What do industrial marketers need to know about CRM tools? Here’s a hint: technology improves your overall equipment efficiency (OEE), and an ERP streamlines your inventory and production schedule. A Customer Relationship Management system provides data for how long it takes to get through your marketing funnel or a sales cycle, information about your close rate and why deals don’t close, such as responsiveness or competitor price.
What do industrial marketers need to know about CRM tools? Here’s a hint: technology improves your overall equipment efficiency (OEE), and an ERP streamlines your inventory and production schedule. A Customer Relationship Management system provides data for how long it takes to get through your marketing funnel or a sales cycle, information about your close rate and why deals don’t close, such as responsiveness or competitor price.
So I am so glad you have all come back welcome, again to another episode of the industrial marketer podcast, the place for the tips, tech trends and tactics that we as industrials. And we as marketers yearn for when we're driving leads to our companies and our businesses. I am one of your hosts Joey stron thrilled as ever to be here. And as always, I'm joined by my partner and friend Nels, Nels. Nels on the shelf Jensen. Welcome, my man. How are you today?
Nels Jensen:Julie, I'm just doing splendid I'm, I'm ready to talk about CRM. Yet another these topics that I really don't know a lot about. But you know, me, I'm curious. So I'm eager to I'm eager to learn.
Joey Strawn:As one of my favorite things about you now says your is your curiosity. I mean, the sun is shining today. Well, maybe not when you're listening to this. But when we're recording this, the sun is shining today. And we want to talk about the weird, crazy, esoteric world of customer relationship management systems, and why they matter for industrial marketers. So let's dive in. All right. So this is this is an interesting one now. So we're talking about CRMs. And like I said before, if you have everyone CRM, customer relationship management tool, the biggest one probably that people know of offhand, is Salesforce. We are not sponsored by them in any means. But it's usually the one that people can be like, Oh, that's what you mean, when you say CRM. So that's, you know, that's that's kind of, I want to set the stage for everybody. A lot of times we'll run up against clients or people's like, Oh, yeah, well, we're using Excel that we've got outlook for that, or, you know, we manage it internally on our own, or we have Salesforce, and we don't have it set up, but we don't know how to use it. You know, we're going to talk about all of that today. But Nelson, you mentioned in the intro, that this is one of those topics that you don't know a lot about. So I kind of want to get us just as a placement from you on, where are you coming to the CRM conversation from? Like, what I know we'll get Yes. questions later. Yeah. So
Nels Jensen:I'm, I'm a content guy. And I basically came from the world of where you develop sources, and you had a Rolodex or business cards. And there is not so much of there was a process, but it's very informal, and it was just very, okay, who do you know, and who do you network with at this particular entity? And then how do you dive in a little deeper? Or do you go a little wider, but it was a very informal process? And it was, and there was no metrics? And it was you knew it when you saw it, but there was not any sort of formula? Well, there was a simple formula, but there was not any sort of official process. It was just one of those handed down from guru to mentor, mentee, you know, kind of
Joey Strawn:Like, well, this is how I did it. And this is how we'll do it.
Nels Jensen:Well, you had to figure it out yourself.
Joey Strawn:Well, Padawan,this is my Jedi Rolodex. But yeah, now that's the idea of me. And again, CRM, customer relationship management, let's just take some of the digits at, you know, digitized words off of it, and really talk about what it is, you know, the process of managing a sales and customer relationship is you have its business development people, you have sales people, you have a system, whatever it is, that's keeping track of where your customers are, and hey, they have birthdays, and some of them have kids. And usually in the past, it would be a Rolodex and being like, Okay, well, I know, Jim, over at XYZ lubrications. He's married to Linda and they have two kids. So I'm going to call me like Jim, our the kids do and a graduations coming up, isn't it? You want to manage that relationship? Well, if you've got 1000s of leads, or 1000s of contacts, it's hard to do that without having 1000s of sales people. And so over time, people were like, man, wouldn't it be great if there was just a system that all of this could be in? And it's like, I could just keep the context, I wouldn't have to have it. It'd be a Rolodex. I could just have it up here. Like, yeah, we use Outlook for that great outlook. I can make notes on the contacts and I can, you know, have emails and I can have all the history of my email and all that in there. But then they're like, wait a minute, what if I could get reminders about their birthdays? What if I could attach how much money that the client was worth, and henceforth grew? These CRM systems. It was basically an outpour of the technology that people needed to help them manage those customer relationships. I know it sounds like malarkey, but.
