Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: At a higher level, a good CRM should quickly give you a clear view of your pipeline as well as historical and future looking information. The biggest benefit is really helping you make better decisions.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello everyone and welcome to the Automation Matters podcast. This is the podcast for sales, operations, business development, marketing and the C suite of industrial automation, advanced manufacturing industry and robot OEMs. And I'm excited because Steve Slothober is joining me today and Steve and Steve's family and I go way back from ATS Automation tooling systems and Steve is a Zoho Consulting partner. His real focus is about growth oriented industrial automation or advanced manufacturing companies that think they might be leaving money on the table because of some poor software systems and why they should implement CRMs and cloud business tools to make revenue in less time. So, Steve, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Thanks Jim. Yeah, I appreciate you having me.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Steve, can you give our audience a bit of your background? Because we both work for ATS Automation and I think it's kind of interesting to some of the people out there.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. My journey into automation began very early. Like you had mentioned, my father was employee number 12 at ATS Automation.
And yeah, he used to bring me and my brothers to the shop when we were really young. He would show us some of those old machining centers and the adept Scarras. And I like to think this planted the seed for me. So I started at ATS out of college in controls hardware design.
Then I moved into software and integration and then eventually moving into more technical leadership roles.
Project leadership. You know, I worked a lot with sales and applications and project management teams there. Then I moved on to Ramp Inc. From Waterloo, Ontario, which is now part of Samuel Automation. And there I was a senior technical lead and project manager. We worked on some really innovative, cool projects. And there as well, I worked with sales and applications to generate concepts, cost models, you know, building proposals. So I got a lot of sales exposure there. But in both companies I was, I was very fortunate to help with streamlining internal processes, you know, within the controls group, within project management, within sales and applications. And I've always really loved driving these efficiencies and seeing the results because they compound and it's super motivating. And this is really what drove me to found my company, EmberOps.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Steve, I was going to ask you what Emberops, where did the name come from? And so it's E M B E R P S, right?
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So the idea behind EmberOps is you as the entrepreneur, have the spark, you have the flame. And we're the operational side. We drive the embers. We grow the embers of your business to help you continue to grow.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Steve, you also joined a company called Painted Robot. Tell us about that and the importance of web marketing for industrial capital equipment industry.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so I joined Painted Robot during the COVID era for a new challenge, but also to allow me to do those efficiency implementations full time.
So we developed several solutions for marketing and sales, inventory management, finance and operations, recruiting. A lot of different parts of the business, really all parts of the business.
And this role opened my eyes to how websites and marketing have a huge impact on any company looking to grow. I think the newer generation of buyers, especially the millennial buyers now are looking for social and digital proof of your capabilities before they'll even talk to you.
This is why digital marketing and having a drive into a comprehensive website, they're. That's very important for any capital equipment manufacturer. And by digital marketing, I mean, you know, social posts and SEO articles or even digital ads.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Your interest took you into CRM and specifically an application called Zoho. And Zoho is spelled Z O, H O.
Can you explain what a CRM is in case there's some people listening that have been under a rock for a while?
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah, so a CRM, you know, CRM stands for customer Relationship Management.
It's a tool that will help really your sales team and marketing team grow your sales by enabling them to work and communicate more efficiently with prospects with clients and then give you just better insights into what is actually driving growth. Right. So it's a sales tool to manage your opportunities. And I like to kind of compare it to going from a drafting table to using CAD software. You know, they both get the job done, but one is significantly easier. And this only really works if it's implemented correctly. So like at a tactical level, the core function of a CRM is to enable sales teams and marketing teams to sort of manage and track leads and opportunities.
Scheduling and automating, follow up and then integrating this data with other core business functions. At a higher level, a good CRM should quickly give you like a clear view of your pipeline as well as historical and future looking information.
Ultimately, the main goal, the biggest benefit, is really helping you make better decisions.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that reminds me of one of my clients who's the salesperson was in a parking lot and he was like, if only my CRM could tell me what this person bought, what they didn't buy, how many quotes we have open with them. So I love this part when we Talk a little bit more about Zoho. So who is Zoho and why do you like Zoho?
