PromoPilot - Blog , Apps

Fillout Might Be the Only Form Builder You’ll Ever Need

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 16:17:27 -0600

Web forms are everywhere. Whether you're collecting leads, scheduling meetings, processing applications, or running internal workflows — forms are where work begins.

But not all form builders are created equal.

Some are clunky. Some are overpriced. And some just aren’t flexible enough for the kinds of workflows print and promo distributors need.

That’s why I think Fillout deserves more attention. I'm so hyped on this tool! It’s a powerful, flexible, and cost-effective form builder that can go toe-to-toe with the big names — and in many ways, outperforms them.

Why Fillout Stands Out

Let’s start with the essentials:

Prefill forms with CRM, spreadsheet, or even API data. Eliminate repetitive entry and reduce errors.
Conditional logic that just makes sense. Show only the questions that matter based on prior answers or who is filling out your form.
Professional, branded design – Hosted forms look like custom microsites — and you can even use your own domain.
Robust access control – Limit access via Google, email verification, magic links, or even a database lookup.

More Than Just Forms

Fillout isn’t just for collecting data — it’s designed to help you take action with it:

Built-in scheduling (a great Calendly alternative)
Support for e-signatures
Unlimited users — no per-seat pricing. I was paying $250/mo for another form app just because I needed 5 users.
Custom error messages for a smoother UX
If you build a lot of landing pages or lead magnets, you'll love its conversion-boosting extras like:

Address autocomplete
Lead enrichment
Abandoned form recovery

Native integrations with tons of apps like HubSpot, Airtable, Zapier, and more
Ability to export/import form templates to make it easy to get started

Whether you're managing client intake, running internal requests, or building lead magnets, Fillout can replace a whole stack of tools.

Web Forms for Redemption Sites

If you’re in the promotional products business, you've probably used web forms for gift redemption sites. Fillout is delightfully well-suited for gifting projects:

Enforce one gift selection per person
Authenticate recipients easily (via email, magic links, or access codes)
Deliver a frictionless, branded experience
Total control over email confirmations and notifications
Streamline fulfillment workflows via integrations or automation

It's not a gifting platform by default, but its flexibility makes it easy to shape it into one — and that’s exactly what I’ve been working on.

The Redemption Tool Kit

If you’re a distributor or branded merch agency looking to launch smooth, scalable gifting programs, I’ve put together the free Redemption Tool Kit to help you launch smooth, professional redemption programs — without starting from scratch. You'll save loads of money on order fees, too!

It includes:

📘 The PromoPilot Guide to Book & Run Redemption Programs

A 20-page deep dive into the best practices, strategies, and execution methods that make redemption programs successful.

🔍 Discovery Questionnaire

A structured set of questions (in Excel format) to help you and your client align on program goals, logistics, and user experience.

✅ Pre-Built Redemption Form Template

A Fillout template that gives you a head start on your next redemption project.

🎥 Over an Hour of Video Training

Step-by-step guidance on setting up, customizing, and optimizing redemption sites using tools like Fillout and Zapier.

There are tons of form builders out there and I've used many of them. But Fillout is one of the few that balances power, usability, and cost-effectiveness — making it a strong option whether you're collecting leads or delivering gifts. You get a lot of features on their free plan so I'd encourage you to check it out!

5 Apps Every Distributor Needs

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 07:38:42 -0600

Print and promo distributors juggle multiple tasks—managing clients, organizing orders, tracking deadlines, and everything in between. Having the right apps can make a huge difference in your day-to-day operations. Whether it's automating repetitive tasks or keeping your team connected, the right software can streamline your business and free up time to focus on growth. Here are five essential types of apps (and ideas for automating them with Zapier) that every distributor should consider using, along with some specific tools that we recommend.

1. Web Form Builders

Web forms are a Swiss army knife for distributors. Whether it’s collecting t-shirt sizes for a campaign, running a quick redemption program, or managing client intake forms, form builders like Formstack, JotForm, and Zoho Forms offer a flexible, easy-to-use solution. They can be used to gather information, streamline internal requests, or even receive customer support tickets.

Once you pair these tools with automation, they become even more powerful. A simple web form can be the first step in an entire workflow—triggering emails, updating your CRM, and notifying your team.

Zapier’s Role: By connecting your forms with Zapier, you can automate almost any task that follows a form submission. Send a thank-you email, notify a specific team member, or push data to a spreadsheet.

Consider: After being a diehard Formstack user for over a decade, we’ve fallen in love with Fillout (here's why). Zoho Forms is another great option if you're in that ecosystem.

2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

Your CRM is more than just a place to store contact details. It can be the backbone of your entire operation, providing each department with the tools they need to manage their part of the order lifecycle. In fact, we've seen distributors make their CRM the primary working app for everyone in the company.

