• 42:24
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Marketing strategies, automation, sales drive, CRM systems, data integration, API communication, problem solving, legacy systems, AI tools, client outreach, automation and human interaction, communication efficiency, lead management, business adaptability, system integration.
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, Dennis Riley
Damon Pistulka 00:07
Alright, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I am your host, Damon pistolka, and I am certainly excited for our special guest today, because we have mister Dennis Riley, from goals to results, and we’re going to be talking about marketing strategies and automation that drive sales. Dennis, thanks for being here today. Man,
Dennis Riley 00:30
hey, I love being with you. This is going to be fun looking forward. Oh yeah,
Damon Pistulka 00:33
yeah. Well, Dennis, we always like to start out by letting our guests share a little bit about their history and how they got where they are today. I mean, you you’ve been in business for a bit, and you’ve done some cool stuff, and you’re doing even cooler as the days go on. Let’s hear about it. Sure.
Dennis Riley 00:51
I started business in 1994 and I’m still here, so I’m doing something right, at least. There you go. But yeah, so it’s always been data related. You know, back in 94 it was client server, before the internet and all that stuff. And so the good news, the reason why I’m still around after all these years, because it’s adaptability. So the tools come and go. Alright, doesn’t matter what the tool is. It’s you want to help your clients communicate with their with their clients, and get the best results for it. And however that is done online, that’s how we do things. And so, like I said, we started before the internet client service stuff, and now we’re doing CRM stuff. And it’s just amazing. It’s, it really is the key thing that the two things that tied me together for all these years are two things, knowing the data and problem solving and learning to adapt. If you can do those three things, you know you’re fine. It’s it. The problem is, when you’re married to one thing and it doesn’t work, a tool doesn’t work, you’re like, Oh, I can’t I can’t go any further. It’s like, no, no. And you want to make sure we were talking offline about this before is that you want to make sure that whatever tools you use make sure it lets you go to talk to other tools, and there’s no ceiling on that. And that’s that’s why I help my clients with and the main thing is, is to communicate with their clients as much as possible.
Damon Pistulka 02:18
Yeah, yeah. And you brought up a good point before. Now we’ve talked about a little bit more. I think that’s one of the things that really has changed over the last decade, is the fact that a lot of the applications have APIs now, or ways to import export data automatically, semi automatically or periodically, that really allow you to talk between systems, whereas before you get if you’re a manufacturer, you get your ERP system, and that’s what you use, and that doesn’t talk to anything else. That doesn’t do you know, that does what the ERP system does, and you better hope it has it in there, or you’re just doing it in a separate system completely, and it doesn’t talk so but let’s just, let’s go down that road a little bit. You know, just the communication between systems. What has that really done in the last number of years here to help people solve these problems?
Dennis Riley 03:14
Oh, yeah, it’s perfect. This is a perfect scenarios. Here is that you used to get a tool, and like I said that you, you, you invested, there was usually a lot of money invested in this tool, a lot of like we come in, we do custom software, whatever. So a lot of money invested in the tools. And you were pretty much married to that tool, and you didn’t want to go elsewhere, because I invested all this money, you know. So you and a lot of my clients, especially the ones older and older, they had to, when it was time to get a new tool, we had to come in, export, import, and write all these new things. It was just, it really was a disaster. You know, it’s like it was, you know, like when I, when I use the word married, it’s kind of like that, you know, married, divorce type deal is really disaster. Well, I probably about 510, years ago, whatever that probably more five years ago that that you write APIs came along and said, Look, I’m writing this tool right here. You can someone, if you want to come into my tool and get data, or me export data. You can do that. By doing that, what happens is, now you can pick the tool that maybe gets 80% of what you do, or 75% what you do, 25% you can pick other tools and then have them talk to one another. I mean, nowadays, you know, people go, No, I want to do invoice and buy have QuickBooks over here. Okay, well, we have a tool here that you do in the CRM, that you know, when we when you great, get a new client, we’ll create the invoice, and we’ll create the record in QuickBooks, and you make the invoice in QuickBooks. So now you’re not learning a new tool. Oh, I know that I do everything in QuickBooks, with my with my invoices and stuff. Well, then do that. Don’t stop using quick. Checkbooks. And if you have a CRM, have the two come together, and now you’ve just built up your system even more.
