What is Smart CRM and why does it matter to your business?

All right, well, let's, let's get going here, I think start coming in. But so welcome everybody again to what is Smart CRM and why does it matter to your business? We're going to make this webinar kind of not webinar, ish in a sense that we're going to try and make this conversational as we go along. So if you have questions, there should be a little Q and a box or questions box down at the bottom of the zoom webinar piece there. You can drop your question in there. We'll try and just hopefully do them as we move along. And then there should also be a raise hand too, I think as well. So if you have a question or you want to make sure that your question is there, make sure we see that. I think that's all the logistics of using the system here.

So, yeah, it's pretty, pretty straightforward. And you know, to your point too, I think, you know, there might be some people here that get our around the Horn newsletter every week that we send out on Fridays and then we do our LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube live session for that, plus the podcast that's on in the afternoon. So I think today we'll kind of run with a similar format.

Yep. All right, My screen coming through.

It is. Yeah, I see it.

Well, okay. All right, hold on one second still and. All right, let's do it. So I'm Tom, I'm over here on the right. That's Kevin here on the left. We're the co founders of Lead Smart Technologies and know a lot of you already, Kevin. I know you know your background. Right. Why don't you just take a second and.

Sure.

Explain your background and I'll explain mine a little bit really quick and then we'll just get into it. Yeah.

So I've spent the last, I hate to say the number, but 30 plus years in the wholesale distribution world. So started my career working for a large national distributor in the industrial world, then started a manufacturer's rep agency, ran that for 10 years, sold that and invested in a manufacturing company, all in the industrial world. And then did a number of years after I left the day to day in the manufacturing world, a number of years consulting with large national international brands throughout multiple marketplaces, the electrical market, electronics, and obviously still in the industrial world. And throughout my whole career kind of struggled with technology and making it work correctly for people in the wholesale distribution channel. So we've been friends since kindergarten, which is a long, long time ago. And we came together and I'll let you talk about your background that led us to starting our company.

Yeah, so my background kind of the opposite. I'm been in tech and technology and building technology businesses my whole career. But when I, you know, Kevin and I were chatting and we had a client that was kind of struggling with this same problem, we realized there was a real need in this wholesale distribution space for a better way, if you will. And we're going to talk a bit about that today and how we got there and some of the things that we've learned along the way. So let's get into it and kind of go through the agenda for today.

Perfect.

So we're going to start with just a quick history of CRM. You know, we may remember all this, but others may not and kind of, you know, where it's been and where it's come. But you know, when we first and Kevin, this was funny, right when we first started Lead Smart, we both kind of looked at each other and go, CRM. Why would we do this? You know, is CRM as valuable as it can be as a four letter word to a lot of companies and a lot of people? And so we said, okay, if we're going to do this, we got to understand why CRM can be a four letter word and kind of what we need to do to address it. And so that's where we came up with how do we make a smarter CRM that's not a four letter word. So we'll talk about those things and then we'll talk about now more than ever. Why does it matter to your business? You know, I think, you know, Kevin, when we started this three or four years ago, we could see why it mattered to the business. But I think the, the accelerators or the things that have, that mattered then have accelerated even now. And we'll go through that and then what should you do? And then we'll end off with any questions that you have or that you want to talk about or again, ask questions along the way.

I think this is going to be helpful to a lot of people, Tom. And these seem like maybe simplistic topics as we look at them quickly, but we're going to dive deep into why these challenges have happened for folks, what the opportunities are out there. Obviously we're going to, you know, show some images and how we do things, but the core of why we're here today is really help people understand, you know, what could be right.

Yes.

Versus the state most people are in today. And so that that's our goal for the Takeaway is people really leaving with what. What does a perfect world look like if I was using technology within. Within my organization?

Yeah. All right, so let's kind of go through this history. So, you know, CRM and Kevin, I think you were one of the early users of both of these products back in the 90s of, you know, act, which in goldmine, which were really more contact management systems, you know, place a database for you to put information about your contacts and the accounts. And I don't know, did you have. Were you tracking even activity back then or.

Yeah, we were. But, you know, it's interesting you talk about that, right, because. And here we are. You're dating ourselves again. There's probably people here that, that weren't born in the, you know, in the early 90s. But, you know, I even think back, right, if you, if you really were to look at this, right, if we think about our fathers, you know, they had that in, you know, a Rolodex, so to speak. And I never had one of those in my career. I really started my career in wholesale distribution in 1989. But what I did have, and I had it up until still, even when we were using some CRM products in our manufacturer's rep agency, you know, you had the books that had the plastic layers inside that you put all the business cards in.

Yeah, yeah. Remember that? Yeah.

Had them alphabetized. And those were in my briefcase. And when I pull over to the side of the road with a, you know, bag full of quarters, you know, I would have to go pull that open at the pay phone to go check in with accounts. And, you know, in our manufacturer's rep agency, we went fairly quickly because I wanted to differentiate. The agency is. We got started, we used ACT for a little bit, and that was kind of a struggle. Goldmine came out, offered a lot better solutions. But I, I ended up, I remember in a, you know, we weren't a huge agency, but, you know, we spent thousands and thousands, probably tens of thousands when all was said and done with a database engineer that I knew that came in and tweaked it. But yes, to your point, we were managing activities. We were managing what product lines we sold to which customer. And that was back probably mid-90s when we really had a lot of that going on.

