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00:00:01
08 The re-imagination of a common tool: the phone
124 Plays2 years ago
It's part of what makes a real business a business: the first phone number. What you do with it beyond there is up to you. Dave and Trygve look at the new advancements in calling and how they're integrated with other business operations for a more smooth customer experience, with Slav and Andrew from Kixie.
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
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Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dave1meyer
Connect with Trygve on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/trygveo
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Transcript
Introduction to Dial It In Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
Indiana Jones & Marketing Tech
00:00:23
Speaker
What'd you do last night, Dave? Well, I made a bunch of calls, got a hold of some clients, did some outreach, normal afternoon, evening.
00:00:34
Speaker
Oh, okay. I watched the director's final cut of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Oh, my stars. And it included an extra 16 seconds of previously unseen footage. I know. I was really excited. And then when I got into it, I realized at the end, I don't know what the 16 seconds were.
00:00:59
Speaker
It was just in there. He didn't know. And maybe it was like 16 seconds of extra credits. And so it got me thinking about the space that we're in and the MarTech space, the marketing technology space, and how there are so many companies that are selling a feature that says, oh, we're better than this other thing. And it's their version of previously unseen footage that
00:01:24
Speaker
At the end of the day, it really doesn't make a means difference in the world. And I know you and I both have what your wife affectionately calls shiny object syndrome. Yes. Where anytime we see something new and cool, we want to go after it and we want it desperately.
Transformative Sales Tool
00:01:41
Speaker
So about four and a half, five months ago, I met a guy at a party.
00:01:48
Speaker
who told me that he was going to change my sales world by giving me a new phone. I thought, well, A, I instantly hate him because he's bigger than me, but B, okay, sure, whatever. Then I sat through his demo because I wanted a free T-shirt.
00:02:09
Speaker
It really did change everything for us. I wanted to spend a lot of time today talking about, as a business use case, how our lives have changed because of not focusing on features and focusing more on outcomes, and how one particular company has helped us change a lot of the ways that we do business. Today, we have our friend,
00:02:35
Speaker
Slav from Kixi and his boss Andrew from Kixi as our guests to talk about new ways of phoning today.
Kixi's Platform Overview
00:02:44
Speaker
Hi, guys. Welcome, guys. Hey, guys. Thanks for having us on. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So I want to start with Slav. He said, yeah, we reinvented the phone. You guys didn't really reinvent the phone, but you put a lot of things together that make the phone more fun.
00:03:06
Speaker
That's true. You can even say we revolutionized the phone. I like that. So we know you guys. So for our listeners, why don't you tell us a little bit about Kixi and who you are? Cool. So Kixi is a calling and texting automations platform. I like to break it up into two parts.
00:03:25
Speaker
So on the right you have your full inbound and outbound to left any system so you have all your calling your texting. I've yours ring groups kind of all those features that you'd expect from an enterprise system on the left and where we really shine is our native integration with hubs but where hub spots solutions and integrations partners. I believe the only one.
00:03:48
Speaker
but in a little bit of a different way than busy web. So if you think about it, this gives us our native integration. So any calls, texts, logging of tasks and logging of outcomes, all natively logged within the HubSpot contact profile. And you also have native Kixi actions within the workflows. So if you have like a speed to lead situation where a form is filled out, contact owners assigned through HubSpot,
00:04:13
Speaker
And through the workflow, through that action step, you can actually have a rep call that lead right away while the information is fresh in their head. Or maybe marketing sends out an email and the triggers to click or more, you click that trigger, and then you can get an auto text being like, Hey, Dave, hey, Trigby, how can we help since you're looking at our email, for example. So it's a really cool way to kind of engage your contacts at the right time and help grow your business as opposed to just being a regular phone system.
00:04:43
Speaker
You guys have a lot of pretty heavy hitters when it comes to the legends of sales who work with Kixi, like Grant Cardone is a customer of yours and Jordan Belfort. Do they get together and talk about the Glengarry leads or is that just, you guys are just that good? I'd like to say we're just that good, but no, they are customers of ours. It's not just a flashy logo.
