Are Sales Platforms a Waste of Time? | Biz To Biz Podcast | Episode 228

You are now watching the Biz to Biz Podcast with Allen and Justin.

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Kevin O'Leary of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we're going to be discussing sales platforms or platforms in general. There's this so many platforms. This platform, that, get on this platform, hang out on this, whatever. You know how it goes, digital marketing platforms. Um, it's quite a few. Anyway, uh, how you doing, man?

I'm doing good. Just, you know, getting the week started. Blowing down through— we're already in March.

It is March. Today is March 12th, 2024.

Yeah, tax, gotta, I don't remember the date for corporate taxes, I think are due soon. And then you got the big tax day, April 15th or whatever.

That's what is in my head. That's what I was gonna say.

Yeah, April 15th, unless it falls on a weekend, then you get extra time. Tax day, tax filing fun going on right now. Everybody's, scrambling with taxes.

They are.

Yeah. And when we went to the business show down in Miami, we saw quite a few platforms down there, some we never heard of before.

I haven't heard of most of them.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Zoho was the only thing that I really— I never heard of any of the ones that you— that that we're— that we've seen.

Yeah, Zoho, that one's been around for a while. They actually integrate to quite a few different payment processor platforms like Authorize.net. We have quite a few people that use, um, Zoho Sign, Zoho CRM, Zoho Invoicing, Zoho Accounting, which I didn't really know they're known— I didn't think they were really known for accounting, but they have like an accounting Zoho platform. Yeah, I have no idea, but I know the invoicing— we have quite a few people who use that, and then it's integrated to Authorize.net. So when they send out the invoice, they can click a button and pay the invoice.

That's good.

So you're not locked into like Stripe or PayPal. You can use outside processors for that. Another one we saw at the show is—

was, um, called High Level.

Yeah, GoHighLevel.

You were very, uh, I don't know, excited about that guy.

Yeah, well, I'd love to have— look, I'd love to have him on the podcast, you know, and, uh, or anybody from GoHighLevel, if you're listening, you know, come on the podcast. But they do a lot of like— they sell a lot of their platforms to these, uh, to like agencies, and then A lot of people that use it are using it for coaching, life coaching, selling, you know, some of it, some e-com going on on there. A lot of core classes, like people make videos and sell courses.

I don't know, for me it's like when I think of a platform, I just think people are being so lazy. Like when I first started in, you know, web design, development, whatever, entrepreneurship. We had to figure out how to manage this stuff on our own. And so we would put together the tools like a package and just get it done. And, you know, I think people rely on these platforms so much that they're, you You know, they're missing them, great opportunities for other, you know, to spend time on something else.

Well, I think a lot of people that are selling the platforms are not necessarily trained to do like on WordPress, right? So they're not really web developer, web designers. They're basically just using that platform and manipulating it to set up what they want.

I guess I'm not really thinking about it in a platform. I don't know, a platform, it's just— that's why I said platform this, platform that, because I mean WordPress is a— I guess is a platform.

Well, it's custom— it's more customizable than most platforms. But like GoHighLevel, the, the thing I was telling you about is for years it was only Stripe Right, but then the—

but I mean, I guess I don't know what that means. Like, I know what that— what you're, you're saying in a sense of like there's only Stripe— is Stripe was only integrated— was the only payment processor that you could integrate into GoHighLevel. But I don't— I, I just don't get the point.

Well, they're making the money. They're probably making commission from Stripe, so now they allow—

I'm talking about the platform itself. I'm not talking about why Stripe is integrated into it.

GoHighLevel is like a more advanced version of Shopify, like with more like— but get, you know, more aimed at like classes and things like that. People selling courses, people selling books, people selling PDF downloadable PDF classes. Uh, like, that's, that's where—

I mean, I didn't even know what that— I didn't know. I thought it was a CRM.

