Kevin Dieny: 00:00:00

Hello, and welcome to the Close The Loop podcast.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:02

I'm your host, Kevin Dieny and today we're going to talk about how to

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:05

get the most value out of your CRM.

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To help us dive into this topic, this fairly technical, pretty complex topic.

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We have two special guests with us today, we have Islin

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:16

Munisteri and Lucas Munisteri.

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They have co-founded Theia Marketing.

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They are a Hubspot platinum partner agency, and they work hard to integrate

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client business processes into the CRM.

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They've lived in several states across the US in Texas, Alaska, and now Colorado.

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They enjoy sharing their experiences with others, all about different CRMs.

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So welcome guys.

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I've also got my colleague here.

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His name is Tim Tran.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:43

He's I guess, Tim, do you want to do a little intro for yourself?

Tim Tran: 00:00:48

Yeah, sure.

Tim Tran: 00:00:48

I'm the internal consultant here at CallSource, I work directly with

Tim Tran: 00:00:52

the teams and make sure that, I have streamlined all the operations,

Tim Tran: 00:00:56

and give advice where we're needed.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:58

Cool, Tim is the ops guy here.

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I thought he'd be a great person to kick around some of the

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discussions around this topic.

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So that's why I've asked him if he'd join us.

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First of all, we're going to be talking about how businesses get

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value out of the CRM first off.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:11

Um, maybe Lucas, define for us, what the heck we're talking about

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:16

when we say a CRM for those that are like, what is that again?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:20

Yeah, so CRM, everybody uses a CRM without even realizing it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:27

And basically what a CRM is, is it's a contact or customer relationship, man.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:32

If you use outlook for your email or Gmail for your email, that fundamentally

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:37

is a CRM at its simplest level.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:41

You're keeping your contact information, their email address,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:44

and how to get ahold of them.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:47

But that level of CRM is very inactionable for a company it's good

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:52

for communication, but it doesn't let you grow that relationship or nurture

Lucas Ministeri: 00:01:57

that relationship because you only know very little data about that.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:02

If you've used something like outlook, you can see, you can go into the

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:06

more properties and you can see it lets you track a little bit more

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:09

detail, but it still has its end.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:12

When you get into a true CRM, something to manage your customer life cycle

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:18

and know how to cut, how customers are interacting with your brand.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:22

That's something like a HubSpot or a Salesforce or Microsoft dynamics.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:27

And those allow you to understand every little detail about your customers

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:32

from which websites are viewing to which products are they buying,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:35

are they interested in down to, are they paying their bills on time?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:39

And depending upon the CRM that you pick, you get different levels of reporting

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:45

and insights into your customers.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:48

Now, Well, you will find as you drive down this road and we'll just leave a

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:53

word here, have you scratch your heads?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:02:55

When you get into a CRM that tracks every, everything you are using, what's

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:01

called an ERP and that's actually an enterprise reporting platform and that's

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:05

used to manage your entire business.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:08

So there is a cutoff of, from one system to another and Salesforce and Microsoft

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:14

dynamics or net suite with, uh, Oracle.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:18

We'll cross those lines tools like HubSpot or active campaign.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:25

They don't really cross that boundary.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:27

They still stay in that CRM component.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:30

And it's more about managing that customer through that marketing

Lucas Ministeri: 00:03:35

and sales portion of the lifecycle.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:38

Yeah, I think it's important that to me, at least the

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:42

CRM sort of came out of a rolodex.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:44

I mean, it sort of evolved from there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:47

So that brings me to the question for you Islin.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:50

So CRMs have probably evolved a lot over time.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:53

So how are they evolving and what are they doing?

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:57

To help businesses today as they continue to become, maybe like Lucas

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:01

mentioned an all-in-one or maybe are they getting a little more niche into

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:05

specific functions that are providing.

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:07

Can you shed some light on that?

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:09

Sure, so there's, I would say there's like different

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:13

CRMs, like there's I would say there's industry specific CRMs, right?

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:17

Like certain healthcare, like doctor's offices, that type of industry.

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:22

There's pipedrive if you're running it like a sales heavy organization.

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:27

And you have under a certain number of reps that that can help too.

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:31

But really, I would say like a CRM, a good CRM will help you track the customer

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:37

journey from like marketing from when a lead fills out a form on your website.

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:45

There's a process called lead scoring, which you can implement.

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:49

And at some point when a lead has viewed enough content or they have seen

Islin Munisteri: 00:04:54

enough websites or they've had enough calls into your system of then, or

Islin Munisteri: 00:05:01

they've had enough email opens, then they become, a sales qualified lead.

Islin Munisteri: 00:05:06

So they move from a lead, from a marketing qualified lead to after enough

Islin Munisteri: 00:05:12

activity, interacting with your brand.

Islin Munisteri: 00:05:15

They becomes a sales qualified lead.

Islin Munisteri: 00:05:17

And then so go from marketing and sales and then, depending on your

Islin Munisteri: 00:05:22

products, right, you can also have a service in there as well.

Islin Munisteri: 00:05:27

And so you're tracking, you know, support tickets and onboarding

Islin Munisteri: 00:05:32

process with your CRM as well.

