In this perceptive episode, Andy Audate, President of AudateMedia, shares strategies for leveraging CRMs to scale your business predictably. If you struggle with disorganized customer tracking or inefficient sales processes, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What mission-critical data to capture in your CRM for profit
– Why a CRM tracks customer journeys to streamline your sales process
– How to choose a CRM tailored to your customer’s specific journey
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder. And today, we’re going to talk about a topic that you have all heard of. There’s a tool that you pretty much all use, or maybe should, on a weekly, even daily basis. And in my experience, working with founders who are trying to scale their sales beyond their own ability, I have found that most of us use it wrong. What are we talking about today? We are talking about the CRM and I’m hardly an expert in CRMs, so we’ve got one with us here today, and that is the one and only Andy Audate, who is an international speaker, renowned small business marketing expert, and the founder of progreta, with a proven track record, he specializes in assisting small businesses in effectively marketing their high ticket services through webinars that have attracted over 9500 entrepreneurs. Andy’s S, A, A, S or SaaS has achieved him a seven figure run rate, and his guidance has empowered 1000s of small businesses to create marketing campaigns that have collectively generated $20 million more than $20 million in revenue. He’s here with us today. Andy, I’m so excited to have you on the show. I have to admit out of the gate here that I have a little bit of a love, hate relationship with the CRM world, and I think you’re going to be able to solve that for us. So you help businesses to streamline, to grow faster. And for a founder who a remarkable number of folks still meet, meet this definition, but they’re relying on spreadsheets or napkins or some other form of keeping track of things, particularly that their clients. How is that holding them back?
Andy Audate
Well, I mean, it’s processes and systems the way to grow and scale a business. Once again. Thank you, Scott for having me here, man, so it’s when you think about scaling a business, it’s the processes and systems that you have that allows you to predictably scale, or it’s going to hold you back without them. And when we think about processes and systems, a CRM is going to allow you to effectively keep track of every single customer at the specific stage of their journey with you. So you can keep track of people who are leads, and maybe they’re not specific customers, but you can also keep track of people who are specific customers. You ever get those emails or text messages from a company that you might already be doing business with them? You’re already a long term subscriber with them? It could be a gym, and you’ve been a member of the gym for years, and they send you a message, and that message says, Hey, we would love to have you as a customer. Here’s a discount. How do you feel when that happens? Scott, I know for me, when I get those I’m like, Dude, I’ve been with you guys for years. What’s wrong with your processes? What’s wrong with your systems? Yes, and that’s what small business owners need, or founders need, is they need those systems to be able to track their customers so that way they can communicate effectively based on where that customer is at in the journey.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Very cool. All right, so there are a lot of CRMs out there, and I have found when you’re buying something like a CRM, you’re buying it from someone who not only has a sales team, but is a sales company, and that’s got its own challenge, because they tend to be pretty good at what they do, lots of smooth talk. There’s lots of great presentations. But how do you get behind all of that you know, for better or worse, and know which is the right CRM for you?
Andy Audate
Well, we got to look at you what your customer’s cycle is. What is the journey for your customer, and maximize the tool specifically for your customer identify. So first step is to identify what is your customer’s journey. And it doesn’t have to be a company that that’s that’s sales driven. It could be a company that is direct response marketing, where you create marketing funnels and a lead comes in and you automatically email them. You may not have a sales team, but all the sales are automatic. That in itself, needs a CRM. And because what you’re going to do here is you can use a CRM to track the customers in their journey, communicate with the customers, and have a system to track all the communication that you’ve had with your customers. So that way you can go back and look at so as your company grows, when you get to 100 customers, maybe you’ll be able to manage it on yourself. Okay, so if you’re a founder right now, you’re at 100 under 100 customers. Maybe you can manage it on your personal iPhone and you can remember, like, Yeah, Bob, I sent him a text message. Let me find Bob in my my contacts. Oh yeah, Tim, and so on and so forth. But then you start scaling your business, and you start getting past 100 customers. You got 200 300 400 customers. You’re gonna need to bring in a team. One of the value points for a CRM is you can have one platform that you and your team can log into and respond on behalf of the company. I’ll give you an example. We have in our CRM. We have 1000s of customers. However, one of our customers, for example, is in the hair salon industry. So they run a. Hair Salon business, all 12 stylists that work in that hair salon, every single text message, every single phone call, every single email was originally coming from each and every single one of their cell phones individually at the salon. So you walk into the salon, there’s 12 stylists working at 12 different hair stations. Each of them have their own personal iPhone. They’re communicating on behalf of the cus of they’re be they’re communicating on behalf of the business to each and individual customer. So when a customer walks in, they get a hair stylist phone number, and they’re like, Yeah, Barbara, shoot me a text message to book the next appointment. Well, guess what happens when Barbara, the hair stylist is sick that day and the client comes in for the hair