Okay, so jumps to 2000s. You know, you obviously have the, the big player salesforce that came along in early 2000s as kind of the cloud first world based, cloud based CRM. And then of course you have, you know, probably most of you have Heard of Zoho or Sugar, CRM or Microsoft Dynamics. A lot of those were kind of, I don't know, trying to replicate a little bit what Salesforce was doing for different businesses and so forth. And then in our industry, you know, we have some, currently we have some players that would consider themselves more industry specific. You know, there's people that do like a subset of CRM. You know, they're not really full CRM, but they're focused on maybe a subset of different things. And of course we got into the mix here in the last few years as well. So there's kind of, you know, and this is just a small subset, there's probably, you know, quite a few more logos that we could put on this slide.

Sure.

But the point is, is there's just been a lot of, a lot of different companies entering the space. But as we're going to talk about the four letter word problem didn't, you know, seems to exist across all of these different products. So it wasn't like a product that was creating the situation. It was more kind of a broader issue with CRM that we're going to get into here. Yeah. So why, why is sometimes CRM considered a four letter word? And you know, why did we go, oh my God, is this something we really want to do here? So, you know, let's kind of go through these one, one at a time. Kevin. First of all, you know, if you look at those products that we had back there, a lot of them are designed for every industry and every situation on the planet. So it's like a one size fits all sort of solution which seems like it could be powerful, but at the same time is very complicated and kind of right off the gate people have a difficult time getting going.

Yeah. You know, it makes me think about that. Right. Is you've got, and we talk about this regularly with our customers. Right. When you look at some of those logos that were there, Salesforce, Sugar, Zoho, Microsoft Dynamics, that's just a start of that. You know, hundreds of so called CRMs that are on the marketplace, but those organizations are going to sell the exact same solution to a wholesale manufacturer, distributor, a manufacturer, a bakery or a law firm. Right. They get the exact same product. We're going to talk about that a little bit more as we move forward today. But that one size fits all piece really becomes problematic. The other side of that is all CRMs are not the same.

Right.

We've got, as you mentioned there, we, you know, on the, below that line on the previous slide Had a handful of companies that, that might say they have CRM, but that it's not a robust solution. Right. It's an add on. Right. Or we see regularly ERP systems that say they have a CRM component, but it's just this bolt on piece. It's not true. Focused CRM.

Right? Yep. Well, and then the one size fits all. The problem with that. Right. Is it leads to overly compl. You know, this becomes overly complicated in a lot of bloated functionality because you keep adding, you know, as a software developer, a software engine software company, you keep adding more and more functionality to cover all of the different people that you're in markets that you're trying to deal with. And it becomes more and more complicated all the time. As it becomes more complicated again, there's. We'll talk more about this. It becomes harder to implement and harder to use. One of the things that we saw early on in this market was, you know, if you think about wholesale distribution, right. And a wholesale distributor in particular, what 90% of their business comes from existing customers. So the ability to integrate with external data, whether it's ERP or even if you're doing marketing or marketing automation or E commerce or whatever the case may be, it was difficult to do and clumsy maybe for other. And so it really didn't, you know, there was, we found that there were quote unquote integrations, but they really weren't very good integrations and they really didn't do what was really needed. So this is an area in this market that we found right away that, you know, was something we needed to hit head on. And we'll talk more about that in a few minutes.

Yeah, I was just going to add to that. Right. We call it as we talk a lot of times there's silo data within organizations. Right. And you want to get access, and we'll talk about that at length later, to all of the availability of all the available data within your organization to make smart decisions for.

Yep, yep. So, you know, again, kind of tied to that. Right. A lot of traditional CRMs require a lot of manual data entry, which, let's face it, sales reps and users, that's not a big, you know, big part of their day that they want to do is to spend a lot of time doing a lot of manual, manual data entry and that hurts adoption. It, you know, causes finger pointing. I don't want to use this. It's taking too much time. But a lot of the products and things that we saw require a lot of manual data entry for them to, you know, work at all.

Salespeople don't like to be stuck in a hotel room, you know, after a quick dinner typing for two hours about who they saw and what they did that day.

Yep, exactly. What I think related to that too. Right. Is that when there's too much emphasis on tracking activity, then there becomes this, wait a minute, is just really something that's valuable to me or is this some Big Brother thing that's tracking? Am I doing work and doing my job? So the two of those things together certainly don't build support and adoption with the end users or with the users of the system. Yeah.

Historically, people have clearly felt like, look, you know, this is my boss's way of finding out how many calls did I make today? Or, you know, am I making enough end user visits or whatever it might be right there. It's a, it's a big brother to the term that's used here. And it's not really historically been shown it's touted as a tool for the salesperson, but how it's used in most organizations, it becomes the big brother solution because there's not. We're going to talk a little bit later about, you know, how you can provide data from these other systems and so forth to really, you know, enable salespeople. But that's not what most people do.

Nope. So this is a big one. Right. And this goes back to the one size fits all is a lot of times when you purchase these products, you get a blank slate. You get, you know, and I'll show you what I mean by a blank slate here in just a minute. That requires extensive configuration and customization. So what that means is you have to figure out what you want to do first, then usually hire consultants or hire people to come in, spend a lot of time configuring it, customizing it. You know, things always take longer than you think, over budget, over time, a lot of failed implementations because it's more than they thought because of this blank slate starting point. And what we mean by blank slate here is this is Zoho, for example. If you buy Zoho and you put in your credit card, or you buy it, however you buy it and you log in, this is what you see when you start, right? It's like there's a lot of functionality in here, no doubt. But what do you do with this? If you buy Sales Cloud from Salesforce, you log in, this is what you're going to see. You're going to see a bunch of things on Here and probably not know what to do with it. So this blank slate concept, you know, can really be intimidating and overwhelming. And a lot of times, Kevin, we see this a lot. People see a demo, right. From a company and the demo, of course, slick and has everything in there, and then they buy the product and it doesn't quite look like the demo, you know.