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:35

Yeah, so, wow.

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:35

So CRMs today are delivering a lot more value than like a typical rolodex.

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:38

So, we have run into CRMs quite a bit, uh, and with our company and some of them are

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:43

much more industry specific than others.

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:46

Like you mentioned, the healthcare ones, we run into a lot of

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:48

home service industry CRMs.

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:51

And CRM is built for some, some of them are like, look, we do the basics.

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:56

You can bolt on a lot of features, a lot of cool things.

Kevin Dieny: 00:05:58

So, uh, Tim in your experience, in our ops side where it's either internal

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:03

or working with clients, have you run into a lot of CRMs out there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:07

And, and what does that sort of seem like?

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:09

Is it this like an ocean of CRMs?

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:11

What is it like out there?

Tim Tran: 00:06:12

Yeah, everyone has like a, their go-to CRM.

Tim Tran: 00:06:15

They have to have it integrate or it doesn't work, or we

Tim Tran: 00:06:18

won't work with you guys.

Tim Tran: 00:06:19

We used to work with a lot of auto dealerships.

Tim Tran: 00:06:22

So a lot of it was like, hey, this CRM needs to work in our dealership.

Tim Tran: 00:06:25

This is what we know.

Tim Tran: 00:06:26

This is what it feeds into.

Tim Tran: 00:06:27

So I understand there's, there's a lot of CRMs and a lot of people

Tim Tran: 00:06:30

are glued or business are glued and tied into those, those CRMs.

Tim Tran: 00:06:35

It's like they're a partner in their business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:38

So that brings me great question out for you, Lucas.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:42

So there's requirements for a CRM, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:45

I guess a CRM might just be like, look, we'll sell it to anybody.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:48

But I think the way that we've adopted CRM is the way that I've

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:52

seen other companies do it is like there's kind of requirements.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:54

You don't just want to list, like buy any little thing and it's out there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:57

You want to make sure if you're going to buy something.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:00

You're going to be able to have either the people to manage it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:03

You're going to take use of it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:05

So there's, to me, there's some requirements out there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:07

So what would you say, like some requirements might be for businesses

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:10

who are considering a CRM?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:13

Honestly, the requirement list is infinite.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:16

It doesn't have a bottom.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:18

And the reason why I say that is you have.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:22

Your outlook inbox, which is the most simple CRM on the planet to the CRMs.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:28

They get to the borderline of any ERP and tracking everything.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:33

The biggest requirement for a CRM though across the board is will you use it?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:39

It, I cannot tell you the number of clients who have purchased.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:45

Zoho pipe drive sales, loft copper, and like four or five other CRM platforms.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:54

And they're using each one for a tiny little bit of function.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:07:58

And like you brought up a minute ago, you can bolt on a ton of

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:01

stuff, but does it really work?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:05

Uh, HubSpot's got a great phrase called Frankenstein.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:10

And it's this concept of, yes, we have the central data repository,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:15

but we're going to add all these other resources around the edges of

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:18

it to make it actually function how we want, but you've only sat settled

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:24

for something that works well enough.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:27

It doesn't actually work how you want.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:31

And that's led rise to a whole new category of programs called

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:35

data aggregation platform.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:37

And all they do is bring databases together and send data out.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:42

But you're you get into this world of tech debt, and I know I'm running in

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:46

circles around your question, but the point being is, if you don't know what

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:53

you want to track, and you don't know what your business is, KPIs are, or what

Lucas Ministeri: 00:08:57

matters to you to your growth, it doesn't matter what the CRM is or what it does.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:09:05

If you can't track what matters and you don't, or even better

Lucas Ministeri: 00:09:07

yet, in some cases you don't know what matters to your business.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:09:12

It's not going to matter what you pick.

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:14

Right, and, and I can see what you mean by that being an endless

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:20

well there, because, what the business really needs is varies business to

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:24

business sometimes, and they may need more resources or different processes to make

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:29

use of a CRM than another business mind.

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:31

Right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:31

Like the, the purposes behind it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:36

The core functionality of it is organizing for a business so that

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:40

when things are more organized, you can better take action on them.

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:43

And then when you do decide to take action, which is the thing

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:46

you mentioned earlier Lucas.

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:47

Was a really good CRM these days, ordering on an ERP is going to help you take action

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:53

on the things that you've organized.

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:54

So Islin, you mentioned some of the ways, like some of the things,

Kevin Dieny: 00:09:58

the tools, the features that are in the CRM or in the ERP is today that

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:02

are helping people, but what are.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:04

I guess general things, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:07

Cause there's so many CRMs.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:08

What are some general things that are helping businesses

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:10

take action by using a CRM?

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:13

Right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:13

So like what tools or what features are companies using today that come

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:18

from the CRM that helped them take action on the information they have?

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:23

So I would say at the beginning, you need to understand

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:29

what your business KPIs are.

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:32

So for example, you have revenue.

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:34

Okay.

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:34

What drives that revenue?

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:36

Okay.

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:37

So you say, you need to have 10 leads a month.

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:41

And the top of the funnel to drive to, to close deals at the end of the month.

