Season 3, Episode 2 – Integrating Communication into Podio with Andreas Huttenrauch

Transcript

Jordan Fleming : 0:01

Hey, it’s Jordan Fleming here. Before we kick off on this podcast with Andreas Huttenrauch of globi. You’ll know him from globiflow globimail, procfu, and pretty much all around podio wizardry, I just want to remind everyone that it really does help. If you can pop over to your iTunes or Google Play, wherever you listen to the podcast, give us a review, give us a rating and share it across your social media. The more we can get the word out, the better it helps the podcast grow, it helps new people get into podio. Learn more. And in general, it allows us to keep going in the second episode, obviously excited to have Andreas and we are always looking for brand new people to be on the podcast. So if you do if you’re a Podio partner, and you maybe want to talk a bit about how you’ve been developing podio, or if your company that uses podio. And you want to maybe give us a bit of insight into that fantastic opportunity to give yourself a little promotion and also just to help the wider podio community. So without further ado, I’ll launch into the podcast but please do like us, give us a review, share it around. And if you fancy it come on to the podcast.

Narrator : 1:17

Welcome to powered by podio automation is everything. supercharge your business with podio.Get ready for another episode of supercharged with Jordan Samuel Fleming, your weekly dive into the awesome impact workflow and automation you can have on your business when it’s powered by podio. Join us each week as we learn from the top podio partners in the world as we investigate system integrations and add ons and hear from real business owners who have implemented podio into their business now join your host Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of game changers for this week’s episode.

Jordan Fleming : 2:03

All right, so here we are today. One of our returning champion in many ways, Andreas, you know from Andreas Globi – globi.ca I guess it is? Um, I hope that’s the main side Yeah, globi.ca and and you know, for those of you who’ve used podio globiflow which is now renamed something hideous like Citrix automated workflow, something nonsense, the longwas Andreas, his brainchild, he’s the one who came up with globiflow as another part of his suite. There’s globimail procfu, and better super menu and a couple other things. And today’s podcasts, we’re really gonna focus on communication and and you know, a lot of people bring use podio for a lot of people use it for, you know, a tracking communication with customers with Leeds driving that sales cycle. And between, you know, products like smrtPhone, which obviously I have an interest in and can talk about, and and certainly global mail, which my company Gamechanges has installed, I can’t even tell you how many times and some of the new tools are always working out today is really going to be about focusing in on on that communication. So, Andreas, I mean, just as an overview to make sure that we’re we’re kind of saying the right things. Can you just make my right about all the apps? What What do you have under your product suite now?

Andreas : 3:33

Yeah, you’re right. That’s that’s pretty much the the main things globimail is the big email giant, well, not giant, but the most used polio email solution. And procfu is it’s quickly coming up to the same size as globimail and procfu through it has all these advanced scripts that you can extend globiflow with, as well as many apps, which is the second biggest portion of it. And the many apps recently got a new update, which allows you to build dashboards with just point and click.

Jordan Fleming : 4:04

Yeah, I haven’t tried those yet. I can’t wait. I I admit that I do the least amount of podio work now, across all my team. I don’t do much anymore. So where I used to be the expert in the room, I now have topass the baton to my team. But I mean, let’s let’s start with globiimail, because I think, you know, email has always been a massive problem for podio. I think, I mean, it’s a massive problem in general anyway, email communications are I find them cluttered. I find them confused and I find them a time suck. But But at the end of the day, it’s not going away yet. still live off email, particularly if you’re in a sales environment. So to me GlobiMail was the first really phenomenally useful way of integrating podio email into podio. I mean when you start atHow is how is globimail developed? And where do you see the biggest kind of focus and functionality on globimail right now?

Andreas : 5:08

Well, it’s actually funny that globiMail was developed before globey flow, it was the first SaaS that I ever built. And that came from an internal need, because I selected podio as the business’s kind of CRM, project management, etc, everything. And like you said, email, email is messy. And one of the biggest issues is trying to find conversations, keeping things in context, where podio is fantastic at keeping things in context, because you have your conversations on items, etc.So I built GlobiMail to try and integrate each email conversation into one specific item in podio. So that it’s all referenceable and searchable from any place.

