Links Mentioned in Episode

• Theia Marketing Website

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello, and welcome to the Close The Loop podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Dieny and today we’re going to talk about how to get the most value out of your CRM. To help us dive into this topic, this fairly technical, pretty complex topic. We have two special guests with us today, we have Islin Munisteri and Lucas Munisteri.

[00:00:18] Kevin Dieny: They have co-founded Theia Marketing. They are a Hubspot platinum partner agency, and they work hard to integrate client business processes into the CRM. They’ve lived in several states across the US in Texas, Alaska, and now Colorado. They enjoy sharing their experiences with others, all about different CRMs.

[00:00:38] Kevin Dieny: So welcome guys.

[00:00:40] Kevin Dieny: I’ve also got my colleague here. His name is Tim Tran. He’s I guess, Tim, do you want to do a little intro for yourself?

[00:00:48] Tim Tran: Yeah, sure. I’m the internal consultant here at CallSource, I work directly with the teams and make sure that, I have streamlined all the operations, and give advice where we’re needed.

[00:00:58] Kevin Dieny: Cool, Tim is the ops guy here. I thought he’d be a great person to kick around some of the discussions around this topic. So that’s why I’ve asked him if he’d join us. First of all, we’re going to be talking about how businesses get value out of the CRM first off. Um, maybe Lucas, define for us, what the heck we’re talking about when we say a CRM for those that are like, what is that again?

[00:01:20] Lucas Munisteri: Yeah, so CRM, everybody uses a CRM without even realizing it. And basically what a CRM is, is it’s a contact or customer relationship, man. If you use outlook for your email or Gmail for your email, that fundamentally is a CRM at its simplest level. You’re keeping your contact information, their email address, and how to get ahold of them.

[00:01:47] Lucas Munisteri: But that level of CRM is very inactionable for a company it’s good for communication, but it doesn’t let you grow that relationship or nurture that relationship because you only know very little data about that. If you’ve used something like outlook, you can see, you can go into the more properties and you can see it lets you track a little bit more detail, but it still has its end.

[00:02:12] Lucas Munisteri: When you get into a true CRM, something to manage your customer life cycle and know how to cut, how customers are interacting with your brand. That’s something like a HubSpot or a Salesforce or Microsoft dynamics. And those allow you to understand every little detail about your customers from which websites are viewing to which products are they buying, are they interested in down to, are they paying their bills on time?

[00:02:39] Lucas Munisteri: And depending upon the CRM that you pick, you get different levels of reporting and insights into your customers. Now, Well, you will find as you drive down this road and we’ll just leave a word here, have you scratch your heads? When you get into a CRM that tracks every, everything you are using, what’s called an ERP and that’s actually an enterprise reporting platform and that’s used to manage your entire business.

[00:03:08] Lucas Munisteri: So there is a cutoff of, from one system to another and Salesforce and Microsoft dynamics or net suite with, uh, Oracle. We’ll cross those lines tools like HubSpot or active campaign. They don’t really cross that boundary. They still stay in that CRM component. And it’s more about managing that customer through that marketing and sales portion of the lifecycle.

[00:03:38] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, I think it’s important that to me, at least the CRM sort of came out of a rolodex. I mean, it sort of evolved from there. So that brings me to the question for you Islin. So CRMs have probably evolved a lot over time. So how are they evolving and what are they doing?

[00:03:57] Kevin Dieny: To help businesses today as they continue to become, maybe like Lucas mentioned an all-in-one or maybe are they getting a little more niche into specific functions that are providing. Can you shed some light on that?

[00:04:09] Islin Munisteri: Sure, so there’s, I would say there’s like different CRMs, like there’s I would say there’s industry specific CRMs, right? Like certain healthcare, like doctor’s offices, that type of industry. There’s pipedrive if you’re running it like a sales heavy organization. And you have under a certain number of reps that that can help too.

[00:04:31] Islin Munisteri: But really, I would say like a CRM, a good CRM will help you track the customer journey from like marketing from when a lead fills out a form on your website. There’s a process called lead scoring, which you can implement. And at some point when a lead has viewed enough content or they have seen enough websites or they’ve had enough calls into your system of then, or they’ve had enough email opens, then they become, a sales qualified lead.

