57:04
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
hubspot, people, crm, salesforce, sales, company, marketing, process, sell, business, measure, talk, bob, davey, find, consultancy, clients, leads, crms, damon
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, Davey Warren
Damon Pistulka 00:00
All right, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I’m your host, Damon Pistulka. With me today, I have none other than Davy Warren from Paragon. Davey, welcome.
Davey Warren 00:13
Thanks. Glad to be here. I’m excited, man.
Damon Pistulka 00:15
I’m excited because today we’re going to be talking about CRM configuration and implementation challenges, because then we’re going to talk about this later. Paragon is the only company that I’ve heard of. And I’m sure there’s others out there. But the only one that I’ve heard of that does CRM implementation, but does not do marketing. So I’m excited to talk about this today. So Davey, we always like to start off with some simple stuff. So tell us how your background and kind of what really tweaked your interest to get into, you know, helping people with CRMs.
Davey Warren 00:57
So really interesting. I actually goes back to when I came out to Utah, I came out for a job, didn’t get it worked for a bunch of other companies, and met my wife. And she said, You need to have like a career. And so I went got a job at a company that worked in lead management systems is what they used to call it so that they didn’t nobody coined the term CRM until Salesforce did they used to call them lead management systems? Databases, customer database? Access database, right? Yeah. And I worked for this company, I got into sell, they use Salesforce for their application and they had they had telephony application. And I said, Well, I want to, I liked the Salesforce stuff.
And I started talking to some people. And they said, Hey, can you help me with it? And so I sort of moonlighting at night, actually helping people set up their Salesforce. And, and a guy came to me and he said, Hey, would you want to come work for me? I do Salesforce implementation. And he’s like, can you come to sales for me and I’ll just pay commission, and I was like, see me work for free. And he’s like, Well, yeah, but I’ll pay you commission. I said, maybe not right now. But let’s talk in the future.
Well, lo and behold, he comes back to me a year later, hires me as his Director of Sales for a company called Kiasma, which eventually got bought by Bailey. And I did three years professionally helping look at people’s CRM or CRM solutions for Salesforce and got heavy in the ecosystem. I was visiting Salesforce whatnot. And then I took a hiatus and sort of managing some sales teams from there and working for a couple of other companies.
And I, I actually got laid off from a company I worked for, and I went home and I was like, Honey, I’m tired of giving away all my, my, on my own, my hustled to go find companies I had, I had closed some major companies in eight months, some blue chip clients for this company. I said, I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do my own thing. And she was pretty pissed at me because no wife loves it when you start your business. Yeah. She’s like, so we’re poor. And I was like, yes report. So I started Paragon, and I actually started as a serum consultancy, and I actually sales consultancy, sales CRM consultancy. I’m actually in the other room right now.
My marketing team is going through some old marketing materials that I had that I pulled out from my closet, and they say things like, help your sales operations, right is what I was doing before I wanted to be an outsourced CRO. And I actually set up HubSpot for one of my clients. He was looking for a CRM and I said, Hey, I’ve seen this. It looks very inexpensive. For small company like yours. Let’s try it out. And I’ll set it up for you. And I started setting it up. And this is pretty cool. It has a lot of features that it didn’t have in Salesforce. And I was pretty heavy into Salesforce.
I was highly recommending it to people. And after setting this guy up, I went, you know what, I think I really liked this. I think I’m going to sign up as a partner and see what they do with partners, like coming to find out that if you’re a partner with HubSpot, they treat you really well. They actually like you. Salesforce, they kind of kick you to the curb a little bit. I felt like no offense sending my Salesforce friends for that’s what I felt like when I go and work with them. And HubSpot was like here, hold our hand. We’ll take you through this. We’ll train you on everything. We’ll you know, we’ll help you out.
And I just fell in love with it and started my little consultancy by November See, that was in May of 2019. By December, January of the next year in 2020. We were ranked as a think we were like a silver partner back then. And then we became a Gold partner. And then we became a Platinum Partner. And now we’re a diamond partner and we’re on track to being elite hopefully by the beginning of next year, which is a pretty big accolade. I never thought I would even be close to elite. If you were to ask me like two years ago, I was like Oh, that’s okay. We’ll get there eventually. So yeah, That’s kind of how we got on this road. And we’ve been.
What I love about it is we’re implementing amazing companies, companies, I never thought that we’d be working with some pretty, I mean, probably like top 500 companies that have been around for a couple of 100 years even. And they reached out to us to work with us, because we’re, we’re solving some pretty cool problems. But what’s interesting is CRM is so it, it’s an amazing tool when people know how to use it, Damon, because a lot of people they get in and they go, Oh, I’m gonna buy this, and it’s just gonna do something for me. Right?
They think, Oh, I’m gonna buy this tool. And then some guy over here who says he knows how to use it, they use it at his company, as a lowly sales guy is now going to set it up for me. And that never happens. Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. And I can literally say hundreds, because I know that I’ve seen over 900 systems now of companies and their processes and sales teams and whatnot in CRM. And they, that’s usually what happens. Some guy says, I know this, I’ll do it, whatever it may be. But what’s funny is they miss out on the opportunity to learn how a CRM can function for revenue. Right? What does it supposed to do?
Well, it’s supposed to remove tasks from individuals, and no CRM comes out of the box, none of them, zero zilch come out of the box, just doing what you want it to do. It has to be customized for what you need. That’s why there’s a marketplace for consultancies, like mine. And my companies need consultancies, like mine, I do this because I know there’s a need, if there wasn’t a need, and I was trying to make a market for it. That’d be horrible. But there’s actually a trainee, because it takes a little bit of skill and some understanding and tricks of the trade.
And there’s a bunch of stuff right at the beginning, that just needs to be set up usually on a CRM that people don’t want to do, nor do you want to go study up on how to do it for 20 hours, just how to do it and to right, so, that’s, you know, that’s kind of where we’ve gone. And what we want to do. We want to help people create a strong structure in their CRM, so that it’s working for them, not against them.
And then also just trying to help with adoption with sales teams most, I’d say, a lot of sales teams don’t adopt a CRM when it first comes out. I mean, it’s pretty heavy, even working with us. And we work with a lot of management teams. It’s still a struggle, but it requires management, you know, organizational change requires individual change. And the first individual that changes the management team, once they adopt it, then it starts flowing down properly.