Nels Jensen:Not you know, that's not to not to disrupt the flow here. But we're not just talking about customers, right? We're talking about prospects to.
Joey Strawn:Everything Yeah, as a customer, a customer from when they like, in the womb, if you will, all the way through maturity. So a customer lead a customer prospect,
Nels Jensen:Right.
Joey Strawn:A customer close and a customer advocate, you know, all the way through that journey, we want to be able to have their hands raised, say this, you know, we have this lead, and we're managing it, this is the person who's in charge of it. These are the actions that are being taken. And this way, no one is falling through the cracks, we can point at different things and say, Okay, well look, man, if maybe if we followed up with people a week sooner than we are, then we could, you know, catch them in a more ready place to talk. And so being able to have these tools that sort of build off of some of that is helpful. You know, as people listening to this may be thinking, Well, what are the CRMs? Like, what are the best ones, and we are by no means, you know, I'm not we're not sponsored by any of these these tools. But I will list a handful that can, that people can connect with, because Salesforce I mentioned earlier is sort of the biggest one. You know, a lot of people, a lot of companies have Salesforce, they can do anything and everything and quite frankly, it you know, it may can do too much for some clients. It's all about the need, and the depth and the complexity of the sales process. And then the lead management process, you know, one that's sort of a mixture of the marketing and the sales side is HubSpot. HubSpot has both elements Pardot ,Marketo, you know, kind of play in this field, but not as much as HubSpot, Scott, like oh, HubSpot, CRM. Zoho is the same way Zoho is a company that a lot of people have heard of that may, you know, bounce around, say, Well, we've got an email client, we've got a social platform, and we've got an analytics platform. But we also have a CRM, and they want you to use their entire suite of services. But then there are also like one off CRM that you can get. So if you don't have, you know, 150 salespeople with very specific regions and follow up timelines that are managing hundreds of potential prospects at the exact same time, something like a nutshell CRM, or was there's one that I was looking at the other day freshworks freshworks is one that's like, we just want to make it simple. You may not need all the bells and whistles. So you know, come we can make it sure for you.
Nels Jensen:So what are the what are the commonalities, right? If you talk about the the basic value prop props, if you will, three or four things, what really matters. With a CRM,
Joey Strawn:You know, it's good, Every company has a different way that they do, you know, your sales process may go from, you know, two weeks to get introduced and acclimated to a client to nine months to close, or anywhere in between or anywhere, you know, extended from that. So every sales process is going to be a little bit different. But one of the main things that every company needs to care about is just the usability of it. And this is one and nothing against Salesforce. But this is one where that box doesn't get checked a lot for Salesforce companies, especially in the supply chain, industrial marketing sectors, because quite frankly, not everybody is FedEx. And not everybody is, you know, john deere, you may not need national management at that level of complexity. And so the what we hear a lot is, well, we got sold Salesforce, like five years ago, or we just got it but it hasn't been rolled out to all departments or not everybody uses it the same way. Oh, man, we've got Hector over in sales, who he's like our top sales guy, and he just will not use Salesforce because it's not his way. And so it's all fractured. So it has to be usable, these tools have to be able to be integrated as a natural in a natural way as part of the work environment. So it can't be a huge burden. That's one thing. The other thing, and this is where Salesforce is really good as scalability. Everything company wants to be like, oh man, in five years, you're gonna be twice as big as we are now and be making a billion dollars. You know, that's the dream. So if you don't have a solution that will allow you to grow and support that infrastructure, then, you know, you need to pick the tool that scalable to the degree that you hope your company is scalable to if you have one salesman now, and you know what your market is 20 customers, you have a small like nuclear maintenance market where there's like 20 people in the world that can use your services, and two guys can manage all of them. You probably don't need to ever worry about scaling too much. You know, but it's so it will that will depend but the the scalability to match your company's growth is going to be important. Sure.
Nels Jensen:One churn two, right, right.