appointment? Well, Barbara sick, the client comes in, they’re like, Hey, I had a hair appointment with you guys. Barbara sick, cool. Put me in touch with someone else. No one else is in relationship with the fact that that customer had a had a had a had a appointment. The CRM, what it does for that hair salon is it allows them to use one software. Everyone has the same mobile app on their phone, and when a customer walks in, Barbara’s sick, she’s no longer she’s no longer there, all the other team members can log in, into the customer’s account inside of the CRM and say, Oh yeah, you did have an appointment, and we already saw that, and we actually already scheduled you with another hairstylist. So you’re going to be sitting with Sandra today, who’s an amazing hairstylist. Think about that customer experience. One is unaware of the customer journey of where they’re at, and the other one is aware which one you think is going to be able to grow predictably, have more revenue and have more customer satisfaction, the one that had the systems that prepared for the Barbara, the hair salon stylist being out.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s a no brainer. I think what’s really interesting about this, and this is something that founders don’t necessarily think about when it’s just you managing just your phone, like it’s not going anywhere. You might, like, you might get your phone wet, I guess, but like, your phone’s not gonna walk out the door. But if it’s your employees, and it’s their phones, and they leave like, who owns the customer, the one who has the customer’s data and and so if you’re going to start like you mentioned, if you’re going to start bringing in other people to help with the sales process, either in kind of an ad hoc fashion, like in a salon, or bring in other sales reps, you don’t want that All. You don’t want that source of data to be their phone, because when they leave, their phone goes with them, and not that. We want people to leave, but when we do, we don’t want to lose the customers as well. That’s a really great point. So when we’re thinking about a CRM, especially if, like the hair salon, we don’t have one in place, it’s not enough to just implement it right, because it’s not like if you have a CRM all of a sudden you automatically know the journey. So what do we have to what are some specific mindsets or specific steps or approaches that we need to take when onboarding a new CRM to make sure we get the most out of it?
Andy Audate
So one, one tool, one feature in a CRM that you that most business owners are going to need and founders are going to need. It’s going to be a pipeline management tool. I know in progress we have one. However, in any CRM that you decide to choose, you want to make sure that you have an ability to track a customer’s journey through the pipeline. And what the pipeline does it’s a visual is visual cards that allows you to understand, is this customer just a lead, or did they already inquire about services? Did they get in touch with a salesperson already? Did they get pricing already? Did? How are they currently receiving email and marketing campaigns? Have they already purchased from us? So imagine that you have a bunch of cards laid out in different lines, like columns and rows. Each column represents a stage of doing business. Each card in the column as it moves along the journey, as it moves along the different columns, it tells you, and it allows you to identify where that customer is at when you’re building a scalable business, primarily, what you’re doing is you’re moving each customer through the same predictable journey. That’s important here. It’s kind of like, it’s kind of like working fast food. If any of you founders have worked fast food, or even have a concept of how fast food works, when I worked at Wendy’s over a decade ago, I used to work at the fast food company Wendy’s. It’s competitor to McDonald’s, and the stage of the burger was the same for everything. The process to complete a burger was the same. We would make the burger on the grill. We would take that burger from the grill, we will put it on a warmer plate. From the warmer plate, we would take the burger, the actual meat, and put it on the sandwich Patty, or put it on the sandwich bun, and then we would add ketchup, cheese, ketchup, cheese, tomato, and any condiments, and then we’d wrap it. So those are the stages. Stage number one, have it be in the grill. Stage number two, have it be on the warmer plate. Stage number three, have it be on the bun? Stage number four wrap it. So we have these, this four step process for every burger. Every single burger goes through this process in a scaling business, whether you’re at $1 million at $1 million remember, I made my first million when I was 21 I used to I’m the youngest T Mobile franchise, and so I owned a bunch of, I owned 4t Mobile stores before my 24th 21st birthday, and that helped me understand what it’s like to scale a business and every single customer that comes in, whether it’s a T Mobile store, whether it’s a franchise, whether it’s a CRM company, every single customer should have the same predictable process. Now, if we can identify what are those stages in the CRM, we should put it into the CRM, so that way we know what is the next step for every customer. It’s no longer on top of your mind. It’s no longer like Bob the customer, oh yeah, he just, I just signed him up to do X. This is what he should do next. It’s no longer in your mind. It’s predictable and it’s documented, and that’s what the CRM does. So that way your team can actually be the one to fulfill for you, rather than you as the founder being involved in the day to day minutia. Yeah, CRM is gonna be able to track that for you.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s good. So when it comes to fast forward a little bit, we’ve got it set up. And one of the challenges that I’ve seen, I’m wondering if you could speak to this for us, is there is so much data that you can track, there’s so many fields that you can fill in so many boxes, you can check so many cards, you can move that if you’re not careful, you can end up just kind of checking boxes and making notes and moving cards and and not actually getting a whole lot else done. How do you make sure that your CRM serves your needs, as opposed to your team serving what the CRM wants.