Damon Pistulka 05:07
Yeah, yeah. That is cool. That is cool because it it that is one of the the big things that you see now is the systems being able to talk allows you to use specialized resources according to your need, according to your industry, according to your your individual business, and that, like you said, if you’re going to keep solving problems, you have to understand how to make these things talk together and how they work and and really find the best solution, rather than be married to a single, single, single thing. And
Dennis Riley 05:43
the interesting thing is, is like, when I walk into a new client, they say, Oh, well, we have this system over here, and then we have this Simpson on here, and we don’t know what’s going on, and we can’t talk to me, but you know, oh, you used to be, hey, we can build a system for you, but you’re going to have to get rid of that one and that one and that one and that one. Now you come in and say, okay, look, you have your erm over here. You got your QuickBooks over here, but you have but this CRM does nothing to outreach to your clients. And so what you do is you have a CRM, the export this data to the CRM, outreach to clients or potential leads, whatever, when they get the lead, boom, you can move the data two ways. One goes to the invoice and QuickBooks, and one goes into your erm as a new record coming in, yeah. Or you have a website, and now you put a form on the website. That form goes right to the CRM, and then when it when there’s inquiry, you can now have workflows to say, hey, when a form comes in, we’re going to do X, Y and Z, and we talked before, and you could throw in chat, GPT into all this stuff. It just the good news is, remember, we talked about problem solving before. It used to be we come to a solution, go, I wish we had tool for that, or a tool doesn’t use that. You don’t have that anymore, because it’s now, instead of is our tool doesn’t use it. What tool is out there to work with us and to integrate into the system we’re already building?
Damon Pistulka 07:12
Yeah, that’s a huge thing. I think you’ve touched on this without saying it specifically, though, is we have so many applications to choose from now because of the SAS economy and the way things are made is like, you can find your specific thing for this little niche deal that you’re trying to do and and it’s probably pretty darn good, probably not flexible. And like you said before, the API communication makes it easy for things to talk easier for things to talk together. It
Dennis Riley 07:43
used to be, it used to be that you had to, like, almost, put square pegs into round holes and whatever leftover. Oh, well, we get 90% of it. You don’t have to do that anymore. So now you can say, okay, look at this tool does do 90% of it, but this tool does the other 10% so. And they both, they both integrate quite nicely with the tool you’re using. So why they want you to do it? And the good news is, if you know how this works, tools have a shelf life. Okay, yeah, so now the shelf lives. It’s like, Okay, this one doesn’t work anymore, but this one does it better. We’ll just take this one out and put it in and not redoing the whole system, just that piece of the tool that you’re using. That’s
Damon Pistulka 08:23
a great point, because as things change, you know, like, just say, for example, AI integration, or an AI tool replaces two or three, because it can, you know, make its own decisions, or whatever. In that ecosphere there, that would be a great example where you’re just replacing tools, and you’ve got one better, more efficient that goes in and takes over and does the same, same thing, or better? Yeah, think about like,
Dennis Riley 08:46
outreach. Outreach right now, it’s emails and, you know, and texting and all that stuff. We don’t know what’s going to happen two years from now. You know, it could be something else. It doesn’t matter, because once you get the outreach and they’re interested, the data still has to be stored somewhere. Mm, hmm. So it doesn’t matter that now you’re not using emails anymore, but you’re using something else. I mean, the interesting thing is, a lot of people don’t realize this, but you know, when you’re on a desktop and you go into Google and search something, but when you’re on a phone and say, Hey, Siri, get me this, they’re not using that Google thing. They use another engine and an AI thing. So it doesn’t matter how that stuff comes in anymore. But once the people finally get to your website, or finally get in and we want to do business, you got to store the data somewhere so we still have that data portion where we need it. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 09:40
