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Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith.
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Talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack.
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Listen to find out how the best of the best achieved success with their team and CRM technology.
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And remember, unless you were the lead dog, the view never changes.
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Welcome to sales lead dog.
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In today’s episode I have joining me Eric Carlson of Miraplex.
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Eric, welcome to sales lead dog.
0:34
Hey, Chris, great to be here.
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Thank you.
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Eric, tell me a little bit about Miraplex.
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Miraplex, it’s an incredibly unique niche in the in the US economy.
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So what our experience is, is that there is a mid market client who really has outgrown their own IT capabilities.
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Miraplex’s business is really to take on the responsibility of running ITIT applications, managed services, professional services for those mid market clients.
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They’re too big for the local mom and pop providers, but they’re also way too small for you know IB, Ms.
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and DXES and and Ato.
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So there’s a really large market that’s in that’s underserved because the little guys can’t get up to serve them and the big guys won’t come down South.
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Miraplex’s business model is really to serve that mid market and delight them in a way that just allows us to to earn the business that that we truly do deserve.
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What are some of the trends that you’re seeing that’s really making the customers for, you know, reach out to you to Meraplex and say, hey, this is we need help.
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What are the are there things that you’re seeing or patterns private equity?
1:42
I think all the all the, all the acquisition growth that we’ve seen, what ends up happening is that companies who are smart entrepreneurial organic growers get to a size and scale where they do need to make inorganic growth happen.
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So we are seeing a lot of uptick from acquisitions, clients become 2-3 times as big as they were overnight and then scaling with that is impossible, which again that’s that mid market that that we feel a perfect fit for.
2:11
And also no one gets into business to run their own IT, right?
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You’re getting business to serve clients in a different capacity in a different environment.
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Whether you’re, you know, an attorney, architect of professional services firm, a doctor’s office, auto body mechanics, like retailers, that’s your business.
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However, the business that we do is taking care of that, you know, infrastructure, plumbing, IT support, which allows you to function in the in a modern society.
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So that blend those two things have really been kind of the the seeds for our growth that we’ve been able to catapult and grab onto.
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I can echo that Impeller and my firm, we also partner with private equity.
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And the reality is if you don’t have your tech stack that that house in order, you’re going to have problems.
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It’s going to hold you back from scaling.
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It’s going to hold you back from doing what you’re trying to do as an organization.
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So it’s really important that you get that stuff taken care of.
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Of course, my marketing team our our latest ad is it’s a face of a woman and she’s saying I was afraid of scaling before.
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I no longer am.
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Thank you, Mayor Plex.
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Right.
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I mean, that is OK.
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So we are on point for market message.
3:22
I will.
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I’ll take note of that.
3:24
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
3:25
Awesome.
3:26
When you look back over your career, what are the three things that have really driven your success?
3:33
It’s a good question.
3:34
So I think probably my first thing I would say is I’ve always raised my hands.
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I’m I’m quick to volunteer.
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So I’m 40, mid 40s, forty six years old now.
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Today, when we’re recording this and our generation is different, we don’t have Ibms to work at with career paths.
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We don’t have cultures that kind of, you know, you work at a company for 20 years and you get a gold watch that that doesn’t exist.
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You have to make your own career path.
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And the way you do that is you need to be 1 and very effective at the job you’re currently asked to do and doing.
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But then when opportunities come up to, to take on a new challenge or to sit on a committee or to volunteer and to listen, you got to raise your hand.
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So I talked about the fact that really in my late 20s, early 30s, I quickly got associated with a lot of executive committees.
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So I’d say I was always at the executive level, but kind of at the kids table, right?
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So I was, I can, I can hear what mom and dad were talking about, like the adults were saying, right?
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But like I was close, right?
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So you develop a lot of relationships, you develop a lot of friendships and, and man, do you learn a lot.
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Oh my gosh, you learn a lot.
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And so those are I think that’s probably the the number one thing that really helped me in my career.
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The second thing I would say is that I was not a great student, right?
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So I’m probably a solid B minus student.
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I’m not going to claim C student, but solid B minus student, right?
