Unlocking Business Potential with Predictive Analytics and AI: A Conversation with Alex Fender with Funnel Science

Mastering Sales Funnels and Predictive Analytics with Alex Fender

In this episode of The Wireless Way, host Chris Whitaker welcomes Alex Fender, the chief funnel scientist and founder of Funnel Science. Alex shares his journey from being a US Marine Corps veteran to becoming a tech entrepreneur specializing in sales funnel optimization and predictive analytics. The conversation covers Alex's background in logistics and technology during his military service, his transition into the tech world, and the founding of Funnel Science. Alex discusses the importance of applying scientific methods to sales funnels, understanding return on investment (ROI), and the challenges companies face with data accuracy and process integration. The episode also touches on the role of AI and technology in modern business strategies, the significance of call tracking and recording, and provides insights into decision-making processes at different management levels. Alex emphasizes the need for constant testing and measurement to achieve better business outcomes. The episode concludes with a call to action for businesses to seek help and invest in proper tools and processes to optimize their operations.

00:00 Introduction and Gratitude
00:53 Guest Introduction: Alex Fender
02:44 Military Background and Early Tech Ventures
07:19 From Marine Corps to Funnel Science
13:49 Challenges in Marketing and Sales Funnels
16:33 Importance of Data Accuracy and Integration
18:14 Leadership and Accountability in Business
22:22 Customer Frustrations with Complex Processes
23:52 The Importance of Speed in Customer Service
25:18 Adoption of AI and Technology in Business
27:05 Challenges with AI Implementation
30:14 Decision Makers and ROI in Business
37:42 Call Tracking and Quality Control
40:33 Final Thoughts and Advice

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Transcript

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 0:05

Hey, welcome to another episode of The Wireless Way. I'm your host, Chris Whitaker, and as always grateful that you are here. And, uh, you know, my guest and I were just talking about Father's Day this past weekend, and it even reminds me how I'm so grateful about a lot of things and, and, uh, totally won't plan on going this way. But I, I'm as well say this in my mind, man. G, an attitude of gratitude will, will get you through. Just about every situation. So I hope you're, uh, having a great day and hope you're grateful for it. And, uh, again, I'm grateful that you're here to listening to yet another episode. You keep coming back, so I appreciate it. Five years strong. 70 plus countries. Uh, it, it's been a great, uh, a great journey for me and, uh, and I'm grateful for Alex Fender. Uh, he's my guest today and I wanna tell you a little bit about him as always. Uh, he's the chief funnel scientist and founder of Funnel Science, and we're gonna hear more about that. Uh, in addition, as important, he would probably say is he's a US Marine Corps veteran. Turn tech entrepreneur specializing in sales funnel optimization and predictive analytics. In my world, we talk a lot about predictive analytics and ai. We're gonna dig into that. As a founder funnel science, um, he has spent over 15 years helping more than a thousand businesses from startups to Fortune 500 companies maximize revenue through data-driven marketing strategies. His expertise spans, uh, B2B and B2C channels as business to business and business to consumer channels, high ticket sales and luxury markets. Again, this is gonna be an interesting one folks. So buckle in. Uh, he's a graduate of Columbia College with a BS in management. Alex furthers his studies and predictive analytics at Northwestern University. Uh, his accolades include being named a Veteran Entrepreneur of the year by MTI, the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, and winning into veteran business Battle at Rice University. Has also served on a committee in Washington DC appointed by the secretary of the SBA, focusing on veteran business and development. So if you know me and you've been listening a while, we hit a lot of things that you'll see why I asked Alex as a veteran myself. Love that story as a technol, a technology enthusiast. Love his day job. So this is, this is a great, this is gonna be a great episode. Uh, Alex, thanks for making time and thanks for being flexible enough to, to get this thing scheduled. How you doing today?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 2:38

Yeah, I'm doing great. Happy to be here and thanks for inviting me.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 2:43

We do. And you know, before I even get into my first question, man, I, it is kind of, actually, it's kind of part of my first question, but, uh, US Marine Corps veteran, you know, I'm an Army infantry veteran here we are talking about algorithms and ai and I don't think we learned this stuff in basic training, did we?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 3:00