yeah, yeah, I want to say real quick, Usman, thanks for being here today. Said greetings from Usman, how are you all there? I’m not explaining. I don’t understand exactly what he says, but good work. Best wishes to each of you and everyone there. Thanks, Usman, Thank. Thanks for being here today. I want to thank everyone for listening. That’s out there. That’s awesome. If you got questions, comments, want to ask Dennis something? Go ahead. Let’s hear them. So Dennis, now we’ve we’ve been fortunate enough to work on some some interesting data projects, where from beginning in and down some longer term even. So what are some of the things that you’re seeing where people are able to take, say, a legacy system, like in manufacturing, for example, an ERP system. And it just is, you know, that that, to me, is like trying to get the government to move right. It is changing an ERP system because it’s such a god awful process that you would never really want to do it, unless you know you’re going to die if you had to do it, or do or do it right? But how do you see these new tools being able to really help the legacy systems? Well,
Dennis Riley 10:55
interesting thing is that so if you have a legacy system and you’re like, okay, hey, does it do an import and export? No, it doesn’t. Or, or it can only import, but can’t export, right? You can work around that. So for example, in the thing that we’re working on together, it’s like, okay, I’ll start with a CRM, because we’re going to do all this stuff. So we’ll store some data there, but we’re also going to move it to the legacy, or it came from the legacy, but we’re going to enter it in now with a legacy. Unfortunately, if there is no import and export, you’re going to have to do some manually input that came so, whatever. So in the situation where we work on together, there has to be that manual input, because there is no time there. But the but in other ones, what we do is that, you know, hey, look, we talked about this before. Say it’s really personal day. It’s HIPAA compliant. Okay, well, the HIPAA compliance stuff, and they already have all their rules and regulation, but, you know, I would love to do outreach and all that stuff. How you do it? Well, what you can do is just export some of the data, or start with the CRM, and when they, when you get the stuff in, bring it into the legacy system. And the thing that’s great there is that, you know, they still have their data. They’re not up breathing, but then all the new stuff happens. And so now, now, once you get again, like what we try to do is we put a CRM in as soon as possible, because that way we can now do a lot of communication using that CRM. And the CRM that we use, it allows you to have all these API calls and stuff like that, and you start to use some of these other tools. That says, Oh, look, this CRM can’t retrieve data, but you know what this tool does. And so it helps out that you don’t have to say, You know what, I’m not using it. I need this. You know, some people are really tied to that system. They can’t move. They can’t so instead of saying, Sorry, we can’t help you, or hey, you can’t use it anymore, and we’re going to bring everything over. It’s like, you know what? Let’s walk around this, like we talked about before, problem solving. What do you want to get out of this? Oh, I want to do this. I want to outreach to my clients. I want to be able to have some automation that, you know, if, if you’re working on some data, and that data triggers something else, we need that to do something. But this, this old system, doesn’t do any of that triggering. We have to do everything manually, like, Oh no, let’s bring some of this data in that allows the triggering, and it’s usually date driven. So when the one of the things that we’re working on together is that it goes for different stages based on dates. Okay, well, if something is in one stage for too long, you can notify someone that says, hey, look, you got to move this over instead of before they would. They didn’t know it was going that long, or things might fall through the cracks. A new CRM and a new system there will help that automation along. So it helped the people who are supporting the system be able to support it a lot more.
Damon Pistulka 14:00
Yeah, yeah, you make a great point there. Because I think one of the things that that really is just an integral part of any of these when you when we’re talking about systems, like a CRM system, now, the automation is such an integral part of it, because we look at the sales process all the way from the time somebody first knows of us reaches out whatever you want to say that first interaction, whether it’s they downloaded something from your website, they they had a quote request, whatever that is that CRM can literally make sure that that person gets immediate, immediate confirmation that they’ve been heard. That both externally and internally, people are reminded that, you know, we need this information. It’s this is due, whatever it is, to keep things rolling through, to be able to get that customer or potential customer, what the information they need so they can make a good decision.
