Want the transcript? Download it here.
In this podcast, Sam shares his story with Mike Maynard of Marketing B2B Technology, from originally being a whitewater kayaker and guide to becoming a complete automation nerd, and how Mobile Pocket Office helps companies identify the opportunities they are missing out on, and which processes they can implement to ensure they are on calls that are closing deals rather than prospecting ones.
TRANSCRIPT:
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to the latest episode of Marketing B2B Technology. The podcast from Napier today, I’m talking to Sam Ovett, who is the co-founder of mobile pocket office. Hi Sam. Welcome to the bulk.
Sam: Hi, Mike, I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Mike: Great. So I’m, I’m really interested to know. Can you just tell us a little bit about your, your background and how you’ve got to a founding Mobile Pocket Office?
Sam: Yeah, certainly. So, you know, funnily enough, it’s, it’s pretty non-traditional but my background is, uh, after, after getting a degree in college, I, I was a professional whitewater kayaker and guide. So I spent a lot of times in the outdoors taken a lot of risk in guiding people through that experience. Um, and then around a certain point, I decided that I wanted to be on the digital side of things.
They didn’t want to use my, my, uh, body to make my money. And, um, Who was really clear that automation was taken over the world as we all feel, and, uh, wanted to be on the right side of automation. And there’s a bit of backstory there around co-founding this with my dad, um, who had a lot of history in business analytics and process.
And so we decided that we’d joined forces, do something together. I’d become really involved in the marketing side from the outdoor sports perspective. Um, and. I made a shift, just kind of a deadbeat. Shift. I said, I want to do this. And I made the, made the shift and we launched mobile pocket office and I can, there’s the whole story of how we actually kick that business off and everything like that.
But the bottom line is I went from being a professional whitewater guide and kayaker to, you know, a complete automation nerd.
Mike: Wow. So, I mean, there’s so much in that I I’m intrigued to know for a start, you know, which was more stressful, you know, being a guide for people in whitewater kayaking or, um, launching an.
Sam: You know, that’s a good question. I don’t know that it was asked it quite that way. You know, what I always say is, you know, there’s a lot of stress when you work with someone’s business and, and it’s their livelihood and other people’s livelihoods that are their employees. But at the end of the day, nobody’s going to die immediately that day, that the risk of dying that day is very low.
Whereas in the other, the risk is there and real, and you can drive. You know, as the primary thing and, and seeing that happen. And so I would say that it’s less stressful in that acute way. Uh, but I think on a daily basis, you know, when you get off the river, it’s all good joy. When you’re improving somebody’s business, there’s a lot more stress.
Real, you know, I get really involved with these projects. So I think the stress is a little higher here, but that’s okay.
Mike: I mean, that’s an interesting comparison nobody’s going to die today is, is, is, um, I guess an optimistic view, but, um, yeah. And do you also start a business with your dad? So, so how did that work out?
Sam: So that’s a whole story on its own, but I think it’s, um, you know, I was looking to make a shift and he had, he had long, uh, worked on the business analytics side of, of business, this process with enterprise clients. Um, and he was ready to make a shift and wanted to have a little more fun in the, the process side and focus more on the sales and marketing process.
Cause that was always something that he enjoyed doing. But a lot of this work was in the analytics side. Um, And so I had been real involved in marketing automation when, uh, as an athlete, because I was automating some of my, uh, social media stuff and things like that. And I, I wanted to make a shift. And so we decided to kick this thing off together, um, as partners and, you know, it’s challenging working, or it can be, it can be challenging working with a, um, A parent, in my case, you know, the dynamic is one that we had to figure out what are the core things I’ll share this, because I think it’s interesting is we had to figure out how to, how to effectively, um, debate an idea down to a better version of it.
And it’s easy in the relationship for, as a father, right? For him to say, you know, Sam, that’s not a good idea. We’re not going to do it, but the reverse is more challenge. Uh, for me to tell my father, Hey, Hey Josh, this is bad idea. You know, and here’s why, right. It can become a very personal attack, like feeling that way.
So one of the, one of the things that we worked out as we did this outside of just the, I guess I’ll say the kind of quote, unquote standard things that go along with growing a business is how to communicate about ideas and problems and solutions. Um, so that we weren’t at the end of the day. We left to go in, Hey, I love you.
You know, you’re my dad. And then for him, you know, you’re my son. And that was always more important. And so at first there was a lot of friction that was generated and, and, you know, we get a bit upset at each other. And then we learned, uh, to say, Hey, you know what? It’s not personal. We’re going to do what we call a catalyst session.
