No More Onboarding Headaches, Agency Formkit to the Rescue!

Speaker A: If you're running a high level agency and onboarding still feels like herding cats, or it feels very generic because you've outsourced onboarding and you want your process to be more helpful to your clients. Stay right here. This one is definitely for you. Welcome back to the Marketers Toolkit in the Spotlight series. I'm, uh, Virginia Schauer, and today is a spot special one because I am sitting down with the man behind the marketer's toolkit himself, Tom Bristol. Now, if you were here for the last episode, I promised you this was coming. And here we are. Tom has been building MTK since 2019. And if you've ever wondered who's responsible for the OG of theme builders, the goat of customizing and making your High level backend look nothing like anything else on the market, it's him. He even took home a vendor appreciation award at highlevel's own own event, recognizing him for better care of the MTK community than anyone else out there. And this isn't an accident. This is just who Tom is. Today kicks off what I'm really excited to say is going to be an ongoing thing. Tom is going to be joining me here on the in the Spotlight series to share what's new, what's being refreshed, and what's coming inside the toolkit. This is first of many, and I could not be more excited about this. And for this first one, he's walking us through something brand new called Agency Form Kit. Same origin story as MTK itself. He looked around, couldn't find what agencies actually needed, and built it himself. So let's dig in. All right, we are here with our founder and CEO of the Marketers Toolkit to bring you some new things that are happening over here. And I'm so excited. This is Tom Bristol. He has been running the toolkit for how many years, Tom?

Speaker B: Uh, since 2019. So it seems like, uh, just yesterday, but it's been, I don't know, seven years now.

Speaker A: So tell us what the marketer's toolkit is and, um, what problem it solves.

Speaker B: So originally it solved the problem that Vibe coding has solved now, but originally it solved the problem of we had a whole bunch of marketers and people that were reselling High Level that were not techies, could not code. And High Level was amazing, but there was little things that bugged people and everybody wanted to do something extra that High Level didn't do because they started with the skateboard model, which I'm sure you've heard them talk about. A billion times where they, you know, try the minimum, they release it with the minimum amount of capabilities, uh, and let the users complain and then they, you know, update it and make it work and it makes it go, go to market really fast. And uh, so that benefited us because we were able to fill the needs ahead of High Level. And it was a constant race because High Level, uh, you know, rightly so and doing a great job, uh, continued to hire people. And uh, so we would fix something, we would put out a little snippet or something like that that people could use to fix it. Um, and then you know, six months later to a year later, High Level would finally come out with their fix. So uh, yeah, so the, the purpose of the toolkit was to let other competitors, like let you as the SaaS Preneur or the marketer, get an edge up on everybody else that's trying to resell High Level. To be able to uh, you know, have the better version of High Level.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And to be able to customize. I mean I came to you, yeah, with um, doing custom CSS and everything in, in my agency and then learning that the best on the market theme, ah, builder and I was able to transform my back in to make it look so incredible and so good. And then on top of it having the customizer, that, that was really what made the difference for me because I could put, add and subtract things, hide things, add things in and make it look completely unique for specifically my niche and my users, which isn't just a vanity metric for me. It was like functionality, intuitive functionality. And that's one thing that High Level just doesn't pay attention to because they don't need to, is intuitiveness. And so I think that um, Tom, your toolkit has brought intuitiveness to my, to my system. So thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, that's uh, a key thing that I always think with is how do we make it so that users don't have to go to help Doc? How do we make it so they can just like look at it and do what they want to do? Um, that's like my motto actually. And uh, yeah, but yeah, the customizer is the only thing like it on the market. It lets you dig in and restructure things. In High Level, uh, if you haven't seen it, if you don't know what the capabilities are, your mind's going to be blown. When you actually see it like everybody's, you don't expect to be able to do what you can. Right. You can restructure the menu, you can rebuild your own menu. It doesn't even look like high level at the end when you're done. And uh, yeah. And now uh, the number of updates that we're putting out is incredible. Uh, the number of things and the you know, upgrades that you can do with the toolkit now are, it's just continuing to go out and we're refining things. So I'm really excited for this year because it's going to be a ah, banner year for uh, high levels with AI, but also for reselling high level I think.

Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. And I have to say that when um, I go to support at high level, I cannot tell you how many times that the support is like unable to navigate my backend because they're like are you sure this is high level?

