Leveraging your CRM Platform feat. Carson Brown

Tune in to this week’s episode of the Brand Shorthand podcast to learn all about leveraging your CRM Platform. Mark is joined by Carson Brown, the agency’s very own primary CRM technician and advisor. Learn how a CRM platform can help your business be more efficient, how you can use the data within a CRM platform to make decisions or provide insights, and what tools and capabilities are available within a CRM that help streamline workflow or manage data.

Join Mark and Carson for 30-ish as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, and of course … positioning.

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to another episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is a very special guest, Carson Brown. Carson is an account executive with us here at Innis Maggiore, and he's joining us today because he is the guru of CRM platforms. So, Carson, welcome.

Carson Brown
Thank you. It's good to be here.

Mark Vandegrift 
Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Give us a little background.

Carson Brown 
Sure, yeah. So like you said, Mark, I'm an account executive here at the agency and I work with a pretty good variety of clients across home improvement services, consumer products, and all sorts of topics. but one of the things I'm actually most familiar with, and that would be the reason why I'm here, as you mentioned, is that I work as the agency's primary CRM platform technician and an advisor to a lot of the clients who do CRM work. And I actually started my career in technical solutions to begin with. I was a technical solutions engineer for an electronic health record company. So I worked with software, a little bit of coding, but I won't claim to be an expert. But my time that I spent doing that was big help to me in just developing my skills as in database platforms, learning SQL, doing Excel imports into CRMs and other record softwares and advising clients on a whole on how they can improve a lot of their automated systems and their interactions with them.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good. Well, we're going to go to the very basics just in case we have some listeners who aren't technologically oriented. And why don't you give us a definition of CRM and a little bit of background of what a platform known as a CRM system actually does?

Carson Brown 
Yeah, so a CRM actually stands for customer relationship management, but whenever you hear people say CRM, and ninety-nine percent of the time what they're actually referring to is a customer relationship management software. People like to shorten the name of a tool to CRM to be a little bit easier because you don't want to say software all the time because it's just makes it a longer phrase. But these are software tools and they provide a pretty large range of customer service tools but primarily in lead management and email marketing. Email marketing is the one that you hear people using by a lot, but they're really a lot bigger of tools than that. and there are a lot of different shapes and sizes of CRMs, a huge variety. And the way in which we define how you might work with it or the way in which it might be useful for your business really just comes down to your specific business or your specific industry. There's no clear-cut answer to how it's going to be used.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good. Well, who would use a CRM and who is a CRM for?

Carson Brown 
Yeah. The one thing that every CRM tool kind of has in common is that they have some sort of contact management system. and that database is a way to store your data for all your contacts. and that might be prospects, people that you just learned their information and they might not even be a lead yet. It could be a lead, and then it could also be customers that you want to send emails to later down the line from maybe receipts to updates to news. And so when I get that question specifically from clients, I'll hear, do I really need a software to keep track of all my customers when I have other tools like Excel or maybe even just a simple email list that they keep track of and a CRM seems too big for them? And the answer is always yes, because a CRM makes your growth healthy and it makes it accessible. Growth is all about getting more prospects, getting more contacts, more leads, more customers, more people. That you can reach out to or you can talk to about all different levels of business from newsletters and updates in your PR to other gaps that you might not be able to fill in the customer relationship without a CRM system. These just manage to kind of do everything all at once. And that's what's so convenient about them and why everybody can take advantage of them.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, you know, a lot of people forget about the fact that there's this thing called automation, which can make life easier. There's the idea of opt-in and opt out. Well, how are you gonna manage that from Excel spreadsheet except to get an email from someone and go in and have to change it? Why wouldn't you make that automated, right? So there's a lot of tools that from the very inane to the things that are pretty major, like automations that can save a lot of time. So in that vein, how can our clients use it a lot because we always push them that way? But how can any organization really leverage a CRM platform and help them become more efficient?

