102 | How to Capture More Revenue Without Spending More on Marketing with Jason Kramer

Patrick: [00:00:00] Have you ever stopped to think about how much money might be slipping through the cracks in your business? Not because of bad marketing or lack of leads, but because of what happens after the lead comes in. So many entrepreneurs are unknowingly leaving tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table, all because their follow-up systems aren’t billed to capture the opportunity that’s already there.
Welcome back to another episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. I’m your host, Patrick Mongan, and today’s conversation is one every business owner needs to hear. I’m joined by Jason Kramer, founder of Cult Device, and together we dig deep into how you can turn disorganized leads. Into organized revenue.
Jason’s built a system that helps entrepreneurs stop leaking, profit, simplify their processes, and finally scale with confidence. In this episode, we’ll talk about why most CRMs fail, how to design one that actually works for your business. And how automation and lead scoring can help you convert more [00:01:00] sales without spending another dollar on marketing.
Whether you’re running your business out of spreadsheets or switched CRMs more times than you care to admit, this conversation will show you where the hidden money is hiding and how to get to it. And as you listen, I want you to think bigger than just software. The same systems that help you capture more revenue can also help you keep more through smart tax strategy and intentional planning.
So when you’re ready to start putting these ideas to work, head over to vital strategies.com/tax and start building out your custom tax strategy today. That’s one of the best ways to make sure the money you’re working so hard to earn actually stays in your business. That’s vital strategies.com/tax where smart entrepreneurs turn tax into leverage.
Alright, let’s dive in. Here’s my conversation with Jason Cramer. From Culty. I’m excited about our conversation today with Jason Kramer from Culty. I think this is going to be fantastic. I think as entrepreneurs we’re leaving lots of money on the [00:02:00] table. I don’t know if we’ll be able to quantify that, but, uh, I think as you, uh, get into this conversation, you’re gonna see opportunity in your business to, uh, start capturing more money.
And so Jason, thank you so much for joining us here today.
Jason: Thanks, Patrick for inviting me.
Patrick: So I’m seeing the, the problems that the entrepreneur is facing, and I tease this a little bit, but I, I think at times can be drowning in disorganized leads. We can have great marketing funnels, and then people come in and then, then what do we do with them?
And we have clunky systems and inconsistent follow up, uh, all of which stifles our, our growth. And we, we think about how much money we spend on, on marketing and how much we desire to scale our business. And like that’s, that’s real issue. Then, uh, the entrepreneur’s just frustrated, feels overwhelmed, uh, even despite their success.
They’re like, man, I know there’s money left on the table. And, um, we as entrepreneurs, we want the confidence that those leads and relationships are being managed properly. And then at the end of the day, business leaders shouldn’t have to choose between [00:03:00] growth and efficiency. Scaling, scaling should be smart and measurable and sustainable.
And so I think you’re gonna help us, uh, solve some of these problems today. So thanks so much for joining us.
I’ll, I’ll sure try. Yeah.
Patrick: Uh, this is great. So can you give us a little bit of your background and explain cult eyes and then we’ll dig into it from
Jason: there? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, the, the quick story is, you know, I come from the world of marketing and advertising, so you might like, well, how’s that?
Have anything to do with CRM? Right? What kind of transition? So I owned an agency, actually being in the agency world for a little while, owned an agency for 16 years, did a lot of marketing, branding, web development, all that good stuff. And what I realized was that a lot of companies, like you just said, Patrick, spending a lot of money, right on marketing efforts, on just networking, trade shows, you name it, all the things of the human capital time, as well as from owners trying to build and grow that business.
But a lot of times the money was. Forgot about in terms of the follow through. If that deal didn’t close right away, then what [00:04:00] happened to it? Right. It probably failed by the wayside, and so after running that marketing agency for 16 years, I wanted a change. And for me, I thought this was a huge opportunity.
To your point before as well, it’s not that the solution is difficult, people don’t know where to turn. What I want to do is create a company that can help guide, almost think of it as, you know, you’re going on a, uh, a hike right, to a, to a mountain that you’ve never been on. It’s a lot easier to get that mountain if you have person that’s been there hundreds of times before and knows the correct path.
Mm-hmm. And that’s what cult wise does. We know the path to how to get a CRM to, I’ll say, play nice with not only your existing processes, but existing technology you already have for the business. You know, we’re not trying to come in and replace everything. We’re trying to fix what’s broken. And we do this, you know, like I said, a lot of handholding and really taking people through that whole process and trying to make it as smooth as possible.
Patrick: Yeah. This is exciting. So I’m, I’m looking forward to getting into this ’cause I, I think I’ve got lots of questions and, and I’m [00:05:00] gonna, I’m gonna confess something here. I think we’re on our fourth, maybe fifth CRM, you know, and it’s generally been because of my frustration with, you know, this thing or that thing.
And the solution probably was just call Jason and, uh. Just understand how to use the CRM. I’m just thinking through our, our process here. So I, I assume we should start with, I don’t know, I wanna call it an audit. Like, let’s, let’s just assess everything that we’ve got going on. Can you walk us through like, uh, am I on the right path here?
Uh, are we assessing the current situation before we we start to build a plan?
Jason: Well, we have to, right? We have to understand what, where the, the gaps are, where the problems are before we come up with any type of solution. So the common things that I always talk to people about, and certainly anybody listening today can do this stuff, right, for their business, whether you’re the owner listening or someone else in an organization or what have you, is write down on paper what your process is to acquire a new customer.
And it may sound very basic, but [00:06:00] when that phone rings, ding, ding, ding, right? Or the, or the email comes through, right? Your inbox or the website lead comes through, what’s the first thing that happens and who handles that? What’s the second thing that happens after that? And so on and so on. And what you’re gonna define is your process for not only your sales process, but for your pipeline.