00:05:13
Speaker
They actually use us and promote us, which is great, but they promote us just because of the value that they see in it. We're not by all means the biggest logo in our industry, so it doesn't make sense for anyone to be flashing Kixi as that's going to be like their flex in the industry. So they actually use us.
00:05:35
Speaker
Wow, very cool.
Call Recording Benefits
00:05:37
Speaker
Now, for those people who aren't very technical, I want to break down what you mean by native integrations because that's really a huge deal. But what you mean by that is that if you buy this platform and you want to integrate it with your CRM, and I know you mentioned HubSpot,
00:05:57
Speaker
The time it takes to integrate the two platforms is north of five minutes, right, or less? The idea of a native integration really means it's just super easy to connect the dots. Correct. And it's honestly to connect Kixi and HubSpot, it literally honestly takes about 20 seconds total per user, which is really cool.
00:06:23
Speaker
One of the things that I think a lot of salespeople immediately bristle at is the concept of having their calls recorded. So organizationally, why is it important for salespeople to have their calls recorded? Cool. So just me as a sales rep, I'm on the channel side, but I guess I can say it more from my end and then Andrew can talk about the manager end. So I would say simply because there has to be a record of everything that was promised, right?
00:06:52
Speaker
Let's just be honest. People forget things, right? Especially if you're a sales rep making calls, you make promises, you say that you're going to do things. You're say that you're going to provide something. So here, but then you're talking to so many people. You forget about that. So you go back, you can listen to this recording, be like, Hey, you know, I promised Trigby a million dollars, you know, I'll do that. Or, uh, I promise Dave this.
00:07:17
Speaker
So I can go back and have that recording or maybe, maybe as a manager, you want to see how people are doing. You can go in, listen to those calls recording those calls being recorded and kind of look at your team's statistics and success that way as well. Yeah. I mean.
00:07:37
Speaker
There's two sides of it. Obviously, there's the compliance, so phones need to have like the two party consent states where you're not going to automatically record that. Clearly, that's just kind of like a legal thing. For a management point of view, it's quality assurance, coaching opportunities. If you connect something like Gong or Voma, where you have more like analytics, there's that as well.
00:08:05
Speaker
Then from a customer service side, if customers like to say they were promised one thing, when they complain, they're like, this is what I was absolutely promised. Then you can go back to the recording and be like, well, I actually sold that with the normal discount or with the normal terms of service. That's where it's really useful as far as call recordings.
Features Enhancing Collaboration
00:08:32
Speaker
If you're a lazy account executive,
00:08:35
Speaker
then you could use that instead of note taking like i'll be honest i'm not the best at updating cms when i was an actual account executive and i would have to go back to call recordings just remind myself what the conversation was not the best practice but.
00:08:52
Speaker
I think it kinda is because it lets you be present in the moment and just talk with people instead of taking notes and I like personally I'm not fantastic at multitasking so if I'm typing I usually lose my mojo and I'm not listening as hard as I should be as the client is telling me something.
00:09:11
Speaker
The other thing that I really love using Kixi with Trigvi and with the rest of our team is that there's the listen in and the conferencing features so you can actively coach and connect with people. So as Trigvi and I are coming in, he can say and just chat me and say, the client has a question about this deal. I know that you were working with them as well.
00:09:34
Speaker
can we meet up quick and then I can just hit a button. There's no hitting star six or whatever to log things over. You just go into the dialer and you click the button and all of a sudden boom, you're in. It makes it super easy to collaborate with people on a team, which I think is incredibly important now in today's virtual world. I know Scott mentioned about just being an account exec. I think the classic example that happened to me is
00:10:03
Speaker
And this happened years and years ago. I came in to the office and Dave sort of mentioned in passing about somebody calling him to complain for me. And I was like, what? He goes, yeah, don't worry about it, though, and then walked away. And I was like,
00:10:18
Speaker
No, no, no, wait, what? What? And I bugged him about it. He's like, okay, well, here's what happened is this person called in and said that you didn't give this person the time of day. And so I looked in the CRM and I know I saw you wrote him two emails and you spent 45 minutes with them. So I told him to pound sand. I was nicer than that. Like I said, like I said, don't worry about it. Oh, okay. And that sort of changed my thinking on
00:10:46
Speaker
There's the big brother aspect of having your activity recorded. Yeah, if you're not doing the activity, it's scary because now all of a sudden there's numbers.
