All Forum Posts by: Adam Adams

@Brian Woods

Pipedrive does integrate email, so I'm not really looking for one. I'll check out this Cloze CRM and see what I think. If it is better, then I may switch. Maybe it will be my next video.

@Chad U. I don't know what old school traditional manner is. I use email and I use it through Pipedrive which is my GMail account. As far as Scalability, what's that mean? You can have multiple users in Pipedrive. And in regards to automating comps and Zestimates and such, that's a preference. I don't believe in Zestimates or automated comps. And I really don't need an instant streetview. What I do is send the assets off to my realtors and property managers to tell me the values because they know better than anything automated. And I send it in email format, so I need to be able to track those emails easily and efficiently. 

Pipedrive also allows for imports and I find their imports better than most. I've been able to replicate Distressed Pro in Pipedrive using simple spreadsheet imports from the FDIC. I couldn't do that with Insightly.

And I don't know how many times I can say this, but if I have 1 attorney handling 20 of my assets, how I could Podio possibly automatically know which project to assign his email to if he originated it. 

And I'll say this over and over again. As soon as any other CRM out there integrates email into their system, I'll probably switch because a lot of other systems have better gadgets. At the moment though, no one else seems to be doing that. And I'll say this one more time, keeping track of my communications without adding extra steps is the most important aspect of a CRM for me.

So if email integration isn't that important to you, then Soho, Insightly, Podio and even Trello are better products. If email integration is important, then Pipedrive is better. For me, correspondence tracking is the most important part of the CRM.

@Chad U. I installed that and used it. And when I say Pipedrive and my Gmail are integrated, I mean that I open Pipedrive and I read my emails from GMail all in the same app. I never have to open up my GMail. 

What I had to do with Insightly was open up GMail and forward emails to Insightly using that addon. I still have to go to Insightly to do my work. And once I am in Insightly, then I have to deal with the email that I forwarded from Gmail by connecting it to what I want. That is not integration and it certainly isn't simplifying anything. I'm dealing with 2 apps at this point and that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid simply because it adds a level of work and I'm trying to avoid working.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I am still under the impression that I have to do something similar with Podio. 

They send the first two notices and then I send the 3rd. The 3rd is the one that has the notice of how much we will be adding to the escrow. My servicer doesn't know that amount, so that's why I send the notice.

Tried Insightly this morning and it still doesn't work with email. It doesn't sync with GMail. Yes, I can connect my account to GMail, but if an email comes in from Joe Blow, the county code enforcement, it's not going to come into Insightly. I'd have to work in GMail and send emails to Insightly, so that's strike 1. I do not want to be working in two systems. Strike 2 is my biggest complaint about the CRMs out there and that is not having the ability to tie an email to a lead, a deal, an opportunity, a project, or whatever you want to call it without jumping through hoops.  It's too much work. I'd have to link the email to the deal using the unique ID, which means I have to go look up that ID and then link it. I'm not going to remember these IDs. I do not care about linking to contacts. Every email system out there does that. It's about linking with the project, deal, opportunity.

I don't need a 3rd strike. But if you need one, it's $50/month. I might as well get the medium level Salesforce for that price so that I can be set up to grow.

I've done a couple of videos on this whole mess and why Pipedrive succeeds in this one area and everyone else fails. 

Pipedrive doesn't give me everything that I want, but I can sit in Pipedrive and do everything that I need and I can do it without using multiple systems. My email is in my CRM, so it is one system. And for me, that is the point. Simplicity. 

Cool. I liked Insightly. That's the first one I tried. It was missing the email integration and one more little problem with custom fields. You can create a custom field, import data into it, but you cannot update that data through an import. Probably not a big deal for most.

I'll go check out the Insightly and see if I can get another trial. Thanks

@Collin Goodwin

I'm not talking about the correspondence between people and the history of that contact. All CRMs offer that. Even basic GMail. I am talking about looking at the deal, which for me is a property or a note, and seeing all the notes that I have made, all the tasks that I have completed, and all the emails that were originated by outside parties that came into my inbox, or emails that I originated. And I can associate all of these things to the deal without any effort except the click of a mouse button. I do not need 3rd party programs and I do not need extra email address.

I have a property and that is my deal. I have partners, realtors, brokers, property managers, attorneys, borrowers, renters, sellers and buyers. I do not have to associate these people to the deal, but I can. I can also associate any email coming in or going out from these people to the deal. A lot of these parties would be involved in multiple deals. My attorneys, for example, cover multiple states, so I would not restrict my attorney to one deal, but I would tie their emails as they came in or go out to multiple deals. Once an email is tagged to a deal, any responses in the chain are automatically tagged to the deal. 

Now two years after I buy a note and I take the borrower to court to foreclose on him, he takes me to court and sues me instead. They demand all the correspondence related to him and the property. I said no sweat. I go to the deal and I see every note, activity, logged phone calls and emails that are tied to it going back to the beginning of time with this deal. It took me less than an hour to get over two years of records printed to PDF and hand it over to my attorney. This is a true story by the way. The ability to be able to click on one thing, the deal, and see every correspondence that has gone in and out and all the things I have done with tasks or notes, is why I use Pipedrive. Other systems have workarounds, but they are tedious and complex. Pipedrive makes it easy. If they did not have this functionality, I'd be using another system, but so far, they seem to be the only one that the price point of around $20-$23/month.

In the image below, you see the correspondence between you and I through Bigger Pockets, you see someone tagged me in Facebook, you see the stages that this deal has been through and when. If I populated the deal data, you'd see all of that as well include relevant persons involved that I have tagged to the deal. It's all on one page and all of the emails are tracked which is the most important feature that I am looking for in a CRM. 

If Podio can do this, then great, but I'm under the impression that it doesn't, at least without some effort. All the other CRMs that I have tried offer this too, but with effort using extra emails. Well, Soho doesn't offer this at all. I don't want effort. 

@Ryan K. When I send out FMVs, I send all my investors a balance statement showing the balance on the investment. As the borrower pays P&I, the UPB is reduced and I pass part of that principal on to my partner, which reduces the investment by the same amount. Why we do that is another discussion, but for FMV, it reduces the amount that is owed to my partner, so the FMV goes down. If the borrower is not paying and it is a non-performing loan, then the balance is the same as when it was initially invested. It never goes up. I have yet come across a custodian who has not accepted this method.

@Collin Goodwin - What if you do not originate the email. How is it assigned if someone, like an attorney, writes to me. How do I tag that email to the deal from there?