One CRM TOO Many: From Frustration to Formation

Dive into the transformative world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with Velvet Ventures.

In this enlightening episode, we explore how the right CRM strategy can revolutionize your business operations, enhance customer engagement, and drive growth. From selecting the perfect CRM to integrating it seamlessly into your daily workflow, we cover it all. Listen as we share real-life success stories, practical tips for CRM implementation, and insights on using CRM to unlock your business's full potential. Whether you're a small business owner or part of a larger enterprise, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways to help you maximize your CRM investment. Tune in to Velvet Ventures and take the first step towards business transformation with CRM.


Episode Sponsors:
Business Health Market
https://businesshealthmarket.com

DallowryFlow
https://dallowryflow.io

Transcript

00:03
But if you can do like that where you can use a CRM to automate all this stuff and just schedule it all out. If in that moment you are choosing to just build every post for the month like it's a banger, and then you can just set it and forget it.

00:17
Welcome to Velvet Ventures, where we talk about life, marriage, and the pursuit of entrepreneurship. I'm Ben, and I'm Chani. This episode brought to you by Business Health Market, better known as BHM. Isn't your typical insurance broker?

00:34
They're the rebels of health insurance. They're not here to sell you insurance. They're here to revolutionize the way small businesses approach employee benefits. As fierce advocates, they're committed to transparency, empowerment, and crafting tailored solutions that fit your unique needs. They're not just brokers. They're partners in your journey to business success. For more information, there's a link below this episode. So today, we're gonna talk about CRMs, what they are,

01:04
business owners should look for and why. Okay. Sounds great. So what is a CRM? So I hear two different acronyms for it. Customer Retention Manager and Customer Relations Manager. Yeah, both would be accurate. Gotcha. Because you can't retain somebody if you don't have a relationship with them. Gotcha. Would be the idea.

01:32
So it's just a software that lets you track and maintain your customers and the interactions that you have with them. So instead of... An assistant? Yeah. Necessarily? Well, you could compare it to like most, I say most, there's going to be a few people listening that are currently using spreadsheets. Yeah. That have green for really strong potential, yellow for mid and red for...

02:03
No thank you. Yeah. And then they'll track the day they last called or the next day they want to call or what the text message was or what the conversation was. So if you're using a spreadsheet, this would take the place of that. So there's several features that a CRM has to have. Right? And the main one is going to be communication. Communication. Email, text, phone call.

02:31
where all of that stuff can come into one place so that you're not having to log into 17 different places to keep up with and track the conversations and communications with your clients. Gotcha. Ideally, it would also have access to like your Google My Business and your Facebook and your Instagram and your Twitter, like anything and everything. Yeah. But base model it needs, at least email and text. Gotcha.

02:58
The next feature I would look for is phone, and then the next features would be social media, as far as communication. And the reason being is, there's only so much that you can put in a spreadsheet before it becomes overwhelming, and you're no longer actually tracking what's happening. Well, and to me, it seems like, using a spreadsheet is, well, one, it's old school, and it's not that it's...

03:27
Yeah, it's a time suck, but it's like you're not capitalizing on the opportunity to automate and to actually just automatically keep track. Because a lot of times, like you said, people color code stuff like, okay, so I use purple for my... I've reached out to these clients twice. I've left two voicemails, and then if it goes to red, it's I'm on my fourth call and this is my last.

03:55
you can go back and track and see and it can just tell you like, hey, you haven't reached out to the Thompsons in seven days, or you could just set up reminders that are automations in there that say, hey, it's been four days and there has not been any activity on this lead. What is next? Yeah. Communication is going to be the top one you need to look for. There's some platforms like HubSpot that have free access. But the problem is,

04:25
is you get integrated with HubSpot and you get used to the platform and then if you're doing your business properly, you're going to quickly outgrow that. And the next jump up is $500 a month. Right. So you have, and I don't quote me on it and they change it a lot, but let's say that you've got a thousand customers that you can put on the system and it allows 3,000 messages per month. That sounds like a lot, but not when you have a thousand people.

04:53
If you send three email blasts or one a week, you're already over your limit. If you communicate individually with each of those people three times at all, you're already over your limit. And so something like HubSpot might work for somebody that has fewer clients, but again, if you're trying to scale at all, I would look at when do I outgrow and what is the next cost. Because if you're not ready and prepared to pay for that.

05:21
then I just wouldn't even get started. Right. I think that also an add-on to that would be, depending on what your business is and being very understanding and conscious of if you are a business that is going to be doing a lot of communication but there's not a lot of responding from your people. Like let's say that your business is a newsletter.

05:50
but you have nothing in there that people are, there's no call to actions to have them respond to you, you can probably get away with something like a HubSpot for a long time. But if you are a company that then is booking people through that, and let's say that you have one person that booked something.

