Behind the Marketing Ep. 1: The CRM, The Closer, and The Chaos

I thought she said it was going to be $3,600 a month.

It's a lot of money.

So let's go over first and foremost what the pricing is going to be.

Whether it's on our joint account or on my hidden bank account.

Wait, use the services from his private bank account that she doesn't know about. He can't tell us what he wants. Like, this is important to me as a business owner because if— Mamba mentality, a constant quest to become the best version of oneself. Syndicate Marketing's got that mamba mentality. Do you? Okay, let's talk about the meeting with HubSpot this morning. So did they get us pricing?

Yeah, but it's— she's pretty pricey. But I think we kind of expected that.

What I'm— what I'm a little concerned with is the usage because you got like the platform cost, but then are they going to nickel and dime the crap out of us? Like our subscription to CLOZ is like $500 a month, but they nickel and dime us for an extra $500.

I doubt they do that in this spot because the monthly is like $5,700 a month.

Yeah, I thought she said it was going to be $3,600 a month.

Well, uh, that's before you add on the seats in it. Wait, what? That's what I'm saying. It's yearly. If you pay, if you pay yearly and qualify for the 10% discount, $7,700 $77,000 a year.

Frick. Our CRM system is basically broken for the level of scale and the number of leads that we're generating. So we've got to really rethink how to just make the tracking more robust, make the reporting easier to track, how to hold our guys more accountable so we can just invest more into our advertising.

So I don't know what you guys are willing to pay. I told her like, we're pretty set on using HubSpot, but I just want to double check with Tanner because it's a lot of money.

So let's go over first and foremost what the pricing is going to be. How much is it gonna cost for us to get it set up with one of their partners? That's number 2. Number 3 is what is gonna be the other nickel and dime fees on it? If you can't measure, then you can't improve something. What's taking place is it's really tough for us to track things like our lifetime value, our customer churn, our— we've got multiple merchant accounts and payment gateways. So in terms of like week to week, we're kind of just in our current CRM system, only able to track what's happening in that finite window inside of Close because of how many different layers there are to this. Like, this is important to me as a business owner because if I can't hold my sales guys accountable and if I can't go all the way through the process from what it costs for me to get a click to that turns into an appointment, how many appointments I need to generate to actually generate a closed deal, what my lifetime value is going to be, what my company's churn is, then I can't make data-driven decisions and be confident to double, triple, quadruple, or even 10x my ad spend. Dude, I heard we're getting HubSpot. Do you know which side is— it's like a CRM. You replace— oh, they want to replace Close, right? Yeah, I know. He's talking about using Salesforce as well. I've used— I use Salesforce my last sales gig. I think Noah's used it. All right, so one of the main problems that we've been facing recently is that You know, we had one of our sales guys, you know, he's a great sales guy, loved working with him, great asset to the company. He decided kind of on a whim to up and leave and go start his own deal. And, you know, I can't blame anybody for doing that, for wanting to go and start their own business, because at the end of the day, I mean, that's what I, what I did and that's what I wanted to do as well. The challenge was, is that how do I, how do I say this? I wasn't as aggressive as I should have been with following up with my guys, making sure that the, you know, they were using the proper decks and just making sure that the sales organization was completely dialed in. So over the last 2 months, I have had every one of the sales conversations go through me. I've been completely revamping our sales org, our expectations, the minimum number of dials and phone time that is expected, our compensation, even like the way that we're incentivizing our guys has been completely changed. We're switching over CRMs, as you know, and we're doing this because I want to make sure that we can be as productive as a sales organization as possible. One of the main problems we're trying to solve right now is finding another type of a closer that can come in, that we can train on our system and can just be an absolute killer. So I've got a couple of references that I'm working with. I've always found when it comes to sales guys, like working your personal network is probably the best way to do it. And luckily for me, I've got a ton of people in, you know, SaaS sales right here in Utah where Syndicate Marketing's headquartered. There's tons of companies that are, you know, that have really great sales teams. So I'm going to give this guy a call right now and just kind of see what he says. Hopefully he answers, dude.

You call him forward into voicemail. The person you're trying to reach is not available. At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up.

Hey, what's up, Mitch? Tanner Smith from Syndicate Marketing here. I got your number from Andrew. I think he's your family or related somehow. Anyways, he told me you're an absolute stud. We're looking for a really killer sales guy closer that can come in and help us grow and build. We're doing some pretty cool things over here. And yeah, he just told me about you and said that you might be open-minded to a conversation. So if you could just give me a call back here, this is my direct cell. I'm available to chat the rest of the day, so just give me a call back if you can. I'm, you know, I'll be available. Thanks, man. All right, well, we'll try again.