And I think a lot of businesses don’t have a clear pipeline. We see it all the time, Patrick, where in fact, I was just talking to an organization in Manhattan this week and they got six salespeople. Everybody has their own Google sheet and everybody’s got tracking different information in a different format.
Mm-hmm. It’s impossible for anybody to leverage that data in any concise way. If you put that on paper, you’re probably gonna stumble upon things that you didn’t realize were actually happening. Um, especially if you’re growing at a, at a decent pace and you’re bringing on new people. If you’re relying on those people just coming up with their own process and they not following what’s work for other people in your organization, it’s really gonna lead to a lot of problems down the road.
Patrick: Yeah, [00:07:00] it’s so true. We, we’ve seen businesses surprisingly running. Uh, a massive amount of data through a Google sheet and, and trying to keep track of it all. And it’s like, it’s not, it’s not a database, you know, it’s just a way to capture the information. There’s not a good way to extract, uh, good info out of there.
So, is it okay if we take a little left turn and, and talk about CRMs for a second? Sure. Can you walk us through, and, and I’m sure it depends on industry, but can you walk us through who you see as the big players in the CRM space that, uh. If somebody’s listening to this going, yeah, I need to, I need to make a change.
I’m running out of a Google sheet or Post-it notes, or what have you, where should they start? And, and I know that the answer, let me, let me preface that. The answer is called Jason and let him understand your business before. But like, I, I’m just curious what, you know, what you’re seeing is some, some useful tools out there that are doing a nice job in the marketplace.
Jason: You know, not to, that’s not to derail us, but there’s, um, a real estate broker that I’m good friends with, a family kind of friend. Her [00:08:00] name is Jackie. And so, you know anything about Breaking Bad Better Call Saul. She, yeah. Real estate signs all over. Better call Jackie. Mm-hmm.
And I
Jason: mean, then she’s just like dominates like the neighborhood because like everybody’s a catchy thing, right?
Yeah. Keep on saying, you know, well you should just call Jason.
Um, yeah,
Jason: so I don’t think it’s so much for me about naming off any particular platform. Mm-hmm. We do have a research guide, which I’ll get to a little bit later on and where people can find that on. What to you look for when evaluating your current system or trying to find a new one.
The most important thing is, is these three things. So the first is, you know, who on the team is gonna be using this piece of software? You know? Mm-hmm. What role are they gonna have with it and where are they gonna use it? Are they gonna be using it in their car, you know, on the next appointment? Are they need to access it from their phone?
Are they gonna be sitting at a desk? The other thing you have to factor in is what are your goals? You know, as a business, what are you trying to track and to achieve? A lot of times people look at the features and benefits and you know, we all say it the [00:09:00] shiny object syndrome and they’re like, Ooh, you know, look at this.
Or Hey, my buddy over here of loves HubSpot. HubSpot must be amazing. I’m gonna use HubSpot. And in six months in you’re like, HubSpot sucks. It’s terrible.
Yeah, it’s
Jason: not terrible. It’s a great platform, but it may not be the right platform for you.
Mm-hmm. So
Jason: understanding what are you trying to get out of it, right.
I think is super simple. And you don’t have to go really down the rabbit hole of goals. It’s just like we wanna track. ROI and marketing spend, or we want to track the pipeline, we want to do this, we wanna do that. What are those high level goals? Um, and I think another two things that are really important and always go overlooked is where do you see yourself in a year, two years and three years with your business, and more importantly, have a CRM is gonna play a role into that.
Often companies are looking at their wallet and they’re saying, okay, well we don’t need anything really expensive. We don’t need Salesforce right now. We don’t need to spend a hundred thousand dollars, you know, on installation. But if you’re saying, okay, well we’re gonna go for our series two funding, or we’re gonna go [00:10:00] for this and we’re gonna grow, you may need that platform in a couple of years, and it may be more cost effective to enter it now than switching over later on.
And then the third part is support. What I often find, Patrick, is the lower cost when it comes to SaaS software, usually the more crappy the support is. So if you’re getting something for free, you’re paying a few sh, you know, sheckles a month. You’re probably getting really bad support and you need that support because you need somebody to be able to answer questions.
So you get on a phone call, get on a video call, walk you through some strategy. You’re not gonna find that at these lower price point, you know, systems.
Mm-hmm.
Jason: So those are some of the things that I would say to look for if you are in the market of evaluating what you currently have or looking for something brand new.
Patrick: Yeah. This is great ’cause we’ve, uh, in all of the softwares that we’ve tried, we had Salesforce for a while and it was a, I think it’s a fantastic tool, but for us to make it do anything, it just costs tens of thousands of dollars every time we wanted to [00:11:00] like, you know, build a workflow out in there. And then every time we wanted to change that thing, it cost us more money to, and I was like, this, this is not, this is too expensive for us to like, you know, be able to, to run our, our firm out of, uh, to make it do the things we wanna do.
And so we ended up at a. Uh, we kind of went too far the other way. We found something that was, you know, pretty customizable, but it was too simple, you know, it, it lacked some of the complexity we needed from like a workflow point of view. And so we ended up kind of in our Goldilocks position after, uh, all said and done.
But, uh, one of the things you highlighted that I think is needs to be acknowledged too, is like, you know, switching CRMs creates all sorts of brain damage. You know, it is a lot of work to get all the data outta the old one, map it into the new one. You’re spending lots of time and energy on the, the front end.
So having an assessment done to figure out, you know, where you’re going and what your growth trajectory looks like, and make sure you have something that that works with, all of that is a critical piece. So, um, and I also wanna highlight, I, I had a friend of [00:12:00] mine, uh, one of our clients, they, they use HubSpot and they are like, you know, deep into it and it does all sorts of amazing things.
And my eyes were like, that would be incredible to have. And then. You know, I talked to a marketing firm that we, we work with, and they’re like, yeah, it’s, it’s an amazing tool, but you better be ready to spend, you know, to get all of those, those, uh, those features to, to run your, your marketing. And it’s like, okay.
