[101] Evolving Your Sales Systems
Oh, hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrapped Web. This is episode 101. I'm Jordan Gahl. Brian, very nice to see you.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian. How's it going there, Jordan?
Jordan Gal:It's going pretty well. It's Friday. It's raining in Portland like it has been for the past week.
Brian Casel:Yep. It's still sunny and cold here in Colorado, and I'm just here for two more days before we head out.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We are in mid February, so it's no longer the the energy of January like the year just got started. We're we're kinda settling in here Yep. Into the first quarter. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Time's flying.
Brian Casel:That's right. Alright. So today, you know, we're talking about building your sales systems. And this is something that's really on my mind right now. It's probably the number one project that that's on my plate is is transitioning the way that we make sales in in Audience Ops.
Brian Casel:And and you and I are gonna kinda compare notes of different, know, from your experiences doing sales in in CartHook. But when I say transitioning, mean, I've been doing all the sales myself up for the first eight or nine months of the business. Now I'm getting ready to bring on a sales rep, but before I can even do that, I've got to build up the systems to be able to to have a team based sales system instead of just me. So, so we're gonna talk through some ideas there.
Jordan Gal:It's a very tricky thing to navigate because a lot of times people get caught up in building their systems and they get mired in that, in the tools and the system and how to make it perfect and how to record everything and measure and it delays getting started and getting started is that's when you actually start to learn. So there's a difficult balance between just getting started sending emails from your own inbox and just starting to learn versus building up the system. So I think you got a, I mean, sounds to me like you've gone about it, right? You've done a few months with a less formal structure and now it's okay, how do we start to do this where you're not doing all of the sales yourself and now you need some systems in place.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it's funny, like, I mean, you know me and most most people know I'm like a freak when it comes to systems and documenting SOPs and building up our operations then but when it comes to the sales stuff, that's only been me. So I've done none of that. I have no systems, nothing documented, like, you know.
Jordan Gal:It's funny. When it's for you, it's the cobbler's, kids thing. Exactly. It's, when it's when it's for you, you don't need to build up the system and have it all perfect. So it's the last thing to get done.
Jordan Gal:All right, cool. Well, I'm in the same boat. I think businesses just go through different eras and sales for us proactive outbound sales and lead generation was the name of the game. It was the only game we were in in the beginning, in the first few months. And we got away from that entirely as we focused on integrations and now we're kind of diving back in.
Jordan Gal:So I think it's good to kind of be able to talk about what you're trying to build up, what we used to have in place, what we have in place now and what we where we wanna get to.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And so I think the way that we'll we'll structure this, we'll we'll start with, like you said, the outbound lead generation and prospecting systems. We'll we'll kinda compare notes there, and then we'll start to say talk about how how do we handle those leads when they come back from those outbound efforts. You know, there's always gonna be, like, organic and content marketing and and SEO and referrals. Like, you're always gonna get leads that way.
Brian Casel:And that'll, you know, grow over time. But, you know, you still wanna mix in the the proactive outbound targeting of, you know, know, your most ideal prospects. So so how have you done that and how has that evolved in in Carthook?
Jordan Gal:Sure. Yeah. And and what you're saying, right, that's exactly what we talked about last week, whereas I said I was in the search for repeatability. But right now we have those inbound leads that just kind of happen through SEO, through old links, through blog posts, referrals and integrations and all that. But you don't really have a business, not a real one until you are generating leads and sales on a consistent basis that is repeatable.
Jordan Gal:And that's kind of what the outbound lead generation thing can do for you. So yeah, I'll tell you there's a few difficult pieces in the whole thing that make or break the success of these types of campaigns and efforts. The first one is the data. And that's just a big challenge. You need to find the contact info for the right people, the right market, the right type of prospect.
Jordan Gal:If your list is bad, then everything else will be bad. That's one of the things that we have focused on over the past two weeks. I am currently using a system called GrowBots. And what I found appealing in GrowBots is that they have the data plus the email sending. Because normally you have to I used to go to BuiltWith and BuiltWith is that service that gives you lists of URLs that use a certain technology.