[00:05:06] Islin Munisteri: So they move from a lead, from a marketing qualified lead to after enough activity, interacting with your brand. They becomes a sales qualified lead. And then so go from marketing and sales and then, depending on your products, right, you can also have a service in there as well. And so you’re tracking, you know, support tickets and onboarding process with your CRM as well.

[00:05:35] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, so, wow. So CRMs today are delivering a lot more value than like a typical rolodex. So, we have run into CRMs quite a bit, uh, and with our company and some of them are much more industry specific than others. Like you mentioned, the healthcare ones, we run into a lot of home service industry CRMs. And CRM is built for some, some of them are like, look, we do the basics.

[00:05:56] Kevin Dieny: You can bolt on a lot of features, a lot of cool things. So, uh, Tim in your experience, in our ops side where it’s either internal or working with clients, have you run into a lot of CRMs out there. And, and what does that sort of seem like? Is it this like an ocean of CRMs?

[00:06:11] Kevin Dieny: What is it like out there?

[00:06:12] Tim Tran: Yeah, everyone has like a, their go-to CRM. They have to have it integrate or it doesn’t work, or we won’t work with you guys. We used to work with a lot of auto dealerships. So a lot of it was like, hey, this CRM needs to work in our dealership. This is what we know. This is what it feeds into.

[00:06:27] Tim Tran: So I understand there’s, there’s a lot of CRMs and a lot of people are glued or business are glued and tied into those, those CRMs. It’s like they’re a partner in their business.

[00:06:38] Kevin Dieny: So that brings me great question out for you, Lucas. So there’s requirements for a CRM, right? I guess a CRM might just be like, look, we’ll sell it to anybody. But I think the way that we’ve adopted CRM is the way that I’ve seen other companies do it is like there’s kind of requirements.

[00:06:54] Kevin Dieny: You don’t just want to list, like buy any little thing and it’s out there. You want to make sure if you’re going to buy something. You’re going to be able to have either the people to manage it. You’re going to take use of it. So there’s, to me, there’s some requirements out there. So what would you say, like some requirements might be for businesses who are considering a CRM?

[00:07:13] Lucas Munisteri: Honestly, the requirement list is infinite. It doesn’t have a bottom. And the reason why I say that is you have. Your outlook inbox, which is the most simple CRM on the planet to the CRMs. They get to the borderline of any ERP and tracking everything. The biggest requirement for a CRM though across the board is will you use it?

[00:07:39] Lucas Munisteri: It, I cannot tell you the number of clients who have purchased. Zoho pipe drive sales, loft copper, and like four or five other CRM platforms. And they’re using each one for a tiny little bit of function. And like you brought up a minute ago, you can bolt on a ton of stuff, but does it really work? Uh, HubSpot’s got a great phrase called Frankenstein.

[00:08:10] Lucas Munisteri: And it’s this concept of, yes, we have the central data repository, but we’re going to add all these other resources around the edges of it to make it actually function how we want, but you’ve only sat settled for something that works well enough. It doesn’t actually work how you want. And that’s led rise to a whole new category of programs called data aggregation platform.

[00:08:37] Lucas Munisteri: And all they do is bring databases together and send data out. But you’re you get into this world of tech debt, and I know I’m running in circles around your question, but the point being is, if you don’t know what you want to track, and you don’t know what your business is, KPIs are, or what matters to you to your growth, it doesn’t matter what the CRM is or what it does.

[00:09:05] Lucas Munisteri: If you can’t track what matters and you don’t, or even better yet, in some cases you don’t know what matters to your business. It’s not going to matter what you pick.

[00:09:14] Kevin Dieny: Right, and, and I can see what you mean by that being an endless well there, because, what the business really needs is varies business to business sometimes, and they may need more resources or different processes to make use of a CRM than another business mind. Right? Like the, the purposes behind it.

[00:09:36] Kevin Dieny: The core functionality of it is organizing for a business so that when things are more organized, you can better take action on them. And then when you do decide to take action, which is the thing you mentioned earlier Lucas. Was a really good CRM these days, ordering on an ERP is going to help you take action on the things that you’ve organized.

[00:09:54] Kevin Dieny: So Islin, you mentioned some of the ways, like some of the things, the tools, the features that are in the CRM or in the ERP is today that are helping people, but what are. I guess general things, right? Cause there’s so many CRMs. What are some general things that are helping businesses take action by using a CRM?

