Revamp your Follow Up Boss for Success
Kee Technology Solutions helps solo agents, teams, and brokerages automate, simplify and streamline their CRM 

Elena Kee: Today I’m excited to be talking with Daniel Poston, the CEO of InterFace, about a new product they’ve created called an Automation Builder. Daniel, thank you for joining me today.

Daniel Poston: Hey, how’s it going? 

Yeah, very good. I appreciate you taking the time to share your new product. Before we dive into that, just for those who don’t know, can you share what InterFace is and what the goal is around your company?

Daniel Poston: Yeah, definitely. So at InterFace we help the best real estate teams in the world automate and analyze their sales process. We focus on teams that use Follow Up Boss because Follow Up Boss has the best open API in real estate and really Sales CRMs in general. It’s pretty solid. So we don’t connect with any other CRMs but we’re building out automation customization within Follow Up Boss with embedded web forms within an embedded app.

And then we’re going to be getting into analytics a little later this quarter with conversion ratios and leaderboards and dashboards and all that fun stuff. You’ll be able to feed any Follow Up Boss data into our system and then build whatever reports you want. We’re pretty excited about it.

The first thing we’re releasing is the automation platform which has a lot of cool things you can do with Smart Lists. And so that’s why I wanted to hop on a call with you because you’re the Follow Up Boss Smart Lists savant. So I thought this was a good place to launch. 

Elena Kee: Yeah, and it sounds like we may need to have a few more in the future to talk about your form integrations and your analytics builder. So lots of exciting stuff. 

Daniel Poston: Yeah, the form builder is probably what people are most excited about. Just because there’s a lot of customization you can’t do within Follow Up Boss. You have deals and person custom fields, that you can’t require them. You can’t make certain fields appear in certain situations. So the form builder solves a lot of those issues. 

Elena Kee: Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing that. So in regards to specifically the automation builder you’ve created, can you share what inspired you to create this builder? 

Daniel Poston: Yeah, so a couple things. One is there just aren’t enough triggers available in different Automation platforms. So Zapier and Make, the way those platforms work is they have companies come in and they build their own integrations. So what Follow Up Boss does with Zapier is they build the five or six triggers that people are going to use the most often. But they have another 20 webhooks that could offer really good automation triggers.

And unless you’re a data engineer or, close to it, figuring out how to get that up and running in Zapier is just too challenging for most real estate teams. So what we’ve done is built out a handful of those triggers so far. And the plan is to build every Follow Up Boss web hook into the automation platform.

So anybody who has Follow Up Boss can easily set up whatever automation they want. The other motivation was it’s the building blocks for our analytics platform. So to feed all the data into the analytics database, we need a data pipeline. And so since we’re going to be building that for the analytics platform, might as well, kill two birds with one stone and give people the ability to automate stuff as well.

And we have some cool ideas to tie those together but we’ll wait until we. So we build that to get into it. 

Elena Kee: Yeah. Yeah. Not only the complexities of setting up something like this and either Zapier or make, but also just the cost. I know at least for sure in Zapier, if you have so many, what they call tasks happen it the bill adds up really fast. So I think this will help a lot of people. 

Daniel Poston: Yeah. And they they just raised their price. I think like 60%. Like an absurd amount they were charging, I think, close to 400 for 50, 000 actions. And now that they’re charging the same amount for 20, 000 so we were charging about 10 percent of what Zapier was charging because we’re focused more on High volume stuff like calls and emails and I, just can’t charge what Zapier’s charging for that.

Nobody would be able to afford it but that we’re about 10 percent of what they were charging a month ago. Now it’s probably closer to 5 percent after their price increase. 

Elena Kee: Wow. I didn’t know that. 

Daniel Poston: Yeah. If you’re on a yearly Zapier plan, your next renewal is going to be a lot more expensive.

Elena Kee: Hopefully people see this if they’re using Zapier. So what are, just high level, can you share what are some of the main use cases you’ve seen agents and broker, brokerages using this automation builder? 

Daniel Poston: Yeah, the primary use cases right now are building better smart lists that are more granular and automated agent accountability. In Follow Up Boss, a lot of people don’t know this but one of the issues with Follow Up Boss smart lists is you can’t indicate who did the activity. So there’s last communication, there’s last call, but there’s nothing that specifies who did the call. So if you build out a series of smart lists and you have an inside sales agent and an outside sales agent that are both reaching out to the same person, when one of them calls them, it’s going to drop that person off the other person’s smart list.

