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So Totally Business Savvy, Episode Five.
Hey, everyone! Welcome to So Totally Business Savvy. My name is Dean Soto, business and technology consultant, here to talk with you today about problems. Problems! We’re going to be talking about problems. We’re also going to be talking about Contact Relationship Managers or Customer Relationship Managers, whatever you want to call them. CRMs, what they are, why you probably should use them. And if you do use one, or want to use one, or what type of CRM should you look forward and the type of attributes, qualities, properties or whatever you want to say, that you should look for in a CRM. All that and more coming up.
So welcome everyone to So Totally Business Savvy. Today is going to be a good, and I’m going to say great, great show. Today’s going to be a great show. But I encourage you, if you have not listened to the previous episode, episode four, I highly, highly encourage you to go and take a gander at Episode Four. Reason being is that I got to interview Paul Tran who is a multi-business owner. If you know Five Guys restaurants, you should know Paul Tran. Fantastic interview, especially if you’re looking to move out from a full time corporate career into a solopreneur or entrepreneur type of lifestyle. But like I said, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to that.
Problems. Let’s talk about problems. Now what do I mean by problems? If you choose, at some point in time—or if you are already are—to become an entrepreneur, to go and start your own business, you’re going to run into a whole mess of problems.
Entrepreneurship is very difficult. And although you might have an expertise in a particular area, there’s always something that comes up, that pops up, that really you just did not expect and you don’t know how to handle it. So what do you do when something goes wrong? Hopefully, you answered that. You communicate because as with anything, as with a marriage, as with a relationship with the opposite sex or even with your friends of the same sex, communication through good times and bad times is key, always key, always key.
And so this whole topic spawns off of experience I had this last weekend. It has happened before but in particular, it hit me really, really hard this last week to where I was spending 12, maybe up to 15 hours with one particular client. It wasn’t necessarily my fault that this particular thing happened but because of the situation, I had to remedy it, I had to communicate, I was the person who was mitigating the problem and giving the solution to it.
So what happened? Basically, one of my clients, they had a whole bunch of network equipment that was so incredibly old and although, I’m kind of moving toward outside of the implementation of the technology stuff outside of the networking and so on, and more of the strategy of building their IT infrastructure, I took on the task in the beginning of the relationship to do IT for them. As I mentioned before, they had this incredibly old networking equipment and they finally just died. That’s it! I mean, it just died.
So luckily, it was on a Friday evening. It was kind of happening throughout the week but luckily, it was on a Friday evening and so I had all weekend to try and fix it. Now, the problem was actually two-fold. The problem was, I didn’t want to buy any of the equipment because the particular customer hasn’t paid very regularly. You know, cash flow is pretty important and you’ll start finding that out when you start your own business. Cash flow is very, very important. So I didn’t want to go pay for equipment. They didn’t want to go pay for equipment. I had to get a workaround going and so I tried everything I possibly could, and needless to say, after 15 hours, I fixed it.
But during that whole entire time, my client wanted to be able to do work even on the weekend, wanted to be able to do work, wanted to be able to get obviously, on the Internet in order to print invoices and do finance stuff.
So they’re sitting there waiting for me as I’m trying to fix this for a good… I mean, they were there six, seven hours just waiting for me. And so the whole time, I’m having to communicate what’s going on, having to let them know that “This is what’s wrong, this is what I think is got to happen, this how long I think it’s going to take,” and so on. Meanwhile, they’re getting antsy and mad and for lack of a better phrase, “pissed off” that everything is down. It wasn’t my fault but they’re getting mad at me because they had to get mad at someone.
And so, the whole moral of the story is that I was there as a professional, and I was there as a professional to remain calm, to remain cool, to give the solutions, and to sometimes, even be the pincushion and the scapegoat because trust me, they were not happy with me at all. But the fact that I communicated, the fact that I was really just giving them up-to-date information as to what is going on, when it’s going to be fixed. After all was said and done, they loved me. And I got an email saying,”Hey, can you do this other project for us?” I mean, their whole network is down for that long and they wanted me to do another project for them. All because of communication!
So, communicate. When there are problems and you will face them, talk, talk, talk! I mean, I can’t stress that enough. Think about the whole BP oil fiasco that’s going on right now. The less they talk, the less that they’re forthcoming with everything that’s going on, the more and more people hate them. And it’s true. Any really major issue that has been in the news like the Challenger incident; everyone hated NASA because they weren’t forthcoming with information. Same thing with BP, same thing with the Exxon Valdez, and so on.
