The Simple SAAS Play with Shaun Clark

Oh, perfect. Excellent.

Welcome.

Thank you guys for joining us today. We're going to be talking all about what we're calling the simple SaaS play. And, you know, a lot of us are kind of in one or two places. I was asking you guys as you logged in, how many of you are already using HighLevel and it's part of your agency strategy? Um, and how many of you are thinking about using HighLevel or thinking about kind of getting involved in SaaS and having this marketing automation as part of what you bring to the table? I would say it was like a 70-30 split, 70% HighLevel users on the call. And the big question is, how do we make it usable? Like, we all get the idea, we want to add it to the equation, and John and his team have done an amazing job with it. But how do we, how do we simplify it to the place where we can offer it to our clients and have them use it and get the benefit from it? And how do we set up a simple drop sell for the clients we can't work with so that we can, we can start the relationship there, we can create an additional revenue stream creating more profitability, creating more stickiness with the client base, a better impact, a better result for the people that we actually serve, and ultimately, you know, better client retention across the board. And so that's the promise for today's session, really give you guys some specific how-tos on how to leverage this and kind of the approach to roll it out to your niche. So without further ado, Sean, thank you so much for coming on and unpacking this for us today.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. So, yeah, so I've talked to a lot of folks. First of all, I love this group. It's got to be my favorite group. All of you are really great marketers and run really fantastic agencies. I have an opportunity to meet many of you, and I will say it's just— it's awesome to talk to you because we always skip over the beginner stuff and we get to really talk about the fun, interesting stuff. So I think the best place to start here, in my opinion, is just understanding what I think is the potential that exists. And then from there we can really roll into how this plays into something actionable for your agency. So I like to start with Thrive because I think lots of you probably run into these folks now and again and they're very much on the drive. So for anybody who doesn't know who Thrive is, It's a publicly traded company. It is literally every Yellow Pages company you've ever heard of in your entire life glued together. It's— they're $1.3 billion in revenue, and they are, you know, YP.com, Dex.com, all that stuff. But the reason I show them off is because they have made a very hard pivot from the world of selling Yellow Pages to the world of selling SaaS. And that's exactly what we're talking about today. And they are doing— and this was fourth quarter, this number has actually gone up— but in the fourth quarter, they did $127 million for the year in recurring software revenue across 44,000 clients. And they're selling it through a base of local salespeople already that were already out in the world selling Yellow Pages. And what I think is really exciting about this is they're not actually selling a platform that they created. They're actually selling a white-labeled version of this platform here called Visita. And if we scroll forward in time to the first quarter of this year, what they're telling their investors is they've been able to do some pretty amazing things. So not only have they grown their client base, but they've grown the average revenue per user 26%, and their monthly churn is 2.5%. Those numbers are phenomenal. By any SaaS standard, but even more phenomenal when you think for a moment that this is the Yellow Pages selling software to their customer base, and their customer base is happy with the software they're selling, and they're sticking around and using it, and they're paying on average $304 a month, um, for that software. And so for me, this really represents what I think the future of all agencies is. I really truly believe that it's not just about selling software, but it's also about selling technology and bringing those both together in harmony to really create a lot of value. And I think there are going to be different ways that this gets done. I don't think that there's a one-size-fits-all approach. Um, but the good news is I don't think it fundamentally changes what all of you are doing. It simply becomes something you add. Some people will add it in the front end. Some people will add it in the back end. but it's simply just an additional item. And the reason to do it is because your customers will use it. And so let's, let's dive in and look at some really specific features that we're talking about when we say the word SaaS, because that's kind of a big, a big catch-all term. So, um, as a, as a really easy example, let's talk about something all of you are very probably very familiar with, um, something like, uh, let's take reputation management. So as an example, this is my favorite example because it's the only one I've got. The only single location business I've ever sold was this business right here, Alpine Heating and Air. When they came to my house 3.5 years ago to do my HVAC, I thought they did such a phenomenal job and I was so impressed. But when I went up to Google, I found that they only had 12 reviews. And the person, the guy who owned the place, he said— I said, well, why do you only have 12 reviews? And he said, well, it's because I'm an HVAC guy. I have no idea what I'm doing. And I said, well, what if there was a piece of software that would automatically help you get more reviews? And he said, oh my gosh, that would be amazing. How much would you charge me for that? And I said $300. And that was 3 and a half years ago, and I haven't really heard from him since. And he keeps paying me every month. And I think it's because he went from 12 reviews to 365, and he did so all automatically. And to really looking at the benefit for him, I watched him go from 2 trucks on his lot to 13 trucks on his lot last time I rolled by. He's probably somebody that Josh should— he should probably hire Josh at this point, just given how big he is. And I think that is a really good example of how something so simple, right, can be so impactful to his business. Now, of course, if I was an agency, I would have already ran out there and tried to sell him a website, all kinds of other things too. But I, but I'm not— I have no idea what I'm doing, so I didn't do that. But this is a really good example of where I think as an agency, all of you have heard about reputation management, you understand it. Well, that's one simple feature in the SaaS play that right there I think is worth $300 a month. But I think there are a couple of more that we can add that are also very simple. And I think so what I would say is let's start with just a quick rundown of when we talk about the SaaS play, what do we mean? And I think that— let me see if there's an easy— I should have thought about this before I— here we go. We'll just write this down over here. So it's— oh, you know what? Actually, isn't this— I guess that's what Google Docs are for, huh? We'll just do a quick— and I'm just going to literally write down the features that I would tell you represent the SaaS play for me. So we already went over reputation management. I would say web chat, two-way text messaging. Oh, hold on, let me cheat. I've got my list over here someplace. Okay, cool. Web chat, two-way text messaging, reputation management. Oops. Google My Business messaging. Google My Business, missed call text back, and Zoom keeps stealing the focus. That's funny. And then text to pay. Oops, I'm going to get it. There we go. Boom. Okay, so now don't forget Facebook integration. Oh, thanks. See, I knew, Rodney. And then Facebook Messenger. Because a lot of businesses continue to talk about and get leads coming in through Facebook Messenger. So what is WebChat? Let's look at WebChat. So I don't know if Dean is here, but yesterday I had an awesome opportunity to jump in and actually help. I don't know if those of you who don't know Dean, he runs an agency called Bug Biz Marketing. Yep. And so Dean reached out to me and he said, hey, I want to know about this crazy SaaS thing. Can you walk me through it? So I jumped on with him and we took one of his existing clients here, Tandler Termite and Pest Control, and we just did one thing. We put the web chat widget on their website and you can see it. We match the orange and everything looks really nice. So I think we put this on yesterday afternoon with him. And before the day was out, we ultimately— we'd already racked up 2 leads. So Jennifer came in yesterday and then Edward came in— oh, actually both yesterday, last night. Now, Dean was a bit unprepared about how fast this would work, so he's scrambling around this morning getting his client in here so they can get back to their leads. But, but WebChat is a really simple example of where you literally take that WebChat widget, you put it on the website, and overnight you're now generating free leads for your client. So check the box on WebChat. That's exactly how that works. Two-way text messaging. It's pretty simple. You can, you can go, you can go outbound right here. You can teach your clients how to do this. And by the way, real quick, just to mention, The SaaS play also, the basic SaaS play that we're talking about today, all of these crazy left menu items right here that are really meant, many of which are just meant for the agency. None of this involves any of these, these left-hand menu items except Conversations. This is 100% Conversations only. So if you're thinking about, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to train my clients on this, how is it gonna work? It's gonna be so overwhelming. It's not. You're gonna train them on one screen and one screen only, and that's Conversations for the basic SaaS play. Once you learn that, you can always expand out and get all custom and crazy, and that's awesome. But at the end of the day, today, that's all we're talking about, just one screen. Okay, so two-way text messaging, very easy. You can also do things like on the website, you can say, hey, text us, and that kind of thing. That one I think is pretty self-explanatory.

Hey, Sean, Paradox Studio is asking if the text messaging works internationally.

