In this perceptive episode, Andy Audate, President of AudateMedia, shares strategies for leveraging CRMs to scale your business predictably. If you struggle with disorganized customer tracking or inefficient sales processes, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why a CRM tracks customer journeys to streamline your sales process

- How to choose a CRM tailored to your customer’s specific journey

- What mission-critical data to capture in your CRM for profit

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 3 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Andy Audate is an international speaker, renowned small business marketing expert, and the founder of Progreda. With a proven track record, he specializes in assisting small businesses in effectively marketing their high-ticket services through webinars that have attracted over 9,500 entrepreneurs. Andy's SaaS has achieved a seven-figure run rate, and his guidance has empowered thousands of small businesses to create marketing campaigns that have collectively generated $20+ million in revenue.

Want to learn more about Andy Audate's work at AudateMedia? Try Progreda for Free for 14 Days at https://progreda.com/lory 'Buy No More Average' Book : How to Take Control of Your Mindset, Overcome Fear, Reach Peak Performance and Achieve Your Goals https://a.co/d/2FnrZUz Text ”Progress” to # 702-830-7408 for access to a FREE live webinar hosted by Andy Audate for a full breakdown of his marketing system for online business owners

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once

again to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only

podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of

your journey as a founder. And today, we're going to talk

about a topic that you have all heard of. There's a tool

that you pretty much all use, or maybe should, on a weekly,

even daily basis. And in my experience, working with

founders who are trying to scale their sales beyond their

own ability, I have found that most of us use it wrong. What

are we talking about today? We are talking about the CRM and

I'm hardly an expert in CRMs, so we've got one with us here

today, and that is the one and only Andy Audate, who is an

international speaker, renowned small business

marketing expert, and the founder of progreta, with a

proven track record, he specializes in assisting small

businesses in effectively marketing their high ticket

services through webinars that have attracted over 9500

entrepreneurs. Andy's S, A, A, S or SaaS has achieved him a

seven figure run rate, and his guidance has empowered 1000s

of small businesses to create marketing campaigns that have

collectively generated $20 million more than $20 million

in revenue. He's here with us today. Andy, I'm so excited to

have you on the show. I have to admit out of the gate here

that I have a little bit of a love, hate relationship with

the CRM world, and I think you're going to be able to

solve that for us. So you help businesses to streamline, to

grow faster. And for a founder who a remarkable number of

folks still meet, meet this definition, but they're

relying on spreadsheets or napkins or some other form of

keeping track of things, particularly that their

clients. How is that holding them back?

Well, I mean, it's processes and systems the

way to grow and scale a business. Once again. Thank

you, Scott for having me here, man, so it's when you think

about scaling a business, it's the processes and systems that

you have that allows you to predictably scale, or it's

going to hold you back without them. And when we think about

processes and systems, a CRM is going to allow you to

effectively keep track of every single customer at the

specific stage of their journey with you. So you can

keep track of people who are leads, and maybe they're not

specific customers, but you can also keep track of people

who are specific customers. You ever get those emails or

text messages from a company that you might already be

doing business with them? You're already a long term

subscriber with them? It could be a gym, and you've been a

member of the gym for years, and they send you a message,

and that message says, Hey, we would love to have you as a

customer. Here's a discount. How do you feel when that

happens? Scott, I know for me, when I get those I'm like,

Dude, I've been with you guys for years. What's wrong with

your processes? What's wrong with your systems? Yes, and

that's what small business owners need, or founders need,

is they need those systems to be able to track their

customers so that way they can communicate effectively based

on where that customer is at in the journey.

Yeah. Very cool. All right, so there are

a lot of CRMs out there, and I have found when you're buying

something like a CRM, you're buying it from someone who not

only has a sales team, but is a sales company, and that's

got its own challenge, because they tend to be pretty good at

what they do, lots of smooth talk. There's lots of great

presentations. But how do you get behind all of that you

know, for better or worse, and know which is the right CRM

for you?

Well, we got to look at you what your

customer's cycle is. What is the journey for your customer,

and maximize the tool specifically for your customer

identify. So first step is to identify what is your

customer's journey. And it doesn't have to be a company

that that's that's sales driven. It could be a company

that is direct response marketing, where you create

marketing funnels and a lead comes in and you automatically

email them. You may not have a sales team, but all the sales

are automatic. That in itself, needs a CRM. And because what

you're going to do here is you can use a CRM to track the

customers in their journey, communicate with the

customers, and have a system to track all the communication

that you've had with your customers. So that way you can

go back and look at so as your company grows, when you get to

100 customers, maybe you'll be able to manage it on yourself.

Okay, so if you're a founder right now, you're at 100 under

100 customers. Maybe you can manage it on your personal

iPhone and you can remember, like, Yeah, Bob, I sent him a

text message. Let me find Bob in my my contacts. Oh yeah,

Tim, and so on and so forth. But then you start scaling

your business, and you start getting past 100 customers.