The more you communicate, the more you put yourself out there and risk, just talk and give up-to-date information, the less problems you’ll have. It hurts when you’re doing it, trust me; and it really sucks when you’re doing it but it is worth it in the end. Your customers will love you and you’ll get more referrals, you will get more customers.
All right! That was my venting session. Now is my venting session because I have a feeling that there’s going to be more stuff like that and I needed to get it off my chest. But communicate. Problems will always happen but communicate through them and you will succeed. Trust me.
All right! We’re going to talk about Customer or Client Relationship Managers. Now what is that? Client Relationship Managers, Contact Relationship Managers or whatever you want to call them—CRMs, they are a way to maintain fresh relationships with people who you know whether its personally or through business contacts, contacts that you met through networking.
Now, these things used to be really only for sales people, people that always had to interface with customers; and the software that they used to use was so expensive and was really just a niche kind of sales market type of application, but now, they’re starting to become more and more prevalent as more and more things, more and more applications go out onto the Web.
So you have Salesforce, and you have Highrise, and you have just a whole host of different Contact Relationship Managers that are available. Salesforce isn’t really cheap, but there are a lot more out there that are available to small business owners, to people who are entrepreneurs and solo entrepreneurs.
So why do you need one? Well, nowadays especially, you meet so many people that you really do want to keep in contact with, you want to keep in touch with. But the problem is that it’s so hard to do so and to maintain fresh relationships, to know what they’re doing, to know what the people that you’ve met are doing now, are doing a month from now, are doing five months from now; and it’s hard to determine who you really want to spend your time with, who is someone who is either going to do business with you or someone that you just really want to build a relationship as a friend. It’s really, really hard! You have Facebook, now you have Twitter, you have Plurk, you have Friendster, you have Friendfeed, you have all these different things that allow you to meet new people which make it harder to maintain the relationships with all those new people, even people that you’ve met in real life.
Now I was at Social Media Day in the OC, Orange County California done by Mashable and Orange County Register. And one of the things that they stressed was that, if you’re going to do any type of social media marketing, any meeting of clients online or offline through social media, you need to have a Contact Relationship Manager. You have to because you have to know what your goals are. If you’re in it for the business which most people are, you have to have some way to see who you’re going to spend your time with if you want to make money.
Now, for me, yes, I would love to do business with everyone that I meet on social media. Predominantly, I think this is what makes a lot of people who use social media successful—the main reason why I’m on social media is because I want to learn, I want to meet new people like Paul Tran in the interview yesterday. I met him, I don’t care if I do business with him or not, I really like him as a person. I like Rochelle Veturis as a person, I like Neal Schaffer as a person, I like Ric Dizon as a person, and all people who I would put their Twitter handle on the show notes for this particular episode. I really find them fascinating as individuals and people who I would hang out with. That is my first and foremost goal is just to build relationships.
They’re busy, I’m busy. How do I maintain that common ground? Seeing what they’re doing? It’s through my CRM! All right, and I’ll give you an example, but I’ll give you an example when I go into which what you should look for in a CRM and what CRM I use. I’m going to give you an example that is a powerful example.
All right, so what should you look for in a CRM? First thing you should look for is obviously being able to keep track of emails and contacts. And what I mean is keeping track of contacts is one thing, yes, their information and so on. But being able to keep track of the communications that you have with them, back and forth, a lot of CRMs out there only allow you to do from your end to them. What I mean is, if you send an email, typically you’ll send a blind carbon copy of that particular email to a unique inbox which will track in your CRM what was said to that particular person, that client, your customer or potential client and so on.
You want to have something that tracks communication. Why? Because you’ll never know when you’re going to have a team at some point in time.
If you bring someone else on, what you can do is you’re going to say, “Hey, I need you to follow up with this person. Look at the last couple communications and send an email to them, say, ‘Hey, can you do lunch with Dean or whoever on Tuesday?”
It gives him the power to do that to see, to go in there and say (rather than in their email just asking to do on lunch), “Hey, you know, I noticed that you were talking to Dean about your latest blog post just within the last few communications. He would really like to talk about those blog posts over lunch. Can you do that?”
Boom! A lot more common ground, a lot more of a relationship builder and it’s not really as cold as just saying, “Hey, you know, I’m Dean’s assistant, can you go and do you want to go and have lunch with him?”
So you’re able to keep your whole team up to date with communication, especially, it becomes more and more needed as your team becomes bigger and bigger and more integrated with your clients.