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But I absolutely love the the customer experience that I love marketing, I love sales.
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And so I’ve never stopped learning, right?
5:09
I mean, it is just something I am into.
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I have a small podcast addiction.
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I mean, it is, it’s something I cherish.
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So I’m, I’m constantly listening.
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I’m really good at connecting dots and seeing patterns across industries.
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So I’ve been able to kind of use that to shape and, and transform the businesses that I’ve been in, you know, and then lastly, having a pretty decent, I’m not patient, but I do have a pretty good long term perspective.
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So what I mean with that is, especially as a salesperson coming up in your career, you’re going to be surrounded by guys who hit deals real early, get big commissions, big paychecks.
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And if you’re a little competitive like myself, potentially, right, those things can crush your ego and you think it’s about you and it’s not.
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It’s just sometimes in sales that really is this magic formula of timing territory and then talent.
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That probably is a lesson I learned early on that frankly frustrated me.
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So I thought that my talent should overcome any challenges.
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But sometimes it, and I think this is actually a truism.
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I think it actually is all the time.
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It is market timing territory or the products that you have and then your talent.
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When you get all three of those to align, now you have a chance for a great career, which is really what I’m experiencing here at Miraplex today is is that exact story.
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But those probably the three things I would say are what I would attribute my career to.
6:40
Yeah.
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You know, I think you’re the first one that’s answered with volunteering as as one of your three elements.
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I remember when I talked with, I have a lot of nephews and nieces and when I talked to them when they’re first going out job hunting, that’s one of the things I tell them is raise your hand when they’re looking for someone, be that person says, Hey, I want to do that because you were going to learn and by the more you learn, the more challenges you face by going through that process of volunteering and not having that fear to put your neck out a little bit.
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You’re going to it’s going to pay dividends.
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And one of my nephew’s worked at a engineering firm.
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Entire engineering team got laid off except for him.
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There were people far more superior than or, you know, with the more experience that him got laid off because he was that guy that he volunteered for everything.
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Oh yeah.
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And you make yourself invaluable if you do that enough.
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I I’ve sat in committees with with bank consulting McKenzie, like I’ve been in rooms I had no business being in.
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Right.
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But again, quick learner, quick study.
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And you do make friends not just in those, you know, in those communities, but within your own organization.
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So you can be the engineer that they do keep on board.
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So yeah, that those, those are my three.
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Yeah.
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Did you want to be in sales?
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100 percent, 100%.
7:59
So I grew up in a family of engineers.
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My dad’s an engineer, my sister’s an engineer, grandpa’s an engineer.
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Like, just go back, right?
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I mean, this is them.
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And so you kind of grew up here and like, oh, those sales guys, they have all the fun.
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Well, I was naturally a decently fun person as it was.
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I’m thinking I could probably figure that out, right?
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And so I always, and I had an aunt who was VP of sales for Time Warner NBC in New York City.
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And she’s just kind of like, Eric, you’re a salesperson.
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Like I’m just telling you, I’m not trying to typecast you, but kind of who you are, you know?
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And so you pay attention to those things.
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And so for me, yeah, I’ve always wanted to be in this.
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Back when I went to school, there really were no college majors focused on that.
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My daughter is in the college pursuit right now.
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And so there are sales majors that she’s that she’s looking at.
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I’m thinking, how cool is that?
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You know?
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Oh, that’s amazing, you know.
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And so, yeah, no, for me, this has always been a pursuit, always been a passion.
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And I also really like marketing.
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And so when I had the chance later in my career to pull together sales and marketing to have a cohesive go to market machine, this has been this has been the best.
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It really has been.
9:15
Yeah, that’s awesome.
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That’s awesome.
9:18
When you look back those early days in sales, what was the biggest failure slash lesson learned?
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So my first job.
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So when again, when we got jobs out of college, there’s only really two things you can do.
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And so I’m from Chicago.
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This is kind of a Chicago story.
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You would either go sell copiers, OK.
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And they basically said if you can sell copiers, you can kind of sell anything, or you would go in Chicago.
9:46
This like when CDW was just first coming into like corporate, right?