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:47

So that you know about how long your sales cycle is.

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:50

You know how what's your revenue machine look like?

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:53

From a sales side, you'd want to have deal tracking, right?

Islin Munisteri: 00:10:58

You'd want to be able to understand what your deal pipeline looks like.

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:02

For, you know, a lot of bigger companies, you'd want to be able to forecast

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:08

probability to close on your deals.

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:12

Once something is closed won you also have a process to

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:15

take that to customer success.

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:17

So it's, it's not like your sales processes is done once

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:22

you kick it over the fence.

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:23

Like there's, there's an entire business process in the background

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:27

that's working and then understanding that business process is key.

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:32

So that's why I was saying you need to have, if you can get, say part of

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:36

the inbound methodology, if you're not doing any outbound farm, like hunting

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:40

at all saying you have 10 leads come in from your website every month.

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:44

And so that's marketing, like a KPI, towards driving revenue.

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:51

And so those marketing source leads need to come down to sales and sales work works

Islin Munisteri: 00:11:57

their process, and then some marketing needs to work their process, whether

Islin Munisteri: 00:12:01

that's like social media, content, email, whatever those webinars, podcasts, you

Islin Munisteri: 00:12:09

know, whatever those channels, may be.

Islin Munisteri: 00:12:11

To drive that traffic to create the leads.

Islin Munisteri: 00:12:15

That's what I mean, that's part of what we do is like the

Islin Munisteri: 00:12:17

customer journey mapping, right.

Islin Munisteri: 00:12:19

How does someone on the street who doesn't know, you turn into a customer,

Islin Munisteri: 00:12:23

turn into an evangelist for your brand.

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:26

Oh, that's really cool.

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:27

So there's a lot of features bringing value to a business, I guess if

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:33

they, if it fits their business model and if they take use on it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:36

So, that kind of leads me immediately to think like, okay, well, who should be

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:41

responsible in the business for making sure that the CRM is going to get used?

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:45

Have you experienced it?

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:46

So, Lucas, I mean, who is usually are in charge of that?

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:51

Is it the owner or the CEO, or is it like a dedicated person

Kevin Dieny: 00:12:54

that works best for that?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:12:55

It depends upon the size of the organization.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:12:57

So larger organizations that can have a team that that's their,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:02

their job is to pay attention to what's going on inside the CRM.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:06

Those are the people that ideally are managing it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:11

If you have a data manager or.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:14

Uh, CRM, admin or somebody, and typically people in like Salesforce environments,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:19

they will have a Salesforce admin.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:22

They're going to be responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the system,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:25

making sure it's working and healthy, but then the individual managers

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:29

or team leaders for departments for marketing or sales are going to be

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:33

responsible for making sure people are actually utilizing that system.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:38

Cause if you don't force people to do.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:41

They're not going to do it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:43

I mean, it's, if you don't tell someone they have to do it or their job's

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:48

important based measured on that, they're going to take the path of least resistance

Lucas Ministeri: 00:13:54

and it takes a little bit of time to get people onboard into that mindset

Lucas Ministeri: 00:14:00

that this is the best way to do that.

Islin Munisteri: 00:14:03

Well, I guess, I mean, at some larger companies, right there, there

Islin Munisteri: 00:14:05

is a revenue operations function, right?

Islin Munisteri: 00:14:08

And they kind of corral the troops across like sales, marketing operations.

Islin Munisteri: 00:14:13

And there's like a new emerging field called customer success,

Islin Munisteri: 00:14:16

operations and rev ops basically make sure that everything is being

Islin Munisteri: 00:14:22

reported system is being used.

Islin Munisteri: 00:14:25

Any big fires or small fires are being put out in the systems

Islin Munisteri: 00:14:28

that are, that are being used.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:30

That's really cool.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:31

I, we have a CRM admin here.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:34

If he was here, he'd probably be representing here on the

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:37

call, but I also look at a.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:40

Uh, CRM, not like as the, obviously, as we've been talking about,

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:44

not as the final destination.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:45

To me, a lot of businesses are going to go, man.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:48

If we knew this, we could probably make more money.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:51

Oh man.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:51

We'd like to sell, but then after we sell, we'd like to help with

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:54

customer support or something.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:56

They think of how they want their business to run and behave.

Kevin Dieny: 00:14:59

And to me, my mind immediately goes, okay, well with a CRM, you can do that easier

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:03

with the capabilities that are tools that mimic, or that are similar to a CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:08

And usually there's like a point where a business is like, well, maybe I can get

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:13

away with using, like, Lucas mentioned, like maybe I can get away with using

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:17

Excel spreadsheets, written notepads.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:20

So I'll go back to you Lucas, at where is the point where a business

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:23

has to go from, notepads, Excel sheets, outlooks, gmails too.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:28

Okay, I'm going to get on board and get a full fledged CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:30

Is there like a, a point cause we've run into businesses, I've

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:33

been shocked how big they were to find out that he'd never had a CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:36

So I think that there might be some line they cross where they're

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:39

like, okay, I think it's time.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:15:42

It's when you want to start understanding what's driving growth.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:15:46

I mean, that's the biggest metric right there.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:15:50

