Resources for Tracking Leads and Requirements

The Small business show episode 312 for Wednesday, January 27, 2021 greetings folks, and welcome back or welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow co. The show where small businessing is a verb. We like to take action and we like to help you take action here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamil.

And in Lafayette, California, I am Shannon Jean. How are you, Dave?

I'm doing well. Yeah. Yeah. Busy, but you know. Well, I said it. See, I gotta train myself. I've been productive, which is productive, not busy. Right, Right. Yeah. I mean, I have been busy, but, but it's better to, to use the subset of busy that is productive as opposed to just killing.

Yeah, it's a better system. And, and every time you say it, you're also training your brain. Right?

That's the key.

Because being busy is, is, can be worthless.

I've proven that too.

Yeah, me too, many times over.

Yeah, I intend to prove it again someday. But, but, but I don't intend. I know that I will prove it again someday. I intend to be productive, but I will fail at that too. So, yes, there you go. We, we asked and you, you delivered. We, I, I, I say that pleasantly. Not pleasantly surprised. We asked you folks to write in and tell us what you liked about the show, what you didn't like about the show, and to send in your questions. And all of those things have happened. So that's great. Yeah. So we have some things about the future of the show to talk about in a little bit. We have two sponsors to talk about in a little bit. Headspace.com SBS and Amazon.com SBSRX we'll talk about what each of those URLs means to you in a little bit. But for now, what I want to do is talk about Scott, because Scott sent in a question that Shannon and I are going to try and address here. Scott says, gentlemen, I am lost and looking for answers. As a small business, a single person with a few employees, I need a way to track potential customers and leads from people who call or meet who we call or meet at various venues. The functions have to be simple as I do not have the time or patience to learn an extensive suite of tools. The idea I had is that when an action occurs, there is a reaction. If the action is a call from a customer, the action, the reaction is what I've promised the customer. If I told the customer that I'll send a copy of our contract and make an appointment to visit their home, then I want the Actions added to my calendar with alerts and alarms. An action would be to send the PDF of the contract with no follow up action. Right. So he says, I've looked into CRM CRMs. Customer relationship managers are all encompassing suites complicated beyond my current attention span, which is limited because I'm trying to run a business. I also do not need all of the features of a CRM because I have other software customized to my industry once they become customers. Ah, that's interesting. Okay, this is a good point to know. He says these allegedly free and small business CRMs are just as complicated as their larger cousins. I also do not need all of their features. Do you know of something in the wide world of software that can help me? So yeah, this is, I mean there. I have some ideas.

I do too. Now that listening. You know, when I first read Scott's email I was like, well, I don't have a solution in my pocket because it's really too. I'm looking at this as two different things.

Right.

We want to track potential customers and leads. So if someone calls or you meet at a venue, you want a quick way to capture their data. Right. That's, that's in the first sentence. And then the second thing that they want is if they, you know, they want to be able to track an action based on something you told the customer that you would do. Right now it the same piece of software but you know, they're two, I think they're two different, A little different action.

Yeah. Fair, fair. And then also he's got his, essentially he's got his CRM or, or some version of that that is customized to his industry. Right. So he doesn't, he doesn't want to reinvent that particular wheel. Yeah. And it's. So this is an interesting problem. Even as a, you know his comment about I don't have the time or patience to learn something new because I'm running my business and it's.

That's a good, really good point.

You know there are, I don't think that there is going to be a magic answer for Scott unless you already know how to use the piece of software that someone recommends to you. Right. Because there is going to be some learning curve. But I totally like. This totally resonates with me. Even though I like learning new things, I don't always have the time to do that. And this is a great example of working, the value of working on the business as opposed to in the business. Right. So is it worth taking a day out of your business life? You're you're working in the business, time to learn some new piece of software or set something up that allows you and everybody that works for you to be more efficient at working in the business. Like how long, what's the payoff? Right. Yeah.

And maybe you have to also step, step back a bit and think that maybe it's not you that needs to spend the time. Maybe one of your, he's, you know, he's got a few, few employees. Maybe it's. You need to task and delegate it to an employee that can then simplify the process of training you and your team to use it. Whatever you come, whatever we come up with.

Yeah, that's a good point. I, yeah, I'm terrible at that, by the way.

Well, I, I am too, but that's.

I, I just, but it doesn't mean it's not true.

Yeah, yeah, but it's just like, okay, at some point, you know, maybe somebody has a little more technical bent or this kind of thing. And I have an idea for, for Scott, as well as you may have as well, Dave, because I faced a similar thing my whole life.