And, no, no. Maybe, maybe how to avoid getting detected or how to avoid, you know, staying out of the, the limelight of getting, you know, your ass shoot, or anything along those

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 3:10

That's right.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 3:11

I,

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 3:11

Right.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 3:12

I learned in the, in the military early on how to be a professional skater and just skate my ass outta any, you know, bullshit scenario.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 3:20

Don't, uh, don't volunteer. Never volunteer. Yeah. Don't volunteer. Yeah. I was a slower learner on that one. That seems. Um, but, uh, what did you do in the Marine Corps, by the way? Remind me, what was your, your MOS.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 3:35

So, um, you know, I served for eight years and I did, uh, I joined in, in 99, shipped to bootcamp, uh, in 2000, and then I got out in April of oh eight. And so, um, my MOS was, uh, logistics for the first six years and it was in oh four 11. And, uh, it's, it's kind of interesting. This is, uh, for the first six years I didn't, I never did my job, not one day When I was, uh, early on, before September 11th happened, I was doing the honor guard and color guard at the base and doing the funeral details. And then September 11th happened, and then things kind of changed. So now we're activating, I started as a reservist going to college, you know, I wanted to be a pilot and, um, and so. What ended up happening was my first car was a 69 Mustang and I had it on base and then September. And I ended up selling this car, uh, parting it out on the, on eBay, selling car parts. And I made quite a bit of profit during this nine month period of a workup to go to Afghanistan. then, uh, so the Marines found out that I was good with computers. And, and so what was interesting was they, they came into my barracks room and did a barracks inspection. They thought I selling freaking drugs. There was no drugs. There was no drugs, but they couldn't understand how a freaking private had made so much money. And the NCOs, they just, they, they. They made me prove to them what, how I was making all this money and so they made me prove, like my eBay account, my order history, my history, my bank account showed car parts I parts. A box and I was selling them on eBay for a box all around the fucking world, and they just, they just couldn't believe this 19-year-old kid was able to do this outta the barracks room. And I mean, every freaking day I'd have like 10 to 20 boxes at the, at the base post office. And so one day the manufacturer called me up and they're like. Why are we shipping all these parts to this military base in Fort Worth, Texas? They thought they was like some hook or something coming in, you know, they didn't know. And I was selling them. I was selling them as fast as they could produce them, and then they had on my back order. anyways, when they found out I was good with computers, they sucked me out of my job and put me in the S3 and six. Ended up working on a database for the squadron and we, we developed it real significant for, for the S3 shop and doing training in ops and, and so that's how I really got into technology on, on that. But you know, before that I'd done my first database, like in the 10th grade. So I'd already had some experience in junior high and high school doing computers. But in the Marines I was 19 years parts and became ran database. Kind of.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 7:03

Oh, that's fascinating. Uh, and you're right, they don't expect that, that E one, E two to be having a lot of folding money, a lot of cash on hand. Usually you, they're spending that all down range, you know, at the bars or something. Uh, now that's pretty cool, man. Thanks for sharing that. And, you know, kind of pivoting a little bit, uh, how did you go from being that, that, that. That Marine doing what you were doing to being the chief funnel scientist at Funnel Science, how, what was that journey look like? What, what, uh, what did that journey, you know, uh, yeah. I'll to edit that out. That happens by the way. I have to edit things out. Uh, okay. So, yeah, so tell me more about that journey of going from the Marine Corps to being the Chief Funnel scientist at the at at Funnel Science.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 7:49

Yeah, man. It was interesting because at the second company that, uh, I. And then an investor and I was, uh, I left for deployment and came back, it was in the summer of thousand eight and a check for 10, a marketing company buy leads. And I asked, you know, of these leads that you're buying. How many are we closing and how many sales are we making, you know? And percent of the leads we were closing leads. We weren't even close to that, I could tell. And I wrote some reports out of the database, just some real simple marketing reports. And I brought him, I brought him the report as he is writing another check a couple weeks later. So he had spent$80,000 on marketing to a vendor to buy leads. And it turns out our freaking close ratio was a goose egg, 0%. You know, maybe if we apply some science to our sales funnel that we might just get a better outcome. And the idea of. Using, using a process to measure your lead quality or just start with like count of leads. How many leads are you getting, how many are qualified, how many are closing, how many sales you're making, like apply some quality control measures to to this, you know? And the goal is as a return on investment, you know, if you spend 80 grand on marketing, well. In sales.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 9:45