Damon Pistulka 07:32
So yeah. Wow. So you said a couple of things here, I just want to back up. Yeah, have you reviewed like 900 systems, that’s a lot to be looking at.
Davey Warren 07:43
It’s, it’s just a lot I’ve been doing it for, I think I’m in my 12th or 14th year now. Okay. Like structure, I actually, I built my own CRM, I had a previous company actually did marketing, which is funny, because I don’t do marketing this one. But I actually had a buddy of mine, build our CRM, I didn’t know what it was called. I was like, I need something where I can put my clients names in, and what services they’re by. And he was just coding that for me, like straightforward. And then I was in the CRM business before I even got into the CRM business. So
Damon Pistulka 08:15
Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, you talk about a couple of things that I think, is pretty interesting, because people that are new to CRMs. Look at them as the contact database. A lot of respects. Yep. But there’s so much more now. And you talked about the CRM as CRM for revenue. So explain what you mean by that a little bit.
Davey Warren 08:42
Yeah. So the purpose of CRM is to reduce friction in your life, right? So I need it to do something else for me that I don’t want to do that’s constant, right? That I’m, like sending out an email, or updating information or moving things through a pipeline, or letting me know what steps I need to take in a pipeline. And what I’ve noticed is that if you if you take a sales methodology, like a Sandler or Miller Heiman or another one, right, and you couple that with a CRM, right, so you have a sales methodology, and you have a tool to use with it, you can actually produce anywhere from 20 to 30% more revenue in your company.
And the reason for that is because you have a tool that now can support your process, and it becomes cookie cutter and scalable, but also measurable. So when we say that it becomes a revenue Gen generator is because you can measure and I was sitting down with a new marketing gal that we hired yesterday, and I was showing her the funnel, because we kind of funnel things through a flywheel HubSpot talks about a flywheel, which is actually even better, because you’re constantly trying to keep things move, right. But what I was trying to show her was that I can take a number up here of 1000 people falling into my funnel that I get through ads Are other mean networking?
You know, whatever it is that I do every day and say I get four deals out of that, that closed or closed one. So for every 1000, I get four. So then I have to figure out how to get that same 1000 and increase it to 2000. But it has to be the same personas, right has to be the same grouping. And then my outcome should be eight, right? That’s what you’re up. And so what’s really cool is it’s not about the 1000 appear, and maybe in a step in the middle.
But if you’re not tracking your steps in the middle, like having a discovery meeting, a contract negotiation, a demo a trial, a second demo, whatever it is that your process is to get people signed on, if you’re not measuring that, to see how many people fall through to the next level. If you just go 1000 And go eight, you’re missing out on everything in between that provides you value that you can tweak and make better. And that’s where you see that 20 to 30% revenue growth. Because you’re actually measuring what challenges you have, you’re finding bottlenecks, think of a manufacturer, right?
The Toyota process, you’re trying to find where your bottlenecks are in your process, if you’re not measuring it, meaning if something’s if somebody’s not putting an input into the system, I can’t measure it. So your best sales guy, I hear this is sales all the time, right? Well, you got five sales guys on a sales team. Bob is the old best sales guy, right? He’s always closing all the time. The other four kind of, you know, the next two are pretty good. They’re pretty equal Bob, sometimes they beat him in a month or whatever. But Bob’s pretty, you know, high level, he’s really close to the it’s got the relationships, right that people talk about.
And he got like some junior guys, and they’re just trying to keep up, right? The junior guys, when Bob comes in Bob’s just like you gotta sell guys get it out, you got to really know this product, and you don’t know this product. Well, if I was the sales manager, I fire Bob in a heartbeat. Yeah, it’s not that the producing is good. But Bob’s aren’t helping other guys. And if I can’t reproduce him, Bob’s gonna be gone in a year or two, and then my company is going to fall flat. If you want to get your company going up, you got to figure out how to duplicate them.
So getting him to enter in his stats, gives you a sense of where he does, well, if you can find out where he does, well, you can find out like, Where does he get his leads? How does he negotiate with them, maybe he does really good. Maybe these other four guys, they always falter negotiation they’re doing, they’re getting the same numbers. And then negotiation, these four, they say here and Bob moves forward, and you go, Oh, I know what’s going on. It’s the negotiation period, if I can get Bob to teach them negotiation, then they would close the same.
But instead, what we do is we go all the way up to the top, and we go, we need you guys to get better leads, or they go to Marketing say get me better leads. And that’s not realistic. And so marketing is over here. chuggin and run it and try to do stuff to try to satisfy these guys. They’re like, well, Bob’s closing stuff is the closing art stop? Well, yes. And he’s did a better job. We’re like, well, we’re just gonna get more to Bob in. And so you get these guys that funnel everything over to Bob, because Bob is the closer when all pop does really good as he just knows how to ask that one negotiation question. Or he knows what to ask about timing or who the decision maker is.
So yeah, a CRM is a revenue generator, when you remove the things that cause you a bottleneck when you start measuring what’s going on. And if you don’t you think Well, I’m just gonna keep Bob because he’s making me money. Bob’s gonna start losing you money when Bob’s gone. Yeah. Because you’ll never know what Bob’s secret sauce was unless you measure it. And it does.
Yeah, how many sales calls you listen to have is, you know, we’ll just talk like, like, Bob, you didn’t realize that Bob did a little bit of extra. It’s like the girl at the restaurant that puts a smiley face on the receipt. And they measured that people who put a writing like thank you, or a smiley face or whatever, actually got better tips or at least got tips. Nobody would know. Nobody would know that. Right? If you just looked at Sally just got a bunch of tips. You’d be like, we’ll just say what Sally says. No, it’s what Sally wrote down. But she didn’t. Yeah.
Damon Pistulka 13:44
Yeah. Well, this is awesome. Because I want to cover a couple things that you said here. First of all, using your CRM to reduce friction in the sales process. I think that is, first of all, one of the things that can do by just making it easier for you, your salespeople and your customers, if you really configure them, right, don’t you?
Davey Warren 14:08
Yeah, it removes a lot of friction. Well think about the customer journey, right? When somebody comes in, you know, I think of the customer journey digitally, like somebody’s walking into a brick and mortar store. What do they see? I used to do? I think one of the reasons I one of the things that’s benefited me in my life is that I’ve worked so many jobs fluctuates in any I’ll, I’ll state this publicly, I calculated at one point and this was almost 10 years ago that I’d had over 35 jobs. By the time I lost my time I was 35 Almost.