You know, I don’t, I I don’t think we need all those shiny things yet. Right. So.
Right.
Patrick: Um, yeah. That’s, this is good. Um, okay, so now we’ve spent some time assessing our, our CRM and making sure that it’s, you know. What we want out of it, you know? Is it checking those boxes now? Can you talk us a little bit through the design phase and, and what it takes to like build something that, that everybody uses and uses?
Well,
Jason: yeah. So again, it goes back to what I said before, you know, what type of information are you collecting about your customers, about your prospects? You know, one of the mistakes we [00:13:00] always see in, and it is mostly in crm, so it could be in other business software. Is blank text boxes, like, they’re like the bane of my existence.
You know? I mean, like, you need to have consistent data, right? Mm-hmm. And so you go back the spreadsheet thing, right? And if people are just entering things in and typing things in and there’s no dropdown menus, and yes, you could have those in, um, in the spreadsheets, but they’re not as controlled right?
And locked down. Mm-hmm. And so that’s one of the things we look at is, is, you know, what, what are you using today? We just brought on. A company that does pool construction and sell spas and all these things. About a year ago, and everything was paper. They didn’t have anything digital except their service department.
So we looked at all their forms. We said, okay, if somebody fills out a contract, show us what the contract looks like. Show us what this looks like and this and that other thing looks like, and then we just digitized everything. We created digital formats for all of the ways that they’re collecting data.
We’re also look at existing data too. You know, that’s really important. Then the final piece, kind of like getting forward, going past that is, you know, [00:14:00] looking over the overarching, um, problems and trying to find those quick wins. I think that’s the biggest thing, Patrick, you know? Mm-hmm. There’s so much like you just said before, like, you buddy that has HubSpot, they’re doing all these amazing things.
You can do those things, but are they needed right now? You know? Mm-hmm. Like what are the critical things that we can do? You know, and one of the things, we might touch on this, but it’s something that probably will ring a bell to a lot of people listening, especially in the B2B space. Maybe even if you’re doing like a home service type business is quote, follow up.
That’s the number one thing we see in leakage. You know, you spend all this time and money and effort to generate a quote. You follow up for, you know, a few weeks for six weeks or two months. Eventually you just give up because you haven’t heard from them or they haven’t made a decision.
Yeah. It
Jason: doesn’t mean that person’s not gonna buy, you know?
Mm-hmm. There’s a quick story I just wanna quickly share. So when, we’ve done this for a lot of different businesses, but we brought on a roofing business, um, the family run business, they’re doing about $8 million a year, give or take, you know, in revenue in [00:15:00] Massachusetts. And what we notice is that they’re doing about a thousand quotes a year.
They have a small sales team of just a few people, and they have to light that five, six week mark. This is after they went to the home, like talked to the homeowner, like introduced themselves, did the proposal, did all this work, spent all this money to get the lead. They would just give up because they didn’t have time to keep chasing.
And I said to the owner, I said, listen, we need to build an automation sequence because the salesperson can’t do it. We’re gonna create a virtual salesperson within the CRM. And wouldn’t you know, Patrick, that in just about four months, we closed over 600 th $600,000 in revenue. Just from this automation sequence, just being like, knock, knock.
Like, did you hire anybody? Yeah. You know, and if you did, that’s great. Can you let us know why? You know? Mm-hmm. And then he started getting all this feedback from a quick one question survey we did of my, my friend did it. My, my neighbor referred somebody else, or price was too high or whatever.
Mm-hmm.
Jason: And they were just shocked on how efficient that process was for
Patrick: Yeah.
I think that’s, that’s [00:16:00] fantastic. And I, I’ve got a similar story. We would have a prospect, uh, come through our, our pipeline and we had lots of gaps in our, our, I’ll say our sales process on the follow up side. If somebody was like, no, not now, I’d be like, okay. And they would basically like, you know, exit my brain and that was disappear.
Um, a problem, you know, because, but what we did is we put those people on our podcast email list, so every week they get a new email just saying, Hey, here’s some new cool content. It’s shocking. How many responses we get to that. Like, Hey, can we set up a time to meet? And it’ll be like the subject, like, Jason Kramer tells you how to not lose millions of dollars, you know?
Yeah. Uh, because of your crappy CRM. And they’ll be like, can we set up a meeting? I’m like, yes, we can. So it just staying in front of people, like that was a really poor example. But it, it just shows like if you just stay. Connected with folks. Uh, imagine what my response rate would be if I like actually followed, had a sequence where I followed up with folks saying, Hey, [00:17:00] now it’s time.
Let’s go. You know, taxes are gonna be due here soon. Let’s, uh, let’s come up with a tax strategy. So, yeah. Uh, this is, this is good.
Jason: Absolutely. And the other thing, Patrick too is, you know, a lot of times people that we talk to, they may be listening, thinking the same thing about them say, is that. They don’t wanna be salesy, they don’t wanna be pushy.
They’re like, okay, well if the person’s not ready, like, you know, and there are other businesses that are very salesy, right? And they’re goal oriented to close that deal. Education goes a long way. You know, almost all the clients we work with, like going back to that pool company. If someone’s like, Hey, like I’m thinking about it for next year.
They’re not gonna get emails being like, Hey, ready to sign the contract. You want to come into the showroom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? They’re just gonna get like, Hey, if you hire somebody, this is the 10 things you should know about hiring a pool company. Mm-hmm. Or the next email. Did you also know the hidden cost about buying a pool like you have to pay for landscaping and all these other things?
You know, here’s some resources. And so it just keeps educating through that buyer’s journey. So if they are ready and when they are ready, they’re like, oh, this company really [00:18:00] helped me. They provide a lot of great information, you know, was able to use it and you’re more like, likely to go in that direction.