Right, right.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 9:47

And, and in that summer I coined the term funnel science and I said, you know, we need to put some funnel science together and, uh, build a better funnel based on some testing and verify, test and measure what works and what doesn't. And then by doing that we, we had really impressive results. And so I. We set the company.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 10:21

How was that first year? You always hear about that first year being tough. I mean, it sounds like you had a good use case. You had some good data, uh, how long before you really felt like it was up and running or,

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 10:35

We, um, the first year was interesting. I was in the middle of a lawsuit with my former business partners. I

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 10:44

Hmm.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 10:45

the company and then got married in, in June. And so it was a very stressful first year. I also quit as a consultant at another company, so I didn't have really any income coming in. It was, uh, operated outta my two bedroom apartment. I had the spare one bedroom, so I put my desk and computer connection there. And you know what I did? I just hustled and I made a. You know, but we had a pretty good process that worked pretty well, and so we, we were able to build up just based on the process. This was pre the software coming about, so Funnel Science built some software starting in 2013, but if you execute a process of. And, and reconcile you in sales. These companies, they, they struggle with marketing and sales because. They just throw poo poo, you know, against the wall and hope something sticks and that that doesn't really work that well. Or that's just a real, you know, the spray and pray method where you spray it out there as far and white as possible, and then you

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 12:03

Right.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 12:03

something comes in. I mean, that shit, that's, that's, that's a

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 12:07

Don't.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 12:08

wasteful,

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 12:09

Yeah. And yeah. And then, and then they're, they're not wanting to invest in a proper CRM. They're trying to use some outdated, you know. Antiquated, uh, CRM or a database that's not really built to be a CRM. I've seen it done all kind of ways. I've seen it done right, wrong, and I've seen it, you know, done perfectly and not so perfectly. But, uh, yeah. I love, I love when we were talking, I guess a little more backstory. You and I met at the ConnectUS, uh, rev up your revenue event at, at Dallas Motor Speedway a few weeks ago. Fun time. We had a great time, man. That was. That was next level event right there. I tell you, uh, I think you're the first guy I actually bumped into at the reception the night prior, so that was really cool. But when I heard what you were doing and funnel science, I'm like, huh, I, I know of a, at least a dozen companies that could really benefit from this, you know, because everyone's, oh, here, here's probably the favorite. You know, they, they have the funnel, they have the CRM, and they have five different reports for the same data set. You just kind of pick the, you, you pick the report that looks the best back to like your CEO talking thinks he had this great close rate. There was probably some metric somewhere that showed, showed that, but the reality was that's not the case. Right. So I, I've lived a lot of the things you described and thought to myself, man, with all this technology we have now and all this software and smart people, why aren't we taking advantage of it? You know, why aren't companies, you know, leaning into this'cause? Yeah. Data is king. I was just saying, you know, God, we trust, but all others must have data and you need to make sure it's right, you know, and, and you can, you can prove your data. So, um, my goodness. So what other problems are you solving mean? Do you see a trend in the companies you're working with? Is, is it similar, everybody kinda the same problems or is it different across the board? What, what, where, where are the key problems you're solving with your solution?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 14:05

You know, this is one that's baffling to me that, I mean, you would think that, uh, people know what ROI stands for, return on investment is what I'm talking about. This is a

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 14:16

Mm-hmm.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 14:16

common. Common measurement for success or use, or should be used and, and what I've found is it's rarely used, it's rarely defined correctly, and then almost never reconciled or never verified to actually make sure that it's accurate or there's some measure of accuracy there, you know, with the degree a margin of error. But I've interviewed and talked to thousands of people. Show ROI report. Most don't have it. And it's like not knowing how much gas is in the tank or, I mean, there's some return on ad spend is another one. If you're doing advertising, especially like with Google or Meta or any sort of digital ads, I mean, this is just such a crucial metric to measure success. And then, um, so return your return on. If it's done on a spreadsheet, like spreadsheets are like 80% wrong or error ridden. And so spreadsheets, know, the wrong tool to be used and they're still being used and it's so freaking crazy that companies invest like crazy amounts of money and then export it to a freaking spreadsheet and then try to present from that almost.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 15:33