You got 200 300 400 customers. You're gonna need to bring in

a team. One of the value points for a CRM is you can

have one platform that you and your team can log into and

respond on behalf of the company. I'll give you an

example. We have in our CRM. We have 1000s of customers.

However, one of our customers, for example, is in the hair

salon industry. So they run a. Hair Salon business, all 12

stylists that work in that hair salon, every single text

message, every single phone call, every single email was

originally coming from each and every single one of their

cell phones individually at the salon. So you walk into

the salon, there's 12 stylists working at 12 different hair

stations. Each of them have their own personal iPhone.

They're communicating on behalf of the cus of they're

be they're communicating on behalf of the business to each

and individual customer. So when a customer walks in, they

get a hair stylist phone number, and they're like,

Yeah, Barbara, shoot me a text message to book the next

appointment. Well, guess what happens when Barbara, the hair

stylist is sick that day and the client comes in for the

hair appointment? Well, Barbara sick, the client comes

in, they're like, Hey, I had a hair appointment with you

guys. Barbara sick, cool. Put me in touch with someone else.

No one else is in relationship with the fact that that

customer had a had a had a had a appointment. The CRM, what

it does for that hair salon is it allows them to use one

software. Everyone has the same mobile app on their

phone, and when a customer walks in, Barbara's sick,

she's no longer she's no longer there, all the other

team members can log in, into the customer's account inside

of the CRM and say, Oh yeah, you did have an appointment,

and we already saw that, and we actually already scheduled

you with another hairstylist. So you're going to be sitting

with Sandra today, who's an amazing hairstylist. Think

about that customer experience. One is unaware of

the customer journey of where they're at, and the other one

is aware which one you think is going to be able to grow

predictably, have more revenue and have more customer

satisfaction, the one that had the systems that prepared for

the Barbara, the hair salon stylist being out.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's a no brainer. I

think what's really interesting about this, and

this is something that founders don't necessarily

think about when it's just you managing just your phone, like

it's not going anywhere. You might, like, you might get

your phone wet, I guess, but like, your phone's not gonna

walk out the door. But if it's your employees, and it's their

phones, and they leave like, who owns the customer, the one

who has the customer's data and and so if you're going to

start like you mentioned, if you're going to start bringing

in other people to help with the sales process, either in

kind of an ad hoc fashion, like in a salon, or bring in

other sales reps, you don't want that All. You don't want

that source of data to be their phone, because when they

leave, their phone goes with them, and not that. We want

people to leave, but when we do, we don't want to lose the

customers as well. That's a really great point. So when

we're thinking about a CRM, especially if, like the hair

salon, we don't have one in place, it's not enough to just

implement it right, because it's not like if you have a

CRM all of a sudden you automatically know the

journey. So what do we have to what are some specific

mindsets or specific steps or approaches that we need to

take when onboarding a new CRM to make sure we get the most

out of it?

So one, one tool, one feature in a CRM that you

that most business owners are going to need and founders are

going to need. It's going to be a pipeline management tool.

I know in progress we have one. However, in any CRM that

you decide to choose, you want to make sure that you have an

ability to track a customer's journey through the pipeline.

And what the pipeline does it's a visual is visual cards

that allows you to understand, is this customer just a lead,

or did they already inquire about services? Did they get

in touch with a salesperson already? Did they get pricing

already? Did? How are they currently receiving email and

marketing campaigns? Have they already purchased from us? So

imagine that you have a bunch of cards laid out in different

lines, like columns and rows. Each column represents a stage

of doing business. Each card in the column as it moves

along the journey, as it moves along the different columns,

it tells you, and it allows you to identify where that

customer is at when you're building a scalable business,

primarily, what you're doing is you're moving each customer

through the same predictable journey. That's important

here. It's kind of like, it's kind of like working fast

food. If any of you founders have worked fast food, or even

have a concept of how fast food works, when I worked at

Wendy's over a decade ago, I used to work at the fast food

company Wendy's. It's competitor to McDonald's, and

the stage of the burger was the same for everything. The

process to complete a burger was the same. We would make

the burger on the grill. We would take that burger from

the grill, we will put it on a warmer plate. From the warmer

plate, we would take the burger, the actual meat, and

put it on the sandwich Patty, or put it on the sandwich bun,

and then we would add ketchup, cheese, ketchup, cheese,

tomato, and any condiments, and then we'd wrap it. So

those are the stages. Stage number one, have it be in the

grill. Stage number two, have it be on the warmer plate.