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So I remember when they just had warehouses you would go to.
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But like this is you go to those two places and I’m thinking, well, I don’t want to sit on the phone, so I’m gonna go do I’m gonna go do the the copier deal.
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I had three blocks downtown Chicago.
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That’s all I had.
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And I only had the front doors of the building.
10:07
I couldn’t even go in the back doors.
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I just had literally the front doors, the whole thing, and I learned so much about tenacity, about asking questions.
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I learned that there are sales techniques, but there is no silver bullet.
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There is no fairy dust.
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Now there are best practices and things you can do to kind of engage and ask qualifying.
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So I just, I learned an unbelievable amount.
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I’ll never forget the first deal I closed ’cause I didn’t even close it.
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I was sitting in the room when my manager, Tom Peters, comes in and he’s orchestrating a meeting that I’m almost having an out of body experience for.
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I don’t really, I don’t even know what’s happening.
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He pulls out a contract.
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He asks for the business.
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I had no idea what I was doing right.
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And I just got a chance to watch it and it was just fascinating to me.
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And then I go on probably a three month cold streak of not closing a thing.
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And it was it was brutal.
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I end up finishing and obviously finishing strong when rookie of the year.
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I love the rookie of the year award.
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I think that’s it’s the best award out there.
11:18
But like just knowing that this is, it’s not an art, it’s not a science, it is it, it, it’s, it’s about, it’s about making great connections and understanding that you’re there to serve the client.
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And it’s not about getting the clothes and never seen them again.
11:37
That was a phenomenal early career experience for sure.
11:41
Has that experience sounds like that’s kind of shaped your philosophy towards sales.
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Do you have a particular philosophy in terms of how you’d like to run things?
11:52
100% So I so in all the companies that I’ve LED, I run basically some very similar customer centric sales methodology.
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We call it, we call it the hero’s journey.
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It is based off of Joseph Campbell’s, you know, storytelling narrative of the actual hero’s journey.
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It has been morphed into a AA100 sales books.
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My favorite is Donna Miller’s story brand.
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I think that the work coming out of that group is really good.
12:22
It’s geared towards marketing, but the reason I like that it’s geared towards marketing is because marketing is all about setting up the journey for success.
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And So what happens in the methodology, you have to understand most of the cultures I’ve been in, it’s been the salesperson who’s gotten the high 5 or been seen like kind of the hero of the deal.
12:44
That really permeated in kind of toxic sales cultures.
12:49
I’m interested in running, you know, client centric, customer focused environments.
12:56
When we teach the hero’s journey, it’s all about having the client as the hero of the story.
13:03
They have a problem, no doubt they have a problem.
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It’s too big, they can’t solve it for themselves.
13:08
Guys, technically they need to buy something to solve their problem, right?
13:12
That’s where us, the sellers come into, come into the story.
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We’re the guide, so we’re the guy.
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We’ve been there before, we’ve seen these problems that clients have had, but we then have to lead them on their journey to self discovery, which is just your sales process to give them the solution to the problem that they have to do for themselves.
13:32
So I also learned this working with working with the largest CRM software company while I was a partner with them is that you know you’re not going to be in the closing meeting anymore, especially when you start selling higher ticket dollar dollar items.
13:48
That story of my boss pulling out a contract to close a, a copier deal.
13:52
I’ll never be in one of those deals again, right?
13:54
We’re doing million to multi $1,000,000 transactions, so you’re not going to be in the meeting.
13:59
What you have to do is you have to prepare your client, the hero in this story, with the informations that they can go enroll, whether it’s their employees below them, their peers around them, and their bored above them.
14:13
And if you arm your client and teach your client well enough, then it’s not really selling anymore.
14:19
It’s helping these clients solve problems that they need for themselves, which is why I love this mid market environment that we’re in.
14:27
And then that’s how it that’s how you do long term business with clients.
14:30
So yeah, you’re right.
14:32
No, having that customer centric hero’s journey has been at the center of what I’ve done and it’s been it.
14:37
It is developed incredibly long and sustainable customer relationships.
14:42
How do you ingrain that philosophy within your team?