And so, um, the other piece too, which, you know, tying into all of what we’re talking about is the, the people that are not knocking on your door. And what I mean by that is. I always use the example of a car dealership, okay? Mm-hmm. You and I both have plenty of things to do, I’m sure, on a Saturday or Sunday morning, right?
Unless we’re in the market to buy a car or we actually will love cars, probably not going to a dealership and like walking in, looking around and sitting in the car, right? Right. Yeah. So think about your CRM where you don’t know who’s walking in the door, right? Because they could be going to your website, to your point, they could be looking at your weekly newsletter, your monthly newsletter.
Do you know? Like unless they’re calling or emailing you, you don’t know. And a good CRM is tracking all that activity and there’s a powerful function of a good CRM called lead scoring. We could [00:19:00] design lead scoring to say, okay, well if Jason comes to our website and does this, it’s kind of like a low tier sort of like, you know, um, behavior, right?
They’re just looking at our blog. Mm-hmm. We’ll give ’em five points, but if they go to our pricing page, we’re gonna give ’em a hundred points. ’cause that shows intent. Now all of a sudden, out of the thousands of people you got in your database, you got, you know, your 10% that have a high weed score and those are the people that the sales team should be tracking down and following up with.
And I can’t tell you how many times Patrick, like I call people, I start seeing that needle move and I’m like, Hey Patrick, what’s going on? It’s been six months since we spoke and they’re like, oh, what? Good timing. And like meanwhile, I know they were on the website for the last couple of days, right? For sure.
I don’t see that. But I use that timing to my advantage, and we’ve closed a tremendous amount of deals just with those insights. And to your point before, it’s low cost, right? Because I’m not spending money to bring that person back into my wheelhouse. They’re already there.
Patrick: Yeah, yeah. No, that’s, [00:20:00] that’s brilliant.
And and it is, it is amazing how valuable information is, you know, and we have so much of this available to us. Mm-hmm. But if we don’t have that data flowing through to us in a. In a productive way that I can see it and quickly go, Hey, here’s an opportunity that I need to go seize it again. It’s one of those leaks that, uh, is just costing me so much money.
And so I think this is, this is great. Um, let’s see. I am, I’m trying to think through some, some other email opportunities that, uh, that are out there. I, I just feel like this is such an important piece of the, the discussion and kind of keeping people top of mind. Now are, are you. Helping execute on those email strategies?
Is that something you’re like, Hey, let’s, let’s create this nurture sequence? Or is that, is that more of, Hey, we find this opportunity for you and go create this yourself? Or have your marketing team do that? How are these sequences coming together to, to make sure that we’re, we’re capitalizing on [00:21:00] this?
Yeah.
Jason: We’re the a architect, we’re the, uh, the contractor and we’re the building inspector. You know, we, we do it all. Um, so I mean, we can work with, you know, marketing teams internally of course, and marketing agencies mm-hmm. On behalf of our clients. But yeah, a lot of clients come to us and, and want help developing the strategy, the cadence, how many emails is the right number of emails?
What’s the frequency of those emails? What should the emails say? Right? Um, we do that a lot. And I think the one thing you talked before about what else with email, a huge component, and again, this is more of the HubSpots of the world, have functionalities like this. We have something called dynamic content.
And just to briefly explain, not to get technical at all, but everybody knows personalization. Hey Jason. Right? Or it’s like your company name’s inserted into the subject message that’s been around for decades and decades and decades. Yeah. What’s newer in the last, you know, five, 10 years and it’s gotten a lot more, um, we’ll get more robust as AI comes in.
The mix [00:22:00] is dynamic content, and what that means is that you could have a list of a thousand people. You could have one newsletter, but the headline, the graphic, the content, the subject message, all elements of the email can be completely unique for every individual based on something you know about them in a database.
So if you’re sending that email to an HR manager versus a sales manager versus the owner of a business versus somebody in one industry or another industry, we can completely reformat that email. So when they get it, it’s as close to home as possible to, yeah. You know, be on point with what they expect to visually see, but also more importantly, the language that is gonna get them to take some action.
And that’s a completely underutilized function of a lot of these platforms. Mm-hmm. That dynamic content feature. Everybody’s just doing the spray and pray in there. Sending out a newsletter to, uh, you know, great example I have going back a number of years ago, working with a children’s museum. They had a database of like 30,000 people.
This was. [00:23:00] Sponsors, right? Donors, people that just walked in for the day and never came back. People that have birthday parties, there, you name it. And their newsletter, Patrick, it was literally, it was like, you know, the Bible. I mean, it was so long, it was like, you know, you heard the term infant scroll. It was just going on and on and on, and I think it had like 42 links in an email was outrageous.
And, uh, like, like, what are you guys doing? I’m like, a, you probably have really crappy deliverability because you have so many links in your email and so many images and. There was a whole world of problems with it, but nevertheless, mm-hmm. You’re sending so much information and you’re trying to cover every single possible person that’s gonna be on here.
Why not just split it up? One email for donors, one email for responses, one email for people that came in just for the day trying to sell them a membership to come back, you know? And that’s what we eventually did. But it’s, it was just like, oh my God. You know? And that happens. I can’t tell you how often, because why?
It’s easy and it’s quick. When you’re using a very basic email service provider, like a MailChimp or something, [00:24:00] you don’t really have any other choice. Like that’s, you know, that’s the easy way to do it.
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is great. And, and you, you bring up a point that I’m, I’m curious your perspective on, ’cause I see so many tools out there, right?
Like, I can have my, uh, CRM do things like manage my email list and send the email and all those other things. Or I can get a. Uh, another software to do those pieces for me. And, and so how much, ’cause I’m gonna share a little bit of my bias and, uh, I’m happy to have you correct this. I feel like oftentimes when softwares get out of their lane, okay, like, let’s say they’re a really good email marketing, uh, software, and then they’re like, Hey, you know what we’re gonna do?