So, yeah, it's, it's interesting that you say that because it's even. I've had even, I think some people on today's call I've had this discussion with is the, the concept behind that is I always tell people, you know, if you're looking at technology and this isn't just CRM, right. This is technology in general is don't ask the salesperson anything other than what does the software do. Don't go down the path of what can it do. Because most organizations don't have the resources internally to make that software hum like that they had looked for or saw it happen in a, in a demo.

Right.

So what you say we, we ran across this just recently within our company, you know, I won't name them again, but company that was on our slide earlier and the early, you know, the earlier slide that was there, and it was. They had bought a product, they had spent tens of thousands of dollars in their organization, and it was that blank screen you showed earlier. But they thought they were buying what was in the demo.

Right.

But they ended up with the Blake slate. And when, when I was chatting with him, they were mentioning a third party that they had been introduced to. They didn't even know why they'd been introduced to the third party. Now, this was unfortunate that they were that uninformed, but they're going to be out hundreds of thousands of dollars on something that should have cost them tens of thousands of dollars.

Yep.

They didn't ask the question, right, what, what does it do versus what can it do?

Well, and you just hit the next one, right. Which is long and expensive implementations. Right, Right. So. And that a lot of times comes from that blank slate. And you know, we've touched on this before, but all of this then can lead to lack of, lack of adoption, frustrated users, you know, again. And then you combine that with a lot of the information that you are able to get out of the system is generally based around what's been entered in and what's been done in the past, rather than helping you see what you could do to move forward with the future insight. So, you know, you take all these things that we have on the Slide here it starts to become clear why CRM and not, you know, there's other, certainly enterprise technologies that, that suffer from these same, same symptoms. But in the CRM world, this is, you know, created a lot of maybe unnecessary four letter, four letter words coming out because it just hasn't been, you know, looked at from the standpoint of how do we address these. And that's what we're going to get into when we talk about smart CRM. Yeah.

And what people have found themselves with. Right. Either because they've heard about these things, they've ignored or avoided taking the leap.

Right. They've heard horror stories. Yep.

They've heard the horror stories that say, hey, you know, our business is doing okay without it. I'm going to hold off on that. Right. We're going to talk about the risks with that later today. But the other side of it is or they just keep renewing and we see this regularly. Right. They have a system in place. They did a few things to try and make it work for their organization. It's doing okay, but it's not driving revenues, it's not enhancing the customer experience that they have because their salespeople have more knowledge and more data and can serve that customer better. And yet they just, they end up with poor adoption. But they keep renewing because nobody has the guts to say, no, we're going to go fix this or we're going to can this. So they just keep renewing. And that unfortunately that's part of the game plan for a lot of these organizations is once I'm in there, you're never going to change because you don't want to go through the headache of it.

Yeah, no, you get apathetic about it. Right. And it's like, okay, well it may not, it's far from perfect, but it's, I don't want to go through this again. So anyway, let's move on to what is smart. Yeah. And when we talk about smart CRM, we're going to go through that. But when we started Lead Smart and, and I'll take it, you know, for myself from the technology side, when I was looking at how we needed to design and put together Lead Smart, I really looked at all of those things that we just went through and said, how do we design something from the beginning that, you know, obviously we're not going to be perfect immediately, but how do we continually design and optimize to turn CRM from a four letter word to something that companies are excited that they've done? They're Getting that return on investment. And they're saying, hey, this is, you know, one of the greatest things that we've done. And fortunately we have customers that will say that, you know, so that was where a lot of this came from. Yep. So let's talk about some of the things that are important for a smart CRM. And Kevin, why don't you start with this one which is sure more of the industry side of it. Yeah.

You know, and the focus that our focus is on this ecosystem we'll talk about in just a moment. But you know, when we go back to that, you know, I call it blank canvas even sometime, you know, you referenced in the slides you reference blank slate technology is, you know, if you're a large organization that has maybe a 10, 15, 20 person staff that maybe understands how to program and you know, really get the most out of off the shelf software, you might do fairly well with off the shelf software. You're still kind of having to hope does that person or that even consultant that you hired, do they really truly understand your business and how your business works? That's where the struggle lies. So the focus that we want to talk about today, you know, of smart CRM is a CRM first off, that is purpose built and driven for a specific industry. Now we look at this within our organization we have three solutions. We have solutions for manufacturers, solutions for wholesale distributors and or manufacturers rep and sales agents because they all work within the same ecosystem. Within our organization, you know, we have manufacturers, sales agents and manufacturers who are both on our platform. They communicate directly amongst themselves. Well, if they were with one off off the shelf software, that would be nearly impossible for them. So the first thing people want to be thinking about is looking for a solution that is for my business. Does the company that I'm partnered with understand how I go to market? Who are my customers? What, what are the needs of my salespeople? And if you're a wholesale distributor, the needs of your salespeople are very different than a CRM user at a law firm or at a bakery.

