turboDial

turboDial icon

Developed by: Bill Jenkins

The Genesis of turboDial

The initial idea for turboDial originated during a conversation in the office of one of my Infusionsoft consulting customers, January 2014. Vytas Skapcevicius talked passionately about building a sales culture in his insurancy agency. In his words:

"We must become a selling business!"

As an example, this meant training his agents to reach out to their large existing client list to pursue cross-sale opportunities - such as people with a homeowners policy but no auto policy. These opportunities were already flagged in the Infusionsoft CRM and some warming email campaigns had been tried. But a key piece of data was missing:

"For each prospect who we want to buy our policy - when does their current policy expire?"

The best way to get the answer is with a personal phone call.

Vytas knew I had the skills to create apps for Infusionsoft and in that conversation and others he asked me to give him a way to help his agents make more phone calls.

Vytas' agency became the beta customer for turboDial. A few weeks after they began using it Vytas confirmed for me he saw value in the app:

"I looked at my dashboard and saw last week one agent made 17 calls, and another agent made 117 calls, then I knew where I needed to put my attention. turboDial has changed my business."

Vytas has continued to expand the role of turboDial in his business.

The Inspiration

The first part of my career focused on engineering and marketing for advanced telecommunications equipment, and in that time I developed many insights into the important elements of a telecom solution. I had recently become enamored with the Twilio API when I used it to add Text Messaging to the TimeFusion app. So when Vytas pressed me to consider creating an Infusionsoft app in the telecom arena, I did not need much coaxing!

I have loved this opportunity to blend my telecom engineering background with the new cloud technologies brought by Infusionsoft and Twilio, all for the purpose of helping small businesses achieve more sales; it has been nothing short of thrilling!

The Primary Mission

turboDial is a closely integrated plug-in for the Infusionsoft CRM. Its purpose is to make personal communication an integrated capability, seamlessly available within Infusionsoft.

It is intended to be used side-by-side with Infusionsoft and is designed from the ground-up with that goal in mind. Users think of turboDial as one more tool they have available to them in Infusionsoft; Along with the things they could already do, like set a task, book an appointment, fill an internal form, ... now they can also make a phone call and send a text message.

The Target Customer

turboDial has a clear target: small and medium sized companies who love automating their marketing with Infusionsoft AND have a strong need to connect with their clients personally, with one-on-one conversations.

Typical target companies are those whose products and services are not suitable for an e-commerce sales process because of high price or the custom nature of the transaction; Inside sales is key to their business success. The best turboDial customer is seeking to scale their business and working to grow their sales team.

For example, some of the early users of turboDial were insurance agencies, realtors and high-end training providers. Some turboDial subscribers are brand-new to Infusionsoft, and a Call Outcome Automation campaign was the perfect "campaign start" for them.

Notable Features

In general, I am proud that turboDial is a "deep" integration into Infusionsoft. There are some world-class telecom solutions that work with Infusionsoft and yet are integrated only superficially, so the power of Infusionsoft is not fully leveraged when using them. turboDial brings the full power of Infusionsoft to voice and messaging conversations.

I am most proud of how the integration has succeeded in packing significant functionality into a small-form web pop-up, while retaining good usability. This was critical to the mission of establishing turboDial as a useful plug-in to Infusionsoft.

Here's the turboDial panel shown next to an Infusionsoft screen:

Small Form

And here's the turboDial panel expanded to expose more features:

Full Panel

I am proud of several other features too. Some that stand out:

Call Outcome Automation: Users define their own call outcomes and create campaign automation in Infusionsoft for each call outcome. Then turboDial triggers the right automation after each call, according to the chosen call outcome. I've enjoyed seeing Users create increasingly advanced Call Outcome Automation campaigns in Infusionsoft as they discover the power of triggering automation after phone calls. Call Outcomes also enrich the information for building powerful dashboard reports.
Voice Message Pre-recording: Users can pre-record the voice message for the list they're calling, and in the case where they reach someone's voice mail a button-click will cause turboDial to leave the voice message on their behalf while they move on to the next call on the list. This achieves a huge time-savings because typically more than 40% of calls reach voice mail.
2-Way SMS: This feature is not like other text messaging solutions for Infusionsoft - It's not for broadcast marketing or lead capture. With turboDial, text messaging is a personal communications tool for real-time 2-way conversations with clients and prospects who can't answer phone calls. These personal SMS conversations are a very effective method for connecting with people and advancing the sale.
List Dialing: Like the others, this feature was designed with input from customers, and they specifically asked that it support Infusionsoft's "Opportunities". So, Contact and Opportunity saved searches can be pre-loaded and then auto-dialed. This feature is key for teams with high calling volume and saves them significant time.
Dashboard Reporting: turboDial records a detailed Note for each call or text and users create powerful dashboard reports based on Task-Note Saved Reports. This report generation technique is new to many users and there is a how-to video on the turboDial website that walks them through it. Sales managers are depending on these reports to set goals and track results as they manage their teams.
Price: turboDial is priced to be accessible to even the smallest sales teams. For that reason the most feature-packed version is available for only $29.95/mo, with deep discounts for additional users.

Please see the image gallery in this Challenge Post submission for a visual perspective of some of the features mentioned above.

turboDial is supported by extensive user guide and support information at http://turbodial.biz, and 100% of support inquiries made by 7:00 PM EST are responded to same day.

Infusionsoft Back-end

The turboDial business itself is operated using extensive Infusionsoft automation. Subscription ordering and recurring billing use the E-Commerce functions of Infusionsoft, and account setup and cancellation are orchestrated by Infusionsoft campaigns. A CustomerHub account provides users access to their invoice history and credit cards, and also provides configuration screens for authorizing team members into turboDial and help screens for installing the browser extension.

Next Steps

There is a growing number of requests from turboDial customers for help in building Call Outcome Automation campaigns, and those requests will exceed my own capacity to support them. For that reason I am planning to offer "turboDial Certification" training to ICPs, and then I will pass along those consulting requests to trained ICPs.

I believe there are many small-medium sized businesses who love Infusionsoft and also depend on the success of their inside sales team to close deals and drive revenue. I believe turboDial can help them succeed, and I plan to increase my marketing efforts to reach them. The ICON15 Battle of the Apps is one strategy in that plan.

Thank you for this opportunity!

signature