We’re gonna bolt on some CRM, or, we’re a great CRM, we’re gonna bolt on some of these other like pieces. They tend to do those other things poorly. And so my thought is like, okay, how do we get the software to all talk to each other and let’s build out the suite That just fits really [00:25:00] nicely for us. Do you see the best success happen in sort of all in one platform, or is it let’s, let’s bring all of the right tools together, make sure they talk to each other.
Go from there, because
yeah,
Patrick: rarely do they seem to talk well. So that’s, that’s a problem I see as well. So, yeah, I’m curious your perspective on that. So
Jason: I’ll say this, I mean, there, there’s never gonna be one piece of software that I found in, in my 20 plus years almost doing this, that is gonna solve a hundred percent of the needs, right?
You’re gonna get close, you might get to 80% and 90%, you know, with one, one solution. But I will say that when it comes to email, having a system that’s capable, now mind you. If you have a CRM that’s not capable and is doing a really poor job, but the emails look like crap, then don’t listen to what I’m about to say.
But if you have a system that can do it well, having email part of your CMI think is just a complete game changer. And the reason being is now the sales person has realtime access to that data. So if they’re getting the email, they’re [00:26:00] clicking a link going to the website and they’re doing something and they’re not filling out a form, they’re just kind of noodling around and that data comes back and increases the lead score.
Well that’s, that’s effective, right? Because now the sales person knows, okay, this person is taking some action. But if you have your email over a MailChimp and someone’s looking at open rates and click rates and, but nothing else is being done with the data, you know, then that’s, there’s no value, right?
Because you’re spending all this time and money and effort to send that an email, but it’s not influence and impacting the sales team. And so. Yes, there are plenty of systems. I mean, specifically when it comes to like building landing pages, right? You know? Mm-hmm. There’s a lot of systems that can do that.
They do ’em. Okay. Much better off going into your WordPress site or whatever you have, and building your landing page there, you know? Yeah. So I agree with you that there are certain functions while the feature might be there, you know, for example, social media posting, I think is a big one. You know, there’s a lot of tools out there, especially CRMs that can post on to [00:27:00] Facebook, LinkedIn, what have you.
The reporting isn’t great, right? Or it doesn’t exist, or you’re limited on the type of posts you can do. You’re much better off going to a platform built specifically for that. You know, if, if social media is important to you, if it’s a big part of your marketing, you need that data. So my answer is, is gray and is, is not black and white is a little gray because I think it comes down to like what component, but mm-hmm.
Email. You know, I would say if your system has it and can do it. Get rid of what else you’re doing and push all your email through your CRM.
Patrick: Yeah.
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Yeah, this is good. It also brings up another thought in my mind ’cause we actually have. I’m gonna admit to two different CRMs. Our one CRM, we, we effectively run our business out of that. You know, it creates workflows for our clients and, you know, if somebody does something, you know, we can track all of that.
Mm-hmm. So like right now we’ve got, one of our advisors is in Greece, and when somebody’s out of the office, I’m like, be out of the office. I don’t need. Right. Checking your email and doing all that stuff. And I know exactly where all the [00:29:00] client work is. ’cause I can go into the CRM and see the workflows, I can see the email communication.
It’s all
mm-hmm.
Patrick: Captured there. And I think it’s beautiful. Um, but the thing I’ve noticed about our CRM is like, it’s great at all of those things. It’s not a great marketing tool. You know, it’s not great at all these other pieces. So we we’re sort of like, you know. Prospects live over here in one, one system and our clients live over here in another system and we, you know, they, they sort of migrate over when they, they convert.
Should I stop doing that? Is there, or is it like, Nope. It, it depends on your situation. And that sounds like it’s a decent solution. I would love it if it all lived in the same ecosystem, but I, I haven’t found a way to, to make it all work well together. So, yeah, I’m curious your perspective on that.
Jason: Sounds like we might need to set up a consult there, Patrick.
You know, feeling it. Yeah. I mean, I dunno what system it is, but you know, I will say, you know, trying to get all that data in one place is certainly easier. Mm-hmm. You mentioned something before about data connecting, right? From one [00:30:00] platform to another. Sometimes you can do that through a tool like Zapier or other tools.
Sometimes you need to spend 30, $40,000 to connect two pieces of software, you know? Yeah. And build a custom integration. Is it worth it? It really becomes down to like, well, what’s, what’s the other side of the coin? So, for example, if you say, Hey Jason, I spent $500 a month on marketing. I really would love to get my marketing data connected to my CRM, but I really don’t know the best way to do that.
I would say, well, if you’re spending $6,000 a year on marketing, it may not be worth the investment right? To, to move to a new CRM or to try to connect that data because, you know, in my opinion, the ad spend would be a little low, right? Mm-hmm. But would be like, Hey, we’re spending 25 grand a month or 50 grand a month.
Yeah, you definitely wanna make sure that all that data is connected because you’re spending a lot of money, right? Mm-hmm. And you wanna make sure you’re getting a return on that investment. So I think there’s a lot of, not a lot, but there’s a few different moving pieces to that spoke. You’d have to kind of figure out what makes the most sense.
Patrick: Yeah. [00:31:00] Yeah. This is, this is fantastic. I’m also curious what you see. Like, I, I love that you’re consulting. You’re not just handing me a, a software platform and saying, Hey, go do this thing. I see there’s so much that needs to be built out around this, both from a, uh, internally, let’s make sure the software’s doing what we want it to do.
But then there’s also a system and process side of things with our, I’ll say our sales team, you know, like, okay, hey, these things need to happen. You know, when this thing happens and you see this sort of light shine up on your, your CRM, you need to go do this thing. Right? And so how much of of the s.
Coaching are you getting into on the sales and marketing side to be like, Hey, um, we, we optimize this thing. Now here’s what you need to do to go capitalize on it.
Jason: So what’s really interesting about that question is that, and this is, you know, not to put down any sales managers that we work with, I’ve spoken to at all, but we, we are often asked to say, Hey, [00:32:00] you know, our team listens to us, but I think they would value an outside perspective.