Speaker B: Yeah and actually that's an interesting thing. Like uh, I was just helping someone uh, yesterday actually that was vibe coding some JavaScript and CSS and stuff to put into their high level, which is very dangerous. Uh, there is a reason we still have a job, uh, because you can vibe code and then lock everybody out of your system. And that's what happened with this guy. So he, he, he ended up like, I mean Claude suggested or ChatGPT, I don't know which one suggested some JavaScript that uh, he put in he just copied and pasted into his custom CSS area or custom JavaScript area and it created a loop so whenever anybody logged in it just like froze and it wouldn't let them go in. And he was like, you know, posting in the Facebook group with like a red alarm like please. The port said it was going to take 24 to 48 hours for someone to get back to me and my users can't log into the, and I can't go in to remove it. And uh, yeah, so danger. Danger.

Speaker A: Yes. I mean I totally ah, I totally vibe with that because um, I had CSS and JavaScript that has broken um, my system as well and to have the marketers toolkit to have you and your team there, um, it's just such a safety, it's such a safety for my system and it makes sure I'm, when everything is running, um, it just makes sure everything is running smoothly and I don't have to worry about it and I don't have to have a team behind me either that are coders or I don't have to worry about going to, spending my hours in ChatGPT to worry about something breaking.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's so true. Right. You know, uh, and we actually. One, uh, of the number one things that I really have attention on with the toolkit is making sure that the support is there for people and making sure that, that their users receive an uninterrupted experience and don't have bugs and stuff. So I always feel like we can get better at our support tickets and handling things, but I think the stability of our platform is the best out there. And, uh, so much so that, uh, I was so incredibly surprised at High Level when we were at our booth because we exhibit there every year. And Josh, uh, Satterley came and had gotten together and got vendor appreciation award from the clients.

Speaker A: Dr. Josh Satterley was like, out of all of the different vendors, you're the one that takes the care of the people the best. And the customizer, there's nothing else there out there. They, uh, there's things that try to be, but they don't focus on what is needed with what you do in the customizer is really cool.

Speaker B: Thanks.

Speaker A: So you have something new. It's like you had a moment or where you had a light bulb or I had enough moment and you knew something needed to be created. So tell us what that something is and what brought it about.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. So, uh, as an intro, the toolkit was originated because I thought, well, of course there's other things out there. And then I started discovering back in 2019, I discovered, oh, wait, no, there isn't that out there. I should probably create it. And so this is a very similar story, uh, in that there are plenty of apps out there that work for forms, right? So think Jotform Cognito Forms, uh, Google Forms that try and handle, you know, just regular forms. But the problem is that they handle all types of forms. They don't handle onboarding forms. And, uh, as an agency myself actually built an Apple like this ages ago for our agency. Uh, and so I was like, I should probably bring this over to High Level because I haven't seen this out there yet. So I'll show you a little bit about it. But the. It handles three things, which is number one, uh, I don't know of any form system that lets you save the progress as you're going along. So you get these huge onboarding forms and the client, you know, needs to take, you know, over three days. Right. And so they don't just leave the browser open. Um, so this lets them save it and then get reminders to fill it out at a later time. That's awesome. And then number two, uh, you as the Agency have already been talking to the client, you've got all sorts of data about them and you're going to have them put all of that data back in again and have them answer it even though they've, you know, told you over the phone or over uh, a zoom or whatever. So how can we put all that into the form so it shows that you're actually paying attention and they don't have to reduplicate their work of, you know, putting it out there. Um, and then number three, how can we automatically do that? So rather than having you just, you know, type it in, how can we pull it in all from high level? Um, scrape their website, you know, scrape their LinkedIn, put it all in together and just uh, pre fill the data and give them a very fast, easy way of updating that form. So yeah, so let me share my screen and I'll show you here. This is Agency Form Kit. So I'm going to sign in using uh, my personal email and fill in your agency data here. And then if you are a toolkit member, um, what you can do is just fill in your data here and it'll link it. So let's just see. I think it's, ooh.

Speaker A: And I see you have a free version in here too. I know people are going to be interested in that.