We’re going to catalyze this idea down to a better version. Of the idea and it’s not personal, but it’s all just about getting ideas better and the way that has improved our business and also our relationship has been pretty cool. And I think something that has come out of this outside of just the business aspect of it, you know, the relationship side of it.
Mike: Oh, that that’s, that’s really cool and really good to hear. I mean, this, this approach, this catalyst session is that then something you’re able to use with your clients.
Sam: It really is. Um, and it’s one of those things where it’s like, okay, let’s take an idea and you can, you can ask questions around this.
However, is interesting. Let’s take an idea and let’s try and distill it down to the better version of the idea. Let’s cut through the crap, right? And let’s, let’s try and throw out the bad stuff and keep the good stuff and iterate this to it’s a better version. And that can be really, you know, when you have an idea that your baby or it’s something that you came up with personally, to be attacked, On the principles of the idea, um, can be, can be, feel really personal unless it’s stated up front and Hey, this is a session to bring an idea to a more distilled, better workable, more simple, but more effective, you know, state that we can then execute on.
And so doing that, I think anybody can use this process with any, any relationships they have with them. Personal relationships or business relationships. And for us, this has been just a, a, I mean, really a game-changing way. Communicate, um, to get to a better idea, because that’s the hardest thing is, you know, you offend people, they get upset, the timelines slow down, blah, blah, blah.
Like that’s, you can’t run a business like that. You know, it’s too slow. It’s not going to work. So if you can have a method, say, Hey, let’s do a catalyst session and get this idea down. Then everybody walks away and goes, yeah. You know, you’re not attacking me personally. We’re just trying to distill an idea.
Mike: So. Awesome. Okay. I mean, let’s take a step back first and just think about, you know, the business mobile pocket office. Um, I mean, when you started it, what did you think it was going to be? What did you really want to achieve?
Sam: So the thing that we wanted to achieve with it, and here’s basically, we saw a gap, a hole, you know, Josh was working for years with these enterprise enterprise clients.
The gap that was always really visible. And I saw it in the outdoor industry that I was in heavily at the time. That was my, you know, kind of my realm. Then I was involved with, um, was this idea that like in enterprise and in most businesses, what we see is people are really good at. Fulfillment. They spend a lot of time looking at the fulfillment process, right?
Because if you can’t fulfill whatever you promise that people have buying, that’s the fastest way to take an existing business, right? Not necessarily the fastest way to grow in, but the fast way to tank an existing business, yet you don’t deliver on whatever your promises, um, that that’s not good. So people focus on that where the opportunities are missed is in the sale.
Area where you have a lead that’s come in, right? You figured out how to generate interest. And then the process from lead to converting to a sale. That’s the biggest opportunity that is just usually just completely wasted. It has a lot of human effort involved. And what most, the majority do that we’ve seen with until they’re introduced to this idea of that, Hey, you can add automation and process to this is they focus.
You know, who’s the hottest lead now, right? What’s the best account. What’s the best deal. And that’s the focus and everybody else who could potentially be a really good customer is forgotten about until that person eventually, maybe comes back and says, Hey, I want to do, you know, I need a big order, right?
Because that’s your focus. That’s how you, that’s how you make your commissions and that’s how you survive. And so we see the just complete lack of focus. Nurturing people and following up with people, especially at the enterprise level, because you’re after the big deal, whereas you could be nurturing, you know, maybe a hundred little deals that could become bigger deals over time with automation.
And some process in place. And we see that that whole was just, it’s glaring. You look around and, and it’s tough to navigate politically too in an enterprise because you’re, you’re trying to implement technology with automation and that’s always a challenge to get everybody on board when there’s a lot of human sales people involved.
Mike: Interesting. I, I mean, the thing that fascinates me as you sit, you said it was about automation and processes. I mean, most of the. Enterprises that we see have, you know, more automation packages than, than they could possibly use to help automate marketing and sales. So, so is it about the process or is it about, you know, getting the right automation package?
Sam: So it really is about the process because when w what do you mean when you say automation package? Let’s open that up for a second. So, I
Mike: mean, Sydney, typically you might see, you know, a large enterprise have, you know, Marquetto connected to Salesforce. I mean, they’re spending huge amounts of money on, on the systems to run both marketing and sales.
Sam: That’s right. And so, and that’s what we see too. And it’s absolutely the case is what I tend to see is that like, they, they usually have the technology, right. And the technology is usually there for them. Um, but it is not usually leveraged in a way to enhance it. Process and make it easier to be kind of this bionic human salesperson.