So we're getting 40, about 40, 50 leads a week.

Okay.

Average CPL is under 20, which is what he wants. Sure. But when we've talked to him about raising the budget, he's just always nixed it.

But he's also been consistently telling us he wants more leads. Yeah. So I'm confused as to what the problem is. 'Cause like, okay, so is this the same guy that's been super emotional the whole time? Like will freak out every morning if there's not a lead and we go 2 hours without generating a lead, he'll freak out.

Literally every day, and this is based on my observation in the conversations we had, it's like they want to get into the office and have 10 leads waiting for them to contact and schedule that day. That's just not— I mean, you and I both know that's not how ads work, right? It literally, if we want to do that, then the only lever that we want to, that we have left to pull is budget. Yeah, which is what I told him. It's what Benson told him. And he still is just so fixated in this. Oh, I need to keep my cost at $20, under $20. So my cost per job is $80. And then the $500, like $500 job on the back end works out that way.

Right. Like it's probably not going to be a good fit because what you're telling us is you're frustrated with the amount of leads, but you're also frustrated if the cost per lead goes a cent above $0.20 and you freak out and you want to— you turn the ads off. So we've got conflicting ideas here. What I would tell him is, hey dude, listen, this is a volume play. Who cares about the $80 front end? All we're trying to do with the $80 that we're collecting up front is to subsidize the ad spend. Like, you're either going to have to be OK with a $30 or $40 cost per lead, or you're going to have to be OK with maybe only generating 40 to 80 a month. Yeah. And let us know what you want to do so we can go to bat for you and you can hold us accountable. Sound fair? Yeah, that makes sense. Cool, man. And if he doesn't— and if he doesn't understand it, like, honestly, dude, let's just not even work with this guy because we can't— we can't— he can't tell us what he wants.

Anyways, just got off the phone with this guy, uh, Eric, who said he's gonna do— he's the guy that said he's gonna do it yesterday. And he owns a junk removal business.

And is that what you guys actually talked about, though? I thought it was a different business.

Yeah, it was a different business. So he owns a junk removal. He wants to move forward with us in July when his contract is over.

But with your junk removal business or with the other business?

But with the other business, which is his wife or girlfriend. Wife or girlfriend. They have a joint bank account, so I'm not sure.

Are they married or not married?

I'm assuming married. Anyways, yesterday he's like, yeah, man, send me the payment link. Like, we'll get things going. And, uh, I like— he hasn't done it yet. And so I was like, dude, this is weird. Like, why hasn't he done it yet? And so I just called him, got off the phone, and he's like, dude, he's like talking about how he— his wife, his wife, her name is, uh, uh, Angie.

And okay, that's fine, who cares. Angie.

Yeah, okay, Angie. So She's, she's like, oh, I need to have my Google Business Profile set up before we like run ads. And she was under the impression that 2 weeks from when you sign that, which is our typical onboarding period, that we're running ads no matter what. Not, you know, if she's ready to take on orders, like obviously we can wait until she's ready to take on orders, stuff like that.

Yeah.

And I was like, dude, so are we getting this done or not? He's like, dude, He didn't say this, but like, she's a little bit like crazy, honestly.

Is it his wife or girlfriend?

Yeah.

Oh, got to be his wife. Okay, perfect. So crazy wife. Okay, so how is she crazy anyways?

She's a— she'll go through his finances like every single day. What he's spending, like all his finances, business, like whatever. Okay. And I said, well, we want to be ready so that when she is, that we can just say yes, let's go. And he's like, Oh yeah, dude, like I was going to pay yesterday and then she was like, wait, hold on, hold on. Like, I want to get this and this started first.

So, okay, so did we communicate this to Angie? Because this is what we need to communicate to her. Hey, Angie, you understand, like, what needs to go into you getting ready to be able to take orders? There's so much that needs to go into the work deliverables that before we can actually get you to a position to be able to take orders. That's why you want to sign up with us now, because if it's 2 weeks from now or a month from now, you actually want to start taking orders. We got to get started yesterday for you to be able to get to a point where you're ready to take orders. It's going to be 2 weeks from signing up with us regardless of what happens. Most other agencies will take a month, 2 months to accomplish the amount of work that will accomplish in 14 days. But if you're ready to get going in 2 weeks from now, let's just freaking go.