Dennis Riley 14:56
The interesting thing is, in a lot of people say this. It’s like, oh, automation is, you know, I can see that a mile away. And, you know, you gotta lose people like that, because there’s no human intervention. And the exact opposite is not true too. Saying I don’t need any of this automation. I do everything I like to do with the combo, the tedious stuff that gets you involved, let that be automated. But if in so, maybe, like you said, the an increase stuff like that. Let that be automated. But as soon as you have like, someone really interesting, they’ve gone through though, you bring in the human and say, okay, and but the automation says to that person, hey, look, you need to reach out to this person right here. And you can say, here, this is what you say. We don’t care. But do that one to one thing, because then the person on the other end goes, Hey, this is a real human being talking to me all right. Now I’m getting somewhere. Hey, they care about what I’m trying to do. So I always try to blend in automation and human aspect together, because I think that’s the best one two punch instead of each extreme. And it really works wonders. I mean, it was kind of funny, because it was one time that, again, these tools can be anywhere. You know, LinkedIn. Everyone loves LinkedIn to do communication, but you know, they have its limitations. You know, every program has its limitations. What we did is we used another tool that that combines Sales Navigator so that we can automate the reach out process. And what we did. So I was using it for my my communications, and I, you know, LinkedIn, I had several 1000s of things, and I just slowly put a message out to these people, saying, hey, haven’t connected in a while. Hope things are fine. This what we do, and let’s catch up. And one person reach, reach back to me and says, ah, Dennis, I haven’t heard from you a while. Let’s get together and blah blah. I got on the phone, I did a zoom call with them, and she was like, going, you know, this is great. We started talking about all this stuff, and I talked about automation. She goes, Oh, I can’t stand those automations. They never work. I’m like, Really, we’re talking because of an automation. She went, what, you know, because that’s what happened, you you, I had that automation tap the person on the shoulder, and then the the moment that person realized, hey, we haven’t talked in a while, I come in with a personal message and start doing something, and boom, I was able to reacquaint with someone.
Damon Pistulka 17:14
Yeah, yeah. And that’s, it’s one of the things that I’ve used in my automation, even for this show, right? Because I used to always figure out, Oh, here’s the people that I want to do, or people have passed us. You’ve been on the get on the show before, and and now the automation simply goes, okay. I say, Okay. I want to see if Dennis wants to talk again about being on the show. What sends you an email like you said today, we haven’t talked for a while. If you want jump on the jump on the link here, schedule a time. Let’s talk about what we want to be on the show and talk about on the show next time. And it’s it means that I can actually reach out to people now, because before for me to sit there, type up an email, put the link in it, do it everything. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re really jamming and trying to get things done, it makes it a heck of a lot easier if I just go, okay, click, click, click, click, click. These are people that I want to want to see what they’re up to and get on the show and talk about some interesting stuff. And these things just save these little chunks of time for us all the way through. And if you’re a salesperson and you, you, I mean, you depend on whether or not you’re getting more more sales in it can mean the difference between your meeting your goals or not. Well,
Dennis Riley 18:32
time is the biggest commodity right now. Things are flying so quickly now. I mean, it’s amazing how fast things go, you know, yeah, like I said, been busy for 30 years, and, like, each decade, it just gets faster and faster. And now, with all the automations, people are jumping on that, and they can do things a lot quicker. So now it used to be that at the beginning it was like, Hey, I’m using this tool to get ahead. Now it’s, I’m using this tool to keep up.
Damon Pistulka 19:00
Yes, yes, because you have to, because you
Dennis Riley 19:02
have to. Yeah, if you don’t, you fall behind. Like, I love these people say, you know, AI is going to put me out of business. No, you not using AI will put you out of business? Yeah, you know. And that’s what people are doing. But it’s like, these tools are really and that’s why I like to say to people, you know, people say, I’m not sure if I’m interested in doing this. I’m like, you know, like they might say, Hey, I’m not for if I invest the time and money right now, I usually turn around says, Can you afford not to do this? Yeah, you know, because that’s what’s going on now, is that you’re it used to be, like I said, the system was an added stuff. It’s a necessity now, and you need someone to come in there and say, you know, this is how it has to get done, and stuff like that. And the tools can be intertwined, you know, like I said this, the CRM that I use is fantastic. You know, you talked about this high level. It’s a great CRM, by the way, yeah, anyone who’s out there seeing it, you gotta check that tool. It’s amazing. If you ever, if you help with checking out, let me know. But the the tool is amazing, but it just like everything it has, it’s good for this, but it can do this, but it’s great for this. Yeah, so the stuff over here on the edges that you need done, it may not be the best interface for it, or may not be the best set of tools for it, but using those web hooks, using that, you know, those calls, those those API calls, you just opened up a whole new world. And, you know, like I said this iPad, I’ve had people use that CRM, just for a CRM. I’ve had other people that they use everything their whole work is in the CRM. It’s like it goes from one thing to another. I have that. And like I said, I have these clients that have this system that they don’t want to leave, but they know it’s limitations. I come in with the CRM, and now it’s like the nice little bouncing thing. And then I can now integrate with these things you want. You can’t count. Get your calendars integrated. You know, get all this stuff integrated. It’s great because now it now opens up your world to, like you say, reach out more and so that, because it’s all about results and time, how you gonna get, how you gonna save the time to do something? You know, the automation especially tedious done that’s we paid up over and over and over again. Yeah, that’s what you want to do.
