In our latest episode on Napier’s Marketing B2B Technology Podcast, we interview Sam Ovett, co-founder of Mobile Pocket Office, which is leading the way in helping new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity.
Find out more about Mobile Pocket Office, and Sams journey from a whitewater kayaker and guide to becoming a complete automation nerd, by listening to the episode here.
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Transcript: Interview with Sam Ovett – Mobile Pocket Office
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sam Ovett
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing b2b tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in b2b marketing today. Welcome to the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I’m talking to Sam over who is the co founder of mobile pocket office. Hi, Sam. Welcome to the podcast.
Sam: Hi, Mike. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Mike: Great. So I’m, I’m really interested to know, can you just tell us a little bit about your your background and how you’ve got to founding mobile pocket office?
Sam: Yeah, certainly. So you know, funnily enough, it’s it’s pretty non traditional. But my background is, after after getting a degree in college I did. I was a professional whitewater kayaker and guide. So I spent a lot of times in the outdoors taking a lot of risk and guiding people through that experience. And then, around a certain point, I decided that I wanted to be on the digital side of things, I didn’t want to use my, my body to make my money. And I was really clear that automation was taken over the world, as we all feel and wanted to be on the right side of automation. And there’s a bit of backstory there around co founding this with my dad, who had a lot of history in business analytics and process. And so we decided that we’d join forces do something together, I’d become really involved in the marketing side from the outdoor sports perspective. And I made a shift, just kind of a deadpan shift, I said, I want to do this, and I made the made the shift, and we launched mo pocket office and I can, there’s the whole story of how we actually, you know, kick that business off and everything like that. But the bottom line is I went from being a professional whitewater guiding kayaker to, you know, a complete automation nerd.
Mike: Wow. So, I mean, there’s so much in that I’m intrigued to know, for a start, you know, which was more stressful, you know, being a guide for people in whitewater kayaking or launching a new business?
Sam: You know, that’s a good question. I was asked it quite that way. You know, what I always say is, you know, there’s a lot of stress when you work with someone’s business, and, and it’s their livelihood, and other people’s livelihoods, their their employees, but at the end of the day, nobody’s gonna die immediately. That day, the risk of dying, that day is very low, whereas in the other, the risk is there and real. And you can drown, you know, as the primary thing and seeing that happen. And so, I would say that it’s less stressful in that acute way. But I think on a daily basis, you know, when you get off the river, it’s all good joy. And when you’re improving somebody’s business, there’s a lot more stress, and I have a lot of real, you know, I get really involved with these projects. So I think the stress is a little higher here. But that’s okay.
Mike: I mean, that’s an interesting comparison, nobody’s gonna die today is, I guess, a mystic view. But yeah, and you also start a business with your dad.
Sam: So that’s a whole story on its own, but I think it’s, you know, I was looking to make a shift. And he had, he had long worked on the business analytic side of, of business process with enterprise clients. And he was ready to make a shift and wanted to have a little more fun in the process side and focus more on the sales and marketing process, because it was always something that he enjoyed doing. But a lot of his work was in the analytics side.
And so, I had been really involved in marketing automation, when as an athlete, because I was automating some of my social media stuff and things like that. And I wanted to make a shift. And so we decided to kick this thing off together as partners, and you know, it’s challenging working, or it can be, it can be challenging working with a, a parent, in my case, you know, the dynamic is one that we had to figure out what are the core things I’ll share this because I think it’s interesting is we had to figure out how to how to effectively debate an idea down to a better version of it. And it’s easy in the relationship for as a father, right for him to say, you know, Sam, that’s not a good idea. We’re not gonna do it. But the reverse is more challenging for me to tell my father, hey, hey, Josh, this is bad idea, you know, and here’s why. Right? It can become a very personal attack like feeling that way. So one of the one of the things that we worked out, as we did this outside of just the, I guess, also the kind of quote unquote, standard things that go along with growing a business is how to communicate about ideas and problems and solutions. So that we weren’t at the end of day was we left to go, and hey, I love you, you know, you’re my dad. And then for him, you know, you’re my son. And that was always more important. And so at first, there was a lot of friction that was generated and, and, you know, we get a bit upset each other. And then we learned to say, Hey, you know what, it’s not personal, we’re going to do what we call catalyst session, we’re going to catalyse this idea down to a better version of the idea. And it’s not personal, but it’s all just about getting ideas better. And the way that has improved our business, and also our relationship has been pretty cool. And I think something that has come out of this outside of just the business aspect of it, you know, the relationship side of it.