So, the second thing you want to look for is, a lot more people are using social media, so you want something that’s going to be able to track their blog, the person’s website, any RSS Feeds, any podcasts (which you can subscribe via iTunes on my podcast, that would be awesome if you could, and then rate me, wooh! Hopefully you would rate me five stars). Anyway, so tracking blogs, RSS Feeds, podcast, tracking Twitter, tracking LinkedIn, tracking Facebook and all those other things because that is what people use the most now. That is what people use to communicate what is going on with them. Now, I’m going to give you an example why this is so important.
My last episode, with the interview with Paul Tran, I think it happened so quickly. The reason why I think it happened so soon was when I was in my CRM, on my dashboard, I was looking at what Paul Tran was doing. And right up in front, he already mentioned a week ago or two weeks ago that he was going to build a blog; that he was going to build a new website. He had shown me but he hadn’t really posted anything. I noticed when I saw on his profile on my CRM that he had a new blog post on there.
I clicked into it, saw that it was a blog posting, “Hey I’m up with my blog and this is going to be for the purpose of writing because I love writing and so on.”
So I saw that and I thought, “Hey, this is a perfect time to ask for an interview because he want people to know about his new blog and it’s a good way to have people know about his new blog and maybe he would want to put this interview on his blog somewhere, on his website somewhere, so maybe on the “About” page where people can listen and find out more about Paul Tran, who is he”.
Rather than just have some old kind of old style traditional “About” page, he has full on audio, full on interview that people can click on, listen to, and get everything they wanted to know about Paul Tran and why they should be reading his blog.
So that was extremely powerful because when I asked him, there was no problem. Honestly, Paul Tran is a great guy and so he probably would have done it anyway, but personally, I think that really helped, that was kind of a catalyst.
So seeing what your friends are doing is super powerful because it can determine your strategy as to, “Hey, how can I help my friend out? How can I help them get more promotion?” And then of course, for me, having Paul Tran on my show is huge. He’s awesome. It’s so super powerful having a CRM.
What CRMs do I recommend though? It’s a good question. I’ll only give you three, three that I’ve tried out. I’m sure there is more out there, oh, actually there is more there that I’ve tried out. I’ve tried Zoho CRM. I like it but it’s a little too clunky for me, it is extremely inexpensive, Zoho.com and then go to their CRM. Extremely inexpensive, but like I said, it’s a little bit clunky for me.
But here’s the three that I recommend, going from the least to the most recommended and basically, the most recommended is one that I use right now.
First one: Highrise. It’s what I’ve used before, just for a brief little stint. Highrise is really, really good. It’s made by the same people who made BaseCamp. They’re called 37signals; very, very good; a simple, simple, simple CRM. Basically, if you want to track email communications, if you want to track your clients and really be able to have a good user interface, simple user interface, do use that, then it’s fantastic. But basically, where it excels in simplicity, it lacks in a lot of functionalities that you might want to have with a CRM. There’s not a lot of social media stuff that you can track. It’s very simple, it’s kind of like a one-way communication with email as well, you have to send everything to an Inbox. And they said they updated it recently but that’s the way it was when I used it. I mean it’s great, it’s great. It’s a good, good system. Don’t get me wrong.
Second system that I used for a couple of months and paid for it as well is extremely powerful: Batchbook. It’s done by Batchblue, Batchblue.com or you can go to Batchbook.com, either way. It’s a fantastic CRM. Fantastic! There’s a lot of stuff that you can do with it. For example, you can manage deals, you not only track communications but you can track like how many deals you’ve had with a particular customer, you can track not only customers but their company, and you can do that with Highrise—the company thing, you can track their company, you can track affiliations, you can tag things and so on.
It’s pretty amazing, but what makes it so powerful is actually two things: It integrates really well with a whole host of things like Freshbooks, integrates pretty well with Gmail, integrates with Zendesk, a lot of integrations, oh, Mailchimp and so on. The other really powerful thing is its tagging capability. It has what this called supertags. Supertags are what really make Batchbook just amazing. The supertags, rather than just being like a thing to be able to search, when you tag something with a specific supertag, say a lead, you can actually put new data in that customer’s profile and you can do whatever you want.
So for the leads. I’ll give you an example what I had in there.
Anytime I supertag something with a lead, I would put, “Are they warm lead, are they cold lead?” and so on.
“What are their three pains?”
“What are their three pleasures?”
“What are they looking for?”
Whatever it is you can put in whatever you want, any type of fields, you can put in calendars, you can put in checkboxes and so on of anything you want. You could put Chavalog or Labadingdong or whatever in there and that can be some kind of question in some foreign language, I have no idea, but you can do whatever. It’s so extensible that you can put in whatever data you want into there and that helps you to have the ability to know more about your customer, to have your people know about your customer than just having something like an address and comments, because you can do comments but these are really targeted things; really, really targeted things that you can make. So that was Batchbook.
