CRM & Automation with Lindsey Pickles

In today's episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast, we're talking all things CRM and marketing automation. And I'm excited to have Lindsey Pickles with me who focuses on helping organizations untangle all the policies and systems that they have to implement these systems.

Now, Lindsay talks about what is a.

CRM system and what the difference between that and a marketing automation tool is, and just who should be looking into these things and how do you go about implementing them. So this is a really practical episode and it was super timely for me.

Since I've been looking at my own CRM.

And so I'm sure you're going to.

Find the episode really useful. So let's get on with today's show.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DeCosta.

So in today's episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast, I'm really excited to have Lindsay Pickles from brightdials with us now. Brightdials helps companies get to grips with their customer data by implementing customer relationship management systems and sales and marketing automation tools, as well as the processes to support their successful use. So welcome, Lindsay. I'm not quite sure how well I introduced you, so is there anything else you wanted to add to that?

No, I think that's a great introduction. Thanks, Rob. It's great to be here.

Fantastic. Okay, so let's just start off by giving our listeners a bit of a definition and also a distinction between what a CRM or customer relationship management system is and what a sales and marketing automation system is.

Okay. A CRM is a piece of functionality which enables businesses to understand what their customers are doing and essentially to record data and information against contacts or companies or deals or other possibly products or other things. Whereas a sales or marketing automation platform, that is a tool that has a kind of broader range of functionality and a CRM can be a part of that. But an automation tool is really to allow you to identify, track customers, understand where they've come from, assign a cost against that value of that customer, and track that customer through the sales, marketing, and also the kind of operational funnels.

I guess you sort of started to answer this question, but why do you think it's important for companies to implement these systems?

I think it's essential for companies to have a system in place really for any size of business. The reason for that being is, you know, you need to understand what your customers are doing and where they are in the buying cycle as a starting point. And also it enables you to remove manual Jobs increase efficiency. So that's another really key part of it as well.

Okay, good. So what would you say to someone like me, this is like me coming clean here, who doesn't have a CRM system in place, but has got their customer data in various different places and their prospect data on spreadsheets and things like that.

Confess it. Confession time. Yes, well, I mean what we do is because every customer is different, right? Every client is different, they have different scenarios. And you know, we work with companies where they may have, you know, all their data on spreadsheets and they don't have any form of system at all. And that's, you know, pushing those people into a platform actually can be a bit easier if their data is clean in those spreadsheets in the first place. But really you need to look at where your customer journeys are, what people are doing and where that data sits. And actually if you have different tools for different things, if that works for you and it's connected properly and the data is passing, then that might be a great thing for you. But for a lot of companies, they tend to develop what's called the patchwork and they'll have multiple tools where there's similar functionality across them and they're not using them effectively and they're not connected properly. Whereas I think, Rob, you've probably got, you know, I think you're fairly on top of what you do, you know, you've got good marketing. So yeah, it really is a case of assessing every client's needs and we spend time with clients, which is a very quick sort of 45 minute free discovery call through to. It can be a sort of 10, 15 day project to identify all of those user flows and requirements.

Yeah, so I think I probably have the sales and marketing automation piece nailed, but I don't think I have the CRM piece nailed. In fact, I was just looking this morning and I got some emails of people that I need to follow up in November and it was a timely reminder of me having this call with you because I thought, blimey, I really need one central place to put this and putting that kind of prospect data into my email marketing system doesn't feel like the right thing to do. So when you go into an organization and you know they're going to be bigger than me, no doubt, how do you start to untangle all of this? Because even a one man band like myself has got some complexities here. So how do you go about untangling where they're at at the moment and what they need and therefore suggesting the right solution and then implementing that solution.