Why do you think that is? What, what, why do you think it's 80% March? Uh, uh, error rate? That's pre, that's high, man. And, and I don't disagree with you. It just takes one guy to copy and paste the wrong formula and it's, it's toast.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 15:44

copy and paste, and it's the multiplicity effect. And it's like they just keep using the same logic, but there's never, this is what it's, this is the key thing. I keep coming in over and over and nobody ever reconciles or counts or rechecks the work, you

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 16:01

Mm-hmm.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 16:02

don't, I don't understand why there's, like, what we did in the military was inspections and so I just plan inspections or go in and inspect things and then, and don't, don't expect what you don't inspect. That's something I absolutely learned, you know? And. If people are telling you, you know, typically your sales team's telling you they're bad leads, okay, well, let's go verify the marketing data, but don't tell me they're bad leads if there's no freaking notes in the CRM or if you're not executing any sales entry, or to tell me, like, quantify why it's a bad lead. So there, there's lots of problems in there between co. The, the, the, oftentimes it's digital base should be collected in A CRM. The report should be automated and built and integrated together. And these companies, they never integrate the data correctly. That's the other thing is so they're trying to match or draw conclusions on reports, but they never the data correctly to begin with. So the reports are never gonna be accurate. They're just never trying. How much sales success you have from a campaign id, and you don't track the UTM values, or they don't integrate it correctly, or the webmaster doesn't do their part, and then the database admin doesn't do their part to sync it in the Salesforce field correctly, so it doesn't show up into Salesforce or you have to tie in like three other freaking tools to make it work. I mean, it just, that's, that's what the norm is.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 17:27

Do. How often do you come across a company doing it right?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 17:32

Like, it's so rare. It's so freaking rare. Um, like not that often. Like once

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 17:42

a year maybe. Okay. Once, so that one a year. Why are they doing it right? Does someone, they have like a data analyst on, on staff that could, I mean, right. Feel like someone has to own that whole ecosystem of information.'cause if it's not, and you, it is all pared out the different departments, no wonder, you know, you can't get three people to agree on a plan half the time. You like even get two people to agree on a plan. What, what are they doing? What, what, what was doing it right look like besides hiring your company?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 18:12

This is a great question. In the military, we, we fight missions and we fight missions to win. And the missions have an objective. And part of the mission is not to kill off all your mi your troops or your personnel, right? And so you go to war, you go to battle or, or it doesn't even always have to be a fight. Sometimes we go fight missions to do like humanitarian work or build something. But you have a common objective and people work together towards that common objective that's very clear. And there's a leader that can drive that. And then that's what's, what's oftentimes is missing is there's oftentimes somebody clearly driving that objective, Hey, we need to gather these people. We need to do this work. We need to accomplish this. It's just the military is very good at that. And then on the civilian side, I see projects, especially like at IT projects, IT projects have a really high failure rate because they're never on freaking time or they never accomplish the business objective, or they're so far out scope or budget that there's just like, sometimes they pull the project because it just doesn't work, doesn't doesn't business. And then here's the other thing. This shit changes so fast, man. It's like changing so fast. So we have tools that are set up and working on Google APIs and everything was last, and you know, and there's this. Agile method, or you have to be able to ideate and build and then unbuild rebuild and then just this constant keeping up. Or at some point there's this maintenance phase of it. So it's, it's really hard. I mean, you have to have some people that really know how to drive this through technology.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 20:06

