Lead Perfection Sub-Tables and Documenting Your Activities

On this episode OneLeg Up: Tech Squawk, the OneLeg tech team is diving further into the Lead Perfection platform and specifically discussing how users can better utilize sub-tables (pre-sale and post-sale), which is a area that can be customized to your business: such as referral information (pre-sale) or lead scoring; and post-sale finance info.

 In the second half of the podcast, the team explores the various ways in which you can document your customer relationship, your marketing and sales process, and how your home improvement company keeps notes about opportunities.

Transcript

Vic Sun  

Hello, guys, welcome to OneLeg Up. And this is our special series called Tech Squawk, where we discuss how you can deliver the very best customer experience through technology. And predominantly, we discuss things like CRM, ERP, dialers CP queues, and how you're able to achieve these zero marketing ways. And, of course, efficiency and effectiveness from within your internal operations. I'm Victor sun, I'm the mastermind here at OneLeg. And today, I am joined, as always, you know, here at Tech Squawk series, by our two special guests, KC Urias, and Steven white. And we will just we will get into this in a moment here. But first, let's check in with these two. Let's see how things are going. Let's start with you, KC, how are things?

KC Urias  

Things are going good. I went to a swap meet over the weekend, and I was able to get a bulk supply of birdseed for my birds. And so in my mind, that's a very good week, how's it going with you?

Vic Sun  

Good, good. I mean, it's, you know, it's been a busy few months, and it continues to be, which is great, because we would deal with all kinds of, you know, really cool problems and challenges and with technology. Let's move on to you, Steven, how are things with you, Steven?

Steven White  

Things are fantastic. It's been a, it's been a really great couple of weeks here, getting tired of this dry weather. But other than that things are good. I just think it's really fitting, you're getting bird seed, and with our bird themed Tech Squawk podcast, it's all just all the gear that wasn't my idea,

KC Urias  

I swear.

Vic Sun  

So, you know, today we're going to be again, you know, we've been we've had a lot of requests, we've gotten some popularity. And we've just, you know, since you know, branded this, this one now as our as a part of one leg up, you know, podcast series and content. But again, lots of Lead Perfection users, CRM users, market sharp, improve your 360, Salesforce job are key, but really, a lot of them are asking how do you make it? How do you utilize, you know, the platform better. And at the end of the day, I think what we've realized in just the last nine months, is many companies, if I were to put a percentage of you using your CRM, your ERP at 100%, many of them are using 50% or less, right of the capability of their platform. And I think a lot of it has to do with not knowing that these things can be done in their CRMs and their platforms, and the other is just not actually turning it on and using it correctly. And so, you know, today, I think one of our topic is going to be focused predominantly on Lead Perfection, right? Our partner or a partner of LP, and Lead Perfection today, what is the two things that you guys can recommend? Or at least would you guys want to discuss today? Let's start with you, KC.

KC Urias  

Yeah, I want to talk about the sub tables, which a lot of people don't know about specifically, because you literally cannot see them until they are requested. So sub tables are, it's a really cool little customized area where you can make things match for your business specifically. And I want to give you guys the inside information on them.

Vic Sun  

Good. And so for the sub tables, really, there's two places on Lead Perfection that you can have this, the front, the front end, which is really before the sale takes place. And then there's also the post sale, right and so for the for the front end, you know, on Lead Perfection, can you can you give some, some examples of how you know, this can be customized and be utilized. And then let's go to the post and afterwards.

KC Urias  

Oh, yeah, you bet. So one of the most common sub tables that I've seen for almost all of our clients is they use it for referral information. And just as an FYI, for sub tables, people utilize them specifically to fill in the blanks. It's almost like a sticky note, or like a a message on the bottom of like a PowerPoint that is like okay, all of these out of the box stuff is great, you know, knowing all the job information is great and when all the contact detail is great. But I also want to talk about this for my company. That's what the sub table is for. So for presale, I usually see referral information where did this lead come from? This is from John Madden. And he he's the one that recommended it from this area, right and not only can you just have just like a blank part of that subtable that is for notes, but you can also utilize Dropbox You can utilize dates, any kind of field that normally is used on Lead Perfection, you can put and build in that field there. It's like a mini form.