That’s supercharged with the ability to follow up and in the enterprise world, I see. They usually have, you know, they do a decent job getting their newsletter out, right to the different segments of clients. They’re pretty good about that. And usually they’re using Marquetto in Salesforce, you know, like you could, with a, you know, you could kind of do the same thing with MailChimp.
And, and so they’re just pretty under utilized. Usually they’ve spent a lot of time designing the visuals of the database, right. But not necessarily thinking about how do we follow up with people at different stages of the sales cycle when business needs to be repeated. A lot of, it’s just some kind of really basic trigger or list.
And they’re still building reports that aren’t dynamic and have paying somebody to build those things. To say, oh, who, who should we follow up with? You know, who should we, whose time for the recurring are? And like, let’s take a manufacturer, you have to recertify certify something, right? Oh, it’s time to get this person certified.
Okay. Let’s all send them personal emails. And then that gets tracked into the CRM system. So they, they use these modern tools, but largely, and this isn’t, of course there’s a, there’s always the outliers, but largely they use them. As like old school CRMs, just a place for the information versus using it to really drive process and follow up.
And that’s the opportunity loss that we see the most. Whereas you’ve got these folks who are icon, like hand-to-hand combat salespeople, right? They’re going out to trade shows. They’re doing all these things that are the, they they’re effective, but they’re also kind of an old school way. Of selling. Um, they go out, they get a stack of business cards and then they follow up with the hot prospects and all that information is in the CRM system.
And then, you know, that person’s getting the news. Maybe if they’ve got them on the right list. But outside of that, they’re not really following up with the different specific product lines and things that they could be interested in and making sure they’re introduced to other parts of the business that they, that that prospect could then buy after they bought the first thing and educating people because the old school role of a sales person, right.
Largely outside of closing, you was to educate you on your options. We have the internet. Now we have technology that can help you do that. And that’s the gap. That’s the big gap that we’ve, we’ve really worked to fill when, when we’re working with a company and then the rest flows from there, right? You have process, that’s all downstream of that initial stuff, but the, if you can get.
Your conversions up then you’re basically saying, Hey, we’re doing this amount of work to go out and generate leads and interest in people being excited about our products. And you’re getting more effectiveness, more efficiency out of that top of the funnel work that you’re doing.
Mike: Interesting. I mean, th the, the thing I, I wonder about is, you know, th these, these salespeople or marketers that large enterprises, they’re smart people.
Why aren’t they. Seeing the problem and addressing it.
Sam: So here’s a, here’s what we see. Usually the marketers, yeah. In a company are excited about it. They want to do it, but they get pushback from the salespeople because salespeople naturally want to guard their, you know, they’re hunters, they’re going out there hunting a good one.
They naturally want to guard their deals. Um, and they don’t necessarily want to tell everybody how it’s done and that’s okay. But if you can equip that sales person. And make them a more bionic salesperson where they could be following up with hundreds of prospects at a time that are somewhat interested in.
They’re going to have the opportunity then to have more closing calls versus prospecting only calls. Um, I kind of went around the questionnaire a little bit, but I think that. Reason it’s an issue is because the bigger, the enterprises are typically the slower they move and there’s more politics. And so, you know, if you’re a medium sized business, you can make decisions and just put them in place pretty quickly.
And your, your, your biggest challenge is bandwidth. But if you make the decision, there’s not a lot of pushback politically, uh, within an organization. So the bigger you are, the more pushback yard you might, you know, we see people get, um, the more consensus you need to change, the way things are done. And. I think that’s why it moves largely slower.
And that’s also why you see some of these really small digital oriented businesses just crush it. Cause they can make D businesses decisions so fast and changes so fast that they’re really effective at that. But the, you know, they don’t have the, um, market presence at some of these enterprise companies have, and that’s where enterprise companies really have a leg up.
They’ve got branding market presence of that, but most of their marketing is usually. PR oriented, um, marketing versus automation oriented marketing, and you can have both. So, and is that kind of answer the question again? That’s
Mike: a great answer. I love the idea of that ratio between closing to prospecting calls.
I thought
Sam: I was one of them. Yeah. Like that’s as a sales person, what do you wanna do you want to be on, you know, if I can get a closing calls all day long versus out hunting, like if marketing does a good job, I’ve got leads. And after that, it’s up to me. Usually they get passed off, but they’re not followed up with, and the sales person, just by the nature of time being constrained, they’re going to go after the hottest prospects, the biggest deals that’s going to be top of mind.