It does, yes. And I'm happy to jump on a call with you after this. More sometime to dive super deep on that. Google My Business messaging. Now, this one I'm going to take a minute to really talk about in depth because I think this has the likelihood of having the biggest impact on all of you, with or without HighLevel this year for your businesses. So for those of you who don't know what it is yet, Google My Business messaging is this idea right here. If I go to Google and I search Visionary Law Group or I search Alpine HVAC, what you're going to see is that there's now a chat icon that's sitting here. So I can actually chat with this business through Google. And what this does is it pops an in-browser chat experience. So you do not at all need to be logged into your mobile phone app. It doesn't expose your phone number, any of that kind of stuff. But now you're literally able to then chat with that business through Google. And what I think is so huge here, and I've really learned a lot more because we are on a beta with Google right now. So all of these chat messages are actually flowing into HighLevel from the businesses that we're connected with. But I've learned that this not only is a really awesome new way for businesses to connect with their customers, I also have learned that this is a big change at Google themselves, where they are trying to— they've seen the Yelps of the world, the Angie's List of the world, the Home Advisors come along and kind of steal their traffic as they think about it, and really steal revenue from them. And so they've decided that they're no longer going to be interested and be in the business of allowing that to happen. And this is a big change. So if you think about it, in the past, you would go to Google, you would search, and you would find something, maybe you would research something, but you would fundamentally leave. Right? You would make a phone call and leave. You would go to the website and leave. But now Google is saying, nope, we want people to come to Google, search, and stay. And that is really a massive, massive change. If we look at— let me see if I got the right— here we go. We get on the phone with the product team for this every couple of weeks now. And this nice lady right here, she's the product manager at Google for Google My Business messaging. And this is the roadmap for the rest of the year. And I think it's really illustrative of how impactful and big this can be. So they're already running an ads pilot, and we actually were part of this ads pilot. I can't remember how many agencies we have on it, 20 or 30. And this is so on a Google ad as a call to action, you can actually have it say, click here to message the business. And so that I think is big. Desktop support is coming in Q3. So they're gonna— it's not just gonna be a mobile-only product. I think that's gonna be huge. They're gonna have payment integration here. They're gonna have reservations in here. I really think this is one of those moments where if you've been around long enough, you remember there used to be this time when there weren't mobile-optimized websites. And there was that point as an agency where you could call and knock on the door and say, hey, did you know that 60% of searches are now done on mobile and your website looks like garbage. Can we help you with that? And you could create business. Or there was that moment where you could call up and say, did you know that your website isn't secure? And now that, that's being flagged by browsers and everybody sees that and you look like you're a security risk. Can we help you with that? Right? These really pinnacle moments where you could, you could make a lot of, hey, as a business and as an agency, helping people really take these digital transformations I think this is going to be massive. And just as a quick nod to the rollout here, this is Google My Business for Alpine Heating and Air. Today you can see in the last month they got 4,749 searches that Google tracked through GMB. And you can see that out of those searches, the green is the direct. Right now, Google My Business messaging only shows up direct, but as of the end of, I believe, next month, the blue circle, which is 82%, will also now start showing the messaging option. And if you think about that, that's really the people you want to see this messaging option. Those are the people that don't know Alpine Heating and Air. So they're more likely to not be customers. They're more likely to be trying to find an HVAC company, right? These are the sorts of searches you want to have that exposed to. So at the end of the day, I think that that is why this becomes such a massive change. As soon as they turn this on, I'm telling you, it'll be huge because all of these searches are already being done across Google today. And so I think overnight you're going to see a situation where the few crazy people who have this turned on will start to get a flood of business. And we've actually already seen this anecdotally in the restaurant space, because what it seems like is in restaurants, people often search the name of the business because they're going to go back to that restaurant. But they, but they often have to research that business because they're gonna like, oftentimes they're calling to order. Now when they go to the listing, they're actually seeing the message button. And the few restaurants that we've seen turn this on, it just blows up like you wouldn't believe overnight. And people love it. And I think it's also really great for the business because how many of us have ever called a restaurant or a business when it's busy hours and all of a sudden you're getting that like busy signal? You're just moving on to the next person, right? And so I think Google My Business messaging is huge. I also know from talking to Google that they're going to start utilizing it as a ranking factor. So people who have messaging on, that's going to be something that they're going to pay attention to because they believe that messaging provides a really good experience. And then within messaging itself, they're going to start looking at— and this is a longer-term play. You probably won't see it until, I would say, next year, Q1. But they're gonna look at how long are the conversations, how good are the conversations. They're already sending out surveys to people who do the conversations and asking how it went. And so over time, you're gonna see not only do you have messaging on or off being an indicator, but also does that business do a good job responding quickly and having meaningful conversations with their clients? These things will ultimately result in higher search rankings across the board. So just a few—

that's a great insight, right? It's one thing to say this is gonna help you convert those better, but Could this actually get them ranked more, which means more eyeballs, which means better results?

It's an interesting concept because Google's position, right, is that their goal is to return the best results. Like, that's what they would say. And I think that as they have a better— and we've seen this in the past, right? It makes total sense. Like, you know, people have run analytics, they know things like, you know, time on site, right, has become a ranking factor, or, you know, speed and all these other, these other sort of metadata metrics. Um, not just the content on the page. Well, this just makes even better sense if you can easily engage a business, and when that customer engages, they sit there and actually transact or spend time and have a conversation or, you know, submit back, you know, a positive survey. Those sorts of ranking factors make a lot of sense if you're just logically thinking about who you're going to put up top for that particular keyword in that particular area. So that's just something to really pay attention to as an agency and be ready for as time goes on. So that's my spiel on Google My Business messaging.

Don was asking, I think Rob had already answered it, but the question was, can you set up the automation when someone starts a message on GMB that they automatically get a response?

Yeah, in fact, just so you know, when you set this up in HighLevel, very shortly we will actually I hope Dean doesn't be hanging around in his account here, but the Workflow Builder went live to all accounts today, which is awesome. When you create a workflow builder, it's literally just a visual builder to do all kinds of campaign creation, automations, all of that. There's actually a recipe in here already for actually responding automatically to somebody. That'll actually be put in place by default when you connect the Google My Business messaging or the Google My Business integration inside HighLevel, which also turns on Google My Business messaging by default. We are doing that because Google has already told us that they are very adamant that there is at least some kind of initial response out to the customer. And so it's a very big deal for them. So we're going to make it super automatic. So right now, If you go to Settings, Integrations, and you connect the Google My Business page, it will turn on Google My Business messaging and in short order add that workflow. But in the meantime, you can absolutely do that manually. Awesome. And then GMB missed call text back. What's great about this is the first person I came in and told this crazy idea to was Josh, because he's an expert in all things GMB and all things marketing. My big thing is, so I have this crazy background in answering service, and I won't bore you with the details, but what I learned is, um, the, the value of a missed call is, is crazy high. Um, and at the same time, the number of businesses who miss calls right smack in the middle of the day when they think that they aren't missing calls is, is also crazy high. And so if there's a way that you can help businesses, um, save those missed calls, because really those Anybody calling into a business, right, they're not calling into a business for fun or to chat or to have a, you know, talk about the weather. They're often calling in because they want to buy something. And if, if you're calling the plumber, the lawyer, the dentist, the, you know, the termite company, it doesn't matter. If they don't pick up the phone, you're just, you're moving on, right? And the nice thing is there's an opportunity here to help our clients. And with GMB Missed Call Text Back, it's actually a very simple thing. We do this now automatically. Again, when you connect the Google My Business connection. But if you look at the Google My Business dashboard here, what we're doing is we're literally going into this info panel. This all happens under the hood. We're taking this primary number here and we're actually moving it to the secondary position and we're putting in an actual tracking number here and then forwarding the tracking number to the primary phone number. So from the business owner's perspective, they lose nothing. Nothing actually changes. They won't even know it happened. But two really important things will happen. One, you'll gain call tracking. So that means that overnight you'll be able to come in here to reporting and you'll be able to look at the call reporting and see all of the data around the calls coming in. And then back to this workflow builder, we already have— and we, we do this now— we put in place this recipe for an auto missed call text back. And what that does is it means that when that missed call happens, it automatically tags them, but also it sends out an SMS. And of course, all this is customizable. But imagine the next time somebody calls in and that business doesn't pick up, it says, oh, sorry, we're on the other line. We'd love to help you. Do you need to book an appointment? And at that point, first of all, that stops you in your tracks. I've had this happen to me actually in real life, and it really blew me out of the water, even though I knew exactly what it was. And then from there, You can take it from there. You can just say, hey, we'll call you back. Or you can say, would you like to book an appointment? And if that person responds yes or sure, sounds good, you can use the AI and all of that in HighLevel to say, oh, great, here's a link to our calendar. Grab a time that works for you. But the most important thing that you can understand here is that you're going to stop people from moving on to that next person down the line. And the great news about this feature is, A, easy to put in place and very automatic. But thanks to Josh and people like him, we've double-checked with— it has zero impact on their Google My Business ranking. And I think that's the most important part. And I think it's highly valuable as an agency. It looks like somebody has a question. Peter?