14:44
Make it part of your culture?
14:46
OK, so what’s kind of fun about this is that the hero’s journey is the formula used in every movie you can imagine.
14:55
So if you think about any movie you’ve seen, it could be a Finding Nemo, like a kids movie.
15:00
It could be, you know, a sports movie like a Rocky.
15:04
We just did a whole session with my team about two weeks ago.
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We had the new account management team flying.
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We watched Top Gun Maverick because it was loud and fun and we all got sunglasses because we’re cool, you know?
15:16
But you use that narrative to really show your show your teams how this story works.
15:23
And the reason you have to do it this way is because just like a good sports team, if you’ve ever been on one, if you’re, if you’re in the ballet and or the orchestra, you have your own language.
15:36
So if we are going to teach an organization how to move forward faster together, we need to teach a common language where the hero’s journey works.
15:43
And if you use movies, because everyone likes movies, it’s not gender specific.
15:48
It’s not you know, you’re not going to be there doing the old high school football coach.
15:52
We’re on the 5 yard line drive at home.
15:54
Like you’ve lost now 3/4 of your audience, right?
15:58
If you tell the movie narrative story and you use that and then you have then you have them dissect their own shows and movies.
16:06
1 It’s kind of fun because they laugh and they realize like I totally now see behind the, the curtain.
16:13
Well, then it’s really easy for you to then help the client or help your salesperson recognize where they are in the deal, right?
16:21
If they, if they chose lower of the rings, it’s, it’s really easy for you to kind of coach your sellers to say, now remember, Frodo has got to get this ring to Mount Doom.
16:31
I’m not sure what it’s called, right?
16:32
Mount something or other, right?
16:35
And so how are we going to enable him to do that, right?
16:40
Hey, you’re buyer.
16:41
They need to get all these issues off their plate.
16:44
What have you taught them?
16:46
What information that what skills do they now have because they’ve met you to carry that message forward to themselves?
16:52
Because, you know, if Gandalf could have just taken the ring and tossed it in the mountain himself, no movie, no show, no nothing, no reason, right?
17:02
So it’s using these, you know, non, you know, just this, I’m going to say not gender, but just really, you know, kind of these open topics that allows you to teach an audience, teach them incredibly fast.
17:15
I’ve run international companies for the last, you know, last two jobs have been all global, international.
17:22
Hollywood’s like the greatest American export.
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Everyone speaks the same language.
17:27
I don’t have to learn the rules of cricket to communicate to my to my Indian partners or you know, you know, Australian rules rugby or whatever European rules rugby are to teach the sales methodology.
17:38
It’s really clean.
17:39
It’s a really clean, great adult learning methodology technique.
17:44
I believe it.
17:44
I believe it.
17:46
That’s one of the things that listening to you, I tell my team all the time, nobody’s buying CRM because they love CRM.
17:54
Nobody’s buying technology because they love technology.
17:57
They want the result of what this stuff provides.
18:01
So we need to understand, we need to connect with that result.
18:04
We need to support and align with that result.
18:06
That’s what people want.
18:08
That’s, you know, what we got.
18:09
We’re here to help the customer achieve the result they’re after, 100% if you are, No one wants what it is.
18:17
They want what it does right?
18:19
And so we are so we, we weren’t, we’re in a similar world in that regard.
18:23
Trust me, no one wants IT.
18:26
We all want to be smarter.
18:28
We want to use AI.
18:29
We want automation, we want process flow.
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We want our business to work easy.
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We want to come on and come on, come to the office and turn the lights on.
18:37
No one wants to know how it works.
18:39
No one wants to be sweating it or trying to find and hire the staff to do it.
18:43
It’s, I don’t care what it, I need, what it does, right?
18:48
I’m looking for a guide who can get me to those outcomes.
18:51
But you have to understand those outcomes.
18:53
That’s right.
18:54
And that’s actually one of the things I’ve seen and many of the companies I’ve been at where I’ve seen CRM struggle specifically is that the tool is so powerful, can do anything it wants to do.
19:02
But I think it’s the guides and my, and my storytelling, right?