06:11
and then that person says, oh hey, you send a reminder about their booking. Then that person says, oh, I'm not going to be able to make it. I'm over here. Okay, well what about this day? No, that doesn't work. Let me talk to my husband. Okay, what about this day? Yep, that way. I mean, you can literally have 25 pieces of communication with one person for one meeting. And let's say that you're putting out a lot of stuff and like you said, even if you have a hundred clients in there and everybody …

06:39
you know, over the course of a month, on average you have 10 to 20 pieces of touch points in there, like you're going to… Which hopefully you do. Right. And that's the goal, I think. But again, it's understanding when you're shopping for a CRM, it's probably important to kind of see like…

06:57
What does my communication look like with my clients? Yeah. Well, not just what do I need now, but what do I want to need in the future? What's my goal as a company? Do I want to not only, I mean, I think everybody wants to have a bunch of clients, but are you going to be communicating with them online? Which most people are, but again, if you're a speaker that you host symposiums or something, you may not do a lot of that other than you are communicating to them when it's happening. If there's any changes, can't wait to see you.

07:26
But outside of that, everything's happening probably in person or at the event. Well, and then looking at what all does your company offer? Are you wanting to sell products or merch eventually? Does your CRM have a platform for a store and a payment processor? If not, you're going to have to pay for another service. Because what happened with me was I would try a CRM and then within two months I'd outgrow it. And then I'd...

07:51
start the new CRM and thought that that had everything I needed and then I would outgrow it. Or then I'd sit and say, oh, this CRM is great. I love the way it looks. I like the way it functions and I'd be happy with it for eight months. But then I start calculating all the other subscriptions and services that I'm paying for because this CRM doesn't have these. And I'm spending five, $600 a month. And it's easy to do that when it's all small amounts, $14.99 here, $9.99 here.

08:22
popping up to the five, 600 bucks a month. And at the end of the day, like, I had to sit back and say, is all of this worth 600 a month? And what's my ROI? What's my return on investment of the $600? And there wasn't one, so I canceled it all. And so, you know, do you want to sell online courses? Your CRM needs to have that, if that's a future goal or a future plan. Do you need to be able to send estimates and invoices?

08:51
electronically, then your CRM needs to have that. If you are wanting to have affiliates that sell your products for you, your CRM should have an affiliate program. And again, it's future thinking, and there might be features that you're like, I never ever am going to need this, but I like that it's there. Right. Finding a CRM that's affordable.

09:14
and still has all these options. So like you look at Monday and back in the day, it was, you know, you could get in for 49.99 a month, pretty reasonable, but it had a limit to the number of automations that would fire within that month. And so let's say, you know, 500, I don't know what it is anymore, but let's say it's 500 automations. That sounds like a lot, just like the communication. But for somebody to fall into, so let's say they fell out of form and they go into

09:44
workflow or an automation. That's one automation. Then for it to send an email confirming that we received that form from the customer, that's a step. That's a workflow. And then for it to send you the information of the information they filled out on the form, that's a step. So, I mean, we've got workflows right now for Dowry and for BHM and for Benson's that are 25 steps long. One person is going through that. Right.

10:11
So if I've got five people going through it, there's a hundred. And that hopefully is happening over one day. Right. So now, you know what I mean? I've got 500, I've got half of my monthly allowance in one, in one to two days already going out the door on one thing, on one thing. And so, you know, it was ended up costing me $250 because then you're paying, you know, 15 cents or 11 cents per automation. Let's per step inside of that workflow. Right.

10:41
And so you just really, you really need to think about that when you're shopping for your CRM. And not be scared to switch. Like so many people are like, oh, I don't wanna switch again. Switch. If it's not working, if it's not doing what it needs to, it's going to be the lid to your organization. So the question becomes, do you wanna stay stagnant or do you wanna switch? It might be a pain to switch, absolutely. Sure. But the other option is not to grow anymore. Right. Well, and

11:10
some of them will work with other CRMs and some of them is a matter of like a good portion, which which most people think of my contact list. A lot of them have it where you can download a CSV file.

11:24
Super simple. And then you re-upload it into your new system. Yeah. Yeah, you'll have to build out your automations and you'll have to build out those other things, but there's recipe cards, there's a lot of templates. Which recipe cards are just templates of the workflow. So you click appointment reminder, it already has a pre-built workflow and you can go in and tweak it or edit the actual messages that are going out, but outside of that, it's pretty well and set up for you.

11:49
Well, and so like one thought that I just had with which would be a good visual representation for people who aren't familiar with workflows and automation steps, imagine a set of stairs. So you can say, go take the stairs. That is saying build an automation. But a set of stairs has 19 steps in it, because that's, you know, like a standard household.

12:16
deal based on code, that's about how many stairs there are given the ceiling height. And so to be able to visualize and say like, those are stairs, but then to then say that is a step, that's kind of the visual representation. A workflow is a staircase. The automations inside are the steps that consist of a staircase. And so when she's saying …

12:41
When you're saying things like there's 25 steps inside there, that's like saying there are 25 steps to the staircase. And when you're only allotted so many steps before they start charging you, I mean, you're not going to get very far.

12:57
with that limitation. Yeah. Well, and you also want to look at what is the cost per message once I've reached my limit? What's the cost per automation once I've reached my limit? I mean, ideally you should find an automation that doesn't have or CRM that does not have an automation limit. Right. That doesn't make any sense for scaling a business. Yeah. Cause then, you know, it hinders, it really limits how you can explore and build. Yeah.

13:24
And so then when it comes to communication, every CRM is gonna have a communication allowance or they should if yours doesn't, switch. But it should have some type of an allowance. So you get, you know, like credits. Like credits. You get a thousand text messages or 500 emails per month for free included in the cost of your CRM. But you wanna look at, okay, but what does it cost me after that? Because if your automation has five texts, those are counting towards your communication credits.