And if you don’t have any kind of automation did follow up with all those other semi interested prospects that probably would buy something as long as you maintained, you know, top of mind presence. And educated them about how the product or service benefits him, the amount of sales you could close and closing.
Cause you could be on, I mean, you can have your calendar booked out way more than you normally would.
Mike: So that sounds great. I, I mean, I it’s just like, you know, I can imagine every sales person listening, just going. Yeah. That’s what I
Sam: want. Yeah. That’s what I want. I’ve heard they’re closing calls all day making my commissions.
Right. That’s that’s the magic, right? If you could put that automation in place and buy into it and say, Hey, I want to leverage these systems and not keep all this stuff in a little notebook to myself and just put in the minimum that I’m asked for, you know, what a good automation team. And it’s usually driven.
Oftentimes driven out of the marketing’s side of things is going to do is, is they’re going to help you close more deals. And so if you can. Information back to them where they’re going to help you find better prospects. They’re going to help you create longer-term follow-up. And I think every, every sales person has heard it, but like the magic is in the follow-up.
Right. It’s it’s not that you’re closing a deal on the first call. That’s like, you know, sure. That’s lovely. But like that doesn’t happen most of the time. It’s a, it’s a follow-up game and any good Salesforce knows that. Right. They’re real good at that. Yeah. And so we take that idea and take the busy work of followup, which is manually sending that communication and getting it out at the right time so that someone’s actually got a customer journey and experience and automate it.
And there’s a lot of different ways to do that. A lot of ways to look at it. But the core idea is that if you can follow up better at that stage of interest to converting to a sale over the course of at least an average sale site, Make sure you maintain communication. You’re going to generate more business.
You’re going to close more deals.
Mike: So, I mean, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve had a bit of a popper, uh, some of the enterprise companies, I mean, is this, uh, an enterprise specific problem or are there similar problems with smaller and mid-sized companies?
Sam: Yeah, no, it’s definitely not an enterprise specific problem. And in any way, um, it just happens to be pretty acute.
Yeah. Um, I think the, the, uh, oh, let’s call it like the lead waste. Like the number of leads that come in that are then just wasted in enterprise companies is more noticeable, um, because they generally have more interest and inquiry. Okay. But it’s the same with a small business and it’s actually almost more important in a small or medium-sized business drawing.
That’s kind of a huge range, especially here in the U S you know, what’s classified as a small business. Um, The bottom line is like, if you could follow up with every one of the leads that come in and you don’t have to hire more people to make that part of your business scale, then all the effort that you do for marketing and getting interest, which is probably the hardest thing anybody can do in business.
Right. It’s like getting interest in their business, getting that awareness. Well, then you’re, you’re going to increase the efficiency or like the effectiveness, you know, the percentage. Of people who are going to become customers by following up, I don’t care what you do. It can be the most basic follow-up, you know, you can get very sophisticated.
You can branch logic of if they do this, or if they do that. But at the, at the end of the day, if you follow up versus not for a longer period of time and educate people and remind them that you’re there, see if they still have the problem that your product sells, you’re going to win more business, no matter what kind of business.
So it’s not universal it’s or it’s not specific to enterprise. It just happens to be enterprises. You know, it’s a fun place, this space to play in because of the spend more money to solve the problem. Um, but it’s, uh, it’s not specific. It’s actually, I think a lot of times easier to implement these solutions for a little bit smaller business because there’s less politics involved and they, they tend not to comp over complicated cause they just want the result faster.
Cause it’s, it’s a little more pressing need.
Mike: Brilliant. I, I think this leads on that to the next question is if someone engages with mobile pocket office and starts talking to you about a social, I mean, do you have a process? Do you have an approach? I mean, how’d you go about fixing these issues?
Sam: Yeah.
And we do, we do have a process and approach because without it, you’re kind of like Willy nilly all over the place. And then what we found and what we’ve done is we’re always adapting our processes as well, but. Let me give you kind of the framework of how we think about this with people, because it’s something that people can, can, you know, you technically don’t need us to go use this framework.
Right. We help catalyze that process. We have experienced across industries. So we pull that experience into the experience, um, to, you know, cause you don’t know what you don’t know in terms of what’s going on, but there, what would you can find out is where do you have opportunities for automation? Right.