Yep. And you get a big head start, right? You're going to get a big head start which is, you know, key to all of this. So let's go to number two. And number two, we talked about data earlier is the ability to aggregate data from multiple sources. So you know, rather one of the things we learned early on is that, you know, again and I'm just take wholesale distribution or wholesale distributors, 90% of their sales come from existing customers. So it's all about how Do I, you know, increase wallet share? How do I make sure my customers aren't churning? How do I build more opportunity and more expansion with my customers? All of that kind of stuff in addition to getting new ones. But existing customers are a big deal. So there's a lot of data in the organization about existing customers which we called first party internal data. And what we looked at is that we, it's important that we take that data and not just try and you know, okay, now we're going to integrate the ERP and now we're going to integrate the marketing system and now we're going to integrate E commerce. All this siloed as we talked about and then we end up with siloed integrations. What we learned early on is that we need to pull.

Tom, you went away there. Can't hear you.

Can you hear me now?

We got you now. There you go.

Weird.

Lost you.

Okay, so I don't know where I got dropped off but what we learned.

Was it was very insightful. It was some of the best wisdom I've heard in a long time.

It's usually what happened. I thought you muted me or something. So anyway, taking all of this together and putting it into a centralized place that then we can use to drive, you know, if we're going to use AI, if we're going to do rules and engines and automation, if we're going to be doing things with external transactions now we have everything centralized and we can use that data together and kind of unsilo it or desilo it so it becomes centralized. So that's a really big deal. And you know, if you're looking at something already or you know, companies talk about integrations with existing software or third or existing platforms is make sure that you're sending it into a platform and you're not just doing one off siloed integrations. Because what we found was, is that can actually in some ways create more problems than it solves.

Tom, before we jump on from here, let's talk a little bit further about, you know, we've referenced twice today siloed data in a manufacturing company or a distributor, a dealer arena. Where would we typically see that data?

Well, I mean obviously erp, E commerce can be. Sometimes companies have E commerce tied into their erp so it's not there. If you're doing marketing or marketing automation or marketing related things, that's usually in its own world as well. So there's things that get spread out. Right. If you're doing, you know, one of our partners is Mobilico, who does text messaging and SMS management. And it's, you know, they have all that data in a separate place, a.

Global marketing data as well from it.

Right. So there's a lot of different places that data can live in the organization. You know, one of the things we want to do is look at where are those silos and then what do we want to incorporate? Because literally the one plus one plus one can equal five or six if you put it together the right way.

Yeah, And I think this is. You're exactly right with this. It's that, it's that cumulative effect that you get by bringing that data in. You know, one of the worst things that somebody could do at that stage would be to leave their organization with marketing automation data, ERP data, e commerce data, and then the plethora of spreadsheets that people have.

Yes, right.

All in these different places. And then people scratching their head and going, man, I know there's some data I should be looking at. And then we get busy and we never go do that.

But when we can trade show data. Right, Data from trade shows that end up in a spreadsheet.

Absolutely.

Any of those things all kind of fall into this category of silo data, so.

Yep, exactly. Right.

All right, we'll continue on. So related to this area then is if I've got a platform and I can kind of aggregate my data into the platform. One of the things that we really spent a lot of time on early on to kind of remove the blank slate syndrome that we talked about earlier is looking at what are some, what we call apps that make sense for this market, that can be legoed in, you know, dropped in, much like you put apps on your phone for specific purposes. How can we create apps that are pre built that already have been proven, utilized, tested, have best practices built into them, but also can be layered in over time and kind of a crawl, walk, run approach. So what we learned is that for sure is that this app structure, by taking and taking the blank slate syndrome that we talked about and just having a whole bunch of one size fits all functionality, building these apps that we can use really, really accelerates the implementation, it accelerates adoption, and it really, really makes it so that you're leveraging that industry specific solution and not having to figure it all out. And as a result, our implementation times are literally a fraction in cost of what would be done in a traditional piece there.

Tom, before we go too much further in this, you just got a message question come through about software versus platform, but can you kind of address that as a technology guy.

Well, you know, a platform is kind of the picture we had on the previous slide. How do, how can I pull things from different places? Can I add different functionality, different capabilities over time? Much like I always say, the power strip like you have in your office, I can plug a lot of different things into that and use it in a lot of different ways. Versus just a single focused point solution that has a very specific objective but isn't tied into the broader platform.

So the platform allows you to really integrate and build within an organization. Versus you use the term sometimes point software or they're designed for a specific purpose. This is what they do. And we see that with the vast majority of CRM companies.

Right.

Is it's a singular piece of software that does one thing versus has a broad scope application across an organization.

Yep. And I want to show real quick before we leave here, if I can, does that show up on my screen? Okay.

Yeah, we're seeing the portal there. Yeah, no, you're good there. I'm sorry, you're right.

Okay, so you'll see here, for example, all of these apps that we talk about, we just have those preloaded so we can go through. We can choose the apps we want to use. Right now, I have them all up here on the menu, but I can pick and choose which ones we want to roll out, how we want to use it, how we want to put those together. So all of that becomes the ability to again quickly Lego in building block in these apps. And this goes a long, long way to a lot of the four letter problems that we just addressed.

Yeah. So Tom, let's. Before you jump on from there, let's, let's. I want to just add to this right now. You know, Most technology, specifically CRMs that people are looking at, which is back to that four letter word scenario, right. Is people are used to. I see contacts, I see accounts, you know, I see maybe leads and opportunities. But it's the same thing regardless of the platform that I use. Now what a smart CRM does, right, is it has these tools, in this case, how we've done it within our organization. It has these apps because field salespeople, customer service people, they're not necessarily focused on trying to remember where is a specific report about my partner relationships? Where is the report on marketing info related to a customer that I'm on the phone with? Do I need to go look at a spreadsheet? Do I need to go into my marketing automation solution? Oh, has this customer bought anything from Our E commerce platform.