Jordan Fleming : 5:50

Well, and I think, you know, I mean, I could see from,from experience that the biggest challenge we found in integrating GlobiMail that I think we’ve solved now is by integrating globimail onto an app into the comments of an app. It’s great if that app has to do with like a support ticket, right? Because it has to define you know that because there’s not a huge, there’s not a huge amount of conversations, usually, the support ticket gets opened, you got a few back and forth, you hope she feels that’s it right, and then it’s closed. But where I found the real problem with that is that an originally when we were first starting with globimail, we were using it as a CRM email tracker, which meant people were doing it on the Contacts app. And that was a disaster for us. Because if you had an like, I have some clients that I email with, you know, 100 times a year, back and forth. And, and it became a real pain of scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, and our new solution, which I will post into the description of this podcast, our new solutions using GlobiMail, which really replicate an inbox functionality, and then an email thread functionality where someone emails me in. And because it doesn’t have a globimail tag, either in the subject or hidden in the the text. I presume you do that, by the way with like, what clear, like white text or something? Yeah. Is that? Yeah, it’s a very small cheap back. Yes, yeah. But you know what i i just converted because you did that after one of our beer and wings sections. Yes. And I use it for clients all the time, I’ve only converted my own email inbox to that in the last like two weeks. And I love it. I love not having that tag in the subject. But so just so people know, I’ll put the video to it. But by using globimail Now, what you can do now is every time someone emails you just say, say, say randomly, one of my clients emails me, it creates in my inbox, app, an item. And then all the conversations back and forth like that, I reply, I reply back reply reply back, they get tracked on that item. And, and then if I want to, if they email me completely separately on a separate issue, it creates another item. So it mimics your inbox functionality and that thread notion, but it also allows you to have an app where you can filter, show me all emails related to this person, between these dates, or to this project or to this company, regardless of the person. And that’s huge. Have you like that, to me is one of the biggest advantages globimail brings now by bringing into an inbox environment. What do you think about that?

Andreas : 8:50

I saw your solution. And I’m very thankful that you supply that video because I think that is brilliant. It is above what I have even done on my own.The original intent, which you know, was just you simply log each email with a comment. But having that searchable inbox of all messages is extremely useful. Because Yeah, we all know how many times we go back to email, try to find something and half an hour later give up.

Jordan Fleming : 9:18

Well, and now and I would say procfu, has raised our ability even more, because procfu has a lot more in the mini apps in particular, I think many apps are going to quickly become the best bit about procfu from a normal usability point of view. I know the geeky side, which you and Andrew can talk about in another podcast, and the scripts and all that shit. Great. That’s awesome. And but it’s I don’t understand it. And I don’t know how to do it. But the mini apps. Um, one of the things that we found is that combining globimail and mini apps means you can also create reallyeasy ways of creating and logging emails directly from different apps in your system. So say I have a projects, apps and a sales app, I can embed a mini-app link on each of those apps, which and that link just pops up with a subject, a email, like a text, for me to write the email, a place for me to add attachments. And that’s it. And when I click save, or as you I think you told me, I can convert the Save to send, I don’t know how to do that still, but I don’t care. But when I click save, what it does by using procfu, globiflow and globimail is it creates a new email chain to that to the person identified. It links it to whatever the project or the sales pipeline, and it sends the attachment. And then I’ve started a new thread. So from a CRM functionality point of view, I can have my inbox, which is great, because it works just like Gmail, or whatever, I can see all my unread emails, I can start a new email chain, etc. But I can also have true CRM integration into my project management, or sales management, or finance management or seller leads, or whatever, by creating these little mini app masterpieces of saying, hey, send this email, and you’re sending it, and in the background, we’re gonna link it here, and we’re gonna send it to this person. And that is amazing.

Andreas : 11:29

And they’re using many apps, one of the main features is or yeah features is you can use it similar to a podio webform. Because you’re basically just creating a new item in podio. And having globiflow, then connect all the little dots.