Mike: That’s, that’s really cool. And really good to hear. I mean, this approach, this capitalist session, is that then something you’re able to use with your clients as well.
Sam: It really is. And it’s one of those things where it’s like, okay, let’s take an idea. And you can, you can ask questions around this, however, is interesting, let’s take an idea. And let’s try and distil it down to the better version of the idea. And let’s cut through the crap, right. And let’s, let’s try and throw out the bad stuff and keep the good stuff and iterate this too, it’s a better version. And that can be really, you know, we you have an idea that your baby, or it’s something that you came up with, personally to be attacked, on the principles of the idea can be can be, feel really personal, unless it’s stated upfront, hey, this is a session to bring an idea to a more distilled better, workable, more simple, but more effective, you know, state that we can then execute on. And so doing that, and I think anybody can use this process with any any relationships they have, whether their personal relationships or business relationships. And for us, this has been just a, I mean, really a game changing way to communicate, to get to a better idea, because that’s the hardest thing is, you know, you offend people, they get upset that timeline, slow down, blah, blah, blah, like, that’s, you can’t run a business like that, you know, it’s too slow. It’s not gonna work. So if you can have a method, say, hey, let’s do a catalyst session and get this idea down, then everybody walks away and goes, Yeah, you know, you’re not attacking me personally. We’re just trying to distil an idea.
Mike: So awesome. So, I mean, let’s take a step back first, just think about, you know, the business mobile pocket office? Absolutely. I mean, when you started it, what did you think it was gonna be? What did you really want to achieve?
Sam: So the thing that we want to achieve with it, and here’s, basically, we saw a gap a hole, you know, Josh was working for years with these enterprise clients. And the gap that was always really visible. And I saw it in the outdoor industry that I was in heavily at the time, that was my, you know, kind of my realm that I was involved with, was this idea that like, in enterprise, and in most businesses, what we see is people are really good at their fulfilment, they spend a lot of time looking at the fulfilment process, right? Because if you can’t fulfil whatever you promised, the people are buying, that’s the fastest way to take an existing business, right? Not necessarily the fastest way to grow it. But the fast way to take an existing business, you don’t deliver on whatever your promises, that that’s not good. So people focus on that where the opportunities are missed, is in the sales area where you have a lead that’s come in, right, you figured out how to generate interest. And then the process from lead to converting to a sale, that’s the biggest opportunity that is just usually just completely wasted. It has a lot of human effort involved. And what most the majority do, that we’ve seen, with until they’re introduced to this idea that, hey, you can add automation and process to this is they focus on, you know, who’s the hottest lead now, right? What’s the best account what’s the best deal, and that’s the focus, and everybody else who could potentially be a really good customer is forgotten about until that person eventually maybe comes back and says, Hey, I want to do you know, I need a big order, right? Because that’s your focus. That’s how you that’s how you make your Commission’s and that’s how you survive. And so we see the just complete lack of focus on nurturing people and following up with people, especially at the enterprise level, because you’re after the big deal, whereas you could be nurturing, you know, maybe 100, little deals, that could become bigger deals over time, with automation, and some process in place. And we see that that whole was just it’s glaring. You look around and and it’s tough to navigate politically to an enterprise, because you’re you’re trying to implement technology with automation. And that’s always a challenge to get everybody on board when there’s a lot of human sales people involved.
Mike: Interesting. I mean, the thing that fascinates me as you sit, you said it was about automation and processes. I mean, most of the enterprises that we see have, you know, more automation packages then then they could possibly use to help automate marketing and sales. So, so is it about the process? Or is it about, you know, getting the right automation package?
Sam: So, it really is about the process, because when what what do you mean, when you say automation package? Let’s open that up for a second.