And we talked about. That specific conversion phase of sales, you know, leads to sales, but I’m going to give you the full picture. Cause this is what we do with people, as we say, okay, if you want to automate things and you feel like you can benefit from that, you’ve somehow gotten this idea. You know, you want to follow up more, whatever it may be.
The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to look at your, your business from your, okay. There’s there’s five pillars, any business doesn’t matter size industry scale. Everybody’s got them, some are done better. Some of them, yeah, worse. You’ve got to attract new business. All right. That’s that marketing work of generating interest.
You got to convert that interest. So that’s the convert states are attract, convert into leads and sales, and then you’ve got to fulfill whatever you prefer. Then the good businesses delight their customers by offering a ways to use the product better, keeping up with it, uh, giving them new opportunities to buy more from them that, that benefit what they’ve, you know, compliment what they’ve already bought and help them as a customer and then re referrals.
So those are the five pillars attract, convert, fulfill delight, refer you with me.
Mike: That’s that sounds great. It sounds, I mean, somewhat reminiscent of the HubSpot model. I don’t know if you’re familiar. Yeah.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. And so you’ll see it across a lot of these different tools, right? They talk about it in these kind of pillar ideas.
It’s like buckets and it’s a great way to think about it. And so we really, really, you know, you, it’s common to see it and it’s for good reason, because then in those buckets, you look at those and you go, what are my processes within these sections of the system of our business, right? What do we actually do?
Within these, and that’s where it starts to break down people get that picture. They go, yeah, we know we attract convert, fulfill, maybe we delight, we get some referrals or like maybe we have a process for referrals where we consistently ask systematically. But, uh, where people get stuck at that point is where do they, how do they find out what their processes are today and how do they figure out of those processes, which should be automated.
And let me lead you down that path. Cause this is what we do with folks. The first thing is we for the funny thing is like we do all this digital automation and we implement it, but we take this very analog approach. We have everybody print off, um, as a spreadsheet for three days worth of 15 minute intervals.
And so just for three days, you give everybody on the team. And you can do this in smaller chunks too. Like if you’re just working with the marketing and sales team, then you, you know, you’re working with your attract and convert, not your fulfillment as much. And so you’d give them this spreadsheet and say, okay, what we want to do is just fill out what do you do every, every 15 minutes, make a note of what you’ve done throughout the day for three days.
And you have to position it that, like, we’re not going to use this to say you’re not productive. It’s just to understand. What processes you do throughout the day? What constitutes the work of your business? Right? What actually makes it your time? And now you have a pattern and some people need to do it a little bit longer.
Maybe you need to do four or five days, or like you have cycles. You know, you, you came back from a trade show. What do you do after that type of deal? Um, with coronavirus, those are largely like, not a thing as much. You just look at what do you do? And now that you’ve documented that in a, we call it a personal activity, log, a pals sheet, which is a name we’ve assigned to it.
And now that you’ve documented that now you understand your process within the system, right? And you may need to do that. Like I said, in different phases. The business year, stuff like that, but you’ll understand. Okay, here’s the busy work. Like I’m moving this information from here to here. I’m sending an email to this interested prospect, blah, blah, blah.
Now you have your process. And two things come out of that. One is of that. What is effective today? What works? What gets you new business? Right? Um, if we’re looking at those top two things. Once you started to understand what works. Those are things that you should start to look at and go, okay, that works.
How much time does it take me to do that and have it? What can I automate? And then that’s that. And only at that point is when we start looking at the technology tools involved to make the automation happen, right. We’re trying to design the house first, so to speak and then get the appropriate tools to build it versus finding tools and then building a house.
So. Once you understand your process now, you know what you can automate. And then you also see, this is where it’s is hard to do, or it can be hard to do without someone else who’s seen it across different industries is, is where their gaps, holes, and opportunities to improve the process, make it more robust.
You know, in this case, we talk a lot about the follow-up longer, make it branch so that the logic makes more sense for different customer segments and driving that using data. And also turning it off at the appropriate time so that people aren’t getting communication when they shouldn’t be. And then you can do that for each segments of your business, um, that attract, convert, fulfill, delight, and refer.
And so if we start there, if we get that going well, we increase your conversions. Well, of course then, you know, you’ve got a fulfillment issue that you have to deal with because you’ve got increased and fulfillment that you have to do and then delight and refer those all kind of go together. But that is literally the steps.
So you [email protected] I think the name changed recently. I have to find it, but, um, to actually map out what you do after you’ve documented that process. And that’s actually like a call that we have, and now there’s a really clear picture of what goes. To run the business.