So if you have an outside sales agent that goes on a meeting set by an ISA and now he needs to follow up with that person weekly After the appointment, if the ISA reaches out to the person to find out what happened on the appointment, now it’s going to drop that contact off the outside sales agent smart list.

Now you have leads slipping through the cracks when communication was supposed to happen. The automated accountability is, there’s a lot of stuff we can do for if a lead comes in and certain action is supposed to be taken, like a call or a note being added or email being sent or text being sent, we can use our triggers to apply tags to the person and then use automation in Follow Up Boss to check for those tags.

And if those tags aren’t there, then reassign the lead to another person. So you don’t have leads coming into Follow Up Boss are just sitting there or, stage changes. And now you have another communication requirement. So you want to make sure those requirements are followed, and if not, automatically, add an ISA to the lead or put it in a pond or whatever your rules are. We can really do that at a high level now. 

Elena Kee: Okay. So let’s dive in more first into the use case for Smart Lists. I know some people watching and listening are following along with what you’re saying, but for those who are more visual understanding people and learners, Can you share your screen and show what that would look like? What, how would that work with the Smart List in Follow Up Boss? 

Daniel Poston: All right. Can you see my screen? Yes. Perfect. All right. So this is our platform. Automation. This is what we’ll be checking out today. Form builder and then analytics coming soon. So it’s very similar to Zapier.

So you have different workflows. We have templates. Anytime we get a use case that a lot of teams are using, we’re going to build it into a template. We understand who our client base is. So we know that teams just aren’t great at doing this stuff. So if we can simplify it as much as possible, that’s what we’re going to do.

So what these are entire workflows that are condensed just to a toggle. So this will create a parameter on the Follow Up Boss lead record for last call by assigned agent. It’ll turn on the entire workflow. And then every time a call happens by the person that’s assigned. To the contact in Follow Up Boss, it’ll populate the date to that field.

And now you have a last call by assigned agent parameter in Follow Up Boss that you can build smart lists off of. So we’ve templatized last call by assigned agent, last email by assigned agent, and last text by assigned agent. As we get more and more use cases, we’re, we’ll build out more and more of these templates where you can just turn on cool stuff in Follow Up Boss.

But we also have the full automation builder. So you come in here, you create the workflow and now you select a trigger. So right now we just have Follow Up Boss as a trigger. The next trigger that we’re going to be adding is our web forms. So you can build out a web form that’ll go in an embedded app in Follow Up Boss. And then you can use that form to trigger automation. But right now we’ve built in people triggers so if any of these things happen, you can trigger automation with no triggers email appointments, which I know a lot of people are really interested in cause this doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Text messages, calls and deals. So what we’re working on right now is to get the person updated trigger really dialed in. So what that’s going to do is, any field on the Follow Up Boss contact record, you can use as a trigger, and if that field gets updated then you can trigger automation. And so What we’ll be able to use that for is if you add like a date to a custom field then you’ll be able to use a date calculator that we’re also working on.

And then you can have tasks created that have dates based off of the Date field on the person, and then we’ll be adding that to deals as well. And then if the date is updated, it’ll be able to update the tasks. If you have an open house that is a week away and you need to do something three days before, but then it gets delayed another week, then your task will automatically get updated with a new deadline.

So that’ll really help with transaction management.

Elena Kee: Not only dates, but then another use case would be value equals in a custom field, then do this. You may want it to do something different if you put in like a number two versus number five, for example. 

Daniel Poston: Exactly. And that just isn’t available anywhere else because the way Follow Up Boss’s API works they don’t send the data with the webhook of what was updated. So the only way to set this up is you have to have a separate database to compare. So every time something is updated in Follow Up Boss, I can check my internal database to see if what field was actually updated. And that’s a hard thing to set up. So that type of automation trigger just isn’t available anywhere right now.

But since our analytics platform is going to be utilizing those internal databases, it, we were already going to be building it. So it works perfect for the automation platform. So you select your trigger. Now you test your trigger. Very similar to Zapier. We’re going to check right now.

We’ve created the call, created webhook. Now we’re testing and checking for a call. And one thing we’ve done that’s easier than Zapier is, if a call happens, we know that you also want the data related to the person that was called. So in Zapier, you create your trigger, and then you have to create like a get step to go in and get data related to other platforms, and it starts getting confusing.