So, I mean, typically, typically, you might see, you know, a large enterprise have, you know, Marketo connected to Salesforce, I mean, they’re spending huge amounts of money on on the the systems to run both marketing and sales. That’s right. And so and that’s what we see, too, and it’s absolutely the case, is what I tend to see is that, like, they they usually have the technology, right. And the technology is usually there for them. But it is not usually leveraged in a way to enhance process and make it easier to be kind of this bionic human salesperson that’s supercharged with the ability to follow up. And in the enterprise world. I see they usually have, you know, they do a decent job getting their newsletter out right to the different segments of clients.
They’re pretty good about that. And usually, they’re using Marketo and Salesforce, you know, like you could with, you know, you could kind of do the same thing with MailChimp almost. And, and so they’re just pretty underutilised. Usually they’ve spent a lot of time designing the visuals of the database, right? but not necessarily thinking about? How do we follow up with people at different stages of the sales cycle, when business needs to be repeated? A lot of it’s just some kind of really basic trigger or list. And they’re still building reports that aren’t dynamic and have paying somebody to build those things to say, oh, Who should we follow up with, you know, Who should we whose time for the recurring are? Like, let’s take a manufacturer, we have to recertify certify something, right? Oh, it’s time to get this person recertified, okay, let’s all send them personal emails. And then that gets tracked into the CRM system. So they, they use these modern tools. But largely, this isn’t, of course, there’s there’s always outliers, but largely, they use them as like old school CRMs, just a place for the information, versus using it to really drive process and follow up. And that’s the opportunity loss that we see the most. Whereas you’ve got these folks who are I call them like Hidden Hand combat salespeople, right?
They’re going out to trade shows, they’re doing all these things that are the, they’re effective, but they’re also kind of an old school way of, of selling. They go out, they get a stack of business cards, and then they follow up with the hot prospects. And all that information is in the CRM system. And then you know, the person’s getting the newsletter, maybe if they’ve got them on the right list. But outside of that, they’re not really following up with the different specific product lines and things that they could be interested in. And making sure they’re introduced to other parts of the business that they that that prospect could then buy after they bought the first thing, and educating people because the old school role of salesperson was largely outside of closing you was to educate you on your options. We have the internet now we had technology that can help you do that. And that’s the gap. That’s the big gap that we’ve we’ve really worked to fill when when we’re working with a company, and then the rest flows from there, right? You have process. That’s all downstream of that initial stuff. But the if you can get your conversions up, then you’re basically saying, Hey, we’re doing this amount of work to go out and generate leads and interest in people being excited about our products. And you’re getting more effectiveness, more efficiency out of that top of the funnel work that you’re doing.
Mike: Interesting. I mean, the thing I wonder about is, you know that these sales people are marketers that a large enterprises, they’re smart people, why are they not seeing the problem and addressing it?
So here’s a here’s what we see. Usually, the marketers in a company are excited about it. They want to do it, but they get pushback from the salespeople. Because salespeople naturally want to guard. They’re, you know, they’re hunters, they’re going out there hunting is a good one, they naturally want to guard their deals. And they don’t necessarily want to tell everybody how it’s done. And that’s okay, but if you can equip that salesperson, and make them a more bionic salesperson where they could be following up with hundreds of prospects at a time Time that are somewhat interested in, they’re going to have the opportunity then to have more closing calls versus prospecting only calls. I kind of went around the question a little bit. But I think the big reason it’s an issue is because the bigger the enterprises are, typically the slower they move, and there’s more politics. And so yeah, if you’re a medium sized business, you can make decisions and just put them in place pretty quickly. And your, your, your biggest challenge is bandwidth. But if you make the decision, there’s not a lot of pushback, politically, within an organisation. So the bigger you are, the more pushback you are, you might, you know, we see people get, the more consensus, you need to change the way things are done. And I think that’s why it moves largely slower. And that’s also why you see some of these really small, digital oriented businesses just crush it, because they can make businesses decisions so fast and changes so fast, that they’re really effective at that. But you know, they don’t have the market presence that some of these enterprise companies have. And that’s where enterprise companies really have a leg up. They’ve got branding, market presence, all of that. But most of their marketing is usually sort of PR oriented. Marketing versus automation oriented, marketing. And you can have both. So as that kind of answered the question, we can have
Mike: A great answer. I love the idea of that ratio between closing two prospecting calls.