But I worked retail and you learn a lot like Yeah, I did everything from manufacturing to retail to construction and irrigation. Who knows what the oh the I never was an astronaut and that’s the one I missed that off but if you think of a retail store, you’re going in as a customer you the first experience is Did the doors open for me if I have to open a door, it nobody really thinks about that. But that’s a friction point. For some people, I like getting in the door open, I gotta get the stroller and right. But if it opens for you’re like, Oh, I love going to the store, right?
We’ll come back to it. And some others will be like, they may skip the store, they may walk down an aisle of stores and not go into one because they’ll be like, I don’t want to deal with opening the door going in opening the door coming out just to look at one shirt. But if they could walk right in, they would have looked at one more shirt. And you probably would have sold one more shirt that day. So then you come in and you get the advertising like here’s the Steel’s and the specials. I hate walking into Old Navy and finding the shirts just everywhere.
And they’re on the floor of everything. I walk in, and I just get dirty and I walk out, right I can’t handle it. It’s like drives me nuts. I like walking into like Nordstrom, right? Even Nordstrom Rack is cleaner. Yeah, then you know, maybe because I it’s clean, and I go, Oh, good. I can see things I can actually like match them up. I mean, they have people at Costco, if you look in Costco, there’s like two or three people constantly refolding restacking. Because everything that’s pristine, it gets easier. So it’s an experience. So we’re talking about the revenue experience and a CRM, it’s the same thing. What does it take to book a meeting with me? Do you have a way that I can book account?
Or if I have to go through your email and go back and forth to try to book a time? Because we’re emailing back and forth? That becomes friction, right? Yeah. If I have to click five buttons to try to book a meeting with you online, that’s friction, people fall 50% of your measure this 50% of people drop off every click down the road. And so that’s why people are always trying to measure abandoned shopping carts online. Because they’re trying to figure out like, why didn’t they buy? Right? What caused them to abandon that?
And it’s the same in your sales process, you got to figure out why did they abandon me after the demo? Why did they abandon me after the price proposal solution? Why did they abandon me at after I sent the contract? And they said, Yes, but then didn’t sign? Or they said yes, signed and didn’t pay. I trained I changed my process. We used to have people sign and then I’d send them an invoice.
Now, I put the signature and I have a Payment button on the same screen. I make more money. I significantly make more money because it’s one less step. Now it’s I have bigger companies that ask for an invoice. But at least for the ones that can I get immediate payment. I had three this week. Or they just said send me the thing. I’ll sign it and I’ll pay. So it’s huge.
Damon Pistulka 17:28
Yeah, it is it is. And that’s yeah, I’m just writing down notes. Because you said so many good things here. Where do people leave? In your process? Where do you see them dropping off? I mean, like you said, Do they sign and not pay? Do they? Do they, you know, say they want to want a proposal or something and not even respond after that. They just go share, whatever, there’s so many different ways. And the other thing that you said to measuring each one of the steps in your sales process is to who you know, who so like if I have multiple salespeople?
The you know, what’s Damon’s performance across each stage? And what’s other people’s performance? But overall, what’s our process? Because our performance because these? One of the things I think that I see I see companies doing that really, really hurts in the long run is not standardizing the sales process. And I mean from there’s going to be there’s nuances, right, you would sell differently than I did selling the same product. But we still have same features, benefits. And we should have even simple things like how many meetings does it take before you get to the proposal? And what do you do at each meeting?
Davey Warren 18:42
Yeah. And you have to measure that differently. Because trying to measure like a meeting and you don’t know. I like to I actually I actually do two measurements on mine. I measure what it takes to get from meeting to close from the scheduling the meeting to close. And then what I like to do is say, what am I really what kind of salesmanship do I really that that tells me how my experience is? Then I go to my salesmanship, which is at the meeting, for the time that I first engage. So my clothes, how well do I do?
Because I want to know if that’s doing better than just the experience, because those are two different measurements. But it’s the same funnel. Oddly enough, I’m just adding one more. And then I measure it differently because it I’m looking at from the initial setting a meeting to the close versus the actual meeting itself. So I’ve scheduled it now I’ve actually had the demo what’s the difference and closes. But you brought something up, Damon, I totally forgot what it was that you brought up that I was going to tell you that that shoot, if I remember I’ll come back to
Damon Pistulka 19:41
about the steps in the sales process and what you do at each stage and how many stages of the sale process like you’ve got it’s a manufacturing company or a construction company, right? What is my process for selling? What is it?
Davey Warren 19:57
And you know, what’s interesting is I get this is i Every I probably say every. When I talk with a VP of sales, this is what I get. Have you ever set up XYZ company industry before? Yes. And then the next thing I get is we want it done like you’ve done for them. No, you don’t. It’s not the way you do your business. You may be the I have. I have two realtors, I have actually have three realtors. I’ve got manufacturing companies, I have SAS companies, right. And they and some even sell some of the same thing. So they’re competitive, right? No, I don’t tell you no.
But my point is, is that they’ll do it differently. Because they have everybody has their special sauce. So maybe your special sauce is, well, we don’t do one demo, we do a demo and a trial. And when companies like well, we just do straight trial, they just sign up for it. Or we sell it this way or that way. Because that’s your special sauce. So your process has to match to that. Yeah. So that it’s not just you know, we have a meeting, and then we close. That’s not how it goes. And I get some of those too.
But every company is different. I have people that have six or seven steps in their sales process. I have some that have three, I have some have 10. Now my first Sass company, five to six is good. So if you have anybody on here, that’s a SAS sales a software five to six, if you’re a direct commodity, so it’s a one and done sale, somebody calls up, they want to buy your widget, you know, you may have like three things in your process, you still have a process? Yeah. Because your process is still to find out like, are they interested? Are they a qualified buyer?
Are they willing to pay? Is this the right time? Because if they’re not one of you know, if there are two those things, you’re gonna put them in a marketing bucket, or you’re gonna reach out to them later and try to get them on board. Right? But it’s a one in 10 sale, meaning like, do you want it? Or don’t you want it? And they’re like, Well, I don’t know if I want it yet. Okay, well, you’re, you’re gonna maybe take a little bit longer, right? That’s the tire kicker. So understanding your clients to So what type of client? Do I have? Maybe your, maybe your processes in about steps?