So what we’ve done is, We know you’re going to want the person data, we just go and get that person data for you automatically. So now you have all the data related to the call, you have all the data related to the person and so now we have filters. Filters, again, we want to make this as easy as possible, so to start we have templates.

Where you just select one. So if a tag exists, and then you could stipulate what tag you’re looking for, the call was made by the assigned agent. If it was incoming, it was outbound, if that doesn’t work for you, then we have advanced filters. And now it’s just like Zapier where you’re going and selecting data and selecting an operator, does it equal?

Is it greater? What a lot of teams are using this for is the duration. So what was the call duration? So then you can have a parameter for if the call was longer than two minutes. Or if the call is less than two minutes. So a lot of times when you have a, let’s say you have a weekly smart list, somebody needs to call every week. Really what that smart list is for is to speak to that person every week.

It’s not just a call. And so the way everyone’s smart lists work right now is that call happens, even if they don’t connect with them, now it drops them off for a week. And they don’t follow up for another week so what you can do with a call duration parameter is if that date is populated, it’ll drop them off for a couple days and then they show back up for another call.

But if the call lasts longer than two minutes, then it drops them off for a week. And so now you’re following up more often if you’re not able to reach them but then if you are able to reach them, then it goes back to your weekly cadence. 

Elena Kee: I like that. It’s not just an all or nothing. It’s if this happens, then show them one day later, two days later. But if this happens, wait a week, I didn’t know that. That’s really cool. 

Daniel Poston: Exactly. Okay. So that’s filters. And then right now our actions are set a tag. And so it’s also about applying tags is when the tag is applied. Now you can use that to trigger any other automation.

So now all the triggers that we’ve built in, you can utilize to trigger Zapier automation or make automation or Follow Up Boss automation then populate custom fields. That’s what we’re using for. All the smart list stuff so you can populate a date to a custom field when any of this stuff happens and then applying action plans, you can trigger action plans in Follow Up Boss.

So the stuff we’re going to be working on next is like Twilio notifications. It seems like every other day somebody’s asking how to notify their agents when a text is sent in Follow Up Boss, so now you can, or a text is received and so now, when you receive a text, you can set up a workflow here to, send a text to your assigned agent. Same thing, email notifications, you can notify them via email or send email notifications to clients or to other people working on the lead, maybe a listing coordinator or transaction coordinator and then Slack notifications.

Everyone’s starting to use Slack, so we’re building that in as well. And then the analytics platform, that’s where you can feed any of your data into our analytics database and build any reports you want. In addition to the template reports that we’re going to provide.

Elena Kee: A side question, just with the 2 things you mentioned. Twilio notification, so there are some smaller teams that don’t have the dialer, and so everyone without the dialer, then the assigned agent wouldn’t get, or sorry, if someone else other than the assigned agent texts the lead, that other person wouldn’t get notified of a response, it would be the assigned agent.

With this Twilio notification, would it be possible to say notify who texted the person? 

Daniel Poston: Yeah, theoretically, if the data is available that would be challenging, because if somebody sent an outbound text and the text got replied, like connecting those two events together might be a challenge actually, but you know what?

We could, because if the outbound text. We would know who sent the outbound text. We could populate data to a custom field indicating who sent the last text. 

Elena Kee: Just like the last call. 

Daniel Poston: Exactly. And then when a text comes in, we could reference that data to figure out who to sign or who to send the text to.

So theoretically it’s possible I’d need to take a closer look to see if all the. Data is available in that whole process. We might need to add one more like The ability to get data related to a user which probably makes sense for us to do anyway Because I doubt that the phone number of the person is available.

It would take a little bit of work, but we could probably have that up and running, at some point. 

Elena Kee: Okay, cool. And then the other question I had was with the email notification. You had mentioned alerting other users in Follow Up Boss, maybe the listing coordinator. Is it possible to alert, let’s say, the title company and send an email to the title company?

Daniel Poston: Yeah. As long as you put those data, that data in custom fields in Follow Up Boss, then it’s definitely doable. But then we’re also with our form system, you’ll be able to enter data into our platform. And so once our form system is fully integrated with the automation platform, then you could potentially create like a form for your vendors, for example, and then reference that data.