Jordan Gal:So I would say, give me a giant list of Magento stores, give me a big list of Shopify stores or Volusion stores. So that company can tell you and lets you download 10,000 URLs that use Volusion. That kicks off your data. Okay. Now I know
Brian Casel:And built with does not give you like the people and their contact info?
Jordan Gal:They used to have terrible personal info, like contact info. Now it's gotten better, but we have found that it is worth doing more on that and taking it and outsourcing it, to someone to dig a little further to try to get a contact email because what they'll find is the contacturl.com. They're not going to find peterstore.com. They're going to find the most generic thing possible and obviously it's better sent to a person.
Brian Casel:What does GrowBots do?
Jordan Gal:So Growbots, I believe uses LinkedIn. So it connects the two. So it does what BuiltWith does where it searches for technology. So I can say, give me a list of Magento stores, but then it goes and connects that company with the LinkedIn profile of individuals and then finds their email addresses. Nice.
Jordan Gal:So pretty powerful. It's a little expensive. I did my little hustle thing and met the founder online and told him I'd give him feedback and he's really cool and gave me like free access to their beta of their newest update. So I'm using it free currently, which was very, very cool of him, but they have a really nice tool. It's not perfect.
Jordan Gal:There are different tools that give you these different pieces, the data first, and then you need to take that and email. So I I was attracted to GrowBots because it could do both.
Brian Casel:Let's just kinda compare notes on that first piece, the data, like building the list. So what what we've been doing, it sounds like it sounds like you're using those tools a little bit more a little bit more automated than what I'm doing. I've been just picking categories of of types of SaaS software companies, like project management apps, or appointment booking apps or invoicing apps or accounting apps. And then I'd go to Capterra and just pull up a a URL of that category, which gives you 200, 300 different project management tools. And and then I hand that over to my VA, and then he goes through that list.
Brian Casel:I I think I tell him to do about a 100 a batch of a 100 at a at a time. He'll go through that list of companies. He visits every website, just just to find out who the founder is. Who the who the CEO is. And, and he puts that in a spreadsheet.
Brian Casel:You know, he's not really hunting for an email address. All he's doing is finding the name of of the CEO, and then we we've we take that list of a 100 names and we feed that into our friend Justin's, lead fuse tool, which goes and hunts down the email address for those names. And it's I mean, it's like 30%. 30 or 40% of the names will come back with a like a green, you know, quote unquote verified email address. You know?
Brian Casel:So for like every hundred hundred companies on that list, I'll get 30 or 40 emails. So it's a it's a it's a small number. It's very targeted and we'll do a couple 100 of of these rounds of batches. When I was figuring this all out, I've, you know, I went through the process of like manually hunting down one person's email address. And there are a number of ways you can do that.
Brian Casel:One one little tool I was using was was HubSpot's Sidekick. You plug that into Gmail, and you just keep putting in, like, combination, like, first name at company name, or first letter, last name at company name. And you just kinda put that into a Compose window in Gmail, and and if their face and information pops up inside in Sidekick, then you know you've you've found their, email address. And of course, that's very slow and manual. Lead Fuse, I think there's something like that and probably combines like five or six different, you know, ways to kinda like triangulate the person's email address and and they and they nail it.
Brian Casel:So that's that's how we build our list.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, it's two pieces, the data. It's the underlying company you want to reach and then the contact info for the person whether it's an email. Yeah, it's a difficult thing. We used to do it super manual. We used to just take the URL and send it over to someone outsourced and we used to say, go to the site, look for the info, go to LinkedIn.
Jordan Gal:But that type of work, it's debatable whether or not it's worth it. It was hard to tell if that was really worth it or if the generic emails were totally good enough. Yeah, and when LeadFuse I know is working on the ability to send the emails also, which I think will be a big breakthrough to put those two together because GrowBots is good that if it has both of them together, but it is pretty expensive and not perfect. Know, now using the system, it works, but it's not it's not perfect.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So what's the next step? You've got the list. You're doing like cold email outreach?
Jordan Gal:Yeah, and then you got to write emails. Now you have another opportunity to screw up. It's like all these things have to be right. You also need to send the right message in the right way. And I think this is where people get really tripped up.
