Parker Web Partner Show

Caleb Parsons 00:02
Welcome to the Parker Web Partner Show, where we find creative solutions for creative agencies.

Darryl Parker 00:11
Welcome to the Parker Web Partner Show. Thanks for joining us today. I am here with my co host, Merrill.

Merrill Loechner 00:16
Hi, I'm Merrill Loechner, Founder and Podcast Producer with Smith Douglass Associates, a creative agency based in New York.

Darryl Parker 00:25
And I am Darryl Parker with Parker Web. And today we have a great show ahead, we're going to be talking about why the customer really matters, CRM. That's what we think CRM means. And we're going to be talking about CRM systems and tools. And we're going to start out with Caleb, and I'm going to talk about a couple of things. And then we have a great guest coming on: Lidi Mocko, who's going to tell us a lot about CRM. She's a CRM consultant and works with small businesses all over the country and helping implement their CRMs. So, welcome to the show. Next up, we're going over to our Developers Desk, where we're going to talk to Caleb about what's going on at Parker Web behind the scenes. Caleb, what's going on in the Developers Desk?

Caleb Parsons 01:11
So recently, and just on theme with our topic of CRMs, we've gotten lots of tickets with from clients just looking for: Can you help me connect to this? Or can you assist me in adding this form to my site? There's lots of different ways that clients can connect their site to a CRM. There are plugins for WordPress, for example, for things like HubSpot and OptinMonster. There are ways that you can embed forms using something like Active Campaign, which can be really useful, because then you can style that form after you've embedded it so that it matches the rest of the site, and then all those leads can go right into your CRM. Or there are other integrations with things like contact forms that will connect to Salesforce or Active Campaign, or sometimes you need a little help in connecting those forms, which is when we turn to something like Zapier.

Darryl Parker 02:36
So that's what we're seeing? We're seeing people needing Zapier more or needing this integration more?

Caleb Parsons 02:42
I think it really all depends on what they're looking for. I think it's a total variety. But what you will see more and more is that for something like WordPress, there are an increasing amount of people that are connecting to XCRM. And so there will be a plugin for getting that integration working.

Darryl Parker 03:08
On their websites. If they have their website and it's out there, or if they're running a campaign on social media and they need it to come back to a form that's on their branded web page, they can do that. If they don't necessarily want to do it in the CRM, they can do it on their website, right?

Caleb Parsons 03:22
Right.

Darryl Parker 03:23
And the website can connect back. That's great. It's a great reminder about how flexible the website can be as a platform for your business and feed all the other components.

Caleb Parsons 03:35
For sure.

Darryl Parker 03:36
Well, that was really informative, Caleb. I really appreciate you bringing us that information. This week in the Corner Office, we're going to talk about how we use CRM at Parker Web and how I invested in over the last 15 years. So, one of the things that I did coming out of the recession of 2008-9, is we started working with clients on scale. Instead of having just a handful, having maybe a dozen or so clients where they were big and we mostly were working with them from a project management perspective, to having dozens and then hundreds of clients. And it required us to try to develop a system that would allow us to work with the clients in such a way where we could maintain their information, but it wasn't QuickBooks. It didn't seem like QuickBooks, or all these other off-the-shelf systems, matched the business process that we were trying to implement with how I wanted to run my business. So at the time, my only solution was to build something. So we built this system in 2009. And so you have to remember this is a 15-year difference to today. We have rebuilt it a few times; we've gone in, we've learned a lot about how our employees interact with the system, how our staff, how our even our contractors use the system. We've married it up with other systems. We use a different third-party ticketing system that then we use an API to connect with. We actually aren't using Zapier, but we use a custom API that we built to connect to this system. So at some point, if you're going to scale and you're going to say, hey, I want to have more customers than I can keep their information in my head, you're going to have to consider some kind of CRM system operationally, or, as we're going to talk about with Lidi, especially when you start getting into handling leads and handling a lot of volume on that side of the house. What's your experience with that, Merrill?