So if, a certain event happens in Follow Up Boss and that event means- One of your vendor needs to be notified, then you can look up that vendor data in the workflow and then use that data to send a text or an email. That’ll all be doable once we get the form system up and running and connected, which is what we’re working on now.

So ideally we’ll have that up and running in March. 

Elena Kee: Okay, great. Yeah, and I know I was getting selfish there, I was asking for my own personal benefit to know those answers, but going back to the smart lists, are you able to share what that would look like? Let’s say we, we want to show creating a list to only show if the call was made by a specific assigned agent.

Daniel Poston: Yeah, so then you’d come over here you have your last text by signed agent, last email by signed agent got a call in here somewhere. Last call by assigned agent. So then what you would do is create a smart list for last call by assigned agent is greater than 7 days, and so let’s say stage. So you’re so you want your engaged stage to be followed up with every 7 days. Now, we would name this, Weekly – Last Call By Assigned Agents, and so now you’d share this list with all of your assigned agents and then you would set up another one for your ISA.

Oh, we don’t have the ISA ones in here. So you would need to set up a parameter for the ISA. And, populate it with the workflow and then you set a separate list up for your ISAs and then share those with your ISAs. And so now you don’t have assigned agents having contacts dropped off their list when the ISA calls and vice versa.

You could also do it for admin, a lot of teams have listing coordinators or transaction coordinators that are calling people through Follow Up Boss. So you can do a last call by admin. And in our workflow, you can do was this last call by. One of these people. And so you’re going to list out all of your admin and then that will populate only when they’re reaching out.

Elena Kee: What if you have an ISA team, let’s say, as long as one of our three ISAs makes a call, then drop it off of all of the ISA lists. Is that? 

Daniel Poston: Yeah, exactly. Cause you’re sharing the ISA list with all the ISAs and you’re sharing the assigned agent list with all your outside sales agents. And so typically for the outside side, we’re just checking to see if they’re the assigned agent because when they, once they get the lead, they’ll be the assigned agent. For ISAs, we’re typically checking for a group of agents, was the call by this person, or this person, and you just list out your ISAs.

Elena Kee: Okay. Good, good to know. Okay, very good. If you’re okay with it, let’s switch gears and talk about the accountability portion of the builder. That one I followed, but I need a better visual representation of what you were referring to, of how to keep agents accountable. 

Daniel Poston: Yeah essentially what we can do is we use our platform we have a call created. Trigger then we can populate a tag. So instead of using custom fields, now we populate a tag outbound and so now we can know that an outbound call happened. And so what we do is for all the different. Activity that’s acceptable. Some teams, it’s just calls. So new lead comes in, you have to make a call. Some teams it’s a call or a text. We have a team that does a call, a text or a note. Because sometimes if they Call outside of Follow Up Boss or they wanted a note to also, a note indicates that, somebody was in there paying attention to the lead and so for them, a note worked. And so we apply a tag for each one of those events. And then in Follow Up Boss, when a new lead comes in, you can through the lead flow, you can apply an action plan.

Elena Kee: I think you have to create a fake lead flow 1st and then you can show applying an action plan.

Daniel Poston:: Been a while since I created a lead flow. This looks super different. Anyway, when a new lead comes in the lead flow, you can trigger an action plan. And so in the action plan, you can delay it, for the next day their new automation platform is supposed to allow more Time in hours or minutes.

So for now you’re stuck with a day where you can assign it a day later or reassign it a day later because what you’re going to do is check for the tag. If one of these tags exists then, nothing happens if none of the tags exist. Now you’ll use the action plan to assign it to a pond to reassign it to another person or add collaborators.

For now, until Follow Up Boss’s Automation 2.0 comes out, if you want we have a team that does it after four hours. So the agents have four hours to do one of their activities. And so we set up a zap that in four hours after the lead comes in, it checks for the tags that our system is applying.

And then if those tags don’t exist, it’ll assign it to a pond. 

Elena Kee: Okay, and what happens, I’m guessing you’ve accounted for this, but what happens if the lead comes in after hours? 

Daniel Poston: We are going to have the ability to check time. We haven’t built that in yet. But you’ll be able to I guess in Zapier you already can do it. In Zapier, if a Automation runs at a certain time. You can check and then based on that time, like if it’s during either run or don’t run. If it’s during business hours, you can wait four hours. If it’s outside of business hours, you can do a calculation to add a certain amount of time to that four hours.