Jordan Gal:They end up buying courses on how to email and it makes a huge difference. I am running an outbound campaign right now that I started earlier this week and it is abysmal. The results are abysmal, but I don't actually know if the results are abysmal because most people don't respond on the first email, they respond on the follow ups. So people are just getting follow ups now and we'll get more next week. So we'll actually see if the email campaign and the copy is doing a good job or not.
Jordan Gal:And then I'll be left with a conundrum. Is the email copy the problem or is my list the problem? And that's the type of thing where you need to just be patient. Okay, I'm going to run this for two months and reach out to 3,000 people and only then will you know if it's a success or not. But that's the next step is you got to email.
Jordan Gal:So inevitable that we talk about the tools. What you use for emailing?
Brian Casel:Yeah, so I use quickmail.io right now. I set that up a few months ago, and and I wrote the the email sequence I wrote, like, a three email sequence, you know. Like, the the initial email, and then the follow-up, and then, like, one one last try email. And I have not I have not changed them since that version one. I I think I think they were pretty good.
Brian Casel:I I've got some response, and we have landed a couple of clients through it. So it is profitable at this point.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's good.
Brian Casel:But I I haven't spent any time optimizing the emails. That's probably something so after I, bring on the salesperson, I'm gonna wanna start to ramp up the leads to feed to feed the sales team. And that's probably when I'll go back to focusing on the cold email and and try to optimize that and and, you know, ramp that up a little bit.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and what do you say? I I know if I were listening to us right now, I had I'd want us to talk about what we actually write in the emails. So I I can I just pulled mine up? I talked about I wouldn't talk about it in in very in very, very detail because I have
Brian Casel:competitors that probably listened. Well, I I don't have mine in front of me, but but one tip, and I actually went through a few rounds with my mastermind group at asking for their feedback on my on my email drafts. And one tip that I got, which I think works really well, is start off the very first email with a question. First sentence of the first email is a question.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's interesting.
Brian Casel:And I think that works really well. You know, it it Like
Jordan Gal:like a straightforward question? Like, what are you doing for your abandoned carts? That type of thing? How are you managing your content strategy?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Or yeah. Something along those lines. Like you, I don't wanna be exact about what we say. But but the idea I'll blame you.
Brian Casel:Idea being as soon as the person opens the email, they see this question and it makes them think like, how do we have that problem? Or how do we handle that? I'm not actually sure. It just starts to put that question in their mind, You know? Right.
Jordan Gal:Orient them to what this is about. I I start off with flattery. I love what you've done with xyz.com. You clearly have taken time on your checkout page. But and then I get into it.
Jordan Gal:What are you doing about your band of cards?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I kinda do the personalization thing in, like, the second or third sentence. Like like, hey. I've been following, you know, so and so company for a while. I've been a fan and and, you know, whatever.
Brian Casel:But yeah, still like keep it short.
Jordan Gal:I know like most people that I've spoken to or asked for advice or for help on it were adamant, short and sweet, don't overdo it. But then I had one of my favorite customers who's like a friend at this point. He forwarded me a competitor of ours, their cold emails to him. And I was blown away by how meaty every email features and a list of stuff. It was obvious that it was deliberate.
Jordan Gal:It was, you might not come to our website, but I'm going to give you all of our selling points over these like five or six emails. So I think it was five emails and this is not someone that you can dismiss. This is like the most successful person in our space, right? Funded and millions of dollars and hiring people for $175,000 a year type thing. So I couldn't just dismiss it.
Jordan Gal:So it was really interesting to see everyone tells you short and sweet. I think it just goes to show you that you don't know what's gonna work, you know, in another week or two, I should just totally change mine up. Not like change the first subject line, but like be super casual or go the other way entirely.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like AB test it. I guess the other the only other tip that I that I remember from when I wrote wrote these emails is, it's not about, hey, let's let's talk about how our company can can help you do this. It's I'd love to share a few ideas with you for how you can improve this. Even if you're not gonna hire us, like, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you some free advice, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I do I do something similar where I don't talk about I I offer a demo, but it's not focused on us. It's, hey, one of our customers has made, you know, $30,000 over the past thirty days in recovered revenue. I'd love to show you how they did it. So that's kind of like my value positioning instead of like, come check out our features.