Sam: I thought, yeah, yeah, like that’s as a salesperson, what do you what do you want to be on, you know, if I can get to closing calls all day long, versus out hunting, like, if marketing does a good job, I’ve got leads, right. And after that, it’s up to me, usually they get passed off, but they’re not followed up with any salesperson, just by the nature of time being constrained, they’re gonna go after the hottest prospects, biggest deals, that’s going to be top of mind. And if you don’t have any kind of automation to follow up with all those other semi interested prospects, that probably would buy something as long as you maintain, you know, Top of Mind presence with them, and educated them about how the product or service benefits them. The amount of sales you could close in closing calls you could be on. I mean, you can have your calendar booked out way more than you normally would.
Mike: That sounds great.
Sam: I mean, yeah, it does, doesn’t it? It’s just like, you know, I can imagine every salesperson listening, just going, Yeah, that’s what I want. Yeah, that’s what I want to do closing calls all day making my Commission’s right, that’s, that’s the magic. And so if you can put that automation in place and buy into it and say, hey, I want to leverage these systems and not keep all the stuff in a little notebook to myself, and just put in the minimum that I’m asked for, you know, what good automation team, and it’s usually driven, oftentimes driven out of the marketing side of things is going to do is, is they’re going to help you close more deals. And so if you can feed that information back to them, well, they’re gonna help you find better prospects, they’re gonna help you create longer term follow up. And I think every, every salesperson has heard it, but like, the magic is in the follow up, right? It’s not that you’re closing a deal on the first call, that’s like, you know, sure, that’s lovely. But like, that doesn’t happen. Most of the time. It’s a it’s a follow up game. And any good salesperson knows that right there real good. Follow up. Yeah. So take that idea. And take the busy work a follow up, which is manually sending that communication and getting it out at the right time. So that someone’s actually got a customer journey and experience an automated, there’s a lot of different ways to do that. A lot of ways to look at it. But the core idea is that if you can follow up better at that stage of interest to converting to sale over the course of at least an average sale cycle, make sure you maintain communication, you’re going to generate more business, you’re going to close more deals.
Mike: So I mean, we’ve had a bit of a puppet, some of the enterprise companies. Yeah. I mean, is this a an enterprise specific problem? Or are there similar problems with smaller and midsize companies?
Sam: Yeah, no, it’s definitely not an enterprise specific problem. And in any way, it just happens to be pretty acute. And I think the call was called like the lead waste, right? Like the number of leads that come in, that are then just wasted in enterprise companies is more noticeable because they generally have more interest and inquiry. But it’s the same with a small business and it’s actually much more important in a small and medium sized business drawing. That’s kind of a huge range, especially here in the US, you know, it’s classified as a small business. But the bottom line is like, if you could follow up with me be one of the leads that come in. And you don’t have to hire more people to make that part of your business scale. Then all the effort that you do for marketing and getting interest, which is probably the hardest thing anybody can do in business, right? It’s like getting interest in their business, getting that awareness within your, you’re going to increase the efficiency, or like the effectiveness, you know, the percentage rate of people who are going to become customers, by following up, I don’t care what you do, it can be the most basic follow up, you can get very sophisticated, you can branch logic of if they do this, if they do that, but at the end of the day, if you follow up versus not for a longer period of time, and educate people and remind them that you’re there, see, if they still have the problem that your product solves. You’re going to win more business, no matter what kind of business you are. So it’s not universal. It’s an it’s not specific to enterprise. It just happens to be enterprises. You know, it’s a fun place this space to play in because they spend more money to solve the problem. But it’s a it’s not specific. It’s actually I think, a lot of times easier to implement these solutions for a little bit smaller business, because there’s less politics involved in a, they tend not to overcomplicate it, because they just want the result faster, because it’s it’s a little more pressing need.
Mike: Brilliant. I think this leads on to the next question is, if someone engages with mobile pocket office and starts talking to you about a solution, I mean, do you have a process? Do you have an approach? I mean, how do you go about fixing these issues?