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Yeah, so Zoho's like a comprehensive suite of cloud business tools. They serve over 100 million users globally now and they're growing at a rapid rate. They're also a private company, which is somewhat rare for this size and type of company, but it allows them to make decisions like prioritizing R and D over growth at all costs. Right. So this is evident when you see the value that Zoho CRM and Zoho apps provide compared to other platforms, maybe like HubSpot or Salesforce or Dynamics365. So Zoho has a suite of 50 plus cloud business applications ranging from CRM, project management, finance, recruitment, collaboration tools, a full office suite, as well as a low code app builder, and many more applications as well. You can really just run your entire business off of Zoho. I personally like Zoho because of the flexibility and the affordability.
Also because they're continuously improving the applications and they're, they're keeping up with new tech trends, including incorporating AI and machine learning into all their solutions.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Stephen, what does low code mean?
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. So low code refers to a development approach that allows users to create custom applications and automate different business processes with minimal coding. So it utilizes things like visual interfaces or drag and drop pre built templates.
The great thing about this is it enables both technical and non technical users to quickly build out and deploy software solutions without like excessive programming knowledge. Right. So there's a lot of platforms, including Zoho, they're making software development within reach of those with little or no programming experience. And by implementing these low or actually no code builders. You know, I love this approach, even as a programmer. I love it because it allows businesses to really quickly deploy things and then fail fast in order to determine like a proof of concept. Right. So maybe you have a concept on some sort of application that you want to run in your business. You can use these low code builders to quickly test it and do a trial run and then, you know, if it works, then then develop more of the, you know, programmatic solution after that testing is done.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Steve, what are some of the big challenges when it comes to CRM systems? Like what are some of the mistakes people do when it comes to CRM?
[00:08:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so the biggest challenge that I typically see is adoptability within a sales staff and I think this is probably common in the industry.
Typically the problem is that people implement CRMs as another layer of work for, for the sales team instead of enabling the users to really like live and work inside of their CRM. Right.
I see a lot of management just wanting them to record activities instead of making it easy for them to actually record activities and do the activities out of the CRM. And this is why integration into other parts of your business are super critical in order to get those sales teams to live in there instead of like hopping around to, you know, email clients and you know, bookkeeping software or your accounting software or project management tools, like having it all centralized just helps them live in there.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Another huge mistake that I see is that companies, especially in the automation space, you know, they think that their process is so custom and unique that, you know, no tool or no out of the box solution could fit their needs. So they end up trying to like make their own CRM, their own version of that. And you know, I've even seen people using Ignition, which is, you know, a controls SCADA platform to make CRMs and you know, if it works, great, but it's not really built for that. Right. So the problem with this, doing it like that is now it's up to your team to update, integrate, maintain and support this, you know, bespoke piece of software. And on top of that, you're never going to be able to realistically keep up with the CRMs on the market that actually have full development teams keeping them up to date with the latest tech. Modern cloud CRMs are very customizable and can suit, you know, 99% of a business's needs.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Tell us about EmberOps.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so, you know, after implementing cloud solutions in many different industries, I saw how like streamlining and measuring your sales and operations is really what drives meaningful and sustainable growth because you have proper decision making. You know, there's a large gap in proper pipeline management in automation and unfortunately a lot of companies are not taking advantage of these tools. So sales and applications in the automation world is challenging enough due to the amount of indirect labor required to put proposals together. You know, sales cycles can also last years or decades.
So as someone from the industry, from the automation industry, you know, I aim to help, you know, automation and manufacturing companies to streamline and integrate their sales and operations so they can understand where their pipeline actually stands and how they're actually delivering to their customers. And, and we do that so that they can make the right decisions on which levers to push or pull back on and where there are holes they wouldn't have seen without the proper tools.
It's crazy how many times whenever we implement CRMs and start looking at actual data, previous assumptions just get shattered. You think that this is what's working and you realize it's actually over here. And, you know, it happens to me, it happens to almost every CRM project that we put in place from scratch. So I love doing that and I love helping businesses make those decisions. And sort of what sets us apart is just the deep understanding of both the technical and commercial sides of the industry. You know, competitors in this space just don't have nearly the insider knowledge that we do.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: Thank you for that. What are some CRM best practices?