Jordan Gal:It's like, no, come see how someone else was really successful with it. So then you kind of imagine in your mind that you could be successful with it too.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Very cool. Alright. So you you get some replies from those emails and you also get leads coming in from other places like we talked about. You've got integrations, you know, organic referrals, content, like and and I get, you know, inbound leads all the time from from various places.
Brian Casel:So what what happens from there? And this is this is the piece that I'm currently working on changing and and ramping up for a team. So so how do you handle that?
Jordan Gal:Yeah, we have two tracks now that's different from a service business that's higher end. We have two tracks. We have the self-service route and we have the non self-service route, right? Because we're very happy when someone signs up and doesn't talk to us and launches and goes to the free trial and maybe has a question or two and then puts in their credit card and converts. That's the ideal, but what we found is that most people who are higher end don't do that.
Jordan Gal:They talk first, they make sure that they like you and that the company is real and whatever else. So we have two tracks. We used to merge them back when we wanted to talk to as many people as possible because we wanted to make sure we had the product right. Whether you came in through a demo request, a cold email, or you just came in and signed up on your own, we would funnel everyone through the demo process. Oh, thanks for signing up for a free trial.
Jordan Gal:Even though we haven't talked to you, let's jump on the phone and I can show you how to use the software.
Brian Casel:Did you find that that's required at all? Like there are people who are like anxious to get going and they don't wanna do a demo demo call? Because I actually run into that sometimes with with different companies who like like some SaaS companies require you to request a consultation just to sign up. Like, can't just sign up. Right.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm always jealous of those companies. I I think that's the right way to do it. I think that's the ideal way to do it. That that's how you price your software high higher, and I think that's a conversation for our update episode. Not not not
Brian Casel:this I I actually got some advice recently that and I plan to implement this soon. What because Audience Ops is a productized service, so we definitely do a do a conversation with every everyone who comes through. But I I have made several sales from people who were like just ready, like as soon as they got on the phone with me, they were just ready to go. They had already learned everything they wanted to learn on their own. Just sign me up over the phone.
Brian Casel:So what I wanna do
Jordan Gal:explanation of what's gonna happen next.
Brian Casel:Yeah. They just needed the ability to sign up, basically. Because they don't get that
Jordan Gal:until Oh, that's interesting.
Brian Casel:So what I wanna do is they they request a consultation. We'll here's the Calendly link to to schedule your call with us. But in the meantime, watch this twenty minute video. It kinda answers all the most common questions. And on that video, there's there's a link to get started right now if you really want to.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's nice. So you do give the option.
Brian Casel:Well, we will. We're not doing it now.
Jordan Gal:Right. Yeah. Right. So let's get back to what happens when someone says, all right, let's see what you have to offer. So we used to run a very formal demo process and now I have reverted back to informal as I want to learn more.
Jordan Gal:I don't want to just tell people what I think they want to hear. I'm back in learning mode. So back when we had a very formal process, which is where you want to be, because that's when you can have other people give the demos like we used to. And the big hint here, the big tip that I learned from a salesperson that I kind of hired to help me build this stuff up was not to do a live demo, not to do a meaning, don't show your browser and click around your app. Because what that does, not only does it leave room for error, which happened to me this week on Tuesday, I had a big customer on the line.
Jordan Gal:Like, so I put my email here, and we'll just go to the activity page, and it'll capture my email immediately. And it didn't capture for some reason, because of some cookie thing. So that was embarrassing. So it avoids that much more importantly, what it does is it forces the salesperson giving the demo to go according to script. Because when you're just talking on the phone, you're clicking around, different things come to mind.
Jordan Gal:You'd, oh, well, let me just show you this and you don't follow the same exact script every time.
Brian Casel:So what's the alternative to not show because say you do have to show your software slides.
Jordan Gal:Slides. Yep. And you can still show screenshots of your software, but in slides. Because what happens then, the ideal that you want to get to is to do enough demos that you learn exactly what objections, questions, things to highlight, up with every slide, and you put that along the notes of the slide. So the salesperson knows, bang, I get to this slide, let me make sure I hit these two points because this is the most important thing I want to cover.
