that's, that's, that's something that I think is very cool about how you guys have built InvestorFuse. So in terms of, you know, one other thing that people ask me all the time, when they asked me about CRM, they you get, again, the guys who are new, not so much the big deal, the guys who aren't new, they asked me about multiple markets, you know, is it gonna be easy for me to make multiple markets is gonna be easy for you to have VAs working in my system? And is or what, you know, scaling it up? How, you know, how easy is it for people to scale up into multiple markets, for instance, or, or into, you know, a larger team with InvestorFuse?

John Whitfield:

Yeah, so easy. I mean, that was the foundation of our groups and premium plan was the ability to focus on those investors that have that functionality, or that need inside of their, their business. And so I mean, a group can be a market, so you can divide up your leads to go into different groups. And then the the ability to restrict access, as far as I know, at least in terms of like, out of the box solution, we're the only ones that have that functionality to say, only show this person the leads that they are assigned, they cannot see any other lead in your entire company. And that's such a key thing. I mean, I've heard so many horror stories of people who have a salesperson come in, they have access to, you know, every lead they've ever generated for the last, you know, 10 years they've been in business, they stay, it didn't work out, they've downloaded their entire leads, and have left the company, you know, we really, like tried to solve that with the security process. But you know, security is a benefit, but also just focus, right? Like, if somebody can only see it easy they can take, and then what leads that they have, and we would have like you could restrict, so you could say this person just started, they can only have 30 leads in their bucket. And so they if they're like, I want another lead, you'd have to go release one, so that you could take another lead into your own bucket. So it really lets you kind of fine tune how you want to treat people how you want to bring them on how you want to give them access to your leads. And that makes it great for scaling into lots of employees in your system.

Jordan Fleming:

It's fantastic. And just one final question that I know I get asked a lot of is, how easy is it to get? You know, it's one thing to get, you know, to upload a list or to grab data I've been working on but if I'm someone who's investing in the PPC, or Facebook ads, or I've got a carrier website or something like that, how easy is it for me to get out, you know, direct leads into investor fuse. And then to make it like very clear, there's a new lead to be actioned.

John Whitfield:

Yeah. So we have an entire department of employees called the integrations department. And whenever you have a new place that you're generating leads, you let them know you give them the login, and they do it for you. So, to this date, we've tracked over 75 different types of integrations that we brought into InvestorFuse. Just because you know, real estate investors always want to try the new and greatest way to generate leads. So anywhere that you generate leads, it can come into the system and then it goes through a whole de-duplication process, make sure that that seller doesn't exist anywhere else. And then it will go into a campaign to track to that lead source so that you can understand how that leads source does, how much profit does you can put costs on that campaign and get your ROI, profit per deal cost per deal, all that fun stuff. And then you know, it will, every lead that gets created in the system, there are notifications that get set up. So by default, they're, they're popping up inside the app, you know, new opportunity, and then you can turn it on to be emailed or texted out, or both. And so people can just get alerted, hey, there's a new opportunities, new opportunity you got to do, but as well, we have campaign auto responders, so you could turn on an auto responder on a campaign so that they receive a text message that that seller receives a text message immediately saying, hey, just got your information, you know, how can I help so that that seller can receive something immediately while you know one of your employees gets to that, that that lead and then can start working?

Jordan Fleming:

Nice, nice. And so then if I'm an investor, you know, I, again, everything's about making things easy, and making sure I'm getting success. So, you know, essentially, what you're saying is, you guys, it'll be a completely streamline process to just invest in my marketing, having those leads drop in InvestorFuse and then essentially pop up to the people I want to deal with those specific leads. And I, you know, essentially, that's a well oiled machine I can put in place very pretty pretty quickly.

John Whitfield:

Absolutely. And I mean, we do the whole setup for our customers. So if somebody signs up, they get two meetings, we walk them through this whole process, grab all the integrations, build it for them, and then they're off to the races, I'm really having to lift a finger except for to say, sign up.

Jordan Fleming:

I love it. Well, it is that time where we go through the real estate tech guy Fast Five questions. These are kind of a streamlined five questions, I asked everyone, because I like to make sure I get interesting answers. So I'm gonna go ahead and start out with those. John. Number one, what feature of your technology that fuse has the biggest impact for your customers business? In your opinion? Yeah, so

John Whitfield:

I mean, we've kind of talked about it, the action based system is something incredibly unique. It's something so simple that anybody can learn, anybody can use, and it makes sure that you actually have an insurance policy on the marketing dollars that you spend.

Jordan Fleming:

Love it. Now, number two, what's the biggest mistake people make when they get into a CRM kind of structure?

John Whitfield:

Yeah, but a lot of people look for cost saving functionality with what I call all in one solutions. And what I always say to that is that if some product that you're trying to purchase does everything for your business, then they are not good at anything, or anything. Yeah. And so we took the opposite to that we were like, we are only going to focus on acquisitions and sales process, we're going to make this the best solution possible, because it's what has the most volume in real estate investor business. And just now I mean, literally, in about two weeks, we're releasing transactions management, taking a lot of what we learned in acquisitions management and bringing it to transactions management. And we'll keep as time goes on expanding in other departments. But we didn't say let's try and do 20% on everything in a real estate investing business. We said, Let's do 100% In acquisitions, so that when somebody comes into our product, they can get the most deals under contract.

Jordan Fleming:

I love it. I love it. Number three, What's the best advice on how to integrate CRMs? into a business you can give someone?