She wasn't on this last call. She was on the Zoom call.

Okay.

She didn't do much talking because Eric is her husband. He's the one paying for it and whatever. Uh, so she definitely needs to be— have that communication.

Yeah.

Uh, but what Eric said is he's like, dude, like, I'm so sorry. Like, I didn't realize it was a 24-hour thing. Like, we needed to get this done to keep the promotion and whatever. He's like, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go talk to her And he's like, no matter what, whether it's on our joint account or on my hidden bank account.

So this is one of my investment accounts. This is not auditing. Okay. So he's going to use the services from his private bank account that she doesn't know about. Yeah. To pay for the services for her business.

Yep. And he's like, if she's like, not about this, he's like, I'm the type that's like, let's just go, go, go. Okay. And like, I know she needs to do this and I want to do this too for mine when mine's ready. And so like, okay, we're going to do this. So he's like, I promise to you, by the time you come in Monday, it'll be done. I was like, okay.

So he's got invoice sent, he's ready to rock and roll. He's going to talk to Angie. Yeah. He's going to see where she's at. If she says no, he's paying for it for her business from his private bank account she doesn't know about. Yeah. But if she says yes, Angie's paying for it from their joint. Okay. All right, let's go, Angie. Let's go, Angie. So sorry, Mr. Call Man.

No worries at all.

I was just driving and then I hopped on another call and just got off another call again. No, all good, man. So where we left that off was you're walking me through how you got all these things going. You kind of got a bunch of plates spinning up in the air and you have kind of the ad platform that you're working through. It's not like the main priority, but it's operational. You want to get people on the platform. So let's— I mean, am I missing anything there? No, you're pretty on point. Like, it is a high priority. I think mainly inventory. I mean, there's a lot of things that he can't tell me about, which you could tell in that conversation was pretty guarded. And obviously we'll edit and redact some of the other information as well, so even you guys as the users probably don't really understand what's going on there. But their main challenge is they're trying to figure out, understand inventory, which is how are they going to have placements for the ads? Like, how are they going to have eyeballs to be able to place the ads? You see, a platform like Meta or Google, for example, has dang near unlimited inventory because of all of the amount of time and eyeballs that we all give to the platform. So that's always the challenge with these new social media platforms that are trying to create an advertising component is how do we get the inventory, aka the eyeballs and the people, and the different ways we can place those ads at scale? And how much in terms of advertising dollars can we support? It's a great opportunity. I think it's a little bit of a long shot. Um, there's a lot of factors going up against them. Number one, people like their existing social media platforms. Getting them and convincing somebody to get to get off of Instagram, to get off of a TikTok, is really tough. So I think that tool and that social media application has to be very slick and it has to be— there's a lot of factors that are outside of their control there. So that's number 1. But number 2 is they have to be able to create environment quickly where businesses can trust that if they put their ad dollars in, they'll be able to get a return on their investment back out. So who knows what could happen with this? I mean, it could totally flop, but in the rare chance that it succeeds, it could be massive. I mean, so I'm kind of new to this, right? It's not like I have tons of experience in building out a sales floor or sales team. I think number one is, dude, are you going to be a self-starter? If you're going to rely on me to tell you everything there is to know about marketing, probably not a good fit. Like, I need you to go and do your own research, watch some YouTube videos, take ownership of your income, take ownership of your earning potential. Like, go and watch YouTube videos on guys that are closing, different closing techniques. Like, you can also watch a ton of the resources I'm going to give you. So somebody who's just like really hungry and eager to learn, number one. Number two, I think having experience in other sales, high ticket, B2B, Sales is a must. Asking for that card, asking for that person to close, like if you don't have experience in that, it's uncomfortable if all you've done is like, you know, residential, pest control, you know, solar, you know, security systems, alarms, like it's a different type of a sell. So that's kind of what we're looking for.

Your call has been forwarded to voicemail.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Didn't answer. In all reality, I don't think people want to see a business that never has any problems or, you know, I don't think that's really super interesting. But number 2, I don't think it even exists. Like that does not exist. Every business, when you get under the hood, it's just problem after problem. That's what business is, is you're solving problems, you're confronting your problems, you're finding the solutions, and you're just, you're just doing that over and over and over again. The businesses that make tons of money and are successful are the businesses that have just had more problems than the other ones, and they found a way to solve them.