Yep. And, and you know, another observation as you were talking, it made me think about, again, it's just kind of the corporate. Mindset of decision by committee. Um, I've always struggled with that because, you know, well, I guess one of the benefits of a decision by committee, when it goes wrong, there's no one person to own it, you know? But in the military, whoever the senior rank and personal site, they were, they're responsible. Even I don't bottom line who, who's in charge here? That's, we still hear that, right? Who's in charge here? Who? Who's OIC or who's N-C-O-I-C? Uh. You know, so if you're listening and you're the, and you are the senior person in your company, I go as far as say what we're talking about. It's up to you to fix it. Someone has to make a decision that we're not gonna live with bad data. We're not, we can't report, especially our board of directors, you're publicly traded. Ouch. I mean, we've seen a lot of CEOs and C levels lose their job because of making decisions on bad data, right? So, uh, you know, what's the other, Reagan have the saying or trust, but verify. You wanna trust your analyst, but. Prove it to you, right? Just like you do with your customers.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 21:16

Reconcile, inspect, check and recheck or ver, I mean verify, and then like it's just like it's not done once a year. It should be done more often than that. I mean, especially when you're spending. You know, millions of dollars on marketing to send to salespeople, and then you're holding, you're, they're held accountable to a quota. But then like the marketing people are held accountable to nothing. Sometimes they're held accountable to nothing, but then they're so, they're so, they don't, and they don't know, or it's not, they, it's amazing how many times they say it's not their job or. I'm, I'm the web, I'm not responsible for leads or I'm not responsible in the sales. And that's where, that's where a lot of leadership fail. Not lining the troops to a common goal and then supporting them with the correct technology components. Here's the other thing, man, I just, I just lit up one of the phone companies, uh, not long back. What they do is they stack shit upon shit, upon shit of process and. Force their customers to go through it. And then the customers are just like, good grief, I'm not doing this, or This is ridiculous, you know? And they start the journey, try to sign up, and then very quickly they abandon it and say, this sucks, or this company sucks and there's no way I'm working with them. You know? So that's, that's another common aspect where they put all of these either processes or typically technologies in place, you. Enter your data in through an, uh, a, a VA that's overseas, and then a salesperson might call you back in like five to seven days from now if you're lucky. You know, and it's just kind of ridiculous what some of these companies put together and then wonder why their sales funnel sucks so bad. It's because it's not designed for speed or customer satisfaction or, or designed to facilitate a seamless. and easy transaction Normally. Normally they're doing a lot of pain in the ass things and we have process and all.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 23:31

Ease of doing business. I mean that everywhere you, every industry, every customer engagement, that's what we all want. Everyone wants it easy. You make it complex, painful. I'll find another way. I'll, I'll find someone else. Or maybe I just won't make that decision. I won't do that by decision at all, possibly. Um, gosh, man, you're so, you see a lot.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 23:52

speed is a weapon, you know, and speed. You can defeat them or accomplish the mission quicker. It's kind of the same thing in customer service. The faster or the faster the salesperson can keep the customer happy and make them happy. That's how you win and that's how you can dominate over your competition because oftentimes their leaders or people aren't thinking of, how do I leverage speed to make the customer and then get paid faster? Profit faster? do speed do reduce latency impact? These other things or measure customer sentiment through AI tools and then measure how happy the customers are. And then to sales velocity or the, the speed is a weapon and it's completely not used or understood with analytics or predictive analytics. In most companies, they don't, they don't, they're not even tracking ROI correctly, so they're not getting to velocity or forecast or prediction because they're still stuck at level one and level two of how do I collect the data and what does my data mean? It's real, real interesting, like you'd think we're way, we should be way further along in this because it's where 2025, but like it's still very, very few companies are putting these things together, but the ones that are just like lightning fast compared to others and the others are still, you know, really stuck back in like early two thousands thinking of this.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 25:18

You know, I, I have a theory on that, Alex, and, and, um, this sounds a little bit ageist, I guess is the right word. I mean, I'm obviously we're 50, been around for a while, got some gray hair, but I, I took a lot of business leaders. Um, if you're not in tech and, you know, you, you kind of came up in that seventies and eighties timeframe and you're in charge. Yeah. It's like, why would I need that, you know? Business was built off a clipboard and a calculator. We could, and you know, now we have Excel. Woo. That's our, that's our technology. As about you said, so, you know, you gotta wonder if in the next decade or so, uh, obviously there's a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of business people in their twenties, thirties, and forties. But, uh, and especially that, I think that thirties group, right? I mean, they kind, they, they've not known a time where there wasn't internet. They haven't known a time where there wasn't. Uh, you know, some type of software, smart device. Uh, so you, you, it, it is interesting. Will there be a time where it's just gonna flip where a business leader in charge says, I expect software to be driving this outcome and not you. And a manual process with 10 different versions of a spreadsheet and, you know, 1.02, I mean all these different versions. Um, what do you think? Does that make sense? Do you think that's possible?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 26:32