13:54
It's not separated. And so if it costs 50 cents a text message after that, and you've got 7,500 text messages that go out on average, or 300, can you afford an extra $150 a month? Like that makes this program unaffordable. And so don't just look at the communication credits and the automation credits, look at the cost of those afterwards. And in my professional opinion, if you have an automation limit, get out, find something else. There's...

14:23
Too many programs out there that do not limit your automation and all that's doing is it's keeping you stuck in being the system in process when you don't have automation in your business. And it's one of those things too where it's like for those people out there that are looking into getting this and like, well, I really like to look at this and that's fine. But what it's kind of doing is, and the advice here is spend a little more time doing long-term research. Not just.

14:51
I Googled it, this was on the front page, and this has great reviews. Yeah, it does have great reviews, and people are using this, but look and see what kind of businesses are using it, if you can, but also, again, looking to see, am I going to grow out of this because I have mass potential to scale? Am I going to be growing out of this? Because then all you're doing is every six months, you're moving around, and while that's okay and you shouldn't...

15:20
not move out of fear. But if you can say like, is it worth spending a week or two researching what you think the potential your business is going to do, looking at, and because I say that amount of time, because it may be a fact that they don't. I mean, every time I moved and rebuilt automations, it now again, this is before I was as proficient. Right. I was a noob in the CRM space it and I was doing it myself. It was 80 hours. Yeah. Every time I switched. Right.

15:50
And I switched six times in two years. Right. So you think about how much money was lost by the time building it, figuring it out, paying for it, and then redoing that. And even at that point, my advice then would be to contact those people, whatever the company is, and email them and say, if it's not blatantly apparent on their website, then you're going

16:18
How much is communication? How much is automated? Is there a limit? Like if those things aren't said, like if they don't specifically say unlimited automations or this is your thing, if you don't see that, email them, message them and ask them, say, hey, I've got a list of questions. How much are my text messages? How much are the emails? How much are the automations? Is there a limit? What is that limit? Those are all things that if you just, again, spend the time to...

16:47
draft those things and then wait for the response before just making a decision. Be like, well, today is the day that I was going to do my CRM. That's just poor planning on your side. If that's what your thing is, it's like, well, it's Tuesday and on Tuesday I had on my calendar, sign up for a CRM, but you've done no due diligence. That's not probably the wisest thing to be doing. Yeah. And the other thing to consider is the help desk situation.

17:16
Right, so we have a CRM and we've got a lot of people that come over and one of the first questions they ask is what's your help situation like? You know, we always have access to help, you can text or email at any time. When our clients start, they get five hours of us for free. And typically what we recommend is they bring us on as auditors to look over systems they've already built if they're not gonna pay for us to do it. But what a lot of people

17:45
have been saying is they're so happy that our help is all US based. Because it's very frustrating when you're already...when you're reaching out to help, you're already frustrated. Right. By something. It's either not working correctly, you don't understand it, or it's not doing what you think it should do. Right? And so you're already frustrated. The last thing that you want is a communication barrier. Right.

18:13
where the person is not understanding what you're saying, or you can't understand what they're saying, and now it just makes it even more difficult. Yeah. You know, and so looking into that as well, like yes, this one might be the best option. Does it hit all of those points, and then what's the help desk situation look like? There's some that you have to pay to have a help desk. I think that's ridiculous. You should have access to help when you're paying for the system. Like it should just come with it. It should not be an extra thing.

18:43
But yeah, so for now, like with us, everything is all in one, right? So our landing pages, our websites, our affiliates, our online stores, our communication, our social media, our forms, our everything, payment processor, everything's all in one. And what's nice is that means that we can do 90% of any of our tasks without ever even leaving this one system.

19:14
I don't need 17 passwords and usernames. I don't have to log in all over the place. I don't need to go to Facebook to answer a message. It is literally just all in one place and organized, which also means that as we hire on people and we give them particular tasks, we can give them access to particular portions of the CRM. If they're in charge of communication, they don't need the social media. They don't need the website. They just need the communications tab. And you can even on...

19:43
you know, BHM side, we even limit it to what the agent can only see, what the agent has brought in or what we assign to that agent. So agents can't go messing with other people's leads. It's their leads that they can see and their leads that they can take notes on and everything else. And so you definitely want a system that has that versatility because you don't know what you need until you need it. And so you want a system that's...

20:08
more robust that you can grow into versus one that you're like, this meets all of my needs right now. Right. I would advise against that. You should have a CRM that's like, wow, I would never need that. Well, if it doesn't cost you anything extra, or it's the same monthly cost as what you're paying, it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Yeah. Well, I think there's something to be said that, going back to your comment about the

20:37
help desk and charging for it and stuff. I think also understanding that if you just need a CRM and you only can afford $20 a month, understand that that's okay and you're going to be very limited by that. But if you go into that knowing that I am going to grow this business and in six months I'm going to have to change.

21:03
Then you can build your systems and processes inside that. I would assume most of them, I don't know every one of them, but to me logically it makes sense that you would then just build it with the expectation of changing it. It's kind of like if you moved apartments, you may not unpack and hang everything and make everything as permanent. If you know you're fixing to get reassigned somewhere, you're going to move again.