Sam: Yeah, and we do, we do have a process and approach because without it, you’re kind of like willy nilly all over the place. And what we found, and what we’ve done, you know, is was adapting our processes as well. But let me give you kind of the framework of how we think about this with people because it’s something that people can, can, you know, you technically don’t need us to go use this framework, right? We help catalyse that process, we have experience across industries. So we pull that experience into the experience to, you know, cuz you don’t know what you don’t know, in terms of what’s going on. But there what, which you can find out is, where do you have opportunities for automation, right, we talked about that specific conversion phase of sales, leads to sales, but I’m going to give you the full picture because it’s what we do with people as we, we say, Okay, if you want to automate things, and you feel like you can benefit from that you’ve somehow gotten this idea, you know, you want to follow up more whatever it may be. The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to look at your your business, right, okay, there’s, there’s five pillars, any business doesn’t matter size industry scale, everybody’s got them, some are done better, some are done worse. You got to attract new business, right? That’s that marketing work of generating interest, you got to convert that interest. So that’s the Convert states attract, convert into leads in sales. And then you’ve got to fulfil whatever you promised. Then the good businesses delight their customers by offering ways to use the product better, keeping up with it, giving them new opportunities to buy more from them that benefit what they’ve, you know, complement what they’ve already bought, and help them as a customer. And then we’re referrals. So those are the five pillars attract, convert, fulfil delight, refer you with me.
Mike: That’s that sounds great. It sounds I mean, somewhat reminiscent of the HubSpot model. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so you’ll see it across a lot of these different tools, right? They talk about it in these kind of pillar ideas. It’s like buckets. And it’s a great way to think about it. And so we really, really, yeah, it’s common to see it, and it’s for a good reason. Because then in those buckets, you look at those and you go, what are my processes within these sections of the system of our business, right? What do we actually do within these? And that’s where it starts to break down. People get that picture, they go, yeah, we know, we attract, convert, fulfil, maybe we delight, we get some referrals, or like, maybe we have a process for referrals, where we consistently ask systematically, but where people get stuck at that point is, where do they How do they find out what their processes are today? And how do they figure out of those processes, which should be automated. And let me lead you down that path. Because this is what we do with folks.
The first thing is, we funny thing is like we do this digital automation, and we implement it, but we take this very analogue approach. We have everybody print off a spreadsheet for three days worth of 15 minute intervals. And so just for three days, you give everybody on the team and you can do this in smaller chunks to like, if you’re just working with the marketing and sales team, then you You know you’re working with you’re attracting convert, not your fulfilment as much. And so you give them this spreadsheet, you say, okay, whatever to do just fill out what do you do every, every 15 minutes, make a note of what you’ve done throughout the day for three days. And you have to position it that like, we’re not going to use this to say you’re not productive. It’s just to understand what processes you do throughout the day, what constitutes the work of your business, right? what actually makes up your time, and now you have a pattern. And some people need to do it a little bit longer. Maybe you need to do four or five days or like you have cycles, you know, you came back from a trade show, what do you do after that type of deal with Coronavirus? Those are largely like not a thing as much, but you just look at what do you do. And now that you’ve documented that, and we call it a personal activity log pals sheet, just a name we’ve assigned to it. And now that you’ve documented that, now you understand your process within the system, right? And you may need to do that, like I said, in different phases of the business year, stuff like that. But you’ll understand, okay, here’s the busy work, like I’m moving this information from here to here, I’m sending an email to this interested prospect, blah, blah, blah. Now you have your process. And two things come out of that. One is of that what is effective today? what works, what gets you new business? Right? If we’re looking at those top two stages, once you start to understand what works, those are things that you should start to look at and go, okay, that works. How much time does it take me? to do that? And of it, what can I automate. And then that’s that. And only at that point is when we start looking at the technology tools involved to make the automation happen.