Speaker B: Yes, exactly. So, uh, we're logged in. Agency Form Kit is based around templates and the idea is a template is a repeatable questionnaire that you're going to be sending your clients, such as a logo questionnaire or a web design rebrief or, or things like that. And they're simply, you know, forms that you can drag and drop or you can create them and import them, uh, from Google Forms, import a high level form or even build it with AI. So say you don't even know what it is that you want to do yet you can give it a overall idea and it'll build your form for you, which is pretty awesome. Or just, you know, reference someone else's form.

Speaker A: Oh my gosh, this is so cool.

Speaker B: Yeah, right? You know, people always say can you just. You're people are getting lazy so let's make it easy for them to be lazy.

Speaker A: Exactly. Oh, I love it.

Speaker B: Yeah, so, uh, yeah, so that's how you create your templates. Once you have a template, you uh, have a whole bunch of abilities here. Uh, you can, once you're, you know, connecting to high level is really easy. Um, all you have to do is create your private integration key and put it into our system here, but once you have that connected, um, you have some great capabilities here with the High level integration. And this looks like a lot, but it's actually really simple. All you have to do is copy this one link right here and if you take a look at it up here at the top, you'll see all we're doing is we're just grabbing that contact ID and passing it along here. So when you do that, it's going to do what I'm going to show you manually here in a second. So when you have a template, that's the reusable uh, form that we've got here. So then you've got clients and a client is you know, a contact. And so if you ah, you can start from form requests or client but say, if you say you're going to create a new form request, um, say we'll do like uh, the basic information because that'll give us enough information here. Um, you can search High level. So I made a fake contact called Reginald who has all the data I gave. Uh, AI told AI go in and make a fake contact for me and it made a beautiful contact and decided to name him. So um, there you go. So anyway, we got Reginald here and you now have the option to pre fill it from High Level. And this is going to do two things. It's going to grab the data from the contact, the notes, opportunities, and then if you have this checked, it'll also even scrape the guy's website up to 10 pages, put it all together and give that as context to the AI that's going to then pre fill the form for you ahead of time so that the contact just sees that you've put in the work to actually put in all the data. So they remember that you remember everything that you talk about. So I'm going to uncheck this because Thunderbottom Biz is not a real website. So here we go. And so anyway, so the idea here is it's now pulled in all the data that is in High Level. Um, and now you can say, you know, we don't know their industry, year of establishment or company size. So I'm going to create the form and get the link. And now this is the link that you would email to the client. And so when they open it up it looks like this. And so now look this and they can just simply answer the few things that they need to. And now they're all complete and they can hit submit if it's like a huge form and they want to come back later they can always hit save and come back at another time and they can copy the link or they can put in their email address and the date and time they want to be reminded and then they'll get an email saying, hey, come back. This is the link to do that. So, uh, all pretty awesome. When you hit submit, it says it's submitted and it's all done. And you've got all sorts of possible integrations that you can do to notify yourself. So uh, if they have filled it out, you can of course fire off a webhook, notify yourself with an email, add a row to Google Sheets, upload the data in files to Google Drive, Slack, you can do multiple of these as well and click up. So, um, you can simply add a task.

Speaker A: Oh my gosh.

Speaker B: With your field mappings, all the things. Wow, It's a full thing. I can assign it to you. And so when someone fills it out, it automatically kicks off all the things, which is great. Um, inside of High Level you have the option of even adding a tag to their contact when the form is completed. So it can trigger off a workflow or whatever is like, okay, they're done, bring them off to the next thing. And um, of course you have a whole bunch of other complicated options that you can do with the workflows and webhooks and things like that. But that's the easiest that you can do right here. Um, yeah. So. Oh, and then another cool thing is if you import like check this out. So say we take a High Level form, like uh, the free marketing console, and we want to make this one of our forms. Right. Oh so.

Speaker A: Oh, that's great.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I've just imported this directly from my account and because it came from High Level, when it gets updated here, it will automatically update the High Level contact field because it's linked to that. So here, um, each one of these is a High Level contact field. You can see that right here. So, um, all of these. Anyway, so that makes it incredibly easy for you to just move a High Level form over and it just, it's like a two way sync.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: In addition to all the goodness of these guys.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So would you recommend using this if you wanted custom fields updated to like create the form first over in High Level and then bring it, like bring it back in or uh, make it

Speaker B: easier I think, because that would, that would give you a better workflow. Uh, because High Level is going to have the list of all your custom fields and you can drag them in there and you'll know, oh wait, no, I need to create another one and it'll make it easier for you to build out and then you can just import them. Uh, like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah. So um, as far as like the templates go in here, where does this information reside? Like where. So it would be, I guess it would be put into like a Google form or ClickUp or something like that. The um, these fields. So they, that's where they live.