21:29
when you're looking at CRMs and you see like, oh, this one does a lot of stuff, but it costs $50 a month for help support. If you are a confident patient and tech savvy, don't pay for it. But if you are someone who is like, nope, I don't understand this and I get frustrated easily by technology, that may be worth it to you. Maybe that's the way that they're keeping their costs, their barred entry low is by charging over here because not everybody needs it.

21:58
So maybe not everybody needs to pay $250 a month for this robust CRM because they don't need tech support. So why should they have to pay when other people need it? And so it's understanding, I think, more who you are, what you need, and what your goals are, and then going out and searching for what it is that you need. And a lot of this is you may not know yet.

22:28
reach out to somebody in the field, try to find someone, go to networking events, reach out to the people who own them who are smaller businesses who there's a human behind it and they want to contact you and they can just, hey, I would love to set up a one-to-one, a chit chat because I don't know what I need exactly and you may not be the best fit for me, but you're an expert in this field, can I buy you lunch? And we can talk about it and maybe we do end up working together or maybe you point me in a direction that's...

22:58
hey, you should really go with this company. They have the lowest barred entry for you to learn. Then once you've learned and you kind of know, and you can see the value in it, then you can come work with us. And maybe now then you'll use this. But I'd hate for you to come buy it. You get an idea and you're like, I hate using the CRM. I had a bad experience. So now you never wanna use one again and you go back to spreadsheets because you feel like you were getting duped because you were paying.

23:26
a certain amount of money each month, but you weren't getting the value because you didn't know. I think it's important to have those conversations with people like you who can help them decide and figure out what it is that they need. Most people don't know, like, I need a landing page. I thought I just needed a website. You don't know what you don't know. That's why we have professionals in industries.

23:55
who are hopefully there to help educate the people and steer them in honest and ethical directions, not just a funnel towards, you need to work with me. I'll only have lunch with you if you sign a contract. Yeah. Well, and I mean, when you demo a CRM, if they immediately push for you to sign up, I would be leery. Yeah. If they immediately tell you that you should or...

24:23
they recommend or whatever for them to build it out for you and you pay them, I would be leery. Right. Those are all options that we have. Sure. I mean, we send the link. When we do a demo, we send a recording with a link to buy the software. But that's our last point of contact because I am not, I'm 100% against the whole sales machine. Like if this is what you want and you see the value and you want to work with us.

24:53
Here's everything that you need and we're here to answer any other questions. But I am not going to chase you down and pin you in a corner to get you to sign up for something. And I tell everybody, before we even allow them to pay for us to do an automation or to do an X, Y, and Z, they have to have tried it on their own. Because there's some people that, you're just gonna figure this out and it's gonna be super easy. You don't need to pay us to do it. There's no point. There's 1,500 templates.

25:22
You might be able to go, yep, that's the exact one I want. It's even the colors I want. I just need to change the language. Great, use ChatGPT. You know, it's completely free. Now you're good to go. There's other people that are like, I'm frustrated by the process or I don't have time. And after they have tried, it's a lot easier. They know that they want to pay us. So there's not any kind of resentment. There's no sleaziness about it. And then there's other people that are like,

25:51
I don't understand this at all. I want you to set the entire thing up. Here's what I want it to do, anything else that you think it needs. But we never build an automation first. You have to have tried it yourself. And so if you're doing a demo and they're pushing you to sign up right there in the demo or they're saying, and we can build it out.

26:17
you should sign up or any kind of that pushy type language. Well, if it stinks, it's probably stinks. Right. If it's really difficult for you to use, to the point you can't set it up, it's probably really difficult to use. Well, and if they, yeah, and I think that again, if you kind of get the sense that they keep using language, like, you know, well, it's easy for me because I'm experienced. And so like this can be tricky.

26:43
to get down and da-da-da-da-da. You don't know them. You don't know what's tricky for them and what's not tricky. But when they are using a lot of that language like, well, this can be difficult for some and this just takes a while to... Those are all probably true statements, but what they're doing is they're kind of laying that groundwork to just let us build it. Just pay us an absorbent amount of money or sometimes it's like an obscene amount of money or it's...

27:12
no money hardly at all and then at that case it's like, well, why are you even trying to charge me for something if you're only going to charge like, we'll build your entire thing out for $500. Well, then it's probably going to be extremely easy or it's going to be, yeah, you built it out but all you did was essentially like open a bunch of tabs and then I'm still going to have to go out and build out the automations and build out all this stuff. You're not truly building it out. You're just unlocking.

27:39
Yeah, you're just using a template and then allowing me to edit it, which I could have done from the template. Right. And so to me, it's like, again, it just goes back to doing due diligence. Yeah. Well, look at their socials. Yeah. I mean, if they don't have back end like demos or questions or like stuff being done on their CRM on their socials, I wouldn't work with them. Introducing Dallery Flow CRM, the game changer in business management.

28:07
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28:36
Get ready to supercharge your business and unlock your full potential with Gallery Flow CRM. For more information, there's a link below this episode. I mean, we publish any demo that we have authorization from the person we're talking to. Every single one of those is published. That is a person asking me live what it does or how it works, and me showing exactly the three or four buttons that you push to get to a desired outcome. Yeah.