Right.

When we work from an app based structure, right. We don't have to think through where is all this data because that data has now been aggregated for me. I wake up in the morning and I'm a senior sales manager and I want to know what's going on in my company with, with leads. I click on Smart Lead Manager and now I see a whole environment of dashboards and reports about the health of the leads within the organization that we have. And it takes away that I've got to run and go figure out where did, where is this disparate data at? It's all in one place for me.

Yep. No, again, it organizes things a lot tighter, makes things easier to find, locate all of that. All of that is again, you know, things we're trying to do to streamline the adoption and streamline the implementation.

Yep, exactly. Right, right.

So moving ahead, we could talk a lot about any of these is, you know, obviously, right. People don't want to do manual data entry like we talked about before. So, you know, one of the things we've done a lot is to make sure that for example, if you're on a sales call or salesperson's on a sales call and they have our mobile app, which we have, you can quickly do voice to text, click a button, record your meeting, record your notes, have it all there, make it super easy to get information into the system. We've also done things with, you know, where you can auto log, zoom and other online meetings. If you're using a soft phone or, or a zoom phone or something like that, you can log calls and transcripts. A lot that can be done with email and calendar syncing. So as emails are sent or calendars are synced or whatever, all of that can happen automatically and then even automated scheduling. So, you know, we have customers that are automating their follow up scheduling and automatically putting them on calendars for periods of time based around previous actions and automatic reminders and all of those types of things, things that honestly make the job easier and more, you know, less manual effort, less administrative work. All of these types of things are areas that we're constantly looking at how do we do because why that improves adoption and gets, you know, sales and the users of the system excited about using the system versus complaining about using the system.

So back to our topic for the day, right. Smart CRM. It's not any one of these things that we've been talking about that we do, maybe others might be working on doing. It's when you put these things together, right? That's when we have information that is moving to a salesperson that becomes informative. There's some industrial channel experts out there that are researchers and speakers and keynote folks and so forth. A few different ones have said, you know, numbers as high as 80% that they think information should be flowing from the organization. If we think about this with smart CRM and we bring this disparate data together from other parts of the organization, we've got these automation tools, things like this, hands free we're talking about, what we're really doing is we're bringing a salesperson and, or anybody that's customer facing customer support, client success, whoever that might be, Right. We're bringing them information about a customer that will help us serve that customer better. And everybody wins because we did it in a smart way where we've done a broad scope of things versus just having a mobile app.

Right? Yep. And that kind of ties into our next one here, which is, you know, the what's in it. Yeah, right. And adoption and usage. And so, you know, obviously, right. Some of the, you know, we, we've seen some implementations that are frankly unbelievable in their level of complication. It's like literally looking at a jet plane, you know, and trying to figure out in the cockpit what you're supposed to do. And let's face it, right, no matter who you are, you don't want a cockpit that you're going to have to figure out or know what to use.

So right away, before you jump on from that, I'm sorry to interrupt you there, but the challenge that we see related to adoption with this is, as you talked about, you know, buttons and menus and all these different things, right. Is what happens is, and I think there's probably a lot of people that either are with us today or we'll see this recording that will relate to this is what happens is sales teams learn how to game the system, right. I'm going to get just enough information into this and nobody bugs me. As opposed to it being tool to help us help our customer more, who's.

Then going to buy well, make more money, make more revenue for, for everybody, right? Yeah. So. So we've done a lot of things to, you know, the obvious thing is how do we make this more easy to learn and easy to use. But that's just really the start of it. So one of the things that we found is that, you know, we've, we touched on this. Rather than making me record a lot of information, how do we Take all this information and make it more valuable to me and proactively spotlight issues and opportunities as an example. So I'm going to show another example of this. Oops. I get to watch all of my things here. So one of the things, for example, we've done is this thing called a genius feed. Now what this is is that if you're a salesperson and you log in to Lead Smart in the morning, you're going to get a list of things automatically generated for you that you might be wanting to be thinking about based around some smarts and capabilities in the system. So quickly I can look and see, like almost here's, here's some things I need to be thinking about. Right. This may be a churn risk. You know, we've. This has got some engagement, so these guys are engaging with some marketing actions. These guys aren't paying their bills. These are off plans for certain product categories. All of these types of things you see here, for example, composite ones have several composite ones. That account has a number of different things here that maybe I need to jump on and follow up. So we want to make it really easy, almost color by numbers, if you will, on what you should do when somebody walks in to the, you know, to go to work during the day. It isn't just trying to figure stuff out. Let's use the data to proactively provide those insights.

Well, we discussed it when we talked with our customers. Right. Is anybody that's customer facing. Right. Should know why they're, what they're doing each day, why they're doing and what they want to accomplish.

Right.

Before you jump on though, from this screen, Tom, that last one you talked about here is operations issues. Right. We have a number of customers that are working on this right now that what they're trying to do is share data from operations about Ms. Shipments or wrong products being shipped or delays or things like that that are going on on an operational side of the business, pushing that data down so that anybody that's customer facing, whether it's a salesperson or client success or customer service or inside sales, has insight into what that customer is experiencing by working with them.