Vic Sun  

Exactly. And I think I did that. And I won't necessarily go into detail because that's probably another topic. But, you know, when I put together and I think, you know, I was one of the first to utilize the sub tables for lead scoring, right, because you had to put some data inputs in there and tie it down to, you know, statistical data from you would get from the Census Bureau, wherever you're, you know, wherever you would pull this information from. But also, quite importantly, is, many companies don't do this. But, you know, they do. Many companies do follow ups, and sometimes multiple follow ups. And what they don't realize is the out of the box, Lead Perfection has the follow up. But that's it, you know what I mean, you you, if you if you meet with somebody several times, you don't even know when and you can't calculate for that. And the sub tables is a great place to be able to go and denote all the other times that you've met with them, and even render some form of disposition or some sort of definition for that. This is especially important for remodelers, you know remodelers who sell big projects, kitchen, bathroom remodeling, big projects, like room additions, basements, you know, and even large projects that have multiple projects, you know, let's say you're doing windows, the roofing the siding, and there's several times that you have to meet with them. And, you know, maybe you have architectural blueprints are diagrams, right? That you have to study that the designer or the salesperson has to visit several times or meet, you want to denote those things somewhere other than the one time that you say all this was a follow up, because what happens is, when you do follow ups, and you change the date, the last follow up gets deleted. So you don't even know. And this is one of the things that I think is missing in this industry is like people are almost always interested in the first visit, because that's the one call close, right? And then what happens there? Do they sell or did I not sell maybe a follow up, but nothing in between. And I think that's a big problem that you can solve. And you can easily come up with ways to even monetize those things where you can come up with really great content, because you now know, Hey, would my remodels, it actually takes seven visits or seven follow ups. And so now here's the cadence of that. And so that's that's one suggestion that I would make on the sub tables, again, underutilized. useed. Because for our clients, we almost always recommend it. But you don't see it with the clients that we don't have that don't utilize it. What about the post sale? Like when when something gets sold? What would you recommend they start using? Or maybe there start thinking about case?

KC Urias  

Yeah, so for the post sale, there is so much that goes on in terms of personal information being shared from the client. And we like there's just not enough tabs to cover everything they could possibly show you. So there's a Finance tab that you can put all the finance information in. But there may be more information that you're like, Okay, well, this lender does this particular thing, or I have this disclosure that does this particular thing, all those little odds and ends that are individual. That's usually what goes into subtable post sale. And something else that actually wasn't mentioned so far is anything in the sub table is also reportable and trackable. So you can run reports based on the information that is in the sub table. And you can also have triggers on the sub table itself as well, but can send people alerts when something is changed or updated on there. So it's, it's just, it's really good for keeping everybody on track, and especially in production. I know, the subtable is sometimes utilized for if there's just so many products that have so many details that this person does, like Steven’s actually worked in the past with like an all in one remodeling company, there just wasn't enough information on the front page to take care of all of the little individual products, measurements and styles for each part. You know, so it's an extension of all the details that you need post sale.

Vic Sun  

Yeah, and that is a good point. Now, there. Just as a caveat, a lot of this is not out of the box. You know, if you're a Lead Perfection user, there is a cost involved, not only in the intellectual side, where you, you know, you probably want to find, you know, companies like us are people like us who are able to go and do those four things for you. And I'm sure there's other, you know, companies, you know, that have people like that, I think we're one of the first to actually be more of like the partner that does implementation for LP, but somebody's capable, because there's a lot of planning involved, right? And there are ways to go and create these particular integrations where maybe you can query a form or a database somewhere and push that information, you know, to The Lead Perfection sub tables. But that is, in fact one of those things that lots of people don't use it, lots of people ignore it or don't know that it exists, which I think is even like that's, that's the part right there that you may not know you're missing on it because you don't know exists. But if you do know that it exists, and you're just not sure, you know, that's probably one of those things you want to ask us about is, you know, how do I utilize that better? Let's move on to Steven Steven, you know, what's, what's the one tip or what's the, what's the thing that you've seen, that we've almost always, you know, try to maximize or use effectively, but not always, you know, with prospects or with people who usually perfection.