Carson Brown 
Yeah, well, I guess to begin with, a CRM software platform is defined by the collection and the use of hard data. It's all about, you know, just simple yes or no's to things, or sometimes maybe you know, phrases to answer questions, maybe an address, a phone number. But it all comes down to hard data things that you input into a database. In fact, it's probably the best tool that you can use to manage and look at and then apply that data to your already existing customers and your potential customers. And while there's other tools available that you could use to maybe send emails and even receive form submissions or track web data, CRMs will let you do all of that and more all at the same time. What that means is if you get a web form from someone and then all of a sudden have some information about like their contact information or maybe their browsing data on your website. It will also integrate seamlessly with the information that you have maybe from newsletters that they looked at and their viewership of the newsletter, maybe a file that they downloaded from a newsletter. And so it really helps your efficiency because you're just cutting down all these different tools that you might normally need to collect a full contact profile and making it just one, just one that you have to look at, and also one that you would need to pull data from if you want to run a report or something like that is you just have to go to the CRM and you have all your information there.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, it's kind of like what we like to say is a single view of the customer, right? And that it's also not only backward looking, sometimes it can be forward looking in terms of if you have the right data, you can do some little bit of forecasting. even if like leads are in process or moving down the funnel, they haven't converted. You know, it can do forecasting that way. So certainly it does a lot more than just Who is my contact and how do I get a hold of them? Yeah.

Carson Brown 
Right. That's exactly right. And one of the things that's really interesting about that is a lot of times CRMs, because of the fact that they want your email health, for example, to improve. They want you to get better at that. These are already programmed to help you get there and not send out emails to people who probably aren't gonna open it or probably aren't gonna click it and really probably aren't gonna be any sort of conversion from it. And so there's a lot of little background stuff that you don't even think about whenever you just send out a bulk email that a CRM's already thinking about way ahead of time.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, and you know, it's funny because you take most marketers, and I would say that you and I are more technologically inclined, but that's kind of the aberration or exception versus typical marketers that might be more creative in the way that they operate. So I always find that a lot of these CRMs have made a lot of those tasks that might require some advanced technology. They've put a nice, easy interface in front of it and made the whole process easier. Wouldn't you agree with that?

Carson Brown 
Yeah, definitely.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. So give us some common mistakes that companies typically make when you see them implement a CRM.

Carson Brown 
Yeah, I would say there's kind of two primary mistakes that I see people run into. The first one is picking the wrong CRM. It sounds pretty basic, but there's so, so many CRMs as I mentioned earlier. And when there's dozens of different software companies, there's also dozens of different people that are trying to make a sale. And you see that a lot when you do any sort of web of technical integration, is there's a lot of different advantages that one company will talk about and pros that they'll talk about with their software and cons regarding the competition. And just like many industries, there are usually about like two to three big names that really jump out when you're looking at platforms. And these platforms might be great for sales companies or for some companies. You might have a platform that's really meant for enterprise businesses and can hold, you know, thousands and hundreds of thousands of contacts, even and information about them, but they might not actually fit the needs of your business. But it's the first name that you might hear when you Google CRM platform on Google.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. We know a few of them.

Carson Brown 
Yeah, absolutely. And so I I think that's kind of one of the first things is just really thinking heavily about what kind of CRM platform you really need. And sometimes maybe even working with a partner to get you to the place that you need to be to find the right one. I would say the second mistake that a lot of clients I see make is they don't necessarily explore everything a CRM has to offer. They might go through the tech demo, a lot of these will you'll go through a tech demo and kind of see the things that you might have later on down the line as an option. And you get into importing all your contacts and doing some basic email marketing, and then you kind of forget about all the cool stuff that you saw when you first saw the tech demo. But it's important to remember a CRM is super super powerful. There's a lot of different stuff that you can do in it. And once you make the choice that, okay, this CRM seems to have the good variety of tools that I need without being too overwhelming, it's important to not underuse some of those tools because it can really just end up being a waste. And you'll really won't be able to meet some of the desired growth or even you know potential growth that you could accomplish with them.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, I think you know, we'll just call out Salesforce here because that's a good example. Very expensive, but very robust. It's almost become more of an operating system for a business rather than just a CRM. And if you add all the plugins, et cetera, that you can get, it's very, very robust. But would you rather use 70 or 80% of a CRM and its functionality or five percent and of a larger system that can do everything, and find out that because it's so complex, you end up failing in the implementation because the lack of user adoption. Right?

Carson Brown 
Exactly.

Mark Vandegrift 
So that's really a good way to look at it is you're trying to get utilization up as high as you can because you can always migrate to a platform that does more and more things. But wouldn't you agree that one of the main things we find is that most companies shoot the moon and they find out that they're lucky to get out of their own city when it comes to using, you know, the functionalities. They want it to wash their car for but they don't they don't even understand the basics of a CRM.

