S2E4 - Interview with Jordan Fleming of smrtPhone.io (and many, many other hats)

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the Citrix developer solutions podcast by brick bridge consulting. This podcast is dedicated to the design development and implementation of a growing number of Citrix SAS platforms, as well as some topics around their associated virtualization products. We'll use this podcast to discuss our own experiences and challenges with these SAS platforms, as well as meet interesting people from around the growing Citrix developer community. If you're a developer designer, administrator, customer, or agency that uses Citrix products, and once the most out of your experience or your customer's experiences, then you're in the right spot smash that subscribe button and the bell. If there is one where you're listening to keep up with our latest, if you have already thank you so much for your support, it means a lot to us. Lastly, please engage with us. If you have a topic solution, challenge, or message, we want to know about it. Our listeners want to know about it. Reach out to us via our company pages on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. You can also send a message or email or Podio chat to service at BRIC B R I C K bridge B R I D G E. consulting.com. We have a wonderful guest for you today. He's no stranger to this podcast. We're no stranger to his. We have Jordan Fleming of smartphone fame. Uh, also of course, uh, we are game-changers and many other hats that he wears around the community. Um, always, always an engaging conversation between the two of us. Uh, once again, uh, a fantastic listen for those interested in the smartphone journey. We're we focused a little bit more on smartphone today. Obviously we wander around on some related topics. Uh, he's also got a wonderful masterclass smartphone, product updates, wealth of content. So please enjoy today's okay.

Speaker 2: 2:07

I'm here with Jordan Fleming, famous for smartphone. Game-changers many other things throughout the community. Obviously no stranger to our podcasts. We're no stranger to his, uh, the supercharged podcast. Make sure you guys listening to us, make that your next listen. Uh, there, you should be on if you're on apple music or many of these other ones, uh, typically our two podcasts are listed together. So, uh, you can just chain that right through wonderful content for both on both of our podcasts. Jordan, welcome. Thank you so much for coming back on with us. I wanted to dive into the smartphones story and a couple other things. How you been?

Speaker 3: 2:44

Yeah, it's, uh, it's been a really good summer. Um, uh, and, uh, you know, we've, uh, I mean from a smartphone perspective, it's been a really, uh, it's been a really good year and, uh, we've had some big, you know, a lot of great things that we've been releasing and some exciting things that are coming up. So, uh, uh, you know, and that's always fun. It's always fun to push things forward.

Speaker 2: 3:06

It'd be very transparent. We're a smartphone users here at brick bridge. We've, we've done several installations for customers, a smartphone. So I'm a bit of a Homer, uh, when it comes to the smartphone product, uh, I will, I will try to ask some hard questions for the listeners, uh, but if you have not checked out smartphone yet, uh, you're doing yourself a disservice. You need to go to, uh, what is it S M R T P H O N e.io and see the offering there. If you're a Podio customer, this is the first logical extension you should be buying. Uh, everybody's got telephones, everybody's usually dealing with CRM or for other style of systems. Uh, just a, just a wonderful product. Tell me a little bit of, you know, what smartphone is, uh, obviously I know, but for the benefit of listeners that, uh, that may not know, uh, and, and kind of how it came about,

Speaker 3: 3:56

Uh, yeah, well, so smartphone, um, uh, smartphone at its core is a cloud phone system. So as, as you rightly pointed out, you know, if you're using Podio for a, uh, CRM of any sort, then the, the absolute best thing that you're going to be able to do is link your phone system and communications systems into it, right? Because that's what makes a good CRM system and smartphone really came about because, um, I had identified a need. We had done an, a, this is game changes. My, uh, well, the company that I was formerly CEO of, I'm no longer CEO. Um, but, uh, um, we had done an air call, uh, integration with Podio because we were running a contact center sort of set up and it was okay, right. Eric Hall was, it was okay, the integration, but, but it wasn't, it was, there was friction and it wasn't a great experience. And, and, and we had sort of, I, we were like, man, it would be good to build a, what we call the Podio foam and adjusted that point. I had been, I was introduced via, via Citrix webinar about the API. Um, I was invited onto this webinar, which is a weird thing because I'm the least technical person of any of the people, the partners you'll meet. I don't do API, like, so I was on this API webinar and I'm like, listen to it and going, all right. Sounds good. Like, I don't know, but, um, that's how I am, by the way I kind of get what's going on. Yeah, yeah. I understand the concept, but I'm not, I'm like, I'm a sales guy. I'm a, uh, you know, I'm a strategic guy. I'm not a technical guy, so, uh, but, but Halen who used to work for Citrix, um, if you remember her then, um, uh, she introduced me to, she had kind of said to Vlad and Alex who are my business partners in smartphone, Hey, you really should meet Jordan and Hey, you should meet Vlad. And Alex and, and we jumped on it. We did, we schedule a call, jumped on it. And they were sort of, they had a, we had a heavy consultative approach. They had a heavy, heavy, uh, technical capability. And so we sorta talked about, you know, you know, how you could share business opportunities and all that. But we also sort of said like, Hey, you know, we should build something. And I said, well, I had this idea for a Podio foam and flat said, I can build that. And so we sort of virtually shook hands, having never met each other more than a zoom call or whatever it was. And, um, and I wire framed up what was the first smartphone interface? I sort of wireframed it. And very shortly after three weeks after Vlad came up with this first prototype and, um, you know, and we, uh, we were able to launch it. Um, a couple of months we launched it in September of that year, I think 2017. And we launched it at the partner conference in Copenhagen. Um, and you know, w this past month we did 1.8 million minutes of calls and 1.4 million

Speaker 2: 7:09

Pets. That's, that's crazy Jordan. That is a million minutes. How many have you done have you started doing, oh my gosh. Uh, have you done the calculation where you like divide the number of minutes by human lifetime? Like how many human lifetimes a month?