Mm-hmm. And often asked, not only in the beginning. To set the stage and say, Hey team, here’s what we’ve built. Here’s why it’s gonna make your life so much simpler. It’s gonna reduce, you know, you doing all this busy paperwork and repetitive tasks and free up, you know, five hours a week for you. They can go sell now and stop doing all this other busy work.
So we try to position it as the value add, right?
Mm-hmm.
Jason: We’re gonna make their lives better by this improvement, but we also stay on board to be an accountability partner,
you
Jason: know? As much as we’re training a sales team, Patrick, we’re also training managers. We’re changing the chain, you know, uh, training the business owners, training everybody in the organization.
This is new, right? They’ve never had this platform before. So we can’t expect anybody at any level to know exactly what to look for and to, to recognize where there’s issues, right? So even though it’s a great system, doesn’t mean there’s not gonna be issues. So [00:33:00] that’s why we do play that role to say, okay, let’s keep an eye on things, right?
For at least six months or a year at a minimum. Make sure everything is, is being done the way it’s supposed to be done. You know, one thing for a sales person or you know, sales manager to say, we want Jason to make 50 calls a day, and we want him to log his notes and log his calls and to do all these other things.
Great. So that’s a great call. Are you tracking that? Are you making Jason’s doing that? Because if you’re not, you know, then what’s the goal without having a way to measure the goal? Yeah. And so that’s, yes, we do help with that aspect of it, for sure.
Patrick: This is, this is so good. And you just reminded me of something I was gonna bring up earlier.
Uh, one of the things like we’re faced with right now, let’s use this conversation as an example. I’m like, Jason, this is amazing. Okay. But where we’re at in our business in, in the fourth quarter, I’m like coming into the fourth quarter is we are so busy. It is the busiest time of year. If you want any of my time and attention to work on, you know, building out our [00:34:00] CRMI don’t have, you’re not gonna get any of my time or any of the team’s time.
So, like, I’m an interested buyer, but I’m not interested until like January 1st at the earliest. And so, um, it’s almost like, uh, going back to, uh, our conversation around like, if we don’t have a follow-up system, we don’t have a way to like mm-hmm.
Because
Patrick: I, here’s the problem with our, as an entrepreneur, I think everybody thinks about my business the way I do.
Like it’s gotta be top of their mind, right? No, it is not, it is not top of mind at all. I’m going to forget about this conversation by January. It doesn’t mean it’s not important to me, but it’s like, man, I need somebody to follow up with me and go, Hey, you mentioned at the beginning of the year we should connect.
Here I am. You know, and making sure we have good systems and processes in place. Or even if I don’t mention that, you know, if I just kind of go quiet, it’s because like, Hey, this is super cool. I just need to like set it aside and I’ll get to it eventually. And if you don’t stay sort of top of mind for me, end up in my email inbox or my [00:35:00] actual.
Mail inbox or phone call or what have you. Like, it’s going to be one of those things that, uh, just sort of goes by the wayside. So, uh, I wanted to bring that that point up as well. ’cause I think it’s, it’s important, uh, you know, the timing piece. You know, we, we generally create some hallucination as to why the buyer’s not buying.
And so, uh, I think there’s, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity to just stay in front of people when the timing’s right. They will, they will pull the trigger, especially when you’ve built trust. Uh. Connecting with them, you know, on the front end. So,
Jason: yeah. Um, and I would just also say to you, to counteract what you said.
Mm-hmm. That I don’t think it would go by the wayside. I think that come January, you may forget about me if I was not doing my role Right. To follow up. Mm-hmm. Or stay in touch. But you’d probably buy or work with another consultant. Right. That’s gonna help with the crm because you’re like, okay, like I’m freed up my business season’s over.
Now I need to pay attention to crm. I remember I was talking to somebody about it, I don’t remember who. Mm-hmm. I’m just gonna do a Google search. I’m gonna find a new consultant. So now you’re still in the [00:36:00] market, but now you’re not buying from the person that originally gave you the ideas that you, you know, fell in love with or got inspired by.
And so, yeah, it’s so critical. And you mentioned things too, like phone call, LinkedIn. I mean, there’s so many touchpoint that, and I get it, some salespeople are scared or they don’t like to make a phone call, they don’t feel comfortable doing whatever it is, right? But at the end of the day, you can’t just rely on email.
There has to be other ways to, to do that. And I think. To today is an, I was gonna say tonight, I don’t wanna say tonight, but today is an interesting time. Not today, you know, literally. But with AI there’s so many tools out there and things you can do to stay in front of people, you know, and the big push, and I’ve been listening to, I listen to a lot of podcasts as well, and I know that, um, influencer marketing is like the new thing, right?
It’s not about. Putting out messages and saying, Hey, this is what I sell. Do you wanna buy from me? And this is how I get help. It’s about commenting on people’s posts and, and [00:37:00] following people and, and just being involved in the conversation. You know, because the one thing, and I’m not an LinkedIn expert by any means, and I, I do fairly well with it, but is when I’m commenting on people that I’m not connected to and they’re like a second, third tier connection and they have, you know, 40, 50,000 followers and they respond.
There’s interaction. People that I’m connected to see that in their feed. Like Jason commented on this and then here’s like a thing going on. And so it just shows that you’re like in the circle of whatever topic you’re talking about. And eventually when that person has some level of interest, they’re like, oh yeah, I remember Jason’s talk a lot about CRM.
Let go over to Jason, see what he thinks about this, you know, question I have.
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s good. ’cause I think in our connected world, trust is really hard, you know? And I think if. If I can go, man, I trust Jason because I, I see, you know, him showing up regularly in these circles. And, uh, if you know that trust can be transferred, you know, if John Trust trusts Jason, then I can trust [00:38:00] Jason.