Carson Brown
Right. And that's one thing to keep in mind that, you know, when I when you go on a s a sales call or a demo call with a a large CRM service like Salesforce or HubSpot's another good example of of one of these, is that one of the things they don't tell you about is yes, Walmart might use their platform and have been very successful in growing from their platform, or maybe JP Morgan and Chase has been very successful in growing on their platform. But they also have the capital in the first place to hire a dedicated Salesforce or HubSpot development team or engineering team. And they have a lot of different departments that all kind of build into an IT team that puts this kind of stuff together. Now you might have someone who is able to do a lot of your CRM engineering for you and be able to kind of work around the back end. But is it really necessary to have a tool that usually requires maybe a 15 or 20 plus person team just to get one automation running? Probably not.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Well, you know, it's interesting when you say that there's a let's say a lack of understanding the data and the processes that CRMs can handle, right? Or what they what they store from a data side and how they function as a as a platform. So let's give our listeners kind of some background info on the data. Let's just focus on the data for right now. What kind of data can a CRM store? And we know name and first name and last name and address and email and phone number, but really take us deeper than that because that's really where the power of the CRM comes in.

Carson Brown 
Right. And yeah, you're right that it can store all sorts of information. And a lot of times the first thing that comes to mind is some of that basic contact information that you mentioned, but that can expand to include much more that works more seamlessly. And for example, there's a concept of a visitor device, so if you go on to InnisMaggiore.com right now, and depending on how your privacy information is is being collected from your mobile device or whatever then your iPhone or your MacBook or your desktop might be captured as a as a visitor device on the website, and that visitor device can then store information about how I looked at the website, maybe how long I looked at a page if I were reading through some blog articles and it saw that I I spent maybe 90 seconds on a blog article reading through it, and some CRMs can capture that visitor device information that provides a whole breadth of experience of my time on the website, and then put it directly to Carson Brown as a contact in the CRM. And that's just one example. There's a super wide range of different kinds of technical stuff just based off of how you click things. I think I mentioned earlier, if you receive an email from a company and then click on a link that takes you to a new product, for example, that's something that we can immediately kind of take note of is okay, I went and clicked on this new product and maybe then I got some more visitor device information based off the fact that I clicked on that link in my email and can see all the different products that I seem to be interested in.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, we have one I think's kind of funny is we it's whether or not the person on our website that's visiting has read either Dick's book or my book. Like why have that field? Well, because we're writing about positioning and if someone's consumed that or at least downloaded it, and we know whether or not there's a deeper understanding of positioning. So when we start a sales interaction, then there's a likelihood that we can start it further downstream. Then having to explain positioning is and give them a definition and examples, they would likely know a little bit more about it because of having either read either one of our books. So there's all sorts of any data you want, because most platforms will allow you to put in custom fields. And it's good over time to capture data because no one's gonna give you all their data at once. But what's amazing is if I ask you one question, you're more likely to answer it than if I ask you two. If I ask you two, you're more likely to answer those than three, you know? So it's geometrically research has shown there's a geometrical pattern to how many questions you'll answer at once. But imagine if once a month I ask you a question. By the end of a year I have twelve more data points about you. And you may not even know that I even am gathering those or for what purpose. So that's really where the power of data comes in and why storing this type of data makes so much sense and why it's so important.

Carson Brown 
And some of these data points are things that like right now we might not even think are that important, like that book download, for example. Right now we might not think that's that important, but say maybe we get three years down the line and we're to take a download of a report saying, How does book downloads correlate with whether or not people made a decision to then work with us? And we might see that 75% of people who download the book decide to work with us, while 25% didn't decide to work with us. Well then we might all of a sudden decide we need to get this book in people's hands.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Yep. Well, and going that's going to that's a good gap or bridge to the functional side because the other thing we can do is guess what? Carson just produced a book. He wrote a book, and we think people that read Mark and Dick's book would be good candidates to read this book. So guess what? A good CRM is going to tell us who read the book and the first people first contacts we're going to email with hey, Carson has a new book out. It's probably going to be those people. So that's the functional side of it, because now you're able to query things. So how can companies use the data they have to make decisions or provide insights based on that functionality?