Jordan Fleming : 11:45

Absolutely. And it but and from a user expect experience point of view, it allows me to, it allows a really easy way for me to be attached to all my staff looking at maybe a sales pipeline or a project and just see the button that says send email, or send project update. And, and that creates a quick pop up, which is an app, but they don’t see anything except for subject. And, you know, subject and where you type your email, and then anything you want to attach. And that’s all they need to see. Because the system in the background is going to say, Who am I sending to it’s the client project leader, what what project it is, it’s this one, what companies are related to it’s this one, and they never have to worry about that. Right. And you can do that from any app in your system. And to me that just takes your email capabilities, and absolutely supercharges in podio. I mean and globally. And those two tools globiflow globimail, and procfu, working together is what you need to make that happen.

Andreas : 12:49

And simplification seems to be the new trend this year and going into next year. Just like with looking at Citrix workspace, it’s all about simplifying each user’s experience and what they need to reduce their cognitive load so that they can perform better, which then translates into the organisation performing better.

Jordan Fleming : 13:11

Absolutely. Now, you you mentioned in our preamble to this when you and I was chatting, this this other tool that you’ve you’ve sort of got, which is I guess in a beta says selection right now, can you tell us a bit about that. And again, I’ll link to it in the podcast.

Andreas : 13:27

Sure. Um, it’s called inbox by globi. For lack of a more imaginative name for now, yes, it is in beta. And it doesn’t do very much, it really is just trying to be a unified inbox, which gives you one screen to look at, where you can see all your emails or your Gmail emails from multiple sources, multiple accounts, all your podio notifications, all your podio chat messages, like slack messages, there’s there’s quite a few integrations you can hook up. And again, from multiple accounts each, so that you get one screen where you can filter through your messages, which is especially useful when you’re pruning like first thing in the day, you mostly you’re going to be deleting, you’re going to be archiving, you’re going to be marking read, you’re going to be unfollowing and all those things you can do very quickly and also on mass. Like if you’ve got a whole chunk of notifications, which are all very similar, you can select a whole bunch of them and just click Mark read or click unfollow. Or if it’s emails, click Delete. So it really makes it quick to make that list a lot smaller and a lot more manageable. Plus, you can also reply to emails and podio check messages. You can unfollow items. Geez, I’m trying to think what else can you do?

Jordan Fleming : 14:43

I am busy. I didn’t even know this existed until five minutes before the damn podcast. So I’ve already on my screen. I’ve already got it up and I’m going to play with it probably tonight or tomorrow morning but But I mean, can you like, I think one of Podio’s biggest weaknesses. If I looked at two fundamental weaknesses Podio has aside from when it’s not working very well, which,

Andreas : 15:12

you know, which is a lot less these days,

Jordan Fleming : 15:14

I do think it’s people keep bitching, but people bitch, that’s what they do. But I actually think is going, they are trying to, you know, addressing it. Um, but you know, you know, this user, there’s the, the user interface is not inspired, and doesn’t give you some options. But I think that’s a good thing as well, I see advantages of a user interface. Um, but the other one was always communication integration. And I remember having a chat with podio years ago, where they were trying to figure out, could they could they create an inbox type app, right, like they were, they were genuine. I had a I wireframe something for podio. Yeah, I got on video calls with some of their key product people, and was like, you know, it needs to do this, this this. And what I wireframe essentially became our inbox solution using GlobiMail, you know, but the second one, of course, from my perspective, is phone and SMS. And when you create a like, if you think of a really strong CRM, most people want to see your communication history with a client or with a prospect, you want to see that history. And for those of you who you know, who haven’t tried it yet, obviously, I will put a link in to the app as well to this podcast, so you can try smrtPhone out. But smrtPhone is a fully integrated phone and SMS and sales dialer system that just like globi allows you to bring a GlobiMail, bring your entire email inbox into podio smrtPhone allows you to have your entire phone and text message system 100% log in podio. And put those three things together. And podio goes from being a nice kind of blue box into being a CRM powerhouse, an absolute powerhouse. And I know I’m not gonna put you on the spot Andreas. I know you’ve never used smartphone, you’re not a guy who uses the phone in your business.

Andreas : 17:21

No, I don’t even use a phone. personally.

Jordan Fleming : 17:23

I yeah, nobody knows my mobile number. Let me tell you, I don’t even tell my friends my mobile number for the most part. But I mean, I do think when you look at communication integration, I think it’s got to be one of the top three key elements most people CRM has to do.