Damon Pistulka 21:26
Yep, that that’s for sure. And that the thing is, is that you talked about something for about the tools, talking together, even, like the old school web forms. You know that we got tons of them out there that people have built, quote builders. They built forms on there. Now being able to the way that things talk, you just hook the things together. You don’t have to go out there and redo your website or anything like that. You just take the information that’s getting submitted on the form. So you talked about earlier, about the personal touch and the process we we’re just helping a client right now, manufacturing client that they get inquiries quotes through their website because they’ve got a quote builder. They spend a lot of money building a quote builder on their website, but they always respond to the quotes by with a human but now what we do is that comes from the quote builder goes into the CRM, so we log we got this quote, they weren’t logging that they had these quotes other than in their erm or their email system. And so now we have a log of each quote from each potential customer, and they can have multiple quotes, of course, per customer, but every time it comes in and it says, okay, Damon, you’re the inside sales person for this client. You need to respond to this quote. And they go into the system and they respond to the quote in the system, and that customer got an answer to the quote really quickly, because that as soon as the quote comes in, the customer now gets notified which they didn’t do that before acknowledge that we receive your quote, and then it then it immediately sends the internal notification to Damon, the salesperson, and says, you’ve got a quote here. Let’s get it responded to. And these kind of things are taking this combination, like you said, of things, communicating together and mixing the human in to really give it a personalized touch. And the
Dennis Riley 23:19
interesting thing is, well, you are saying, you exactly right. It’s like someone says, Hey, look, I have a website. It’s in WordPress, great. I have a calendar. I use Calendly, you know? And I do this, and, oh, you know what? I have MailChimp that does this. None of them talk to one another. Okay, so what happens is, yeah, great. You have all these tools. But so for example, the website, where’s that data go? Well, goes right into my email. Without 1000s of other emails, you get a day, okay? It’s just It goes into your email, and if you’re busy, you don’t reply to it too bad. They couldn’t go to a central area and have someone reply, or something reply. And then when you’re saying up calendars and currently, what happens afterwards? If someone’s brand new with you, except County, you don’t have their information. You just have it in the county. All right, imagine if they now you have a calendar that syncs In with Google or Outlook, whatever, and that stores that data inside a CRM. And then same with the MailChimp. It’s like, okay, yeah, I have a MailChimp there, but those are those clients? Are those leads? I don’t know. Well, how do you get to that? Well, yeah, I can do that inside MailChimp, but yeah, now you don’t have everything else. If all of that’s the hub, you make the hub, the CRM, and all these things are connected around it. Now it’s not especially, I’ve seen this. Business owners always used to be the the funnel, and they would be the blockage of the funnel. You know, now you have that hub that the business owner doesn’t have to be the center of the hub anymore, all right, so the business can do what it’s supposed to do, and you have the system reaching out, and, like you said, a hybrid of people doing it. And the good news is, when things fall through cracks, emails go out, you know, yeah, hey, this person hasn’t been referred to in the last couple of days. You know, what’s going on here? You know, it’s great. Like I said, if you connect them all together,
Damon Pistulka 25:14
that one thing is because we’re we said the same thing in the meeting I was talking about today. It was, it was, hey, you know, humans aren’t as good on their best day. We’re not going to be 100% we’re certainly not going to be 100% consistently all the time. So as you said, the process is set up. So that a I gave you a reminder that, Damon, you need to respond to that quote, and if you don’t tell me the system that you responded to that quote, or I see that your email went back out to them automatically and and know that’s what it was, then I’m going to ping you again. And after that, if I don’t hear if you don’t get it done, then your boss is going to get an email the next day or a text or whatever it needs to be, so that we make sure this gets done in a timely manner.
