Legacy CRM Challenges: Stop Burning Money and People, Modernize with AI

Well, good morning everybody. It's nice to meet everybody and thank you Gerhard. And thank you Mark. And I don't know about you. I thought it's been an amazing three days thus far but there's a lot of things that we've learned over the last several days and especially where AI is taking us and we're going to talk about that and how AI is really changing the game in the way of CRM. Just a little bit about me, I'll let you read the slide. Not going to dig into it, but a little fun fact. I have spent more time deeper in the ocean than anybody on this call today. How is that, you may ask? I want to leave you with one thing. I was enabled submarine officer for a number of years going under the world's oceans and, and poking holes and disappearing for a while. But you know, let's talk about this. Where do I come from? Well, I'm a business guy. I come from the business perspective. I'm not an IT tech guy so. But I've worked in technology for the better part of the last 15 years. In fact, most recently prior to starting up my own system integrator business, I was an executive creatio. Helping customers transform the way they think about technology and specifically CRM. And if you haven't heard of creatio before, that's okay. What's important to know is that they are a low code, no code platform that has got rapidly into this CRM market, competing with Salesforce Dynamics, HubSpot, all of those you see in the leaders quadrant for marketing automation. A visionary which is a future leader position in the Salesforce Automation and ultimately a strong performer in the Forrester wave. And what gets them there is the tool set that's behind them, allowing you to very quickly and rapidly change your CRM to meet your business needs today. This is why Forrester has put them as the only leader ahead of Microsoft power platform and other place in this world of what's called citizen development. Not going to bore you with all those details today, but we do want to talk about what the big topic is today, which is this challenge but legacy CRM and this leadership dilemma that we face with it. You know, I've invested a lot into legacy CRM but I don't feel like I'm getting what I need out of it. Now AI is really disrupting this entire kind of ecosystem. But how does this impact me and my sales team? And why is this such a painful thing and why is my old legacy CRM maybe something like Salesforce or Dynamics or Oracle. Why is this holding me back? Or how is it holding me back? And we're going to cover four main topics today. You can kind of see them on the screen here. But let's get started. Let's talk first about this administrative tax. What is this? Well, it's that burden, it's that just unwielding demand that the legacy CRM systems have for time and effort, constantly putting data in. It's amazing. Especially CRM systems that were implemented more than five years ago. There's so many bolt on things, more data fields because somebody needed this one extra data field per report or needed this one extra thing to be able to do something that they only needed. This is how we massively grow systems become unfunctional and not meeting today's need. And it's also what takes us, you know, 18, 24 months to unwind this tangled mess that we've created. You know, it's funny because a lot of the times sales administrators have to navigate through different windows, different screens. But what if we change the way that we interact with our CRM? What if modern CRM you no longer had to click through screens? You could use natural language in an AI interface to engage. Maybe it's something like looking at strange discounting or it's asking AI to give you up to date status or give you a summary of a deal. Now whether this is from a sales manager standpoint or a sales rep standpoint, these are the things that are typically very manual. And as you can see here, we're getting kind of an opportunity summary from AI for the sales manager and we're able to understand it. So we can do things like opportunity or lead routing based upon maybe a number of key characteristics that we could ask AI to use in making that determination. But it's not just about how we interact from a natural language standpoint, it's about how we do our day to day activities. Let's look at an example here. Now imagine I'm a sales rep and I'm at a conference and the first thing I'm going to do. Let me go back here really quick. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to maybe meet somebody at this conference and I'm going to want to get a business card and I can scan that business card and that business card will automatically be loaded into the CRM. No action required by the sales rep. And it's very easy for me then as a rep to come back to the sales CRM and Again through natural language. Ask the system to bring up that lead and then take actions that were typically very manual. Do research, enrich data, maybe find more information not only about the contact but about his business and then provide that information into the system to enrich it using enrichment tools like Apollo, Zoom Info, something like that. Now you have all these pieces, but it's not just enough to have the information, it's how do I take action on it. Maybe I want to schedule a follow up meeting or maybe I want to make a phone call. Well, how do I do that? I need to prepare, I need to get a meeting preparation package or a deck or something like that pulled together. AI can help us do those things too. Now what's very unique about Creatio's AI is it's all in one platform. It's not a bolt on like Agent Force or it's not trying to tie in, you know, legacy, I won't even call them legacy. I'll call them standalone LLMs into the system and having a bunch of your own data scientists do all this work, it's all native in Creatio so it has the ability to do all of this without heavy data science need. Now what's also important to understand is that the system can move past just that meeting preparation maybe in particular case we're getting ready, we've been with procurement and we want to start putting a quote together and we're preparing for a meeting that's going