Joey Strawn:Oh, man,
Nels Jensen:Yes. Anyway, sorry. So number
Joey Strawn:Three, churn is a fantastic segue into number three, because it has to adoptability. Let's put it that way. So the adoptability of the tool, again, everybody has to use it, and everybody has to use it the same way. So if it's not being adopted by 20%, of your most profitable salesman, then the data we're getting in it is not accurate. And so if if it's going to be a huge hurdle, to have everybody in the company adopted, that needs to be part of the planning process that needs to be known upfront, because adoptability across the board, no matter what platform you use, is going to be important. And then finally, you have you've chosen the thing, you have your tool, you're like x, y, z CRM is going to be the thing that we use as a company, it can't stop there, it has to go. And this is how we're going to use it. Like you have to have that last step. If even if it's a simple diagram of a lead comes in, it gets tagged with this source, because of this formula assigned to this sales lead. And they use these five columns to say, prospecting, investigation, closed, one closed loss, whatever those are for you, there just has to be mapped out. So everybody follows the process. So what we put good stuff in so we can get good stuff out. So that's, that's where I land on the four things that doesn't matter what platform, no good stuff, you've got to have those four areas covered.
Nels Jensen:So you have the adoptability, I lived through a place that a previous job once where the sales team just tried to take the old legacy process and wedge it into this into the CRM. Did that work? It was a good learning experience for the that part of the organization put
Joey Strawn:They Thomas Edison their way into what we learned how not to do it? Yeah,
Nels Jensen:Well, that's, you know, that's culture. Right. That's, that's good. You're right, you have to deal with that from The very start, right?
Joey Strawn:Just knowing it's not a matter. It's not a detriment to say, Hey, don't
Nels Jensen:use this system, because it's going to have a hurdle. But at least you know where that hurdle is. So you know, when to jump. Hey, change is hard. And if companies haven't figured out in the last few years about the pace of change, you know, then they're going to be behind the curve anyway.
Joey Strawn:Right. All right. So now, we have a special guest for this episode. And I don't want to spoil it just yet. But you told me before we started recording that you had a couple questions that you wanted me to answer. You were like, you know, I need a good Nels needs to know section of the show. Yeah. I'm gonna wait, wait, I gotta do your intro music. Now nice to know. Alright. That's, that's your intro music. Alright, nails again.
Nels Jensen:Okay. So our CRM is actually designed for manufacturers. I mean, you get these elongated buying cycles, you have to educate engineers and purchasers. It's not a linear journey. The high value of a qualified lead really, are these customized for manufacturers?
Joey Strawn:Yeah, the short answer is yes. The long answer is, well, let me ask you, let me ask, I'll see your question with a question now. Do manufacturers have sales processes?
Nels Jensen:Yes, I hope.
Joey Strawn:Then CRMs are beneficial for manufacturers. That's really what this is. You know, in our last episode, we talked about sales enablement, and the tools required for sales enablement. I had mentioned a handful of times where you've got your marketing tools, and you've got your sales tools. In essence, I met any RP system, a CRM and any sort of data warehouse like those are your sales tools that I anticipate you having in place when you're working on a sales enablement plan, because without a CRM, to help manage that data to help manage and understand that sales process, then there isn't a way there isn't a way to optimize it and make it better outside of just gut instinct. And that takes time and can mess up and can be costly.
Nels Jensen:Sure. Okay. So we hear a lot small companies, manufacturers, small sales and marketing teams, small volume, but high value in the product. What kind of investment might they be looking at? Are we talking the equivalent of a FTP or is it a giant? It's not like buying a machine? What kind of investment are we locking?
Joey Strawn:Okay, so again, I'll go from the high to the low. So there are some Some Salesforce again, I'll use them as the prime example of how big you can go. I mean, you could be talking hundreds of 1000s of dollars of a price tag, because of users or restrictions or customizations and support, and all everything database size. But the thing about CRM is, is there are hundreds of them, there's are there tons of them, it just, if just searching online will bring up a lot. And I mentioned a handful just printed off a handful earlier, and there are a lot more. So there is a CRM out there, at the price point that will work, some of them start as low as like 15 to $20 a month. Like if you could cut out maybe a bottled water supply shipment, then it covers the CRM cost. So sure, it's not a huge investment. But it does matter that you that you do your research, you find the right tool for the investment and for your team based on what we talked about before. And then you manage that investment. Like it's not just something that you sit on the wayside by and you use the tool. If you don't use the tool, it's a waste of money.