We've worked with clients that have grown to a $15 million a year business in

Lucas Ministeri: 00:15:55

Excel, workbooks, and, people's brains.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:15:58

Like there is nothing documented, but someone goes on vacation

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:03

and everything breaks.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:05

So there there's a scope of like yes and no.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:10

I think it really comes down to picking a CRM from day one.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:15

And you can pick HubSpot as a CRM because they offer a free version out of the box.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:21

There's a lot of other like low cost, low effort CRMs to get you started.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:29

Because as long as you're just focusing on the CRM component, not the marketing

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:32

automation, not the sales automation or the pipeline or deal management and

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:37

all of these other things that come as an anciliary function of having a CRM.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:45

A lot of that core data structure, these companies provide for very low cost.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:51

And I don't see a reason for people not to do.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:16:55

However, there are still people who will fight you tooth and

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:00

nail because of some reason.

Tim Tran: 00:17:04

And on that point at what, when you guys are working

Tim Tran: 00:17:06

with clients, what's the best way to get their team adopted into a CRM?

Tim Tran: 00:17:10

Well, like which ways have you guys seen the most effective.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:14

So we do a lot of hands on training with our clients.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:16

A lot of time and effort spent.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:19

Teaching them how to use the tools and working through those friction

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:24

barriers of I can't, or I don't want to.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:29

And when it comes to the individual contributor, the person doing

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:34

the work, if their boss says, you will do this, it's much easier.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:40

If their boss says, Hey, the CEO paid for this, but we're

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:44

not really going to do that.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:47

They'll never use it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:48

It just it'll never happen.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:51

And so it comes down to that encouragement to do it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:17:58

You will find the occasional, like person who's like the individual contributor.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:18:04

Who's like, I need this, I want this.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:18:06

And typically it's because they've come from an organization,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:18:10

that's used it in their past and they've seen the value it adds.

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:14

Another aspect of a CRM to me is also the internal side.

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:18

Like helping with collaboration, for instance.

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:20

So it isn't do you think you could comment on how a CRM might help a company?

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:25

Increased collaboration with in itself, like within internal departments,

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:29

sales, with marketing support, with marketing support, with sales, just

Kevin Dieny: 00:18:33

anyone be able to collaborate easier with each other because they have a CRM.

Islin Munisteri: 00:18:38

The great thing is that.

Islin Munisteri: 00:18:41

For example, HubSpot does email tracking and a bunch of other CRMs do that too.

Islin Munisteri: 00:18:46

And that way that email is not living just an outlook.

Islin Munisteri: 00:18:50

And if you go down for a week or something, then that email is like

Islin Munisteri: 00:18:55

unresponded to, or like I would say SOL but then if that email is

Islin Munisteri: 00:19:00

living in the CRM, then another team member can take action on it.

Islin Munisteri: 00:19:07

It's like, oh, we, we need to respond or we need to do something.

Islin Munisteri: 00:19:11

I would say the marketing, the sales handoff, if you have some sort of

Islin Munisteri: 00:19:16

marketing automation going on behind the scenes, life becomes a lot smoother.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:21

Yeah, I mean, I can add a little more color to that.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:24

Within like a lot of the organizations we help configure, they'll track

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:28

a person through that marketing funnel from a lead all the way to

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:32

an SQL or a sales qualified lead.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:35

And when they hit that phase, they're automatically created as an opportunity

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:39

for a sales person to reach out to.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:41

So provided both teams have aligned on what's a qualified person.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:46

It helps the sales team know who to reach out to.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:50

And then when the deal closes, it automatically creates a ticket

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:54

to either do the fulfillment or the project onboarding or

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:57

fulfill whatever they purchased.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:19:59

So that there's a seamless handoff from each phase, and

Lucas Ministeri: 00:20:04

everybody knows what's going on.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:20:07

And depending upon where you create those tickets or tasks, it helps

Lucas Ministeri: 00:20:11

people have line of sight to what their potential pipeline of work will be.

Islin Munisteri: 00:20:16

Yeah, all of that historical information

Islin Munisteri: 00:20:19

is stored within the CRM.

Islin Munisteri: 00:20:21

So you can see all the emails that marketing and sales has had

Islin Munisteri: 00:20:24

once customer success takes over.

Islin Munisteri: 00:20:26

So provided, someone actually reviews the data and then you'll feel more prepared

Islin Munisteri: 00:20:32

going into that, that client engagement.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:34

Yeah, so I guess coming off of that, then my question for, I

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:40

guess, back to you Islin here would be like, how long should a company or how

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:45

long do come some companies take before they see some value out of the CRM?

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:50

I think some of the requirements we mentioned we want to use the CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:54

And when you start using it, is that, does that enable any value, like day

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:59

one or is it more likely that they'll see value at some time down the road?

Islin Munisteri: 00:21:05

So I think Hubspot and a few other customer success,

Islin Munisteri: 00:21:09

like communities have said, there's something like a day zero.

Islin Munisteri: 00:21:12

Where that's the first day you start seeing value from the product.

Islin Munisteri: 00:21:17

And that could be three to six months, down the line.