[00:10:13] Kevin Dieny: Right? So like what tools or what features are companies using today that come from the CRM that helped them take action on the information they have?

[00:10:23] Islin Munisteri: So I would say at the beginning, you need to understand what your business KPIs are. So for example, you have revenue. Okay. What drives that revenue? Okay. So you say, you need to have 10 leads a month. And the top of the funnel to drive to, to close deals at the end of the month. So that you know about how long your sales cycle is. You know how what’s your revenue machine look like?

[00:10:53] Islin Munisteri: From a sales side, you’d want to have deal tracking, right? You’d want to be able to understand what your deal pipeline looks like. For, you know, a lot of bigger companies, you’d want to be able to forecast probability to close on your deals. Once something is closed won you also have a process to take that to customer success.

[00:11:17] Islin Munisteri: So it’s, it’s not like your sales processes is done once you kick it over the fence. Like there’s, there’s an entire business process in the background that’s working and then understanding that business process is key. So that’s why I was saying you need to have, if you can get, say part of the inbound methodology, if you’re not doing any outbound farm, like hunting at all saying you have 10 leads come in from your website every month.

[00:11:44] Islin Munisteri: And so that’s marketing, like a KPI, towards driving revenue. And so those marketing source leads need to come down to sales and sales work works their process, and then some marketing needs to work their process, whether that’s like social media, content, email, whatever those webinars, podcasts, you know, whatever those channels, may be.

[00:12:11] Islin Munisteri: To drive that traffic to create the leads. That’s what I mean, that’s part of what we do is like the customer journey mapping, right. How does someone on the street who doesn’t know, you turn into a customer, turn into an evangelist for your brand.

[00:12:26] Kevin Dieny: Oh, that’s really cool. So there’s a lot of features bringing value to a business, I guess if they, if it fits their business model and if they take use on it. So, that kind of leads me immediately to think like, okay, well, who should be responsible in the business for making sure that the CRM is going to get used?

[00:12:45] Kevin Dieny: Have you experienced it? So, Lucas, I mean, who is usually are in charge of that? Is it the owner or the CEO, or is it like a dedicated person that works best for that?

[00:12:55] Lucas Munisteri: It depends upon the size of the organization. So larger organizations that can have a team that that’s their, their job is to pay attention to what’s going on inside the CRM. Those are the people that ideally are managing it. If you have a data manager or. Uh, CRM, admin or somebody, and typically people in like Salesforce environments, they will have a Salesforce admin.

[00:13:22] Lucas Munisteri: They’re going to be responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the system, making sure it’s working and healthy, but then the individual managers or team leaders for departments for marketing or sales are going to be responsible for making sure people are actually utilizing that system. Cause if you don’t force people to do.

[00:13:41] Lucas Munisteri: They’re not going to do it. I mean, it’s, if you don’t tell someone they have to do it or their job’s important based measured on that, they’re going to take the path of least resistance and it takes a little bit of time to get people onboard into that mindset that this is the best way to do that.

[00:14:03] Islin Munisteri: Well, I guess, I mean, at some larger companies, right there, there is a revenue operations function, right? And they kind of corral the troops across like sales, marketing operations. And there’s like a new emerging field called customer success, operations and rev ops basically make sure that everything is being reported system is being used.

[00:14:25] Islin Munisteri: Any big fires or small fires are being put out in the systems that are, that are being used.

[00:14:30] Kevin Dieny: That’s really cool. I, we have a CRM admin here. If he was here, he’d probably be representing here on the call, but I also look at a. Uh, CRM, not like as the, obviously, as we’ve been talking about, not as the final destination. To me, a lot of businesses are going to go, man. If we knew this, we could probably make more money.

[00:14:51] Kevin Dieny: Oh man. We’d like to sell, but then after we sell, we’d like to help with customer support or something. They think of how they want their business to run and behave. And to me, my mind immediately goes, okay, well with a CRM, you can do that easier with the capabilities that are tools that mimic, or that are similar to a CRM.

[00:15:08] Kevin Dieny: And usually there’s like a point where a business is like, well, maybe I can get away with using, like, Lucas mentioned, like maybe I can get away with using Excel spreadsheets, written notepads. So I’ll go back to you Lucas, at where is the point where a business has to go from, notepads, Excel sheets, outlooks, gmails too.