Yep. So if it gets fixed, I can quickly go here, say resolved and boom, it's now resolved and so forth. So other things I can do here just quickly is, you know, for example, I want to come in and see where do I have opportunity for expansion with my customers. So, you know, here's an example of some dashboards to look really quickly. Again, this would be based around territory by territory or whatever is who's underachieving and what product categories are they underachieving, who's overachieving on different product categories, what accounts are doing well, which ones are not all of that kind of stuff. Right. This is immediate, actionable data that can help me, help me as a salesperson and in a sales organization actually grow my territory, grow my business, make more money and serve the customer as you've talked about. So we're constantly looking at things that are going to make it proactively spotlight issues and opportunities rather than just things that are, hey, I got to enter data because I had a phone call.

Yeah, right. It's things that we all know how to stay busy. Do we know how to be effective and accomplish things that are going to serve, yes, our customers and our organization.

So I'm going to move a bit faster because we're going to run out of time.

Otherwise that's fine.

So customer intelligence, you know, this is kind of related to that. How do I get forward looking insights that can positively influence the customer behavior and what the customer, you know, does. So that's an example of what we were just looking at there. And then we also try and use visualization wherever we can. And I will just show you that real quickly. For example, one of the things that we've got a lot of feedback on is hey, how do you make it geographically visible? For me, I'm going to go on a trip or I'm going to go visit an area and I want to be able to quickly know who I should be visiting and why and do some searching and look for accounts and you know, if somebody cancels, where do I go to and all of that kind of stuff and be able to drill in quickly and see what's going on with that account through a geographical perspective. So we've done that through something called a geoplanner. If you look back over here, one of the things that we constantly use are icons like you'll see over here on the left to quickly show for example, who is, you know, the green here means they're, they're not a churn risk, but if they were a churn risk or they're not buying quickly be able to see this. Who have we not contacted, who's engaging with our marketing? This Flame and Snowflake can help us understand who's engaging with our marketing and who isn't and all of that. So again, using visual cues, visual icons, visual things that make it really easy for somebody to make a decision and know where they should be thinking about where they're going. And then lastly, you know, obviously most of you have probably heard a ton about generative AI and ChatGPT, but how that all applies here. We have a number of things and don't have time to get into it today, but where we can use generative AI for analyzing prospects, generating emails, generating follow up messages, all of that kind of stuff, again making the job easier so that the salesperson and the users of this are like, I can't wait to get in here and get to work versus oh my God, I don't want to, you know, touch the CRM.

It's got to be about the user, right. The user needs to have the tools that are being given that are going to make their life better versus it just being another task is something they do.

Yeah. So this, I would say, Kevin, this is probably where we spend the majority of our time. Not only in our development, but even in our implementation. We're constantly looking at, we almost start from the what's in it for me viewpoint. Because if we don't, then everything kind of ends up playing catch up all the way down the line.

Sure.

And we've seen great results by doing that. So the last thing here with partner, with partner collaboration, this is another big thing, right, with Smart CRM is that, you know, the world we're in and wholesale distribution is run through this ecosystem and people want to share data with that ecosystem, they want to do that securely, not just saying a spreadsheet or sending an email or whatever and having it go into a black hole. So smart CRM, we said we've got to be able to securely share data with ecosystem partners. We gotta be able to securely assign leads and accounts to partners. We have to make it easy for the partners to share data and activity between us. So if a partner is working on a lead on our behalf or with us, how do we share that data and that activity really easily? And then maybe more importantly, or as importantly, you know, and I know, Kevin, you've run into this a lot in your career is how do you objectively track partner activity and performance? I think a lot of partner activity has been very subjective. Right. It's going great, you know, but you don't really have any data to back it up, right?

Well, when you're tracking your relationship history and success on spreadsheets, Right. That's guesses. The other part of it is we know that, you know, if you get the Statistics are over 80% of spreadsheets have errors, you know, and then with Whose spreadsheet am I using? And so when we think about it, right at the end of the day, you know, we talked, there's been some people have joined later in our, in our session today. But you know, early on, one of the things that we talked about. Right. Is is this ecosystem within wholesale distribution slash manufacturing is manufacturers independent sales agents or manufacturers reps and distributor and dealer networks. Well, at the end of the day, all three of those, their final customer is who drives everybody's revenue. Because until you understand and can communicate and partner on servicing that end customer, you're never going to maximize your success. Right. And so that's what partner collaboration really means. Here is what is going on with sales leads, what is going on with contracts or quotes, what is going on at that end user, that person that's going to consume a product that was manufactured, that went through a distribution chain. Right. We need to be able to collaborate on making sure one, we get that customer and two, we maintain that end customer.

Yep.

These are some key things we need to be able to do.

Yeah. And other things are, you know, how do I reward or incentivize the partner for collaboration? You know, we've had a lot of conversations on that with people and provide self service up to date access for resources and support.

So let's look at that, let's see what that kind of, that last one. Let's, let's see what that means.

Yeah, so that means, you know, like a partner portal which we've built into our system is the ability for a partner to have a portal that they can go into and get information. I'll jump over here real quick.

It's kind of a central hub, right?

Yeah, kind of a central hub here where I can go in, I can see what accounts have been assigned to me. So I can quickly go here and see what accounts that, you know, I've been assigned as a partner, the deals, the quotes maybe that I'm working on, but maybe even as importantly the resources that I have available that I can, that the company's sharing, whether it's reports or pricing or possibly even like a newsfeed of what's going on with the company that I'm partnered with. And all of that, all of this becomes that centralized hub, as you just said, for me as a partner. And now I have some analytics too that I can look at, we talked about objectively right now I have some analytics that are relevant to me as the partner that is being provided by the companies that I'm working with. And I'm partnering with. So this partner portal becomes a real tool for that. And then we have using that partner portal data, we can now look at this within our own lead smart system and see which partners are objectively producing. Right. Who's producing revenue, who's following up on the leads that we're providing them, who's closing revenue. Whether it's a rep, group or a distributor, all of those types of things, we want to have that objective view. This gives us the opportunity to actually do that and put it into place.