Yeah, I would say I just want to chime in 100% on this one feature just by itself, having the automatic text message go out. Has saved tens of thousands of dollars on a per-client basis just because people know, like, all right, I got the response. There's somebody real on the other side. They didn't ignore my call, and they prefer to engage via text message, via phone call versus phone call anyways. So now you've moved the conversation from a call to a text message that you can quickly move to dispatch. Um, you, it says million dollars right there. Just that one little aspect of this is extremely powerful. I think the question was about the call tracking and whether it was a useful replacement for CallRail.

Oh sure, I mean, of course we're going to say absolutely. I mean, from our perspective, we have full number pool capabilities, number swapping capabilities, all of that stuff. So we fully replace CallRail. And so it's really easy to come in here. And actually, I was pleased to see this. Dean's already on the— Dean's already done this himself. So You can see right here, not only can you come in and add number pools just like you can for CallRail, you can do all the dynamic number swapping, all that other good stuff. This gets a little out of the SaaS play, but I think it's important. The other big thing that we have is what we call attribution tracking. So not only can you track like, oh, I just got a call from this ad, which is cool, don't get me wrong, but you can actually track it all the way through to revenue. So you can track it all the way through to I got this many calls from this specific ad or this specific campaign, and it resulted in this amount of revenue, which in my opinion is a way better conversation to have with the business owner than I got you 10 calls. That's a good start. But if you could say I got you $100,000, man, wouldn't that be a lot better? So we absolutely have that in the system and happy to talk further about that on other calls. But I think that's a great question. And then let's see, what do we miss here? Oh yeah, text-to-pay. So let's see if I got a— oh yeah, okay, cool. So let me jump into another account here real quick and I will show you text-to-pay. I don't think we didn't get to that yesterday with Dean, but imagine that essentially what you can do is you can have it so that every time your customer wants to actually collect a payment from somebody, they can literally create a link that goes out and actually allows them to do this. So it's a very simple move. So inside the— again, back on the conversations page here, inside the conversations page, there's a button down here that says request payment, and you literally just click that. And if they already have their email in there, it'll skip this step. But then it'll just say, listen, what do you want to charge for? And you know, you could say, oh, you know what, I remember that, you know, we came out there yesterday and we did, you know, a little water heater service. And that was $150. And then we also, I think we were, you know, we replaced a, we replaced a pump or something. And then that was another $200. And now you can say, okay, I want that due on Saturday the 19th. And when you hit save, what it's going to do is it's going to go ahead and generate this link for you. And this link can be used anywhere you want. It doesn't have to be SMS, it doesn't have to be email. And then when you send this link out, it's, it's really, really simple. So you pull this up and you can see here that I can now pay via credit card. I can also view those invoice details. There's your water heater, there's replace the pump. And now I've actually collected payment from my customer very quickly and very easily. And it's just a very simple payment function. But I think it's also a very powerful payment function.

Um, can the currencies be customized for that in, in Australia, UK?

Yes, in fact, uh, this one right here is not in US dollars. I don't, I don't know what that is, but it is not US dollars. So absolutely.

What do we do if the client doesn't already use Stripe?

So when they— so when they— well, actually, we set this up, we thought about this ahead of time. When they click request a payment, if they don't already use Stripe, it'll actually run them through the Stripe setup flow. So it's already kind of built in and there's no cost to Stripe. So I mean, getting a Stripe account doesn't cost anything.

Obviously, Stripe is amazing.

Yeah, I highly recommend that. We have other payment gateways coming. I bet you— I haven't looked at the chat, but I bet you somebody asked that. And so PayPal is up this quarter and then in Q4 we'll bring on Authorize.net for all of you who have— or actually, or maybe NMI, one of the two. And actually, I'm glad I jumped in here. The other thing on the reputation management side, just real quick. So we have— when a new review comes in, it actually pops in as a conversation item, and the customer can actually respond to that review right here without having to go to another page. We also have the Google Dispute tool built in. And while those of you have used it, we all know this is an imperfect sort of thing. I still think it's a good peace of mind from a customer perspective. That you could say, oh yeah, and if you don't like the review, you can dispute it right here on the conversations page. Given that that is the best tool for the job at the moment, I still think there's a lot of power in that. So again, keeping them on one page, really driving home that ability. And then obviously Facebook Messenger, it's a very similar concept. It's just going to come in as a conversation item. The cool thing here, obviously, not only you can automate, by the way, off the back of all of these channels. So just as a general rule, you can create automations for responding. The Facebook one, we did just get an update here recently. We got access to what's called the human tag, which means that if you send back a response here, normally there was a 24-hour window that you had a limitation of responding. But now you can respond up to 7 days, which some of you would say 7 days would take that long. But you'll be surprised. Your clients can be a little slow when it comes to responding. So there's a gazillion things that HighLevel can do, and some of you are aware of that. But really, that right there is the feature set that we talk about when we're talking about the SaaS play. And then, but let's talk just briefly about, well, okay, cool. I love those features, Sean. Those are awesome. How the heck do we actually sell this thing, make money? How does that all work?

So that's been the challenge. Just real quick to check in with folks. Like, we get it, right? Yes, we want to sell software as a service. It's going to make us more sticky. It's going to help the clients. Stay logistically though. The client says yes, how do we charge for it? How do we get the billing set up? Give me a 1 in chat, and I know that's going to blow up, um, if that's been like your stick point. It's like, how do I actually roll this out without creating massive friction? Yeah, lots of— so, so that ideally, Sean, this, this is the promise, the simple SaaS play, you know, session here today. We're gonna show them how to get around that, that friction.

Exactly. So, so we recently rolled out a new plan we call the Pro Plan or the SaaS plan. And this is really where we have— we're focusing all of our time and energy. And the idea here is simple. So if, if you just walked in here, out of the— off the cuff, we would tell you, look, here are, here are 3 plans already built for you. And I recommend charging a little more for the base plan. But you can, you can very easily choose what you want to charge. You can set your complimentary credits because let's just for a second, let's remember, we're sending text messages and phone calls and, and then, and then also emails. And so think about the idea, like, I just signed up for your plan, what does it include? Oh, it has all these features, and I get 100 free text minutes or free text credits or whatever it is, right? So I can send, you know, what, and you get to define what that is. And then Right here you can also set your free trial periods, if or not, depending on if you want to offer a free trial. And then finally down here, and I think this is something not to be missed, this is your ability to take your Twilio costs and mark them up. So this is where you're determining, you know, if Twilio is charging you, uh, $0.0075, what are you going to charge your customer? And while that may not sound like a lot, I have to tell you, there are, there are people that make $100 plus a month just right here off this one feature. Per client every month. Um, and, and what's great about it is if your client were to go out to the market and look for text messaging software or something, they would find that you're, you're at or below markets and you're still able to make that kind of margin. So it just creates a great deal of margin here for you. And then right over here where this little square is, um, by the end of this month— so that's less than 2 weeks away— there'll also be email rebilling as well. So you'll be able to upcharge on the email usage as well. So out of the gate, might as well, right?