19:06
The, the salespeople, the, the consultants, Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the consultants who are coming in and saying they’re, they’re not prescriptive, right?
19:16
And you end up in a scenario where you end up like you said and like, like kind of being a little, a little pressure at your CRM.
19:22
Oh yeah, no, don’t even get me started on this, right?
19:29
So how do you hire for this, this approach, this culture that you’re creating?
19:36
Are there people that won’t fit into this model or is this something that everybody could, you know, should be able to adopt?
19:44
So the hero’s dream methodology, everyone should be able to adopt.
19:48
Everyone should be able to adopt that.
19:51
That’s I’ve never had an issue with that.
19:53
The thing I have had an issue for is you hire for culture.
19:56
You really do.
19:58
And I am a I’m a culture hawk.
20:00
Culture is like what matters to me more than anything.
20:03
I run a pretty unique culture, at least that it’s not terribly unique of when I explain it, but like, we work incredibly hard, but we have a ton of fun.
20:11
Right, like I am very quick to joke, very quick to lighten it, but I’m also very quick to you can use on you can use humor to to communicate honesty, right.
20:21
And sometimes in in a, in a growing organization and a rapidly scaling organization, you’re gonna have a lot of hard conversations and hopefully the humor when done correctly, is it softens it and it just it it, it allows things to happen.
20:35
But when it, when it comes to hiring, what I’m looking for is in it really depends what you’re hiring for.
20:41
So in some of the roles I’m hiring for, So if it’s our account management business, I need people who really are, who understand the customer’s environment, maybe have walked in the customer’s shoes, who can be empathetic to the customer’s side of the fence.
20:56
That’s, that’s really important to me.
20:58
Account managers for us.
20:58
So that’s like our farmers, that’s the, that’s the in house customer care, customer satisfaction team account executives.
21:06
You cannot hire for a Rolodex, right?
21:09
I think that that is that thing that that’s pretty tough to do.
21:12
And it’s also doesn’t have a lot of long term success or sustainability.
21:17
What I’m looking for an account executives are people who are who are hungry, who have a good personality, who present well, who are familiar with, again, they don’t need to have been on the client side, but they need to be empathetic to the client side.
21:32
It’s probably the biggest thing I’m looking for is, is, is customer empathy.
21:37
And I’m listening and you know, it’s, I don’t do stale interview tactics, you know, but I’m, I am listening for times when they have taught something or times when they’ve kind of had to lead a client on a story.
21:49
And what you’re really listening for is making sure that they did the leading and they weren’t on a team and they just watched, right.
21:59
That’s where I think I’ve seen a lot of the the guys that work for me, my my field VPS, some of their hires where they’ve gotten burned is the guy said all the right things.
22:09
He knew all the right words.
22:10
But he himself or she herself was not a was not an active leader.
22:16
Yeah, I call that.
22:17
Are they a doer or a talker?
22:22
Yeah.
22:22
Chris, you’re just calling like it is.
22:23
I mean, that’s a yeah.
22:25
And that’s, I ask that question like when someone say I’ve got someone that you should take a look at, that’s first question I ask.
22:32
Yeah, I need doers.
22:33
I don’t need talkers.
22:35
Totally.
22:35
Yeah.
22:36
How does this culture, this, this, you know, the, the approach you’re taking, how do you leverage this to cultivate your leadership team, the future leaders that you want to move from a sales role into a leadership role?
22:52
So I’m obsessed with that idea.
22:57
So one of the things that I tend to do is I tend to, I believe that you can, you should work yourself out of a job because if you do, you will find another one.
23:06
That was, that was something that I just kind of like that, that nothing I was ever taught that, but it just kind of worked out that way, right?
23:15
Because I did watch, I did watch my, in my, in my, my dad’s business or other executive businesses where it’s you find people that you, they can’t get promoted because they have no, they have no one behind them.
23:27
So the big thing for me is I’m huge on teaching the difference between perception and perspective.
23:36
And So what I really want to do with my leadership team is show them the information that I’m working with, the information that I have access to present them.
