ENTI 407 — Elevatie Software Review
ENTI 407 — Blog Post
I interviewed Steven Phan, the creator and CEO of Elevatie. Elevatie is a software solution company for businesses. Steven Phan is a Serial entrepreneur from the age of 14, and he has a wealth of experience from e-commerce to technology solutions. Elevatie was inspired by a family business struggling to gain useful customer feedback. His company helps small-large service-based companies improve their online reputations and increase their bottom line.
Elevatie is an integrated web/application software solution that gives multiple options for technology suites that a business can utilize to improve their operational processes and online reputation. The main feature of Elevatie is the way it integrates with a business’s website and client relationship management. Elevatie tracks analytics on its dashboard from a user’s website and stores a customer base right on the platform. Once a lead becomes a customer and goes through a conversion Elevatie has a seamless messaging system with an imbedded site funnel; this system will send a customizable message to a customer through the desired sites “call to action” and prompt them to leave a review on that specific site. The whole process only takes a few seconds to leave a review on the desired location and is runs through text messaging. This review process was the main reason that Elevatie exists (Personal Communication (PC), 2020). In today’s society, online reviews are the new word of mouth recommendation and businesses online reputation directly relates to their customer traffic, conversions and bottom line. The platform continues to add more features like an advanced messaging system, shadow funnelled reviews, review response/management and other systems that help improve business efficiency all on one integrated platform.
The company has an advanced software development system that they use to develop Elevatie. The software solutions programming stack is ASP.Net, C-Sharp and J.query. Elevatie has been migrating their code to React and consistently keeping up with the language stacks to mitigate unnecessary code that is repetitive or bulky. This software focus reduces clutter and increases the speed to make sure the software solution is best serving its user base (PC, 2020). In addition, they have integrated Zapier, a software that opens the doors to over 1500 other software companies that local businesses and enterprise businesses can use in their day to day operations. Zapier operates as a bridge to integrate customizable software tools and technology utilization. The platform facilitates the ability of many software and applications to interact and work together for unique user benefits (Zapier, 2020). This integration allows them to optimize their software process and serve their customers base in the best way possible.
Let’s take a step back and look at what Elevatie is doing to manage their team and business. Within the organization, the primary source of communication and community runs through slack. Slack is an online messaging application that allows you to create multiple workrooms specific to the needs of the organization. Slack improves the efficiency and effectiveness of communication throughout the Elevatie team. They have professional rooms, support ticket rooms, salesrooms, team project rooms and have chats that have a social focus to foster corporate culture. For conference interaction and telecommunications Elevatie utilizes zoom; Zoom is a free online software that allows groups of people to talk and has the option of sharing screens or using a camera to show the individual that is speaking. Zoom can connect people from anywhere in the world since Elevatie has no local office; a large portion of business happens on Zoom. You can invite people to zoom through an email or with a link to a chat room. Elevatie uses zoom for their weekly sales training meetings, conference calls and management meetings. Elevatie team is comprised of people from across the world, having technology like slack and zoom is essential to facilitate communication and training.
The entire team is set up on G-Suite and HubSpot to facilitate internal interaction and improve client relationship management. G-Suite allows the team to share documents, projects, training information and any important emailing from the company. This stack enables the company to monitor its employee’s activity through email accounts on one platform. Using G-Suite gives the company a unified image and make the employees more reputable to their user base. The google application stack allows Elevatie to utilize google drive for cloud storage and all the applications it offers. The team uses google calendar, google docs, google sheets, google slides and various other google applications to create materials specific to Elevatie. Each person that interacts with clients at Elevatie must use their HubSpot account to track and optimize client relationship management. HubSpot allows you to track analytic data, notifies a user when an email has been opened, has customized sales funnel tracking, scheduling, user reminders, notes about client interaction and all the necessary tools for an employee to turn a lead into a long-standing happy customer (Hubspot, 2020). HubSpot creates a database for all the clients that Elevatie is managing and a history of outreach for the company. This way, the company can utilize the platform for re-targeting and track the progress and productivity of the sales for customer interactions. G-Suite and Hubspot are necessary applications that help Elevatie with their employee operations, training, and customer management.