to have procurement in it. But a lot of times agents and reps don't just work in CRM, they work in places like Outlook. But like you see here, ratio AI follows you, it will go into Outlook with you and it'll help you interact with the CRM system while you're in Outlook. Now this is really important because we know sales reps spend a lot of time in these types of tools. Now what's also important to understand is there's other places where we're going to do work. Now as we can see, what we're doing is we're setting a meeting, we're getting a meeting set, we're scheduling that 30 minute meeting and then it's automatically going to send that meeting invite out with the, with the teams or the Zoom link and then it's going to be able to schedule that by looking at the availability of the calendar. Now once we've done all that, it's going to send this email off and then we're going to start the meeting. But you'll notice we're in Microsoft Teams Creatio AI has followed us there as well. So now we can ask things like who are the participants in this meeting? What is Cratio doing? It's getting that information directly from teams via API and then it's going to give you all of that information. Who's in the meeting? What are they worried about? What are the things that we've talked about with these people before? Maybe we can look at what discounts have I given them before? Because we see there are procurement managers on this call. These are all things that typically would have taken a lot of manual steps digging within a legacy CRM for a rep to be doing very manually. But also we completed that meeting and all of our notes, our transcript can be brought directly into the system. We can even have the system take action based upon the follow up messaging or notes that were captured in that meeting. All of this autonomously without having a lot of rep interaction but having reps verify this as we go. So that's that kind of idea behind how do we change the way we interact with CRM. But what other challenges do we have? Well, another one's a big visibility gap. Have you ever went into your CRM looking for something or wanted information out so you could build a report and you just couldn't do it? Why? Because data is all over the place. It's siloed. Maybe a lot of reps aren't using the CRM. It was as a joke Hunter mentioned legacy reps. A lot of reps just don't spend the time to input the data in the CRM because it takes too long. It's too much effort. This creates this shadow CRM people are still managing from Playboy. This leads to execution breakdown, lack of insight because or you have insight lag, your forecasts are distorted. I'm sure all of this sounds very familiar to you, but this has an ultimate impact on your business. Modern CRMs break this down ratio CRM and their AI allows you to build all of this based upon the information directly in the system because it's easier to use because it takes away a lot of these barriers that rep space. It also helps the sales manager. It allows us to see things like what's causing spikes in revenue forecasts or dips in revenue forecast. Where do I have lag? Or maybe there's some unique driver that's causing these changes. Well, I can ask Creatio AI exactly these things and it can give us insights based upon all of the different historical and systemic data that it has. But the other thing that we can do is we can use Cratio AI to do account insights. We can use it to look at selling patterns. One of my favorite use cases is using Cratio AI to recommend if I deliver this asset at this stage within the sales cycle, I have a 20% higher closing rate. Right. Creatio AI can see those things and then we can take the sales process through again all through natural language, engaging with AI without having to do a lot of the click throughs or the processes that we're used to doing very manually. Now we can see that we're doing things like scheduling calls and meetings. We showed this a little bit earlier. But we also can understand based upon our past interactions what this customer might be interested in. It's great for things like cross sell upsell. We can even make modifications to quotes via AI right off the bat, generate the emails, right. These are great generative scenarios. What's important to understand is that Creatio AI brings together all three patterns of AI, traditional AI, generative AI and agentic AI. Now I'm sure a lot of you probably have a little bit of angst or a little bit of heartache over generative AI. It was supposed to be the solution to the world. The problem is it's great for some minor productivity games but it doesn't ultimately solve the problems we need. That's what Agentix before. But all three of them working together is what truly gives you more visibility and streamlines your operations. So we've talked a little bit about the visibility gap, we've talked a little bit about pain and the complexity of it. But what is the real cost of that, that hidden cost of complexity? It's, you know, systems, your legacy systems don't move as fast. I mean, how many of you have said, oh, if I want to put in a CRM System it takes 18, 24 months, which means a lot of resources for a really long period of time. And then if you want to make a change to it, either you're doing it yourself with a team of Salesforce developers or you're paying a third party tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ratio is not that way. Matter of fact, I'm going to show you a customer here in just a little bit. They're managing 3000 users. It's like 2500 sales and support team and some administrative folks with just three people. 