Maybe it’s about identifying what type of person you’re working with. And you identify those people and put them into buckets in your process, that a lot of different nuances that people miss or don’t understand. And it’s, you just have to sit down and say, let me tell you the secret sauce, all of this, sit down and write out your process, and then go in and scrutinize it. If you took it apart and rebuilt it again. What would you remove that you think would cause your freight ship?
And Damon The reason I say that is because 50 to 60% of the companies that I’ve talked to do not have a written out process. By the way, I’ve written mine out three times now. And my own company, we revisit it almost every six months. And I go through and I’m like, Alright, let’s scrap it all, what are we gonna do differently? Because I want every move. I’m like, can we just can we automate this? Can we move this over here? People aren’t buying this, why are we even talking about it? Right? And I’m trying to move things out of the way and simplify my process. And our sales have gone up. Because you’ve got to it’s an engine, you’ve got to you got to tune it up.
And it’s not about tuning the guys. The guys will always sell, you’re always gonna find a sales guy. That’s important. You’ve got it. You got to sharpen the saw over there. But you got to work on the engine too. So you got the driver and the car. Okay, yeah, you got the driver who has to have skill, you got to work on his skill, he’s got to stay fit. He’s got to be able to go three hours driving a car turning left all the time, right. I’m a big IndyCar guy. I love going a bit eight times love it. Night.
And, and but the car, the engine itself, it’s got to be fine tune it’s gotta be taking care of, you got to get new tires on it. It’s got to get its oil change its gas, you know. And so when you put both of them together, now you get us. Now you have a sports car, but it has both the driver and the vehicle. You can’t just have the sports car.
Most people think that Salesforce is like the sports car like Yes. And I’m going to get a really good sales guy. And then they put them together. And the guy doesn’t know how to drive that sports car. Or he does. But he’s like, why aren’t you tuning the engine? And they’re like, Well, no, I got you the sports car, aren’t you? The guy that knows how to tune it? No, I’m the driver. I don’t know how to make your I don’t know how to make your car
Damon Pistulka 24:02
better. Think about what that thing does behavior that make me go fast.
Davey Warren 24:06
I’ve never seen blinker fluid or go laminator before.
Damon Pistulka 24:10
Exactly.
Davey Warren 24:12
But that’s really that’s the that’s a great analogy, I think to you’ll My wife hates me have a ton of metaphors and analogies for everything. So yeah,
Damon Pistulka 24:21
no, this. This is awesome, though, because you’re talking about something that I think people don’t consider enough before they even talk about getting a sales CRM. Because if you don’t know what your sales process is, and you get a CRM, you’re going to have to go back and figure that out in the first place or otherwise you aren’t going to get your CRM setup.
Davey Warren 24:43
Well, it goes back to what I said before people think that the CRM is the solution. Like it’ll already have it pre built in there. Oh, it already has the process. It doesn’t it has the wherewithal to meet the process.
Damon Pistulka 24:54
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So man, this is awesome. Some this I think now people if
Davey Warren 25:02
you’re like, Am I blowing your mind? Damon is that let’s go no, no, this is
Damon Pistulka 25:05
great. This is great because we’re getting into the things where, where people really considering a CRM really should listen to this, because it’s not the solution. It’s a tool that you use to help you solve what you want to do. But it’s going to take thought, front end, it’s going to take thought during it’s going to take refinement, and you really need to understand that that that what that tool is going to give you and what you have to give it to make it effective.
Davey Warren 25:35
Yeah. And don’t get me wrong. We’d love working with people. They’re like, look, we kind of have a nuance of what we want. Can you help us? Right? But then I still let people know. You still got to train these guys. Like they’re the SR tools not going to sell it. I can put a playbook in that they can read from, but they still have to hone in on the skills, right? Yeah.
So it’s, it’s not to say you can’t work with a consultancy like mine to help you. But one of the things we come back to people very beginning is, okay, tell us your process. And that’s the first thing that we do when we do discovery. Walk me through your process. Where do you lead? So the first place? Where do your leads come from? That’s, it’s my, it’s my, it’s my first question.
Where do your leads come from? They come from here. Great. And then what do you do with them after that? I’ll tell a funny story. Damon, I did this with a major company, once we went through, we went through their whole process leads over here, paperwork goes over here, documents go over here, you know, they’re passing things around is pretty sophisticated thing. Okay. So they walk through it with me. And then what I used to do is I used to sit down and I get on like a Lucid Chart or like a little charting tool, and I would chart it out, I take their words, and I make it a display for them. Because in my next meeting, I was going to verify, they would tell me what they were doing.
But they’d also tell me what they wanted. And so I put like, what they’re doing and what they want, I’d say this is what you’re doing. And then I show him another one I was like, and then this is what how you want it to work. And they go yes. Because I’d basically be they’d have like 80 different things. And then I consolidate them say it’s all going to be done here. Right? So I’m talking to this company, and then the lady I go through and I can’t actually divide by second diagram, because in my first one, I have a gap in the process. So there’s a process here and a process here. And there. I can’t draw a line to it.
Yeah, because I actually don’t, they never told me how this gets passed over to this. And I assume that it just got Sally walked around the corner and handed the paper to bill or something. Right. Okay. So I get on the phone, and there’s three people were sitting on the phone, and I’m like, Alright, guys, let’s go through this. I said, I have a question. I don’t know where how this gets over to this. Kid you not all three people are like Do you know? Do you know? dB? Can we get back to you in a week? We? We don’t know. And I said I was like, what? You don’t know where? You running? Right? Like somebody’s getting it somehow it’s getting there. But they didn’t know how.
Yeah, they sat back. And a week later, they said, We just realized that we have a huge break in our process. We’ll have to get back to you in a month. Because they found out. This is why it’s so important. Write out your process. Right? Yeah. All of a sudden, they found out that they had a huge there. They thought their company was failing because they didn’t have a CRM. Their company was failing because he didn’t know their process. And they had a bottleneck that they didn’t even know they had. And I’m the one who had to show it to him.
And I was embarrassed for him. Because like we don’t know, the most awkward conversation. So somebody’s not knowing how their company ran. So yeah, definitely important to lay out your steps. Yeah, but we can help you with that. And for them, theirs was a little more complicated. I couldn’t tell them how to get the paper from A to B, because it was a physical document they had to pass. This is back in the day when there was a lot more physical documents. I mean, this is like 10 years ago. So but yeah, anyways.