Zoho CRM, for example, offers features that allow marketing, operations, and analytics teams to have tailored experiences within the same platform. Whether you need it to track sales leads, automate client follow-ups, or analyze performance, a CRM can be customized to suit your specific needs.

Zapier’s Role: With Zapier, you can automate updates across multiple platforms, ensuring client data is always synced, tasks are automatically assigned, and important emails or reminders never fall through the cracks. This reduces double data entry and ensures that everyone is working with the latest information.

Consider: Zoho CRM, HubSpot, Odoo

3. Project Management Platforms

Managing client orders, timelines, and team responsibilities is essential for distributors. Project management platforms help keep everything organized, track progress, and make collaboration easier, so nothing falls through the cracks.

While tools like Trello and Monday.com are great for tracking tasks and deadlines, we like Basecamp for its intuitive and flexible approach. Basecamp combines task lists, message boards, document storage, and even team communication, making it an all-in-one platform that’s easy to learn and use. It’s especially useful if you want an app that doesn't require much setup and works for everyone, no matter their role.

Zapier’s Role: With Zapier, you can automatically create tasks from incoming orders, set reminders for deadlines, and sync data between your CRM and project management tools to ensure that both platforms are always aligned.

Consider: Basecamp, Trello, Monday.com

4. Team Communication Tools

Staying connected with your team is crucial, especially when working remotely or engaging with multiple teams at once. If your company has adopted Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, you're likely already using Teams or Google Chat for internal communication. Chat apps offer more than just messaging, though; they support bots and slash commands that can integrate with your workflows, bringing information and automation directly into your chats.

Bots and commands let you retrieve data, update tasks, or trigger automations without ever leaving the conversation. For instance, you can use bots to notify your team when a new order comes in or to summarize daily tasks.

Zapier’s Role: With Zapier, you can take these tools even further by automating notifications for project updates or creating new tasks based on chat activity. It’s all about ensuring that important and actionable information reaches your team in a timely manner.

Consider: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, or Discord if you're a gamer 😉

5. Workflow Automation Tools

Last but not least, workflow automation tools like Zapier are the glue that ties all your other apps together. From automating repetitive tasks to ensuring data flows seamlessly between your CRM, project management, and communication tools, automation is essential for running an efficient business.

By creating workflows between different platforms, you can automate everything from sending follow-up emails to updating client information in your CRM based on form submissions. These tools ensure that your apps don’t work in isolation but as part of a seamless, integrated system.

Consider: Zapier is the one for us but you might like Power BI if you're a Microsoft shop, or Make.

Our Experience with Zoho One

At PromoPilot, we use Zoho One. At just $444 per year (per employee), it’s an incredible deal. This subscription gives us access to over 40 apps in the Zoho One suite, covering all the categories of apps mentioned in this article—CRM, project management, web forms, team communication, and even workflow automation.

One of the standout benefits is that PromoPilot’s website and email hosting are included in that same subscription. It’s rare to find a platform that can handle so many aspects of a business for such a low price. While not every app is top-tier, the CRM is definitely a premium tool. Plus, having all these tools in one ecosystem under a single vendor makes managing my tech stack so much easier.

If you're looking for a comprehensive, affordable solution for your distributorship, Zoho One is worth checking out and you'll be joining a growing number of distributors who are augmenting their industry apps with Zoho.

Conclusion

The right combination of apps can transform the way you run your business. Whether you're looking to automate workflows, streamline communication, or keep your projects on track, these five types of tools are a must-have for every distributor. Start by experimenting with one or two apps from each category, and you’ll quickly see the benefits of using technology to simplify your operations and focus on what you do best—building relationships and delivering great products.

Why Your Distributorship Needs an LMS

Tue, 14 May 2024 14:45:34 -0600

Are you struggling to keep your team consistently updated on the latest processes? Is onboarding anew hire an overwhelming thought? In today's competitive market, fostering a culture of continuous learning and development is not just an option—it's essential. A Learning Management System (LMS) can be your ally in this mission, streamlining the learning process, making it more efficient, measurable, and scalable. Whether you're training new hires, upskilling current employees, or ensuring company-wide knowledge retention, an LMS offers a strategic solution. Let's dive into how an LMS can transform your business by enhancing training efficacy and operational efficiency.

What is a Learning Management System?

A Learning Management System is software used to plan, execute, and assess a specific learning process. It is designed to help businesses deliver educational courses and training programs to their employees.

Key Features of an LMS include:

Course Management: Allows managers or instructors to create, manage, and deliver course content efficiently. Courses can be developed using video, written articles, and images.
User Management: Typically, an LMS will allow you to create users for your employees, segment them into groups, and monitor their individual learning paths. You might have groups for sales, production, your online services team, and more.
Assessments and Testing: Understand where your team members are in their learning journey and test their knowledge retention with quizzes.
Reporting and Analytics: Provides detailed reports on learner performance, course completion rates, and other metrics. This data is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of training programs and for making informed decisions to improve them.