Speaker 3: 7:27

I haven't, but I was I'm, I'm trying to, I'd like to pitch a blog post to Citrix about, uh, I like to take a year or the last year of growth in smartphone and add up some of the key numbers. Cause you know, Citrix always does these like, look how many workflows we've done and said, well, if I take a year of smartphone, how many million of minutes that is? How many text messages, millions of text messages, minutes of like we're currently in the last bill. I think we've got 10 million minutes of recorded storage recorded phone right now. Um, so, you know, fro it's sort of when you launch these products, you know, anybody who's ever launched a, an actual, you know, there's this difference between a consultancy and a product and sold and see is blood, sweat, and tears, right. You're always selling things. It's sir, it's a service, it's a service. So you're building things you're being paid by the hour or by the project or whatever that is building a product that is going to live and breathe is a very different thing. And not something I'd done before. I I've been in the kind of consultancy game around it, but I've never done it myself. And, um, you know, now we've got a team of about 25.

Speaker 2: 8:40

Yeah. Smartphone, just a smartphone alone, my phone.

Speaker 3: 8:43

Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, um, and you know, we're, we're, we're continuing to grow, we're continuing to expand both the capabilities of the system, but also, uh, you know, the client base. Uh, and now we're, you know, we're entering into an even bigger period of growth. So it's, it's a pretty exciting couple of years that we've gone through. It's not just going to be Podio. Right. Can we, can we talk about that? I mean, smart. So we, yes, right now we are expanding a smartphone and other systems. Um, uh, you know, we've been working heavily with your team to, uh, bring it into the workspace environment. I'm going to touch on that, which I'm very keen to finish off and get out. Um, cause I think there's some real opportunities there because you know, the smartphone smartphone is an enterprise product. Now it has that capability. We can handle the volume we can handle, you know, and there's a, there's a few better kind of user permissioning things we're bringing into to make that possible, but we can, we can do it. And, um, the infrastructure we have put, you know, Vlad and his team have spent an inordinate amount of time building an enterprise level structure that can just scale as much as we want. I I've met

Speaker 2: 10:00

Vlad, uh, for the benefit of our listeners here. He's a sharp guy. Uh, I've always enjoyed our conversations. I could definitely tell that I'm being dwarfed by the technical, know how, because they'll ask and you can tell, he's trying to dumb some of the questions down for me. Like I know bro, so it's um, yeah,

Speaker 3: 10:25

Alex, I should say, Alex is our other partner. Um, Alex and Vlad are we're partners and they've got, you know, they've got a Podio consultancy and software company called swift pod and swift net. And then they've also got a real estate system called our evolution built on Podio and we partnered together, uh, and joint venture to build smart smartphone and created a it's own separate entity for that and, and, and have pushed that forward.

Speaker 2: 10:51

It's good mentioning that they have an, uh, product, uh, it's not, phone-based it's swift mail, right.

Speaker 3: 10:56

Swift mail. And they've got overview, which is a dashboard project that you can bring Podio data, Podio reports in and dashboard, as well as like LinkedIn, Facebook and every other system out there. It's, it's a very nice system as well. If you

Speaker 2: 11:09

Haven't seen it, understand the geo-tech, I've looked at swift mail a couple of times that I'm not a user of, but, uh, it does look pretty good. And, um, that it's a competitive product to KLOVE Mayo, I believe. Right. Andrea

Speaker 3: 11:24

It's, uh, it is, um, it's a slightly different product to then we'll be male as well. Um, um, I, you know, I've used it and I, I use it for smartphone and I like it. It's a very nice product. Um, uh, we S we use global mail as a game-changers methodology. Um, uh, and that's mainly because we can accomplish all automations ourselves using global flow or PWA, and we couldn't do that in their mail system.

Speaker 2: 11:55

Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, let's, uh, I want, I want to continue on a little bit about some of the use cases, smartphone. I want to touch on smartphone a workspace, uh, but what, why would somebody be interested in smartphone? Like what's what is going to be their main driver as to why? So, you know, touch on some of the, maybe the features benefits that smartphone brings to somebody inside of a Podio context. And if you want to wander outside of that for some of the other systems you're going to, you know, why, why, why do they care? Right.

Speaker 3: 12:26

Well, I would say I would, I would sort of step back and say, there are usually from our experience in smartphone, there are two type of companies that we see onboarding smartphone. Number one are companies that have already bought into the voice or voice over IP, IP phone, virtual phone system, right? So they're companies that have already tried. They're already using one of our competitors call rail, RingCentral, whatever. So they've already realized as a business, they need a virtual phone system that can be more flexible and a virtual phone system like smartphone compared to the other type of company that is using a traditional inside your office, sign up with an account with at and T or some provider or someone on the desk and the phone's on the desk. And you pay a big phone bill every month and you've gotten, you know, had you pay per handset and all these sorts of things. And, uh, you know, and, um, that is an all like that. If you're using a, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll phrase it this way, if you're the, those are the two types of companies we see, uh, onboarding at that level. And if you're using a traditional phone system, you need to stop because it was quite easy. I agree. I agree with this. Yeah. Is it is senseless in this day. COVID brought into such sharp relief. When, if you've spent thousands of dollars, outfitting your office with a phone system, and then everybody went off and worked across the country from where they hunkered down and bunker down in homes. What the hell are you doing? I've seen people shipping out IP phones and having to get it like a virtual phone system on IP based internet phone system is we'll give you the most flexible phone solution out there with the minimal amount of hardware and infrastructure spent with smartphone. The most you should have to spend is as headset. If you want a decent quality phone, that's it, you plug a headset into a laptop and have a decent internet connection anywhere in the world. I have been on a beach holiday or in the mountains, and I've made my phone calls and people, you know, people call my office and they come through to me and it's absolutely no problem. So, yeah, right.