Everybody's business faces this problem. Right. You are not alone, Scott, which is why there are these tools out there. Right. And the question is, find the. Perhaps, Perhaps. Scott's. If I'm, if I'm going to read into this and sort of reinterpret what you're saying here, Scott, I might be wrong, but I think I'm right, at least for a wide group of us small business owners, it's not so much the time learning one piece of software that is the stumbling block here. It's the time that it would require to learn five pieces of software to then select the right one for you. But that is the thing that you don't want to. The path you don't necessarily want to head down. And I get that. You know, if, if I were in this scenario, and I have been many times, what I have chosen for myself every time is filemaker.

And the reason, so funny as I was going to say the same thing.

Yeah. The reason I've chosen FileMaker is because a, I know it and B, it's very customizable. You can start with their templates. They have a lot of filemaker is it's a database environment into which you can build your own little database apps. And that sounds a whole lot more complex than it actually is. Right. It can be very complex if you want it to be, but getting started doesn't really take all that much time. The FileMaker database that we use to track all of our contacts at the Mac Observer. I wrote in an hour and a half on a train ride. And this was probably 10 or 15 years ago and it's still basically what we use today because you design it just by laying things out. You say, okay, well what do I want? I want first name and last name. I want company. Okay, well maybe I want company as one type of record and then I want contact as another type of record and I want them related to each other. And FileMaker makes it really easy to do that. And then I put a little email button in or add to calendar button and I can do these things. And they're all built. Filemaker has all these sort of functions built into it. So for me, sitting down and creating what you're talking about here, Scott, would be a fairly straightforward process in FileMaker. So maybe if, and it's entirely possible Scott understands FileMaker and this is the right path to head down. And maybe he's having an aha moment. But if you're not, then maybe you hire someone that knows filemaker to go and do this and you spend a few hours with them explaining what you want and then you send them off to do their thing and they come back and they say, does this do it? And you tweak with them. And that's the beauty of filemakers. I am, we have filemaker databases that run that one for Mac observer, our entire back end at Backbeat Media, for all of our billing, all of our campaign management, all of our, you know, our customer management. All of 100% of it is it uses FileMaker. We, we use QuickBooks as our accounting package. And I, we, we have linked via our own scripts, FileMaker and QuickBooks. So the data from FileMaker, you know, somebody pays an invoice that's tracked in FileMaker and then it's just sent over to QuickBooks. And, and that works for us. And we are constantly making changes to, to the database because that's the key thing. Yeah.

That you, and you can't put too fine of a point on. That is the, is the flexibility you have with FileMaker Pro is that you say, you know what? I'd like to add this thing. I want to track how long it's taken them to pay. Okay. You can put that countdown timer in there where an off the shelf piece of software or a cloud service that you're subscribing to. Forget it.

And these types of changes are like things that I can do in five minutes or less. Right. Like If I realized, oh, we want to add a field to track someone's pronouns, right? Like when we built the database 20 years ago, that just wasn't nearly as important as it is right now. And so it was like, okay, great. And I dropped into edit mode to layout mode. I built the field, I put it in there, and it took me probably less time to do than it did for me to explain to you what I just did. So that's the beauty of filemaker. Now, if I were in your shoes, Scott, and I did not have my years of momentum in FileMaker, and perhaps even a better way to say this is if I could go back in time to the beginning of Backbeat media and say, okay, what tool from 2021 could I use in 1999 or whatever it was to track all this stuff, I would strongly encourage myself to use Salesforce. And the reason is the little things in filemaker are very, very easy to do on your own, right? But Salesforce has so many built in integrations for all kinds of different things that there are things we do not do with our FileMaker database because I don't have the time to develop them. And we haven't paid someone. We would either have to take the time ourselves or we would have to pay someone custom development to add these features. Whereas if we were in Salesforce, and yes, we'd be paying every month, probably about 110 bucks a person or something. You know, it's not cheap, but if we were in Salesforce, we'd just be able to inherit these things. It's akin to me designing my own web cms. I got CRM on the brain, but cms, our content management system, which we did in the beginning, right? I wrote my own content management system and then eventually we wound up on WordPress. And in most ways that's better. There are still some things about WordPress I wish I could change, but that's normal. But the nice part is any features, big features we want to add, there are plugins that we can just incorporate into WordPress and usually, you know, for any one type of feature, there's probably 10 different plugins we can select. The one Salesforce is a lot like that saves you on that development time and gets you to new feature added and in, you know, incorporated into your workflow that much faster. So I really would encourage you to look at Salesforce. I'm not. If it were me, it would either be Salesforce or Filemaker. I would not choose any of the second tier CRMs. And I don't mean to disparage the other ones out there, but there's one big dog in that market and it's Salesforce and there's, it just like there's one big dog in the, you know, the CMS market and it's WordPress. I don't think it's a good idea to, to find a different one. If you think there's any chance that you're going to want to use, you know, these features that are constantly being added because Salesforce has legs, it's going to go. So that's, that's my, but it is, it's not cheap. Right. So it's, and it's not for everyone. But that's my thinking on this. Yeah, yeah.