Andreas : 17:41

Yes, I totally agree with that.

Jordan Fleming : 17:43

I mean, forget it, what do we personally do? Let’s it from a business workflow point of view, those are just, you know, communication integration is going to be an enormously important element of a good CRM.

Andreas : 17:56

I mean, you have to communicate, especially if you want to make a sale. And your whole team has to know the same thing about each prospect, because otherwise, communication breaks down anyway. Right?

Jordan Fleming : 18:08

Well, and centralising and that’s the other thing, I don’t know what your your feelings of this from an email point of view is. But, um, one of the things that I hear all the time when we’re integrating globimail, and smrtPhone is, you know, I don’t know, like everybody’s using their own if everybody’s using their own outlook, and everybody’s using their mobile phones, it’s really hard to know what everybody’s doing. Yes. And, and that becomes a real issue when, you know, client A has a really shitty experience, you know, talking to one of your people, but the next person who picks up the phone doesn’t know this. And so they call up and say, hey, how’s everything going, and they get, you know, and then they get fucking hammered. You know, being able to actually see all of the emails logged against the company, all of the emails logged against the person. All of the phone calls all the text messages, both of the contact and the company level, because you can use globiflow to push things around. You suddenly have a communication platform in podio. That rivals pretty much anything. Plus you can use the power of the automations that podio allows you to do for drip sequence follow ups automated emails. campaigns. Yeah,

Andreas : 19:30

it’s well, you mentioned a few things there. Firstly, Outlook, nobody should be using Outlook. Every man. I Microsoft doesn’t understand email. And they don’t seem to follow any of the email standards, maybe because they don’t have to, but they don’t. So most systems that integrate with email have a really hard time, mostly because of Outlook and exchange. And when it comes to mobile, I know a lot of users these days are mobile It also depends on the business, of course, and podio’s mobile experiences not the best. But prefers many apps were designed to be mobile first and mobile friendly. So you can recommend the app around any podio app in less than 60 seconds. And your whole team can now access this on the go. And it just does what you needed to do. And it works nicely on a mobile device.

Jordan Fleming : 20:24

When at 100%, and, and, and, and and you solve a couple problems, you know, but and again, by integrating both, you know, phone, text and email together in the CRM, you’re solving a lot of transparency problems. And you’re solving a lot of, of workflow efficiency problems, because there’s nothing you know, the amount of times I’ve seen people say, Jesus, it’s taken me 45 minutes to chase up and find when this you know, what, when we sent this thing, or, or when you know, when I couldn’t find, so and so said he called someone but I couldn’t find it. So I trolled through records. And all of those problems go away if you properly integrate your communications into podio.

Andreas : 21:13

Yeah, and knowing things. One of the big benefits of globimail is, you know, when an email has been opened, or a link has been clicked, and I know countless globiimail users that started using it for their businesses that now have a personal inbox that they hooked up just for that feature so that they can see when somebody opens their email.

Jordan Fleming : 21:35

Well, and I’m embarrassed to say we integrated globimail for years, and didn’t realise the power of your globimail actions now, and we were doing like gerry rigged bits around comments, like, comment, come if the email comes from this person that is not one of us, etc. And then one day, we found that I found the automations. And I went, holy shit, guys, we’ve been doing this wrong for years. But yeah, but I mean, being able to see the open rates, being able to see you know, I my email got sent, oh, he opened, he’s I’ve just watched them open it, it hasn’t open was, you know, open one minute later, boom, clicked, right? I know, when when I’m about to get a calendly invite, because so it’ll He’ll open my email, and I’ll see clicked. And then 30 seconds later, my Apple Watch will buzz and it’ll say, new calendly invites. And I’ve seen that.

Andreas : 22:32

But it’s also very useful when people come back and say, Oh, I never got that email.

Jordan Fleming : 22:42

Absolutely, um, and from a globimailperspective, I mean, I say, there are many ways to skin the cat. And I think one of its greatest, you know, globimail incredibly flexible as well. You can like if you’ve got a support ticket type system, if you’re a property management company, you could put GlobiMail directly on a tickets app. And treat it like you probably originally intended, which was ticket gets raised and the emails for that ticket, get attached. Or you could watch our video about how to create your whole inbox. And you could do that including the ability. And I think this is one of the cool things you and I’ve talked about that ability to have your own inbox, in your own workspace, private. And then simply we have a functionality where we just click the shared button, and it goes to the central CRM email as well.