Merrill Loechner 05:44
I have worked with companies that had high-end CRMs, I have worked with companies that put everything in Excel, and it did not work very well. I started working with a law firm that had just spent six figures to move over to Salesforce, and then treated it like a Rolodex.

Darryl Parker 06:04
Oh, gosh...

Merrill Loechner 06:05
I was like, "You just bought a Lamborghini to drive to and from this train station. What are you doing?" And I kept explaining, "This is this powerful tool, you put this information in." And the lawyers were like, "Oh, no, no, no, the admins are going to use it. They can put all the notes in." I'm like, "The admins aren't the ones speaking to your clients, they don't know."

Darryl Parker 06:25
And I think that gets into what we're going to touch on here shortly as the philosophy of a CRM and why do you have a CRM? And when is it important for you to start considering a CRM?

Merrill Loechner 06:37
And the training. You can't just show up one day in your company and say, "Okay, guys, we got this new CRM, go play with it."

Darryl Parker 06:43
Right?

Merrill Loechner 06:44
It has to be adopted from the bottom up, from the top down. And it has to be part and parcel of how you deal with every day. I mean, I used to use Salesforce. We didn't use Outlook, we didn't use Gmail; all email came and went through Salesforce. So we can look immediately like, okay, when's the last time I reached out to this person? And what did I say? Well, you go to that person's field. And here's all the emails we sent back and forth, it makes it so much easier,

Darryl Parker 07:15
Right. It just integrates that data collection into your daily operations and things that you're doing every day. So, we're going to talk some more about it coming up. But the big takeaway is that there is no magic bullet for how to solve the CRM problem. It usually comes in a lot of different ways. But it is something that as you grow, you're probably going to have to reckon with at some point, and how you do that. There is no wrong way as long as you're making an effort and as long as you don't treat it like a Rolodex.

Merrill Loechner 07:47
Exactly.

Darryl Parker 07:56
All right. Well, welcome to the Roundtable today. Today we're going to talk about CRMs--customer relationship management tools--and why they're important. And today we have with us Lidi Mocko. Lidi, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Lidiane Mocko 08:09
Yeah, sure. I am an immigrant. I was born and raised in Brazil, I have been in the US for 20 years; became a citizen in 2015. And my background was as a software engineer before I started working with CRM systems. And I went back to school; I got an MBA at the University of Denver and then started doing consulting work with customer relationship management systems.

Darryl Parker 08:41
And that's how we met; you work with small businesses and consult with them to try to integrate CRMs into their businesses, right?

Lidiane Mocko 08:51
Yes.

Darryl Parker 08:53
And so you do seminars and you do a blog about it. You have a lot of information about CRMs.

Lidiane Mocko 09:00
Yeah, I have a blog. I have hosted workshops here in the Denver Metro area at co-working spaces. And I've been a guest on different podcasts. And a lot of work with small and growing organizations in terms of helping them to implement a CRM or, these days, more than helping them implement from the beginning, quite often I get engaged when they already had a system for a while, and they have some pain points because it's not really working as they expected.

Darryl Parker 09:47
I'm a business owner, I have an agency. I work with clients, but why have a CRM? Why is it important to me?

Lidiane Mocko 09:56
Yeah. Do you remember what you had for breakfast exactly three weeks ago?

Darryl Parker 10:04
No. Well, it was probably oatmeal, but it would be a guess.

Lidiane Mocko 10:09
And so you have an agency. It's somewhat like consulting like you. When people are going to purchase services from you, do they come up, give you a call and say, "Oh, yeah, I'm paying you right now. We're good." Does that happen?

Darryl Parker 10:30
Not often. No.

Lidiane Mocko 10:33
So it doesn't happen often. So, does that mean, you need to do follow-ups? You need to understand: what did you talk to them about last? What should you talk to them about next time you meet with them?

Darryl Parker 10:55
So, it's a record of the interaction with a person, right? I met Caleb and now I want to get to know Caleb better in case Caleb wants to buy something from me in the future?