[00:12:47] Speaker A: That's a great question. There's two main best practices that I follow.
User interface and integration. You know, making it easy for your sales team to live out of. Like I said before, this ensures that they're spending more of their time closing instead of updating. Right. So just making it easy for the sales team, as easy as possible, should be your number one priority. And then secondary to that is just the data structure and the cleanliness. Making sure you have a good data structure and deduplication strategy, making sure you can't add multiple records of the same, and also making sure that the right data is captured at the right time, and giving users a view of what's really most important or what you want them to see that is most important to the business that will help them drive the right actions and then set that foundation to grow.
I think if you have really good user interface and good data structure, the rest becomes very easy.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Is there a particular return on investment on a CRM system?
Is it like years or is it a number of months?
[00:13:58] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's a bit of a difficult one. There was a report that I read not too long ago from a few years back from Nucleus research that stated that every dollar invested in a CRM yields 8 or $9 back. While I think that any company invests properly in a CRM will get a great return, like with anything you try to automate or streamline, the ROI depends on your current situation.
So if you're spending hours developing proposals and managing leads, you in emails, or you have disjointed processes and need to copy and paste a whole bunch of data, and you're just doing a lot of manual work, then ROI can be pretty quick and we can streamline a lot of that data and merge it automatically. Additionally, if you have systems that help you minimize errors and oversights, then you could ROI in one proposal, if you avoid under quoting something due to a Mistake.
The main thing in this is that I try to explain to owners and sales leaders is that CRMs really enable your team to grow. Right? So instead of thinking how quickly will I get my money back on these trivial tasks, think about how quickly I can reach my revenue goals because I have the right tool in place to make better decisions and make their lives easier.
How many more customers will I retain because of this tool? You know, how many more leads will I convert because of this tool? How much better will my decisions be because I had, you know, a clear view of my pipeline and forecast?
[00:15:31] Speaker B: Steve, what are the motivators for business owners to consider the efficacy of a CRM? Like, who else likes to see a CRM used in a business?
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I think for efficacy, you know, integrations into your other systems are a huge factor, you know, in the other parts like marketing into finance, project management, you know, and operations and, you know, being able to easily and automatically transfer data from your CRM to those other, to and from those other departments is a huge benefit. I think cloud based and mobile friendly is, is key. Like your friend that was in the parking lot, you know, being able to pull up the quote on your phone from anywhere, you know, that's, that's very key. And I think most importantly is just having a comprehensive reporting and bi tool really to generate historical and projected financials and performance. I think that's really key. As for who else likes to see a CRM being used, I Find Finance loves CRMs because, you know, it can help them project cash flow if it's done properly. I think project teams love CRMs because they can, you know, transfer the contextual information that the sales teams have had with the, with a client to the project managers now so they understand those, the nuance and the conversation and they're not having to go dig for it or bug the sales team.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: I think when I was at one of the big integration companies, we decided to track salespeople's commissions out of the CRM we were using at the time. And I'll tell you what, people made sure that they got their numbers exactly right.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: So yeah, for sure. I think just on that note, it's hard, but I always like to have for, especially for the sales team to make it somewhat consequential. There has to be some consequence to not updating the CRM and I don't want to. Again, user interface is key, but making sure if they don't use the CRM, the order's not going in, the project's.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: Not getting started, that's a great motivator all in itself. Right?
I think it is a bit carrot and a bit stick. Say, who typically makes the decision on installing a CRM?
[00:17:48] Speaker A: I think it depends like on the size of the business. But typically whoever is in charge of sales is tasked with finding that CRM, finding maybe an implementation partner. And then it's the C suite or ownership that is consulted and sort of guides that decision.
You know, it and legal obviously at larger corporations need to be on board for security and privacy reasons.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: So what else can I do with Zoho as a manufacturer or a machine builder?
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Yeah, so again, like Zoho's got a suite of 50 plus business applications. Like you can really run your entire business on it. So the key things I think for the automation sector specifically would be, you know, project management, accounting and finance support ticketing.