Man, I am reading business plans and I'm hearing investors speak about how they're looking at org charts for new companies that are getting pitched to them. They might have like one or two or three founders in it. And then in the org chart, it's not personnel, it's it's agents, AI agents, or Devons. And so they're saying like, director of marketing, this bot, director of sales of this bot, director of customer service, this bot. And so you have what's called Devons AI agents. Is is what it is. Um, I, I'm seeing a lot of dumbass ai, customer service stuff, but I'm seeing a lot of it be really, really intelligent or work very effectively. So it just takes, it takes some humans. There's called unsupervised learning or supervised learning. You have to supervise it and guide it and like reinforce it or keep training it to make it. Humans notoriously do really bad at work consistently, and. Why not? I mean, but it's not, you can't. You have to, what we're seeing, we're using it daily. This is what we're seeing. you have it, the tool put in the right hand. It has to be like with the correct business leader or architect and developer, and then you deploy these, these bots or these agents together. It can be very impressive with the outcomes, but we're. When people try to do it, lay, lay business person not knowing the technology or not knowing the coding or development aspects of it, they can hack it or duct tape it together and they, they think it works, but it kind of crashes and burns pretty quickly and you're seeing a lot of companies do that. One of these companies was freaking completely fluffing it and having, you know, Indian tech support. It, it doesn't always work because they're, they're not building it correctly and it takes like the really, really great engineers to bring it together. That's what I'm seeing. It takes like a couple great engineers and that's where companies don't have it. They're not trained in it, and so they're like, their webmaster becomes the freaking AI guy or something, you know, or, um, worked on a recent project. The project was, uh, API project. They failed at it for months and months and couldn't get it done, and we were able to get it done in like four to six weeks, where previously it had been stuck, you know, for months. So these AI agents can't figure out everything. But I think you're gonna see this, this in new company structures quite often where personnel are replaced with what's on the org chart is essentially a bot with that function.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 29:26

Wow. Is anyone supervising that bot? Like anyone fact checking it? I mean, is that, it seems like that's my thought.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 29:35

They

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 29:35

be. Yeah. Yeah.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 29:37

they're probably not, probably not, you know.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 29:40

Yeah, copy and paste. Copy and paste it. There's a whole, whole new meaning of copy and paste now that, uh, take, you know, taking AI output, not fact checking it, just using it as your own original idea. That's, that's dangerous. But again, I, I'm a content creator. I use AI all the time, but I use it as a tool. It's not my end all be all. I've, I've always fact checked it. Make it my own change words.'cause I always use words that I would never use. Uh, that's always like a red flag. You can tell when someone's copy and pasting, you know, Chad, GPT, not you not making it their own. Hey, Alex, one of the questions. So who, who, who's mostly making decisions to go with your company? What level? I mean, who, who are you talking to at a company that will say, yeah, we want to do business with you?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 30:25

Um, for, for the most part it's gonna be mid-level management to senior level management or executive management. Um, we're dealing, uh, we're, we work with companies all across the country. We do a little bit of international, we've done international for some time, but we're primarily North America. And then we. Often all the time. And then, um, it depends. We, we, we do three things. We do marketing, we have the software, and then there's the other technology aspects. So it just slightly depends on who's coming in or contacting us. Um, we had one interesting last, a few weeks ago. Uh. in for our phone service that does phone tracking and recording and sentiment analysis, and the sentiment tracks how positive or happy the calls are. And it was a property management group, so mid-level managers, they saw the demo, so they were influencing, or the owners of this. Complexes, it was their midlevel management, reaching out to marketing. Um. Other times it's executives or vice presidents at bigger companies that are, you know, having real large marketing budgets, like 20$50 million marketing budgets, and they're trying to expand sales teams and leads and things like that. So just there's, there's a range that we work with. Not so much startups anymore. Um, they're well funded startups. We do some of that, but definitely no nonprofits or no, no government or.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 32:13