3,000 people on Salesforce, you're going to need a small army to manage that, probably 30 to 40. It's like one to every hundred. But all of these things, this hidden complexity is what really hurts you, right? You get locked in, you end up building all these things that you don't know how they work, how they're interacting with each other because they are not composable, they're all kind of bound together well. Creatio, this composable architecture that they use, it's pluggable, scalable, replaceable and most importantly it is expandable so that even if you start with a small set of use cases, all of these pre configured blocks and elements can be assembled to make your custom CRM neat. It's not about taking this massive solution. You're only going to use 10% of it and be charged for 100% of it. How many of you feel like you're paying millions of dollars a year for one of these legacy CRMs, but you're only using just the surface of it, but yet they're trying to upsell you for another few hundred thousand dollars or millions of dollars to add AI. All of this is built into one platform. At Croatia we're able to save customers over 50, up to 70% a year in their cost, in their costs that they're spending on these legacy systems by moving them to creatio. But it's also about being able to drive all these analytics and dashboards. It's not about having to have Quick View or Tableau or any of those things directly within creatio we're able to build all of these different elements manually or we can even use AI to build these reports and these dashboards for us and then we can use AI to deploy them as well. Now again for the enterprise folks are on the call. There's all the governance and controls that all everyone in it is going to want and demand SoC2 compliance, all of the role based access controls, WCAG, ADA compliant. Right, all of these things are there. But it's most important to understand that Creatio is this expanding kind of next generation AI driven CRM that is changing the game. Now I don't want this to sound too salesy, that's why I really want to focus on the functions that you're seeing here. Engaging in natural language with AI to change the way that CRM works not just from an operational standpoint, but from the visibility standpoint. How we're building it, how we're managing this is what allows us to move faster and quicker. The average implementation time for an enterprise grade deployment of ratio is less than nine months in many cases. I've got one right now. We're going live in less than eight weeks on both sales and marketing. This gives you an idea of how fast no code can can work and help drive these functions for you and other customers. Now the other thing that's important to understand is that creatio AI is built with a number of AI skills already built. Now that's great, but you're always going to need more. So imagine you want to use AI to build an AI skill. Now if you're not familiar with this term, an AI skill, a skill is something that the computer does. It's what AI does for you. In this particular case, we're building a supplier scoring model so that every time we onboard a new vendor, it's going to look at the data that I'm going to tell it is important. It's going to develop the scoring matrix, the scoring model which I can always modify manually later. But it's going to build this unique element so that I can deploy it directly into production so that I'm literally using AI to build AI and it's deployed directly into my CRM. Now I don't know if you've ever tried to do those types of things manually on Salesforce or something like that. My guess, it's going to take you three to six months. Something like this would take two days. That's how fast this can move. And again with all the governance and controls that it would expect. Now I can sit here and talk about all these great things, but it's really this no code tool set along with the pre built AI skills and the ability to modify those skills and make new skills that really drives things quickly. Now it's important to understand that this can be done with any CRM workflow. In fact, it's important to understand it's not just about me talking. The analysts are saying this too. If you're not familiar with Nucleus Research, they're an independent research firm like a Gartner or a Forrester. They're not a pay to play type of model. They go out and they talk to actual customers and they find out what that bottom line is. And what did I tell you? Move faster, save money. This is what actual customers are seeing as they were migrating off of Salesforce. Now when we think about this, whether it's traditional CRM, modern CRM, the most important thing is it fits the need for your business most of the time. If you've had CRM installed for any length of time, it probably doesn't fit your needs today. So you're going to either have to spend money to upgrade, modify, redeploy, or you can move to a more modern platform. And that's what we're talking about with creation. Now, the final area I want to talk about is typically this area that is a little bit personal. A lot of time you get reps that are frustrated, they're burned out, they can't control, consistently hit their quotas. It's too much effort, it's too difficult to do the things that should be simple. Well, what Creatio AI does is it helps address this burnout and this frustration. We want a players to stay a players and we want them to stay with us. We don't want sales managers having to micromanage every task and activity that our sales reps do. We want this to be easy to use. We want it to be systemic so that everybody has the same game plan. All of these things are available out of Creatio, out of the box, and they can be modified very easily for your business. We looked at the sales homepage earlier. It's not just about. It's not just about the. The different graphics. It's about understanding where you're at at any given time. It's using the information that you have because it's easier to put in the system now to understand where do I need to move do what if analysis. If my three biggest deals fall out, how am I going to look at next quarter and pull those things in? Ratio can help you achieve those. And ratio AI allows you to do those kind of what if analysis as well. But it can also help you plan future proof and execute with. With. With absolute tactical precision. The other thing is, is it. It makes teams happier, it makes teams and reps more capable. I'm going to quickly move ahead now and I want to bring in my friend from Creatio, the Chief Revenue Chief Growth Officer Andy Dobgan and one of the Creatio customers. Jim Slamacca is the Chief Revenue Officer at BSN Sports and you're going to get a chance to hear from him exactly how they're using Free Ratio to be so successful.