Yeah, what we do is we start with kind of research phase and that involves asking lots of questions, researching all the kind of stakeholders involved in the organization, understanding the process that each part of the business takes and which tools are already being used, how those tools are connecting into other places. So there's a lot of work to kind of evaluate all of those pieces of information. It's also looking at what kind of contact level of contacts that the customer has because volume related costs can get out of hand very quickly. So for some businesses, they may have a sort of lower volume of customers and that would have enabled them to use perhaps a more expensive platform that has more functionality. So yeah, there's a lot of steps involved. And yeah, the user journey mapping is a key part of it. We go in and extract all of those processes and that's kind of a very enlightening part of the process for clients where suddenly they can sit back and see what's happening with their customers and what they need to do and where we then produce those user journeys and that enables us to those processes and other tools and integration, existing data, sort of structure and format, along with the other requirements that they have. We then look at producing a document which is kind of an educational tool for the client as much as anything. But we go through all of the features that you can have in different platforms and we prioritize those. So we can say the CRM will always be a very important part of it, but perhaps quite sophisticated ROI tracking may not be as high a priority for some clients or dynamic landing pages because that's fairly sophisticated piece of kit for someone who may not have a very experienced marketing team. So we'll prioritize all of the different features and go through that with the client as well. So that enables them to really get a feel for what it all means and take a lot of the kind of scary stuff away. And we research which level of account that the client might need because obviously there's lots of different account levels as well that you'll find with different software partners. And then the out of that, you know, this whole process helps us identify which tool is the right one using obviously our expertise and experience. And we will then provide like a demo to the client. So that will allow the client to sort of have an idea of what does the system look like, how can I use it? And that's usually the point where they go, yeah, that's the one, that's the one for us.

Right, that sounds Good. So you talked about level of accounts and volume related costs. Can you just explain kind of in layman's terms what that means?

Yeah, in most platforms, in addition to having different levels of account, so you might get a basic, a starter, a pro, an enterprise level of account that's usually related to the amount of features that you have in the software and then the volume related costs. They usually relate to the number of contacts you have and the amount of emails that you would send on a monthly basis. So some software partners will say you can have unlimited email sends. Other software partners might charge for tracking. So if you have subdomains, obviously your website will be tracked as part of this. That can also really up the price.

A lot of our listeners are small agency owners that are starting out or they may have somewhere between say 1 and 20 staff. At what stage in their journey do you feel like they should start investigating CRM and sales and marketing automation?

I kind of feel that really any size agency should have some form of CRM at a very kind of basic level. I think that, you know, there are lots of tools out there that can give you pretty good functionality for low cost. But really if you're out there trying to do marketing and win business, you know, to track sales through your pipeline is essential for any size of company. Really.

Yeah. And I think something else I just wanted to touch upon because I certainly know for myself who really is into the whole sales and marketing automation. You talked earlier about efficiency gains, so could you just talk about some of those benefits that we're going to get from some of these automation tools and what they can take off your plate as an admin task and do automatically?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think in relation to agencies, I think the kind of thing that can help a lot is the kind of sales automation piece. So when a lead is captured, actually having pipeline of what you need to be doing with that lead and automating some of that by creating notifications to your staff when they need to follow up with the lead. Also the tools enable you to see when a prospect is engaging with your channel. So perhaps they visited your site, then having notifications there to give salespeople the right. You know that automation allows salespeople to contact clients when they're thinking about you and engaging with your brand. So that piece is really important. And yeah, the automation and really the tracking I think is very important. So that in addition to tracking the touch points that a potential client has taken, but tracking what campaign has driven that lead to you and then following that through the sales pipeline is a very important thing for automation.

Yeah, I mean, this is another topic really, but it's something that I am grappling with a bit at the moment and that is really understanding your numbers and understanding your data and understanding the source of those numbers so that you can do more of what works and less of what doesn't work. And I'm acutely aware myself at the moment that I need to improve that. So it's something I'm working on. But I guess with all these tools there's so many great integrations these days and tracking mechanisms that it's actually a lot easier to do than it used to be. Certainly when I ran my agency sort.

Of 15 years ago, that automatic campaign tracking, that should be fairly sort of standard. I mean, obviously if you have specific campaigns that you or partners that you work with and you want to track that, you need to use UTM tracking codes and things like that. But it's really very handy to understand what the value of the cost of the lead that you're working on that turns to a customer.

Exactly. Yeah. We need to track it right the way back to its source, all the way through that journey to then becoming a customer. Obviously you go into organizations and you help implement this, but if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, right, I need to get my head around CRM systems and marketing automation systems. How would you advise people to go about selecting the best tools for them?

Well, there's a very handy guide on our website that somebody can download that is for people who are earlier on in the journey. Gives you the kind of areas that you need to consider when you're choosing a CRM. And you know, those considerations can range from budget through to the kind of level of sophistication of that platform and how many people you would have working on it. But yeah, there's lots of different factors that you need to consider. But yeah, I'd recommend people download the guide and have a read and think about it. Really?