Andreas : 23:35

And I saw that that’s,

Jordan Fleming : 23:37

yeah, that way I can, as a business owner, I get sometimes, you know, emails from lawyers, or banks or whatever HR, which I can’t share with my team. Or like fucking Domino’s Pizza, which I don’t need to share with my team. But then the ability to have them come in private, and then click shared so that you’ve got really truly integrated, you know, community based email and private a base email, but all still logged to everything. So I could log 10 private emails to Andreas in podio and 15 Public ones. They’re all logins undress. And so we’ve got that whole history, even if I team can’t see the share the private ones, which is super cool. Absolutely. So do you have any sense or is there anything here that are coming down the pipeline from your point of view that you find fascinating, interesting, from a communication point of wise? Are you gonna plan to take mini apps or inbox any any further? Like, is there things you thinking of doing or that you want to hear from people about?

Andreas : 24:45

Yes, I always want to hear from people. That go GlobiMail has pretty much gone to where it will go. Because there’s only so much you can do with email. And procfu. I’m starting to learn what the main features are, because when you’re in the development cycle of a new product, you kind of throw things out and see what sticks and the stuff that sticks, well, you then focus on the stuff that didn’t stick you start pulling back on. But with inbox being new and in beta, it hasn’t quite figured out what it wants to be yet or what it wants to do. And a lot of that will depend on customer feedback. So it’s a free beta, anybody can go and use it. Because it’s in pre beta, it also means don’t expect support, but use it. And if you think it should do something that it shouldn’t definitely post in the workspaces. And let’s have a conversation, get that going. And let’s see what you know what comes up,

Jordan Fleming : 25:43

I will look to add the integrate with smrtPhone to inbox later in the year.

Andreas : 25:50

If you have an API, I can integrate,

Jordan Fleming : 25:51

do we do now we go? Well, I can say that, you know, from a smrtphone perspective, you know, we’ve got a pretty strong development roadmap right now for q4, we’ve already launched a bunch of cool shit. And we’ve also got the mobile apps, like we got the iOS and Android app, we’ve got the sales dialer, we got this core smrtPhone product, and we’re gonna go over the next quarter. So we’re gonna be upgrading launching a brand new Chrome extension, which brings the whole dialer functionality into podio. So that you can have your phone system as a right there that you can see it when it rings. But in podio, we’re going to add in some more, we’re gonna integrate even deeper into podio. So that you can, you know, add, even, you know, maybe even select apps that you want to be able to link to, and see them in your smrtPhones. So you can you can automatically do things. And even we’re even playing with the concept of integrating WhatsApp communications. Be Yeah, there’s that we’re play. It’s it’s, it’s in its most it’s in his alpha planning stage. But Twilio, which is, of course, the provider, which smrtphones built on, does have a WhatsApp business API integration. And so that, that ability to potentially track WhatsApp conversations directly in podio, I think would be a really interesting upgrade.

Andreas : 27:18

That sounds fantastic.

Jordan Fleming : 27:20

Yeah, that that that should be interesting. And we’ve got, you know, we got some exciting things. And again, for for anybody listening, I’ll post in the podcast links for you guys to try these systems. We got, you know, links to globimale links to the videos we’ve done, so you can see what your options are. But also, you know, just like Andreas said, we’re always hungry to understand what you guys want. from, you know, smrtPhone point of view, how could it make, you know, beam better? What functionality do we not think of? And yeah, you know, and, and, because a lot of the times you and I will speak about globimale? And I’ll say, Andreas, please fucking Can you do this? And, and lo never would have occurred to me, you know, it’s, uh, you know, it’s, it’s fantastic. And we’re the same, you know, we don’t know what we’ve not thought of, and then someone will say, Well, I wish it could do this, you think, oh, cheese. Yeah, we can do that. But and, and it turns out, everybody wants that.