And at that point also you get this benefit that it’s easier to train somebody new because you just documented how the business runs. And then you start to put numbers to the value of automation. There’s two opportunities for automation. One is, and they both help you scale. But one. One that saves money, right?
Where are there holes in your process where you’re leaking money? Because you’re, you’re paying more people to move information around from one system to another, right? That’s a leak that’s money you can save. So automation can save you money in that way and allow you to scale, um, and free up humans to do more creative work, more interesting work.
And, you know, occasionally people lose job. That’s the unfortunate nature of it, but like, Humans want to do interesting work. They don’t want to do repetitive stuff. Um, and so, and given, give somebody that opportunity, they’re probably gonna flourish, be more excited about their work, all of that. So that’s just the side benefit, but the other is where can you make more money?
Right? How can you be more profitable? Because you’re not communicating, you’re not capturing people’s attention and converting that to it. And so those are the two big things. So they all relate to scaling, but one is saving money. One is making more money. And then on the, uh, you can ask some questions after this, but like on the saving money side, that was pretty easy.
You got how much time are we spending doing this on a, on a weekly or monthly basis? Whatever the timeline is, that makes sense for the price. And you know, when we pay for it for this to get done, what does the person who’s doing this? What’s their time build that? Or what do we, what do we pay them? And if we automate it and we pay for it once with an automation tool to get it built out, or we built it out, you know, then you can do some basic math and understand the savings.
Mike: So it’s interesting. You seem to be, um, looking at it from both sides of that return on investment equation, you know, both reducing the amount of money you have to invest, uh, to implement the process and also increasing the return by making it more efficient.
Sam: Yep, exactly. And so, you know, the basic idea where you can think about this.
On the saving money side, someone who’s doing administrative tasks that are required to make a business run. If the majority of their tasks can be automated and you pay them anywhere between, let’s say $50,000 a year or something like that. Right. And all the health care that’s involved and all that. And like, generally that person’s also doing other stuff most of the time, they don’t just do.
Wrote admin work. In fact, the majority of the time, what we see as like that person is overwhelmed with stuff to do. And so if you can that up, then they’re going to be more focused on the more on the higher value items. But at the same time you can think about it like, well, if we invested that same amount once to build out the automation and we don’t have, and the automation never takes a holiday and never get sick and all those things about automation that.
Where computers are different than humans, then you’ve invested at once versus having to hire maybe another person or pay that person to do those things year after year and consistently most of the time.
Mike: Yeah. So that’s, that’s fascinating. I mean, I guess one of the pushbacks you hear against automation is that it creates in flexibility.
Once you’ve coded that automation, you can’t change the process. Is that something you hear from, from clients and what’s your response?
Sam: I am glad you brought that up because I actually, you know, we don’t hear that because we take people down a different path, but it is, um, it is a problem and here’s how you address it.
We live in day and age where the tools are not what’s so fat. Fantastic. Right? They are fantastic in what they do, but they it’s, it’s the strategy around it. That’s more important. So if ever, we see somebody going down the path of trying to custom code something where it’s fairly inflexible and it’s not relatively easy to modify, we, we try and hit brakes and stop them because we live in an age where the tools are.
So. The interfaces are so easy. You know, I, we do some custom coding with folks, but largely it’s the strategy around the automation and the value that it provides to the business. That’s, that’s the real magic and like tweaking it until it’s better and better. Um, and I can talk a bit about that, but the main thing is that.
You know, kind of like my, my public service announcement is, is don’t code anything that you don’t have to use drag and drop builders, use these easy to use tools they’re out there. You know, when you have to code stuff, you do, but the ecosystem of tools is so strong nowadays that you should be able to use a tool that’s with a few clicks, allows you to modify the process.
Lines of code. Um, and so the, the end of the day, like done well, we turn the systems over to our clients and give them methodologies to improve the systems so that they can track the effectiveness of it. And then what I love to see is like you have at least one or two smart people on the team who are smart in the realm of these tools, and they’re gonna, they’re gonna be able to make those tweaks internally.
And, you know, typically what happens, we sometimes will do it for folks, but we just guide them on the strategy and help them make decisions. Once the big implementation has been put in place, the infrastructure is there.
Mike: That’s great. I think that’s,
Sam: you shouldn’t be coding now. Anybody who’s like who’s writing code is like, you should be writing code.
If you’re building a new system for somebody that is like, then you’re going to sell a bunch of people. But if you’re just using a system to try and automate some things, unless you’ve got a. Complex situation that just can’t handle it. Uh, and maybe you need something custom, but the reality is like on the sales conversion side, you’re probably not gonna run into it.