Right, we’re trying to design the house first, so to speak, and then get the appropriate tools to build it versus finding tools and then building a house. So once you understand your process, now you know what you can automate. And then you also see, this is where it’s hard to do, or it can be hard to do without someone else who’s seen it across different industries is is where the gaps, holes and opportunities to improve the process make it more robust. You know, in this case, we talk a lot about the follow up longer make it branch so that the logic makes more sense for different customer segments and driving that using data. And also turning it off at the appropriate time so that people are getting communication when they shouldn’t be. And then you can do that for each segments of your business. That attract, convert, fulfil, delight, and refer. And so if we start there, if we get that going, Well, we increase your conversions. Well, of course, then, you know, you’ve got a fulfilment issue that you have to deal with, because you’ve got increased fulfilment that you have to do. And then the light and refer those all kind of go together. But that is literally the step. So you look at that. And then we use a digital tool called diagrams, that net, I think, the name changed recently, I have to find it, but to actually map out what you do after you’ve documented that process, and that’s actually like a call that we have. And now there’s a really clear picture of what goes on to run the business. And at that point, also, you get this benefit, that it’s easier to train somebody new, because you just documented how the business runs. And then you start to put numbers to the value of automation. There’s two opportunities for automation.
One is, and they both help you scale, but one is one that saves money, right? Where are there holes in your process where you’re leaking money, because you’re, you’re paying more people to move information around from one system to another, right? That’s a leak, that’s money you can save. So automation can save you money in that way. And allow you to scale and free up humans to do more creative work more interesting work. And you know, occasionally people lose a job. That’s the unfortunate nature of it. But like most humans want to do interesting work. They don’t want to do repetitive stuff. And so, given give somebody that opportunity, they’re probably going to flourish, be more excited about their work all that. So that’s just a side benefit. But the other is where can you make more money, right? How can you be more profitable, because you’re not communicating, you’re not capturing people’s attention, and converting that to a sale. And so those are the two big things. So they all relate to scaling, but one is saving money. One is making more money. And then on the you can ask some questions after this, but like on the saving money side, that was pretty easy. You know, how much time are we spending doing this on a weekly or monthly basis? Whatever the timeline is that makes sense for the process. And, you know, what do we pay for for this to get done? What is the person who’s doing this? What’s their time? build that? What do we what do we pay them at and if we automate And we pay for it once with an automation tool to get it built out, or we built it out, you know, then you can do some basic math and understand the savings.
Mike: So it’s interesting, you seem to be looking at it from both sides of that return on investment equation, you know, both reducing the amount of money you have to invest to implement a process, and also increasing the return by making it more efficient.
Sam: Yep, exactly. And so, you know, the basic idea we can think about this is like, on the saving money side, someone who’s doing administrative tasks that are required to make a business run, if the majority of their tasks can be automated, and you pay them anywhere between, you know, let’s say, $50,000, a year, or something like that, right. And all the health care that’s involved in all that, and like, generally, that person is also doing other stuff. Most of the time, they don’t just do rote admin work. In fact, the majority of the time, what we see is like, that person is overwhelmed with stuff to do. And so if you can free that up, then they’re gonna be more focused on the more on the higher value items. But at the same time, you can think about it like, well, if we invested that same amount once to build out the automation that we don’t have, and the automation never takes a holiday, and never gets sick, and all those things about automation that you know, where computers are different than humans, then you’ve invested at once versus having to hire maybe another person or that person to do those things year after year, inconsistently, most of the time.
Mike: So that’s, that’s fascinating. I mean, I guess one of the push backs, you hear against automation, is that it creates inflexibility, once you’ve coded that automation, you can’t change the process. Is that something you hear from clients? And what’s your response?
Sam: I’m glad you brought that up. Because I actually, we, you know, we don’t hear that because we take people down a different path, but it is, it is a problem. And here’s how you address it. And we live in a day and age where the tools are not what’s so fat, fantastic, right? They are fantastic in what they do. But they it’s it’s the strategy around it, that’s more important. So if ever we see somebody going down the path of trying to custom code, something where it’s fairly inflexible, and it’s not relatively easy to modify, we, we try and hit breaks, and stop them because we live in an age where the tools are so the interfaces are so easy, you know, we do some custom coding with folks. But largely, it’s the strategy around automation, the value that it provides to the business, that’s that’s the real magic, and like, tweaking it till it’s better and better. And I can talk a bit about that. But the main thing is that, you know, kind of like my, my public service announcement is don’t code anything that you don’t have to use drag and drop builders use these easy to use tools, they’re out there, you know, when you have to code stuff you do, but the ecosystem of tools is so strong nowadays, that you should be able to use a tool that’s with a few clicks, allows you to modify the process versus lines of code. And so the the end of the day, like done well, we turn the systems over to our clients, and give them methodologies to improve the systems so that they can track the effectiveness of it. And then what I love to see is like you have at least one or two smart people on the team who are smart in the realm of these tools. And they’re going to they’re going to be able to make those tweaks internally. And you know, typically what happens, we sometimes will do it for folks, but we just guide them on the strategy and help them make decisions. Once the big implementation has been put in place, the infrastructure is there.