Speaker 2: 14:39

Yeah, of course doesn't even know.

Speaker 3: 14:41

Well, I, they call my three, three, six number and it comes to me in the mountains of Romania where I'm on holiday, sipping a beer. And, um, if I have it on, um, so that that's thing. So if you're still using a, a hardwired sort of phone system, you really need to think about what it means from a cost point of view and an efficiency point of view, to upgrade into an IP phone system, point of view. And, and, and, and that'll come into the workspace conversation we have because these companies who are using workspace should be looking at smartphone and saying, well, geez, why aren't we running our phone system like this? Because that way our employees can be anywhere in the world with no hardware and they can function. So that's one side, the second are the companies that are already using a platform. Um, and you know, we get a lot of real estate companies, solar companies, sales-based companies who made the switch to a virtual system a while back in order to benefit from what, what they consider to be better tracking. Right. Um, so what you'll see a lot of times people, will you be using these a web based phone system, cloud-based phone systems like smartphone, because they can easily just keep buying numbers in different markets, uh, for, for different marketing activities, like say I'm running five different postcards in five different markets. I can put a separate phone number. I can, I can click a button, buy a new phone number, drop it on a piece of marketing. And every time that phone number gets called, I know what marketing I've used, right? It's, it's, I've tracked. And I know, oh, wow, this, this postcard using the whatever number has had 58 calls in the last week, right? And the advantage of a cloud phone system is that you can log into smartphone and you can buy numbers all over the world, but let's just take us, for example, you can buy them numbers in all these different markets, click of a button, buy a brand new number, set it up to configure. How, what happens when you, when someone calls it, who does it ring? Does it ring a group of people, single person, whatever. And you've got all this control and critically from a smartphone perspective versus any other clouded phone system, because smartphones built for Podio. You've already identified where your CRM is in podium. We already know where to store everything and where everything is. So there's a seamless linking directly into your CRM. And if you're a business, whatever business it is, it's always better. If you're, if someone's calling you in, you know, the fact that every single call text, uh, that you do voicemail, whatever is logged in Podio is logged against the contact. And you can use the power of podiums PWA to do all sorts of automation around that. That's, you know, that's a why you should use a closed cloud phone system. And that's B Y smartphone. If you're using Podio is the only solution really you should look at. I would say that though.

Speaker 2: 17:27

I have to agree. Um, it's really, you guys don't really have any peers in the Podio space. There's just not. And I think for good reason, uh, you've hit, you've hit all the benefits that people would want to derive. I, I wanna, I wanna unpack one thing real quick, which is, uh, where people can issue telephone out onto different marketing materials. It doesn't matter, which just kind of take that out of some of this content. It doesn't matter if you use a smartphone or whatever you're using. If you're a business person that's in, that has marketing or sales, you want these unique numbers on all these materials. We, we inform a lot of clients about this, as we're, as we do our consultancy side of our business, that you can get AB testing, that you can get pure KPI and ROI tracking on marketing efforts, which has been for a very long time, basically since its inception, especially when you look at pure advertising, somewhat mysterious, right? You just, okay, I'm going to go write this check that goes away because, you know, marketing somewhat of an investment, but it does exhaust. And I'm going to get phone calls, question mark. Right now you can tell, especially if you're using marketing vendors, uh, if you're a, if you're a business that uses vended marketing, uh, you can tell if they're what's happening and we've installed some of these systems using smartphone. You can also do this in email and other forms of communication, but being able to tie that back directly go, I spend X number of dollars, putting a sign on a corner. We do this with the, uh, you mentioned real estate, the bandit signs that they stick out into the ditches and stuff. I don't think they call them banded because it's not technically supposed to do that. But, um, I think most city ordinances are against, but nobody, you know who who's gonna say, but you could, you could w the same company could have two signs, exact same signs, face one east, west, and one north south on a, on a street corner, put two different numbers, one on each side, and you could tell same sign, just different telephone numbers just faced in different directions. You could tell which east or west, or north or south bound traffics are going to net you the most. And if there's a billboard in that area, especially if it's a traffic area, you know, you should buy a billboard space, cause that's not cheap facing one direction or another. I mean, that's how precise you could use something like smartphone and telephone numbers to test east and westbound. It's insane. It's insane. The amount of KPI and in granularity, you can get out and have all kind of business functions, marketing and advertising really needs to be trapped because it is kind of dollars to a black hole. And in some sense, I mean, yeah, the, you can invest in marketing technologies, but when it comes to like buying the billboard at, you got pay the billboard companies, stick the ad up there and spend the money. And if you get phone calls, you do, if you don't, you don't right. I mean, it's just that money gone. Uh, and it can be very expensive. And if you're a younger company or a smaller company, it can be very risky to spend that kind of money on those kinds of things. So, uh, thank you for letting me dive into that. If there's anything you want to add to that, I, I, I preach that a lot, uh, to our clients that, uh, sort of great investment in your software to be able to afford that level of tracking.