Damon Pistulka 28:55
Well, and one of the things too, then that’s a great point, you know, diagramming is heck, just put it on a piece of paper and just wipe ripple it out whiteboard, whatever. Think about what your sales process looks like. Because, you know, I’ve been in these similar situations where we do we do value mapping in, in, in a business, right?
Where we’re value mapping, okay, how does the order flow through the company and you realize that holy heck, or double, triple, you know, tripling the work because it gets copied or whatever the you know, again, it’s Oh, call, it’s just a mass of wasted effort. And you find that, listen, there’s so much opportunity to simplify here. And in the sales process, you can be making it really hard for your customers to buy what they want to buy from you. Yep.
Davey Warren 29:53
I had a company we worked with we found out that they that a CPQ a quote In Process issue, where they sold these huge radiology machines, and they had a lot of parts to them itself. And so the sales guy be really excited because he sold this like half, half million dollar machine or million dollar machine, right? He goes through he builds the quote, puts all this stuff and gets all the main stuff, sells it to him coming to find out. He forgot to add the plug. And they’re embarrassed so they just throw the plug in but the plugs $10,000 Oh, my I have to take they have to take a loss because they didn’t have a way to figure out what they need. And so they need it.
We help them to create a process that said, Okay, let’s figure out in your tool that if you add these items, you have to also add these items so that they don’t miss it. And they’re in their system. And so that’s, that’s key. And you know, you can find out where you’re losing money, right? Find out, find out where you’re losing money, find out what is causing the RIP, I’m telling you 20 to 30% increase in users and people. If you’re, you know, those that are on, if you don’t believe me, try it out. Try just map first map your process, figure out where your leads come from, measure, measure, measure, and set goals and figure out what’s going on. Like what’s causing. So you it’s okay.
People always like we’re gonna set a goal for 1 million, let’s do it. And in the back of my head, I go, but how? How are you going to do that? Well, we’re just gonna we’re gonna pump more money into marketing, really? But how do you know that your marketing is effective? Did you measure it? Did you measure that your marketing is actually doing it, or where you’re because I worked for a company, they dumped a bunch of money in our head, a million dollar budget for marketing, K, small business, million dollar budget for marketing. And I sourced every one of my own leads.
And I had a book of about an eight months $8 million, the marketing team had probably produced maybe 1/10 of that, and the amount of time that I did, but they kept pumping money in the marketing team thinking that they were the reason why they’re right. Our website looks better. We have more followers on our YouTube channel to watch our little Lego commercial that had nothing to do with what we sold. Bad, bad, bad. You’re not measuring it correctly as a bad.
It’s been a bad measurements. Yeah, make sure you’re measuring the right thing. The right thing is end to end measurement. Did this equate to this, if you’re just measuring this to see if it increases, not seeing if the other is having a correlation with it, you’re getting nowhere you have to see if correlation is there. And in your business. When you’re doing stuff, from marketing to sales to fulfillment, it makes a big difference. And I tell people, it’s you know, the other side of this, the other side of your friction, where people lose money, and you can make so much more money is in your retention.
And people were like, Well, mine’s a one and done. They buy a I actually just happened. They buy a Swiss army knife. That’s it. I’m done. Well, this is my fifth swiss army knife. Yeah, it’s because I like it, right. So if they like your product, and it’s good, and they have a good experience with it, especially in a SaaS marketplace, right, or manufacturing a product, people will buy again, more importantly, they let their friends know or they end up going to another company where they go, Oh, if you’re going to buy knives, you’re going to buy businesses or you buy Yep.
And we’ve seen that in our own business. So we’ve been doing this for years. And I’ve my mindset gaming has been, I’m going to start today to build relationships with people that will probably become my customer four years from now or five years from now. I’d never expect anybody to be my customer today. I expect them to be my customer and five years. When they go, oh, you know what, I’ve moved, and I’m over here or I have to go to a new company.
And I was in. I’m in this new department and they just happened to bring up HubSpot. I said, I know, Davey, right. I, by the way, I get those calls all the time. I love them. They’re my favorite thing. I love being called the HubSpot guy. Right? My wife knows this. I go home. We were at the HubSpot guy. And I was at an event is like we were first starting and some guy came up to me. He goes oh you’re the HubSpot guy. And I was all smiling or whatever did my what my wife was with me at this little thinner like a ball sweetheart. They call me the HubSpot guy.
And she’s like, was having anything did it I’m I finally met my ugly. But that’s what happens on the service side. You know people recognize you. And then when you get recognized and we’re not talking like viral YouTube tiktoks up Yeah. And about the fact that you’re good at what you do. And that people want to come back and work with you. Right? They see these and work with you. And you reduce that friction. And but that’s money. Think about your revenue. That wasn’t the sales guy. That wasn’t even marketing. That was because your customer service your fulfillment team did well.
Yeah, I worked for a company where I was doing projects. The company I got laid off from Okay, They laid me off because they couldn’t afford me. And the funny thing is, I was on my way out anyways. And the reason I was leaving is because they kept telling me to sell and they couldn’t fulfill for my current clients. Pepsi was one of my clients. Yeah Pepsi big company. Yeah, we were three months behind on a project for a three month project. So we’re six months in, and they they’ve been patient with me. And I’m like, Guys, I’ll get you an answer. I couldn’t get an answer for the life of me where the project was, when we could get it completed, what was stopping it?
And why we weren’t working to get it done. Nobody had answered me and I said, and then it kind of be like, Hey, by the way, you need to close like another like 3 million this next month. And I’m like, why? If you’re not fulfilling me selling 3 million as it did, because that money will never come in, because you’ll never go for that guy. You gotta fix your process. So revenue isn’t just on the sales team. It’s the whole company. Yes, it’s your it’s your marketing team, helping your sales team is working together to find out what is beneficial. It’s your sales team, working with your fulfillment team and your paths.
How you pass it over. It’s your fulfillment team working with marketing on how they outreach again, to those additional clients or find out where they’ve moved to or, or if they’ve expressed in that and who they’re talking to her. Hey, you know, we all do the old I hate this. I would never come to your game and be like, by the way, do you have three friends that you could think of this week that would use HubSpot? I hate that question. What I’d rather do is be friends with you, which we are we’ve been friends for what two years now? Yeah. Continue to meet up with you. And when they you go, Hey, by the way, I know somebody that needs some HubSpot help.