I mean, it's just like anything else. You make a little margin on, on what you're doing for the clients.

Exactly, exactly. And again, this is this whole idea, right? So let's just take a step back. If your clients are using text messaging software, they're already paying a markup, I promise. If they're using email software, they're already paying a markup. In fact, you know, a lot of people are familiar with MailChimp. What you probably don't know is MailChimp doesn't actually send any of their own email. They use this company here called SparkPost, and literally what's happening is SparkPost is sending the email out, Mailchimp is building the toolset, and then upcharging you on all of those emails. Well, now our goal here is to turn you into that same person and give you the opportunity to do the same. But from an ease of use standpoint, what are we talking about? So first of all, these plans are just here. They're already out by default. You can, you can change a couple of small options as you need to, or don't change anything at all. And then from there, it's very simple. You're creating a landing page, which we have a template for, and you're literally just having people go and sign up. And it's a two-step order form. It's exactly the way we do it at HighLevel. And after they fill out that order form, some magic happens. The user is configured and created. An account is added, the credentials are sent out. The credit card is captured. And now when that person actually logs into their account, they're going to see the exact feature set that you defined and no more. And then also all of the billing information is going to be— I actually have to go to a SaaS-enabled account to do that. But all of the billing information is going to be sitting right there. And we have a couple of test accounts, as you can imagine, but all the billing information is going to be sitting right there ready for them. And they can see all their billing history. I'll, I'll, I'll find one of those in a second. And so they'll be able to actually look at all of their, all of their charges. They'll be able to update their credit card, all of that stuff that you would want to be able to do. So that way you don't have to manage any of that. So at that point, what have we done? So we've literally created an account. We have that person in the account. They have the features that they need. They're being billed properly. And then generally from here, the next 2 questions I get are, yeah, but I have no idea how to set it up. Right. So that's cool. We actually offer a service to do this at HighLevel. So if you want, for if you go out to your client and say, make the sale, say, hey, look, it'll be $199 setup fee and then come pay us $100 and our team will get on with your client as your software team. Right, to actually set all of this up and do a small training on those basic features off that one conversation screen. So, and then the next question I get is, what about the ongoing support? And so we have, we, we have several partners who have, who do this, um, and I'd be happy to talk to anybody who has that concern later. But honestly, we've tried to make this as paint-by-numbers easy as possible, because I think that the potential here is insane. And I think that if you just look at somebody like Thrive, who they believe in 3 years they're going to be doing $500 million in revenue. Many of you are familiar with Podium, and this company is already over— this is old news, they're probably at $150 million now, but they're Easily over $100 million. If some of you are familiar with somebody like BirdEye, for example, here is— if you go back and you look at BirdEye, this was several years ago. They already— on the wrong link here— $24 million, 10,000 customers. This is an interview, I think, from 2016 or something. So there, there's company after company after company that, that, that's in the space that many of you already know, that you run into every day, that fundamentally are providing these same features. And I honestly believe doing customers a disservice, because while they're certainly able to create huge amounts of revenue for their, for their businesses, I think what's happening for all of you is that they're, they're really, they're just doing the software piece and they're not doing any of the services. And as a result, when those customers buy that software, they think they're getting this amazing marketing in a box, sort of all-you-can-eat, you know, magically market my business software, only to find out later on that there's all these other things that they need. But unfortunately, the BirdEyes, the Podiums, the Thrives of the world, they're not there to help them with any of that. That's just not what they do. And this is where I believe agencies can come out and create a lot of leadership in the space. And if anything, I will tell you, I think this is going to get better for you, not worse. And let me show you why. This guy right here, if you go to ChiefMarTech.com, he is famous for one thing. He's a very smart guy, but he's famous for, for, for this. He has kept track of every marketing piece of software created since 2014 when there were 947 of them. There are now 8,000 of them. So imagine, if you will, your customer, they have to go out into this massive sea of software and figure out how to glue all this stuff together. Tell me that's fun. Tell me that's what they want to do. Tell me they're even qualified to do it, right? No. So imagine if tomorrow you as an agency came in and said, hey, listen, you don't need any of this stuff. You can stop paying for all of it. I have all of this for you. It's a one-stop shop right here. Let's just go ahead and get you going, and I'll help you get it all set up and rocking and rolling. I will tell you, the sigh of relief I believe that you will see from your customer will be amazing. And I think that you'll get a yes every time. So this to me is this massive opportunity that only grows over time. Because I promise you, this, this, this latest slide is a year old now. I guarantee you there are more than 8,000 solutions now, and it's only going to continue to go up. So as an agency, I think there's a huge opportunity for you here. So I think I got it all.

Yeah, no doubt that, that was awesome. And really the whole idea here is have something that you can plug into your existing clients to be stickier, to generate better results for them. Um, but then also have that drop sell so that the client that— or the prospect that's in a closed market, the prospect that just isn't the right fit for your services, which most of us is the lion's share. Like for us, 90% of our leads don't qualify just because they don't make enough money, they're not the right fit. Uh, give them something that's going to be really powerful and impactful and create an annuity, so to speak, like an additional stream of profitable revenue.

Absolutely. And Robin, actually, I realized mentioned something I left out. I never know who I'm talking to. I'm sorry. I have this assumption. Always also remember, HighLevel only sells to agencies, right? And as a result, we're all white label. So not only do your clients not have a clue that we exist, we try to go a little further. They're not logging into our app. They're logging into your app. So this is an agency called Law Hustle that uses us. This is their login screen. This is their iPhone app. And they also, of course, we have an Android app as well. So it's an end-to-end solution as a platform that really creates a ton of value for you. And so the white label aspect, I apologize, I missed that. But yes, that's a great thing. And what Josh just mentioned, I think, is huge as well. Gosh, who did I just— I heard this from the other day. They're kind of doing the same thing where they're— what Josh is doing is running into these leads where he could really only work with at a full retainer, really the top 10% of his audience. Right. But if you run into those leads that you can't necessarily help because they can't afford in the full way that you want to, this is a way to get them started. Right. This is a way to create instantaneous value. And as you talked about the annuity, it reminded me, the other thing is, if any of you ever want to sell your business in the future, and some, some may not, but any of you who ever want to exit your business, if you go today on a pure services revenue stream and say, yeah, how much is this worth? You're going to find that you get a 2 to 3 times multiple on your services revenue, because the thing about services is it tends to be lower margin, it tends to be lumpier, um, it tends in the sense that it tends to go up a little bit and down a little bit and up a little bit. Um, and then, and it's— and it tends to just be harder for people to roll in and just kind of have that annuity-style stream of revenue. But software is the opposite. It doesn't require a bunch of extra staff, it doesn't require a bunch of scaling up, and, and, and the line tends to be a little bit more up and to the right and very flat, which is why on the software revenue, you're, you're going to easily see a 10x revenue multiple, um, over your services revenue. So as a result, just keep that in mind as you move forward in thinking about your exit plans for your agency. And that may be 10 years down the road, but I still think it's worth noting.

Good stuff. I think everybody sees the value. A lot of us are already using HighLevel, and ideally this SaaS mode gives you the ability to simplify getting people the ability to choose your option and then get signed up. Make money on the recurring and then also make money on the, on the rebilling. I know you had a special incentive for the people that were thinking about testing out the Pro plan and the SaaS plan.