You’re gonna run into unique things and you might have to adapt a little bit, but like you should be able to adapt around and use the tools that exist today. Fulfillment’s a different story. You know, fulfillment gets kind of a more custom experience. A lot of it. Um, but fulfillment stays less fluid. It’s is less changing.
You know, if you have a product or service, you can usually, you’re pretty happy to invest in the fulfillment automation because you know how that works and is consistent. But what you want to tweak is you want to tweak that, that experience in the, in the, in the attract and convert stages. For sure. So, yeah.
Dopey code. Use do you use the like, easy to use tools, um, and how, and, and how you got to set up. You got to think about how you set them up right there. That’s the deal, right? Cause like you can buy Salesforce, you can buy a marketer, you can buy an Ontraport, you can buy or whatever these tools are by HubSpot.
But if you set it up like pilot junk, you know, and don’t utilize it right. That’s where you’re going to go. Oh, this thing doesn’t really do what it’s promised. Right? It does do what it’s promised. You just got to design it for your situation.
Mike: Absolutely. Makes sense. Um, I, I I’m interested. Do you have some examples of, you know, perhaps some customers you’ve helped and how you’ve helped them out, so you can perhaps explain a little bit as to what it feels like to work with you guys.
Yeah,
Sam: absolutely. One of the customers I mentioned in the enterprise realm is Jax Nippon. So they’re a bigger company, people know, and they’ve got a bunch of different business lines. Um, one of the, one of their headquarter office here is in the, for one of their lines in the United States, in Georgia actually.
And they have a in there. So I’ll talk about one of the products, which is the, um, people probably do you guys know Tyvec right. Does that ring a bell? Like the siting of houses stuff like the waterproof membrane on the side? No.
Mike: No we don’t. But
Sam: so if you think about it, right, and you see a house being built, you see that like when it goes up, there’s like that plasticky looking stuff in the house.
Yeah. We’d call it a
Mike: dam course over here in England.
Sam: Okay. Yeah. So Dan, of course, so you take that stuff and that’s one of the things they make. Right. They make a version of that. Um, you know, of course they think it’s superior. Things like that, but that’s, besides the point, they have a team of salespeople that were going out to trade, shows the, reaching out to prospects.
They’re trying to find dealers, you know, who are, who are working with larger accounts and they had sugar, CRM enterprise. People probably know that. So older CRM system, you have pretty flexible. You can do what you want. Not, not crazy, uh, easy to use, like some of these newer ones, but. It’s a CRM system.
Right? And unfortunately, most of these tools just get used like CRM systems anyways, versus actual marketing automation and sales automation tools. But they would go out, they would meet people. This was in the time of trade shows when we did this one and the same can be said for anything virtual, it’s just following up.
They would go out and they would get a list of prospects and people would become interested. Yeah. Then they would only follow up with the hot prospects and it was all scheduling via email, you know, very cumbersome. And they would take these business cards and import them in manually to some Excel spreadsheet if they even did that.
And then the rest of the business cards would live in a drawer on their desk when they got back from the event. So there’s a lot of opportunity waste. Right? All of these cards could be potential costs. But they’re only following up with one or two hot prospects. Cause that was, you know, how they are meeting a quota and helped them reach their goals.
They had no automation around up. And so a really basic, but very effective example in their case was to start there at that aspect of it, which was understanding. That helping them understand that they could, you know, automate pieces of that where, Hey, now you can just use your phone, take a picture of the business card in this app.
It pops it in to, uh, you know, in their case, a tool like sugar CRM, and that talked to another tool that could send some automated emails that could educate somebody with some videos and information on a, uh, like 60 day sales cycle. So it spanned that whole gap of time with information about the product, right?
So you never were forgetting about that person. And then each of the emails had an opportunity to schedule a call cause they were still, you know, we didn’t, didn’t take it to the extreme where they’re buying online in their situation. They were still closing that deal and doing, doing the custom deal on the phone, but what they were doing is everything leading up to that closing.
Was able to be automated where all the followup was education-based it was bringing the customer into their world. And also the primary thing in their case was just not forgetting about people. Right? You met them at a trade show, everybody goes back. And then a few days later, everybody forgets about everybody.
They said their follow up with except for the hot lead. And so now they. Gone from one or two really interesting prospects per trade show to following up with all the business cards they got. And so they were able to increase the conversion ratio of people simply by maintaining in touch because you know, their competitors were doing the same thing, trying to follow up a lot of cases manually.