Yeah. How do you, you mentioned ROI and, and I, I do believe in that too. It's like, if we're gonna do it, let's make sure there's a benefit, there's an outcome that's beneficial to the, to the company, and that's ultimately why we're all here. Uh, how, how do you show an ROI to your customers? Are they, is it, is it a, is there a pla a dashboard or is there some metrics you show them that, Hey, since we started to where we are now, you're earning this much more? Is. Is that, is that a thing for you? Does your customers expect you to help them show that?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 32:41

dashboard. As soon as you sign in, it's the first thing you see. How

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 32:46

I.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 32:46

did I spend? How much did I make? How many leads are on deck? What's quality? And it is like there's core set of metrics that you need to know, but you need to know how much am I spending, how many sales are coming in, how much revenue should be coming in from new sales, total revenue or recurring revenue. However, we're tracking this for the funnel, right? So those are five in like the first five columns of the dashboard. 2, 3, 4, 5, right there. And then if it's set up right, there's another's, all the at end O. So this sales projected into. How many are qualified, your closing rate, the days to close, or basically a sales forecast or a sales projection. So you're bringing in leads today, but they're not closing today. They should be closing in the future. So if you run predictive analytics, that would be the final aspect of it. So, so we have that built in, and then we have a funnel report that shows the customer journey and it shows how many customer and. So to the word, how much did you spend on the word, and then how much is that word making you in leads and sales? So I mean, it can be drilled down to that specific, or to the page, or to the campaign, or to the ad id, and you can get really precise with what your ROI is on, on your digital assets.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 34:18

Have you ever come across a prospect that just wasn't ready for you? I mean, they just, they didn't, everything was done on clipboards and paper. Maybe. I mean, I mean, if this, if their ecosystem's not digitized, it's probably hard for you to work with'em. And, and is that like a, I mean, every, every Met customer, a customer, like, yeah, I don't know if we can help you'cause you're just not ready. You're, you're so messed up.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 34:39

You know, it's all the time. And I had one, and it was crazy to me. It was a marine company, a marine owned company. He and we connected and it was crazy because we had really great successes in his industry and we knew exactly what to do. And I could tell in the process, in the, in the contracting or the agreement process, I was like, I don't think this guy's gonna do it right. And just based on how he was kind of talking. So I actually wrote into the contract like three different bullets and said, you must do this. You must do this, you must do this right? And this is what it was. It was very simple. Very simple requirements for success here. You must give us your webmasters access and support, and we must be able to make updates to your website. And it wasn't anything crazy. It was very simple. That was number one. Number two, you have to track your leads and you have to verify or give me a report or a measurement of the leads, like you have to track your leads and put it. I can't what the third thing was. And I did a pilot with him for 90 days. And then, you know, they made, this was the other thing. Oh, I remember what it was, man, it, I told him not to do this too. said, uh, he gave me the freaking rookie new hire that had no training, never been in the industry, and then he, he stuck them over on our project success. Give me your best guy to work with. Don't give me the FNG that doesn't know anything yet, that's trying to do the, know, on the job training, learn as you go. And so sometimes man, they just don't put it together right on. Like, I told you exactly what you need to know, like marine to marine, and he still wasn't willing to listen.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 36:50

So people are just aren't, yeah, they don't want your help. Or people want an easy button and you know, anything worth doing, it's gonna take effort. I mean, you like, you know, you can get a personal trainer. Which I, I, I keep saying I want to do that, but, but I haven't. I should, but if I had one, I know I would. Well, I'm paying for it. I want an ROII, I wanna see a return on it. Just to having a personal trainer is not gonna make me in better shape. I still gotta show up. I gotta eat right. I gotta put the time in. That's interesting. I'm an advisor to advisors and I've talked to a lot of folks and. And, um, I, I can hog, I'm blue in the faith face, but if, if someone's not willing to change their behavior or at least contribute and show up and put effort into it, there's no point in us talking honestly. Right? I mean, so it's probably the same for you. There's no point in calling you unless you're willing to acknowledge you're not doing it right and you're willing to make some changes and, and follow a plan. So