Yeah, absolutely. So for this audience, you know what, what we're going to do is we're going to give all of you a 30-day free trial at the $497 level, which is the Pro SaaS plan if you're interested. And so we'll drop a link here. I think, Josh, you may actually have it. Yeah, there you go. Perfect. And so For those of you who want the 30-day trial, you can use Josh's link there and we'll get you upgraded. Robin can also help run that down if you have any questions on that. And then, and just as an easy way to get in and just try this out, we've been amazed how quickly people are able to put this model in place, especially this group. Because again, if you just call all of your existing customers today and you say, hey, Did you hear about Google My Business messaging? Like, pick your lead in, right? We have this new platform or we have this new feature that is going to allow you to start pulling those people in and getting more free leads. Oh, and by the way, we have this web chat widget, that kind of thing. I think there's a very easy lead in there. We have a WordPress plugin, by the way, for those of you who— I think this is WordPress. Yep. Who haven't seen that. So it's called Lead Connector. So when you're inside HighLevel, if you go in and actually to any of your accounts and you go to the web chat section, you can see a very easy link here. Chat widget, get it for WordPress. And of course you can get this within WordPress as well. And again, it's generically branded just because we couldn't create one for every agency. But that again, trying to make sure that we're keeping your customer from knowing the HighLevel brand. Love it. Question.

Love it. And this is the idea, right? The whole idea is this simple aspect of it. But the reality is this is something that has a lot of other functions that you can bring to the table. I think the mistake we made early and some of the other agencies tried to make early is trying to bite off more than you can chew right out of the gates. So like, oh, let's set up funnels, let's set up marketing automation, let's set up live chat, let's set up all of this. And the goal here is simplify, focus on those 5 features. That just about any client can plug in or any prospect could plug in and start to use and then increase the value that you're bringing to them over time as opposed to trying to take it all down at once.

Exactly, exactly. And you know, again, HighLevel, if you don't know us, I mean, we really are committed to being the agency platform. So we have a ton of tricks up our sleeves. So, you know, I check out the Workflow Builder. And that kind of thing. It's full marketing automation, CRM, you name it, and we'll continue to blow this out. I mean, we have Outlook calendar integration still on for now and the end of the month. We have PayPal integration on for the end of the month. We have a new workflow bot that does booking that's on for the end of the month. So we have a lot of those things next quarter. We're going to be launching a hosted version of Twilio. I don't think I told Josh this yet, but we're going to be also adding WordPress hosting in. So there's going to continue to be a ton of stuff that we add as a platform. But I find that when I go too crazy down that road, what I often run into is people get overwhelmed with the features. They get excited, but then they get in and they get overwhelmed. My purpose here today is really simple. I want to, I want to say, I want to go back to this simple list that I started with. These are the items that I truly believe that almost anyone could put in place at their agency. And create amazing amounts of value overnight and always grow from there. And I really want to see more people go there because I can see the Thrives, the Podiums, and the BirdEyes of the world doing this en masse and being incredibly successful with it. And I think they should be the last people to be successful when, when coming up against an agency, because all of you folks can do and do already so much more for your customers.

Sean, can we open up for questions? Because I know, of course, yeah, we've got about 130 high-level users here.

I'm gonna be— I'm gonna be— I'm gonna be quiet about this.

I wanna, I wanna dive into Dan Starn's question here. Dan, let me see, let me see if you can unmute yourself real quick.

I'm glad we're doing—

hey, it's a lot harder than keeping up with the chat.

Yeah, exactly.

There he is.

Hey, hey Dan, go for it.

Hey Josh.

Hey, hey, great.

So yeah, so how should I— I have a company and I, um, I don't really do the work in my company. I get, you know, other obligations. And yeah, I want to make somebody the expert. I'm all in. I've already paid in advance for a year of the Pro Plan. I have hundreds of customers. Um, I have a sales team. I actually even have a 2x President's Club trip winner from Thrive. I'm interviewing somebody.

I've always—

I have somebody else who worked at that company. I'm interviewing somebody for sales leadership who was pretty high up at that company. So like, I love this. I'm all in on everything you're saying. But from the implementation standpoint, even though it's relatively simple, I can't be in the— get in the nitty-gritty and figure it out and do it and even learn to teach. Yeah, so as far as hiring and, you know, put— making somebody else my expert in my company to kind of own it, how would you approach it if you were me, if that makes sense?

Ask Josh.

Yeah, we recently just— we recently just did this because just like you, right, we run a successful agency, we're focused on the top-level priorities. Um, we, we recruited, right? We recruited within the HighLevel community to find someone that really understood HighLevel, that was excited about HighLevel and hired them full time. And that's what they're doing full time. So their main function as we get clients, making sure that those clients are set up correctly on HighLevel, interfacing with our account management team, making sure that that account management team, you know, when they're stuck and they don't know what the problem is, they don't know how to answer it. They've got an expert to fall back to and also helping to kind of come up with the promotional strategies within our company. So there's people now that understand HighLevel that aren't going to go sell it themselves necessarily. So that was what we did, and that would be my suggestion.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of different variations that I've seen. I mean, some people are looking for offshore VAs, you know, paying $3, $4, $5 an hour going that route. And there's a huge community of that that's happening. There's people who, you know, maybe they're a smaller agency, almost like a freelancer. And you can kind of run the model that Josh did where you're recruiting someone like that where, you know, they might not have the most in-depth agency, but if they see an opportunity where they can work full-time with your agency, they might jump on that right away. There's also third-party companies out there that provide support. We also have seen agencies where you might have someone who's really strong at doing ad campaigns or doing other services, and what those agencies are doing is, you know, adding more responsibility to those individuals they're buying our priority support, which gives you an account manager on our team. So that individual has a point of contact because, you know, you might have special needs within your agency, understanding the nuances of the customer base. So that might be an option as well. So there's a lot of different variations. It just depends on what you're trying to achieve within your agency.

How does—

I think Dan, Dan, at your size and at your scope, like with the amount of salespeople you have and the amount of clients you have, I think a dedicated, manager of that product would be a really smart move.

Yeah, I want to do what you did. That's— it's an answer, kind of obvious, but thank you for giving it to me because I hadn't done it yet.

So Dan's, Dan's on the high end, right? So, but if it were me, and I'm thinking about this all the way, so if you're thinking, oh wow, I don't have, I don't have near that, that level, here's how you put it together, in my opinion. Even if you're a single owner operator, I don't care if you have zero employees, go make the sale. Okay, go use our setup for SaaS, which is right here. And then just as a quick nod to— there's a gentleman by the name of Matt Tocino who does ongoing support, and I'll drop his Facebook link here and you can all flood him with messages. And I think it's $297 or something. And so he does ongoing customer support for SaaS. And, um, and so, and so far I've had really good feedback. Obviously don't just believe me. Um, definitely ask for—

it's good.

Matt's, Matt's like white label support service is awesome. We use it as well.

Oh, there you go. Josh uses it. Okay. So even if you were a single owner operator and you had none of the setup and none of the scale, literally make the sale, have us set it up, have Matt support it, go make another sale, rinse and repeat until you get up to scale.

Yeah, and it also comes down to the delivery, right? Like, you know, if you look on this list, if you follow these checklist of items that you set up for customers, it's actually not difficult. Complexity comes in when you're starting to do more advanced features where, you know, it's very niche-specific, which all of that's needed. And when you're working on that model, that's where you're gonna need specialization. But if you're on the, you know, what we recommend is really starting out on this light side. Because at the end of the day, these are the core features that businesses don't have, but they really need it. So if you start there, you're putting yourself in a good position for the long term.

Dan, did that answer your question?

Yes, thank you.

Sweet. I know a couple, a bunch of you guys have questions. So let's, let's squeeze every, every, you know, ounce of juice we can out of Sean and Robin while we've got them here. Who wants to go next?

I do.

Okay.

Hi guys, uh, quick question. I'm, I'm top class newbie. I just secured my first client in the dental niche, uh, 3 days. Yeah, fantastic. I'm excited. And I've been working with Matt. Matt has been making my, um, my snapshot a really solid snapshot. My question is, because I was just alone, I was on the $97 plan So now that I've got a client, I want to start straight up with the SaaS mode.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So my question is, with this free trial that you have given us for 30 days, if I sign up today, am I getting the next 30 days free to get onto the Pro plan?

Robin?