John Whitfield:

Yeah, so we we often not, I wouldn't say often, but we hear this line a lot. You know, I think it's great. I the business owner, I think it's great. But my team preferred to stay in insert, you know, last solution that you're on. And my response to that is always well, if you thought it was great, and it's gonna help your bottom line, why are you letting the team drag you down? You know, when you implement a new piece of software, it's not going to be easy change isn't fun. And ultimately, I mean, it can be a great red flag for your employee base. If they're like, I am not changing, I hate this, they're probably not going to be a good employee to have around for a long time. Because the world changes the industry changes. You need to change with it, and your employees will need to as well. But have a plan, have daily meetings, review the CRM every day, hold them accountable to the system. And with InvestorFuse, you can log in and within 30 seconds with our action based system know if somebody is not doing what they're supposed to. So there's no reason why you can't jump on a 10 minute phone call, load up the team action, see what's overdue, and then have a conversation about that. But the other part of it too, is training. I think every business should train every day on their systems. And because people forget things and it's not just CRMs like everything, how do they use their phone software, how do they correctly email with people, like just review something every day, and maybe you've got, you know, 50 topics. So every 50 days, you're cycling back to the beginning, I guarantee you somebody forgot something, and reminding them of that training is going to be beneficial to your business.

Jordan Fleming:

I would augment what you said about that whole change management process. I have seen so many companies fail at onboarding CRMs. Because they wouldn't put the EFF this the minimal effort in to just they want a magic system, that that that does everything they have ever needed and closes all their deals for them, and requires no money in no time. That's their ideal scenario. And when they don't have it, and they and they realize that actually, they have to learn it, and they have to start it in the process, especially in the real estate investor market. I've seen so many people fail for that. So I don't normally get answering the five fast fives, but I guess I'm not supposed to answer those. But I'm gonna do it. Anyway. It's my podcast I wanted. Number four, what's the one thing you wish everyone knew about the CRM sort of landscape or InvestorFuse in particular?

John Whitfield:

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like a nerdy little answer. But we're built off of a piece of software back end called Firebase, which is what Google has built, very different to like Amazon Web Services, which a lot of products are doing. And the cool thing about it is it's infinitely scalable. So there's no like Max server stat that we can do. So you know, if all of a sudden the volume increased on one day, like it's not going to affect the performance of our product. So that's something that we made a choice at the very beginning of when we develop this to make sure that we are on a platform that if something got busy, if you know, a bunch of leads started coming in people would not see drop in performance.

Jordan Fleming:

And the final one is, if someone's now just starting out, yeah. So they're a new, they're a brand new investor. What three bits of technology would you recommend they bring on first, so they're just starting out?

John Whitfield:

So this is kind of weird. I usually don't recommend us for that. Like I said, like, you've got to be generating leads. And I'm not actually going to include lead generation in my list of three. I feel like that's just a given. Yeah, but I'm a very operational kind of person. And, you know, I think real estate, wholesaling people, I have learned that you can get somebody on your team pretty quick, whether that's a group of friends, two partners, or you're going to get a VA. So this own your operations, get a business email, if I see somebody sending me an email from gmail.com, I'm, I kind of flipped out internally a little bit. Okay, please get a business email I did. They're cheap. Get one. All right. Get a business phone, do not let anybody that works for you call from their personal cell phone. Ever. Just like no, that's not a thing. Don't do it, it's most, it's important that you can control that communication method. And then finally, put the leads in a place that you control. That could be InvestorFuse, but honestly, for people just getting started, you know, get Google Apps, or Office 365. And yeah, put it in Google sheets that you own, so that if you have to kick somebody out, somebody leaves, they no longer have access to that.

Jordan Fleming:

And I'll follow out, I agree with you. I love those because they're not just like me, like me, I'm legit. CRM, obviously, because I agree that if you're just starting out what's actually important, I will say, you know, look at the things like Google Sheets, more, you know, do not start, do not email people, a spreadsheet, like an Excel spreadsheet of your Don't, don't, don't hire somebody and go, Hey, here's all my leads in this one spreadsheet, because that's just a recipe for saying goodbye to all my leads. So as you know, as John said, you know, find those collaborative things where you can lock people out in a heartbeat, whatever method that is. I love it. That's Those are great, Fast Five. Listen, I want to close this out, John, tell people how they can find you how they can sign up, what the kind of costs involved. Let people know how they can make invest with you as part of their tech stack.

John Whitfield:

Yeah, absolutely. So you know, investorfuse.com is our website, you can go there and check out our pricing. We like I said, we have plans for different types of investors and team levels. But inside of that, but we definitely have a deal. So if you go to investorfuse.com/thatRealEstatetechguy, you get 20% off your first month, and that will definitely help you out and we have a setup fee. And then there's a 14 day window where we get you set up inside of the product, and then your subscription starts. So you get 20% off that first, that first month once the subscription starts.

Jordan Fleming:

That is fantastic. Well, John, honestly pleasure to see you and to have you on the podcast. I appreciate it. I know that's the kind of CRM and lead management element is something I get asked to wherever I and people find out I'm in real estate technology. So I'm excited for people to hear this and I appreciate you coming on today.

John Whitfield:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Narrator:

Thanks for listening to another amazing episode of that real estate tech guy. Head over to thatrealestatetechguy.com to check out all episodes and get special discounts on tons of awesome real estate technology platforms.