And you’re the only guy I know. Right? Yeah, that’s what I that’s, that’s, that’s the best thing for me. Right. Yeah. So because we have a relationship that that builds up over time. I’m not going to ask you for referrals. Damon, honestly, could you think of even one person right now we’re like, oh, my gosh, I need to send? I’m going to introduce Davey today because Oh, my You know, maybe you aren’t right now because we’ve been talking about it for 45 minutes but before this if I come to Him be like hey, team and before we start Do you know somebody that does
Damon Pistulka 36:47
not cold not cold? What happens is this kind of stuff happens and that’s the thing about these relationships, I like your five year four or five year timeline, because that’s how that’s how people really build businesses. It’s not like a flash and you know, flash in the present that’s gonna make the relationships and build these long term stable businesses. It’s yeah, it’s building the relationships over time that people you are the HubSpot guy. You are the guys that will solve the problems.
Davey Warren 37:17
i It’s been three years I think it’s been three that we’ve known each other my. Yeah. Okay. So when you first met me, and we met, did you go? Well, this kid’s got kind of a pipe dream of a job. I hope he does. Well, you know, he seems to know his stuff. I hope he stays in business. Let’s be honest. I went up and like this got a pipe dream, right? You probably for a second. We’re like, Well, I hope things go well for you. I’ll give you a little bit of advice.
We’ll see where you go. I hope he makes it. And here we are. Almost it’s gonna be five years. This fall, right? It’s gonna be five years this fall. And it i Mike, my mind’s blown by that, but consistency, right, that makes a big part of it. So anyways, I know you got some other CRM questions. We don’t need to go into philosophy. Oh,
Damon Pistulka 38:00
no, this, this is great. Because, you know, the one one of the things that that I really want to talk about a little bit is, is, first of all, what are some of the exciting things we’re gonna because we’re going to talk about two things before we finish up today. One of them is going to be CRMs themselves. But then I also want to talk about the fact that you guys are not marketing and but doing HubSpot. So let’s talk about some of the things that you see exciting that you see CRM is doing now. And you see that they might be doing in the future that’s like will blow my mind kind of stuff.
Davey Warren 38:38
Yeah. So why don’t you think of what CRM and it’s always evolving? And look, no, I do HubSpot. Right. No, Danner to HubSpot. But I’m sure 10 years from now. It’s going to there’s going to be somebody else. Right. It’s going to kick the marketplace and do awesome and HubSpot is going to have their, their good solid base, they’re going to be solid. I think they are solid as a company. And they’re going to stick around, right?
They’re going to be that IBM in their space. Yeah, they’re doing it right now. I’m actually like, I hitched my wagon to this four years ago. And I’m just shocked that they’ve done so well. But it’s what’s getting amazing about CRM is that it has to be adaptable to the newest trends. So let me give you an example. HubSpot is one of the number one marketing automation tools in the world has been ranked by a couple different groups that can be argued with others. But anyways, I’ll say that because that’s who I represent. But, and I’ve got some stats behind that. Well, you’re on Facebook, right?
Because we you’re on Facebook, you’re on LinkedIn, LinkedIn has been around LinkedIn to become a staple. My question is what’s going to beat out LinkedIn? I always wonder that that’s like, the newest thing for me is like what’s going to be LinkedIn? I used to teach LinkedIn skills to college kids like I or like 10 years ago. I used to tell him all the time I was like, promote yourself, not your business. Now it’s like promote your business that yourself. But you’ve got things like tick tock that are out now, right? Yeah. And I’m waiting to see how does HubSpot pivot because they do social media. But Tiktok is a kind of a beast. And there’s nobody’s really locked it down yet.
As a catalyst for business, like business people have found ways to be influencers and be do advertising on it. But as a business for yourself, like Daymond, I’ve got my I’ve got my marketing gal, I Mike figured out a way for us to do little tick tock things, it’s having a huge impact on people. I just want to be relevant. But at the same time, I’m like, I don’t know where it’s going. I think that’s the story. There’s where CRM going serums gonna follow the trend. Right? The trend is, how can you make it easy? So think of it from a sales process? How do I make things easy?
If we’re making it easy for a client to come and sign up for something online? It’s going to remove some sales guys, and they’re going to be more consultants. They’re going to be architects for something they’re going to be solution. I used to coined the term I guess it is a term used to say solution. iser people be like, what do you what are you? I’m a solution. iser, right, let’s figure out what the solution is. Yeah. And so as we see, sales is still sales. I’ve got two Miller Heiman books on my shelf over here. And they still teach the same principles today, since the dawn of Christ, the same principles of treat your fellow man kind. Honestly, if you read any sales book, that’s a good sales book.
Not one of these guys. It’s like, I’m going to be really loud and proud, right? But true salesmanship is those same principles. They’re, they’re, you know, finding out what the need is fulfilling the need, finding out what their pattern is, and communicating with people properly, right, building a relationship. But I mean, I had a client today, find out what their ROI is, right? What I talked to the company, I said, Okay, if we fix this problem, because I had no idea how to where to even start, I said, if I fix this problem, do you have any idea how much you think you might increase?
And they said, 10%? I said, that’s great. Let’s figure out how much revenue you make. Do you know, your revenues? And they said, Yeah, they said, it’s a couple of million. And I might suit saying, you’re saying that if we do this, I’m going to save you. I’m gonna help you make another quarter of a million, if not millions more, technically. And they’re like, Yeah. And I said, well, then my price is going to be a drop in the bucket. Yeah, because I’m so much less than that.
And I’m going to be able to do it in four months time, and you’re gonna get in rock and roll in there. i Great. We’re sold. That that. That was fast. It was it five minutes. They were sold. They just wanted, they wanted to check my credentials. And, you know, they wanted to figure out like why recommended whatever it was, but, but I think that, that, we’re going to find ways to speed up processes, we’re going to figure out ways to CRM is going to figure out ways to automate more stuff, right? Yeah. So when I get on my phone, right, now, I have to get onto my app and make a phone call, I can make a phone call from my app.