Islin Munisteri: 00:21:22

If you're onboarded within like a month or two, then you can start

Islin Munisteri: 00:21:27

seeing a value right away from the tool during the onboarding meetings.

Islin Munisteri: 00:21:34

But the, the real value comes from actually using the tool, right.

Islin Munisteri: 00:21:39

And then taking actionable insights from the reports and dashboards.

Kevin Dieny: 00:21:45

Yeah, that's that's why, so maybe instead of commenting

Kevin Dieny: 00:21:51

on it, I may ask you about it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:21:52

So Lucas, let's say a company is like, we're going to get a CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:21:57

What things could they do beforehand or ahead of time,

Kevin Dieny: 00:22:02

or let's say they have a CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:22:03

What things can they do to make it so that when they get a CRM, that they are ready

Kevin Dieny: 00:22:08

and prepared to get more value out of it?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:11

How do I put this politely...

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:13

knowing you have a problem is half the battle.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:19

The second half of this battle is understanding how do you want to solve it?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:23

So the number of people that buy a CRM that aren't ready for a CRM, and

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:30

that kind of contradicts what I said a minute ago around like everybody

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:33

needs one, but if you don't have a process, if you don't have a way of.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:44

If it lives in your brain, the hardest thing for you to do is get it out of your

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:48

brain and into a process or a system.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:51

And so the first step is figuring out how are you going to put

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:57

this into a process or a system?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:22:59

How are you going to make this something that you can action on?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:04

Because otherwise you'll be paying for a CRM and you're not going to have.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:11

Any idea how you want to structure it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:13

And if you, yeah, you've got to have that plan.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:18

I mean, we spend a lot of time with clients who buy a CRM, we start their

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:24

onboarding and it's like, we want to build out your sales pipeline.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:27

What does that look like?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:28

How do you manage your sales process?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:30

I call people and I sell to.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:33

And you're like, okay, well, what if they say yes, what do you do next?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:37

What if they say no?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:38

Like they genuinely have no idea.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:23:43

And so getting that on the right, that right level is hugely important.

Islin Munisteri: 00:23:52

Your process there, there needs to be a process

Islin Munisteri: 00:23:55

where it lives in your head or in lucid chart or Vizio or something.

Islin Munisteri: 00:24:00

You need to have some sort of step-by-step one to free for.

Islin Munisteri: 00:24:04

This is what I do in my sales process, or this is how I'm getting

Islin Munisteri: 00:24:09

marketing leads, or this is what my own onboarding process looks like.

Islin Munisteri: 00:24:14

This is what my support process looks like.

Islin Munisteri: 00:24:17

We've helped companies build out these process diagrams.

Islin Munisteri: 00:24:21

For their companies, right.

Islin Munisteri: 00:24:22

But that way it's documented and all the troops know which

Islin Munisteri: 00:24:26

direction to head in when it's no longer lonely in someone's bring.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:31

Okay, so it brings me two questions into my head,

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:33

after what you've just said.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:35

So I'll throw it right back to Lucas.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:37

A small company, who may not have, let's say the most complex processes.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:42

But they do have maybe, you know, something.

Kevin Dieny: 00:24:44

So is a CRM for them?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:24:47

Yeah, I mean, put it this way.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:24:50

When we started five years ago, the first piece of software

Lucas Ministeri: 00:24:54

we bought was Active Campaign.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:24:55

And that was our CRM that we were going to use to manage contacts.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:00

We bought that before we bought Microsoft for documents or

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:03

Google for email or anything.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:05

The very first thing was how are we going to track these

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:08

people that we want to work?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:10

And so having that day one, we didn't know exactly what we were going to put in it

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:15

and how we were going to structure it, but we bought something and we got started.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:21

And when we left active campaign and went to HubSpot, we knew the entire database,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:28

it was in such a bad shape that it really wasn't a structure that was maintainable.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:33

But because we had tried and been working in that, in that system, that invite.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:39

The move to HubSpot was very easy.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:41

We knew what we were doing wrong.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:43

We knew what we wanted to do differently the next time, where,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:47

when you're doing it from firing from the hip, the best way to put it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:52

And it's all in your head, it's very hard to get that out.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:25:56

And so sometimes a blank piece of paper, pardon me?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:00

A blank piece of paper is easier to start from than a book that you have to rewrite.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:07

And so.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:09

Their CRMs are great early on.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:12

They help you structure and think.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:14

And when you get to this like midpoint where you're stuck, it's very hard to

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:21

change how you think and transition.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:24

You need to do it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:25

You just it's a lot of work.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:29

And so knowing, having an understanding of how you want to

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:34

manage that, Is the hardest part.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:38

And then you're, you're working, you're busy, you're doing things.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:40

So asking a boss or that owner seller, like fulfiller role person

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:47

to take five minutes and step back and say, how do I sell more?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:52

How do I bring on salespeople?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:26:56

That's one thing having a CRM helps tremendously is you can

Lucas Ministeri: 00:27:00

bring on an account manager and she can, or he can go look at.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:27:05

That contact record and see the emails, see the deals, see where they're having

Lucas Ministeri: 00:27:09

problems with tickets and get up to speed in a matter of days, minutes

Lucas Ministeri: 00:27:15

versus weeks of who do I manage?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:27:18

How do I manage?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:27:18

What, what next?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:27:22

And so it's this chicken and egg thing.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:27:26

It really is a challenge.