Tell us a little bit more about your company. You guys are an absolute leader in your market category. To what do you attribute the success

always attribute to our people. We have fantastic people in the field and here at headquarters supporting our folks in the field, people who really care about our mission, what we do for our customers and what we do to elevate a student experience. So creation has been a big part of what we've done the last five

years help me to understand how big is your sales team now?

We have 1300 salespeople in the field, about 150 managers. There's 100 people on our inside sales team here in this building and we have about 400 support people kind of around the country supporting everybody in the

field as well as a go to market leader. What kind of role do you see for technology in your overall sales picture?

Our digital enablement has been huge for us in really every part of the business. Creatio has helped us drive a lot of efficiency into the field. Getting our process into the field. We've been able to move our sales book size in the last five years, about 50 to 60% larger per sales pro and we expect that to continue as we drive more digital enhancements and more enhancements for Creatio in the future.

How we go nimble and quick is we don't need it. Involvement with creatio we did when we built it and we did when we launched. And again, because we had to connect our erp, it was a one and done exercise. But now because we've done that, all the ideas we have going throughout the year, we. We do not need it. What we're able to do here is we support 2000 salespeople and support people with three Creatio admin.

So our field people are actually seeing the real value because they're understanding exactly how they're going to go meet their goals. And as sales leaders, we worry about our number, we stress about the number, Salespeople worry about the number every month. And I'm always preaching to my people, stop worrying about the number because the number's never going to change unless you drive your activity and, and what's happening in your pipeline. Again, what we've done with process through Creatio has made that very clear. All of our salespeople, how they're going to win each month, how they're going to win each year. And that's really helped us get adoption quickly.

We are a carrot, not a stick shop, right? We don't want to beat someone into submission saying you have to use this new tool that we've invested in. So what we want to do instead is we want to give them something that they want to drift to. So what we did as a philosophy with Creatio is we put a bunch of stuff in there that actually helps make the day in the life of a stuff salesperson easier. So a lot of people laugh when we say like our adoption is 100% again it's not because we beat them into this place saying like you have to use this thing in order to do the day job. You have to use creatio.

You have field management, you have inside sales, you have online sales. So how do you align those teams and how do you manage those diverse processes?

Sure, we, we segment all of our customers by addressable opportunity and their needs and then we have specific sales teams that are assigned to each one of those segments. Creatio and what we've done in our CRM has made that very clear as to who's doing what, what our goals are and how we're performing against those goals. And everything's dashboarded very cleanly. So Creatio is an everyday tool and every hour tool for us with all

of those teams you have wide experience with different technologies out there. So how would you compare creatures modern no code approach to some traditional heavyweight enterprise jobs?

Well, like as I told you, we've been on this journey with our sales team and getting them aligned on sales process and goals and to a more performance based culture. If I would have been with one of your larger competitors as I wanted to change and adjust that would be an 18 month project, $7 million right now. If we need to change and adjust something it takes about 30 to 45 minutes and we're off and moving. We would not have been able to go on this journey and be as successful and as fast as we have been without creatio.