So it’s like that’s all, uh, all really good. And another point too that I think is, you know, going back to our phone calls and, uh, some of those other things, that’s what marketing is. It’s a bid for attention, you know. And you know, the old school mail might be the easiest way to get somebody’s attention now because I’m bombarded digitally and Oh yeah.
You know, when was the last time you received a handwritten letter? You know? So it’s like, uh oh, cool. Like I’m gonna respond to that. I remember, I also remember I got this enormous, enormous like pack, not package, but like letter in the mail and I opened it up like, what is this thing? I had to call the guy I didn’t wanna buy, but I was like, Hey, great job.
Like you got my attention. Um. You keep me on your list, but, uh, I’m not interested right now. So it was, it worked, sort of, you have to be
Jason: clever. I mean, you have to stand out, you know, and the one thing that really, and again, I’m not, I’m not the marketer right now, I don’t do lead gen, but the one thing that I always find crazy is when people reach out to me, [00:39:00] Patrick, I’m sure it happens to you, and they’re like, we can get you a thousand leads a month or this right?
And all this. I’m like, I don’t want a thousand leads a month. I’m happy with 10 leads a month. If those 10 leads are super qualified. I have a 50% chance of closing those 10 leads that I bring on five new clients. I’m good. Like I don’t need the thousand that are never gonna respond to anything. You know?
And I think that’s what a lot of people focus on is the volume. We need volume. Mm-hmm. We need volume. We need volume. And to me the quality is way better than the quantity, you know? Absolutely. And I think that’s something also CRM can certainly help with too, is, you know, solidifying, you know that approach.
Patrick: Yeah. I think there’s a, uh, there’s an adage, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna screw this up and I apologize to the author that, I don’t know. It’s either a hundred raving fans or a thousand raving fans. And it’s like, if you get to that number, you have a successful business, you know? Mm-hmm. And, and so I think about what you just talked about, and there’s a saying that we, we like to, to talk about, uh, internally, and it’s, if our [00:40:00] visibility outpaces our capability, it hurts our credibility.
You know what you’re talking about. If I ran a Super Bowl ad, you know, and I had more leads than I could possibly manage, like, it, it blows my business up in a bad way. You know, I’m not able to serve all those people well. And then everybody’s like, oh, that, that organization’s a joke, right? So, uh, we have to have the right visibility at the right point.
And I think that leads us to, uh, scaling, right? Uh, I think the things you’re talking about are not. We could take our marketing spend and double our results by just making sure all the leaks are plugged, right. You know, all the leads that are coming in. You know, uh, we don’t have to do anything new. We just have to make sure that we’re capitalizing on things.
And I think that allows us to now scale our business in a way that is, um, you know. Efficient, effective, uh, and is pretty exciting. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts or comments on that, but I think scale is kind of the, the last piece of this whole thing when
Jason: we No. Yeah. And it’s also about the [00:41:00] existence.
Listen, if you’ve been in business for, you know, three years, five years, 10, 20 years, you have a lot of data. Hopefully you have data somewhere, you know, and everybody’s like, spend, spend, spend. Go to a trade show, do the AdWords, do this, do that, host a webinar. You might be sitting on a gold mine and if you’re able to even go back to even your accounting software and say, pull up all the customers that spend, you know, more than X with us in, you know, their lifetime or their per year, and you’re like, okay, well when was the last time they bought?
They haven’t bought from us in two years, but they were spending, you know, $80,000 a year with us. Why? Why’d they stop buying? You know? Mm-hmm. Somebody dropped the ball, right? So going back and trying to rekindle relationships with your old data. I mean that’s, it’s like a no brainer, you know? Yeah. You have to have the data.
We have to clean the data. We have to kind of do some stuff and massage it, but if you have that data, that could be a huge value add. And people often don’t think about this three components, I think, right? So there’s the old data to [00:42:00] increase revenue. There’s the upsell and the cross sell, and there’s so many companies that just don’t do those three things.
They’re just net new, net new, net new, net new, and, and that’s all they live by, you know? And it’s, and some businesses listen, they don’t compliment a cross-sell, you know, upsell opportunity. Right. There’s nothing to sell the else except this one thing. Mm-hmm. Fine. I get that. But most businesses have something else they could sell.
You know, you call an exterminator because you got bees. Well, they should be upselling you on their yearly maintenance package.
Mm-hmm.
Jason: You know, I mean, and that usually works, right? It’s like, well, you got this problem. If you hire us for the year, you probably won’t have the problem next year. Okay, sounds good.
Where do I sign? You know? Yeah.
Patrick: Yeah, no, Jason, this is, uh, this is so good and my encouragement is, uh, I have people go to cult device.com. Uh, your website’s great. You’ve got a lot of really good information, and it’s also, uh, you, you’ve created a, uh, a link, especially [00:43:00] for us, uh, after the lead.com. Uh, people can go there, uh, that have listened to the podcast, and you’ve got all the easy ways to connect with you there.
I, I think setting up a. Uh, a time to just talk through, Hey, where am I at? Where am I going? What, what problems do you see in my, um, you know, my, my pipeline, you know, my CRM that, you know, I can start plugging those leaks and then increase my revenue. I think that’s, that’s fantastic. So, I know we’ve talked about a lot of things.
Is there anything else we, we need to cover that we haven’t covered so far?
Jason: I think on the world of CRM, I think we pretty much exhausted, you know, everybody’s, their input, a capability, right? To absorb all the information. But I will say this, you know, you know, the other thing to think about is because lots of people have so much software, so let’s forget about CRO for a minute.
That’s just mm-hmm. Software in general, right? If you’re the owner listening, right. Or if you, and if you’re not even the owner, but you can get access to a bank [00:44:00] statement and the what I’m, my little tip here is. Look at your, your last six months and start going through with a highlighter. What are we spending money on?