How an LMS can help your business.

You are probably familiar with industry education programs from PPAI, ASI, and for my print friends, Printing United. If you haven't made these resources a part of your onboarding process, I highly encourage you to do so. We know how complex this industry can be and by investing some of a new team member's time into the content these organizations provide, you're starting off on the right foot.

Similarly, your specific business is complex. Nobody works quite like you. You have unique processes and a unique technology stack. Sometimes we hire in the midst of chaos and do our existing team members a disservice when, amidst the maelstrom, we ask them to train a new hire on those processes and apps. By implementing an LMS you are providing your team with a streamlined way to access the knowledge needed to perform their work.

An LMS can help your distributorship deliver consistent and quality work to your customers. By building and making available a knowledge base to your team, you can ensure that your standard operating procedures are known and followed, resulting in streamlined work, less confusion, and happy customers.

Knowledge Retention

In the rapidly evolving promotional products and print industry, an LMS enhances knowledge retention crucial for maintaining team expertise and operational efficiency. Distributorships can benefit significantly from tailor-made courses specific to their unique needs, such as accounting processes, building and operating a successful program, or even following a specific client's brand guidelines. Updates to courses can be made swiftly in an LMS, ensuring that all team members have access to the most current information.

Interactive learning tools within an LMS, including videos, charts, and other rich media, engage learners, making processes like building an online store or creating product virtuals easier to grasp and retain. These interactive modules are complemented by spaced repetition and microlearning techniques, which help reinforce knowledge through brief, focused segments, ideal for quick skill updates.

Assessment tools in an LMS provide immediate feedback and quizzes, essential for evaluating knowledge retention and addressing misconceptions quickly. Additionally, features such as discussion forums and expert or even peer-led webinars encourage a collaborative learning environment, fostering a community of continuous learning and knowledge sharing.

Knowledge retention is also important when it comes to turnover. Let's face it, sometimes we lose team members who carry a lot of expertise in their heads. When someone decides to leave your team, if that knowledge leaves with them, it can be a recipe for pain. Before starting PromoPilot, I worked with two different distributorships who I continue to care about and wish them nothing but success. For that reason, it was important that I documented as much as I could about the processes and systems that I was involved with. An LMS is exactly the place that sort of information should be cultivated in.

Finally, an LMS not only facilitates efficient training and upskilling in your distributorship, but also ensures that training is directly tied to measurable outcomes in knowledge retention, employee performance, and ultimately, customer satisfaction. This strategic approach to training empowers businesses to stay competitive in a market where technological adeptness and product expertise are key.

Leveraging Automation with an LMS

You might have heard that, at PromoPilot, we're fans of automation. Fortunately many LMS applications include automation features that can assist with enrollment, employee onboarding, continued learning events, and report generation. If your LMS has such features, make the most of your LMS investment by leveraging these at your business.

If your LMS supports no-code automation tools like Zapier, you may be able to get even more automated value from your LMS. For example, automatically notify user groups when a new course or article is published, automatically assign a new employee to a user group when they appear in your HR app, or update a user's status when a pivotal event occurs in another application. Automation within your LMS can significantly enhance both the learning experience for users and the administrative efficiency for managers.

Choosing the Right LMS

Choosing the right LMS for your company can be based on a number of factors including user experience, features and capabilities, available support, and cost. Personally, I have the most experience with Zoho Learn. Learn actually started as a simple wiki product which was great for creating and gathering internal documentation. However, it has grown into a full blown LMS with important features like collaborative editing, version tracking, course generation, and quizzes. They have a generous free plan which you can use to get started or build out with a single department. But paid plans start at $1/mo/user, making Zoho Learn an easy investment.

You may also consider kicking the tires on these popular LMS offerings:

TalentLMS
What stands out to me with TalentLMS is that they provide a growing library of ready-made courses that you can leverage with your team. Categories include technology, business skills, sales success and more. This adds a ton of value to TalentLMS's offering. In addition to the ready-made content, you can still build dynamic courses of your own. TalentLMS also has a Zapier integration, right out of the box, to meet your automation needs.

Trainual
Trainual's approach to employee learning can be summarized in four buckets – easy process documentation, engaging training, operations, and accountability. What stands out is their impressive list of built-in integrations with apps you may already be using! Share your content in your internal Slack channels, embed videos with Loom, or add new users when you set up a new employee in Paylocity. There are many more integrations to explore.

Implementing an LMS can be a transformative investment for your dynamic print and promo distributorship. An LMS not only streamlines the delivery and management of training programs but also significantly enhances knowledge retention and employee development through interactive and personalized learning experiences. By embracing the automation capabilities of an LMS, businesses can boost administrative efficiency, enabling them to focus more on the fun (and important) elements of the business rather than routine tasks. As we continue to navigate the complexities of a rapidly evolving marketplace, integrating an LMS will equip your workforce with the necessary skills and knowledge to thrive.