Lidiane Mocko 11:07
There's a bigger picture, right? In terms of customer relationship management, there are three main pillars, from my perspective. One is any business owner needs to do some level of marketing. If they're doing some level of marketing, they're going to a trade show, they're going to a networking event or networking group, they're getting information about other people who might be potential clients or not. Where is that information going, especially if you need to follow up. So, in a CRM system, they would go into a leads record and then you would do your follow-ups with those leads, and try to understand: Are they a good fit from a budget perspective, from a fit perspective--in terms of what they need versus what you offer--from a timing perspective--like they want things for yesterday, but you have clients and you can not drop everybody and just go work for them right now. So, you evaluate those factors and then if all those fit, then you can convert them--so there's enough fit here for us to keep talking--then in a CRM system, you convert that lead record into a contact record, an account record, and potentially an opportunity record. And the opportunity record is the one that has that beautiful sales pipeline that a lot of people see, that funnel in some graphs, and that's where you start having more of: Now I have enough information to know that we can talk more, so let's discuss scope of work. And once you start having those conversations about scope of work, there is some back and forth, there's some education that goes into it, just so they understand how you approach marketing, what is valuable, what do you do differently from somebody else that does marketing, and there is some back and forth, right? And then there is the part that you get to a negotiation or proposal and then they need to sign. And all those things usually happen sometimes over a period of three months. If you're lucky, they might happen over a period of time of two weeks. In reality, you usually don't have control over that, right, because it's a conversation. Sometimes, you know they really want to work with you, you know you really want them as a client, and COVID hit and you need to figure out: Okay, I know you want to work with me, so let's just keep in touch and I will reach out to you once things calm down. Once you have assessed what happens on your end and I assess what happens on my end, and how we manage this crisis that is affecting everybody at the moment. So that's where the CRM is important because--especially for small business owners, where quite often they are not doing just sales. They might not have necessarily someone dedicated for that sales role. Even if they do, if they have someone dedicated for that sales role, a good salesperson has a notebook where they're keeping track of things. As a business owner, do you want them to keep it in their notebook?

Caleb Parsons 14:47
Right, right.

Merrill Loechner 14:49
I worked for a big multinational corporation, and I got headhunted from a startup that had a very robust CRM system. So I went to this huge multinational corporation and I asked, "What CRM system do you use?" And I got a few raised eyebrows and they said, "A what?" And I said, "Well, where do you keep all your client information? Where you keep your customer information?" And one of the sales guys hauled out this big packet of business cards from his back pocket and said, "Oh, this is my database." "And if you get hit by a bus, what happens to your clients?" I had never seen such a big company not have a CRM, and I came from a 15-person tech startup with full bells and whistles Salesforce. So it was very odd feeling. Not surprisingly, that big multinational company got bought out and no longer exists.

Darryl Parker 15:47
I mean, I can remember 10 years ago, having a folder full of business cards; that was my reference point. If I was going to a networking event or something, have I seen this person? I would go back and flip through and say, "Is there somebody there that I need to see?" That type of thing. So, I definitely can see where it translates over to almost like an operating system for your marketing, right? It kind of gives you these points to move along for marketing. So you said that's one pillar, and you said there's three pillars for CRM usage?

Lidiane Mocko 16:16
Yeah. So the one is marketing, which is the lead, because what happens is: Anybody investing money in digital marketing, where are you capturing the leads? You should funnel them, integrate them with a CRM. So, if you're investing your money in marketing, you need to know where those leads are going, because you need to do your follow-ups to convert them. So marketing is one. The second is the sales aspect and the sales pipeline. And the third one is customer service, which is a ticketing management system, or customer service in general.

Darryl Parker 16:56
That's when they're already a customer, they've become a customer, and you're using the same information that you used during the lead process and the opportunity process to now they're working with you.