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:29

That's a great answer there, detailing all that out.

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:33

The hard thing about it is like, it's, we're talking about a tool, right.

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:37

And with a tool, like a hammer, it, it has, maybe it has the standard

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:40

purpose of driving nails, but it, it can be used in a lot of different

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:44

ways for a lot of different things.

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:46

So when we're talking, like how does it, how does a hammer do what it's supposed

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:50

to do for people it's like, well, it does.

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:51

It's basic functional capability.

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:54

But it's also like about the person who's swinging it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:27:57

It's also about like what they're going to do, what they need it to do,

Kevin Dieny: 00:28:00

or, you know, maybe there's different hammers for different types of purposes,

Kevin Dieny: 00:28:03

different things that they they have.

Kevin Dieny: 00:28:05

So the answer is tough to be more specific on, right.

Kevin Dieny: 00:28:09

But it's also like we could, but we'd be here for a very long time.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:15

Yeah, I mean, I guess the best way to put it with

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:18

a CRM is using your hammer analogy.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:22

Every tool is a hammer, but not every hammer is.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:26

I mean, if you get into that, like that's really, when you see people using Excel

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:33

as a CRM, I mean, that is definitely a very non-traditional way of using it

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:43

and actually pop on my soap box here for 30 seconds.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:48

You now have this like onslaught of project management tools, click up

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:52

Monday, a sauna selling themselves a CRM.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:28:57

And that creates a whole new world of challenges.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:29:01

When people go to try to leave a project management tool that they've been using

Lucas Ministeri: 00:29:06

as a CRM, it, they want to do things that you, that a CRM is not designed,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:29:13

not, not meant to do inside their CRM.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:29:17

But then they're stuck in this mindset of a project.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:29:20

Everything's a project management process.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:25

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:26

Okay, so this brings up another question for me, so Islin, see dirty CRMs.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:33

CRM's filled with, uh, for the lack of a better word, crap data, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:38

That's a big problem.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:40

So that might keep a company from even using the CRM they have today.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:44

You mentioned Lucas that you guys went to HubSpot and then, okay.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:47

We know what we want to do.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:47

We're going to clean this up as we transition.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:50

So how big of a problem is bad data, incomplete inputted information.

Kevin Dieny: 00:29:56

How much of a problem is that for a CRM?

Islin Munisteri: 00:30:00

I would say I would let Lucas handle that question

Islin Munisteri: 00:30:02

because he has a lot of direct client experience with dirty, dirty data.

Islin Munisteri: 00:30:07

He cleans it, but I would let him, I'll let him dive the dirty data.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:16

Yeah...

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:18

hahahaha.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:21

Garbage data's garbage.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:23

Always will be.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:25

It's more of a behavior.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:28

You don't know what to track until you start trying to track things

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:31

and you start trying to analyze what works and what doesn't.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:34

And so just jumping in and starting something is better than doing nothing.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:43

If everybody listening right now, would you rather your employee sit

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:46

there and twiddle their thumbs and say, I don't know where to start.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:50

Or them to start and make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at

Lucas Ministeri: 00:30:53

the end of it, know what to do?

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:56

That's a good question.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:56

So, okay.

Kevin Dieny: 00:30:57

So Tim, in the world of trying to figure out, let's say a CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:05

So, if you were to try to go figure a CRM out right now, go pick one and

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:09

go, I don't know, go navigate them.

Kevin Dieny: 00:31:12

What are some of your biggest fears about picking one?

Tim Tran: 00:31:16

That's a good question.

Tim Tran: 00:31:17

I, my biggest fear picking the wrong one would be I, I, back to everyone's point,

Tim Tran: 00:31:27

like I need to know what I'm tracking.

Tim Tran: 00:31:29

I need to know what my people are doing.

Tim Tran: 00:31:32

I guess I would want a CRM, that's versatile that doesn't just track sales,

Tim Tran: 00:31:38

but tracks sales and operations because it's the world that we live in right now.

Tim Tran: 00:31:42

Right, so, I would like to know what my salespeople do.

Tim Tran: 00:31:46

I guess, marketing too Kevin, make sure that marketing is doing their

Tim Tran: 00:31:50

job to get people in the door.

Tim Tran: 00:31:52

Salespeople are closing deals, and if they're not closing deals, what

Tim Tran: 00:31:55

are they, why are they failing?

Tim Tran: 00:31:58

And when it goes to operations, how the handholding, the clients,

Tim Tran: 00:32:00

where are they walking them through?

Tim Tran: 00:32:02

And then even at the end of the life cycle of a customer,

Tim Tran: 00:32:03

like, why are they canceling?

Tim Tran: 00:32:05

Why did they leave us?

Tim Tran: 00:32:06

Um, I think all that data is important, impactful for business, right?

Tim Tran: 00:32:09

So like how do we keep them longer?

Tim Tran: 00:32:10

Where are pitfalls, and then break it down by each department

Tim Tran: 00:32:15

to streamline the operation.