Steven White  

You know, it's funny, you mentioned this whole, only using about 50%, one of the things I want to mention is like, like the old trope, you're only using 10% of your brain, I feel like a lot of Lead Perfection, users are probably only using about maybe 50%, like you said before, of the Lead Perfection process, or they're misusing it or using it in a wrong way. And one of the things that I think is the most important, really just simple documentation, there's, right out of the box, several places where you can keep your notes, and I've seen this misuse almost across the board with all the companies that I've seen, it's just seems to be a simple thing that is either over thought or under thought. And it just leads to confusion across the board, depending on you know, who is it? Who does? who's able to see this, you know, where is it where the notes? Are these useful for the sales rep, are these useful for the next person to make the phone call, we want to try to improve the user experience. And if the notes aren't properly made, or kept, then it's just turning into a challenge for sales reps callers. Just everybody, and and the challenge with, you know, keeping bad notes, something that I've heard some of the people who makes a phone call, say, especially if the notes aren't kept correctly, is didn't didn't you look at the notes didn't you know about this last conversation, you've already had this conversation with me before. And gosh, feel like, I feel like such a while I just feel like you're in a bad situation really brings down the morale of your team, especially if you're having this conversation for the second or third time, you're bringing down your brand. And I'm just getting too deep into it. But I want to go down into the into explaining what are the different notes, tabs, and what are their purposes.

Vic Sun  

You know, this is a very simple piece, it's out of the box available to all the perfection users. And it's available both on the on the front end and the back end, right elite perfection the notes now for the side, it sounds like you're talking about people who are in the marketing call center, you know, front forward facing sales, and they're not utilizing that, or at least are not a Kenyan pieces of information that they should be Now, the reality is, you know, if you're using dialers or some form of transcription or automation, you know, there's a way to be able to do that, and then push that information into LP right into the record. But if you want to just keep it simple, it sounds like you know, you've seen it working with I mean, you are our five, nine, resident, you know, alchemist as well. And you you go and deal with companies who have large call centers, for example, and they don't take notes. And so what happens is, they're only interested in the outcome, but not in the details. And and I think that that is a that's a more of a cultural problem and a management issue, I think. And we you know, we have seen companies where they've just not even use the notes section. Right? The notes section is completely blank. There's nothing in there. And I think that what you're suggesting is is quite simple. And it's it's something that's useful, right? Have your team put down what happened in the call what they think happened. Same thing for salespeople. And there are reports only perfection that you can tie these things down. Like some people don't realize that there's this report called The mod report that comes out for salespeople, and they can you can actually quantify what it is that they've said on the notes. And once they've run the jobs for all the things that you see on the presentation page, quite interesting. Lee enough. Some companies, you know, don't like that, because they don't want the salespeople writing their stuff. But I think it's quite therapeutic. And you can really get into the mind of the salesperson, you know what they're thinking on the sale on the call center side. You make an excellent point, you know, people, clients will be pissed off and say Vinod, I just tell you that I'm still waiting on this quote, and I need you guys to follow up in this date and time or I didn't I asked you guys to send me this info and nobody sent it to me or this issue. And then then the other next call center rep who follows up a week later, no notes and they go. I didn't know that. Because there were no notes written down.

KC Urias  

I actually I wanted to do jump in and give a small anecdote about that. We actually had a sales rep go missing for a couple of days in one of my last jobs. And we thought the guy ditched, we didn't know where they went. And when we went in the Notes tab, we found out that their car got stolen. And they were, they were at the police station, trying to figure out who stole their cars. So yeah, you know, you never know what you'll find in there.

Vic Sun  

It's interesting, wow.