Lidiane Mocko 17:08
Yeah, they are different types of records in the CRM. So from a lead, it's converted into a contact, then you have their account, then you have an opportunity that represents your engagement with them, a specific engagement over time. You might have more than one engagement with the same account; they are represented by different opportunity records. And then you have case management or tickets, in order to represent the customer service aspect of once they became a client. And that's the core. If you're working in a platform like Salesforce, then you can incorporate an integration with a project management system, or install project management from the app exchange that would help you to manage the phases of your project, and track how that is going if you're in a service-based business.

Merrill Loechner 18:16
Well, that's one thing I like about the big CRMs because its goes from: Okay, we were at a trade show, what leads did we get? We put that in a system; we tag it with the show. Somebody else, our sales guys, reach out; they're not ready to buy it. And then the person visits our website and downloads a white paper; we can add that to the CRM. And then possibly downloads something else from our website; we can track that. So by the time our salesperson gets back to the person: Okay, I see we met at this show, and you were really interested in this. Well, I just wanted to let you know we're updating, so we're doing that; I'd love to tell you about our... And so it's not just a Rolodex, it's not just the contact information. It's all the contact points: what trade shows, what digital marketing, what's been effective, how often has the salesperson touched point? So, if you're a manager, you can go and say: Okay, it's been six weeks since that trade show; are all our leads followed up? So you can do a report, you can do a dashboard saying: Okay, we got X number of leads and the salespeople qualified this many, and this many are hot leads. And these were just college students who stopped by the booth to pick up swag and that way you can monitor this from the first touch point until either the final sale and, as you said, beyond the sale when customer service can now come in saying: Oh, I see you bought this at this point, and you've got this model. There's a problem there; we can help with that.

Lidiane Mocko 19:53
Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Merrill. That's very much--all that goes into it. I think the main thing, I talked about lead records, opportunity records, account records, contact records, I think what you brought up is the campaign because in most CRMs, you're going to have a campaign where you can have contacts or leads tied to a campaign. And a specific campaign can even help you to see: Okay, now I can see that this client was actually exposed to three different campaigns before he made a purchase.

Merrill Loechner 20:40
Exactly. And as a former marketing manager, you can look at that saying: Where should my market budget go? It's like, wow, this trade show generated X number of leads that turned into X number of sales. This trade show had twice as many leads, but only two sales. So maybe we want to spend more money on Tradeshow A than Tradeshow B. And the same thing with digital campaigns. Okay, we did this Facebook, and we did this SEO, and we did this. This is the information coming in. What's our best ROI? What's our best bang for the buck? And you can't do that, unless you've been tracking that, and CRMs are the easiest way to track.

Darryl Parker 21:17
So one of those situations is, if there's a particularly sales-oriented entrepreneur, right, and they're like a solopreneur, maybe it's them and one other person. Maybe they have gotten into a CRM or something cloud-based or something easy, straightforward for them to track. I was not that person, right? I was very much wing and a prayer in terms of who I was building a relationship with. And maybe I had a little bit of a Google sheet or something that said: Okay, I need to call that person again. But, I mean, when does it make sense for a company to really start considering: Hey, it might be time for us to look at getting a CRM.

Lidiane Mocko 22:04
Yeah, good point. My response to that is, how long do you understand business? Do you believe in what you're doing? Because if you do, you're going to start from day one. And there's no excuse not to start because, okay, you don't want to spend any money, then there are some free ones. You can get started with a free version of HubSpot. Salesforce has a small business offering that starts at $25 per user per month,

Darryl Parker 22:37
But is it really about the money? Or is it more about the time that it takes to do all these different steps and keep up with those things? Or maybe the training? Are CRMs intimidating? I would think they're a little intimidating.

Lidiane Mocko 22:49
Yes, they are. They're definitely intimidating because you need to think in terms of data and how you're going to use it. And oh God, I've seen--there was a client once that all their revenue information, instead of being in opportunity records, they had it in notes under the contact record, because they knew they needed a database. They had no idea what CRM meant, or how to use things in a CRM.

Darryl Parker 23:22
There's a skill involved, right? And most of these platforms offer some kind of skill training, right? To get over that initial hump.