23:45
We do this thing called King for a day, which is essentially just telling your guys, Hey, if you had my job or my boss’s job or on the board, like, how would you fix all the problems, right?
23:55
It’s, it’s a fun exercise.
23:57
It’s you, you, you can’t say anything wrong, you know, and I get all my good ideas from from those meetings and I’m really just trying to teach them and expose them and give them, you know, the autonomy to do what they want to, to, to do my job right, because my job is about making, you know, going back to that hero’s journey.
24:21
This isn’t about me.
24:24
If, if we, if I take care of our employees and our employees are going to take care of our customers, it all is a beautiful cycle that comes back.
24:31
And so we’ve already had, you know, we’ve had back-to-back record quarters, guys are we had the largest Commission run in company history last quarter, which I heard a lot about.
24:40
But I said, guys, success begets success.
24:43
You know, we’re here to make money, you know, so, so there’s, there’s fun things like that, right?
24:48
But you got it.
24:48
I, I use a lot of exposure to, to let people just try it out, you know, and then kind of like you’re kind of the story told about your, your nephew.
24:59
I mean, when you raise your hand and volunteer and you do things, it’s, the bosses are going to figure that out pretty darn quickly.
25:06
How do you know someone’s ready?
25:10
I maybe I don’t, you know, I think that I think that there’s, there’s a real difference between being ready and timing.
25:20
This is so when I was a kid, I had this experience where my dad ran these companies.
25:29
And so I was in his office one weekend and this guy comes in, talks to my dad, my dad.
25:33
I can tell my dad, my dad likes this guy.
25:34
I’m doing my homework on his conference table and the guy leaves and I say, hey, who is that?
25:39
He goes, well, that was Jim Jam Rosen.
25:41
Come on.
25:41
Well, who dad?
25:42
Who is Jim Jam?
25:43
I’m like 8 years old.
25:44
Like who’s Jim Jam Rosen?
25:45
You know, he’s like, oh, he’s going to be the next plant supervisor.
25:48
Well, why isn’t he the plant supervisor today?
25:52
My dad’s like, well, it’s just not time.
25:53
He just needs a little bit more time in the saddle.
25:56
And so, you know, it was, it was interesting how watching that conversation happen because he could see potential, but the timing wasn’t right.
26:04
I think in that’s kind of that era I was talking about before us where they had like career developments.
26:10
I think in today’s world, the pace that a lot of our businesses are moving at, you are going to be more often thrust into opportunities that you’re ready for, but maybe not perfectly ready for.
26:26
And so for me, in my experience, I have promoted more people into those roles and then really just been a a big coach for them and help them through imposter syndrome.
26:37
That is, you know, you, you can fake it for a while until you make it.
26:44
And so I think I’ve, I’ve seen almost as much of that as really knowing when someone, someone’s ready, because that actually might be one thing.
26:53
I might not be the best judge of character on that one.
26:58
I tend to believe in the, in the folks and tend to watch their work ethic to figure out if they have the, the muscle, the, the fortitude, the stamina so they, so they can make it so right.
27:10
You know, I, I coached a lot of entrepreneurs and that imposter syndrome is such a big thing where like now they’re, they’re the top, like they’re wearing all the hats.
27:23
And that’s an emotional struggle for a lot of people.
27:26
And you mentioned before, it’s perspective, you know, you have to help them adjust their perspective that hey #1 if you have this belief that you think your boss or previous bosses you had knew had all the answers and all that, you’re flat out wrong.
27:42
A lot of times they’re faking it through the meetings.
27:44
Just say, hey, we got to make a decision, Let’s make one and move forward and see if it works.
27:48
You know, you got to have that.
27:50
You got to have that willingness to take the jump, you know, and, and, and let’s see what happens.
27:56
And if we’re going to fail, let’s fail fast so we can adjust and go in a different direction, right?
28:01
Well, Chris, but but what you’re saying though, and I really appreciate is that you’re also talking about someone who is they’re willing to make this.
28:08
It sounds like they’re willing to take a take a risk and make decisions, but they also don’t have such an ego that they also can’t admit that when hey, guys, we tried something, all right, it didn’t work.
28:20
What’s Plan B?