Andreas : 28:18

You know, that’s the true power of podio, because everybody does things differently. And podio doesn’t try to make you do things in one particular way. And then, when it comes to our own products, we don’t often know how other people want to do or how they do run their businesses because we have a certain picture in our mind, because based on how we do things,

Jordan Fleming : 28:41

well, and also I mean, I don’t know I can’t speak for you, but I’m embarrassed like I don’t use the phone that much. So I don’t even use like I love smrtphone with all my core being but I don’t use the phone a lot. I do a lot of text messages to clients. So comparatively my use of like a smrtphone, a lot of its functionalities, particularly around like, you know, things like the smrtdialer, which is a sales dialer. We just don’t do cold calling. So So I very I know how to use it, and I can demo it, but I don’t use it. And it’s only when you use it that you can come back to us and say, Oh, this would be awesome. I’ll give you an example. We we first set up smrtDialer, the 2.0 version we’ve got right now you can create a campaign and smrtdialer. So cat for most part, you have two types of campaigns and smrtdialer smart that is a sales dialer. And you you either set up a cold calling campaign where you’ve got a VA somewhere in the Philippines or in Mexico or wherever and they Their job is to load up a list of 40,000 and just bashed through and qualified. Right and then and then Sorry, just one second. My wife is calling me. And then that’s one type of campaign. And the second is where you’ve got like a list of your clients or your sales prospects, and you want to hit the warm ones. Um, and those, that was when we first set up 2.0, we could only filter the data set by Category field. And we did that because it hook based, and we thought, well, everybody’s gonna want hook based things. But actually, what people wanted was a view was to be set up podio views. And and that’s something we wouldn’t, we didn’t really think of, and we got that information from our customers.

Andreas : 30:36

Yeah, that was often how it works.

Jordan Fleming : 30:40

It’s critical that people give us these things.

Andreas : 30:44

And my philosophy, when I started globiflow was to actually with most products is launch early, launch with an MVP, and just iteratively keep adding what people really want globiflow didn’t do much at all, in the beginning.

Jordan Fleming : 31:00

I remember your first versions of globiflow, um, I I do remember them. And I remember, I remember what it looked like. And I also remember, you know, when you added, like, when you added something like this, I think I remember like if statements came in, and and right away, that opened up a world that was just like, holy shit. Think of this now. Now I can really drill down and be like, Okay, if this happens, then layer it in. If this happens, then if this and this happen, do this, but if this and this, and this happened, do this other thing. And that was just like, holy shit. Like, that opened up a world of automation that I didn’t, I couldn’t believe it was amazing. So yeah, I mean, I’m excited to I’m excited to try your new inbox. I will, I will bash on that tonight. I know, I will put that link in for anybody Listen to this. And for anybody listen to this, you know, if you’re if you’re maybe new to podio, I heartily endorse the idea of of joining the workspaces, smrtphone, globimail globiflow, procfu the workspaces, you get a real community element, you can ask questions. For anybody, you know, thinking about integrating these communication tools, I will post the videos and the guides and things in this podcast so that you have easy access to them. I cannot emphasise enough how great podio becomes when you integrate communications. And, and I really strongly encourage you, you know, to try them all out if you need a hand, you know, give us a shout and you know, it’s a it’s a fantastic opportunity to make your podio system soar even more. Andreas, any any kind of Final thoughts around? video from you? Um, I’m putting you on the spot, man.

Andreas : 33:01

Yes, you are. Final thoughts. I don’t really have any try inbox. Let me know what you think.

Jordan Fleming : 33:07

I always I love putting on the spot because it’s it’s a lot of fun. I will I will say that, you know, right now, guys. It’s September and 2020. Well, we’re in the midst of COVID nonsense, but I am planning to go back. Andreas is in Canada right now. And I am planning on coming back to Canada as soon as it’s available. And I look forward to going out for a few beers with you my friend.

Andreas : 33:32

Absolutely. Me too.

Jordan Fleming : 33:34

All right. Thank you for listening. everybody. Have a fantastic week. Thanks, Jordan.

Narrator : 33:40

You’ve been listening to a supercharged with Jordan Samuel Fleming. Subscribe today on iTunes, Google Play or Spotify for your weekly dive into how you can supercharge your business by making it powered by podio Be sure to check out our website we are game changers.com where you can learn more and arrange a 30 minute call with Jordan Dale. Do you understand how podio supercharges you