[00:15:28] Kevin Dieny: Okay, I’m going to get on board and get a full fledged CRM. Is there like a, a point cause we’ve run into businesses, I’ve been shocked how big they were to find out that he’d never had a CRM. So I think that there might be some line they cross where they’re like, okay, I think it’s time.

[00:15:42] Lucas Munisteri: It’s when you want to start understanding what’s driving growth. I mean, that’s the biggest metric right there. We’ve worked with clients that have grown to a $15 million a year business in Excel, workbooks, and, people’s brains. Like there is nothing documented, but someone goes on vacation and everything breaks.

[00:16:05] Lucas Munisteri: So there there’s a scope of like yes and no. I think it really comes down to picking a CRM from day one. And you can pick HubSpot as a CRM because they offer a free version out of the box. There’s a lot of other like low cost, low effort CRMs to get you started. Because as long as you’re just focusing on the CRM component, not the marketing automation, not the sales automation or the pipeline or deal management and all of these other things that come as an anciliary function of having a CRM.

[00:16:45] Lucas Munisteri: A lot of that core data structure, these companies provide for very low cost. And I don’t see a reason for people not to do. However, there are still people who will fight you tooth and nail because of some reason.

[00:17:04] Tim Tran: And on that point at what, when you guys are working with clients, what’s the best way to get their team adopted into a CRM? Well, like which ways have you guys seen the most effective.

[00:17:14] Lucas Munisteri: So we do a lot of hands on training with our clients. A lot of time and effort spent. Teaching them how to use the tools and working through those friction barriers of I can’t, or I don’t want to. And when it comes to the individual contributor, the person doing the work, if their boss says, you will do this, it’s much easier.

[00:17:40] Lucas Munisteri: If their boss says, Hey, the CEO paid for this, but we’re not really going to do that. They’ll never use it. It just it’ll never happen. And so it comes down to that encouragement to do it. You will find the occasional, like person who’s like the individual contributor. Who’s like, I need this, I want this.

[00:18:06] Lucas Munisteri: And typically it’s because they’ve come from an organization, that’s used it in their past and they’ve seen the value it adds.

[00:18:14] Kevin Dieny: Another aspect of a CRM to me is also the internal side. Like helping with collaboration, for instance. So it isn’t do you think you could comment on how a CRM might help a company? Increased collaboration with in itself, like within internal departments, sales, with marketing support, with marketing support, with sales, just anyone be able to collaborate easier with each other because they have a CRM.

[00:18:38] Islin Munisteri: The great thing is that. For example, HubSpot does email tracking and a bunch of other CRMs do that too. And that way that email is not living just an outlook. And if you go down for a week or something, then that email is like unresponded to, or like I would say SOL but then if that email is living in the CRM, then another team member can take action on it.

[00:19:07] Islin Munisteri: It’s like, oh, we, we need to respond or we need to do something. I would say the marketing, the sales handoff, if you have some sort of marketing automation going on behind the scenes, life becomes a lot smoother.

[00:19:21] Lucas Munisteri: Yeah, I mean, I can add a little more color to that. Within like a lot of the organizations we help configure, they’ll track a person through that marketing funnel from a lead all the way to an SQL or a sales qualified lead. And when they hit that phase, they’re automatically created as an opportunity for a sales person to reach out to. So provided both teams have aligned on what’s a qualified person.

[00:19:46] Lucas Munisteri: It helps the sales team know who to reach out to. And then when the deal closes, it automatically creates a ticket to either do the fulfillment or the project onboarding or fulfill whatever they purchased. So that there’s a seamless handoff from each phase, and everybody knows what’s going on. And depending upon where you create those tickets or tasks, it helps people have line of sight to what their potential pipeline of work will be.

[00:20:16] Islin Munisteri: Yeah, all of that historical information is stored within the CRM. So you can see all the emails that marketing and sales has had once customer success takes over. So provided, someone actually reviews the data and then you’ll feel more prepared going into that, that client engagement.

[00:20:34] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, so I guess coming off of that, then my question for, I guess, back to you Islin here would be like, how long should a company or how long do come some companies take before they see some value out of the CRM? I think some of the requirements we mentioned we want to use the CRM. And when you start using it, is that, does that enable any value, like day one or is it more likely that they’ll see value at some time down the road?