Jordan Gal:And we've heard this objection a bunch of times on this slide, so just talk about it even if they don't mention the objection. So that's kind of like the ideal. So you can make it look, you're not like trying to kid anybody, it's not your app on the web, but you can do a lot on slides. You can use, you know, red arrows to point things out. Do you see what where the red arrow is pointing right now?
Jordan Gal:That's the number that shows you how much revenue they recovered last month. And how do they do it? Next slide. Here's the email that gets sent out after sixty minutes after abandonment. And next slide.
Jordan Gal:This is how it looks in the Gmail inbox after they get it. And what happens when they click this button? Next slide brings them back to the cart. So you can mimic the whole motion of your of your app, but but through slides and it makes it much more rigid.
Brian Casel:I like I like that. And and, you know, so a quick sidebar right now, a little quick plug for an upcoming episode of Bootstrapped Web. I just remembered we have our, friend Damian Thompson coming on for an interview, and he's like the sales sales guru when it comes to selling software or or productized services. So it'll be cool because I think right now, we're just kinda talking through what we've done and what we've kinda hacked together over the years. And certainly in my case, I'm just I I kind of feel like I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
Brian Casel:But yeah, Damian's gonna come in and and kinda show us how it's how it's really done. And he's got a lot of, you know, case studies and examples of of of people that he's worked with. So so that'll be cool. That's that's coming up, sometime in March.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I'm I'm looking forward to that very much.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well, actually, I have a question for you because we just do calls just because we're just talking about content and about your company and about how we might do content together. And like, that's that's all it is. It's a Skype call. Sometimes it's a phone call.
Brian Casel:In your case, how do you like, is it always guaranteed that you're gonna be on a video call where you can show slides? Are you like inviting them to like a GoToWebinar kind of thing where it's like implied like I'm going to give you a presentation?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. So as soon as someone schedules through Calendly or a point later or whatever you're using, I have like a canned response email basically saying looking forward to So I think this is a good time to bring up a link that was recently shared from attach.io and we'll link this up in the show notes, but it's attach.io. It's like the ultimate guide to demos and this thing is so good. Everything from turning off notifications to making sure you email right when they set the appointment and then, you know, twenty minutes before, I'm looking forward to speaking with you in twenty minutes.
Jordan Gal:At that time, I will call you at this number. We will share my screen by going to this link. Like, don't mess around. Don't wait till two minutes before the call and say, oh, let me go find their phone
Brian Casel:Don't give any room for error.
Jordan Gal:Right. Why? This is, you know, you wanna get to a point where you're doing these multiple times a day and you have it repeatable. That's that's the thing which and that's why I think hearing you say that you guys just do basically just calls. You just get on the phone.
Jordan Gal:I mean, if it's working, then don't mess with it. But I think the the place to get to is is a more rigid
Brian Casel:I think so.
Jordan Gal:Script, or at least things to hit on.
Brian Casel:Well, actually, have another question about that. Because I'm also developing I'm kinda skipping ahead to something, you know, figuring out how I'm going to train a sales rep to do what I've been doing on the calls. And I think that boils down to, like, analyzing what I've been doing over the past 100 sales calls that I've done, and and put it into some kind of teachable format. Like, always ask these few questions up front, and then I kinda turn the conversation this way, and then we and and then and then I get to this kind of conclusion. But like for my approach has always been just to ask a lot of questions and be very conversational about it, and and I'm I start off every sales call just being genuinely very curious to learn as much as I can about your company, what you guys are about, who your customers are, and what you're focused on right now.
Brian Casel:And and I just ask a lot of questions around that. So how do you fit that sort of thing into a sales demo? Like, is it is it a presentation like, hey, you sit there and tune in and I'm gonna show you all this stuff, or do you have some section where it's like a conversation like, let me hear what your pains are right now?
Jordan Gal:I think that's that's where practice comes in and and repetition. When the first few times you do it, you're rigid because you're saying yourself, need to get through the script. I need to say exactly this. And the more you do it, the more natural it can come off and the more yourself you can be, more authentic everything feels because it's not
Brian Casel:Can you, like, insert sections or certain slides can be like, I'll tell you this this headline and then let's talk about it. Like
Jordan Gal:Definitely, that's where questions come in. Yeah. So this is how they do it and would that make sense for you? Is your checkout built in that same way or I mean that's definitely part of it. It's not sit there and watch for twenty minutes, that would be terrible.