Andy Audate
So I would ask you to this, what is mission critical in net profit, when you look at the net profit, what data points is mission critical? Is it important that you understand that your customers are men or women? Does your business? Does it matter to your business if it’s a man or a woman that your your company is serving. If it’s not important to you that it’s a man or a woman, then that’s totally fine. Skip that piece of data. Most CRMs could track that information, but it’s not important to you. Skip that data. Is it important to you where the geographical area of your customers? Maybe you’re a business that that drives out to people and you only serve a specific zip code. Well, if that’s important to you, you can capture that specific data. But for like, for example, for an online coach who is working with people internationally on online, doesn’t matter where, what zip code that they’re in, but if you’re a a business that delivers products or services to your customers in a geographical area, it may be important to capture a zip code. So if you want to identify what is mission critical to net profit, once you identify that, for example, if I am a online coach, I know what’s going to be important to me. It could be the revenue. If I’m a business coach, it could be the revenue of the of the client. Well, that’s important to me, so I’m going to catch I’m going to capture that information, because it tells me what plan my that a customer who’s buying my services from, what plan that they can’t afford based on their revenue. So I’m gonna capture that information. If I’m a business coach and I’m consulting a team, how many members on the team Am I talking to a company that has three employees? Am I talking to a company that has 400 employees? I want to know that information that’s mission critical to net profit, because it tells me how many coaches I need to deploy inside of that or consultants I need to deploy inside of that campaign. So whether three employees that I’m going to be coaching, or 400 employees, that’s that’s mission critical to my profit, right? So now that we understand what’s mission critical to profit, you want to update custom fields inside of the CRM and any CRM, mostly arms are going to have a section called Custom Fields. Those fields allow you to customize data that’s specific for your business, everything that that is not mission critical to net profit. Disregard so if you’re an online coach, it doesn’t matter where they live, it doesn’t matter about the zip code you’re coaching them on Zoom or online. Disregard the zoom the zip code, disregard the address, but if it’s mission critical to have the number of employees capture that information, and now you’re telling your team to only fulfill what is in the custom field section, kind of like a check box, which is only going to be the information that’s mission critical to net profit.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s perfect. I love that. So it seems like just, I’m going to shift gears on us a little bit here, because it seems like just about every guest we have on AI is doing something in their world. We it’s almost obligatory now that we talk about it, but I think that’s particularly true of CRMs and marketing automation specifically. So what are you seeing as some of the best practices right now for leveraging AI specifically to boost sales.
Andy Audate
Well, specifically to boost sales is the ability to communicate with your customers faster than a human could. If you’re a founder, you’re at between 1 million to two, maybe three, maybe $5 million in revenue. One of your challenges is going to be payroll and staffing. That’s one of your challenges. Challenges, whether you hire domestically or you hire internationally, remote employees and their virtual team members, the biggest the biggest line item on most businesses, most service based businesses, is going to be your payroll. And for you to have someone online 24/7 is quite challenging, and it’s very costly. The next alternative is to hire an AI agent that is online, that costs pennies to operate, that can communicate with customers on your behalf. So there’s one specific AI tool called conversational AI. Conversational AI. What that does is you first create a knowledge base documentation, and if you’re a scaling business today, many of you may not have that, but that’s what’s necessary. That’s to get you past 6,000,007 $8 million is going to be documentation of your processes. So whether you’re building documentation for humans or AI, it’s necessary to build a knowledge base. So step one, you’re going to create a knowledge base. That knowledge base is going to be every all your price points, of your offers, what’s included, what your sales process is, where to get information from now, specifically in pro Greta, what, how we build our knowledge base is we crawl your website. So if you have a fully built website with your hours of operations, your price points, the information about the team, information about past customers, testimonials, information about your your unique process, on how you deliver your products or services, and all the information that’s about your business. What the crawlers are going to do, it’s going to go through every single web page, capture all the text and put it into a and store it into a knowledge base, where the AI will then go and research it to answer questions later. Then when a customer sends you a DM on Instagram, a message on Facebook, or a text message or an email, the AI can actually respond on your behalf and act as a human on your behalf to your customer. So for example, if you get a text message to your to your business, this is what an example, what a CRM can do to help you generate sales if you get a text message to your business that says, hey, I’m interested in your services, but I wanted to find out the pricing. First, can you tell me the pricing on the on the hair salon products? And then the AI can actually respond and say, Thank you so much for your inquiry. To best identify which one you need. We have redkin, we have salon we have salon air. Which one do you think is going to be the best for you, and the customer says, I don’t know. Well, if in your website you have the Frequently Asked Questions section, we can actually take that data, feed it into chat, GPT, and have a conversation back and forth where the AI says, Okay, great. Do you have long hair or do you have short hair? Let’s start off with that and go back and forth with your customer via text message to identify the best product for them and then pitch them the product, and if your website has the ability to buy it, send them the link directly, without you ever getting involved. And that’s right, then, that’s just a text message. We have voice AI available as well to actually manage conversations when a phone call comes in.