I know that you're a growing business, your needs are evolving. So how do you see evolution of your sales automation technology?

Digital enhancements will continue to play a huge role in our future both on the front end sales and back end support. It's happening now and as we want to drive in other segments we expect to attack digitally on a continual basis. So we expect that the digital tools we have now will help us continue to drive the efficiencies we've seen in the sales field far into the future.

And what's the take on the.

I sure, I mean is going to help us be more efficient. Right. It's going to help us make better decisions both on the front end and on the back end. It's going to help us honestly be able to reduce our need for hiring and again make our salespeople much more efficient.

So you heard it there from Jim. This is what they. And they've, they've been successful with doing this for the past couple of years now. I Met Jim for the first time about three years ago as they were first implementing and like I said, today they're up over 2,500 users on the platform and managing it with just three folks. If you want more information, there's a link that when the deck goes out, you'll be able to click on the link, but you can also go look and go Creatio BSN. You'll find it on YouTube. That full video, it's a much longer video. I just kind of pulled it together. But what's important for you to understand is that every aspect of their sales business is run directly in Creatio. And you heard it from Jim, they were able to move much faster. So as my time here is ending with you, I wanted to invite you to a couple of things. If you're interested in learning a little bit more about Creatio and what Brightpaws can do for you, I encourage you to pull out your phone, take a little screenshot there. You'll take it to your website. If you'd like to get in contact with us, we've got a form there you can fill out. But even more importantly, every year Creatio runs their flagship event down here in beautiful sunny Florida. This year is no different. June 11th through the 13th, if you want to click on that QR code or you can click on the Bit Ly link when it comes out later, you can join us. Let me know. You're welcome to be my guest. What will you learn? You'll learn about Modern Agentix CRM. You'll get to hear from the keynote speaker. This year it is Michael Phelps on what it, what it means to focus your efforts, your time to be the most successful at your business, just like he was the most successful Olympian of all time. These are the things that Creatio brings to bear and I would love to be able to run this journey with you. If you'd like more information. Www.brightballit.com My name is Jason Miller. It's been a pleasure today, Jason. Thank you so much. Incredible, incredible insights. The efficiency with which you're operating at Gearhard. What, what was your take on it? I'm blown away.

I think that Jason hit Danielle. I mean, most CRM solutions were built to record what happened and Creatio is built to drive what happens next.

I love that approach because now it's a very good way to put it. Very good way to put it.

Gerhardt and I think the difference is a visual analogy between a, a dead Filing cabinet and a live sales coach.

Nailed it. I appreciate the time, everybody. Yeah. And I, if anybody has any questions, we're here to help.

How can people reach you? Do we, do we have a LinkedIn?

Yeah, it, you can find me on LinkedIn. Bright Pulse IDs on LinkedIn. You just, there's, I'll, I'll bring up the QR code one more time for everybody. So if you want more information, you're able to come back here and pull it up for you. But if anybody has any questions, you can come to www.brightpulseit.com or go ahead and click on that QR code right there and then you can fill out the form, get in touch with us. I'd love to hear from you and I'd love to hear about the pains that you're feeling today, how we can help.

And you are Jason@brightpulseit.

Jason. Brightpulseit.com. that is correct.

All right. Well, I recommend anybody who wants to work smarter and not harder connect with Jason. He knows your pain and he knows the medicine to relieve it.

The one other thing as we wrap up here, I will tell you that it's industry agnostic too. Right. We see the different pains, everything from public sector to banking, financial service organizations, manufacturing, cpg, retail. It doesn't matter if you've got pains and you're using a CRM, whether it's B2B B2C ratio is an excellent choice for you in today's world. Thank you, Jason. Absolutely terrific having you with us today. I think we're taking a 10 minute break now, right, Gerard?

Yeah. But I have one more question. There is that term saspocalypse. How do you, what side of the fence are you on?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I'm actually going to defer that. I don't think there's a right answer on that one. I think it depends on the business, it depends on the business needs. You know, I, I, I think that both directions are going to continue to thrive for many years. But I don't know, I mean we're only three years into this whole AI thing. Gosh knows where it's going to go. We'll see.

Thank you.