LeadSmart Team Story

Good morning, everyone. This is Kevin Brown with LeadSmart Technologies. I'm here today with my good friends, business partners and co founders of Lead Smart, Steve Snap and Tom Burton. We wanted to spend just a couple moments today giving you a little bit of background and history and understanding of our company and why we started Leadsport. We've got some interesting backgrounds and a unique history and work experience amongst the three of us that we thought that we'd fill you in on. We've been developing quite a bit of both written and video content that you'll see all three of us appearing regularly. So we wanted to just take a few minutes of your time and introduce you to our team a little bit. I wanted to ask a few questions as we get started. Tom, we'll go to you first. Tom, tell us, why do you think the team's important in the group of founders that you have in a software organization? Why do you think that's important?

Well, I'll talk a little bit about my background in a minute, but you know, this isn't my first software company and the first business I've been involved in. And what I've certainly learned over the years is that first of all, experience tells you that you have to be solving business outcomes and what you're doing and building software that truly is a painkiller and not a vitamin for businesses. And obviously with our experience, as I know we're going to get into, we have lived through and we've seen a lot of the problems, if not most of the problems that we're addressing today currently in Leadsmart. And this wasn't just, hey, let's just build a software company because we have a interesting idea. It was all based around experience and having been there and then translating that into something that's really truly a painkiller and not a vitamin. So I think that's a big difference that experience brings to the table.

Great, that's very helpful. Steve, do you kind of have some thoughts and you might want to add in on the depth of experience and really subject matter experts on a product?

Yeah, I really can't reiterate enough how important what Tom just said is. I've learned that clearly identifying the problem is probably the most important thing that you can do. And when I started out implementing CRM20 some years ago, I probably spent 10, 15 years explaining to people all the options and how they could solve problems with all these different tools. And I've come to realize that what people want is they want help clearly identifying the problem and they want to Leverage someone who's solved that problem before and they want it solved quickly and they want to know that it's going to work. So clearly identifying the problem is huge. And knowing what a problem is and knowing how to solve it comes with experience.

Those are great points. I think to recap what both of you have said is that the clients and users of software are looking for business results and outcomes. They're not looking for more software tools. And they get that from people who understand their business problems. Do you guys agree with that?

Absolutely.

Very good. So I'm going to kind of recap just a little bit about how we came together and then we're going to talk individually about our backgrounds today. So it's quite interesting story that we have. So Tom and I have been literally been friends since kindergarten in Long Beach, California, and we've known each other for way too many years that I want to talk about. But I've always had a good friendship. And in the last five, six years, we've done a number of business projects together. And all of those business projects had the same exact problem that LeadSmart solves. So we kind of were going down a path of other projects. I've been fortunate enough to also be good friends with Steve for coming up on 15 years now. We've done quite a few different CRM implementations for companies I've been involved with that have leveraged Steve's knowledge and background and expertise both in the CRM world and the technology world in general. And when we started talking as a group, finally had an opportunity to get Steve and Tom introduced to each other as well, it was very clear that our backgrounds really came together with some unique synergies and to develop a product that the marketplace was missing. So that's kind of our story quickly about how we came together. There's more information out there online about us, some articles that have been recently done and some technology publications to tell the story a little bit deeper. But my background, I kind of the guy that has lived the problem that leads tomart solves. So I've always been, I'd like to say, kind of an early adopter of technology tools and so forth to grow my business. But my background is in distribution, getting products to market. So the easy way to look at that is I started my career in working for a very large international distributor of products. We were getting leads from manufacturers whose products that we sold and we always struggled with that business problem. I then went on to just start and found a manufacturer's rep agency. So I was an Independent agent representing multiple different companies. We would consistently get leads from them and need to manage those through our network, which was always a struggle to get information back. And then finally after leaving that business and exiting that company, I invested in a manufacturing company. And now I was the guy that was at the trade shows and the events and generating leads, coming home with those spreadsheets and hoping that my channel partners, my manufacturers, reps and distributors were going to do something successfully with those leads and nearly always failed at that process. So what I knew I needed in my business adventures over the years was a tool that really brought the ability to be kind of a cutting edge CRM tool. Because I'd always struggled with problems with CRM as being too complicated and user adoption with my own teams. I needed a tool to market and develop leads into sales ready leads and then obviously needed a way to manage the channel partner. So as we started working on this product, that's how things kind of all came together with my background of really living the problem that leadsport solves every day of my career. So that's a little bit about my background. Why don't we kind of jump in and Tom, why don't you share a little bit about where you come from?