Speaker 3: 20:54

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's no, I mean, there's no question that the, the, the, the, the granularity of, of tracking like that is a critical thing. Um, uh, but, but underlining, everything is just like, if you're using the phone in any sense at all, as a marketing customer service, sales, whatever, and you use Podio, you want to have your calls low, like whatever your CRM is, but presuming if you're listening to this podcast using good Podio, um, the, if you have your communication streams fully integrated, so the inbound outbound are all completely logged against the people in your CRM. It's that is, that is what you want from your CRM. I mean, that's cause that's, you want to be able to look at a contact and see the history and see the, you know, the, the text messages back and forth easily see the calls back and forth easily. And that is just a, a fundamental business decision that is about good practice set aside, whether you're doing sales or marketing or customer support, the more you can have the system apps actually logging things. I mean, 10, 15 years ago, we used to have to, you know, you used to, um, half the time you'd have to log your calls manually by clicking. You know, I logged someone, you know, I logged a call and take your notes. 10 15. I called John. And here are my notes. Well, with smartphone, you make, you just cook. You make the call, you get on the call, you have a little chat to them. The call is automatically recorded. If you choose to record it in, uh, in, in wherever you are, you can, you know, do all that. You can take notes directly into the interface, either on the cell phone app or in the web interface. And when you hang up, you can choose your disposition. You know, I, you know what I answered or need follow up or whatever. And everything's immediately in podium, the call recording in Podio, the notes you took in Podio, and from a CRM perspective, that's, that's exactly what you need.

Speaker 2: 22:57

Going back to your earlier point. You can leverage a Podio workflow, automation, PWA to attract KPI, right on top of that. And without any human need to count those beans, so to speak, you know, how many people answered the phone calls that you did outbound, right? How many inbound phone calls did you miss for the day? Did you make enough dials? How long was your talk time? Like all those kinds of KPIs, which aren't necessarily easy to do, right? Especially if you want to get into the grant granular stuff that we're discussing. It's, it's kinda, it can be, it can be very difficult. Uh, if you've got an inbound call center, how many phone calls and talk time, and then, you know, sales, hopefully from a particular mail out right. Postcards or whatever. So you can not only track the individual performance of the sales person, but also the teeing up of marketing. Cause I know, um, and I'll, I'll tell very, very, very short story here, which is I, I showed up, I have also a sales guy. That's, uh, I came from the financial and banking industry. Uh, lots. I used to do$120 a day. So I'm, I'm super appreciative of what smartphone is. And let's be honest. I mean, it's dialing for dollars. Uh, you get a CRM system at the time. I won't disclose the company, but it was a Salesforce based company. This is well over a decade ago, kind of, kind of this one, Salesforce was really hitting a stride. That CRM was a wreck. You know, they had loaded leads in there a couple years before I had shown up. And I, you know, I spent probably a good month and having to deal with it. Cause I, I had been doing sales for almost a decade when I got there. So I, I kind of had an idea that when I got a wreck of a CRM, no one had been logging calls. This is a B2B situation, which is highly relational. Right. Um, and it's, it was kind of a, at a wholesale level. So the people that were actually generating my paycheck or the persons I'm calling customers, right. So a little, little higher up the tier, um, in, in a financial sales world. And it ultimately, I quit. I ultimately, I quit after about 10 months and I said, this, this is insane. There's no way for me to be able to track my success. No one was logging outside of that. A call was dialed. Cause the dialer that it wasn't an outbound. It wasn't an autodialer, but just dialing out on the keypad, that system was tracked, but it was tracked separate of the CRM system. So you had no ideas. Yeah. I'd call somebody like you all just called me somebody else in the company. I'm like, well, it's my territory. But the territories were all messed up because I kept changing them around. And of course people would get a hold of somebody, especially in this situation, they don't want to give that customer away. Right. So even though they had been reassigned to me, they were still only talking to the other. It was just, it was, it was all of, it could be solved as something like smartphone. Cause I could have seen somebody who had dialed that call, right. At least the dial in number. And I could go to a manager and go, Hey, they keep dialing because of course, what do they say? I didn't dial them. They just with me. Right. And it's like, well, they just told me he called, I got into several of those conversations. So if you're seeing something like that at your company, especially at an enterprise level, I think small business startups, stuff like that probably doesn't have problems like this. But for enterprise customers, you could see a sales team of 2030, because I think that's about the size. We were people step on each other's toes. Sales is competitive, especially if he keeps shaking things up and from a management perspective. So

Speaker 3: 26:28

I'll give you an example though. I mean, when you say enterprise level and smaller teams don't have this problem, but actually when you're talking on a smaller teams, you often do have a problem of, of, of dropping leads. Oh yeah. These are so, I mean like just a really simple setup that we do on all of our real estate systems are, um, on the, the, the, the, the lead app. Right. Cause yeah, there's always the leads out right on the leads app. Um, we have a little section for communications and aside from just the, like the mark down table, showing the history and all that, we also have a status that says last communication direction, which flips between outbound and inbound. We have a date field for last communication date and we, and we simply run flows from the, where smartphone logs into the communications app, which is the app smartphone installs. And the podium. We run very simple workflows that keep updating those sections, inbound, outbound, inbound, outbound, and the date. But what that allows you to do is it allows you to do very defined views, um, and lists of ones where the last communication was in, you know, was outbound and seven days ago, or, you know, you can, you can, you can very easily start to because you're tracking it. You can very easily see, well, you know, the, you know, geez, look, there's five, there's five leads where the last communication was inbound and it's more and it, and it's, you know, um, it's more than like what's going on. Like, I, you can, you can see that because it's fully integrated in new CRM and you're tracking every single communication. You can see that, you know, Hey, they called four days ago, someone tried to connect, connect you what's going on.