And I, I, I really don't have, I mean, I've used the Salesforce product before. I have, you know, I use FileMaker every day. Yeah. Like, just like you do, Dave, and I have a lot of love for it. But you definitely do hit, you can hit a wall and if you do learn it, then you can have, you know, a big impact on your, you know, usually. So like we were talking before, if you want to make a quick change and the, the one point in your email which I really agree with is, you know, you don't need, it's like these are the specific features I want and I don't need anything else.

That's filemaker.

Yeah, yeah. And I have spent a lifetime, I was just trying to do it the other day, trying to make something work and like, well, how can I make that on another piece of software on a different online type database? And it was just a nightmare. And with filemaker and you know, they also have a cloud service you can, you can sign up for to get it on. You know, all your employees, they can have it on their phone. You can be all be connected to the same database and you know, making these actions and keeping things synchronized between employees and locations. I really think that's a great place to start. And if you outgrow that, then, yeah, like you're, like you're saying, Dave, take a look at, you know, Salesforce is the 100 pound gorilla.

That's. Yeah, exactly.

In the market.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a pretty light gorilla, but yeah, there you go.

So, so let us know what you think. Hear this and if you try it out, you know, come back and tell us your thoughts. There's also a ton of, I would say, relatively inexpensive programmers available to help you in FileMaker. If you need it, you can find them up@FileMaker.com you can also find them at Fiverr F I V E R r dot com. There's a bunch all over the world, a bunch of, you know, again, relatively inexpensive people that can build this database for you in a very simple format. And, and you know, I got started with FileMaker by downloading their free and learning how to modify those and it was great because then you can kind of dissect it and look and see how did they make that calendar hook. So when I told the customer I'd send this by, you know, January 25th, how did they make that work in their solution? And then I would implement that same script in my solution.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Thanks for the email, Scott. It's great stuff. Feedbackusinessshow co is where you can send in your stuff and we would love to help with stuff like this. And we're like I said, happy, happy to anonymize things in any way you require. We do it all the time. So the next thing I want to do is talk about Amazon Pharmacy. Look, Amazon, we all know how quickly Amazon can get stuff to us, right? I've been a Prime member for a very long time and they I love it because things just show up so fast and it's so easy. Well, Amazon Pharmacy leverages that, right? Because it saves you time. They deliver your medication directly to your door so there's no more waiting in line at the pharmacy and no more having to interact, you know, with potentially infectious people and all of that stuff, right? You can have your doctor's office send your next prescription straight to Amazon Pharmacy and you can use your insurance. Amazon Pharmacy works with most insurance plans nationwide. And like I said, because you're an Amazon prime member, right? You're an Amazon prime member. You should be get free two day delivery and you get to save on prescription medication when you're not paying with insurance. It's very, very cool stuff the way that they've put all this together and delivering it right to your door. Super convenient. Right now, Amazon prime members can save on prescription medication when not using insurance and get free two day delivery. You can learn more at Amazon.com sbsrx that's a M a Z o n.com/sbsrx get it small business show rx Amazon.com/sbsrx and our thanks to Amazon Pharmacy for sponsoring this episode. Next up is headspace@headspace.com SBS. You deserve to feel happier, right? Headspace is meditation made simple. It's your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in their super easy to use app. I've been using Headspace since way before they ever even thought about sponsoring the show. I'm a, you know, I've had the app and they've put this together in such a way that it makes it super easy. If you've got, you know, 15, 20 minutes and you want to do a meditation that long, great, they've got them for you. If you only have a few minutes, three minute meditations, They've got these three minute SOS meditations. Totally helpful. And the way they put them together, they really are super helpful. Their approach to mindfulness at Headspace can help reduce stress, improve sleep, boost your focus, and increase your overall sense of well being. And it's backed by science, 25 published articles on its benefits, 600,000 five star reviews and over 60 million downloads. So you deserve to feel happier. And Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to headspace.comsbs Again, headspace.comsbs where you'll get a free one month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every situation. This is the best deal they're offering right now. So head to headspace.com SBS today. And our thanks to Headspace for sponsoring this episode. All right, we have, we asked for your opinions on what to do with the future of the show and we've gotten actually quite a few responses. Chuck wrote in and says, I have nothing but praise for what you two have done with sbs, but you asked for some feedback. I would say don't change a thing. But there is one thing I think you have bordered on in a number of shows that might make the show even more useful. When you have a guest, include two or three specific takeaways that struck each of you or perhaps both of you. From the guest's comments, he says, I know that I often have some myself, but I often have to go back and re listen to make sure that I groked those. I'm guessing that yours would be some of the same as mine, but having yours might make me reexamine what was said. So that's good feedback. Thank you for that, Chuck. Yeah, we used to, Shannon, when we had a guest, we would finish the episode with the guest. I don't want to say we used to. There were times when we would have a guest and then immediately following recording with the guest, we would record the next week's episode, which was our reactions to what was said with the guest.