29:05
You know, and being honest, like, there's tons of software out there. It's just a white label of an original software. Right. Ours is a white label. We will tell you ours is a white label. Sure. You can a hundred percent go directly to go high level and you can sign up and it'll cost 297 or $497 a month, depending on which package you get. Right. Or you can work with Dowlery Flow and it's $99 to 150, depending on which package you get, but if you're working with a company.

29:34
I was actually on a white label of go high level. And then I found out that the people that were charging me weren't actually in charge of the CRM, that they were overcharging me based on going to the original, like I was paying 500 a month, right? I could have just gone directly to go high level and paid less, $3 less, but still less for the exact same thing. They were charging me per automation. They were doing, they were just, they was a money grab, which is.

30:02
They were just being unethical. Yeah, it was their prerogative. But as soon as I realized that I could white label this thing myself, we built an entire company around providing support and working with Go High Level to develop new features for our clients. But we tell all of our clients, this is a white label. Right, we did not write the backend code.

30:27
to this. And I think it's important for people to know because, and I think again, it's not that the company you're working with was being unethical by using them. They just weren't transparent in the, this is not ours, in the terms of like, we did not generate the lines of code in this, but we are blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, when asked about a feature's price point, there was at one point I tried to negotiate with them and just said like, hey, is there any way I

30:56
pay 45 instead of 99 because I'm not planning on using it to the level. And I was told no. Well now I know that's 100%. That was a fallacy. They had total control of the price as the white label. And so what we did is we made our prices as low as possible. They are as low as we are legally allowed to go on the software that we're offering so that nobody feels like they do have to bargain or, you know.

31:25
they're not getting screwed over by shopping this price. Yeah. You know? Well, I think two points on that is with the pricing, it's like with anything. You get what you pay for, but there's also brand recognition. There are people who are right now charging $1,200 a month for the exact software access.

31:53
that you get through Dowry for 99. But again, they're not doing anything wrong. They license it. They can do what they want with it. And what they may be doing is, again, you need to find out, they may have one-on-one support. You may have complete access to a person that 24 hours a day, you can contact them. That's why you're paying $1,200 a month. But then you can get on some. So my point with that is then you have the $20 a month CRMs. And

32:22
They may be functional, but you get what you pay for and you may be severely limited. You may be basically- 48 hours response time. Right. You might get a response or it's just straight up essentially a glorified spreadsheet with not a lot of functionality, but they're calling themselves a CRM because they will automatically text somebody or email or whatever.

32:53
I think that it's important for people to understand when they're looking at CRMs, there's not... It's like with anything. There's five tire manufacturers. Five companies make thousands of different brands of tires made in the same store. So even like, what is it? I think it's Ryobi and Milwaukee drills. Milwaukee is right now the hot power tool.

33:22
and Ryobi has looked at like the DIYer, like there's, Milwaukee is three times the price. Well, come to find out they're both made in the exact same factory. That's not to say they're all the same material, but they're made in the same location by the same people and half the time they are, they're just different colors. And so understanding that's like, that's business.

33:46
And most CRMs are probably white labels of somebody else's code or somebody else's design. And there may only be a few dozen truly original 100% ownership good CRMs. But what you're doing when you're getting with a white label like, Daleriflow and lots of other ones out there, I'm sure. But you're getting the... You're getting...

34:15
the person that is operating the business. It's not just about a CRM, because you could, like you said, you could go high level. You'll pay more, but then I mean, you can license it out or you can do whatever you want, but now you're just responsible for it. And so most of the time, it's just understanding that I need this thing, and there's thousands of people out there that have a very similar product.

34:43
But I like working with you because you're going to help me and you're going to be honest with me and you're going to give me all the features without trying to charge me and nickel and dime every single move that is made inside of this software. So I think that people just need to understand because I think some people get like, you're white labeling it? Like, yes, 100%.

35:09
Do I look like it? Would I be charging $99 a month if I just spent five years developing this? The only reason why those companies are able to do that is because thousands of people are using it. Because they probably spent a decade or two building it. So that's a long game. Yeah. But I mean, for Dowry Flow, the clients that move from a spreadsheet into Dowry Flow typically see a 37% increase in net growth.

35:39
Now that growth can be contacts if they're not actually fully launched yet, that could be net growth sales, net profit, it's net different for every business. But they have a net growth of 37% in three months. That's all organic, like you're not paying. Yeah, that's crazy numbers. And so if you're sitting with a spreadsheet and you feel stuck or you don't feel like you're growing fast enough, it's probably because you're still on a spreadsheet.

36:09
That is capping what you're able to do. Because what happens with us, like we're gonna be able to enjoy the holidays. We're able to enjoy our weekend. All of our stuff is turned on airplane mode while we do these podcasts. And sometimes they're in the middle of the week, other times they're on the weekend. It doesn't matter when we do them because the businesses are all still operating. If somebody calls, I already know everything's being taken care of.

36:39
even during off hours. Like it's just going to run whether I'm there or not. Because if I'm the most important thing in our business and I have an off day, then the business has an off day. The system's got to be the most important. Yeah. And by being there, you are meaning like, so the system is not building itself without you. No. What it's doing is if someone is reaching out to you via email.