Speaker 2: 28:16

You know, I've never, I've never actually thought about that. The kind of almost the weather of the lead, you know, if they're calling in more often than you're calling out to them, I should say, I'm going to have to play with that in my mind. I, I have never encountered that in a system before. So that's pretty, it's pretty brilliant. Um, okay. What's I want to, there's a couple other things before we run out of time. I want to jump into, uh, first, I want to make sure people can get to smartphone when we mentioned the URL. I mentioned it again, S M S M R T P H O N e.io. Uh, for those that want to go look at the product, I can start a trial there.

Speaker 3: 28:57

Uh, yeah, you can start a free trial. Um, uh, I'm sure we can, we can drop the link into the podcast notes, um, as well. Um, and, uh, uh, to make it easier to, to just click directly from the podcast, but, um, yeah, you, you can start a trial and you can be up and running with your system in as little as like a couple of minutes. So all you do, um, is, uh, you, you know, you do have to sign up via the web browser. You can't do it on your phone because we've got to authenticate via Podio and all those things, but you simply go to, you know, when you get the smartphone, you start to trial, you essentially, you, you link your Podio, you choose wherever the thing is in Podio and map everything, and then you're up and running. Um, and you can buy a number and make a call within minutes of, of setting the whole thing up. I, I love

Speaker 2: 29:44

The, the on the onboarding is, is quite rapid. Uh, obviously, uh, there's a lot of resources on smartphone. People can also come to us here at brick bridge. We do these installations. Uh, I'll make sure that the link is in the show notes for those that are maybe driving or something while they're listening to this. Um, oh, well, we have a special offer code through you guys as well for a discount. So make sure that you guys, um, take a look at the show notes and grab that. However, if you, you know, if you just want to check it out real quick, smartphone.io, uh, definitely, uh, hit that show notes for, for an extra discount. Um, okay. You guys have Twitter,

Speaker 3: 30:25

We don't have a Twitter or we do tactically have LinkedIn, but I mean, it's just a company page, Facebook. We do have a Facebook page. Uh, I believe it's Facebook, um, slash smartphone for Podio, um, uh, yeah, smartphone for Podio. Um, but realistically, I mean, uh, you know, if you're curious about smartphone from a sales perspective, hop on our website, we do have, um, we, you know, we do outline the different products that we have because of course, we've got a few products in smartphone, including a sales dialer, which if you do a lot of sales, it allows you to get agents rapidly dialing lists to, to, to try and close more sales. Um, and, uh, you know, we do have a live chat available, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM EST Monday through Friday. And that's both from a sales point of view, uh, but also a support point of view. So, um, you can ask any, you can talk to the live chat. Uh, we've got a whole team involved there and they can answer questions

Speaker 2: 31:25

For you. Uh there's one, uh, you bring up the autodialer and then there's also pro dialing features. I want, I want to highlight this for the listeners and I'll, I'll do a little bit of highlight if you want to expand on it. Jordan, I love like the barge, the whisper, uh, all these pro features that are, I I've, like I said, I had a long career in, in, in and outbound sales. So I've, I've done my time in the cube farms and, and those kinds of situations and being able to have that kind of technology in the fall. And it sounds somewhat arbitrary, but if you've got, you know, if you've got a team of 20 or 15 or more, does it, or more, or obviously a call center, you might have, I wasn't one that had 300 people in it. I mean, that is packed in there. Uh, being able to listen to each other's calls for training purposes, being able to coach people without the other person on the other side of the phone, hearing that those benefits, if utilized properly, you can, can really just honestly pay for the whole phone system, uh, being able to barge or transfer calls easily. I mean, even the, even the plastic handsets on the desk, it's sometimes hard to transfer calls around. I talk about the dialer a little bit, talk about some of the pro features. Cause I, I find that, uh, it's almost a must buy with his phone system.

Speaker 3: 32:49

Yeah. So the, there, the pro se the smartphone pro, which is, so there are two basic, uh, the smartphone cloud phone system is one product. And then the smart dialer, which is the sales dialer and the rapid dialer is a second add on product smartphone and smart smartphone, which is, you know, the kind of smart, uh, cloud system. Um, we, we created the pro account for those companies that really seriously use the phone for sales, um, because you know that there are companies out there that simply, um, you know, that, that simply use the phone for, you know, like calling on us the game changes. Like we don't use the phone a lot. Yeah. The phone doesn't ring, you know, what we do. Um, and, but smartphone pro was really designed for those companies that are, are using the phone as a core communication and sales platform. And, and, and within smartphone pro you've got, uh, a couple of key features, um, to make your use of the phone system even better for you. Number one, as you mentioned, the call monitoring, um, being able to watch all the live calls going in your system, uh, listening on an individual call, whisper to the agent, to coach them, uh, and even barge into, to speak to the end customer. Um, those are useful not only for training purposes, but also for quality assurance. It's a really critical thing. If you've got a company relying on phone sales or support. So that's one, the second is of course, we've got a bunch of features like, um, you know, um, conference transferring where you can, uh, you know, you can be on a call and you can add in, uh, I think it's up to 50 other people to the call and, uh, both internal and external and dial new people and add them in and draw. You can transfer a call over, you can, I can be on a call and I can bring Gill in and I can introduce them and I can leave. And the call stays connected at all log in Podio. Um, and then you've also got an ability to work in different markets by automating the process around how we deal with those markets. So, good example is let's say real estate, because it's one that we're all familiar with in Podio, uh, say you're working in California or in Los Angeles and in Oregon, for some reason, um, you can actually, uh, with smartphone pro you can actually set up call rules and texting rules for your different agents as to what number we use based on the area code we're dialing. And that's really important to be able to be efficient so that, and, and to make sure you're a local presence. So if I've got one agent and he's based in the Philippines, or in, let's say North Carolina, it doesn't matter either way. And I'm all I'm calling people in Los Angeles and in, uh, you know, and in Portland, um, I can set the rules up with smart phone pro that says, well, it wouldn't Jordan calls this area code, use this number, but when he calls that area code, you use that number. And when he calls this the number it's totally localized and the agent doesn't do anything, they just call the system, routes it, using the correct number. And, um, and that, that is a really powerful thing when you're dealing, when you're trying to maintain a local presence, um, and make sure that you have a local presence in, in different markets to make sure your agents don't have to think about it. They don't, they can't screw it up. Um, you know, nationally as well. Absolutely. Yeah, you can. Yeah. Not only does it work internationally, but, um, it's, uh, you can set up different rules that say, like, when I call this country in this area code, use this number, but this country, and this area code uses this number and this country use this number and you can set all these rules up in the end of smartphone and then say like, we've got them. Cause we've got office in Poland, we've got office in the U S got off. Um, our systems already set up. So whenever I click a call, if I'm clicking number and it's in Poland, it's going to use our Polish office number. If I D if I get a dial, uh, uh, 904 number, it's going to use whatever the number I've set up for that. And I don't have to think about it. I just clicked the number and call fantastic,