Nels Jensen:Right, right. So one thing that we don't talk about, we haven't talked about a lot recently, but is really important in this changing world is organic growth. Right? So I'm assuming that this CRM is if you just go by the name alone, if you're managing your existing customers, that there would be a robust component for organic growth in these things. But that's really, especially once you know, it's the depersonalized nature of the current, you know, investigation and buying process. That seems to be a goldmine for a lot of manufacturers organic growth.
Joey Strawn:I agree. And honestly, I would reference everybody to go back and listen to some of the things that you and I talked about, on our sales enablement conversation, because this, that is the blown out version of that question is, well, once someone comes in, every, and I would love it, if every salesperson would had the capacity, mentally, and emotionally and timewise, to know everything about every prospect, and when the best times to reach out and convert and all that would be, that would be great. But for most of the time, they don't, you know, most of the time, they need the assist, if you will, or the backup of some of those, those tools. And, and those can be great to say, Okay, well, this person came in under this way. And we know, from the data on the back end, that if they hit these triggers, or they do these activities, or engage in these sorts of ways, within the sales process, or within their lifetime, that we can offer them these things and increase, you know, the ROI on our activity with that client. And that can, and with a sophisticated enough planning process and setup process, usually usually something like that would involve getting with a technical partner, or at least using an agency or a technical resource at the CM CRM, Home Office. But it's totally doable and organic growth in today's market is, and especially in the manufacturing world, is one of the key areas of growth opportunities. But everyone's kind of scared of it because of the pandemic. And I think there are natural ways to, to work those in.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, you actually made a reference here that that we shouldn't let go of customer relationship management, but you're also developing a relationship with that vendor. And they're a solutions provider. And they're a resource. And that's somebody who can help you, you know, you should have a good relationship with your vendor. Right? If you want to optimize that technology and that investment, they're a partner. So I would suppose a good CRM is also going to be just a growing budding relationship that you can lean on to help you optimize that technology.
Joey Strawn:Yes, I mean, it should be. And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier with scalability is that it needs to be something that allows you to gather and this is a buzzword, if you will, but big data, it allows you to gather over time, bucket loads of data, to then be able to say if you have the right partner, you have the right person who can look at that data and then extrapolate, you know, right arge trends and large opportunities, that can be a treasure trove. And if all of that information exists scattered among 100 different outlook accounts, with people who no longer work at the company and are deleted forever into the ether, then that you're not benefiting from that collection of data and from the natural history. trends that exist within your business. So I this is this has been really fun but but now it's I have a surprise for you. I brought a guest to the show today who lives in the development world and knows about this CRM stuff backwards and forwards. I have director Dev, Brent Lathrop, ready to come on and talk more about and answer your questions about CRM. All right. All right. So you want to head down to the shop floor and get Let's get down there. And let's let's go visit with Brent. All right. we've tracked all the way down here to the shop floor now. And as I prepared you for here is our special guest, director, Dev, Brent Lathrop. Brent, welcome to the show.
Brent Lathrop:Hey, good to be here.
Joey Strawn:Oh, I'm happy. So So Brent to fill you in. Nelson, I have been talking about the importance of CRM, as specifically CRM tools for manufacturers. And I told you beforehand that says you've lived in a couple of those for some of our clients that I wanted you to be able to talk about it Nels, he says he's a he's an else newbie, to CRM. So, Brent, why don't you start us off and tell me in Nels, why CRMs are just so darn important for manufacturers to have?
Brent Lathrop:Well, it's a great tool for being able not only to, you know, CRM, if you're new to the business, and not understanding stands for a Client Relation Management. But it's, it's so much more than that. It's allowing companies to track the sales process through their sales funnel, and see the data that's coming into their business, right, and then being able to see, you know, things like sales velocity and close rate, and have that open accountability for the sales team, to be able to track their performance, have transparency into the company, being able to come to those Monday morning meetings with your superiors and have that those data and those numbers. And it's, it's crucial for that, you know, if you're, especially in today's day and age, you can't run a business without having those KPIs. And coming to the to the those meetings with understanding and knowing what is working and what's not working.