Eventually, somebody’s going to come up with a process that when I make a phone call, and I get off and they’re like, hey, this person’s in your CRM, do ya log that call versus going to the CRM, calling them from the CRM, and then logging it, they’re just gonna, it’s gonna know and it’s just gonna log and then it’s gonna get auto log for me. Right now my emails get auto logged, whereas before, when I was in Salesforce, you had to like pick and choose what you logged in the system from another from a third party app. HubSpot has it built in it does it automatically. And I can do it from multiple emails. It’s just an evolution of automation that occurs
Damon Pistulka 43:32
and evolution of automation. Yeah,
Davey Warren 43:35
yeah. It’s really what it’s coming down to is that they’re just going to speed up because the reality is, this doesn’t change. Damon, you and I are still going to talk. They’re not going to buy my consultancy, just because you read something on my website. Yeah. Because if that was the case, everybody overseas that scams, you now is going to scam you even more. Right? We all want to know that we have a physical person to talk to, and that we’re going to work with. We’re going to look can I’m gonna get on a soapbox real quick for just one minute. Yeah, this work this work from home stuff. You’re working from home, I’m sure, yeah. But you own your business.
That’s for these companies that have worked from home, IBM did this already. And then they called everybody back. And then the pandemic hit, it was really funny. They put every I think is back in 2013, or 14, or whatever IBM is, like, we’re gonna have people work from home, we think it’s going to be more effective. And then I think in 2018 17, some like that, like, couple years later, they’re like, Nope, we’re bringing everybody back. And then bam, pandemic hit. And then everybody went back to working from home. And so and for I think what we’re finding is that it’s a test, these industries are going to do really well work from home.
These industries over here. Now they’re gonna come in the office. Why? Because people need to meet like, I think it was like the capital growth companies had a huge issue because they couldn’t get in front of their CEOs. And as soon as they can try as soon as they could travel, they’re trying to get to them before the other guy was to make sure they got the future. A deal, because it was the handshake that made the difference. And so you’re like I, the handshake doesn’t matter, it does matter.
Because I want to be able to look you in the eye, I want to be able to meet with you in person, I want to size you up for who you are, and make sure that this is going to be, you know, it’s gonna be so evolution wise, the serums gonna grow and automate, but the person to person, the fact that we can do video calls like this even right now. And now, we’re just going to find more and more ways to reach across virtually to one another. But we’re still going to have zoom meetings and eventually we’ll have like, you know, I’m a Star Trek Star Wars guy is going to have holograms, you know, I’m going to be standing here, and you’re going to be able to see me in 3d.
And I’m gonna be able to reach out my, I guess, the Metta World, which freaks me out a little bit, but we’re in a better world, right? Eventually, and eventually that will get adopted right now it’s getting, it’s getting its kinks out. It’s weird for people, it’s like when online dating came out, and all my data came out, I made fun of everybody that met their wife through online dating or bet some girl like, that’s not going to work out she’s gonna get fishy, like, this isn’t real, you know?
How are you going to get to know somebody online? Well, do you know many people are married now because they met somebody online. Heck, my wife and I, we met in person. But we connected via Facebook for our first date and communicated for a while before we went on our first date, we are still some semi online dating as you’d call it. Right? That’s like a norm now. So anyways, okay.
Damon Pistulka 46:25
Well, I think I think this is a very good thing is the CRMs have to be flexible. And this is one of the things that I see with systems overall for business, because one of the things I really, really, really think we learned that’s positive from the work from home experience is that hybrid works, hybrid work situations are so awesome for a lot of people. Because, yes, you need to be in the office for mentoring for camaraderie for team building for just doing some things as a team and project type settings.
Yeah, that’s awesome for it. But when you got people like we’re, I’m at in Seattle that are commuting three hours a day or two hours a day, when they can go from five days a week to three days a week, and, and set their schedule, their life changes drastically. Yep. Because they know, they know that, hey, Wednesdays, I don’t drive to work, because that’s the worst traffic day. And, and that’s the day that they can, you know, take the kid to school in the morning or sleep in for an hour. You know, they’re gonna,
Davey Warren 47:29
they’re gonna have satellite, they’re gonna have satellite images of cities during COVID, where they’re gonna see like, and look how many people and then look how it grew again and went back like, yeah, they’re gonna have like these, it’s gonna be like animal migrations, or like, when the water change, you’ll see the migration of the, you know, big corn sheet moved from here to here. That’s what we’re gonna see to see the human population movement. I call it the, by the way, I call it the oldest movie, and I call it the, we said the westward expansion.
I call this the inward expansion. New York and California have been cult being coming into middle America again. Yeah. And I call it the N word expansion, literally. And it’s true, though, because we’ve seen statistically speaking, I coined the term that nobody are going to put in history books that later on thought, we’re going to talk about the years between 2019 and 2025, with the N word expansion, and you know what caused it. So anyways, yeah, well, let’s get to your other question, because you’re wondering, so well, why I’m the only guy.
Damon Pistulka 48:22
What Why, why did you choose to do HubSpot implementation, but not marketing?
Davey Warren 48:30
Great question. Let’s end with this. So here’s the deal. I hitched my wagon to something that I was hoping would take off and, and compete with Microsoft Dynamics and Zoho and Salesforce, of course, right, because that’s what I was used to. And I saw a pathway for HubSpot, I went, Okay, I’m going to do this. And I really, really am praying and wishing that they do this, and I got lucky. Okay, so I don’t recommend it for anybody had to I took a big chance.
They all of a sudden came out and said, Hey, we’re going to do custom objects. We’re going to do these or we’re going to do development stuff. This is all stuff that helps me compete with larger CRMs. And I was like, yes, we’ve got the biggest we’ve got the tools now that I can go and compete. And what’s interesting for us is I started this way we’ve never done, we’ve done well, I should say we’ve never done we’ve tinkered with a few things in it, but we try to stay away from it. And that is the marketing side of HubSpot. HubSpot number one marketing automation tool.
Yeah. And then here I am selling it as a CRM that can beat out Salesforce. That’s like blowing people’s minds. It was even a question I laugh because it’s so my buddy. So as soon as somebody goes, so you used to do Salesforce when I hear that in my conversations, I know the next question is, so why do you think Salesforce or HubSpot is better than Salesforce? That’s always the next question. Right? Yeah, I used to do Salesforce.