37:08
text, Facebook, Messenger, any of those platforms, there's a point of contact that's being made. You're making a touch. So give us an example of like right now, if I am somebody who logged on to Facebook, saw one of your videos, clicked through and hit message and I sent you a message that says, hey, I really like your video. I'm interested in your Dowry Flow software. I would like to set up a demo of my own.

37:37
because I just watched a video of that. What happens? So because of the words that you used, demo and schedule, an AI bot is actually going to message back. It'll talk to you for at least three messages or five minutes. And its end goal is to get you the link and to get you booked into an appointment. If it fails, then it messages me the entire conversation so that I can then jump in as a human. Gotcha. So if I'm Sally and I just got off

38:07
I have a side business and I make candles, but I also bartend to pay the bills. And so I just got off at 2.30 in the morning and I'm winding down in bed. It's three o'clock in the morning. The point of contact whenever she messages at 3 a.m. and you're not awake and there's no assistance that are on standby to reply to people that AI bots going to take the information that that person, the language that they use is going to analyze it. It's going to.

38:36
Determine if it's positive or negative and then respond appropriately. And then you wake up in the morning and you go then hop on your CRM. And ideally an appointment's already booked. And somebody is already booked and you can literally log on and say like, oh, it will send you a notification that says, hey Channing.

38:57
Samantha Smith has booked an appointment for next Thursday at 2 p.m. for a virtual demo. Yeah, and then in the back side of my CRM, I can see exactly where Samantha Smith came from. So Facebook, from the website, what was the initial point of contact. I can read any of the messages that were sent between Samantha Smith and the AI bot or the text or the emails or whatever. I can see if she called, what time she called, if she left a voicemail, that voicemail's there.

39:24
I can see any other additional pages that she went to. So if she started on the website and then went to five different landing pages, it would show me all five. It'll tell me the timestamp too. So I can pretty well generalize how long she spent on each page depending on what the timeframe is between the different pages that she went to. So there's a whole lot of information that I have before I ever even hop on a demo with Samantha.

39:52
Like your social media. So you talk about running behind the scenes and you can take a day off and not have to stress about content, for instance, because that's a big one that everybody is. You got to be consistent. You got to be doing three posts a day. You need to be doing these things in order to really see some traction. So what does that look like? Like again, I'm Sally, the candle maker.

40:20
And this is my side job, my side business that I do want to take. And like I go to the farmer's market each Saturday and I'm, I'm making good money and I'm doing some online sales, but I really need to do this, but I have two kids and I, you know, I bar 10, so I'm late in the evening and then I've got this morning and I'm up late. And so how do I, what's the best, like as a professional in this spot, what is your recommendation? Like how would you.

40:50
recommend to Sally at that demo, this is my biggest thing. Like I need content so that way I'm constantly in front of people on, I use, you know, Instagram and Facebook. Yeah. So, um, your CRM should be, have some sort of connection to social media.

41:12
If it doesn't, you probably need to find a new one. For us, we integrate with Google My Business, which a lot of businesses don't take advantage of posting on there. Every time you post on there, you're literally telling Google what search words match your business. You should be posting on there just as much as you post anywhere else. So Google My Business, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn are the six right now. And so what's nice is you can schedule everything to be the same.

41:41
minus TikTok because it has to be video, right? But if you have just like a social media, like a word post, you could schedule it across all the platforms at once. You can edit it where each platform has a different wording of the thing. So I would say find your 12 content pillars, which content pillars you have one per month. It's just what is something to do with your business, right? So for us it'd be CRM, it'd be content creation, it'd be email marketing, it'd be, you know, and the list goes on to 12.

42:10
Then you decide, okay, there's four weeks typically and every single month. So you'd find four subtopics of this one main topic, right? So if it's CRM, we could look at the features, we could look at the price point, we could look at the communication, and we could look at why, why CRM. Then we're gonna look at how many times per day do we wanna post, right? So we've got one month, four weeks, and how many.

42:38
days in that week do we wanna post? So for us, we post three times per day. But let's say, Sally, you really only need to post once a day and then show up organically when you can or when you feel like it. So you're gonna say, okay, so for this subtopic, let's take CRM features, what is five ways that we can answer a question or talk about CRM features? And you're gonna use every single one of those for one post per day. And then use Chat GPT for all of this.

43:07
brainstorm with chat gbt your content pillars brainstorm with chat gbt your subtopics Brainstorm your questions and then literally brainstorm your posts once you have your post go into your CRM and schedule it all out I Mean right now Dallery is scheduled all the way through the new year. Yeah, so we don't have to worry about it

43:26
Because I knew that the holidays, we like to stay busy. We have a whole lot of family, got big families on both sides. We like to be involved and we don't want to be working or stressing constantly. If that content is not scheduled, it's going to be on my mind, which means I'm gonna not be as present in the moment and I wanna be present. So for us, I needed all of it scheduled through the end of December. Now...

43:52
We can still show up and we can still take pictures and post when we feel like it, but it's just extra. We are going to be consistent through the end of December because we're already done with it. Right. So what I took away from that would be, again, my candle business. I would use chat GPT, maybe Canva to create some graphics or just take my photos. Because again, in the beginning, it's not about perfection, it's about showing up. And so-

44:21
to be perfect. Right. So let's say I went and I would take, you would suggest to me if you were consulting me on this, you would say get 30 photos of products of you, of your setup, you at the farmer's market. The oils you use. You would set all those things up and then you would go in there and it literally looks like a big calendar and you would create these posts and you can go ahead and type in and say like here's my caption.