Yeah, it does see— it does CRM also, but it does— but it's more like, that's, that's like their— what it's more geared towards. But it's also geared towards people who don't know how to make a website out on WordPress, and it's a plug-and-play platform.

Got it.

And I think there's a lot of those like funnel builders. What's the one big funnel building company? ClickFunnels.

Yep.

Right? Now there's gazillion copycats of ClickFunnels. Kartra, there's a whole bunch of them now.

Don't even start on Kartra. This guy and Kartra.

And then Zoho. Now they made a new platform they're calling Bigin. B-I-G-I-N. Bigin. It's a new platform. Zoho made it. So it's a new CRM feature, a new CRM platform that they're coming out with to target smaller businesses, you know, who not going after something like, like Salesforce is also a big CRM, but You know, it's— you need, you need to have a Salesforce developer to really build it out. You can't just— it's not a, it's not really a do-it-yourself kind of a platform, you know.

I don't know, I've never used it, but I, but I—

well, we, I've, we've worked with companies and their back end is on Salesforce. Some of them are really hard to use because you know, they don't pay a lot of money for the developer, so it's very clunky, you know. But if, if, you know, somebody spends money on it, then it's like less clunky. And Salesforce, you can integrate different, um, they have open APIs. You can integrate, um, integrate payment processing onto Salesforce, Zoho. Now with GoHighLevel, you can integrate NMI or Authorize.Net Gateway and then just get your own merchant account. So they're, you know, they, they probably had too many people that couldn't use Stripe or were getting kicked off Stripe and they decided to open it up. I mean, they're not going to make money from that, so that's kind of the, you know. But Shopify, that's a platform.

QuickBooks. And if you really think about it, I mean, when you say Shopify as a platform, I don't agree. Okay, it's a content management system. Okay, so that mean— I mean, to each its own. I guess you could call it a platform, I guess, but it, it's a content management system. It's where you put your— where your website, you know, it's for a website, right? But I'm saying I think of a platform, I think of HubSpot, Zoho, um, Zapier. You know, those are platforms.

Yeah, like, like HubSpot. Now I think you can build a website with HubSpot. They have like websites.

Yeah, there's a website builder.

Yeah. So a lot of people, you know, they're just moving to these— a lot of people move into these platforms because then they don't— they need, I guess, less development from—

it's probably easier for someone like yourself to Yeah, to learn websites.

Not me. I would never try to even build a website myself. Drive me crazy. No, but younger, you know, somebody who's younger and then they don't want to do WordPress and they go, okay, well, I'm gonna figure out how to master one of these platforms. I mean, there's tons of people out there. We work— we have one— we worked with a guy who was, uh, all he did was build ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels for people selling books.

Yeah, I know a lot of people do that stuff.

So that's all he did, he's just building ClickFunnels.

I never liked the platform. I never liked ClickFunnels. I'm a WordPress guy, bro.

I get it, straight up.

Shout out to WordPress, the community. Yeah, I love you guys.

No, so it just gives, uh, I think when people go, you know, when I look at it like a web— when I look at a website and I see like maybe it's not, I don't know, overused because they give people like these pre-done funnels. So I think when you look at some of this stuff, depending on what type of product it is, like a vitamin or something like that, you see the people using the same type of wording and, you know, and it's all different products. It kind of, it kind of doesn't give you confidence in some of those companies.

What do you mean?

Well, you know, if you go look at a— let's say you're going and looking at a product and then you look at their competitor's product and the website looks almost the same, you begin to wonder like, oh, is that a real product? What's going on with that. Doesn't have—

I mean, for me it's just like, oh, they use the same template. Yeah, I just— yeah, but that's every—

everywhere.

I mean, you look on Shopify, all the websites look the same. They're just different, uh, color schemes. Um, for— I mean, not all of the websites, but you can see the similarities in, in different— yeah, I mean But there's nothing really new under the sun. There's only so much you can do on a website and internet. So, you know, it is what it is in that regard. But creatively, I mean, I think what's happened is that business owners don't see the value in being unique or don't have the budget to hire a professional web developer, so they cut corners and they use these platforms and they end up getting a shitty result. So that's pretty much the end, you know. For me, that's how I look at it, right?