[00:21:05] Islin Munisteri: So I think Hubspot and a few other customer success, like communities have said, there’s something like a day zero. Where that’s the first day you start seeing value from the product. And that could be three to six months, down the line. If you’re onboarded within like a month or two, then you can start seeing a value right away from the tool during the onboarding meetings.

[00:21:34] Islin Munisteri: But the, the real value comes from actually using the tool, right. And then taking actionable insights from the reports and dashboards.

[00:21:45] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, that’s that’s why, so maybe instead of commenting on it, I may ask you about it. So Lucas, let’s say a company is like, we’re going to get a CRM. What things could they do beforehand or ahead of time, or let’s say they have a CRM. What things can they do to make it so that when they get a CRM, that they are ready and prepared to get more value out of it?

[00:22:11] Lucas Munisteri: How do I put this politely… knowing you have a problem is half the battle. The second half of this battle is understanding how do you want to solve it? So the number of people that buy a CRM that aren’t ready for a CRM, and that kind of contradicts what I said a minute ago around like everybody needs one, but if you don’t have a process, if you don’t have a way of.

[00:22:44] Lucas Munisteri: If it lives in your brain, the hardest thing for you to do is get it out of your brain and into a process or a system. And so the first step is figuring out how are you going to put this into a process or a system? How are you going to make this something that you can action on? Because otherwise you’ll be paying for a CRM and you’re not going to have.

[00:23:11] Lucas Munisteri: Any idea how you want to structure it. And if you, yeah, you’ve got to have that plan. I mean, we spend a lot of time with clients who buy a CRM, we start their onboarding and it’s like, we want to build out your sales pipeline. What does that look like? How do you manage your sales process? I call people and I sell to.

[00:23:33] Lucas Munisteri: And you’re like, okay, well, what if they say yes, what do you do next? What if they say no? Like they genuinely have no idea. And so getting that on the right, that right level is hugely important.

[00:23:52] Islin Munisteri: Your process there, there needs to be a process where it lives in your head or in lucid chart or Vizio or something. You need to have some sort of step-by-step one to free for. This is what I do in my sales process, or this is how I’m getting marketing leads, or this is what my own onboarding process looks like.

[00:24:14] Islin Munisteri: This is what my support process looks like. We’ve helped companies build out these process diagrams. For their companies, right. But that way it’s documented and all the troops know which direction to head in when it’s no longer lonely in someone’s bring.

[00:24:31] Kevin Dieny: Okay, so it brings me two questions into my head, after what you’ve just said. So I’ll throw it right back to Lucas. A small company, who may not have, let’s say the most complex processes. But they do have maybe, you know, something. So is a CRM for them?

[00:24:47] Lucas Munisteri: Yeah, I mean, put it this way. When we started five years ago, the first piece of software we bought was Active Campaign. And that was our CRM that we were going to use to manage contacts. We bought that before we bought Microsoft for documents or Google for email or anything. The very first thing was how are we going to track these people that we want to work?

[00:25:10] Lucas Munisteri: And so having that day one, we didn’t know exactly what we were going to put in it and how we were going to structure it, but we bought something and we got started. And when we left active campaign and went to HubSpot, we knew the entire database, it was in such a bad shape that it really wasn’t a structure that was maintainable.

[00:25:33] Lucas Munisteri: But because we had tried and been working in that, in that system, that invite. The move to HubSpot was very easy. We knew what we were doing wrong. We knew what we wanted to do differently the next time, where, when you’re doing it from firing from the hip, the best way to put it. And it’s all in your head, it’s very hard to get that out.

[00:25:56] Lucas Munisteri: And so sometimes a blank piece of paper, pardon me? A blank piece of paper is easier to start from than a book that you have to rewrite. And so. Their CRMs are great early on. They help you structure and think. And when you get to this like midpoint where you’re stuck, it’s very hard to change how you think and transition.

[00:26:24] Lucas Munisteri: You need to do it. You just it’s a lot of work. And so knowing, having an understanding of how you want to manage that, Is the hardest part. And then you’re, you’re working, you’re busy, you’re doing things. So asking a boss or that owner seller, like fulfiller role person to take five minutes and step back and say, how do I sell more?

[00:26:52] Lucas Munisteri: How do I bring on salespeople? That’s one thing having a CRM helps tremendously is you can bring on an account manager and she can, or he can go look at. That contact record and see the emails, see the deals, see where they’re having problems with tickets and get up to speed in a matter of days, minutes versus weeks of who do I manage?