Jordan Gal:And I'll tell you what I've done over the past two weeks in my demos is I've thrown all that out the window and I say and I share my screen with the app live. And I'm I'm trying to see how I go about it now because I I set up that presentation six months ago. So I'm seeing how do I talk about the app now compared to six months ago, and then I'll redo the slides according to kind of where my head is at now and what I've learned over the past six months of what people want, what they care about, what they think is awesome, what they don't think is important. Yeah. I I try you're right.
Jordan Gal:What what I end up what I end up doing is I I like make people feel special by being authentic. Comes off as so inauthentic what I just said, but here's what I mean. What I mean is the, when we get on the phone, I tell them like, look, I'm not going to do like this whole thirty minute demo and make you sit there and watch. I'm just going to get right to it and show you how one of our customers is successful using our tool. And then you and I can just talk.
Jordan Gal:How does that sound? So like, that's a line that I memorize and I just use, but it's authentic. It's like, dude, I don't want to do a demo for twenty minutes either. You don't want to watch a demo for twenty minutes. So let's just run through this like we're buddies and then let's like talk about what we really want to talk about.
Jordan Gal:How does that sound? Yeah, I like it. Yeah. So it's like, I'm going to get all my points across, but it's going to be a conversation of equals. It's not like I'm hoping for your money or you're trying to work with me or something.
Brian Casel:Yeah, cool.
Jordan Gal:I have one tip on the demo. The tip that my man, Jonathan, the sales guy here in Portland taught me was to ask for the free trial sign up while on the demo. So that's what I do. I don't say, okay, how does this sound? Go talk to your team.
Jordan Gal:I say, okay, well our thirty day trial doesn't start until you launch the campaign. So why don't we just create an account for you now and you can see what it's like. So I try to get them to sign up while we are on the phone because that is like such a, it's like a yes ladder of like, I already have an account. I guess I might as well just go with these guys instead of talking to the competitor next week. I already have an account.
Jordan Gal:I'm already inside. I already filled this out. It's so easy. It looks great back there. Why not just work with them?
Brian Casel:And by now you must have heard all the same objections come up again and again. Right? Like you've developed how to how to overcome the common objections?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The I think the difficult thing for us right now is when we don't get the objection. When they're just kinda thinking off on their own, they're not, you know, they're not saying their objections out loud. They're not expressing them. So that it's like you have to, pull it out.
Jordan Gal:So I'm like, you know, how did you find out about us and what are you thinking and what's your timeline? Well, it seems like try to, pull out, like, let me help you, man. What let me tell tell me what you're thinking.
Brian Casel:Right. Right. Yeah. Yep. Actually, haven't really thought about it that way.
Brian Casel:Because I I do hear the same they're not really objections. They're more questions. And I've and and I just from doing calls again and again, I I have standard answers, but I have nothing, like, documented, you know. Nothing is standard. And and to be honest, that's I should do a better job of this because some days I'm just off my game.
Brian Casel:And and I've been I so like, I've I've got really solid answers to objections that when I'm on my game I can rattle it off like almost word for word, you know, and and and kinda drive it home. But then some days I'm just tired or I've got too many too much shit on my plate that day and I just start to ramble and and go off off script. It like quote unquote script. I have nothing documented. So
Jordan Gal:Right. But what you normally Right. Would say or or what your ideal answer to these things are.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Yep. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So So what's the next thing up the chain? Is it is it CRM?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I guess so. So what I've been doing up till now is the consultation request comes in and and everything happens in my personal Gmail account. But I mean, my, you know, brianaudienceopsaccount. And, and so what I'm trying to get away from is is not have everything, like, siloed in my own in my account or even in somebody else's account.
Brian Casel:And so I can talk a little bit about using Help Scout to to make it more team based in a minute. But in terms of CRM, since I've been solo doing sales, I I've been using Streak CRM within my Gmail. And that's been fine, like, up until now. And I know they have team features and everything, but I I don't think it's ideal for that. So this past week and this week, I'm working on migrating over to, to Pipedrive CRM, mostly from your recommendation.