Yeah, we have done that. Yeah.

And we got into a habit of compressing that into just the outro of the show with the guest. Really the same thing happened. We recorded it right away, but we didn't delay the listing. And therefore it didn't get to be quite as in depth an examination of what the guest had said because it was right after that. We didn't want the show to go on forever. So that's good. We are intentionally scaling back the ratio of guests to not guest shows. So that'll leave more room for exactly that. And I think that's a really good thing for us to make sure to plan for, Shannon, is when we have a guest, at least, you know, a segment, if not the entire next episode being a dissection of what the guest said.

So, yeah, I'm also interested in trying perhaps if, if the guest, you know, if the interview runs long, perhaps splitting it into two episodes and then that give us, you know, more time to talk. Because I think with our, you know, we're tracking engagement with the show a lot and we're finding that, you know, little shorter episodes and you know, nice enough with us interacting more that we're getting higher engagement levels, which is what we're looking for.

That's what we're looking for. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So we'll try some new things. We'll keep, you know, adjusting and trying. And we definitely want to hear from you feedback@businessshow.co what you like, what you, what you don't, what you suggest or if you want to come on the show and talk about your experience.

Absolutely. I, while we're here, we did, we did have an email from David that there's, there's actually many parts to this email from David. We're, we're going to focus for, for right now on there's a business therapy thing that we will, we will do in a future episode. But, but he had some comments too about the future of the show. And it seems appropriate to, to bring them in now. He says, I listen on Overcast, so my stats are not part of Apple stats, which is an important thing for you and I to remember that, you know, we see engagement on Apple stats, but that's not where most people listen. And we're aware of that. We just, you know, it's the one that we can see. So we, we assume that it, it spreads out. He says, but I generally listen to 100% of the episodes when I, if I am tempted to skip an episode. He says, I admit I'm more likely to skip an interview show. So that's interesting. To know. And he says, I do like the shows where you both talk without guests. The guests are generally good and David is a previous guest. So he says some are fantastic, but to be honest, most of them are not people. People that I know. Some do have experience advice and that's relevant. But on the other hand, I could probably get similar experience by chatting with one of my own customers who are mostly other small business owners or another print shop owner. David runs a print shop for half an hour. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but if I chat with my customers and ask what's new, what good ideas they have, what are their struggles, it will be similar experience to listening to your interviews, but much more relevant to me because. Because they're, they're in my industry or they're, they're doing similar things. Essentially he's saying by him choosing the guest that he listens to, it's far more relevant than you or I choose the guest that he listens to so that. That makes sense. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no, that's good.

Well, the, the interview topic is really interesting and we'll probably have to take a deeper dive because, you know, I, I love having, you know, bootstrap business owners on like David, you know, come on, talk about when I think it's very relevant and I enjoy it that what happens over time. What I saw happening with us too is that we tend to get approached more and more by, you know, guests that are maybe coaches or mentors or social media things, which is great. And they have very valuable things to share.

Sure.

And the, you know, I think the goal will be to, to try to take that step back to just get kind of the nuts and bolts business owners back on the show. You know, perhaps try splitting things up, you know, if we run a little bit long so we can keep these in bite sized events. And I've even, you know, thought of perhaps having two shows per week that are, you know, 15 to 20 minutes versus, you know, 40 minute show, so.

Sure.

Well, that's the key thing is change, right?

The key thing is change. It was experimen, David, just to wrap it up, he says, I do like your business therapy sessions. Great. Well, we did one of those earlier this episode and we've got more queued up, including one from you. And lastly, he says, I'm not sure if this is relevant or not. Well, I am, he says, but your podcast episodes seem to be a bit longer. In the past, I think they averaged 30 to 40 minutes. Now they seem closer 40 to 55 to 60. And if people are checking out after 65%, well, 65 or 45 is 30. So there you go. Well, I agree with you. And, and we are working to keep these episodes a little bit more concise. And so, you know, here we are at 25 minutes, and it's, it's time to wrap it up.

It's time to roll.

Yeah, that's right.

It's good stuff. Feedbackusiness show. Please let us know. Help us keep making the show better. And we appreciate your support.

Absolutely. And make sure. Go check out Amazon.com sbsrx headspace.com SBS and keep living that charmed life.

Lee.

See you next time.