Recruiting is actually a huge one as well.
NHR internal knowledge bases and intranets and really any custom operational applications you want to build, we can build that with Zoho Creator and then again pulling all that data along with even other applications outside of Zoho into their comprehensive BI tool, Zoho analytics, and then being able to tie and stitch that data together, maybe from a different ERP if you need, but we can pull that all into Zoho Analytics.
One cool one that Zoho recently came out with is an IoT application builder. So you can actually monitor assets and connect to PLCs, MQTT, brokers, sensors, all that. You can actually connect to them and monitor those assets in real time, which is, which is really cool. And from that you can actually connect to your ERP or your Zoho. Right. So they are really trying to bridge that ITOT gap, which is really cool. They're also, you know, Zoho is very much on board and they're making huge investments into the robotics space specifically. So it's really cool. They see the importance of robotics and automation all over the world and they're making big investments.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Steve, you probably are pitching this to a lot of CEOs of automation companies and machine builders and such. Do you ever have skeptical CEOs?
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely.
I think a lot of CEOs and sales execs that have been doing sales themselves and consider themselves maybe, you know, old school or relationship based or, you know, do things because of word of mouth. You know, they're skeptical because they think that using a CRM means that you, you kind of like take away from that personal touch. I think it's the opposite, you know, by adopting technology it allows that person, the salesperson, to do sales and free up their time and ensure they're also staying in touch with their customers. Right. Instead of having to remember it in their head, they have a tool then to help them remember.
Especially on the account management standpoint. You know, I've seen statistics showing that companies that adopt CRM, you know, have a 27% average increase in customer retention. So I think using it as a tool, get it out of your brain and get it out of your emails and get it into a centralized place, just helps you have better relationships with your customers and prospects.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: You know, there's so many reasons for CRM and you know, one of them is with, so with the M and A, the mergers and acquisitions that happen in the industry.
If you have cleaner data and a better CRM, you'll get more money for your business. Right. If you go to sell it. So I think that that's kind of a really simple, easy one for me.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely, definitely.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Do you have some Zoho success stories to tell the audience?
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I've had some really great success, you know, helping companies to streamline both like sales and operations in this space. You know, I have one client that we help really streamline their sales and account management process and then within two years they had, they had doubled their sales. And I, you know, I can't take all the credit but like, I don't think they would be able to do this without having a proper CRM and insight into that pipeline from an operations standpoint, you know, I've helped a number of companies bring their data to the cloud and now they're able to grow at a significant pace because they, they had the insights and they had the tools. I've, I've just seen so many companies with disjointed paper tools and different ways of doing things, spreadsheets all over the place. And, you know, we either help eliminate or tie those into the CRM or into their, into their Zoho. And you know, that's where we've had a ton of success.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: So how long does it take to, say, train the sales staff?
[00:22:35] Speaker A: I think for me, like, I aim to make the user experience, like I said, like, that's a priority for me is user experience. So, you know, you kind of take maybe Apple approach and you try to make it very intuitive and user friendly. And we try that as best we can in our customization so that staff can be up and running after maybe one or two training sessions.
And then it's a lot easier to onboard people. Right. And we also provide video tutorials in a segmented way so that staff can reference those. And we, we do it in a segmented way so that we can like switch ones out if we need to.
So we find video training and you know, having a really good user interface is. Helps a lot.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: So when I was at marketing at ats, one of the things that was really important to me was prove the marketing spend from a show, let's say the ANAHEIM, you know, 2020 show.
So I would be interested in to hear about this report. So that's a segue into this question. What are the most popular reports that a new user might use?
[00:23:43] Speaker A: Yeah, for new users, I think, like just waterfall reports. So like seeing how many leads you've prospected or inbound leads, two deals, two one deals over time, you know, is a very useful report to just show how you're converting and then showing that by either lead source, like trade show or maybe by industry, depending on your type of business.