Brian Casel:But I I love it so far. I just really like it. I I I love the the the Kanban style, you know, workflows. That makes a lot of sense. It integrates with just about everything.
Brian Casel:It it's in Zapier, which is good. And so I can I can talk a little bit about the the actual tools and the systems that I'm working on hooking up? I guess I'll just run through that real quick right now. So, Pipedrive for the CRM, and the idea is as soon as somebody fills out the the consultation form, which is a Gravity form, by the way, that integrates with Pipedrive using Zapier. So the so the details get into Pipedrive.
Brian Casel:The email will drop into HelpScout, and we're gonna set up like a like a sales specific email inbox in Help Scout. And so so the person's details and their and their first message comes into Help Scout, it's also into Pipedrive, that happens automatically. I I have an integration between Pipedrive and HelpScout, so whenever you're viewing an email conversation in HelpScout, you can link right over to them in Pipedrive. And then I set up a Zapier, automation so that as soon as a new deal is created in in Pipedrive, it automatically creates a first action, to email that person and set up the, the Calendly schedule. Then the other piece is recording calls.
Brian Casel:So up up until now, I just use Skype when I call people, and I and I use Skype, Call Recorder to record my own calls just for kind of training purposes for for the future when I when I bring on the sales rep. Now I'm looking at I haven't set these up yet, but I'm I'm looking at talkdesk.com and aircall.io. I think they do somewhat the same thing. They kinda you know, it's like a call center online, you know, in a box is the idea. And, that I think should allow you to record the calls.
Brian Casel:And I think that they both integrate with Pipedrive, so I can attach call recordings to the contact in in Pipedrive. And that's, that's about it. And and we'll continue to use Calendly. I've been using it personally, but Calendly just recently launched a Teams feature too. So so as the sales team grows, I think we can all get hooked up into the same kind of Calendly account.
Brian Casel:I I'm still figuring that
Jordan Gal:out You can see everyone else's calendars and appointments and
Brian Casel:I think so. I haven't played around with it too much yet, but I I think yeah. I don't know. I and the other question is like, do we should we use a a company Google Calendar, like a Google Apps from our from our sales email address and use that as the Calendly appointments. Because I'm also like, today I was working on trying to integrate, like, when somebody books in Calendly, Zapier that thing over to Pipedrive, so that there's automatically an event in Pipedrive.
Brian Casel:So like, what I'm trying to do is integrate all these things so that there's as little manual input as possible. You know? But but everything is in Pipedrive. And and the and the actions, like, the next actions are, are set up correctly.
Jordan Gal:Right. So there's there's very little thinking. It's like, oh, this came in, therefore, I take this action by this date.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that I really like about Pipedrive so far is that you can set the, a couple of features I like that but you could set the deal, value. And and I have some metrics in Audience Ops now that I know the the average customer lifetime value and also the the monthly value on average. So, so I attach that to every every new deal gets that standard average value that I know every customer is.
Brian Casel:So I can look out, say, like in the next thirty days, we have this dollar amount of pipeline that's coming through the system.
Jordan Gal:Right. And how far along it is.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I love Pipedrive. Just the ability to set up a custom funnel according to your needs is for us, that's what sold us on Pipedrive and the second feature, right? So our software is like, it has its own cadence in converting someone. It goes from free trial to launching their campaign, to getting week one update, week two, week three, week four, and then conversion offer and then a follow-up offer and then is it won or is it lost?
Jordan Gal:So the ability to set up all those stages in Pipedrive according to exactly the way you want is that's what I like. Then assigning a value, you can see how much potential money is in each stage of the pipeline.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and you can like percentage on each level, right? Like, it goes from like 20% likely to 30% to 50%.
Jordan Gal:Right, so it really starts to help you forecast like when I'm sending an investor update in a few days and I'm like either optimistic or pessimistic, go there and I just get a clear picture. I say, I know where we are right now, but by next week we're actually going to have a good week because we have 10 trials coming due for conversion and based on his blah, blah, blah historical, I know this much should convert. So I should feel better or I should light a fire under my ass. So it's, yeah, the second thing that we use Pipedrive for is it allows you to create multiple pipelines And that coincides with the sales process really nicely because we have a free trial pipeline, which is what I just described. But we also have a demo pipeline like expressed interest scheduled, rescheduled, had the demo, follow-up after the demo.