Elevatie leverages the software of Azur Devops and Asana to help with operations and project management. Azur DevOps is a suite of applications like G-Suite; however, these applications help with organization, testing and software. Azure boards provide tools to plan, track and discuss work across your team. Azure pipelines and Azure Repos interact with Git Hub, which helps build, test, deploy and store software coding (Azur Devops, 2020). Asana is a project managing software that encourages collaboration, organization and transparency across the organization. You can assign tasks by importance, assign employees to projects, set deadlines, set goals and encourage cross-team collaboration across projects (Asana, 2020). This software helps Elevatie organize and assign specific employees to manage their projects while keeping on track to meet deadlines.
Elevatie primary business presence can be found online and through social media. The Elevatie website is designed through WordPress and hosted on Amazon light sale. They chose these platforms because they best fit the customization, optimization and integration that they wanted to achieve. WordPress is an online site builder that utilizes integrated themes to give you a foundation then is customizable with interface options and hard coding to get your desired result (Word Press, 2020). Having the right blend of already developed and coded options with the accessibility of hard coding into the program yourself gives Elevatie everything they need to have an excellent site. Amazon light sale is a hosting site that manages their domain services and makes their website accessible online. Google analytics and pixel tracking run the interaction data on their website. It is important to track customer behaviour and collect data for website interaction to build/design marketing campaigns and re-targeting. Analytic information loads onto a dashboard that shows interaction information like bounce rate, click-through rate, time on site, frame speed, load speed, demographic information and Elevatie utilizes this information to improve their website and the success of their business. With analytics, they measure the success of their online marketing campaigns to make decisions about what works and does not work for their business. When designing their site, they used WordPress for the base theme, free stock photos from online websites, designed graphics powered by adobe photoshop and a blog plug in to release information on site. Adobe Photoshop provides a higher level of design customization and photo editing to ensure that the content they publish on their website is high quality and fits the image they want to achieve. They outsource their blog posts to Freelance blog writers on a site called Upwork. You can find various service offerings for a reasonable price that fit your needs on UpWork. Being able to outsource tasks like blogs, frees up time and resources from Elevatie employees to focus on other aspects of the business. On-site, they have a forum plugin allowing customers to request a demo by leaving their personal and business contact information. This forum is their conversion generator on-site and links directly to the company email for a representative to follow up with that specific client once received. Having an efficient and easy to interact with website is essential for Elevatie, the tools they use in the background to make this possible give them the ability to serve clients better and grow their business.
Elevatie has tried various marketing strategies to grow their business. This includes social media sites, marketing materials, and campaigns to reach their customer base. Initially, Elevatie designed a direct sales process with detailed information created on Microsoft word and Microsoft PowerPoint. This process developed the supporting documents for their hiring, training, outreach process, sales demonstration, sales pipeline, and client relationship management. Then by utilizing secondary data and information providers, they started outreach through emailing from hot and cold lead generators. Emailing has been their most fruitful source of business generation and conversion. Their team manages 1000’s of emails and clients with email management powered by HubSpot.
When using other mediums of outreach, they have focused on content marketing, creating blogs, e-books and awareness graphics to inform potential clients. With their content, they have created marketing campaigns on LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn has yielded better results than Facebook; however, both social media sites have had an undesirable return on investment. On LinkedIn, they leveraged a software called lead connect, which automates a series of messages over time and directs you to relevant connections that you can message and interact with. They have tried Google ad words to increase their online presence by using relevant key word searches. Still, similarly to the social media sites, they were getting a high amount of traffic but lacking on conversion, and the return on investment was not as high as they anticipated. Google ad words create online ads that generate from keyword searches that relate to your service and make you the most relevant search for those specific google searches.
Since online traction generation yielded low return on investment, they returned to their cold email campaign but implemented tools to make sure it was more successful. They use amazon simple, emailing software, then an email clarification software called clear out and finally send grid. Amazon simple email services is a cloud-based email sending service designed to help digital marketers and application developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails. Clear out is an email clarification software that checks your email lists with various email authorities to make sure that the emails are valid. Clear out ensures that the emails will deliver directly to valuable and valid recipients and ensures you are getting quality email lists from providers. Send grid is a leading cloud email service in clearing emails as “trusted” providers; this ensures that emails flow to inbox directly. With the help of send grid, 96–98% of Elevatie’s emails go straight to the email inbox. To generate email lists, they use an automation tool called Snovio, Snovio can scrub emails from domains and LinkedIn profiles. It also integrates to help with email campaigns and email verification. It is another optimization tool that aids in the development and management of their email campaigns. The software tools Elevatie uses for its marketing and sales help with efficiency, optimization and control of campaigns.