I think activity reporting is helpful just to see what types of activities are being helping you convert, engage where you're at. And then just basic pipeline reporting, like showing how many leads you have in the pipeline into deals and what stages they're each at. So you can see if there's holes in your pipeline so that, you know, you gotta, you know, push up front, clean out things.
But to your point, I think really the most important reports, they take time and data.
So two big ones are, you know, lifetime value or even lifetime gross profit of clients is super helpful to know.
And then with that, your customer acquisition costs. So like what it costs to go to that trade show, how many leads you got, maybe you're doing digital ads and how much those ads are costing and then being able to tie that all together and see, you know, what return you're getting on that spend is super critical.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: You know, this takes the guesswork out of things like, and I remember because I was an apps guy too, this customer, this automotive customer, you know, it's like, hey, we're spending way too much quoting this customer. But what happens is you can just print off a report, right? And says, actually, let's see, what have we won? What have we lost? What have, you know, what, what's died on the table? So I think so, so important for sure, for sure.
So what about it?
[00:25:42] Speaker A: Yeah, so for me, I haven't. I've been mostly working with like small mediums, so this hasn't been a huge hurdle. Although, you know, security is always top of mind that being said, Zoho is SoC2 HIPAA, ISO compliant. Right. So there's no issues around security there, which is mainly an IT concern.
Integrations as well into other parts of the business is key. So, you know, Zoho is very open with their APIs and different connection methods, so that's usually not a huge, huge hurdle.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: So do you connect? Like, say you're working on a new company website or we're putting up a new company website. Do you actually embed Zoho into the new company website?
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Yeah, so we'll. There's different tools that you can embed in the website, but, you know, at a minimum, we make sure that their web forms are going into the CRM. However, there's many different ways to do that, but I think that's sort of a basic requisite integration.
I actually talked to someone the other day that said they were actually losing leads because they didn't really know where the emails went to when someone submitted a contact form. Right. Maybe they weren't getting a lot, but they're losing some. So, you know, that's definitely something we aim to fix immediately. And then like I said earlier, you know, there's ad data or UTM data, which are tracking methods to see where your traffic is coming from on your website.
So like UTM data is all those things at the end of your URL, like UTM source or UTM medium, Those are all the things that you can build into links from ads or social posts or different calls to action.
That allows things like Google Analytics or different Zoho tools to see where traffic is coming from.
And then to take that a step further, you can then track that UTM data into the CRM. So with hidden fields, for instance, so if someone came from an ad, they went to the website and then they submitted a form, we can track that UTM data to know exactly which ad they came from. And then we carry that data through the CRM until a closed one deal.
And that's where we can see where we're getting a return on this ad, on our ad spend, which ads are giving us an actual converting to actual customers. Right. So that's super critical.
Zoho's also got tools like SalesIQ, which is, it's a visitor tracking tool and also a chatbot tool.
And they also have page sense, actually you can put on your website. It'll help you track sessions and see where people are, you know, dropping off in your, your website. So that's a huge thing, right? Like, I forget the exact statistic but every 25%, you know, a lot of people are just dropping off of your website. Right. So these are all integrated tools that integrate into the CRM as well and, and just give context and buyer intent data to your sales team so that you know they can make better decisions and attack when needed.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Steve, thanks for coming on today. I've been learned a lot. I think it's really, really interesting. Did we forget to talk about anything today?
[00:29:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to mention that, you know, I talked to a number of small medium system integrators and builders and a lot of them are struggling right now with just generating leads. You know, I put up a little simple document together for new business development outlining some actions and tools that these companies can use to help drive leads and fill up their pipeline.
It's in my LinkedIn Featured section. But yeah, it's some information. It's pretty simple but it's very effective even for me and I've seen it for other companies.
It's super effective at just getting more leads and targeted leads.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: Great. And how best can people find you?
[00:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah. So you can go to my website, ember-ops.com but mostly on LinkedIn. You can look me up. Stephen with a P H Slothauber S T E P H E N S L O T H O U B.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: E R thanks very much for that and look forward to chatting more with you. Today's podcast was produced by Customer Attraction Industrial Marketing. I'd like to thank my team, Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production. My business partner Janet, thanks very much and we'll see you out there. Thanks for listening.