What do I use? I use Gist, g-i-s-t.com I don’t know if this is the right decision or not, I really just jumped into it, off of Batchbook and it might have been the right decision to move to Gist. But they’re in beta right now, it’s free for the time being. They will have pricing models at some point in time so I’ve heard, but the cool thing about Gist is that everything, like 90% of the stuff is automatic. 90% of it is automatic. It goes out and searches your contacts, blog stuff, it goes out and searches their social media, their social media communications on LinkedIn, Facebook, and so on. It also goes into Gmail and rather than having to email the specific box imported to there, it will actually automatically go into Gmail and give you all the communications back and forth from Gmail.
Not only that and this was so cool and I just really, recently saw that it did this. It will look in Gmail, at the email addresses and say, Paul Tran also has CCd or has on the 2 line, Neal Schaffer, or some other person. It will automatically affiliate Paul Tran with Neal Schaffer because they have some kind of affiliation. That is so awesome.
So you have all these things linking together and allow you to have a better view of who your contacts have as friends, what they’re doing on social media, what they’re doing on email, where you’re at totally. So if you have a team, they will know just about everything they could possibly ever, ever, ever know about your contacts, almost automatically.
Other thing you can set is the importance of people and who you want to watch more than others. You can also do things like request info and a lot of times, I don’t want to sit there and add information. Sometimes I might not even have it, so what I’ll do is I just request info, send an email to the person that I want to know more about, and they’ll fill it out and that’s it. Everyone that I’ve sent it to has filled it out. I think that’s awesome. Personally, I don’t have the time and they don’t either. They know their information a lot more quickly than I do if they were, on their side, want to spend the time doing that as well. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.
Anyway, I just think it’s a fast and quick way to be able to get information about your contacts that you might not have had before. Oh, and there’s one more cool thing was that they have this thing called ‘dossier’ and you can actually print out a dossier. You say you’re meeting someone for the first time, you met them on social media and you’re going to go do lunch. It has a little thing, you can create a dossier with their picture, with all the social media stuff with their latest blog post and so on that you can literally take with you if you really wanted to and kind of scan over it before you even meet them so you have a great picture of who they are, while you’re talking and so on so you have common ground. I think it’s awesome.
I like Gist. You know, I haven’t had any problems with it whatsoever. It seems to be very popular, and yeah, I highly recommend it.
So, know your contacts, know your clients and communicate. It’s all about relationships, it’s all about communication, all about getting to know who the people are that you’re serving.
Well, with that, guys, hopefully, that was of value to you; I thought it was, I love Customer Resource Managers. They have helped me so much in being able to keep in contact and keep up to date with the people that I know and the people that I do really care about. So with that, I think we are done.
If you have any questions, if you have any comments whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to leave a voice mail. I love your emails, I love all the Twitter communications. Oh, and by the way, John Lusher, Rochelle Veturis, let’s see who else? I mean, tons of people! Neal Schaffer, Debbie Miller, all these people have been re-twitting my messages. Oh, can’t forget Gina Parris. I’m trying to get Gina Parris on for interview soon as well.
But anyway, thank you so much for re-twitting the Paul Tran interview. Ah, that was awesome of you guys; I really, really, really, really, appreciate it. But I would love to hear everyone’s voice. So if you can, 714-643-5301, comments, questions, whatever it is. Any tips, too; honestly, I don’t know everything. I’m really in the beginning stages of all these stuff. It’s almost going to be a year and I’ve learned a lot. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned a lot but I have so much more to learn. With hearing Paul Tran and talking to other really, really amazing professionals, uh, I’m not even close to their caliber but I’m doing it.
So please leave tips. Leave tips, comments, questions and so on. Last time, last time, I’m going to stop begging, 714-643-5301. Alright guys, thank you so much. You can also email me at dean@youcanworkless.com. That’s dean@youcanworkless.com.
Next time, we’re going to be talking probably about pricing. I had a hard time, always had a hard time with pricing. I’m a lot better now but I’ve always had a hard time with pricing and I’m sure a lot of other people have that problem, too. So we’re going to be talking a little bit about how to price yourself, what pricing is fair, should you do hourly, should you do a fixed price. All these questions are extremely important and if you’re doing something like consulting, there are certain ways that you should price and certain ways that you shouldn’t because you can easily devalue yourself. But we’re going to go through all those things in the next episode.
All right, guys, I hope you guys have a great work week and I will see you guys in the next episode. Have a good one! This was So Totally Business Savvy with Dean Soto. Have a great one guys, God bless.