Lidiane Mocko 23:33
Yeah, you can Google: give me an overview of the CRM. HubSpot has in their HubSpot Academy different courses available. Salesforce, with their small business offering, also has a lot of tutorials. They are trusting that if you're purchasing that level of subscription, you don't have the budget to hire consultants to walk you through it. So they will give you videos for you to onboard yourself. Back to your question. I asked my very first question: Do you remember what you had for breakfast three weeks ago? So as your business is evolving, it's always helpful to go back and look at data from five years ago, or three years ago, or within a year. Okay, if I look at a year ago, who was I talking to? What was happening? You can pull some reports in the CRM and look at the activities and look at the opportunity records you created, the contact records you created around that time, and, and have a better pulse.

Darryl Parker 24:46
I think for us, the turning point was when the client information could no longer just live in my head. Someone else had to have access to the information and we needed to have access to it in kind of a universal way. We built our first little CRM system, we wound up building an internal one and combining it with a ticket system, and built that very early on, growing as a small company focused on the services that we offer. It changes the way that we interact with our customers. And now we're to the point where we're outsourcing and employing people to specifically work on business development. So now, a CRM from both the lead side and the marketing side becomes more important, because it's no longer just in my head, right?

Lidiane Mocko 25:35
Yeah, good point. You're talking to me...I'm obviously biased, right? That's what I do for a living.

Darryl Parker 25:45
That's why you're here, because you're biased.

Lidiane Mocko 25:46
And I have more of a technical background, so I like systems in general. If you're not a person with this profile, if you're more like Darryl, you got to a point where you had so many clients that it was too much information and your team was growing, too, you couldn't just keep the information in your head because you needed to collaborate with your team. So you ended up building an internal system, and now you are at another stage where: Okay, I want to grow my wingers a little bit more. What does that mean? I am hiring other people to do some of the business development. In this case, then, I need a CRM to track the leads and the sales process, just so I can identify how that is going.

Darryl Parker 26:39
That's perfect. I think it's a good point. I mean, there is no sure definite time, but if you have the inclination, do it, right? I mean, that's what I'm hearing. But if you don't, there are some points where you definitely are going to have to do it at some point, if you want to continue to grow.

Lidiane Mocko 26:55
Yeah, I cannot tell you how many times during an implementation process, it always starts with resistance. There is one person on the team who has the vision, or who had some experience in corporate America and came in and: Oh, we need a CRM; let's work with someone. And then in that stage, there's a lot of resistance, because in implementation, I'm going around and asking questions. I try to make people comfortable; I try to meet you where you're at. But still people feel insecure: Oh, maybe she's judging how I'm making my own process. All those insecurities come up in that process. But I cannot tell you how many times I heard exactly what you said: Oh, my God, I don't need to keep all this in my mind. But that's the moment when the light bulb starts to go on, when they start seeing the data coming together in the system. And they start realizing: Oh, I can just do this filter and then I have this data that I need. And I can pull this report and I can have this dashboard and just click a button to refresh it. So I can host my meeting with everybody looking at the same thing. So that sentence right there: It doesn't have to live in my head anymore. It's a good one.

Merrill Loechner 28:26
And even if you're a solopreneur, a CRM is good. Because yeah, even if it's living in your head, there's a lot of stuff living in your head. You've been networking, you've been meeting people in networks. You go through your database, like: Who is this person again? Why did I...? Where did I meet them? What did I talk about? Why did...? And if nothing else, I remember when using Salesforce, you can set up little calendar things like "Reach out after six months." This is what we talked about. Within Salesforce, you can email directly from Salesforce. So within the one thing it's: Okay, here are all the emails I sent. Here are the notes. And you can also customize it like: Oh, here's his birthday. His anniversary is this day; let's send out a card just as a reminder saying: Hi, you're top of mind. There's so many things you can do with it. Again, like I said, it's not just for sales, marketing, it's a customer relation, you can customize it to work on how you have relationships with your customers.