That’s a reoccurring charge every month. Mm-hmm. You know, and are we using that, that tool, whatever it is, are we using that thing? And it could be even like, you know, the cleaning surface that comes once a week and you could kind like cut that back twice a, you know. Mm-hmm. Twice a month. Right. Whatever the reoccurring charges are.
People often sometimes will say, well, I don’t have the money to invest in the CRM or in something else.
Mm-hmm.
Jason: We say, okay, well where is that money being spent that you’re, you’re spending money today. Where can we free up money? And that’s often something that, you know, and I know there’s tons of apps, you know, that they advertise on.
And I don’t, any of ’em, you know, myself, I just kind of like monitor that. But there, I’ve been caught myself. It’s like, oh man, I thought I canceled that piece of software last six months has been charging me like 80 bucks a month. So, and like I don’t even use it anymore. And so. That’s another good exercise too.
And that’s, it’s not gonna make a huge difference right. On the, on the PL. Mm-hmm. But it’s always [00:45:00] just to kind of free up and to kind of get you in the mindset of like, are we as fine tuned as we can be with our ruthless
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I do want to, I wanna maybe challenge one of the things you said.
’cause I, I, I think the raindrops fill up the ocean and I think all of these little efficiencies that we start to create, start adding up to real dollars on the bottom line. I think people should do exactly what you said in their business. I also, I’m a, I’m a finance nerd, so I run all of my expenses through QuickBooks personally too, and I go through and I categorize everything and I’m like, could we be subscribed to another video streaming system?
And we have one TV in our entire house and nobody ever watches the thing. I’m like. We’re paying hundreds of dollars a month just to not watch tv. You know, this is, uh, this is insane to me. They sucked you in with like that one show that you need this new thing and it’s free for 30 days and then Yeah, forget, cancel two years later you’ve forgotten about it and you’re like, man,
Jason: I gotta get rid of this stuff.
Well, I think that the biggest Culprit two is like, and listen, this is not, you know, it might get a little personal, but I remember this is going back [00:46:00] years ago, but, um, and I don’t even know why I was looking, but I’m like, notice that like hundreds of dollars was being spent at like Dunking Donuts every month.
And I’m like, like, what’s going? Like I don’t go to dunk and Donut, like who’s go to dunk and donuts in the family so often, you know? Yeah. And I was like, you know, telling my wife and my kids and I’m like, Hey guys, like I don’t wanna us go on dunk and donuts, but I think we just be dropping like $400 a month at Dunka Donuts, you know?
Mm-hmm. Like, we could probably make a bagel or get, or make our own coffee, or whatever it is. Right. And it wasn’t nickel and d it was just like, it’s like it was excessive, you know, in my mind of like, you’re trying to control budgets and so. I think it’s all aspects of life. But yeah, the subscription model, man, they got that nailed down and they make it.
And the newest thing, Patrick, that I think is gonna be super scary. And if you think of like the movie Minority Report, I dunno, we’re dating ourselves. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jason: But I was watching, and this is not new, it’s been for like months, I think I was watching something on Prime the Night my wife and a product comes up on there and it’s like there’s a buy-in, click here to buy now and enter your cart right from the tv, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. [00:47:00] And I’m like,
Jason: pretty soon you’re just gonna be like, you’re verbally being like, I like what I see on the tv. Send it to me and it shows up at five in the morning. It’s on your doorstep, you know?
Patrick: Right. Yep. We’re not that far
Jason: away from it, so it’s,
Patrick: I agree. And I think AI’s going to just, uh, continue to, and you, you talked about this, you know, like customizing that content for people.
I think it’s gonna get more and more customized and, and all of the data that is out there. Floating through the ether because we interact with technology on a regular basis. They know how much money I make, where I spend it, you know, all the things that I’m interested in. And it’s like, man, you know, they’re gonna, they’re gonna like be able to just nail me with the correct marketing message to get all of the brain synapses going.
Yep. You need that thing. So, uh, it, I’m excited about it. I’m also a little, you know, worried about, I just look at the, the impact of. Social and technology just on our society in general. And it’s like, I don’t, I don’t know if this is leading us down a healthy path. So [00:48:00] this is a whole nother podcast, conversation podcast.
And I also
Jason: say when this goes live, you know, I cannot blame, you know, myself. If you start seeing ads for CRM consulting or anything else, pop up all over the place. You know Yeah. Little pigeons flying by with, you know, little banner strapp to ’em. Sure.
Patrick: Yep. I, I love it. So Jason, I think about the stakes here, right?
Yeah. If, if I fail to take, act on, take action, on, on, you know, sort of plugging the holes in my CRM leads will continue slipping through the cracks, uh, growth. Fails to scale, you know, it, it just, it’s frustrating, right? And, uh, we’re just leaving untapped revenue and frustrated clients sort of in the mix.
Like, man, I thought somebody was gonna get back to me. But then I think about the success side of things. And, you know, when we have a, a clear automated system that nurtures leads, increases conversions, and creates like, measurable, sustainable growth, that’s exciting. And, uh, that’s where, you know, as an entrepreneur, we can, we can get, uh.
[00:49:00] Uh, really excited about the future and scaling our business. And so I think this is, um, this is good stuff. I think people should, should check you out. Uh, cult eyes.com. Also you gave us after the lead.com, I think it’s a great place to just get engaged with, with you and schedule some time or just check out all of the social channels and, uh.
Learn more about, uh, what you have going on, but I’m assuming if people do that, that are gonna enter your ecosystem and, uh
Jason: Oh, they sure will. It’ll be good.
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah.
Jason: But you know, they’ll enter it in a very, you know, like peaceful and loving way, you
Patrick: know? Right. Yeah. All right, Jason, this has been great.
Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning into this week’s episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. I hope you found real value in today’s conversation and maybe even spotted a few ways to capture more of what’s already sitting in your business. If you did, I’d love for you to share this episode with another entrepreneur who could use it, whether it’s a friend, a colleague, or someone in your network you never know who might need to hear exactly this message.
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