Speaker 2: 36:55

Valuable to be able to localize those communications, especially a real, estate's a good example. People want to deal with local people. That's not always feasible from a business model perspective to have someone physically located everywhere, right? And, and it's probably not economically sound. You're going to have a call center at some point. Any, any company that grows beyond kind of a mom and pop or small business operations is going to start operationalizing and using the economies of scale on some of these assets. So I love that it's internationally and again, appealing and appealing to that enterprise crowd. Uh, you know, having, if you're, if you're doing business in multiple countries, uh, being able to localize that almost as critical, obviously who's gonna, you know, think about yourself. Are you going to answer calls from outside of your country? Not, not likely, right. Not, not less, unless you're used to that, uh, which somebody, again, just use a real estate, it could be anything, uh, you know, people that you're calling outbound sales to, aren't going to answer calls from various countries, right. So it's gotta be,

Speaker 3: 38:01

Yeah. And from a real estate perspective, what we see the most of is we see a lot of real estate companies who hire VA companies or VA individuals in the Philippines, for instance. And they, you know, because smartphone is cloud-based because it's intelligent like that they can be sitting in the Philippines, they can be dialing or answering calls. And the end user is none the wiser, they don't, you know, they, they, I make a call and it looks like they're die. I'm calling from North Carolina. And, um, the fact that I'm sitting, you know, in the Philippines or me in Poland right now, it doesn't make a single bit of difference from the end user is going to see that my three, three, six number is calling them phone

Speaker 2: 38:45

Also allows companies to trust outsourcing those operations, right? Because you're recording all the phone calls. You're seeing the productivity of the agents. I know, I know trust tends to be a problem, especially if the company was small and it's starting to grow. And of course the owners or senior, or the senior people that are there may not want to sales is so important. They may not want to give that up. Especially you're asking them to give it up to somebody outside the country, right. It's even bigger as smartphone allows for, for a, at least a level of visibility and transparency that trust can be built on top of that, those agents are working with the VA companies or vendors that may be that you're hiring are, are appropriate and doing the job that's specified is so easy. There's so many, so much spam around. We'll do your sales stuff. Um, smartphone allows people to have the clarity that's, that's there. Okay. A couple of things as we wrap this up, uh, I, I don't want to bury this any further. We are helping smartphone come to workspace. We've actually started our principal development on our side. Uh, we, we want to be able to get you guys Citrix ready. I know that there's been some advancements in the API for those that may want to do some custom work in that. Is there some news around what you, what you guys are bringing on the API side? I

Speaker 3: 39:59

Mean, I think to be fair, I think the API is pretty much done and when it's not an open API, um, it's, it's an API that we Dole out to where we need it. Um, because there's too many, you know, there's too many things that can potentially impact, but, um, you know, we, we have spent a lot of time over the last year. Um, I mean, if you're, if you're in smartphone at all right now, you'll have seen over the last month, even a brand new menu last two months on new dialer, a new menu system, a new dashboard system, um, a new Chrome extension that's just launched, which brings by the way, isn't a good, the new, like when it just drops down in Podio. Um, and, and you can answer it without leaving the screen. I mean, we've, we've, we've been rolling out a bunch of stuff. We've got even more ruling out, including a new product, a new part of the product suite. We've got a new suite product coming out, um, in the next three, uh, two months sort of thing. Um, and so, you know, there's, it's, it really is. Um, it's pretty exciting. And, um, the AP we've spent a lot of time, uh, making, you know, when we initially built smartphone, it was 100% just for Podio and that's it. And so a lot of the infrastructure was designed around Podio, and now we've spent a lot of time with last year, decoupling it, not to minimize the Podio instance at all, because we're still, but to make the plan, the infrastructure primed. So that Podio is just one of the spokes, right?