00:10:59
Speaker
But if you're doing the activity, it really doesn't matter. And all it can do is help. So that's, I think, one of the things that was really neat and a difference maker for us. Because I know when we started working with you guys, we could only record our outgoing calls. But now our incoming calls are recorded too. So now, as Slav said, that idea of somebody
00:11:23
Speaker
claiming that we sold one thing where we really didn't say that. I mean, the classic example is somebody says, oh, can you make me a purple monkey dinosaur? And the sales response to that is, well, sure, we can look into that because anything's possible with enough time and money. But that doesn't mean that I said we would do it. I just said we'd look into it. But people hear what they want to hear. That's the kicker. So what are some of the other
00:11:51
Speaker
really cool differentiators for Kixi as opposed to just a straight up phone. So some of the best ones obviously are our voicemail drops.
00:12:03
Speaker
where you're able to prerecord voicemails and if you're going down or like a long list of people that you're trying to call, you can literally select the voicemail that you want to leave them. Click select or confirm and it'll send out the voicemail and end the call and you can move on to your next call, which is really cool. So it eliminates things like voice fatigue and just makes the whole process of cold calling less annoying. And then similar to that, we also have SMS templates.
00:12:33
Speaker
kind of like email templates where if you want to send one off text messages to people, you can actually pull tokens from the CRM like first name, last name and have it sent out and create a template for that. So ultimately Kixi has functionality to also save reps time and help them stay on the phones and do the job that they're actually there to do.
SMS Integration Advancement
00:12:54
Speaker
For sure. Well, SMS is something that we haven't really covered much yet, but
00:13:00
Speaker
That's the way people talk to each other now. And it's one of the best ways to reach out. And it's also one of the big gaping spots in HubSpot strategy. They don't collect SMSs in the CRM natively. So the fact that I now have in my timeline for every contact on my CRM
00:13:19
Speaker
Every SMS that I've sent or received with that person as well is a game changer for me to have the data because before that I was missing like 30% of every contact that I had with any of my clients. So that's hugely helpful. I think I've written hundreds of text messages to clients.
00:13:39
Speaker
If you want to know a fun fact, HubSpot released a way to manually log SMS, which because they don't actually do SMS, they have a basic calling that's about all that they offer. We actually have their API and releasing next week is all of our
00:14:00
Speaker
texting or SMS is going to log as a true HubSpot SMS now, which is pretty exciting. Yeah. Right. Little sneak preview. I can't wait. That's cool. So as we look at this, you know, I know that, you know, voicemail drop is something that, you know, for sure, when we demo blew my mind, it's like, holy cow. You mean I can reach out to my 50 calls that I need to make today and anybody that I don't reach, I can just hit a button.
00:14:26
Speaker
instead of restating the same thing over and over again, what else for time saving do you have that or that people really open up their eyes about and say, holy cow, what else can this do? So something else that we have, I would say two more things, especially on the calling side. So as far as time saving goes, we have our power dialer, aka our multi line auto dialer.
00:14:53
Speaker
which is our power hour, we can pick up 10 lines. And if you have like a list of like five, 6,000 leads, you can dial through them like in the span of like an hour, hour and a half. So it's super cool.
00:15:11
Speaker
Definitely. So you can pick from one line to 10 lines. And I don't know if you guys ever got those calls where it's like you answer and there's a gap and it's like, Hey, your car warranty is overdue, right? So they might be using something like that, but what makes Kixi's better is that ours is actually a native conversation. So if I'm using 10 lines, calling 10 people at a time, the first person to pick up is who I'm going to talk to.
