Mark: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award winning financial services and business advisory show that challenges your old school business practices and the traditional business suit culture. On this show you’ll hear from industry professionals who will challenge you to think beyond the suit and tie, while offering you meaningful, modern solutions to help you enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host, Mark Van Benschoten.
Relationships are the life blood of your business, each customer and prospect is different and treating them all the same, we’re selling them all the same product in the same way would be a mistake. Fortunately technology has made it easier than ever before to manage relationships with your customers and prospects. Brian Harr, president of Three30 Group in New Philadelphia, Ohio, joins us today to talk about the benefits of CRM and how this tool can help you improve your relationships and grown your revenue. Welcome to unsuitable, Brian.
Brian: Thank you for having me.
Mark: Brian, before we get started, can you just tell us a little bit about the name, Three30 Group?
Brian: Originally I had a software business called Systems Factory, we had merged the business with a small marketing company in the area called Think Marketing. We thought the best way to bring us together is under a new brand and you start to go through, “Okay, what’s available as far as domains go, what represents us? What encompasses all that? What’s available as far as trade names go?” We went through a list of about three hundred names and one of our IT guys goes, “Hey, we’re passionate about doing business in the Dover, New Philadelphia area, area code’s 330, could it be Three30 Group?” Then we added a creative guy and he’s like, “Let’s call it Three30 Group and we’ll put a little cock symbol on the logo.” He brought it together and it turned out really nice.
Mark: That’s great, this is being recorded before it’s going to air and I leave for Amsterdam in the morning, so when I saw that I was like, “Why don’t you name it 420?” We’re here to talk about CRM, sorry about that, Brian. Caught you off guard there.
Brian: That’s okay.
Mark: Talk about CRM and for those people who are not into marketing, us accountants in the world, what is CRM actually stand for?
Brian: It stands for customer relationship management. It also encompasses sales force automation tools and it starts to get out toward some of the marketing automation tools that are out there as well. It’s really just a way, like you said at the intro, it’s a piece of software that helps automate some of your existing processes, helps you manage the data, manage the relationships, track those interactions so at the end of the day you can grow the business and improve your customer relationships and ultimately improve profitability within hour organization.
Mark: I’m going to say something silly here, if I buy this software, I’m all set, right? I install it and I’m good to go?
Brian: No, and that’s something we run into quite a bit, we run into situations where we want to start laying out a customer sales and customer service processes and they really don’t know, they obviously have something, but what we don’t want to do is put the software on top of that and make bad faster. We need to make sure they’ve got a good process in place because software’s not the silver bullet, as everybody knows.
Mark: I like your term, ‘bad faster’. You buy our software, we’ll get you to bad quicker than you were before.
Brian: That’s right, we’re going to automate bad, we don’t want to do that. We always start off by looking at the process that they have in place. We have partners that we work with if they need that. We have experience, help them lay out the process, but when we start to see this goes beyond just a software implementation, we like to get some experts involved with some sales training, customer service training, implementing the proper processes to support their business.
Mark: Those are the things that sales training, what other things would you be looking for before you did an implementation?
Brian: Beyond the training, just them understanding what they’re trying to accomplish, what key drivers and metrics are going to get them there, so that as we start to set up the software we can identify what types of reports, what kind of KPIs they need to make sure that they’re on track to achieving those goals.
Mark: Do you coach them along and say, “What do you want to accomplish?” Do they ever get the deer in the headlights, “Oh I don’t know.”
Brian: Yeah, we get that a lot.
Mark: I was a the golf club and my friend said, “I just installed the CRM, you should have one.”
Brian: We actually work with quite a few sales training organizations, so a lot of times we get referred in that way. They’re like, “Okay.” We’ve been helping them with the process, we’ve been helping them with the training, we’ve identified the cook book items or things that they want to track, but they’re doing it all in spreadsheets and then they’re tracking customer dialogue and interactions through emails and they’ve got documents spread all over the network, so we’re ready to put some software on their to bring it all together, centralize it, make it more accessible and look for areas where we can even automate along the way as well.
Mark: Do you mean that’s not a good idea to track interactions via spreadsheets and have six hundred tabs for an ABC customer, I only have access to, that’s not the way to do it?
Brian: No, not usually, not if it’s an organization, especially where you start to have more than one sales person. A lot of sales … you get different types of sales people or sales organizations. There’s those that feel like it’s more of an art form, but they have a process, they just might not know exactly what it is. They might not know where some of the bottle necks exist, they might not know some of the opportunities that are there because they don’t have a way to bring that data together and analyze it.
You’re really trying to look across the organization and see what’s working, what’s not, where’s the bottle necks? And if you don’t have a system in place to do that, it becomes difficult.
Mark: True.
Brian: It’s hard to aggregate and analyze information across spreadsheets and individual email accounts.