Joey Strawn:Brent, I am actually, I'm so glad that you said there's some of those terms we haven't even talked about so far on the episode, and no one had you here. Because like things like sales velocity and salesman accountability, could you talk specifically about how you've seen some of two of those things come into play when diving into some of these systems? Because that's huge. And we haven't even we haven't even touched on velocity and like accounting for the sales people's activities yet?
Brent Lathrop:Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, you know, when when you get into something like Salesforce or HubSpot, you know, these things, you know, we can talk about all the different systems that are out, right. But you, you need to have those, you know, kind of like I was talking about, do you have those metrics, and when you're looking at some, like sales velocity, and how quickly something is getting through the funnel, we know, you know, for the manufacturing industry, like their sales velocity is a lot longer than, you know, standard consumer products, right, you know, sometimes sale can take six months or even a year, in some cases, so, but even being able to see what the holdup is in that process, and having those defined steps along the way, is just it's huge in knowing what your sales team is doing, and how you can increase in on that performance, which which turns into like, close rate. Right? Right, and how effectively guys are closing and having having that data in, in your CRM to know why you aren't closing. And you know, it could be they went to a competitor, it could be that they, you know, didn't follow up quick enough, you know, things like that.
Joey Strawn:See, and that's where I'm glad that you mentioned that, like, for example, like to put what you just said into action. And it's again, it's not a way to like spy on the salespeople. But there isn't accountability method. Because if we know that at our company, it takes on average nine months to close a sale, that's just historically how long it takes to sell a nuclear generator or whatever. Like that. We know that. Well, if we have data across the board that says okay, well, for whatever reason, seats nine, and seats 13 take on average 16 months to close sales, which actually pushes their, you know, like lifetime value of some of those leads out by 18 to 24 months, if we don't know that. And it may be and it has nothing to do with Well, that's a bad salesperson. It may be that the types of clients that they have, or the types of prospects that are being funneled to them in their territory need different resources. And but without being able to identify that there's an inflection point in the data. There's no way to identify that as opposed to just like oh well Marty is not pulling this Wait This quarter? Oh, yeah, exactly. That's, that's, that's very important. You know, especially in our industry, knowing the different seasonality in different sections of the of the state, right or the of the nation, right. And being able to, as you said, Give those people the materials that they need or or the advertising or the marketing that they need for that specific sector that, you know, time of the season. You know, we see season seasonality in industrials, quite a bit. Well, especially, I mean, when we were talking with clients, you and I, Brent last week on it's like, oh, well, that's when, you know, plant closures are, you know, we know there's gonna be planned shutdowns, like not a lot of Walmart's don't have planned shutdowns, or no one can shop at Walmart for five days, you know, but the manufacturers they live in a different environment that they live in with different systems and processes. And what else? What questions? Yeah, we've got director dev here.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that I brought up earlier with Joey, too, is this opportunity for organic growth, right? We, we talked a lot about prospecting and qualifying leads, but what about the people you already have? In your family? if you will? So how are you able to leverage CRMs to build growth within your existing customers?
Unknown:Yeah, I like that. Because it's, you know, as I was saying, before, it's a client relation management tool, right. And that's the part of it where you're putting your current current pool of prospects or current pool of clients, because as you're saying, it's current clients. And you can track the communications that you have with them. You know, we use HubSpot internally, at industrial, it's a tool that we like and, and were able to do and, you know, when we are using the tool for organic growth, for example, we can put that deal in there, and we can see the potential revenue that we have coming for next quarter, or you know, it's going to the value of it, it's also a good value tool for your accounts team, accounting team, right to see what potential deals are going to close next month. So you have that as a tool as well.
Nels Jensen:So I imagine you can, I'm sorry, what? So you could record what you're pitching like, Hey, we tried going after a, b and c with them. So maybe the next time someone is going to try avenues, you know.