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 37:41

One

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 37:41

it makes a lot of sense.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 37:42

tools that we use, that we built, uh, back in like 20 that we still use like every day to is uh, call tracking. Call tracking and recording, and then we've added a few tools on top of it, the transcription and the sentiment analysis so you can analyze the conversation or build reports quicker. But, um, it's call recording and listening to how your employees. Talk to customers or how your customers talk to your company in what you hear in these phone calls can be just absolutely revolutionary and change. But what's crazy is sometimes you present a call recordings to people and you show'em where they're doing a bad job and sometimes they just get it and they go. I shouldn't have said it like that, but

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 38:31

Yeah.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 38:31

times you show'em calls that were like, really handled poorly and you're like, you can't talk to customers like that. Or You can't do it like this. And then like blind dropping calls or parking calls on hold for too long, or just bouncing calls. Like that's a, that's a common one, you know, but it gets pretty, it gets pretty crazy in what we hear in the call recording and so. Powerful and probably one of the most underutilized management tools that I see. But the companies that use that or do quality control on what the, the customer interactions and measure the customer interactions, man, they get way better outcome. But the call recordings, man, that's, that's probably one of the best, most powerful tools to use for marketing, sales, customer service. Accountability, like branding, you know, like reputation and then even website content or what your customers are calling about. And then sometimes even competitive reviews because they're calling in telling you stuff that you guys and thing know. Shoulda in.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 39:52

And, and that's a feature of your service then, it sounds like, right? I mean, that's what you provide

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 39:57

It's something that's built in, it's definitely

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 40:00

in.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 40:00

on the marketing side for marketing quality control. It's also used on the sales side, like how, how are our leads doing, or how many leads are closing or what's happening on the sales side. So we use it as quality control to measure marketing effectiveness, and then the sales follow up and how sales does.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 40:17

That's a very interesting, well, this has been a fascinating conversation. I know we were just gonna kind of, uh, scrape the surface of it. Uh, definitely if you're listening in, you're interested to check the show notes. I'll have links of how to get, uh, in touch with Alex and his team at, uh, funnel Science. I. Alex, last question. Uh, you know, is there anything you wanted to cover we didn't hit on, or any last words you wanna leave us with?

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 40:42

Hmm. You know, uh, always be testing. That's one, that's one thing to be focused in on. Set up a tool measure, have the correct measurement or quality control piece, and then always be testing and then test and verify and just keep measuring and

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 40:58

Always be

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 40:58

your

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 40:59

testing. Yeah, well of course we all know always be closing, but I like to always be testing. That definitely has me thinking. Um, I. Very interesting. Yeah, that's, that's a good one. Well, uh, thanks for your service. Thanks for your service to commercial industry and, uh, you know, the, the business world. I think that's, it's fascinating that, you know, so many smart people do start great businesses and they make a lot of money, but it gets to a point where it's kind of, uh, like that Peter principle. They, they, they raise to their level of, uh, incompetence in a sense. And they, and they need help. And a lot of'em, the ego prevents them from asking for help. Ask for help. There's nothing wrong with getting help, uh, call it assistance if you'll, you get some assistance, uh, guidance, a backup support, whatever it is. Um, Alex, thanks a lot for making time. Thanks for sharing your story with us today. I, I appreciate it.

alex-fender_1_06-17-2025_113414: 41:51

Have a good one. Great meeting with you.

chris_1_06-17-2025_123414: 41:53

Likewise, likewise. There you go, folks. Another episode of The Wireless Way. And as always, if you heard something. That resonated. Something that, uh, you think a colleague or a client or a prospect of yours might be interested in, please share this episode with them. You can always go to the wireless way.net. Uh, it's a website for the show and you can hit the contact us button and, uh, provide feedback or, or suggestions or. Just, just check in, you know, just check in with me. I'd love to hear from you. Uh, a lot of great episodes coming. Uh, man, just, it's been a busy summer already for the wireless way. A lot of great episodes coming your way. So, uh, thanks again for checking it out and we'll see you next time on the Wireless Way.