Mark: You’ve obviously been in this business longer than I, but I assume it’s some way to input data, interactions, but probably more important is to be able to call that data, look at that data, make some sense of that data, the retrieval aspect of it?
Brian: That’s correct and a lot of sales people when they start hearing this, start thinking, “I’m being tracked, and I don’t like being tracked.” If an organization approached the right way, they show these sales people this is a tool to enable you. We’re going to look for what’s working across the organization. Why is salesperson A and B outperforming the rest of the organization? What are they doing? What’s right? What bottle necks were run into in the other areas? There’s opportunities to look at territories with things like that and say, “Do we have things spread out evenly? Does everybody have equal opportunity to succeed?” We can start to track things with what marketing efforts? What literature’s working?
Again, it’s looking at the whole organization, identifying areas for opportunities, eliminating areas of waste and that’s generally what leads to productivity improvements, reducing your administrative costs and ultimately leading to more profits.
Mark: Would it also be, use the example of the accounting firm here, we have some people that are designated revenue generators, I would think a staff accountant going out to a client could enter something into his CRM system that had had impact for that business, for the other people on the engagement team.
Brian: Yeah, correct, you’re collecting all those interactions, whether that’s an accountant working with one of the clients, a customer service rep working with a client, marketing, anybody that needs to put something in there that’s relevant and what is important though, is not to just do a lot of data entry, again, it’s making sure you’re collecting the right data, the data that’s going to ultimately lead to more sales or better customer relationships. It’s great then for the sales person to be able to get in there and say, “Okay, I can see they just called in, they had a question about a product or they asked for some literature on a different product, and I wasn’t aware that that conversation happened unless I talk to the customer service rep, but I’ve got it at my fingertips because it’s right in the CRM.
Mark: To get into data entry, and I think a lot are like, “Oh, I don’t want to enter it, I already fill out a time sheet, I already do this, I don’t …” Can you address that how would you say it’s not excessive data entry?
Brian: Again, I think it’s making sure that you only enter what really is important. You don’t want to track, “Hey I made another call, I just made another call.” It’s more, “I had this dialogue and the customers interested in this, I need to create an activity for me to follow up, I’m going to set up another assignment for somebody inside to send the literature on this product.” It’s those key pieces of information that need to be tracked.
Mark: Can that work between … Outlook seems to be a popular calendar.
Brian: Yeah, a lot of the tools … the important part is making sure it’s easy and accessible. Sales people by nature don’t want to be tied to a laptop and really your organization doesn’t want them to be. They’re out, they make a call, they’ve got their mobile device.
Mark: Sometimes they don’t have time to put socks on.
Brian: Yeah, that’s right. It’s about making the tools accessible and a lot of the modern day CRMs are out on the cloud, they’ve mobile applications that allow somebody to start to talk into the phone and it annotates it and adds it to the record in the CRM for them. If they send an email, it’s going to tie that email to the account automatically in the CRM. That’s some of the easy use stuff that encourages getting the information into the CRM without having to sit down at a laptop in the hotel at the end of the night.
Mark: I assume this is only for big companies, right? Really expensive?
Brian: No, not necessarily, and that’s something our organization specializes in, we’ve identified that there’s a need with small to mid-sized organizations. A particular solution that we implement is less expensive, but a very powerful tool, very comparable tool to the big names out in the industry. Really we have some mid, I wouldn’t say large clients, but people that maybe have ninety sales people in a sales organization. We’ve been able to move them on to our platform and reduce their costs pretty significantly. Back to your point, it’s not just for the big companies, I think it’s for any company that wants to start tracking their sales activities, start to put … for somebody, it’s a small, one person organization, might say, “Why would I want a CRM?
It could be making sure that you’re keeping on top of all the follow ups that you have to do, if I’m a small business owner and I’m doing sales, I’m also doing my books at the end of the month and I’m doing my marketing, I start to lose track and one of the things you really should be on top of is making sure you don’t miss on any sales opportunities that are out there.
Mark: Correct. It’s interesting, you’re talking about relationships and Jeff Lacy was one of the recent guest on the podcast, talked about the importance of relationships and the value of a company and I never really thought about that and normally from the accounting world we think about work place and force, that’s going to generate value, but it’s about relationships outside of that too, your customers obviously and to your vendors, so you talking to us about CRM is really important. It goes hand in hand, I don’t know who selected our guests, but whatever they did, did a heck of a job backing you two up. About the importance of relationships in business and your point there about being the sole, you’re in business, just one man shop. Right, how do you manage all this stuff? How do you keep it all organized? And I could see how that would be important.