Tim Tran: 00:32:16

I, And Lucas brought it up and I am very curious what the difference

Tim Tran: 00:32:19

between ERP and a CRM is, right.

Tim Tran: 00:32:21

So this is a question for Lucas.

Tim Tran: 00:32:24

Can a CRM turn into an ERP or do you have to look for an ERP?

Tim Tran: 00:32:29

And when, when is that jumping point?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:32:31

If that is not the world's most loaded question.

Tim Tran: 00:32:35

Well, don't fail.

Tim Tran: 00:32:36

It's not hard!

Tim Tran: 00:32:39

Hah hah.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:32:39

Um...

Lucas Ministeri: 00:32:40

hah hah hah.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:32:45

So you have tools out there like Net Suite, Microsoft Dynamics that

Lucas Ministeri: 00:32:50

are just natively ERP or Sage.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:32:54

Then you have tools like Salesforce that is a CRM and through a bunch of

Lucas Ministeri: 00:32:59

bolt on modules can become an ERP where tools like Active Campaign or Hubspot.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:07

I think this is my reading tea leaves.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:10

I believe HubSpot's trying to move to the ERP space where Active Campaign

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:16

is firmly staying out of that.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:17

Like I just don't see them making that jump.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:20

And the difference between the systems, the environments is an ERP

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:25

helps you manage overhead costs, business structure, hiring, and firing

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:29

employees, time off, payroll, invoicing.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:33

So APAR, all of those things.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:37

And a lot of companies can manage that with QuickBooks or

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:39

Xero and it works just fine.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:43

In our case, we were on an ERP to manage our billing because

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:47

we have lots of contracts.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:49

Federal entities or state entities.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:50

And there are each, one of them has their own negotiated rates.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:33:55

And so with that ERP, I'm able to build a rate table for each client.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:01

And so anybody that needs to build a quote has that client's negotiated

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:05

rates in the inside the database where something like HubSpot it's a fixed cost.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:12

I would have to build thousands of line items to manage.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:17

People building that CPQ quote, inside HubSpot, it's just, it's not, it doesn't

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:25

have a client level way of managing that.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:28

Neither does Salesforce in a very solid way.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:32

It does do it, but it's, it gets convoluted as well.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:37

And really that threshold.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:40

Deciding do I need a CRM or an ERP comes down to how complicated is your

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:47

accounting and your billing and how much are your prices dictated by overhead?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:34:55

I mean, if I were to ask anybody on this podcast, how

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:00

do you calculate your overhead?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:01

Are you taking an employee salary and multiplying it by like industry

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:05

rule of thumb of three to four times to figure out your billable?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:10

Or are you actually saying, Hey, this employee needs X software licenses.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:15

I have this number off the top of my head because we just redid it for our

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:18

22 forecasting, a individual contributor inside our company has over $40,000 a

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:25

year in licensing costs between computers, power, internet, insurance, all those

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:33

things that it takes to support them.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:35

So even if I hire John.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:38

$20 an hour.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:39

So he's a $40,000 an hour employee.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:42

He actually costs my business another 40,000.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:45

So if I had triple his rate, the third goes to him, a third goes to overhead,

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:51

and that leaves a third for margin.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:53

And the unexpecteds, that's pretty lean to run your business.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:35:59

But if you hire Mike or Suzie at $200,000 a year, Now you've got a lot

Lucas Ministeri: 00:36:05

of padding, so it's how do you manage.

Tim Tran: 00:36:08

Got it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:09

As far as you've been, you guys have both have a lot of experience

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:13

with CRM applications with businesses.

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:15

So do you have any stories, anything you'd want to share?

Kevin Dieny: 00:36:19

We start with you Islin, how a client got value out of some way they used the CRM?

Islin Munisteri: 00:36:26

Sure, we have case studies, we onboarded like a

Islin Munisteri: 00:36:29

sales training franchise, which you probably have heard of, onto HubSpot.

Islin Munisteri: 00:36:35

And they saw like a 60% to 70% increase in their business over a year, right.

Islin Munisteri: 00:36:43

Or they saw a 44% increase in the number of activities they were doing, because

Islin Munisteri: 00:36:48

they're finally tracking the number of calls, the number of emails, the number

Islin Munisteri: 00:36:52

of paths they were doing within the CRM.

Islin Munisteri: 00:36:57

You can see those productivity increases really, really quickly.

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:01

On the marketing side, right.

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:03

Just applying a little bit to the flywheel, right?

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:07

Just sending out a couple email campaigns and running ads.

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:11

We helped a engineering school, completely fill their enrollment,

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:18

just by, doing some marketing motion.

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:21

Running an email campaign and I think a Facebook and Instagram campaign there.

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:28

We've also helped organizations with, I would say really onerous sales processes.

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:36

We basically mapped out their entire sales process and put it into the CRM

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:41

and had automation in the background that was updating contact properties

Islin Munisteri: 00:37:45

and other and deal properties to move them along a deal pipeline.

Kevin Dieny: 00:37:51

Very cool, uh, it's awesome.