Stage number three, have it be on the bun? Stage number four

wrap it. So we have these, this four step process for

every burger. Every single burger goes through this

process in a scaling business, whether you're at $1 million

at $1 million remember, I made my first million when I was 21

I used to I'm the youngest T Mobile franchise, and so I

owned a bunch of, I owned 4t Mobile stores before my 24th

21st birthday, and that helped me understand what it's like

to scale a business and every single customer that comes in,

whether it's a T Mobile store, whether it's a franchise,

whether it's a CRM company, every single customer should

have the same predictable process. Now, if we can

identify what are those stages in the CRM, we should put it

into the CRM, so that way we know what is the next step for

every customer. It's no longer on top of your mind. It's no

longer like Bob the customer, oh yeah, he just, I just

signed him up to do X. This is what he should do next. It's

no longer in your mind. It's predictable and it's

documented, and that's what the CRM does. So that way your

team can actually be the one to fulfill for you, rather

than you as the founder being involved in the day to day

minutia. Yeah, CRM is gonna be able to track that for you.

That's good. So when it comes to fast

forward a little bit, we've got it set up. And one of the

challenges that I've seen, I'm wondering if you could speak

to this for us, is there is so much data that you can track,

there's so many fields that you can fill in so many boxes,

you can check so many cards, you can move that if you're

not careful, you can end up just kind of checking boxes

and making notes and moving cards and and not actually

getting a whole lot else done. How do you make sure that your

CRM serves your needs, as opposed to your team serving

what the CRM wants.

So I would ask you to this, what is mission

critical in net profit, when you look at the net profit,

what data points is mission critical? Is it important that

you understand that your customers are men or women?

Does your business? Does it matter to your business if

it's a man or a woman that your your company is serving.

If it's not important to you that it's a man or a woman,

then that's totally fine. Skip that piece of data. Most CRMs

could track that information, but it's not important to you.

Skip that data. Is it important to you where the

geographical area of your customers? Maybe you're a

business that that drives out to people and you only serve a

specific zip code. Well, if that's important to you, you

can capture that specific data. But for like, for

example, for an online coach who is working with people

internationally on online, doesn't matter where, what zip

code that they're in, but if you're a a business that

delivers products or services to your customers in a

geographical area, it may be important to capture a zip

code. So if you want to identify what is mission

critical to net profit, once you identify that, for

example, if I am a online coach, I know what's going to

be important to me. It could be the revenue. If I'm a

business coach, it could be the revenue of the of the

client. Well, that's important to me, so I'm going to catch

I'm going to capture that information, because it tells

me what plan my that a customer who's buying my

services from, what plan that they can't afford based on

their revenue. So I'm gonna capture that information. If

I'm a business coach and I'm consulting a team, how many

members on the team Am I talking to a company that has

three employees? Am I talking to a company that has 400

employees? I want to know that information that's mission

critical to net profit, because it tells me how many

coaches I need to deploy inside of that or consultants

I need to deploy inside of that campaign. So whether

three employees that I'm going to be coaching, or 400

employees, that's that's mission critical to my profit,

right? So now that we understand what's mission

critical to profit, you want to update custom fields inside

of the CRM and any CRM, mostly arms are going to have a

section called Custom Fields. Those fields allow you to

customize data that's specific for your business, everything

that that is not mission critical to net profit.

Disregard so if you're an online coach, it doesn't

matter where they live, it doesn't matter about the zip

code you're coaching them on Zoom or online. Disregard the

zoom the zip code, disregard the address, but if it's

mission critical to have the number of employees capture

that information, and now you're telling your team to

only fulfill what is in the custom field section, kind of

like a check box, which is only going to be the

information that's mission critical to net profit.

Yeah, that's perfect. I love that. So it

seems like just, I'm going to shift gears on us a little bit

here, because it seems like just about every guest we have

on AI is doing something in their world. We it's almost

obligatory now that we talk about it, but I think that's

particularly true of CRMs and marketing automation

specifically. So what are you seeing as some of the best

practices right now for leveraging AI specifically to

boost sales.

Well, specifically to boost sales is

the ability to communicate with your customers faster

than a human could. If you're a founder, you're at between 1

million to two, maybe three, maybe $5 million in revenue.

One of your challenges is going to be payroll and

staffing. That's one of your challenges. Challenges,

whether you hire domestically or you hire internationally,

remote employees and their virtual team members, the

biggest the biggest line item on most businesses, most

service based businesses, is going to be your payroll. And

for you to have someone online 24/7 is quite challenging, and

it's very costly. The next alternative is to hire an AI

agent that is online, that costs pennies to operate, that

can communicate with customers on your behalf. So there's one

specific AI tool called conversational AI.