One of my favorite movies, growing up as a kid, was a Woody Allen movie called Zelig and it’s just talking about him and he’s kind of a chameleon, he’s in all these different … they had him up on stage with Hitler and then with the pope and he’s just always in these things and I always thought about that as being relationship and in the introduction like, “You can’t sell the same thing to everybody the same way, it’s just not going to work.” I think a CRM system would help you. They would know … a good CRM system would know I’m a New York Yankee fan and if somebody sprinkled some New York Yankee information on me, that would be huge.
Brian: Absolutely and those are the types of things that you can track within the system, but it’s also important as the organization grows, how do I continue to do that? Now it goes beyond me as the small business owner and I’ve hired a sales person or a couple or sales manager, how do I pass that information along and a CRM’s a perfect way to do that. You’re not going to have time to go back and talk to everybody about every single client that you touched. They’ve got an interest in fly fishing or an interest in the Yankees or any other types of significant personal events. Again, you want that relationship to be maintained as the organization grows and that’s a good way to track that, make sure it carries through the organization.
Mark: Do you ever outgrow your current CRM system? A lot of businesses get started and they start with QuickBooks and then they might go to Peachtree and then they might go to Solomon and then they might go to … is there some sort of a hierarchy? Do you ever outgrow a CRM system?
Brian: I think a lot of the newer cloud based systems are more scalable, so that’s less of a concern, sometime what people might run into is if they graduate from a QuickBooks or small accounting package and they get into a larger ERP package, an SAP, packages along those lines, some of those systems either have or are starting to build in CRM capabilities.
Mark: Within the package?
Brian: Yep. Now, what an organization has to decide is, are the capabilities of that system as good as the package I was on? Obviously the integration’s a benefit, there’s ways to integrate some of those standalone CRM packages into your URP, so it’s a decision that they, as they get onto an ERP package, do I want to use what’s built in because it’s tightly integrated with my system? Or are their shortcomings with it, that I should stay where I’m at and look at just integrating the two?
Mark: Interesting. My initial thought would be that the stand alone package would be more robust than the built in.
Brian: Yeah, and that’s usually the case, a lot of the built in ones with the ERP systems, are usually not much more than a glorified contact management system, but they recognize that CRMs are becoming an important part of an organization’s sales and customer service process, so a lot of them are starting to build those in or starting to buy some of these other packages.
Mark: I’ll give you some business advice, you didn’t ask for it. Start another company called 420 and sell a CRM system to SEP.
Brian: No that sounds good.
Mark: I won’t ask for any more, I won’t look at any more LTs or anything like that.
Is there any … how do I ask this … is there some business that you would say, “No, they don’t need a CRM system? Any industry?” Maybe a doctor’s office? I don’t know.
Brian: I think any business that values the relationship with their customers and feels that’s something they need to have in place to grow the business, to generate sales, maintain existing relationships and customers, needs a CRM. I think people are still just figuring out what it is, so we bring up the term, sometimes we have to tell people what does CRM stand for and to go beyond that we’ve got to start showing them what it can do for their organization. We haven’t run into too many that said, “Yeah, that’s something I absolutely wouldn’t need.” The only time I’ve actually ever heard that is companies that are like, “Hey, we’re not really looking to grow, we’re happy where we’re at.”
You do get that once in a while, it’s a shocker when you hear it because I think a lot of companies are looking to grow, but we occasionally hear that.
Mark: Interesting. Very, very interesting. I really enjoyed our conversation and just to recap, you need to have processes, you just can’t install CRM, you need some processes up front. You need to have some knowledge as to what you want to track, what’s important, what’s not important. Information needs to be accessible, without significant duplication of data entry. Cost should not be … it’s not just for the larger companies, everybody, you mentioned that being a sole proprietor there could have ability, a doctor’s office and you keep coming back to relationships and I do think that that’s really what matters in business this day.
Before we wrap up every episode, Brian, there’s a question we ask every guest, if you could have one super power, what would it be?
Brian: I knew you asked this question and I really struggled. I thought clarity, I thought being able to offer people clarity and this is kind of beyond the discussion of the topic here, but I think a lot of people are looking for a purpose in life, they’ve got a lot of powers and capabilities and tools in their hands, but they don’t always know how to apply it or what they should be applying it to and I think if people had clarity on their purpose in life and they had the courage to then go do that, which is a whole other thing, but I think that would be great for a lot of people, I think you’d be a very popular super hero.
Mark: I agree with you and I think that the CRM system does provide clarity to people.
Brian: Yeah, it does, that was my tie-in.
Mark: You must be in marketing or something like that. Thank you for joining us today, Brian. This is a very interesting topic.
If you liked this episode, let us know, send an email with your feedback or future topic ideas to podcast@reacpa.com and don’t forget to subscribe to unsuitable on Rea Radio on iTunes or on SoundCloud. Until next time, I’m Mark Van Benschoten, for unsuitable on Rea Radio encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.