00:15:39
Speaker
the rest are gonna drop off and not one person who's gonna pick up it's gonna be it's gonna just connect to them natively so is as if i was to call that person on their cell phone. There's no robo cold on nothing like that and people like it because at the same time it's a combination of like a natural call feeling with the functionality that you can get through so many leads in such a short period of time.
00:16:02
Speaker
Amazing. That is fun. And honestly, that's one of the things that I'm trying to get better at is using the power dialer. And I haven't broken that into my regular habits yet.
00:16:15
Speaker
So thanks for making the distinction. Of course. There's that great scene in the Will Smith movie, The Pursuit of Happiness, where he's making calls and he never hangs up the phone because that's six seconds of lost time. And that added up to six minutes of the course of a day where he could make three or four more tries.
00:16:36
Speaker
In a sales game, as daunting as that sounds, that three or four more tries is one more at bad. It's one more free throw that you have the ability to potentially start a relationship. It does add up. Agreed.
00:16:50
Speaker
But what's important that I want to say, and you guys can chime in and that doesn't make you a telemarketer. If you're calling a lot of people, you're just making a lot of efficient use of your time. That doesn't make you a spammy telemarketer because the point of using a technology like this is so you are still having the one-to-one relationship calls.
00:17:14
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. I think the distinction is telemarketers typically have a script and one could also argue that certain sales, uh, sales teams have scripts as well. I mean, we all have some sort of a pre-described type of talk track, but.
00:17:34
Speaker
The telemarketer thing is very much like you think of just the sales, they're trying to switch you from Verizon to Spectrum or whatnot. But if you're actually using it, if you have a prospect list, it's just a way to be efficient.
Power Dialer Efficiency
00:17:50
Speaker
It takes a minute to get used to just because you get one, you get very used to and very good at your intro because that's the first thing that you're hitting right away every single time. But it's just the efficiency which is great. I've been an account executive for many years and it's easy to get lazy. Those six seconds,
00:18:18
Speaker
like Will Smith was talking about. I've been on the end of a sales organization where I was making three to 500 calls per day and I was actually using a traditional phone. Yeah, seriously oil and gas. How's it even worked? That's crazy. Yeah.
00:18:37
Speaker
And you know, you just let it ring three times because all you want is to get someone on the phone. And so you just don't care. You don't care to leave voicemails. You don't care to do it. This was before I even knew about technology that exists, like with Kixie. You just want to get the person on the phone. So having a power dialer would have been like absolutely perfect for me in that role, where all I want to do is get someone on the phone so I could have that conversation. Well, and the voicemail drops for the folks that don't pick up. Holy cow.
00:19:05
Speaker
Oh, that would have been huge. That would have been a game changer because I never left voicemails. Like, I didn't want to spend the time. I didn't want to spend there like 20 to 30 seconds listening to however long their voicemail was and then leave my voicemail and do that, what, 300 times a day. That would just be exhausting. I was already exhausted by by the end of the day from just the conversations I had, let alone the voicemails. Wow. I used to make the joke that I it's not really a joke that I have two parts on jobs.
00:19:35
Speaker
working busy web and then I leave voicemails. Yeah. I can understand that one. The power dialer is huge, the voicemail drops are huge. What are some of the other ways in which you guys have figured out a better way to accelerate the calling? Yeah. I'll touch up on this one. It's the way that we automate things.
00:20:04
Speaker
would probably be one of the most revolutionary ways that we work. And by that, I mean using for HubSpot specifically, it would be their workflows. So it's ways that we can like, it's not just speed up, some of it is, but it's we can take the
00:20:22
Speaker
Human element out of it on one side of it and put it on the other side of it so what i mean by that is if you have a new lead fill out a form they're interested the biggest thing is how fast can we get that lead and the fact is sales account executives whoever's on it.
00:20:41
Speaker
They're doing a whole bunch of stuff with their day and they may not be on their new leads. But like we know that the faster you get to lead, the more likely it has a chance to close. And so we can have a text go automatically out to them. That's personalized. So they have that feel good touch point right away.