So Zapier. We are a lot of the stuff that like right now we work in conjunction with Follow Up Boss Automation and Zapier Automation, we’re going to be eventually building a lot of that stuff into our platform so you don’t have to use multiple different platforms, but for now it is doable in Zapier. 

Elena Kee: Okay, got it. Very good. Oh, another question I want to make sure I didn’t forget. So obviously you’re pretty much collecting, like, all data points ever created now or in the future as you’re continually improving your platform. I’m sure a common question or concern people may have is security. So how are you ensuring the data is private that they’re sharing with you and everything, everything is secure?

Daniel Poston: So we use AWS, Amazon Web Services and we’re definitely very careful With keeping the data secure. We have virtual private servers that we utilize to make sure the data can’t be accessed and we’re diligent because you have to be. There’s so many bad actors out there and there’s so many different ways to hack into different stuff.

You have to be diligent but at the same time, there’s no perfect solution for security. You just always have to pay attention and not let your guard down.

Elena Kee: Yeah. Even Lastpass had a data breach and not mistaken, maybe one password did or almost did or something like that. And those that are specifically made for password, which is like everything.

Daniel Poston: Exactly. We utilize two factor on everything. Which I recommend to everybody, if a platform has two factor, set it up. And I’m excited about these new pass keys that are coming out where you don’t have to use passwords anymore.

Elena Kee: Oh, yeah. You just, there’s a lot of places I go to log in, and now they just either ask my phone number or email and they just send me a one time use pass. Yeah, very cool. So what does support look like if someone had a question or needed some guidance and they’re stuck?

Daniel Poston: So we have a chat widget on our website where you could always go and we have people monitoring it support@interface.re. We’re monitoring often and you can always set up calls with us if you want to brainstorm on what you want to build or having an issue with. A glitch or something and then we work closely with people like you too. We’re a software as a service business, we don’t get as much into the actual Follow Up Boss set up as people need. And so we partner with a lot of different companies. If you want super advanced Automation or custom integrations. We work closely with the Bara Agency for setting stuff like that up. If anybody wants to set up a lot of solid granular smart lists, we would send that person to you and you, from what I hear, provide spectacular, Customer service.

Elena Kee: And then your team in turn would be talking to me, figuring out, make sure I know how to do it. 

Daniel Poston: Yeah, exactly. Yeah we definitely have the people in place to provide the necessary support. And all of my clients can always hop on a call with me. 

Elena Kee: That’s great. How receptive are you to feature requests?

Daniel Poston: Very receptive. We definitely want to hear all the feature requests. How quickly we’ll build them, that’s the question. But we always want to hear feature requests because that’s how we figure out what we want to build. The more people that are requesting a feature, the higher we put that on the priority list.

Right now our roadmap is pretty set in stone for the next three months. As we, right now we’re beta testing the automation platform. We’re about to do like the soft launch at the end of this month. Then web forms where we just started beta testing that probably will be launched in May.

And then analytics, our goal is to launch that by the end of Q2. But then after that, the plan is to start building in other platforms. Maybe dot loop or what’s the other one? There’s another. The Exp uses, that people ask about a lot. Can’t remember what it is, but it’s a, like a dot loop like platform.

So we’re going to be tying in other, we want to build the optimal tech ecosystem for Follow Up Boss, as Follow Up Boss has this great API. And there’s other platforms like Open to Close. Highly recommend Open to Close for transaction management. We integrate with them. And so we want to find platforms that have a great API focus on doing one thing really well, and then we want to build that into our system. So anytime somebody wants to use one of those platforms, they don’t have to worry about integrating it with one of the other ones. But we don’t do anything with the all in ones that have terrible APIs. We highly recommend avoiding those like the plague and just get set up on Follow Up Boss and Ylopo. 

Elena Kee: Yeah, for sure. Alrighty, and I forgot to mention this, but if you want to learn more about InterFace, you can schedule a demo on their website. I will put a link to InterFace’s website in the description and you can certainly learn more or reach out to the team at InterFace. Again, I really appreciate your time.

I’m sure we’ll be doing this again to unveil the next new thing you create. And I’m excited to see not only what you already are in the process of creating, but what you create in the future as well. So thank you, appreciate your time. 

Daniel Poston: Thank you. Appreciate it. Have a good one. 

Elena Kee: You too. Bye bye.