Joey Strawn:Yeah, yeah, it because it comes organically, right, through conversations with your clients. And, you know, they say, Oh, yeah, we need to increase our organic leads through through Google. And that might be a good opportunity for our account team to say, okay, you need SEO services, and then you can put that SEO Services at certain dollar amount in your CRM tool and kind of track that and, and, you know, assign it to somebody else to help you out. And, you know, kind of walk it down that funnel, you know, because there's going to be different funnels, right, you have the, the, the new prospect funnel that's coming in, and then you have a different funnel that's coming in for organic leads. And that's going to take a totally different, because you already have that built that relationship with them, and they trust you and they understand what you can do for their business. I know, it's, it's like I'm gonna play seven degrees of integrated marketing here real quick, because in our last episode, Nels with sales enablement. And even before that, when we've talked about the importance of content pieces, this is where a lot of that can come into play. So you've got a client that you've been selling regular services for human services, update services up keep, but then you put a white paper on your site or a guide on another service that you offer. And you notice that your rep from this company that you just have an annual renewal contract for services for is now downloading your guides on the products that you sell, and you can reach out and be like, Hey, I noticed that you're interested in, I noticed that you downloaded that thing that we have on these products. Do you want to talk about that. And that's an organic growth to be able to say I was notified by our CMS that he downloaded this piece of content that's outside of his normal bucket of, you know, revenue generating activities, that's an opportunity for us to reach out and offer additional services and grow that account. Because a lot of times what we find and Brent I don't know, via if you can back this up from from your end as well, but I feel like you will is that a lot of times they'll say, Well, our clients don't even know that we offer that. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, we've had many over many, many times over the years to where they provide. You provide a printed, you know, marketing as well or you provide SEO, we didn't know that. Like Wait, you can not only service their mechanics, but you can build them the structure that it's how Within, like, why aren't you telling them that? And so yes, there's a lot of that that goes on with organic growth.
Nels Jensen:So you're telling me that this is also a team sport?
Joey Strawn:Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's a tool. It's a tool that a team should be using collectively. We touched on that earlier. Yes. scalability and adaptability.
Unknown:Yeah. And that goes back to what I was saying earlier, too, is that that, that transparency, right, because you have that record, you have that open record in your CRM, and, you know, if somebody is on vacation, and somebody needs to step right on in and help out that that customer, whether it's a current customer or prospect, you know, you have that record in there. And you have the the communications that have gone on during the process, like, you know, I talked to you.
Joey Strawn:Like, oh, how do we get into Catherine's? outlook?
Unknown:Yeah, exactly. Yep. Or worse? Or where's that Excel file that we're using for, you know, tracking? Because as funny as that might sound, you know, just six or seven years ago, we were dealing with a company, like we're asking them, how, how do you track your leads? And oh, yeah, we have a, an Excel file on our server that you know, is only accessed by two people, and then you know, that file went corrupt. I mean, what, that's all their sales are gone.
Joey Strawn:Eventually that file is gonna get big enough, where an update of the O S is gonna corrupt it somehow, like it's gonna take forever to load, it's gonna do the spinning circle of death. It's gonna happen.
Brent Lathrop:Yes.
Joey Strawn:Oh, man. All right, well, now, we've got to let Brent get back to work here soon. But What other questions do you have for him? Before we let him go?
Nels Jensen:Well, you talked about the seasonality and the the difference in geographic regions. So help me understand what does that look like?
Unknown:Well, that's going to depend on industry, you know, if it if it's, you know, somebody that's doing tire changers, you know, they really don't have seasonality, because, you know, tires are always going to be changed. And so just to depending on what segment of the industry that you're in, or just budget season, for example, like, you know, we'll see, especially for us, you know, during the end of the season, or end of the year is budget season for for a lot of our prospects, and they're trying to get money out the door, and they'll, they'll hit us up at that point, you know, for So for us, it's, it's usually near the end of the year. For somebody else, it's just gonna depend on, you know, what segment of the b2b world that they're in,
Nels Jensen:I suppose, you know, if a if a company has done some initiative where they are prioritizing A, B, or C, you have that recorded, and then you have more targets to aim at.