[00:27:18] Lucas Munisteri: How do I manage? What, what next? And so it’s this chicken and egg thing. It really is a challenge.

[00:27:29] Kevin Dieny: That’s a great answer there, detailing all that out. The hard thing about it is like, it’s, we’re talking about a tool, right. And with a tool, like a hammer, it, it has, maybe it has the standard purpose of driving nails, but it, it can be used in a lot of different ways for a lot of different things.

[00:27:46] Kevin Dieny: So when we’re talking, like how does it, how does a hammer do what it’s supposed to do for people it’s like, well, it does. It’s basic functional capability. But it’s also like about the person who’s swinging it. It’s also about like what they’re going to do, what they need it to do, or, you know, maybe there’s different hammers for different types of purposes, different things that they they have.

[00:28:05] Kevin Dieny: So the answer is tough to be more specific on, right. But it’s also like we could, but we’d be here for a very long time.

[00:28:15] Lucas Munisteri: Yeah, I mean, I guess the best way to put it with a CRM is using your hammer analogy. Every tool is a hammer, but not every hammer is. I mean, if you get into that, like that’s really, when you see people using Excel as a CRM, I mean, that is definitely a very non-traditional way of using it

[00:28:43] Lucas Munisteri: and actually pop on my soap box here for 30 seconds. You now have this like onslaught of project management tools, click up Monday, a sauna selling themselves a CRM. And that creates a whole new world of challenges. When people go to try to leave a project management tool that they’ve been using as a CRM, it, they want to do things that you, that a CRM is not designed, not, not meant to do inside their CRM.

[00:29:17] Lucas Munisteri: But then they’re stuck in this mindset of a project. Everything’s a project management process.

[00:29:25] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this brings up another question for me, so Islin, see dirty CRMs. CRM’s filled with, uh, for the lack of a better word, crap data, right? That’s a big problem. So that might keep a company from even using the CRM they have today. You mentioned Lucas that you guys went to HubSpot and then, okay. We know what we want to do. We’re going to clean this up as we transition.

[00:29:50] Kevin Dieny: So how big of a problem is bad data, incomplete inputted information. How much of a problem is that for a CRM?

[00:30:00] Islin Munisteri: I would say I would let Lucas handle that question because he has a lot of direct client experience with dirty, dirty data. He cleans it, but I would let him, I’ll let him dive the dirty data.

[00:30:16] Lucas Munisteri: Yeah… hahahaha.

[00:30:21] Lucas Munisteri: Garbage data’s garbage. Always will be. It’s more of a behavior. You don’t know what to track until you start trying to track things and you start trying to analyze what works and what doesn’t. And so just jumping in and starting something is better than doing nothing.

[00:30:43] Lucas Munisteri: If everybody listening right now, would you rather your employee sit there and twiddle their thumbs and say, I don’t know where to start. Or them to start and make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at the end of it, know what to do?

[00:30:56] Kevin Dieny: That’s a good question. So, okay. So Tim, in the world of trying to figure out, let’s say a CRM. So, if you were to try to go figure a CRM out right now, go pick one and go, I don’t know, go navigate them. What are some of your biggest fears about picking one?

[00:31:16] Tim Tran: That’s a good question. I, my biggest fear picking the wrong one would be I, I, back to everyone’s point, like I need to know what I’m tracking. I need to know what my people are doing. I guess I would want a CRM, that’s versatile that doesn’t just track sales, but tracks sales and operations because it’s the world that we live in right now.

[00:31:42] Tim Tran: Right, so, I would like to know what my salespeople do. I guess, marketing too Kevin, make sure that marketing is doing their job to get people in the door. Salespeople are closing deals, and if they’re not closing deals, what are they, why are they failing? And when it goes to operations, how the handholding, the clients, where are they walking them through?

[00:32:02] Tim Tran: And then even at the end of the life cycle of a customer, like, why are they canceling? Why did they leave us? Um, I think all that data is important, impactful for business, right? So like how do we keep them longer? Where are pitfalls, and then break it down by each department to streamline the operation.

[00:32:16] Tim Tran: I, And Lucas brought it up and I am very curious what the difference between ERP and a CRM is, right. So this is a question for Lucas. Can a CRM turn into an ERP or do you have to look for an ERP? And when, when is that jumping point?