Caleb Parsons 28:27
As someone who is very data minded and data driven, but also someone who has an absolutely abysmal memory, I use our system constantly, all the time, every day, and it is absolutely invaluable.

Darryl Parker 29:53
Well, while we're talking about systems and tools, that's kind of how we like to wrap up. So Lidi, what's your favorite tool that you like to use in this space?

Lidiane Mocko 30:04
Yes, I just want to touch on one thing, because we talked a lot about the CRM and the value industry aspects. But I know, Caleb, with your background, one of the things that happens after the initial implementation of the CRM is the integration piece. And when we get to that integration, because then it's kind of like: Okay, we got up here; how do we get up there now? Which tools do we need to integrate with? And when we get to that point, then there are different features that can be used. There's API integration, there's some level of automation that you can build within the tools depending on the tool; they're going to have different levels of automation. And a tool that I know Caleb mentioned before is Zapier. There's a lot of Zapier integration that can be leveraged, because that can make information flow from one system to another. I think I'm not going to say too much more about it, because I think Caleb probably has maybe some use cases of integration with Zapier that he can share when it's his turn. In terms of tools at this point, I am a Salesforce partner and Salesforce certified consultant. Salesforce is my favorite CRM. At the same time that I say that, I am also...it's a tough one to say, because it has grown so much, it's so much more than just a CRM. If they could, I think right now, they would be calling themselves AI Force. And you might see that term coming up pretty soon. But yeah, I really like Salesforce in terms of, it's a platform that has a lot of flexibility, you can do different types of automation. And you can do a lot of tracking of business processes through the customizations that go beyond those aspects of marketing, sales, and customer service that we talked about. And that's one of the reasons I like it. On the other hand, I will be very transparent that I do feel a little uncomfortable, because I feel like Salesforce has been, it's becoming so big that to me, it's almost compared to the Big Four of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. And it's just not talked about as much because it's more of a business to business. It's might not be at the forefront. So, that's the part that--I feel anytime that there is such a dominant force in the market, I think it's a little scary.

Darryl Parker 33:13
Caleb, so Lidi brought you into that. What's your tool for this week?

Caleb Parsons 33:18
Yeah, Zapier we've found to be very, very useful for any number of things. It's a really great tool for when a client comes to us, and they're looking to do something, they're looking to connect to their CRM, they're looking to do something that isn't quite standard, or they're looking to customize something for their business, and they're not really sure how to do it. And if there hasn't been a standard implementation of that, Zapier is perfect to have that kind of functionality for a client. It's very easy to use; it uses triggers and actions. And it's definitely our go-to for when a client is like: Hey, can we do this? And we can say yes,

Darryl Parker 34:13
And that's the thing I really like about Zapier. It's almost like your business becomes the central hub and you can go out and pull the things that your business needs specifically, and it's almost like it becomes its own unique thing in the world because you've connected all these things to it. Right? And so it's like, well, this is how I use Zapier. This is how I use all these tools that it connects to, in order to uniquely execute on my company. I think it's a great product.

Caleb Parsons 34:40
Yeah, for sure.

Lidiane Mocko 34:41
And it avoids: What would be the other option? If you're not using Zapier, it would require you to create an IT infrastructure in the cloud and host some code up in the cloud. And then the next thing you know, a lot of business owners are having to become IT experts. And with that, using Zapier as an integration tool simplifies a lot and decreases cost and complexity.

Darryl Parker 35:15
Absolutely. Merrill, did you come up with something this week?

Merrill Loechner 35:17
Yeah, well, one of the things that you do as a consultant is some of my consultant clients are hourly. And so I use a program called Clockify, which lets me monitor time. Right before I start work on a project, I hit Go, and I'll work on the project. And when I finish at that point, I hit Stop. And it just monitors how much time I'm spending on each particular project for each particular client. And I set up: Okay with this client, I'm charging this much an hour. So at the end of the month, or end of the week--however we set up billing--I just do: Give me a report,. It gives me a total report, and it could actually generate an invoice as well. So I find that very useful. I have several lawyer clients; they recommended it and I find it highly useful.