Yeah, so I'm probably the complete opposite. Right. So my background is I'm a computer science. I have a computer science degree by education. But when I came out of school in the 80s, I was lucky enough at that time because there weren't many of them to join a software startup. And I was employee number four at that startup. And we ended up when we sold the company 11 years later, I think we had close to 400 employees and certainly had grown significantly in that timeframe. I look at that as my, I say over and over that was my 11 year MBA program because anything that could have gone wrong or every challenge or every high and low that you can have in a business, we had in that business. But it was a super great learning experience. And one thing that I took out of that is that, well, I certainly love the potential of technology and I love technology and automation. What I even love better is how to apply business to that. So how do you use technology and automation to improve your business and drive your business? When I came out of that company, I did consulting for a lot of years with predominantly with large Fortune 500 companies, traveled all over for that. Then I created another software company, interestingly enough, in the real estate space. And this was in 2007 or so 2006, that company I ended up selling to Intuit in 2008. And as part of that, I went to Intuit and worked for them for about a year and a half. And it was interesting because the whole idea of digital marketing as a tool for lead generation was just coming out. And Intuit actually put together what they called a task force or a group to study how they could use digital marketing for their business. And so I was able to get on that task force and got introduced to the whole area of digital marketing, which I love because it combined my passion for technology and my passion for business and passion for analytics, and brought those two things together in a way that we'd never been able to do before. I always tell people I always hated marketing in my business because I could never measure the results or be able to have a tangible roi. So when I left Intuit, I did a number of things related to digital marketing and helping companies use digital marketing technology to grow their business, of which and Kevin, we worked on some projects together for that. And one thing that we were finding, especially with companies that sell through third party distribution like you just talked about, is we were generating a ton of leads for them using the lead generation tools that we were doing. And then those leads were going down into the channel and getting lost or not getting followed up on. And the manufacturers and the companies we were working for saying, wait a minute, we're spending money for these leads and we got these valuable leads and what's happening. And when they debugged everything, they realized that just things were getting lost in the shuffle, hence where the whole lead smart evolution occurred from. So it's kind of interesting, we both came from different directions, but kind of met here in the middle, if you want to call it that, and doing that by working with some clients that I was helping more on the digital marketing side. But you were working with as from using your distribution and your go to market background. And those two things came together and then that's where Lead Smart came in. And then Steve, that's kind of where you entered the picture on the whole thing.

Yeah. So my story is pretty, pretty simple. I think I was second or third year in college and had been tinkering with a couple different business ideas. And then I was working as a sales rep for a small company in Orange county and a buddy of mine, we just decided, why don't we go show companies how to use act? And so dating myself a little bit there, but we just started knocking on doors. And I remember the first lead we walked into, the guy's like, what are you doing here? And I saw ACT on a screen. I said, well, I help people set that up. And he's like, okay. He gave me a check. And I thought it was all the money in the world at the time. And so that was kind of our first start. And so we just started helping companies set up CRM. You know, it wasn't called CRM then, but ACT Gold Mine saleslogix. And then probably spent the most of what we've been doing in the last probably 15, 18 years now with Salesforce. And I think in the last five to eight years became what we call a platform reseller, which just means that we sell a license type within the Salesforce space. That is what I call the core license. And it's really designed to identify problems and build solutions for. So we last several years just been building industry solutions on that platform and then had worked with Kevin, like he said, quite a few times on various projects. And I think this idea of solving problems for manufacturers and manufacturing reps was always out there, but we weren't quite sure how to solve it. And I think when we really started talking about not just how do we improve collaboration with our channel, but how do we actually incorporate marketing automation into that so that, you know, we're really covering all aspects of it, you know, all of these tools that we talk about, the words CRM or Salesforce automation or marketing automation or collaboration, there's tools that do all those things. But bringing it together and solving some very specific problems, I think that's what we've really done. So my experience really has been in that the CRM space specifically targeted at selling and helping organizations improve their lead flow, track their leads, improve dashboards of visualization, and really focusing on those core problems that they're dealing with in that side of the business.

That's great, Steve. Thank you for that. And thank you for that as well, Tom. So that's just a quick little intro to our team here at Leadsworth and we'll look forward to talking with all of you in the future. If you ever have any questions for us both about leadsmart or anything that you saw from today's video that you can take advantage of the background and the expertise that Tom, Steve or myself have, please reach out to us anytime and we'll look forward to our next session soon.