Conversational AI. What that does is you first create a

knowledge base documentation, and if you're a scaling

business today, many of you may not have that, but that's

what's necessary. That's to get you past 6,000,007 $8

million is going to be documentation of your

processes. So whether you're building documentation for

humans or AI, it's necessary to build a knowledge base. So

step one, you're going to create a knowledge base. That

knowledge base is going to be every all your price points,

of your offers, what's included, what your sales

process is, where to get information from now,

specifically in pro Greta, what, how we build our

knowledge base is we crawl your website. So if you have a

fully built website with your hours of operations, your

price points, the information about the team, information

about past customers, testimonials, information

about your your unique process, on how you deliver

your products or services, and all the information that's

about your business. What the crawlers are going to do, it's

going to go through every single web page, capture all

the text and put it into a and store it into a knowledge

base, where the AI will then go and research it to answer

questions later. Then when a customer sends you a DM on

Instagram, a message on Facebook, or a text message or

an email, the AI can actually respond on your behalf and act

as a human on your behalf to your customer. So for example,

if you get a text message to your to your business, this is

what an example, what a CRM can do to help you generate

sales if you get a text message to your business that

says, hey, I'm interested in your services, but I wanted to

find out the pricing. First, can you tell me the pricing on

the on the hair salon products? And then the AI can

actually respond and say, Thank you so much for your

inquiry. To best identify which one you need. We have

redkin, we have salon we have salon air. Which one do you

think is going to be the best for you, and the customer

says, I don't know. Well, if in your website you have the

Frequently Asked Questions section, we can actually take

that data, feed it into chat, GPT, and have a conversation

back and forth where the AI says, Okay, great. Do you have

long hair or do you have short hair? Let's start off with

that and go back and forth with your customer via text

message to identify the best product for them and then

pitch them the product, and if your website has the ability

to buy it, send them the link directly, without you ever

getting involved. And that's right, then, that's just a

text message. We have voice AI available as well to actually

manage conversations when a phone call comes in.

Stunning, stunning. Andy, there's a

question that I have for you ask him. I guess I'm

interested to see what you have to say, especially from

this perspective. But what would you say is the biggest

secret you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's that one

thing you wish everybody watching or listening today

knew?

I wish that everyone watching. If you're

scaling your business, everyone in your company

should have a key performance indicator that helps with the

bottom line. Words, inside of our company, I feel like I

have this, this secret that I'm holding on to. Inside of

my company, I've assigned everyone a KPI key performance

indicator that helps with the bottom line, and we are

passing profit margins that are industry standard, because

everyone has a number or a metric that's assigned to

them. I'll give you an example. Most people, I'll

give you an example. I'll give you one that's that's pretty

unorthodox. In my company, we have dozens of employees, and

even my bookkeeper has a KPI. You know what my books keeper,

my bookkeepers KPI is, is an noi percentage, net operating

income percentage. When I looked at chatgpt, and I went

to a mastermind full of my peers, and I'm like, Hey, does

everyone in your company have a KPI? Everyone's like, yes,

yes, yes, yes. And I said, you know, I'm stuck. I'm stuck on

my my bookkeepers KPI. And everyone's like, dude, the

bookkeeper doesn't get a KPI. The bookkeeper is there to

Track, track data, of historical data. And I'm like,

No, I want everyone to have a KPI. And what that meant for

for me was I had to get get kind of creative. And then I

remember, my bookkeeper sent a message to me. He said, he

said, Hey, I just want to give you a cogs report on cost of

goods sold. And I said, that's your KPI. Your KPI is managing

cogs. So now my my bookkeeper goes through every department

inside of my company, the tech department, the admin

department, sales department, and they're tracking where

there's opportunity to save on cogs or to increase. Revenue.

We're on track for 50% revenue, 50% margins, inside

of a SaaS business, inside of a in a marketing services

business. Marketing Services is typically between 10 maybe

12, as high as 18% but we're on track for 50% total net

bottom line, revenue, net profit, because I put a KPI on

my bookkeeper, on my admin support representative, on my

customer support representative. So the biggest

secret that I knew of like three years ago, four years

ago, five years ago, is every single person that's involved,

including contractors, shall have a key performance

indicator that drives profit to your bottom line.

So good, so good. Couldn't have said it

better. Andy, folks want help with their marketing, their

CRM. They want to learn more about the work that you guys

do, the software that you offer. Where can they find out

more?

You can learn more about me Andy Audate on

all social media platforms, a n, d, y, a U, D, A, T, E, or

learn more about our company at progreda.com P, R, O, G, R,

E, D, A, now progreda stands for progress daily. We just

took those two words, progress daily, we mash it together. We

dropped that s, s on progress, and then we dropped the i, l,

y on daily. So we put progress daily together, and now we got

proGreda. progreda.com is our website,

amazing, amazing. Andy, thanks for

being on the show. Really a privilege and honor. Having

you here really appreciate the conversation. It was

fantastic. And for those of you watching and listening,

you know that your time and attention mean the world to

us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know

I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.