Well, you know, they say like for Shopify, you know, like I think 7 out of 10 people like quit within the first 3 to 6 months.

Of trying to build their website.

Yeah, of trying to build the website because they—

I can for sure relate totally.

Yeah, they try to be ready to quit every 3 to 6 hours.

But I mean, the businesses are— business owners have to, you know, I guess be a little bit more proactive in, into what they, you know, want, and then like literally see like, okay, this is what I want, this is what, you know, how much does this cost, what, which platform am I going to use for this, you know what I mean? Like, that's pretty much how I would go about it now because I mean there's so much you could just get lost in the sauce trying to figure out, oh, I want to do this, this is something new. Let's try this, or I like the way, you know, it kind of goes back to the project we're working on, like this Kartra thing. Like, Allen signed up for a, you know, we're about to release a product and we were using, he wanted to use this platform Kartra. And for me, it's just like a pain in the ass because all of the stuff that I can do it myself, I don't need a, you know, like this platform to do it for me. Um, I'm interested in seeing these, the, the lead capturing thing that, that, that you keep talking about. Whatever, I can't wait to see that. So But I think that like the time, you know, like I'm spending on it, for instance, to learn— well, you know, I shouldn't even say the time I'm spending on it because it's not the time that I'm spending on that. It's just like there's little parts to it that we can't do because we don't have a pro whatever or It's just not like, for me, it's not like, okay, this is where you— this is where this is at, this is where this is at. It's just a real clusterfuck.

Sorry. Well, it just, you know, that's the one thing that you get out of like using a platform is sometimes they have like different workflows built into the— into the platform. And because there's different workflows built into there, then you're not you're not building it, you're not taking like all, you know, taking a bunch of pieces and putting it all together. It puts together like a whole workflow. We'll just have to see how it works. It's an experiment. We'll see how it works. Hopefully it works. It's working for other people and it's worth a try.

So yeah, Mario's gonna finish it, okay? Because I'm, I'm ready to throw the whole computer PC in a dumpster. Just don't even want to deal with it. Uh, yeah, but, uh, it's nothing against Kartra, you know. It might be the— it might— I—

it's not going to take over WordPress, but no, none of these take over WordPress. It's just, you know, the way, the way you have, you know, you have to think about—

competitor, bro. Okay, that's all it is. It's a competitor to WordPress. It's a page builder. It comes with pre-built themes and templates. It's a— it's just a competitor to WordPress. Okay. I mean, there's nothing— I've been building websites for over 15 years, and there's nothing inside of there that is like blowing me away, like, oh my God, this is state of the art, or this is— no, it's more work to do than WordPress. But like he said, it's an experiment, and you know We'll see how it works. You know, he says Allen is very confident in that these people that he's speaking to are telling him the truth. So I want to see the proof in the pudding.

Okay, well, we'll see the proof in the pudding. We're doing a test and we'll see, you know, we'll see it. We'll see how it works out. I mean, it's, it's just a different type of sales approach. And we're going to see how that pans out. And that's why I think people are drawn to those type of platforms, because it just gives a different flow. Why is it a different sales approach to you?

Explain it to me.

Explain why it's a different sales approach?

Because it's not, but to you it is.

To me, it looks like a completely different sales approach, the way that it flows. It just flows in a different way that we're, we're, you know, and I think that that's why people use those type of systems, is that because it gives that quick flow. Because people want— we talked about this when we did the podcast at Dating and Sales— one of the things people look for is, I want it now. And that gives you the feeling of, I want it now and I'm getting it right now. And that's kind of like what it is. And it's just a condensed, a condensed, um, condensed product offering. And that's what it is. And, you know, we can't do that on our general website, so do try it with this. I mean, maybe it could be put together through, through WordPress, but let's just see what it does and how it works and what, you know, how it's all put together. And that's what we're going to see. I mean, there's tons of people that are using these platforms to, to give that immediate gratification to the buyer. Okay. And I think that's just what it, you know, I think that's what those platforms deliver the, deliver the most, is they deliver that immediate gratification.