Dennis Riley 26:00
And the great news is all this stuff can be put in pipelines as well, and so therefore. So, like you said, you know, if there is five stages to a lead to it from a lead to a sale, and something gets clogged in the fourth stage, and not only you pinging it out to, like you said, but your boss is looking at the overhead of the painting of the pipeline. Say, why are we not solving this one? Why is it stuck on number four? You know? So we have everybody jammed up exactly. And so it’s not like it’s a, haha, I told you, but it’s just more of a it’s a consistency. It’s more efficient. And so now it’s amazing what you can do on that, and especially people who have lists. I had a client, a recent brand new client, last week, he gave me his list of 7000 records. I said, if you would, you reach out to all these people. No, I’m like, there is money there. There is so much money there, because you’ve known these people over time. And he’s, he was another, like, 30 year, 30 year business owner. He had them all. And, like, yeah, most of them are probably, you know, not around anymore. But still, you don’t think there is activity in that list. There absolutely is activity in that list. And
Damon Pistulka 27:19
just the simple, like you said, simple outreach with helpful information makes a huge difference. And just letting people know you’re around,
Dennis Riley 27:26
the key is communication on and no matter what you’re doing, if you’re communicating to your to your outside world and communicating in the inside, because you know, if people know what’s going on, most of the problems happen because of lack of communication.
Damon Pistulka 27:43
Yeah, that’s a great point. That’s a great point, and it’s totally, totally true. So what really has you excited about the systems, what’s happening and where things are going?
Dennis Riley 27:56
You know, it’s kind of funny. This AI stuff with, uh, with chat GPT, and they it’s, I love it. I love when chat GBT came out, and it was like the only game in town. And now that has all the competitors. Everyone’s trying to outbid themselves to see what can happen. And things are flying so quickly and learning things in so you’re seeing new things happen almost on a daily basis. I love that. Again, it’s the communication. If you can get there faster, that’s the key, you know, and it’s so great that you can do that. It’s so great that you can have these things work for you as much as possible. And like I said, it really isn’t just automation, just human, it’s the blend that puts it together, and that is so the key to this. But, you know, it’s kind of funny, because it’s always, especially if you work on a see that, you know the CRM long enough you’re going to run into problems. You know, it’s like someone says, like, a perfect example, someone said to me the, you know, about a month ago, hey, look, does this CRM have backups? And it has a system backup, but not to the granular way. And we said, what’s going to happen? I need a backup. I’m like, All right. So what we did is we took another tool, CloudFlare, okay? And and what we did is, when we added data into the CRM, we had a little trigger, take that data and move it to Cloudflare as well. All right. So now it’s great because double redundancy in data, which means so if something ever happened to you know, the server at high level, you still have your data in Cloudflare and vice versa. But now the key thing is, is that now that’s being in CloudFlare, you already have your instant backup. But b There’s another limitation on some of the CRM stuff is that it somehow has trouble retrieving the data. It can put data in like that, and you can access this anytime, but retrieving it on a screen is tough. Well, my data is already in CloudFlare, so now I have this code that you can write in you can Cloudflare doesn’t use code, but there’s. Another thing called GitHub that you can connect to cloud Fair, which writes code. And then in high level, what you do is you write a page and say, Okay, here’s this code that’s external. Get it from this one, and all of a sudden, you pass it what you’re looking for, the key. So for example, in high level, there’s always a key. It’s either going to be your email or your phone number. Okay, those are the unique keys. So if you want to know, hey, give me all the data on this phone number. And you’re using, you’re using the web server. You just pass the phone number to the CloudFlare, and all of a sudden, the get the GitHub will get it for you and retrieve it and put it on the screen. Boom,
Damon Pistulka 30:42
yeah, yeah. And that’s the thing. You’re great example of how systems talking together, the variety of systems we have at our fingertips to just make things happen that we couldn’t, you know, 10 years ago, easily.
Dennis Riley 30:57
Yeah, again. And you’re right, and it’s also talking to say, what do we want here? What’s this, what’s the problem? Figuring out, well, forget about the tools, what’s the problem and and what’s your end result? And you’re like, Well, I want to get here and, like, five years ago. Sorry, pal. Good luck to you. You’re going to have to humanize that, or something like that. Now, it’s like, Okay, let’s see what tools are out there. And chances are you will find the tool,
Damon Pistulka 31:26
yep. And then, like you said to that, the AI piece in it. When you find that tool, you’ve probably got some AI help in there to get it set up and get it going. Perfect
Dennis Riley 31:37
example I was doing, like I said that Cloudflare to the GitHub. I’m like, I don’t know, it’s been a while since I wrote this code. I went to chat. GP said, Look, this is why I want to do a GitHub code written, plugged in, tried to do some modifications. You know, we had go back and forth. Had the whole thing done in a couple of hours. Yeah, I didn’t have to, I didn’t have to call, call up a coder to do this, or whatever. I just did it. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 32:09
so you brought up data. You know, people talk about this, and like you said, a great example. You’ve got that 30 plus year business owner setting there had all those email addresses. They don’t have that CRM. They don’t have a system for outreach. I mean, is there a way for us to really quantify that? Is that what? What is that value that they’re leaving behind there? Because it just really seems like not having that data in something where you can do that communication is really costing a lot of businesses money, and to the point that I’m, you know, could be detrimental to their business.