First, that’s great. I think that you know, I mean, like, you shouldn’t be coding. Now. Anybody who’s like who’s writing code is like, you should be writing code. If you’re building a new system for somebody that is like, then you’re going to sell them a bunch of people. But if you’re just using a system, trying to automate some things, unless you’ve got a super complex situation that just can’t handle it. And maybe you need something custom, but the reality is like on the sales conversion side, you’re probably not going to run into you’re going to run into unique things and you might have to adapt a little bit but like, you should be able to adapt around and use the tools that exist today. fulfillments a different story. You know, fulfilment gets kind of a more custom experience a lot of the times but fulfilment stays less flu is less changing. You know, if you have a product or service you can usually you’re you’re pretty happy to invest in the fulfilment automation, because you know how that works is consistent, but what you want to tweak is you want to tweak that, that experience in the, in the, in the attract and convert stages for sure. So yeah, don’t be coding, use your use use the, like, easy to use tools. And how you got to set up you got to think about how you set them up right there. That’s the deal, right? Because like, you can buy a Salesforce, you can buy a marketer, you can buy an ontraport, you can buy whatever these tools are by HubSpot. But if you set it up, like pilot junk, you know, and don’t utilise it, well, that’s where you’re going to go, Oh, this thing doesn’t really do what it’s promised. Right? It does do what it’s promised. You just got to design it for your situation.
Mike: Absolutely makes sense. And I am interested, do you have some examples of you know, perhaps some customers you’ve helped and how you’ve helped them out? So you can perhaps explain a little bit as to what it feels like to work with you guys?
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the one of the customers are mentioned in the enterprise realm is gx Nippon. So they’re your company people know. And they’ve got a bunch of different business lines. One of the one of their headquarter office here is in the, for one of their lines in the United States, in Georgia, actually. And they have a in this, we’ll talk about one of the products, which is the people probably, do you guys know, Tyvek? Over there? Is that the siding of houses stuff? Like the waterproof membrane on the side of houses?
Mike: No, no, we don’t.
Sam: But if you think about a building, right, you see a house being built, see that, like, when it goes up, there’s like that plasticky looking stuff outside,
Mike: We’d call it a damp course over here in England, okay.
Sam: So you take that stuff, and that’s one of the things they make, right, they make a version of that. You know, of course, they think it’s superior and things like that. But that’s besides the point. They have a team of salespeople that are going out to trade shows, they’re reaching out to prospects, they’re trying to find dealers, you know, we’re working with larger accounts, and they had Sugar CRM, enterprise, people probably know that. So older CRM system, you know, pretty flexible, you can do what you want not not crazy, easy to use, like some of these newer ones, but it’s a CRM system, right. And unfortunately, most of these tools just get used like CRM systems anyways, versus actual marketing automation and sales automation tools. But they would go out, they would meet people, this was in the time of trade shows, when we did this one, and the same can be said for anything virtual is just following up, they would go out, and they would get a list of prospects and people would become interested. And then they would only follow up with the hot prospects, and it was all scheduling via email, you know, very cumbersome, and they would take these business cards and import them in manually to some Excel spreadsheet, if they even did that. And then the rest of the business cards would live in a drawer on their desk when they got back from the event. So there’s a lot of opportunity waste, right?
All these cards could be potential customers, but they’re only following up with one or two hot prospects, because that was you know, how they meet your quota and help them reach their goals, and no automation around follow up. And so really basic, but but very effective example, in their case, was to start there at that aspect of it, which was understanding that helping them understand that they could, you know, automate pieces of that, where, hey, now you can just use your phone take picture of the business card, and this app, it pops it in to, you know, in their case, a tool like Sugar CRM. And that talked to another tool that could send some automated emails that could educate somebody with some videos and information on a, like 60 day sales cycle. So it span that whole gap of time with information about the product, right, so you never were forgetting about that person. And then each of the emails had an opportunity to schedule a call because they’re still, you know, we didn’t didn’t take it to the extreme where they’re buying online in their situation, they were still closing that deal and doing doing the custom deal on the phone.