[00:32:31] Lucas Munisteri: If that is not the world’s most loaded question.

[00:32:35] Tim Tran: Well, don’t fail. It’s not hard! Hah hah.

[00:32:39] Lucas Munisteri: Um… hah hah hah.

[00:32:45] Lucas Munisteri: So you have tools out there like Net Suite, Microsoft Dynamics that are just natively ERP or Sage. Then you have tools like Salesforce that is a CRM and through a bunch of bolt on modules can become an ERP where tools like Active Campaign or Hubspot. I think this is my reading tea leaves. I believe HubSpot’s trying to move to the ERP space where Active Campaign is firmly staying out of that.

[00:33:17] Lucas Munisteri: Like I just don’t see them making that jump. And the difference between the systems, the environments is an ERP helps you manage overhead costs, business structure, hiring, and firing employees, time off, payroll, invoicing. So APAR, all of those things. And a lot of companies can manage that with QuickBooks or Xero and it works just fine.

[00:33:43] Lucas Munisteri: In our case, we were on an ERP to manage our billing because we have lots of contracts. Federal entities or state entities. And there are each, one of them has their own negotiated rates. And so with that ERP, I’m able to build a rate table for each client. And so anybody that needs to build a quote has that client’s negotiated rates in the inside the database where something like HubSpot it’s a fixed cost.

[00:34:12] Lucas Munisteri: I would have to build thousands of line items to manage. People building that CPQ quote, inside HubSpot, it’s just, it’s not, it doesn’t have a client level way of managing that. Neither does Salesforce in a very solid way. It does do it, but it’s, it gets convoluted as well. And really that threshold.

[00:34:40] Lucas Munisteri: Deciding do I need a CRM or an ERP comes down to how complicated is your accounting and your billing and how much are your prices dictated by overhead? I mean, if I were to ask anybody on this podcast, how do you calculate your overhead? Are you taking an employee salary and multiplying it by like industry rule of thumb of three to four times to figure out your billable?

[00:35:10] Lucas Munisteri: Or are you actually saying, Hey, this employee needs X software licenses. I have this number off the top of my head because we just redid it for our 22 forecasting, a individual contributor inside our company has over $40,000 a year in licensing costs between computers, power, internet, insurance, all those things that it takes to support them.

[00:35:35] Lucas Munisteri: So even if I hire John. $20 an hour. So he’s a $40,000 an hour employee. He actually costs my business another 40,000. So if I had triple his rate, the third goes to him, a third goes to overhead, and that leaves a third for margin. And the unexpecteds, that’s pretty lean to run your business. But if you hire Mike or Suzie at $200,000 a year, Now you’ve got a lot of padding, so it’s how do you manage.

[00:36:08] Tim Tran: Got it.

[00:36:09] Kevin Dieny: As far as you’ve been, you guys have both have a lot of experience with CRM applications with businesses. So do you have any stories, anything you’d want to share? We start with you Islin, how a client got value out of some way they used the CRM?

[00:36:26] Islin Munisteri: Sure, we have case studies, we onboarded like a sales training franchise, which you probably have heard of, onto HubSpot. And they saw like a 60% to 70% increase in their business over a year, right. Or they saw a 44% increase in the number of activities they were doing, because they’re finally tracking the number of calls, the number of emails, the number of paths they were doing within the CRM.

[00:36:56] Islin Munisteri: You can see those productivity increases really, really quickly. On the marketing side, right. Just applying a little bit to the flywheel, right? Just sending out a couple email campaigns and running ads. We helped a engineering school, completely fill their enrollment, just by, doing some marketing motion.

[00:37:21] Islin Munisteri: Running an email campaign and I think a Facebook and Instagram campaign there. We’ve also helped organizations with, I would say really onerous sales processes. We basically mapped out their entire sales process and put it into the CRM and had automation in the background that was updating contact properties and other and deal properties to move them along a deal pipeline.

[00:37:51] Kevin Dieny: Very cool, uh, it’s awesome. We work with clients of ourselves that when we put their calls into the CRM or we give, we show them the information behind their calls, it’s like, oh wow. Like we had ideas in our head about this, but now that we see this. Totally different way of thinking now that we have data and we have information, it just creates questions for them that they didn’t have before they never had before.

[00:38:16] Kevin Dieny: So that’s really cool. As an Lucas, did you have anything?