28:22
And that’s the kind of leader that I can follow.
28:24
And that’s the kind of leader I think that I tend to be.
28:28
But, yeah, that’s the it’s the guy that doesn’t know he’s doing that, which makes us all want to, you know, scream and lose our mind.
28:35
Oh, no, he’s totally.
28:36
No.
28:38
Come to me.
28:39
What do you, you know, come on.
28:41
No.
28:41
Totally.
28:42
So well said.
28:43
Well said.
28:44
Yeah, No, totally.
28:45
It’s it’s.
28:47
But it’s one of those things that eventually you feel like, hey, I’ve got my legs under me.
28:51
I feel I’m getting some confidence here that I actually do know what I’m doing.
28:55
Yeah.
28:56
You know, let’s shift a little bit CRM.
28:59
Do you love it or do you hate it right now?
29:04
I want to say I love the idea of it.
29:06
OK, right.
29:06
I love the idea of I know exactly what you’re not the first person who’s answered that way.
29:10
Oh, that’s a that was a that was a common idea because that was one.
29:14
Maybe I’ll, I won’t, I won’t claim, you know, authorship, but I clearly am also not alone in this.
29:22
Yeah, in all fairness, no, I think that CRM for me as a kind of a, as as seeing the entire sales spectrum, owning marketing, new logo sales account management and customer satisfaction, you absolutely, you know, the you absolutely, absolutely need a tool to be able to see all the way through.
29:40
And when our CRM is working it it’s actually kind of helps alleviate some of my natural anxiety around, you know, what’s our early funnel look like?
29:48
How’s lead Gen.
29:49
doing?
29:49
What’s our closing like The, the tool is so unbelievably powerful.
29:53
It just in, in, in our, in our instance here, there’s we have a few, a few knobs we need to turn to, to optimize it to a place where it would be, you know, much more effective.
30:04
Yeah, that’s not uncommon.
30:05
I mean, I in my world, I see that all the time, but looking back over your career when you’ve been using CRM, what are some of the common struggles that you’ve had in how did you overcome those struggles?
30:18
So there’s the three common struggles you tend to see is that you tend to, especially from like a marketing standpoint, you tend to inherit everyone’s garbage lists.
30:28
And therefore it’s really hard to figure out who you’re targeting, what you’re doing.
30:31
We’ve gone through a massive ICP project here, right?
30:35
Ideal client profile especially.
30:38
We’ve been able to do a nice job of kind of identifying who we are and what we do as a business.
30:43
We can target those clients better.
30:46
So we haven’t had that much issue there, but I’d say I’ve definitely had that in, in other places.
30:52
The big issue that we that we tend to experience is interfaces, you know, different departments trying to talk through, especially trying to trying to connect with operations and working with home grown systems and then having those interfaces done in a there’s there’s a meeting.
31:10
I hate in every CRM environment I’ve been in where it’s kind of like just had a dream session.
31:17
Just just tell us what you want this to do and you’re just kind of like, hey, buddy, this thing is about to go out the rails real quick, right?
31:25
We need to have some absolutes that we’re not going to do.
31:29
We need to kind of follow some of these things out-of-the-box as well.
31:33
And So what ends up happening, I’ve seen we get into debates about like, well, we can create a button to do that and we’re in the weeds and we’re not on the architecture of the system.
31:43
And I think that’s that’s probably the other thing I’d say that I’ve had the biggest problem with is that we’ve somehow, someway, we either never started with a proper architecture or we’ve we’ve someone’s lost the map and we are now off the reservation and it is a it’s a circus.
32:02
I think those are the big things I think about.
32:04
Yeah.
32:04
Those are those you.
32:05
I think you pretty much summed up my world when we’re coming into rescues where the world sounds like a disaster.
32:12
Yeah, I have one in mind where they the developers were basically yes to everything every they came along like sure, we can do that, sure we can do that and ended up with the most over over architected CRM I’ve ever seen.
32:27
And it was all out of goodwill.
32:28
They weren’t, you know, they were trying to do what they thought was right, but there were no guardrails established and there was no focus.
32:35
There was no map.