Scott Ritzheimer
Stunning, stunning. Andy, there’s a question that I have for you ask him. I guess I’m interested to see what you have to say, especially from this perspective. But what would you say is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Andy Audate
I wish that everyone watching. If you’re scaling your business, everyone in your company should have a key performance indicator that helps with the bottom line. Words, inside of our company, I feel like I have this, this secret that I’m holding on to. Inside of my company, I’ve assigned everyone a KPI key performance indicator that helps with the bottom line, and we are passing profit margins that are industry standard, because everyone has a number or a metric that’s assigned to them. I’ll give you an example. Most people, I’ll give you an example. I’ll give you one that’s that’s pretty unorthodox. In my company, we have dozens of employees, and even my bookkeeper has a KPI. You know what my books keeper, my bookkeepers KPI is, is an noi percentage, net operating income percentage. When I looked at chatgpt, and I went to a mastermind full of my peers, and I’m like, Hey, does everyone in your company have a KPI? Everyone’s like, yes, yes, yes, yes. And I said, you know, I’m stuck. I’m stuck on my my bookkeepers KPI. And everyone’s like, dude, the bookkeeper doesn’t get a KPI. The bookkeeper is there to Track, track data, of historical data. And I’m like, No, I want everyone to have a KPI. And what that meant for for me was I had to get get kind of creative. And then I remember, my bookkeeper sent a message to me. He said, he said, Hey, I just want to give you a cogs report on cost of goods sold. And I said, that’s your KPI. Your KPI is managing cogs. So now my my bookkeeper goes through every department inside of my company, the tech department, the admin department, sales department, and they’re tracking where there’s opportunity to save on cogs or to increase. Revenue. We’re on track for 50% revenue, 50% margins, inside of a SaaS business, inside of a in a marketing services business. Marketing Services is typically between 10 maybe 12, as high as 18% but we’re on track for 50% total net bottom line, revenue, net profit, because I put a KPI on my bookkeeper, on my admin support representative, on my customer support representative. So the biggest secret that I knew of like three years ago, four years ago, five years ago, is every single person that’s involved, including contractors, shall have a key performance indicator that drives profit to your bottom line.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, so good. Couldn’t have said it better. Andy, folks want help with their marketing, their CRM. They want to learn more about the work that you guys do, the software that you offer. Where can they find out more?
Andy Audate
You can learn more about me Andy Audate on all social media platforms, a n, d, y, a U, D, A, T, E, or learn more about our company at progreda.com P, R, O, G, R, E, D, A, now progreda stands for progress daily. We just took those two words, progress daily, we mash it together. We dropped that s, s on progress, and then we dropped the i, l, y on daily. So we put progress daily together, and now we got proGreda. progreda.com is our website,
Scott Ritzheimer
Amazing, amazing. Andy, thanks for being on the show. Really a privilege and honor. Having you here really appreciate the conversation. It was fantastic. And for those of you watching and listening, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Andy Audate
Andy Audate is an international speaker, renowned small business marketing expert, and the founder of Progreda. With a proven track record, he specializes in assisting small businesses in effectively marketing their high-ticket services through webinars that have attracted over 9,500 entrepreneurs. Andy’s SaaS has achieved a seven-figure run rate, and his guidance has empowered thousands of small businesses to create marketing campaigns that have collectively generated $20+ million in revenue.
Want to learn more about Andy Audate’s work at AudateMedia? Try Progreda for Free for 14 Days at https://progreda.com/lory ‘Buy No More Average’ Book : How to Take Control of Your Mindset, Overcome Fear, Reach Peak Performance and Achieve Your Goals https://a.co/d/2FnrZUz Text ”Progress” to # 702-830-7408 for access to a FREE live webinar hosted by Andy Audate for a full breakdown of his marketing system for online business owners