Jordan Gal:Like that's its own pipeline, you can see where people are depending on the pipeline. Yeah. That that gives
Brian Casel:you I set up three pipelines in for audience ops. One is the main like the main pipeline, which is like consultations and to getting to proposal and and then getting to to become a client. We've got another one that that that's called like gone cold. Like, we've sent you the proposal, did not close. We're gonna clean you out of the main pipeline because it's been like a month or two or more.
Brian Casel:Put it into the gone cold, but there's a pipeline for that. So like, we'll follow-up after like two months and see if we can reopen Right.
Jordan Gal:Give them an update on some case study or something rather, but yeah. But it's there.
Brian Casel:And then the third one is after they've become a client. And and I haven't developed this much, but I wanna do, like, have, like, a one month check-in call and then, like, ask for a referral and that kind of thing.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. Yeah, dude. All this stuff, you know, takes work, but it it works. The dream the dream is to have the system built out and functioning and then adding power to it, adding people, adding salespeople, being more organized, being more efficient, figuring out which are the high value customers that you should deal with versus the non high value that other people should deal with.
Jordan Gal:Developing this out is the that's like the heart of it. I feel, yeah, sometimes I feel guilty that we focused on it hard and then we started getting so much traction through integrations that we moved away from depending on these systems and salespeople and outbound calls and emails. And I look back and I think, that was, I wish I had more capacity that we could have just kept pushing, kept developing it while doing integrations also because we, the company would be a lot better off right now.
Brian Casel:Yeah, but that's how it is to kind of, you know, it's like a pendulum, know, you go from like one thing to another, you know,
Jordan Gal:So we've gone through the process. Let me ask you what what's your ideal vision of what what this does? Right? Is it like multiple salespeople with you just overseeing it? Right?
Jordan Gal:That's that's what we should have in mind. What's the successful outcome?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, the successful outcome is and I'm far from it today, but hopefully in the next few months is, is for me to not do any sales calls anymore. As as Damian Thompson put it when when we were talking before, you know, the goal is, for a complete stranger to come to Audience Ops and sign up as a customer and have the service delivered, and I've never talked to them. You know? And that's that's the goal.
Brian Casel:And, You know, putting all these tools together, it it in terms of my role in this, You know, I'm I wanna go from being the salesperson to being the coach for our salespeople. You know? And to and not even that I'm such a great coach or anything, but like, in the short term, to kinda coach them on the product and coach them on how to how to handle the process and how to handle, the people who come through. And I wanna build these systems where everything can be tracked, all activities can be tracked, we can optimize every activity in the funnel. And that might mean tweaking our our processes and and tweaking how how sales people operate the system, but having things like Help Scout and Pipedrive and, you know, Calendly, you know, just being able to see all these things and access them, like, has access to the same stuff, should be it should be easier to track.
Brian Casel:Because because currently, it's all, like, contained within my personal email. And so I'm I'm I gotta get it into, like, a team based system. That's kinda step number one. And then train a salesperson, kinda share half the leads with him, and I'll still do the other half. Then eventually, give all the leads to him or or her and maybe bring in like two or or more salespeople and and kinda, you know, ramp it up from there.
Brian Casel:That's the goal.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I hear you, man. Me too. I just I wanna build a machine.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:Dull and boring and predictable. You put $10 in, you pull $20 out. You put $20 in, you take 40 out.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And the big reason for me at this point is it like, the reason why I'm focused I'm so focused on this and why I see it as such an urgent problem to solve is I need to be focused on other things. Like, need to be building out our other products and improving our service and improving everything and working on higher our hiring funnel, which I've talked about before. Like, I need to get myself out of the sales stuff. And, that's that's the goal.
Jordan Gal:Cool, man. Well, now I'm I'm all excited about focusing on this again.
Brian Casel:Cool. Alright. We'll, talk next week.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Have a great weekend. Alright.
Brian Casel:See you.
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