All right, well, that's the— that's your answer for Karcho.

So yeah, that's my— you know, I think with most platforms, that's what it is. I think it's— that has to do with the workflow, the, the product, the product itself.

Yeah, once you're selling something, that's the workflow kind of creates itself. Yeah, so like if you're selling 400 products, right, or offerings like we do, right, to have a workflow is very difficult, right?

So that's why this is a—

I mean, that's why there's click here, fill out now, apply now buttons, right? Yeah, it's kind of for everyone. But yeah, but we've talked— I'm not hating on Kartra, but all I'm saying is I don't need— we don't need Kartra for a single product.

I understand that, but what, you know, we're trying to do is we're trying to aim the offering at the younger age category, and those people don't want to fill out a form and talk to us on the phone. They want to get it now. That's why they're going to Stripe, Square, and PayPal, okay? Or signing up for QuickBooks. They're just passing us right by.

Also, those different companies you just mentioned are cool.

Well, we're cool.

Yeah, it's cold in the office.

Yeah, we don't have billions of dollars.

Yeah, that's the difference. Like, it's cool, right? It's hip. They see it. They know it's a brand name. So younger people are going to be hard to sell regardless.

I beg to differ. We don't need to grab 100,000 people like Square does. We just need to get a few. So that's the difference. As a small, small to medium-sized business, you know, you don't need to get 5,000 customers a month. We don't need to get 5,000 customers a year. If we're able to capture 10 or 20 extra customers either each month or each, you know, let's say 10 new customers every month, then it's going to be successful. Because it's 10 customers that probably would not have bought from us. That's what it— that's what it's about. And that's why— that's why people, I think, gravitate. That's why you see a lot of websites now selling 1, 2, 3 items on it, and they're not selling 40, 50, 100 items. I even noticed it with like CBD products. If we take a couple of, you know, clients that we have that sell CBD or nutraceutical The ones that sell 1 to 6 items on their site are more successful than the people that have 100 items on their site because it's just a more direct sale.

Saying that since we started here.

Okay, well, we can't take the company and go, okay, well, we're only going to offer 3 things now and we're not going to offer these other 97.

I'm not saying that either, but what I'm saying, like, you can put that on the website and, you know, forget about all the other stuff.

Yeah, but it doesn't make sense to do that because the other stuff also brings in money.

It's a never-ending circle jerk.

It's a, it's just a different, different style offering. And I think a lot of companies are doing that now, and they're, they're simplifying their offers, which is—

yeah. And I think that is happening on a global—

yeah, people, it's not just Yeah, but, you know, yeah, I think companies who have 1,000 items to sell are figuring out, hey, here's our 3 or 4 most popular items, and let's either make a single website for that item, or let's make a condensed website. Let's put our 5 most popular items on there and then try to really move those. But they're not going to not sell the other 95 items that they have. They're going to still sell those because they're selling it and it's bringing in business. So, you know, that's what you have to do. You have to come up with different sales techniques to bring in, to bring in additional business. And that's maybe that's what it's going to take. Maybe we're going to end up making, doing some other type of small websites, you know, focused on single products down the road because maybe that's what's gonna attract more people to do business with us. But we'll have to see how this one pans out first. Indeed. Yeah, but I think, I'm seeing more and more platforms. There was a company at the show called Brevo. They're not even from the United States and they're trying to break into the US. They're— I think they're out of— I think it's an Asian company. And, you know, there was another company there too. I don't think they were— they didn't have any collateral at their booth. They were also coming out with some sort of a CRM website, you know, a whole, a whole platform. And it's just—

I just started laughing at that, man. I mean, because I've been in the business for so long. Yeah, like I've seen so many of them come and go. It's just, it's crazy because at the end of the day, you can't beat WordPress because there's a community of millions, right, that are using it.