Dennis Riley 32:55
I use it I was talking to someone a while ago, and I use the analogy. I’m like, you know, you’re in a room, it’s a hot summer day, and you have a window AC unit on, and so you have that one window that the AC is just blowing on you, all right? And that is the leads coming in. And, you know, everyone’s all business owners get more leads, get more data, new clients, new clients, new clients. But then there’s a window right behind you that’s open. It’s just all that nice air is flowing out. That’s your past list. So it’s great that you’re getting new clients and stuff. You know how hard it is to get a brand new client who doesn’t know you at all, and you have to form that new relationship. It’s great. It’s the honeymoon stage. Life is great, but you know what? There’s a lot of people back there who already know about you, okay, or know of you, or know people who could use you, and you’re not reaching out to them. That, to me, is like, why? Because it really is, especially like I said, and I was talking to that client today. I’m like, you have 7000 records, I can guarantee you there’s at least one sale on that 7000 records. It might take a while to get there, but what I’m saying is and and how realistic is, it’s only going to be one sale, you know? I mean, there’s so there’s so many things that they could do. You know, think about this. Okay, let’s use that 7000 Yeah, of course. It’s 30 years. Let’s even say, like, two thirds of it is garbage. It’s just gone. Okay, you still have, like, say, even only have 1000 so say 6000 is garbage. They don’t, you know, there’s an AOL dot extension. It’s just not there anymore. Netscape, whatever. But now you got that 1000 and you just have to reach out to him, say, hey, look, I know it’s been a while since we reached out, but this is the stuff we’re working on lately. If it interests you, or you know anyone that might might use this service, please let me know. I’d love to get in touch with you. Yeah, that’s it. You don’t think. That’s going to start a conversation. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 35:03
that’s really where the where this, having the ability to do this with your with your past customers, is such a powerful tool, because you’re sitting here today without it. What are you going to do?
Dennis Riley 35:14
Well, you can get on the phone, even if you let’s, let’s, let’s just say you had that again, this was in an Excel spreadsheet. Actually is an outlook, so we exported it. But imagine if you didn’t have automation. Someone goes, Okay, I’ll take care of that. You know, even if you cut and paste an email, how long does that one person take to get 7000 out the door? Okay? And then those 7000 come in, you’re like, Oh, my God, what am I doing? What am I doing? You have that automated and see what happens. See what happens. Who cares if 6000 don’t exist anymore? Okay? And see to me, that’s totally different than cold emailing someone, because it is your list. Now, if you just bought that list, have a list of 7000 what you get for more I paid, you know someone over here, and they gave me all the X, Y and Z of this area, well, that’s a different story. That’s a cold email. Yeah. If you have a list of people that know of you have done services you or, or, here’s another thing. Or were potential leads and at that moment in time wasn’t the right fit. Why wouldn’t it be now? It could be now something that was done maybe a year or two ago. You send them out something right now, maybe it is the right time or three years ago. Guess what? What they wanted to do you couldn’t do but now you have the tools to do it. Boom, yeah, yeah.