32:36
And again, that’s where when I see that for me personally, that’s because they, they don’t, they’re not focused on the result that they’re trying to get to.
32:46
They’re just focused on, hey, I’m having some immediate pain.
32:49
How can you alleviate my immediate pain?
32:52
Take these pills and the pain will go away.
32:54
And but then you’ve got something else now you have to deal with later on.
32:59
And so that’s where I think if you get that focus on what are we trying to do to move the needle with the business?
33:06
How do we best align our technology to support that?
33:08
That’s when you can have success with CRM.
33:11
Yeah, no, you nailed it.
33:13
And that is, I love your comment about just taking away the immediate pain.
33:17
I grew up in a manufacturing, engineering, manufacturing family.
33:20
And so you just kind of watch like guys, you got to, you got to look at how the whole assembly line operates together.
33:27
And you’re, you’re what you’re doing over here.
33:30
It’s, it’s the whole squeeze, the balloon, it’s the whole, it’s the bottleneck story.
33:33
It’s, you’re just causing.
33:35
It’s, we’re not solving the problem.
33:37
OK, let’s just establish this.
33:38
We’re not solving the problem.
33:39
I’m going to totally steal that analogy.
33:41
I love that because that, that’s so true that like we had another client that we were consulting with where one department would go through and hey, we’re going to optimize all our processes.
33:53
It’s going to be great.
33:54
They had no idea that they’re completely hosing up the the departments that were downstream from them because they’re working in a vacuum and you can’t do that.
34:02
You have to look at everything end to end.
34:05
And to be fair, they’re working in a vacuum, but they’re also sometimes that Salesforce or is a salesperson, you know, the CRM administrator, they’re not hip enough to the business to understand that Department B is totally gunking up CDE and F, you know, this, this department’s really loud.
34:24
They’re really noisy right now.
34:26
And so, yeah, that’s all right.
34:29
Chris White Cat, this has been this.
34:30
Thank you for this.
34:31
This has been been a therapy session for me.
34:33
All right.
34:33
Is been.
34:34
All right.
34:35
There you go.
34:35
Yeah, it’s all good.
34:37
It’s all going to be good, Eric.
34:39
Thank you.
34:40
Thank you.
34:40
Good deal.
34:41
Well, hey, we are at our time here on sales Lead dog.
34:43
I really appreciate you coming on.
34:45
This goes by way too fast for me.
34:46
This is always one of those ones where like I look at the clock and you’re like, no way.
34:52
But if people want to reach out, if they want to connect with you, learn more about what you do and how maybe you can help them with their tech stack, what’s the best way for them to do that?
35:02
Best way to reach me is probably just from a work perspective.
35:06
e-mail, right?
35:07
So it’s just Eric dot, you know, Carlson at Mairplex.
35:10
Also LinkedIn.
35:11
I mean, I probably am, I probably am better at LinkedIn than I am at e-mail because one of the things I will say is that I, we, we marketers have destroyed e-mail for everybody.
35:22
And I just wanted to say on behalf of all marketers, I’m sorry it’s happened and it’s now an unusable tool.
35:28
So hit me up either on my, my, my LinkedIn profile or, you know, I do, I do check my e-mail.
35:35
So I’ll, I’ll keep an eye out for it.
35:38
So that’d be, that’d be perfect.
35:39
So if you didn’t catch his e-mail when you check, that’s OK.
35:42
Check it out in our show notes.
35:44
We’ll have his e-mail and his LinkedIn profile link there for you.
35:47
You can get those show notes at impellercrm.com/sales Lead Dog where you’ll get not only this episode, but all our hundred plus episodes of sales lead dog.
35:56
Eric, thank you so much for coming on and welcome to the Sales lead Dog pack.
36:01
Oh, you got Chris.
36:02
I love this.
36:03
I love listening to other leaders talk.
36:04
This is this is a this is a can’t miss for me.
36:07
So thank you so much.
36:08
Awesome.
36:12
As we end this discussion on sales lead dog, be sure to subscribe to catch all our episodes on social media.
36:19
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36:22
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36:31
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36:33
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