Kevin Dieny: 00:37:54

We work with clients of ourselves that when we put their calls into the CRM or

Kevin Dieny: 00:37:59

we give, we show them the information behind their calls, it's like, oh wow.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:04

Like we had ideas in our head about this, but now that we see this.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:08

Totally different way of thinking now that we have data and we have information, it

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:12

just creates questions for them that they didn't have before they never had before.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:16

So that's really cool.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:18

As an Lucas, did you have anything?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:19

No.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:20

I mean, Islin kind of summed it up.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:21

I mean, there's, I can't think of a single client that we've worked with.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:26

That's actually utilize the CRM, that it hasn't benefited them.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:31

And thinking back to that statement a little bit ago of

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:35

how quickly do people see value?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:38

It's there's day one value.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:41

And then there's also like day 90 and day 180 and date at the end of the year.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:49

You're there constantly gaining more from it.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:38:53

As long as they're using it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:56

Yeah, some of the things that we've mentioned that, that have

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:59

been really important are set out to utilize this CRM, like pretty much,

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:05

very bold point would make on that one.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:08

And how you'd use it needs to come from how your business does, what it does.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:12

What processes do you have?

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:13

Do you have that theory'd, processed out, drawn out?

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:17

We love this tool called Lucid Chart, but you know, we plot same way.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:21

You mentioned Islin, we build out the process, so you can see it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:25

And then everyone's like, okay, yeah, everyone's agreement.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:27

This is what it looks like, yeah.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:28

This is how it's functioning.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:29

And then it becomes much easier to find places where

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:32

you can get value out of a CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:33

I think, another one we've mentioned is, what CRM is the purpose of

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:37

it is for businesses that we mentioned the hammer example.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:41

It's a tool, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:42

And it's as good of a tool as you can use it for, but there's

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:45

a lot of use cases for it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:46

A lot of different ways to find value, a lot of cool ways that a business can

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:51

utilize information they're receiving that they can take action on it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:55

Either with marketing campaigns, like, as I mentioned, or just improving

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:59

collaboration, improving the way, the business accounts for what

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:03

it's trying to do, like different modules or things like Lucas.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:08

The last thing is I like to look at it, a CRM is an investment.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:11

I don't think it's just a cost like an operational cost.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:15

I think it's definitely something that generates revenue and generates value.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:18

You can generate profit.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:19

And if you have fears, like Tim mention, I'm afraid if I pick the wrong one,

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:25

you know, I think there's a, there's probably a plethora of information

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:28

out there, but it does get difficult because like Lucas, you mentioned....

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:32

Every tool is making it look like they're a CRM these days.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:35

So there's help out there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:38

There's support.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:38

There's lots of resources, maybe look at other companies like yours

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:42

to see what they're doing, how they're applying and using CRMs.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:45

Talk to agencies, talk to consultants.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:48

There's a lot of help out there if you want to take some time to figure it out.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:52

So with that, Lucas, Islin, is there any way, anyone can find you.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:57

Learn more about what you guys do, connect with you.

Kevin Dieny: 00:40:59

If they want to ask questions, if you guys, so Lucas, start with you first.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:03

Yeah.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:03

I mean, so you can always go to our website at www.theiamarketing.com

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:09

and that's spelled T H E I A.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:13

We're also on social media and if you go to our website, it's all down there.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:16

And just fill out the form.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:18

If you guys need help, if you want some advice or guidance, we do help people

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:22

figure out what is the right CRM.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:24

How do we pick the right thing to get going?

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:27

Because this is a space where you're going to fail without help.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:33

And not that I would need to sell my services or anybody else's.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:37

And if you have that tolerance for failure and learning a few times get started.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:42

But if you don't have that tolerance, if you need to get

Lucas Ministeri: 00:41:45

going, reach out to somebody to get you in the right direction.

Islin Munisteri: 00:41:50

Yep, and I would say you can connect with me on LinkedIn, or

Islin Munisteri: 00:41:54

you can give us a call to our business.

Islin Munisteri: 00:41:58

It's 7 2 0 6 4 2 7 3 7 0.

Islin Munisteri: 00:42:02

We do pick up calls and if you leave a message, we will call you back.

Islin Munisteri: 00:42:06

So we're, we're kind of old fashioned, too.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:09

That's great, yeah.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:11

And, uh, Tim, any way anyone can reach out to you and talk

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:14

to you or ask you anything.

Tim Tran: 00:42:16

Yeah, sure.

Tim Tran: 00:42:16

They can reach me directly at 8 1 8 5 9 6 6 9 5 2.

Tim Tran: 00:42:20

You leave a message.

Tim Tran: 00:42:21

I'll call you back.

Tim Tran: 00:42:22

You can also text that number, this text enabled.

Tim Tran: 00:42:25

So the, you guys texted me out.

Tim Tran: 00:42:26

I'll text back.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:27

Awesome.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:28

Well, thank you, Lucas and Islin.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:30

Thank you guys so much for coming on, being our special guest today for

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:33

the episode and, and how businesses can get more value out of a CRM.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:36

I really appreciate you coming on.

Lucas Ministeri: 00:42:38

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Islin Munisteri: 00:42:39

Thanks Kevin.