Carson Brown 
Right. And I think one of the easiest ways to think about how we use data is thinking about it pretty similar to how we use our face-to-face interactions to make a sales decision in a very traditional sales environment. For example, when we think about sales, we might decide that it takes three touch points with someone for leads to make a decision. Now, if we apply this to a CRM and we're looking at it the same way, we might think that, well, we need to create a unique touch point with three different emails that are sent to a lead over time. And then we also want to keep track of do they interact with those emails? And so it's kind of about maybe a little bit of nuance compared to the digital versus the physical face-to-face interaction, but it's kind of thinking in the same way, just picking up on patterns and then applying those patterns to the different CRM automations or mechanisms. Another example might be in demographics and we might know that leads that are under about 30 years of age prefer a certain type of product over another. And so we might focus on that product if we're meeting with a potential customer who is under 30 years of age face to face. Similarly, if we have the CRM, we might take note of that lead's age maybe as a demographic field at some point if we if we're able to capture that from somewhere and then focus all the digital interactions that we make with that person around that same product, either through maybe complete automation or through some manual interactions through email or texting or whatever it might be. But that's not necessarily all. Say in that situation, and this is kind of like I mentioned about the book earlier, we're collecting the age of every customer by the time they buy a product. And then we go back and look. We made a mistake. That product actually isn't all that popular with people under 30 years of age. Actually, it's much more popular with people who are 55 plus. And that's one of those things that you don't even think about with a CRM is well, if we think about it as just a sales tool, then we're just going to focus on how we can make the sale. But once you think about it as a fully efficient machine that then plays back on some of the things that we've we've learned about people in the past, we can now make even more informed decisions based off of just hard data. Again, this depends on the company and the products and what the process might be, but there are just so many little different things that we can use to inform our current sales situation, our current marketing situation. And then down the road realize, okay, there's even more things that we can learn based off of things that we previously collected.

Mark Vandegrift 
So you're touching a little bit there on some sensitivities that people get with, ooh, big brothers watching and all that type of thing. Maybe speak a little bit on this notion of permission based marketing and the controls that are in place.

Carson Brown 
Sure, I would say that for one thing, whenever you send device information, I think I mentioned that earlier, is a a visitor device. Visitor devices are essentially anonymous. They aren't really assigned to a specific person right off the bat. Like if you were to log on to Innis Maggiore's website right now without ever having been on there before, we have no idea really who you are or your interactions on the website until you then decide to give that information over and if you give that information over, it might be through a web form or it might be that you make a call and somehow the call is tracked, but there's no way for me to know that you had some sort of interaction with the website until you choose to want to engage with us a little bit more.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good. And then you can always opt out. So that's one of the key things.

Carson Brown 
Yeah. That is true. Yeah, that is and a lot of people do that a lot already. I think that when people see accept or reject cookies, still probably leans towards most people still just automatically click accept. But a lot more people are aware that you can you can click reject, you can click opt out. I think now your iPhone tells you if a new app or a new website you're on wants to use your information for future marketing endeavors and it since it tells you that right away, you can click reject right off the bat.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Yep. Good. What are so give us some of the tools, or maybe we call capabilities available within some of the CRMs we use and how that helps streamline the workflow or manage data.

Carson Brown 
Yeah, and this kind of gets to one of the big pieces about CRMs that people really know about them. And I mentioned them earlier is automated interactions. And almost all CRM platforms have some sort of tool that allow that allow us to maybe fill in the blanks when it comes to our data or next steps. And these are a wide range of different automated features. They can really vary in huge complexity, or they can just be like, you know, small little mechanisms that we build out that's just one thing leads to the next. But they always come down to just trying to reduce the burden of the person and trying to keep track of lead data because the more you grow, the more leads you're gonna get, the more customers you're gonna get, and the less that you're gonna wanna have to deal with filling out every little piece of information yourself. For example, an automation might just send a thank you for contacting us to email to anyone who fills out a web form. That's one that we're very familiar with because we see it almost every day. That's a simple task, but it helps let a prospect know that they've their inquiry has been received and they'll be contacted in the future. But it could also be used for internal operations as well. Like in our previous example, we could keep a running list of customers who purchased a specific product and are over the age of 55, and so that way maybe we want to do some email marketing on that product in the future or let people know when there's a new related product that's been introduced to the public. And that list could be the people that we right off the bat want to send that information to.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, and you know, it's funny because we might get that thank you for your inquiry on our end as a consumer. But on the back end, it could be sending a notification to this salesperson and information to this marketing team. And that's the amazing part of the automation is it's a bunch of if then statements, right? If fifty five plus, if visited website three times, if you know, keep going, then do this and it can be set up in a pretty crazy format. So that little email that one person gets on the front end that may not realize the flurry they're setting off on the back end. So that's kind of the fun to set that part up. I know you and I, we enjoy that sort of thing, but we geek out on the on the transactions.