Steven White  

It, I think it's important to break down the different kinds of notes, because only perfection, just like I meant out of the box right there on the lead detail page, there's three different places where you can keep your notes. So I just want to make sure we're clear about what notes section you're talking about. Because if you say notes, it could mean different things to different people, depending on what the culture company culture is, if the notes section is, I'm going to leave a note on the lead, then it's going to turn into especially if you're looking at the lead screen, and you can, if you're watching us on YouTube, then you're gonna see this, this graphic for your your, you know, something to reference, the neat the notes here, these are going to be the notes that are left for your designer, typically, this is parked outside, it's, you know, behind the blue sedan, you know, make sure if you're driving up, you want to let them know, you know, this is the gate code, this is the kind of do leave on this section here. If you're leaving notes for the next caller, so that there can be better prepared to make that conversation a little more effective, that's going to be on this note screen, it's going to have a little bit more detail. As far as timestamp code when the call happened, a little more continuity left for the next caller. And then if you're leaving a note for the sales rep, on how to handle that appointment, this isn't directions on how to get there, but how to handle this person, maybe they're a veteran, maybe they're it's a person who recently had a bad experience with another sales rep and trying to set them up to succeed. This is the best Notes section for that information. And, and I see these notes just across the board misaligned so that, you know, you're leaving notes that should be left for the next caller and one of these other sections, and the next person is just not aware of what's going to be the best way to handle the call, or the best way to handle that say

Vic Sun  

it's the challenges industry, you find a lot of sales training, you know, and sales, you know, gurus train, but there's not a lot of companies that do, like CRM, data training, use of your platform training, which is just as important, you know, and nowadays, in the world of data and analytics, you know, one could argue that it may be more important, because it's quantifiable data. Right. And, and I think it's as having a discipline, you know, a lot of companies make this mistake of relying on their call center manager to be their technology expert, right. And, and the reality is that that's just not the case, you're hiring somebody to lead a group just like a sales manager, by inspir, inspiring people training them how to speak and going through those, you know, through those through those exercises. But most of the time, they're not the technology expert, they're not the one who is going to be able to go in and say look tactically, this is the section that's going to be used here, this is the section that's going to be used for sales is a section for notifications only. And then I want to tie all of those things down, you know, independently on reports or analytics, right, because now you have NLP natural language processing, AI, you got transcribing, you can actually go and pull all these words, the speech, you know, you can do the, the speech to text, transcribe them, and then put them on a platform that actually analyzes the words, right, so that you get that so words do matter. But you need to collect this data. But again, I think the issue I think, you know, from what you're both are saying is training is not knowing where to place it not having the discipline. And that's because most companies don't really have a call center, they rely on the call center manager, or their call center management team to go and understand this, when the reality is they're not experts on the technology themselves, right? They're there, they're more geared towards the people side of things. Okay, so that's, that's definitely something that now how about on the post sale and, you know, you have any recommendations there, you know, for either one of you guys, in terms of being able to use the notes because I know what the on the on the sale of that post sale, it can be quite confusing to some users, especially those who have not used it because on the post sale, side, there's two do tasks, which are technically notes that are kind of like virtual posters, then you've got comments, and then you've got notes. You know, so, you know, any any ideas there on how people could maybe, you know, navigate through those or maybe start thinking about using them.

KC Urias  

For the good news on post sale, there, there's a lot more tracking in terms of step to step using like milestone grid and being able to track statuses because that's a drop down available on the top. But it literally is limited by characters. And so you might have one to two to three words on what your statuses are, or like a handful of like, like a phrase on where you are in the project. But that doesn't tell you the details of the project. And so, in that step, where you are right now, you can utilize the note tab to get specific, you know, why is it stuck in production? Why is it stuck in this area? Why has it been there for so long? And then people getting the notification saying, oh, shoot, you know, we're way past due in this part of the step, you're like, Well, this is the reason why, and they don't have to go hunting the same person down over and over and over again, and asking them a bunch of questions. The same question rather.

Vic Sun  

Yeah, yeah, missing items, things that you could just documenting that what took place in the last phone call that's kind of held us back? Or what's happening in the department? Those are all appropriate on the notes, I think, and then, you know, comments would be individual comments, like, I feel that, you know, we could have gone a different route on an addendum or a change order, or I feel like, you know, and those sort of things can be probably separated or segregated. But again, it's very tough to rely on the sales manager, or even your, even the people who are, you know, conducting the administration of your documents from leap or a CPQ. Right? Because they're not really looking at those things. And on an internal level, and, and, and looking at it from a perspective of, well, how am I going to tie this to reports or analysis or the internal process? Right, that's really the challenge here. Any other suggestions, you know, that you guys may have, we're almost at time here. Want to give you guys you know, another one last, you know, chance to maybe provide another tidbit here that maybe people don't know.