Unknown:Yes, yeah. And then also, you know, if, if you're attaching your CRM to your marketing automation tool, you can have that, that connection to where you're your marketing, you're sending out an email, and you're seeing when you're sending out that email for, you know, let's say you send it out in July, and you're seeing a better open rate, and you're seeing a better close rate for your sales in July, you know, you know, that people were, you know, for example, we deal with the fan company, right. So seasonality for them is going to be when it's hot. And we found out recently that that's not necessarily true. And they need to get the word out, you know, this,
Joey Strawn:But nobody knows that.
Brent Lathrop:Yeah, we need to get the you can reverse the fan. And you can, you know, then in the winter, you can get that heat, you know, blowing down and heating up the the facility as well. So, so it's it's, they have CRM, there are a huge tool in not only going along the funnel, the pipeline or your sales, but also for a client relation management, and connections into other tools such as a, you know, a HubSpot or a Pardot or Marketo, for marketing automation as well. And it, it allows you to expand that universe of your CRM and kind of get all those connections and getting more data flowing into it as well. So
Nels Jensen:Yeah, I guess you're identifying patterns, right? Yes, exactly.
Joey Strawn:I love it. So I was gonna say, in short, what I'm hearing CRMs are important for manufacturers. And they shouldn't just be Excel files that live on a single person's computer. They are very important, and they should not Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing. I think when when these companies think of a CRM, they think of this technology that it's very confusing and hard to get into. And, you know, my recommendation would be just to keep it simple at first, you know, get into something simple, you know, HubSpot has a free a free tool that you can use, you can get in there and start using it and figuring out what your funnel is, if you don't even have a sales funnel, you can figure out what your sales funnel is, and then steps you want to take along the way. You know, for example, the one that we A few years ago, kind of stepped in and help them figure out their process. They had, you know, for Salesforce, for example, you know, you have a lead, and then you bring that into an opportunity. They had like six steps during their lead process. And then they had six steps during their opportunity process. And we brought that down to like three, or four, and three, or four. And that adoption rate, you know, is through the roof two years in a row that now they've been using it every single day. So just keep it simple at first. And you can always add data points, you can always add steps later in the process. Don't overthink it at first, and just come in and just start doing it. That's all you can. That's all you can do. You need to you need to do it, otherwise your business is going to suffer. I love it. that I feel is a perfect nutshell encapsulation of what we set out to answer on this episode is why they're important and why they should be used, you know there. And earlier in the episode, we were trying to not say like, you know, you have to use this one or you have to use this when there are hundreds of them. There is a solution that will work. And there is a way to make it as complex or as simple as you company need it to be.
Brent Lathrop:Yes.
Joey Strawn:So, Brent, thank you for joining us today, we're definitely going to have you back the more times we talk systems because this has been incredibly helpful and, and I will relieve you now to go do your job and make some other people's sites work better, and other people's systems run smoother.
Brent Lathrop:Well, thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you both for having me on.
Joey Strawn:Thank you, Brent. Now, this has been such such a fun episode. I love it when we get to get technical and nerdy. I love it even more when there's an episode where you're like, Oh, I'm gonna learn something this week. And so that that always makes me happy. You feel like you learned something now?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, you know, but it's it. It all fits together in the big puzzle. The marketing automation should be connected to your, you know, leads and current customers and that should be playing off the content you have in the different points in the buying journey. And it's it's just that to be able to extrapolate insights. Right? That's that's the trick. That's the magic of marketing is taking this data and making it intelligent and making it something you can utilize and CRM sounds to me what I've learned is that is a head start to identifying patterns and to realizing opportunities.
Joey Strawn:It Well it sounds like you have learned something today now. That's wonderful. Well, I hope everyone listening also learned something today. And if you aren't already subscribed to the podcast, what do you do and Come on, subscribe to the podcast. Click right there to button. Come on. Now. subscribe to the podcast, share it with your friends, if there are other people that you're talking about. And I know you have professional nerdy conversations Don't lie to me. I know you do. share these with people you've had conversations with? Well, they're using Excel for their CRM and I don't know how they do it. Get people involved in this community. We're growing and answering questions and learning from each other every day. You can follow us on all the social medias anywhere you want to find us. But our home base is industrial marketer calm you can find all of our articles, executive pieces, reviews, trends, tools and other experts there and you can find our back catalogue of these episodes there as well. Until next time, guys, and ladies, please be great industrial stewards be great industrial marketers, and Nels and I will see you nex time