Speaker 2: 41:33

The product is so good. And there's w we love Podio. We both do. We've been around Podio a long time, but there's other CRM systems out there. We just talk about Salesforce. I mean, there's, there's, there's tons of, there's a lot of flavors that people like, um, regardless of, of who we like that I think smartphone is going to be able to help. So yeah, this is, this is fantastic news,

Speaker 3: 41:55

And I'm excited about workspace. I mean, I think, um, you know, with our new, with the new functionality we're bringing out, or the next two months as well, it's going to play right into the workspace integration that you, you guys are working on. And the ability for smartphone to be, um, you know, to, to be rolled out to any company of any size, really, you know, enterprise, you know, you have a thousand employees, we can handle it and, and have, you know, your address book directly inside a smartphone where we've pushed the contact into smartphones. You can see them, you can scroll through them, you can open up a contact in smartphone, see the history with that person, call them, um, see the, the, the, the calls you've made, but also because smartphone, I mean, the big advantage that smartphone is going to bring the workspace end and other systems just like we do to Podio is, um, it's one system that meets all your needs because we are constantly seeing, you know, we see people that use that come up with a smartphone, um, and they were using call rail and mojo dialer and something else, right. Because cause they, you know, and, and mojo for call volumes, uh, lead Sherpa or batch leads to text, um, call rail to do the calls. And even then, Caldwell's not great at calling, although it's a great system. So you're batching together things well with smartphone, inbound, outbound call texts, voicemail, um, sales dialing up to four lines, rapid dialing, um, you know, all of those things combined in one system fully integrated together, that completely integrates your CRM. I mean, what

Speaker 2: 43:34

Else do you need touched on the call, flows stuff or handle stuff that's coming inbound is an IVR system, you know, touch to do options. Um, well, w what's I'm going to leave it at that. There's plenty for people listening to explore. If they don't know Spotify, if you're in a Podio development community, probably know who smartphone is. I obviously probably know Jordan, but for those, uh, we're expanding our listing out to other Citrix developers and other products. I think that you got to go check this out, even if it's just, I love you guys as a model to look at, right. Maybe, maybe if you're, if you're an aspiring entrepreneur or something, look at smartphone and the story behind smartphone, it's, it's a wonderful journey that you guys have had. And I think it's just so cool. So thank you so much for sharing with us today, Jordan, there's a couple of things we got coming up. Um, first, you and I will be back together again on July 29th. Um, it's a of weeks from the time that we're recording this podcast. Uh, we're, we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about Podio and workspace. I know that's our tend to be our favorite topics of conversation, but we're just going to spend a short time with this on a webinar on July 29th, 2021. Um, uh, roughly 12, 15:00 PM. Eastern time. Are you ready for that Jordan? So only 15 minutes. I know. We'll have to try to keep it.

Speaker 3: 44:53

Oh yeah. I was going to say the hardest what's going to be time management, right?

Speaker 2: 44:57

Yeah, no doubt. I know. I was like, Hey, this podcast is going to be 2030 and we're already probably 40 something. Uh, I always enjoy talking to you, uh, a very enjoyable person, Jordan, I've always swayed. I know we've done a few podcasts together, so it's always a pleasure, always a great time. You also have a, and I think this is critical for people. Uh, oh, before I move on, uh, that you can sign up for that webinar. If you're interested, it's just brick bridge, consulting.com, big red banner sign up for register for the webinar. Uh that's there. Um, you got a masterclass coming out, right? If somebody, somebody has finally put together a training package for Podio developers, it is you. We are going to make that mandatory training for all of our new hires, by the way. There's just not really any reason. I think there was another company that kind of put out some, uh, Podio workflow automation or GlobiFlow flow as it used to be called, um, stuff. But, you know, I think that, uh, from Podio centric training is just draft of resources. So we spend what our new hire has been two to three weeks, just sitting next to somebody, just figuring out, tell us about this masterclass. I'm super excited about.

Speaker 3: 46:12

Yeah, it's, it's just something that, that we decided to do. I mean, what I, you know, myself, I would, I would probably be classed as a veteran partner partner at this point. Um, been around a long time and the podium ecosystem is a partner and, and, and done all that. Um, and really we, we decided to put it out. Um, you know, and I will say, it's not like if you, you know, we've got about five modules that we've been, we're just finishing off recording all of them right now and getting them up. And each module has about gosh, anywhere from 10 to 15 lessons. And, but the lessons are part, um, nuts and bolts. Here's how you do things, but also part what have we learned in Podio development, because you know, like the nuts and bolts of like, how do you use a PWA flow to create, click a category, field button and create an item? Okay, we got a fit, we've got bits of that in it as well. You know, um, quite a few bits of that in it as well, but, but it's also around like, what are you going to, what should you understand? So you don't make as many mistakes as we've all made over the years. Right? What, what, uh, it's our ideas workspace organization and, um, you know, and best practices around X and user management door, you know, uh, Y you know, Y you sh you know, how you should approach creating larger apps or breaking them up into little one. It's, it's the concept of what does it mean to really get good at building Podio?

Speaker 2: 47:52

Podio is so pretty, no code, low code kind of interface that it really cruxes down to design. It's about

Speaker 3: 48:00

Choices. It's about choices. And a lot of times, most of us come up. I would bet that most of us who are experienced Podio, people have relatively the same basic ideas around what's good. And what isn't, we may have a few things we argue about, but I would bet that were within the margin of error, because we've probably all made the same mistakes and realized why it's socks and co and gone, well, this is the way we're going to do. And then there will be stylish differences, but the truth is good. Podio development is about D is about understanding some fundamentals of Podio and what this masterclass is going to do. The modules, um, you know, we've got sort of fundamentals of Podio design, where we talk through concepts, things, conceptual things we've learned over the years to give people that insight. We've got things around PWA about communications, about, you know, tips, hints, and tricks, and, you know, you know, little things like, you know, you should always create a bread. If you're creating an item somewhere, create a breadcrumb link in the comments to take you right there, right. Or, or, you know, like little things that'll, that'll help you become a better Podio developer. Um, if you're just starting out and, and hopefully get you at a more, to a more advanced stage,

Speaker 2: 49:21

Recommend anyone that's been doing Podio development for any length of time, not just new ones, we're going, we're going to have all our new people. Obviously it's very obvious, uh, for new people, but for people that have been coding in Podio or developing in Podio for, for awhile to see also a new perspective of how design has done you're right. There's a lot of different spins they can take, but there are some patterns to Podio design that are true and, and stylistic choices. Yes. But there, there are certain ways, you know, especially I w we always do. We have a pattern that we use for CRM systems that are over and over and over again, that we, you know, we only allow eight choices when it comes to the stages, right. We don't want to have a zillion stages of a lead. I mean, you know, either they're buying or they're not, and there's a few phases to that process. And every, you know, each industry has its own spin, but it, there's a pattern there over and over again, because we know that if you give any more statuses than that, from our perspective, they're not going to use them. And then you're going to spend all this time building automation off of status as nobody ever clicks on. Right.