44:51
Here's my hashtags, here's my image, and you could literally insert… Here's where I want this particular post to be posted. Here's the platform. And here's the time of day. And here's the time in day. And so what you would do is, what that looks like for people who haven't done that is you see this calendar and there's all the days of the week and whether you do weekends or not weekends, and you see…

45:16
all these words and these photos and stuff and you spend, you know, once you do it a few times, like you may spend, once you've gotten all those things together, like you might spend a couple of hours, maybe, if you're doing like one post a day, scheduling out your whole month. So you spend, you know, like let's just say again, let's say that you've taken your photos for a few days and then you just literally spend one full day, you know, maybe that's

45:43
four hours, maybe that's eight hours, depending on your efficiencies, but you create all your captions, all your hashtags, upload all your images, and you schedule all out. That's one time for a month, and then you don't even have to think about it. Then it's just, we are doing something, or like a customer sends you a picture of their candle saying, oh my gosh, I love this or whatever. Then just do a post, because again, this is not to replace your app, your presence. It's to...

46:12
add to it. So right. And again, like we would advise you do it yourself first. At the end of the day, if it's too much or you're like, this is a waste of my time, I need to be doing revenue generating activity, then we've got a $99 membership for content. And if you're a Dowry Flow user, which is 99, we will post for you on these platforms that we connect with for 30 bucks a month. So for 229, you have your full CRM with all the other features.

46:42
plus your content and your posting, done. So all you get to do is focus on the growth of your business. And it's because of those kinds of things why our customers see the 37% growth. Because when they don't have to worry about the mundane appointment reminders, and they don't have to worry about the mundane social media posts just for consistency, and they don't have to worry, when they can focus their brain on the things that are actually gonna move the needle,

47:11
The needle gets moved. Right. Well, I think a lot of us can relate to, it's 10 o'clock at night and you're laying in bed or you're getting ready for bed and you're like, I completely forgot to make my post for today. And so then you're frantically putting something together and you're putting it out there at 10.30 at night. And depending on what your product is, is anybody going to see that? And especially if it's like, hey, oh, by the by.

47:41
tomorrow we're doing blank. Like no one has plans now to do that. You know, because you did it late and it's not, again, no shame but that could have been done. Well, you can't post too much. Like there's a misconception about posting. You cannot post too much and Gary Vee talks about this all the time. Every single time that you post, not everybody sees it. Yeah. Facebook is only going to show that post to the people that like...

48:10
that type of language about that type of subject and are on Facebook on that time of day, regularly. So you posting three to five to six times a day on one platform, it's not obnoxious to your people. They're not seeing all six posts. They maybe see one to two.

48:29
and it's being shown to different people. So having a lot of content is great and having a variety of content is great because every post is, it's gonna hit different and it's gonna be shown different for every single person. Yeah, and yeah, there's several people, Gary V does come to mind with this particularly because it's kind of that whole adage of, cast a wide net or you could also look at it from plant as many seeds, like you're not gonna plant one tomato plant in hopes to make salsa.

48:59
You're gonna play at six because two are gonna die and one of them is gonna get eaten by grasshoppers. Well, it's compound interest, right? So if we did one podcast and posted it, oh crap, only two people listen. Well, no duh, nobody knows who we are. But by continuing to do it, our people will find us and what we talk about will intrigue some people, it'll piss some people off and not every episode is going to be for every single person. But we keep doing it.

49:28
because we want to and this is how we want to show up online. And so if you believe in your product and it's what you want to do, you've got to keep showing up and push through the fact that nobody's watching. The fact that, because it's just a yet. Nobody's watching yet. Nobody's listening yet. Nobody's following yet. It's all a yet. And as soon as social media realizes that you're not gonna let the yet get to you, then it'll start posting your stuff out. Right.

49:57
But it's going to test you first. If you're not going to show up consistently, even when nobody's watching, it is not going to push your stuff out. Well, it's like with anything in life when you can just wrap your head around the idea that it's about consistency and resilience. Because, I mean, no athlete just walks out and wins a Super Bowl. Nobody, I mean, like you can look at Mr. Beast and other people, like you go back and look at their first videos. They had no views.

50:27
And some of these people are like for years nobody is watching them. No one's, I mean, have maybe double digit views. Yeah. MrBeast talked about how he wasn't even able to monetize YouTube for the first five years because he couldn't hit the metrics. Yeah. And so there's a lot of things. But he just kept posting. Yeah. And I mean, there's some people that are, you know, they do things differently in that, you know, they want to keep things pure and stuff and so they don't monetize. But...

50:57
There's I think of people like Casey Neistat and stuff who, I mean, people look at what he's doing now or what he's been doing the last five years and like, oh my gosh, but go watch his early stuff. Watch his early, early stuff and see the videos he was taking 20 years ago. In retrospect, I'm like, it's garbage compared to this because it's like, again, you're just figuring it out. You're just trying to see what works and you're just showing up day after day, month after month.