00:20:57
Speaker
And then we can actually queue up a call from somebody from the sales team to then outbound call them right away within minutes. It's great. After the call, we know that there's a bunch of busy work that needs to be done, that you're going to send an email, maybe a follow-up text, maybe you're going to move them to a new deal stage if you send a proposal. We can automate all of that kind of stuff. So it saves
00:21:18
Speaker
both time it kind of secures the fact that things are getting done and getting attended to. That's one side of our business that we love and that's where we share with other solution partners where we have solution engineers that can help with that, but we also know that that's also part of your world, marketing automation, all that kind of stuff. That's a big part of just even
00:21:44
Speaker
simply adding a text to your marketing sequence, your marketing campaign. Just even adding that touch point that we know is more likely to be responded to than an actual email because email is so crazy. I didn't want to even look at my inbox. I think there's 10,000 unopened emails. But I get a text on my phone,
00:22:09
Speaker
And I see it right then and there, you know, because it's just more intimate. So that's kind of one of the differentiators, I would say. And like, because you were asking, like, how can we make things more efficient? Well, automating things can, can do that. And even as something as elementary as, as, as the phone can have, and that's really why we have you guys on is because there's, you think, oh, everybody needs a phone and everybody needs a computer. And then you, you know,
00:22:39
Speaker
the old sales axiom would give somebody a chair and a phone book and let them go to town. The ability to use technology goes so far beyond that shiny object into this whole new world of
00:22:52
Speaker
efficiencies is truly astonishing. Do you guys feel like the phone is still relevant in 2023 as we're recording this?
Post-Pandemic Phone Importance
00:23:02
Speaker
Because we've just gone through a pandemic. Everybody's now away from their office, and they're not necessarily there anymore. What's the value of the phone in this day? I mean, I think the value of the phone
00:23:18
Speaker
So that's an interesting question because Zoom is so prevalent as far as getting on to, and we know that, right? Zoom is, and we use it all the time in our company, like as far as like having and holding actual meetings. A phone is never going to not be relevant. I think it's how you use it now is what
00:23:43
Speaker
Makes the distinction because i wouldn't say there's too much change as of last year to this year necessarily i think people still expect phone calls i think the one thing that we forget is.
00:23:58
Speaker
can't rely on just texting alone and emailing alone. There's no reason for a salesperson to exist if that's the case. I had a VP of sales one time say, guys, if you're just emailing your prospects, he's like, I have a marketing team that can do that. I don't need you. And we need that human connection. So the phone is important. But
00:24:20
Speaker
It's trickier now because spam detection is so high right now that that's something that everyone has to battle and the carriers now are being so much more protective of that. So it's how you use the phone, in my opinion, is what is kind of making the change in 2023 because before the pandemic,
00:24:48
Speaker
I called someone on their cell phone when I was an account executive, and that executive was so pissed. He was so upset. He shut that conversation down. I, of course, emailed immediately and apologized, but never again. But now the fact is that cell phones are so much more in use now, and because the pandemic, we're used to that world. So it's now, I think the change is
00:25:14
Speaker
To make it more relevant is to be very specific with your messaging and take care with how you're reaching out to them, knowing that you might be on their cell phone. They might be at home. They might have kids running around in the background. They might be at the grocery store. They hopefully are open to your product, your offering, and just having a little more care with those conversations.
00:25:40
Speaker
That's I think the difference in 2023 is how you conduct your actual outreach. That's the change. You mentioned your email. I think one of the things that I've seen since the pandemic is that everybody moved to an alleged digital platform to try and sell and they all use the exact same template.
00:26:04
Speaker
Hi, first name, quick question. Do you have this problem? If so, let me tell you about my ABC differentiators. When can we jump on a meeting? Love some guy you've never met. And I get that email eight to 10 times a day. And I don't even have, Dave's email is a lot more prevalent than mine is. And I get that email 10 times a day.