But what they were doing is everything leading up to that closing call was able to be automated, where all the follow up was education based. It was bringing the customer into their world, and also the primary thing in their case, which is not forgetting about people, right. You met them at a trade show where he goes back and then a few days later everybody forgets about everybody they said their follow up with except for the you know, hot lead. And so now they had gone from one or two, you know, really interesting prospects per tradeshow. To following up with all the business cards, they got in They will increase the conversion ratio of people simply by maintaining in touch because that you know that their competitors were doing the same thing, trying to follow up a lot of cases manually. And then. So that’s one step of the process and also took the burden we introduced calendar scheduling tool that allowed them to schedule those calls with people more effectively, more efficiently, less back and forth busy work of sales time. And so their effort could be focused on closing costs. The other side of that was understanding and their case, their relationship to customers and referrals, right? Where did referrals come from? How did they get referrals? When people refer them something? What What was the, what happened? Like, what was the process that was experienced? And based on that building process to remind them, when it was time to send an email, in their case, we kept it still kind of manual, about asking for a referral, right, which is at a certain stage in the journey. So you just delivered something the customer is happy, they’ve got what they want, you just find that that point where the biggest joy is in the customer’s experience, right? Are they Something has just been fulfilled on a timeline.
That’s when you need to ask for that referral. And so just by reminding and putting process in place to ask for referrals,they were able to increase their referrals quite a bit, because of process now being in place to remind them through some pieces of automation, hey, it’s time to ask for a referral and bugging the salesperson to remind them, while they’re in the middle of whatever hot lead, they’re talking to, you know, closing deal making whatever that is at the enterprise level, which can, you know, it’s it, that is something that can be part of the, you know, part of the process is making that deal and that can consume time. And so if we can automate everything else around that and remind the sales team, hey, you have an opportunity for a good referral, right? You’ve just, you’ve just, you’re the fulfilment team has delivered the product, right, it arrived, everything’s there happy, then now’s the time to ask for that referral. And that’s a natural way to increase business in an amazing way. And it’s, you know, the marketing’s effectively free for that next lead. So those are two examples out of that. Any, any questions that come out of that?
Mike: No, I mean, that’s, that’s absolutely fascinating. And I’m sure people listening would be, you know, really interested in talking to you and working out how it could be applied to their business. So I guess the question is, how would how would people get in contact with you if they’d like to follow up after listening genre podcast?
Sam: Yeah, well, that’s the easiest way you go to mobile pocket office.com. And on the front page, we’ve got a big book now button, you can book a call. And that’s a call with Josh, and myself. And then our team is, you know, we, we manage the implementations I, I primarily manage all the implementations once we’ve done the strategy work. And then we QA that, but we have a team that actually does the building of it. And so that way, we’re freed up to do the things we like we talked about, which is to be on those on this calls, you know, prospecting and closing costs, to kind of eat our own dog food and that way. So it’s real obvious on the site book. Now, you can book a call, it’s got an automatic scheduler, and it books it all in our calendars, it puts it on your calendar. And it’s it’s really easy, you know, use automation to our benefit there.
Mike: So actually doing what you preach, which is great here. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Sam, it’s been really interesting. It’s certainly great to hear someone talk about how to use tools effectively, rather than just the features of tools. So I really appreciate your time on the, for the interview.
Sam: Thank you, I will leave people with one other thought just one thought and kind of wrap it up is don’t try to make a lot of big changes all at once. It’s hard, make a lot of small changes. And also that’ll get especially in the enterprise world, that as people see those Quick Hits results. And it’s easier, things are faster, they take less time. They’re, they’re more consistent. There’ll be happier to do then the next thing and before you know it, you’ve covered a lot of ground.
Mike: Perfect. That’s great advice. Thank you very much, Sam.
Sam: Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at Napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