And we even have distributors and dealers using the portal because they want to track and manage and communicate back to people within their chain. It could be downstream or upstream from them. It could be sub rep, somebody that works as a sub dealer, whoever it might be or. And then they want to share uphill back to the manufacturer. So that's good stuff.

All right, so just to recap, what is Smart CRM? We said it's industry specific and purpose built. The ability to aggregate data from multiple external sources, especially in the industry that we're talking about here. Modular app based, pre configured functionality, hands free automation. Of course, the what's in it for me, all the adoption and usage things that we went through and then partner collaboration. Now when you look at these, and I think your point earlier, Kevin was right on. When you look at these holistically together, that's what smart CRM is. It's not, well, I have partner collaboration, so therefore it's smart CRM. If you look at all of these things together and this is what we've done and continue to do, this is what I spend a lot of time with my engineering team on, constantly looking at these. This is what eliminates the four letter word and makes the system valuable. You know, and, and we have customers that literally have said they believe their revenues have increased 20 to 30% in a year by doing some of these things and taking advantage of smart CRM. That's what the whole purpose of this is and why we were excited to get involved with this in the beginning.

So I think before you jump ahead here, Tom, just one quick comment on number three. Right. We didn't really talk about this, but I had mentioned a number of times earlier the concept of asking a software vendor, whatever software it is, what does the software do versus what it can do. We've talked just because we make a solution like this, of course we're talking about in using an example, our platform, but that's what we do. Our customers have found that their 70% or more ready to go out of the box.

Right.

So what does that mean? It means that instead of that blank screen like we saw at the beginning of our presentation from most technology companies, we're customizing and, and adjusting and configuring the solution to the customer's needs versus building something.

Right.

So we've got that pre configured functionality for manufacturers, wholesale agents, or manufacturers reps and wholesale distributors. It's ready to go almost for them right away. And that's what that third piece means here.

Yep. All right, so I'm going to zip through this part because we're, we're behind and there's some questions. I want to make sure we get to them before we run to the top of the hour. So one of the things that comes up a lot is, okay, well what does it matter to your business? Why does this matter to your business that we just went through? Well, the second question that comes to that is what has changed in the sales world and why does this, you know, matter? And the fact is, just about everything, and we've seen this more and more over the last few years. I'm just going to zip through these. I think, Kevin, we could do a full webinar just on this stuff alone. Yeah. But you know, obviously younger buyers, there's a lot more younger buyers and they want to be in control of their own buyer journey.

Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, that's one and two here kind of go together.

Right.

Omnichannel hybrid buying experience and younger buyers. Right. Everybody has one of these. Right. And what we know now is that, you know, well over 50% approaching 60% of B2B buyers. Right. And that is if you're a manufacturer, that's at your distributor and at the end user, if you're a distributor or dealer at the end user. Right. That the buyer is younger and they want a different experience than we're used to historically providing.

Yep, yep. And on top of that, right now the people you're hiring in your organization are younger and it's a new generation of sales and marketing employees and staff. And we see this over and over. Right. There's still some of the older guard in there, but there's a lot of new, new people that are coming in that have lived with technology and expect technology.

That's right.

Which, you know, I think which is the next one here is that your, your customers, prospects and employees are expecting you to employ modern technology. And we've heard over and over that, you know, especially again, the younger buyer and so forth, they almost feel like if the, if you're not employing modern technology, it's like you don't care, right? You don't care. You're not taking this seriously. And we've seen employees, too, that don't take jobs because they don't have modern technology. So this is going to be more and more of the case is you.

Might, you might not be experiencing this today. You might be, somebody might be watching this with us, joining us today or watching a recording later. I, I don't, I don't see that the answer is yet.

Yet.

You will be seeing this, right? It is happening around you. You might just not have seen it yet. And we were talking about this last week on our, on our podcast weekly with one of our guests, and he said it's almost more scary if you're not seeing this because it is happening, right?

It's happening. Yep. And more and more, the need for sales personnel to be an advisor versus a salesperson. Right. It's like they don't need a salesperson to do customer research and look up your products and find out information about your products, but they do need help in a lot of cases on how to best utilize them and where to take advantage of things. And again, we want the smart CRM to help that salesperson become more of an advisor than an actual salesperson. And then lastly, partners expect tighter and more collaborative partner with partner relationships. You know, again, we see this over and over, is that partners are looking for, whether it's a rep group working with a manufacturer or distributor or whatever the case may be, they're expecting tighter and more collaborative relationships that leverage technology. And these are trends that are not changing. They're going, like you said, you may not be experiencing all of these right now, or maybe you are, but it's not obvious. But it's continuing to be more and more of a trend. So obviously. Pardon.

What next?

What are we doing next? So what should you do now? And I'm just going to, again, zip through these. We'll zip through these quickly so we can get to these questions because I, there's some good questions here, and I just don't want to miss out on them. You know, first of all, evaluate the risk reward of a smart CRM solution and look at what happens if you don't do it. You know, really kick that around. And I, you know, as we said earlier, right, Kevin, there's a lot of companies that are just almost apathetic because of the horror stories and the other things that are there. But I think it's a Discussion that we're seeing happening more and more in companies. But if it's not happening, you definitely want it to happen just to look at it.