Carson Brown 
For sure.

Mark Vandegrift 
So we can't have a discussion about a CRM today without having AI part of the I guess discussion. So we have this growth of AI, as everyone loves to say it. I think it's been growing since about nineteen ninety-five. But how do you think it's changing the way CRM systems or software operate today?

Carson Brown 
Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting question. I get that one a lot as well, and I see people already get the gears turning in their head when they think about something like Chat GPT and how is this going to line up with my my CRM software. But I think one of the things to think about is whenever you think about CRM platforms, is that they've always been on the cutting edge of technological innovation. Like kind of like we talked about with those automated email sends that are thank you for contacting us. That's already a form of artificial intelligence in a way when you think about it. And a lot of the advancements that we see actually just kind of reflect an improvement on some of that pre-existing technology that already existed on these platforms. And so kind of the key is with applying it effectively and usefully is going to be in what a lot of these AI platforms do best, which is make it feel more personalized. Make the interactions that you have with a company feel more like a face-to-face interaction that we already know usually is the best when it comes to sales compared to just online emails or messages. And a lot of these integrations that we're going to see come down the line and some of the ones that already exist with CRM platforms are not about fully automating everything to the point where you don't have to touch anything because then it's going to make mistakes. And we don't really want mistakes to be made. It's gonna be more about making sure that your customer feels like they're actually being heard, they're actually getting stuff that's appropriate for them, and that they're actually getting assisted with all of their digital interactions like they would be in a face-to-face interaction.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. You just touched on it. that keyword customer interaction, right? I think that's critical because CRMs, a lot of times people look at them and they go, gee, if I could just get the CRM to do this and do that and take away all my work, basically, which is AI is already helping to do. But what would you say is the key thing about a customer interaction? Isn't it to improve it?

Carson Brown 
Exactly. Yeah. And that's I think that's what's really interesting about how these CRMs are getting applied to the different digital interactions that we see. Because when we hear digital interaction, it's almost kind of an instinctive, like, I don't just don't know of how effective that's going to be compared to other options. Just because we know that we're removing the the physical presence of another person. But in a lot of cases, a CRM, it's not just about improving the customer interaction, but actually making things possible that would have been impossible in the digital sphere in the first place. So think about all of the things that a CRM is able to remember. We talked about a bunch earlier. It's able to remember the kinds of pages or products that you are looking at on a website for longer than other options. Well, take away the digital side of that, we wouldn't actually even be able to know that at all without the web tracking information that we have and so immediately, say I'm a salesperson going in to talk with someone who has entered through a web form, and I can see that they spend a lot of time looking at this very specific product when they're on the website. That opens a whole new avenue of ways that I can start talking with that customer about those products that I wouldn't have had beforehand if I first had to kind of figure out what they're more interested in. It makes the best salespeople better salespeople. That's kind of the key with it. And a CRM's ability to respond quickly with some of those customer interactions is always going to be faster than what a human can figure out on their own. And so that's one of the examples of how it fills in the gaps. And it doesn't just fill in the gaps that we might have been able to do in the past without a CRM. It starts filling in gaps that we could have never done in the past. And they don't just improve interactions overall, but actually make it a more consistent experience for the customer in the first place.

Mark Vandegrift 
That's good. Well, we could keep talking probably for a lot longer because these platforms do a lot of things. Maybe we'll have you back on soon to talk about sale the sales side of it. Because I think lead management and queuing up salespeople to do their tasks, if you will, to do follow up, to learn more about their prospects, I think is really powerful. So maybe I'll be a soon coming future episode of Brand Shorthand Podcast. But let's wrap it up for today. I want to thank you, Carson, for joining us. I think this is your first time on the Brand Shorthand podcast. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in this week. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe, tell it to your friends, shout it from a mountain type. We don't care how you get the word out. But until next time, have an amazing day.