Uh, yeah, so when you sign up, basically we're turning on all the Pro features. And so, yeah, so for the next 30 days you'll get access to every possible tool, basically, and moves it up to the—

and unlocks all the features. Yeah.

And the— I think someone asked this question in the chat as well. You can do all these features at our agency level, but the features that you'll be missing out on is the ability to do rebilling, you know, where you can charge the customer for all the data usage on text messaging, calling, things like that.

Um, we're on track My question, I don't want to take a lot of time for others. My question is just that for the next 30 days, am I paying, right? If I sign up today with the link here, am I paying money right away or it's free for the next 30 days? That's my question.

No, no money. Yeah, it's free.

Okay. Perfect.

Perfect. That's all I needed to know.

Thanks guys.

I appreciate you.

Yes, sir.

And it's something special on the call. It's something special we did for Josh and the community here. So. Even if you are a customer, we'll upgrade your account, uh, for the next 30 days for free. So we'll unlock all the features. And if you're a net new customer, um, you'll get access to the platform for the next 30 days.

Great.

Thanks. Appreciate it. Awesome.

Hey Peter, why don't you unmute?

I'm unmuted. Thank you guys. Uh, I run an agency on the East Coast in Connecticut. We have about 700 clients and I gotta tell you, we use Yext for local claiming. It is a total nightmare. So I saw during the presentation the online listings tab. Please tell me you have a solution for that nightmare.

Uh, you know what, we, we use Yext. So, okay, um, we, I mean, we, we offer— I mean, you know, the, the local listings thing, we, we looked at it and, you know, there's 3 zillion different providers. But, you know, the thing about Yext that we found was, A, we could get a much better deal at size and give that same deal out to agencies. So, you know, we got it for $30 a month. So for most people, that's a really good savings. And then, you know, they have— they just have deals with different sites that you can't get because they paid for those deals. And so, you know, from my perspective, Um, I, I mean, I honestly in my heart believe that listings will be less valuable a year from now than they are today. And so we're just going to ride it out with eX for now and call it a day. But I, I totally feel you on— I think there are very few perfect solutions there.

Well, I tried all the alternatives like Sign Up and all that, so still eX is the best in the industry. So I guess my question is, it's like a POS system. If you guys, if you guys get discounts based on volumes, are you giving us that, those discounts?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, uh, that's how we get it. That's the $30. Yeah, that was the idea.

Yeah, the X-Factors that we offer, it's their Knowledge Base Pro, which I think is retailed at $120, and at our volume we got it down to $30 per location.

Then it's a no-brainer.

So which is less than we pay at our size as plumbing and HVAC SEO. So I mean, there's definitely a volume benefit there.

Josh, we need to move you.

So we can basically drop the Yext and move it to your platform?

Yeah, you can move all your existing Yext locations over and all of that good stuff. They're very good about that.

All right, guys, I'll let someone else ask questions. Thank you so much.

Uh-huh.

Question. I got a question. Who else wants to unmute?

I got a question. Okay, so this is more from a positioning standpoint, I think, for my niche because it's landscaping. Um, the hardest part, and I've already kind of tested this out with using GoHighLevel with my clients, and the hardest part that I'm finding, uh, for them is because, you know, they need to have it simplified. It's very, you know, but the biggest thing is they use CRMs already, like that Service Autopilot or ServiceNow, things like that. And it's hard for them to break out of that because as much as this is like a great lead generator communication tool for their leads, the biggest problem is having to have that move into the transactional side, right? So, and not only that, but these service like Service Autopilot, they book out their team and their crews and everything through these calendars and stuff like that. So for them to have to move and shift, it's, it's not even the owners or the operators that are doing that. It's people in the office that have to learn this whole thing and try to figure out how to— and it just seems like they just get really frustrated and then they're just like, no, just go back to the old way. I personally feel like they're losing out on higher conversion rates by not using this tool, right?

You're correct.

But it's really hard to position it and I'm trying to figure it out.

So, so are you— what, so when you tried it, um, did you just start them off on the conversation screen?

No, they This is new for me now learning this, so I think—

There you go.

So there is the mistake, right? I totally get where you're coming from. It's funny, I actually talked to the CEO of Service Autopilot the other day. And, but, you know, we see this all the time. Remember, in every organization there's a sales and marketing function, and then there's an operations function. We are not trying to ever replace the operations function for most, small businesses. I mean, we will add invoicing and estimating next quarter, um, and that, you know, for, for one man in a van, that will probably do great. But we are ultimately not trying to replace people who have already invested in these other products. What we're saying is, look, we're on the front end, we're like your front door, right? And as soon as that lead gets to the right spot, boom, boom, you're into Service Autopilot, Service Titan, you name it. Yeah, keep— yeah, go do your thing. We're not going to be upselling them Anything. So that's where you should focus. And you should say, you know, you don't need to change anything you're doing right now. Don't take the fear away from them. Like, this doesn't change anything. What this does is it makes it— it nurtures that lead, right, to that point where they're ready to be sold, or they have been sold, and then we just boom, move them in. And you might have to do a little bit of work, like for example, like just making sure there's a Zap or whatever set up for Service Autopilot, or an API. That's the problem. Or even just an email though, right, at some point. But the reality is, and actually this is something that we're also going to be launching, um, well, I'm pulling, I'm twisting Robin's arm for next quarter, is, um, so it'll first, we'll start doing a daily report that says, hey, listen, congratulations, you got 100 new conversations today. But sorry to break it to you, you actually lost 90 of those because you didn't respond to them within the first 5 minutes. But once we do that, we're gonna have a little button that says, hey, click to solve this issue. And the idea is that we're gonna have a done-for-you nurturing service, right? And I think this will be a huge hit because I think that it'll help a lot of folks like you potentially where you in the short term will push on this conversations-only flow, and I think it'll be incredibly successful for you. But actually, even if those businesses bought in hook, line, and sinker, they're still going to miss a lot of these conversations, not going to get back to them fast enough. So we'll create that rollover service as well as another additional add-on that you can provide to those folks. But in order to solve your current day issue, it's really simple. Just say, listen, it's just conversations. As soon as they're ready, we'll move them into Service Autopilot, or we'll move them into Service Titan for you, right? That's how you should address that.

Okay, a couple, a couple people mentioned the, the link's not working if you've already got an existing account. What's the best way for them to connect with you guys on that?

Just email Robin.

Yeah, actually, can you, Josh, can you want to put out your email and you can send it to our team and we can make that happen?

Yeah, is that cool? Yeah, just email Josh. One way or another, we will absolutely get you done.

Yeah, we'll get you guys taken care of.

No, no worries.

Did that help?

Oh yeah.

Who else? Who else has got questions for, for Sean and Robin on this? Any burning issues? Ricardo mentioned a couple times he's seeing this service, um, patient pop in the, in the chiropractic.

Are you kidding me? I know all about PatientPop. What do you want to know?

What's the question on PatientPop? You mentioned it a couple times in chat. Ricardo.

Hey guys, how you doing?

Good, how are you?

Hey Sean, doing good, thank you. Yeah, um, one of my clients, a chiropractor, yeah, uh, his, uh, assistant, actually, um, COO, chief operating officer, reached out to him. And when she came back to the office She said, hey, my dentist is using this thing called PatientPop and it's so awesome. So he checked it out and then he reached out to me and said, hey, I looked at this PatientPop. And I was like, okay, let me check them out now. And when I checked them out, I was like, whoa.