KC Urias  

One last hurrah, on my end is if you can't get the sub tables up and running as fast as you want them, there's something called user fields that a lot of people also don't know about. And that's where you can take just a little handful of fields that you need, you just have that one thing that you want to have the date on, or you have that one bit of information you want to have on your team's post sale information, you can go in there yourself and put in those user fields. And that's something that is out of the boxes nitpick

Vic Sun  

yes and no, in the sense that, even if yes, it's available, you may not have to pay for those things, to customize them if you know how to if you know how to do them. But I think at the end of the day, if you didn't know they existed, you don't know how to use them. It's like, you know, it's like trying to cook for the first time. It was funny, because when you were doing this, and you're you're explaining it, I was imagining a chef describing to me how to go and put it together, you know, this meal. And I think this is a challenge for a lot of Home Improvement companies, they, you know, there's this thing where you come up with an idea, because you hear it from somewhere, and you think I can do that. You know, I mean? When I was younger, I thought I'd be a basketball player. Me I thought that'd be a good idea if I could be a basketball player or football player, but it never happened. Because, again, you know, you have to figure out that there's a reason why certain people are very good at it because of experience or maybe because they're geared towards it. But the other thing is if you really do need it and you really want to go and use it you should seek the help right of the expert or the person who at their hands can can really make that happen or work. I would use even any last thoughts here.

Steven White  

Yeah, I think that like like you said, like, it's it's challenging to imagine an improved and improved system, when you're stuck in the minutiae. If you're dealing with the day to day and you're just trying to keep your head above water. You can't sit there and think, Well, how am I going to improve a system when the challenge is trying to make the system work on a day to day basis? And I think that that's that's really the the challenge for a lot of maybe not like Lead Perfection users, but just people in general, like, you get caught in a rut and you're just kind of stuck with the way things are and I think that I'm sick of hearing about how people are stuck with the way things are, there's there's a better way to do

Vic Sun  

things. That's well, that's a good point. I think we found out you've been you've been you know, taking on projects with for us where the companies are busy, you know, they're fairly successful and so to have existing people in their team handle another project and hey, let's oversee this new improvement and oversee the training and oversee the procedural recordings and SOPs and the videos and training the staff and deploying and testing is just like, Well, why don't you just tell me not to do my the rest of my job you know, that I have to deal with every day. And I think the challenge is a lot of a lot of companies do have to make that decision, you know, you, you, you, some owners are very quick to, to go and think well let me go and put that on my existing team. And they've, their plate is so freakin full that, you know, to them they just like no, we don't need it and, and I spoke to an owner recently who literally told me, I don't understand why my why my, my my marketing manager, my policy manager doesn't want to do this. And then when we reviewed their their workload, you know, we were the first to say, we wouldn't want to do this either. I mean, because we're already swamped, and, you know, paying us more money to do this. And this is, and so I think that it's, you know, anything that's a value you've got to pay for, you know what I mean, and if it's not valuable to you, and if it's not, it doesn't make any sense, then you're not gonna pay for it, and you're not gonna want it to happen, you know, the level of your focus and your drive for improvement is actually quite easily measured. It's really just measured in terms of what you're investing in it you know, if you're not investing in it, if you're not improving it, then you're not serious about it. You're just you're curious, you're not serious, right. And so with that, you know, in mind, we will end it here I think that was another really really cool you know, episode we're gonna have this pretty much every week now. Because of the the demand and the people that we've been, we've been connecting and of course, you know, because of some of our partners you know, that that have been asking us for this particular content that so again, you know, we're very very pleased to have you both thank you again, guys for all your your your your your great insight. We hope that you enjoyed our chat guys and for our audience learned a couple of things as always, we here at one leg believe por marketing pollutes the planet, and that business is full of tired, outdated, indistinct and under performing unremarkable technology and marketing. That sucks but what's even more is that many companies have forgotten the most important thing of all, the customer and that's also your end user. Right your internal customers. So we're on a mission on behalf for clients, you know, internal users and customers to change that. To learn more, go to zeromarketingwaste.com where you can subscribe to our blog in this very podcast. You can always find us and follow us by looking for the flamingo, and the OneLeg handle wherever you socialize online. We will see you on the next episode.