And what I realized is that there needed to be I’m actually following a playbook that I did when I was doing Salesforce, which is I’m starting kind of slow. We’re a small consultancy, but I’m focusing on one An area that I think we do really well. And it seems like it’s really broad but it’s truly nature of what we do, which is we help architect the system and provide we have expertise in several different areas within it within my team, they can help bring it together for one solution.
And the reason what’s interesting is we are. So right now we’re in the top 3%, of HubSpot partners worldwide, or at least in the US, in the US, not worldwide. Let’s say us, I want to make sure I’m quoting myself correctly. Yeah. Top 3% in the US. The reason that we are a niche or an anomaly is because most partners for the last 15 years have been marketing agencies. And they have made great business and it’s been part time like a lot of them. They’re like HubSpot was just one of the accolades of maybe doing Eloqua or Marketo, or Sales Cloud or marketing cloud with Salesforce.
And they did all of them. And they were just good marketing experts. And they just understood we’re gonna put a campaign in here. I’ve got my Salesforce expert, My Eloqua expert, my HubSpot expert. And we’ll build the campaigns over here. And then we’ll have our guy implemented over here. Well, HubSpot stepped up and said, Look, we’re really good at marketing, but we keep getting people that need to manage their leads, and every single day, and Brian Halligan said it best.
He’s like, I started using Salesforce. And I hated it. I hated the difficulty of setting it up working with it. And I had been put a bunch of tools that he’s like, I just made my own. And I went, well, that’s great. Because what happened is you took something and they built it, right? Because they took what people were saying what they should do, and they built it right? Salesforce, if you get at Salesforce, it gives you a lead, that then you convert to an opportunity and an accountant a contact, it sucks.
It’s the thing, it’s the first thing we used to do peoples, we’d say, hey, the first thing we do is we’re just going to immediately convert, we’re going to auto convert all of your leads. Why? Because a lead would stand alone. And so if we were with the same company, they’d have Daymond. And Davey, we both be leads, but we’d never crossed paths in the system to different leads, and we’d be working independently. It was dumb, and HubSpot. They’re all contacts, and guess what every other hubs every other CRM now realize that that’s dumb. But Salesforce hasn’t changed their ways.
But other people are like, Well, I’m a b2c. So it makes sense, doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing, it’s the same thing, you need to have a contact and you need to be able to track that you and I have worked for the same company. So I can see all of the activity of that company in one place, Salesforce had done that, and put it all in one place, but only after you converted it. So you’d actually lose momentum because you’re calling on the same sales guys were calling on the same company 234 1020 times because they had 20 leads in there when they already had a deal moving through the pipeline over here.
So I recognize that HubSpot was moving in this direction. And then they just, they just laid it on, they just put some gasoline on about a year and a half ago, almost two years, how long has it been. And then they’re just taking off more and in a week and a half is their conference. And if anybody’s interested, they’re going to be laying out a whole bunch of new stuff that they’re doing, which is going to be phenomenal. I’ve been able to take a peek at some of it.
It’s awesome. It takes us next level I’m really excited for Alicia can tell you about it, because we’re actually working with some of it right now. And we’re already in theaters and stuff. And it’s cool. And what it is, is it’s just helping make things simpler, easier, more effective, better communication. So the reason that by the way, I invite I’m working with several different partners, I go to them all the time. And I’m like, let me tell you what we’re doing and how we architect because I need competition. Competition is healthy.
I truly believe in it. I want tons of competitors, because competitors helped breed more clients for me. Because when people realize that it works, like I said that five year thing. Five years from now, people are going to be looking for. They’re gonna be like, well, we use HubSpot before and it actually worked out. They’re gonna go to a new company, and it’s going to spread like wildfire. And that’s how Salesforce did it. By the way. Salesforce, I remember getting on phone people are like, well, I don’t know. I mean, this company is still kind of new. And they’re kind of weird.
You know, we’re gonna stick with our Dynamics or Oracle. And I’m like, okay, that’s what it was back in, like 2013 people were like, I don’t know if I want to do Salesforce. Yeah. Right. And that’s what people are doing right now. I don’t know if I want to do HubSpot. You know, and, and I’m like you, you should, it’s the next evolution. It makes sense. You’ll be better off especially since you don’t use 50% of your Salesforce system anyways, why don’t use a system where you can use almost 100% of it and actually use the tools that you need. So I think that we the reason we’ve done this is because we think it’s effective. I got over damnit, but really appreciate it.
Damon Pistulka 54:42
Man, Davey. It has been incredible having you on today. I knew I was going to learn a lot. I knew that we were going to see this from a different perspective because you don’t talk about the CRM from a marketing perspective. You talk about it from a sales instead sales process perspective, which I think is where people can really, really, really leverage the power of a CRM to, as you say, reduce the friction in the sales process. So people that are listening, I just want to tell you go back and listen to some of the stuff that Davey said. And also Davey, how can people get a hold of you if they want to talk to you about HubSpot about you know, CRMs, and things like that? Yeah.
Davey Warren 55:27
I appreciate that. Thanks for letting me put a plug in. You can go to Paragon Parag o n.com. It’s a play on the word of pairs or logo, sub pair and then agio n.com. There’ll be a place on there for free consultation. We do audits of people’s HubSpot for free. We do free consultation and talk with you about what CRM you’re on and what you’re looking at, or maybe considering it. Before you buy HubSpot. Come talk with me.
Because we actually helped negotiate great pricing for our clients on the licenses. And even though it’s already inexpensively can help you to get a little more to help some of those smaller businesses that are getting started. So yeah, feel free to reach out. You’ll probably talk with me directly or one of my other sales guys. But yeah, looking forward to it.
Damon Pistulka 56:15
All right. Well, thanks, everyone for being here today. Thanks, Davey. We had Davy Warren today from Paragon talking about CRM, configuration and implementation challenges. And man, did we get a schooling on how you use your CRM to make your sales process better? Let’s just think about this. Get back get into the different spots in this there were several just golden nuggets, a daily drop.
And when you’re talking, I want you to go back and listen to those. I also want to thank everyone who has listened today. And just thanks for being here. We’re going to take a couple of weeks off for the vacation or for the holidays coming up because I oh my goodness. Can you believe it’s almost summer’s almost over the kids back in school and everything like that is crazy. So we will be back in a couple of weeks. Thanks, everyone for being here. Thanks.