00:26:30
Speaker
And now what I'm seeing is people abusing what's a HubSpot tool, which is a meeting calendar invite. And they're sending me calendar invites and asking, where did you go? Why weren't you on there? And so then I open it up and oh, cause I am usually think, oh crap, I missed a meeting. And then I open it up and I have no idea who this person is. And I think, oh no, did Dave send me a lead that I dropped? No, it's just some schmuck.
00:27:00
Speaker
And the thing that is driving me nuts right now, and I don't know how you guys feel about this, is bump emails. Drives me. Hey, just wanted to ask you about my email I sent. Oh, that's insane. I hate those. All this being said, the easiest way to combat all of that noise is just by being a real person.
00:27:27
Speaker
I don't think there's been a more critical time to be good at using the phone. What do you think, Dave? Yeah, it's a lost art. I was actually just reading something that I thought was fascinating about how inbound is one of the things that we do at BusyWeb, but the opportunity of creating catchy, informative, magnetic communications in and of itself isn't going to transform a B2B company.
00:27:57
Speaker
you still need to do the legwork to make outreaches to actual people if you want to sell. Even having a brilliant inbound marketing setup isn't going to generate leads at any rate like simply picking up the damn phone will.
00:28:15
Speaker
So that's the big differentiator and that's why I'm so excited that you guys are here because BusyWeb has taken phones seriously again and it's been huge for the amount of connections that we're getting, the amount of touches that we're getting, the amount of usefulness that we have for our clients now because we can be far more proactive
00:28:38
Speaker
than we have ever before. So on audio, I'd love to thank you guys officially for making that possible for us. And this is a little tongue in cheek because we invited you on because we thought it'd be a good discussion, but this is a really kick-ass tool that more people should know about.
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah. I hate that people are giving phones a bad rap. It's like lumpy mail. It's a great way to stand out. People say that mail is dead. If you want to stand out in a place where people are sending five, hey, you haven't opened my e-mail yet, e-mails. You want to stand out, actually give them a call.
00:29:22
Speaker
and not be afraid of that. Yeah. Right. So Andrew, as you dial in, as you work with folks to help coach them on great approaches, what are some of those things that really make you stand out as you're connecting and trying to make a voice connection with people?
Genuine Sales Connections
00:29:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting one these days. I think like you just mentioned a couple of minutes ago,
00:29:47
Speaker
It's about being genuine. It's about not coming off as salesy, and that's easier said than done. We've all been there before. Whatever you can do just to be human, and I've had different directors of sales and managers that say, don't ask how someone's doing. When you say like, hey, this is Andrew from Kixe, how are you doing today? It opens up,
00:30:16
Speaker
the option for them to say no, to have an objection and be like, no, I'm not interested. But at the same time, it's just like, be human. Have a conversation with someone. Don't jump to selling right away. Yeah. And just the more that you can
00:30:34
Speaker
do that connect part. And Trig V leads a sales bootcamp for HubSpot like every week, right? Every week and how to pick up the phone and call people. Yeah. And that's huge. I mean, you don't start going right into your script. You start with, Hey, how's, how's the weather? Oh, you're in Buffalo. Holy crap. You guys got a lot of snow or, you know, Hey, you're in Miami. Can we come and visit because I'm in Minneapolis?
00:31:00
Speaker
So what are those things that you can do to connect? So the first thing that I teach people to do is to when you call somebody to embrace the pause, you don't immediately ask a question. So instead of you say, Hey, Andrew, it's triggered busy web.
00:31:23
Speaker
And then you wait because their lizard brain is functioning going, what did he just say? That was a crazy name. And how do I know this guy? And oh my God, it's been four seconds and I haven't said anything. I should really say something.
00:31:39
Speaker
The next, and they'll fumble. They'll come back. Oh, hey, hey buddy. Hey, it's you. Hey, good to see you. So, okay, fine. The next thing you do is you don't ask a question that you don't want the answer to. So in Andrew's example, I'm going to critique you, but when you say, Hey, how are you doing? How is your, I'm, I'm doing shitty. Why are you calling me?
