Jetpack CRM, WordPress Multisite and WP Ultimo

This guide is created to help CRM Resellers who want to offer Jetpack CRM to their clients through a WordPress Multisite setup, and charge for access to the CRM site.

Getting started

First up, to follow this guide (and set up your own powerhouse CRM to resell to many clients), you’ll need three things:

1. Jetpack CRM Reseller account (you get 10+ license keys!)
2. WordPress Multisite installed.
3. WP Ultimo – if you want to charge for access to the sites in your network (i.e. sites that are running Jetpack CRM).

With those three sorted, let’s dig in:

Before you start: Decide on Pricing & Market Fit

How much will you charge? … that is the question. We’ve seen resellers charge as much as $100 per month for a hosted version of our CRM. This makes for a great ROI. We’ve also seen users add it to an existing set of tools they offer their clients, charging $20 per month and still making a healthy return.

If you’ve already got clients who could use a decent CRM, this is a no-brainer. It’s quick & easy to setup, and YOU set the pricing (paying us a small reseller fee).

Example:

Reseller cost = $10pm per install

You sell at $30pm (or $360py – low for a CRM of this calibre)

Revenue Per Client Per Year: $360

Cost per client per year: $120

Net Profit Per Client Per Year: $240

(and that’s just sticking at a low $30pm and for 1 client! With 20 clients thats a steady $4,800 netted, for simply setting it up. Clients often stick around for years with next-to-no support!)

With Ultimo & Jetpack CRM, you can choose to have a setup where people can sign up for the free plan (no extensions for Jetpack CRM) or a Pro plan (all extensions). Then try and up sell people from free to pro (but not limit their time using the CRM on the free plan).

The other option would be to run only the Pro version, but with a limited time trial (say, 14 days). This is the most common practice and how the rest of this guide will proceed under the assumption of.

… Excited yet? – Once you’ve got your CRM reseller account, follow the steps below to get this moving!

Step 1: Install WordPress Multisite

The first thing you want to get up and running is WordPress, particularly the WordPress multi-site variant of the popular content management system.

After installing your multi-site admin should look like this:

This will be very familiar to users of standard WordPress. WordPress Multisite is the same admin screen except with the addition of the following areas:

• Sites – this shows the sub-sites in your network. Each of these will be it’s own Jetpack CRM install (for one client/end user/team). Remember, each one of these takes up a license key slot.
• Users – this is slightly different to the normal WP users area from a single site install

Step 2: Install WP Ultimo

WP Ultimo is a WordPress plugin which runs on WordPress multi-site and makes it easy to offer “WordPress as a Service” (WaaS) what this means, is you can offer your customers an install of WordPress – which you host for them.

This is great if you want to offer your customers a CRM which they can use and have their data separate only to themselves (vs running on single site, with multiple CRM users).

Once you’ve installed WP Ultimo, your site will look like this (network admin):

It adds the following areas to your WordPress Multi-site install

• WP Ultimo
• Subscriptions
• Plans
• Coupons

We won’t spend the time going through how to setup WP Ultimo – that’s covered in their documentation. The next step would be to setup the plans you want to offer your CRM under (using Jetpack CRM) and which plugins should be used in each plan, but first set up Jetpack CRM and install the extensions.

Step 3: Install Jetpack CRM and Extensions

Next up, you install Jetpack CRM to your WordPress Network Admin area:

Now you have Jetpack CRM installed on your network, before we network activate it, let’s take a look at how a sub-site would look:

When it’s not network activated – the sub site has the option to activate Jetpack CRM. We don’t want to give them that option when using the CRM, we want it to be installed and active by default.

Click network activate for Jetpack CRM and now your sub-site will have Jetpack CRM.

Installing extensions

Next up, you want to install the extensions for Jetpack CRM, however you do not want to network activate these. It will be clear why not in a minute.

Step 4: Set up WP Ultimo Plans

This is where things will start to fall into place. When we installed the extensions above, we chose not to network activate them. This is important if you want to offer a free plan (i.e. use the CRM for free, without any extensions).

When setting up your Pro plan you can then choose which plugins should be available for sites who have signed up on that plan.

This is one way to offer a specific plan with only a subset of CRM extensions (e.g. the eCommerce plan)

If you set up a Free plan and leave this unchecked – any one who signs up will not be able to see this as a plugin option (and therefore, only use Jetpack CRM on its own).

Step 5: Give your customers a way to sign up

WP Ultimo does this via their shortcode for the pricing table. Simply add the following to a page for your pricing

Then hit publish, and your pricing page will look like the below (this is on the twentyninteen WordPress theme).

Not the prettiest, but you can easily style this with a theme, or some CSS of your own. This guide is focusing on the functionality of the setup (and not the aesthetics)

Recap

So now lets recap about what we have in the setup. We have the following:-

• WordPress installed and setup to run Multi site
• WP Ultimo network installed – to give the functionality for people to pay for a site in the network (i.e. get their own CRM)
• Jetpack CRM network activated (to give everyone a CRM once they have a site)
• Jetpack CRM extensions installed, but not network activated (so they can choose which to use, once logged in)

Step 6: Offering a fully extendable CRM

This is one of the key benefits of Jetpack CRM, you can extend the CRM and use only what you need. If you’re offering this to your customers though, you won’t know what they need – so the best way is to install all of the extensions on your network admin (but do not network activate them)

This then gives your sub-sites the ability to activate which extensions they need from their plugins page.

So, going back to the Plans in WP Ultimo and ticking the Sales Dashboard makes them both available to the sub sites, but it does not force them to be active (the sub-site themselves choose which they want to activate):

To run this as a fully fledged CRM to your clients, spinning up CRM sites for them on the back of them paying your fees, is super easy.

Step 7: Making it CRM only

Each sub site will have the options for posts and pages. This is where the power of this approach comes in. You can let them use their CRM with some front pages too (their site will have a front end, as shown below)

This is pretty important as there are certain areas of the CRM which you want customers of your client to be able to see, for example

• The Client Portal (for people to see their details)
• Lead generation forms (if embedded on the front of the site)

So, by now. You’ll have provided a CRM for your customers, which can be setup to be “CRM only” and full screen.

It can also be further customised to fit your brand, which will remove references to Jetpack CRM and you can link to your own support channels etc.

Step 8: Custom Domains

WP Ultimo even gives you the option of allowing your customers to have a custom domain for their website. This is useful if you want to package up a more broad offering to your customers, for example

• Free website, with [X] pages
• Pro themes, where they can use any theme you have active
• etc

If you just want to offer a CRM though, then you can offer it very easily using WP multi-site, Jetpack CRM and WP Ultimo to manage the payment and setup of the sub-sites.

Rebranding the CRM

Jetpack CRM also comes with the ability to fully Rebrand itself. You can pick your brand colours, add a logo and a name, and run this with your own company as the “creator”. This removes our name and logo from the install, the steps are exactly the same as above, but rather than install Jetpack CRM and extension on the network admin, you’d download the rebranded ZIP, extract your rebranded CRM and extensions and install those on the network admin area. For more information on rebranding, see How to Whitelabel Jetpack CRM.