Yeah. And the answer right here is, is what happens if my competitor does it? Right. If I'm a distributor or wholesaler or dealer. Right. And the guy down the street that I'm fighting for, the same customer, has deep insights into that customer's needs, who wins? Yeah, Right.

If.

If I'm a manufacturer's rep and I'm able to communicate better with my distributor network or dealer network and back to the factory that somebody else can't do, who wins? If I'm a manufacturer that can do a better job of partnering on leads and deals that are going on out there with my distribution network versus the other guy that makes an abrasive or whatever the product might be, who wins? Where do I want to be in this process?

Yep. And I think it's worth a discussion, right. Whether you do anything or not, it's worth a discussion just to be looking at it. And then secondly is, we call it get your data act together. So identify your silos of data, where they're coming from. Again, trade shows or spreadsheets or ERP or whatever it is, even if you're not doing anything with it right now, start getting it together. Because in. And we're happy to talk to you about this, there's things you can do right away, even just to get that data centralized and together, even if you're not using it right away. Because if you're not, you're throwing away or potentially wasting a very valuable asset that you're going to want to take advantage of. And then, you know, determine do you need or want collaboration. Right. Look at your partners or do you have what partners do you want to be able to collaborate better with? Again, this kind of comes back to that first question of the discussion of risk reward. But how does this, you know, tie into all of this? Yep. And then evaluate your current level of CRM or smart CRM or there as. And, and, you know, are you using no CRM? Are you just using spreadsheets or things like that? A lot of companies are, do you have a CRM, but do you feel like it's outdated or more of some of the stuff we talked about earlier? Or maybe you're only using partial functionality of the CRM that you have, or your adoption level is poor. Right. Evaluate that and then look at where you are now and where you want to go. And then from there, we can work out a Crawl, walk, run plan for actually doing this and rather than going, oh, we're going to hand grenade everything and start over, or we're going to take on a major project that's going to take five years. And again, that's where people get apathetic and go, I don't have time for this. Right. I don't have the time or the attention or the resources for it because everything looks huge and overwhelming. But, and again, we're happy to talk to you about this and kind of help you with a plan on this, but it really doesn't have to be a hand grenade of what you're already doing. It can be that crawl, walk, run approach.

Yep. Tom, we got we running real short on time, so let's get a little bit of some questions. Feel free, folks. If you haven't asked a question already, if you have one to pop it into the, into the Q A that's at the bottom of your screen. But we have some here we should.

And we'll do these in three minutes so we can get done at the top of the hour. So first one I have here, Kevin, is, you know, can I do some of these things that you talked about with Smart CRM? If I already have a CRM in place, you know, so if I've already implemented the CRM, but maybe it's partially implemented or whatever, can I already, can I do some of these things? Obviously we need to know more about your specific situation. But in general, if you're using say Salesforce or Salesforce Sales Cloud or whatever, almost everything we talked about here, we can show you how to do quickly and relatively easily to kind of take that, what you have to another level. If you're using some other CRM or whatever, we probably would need to know more about what that is and, and what the options are and what could be done. I think that depends upon.

Certainly, certainly go investigate that solution that you either have or, or are not maybe optimized yet with, yet digging deep with what can it do and try and implement as many of these things as we've talked about today.

Yeah. Next question is, you know, expand more on crawl, walk, Run. So Kevin, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I think I, I, yeah, I will. And you know, we, we see this in a few different ways.

Right.

Is you talked about the app structure, right. You don't need to do everything at once.

Right.

You need to get started with. And sometimes you don't need to do all parts of your organization to get started with sometimes it's, we're going to start with this division or a group of a company to get them up and running and successful. And we're going to work on focusing on, you know, sales expansion and our partner relationships. Maybe we're going to key in on some things so that we're not trying to, you know, get a sip of water out of a firehouse. And that's kind of the core of that.

Right.

So looking at adoption rates growing because we didn't just, you know, dump a wheelbarrow on top of everybody full of stuff that they're expected to know day one.

Yep. And this may be the last question we're going to be able to get to now. But Marianne asks, you know, well, how can we start showing like, how can we prove the ROI from this right, at all? How do we actually tangibly show that if we invest in something like this, how do we get a return on investment? You know, there's a lot of things you can measure. Some of them are, I guess call them tactical roi. You know, for example, one of the things we do, Kevin, is we do a lot with managing quotes. And quote management is a problem in a lot of companies because they don't know what quotes actually close, which ones are being worked against, all of that kind of stuff. There's some real sort of tactical things you can do around roi. But the bigger picture is, like we talked about earlier is, you know, we have companies that literally believe 20 to 30% growth has occurred by doing some of the things that we talked about before. So we need to look into a snapshot of, okay, where you are, where you're trying to go, and how are we enabling that to occur. That's really where the big time ROI comes into play.

Yep, that's. That's it. You know, and again, what we've talked about all day, right, is when we have more information on the customer, we understand what that customer is doing today and what they could be doing. We're able to serve them better. When we're serving the customer better, they're buying more. Salesperson can't wait to use the technology because it's helping them grow. They're putting more dollars in their pockets. And back to that Big brother thing that we talked about earlier today was management will end up getting more data than they've ever even imagined they could get from their team because they're using this holistic approach. And ultimately everybody wins when you do it this way. So some more. Top of the hour.

We're going to end off but I want to appreciate everybody who showed up and the questions. And we'll get the replay out, of course, to have this available. And please reach out to us if you have questions or anything you want to talk about. Okay. All right. Thanks, everybody.