00:32:07
Speaker
that because people do that or you say, hey, can I have a couple of minutes? No, click. I'm in a meeting. Then that's my favorite. When somebody said, why I'm in a meeting, why are you picking up the phone if you're in a meeting? It can't be that important of a meeting, but you can't say that. The line that I use is I say, thanks for picking up the phone because it's an affirmation about something that they've done already. Hey, I appreciate you.
00:32:35
Speaker
And again, it's an abrupt thing because I haven't asked a question and I've immediately been nice and I haven't asked a sales question yet because their hackles are up. Then I can say, and then eventually what you get to is, I said, well, why are you calling today?
00:32:56
Speaker
And then you can get into the reason you're calling. Well, I noticed a couple of things. I saw some things, I heard about some things and I think there's an opportunity that I could help you and I wanted to reach out. Can we talk for a couple of minutes right now? And then what'll happen is they'll either say yes or they'll say no. And if they say yes, then you can go into not a script, but a pre-subscribed list of bullet points that you want to hit.
00:33:23
Speaker
If they say no, say, great, I understand. Let me tell you, let me tell you a little bit about the value proposition I have, but I want to, okay, but I know this isn't the time. When is the right time that I can call you back? Right. And that's what CRM is for. And then, and the kicker and why using a tool like Kixi is really important is if they say, call me in a couple of days, then you're going to have to call in a couple of days.
CRM's Role in Client Management
00:33:49
Speaker
Because if you don't, then the entire process was meaningless.
00:33:53
Speaker
Right. So that's that's my two cents on that. But I think to your point, Andrew, is that having starting a relationship with somebody is hard. And it's one of the scarier things you can do is to call somebody and go from zero to something immediately. And it really is a lot of start.
00:34:15
Speaker
And so anything that companies can do to utilize efficiencies is going to make that effort all the more fruitful.
00:34:27
Speaker
And honestly, the connect call thing and making a connection and trying to get to some point of value, for us, a lot of times we'll just start with an invitation to something. So an event or, you know, hey, we've got a, we've got a podcast and I know that people in your industry have generally seemed to enjoy it. Are you a podcast guy?
00:34:50
Speaker
And maybe that's one where they could say no. But it's like, we have this thing. And it's important, and this is kind of where inbound meets with calling, I think, is that you come up with something intensely valuable. And that's the trade. In your call, you're not trying to get all the way. That's kind of like dating. You can't go to third base.
00:35:14
Speaker
before you get to the car you need to actually connect up and and have a milkshake and talk and see how people are and you know get to know them a little bit so yeah maybe that's how you know that's how you successfully get to third base right right take your time right so you and uh again weird guys on a podcast it's getting weird
00:35:38
Speaker
This is one of those things that I think is so important. And now the fact that we have the ability to send easy texts and to get them in a CRM and to actually apply some process to this so that we're not missing it. Because we have the interesting job in sales of making meaningful conversations at scale.
00:36:06
Speaker
And so the voicemail drop and the texts capability and the ability to do power dialing lets us get around all of the bullshit that we have to wade through in order to make those connections. Yeah. Andrew, if folks want to find you online or see the products, what's a good fit customer for Kixi?
Kixi for Sales Teams
00:36:31
Speaker
Who would really appreciate having a tool like yours?
00:36:35
Speaker
I mean, I would say, I mean, I don't want to just say anyone that needs a phone. That just sounds like a cop out. Um, it's partly true, but like anyone in sales is probably like the easiest fit because we have so many tools like we're talking about to help. So if you are making outreach, you need to make outbound calls and you need to be effective then
00:37:03
Speaker
those are like the immediate fit. We obviously have other use cases for customer service teams or account managers and stuff just because of the integration with a CRM to track all of your activities. But the best fit is our sales teams. Sales teams that need to be more effective, that if you're a startup and you're on your cell phone,
00:37:30
Speaker
Get off your cell phone. I used to be that sales guy that had my cell phone in my email signature so that I could be reached at any time, always ready to make the sale and make it happen, wheel and deal in my garage, whatever. I don't do that anymore. I'm too old for that. I don't need to be that reachable. I have business hours for a reason. I will answer emails and requests after hours, of course, to satisfy customers.