On the back end of the business, Elevatie uses Quickbooks for accounting management and stripe for payment processing. Quickbooks allows them to track all their accounting related information on one platform. They run their accounts payable, invoicing, expenses, payroll and various other accounting practices through Quickbooks. Stripe is a payment processing system that accepts debit or credit in person or online. All their clients run their payment through stripe, which integrates with Quickbooks for data tracking. To aid in tracking financial performance, they use chart mogul. Their primary interest using chart mogul is for budgets, turn over, churn rate and visual representation of their financials. Chart Mogul uses their uploaded financial information to track progress, create charts, set benchmark and help you achieve your goals for turnover and churn.
Overall, Elevatie has integrated a full set of software tools to facilitate their business. These tools have immense value in the organization, management and interaction aspects of the company. They focused on using as many free or low-cost entrepreneurial tools as possible to achieve their desired results. However, they are happy to pay higher subscriptions if the tools provided enough value to the company. With all their software integration, the amount of information and data that they have on their business and clients allows them to make effective business decisions and consistently grow. They are looking forward to the future and happy with the success they have achieved with Elevatie so far.
References –
Adobe (2020). Adobe Creative Suite. Retrieved from: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html?sdid=KKQWX&mv=search&ef_id=CjwKCAiA-vLyBRBWEiwAzOkGVNoXgs8jQjBXnIJzxRamXFuQzSCptMPaz3A8H8hAClHWhuJ2-Bpf-hoCOrcQAvD_BwE:G:s&s_kwcid=AL!3085!3!356459423190!e!!g!!adobe&gclid=CjwKCAiA-vLyBRBWEiwAzOkGVNoXgs8jQjBXnIJzxRamXFuQzSCptMPaz3A8H8hAClHWhuJ2-Bpf-hoCOrcQAvD_BwE
Amazon aws (2020). Start building on AWS Today. Retrieved from: https://aws.amazon.com/?nc2=h_lg
Asana (2020). Manage your team’s work, projects, & tasks online Asana. Retrieved from: https://asana.com/?noredirect
Chart Mogul (2020). Subscription Analytics and Revenue Reporting. Retrieved from: https://chartmogul.com/
Clear out (2020). Accurate Email Validation & Verification Service. Retrieved from:
Elevatie (2020). Customer Review Software. Retrieved from:
G-Suite.google (2020). G Suite: Collaboration & Productivity Apps for Business. Retrieved from: https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_ca/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=na-CA-all-en-dr-bkws-all-all-trial-e-dr-1008072&utm_content=text-ad-none-any-DEV_c-CRE_335553422771-ADGP_Hybrid%20%7C%20AW%20SEM%20%7C%20BKWS%20~%20EXA%20%2F%2F%20GSuite%20%5B1:1%5D%20G_Suite-KWID_43700024702711121-kwd-299032858719&utm_term=KW_g%20suite-ST_g%20suite&gclid=CjwKCAiA1rPyBRAREiwA1UIy8PKXxGq0ubnvRDfbbnJXQ3xAz4qERrVPeD5qXn5VNRwxKwdoq_QhSxoC88MQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
Hubspot (2020). Inbound Marketing, Sales, and Service Software.” Retrieved from:
QuickBooks (2020). QuickBooks Cloud Accounting Software. Retrieved from: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/au/
Microsoft Azure (2020). Cloud Computing Services: Microsoft Azure. Retrieved from:
https://www.citationmachine.net/items/confirm
Send Grid (2020). Email Delivery Service. Retrieved from:
Slack (2020). Where work happens. Retrieved from:
Snovio (2020). Cold outreach automation platform. Retrieved from:
Stripe (2020). Online payment processing for internet businesses. Retrieved from: https://stripe.com/en-ca
Upwork (2020). Hire Freelancers. Make things happen. Retrieved from: https://www.upwork.com/
Word Press (2020). Create a Free Website or Blog. Retrieved from:
Zapier (2020). Connect your apps and automate workflows. Retrieved from: https://zapier.com/home
Zoom (2020). Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing. Retrieved from: https://zoom.us/