Damon Pistulka 36:41
How do you see these, these systems changing? You know, the small business down the street,
Dennis Riley 36:49
and that’s a great question, because, and I always tell people, Look, when I I don’t know how to do your job. Okay, I don’t want to know how to do your job. I don’t so I don’t have to come in and learn what you do. Okay, yes, I do ask the questions and all that stuff, but most of the time they’re good at what they do. We’ll take what you have, don’t worry about it. We will do the outreach and all that stuff, and just tell us what to say. Or if you’re not sure what to say, we’ll write something else and say, Hey, is this good? And what we usually do is we try to know their, you know, after a while, we know their their way of talking, and so we, you know, so it makes it sound like them. It’s not just this generic thing that someone who doesn’t have that tone won’t say that. So we try to find their tone. But yeah, it doesn’t matter, especially the people down the street who like, don’t have a system at all. And then they say, Hey, you know what? I’ve done this for a while. I don’t need a system. Well, I ask it, hey, do you need more income coming into your business? And how you getting that and and even if you don’t need more income, and you want to keep things up, if you don’t need more income. Are you keeping track of are you keeping up to date in in in line with your current clients? Because if you don’t want more income, and those clients drop off, guess what? Yeah, you need more income. Mm, hmm. So it’s not just getting new revenue and getting new clients. Are you making sure that you’re reaching out to your current clients to keep them up to date. And again, most problems happen because of lack of communication. Alright, so if you have a client that you’re working with and you it’s been a long term client, but they haven’t heard from you lately, and but they’re still paying your bill, eventually, some of that office is going to say, why are we paying Dennis this? Yeah, Dennis who, oh, he has done nothing for us. But even though that you have, if you don’t reach out to them and keep them top of mind, yeah, they’ll never, if you’re in you keep telling them, these are results I’m getting. Do you want to improve your results? So if you’re always saying, hey, look, this is what we’re doing, the valuable person is never going to be questioned. Yeah, if they’re valuable to you, and some other person comes in and says, Why you paying? Don’t even touch Dennis. Dennis is doing what he’s doing. You find some other ways to cut. I’m not cutting Dennis. Yeah, it’s a totally different situation. Only because I kept up with the communication. If that lack of communication happens, why would they keep me? What? What value am I doing? And most people don’t understand what’s going on, even if they say, if I do a system with them, it’s constantly doing it, and I don’t keep up with them. But all these things are happening that they don’t know about. They’re going to say, You know what? Dennis used to be, all these results. I don’t see the results anymore. They see it, but they can’t. Yeah, that’s the reason,
Damon Pistulka 39:44
yeah, yeah, that’s a great point. The communication is huge anytime, and when you can, you can automate it, make it meaningful for the person receiving it. It’s it’s just better,
Dennis Riley 39:54
yeah. Again, you blend the automation the human together, and so that usually. It’s kind of funny, there’s, there’s another client I have that, you know, I don’t go specifically to get them leads, but I save them so much time in their business that they have time to get leads. And so if I don’t like, you know, and I keep telling them, let’s improve this. Let’s improve they’re like, Oh my God, we love you. We love you, you know, because now they’re saving them time to go out to do what they really need to do, and that is just as important as, hey, look, I’m a lead generator. I’ll get you
Damon Pistulka 40:29
all this stuff. Yeah, yeah, giving them time to do what they need to do
Dennis Riley 40:33
exactly. It’s all about saving them time. Yeah? Good
Damon Pistulka 40:36
stuff. Well, Dennis, it’s been awesome talking today. Man, it’s so much fun, because you are a legend in my mind anyway, and doing these automations and really putting things together that that do solve these problems. I mean, because there are problems, systems don’t talk things just could flow better if we could do this. And it’s it’s great getting to talk to you today, hearing some of your insights. Just thanks for being here today. Appreciate
Dennis Riley 41:03
- You know, it’s always a great time seeing you. And yeah, talking to your fans, yeah.
Damon Pistulka 41:07
So Dennis, what is the best way for people to find you? Go to
Dennis Riley 41:12
my website, goals to results.com and go there and fill out a form. And guess what? That goes to my CRM, which will come tap me on the shoulder.
Damon Pistulka 41:21
Nice, nice. Well, thanks for being here today. Dennis, I want to say thanks, Paul. You dropped a couple comments in there. Thanks so much we got Usman dropped a comment. Paul dropped a comment. He dropped a LinkedIn or sub stack link. Uh, so much. CRM, yeah, I’m telling you, if you, if you haven’t gone out and done some research on Reddit or something in our CRM forums or something like that. You definitely need to give it, give it a look, because CRMs are not your sales force, bloated thing from the past. They’re they’re nimble, they’re easy to implement and and they are very effective. So thanks for being here, Dennis. We’ll wrap up offline. If you got in here late and you didn’t hear Dennis from the beginning, you want to go back, roll this thing back to the beginning and start over, because he dropped some golden nuggets in there. If you want to talk to Dennis, reach out on goals to results and get a hold of him there. Thanks everyone. We’ll be back again next week you.