Speaker B: You mean where does like where do you get to see this data at a later date?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: So we have some cool things. Let. I was gonna. Yeah, we have some cool things. So here you've got your form request. So you can see if you click into it you can see the form data that they filled out right here. Um, you can also see the form activity. So you can see um, who updated the field. So you can see the agency updated these fields here because it tracks the IP address. So it can tell who's been updating the data. So you can actually, when you look at this you can see. Okay, so this was all pre filled but this other data was updated by the client. So you can see what they've done and what they haven't done.

Speaker A: So smart.

Speaker B: Thank you. So uh, what is going to show is we have the option of doing a wizard and the wizard is basically like the slide. So you can still do the um, like a survey. It's like a survey. It's like a high level survey.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So you've got a couple options there.

Speaker A: Uh, that's great. Yeah.

Speaker B: And this is a work in progress of course. So if there's uh, as soon as we released it I got a bunch of uh, things from people saying hey, it would be more intuitive if you did it this way and uh, things like that. But uh, yeah, a lot of work and attention has gone into this to make it as simple and easy for people as possible.

Speaker A: It looks like you can just jump right in and. Yeah, work with it and it's easy to navigate. Really simple and clean UI here. It looks really, really good.

Speaker B: Thanks. Um, for each toolkit members, which is very cool. Okay.

Speaker A: Yes. So it's free to toolkit members and that's what I was going to ask you actually. What is the difference between. If somebody were to like just want this, what is the difference between the free version and the paid version?

Speaker B: That's a good one. So uh, the free version gives you uh, integrations. So it doesn't have um, it just has basic email Notifications, um, and it doesn't have a lot of the white label stuff. With the pro version you can actually put it on your own domain and um, we haven't released it yet but you'll be able to, you know, add your own email authentication so you can send it from your own email and things like that to further make it your own agency as opposed to agency form kit. So free version, like most of these free versions, uh, let you use it but add their own branding to it.

Speaker A: Awesome. Um, awesome. And so last question. What do you want agencies to walk away with believing that's possible with the

Speaker B: form kit, Simplify their onboarding, uh, and stop having to deal with huge amounts of Google forms and just have things flawlessly go from you know, one thing to high level to ClickUp to whatever their native stack is. Just have it, uh, be an entryway into it.

Speaker A: You know, you have had onboarding form capability inside of the toolkit for a while and I have interviewed some high level power users that have, you know, a hundred plus, a thousand plus users in their system where they have been using the toolkit for their onboarding. But they've had a lot, they, you had to have like a lot of development, understanding behind the scenes. And this, it simplifies things so much for um, the agency. And it's something, I mean to me every agency should have some sort of onboarding process for high level.

Speaker B: That's incredibly true. Yeah, it's very, very important. And if you combine this with our agency workflow app that gives you the ability to update custom values and things like that, that's going to like take it to the next level.

Speaker A: Exactly. Well, thank you so much Tom for coming on and sharing this with us. I know a lot of people are going to jump in and for those of you that have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. We're here for um, we'll see you next time.

Speaker B: Beautiful. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Of course. The pleasure is so mine. We want him more on. Right. Oh, you guys. Tom is building uh, behind the scenes for all of us and I feel so lucky to bring conversations like this one to you. Being his community and client optimization advocate has honestly been one of my favorite things things. It's totally my jam and I can't thank him enough for the opportunity to serve fellow GHL agencies and be a part of this amazing ride and take it to the next level is exactly how he left it, which feels just right. You know what struck me most in this conversation is how much of the heavy lifting the Agency form kit does before our client even sees the form, it already pulls their data, pre fills what it knows and sets them up to just confirm and move on. So if you want to try it, go head over to agencyformkit.com There's a free version and if you're already in the toolkit, why not? You're in, it's free, it's included in your plan. So questions? Come find us inside the Marketers toolkit for Go High Level Facebook group. Chris hosts live Q A calls every Friday at noon central and the zoom link is right there in the group Group, thanks for being here and we'll see you on the next one.