Keap

Infusionsoft is a great tool for small businesses that need to kick it up a notch with their marketing automation. It offers an easy to use visual workflow builder and although the learning curve is a bit steep, once users get the principles, the customization is a great trade off.

Infusionsoft does have its quirks and the learning curve can be steep for those who are not technical or logical. Recommend working with a partner to get past this challenge.

The platform seemed to have robust functionality but Infusionsoft's third party providers missed every deadline, failed to provide training, all required programming, and implementation services. Unfortunately it took seven months for us to figure out we'd been taken for a ride. We just made the decision to use our own internal IT staff to create the programming necessary to connect our new website to Infusionsoft (Our website was intentionally designed and built along side our signing with Infusionsoft CRM to insure all technologies aligned). In short, this has been an incredibly slow, frustrating, and expensive lesson.

The Infusionsoft sales person and sales tech flat out lied about the cost required to set-up/program our CRM system. We provided 100% of our specs in writing, reviewed them between a prospective web developer, my internal IT director, and Infusionsoft. After spending 10-hours over a period of two months reviewing specs, building campaigns, etc etc we signed an agreement on the basis that they could do everything we discussed. Only after you sign an agreement do they tell you they do not train or provide programming themselves. Rather, customers are forced to repeat all the same specifications (4-hours including 4 highly paid vendors & staff = 16-man hours) again with a third party provider. Infuriating! The first third party provider (Success Engine) provided a statement of work on March 2. The end date was April 2. The statement of work communicated they were to complete a total of 10-hours of programming work. Long story short, they slow rolled the build out, missing deadline after deadline, and in June (yea June - to do 10-hours of programming?) provided us with a new quote (bait & switch) stating there was an additional 15-25 hours of programming work required to complete the build out per our specifications. Keep in mind those are the same specifications that we provided and reviewed with them in painstaking detail in February. Infuriating! After receiving the new quote in June we felt we had no choice but to push ahead because we were so far behind schedule and had invested so much time and money into the project. We gave them a deadline of July 1 and they quickly turned down the work because they said they wouldn't be able to meet the deadline. Infuriating! It ultimately took Success Engine until the middle of July to complete the original 10-hours of set-up/programming. Infuriating! So back to June when Success Engine turned down the work; we were forced to ask Infusionsoft to provide us with a new third party provider which of course required us to go over our specifications for a third time (4-hours including 4 highly paid vendors & staff = 16-man hours). The first contact with the new third party provider ThinkAutomateGrow (TrickApatheticGrievance). was mid-June. Once again we communicated our specifications to our assigned programmer and the next day that programmer had a death in the family and was gone. She passed us to another programmer. The new guy was around for about three weeks, didn't do much, then was fired by ThinkAutomateGrow. The first programmer reappeared for about two week but then reported that her son broke his arm. She didn't reply to emails or calls for the next 10-days. When she did reply she said she went on her honeymoon and the auto responder on her email must not have worked correctly. She introduced us via email and teleconference to the owner who spoke to us twice briefly by phone, and replied to a total of three emails. That brings us to last Friday, August 14, 2015. That was the absolute deadline for ThinkAutomateGrow to add us to his production calendar. He failed to respond. It is now Aug 19. The decision was made to use our own internal IT staff to create the programming necessary to connect our new website to Infusionsoft. I WOULD NEVER, EVER, EVER, DO BUSINESS WITH THESE UNETHICAL SO-CALLED BUSINESS PEOPLE.

Infusionsoft is commonly referred to as "Confusionsoft" by a lot of people in the industry, simple because there's a steep learning curve during initial adoption of the software. It operates a bit differently than other CRM and email marketing software out there. However, the email marketing automation features are absolutely top-notch. The software is built to do just about anything you need with email marketing and has great deliverability.

Just the learning curve. It takes a while to get used to the software and it seems like there's always a better way to be doing things.