51:26
and knowing that it will eventually happen in some capacity. And so I think the posting is the same. A lot of people, like you said, they get discouraged after a post or three or five and be like, wow, I'm only getting like two likes. Yeah. Well, and that's why it's just easier to have a CRM handle it. I don't worry about the number of likes or the comments or the anything. I hop on Facebook to comment back to people so it's organic in the post. But...

51:55
Outside of me responding to comments, I don't even look at our Facebook feed Because it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter. Well, it's it's it's not It's not that it wouldn't matter to anybody. I think what it is is You can get lost people can get lost in The performance right and they'll get very discouraged if you overanalyze it you're gonna stop posting, right? It's like if you just watched

52:24
paint dryer, if you just watched a plant grow. Right. Like, you're going to get discouraged and leave. Yeah. But if you can do like that, where you can use a CRM to automate all this stuff and just schedule it all out, you will have less of a, like, if you took the time to that morning, like go take a picture of the sunrise and then you made a caption and you did this stuff. If by the end of the day you haven't had some interaction on it, like you're going to feel defeated and you're not going to do it the next day.

52:53
If in that moment you are choosing to just build every post for the month, like it's a banger, then they're going to be good. And then you can just set it and forget it. You're going to be a lot less likely. Because there's posts that I was so proud of. Like, oh, I can't wait till this one comes out. Nothing. Crickets. I was pissed. But I already had the rest of the month scheduled. So it went. It didn't matter that I was pissed or that my feelings were hurt. Everything else for the rest of the month is still going to go without me.

53:23
So I think, again, the takeaway is going to be do your due diligence, figure out who you want to work with, are you capable enough that you can just build everything that you need to and you feel confident and you have the patience to do it, or again, that's part of that due diligence of find someone who you want to work with and look at all the limitations, the upcharges, the cost of communications after.

53:54
and then know where to start in building it. Or just ask if you don't know, say, this is my business. Like hopefully if you're doing a demo with a person, you can kind of get guidance from them during that demo that says, okay, cool. This is my business. This is my goal in the next 12 months or something. Like what would be your advice on step one in doing this? And it could be...

54:19
building out email campaigns, building out your social media marketing strategies, yada, yada. And then... Our clients like that we're not just a CRM, that we can come in and help with the backend, but then we help them scale, grow, and monetize other avenues that they didn't even see. We really become the cheerleaders to their organization. And...

54:43
we brainstorm like partners, but we step back like cheerleaders. Yeah. And it just allows our business owners that we work with to really flourish in whatever space that they're in. And that's the part that I love. Yeah. And I'm hoping that we have the capacity here soon to start taking on, again, we don't like using the word coaching. Yeah, I don't like coaching. But some sort of like...

55:11
brainstorming sessions or something that we can offer to clients that is outside of stuff. I'm interested in doing this because we've had some meetings with some of our tried and true customers who are some of the first ones that were very vested in their success and we're very passionate about helping them grow. I think that when we have these brainstorming sessions, like

55:38
Sometimes they last a long time and sometimes it's just during the initial get to know you one on one meeting. But we are, I think we're really good at, one thing I'm proud of that we can do is we can get on their level and we may have never heard about whatever their business is and we don't have any experience in it. But what we are is we're fresh eyes, we're fresh ears and we are creative people in thinking outside of the box.

56:08
And so I'm excited with the prospect of someday people will be able to book a meeting and that could be an hour, it could be four hours. Like there's some of them that we had that literally turned into four or five hour long. Well, we schedule four hours out. Right. But the things that we take away from that, the things that we maybe thought were going to be the takeaways were not.

56:38
It ended up turning this into because then they realized and they said, oh, this is exciting. Right. And then literally 24 hours later, when things are successful and when things get announced and just boom, one of those ideas that we had and then we kind of worked together and what does that look like? And then within a couple days, Yeah, the next round was already sold out. Or it's like tripled.

57:07
the revenue that was driving this other product or this other thing. Yeah. Like that to me gives me so much pride and excitement for those businesses that I'm like, this is something that I want to figure out how we can offer to more people because I feel like we have something to give and I want to make sure that it is something that people value it.

57:35
and they are going to take it serious. This is something that I think we are both passionate about stretching our creative muscles, but just helping people grow and realize that they're capable of growing. So many people, when they've been in their business for a year or two years or something and they feel like it's stagnant, they feel very down on themselves and they feel very stuck. I think that we have a pretty decent knack for coming in and breathing life.

58:05
into their project and encouraging them and being their cheerleaders and getting it and maybe helping to kind of get that ball rolling again and get everything like reignited and get that fan that flame. Yeah. I like to push the ball down the cliff and then like I'm totally fine being in the background and taking absolutely no credit. I just want to help get the ball rolling again. Right. Yeah. So I'm excited. I think that that's something that...

58:33
has been on my mind and my heart for a little while and I just, I want to, I want to figure out, you know, how are we going to incorporate that into, you know, version 3.0 of this. But anyway, so yeah, so due diligence, come with, prepare to take notes, you know, and just kind of know what...

59:00
what you're needing out of it and be, don't be afraid to ask those questions. Yeah, ask the money questions. Yeah. So, but thanks for tuning in. We'll see y'all next time. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to the Velvet Ventures. If you'd like more information about who we are, what we do, or you wanna follow us or any of our companies, then feel free to check out the link below. Other than that, thank you so much to our sponsors for making this episode possible. See you next time.