Yeah. Well, that was a good plug accidentally from me. But what I'll do is I'll make sure I'll put a link in the show notes to your guide because I think the upside of this is that there are so many great tools that can work on your mobile phone as well as your, your desktop and can automate so many things. That's the sort of the good part about this, but the bad part is that there's so many tools you just don't know where to begin. I don't know if you've got much of a view on this, because I've used loads of tools in the past, but what's your view on tools that can do one job? So you need a number of them and then you need to connect them together versus tools that are integrated and do all the things. I think, you know that I use Kartra and I use Kartra for almost everything I do. It's a membership site, it's a web hosting platform, it's an email automation tool, manages my calendars, my campaigns. So there's those kind of tools of which there are a few, but then there are. Obviously I could also buy lots of different tools and try and integrate them together.

Yeah, I think, you know, I would always veer towards advising a client to use a tool that will cover as much of the functionality that they need in one place, because the more points that you are transferring data around, the more points of failure that there are and the more chances there are for things to go wrong. It also means that if you're tracking your email in one place and your CRM somewhere else and other things are in other places, that you actually don't get that holy grail of the, you know, the single view of the customer. Whereas if you have an automation platform and you have all of the functionality contained in there, it gives you much better tracking and understanding of your customer.

Yeah, a good example of that would be, and one of the reasons why I switched to Kartra was so that I could do things like know how much of a video someone's watched on a web page and consequently, depending on how much of the video they've watched. For example, I would send them email A if they watched only watch the first bit, or email B if they watched the whole thing. And I think it's harder to connect all that kind of thinking together. If you're using lots of different platforms, you start having to either hope those platforms offer you an integration or you use Zapier or something like that to connect them together. And that's a bit of a minefield as well, isn't it?

Yeah. And I think also, obviously, even if you do connect it, then connecting campaign data can be quite tricky. One of the things I say to clients is you can track behavior and things using Google Analytics, but the key difference with an automation platform is that you know who is doing those things.

As we record this podcast, can you give us some of your favorite CRM tools and favourite sales and marketing automation tools? Obviously, I've talked about Kartra which is a tool I use. But what others have you got experience with?

We're an independent agency, so there's actually not that many agencies who are independent. You will find agencies will work with one platform, HubSpot being a classic, which you know is fairly pricey, so it can get shoehorned into clients. Whereas we are independent and we work with different platforms. If we find as the result of our research in the discovery phase, it might actually be a platform we don't use or we haven't used before, but we've identified that platform as the right one. So we work with lots of different platforms. So Sharpspring, ActiveCampaign, Zoho, Ontraport, HubSpot. We also use Pipedrive. I think Pipedrive is a great sales and Opera and actually it can be hacked to be an operational tool as well. So it varies a lot depending on what the client's require, what their requirements are. But I do, you know, for sort of entry level, easy to use marketing automation and sales tracking. Activecampaign is great, I think for sales automation and tracking. Pipedrive is another really great sort of entry level tool. Although Some people think ActiveCampaign is quite clunky on the interface, it's very simple. And actually that that's for clients who don't have perhaps more sophisticated experience of using these tools. They're great ones for entry level.

Yeah. And I used to be an ActiveCampaign user, then I switched to ConvertKit because ActiveCampaign just had a lot of functionality I didn't need. And then about a year or so ago I consolidated everything from ConvertKit and from my training platform Teachable and from Calendarly and all these other places into Kartra, which is quite an expensive but it really does many things. So that that sort of works for me. And I guess it's weighing up the jack of all trades, which means that often it won't quite do each of the individual things as well as those tools that are just specifically designed for it. But collectively overall I think it works for me. And even though it's quite expensive, it probably is still cheaper than all of the other component tools that I was using added together when you look at those annual fees. So if you've got any last tips for somebody who's listening to this thinking, oh, I don't have any of this in place, what should I do next? Obviously one of your tips is download your CRM guide because that will help you select the guide. But have you got any other tips for someone who listening to this, it's resonating with them, but they're not quite sure where they should start.

It's always a good idea to map out what you want your customers to do. So what's the journey that you want somebody to take? It may not be the one that you have at the moment, but it's identifying the ideal flow and just getting a piece of paper and actually drawing it out. And that's a really fundamental part of our discovery process to do that. And it really is a very helpful one. And I think it's taking time to do that because a lot of the time working with clients, they just haven't had the time to look at the big picture. And that point really gives them clarity on what they need to do.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the problem that so many people have, that they're so busy, stuck in their business with this sort of nagging voice saying, look, we really need to sort this out. But they don't have time. And a lot of the time they.

Don'T have the inclination either because they.

Don'T know what to do, which is obviously where you come in.

Yeah.

And when you talk about customer journey, you mean the prospect as well. You mean the ideal customer that isn't yet a customer, don't you, when you talk about that?