And then, so that’s one step of the process. It also took the burden. We introduced a calendar scheduling tool that allowed them to schedule those calls. With people more effectively, more efficiently, less back and forth, busy work of, of sales time. Um, and so their effort could be focused on closing costs.
The other side of that was understanding in their case, their relationship to customers and referrals. Right? Where did referrals come from? How, how did they get referrals when people refer them? Something? What, what was the, what happened? Like what was the process that was experienced? And based on that building process to remind them when it was time to send an email in their case, we kept it still kind of manual about asking for a referral.
Right. Which is at a certain stage in the journey. So you just delivered something, the customer’s happy they’ve got what they want. You just find that, that point where the biggest joy is in the customer’s experience, right. Or that something has just been fulfilled on a timeline. That’s when you need to ask for that referral.
And so just by reminding and putting process in place to ask for referrals, they were able to increase their referrals quite a bit because of process now being in place to remind them through some pieces of automation. Hey, it’s time to ask for a referral and F and, and bugging the sales person to remind them while they’re in the middle of whatever hot lead they’re talking to, you know, closing.
Deal making whatever that is at the enterprise level, which can, you know, that is something that can be part of the, you know, part of the process is making that deal and that can consume time. And so if we can automate everything else around that and remind the sales team, Hey, you have an opportunity for a good referral, right?
You’ve just, you’ve just your, the fulfillment team has delivered the product or had it arrived. Everything’s there happens. Then now is the time to ask for that referral. And that’s a natural way to increase business in an amazing way. And it’s, you know, the marketing’s effectively free for that. So those are two examples out of that.
Any, any questions that come out of that? No,
Mike: I mean, that’s, that’s absolutely fascinating and I’m sure people listening would be, you know, really interested in talking to and working out how it could be applied to their business. So I guess the question is how would, how would people get in contact with you if they’d like to follow up after listening, John.
Sam: Yeah, well, that’s the easiest way you got to mobile pocket office.com. Um, and on the front page, we’ve got a big book now button, you can, you can book a call and that’s a call with Josh and myself. Um, and then our team is, you know, we, we manage the implementations. I I’ve, I primarily managed all the implementations once we’ve done the strategy work.
Um, and then we QA that, but we have a team that actually does the billing. Of it. And, uh, so that way we’re freed to attack to do the things we like we talked about, which is to be on those, on those calls, you know, prospecting and closing costs. Um, so we kind of eat our own dog food in that way. So it’s real obvious on the site book.
Now you can book a call. It’s got an automatic schedule. It books, it all on our calendars, it puts it on your calendar and it’s, it’s really easy, you know, use automation to our benefit. They’re there too.
Mike: So actually doing what you preach, which is great. Hear, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Sam, it’s been, been really interesting.
It’s certainly, um, uh, great to hear someone talk about how to use tools effectively rather than just the features of tools. So, uh, I really appreciate your time on the, uh, uh,
Sam: Thank you. I’ll leave people with one other thought. Just one thought to kind of wrap it up is don’t try to make a lot of big changes all at once.
It’s hard, make a lot of small changes and also that’ll get, especially in the enterprise world that as people see those quick hits of results and it’s easier, things are faster. They take less time there they’re more consistent. There’ll be happier to do then the next thing. And before you know it, you’ve covered a lot of great.
Mike: Perfect. That’s great advice. Thank you very much.
Sam: Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B tech. We hope you enjoy the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more. Please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
—————————————————————————————————-
If you answer yes to one of these questions.
- Need to fix your business and get a life?
- Just starting your automation journey?
- Feeling overwhelmed on where to begin your automation?
- Just feel sometimes like chucking your whole system out the window?
Then we can help.
Here’s the problem: You are manually doing everything in your business. And have no idea where to where to start or how to start automating. Finally, you want to be working ON your business not IN your business.
Here’s the solution: Understand what your process looks like to acquire a customer. By making a map of each and every step a customer takes in your funnel. Then reduce any mistakes they can make when entering information.
Easier said than done. Traditionally this is called Business Process Engineering and we at Mobile Pocket Office have taken this concept along with Six Sigma and LEAN manufacturing concepts concepts to improve a business … aka be human where it counts, otherwise automate!
Just because your business is still afloat, doesn’t mean it isn’t taking on water. But you probably already know this, and that’s why you are here. Identifying that there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be is the first step, but what are the next steps? Mobile Pocket Office is leading the way in helping new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity.