00:37:57
Speaker
But like anyone who needs help in those regards that's the best fit so for sure that's actually good point though you kixie does have a mobile app. And so you have your office line you can get that office line just by installing the app and it'll ring yourself.
00:38:15
Speaker
Yeah. 100%. Yeah. We have, we have a mobile app. Um, it'll log the calls to your CRM to HubSpot. It'll have the call recordings. If you don't want to use the mobile app and you just want to have it forwarded to your phone, if you do that as well, it'll announce the call. It'll say it's a Kixi call. So you know, it's business versus a personal call. Yeah. We have that flexibility because like in today's age just goes back to what you're saying earlier about everyone post pandemic, you know, I'd say majority of people are probably still working at home.
00:38:43
Speaker
Office is not the norm. I'm working from home this morning, but I'll be in the office here right after this. I love being in office, but so many are not. A cell phone is just like a norm. You're on the go, people are doing business, and especially in a recession, when times are a little bit tough, I think everyone's doing everything they can to make sales happen, to make relationships, regardless of industry.
00:39:08
Speaker
Open to do whatever is necessary to close a deal or you know and be successful. No one thing I didn't want to point out we've talked a lot about hub spot cuz I think you guys are trying to flatter us cuz you know we're a hub spot. Maybe you have a lot of other native integrations too and you're pretty agnostic so what are some of the other integrations that you can get when you work with kixie.
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we love HubSpot, you know, ourselves. It's one of our best integrations, but we're native with Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, like others, as far as like that's concerned, but like Avoma and Gong are probably some of the best ones. I would say our best integrations are Avoma and Gong, as far as like tools that like... Let's make this about me. What does the Avoma integration get me? Because I have Avoma.
00:40:00
Speaker
Does that mean that you can start transcribing them and then see how many words I'm using? Well, I think it's not only just about the transcription, but it's about the analytics. It's about what you can take from that call where it's going to break down the call and tell you where you're building rapport, where you're talking about pricing, where you're asking closing questions, stuff like that. Wow. Cool.
00:40:27
Speaker
I didn't, and we've had a moment for a year and a half. I didn't even know we could do it. See, this is already paying off. See, we're learning here. Slav, any last words?
00:40:43
Speaker
I just want to say thank you guys for letting us have technical difficulties. So he's chatting up saying, I can hear you guys just fine. It's not coming through. So if anybody wants to find Slav and get a demo, let's prop him up. How do they find Slav to get a demo Andrew?
00:41:03
Speaker
You could actually just go to, you can email him at slavatkixi.com, S-L-A-V. That's probably the easiest way. Right on. And then if you want to know more about Kixi, it's just K-I-X-I-E.com.
00:41:20
Speaker
Yep, that'll bring you to our website. That'll show you a little bit about what we do, but we like more personalized approach. So Slav's my boy. Just reach out to him and he will answer every question. For sure. And in show notes, we're definitely going to link directly to Slav's email address. Absolutely. So we'll make sure that he gets plenty of contacts.
00:41:40
Speaker
Guys, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. I think it's important that we talk about more than just, you know, uh, coffees and other things and marketing. Yeah. And I do really believe that this is the master skill to make your business stand out, especially in B2B because there's no such thing as easy in B2B and doing the hard things and using Kixi to make it easier is a big deal.
00:42:09
Speaker
I went to Disney World last summer and part of going to Disney World is you just have to stop, you have to not care about the money you're spending and just take your hands off and enjoy it. And so I've learned that in my life now, there are things that are like that, that if they're providing me with that, such an incredible amount of value, then those are the places that I want to lean into. And I think Jakes is definitely one of those things. So thank you guys for joining us. Appreciate it. We'll see you guys on our next episode.
00:43:01
Speaker
Thank you so much for the opportunity. We love working with you.