So I realized what's so whoa about them, by the way, because of this, this exact call, SAS. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So because, by the way, here's the pricing just in case anybody needed it. I told you I knew a couple of things. Um, so, okay, so their play is really simple. Um, so they're gonna— what they're gonna do is they're gonna say, oh, um, you have a website? Yeah, your website's terrible. We're Patient Pop, we have some magic secret sauce nonsense. Um, what we're gonna do is we're gonna come in, we're gonna, we're gonna replace your website with a WordPress template that we reuse all the time. It looks the same. It's going to look like this. And this is your classic— oh, actually, sorry, this person ditched them. That's not your classic one. Your classic one. Let's see if we can catch one here. So they come in, they do a new website for everybody is their pitch, and then their goal is maybe this is them now, and they give them a new website and then they come in and they price it all basically out with this model here where it's like, hey, listen, and this is okay. So this is something I cannot emphasize the most. My observation through and through is that businesses are insanely price sensitive. Now you may all say, no duh, but what I mean by this, and this is where I think the SaaS play stands to really crush it, is the reason why PatientPop has been so successful. And by the way, they've raised $70 million. But the original story of PatientPop is they're in some really expensive California city like Malibu or something, and they literally walked around Malibu and got to $1 million in revenue by walking around. And what they did is they would go to every doctor and they'd say, hey, listen, what about for $600 a month, what if we could do your marketing for you? And I think that in the mind of the customer, they just, they cannot qualitatively analyze the difference between you at more than $600 and $600. They just hear the price and they're like, $600, yes, I'll take a bet on it. Right. And $3,000, I don't know, I'll try the $600 first and see how that goes. And what you'll see here is that they're not doing that much. They're actually just putting in a WordPress website, more or less. And then what they do is they walk them up the value ladder. And by the way, they do some other tricks too. They've got a 12-month contract that they put in place. So they automatically have the 12 months of cash flow there that they can't break out of. They're really, really, really aggressive about not letting you out of that contract. So this is where I think SaaS is very, very key, because as an agency, all of you, what I love about you is that you go above and beyond for your clients and you try to create these tremendously awesome results. But you also know there's no way to do that and collect $600. Like they, like, it just doesn't compute, right? But from the customer's perspective, they don't quite, they don't realize how amazing you are. And unfortunately, if you don't ever get them as a customer, they're never gonna know. So this is where you come in with a SaaS plan and you're like, hey, it's only $300 a month or $500 a month, or pick your price so that way you can get the yes, create some initial value, and then upsell them, I believe, into your better services, your greater services. Once they know and trust you because you've been able to give them an easy yes out of the gate. Yeah, I see. Agreed.

Um, definitely. Um, there were some chiropractors actually of Maine, two chiropractors in my area. I mean, like within driving distance, like 5 miles away from me. And when I checked them out, scroll down to the bottom of their website, for sure it was PatientPop. And then I reached out to the owner, you know, I said, hey, you know, I talked to him and he told me about about their services, and I definitely wanted— I actually had a scheduling conflict for today's meeting, and I rearranged that so I just—

I could be on this call right here today.

Well, there you go. And there, and there's your pricing that you're, that you're, uh, competing with. But, you know, all right, so, so now— so hopefully I helped not only give you the SaaS play but also the patient pop answers. Thank you, appreciate it.

It's awesome. Thank you so much. Good stuff. Um, Mike Corso, we're gonna come to you next. I'll just say the other thing that he did there you guys should all pay attention to You know, these larger companies that have a big footprint, not hard to reverse engineer who their clients are. And if you can find an angle to approach them, there you go. You've got, you know, hundreds of prospects in, in your ideal space.

Oh, totally agree with that. Yeah, so anything that's web-based, built with, is great. Um, they are on the spendy side, um, but you know, if you wanted to know all of the BirdEye customers that were out there, here you go. Here's your BirdEye customers. Um, and by the way, you can see the trend here, um, clearly doing not doing half bad. You know, you can see the Podium folks out here. Again, 21,000. I mean, you can just see how insanely good the uptake is on these services. And my problem here is to the business, this is a disservice to all of them because they clearly need more than this. And the BirdEyes and the Puddings of the world are never going to offer it. So this is your opportunity. Just go talk to half these people. And ask them how they feel about it. And they'd say, I hate that, I hate the annual contract, I need more and I can't get it. These are your openings.

Hey, Mike, go ahead, let's unmute.

Um, yeah, hi, thanks. So I was chatting with Robin actually about automotive dealerships. So I'd like to maybe just, you know, 2 minutes, if you guys can give me your view, like a real 30,000. Oh yeah, let's talk about automotive dealerships, automotive dealerships, and then also Robin mentioned, you know, how Gubagoo is, you know, involved here. And I was wondering, what are they doing? Is this their chat feature? Is it just the high-level integration here? But go ahead.

Oh, I wish, but no. So Gubagoo, who should go on record as having one of the worst names ever, is crushing it like you wouldn't believe in the automotive space for one very simple reason. They are making life so much easier much easier for these auto dealers. So, you know, if you're an auto dealer, and I think if you're anybody, you know, how much technology do you think these auto dealers get pushed on them all the time? A truckload. They don't want another app, right? They want to sell more cars. So what the Gubbagoos of the world did is they figured out, you know what, they said, listen, put our widget on the website, and you know what, we'll just take it from there. We'll just have more people come in and buy cars from you. How's that sound? And the dealership's like, what do you mean? I don't have to train anybody? No, no, you don't have to do anything. Just put the stupid piece of code on and we'll sell some more cars for you. And that's exactly what they do. You put the—

So this, just to interrupt, this Toyota widget here, this is you?

Right here. No, right here. No, it's not us. This is Gubbagoo.

It's not you. All right, so where are you in the Gubbagoo ecosystem?

Gubbagoo and us aren't related at all. I just know who they are and I know what they're doing. And it's the model of the future. For a lot of businesses.

Yeah, this could be you.

Yeah, well, yeah, that's the play here. We're showing you Guggaboo and we're saying you need to have it say powered by Mike Corso or Corso CRM, and you go out to the automotive industry and sell your brand, and you can do exactly what they're doing.

And so what they're doing in this situation, just for everybody who doesn't know, is they're literally taking the conversation off the site and walking that person all the way into the dealership and handholding the person all the way through. And so on our side today, we actually have people who do this. So we have a platform that basically allows you to take for bigger customers. If you have— let's say you said— somebody said I had 700 clients. We have like a rollover system. So if you have like a team of agents in-house or VAs in-house, we do this with people. You can actually do this right now with HighLevel. Where if a chat comes in and they miss the chat or the client doesn't respond, it rolls over automatically. And Robby, you might wanna queue up a demo of that. But, and then you can actually respond and become this service. And so if you wanted to provide this, this is absolutely something you can do today. But I believe this is really where things are going, right? Because this will help us first sell in the software. And then as the software is providing the value, as we're creating those outcomes for people were then able to come back in and actually pick up some of those conversations that they're currently dropping. And I don't know, hopefully there's no bad blood here, but do you happen to know Ryan Hartigan, Mike?

No.

You should know Ryan Hartigan. So Ryan Hartigan is in the automotive space, and what he has done with HighLevel blows my mind. He has full integrations with all the inventory management systems and and the credit systems that all these guys use. And he's built it into HighLevel so that they can actually check inventory on the lot and run a credit app all, all during the, all during the chat.

Wow.

So you might want to reach out to him.

Yeah, I partnered with a, a platform that's competing with AutoTrader and CarGurus. It's called Shop Smart Autos. So I've created shopsmartautos.com.

There you go, exactly.

Yeah, and they, they have the same inventory.

Awesome.

Capture.

Yeah, I don't know what Blackbook integration is or HomeNet or anything. I, that's, that's all foreign to me, but it's— I've seen it in action, it looks really cool. So I think though, but anyhow, I think this is a really good example of something that you could move towards and I think would be highly successful for you.

All right, so just, just to summarize then, I could go to a dealership and say, hey, uh, we can throw this, you know, snippet of code on your site and pop up this widget just like we're seeing. I may not mention Gumugu, but I could say— and it's all basically, I'm getting it all from you guys.

It's all right. Just say, hey, look, put this on our— put this on your website and we'll take it from there and sell you some more cars. How's that sound?

Yeah, okay, great.

And Jennifer here, it could be Jennifer. Who's next?

Yeah, so Nick, to clarify, yeah, so Right now you can set it up where that chat starts and then the client can either log in and respond, or you could put somebody on your team and task a team to follow up and kind of nurture. That's what he's talking about there. Or HighLevel has third-party partners that you can send those leads into that service and let them help nurture the leads that come through.