Speaker 3: 50:27

Exactly. And it's an exciting, it's a fun product. It's a labor of love for me. It's, it's sort of my Swan song as a, as a, you know, as a, as a Podio developer, because realistically I'm not one anymore. I haven't been one for a years. Uh, you know, Andrew, who's taken over as CEO of game changes. Um, and the team we have, they do amazing things. I stopped building in Podio a couple of years ago. Um, you know, w when I built a team to do it for me, and, um, but, but the truth is, this is a chance for me, it's, it's, um, uh, for me to, to get, uh, to canvas my team, my amazing team for their ideas, and to communicate, um, a lot of ideas around Podio, which I hope will be useful to people. And like I can say right now, the first module is a lot of, you know, it's a, five-minute, there's, there'll be a module lesson where it's five minutes of me talking about, you know, about some about good workspace, design and app, you know, and now, you know, and, and, and it's five minutes where you may think, well, I don't need to listen to that. But actually that's 12 years. I've been building in Podio where it's like, listen, let me just explain to you why I think this is important. So I'm hoping it'll be valuable to you.

Speaker 2: 51:45

Cool. I, I can't imagine that it's not just, just hearing the perspective and giving people it's the design is the art, right? That's the hard part to learn, and that's what you guys are trying to impress, but I'm sure there's some technical knowledge as well, that that has to go along with it. But, you know, it's, it's the art of design to Podio. The system itself really gets it down to that. Workspace with intelligence is similar. It has a similar thing. So, um, you know, it, well, what, leave it at that? How can people access? It's not up yet at the time of this recording.

Speaker 3: 52:21

Oh, it's coming up. I meant I was supposed to get it live by the end of June. And then I had a holiday and kids and family. It will 100% be the first few modules will be up. Uh, I'm hoping, uh, next week, uh, I'm going to launch the first couple I'm recording actually more today. And, um, you, all you have to do is go to, we are game changers.com. I mean, there, there's, there's two things to look at on our website. There's the podcast page, and there's the masterclass page. And you can put your details in to be notified when it launches. Um, the master class is a hundred percent free as well. Um, there's no paywall and there's no hidden content. So you'll be able to go through and watch them all.

Speaker 2: 52:59

Oh, I didn't re I thought there was gonna, I thought you were selling this. No, no, no,

Speaker 3: 53:05

No, no. To be fair, I will say this to be fair. Um, you know, if you go through the mask glass and you need a little help, there's a going to be a guided ability for you to, uh, go ahead and engage with game day team. But, uh, but no, this is, uh, this content is not buying a paywall.

Speaker 2: 53:22

Well, uh, your generosity is greatly appreciated. I had already gotten my credit card out of my wallet, ready to pay for it, especially new hire training, but that's, uh, that's wonderful news. So listeners, please swing by and take a look again. We'll, we'll have all this information in the show, notes, links and everything else for all the things that we talked about, please join us again. July 29th, a couple of weeks from the time of this recording, uh, should, should be a great, uh, hopefully we can stick to 15 minutes session. Uh we're we're I put it at the end. I was going to put in the middle and I was like, oh man, that's going to wreck the next speaker. So I switched it to the end in case we tail off a little bit. Uh, but we want you to join the party with us on July 29th. Thank you so much, Jordan, once again, uh, for everything that you do for the Podio community, what you're doing with the smartphone, I think it's huge value to anyone that's interacted with it. Uh, so thank you for the personal effort, uh, to make this all. And of course, thank you once again for coming on. And, and I always enjoy chatting. We got to w w we we've done so many podcasts together, but we we've yet to meet in person. We've never had a beer we're we're planning on trying to get over onto the Euro side. I know, uh, we we're trying to do that. And then of course, uh, good old COVID showed up, but, uh, yeah, w we'll have to get, uh, I know trout restrictions are easing. Uh, we might have to do one of these live. One of these podcasts live at least here in the next couple, couple of times,

Speaker 3: 54:52

It will be very pleasing for me to finally be able to sit down and have a beer with you as a, it's always a pleasure to chat with you and, uh, and to have you on my podcast and to be a guest on us.

Speaker 2: 55:03

Excellent. Well, I'll see you again on the 29th or listeners. I'll see you again on the 29th, and thank you so much, Jordan. Thank you. Ma'am.

Speaker 1: 55:11

Thank you so much for listening to today's interview. I hope that the guest that we had was engaging. We'd love to have you on listener. Please reach out to us. You can reach out to us through any of our social media properties, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, many others. You can also hit us back with a email or message Podio chat service@brickbridgeconsulting.com. Love to have you on we're all yours on interesting topics that, uh, anything that is Citrix, uh, and not just their SAS offerings, got some episodes coming up that are going to be related to virtualization in the future. We also have our webinar. That's coming up on July 29th. After listening to this 2021 that's July 29th, 2021. Love to see you all there. You can register at brick B R I C K bridge, VRI BG consulting.com. Thanks again for your listen. Hope to see you back on our next episode.