Darryl Parker 36:06
That's very cool. The thing that I jump into is Calendly. So I actually had to, because we were using a POP email service, I wound up having to move into Exchange in order to really maximize Calendly, because I'm not using Gmail or anything like that. And Calendly has been a game changer in the way that I'm able to set appointments with my clients, and not just in the sales mode but with clients, with my staff, with my students when I'm teaching. So it allows me to open my calendar up to the public in a very controlled way. Because I can create different links that come in to Calendly to say, expose this calendar to this link and expose that calendar to that link. And then it all talks back to my main calendar, which then interacts with my mobile and it's all synced up, right? So it's been, I mean, there's just no more back and forth. And my meeting volume has just skyrocketed since I've gotten the system set up. So I found that to be an extremely useful tool for people who are in the position where they need to meet with people on a regular basis.

Merrill Loechner 37:14
And especially like you said, the back and forth: How's Tuesday? No, Tuesday is not good for me; how about Wednesday? One of the things that Calendly now does is you can send out a note to a group of people saying: Okay, pick the dates and times that work for you. And once everyone clicks the same one, it will book that time. If you're trying to set up a meeting with a group of people, you can just have them saying: Okay, pick which one that works. The first one that everyone says yes, booked.

Darryl Parker 37:45
Nice. Lidi Mocko, thank you so much for joining us here today. Tell us how folks can find you.

Lidiane Mocko 37:53
Yeah, crmgrowthstrategy.com; there is a Schedule button on the homepage and that's where they can learn more. And on LinkedIn, if you search by my name, Lidiane Mocko.

Darryl Parker 38:07
We'll put it in the show notes, so your LinkedIn will be down in our show notes. Thank you so much for coming out today. We really appreciate it.

Lidiane Mocko 38:19
Thank you. This has been a great conversation.

Darryl Parker 38:27
Thank you for joining us here today on the Parker Web Partner Show. Merrill, any closing words?

Merrill Loechner 38:32
I always thought CRMs were so important. And it gets frustrating when you're talking to other people who either have their stack of business cards, or: Oh, I just put them in a spreadsheet. Yeah, that's the tricycle. If you have a company and you want to grow that company, you can't be on the tricycle. At least get a Huffy or a 10-speed, or Salesforce, which is the Harley Davidson. But if you want to grow, you're going to need a real CRM.

Darryl Parker 39:02
Yeah, I would say that I grew my company to several hundred customers with a Big Wheel. I just was doing it the hard way, and it has made such a difference. We had a really pretty nice system, a custom system for the operations side but the sales side we've only recently taken that on and incorporated it in. It makes just such a huge difference.

Merrill Loechner 39:26
Yeah, having a CRM makes your life easier. You're thinking: "Oh God, CRM, big scary. I don't know how to do this. It's expensive..." but it pays for itself very quickly and will really help you scale up your business.

Darryl Parker 39:39
Well, I think you get the return. You're not going to learn it overnight, but if you give yourself 90 days of just immersing yourself in it and trying to learn about it, before you know it, you're going to say: Well, how could I ever live without it?

Merrill Loechner 39:53
Exactly.

Darryl Parker 39:54
So it was really good to hear from Caleb about how our own customers are asking for this already. We touched a little bit on our internal CRM system that we built 14 years ago. And then it was great to have Lidi here to talk more about her experience and the philosophy of a CRM and when does it make sense to bring a CRM and you know, she's got a ton of knowledge in Salesforce and whatnot. So I hope everyone reaches out to her. Thank you very much for joining us, and we will see you on the next show.

Merrill Loechner 40:27
Have a great week, everyone.

Caleb Parsons 40:31
You've been listening to the Parker Web Partner Show. If you need help in this ever-changing digital world, reach out to us at 877-321-2251 or visit our website at parkerweb.com.