I mean, they say WordPress makes up probably 70 or 80% of the, of the websites on the internet.

Exactly.

Okay, so obviously, but you know, I think you have to look at your business and in two ways.

And I'm not saying sales funnel doesn't work, like ClickFunnels or whatever, you know, they do work, but it's for like an indiv— like a single product, right? Like you said, like a book or, uh, whatever it is, you know what I mean? Um, but for these larger companies, it's just really difficult. One, on a marketing side, to get people to find that website, first of all, is next to impossible. I mean, you have to have a really large ad budget, you know what I mean? Or whatever campaign that you're setting up to get traction for that domain is going to be really hard. You're going to have to set up paid ads for it. You're going to have to, you know, promo the hell out of it. Um, yeah, it's, it's something that I think the, the putting together of the website is one thing, right? And then after that is, is what, you know, drives the machine, right? Like, yeah, you know, like, I can build a car tomorrow.

I get it.

But what's going to get people to that? You know, how is that? How are we going to get fuel for the car? Where is the fuel coming from? You know what I mean?

Well, that's the next part. First, you got to finish this part, and then we're going to—

I'm not talking about us. I'm talking about everyone. Yeah, it's true.

It's true with everything. I mean, it's one thing, you know, like I always talk about is, you know, advertising is not on there's— we don't, we don't deal today where advertising for big companies and small companies is on an even playing field, right? So when it comes to the advertising, I think if I think back to— I'm a little bit older than you, and you probably remember when there still was a newspaper around. When there was newspapers, I don't think it really mattered. And when there was Yellow Pages, You could be a big company or a small company and you could still get your— you could still be successful with some advertising. As an example, when we first went into business, we had an ad in the Yellow Pages that said we fix credit card machines. We used to get tons of phone calls from that because, you know, there was a few other merchant companies in there, and I'm sure most people probably called 2 or 3 of them. But we're the only one with that and we end up, you know, getting business, right? So, you know, but now if we just put a web page up online and said we fix credit card machines, wouldn't get anybody coming to that, wouldn't attract unless you do the groundwork, right? But I'm just saying it's more difficult because you could go have Square could say, oh, we fix credit card machines and they're what they can spend on advertising is, you know, 100,000 times more than what we could spend on advertising.

Agreed.

So that's where it comes in. Even with restaurants, you go see one restaurant is completely packed, a chain or a franchise, and their place is packed. And then the place right down the street from them or a few doors down in a shopping center, they don't have very much— they don't have very much business because it's a mom-and-pop. Type restaurant, you know, and those restaurants don't have the ad budget for whatever, Chipotle or Domino's or Cheesecake Factory.

Yeah, that is the double-edged sword of the internet, my friend.

Yeah. So there's no, you know, there's everything.

You can find everything, right? But you could also not find what you're hoping to find as well. Or not. It's— you're not going to find what— say, say someone's looking for Nationwide Payment Systems and they don't know Nationwide Payment Systems or whatever, and they click on something else. That's the nature of the beast, right?

But I'm just saying, it's, you know, there's no— there's not a level playing field when it comes to advertising. The same thing, that's where people don't have a budget And then they end up, you know, they use these platforms because they say they don't have a budget to do what they really want to do, you know. But I'm thinking that, you know, maybe there's a different, you know, you have your website and then you have other smaller sites that you're promoting. Yeah, microsites that you're promoting. And I think we're going to see a big trend of that going on, especially in the small to medium-sized businesses. If they're not it now, they probably need to think about doing it in the future, right? Because I think that when, you know, like if you're trying to sell t-shirts, for instance, right, maybe you just have a site that has like one or two t-shirts on it, then once somebody buys, right, then you can direct them back into your main website where you have more inventory.