And I think— and then also the other thing that Nick's talking about is the difference between a real-time live chat as well as an SMS chat. So We'll have a real-time. So the reason we didn't start with the real-time live chat, very important point here. Most of you work with business owners. Like, let's go back to these folks right here. They're not sitting there all day long ready to take those chats. And the problem with a real live chat in 99.9% of cases is they can't get back to them fast enough. The person leaves the website and they're gone. So by turning into an SMS conversation, and this is exactly what happened here, they got their first 2 leads last night. Well, guess what? They didn't respond. It's been hours. But don't worry, because they can still get back to them because we turn it into an SMS conversation.

Now, once Podium does—

by the way, Podium, exactly what Podium does, submission that goes to a text. That's right. That's right. And so what you'll— as we don these more live answer features, we'll also give the option to do real-time web chat as well, because we'll know that the response times can be high.

Yeah, great questions, guys. I'm sure we could go for hours here, but I know Sean and Robin are both really, really busy. Hopefully you got some good insights here. Bottom line, this for Sean, like, get us to like the fundamentals of what we want to do. This thing can do 1,000 things. It can replace all of your softwares. But the reality is you got to start with something simple. And that's what this, this simple SaaS point.

And that's the idea. Like, you know, totally. And I think that's the most important thing. Hey, can you get to the place where this small feature set is in place generating value for customer, generating revenue for you and creating stickiness for you, which is the other big part about this. It's a churn buster like you wouldn't believe. And can you get this one thing done? If you get this one thing done, you'll all be happy. Like you could never use another HighLevel feature again and you'd be stoked. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I think that this is just an easy thing where everyone needs to be doing it. And we just wanna be, you know, we wanna make it as simple as possible for all of you. And so hopefully I've given you a really good roadmap on this, you know, whether it's done for you setup or you do it yourself, ongoing support considerations, all that stuff. All you have to do right now is just go out and make the sale.

Yep, and you know what's funny that on this feature set, the one thing that you didn't add that I think is also kind of the no-brainer is the, web form follow-up automation, right?

I agree, I agree. But you know what happens right there, Josh? Now it's the form, then I got to create a workflow, right? And I got to do automation. And nope, it's like, wait a sec, hold on. That all of a sudden can trip a lot of people up, right? Yeah.

So I would say for, for the SaaS standalone, this is the service offering. If you've got agency clients, you're trying to justify why do I invest in this, how do I make immediate return for my clients, you take their web forms that are just being submitted via email and you turn them into smart web forms where there's a call automatically calling their office, there's a text message going out to the prospect, and those web forms that are converting 1 in 10 start to convert 8 in 10. That justifies your service almost instantaneously.

And that's where things start getting really fun because now, you know, we have a lot of the call roll features so you can actually go in and do number swapping. So on the whole website, you put a little JavaScript and all the numbers turn into the Twilio numbers. So all those start coming into HubSpot. HighLevel, you know, we'll get into WordPress hosting so that you can actually resell WordPress hosting on Google's cloud. So it'll be, you know, if you guys are using Flywheel or any of those platforms, will be faster, if not faster, on Google CDN. Um, and so you'll just be able to add more and more features as you get deeper into the product. But we'd like you to start at the basics if you're not using HighLevel today, because we know that you can win just alone with that, and then you can double down over time.

Yep.

John's asking about web form spam. It gets tons of web form spam. Is that on your HighLevel forms or—

Well, we've got the CAPTCHA option here. So if you've got web form spam, you can always just add a CAPTCHA to it. I'm still logged into this location or not. Sometimes I jump in and out of accounts.

To change it.

So yeah, just add the—

John, are you getting lots of web form spam even with the CAPTCHA? Because that should break it down by at least 90%.

Yeah, sorry, we are. We're getting a lot of— all of our clients are getting a ton of spam ever since COVID It's not automated, they're manual. These guys are just— I don't know where they are, but they're pasting thing and they're trying to sell SEO, they're trying to sell all sorts of goofy stuff.

Well, let's think about that, right? So like, so what's the problem with the spam? The problem with the spam is we're bothering the client with it, right?

Right.

So what if instead we just run it through an automation and we make that person, we make that person really have to do, to jump through a hoop or two. I wonder where that spammer will fall off, right? So it's like, I love— because like when I get those phone calls from people who are like, hey, it's the IRS and you owe us a lot of money, I'm always like, oh great, let me get my credit card, I'm ready to pay. And boom, it just clicked right there because they know I got them, right? So I wonder if you just text them out and you say, hey, thanks a lot for filling out our form, is now a good time to get you booked on an estimate, right? Is that spammer really going to book a call on an estimate? Man, that is going to tee off one business owner. There's no way in the world they're gonna, they're gonna be happy about that and make a sale. So I wonder if we can get them to drop right there. We should experiment with that because then we can use the automated booking recipe for this. Right. So you've got the appointment booking recipe. It's, hey, would you like to book an appointment? And then we wait for the response and we see, was the response positive? Like, sure, yeah, I'd like to book an appointment. And if so, We're shooting out the calendar link. All of that's automated. Now the spammer can still book an appointment, but if they do, I mean, I think it'd be pretty brutal to like falsify your showing up for an estimate. I couldn't imagine a business owner that would be happy about that.

True. Okay, thanks. Yeah, we were looking at doing a double opt-in on a lot of these forms to kind of eliminate—

I mean, you know, but, but for, for— so oftentimes people focus on the, on the, on the rule breakers, but if you focus on the good submissions, right, The positive power of this in all reality isn't to cut down on the spam. It's actually to take that person and move them down the funnel to a step we actually want them to take, like booking an appointment. So my question is, can we get them to do that? Because if we can, that's where the real value is for the business owner. Perfect.

Thanks a lot.

Yes, sir.

Good question. And if you haven't seen this workflow builder, this is pretty awesome stuff, and you guys have done a great job fletching this out.

I'm excited because I actually— I have to go make a video on this for everybody. But, you know, today it actually finally went live to everyone by default. So it's, it's pretty neat. It does some cool stuff and it has a lot more functionality. And we'll continue to grow this, grow this out. But, you know, like right here, the book— this, this is the booking automation that I always love so much where it's, you know, hey, do you want to book an appointment? Yes. Great. Here's a calendar link.

I mean, that—

this kills for so many, so many verticals and so many accounts. And this is the thing that I wish every small business in the United States had. Today, and they would just be crushing it with most of their leads.

Hey, Josh.

Yes.

Oh, I'm sorry, I don't have my video on here. This has been a really, really amazing call. And I was thinking that we could take the model that they've built there and get those things implemented. We could do a training on that. I could do it either on the next Thursday skill session training, and I'll map out the sort of the SOP on getting all of those things together. And I'll do a training on helping all of these guys get this, get this in place in their agencies.

That'd be amazing.

Yeah.

So like, obviously, 7 Figure Agency members, Lynn is now a member of the coaching team here at 7 Figure Agency. He is a ninja with all things HighLevel. So yeah, if you'd like to see him put that together, put a 1 in the chat because that's our goal. I think we've given you lots of how to use HighLevel for your agency to get clients. Our goal now is to give you guys more and more on how do we implement this for the clients that we actually serve. So yes, lots of ones, Lynn.

That would be amazing. Lynn, if you run into any issues, you have any questions, whatever, just hit me up.

Happy to help.

Or Robin. Got it.

Excellent.

All right.

Well, Sean, Robin, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time for unpacking this. Thanks for building this amazing platform. This probably could go for hours, but time has come. If you need help, Sean and Robin both have their schedule links in there. The link to grab the, the free SaaS trial for 30 days is there. If for some reason it didn't work for you, feel free to reach out to me, Joshua Nelson, at 7figure8cc.com, and we'll make sure that you get taken care of.

Thanks, everybody.

Awesome. Thanks a lot, guys. See everybody later.

Thank you.

Thank you.