[00:38:19] Lucas Munisteri: No. I mean, Islin kind of summed it up. I mean, there’s, I can’t think of a single client that we’ve worked with. That’s actually utilize the CRM, that it hasn’t benefited them. And thinking back to that statement a little bit ago of how quickly do people see value? It’s there’s day one value. And then there’s also like day 90 and day 180 and date at the end of the year. You’re there constantly gaining more from it.

[00:38:53] Lucas Munisteri: As long as they’re using it.

[00:38:56] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, some of the things that we’ve mentioned that, that have been really important are set out to utilize this CRM, like pretty much, very bold point would make on that one. And how you’d use it needs to come from how your business does, what it does.

[00:39:12] Kevin Dieny: What processes do you have? Do you have that theory’d, processed out, drawn out? We love this tool called Lucid Chart, but you know, we plot same way. You mentioned Islin, we build out the process, so you can see it. And then everyone’s like, okay, yeah, everyone’s agreement. This is what it looks like, yeah.

[00:39:28] Kevin Dieny: This is how it’s functioning. And then it becomes much easier to find places where you can get value out of a CRM. I think, another one we’ve mentioned is, what CRM is the purpose of it is for businesses that we mentioned the hammer example. It’s a tool, right? And it’s as good of a tool as you can use it for, but there’s a lot of use cases for it.

[00:39:46] Kevin Dieny: A lot of different ways to find value, a lot of cool ways that a business can utilize information they’re receiving that they can take action on it. Either with marketing campaigns, like, as I mentioned, or just improving collaboration, improving the way, the business accounts for what it’s trying to do, like different modules or things like Lucas.

[00:40:08] Kevin Dieny: The last thing is I like to look at it, a CRM is an investment. I don’t think it’s just a cost like an operational cost. I think it’s definitely something that generates revenue and generates value. You can generate profit. And if you have fears, like Tim mention, I’m afraid if I pick the wrong one, you know, I think there’s a, there’s probably a plethora of information out there, but it does get difficult because like Lucas, you mentioned….

[00:40:32] Kevin Dieny: Every tool is making it look like they’re a CRM these days. So there’s help out there. There’s support. There’s lots of resources, maybe look at other companies like yours to see what they’re doing, how they’re applying and using CRMs. Talk to agencies, talk to consultants. There’s a lot of help out there if you want to take some time to figure it out.

[00:40:52] Kevin Dieny: So with that, Lucas, Islin, is there any way, anyone can find you. Learn more about what you guys do, connect with you. If they want to ask questions, if you guys, so Lucas, start with you first.

[00:41:03] Lucas Munisteri: Yeah. I mean, so you can always go to our website at www.theiamarketing.com and that’s spelled T H E I A. We’re also on social media and if you go to our website, it’s all down there. And just fill out the form. If you guys need help, if you want some advice or guidance, we do help people figure out what is the right CRM.

[00:41:24] Lucas Munisteri: How do we pick the right thing to get going? Because this is a space where you’re going to fail without help. And not that I would need to sell my services or anybody else’s. And if you have that tolerance for failure and learning a few times get started. But if you don’t have that tolerance, if you need to get going, reach out to somebody to get you in the right direction.

[00:41:50] Islin Munisteri: Yep, and I would say you can connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can give us a call to our business. It’s 7 2 0 6 4 2 7 3 7 0. We do pick up calls and if you leave a message, we will call you back. So we’re, we’re kind of old fashioned, too.

[00:42:09] Kevin Dieny: That’s great, yeah. And, uh, Tim, any way anyone can reach out to you and talk to you or ask you anything.

[00:42:16] Tim Tran: Yeah, sure. They can reach me directly at 8 1 8 5 9 6 6 9 5 2. You leave a message. I’ll call you back. You can also text that number, this text enabled. So the, you guys texted me out. I’ll text back.

[00:42:27] Kevin Dieny: Awesome. Well, thank you, Lucas and Islin. Thank you guys so much for coming on, being our special guest today for the episode and, and how businesses can get more value out of a CRM.

[00:42:36] Kevin Dieny: I really appreciate you coming on.

[00:42:38] Lucas Munisteri: Yeah, thanks for having us.

[00:42:39] Islin Munisteri: Thanks Kevin.

[00:42:40] Tim Tran: Thank you guys.