Yes. So obviously lots of people have different terminology, but what we do with that process is we go, we start at the top of the funnel and we start with which marketing channels do you use where, you know, where are those leads coming in? And then we look at, you know, is that an event? So, okay, are you using Eventbrite? You know, what's happening there? How are you getting your data? Then it's about assessing how that data capture comes in and then mapping out each stage below that. So if it's a prospect, which is early on in the journey, then creating a nurture process to educate that client and bring them down to the point where they may be ready to turn into a customer. But really going into what's your sales process, are you B2B? And you need to go through proposal stage with the prospect and then converting that person through and then actually what lies beyond that, you know, what lies. Once somebody's become a customer, you can use these tools for operational process as well. So actually onboarding customers, using automation to help you with that can be hugely time saving. And how do you connect that into your billing and are there other operational tools as well? So it's really mapping out that whole picture.

I Think the big message to give here is that what we're trying to do is get more efficient and we're trying to automate those tasks that can be automated and get them off our plate. And of course, by automating them, we are being more efficient. And I think the. The driver for me at the moment about getting the CRM in place is the fact that I worry that I will miss out, I'll miss some opportunities because I'm not got them all documented correctly and I'm not. I've not got those automatic reminders going, hey, that person said, get back in touch with me in the middle of November. At the moment I have a danger that I might miss some of that stuff. And so that's what's sort of my driver. So to be. To be more efficient and also to automate stuff to get it off my plate.

The leaky funnel that you mentioned is the classic kind of problem that a lot of people have. And closing all of those holes is really important. And I think it's also about being consistent as well. So quite often you'll have sales and marketing teams working quite independently. And really there needs to be more consistency between those areas as well. So that's a really important thing that the automation can do. So making sure that marketing's in control of the messaging and sales are notified when they need to follow up.

Nothing worse than working really hard to get a prospect and then kind of forgetting about it because you haven't followed it up in the timely fashion when you agreed to.

Yeah, yeah.

So let me ask you the question that I ask all of my guests and then we'll talk about how can find you. So if you could go back in time and give your younger self just starting out in business one piece of advice, what would it be?

I tried to do too much too soon in my career, wanted to have my own business. I would tell my younger self to be a little bit more strategic about how I approach that because it's taken several attempts to kind of actually have my own business and where I want to be. So, yeah, that would be my advice, I think.

I wonder whether our young, arrogant, naive, youthful version of ourselves, an impatient version of ourselves, would actually have taken and listened to that advice. Because I only say that because I can relate to that. I always think it was sort of my arrogant, youthful naivety that got me to where I am. Because if I knew then what I know now, I don't think I'd have started my business. I'd have been too scared Lindsay, if people want to get hold of you, what is that the best way for them to reach you?

As always, there's multiple ways. But you know, obviously on LinkedIn is good. Please connect with me on there if you've got any questions. But you can visit our website@brightdials.com and if you go to brightdials.com discovery, you can book in a free session, a 45 minute session where we do that initial kind of work to find out the best way forward for you.

Okay, brilliant. I'll put all of those links in the show notes and it sounds to me like getting that 45 minute discovery call and downloading your guide would be good things for people to do, even if it's just to help them start that process of mapping out that journey and working out what they need to do and when they need to do it.

Yes, absolutely. And there is another, there is another guide on there as well, which is a terminology guide. So that can be quite sort of terrifying for people. It's like, what does this all mean? So there is also a guide you can download and that will help too.

Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes to that as well because I'm always mindful about when we're talking about things like CRM and marketing automation that it's either confusing for people or people have different interpretations of all of the language that we've been using. So that would be great if people want to download that guide.

Yes.

So, Lindsay, I really appreciate your time today and thank you for sharing your wisdom. This is a topic that we haven't spoken about before, but it is a really important topic. And when we're looking at sales and marketing for our agencies, this whole piece, this whole conversation is a really important part of that.

Yes, it is. And likewise, thank you for your time and having me on the show. And it's a pleasure as always.

So there you go. I hope you found this episode useful. I think we should all be thinking about email automation to make ourselves more efficient and to find a way of continually staying in touch with our ideal target customers and also having a CRM system of some sort, even if it's just a spreadsheet for now so that you can keep track of all of your prospects in your sales funnel and make sure that you are contacting them back in a timely manner. As ever, if you enjoyed this episode, please share with your colleagues, please hit subscribe and I would love if you could could leave a review. As you know, that helps me be found and Other than that, I hope you have a brilliant weekend, and I will see you next week for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast.