1917 – CRM & Marketing Automation with John Burdett

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1:06With us right now, John Burdett. John, you are the president and CEO at Fast Slow Motion. You're found on the web at fastslowmotion.com. John, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Josh, for having me. Very honored to be here. Absolutely. Well, what is Fast Slow Motion? We're a business that help other businesses scale and grow the right way using CRM platforms, primarily Salesforce and HubSpot. So we're the boring process people that help do the right things to help grow and scale businesses so that little businesses can become big businesses over time. Yeah. And so when we're talking about kind of really leveraging our systems or our platforms well, I'm sure you've got a laundry list of things that people are under utilizing if they use.

1:55So it looks like, again, you work predominantly with HubSpot and Salesforce. Is that right? That's exactly right. Yeah, most smaller businesses have technology bloat. They have a ton of tools, a ton of systems. And a lot of that is the victim of us entrepreneurs buying shiny objects and things like that. So we're big fans of standardizing on one of these major CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot and running most of your business processes within those tools so that all the data is in one place. You can do things consistently. You don't have to worry about integrations. And the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

2:31So when you win that deal, your implementation team or your account management team or your project team has all the same information that your sales team had and vice versa. Yeah. What are the consequences of like, let's say, again, you invest in HubSpot and you're using 5 % of what's capable just because and there could be. Well, let me ask you, why do people underutilize what they buy? Is it just confusion? Is it overwhelming? You know, obviously, I think they might be looking at maybe the extra investment or expense and they're like, you know, we're already paying this in our internal staff in our platform.

3:08and maybe it's just not budgeted. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like any investment. A lot of times when you buy something, you don't get the full return on that investment. So a lot of times I tell people when you buy Salesforce and you don't use a partner like us to help you implement it, it's like buying a Ferrari and just listening to the radio in the garage. You're not getting the full benefits of all that Ferrari will offer. It's usually out of ignorance. They don't understand all it can do. And it's not the best use of their time to configure and use the tools the right way. They need to be focusing on building their own business, talking to their customers, hiring people, and things like that.

3:43So just like when I'm remodeling my house, I don't do it myself. It would be a disaster. So I hire a general contractor, I hire a plumber, I hire an electrician. You really need to do the same thing with your business tools if you want to get the most out of them. And if you don't, they're going to be super expensive things that you just leave parked in the garage and don't get the full value out of. On the opposite end of that, if you do configure them the right way, you can really get a huge ROI and really lower your total cost of ownership of some of these tools and get rid of a lot of things that you don't need and make your life a lot simpler and be more efficient, which allows you to outscale and outgrow the competition because you're more nimble fast.

4:26You have an information advantage, all of those types of things. And so that's really kind of the holy grail that we like to help figure out for our clients is, yeah, CRMs are great for sales. They're great for marketing, but they're also good for project management and account management and service and customer service and building customer portals and all these kinds of things. HR, we use it for full HR, recruiting, all that kind of stuff all in one place. and then suddenly you're getting a ton of investment out of this tool that you're paying for because you're only paying for it once and you're getting all of these benefits out of it.

5:03Yeah, I wanted to ask you about this too. I remember having a transformation experience on this a number of years ago where I didn't realize the importance of having system and structure to sales stages and cadences, right? which might sound like such an elementary thing to some people listening to this, but to others, they're probably like, wait, what? Right. And, and there was a point we had about, we had over $200 ,000 MRR just sitting in our pipeline. And I'm looking at all this. I'm like, why aren't these people buying, you know? And I'd look at this list every day. I'm like, huh, you know, just trying to guess what I should be doing with each person every day or me and my team.

5:46And, you know, really what I discovered is that, man, if you just leave it to chance every day on what you're supposed to be doing, I mean, you're really hurting your sales. Yeah, you want to be intentional. You want to be proactive and not reactive. And if you think about it, we're that way in most aspects of our life. But sometimes we get demist. We want to make this sales process some magic art form. And it's really more of a science or an engineering kind of discipline where you don't have to over-engineer things. You can keep things as simple as possible, but consistency and knowing why you're winning and why you're losing is really the thing you need to discover so that you can double down on the things that you're winning for and then stop doing the things that are causing you to lose.

6:33And it also reduces the reliance on heroes. So many organizations, you know, they have these great salespeople and they're doing great things, but they don't know how to repeat it. Those people leave. It creates a lot of frustration. So what we want to do is we want to put, you know, the best golf clubs inside of people like Tiger Woods, right? We want to use both. We want the hero working for the organization, but put the best tools and processes behind them so that they're focused on hitting the golf ball and not all the other things that come alongside being successful at sales or any of the other things that are critical for a business.

7:11Yeah, you know, I'm a fan and I'm wondering if you can help me with some ideas. If our goal as an organization would be to exercise greater empathy, exceptional empathy for our potential clients or those that might be in our pipeline, what are some best practices that you're a big fan of today? And I don't know if this is outside, if this is in your zone of genius, but I'd love your take on it. No, I think it's mission critical because we're humans and humans want to interact with humans. And at the end of the day, selling is caring and helping. It's not bad. If I have a problem, I want to be helped.

7:50And so creating systems and processes so that you can help the right clients and not try to sell to people that aren't interested in what you're really trying to do. And those tools allow you to be more empathetic and focus on those right ones. So much of what we do in our sales process is we're really trying to qualify the buyer to make sure they're going to be a good fit for us and we're a good fit for them. And if we're not, we're trying to help them find somebody else that can help them. And then that way we're not wasting our people's time and we're not wasting their time trying to sell to the wrong people.

8:25And I think a lot of times in sales, that's where you kind of have that used car salesman adage where you just, I mean, it's because they're selling to you things that you're not interested in. And, you know, capturing both the qualitative and the quantitative information throughout the sales process allows you to be smarter and more empathetic with the person that you're selling to. So I think it's a combination of recognizing that and then putting systems in place to systematically capture that information so that you're capturing, you know, they went to this college, they love dogs, they like to go out to eat at night and all these kinds of things that allows you to be a human and relate to them.

9:07but also understanding all the business problems they have, which allows you to correlate that information next to all the other information you have in your system. Say, yeah, we've worked with ambulance providers multiple times across the year. Those people are awesome people. They do great work. And here's how we solve some of their problems and get very specific. When you talk like that to a business owner and you speak their language, that's the definition of empathy because you're putting yourself in their shoes. and you're able to almost complete their sentences before they are, that's an awesome area.

9:39And then they're like, oh, yeah, I need your help. And you're able to really add value to them. I love that. I love that. John, to those of us who don't necessarily pay attention to the headlines coming out of some of the bigger CRMs like your Salesforce and your HubSpot, I'm curious what they've been doing over the past little bit when it comes to AI. And if you're hearing any rumblings of what's coming up ahead, but I can't imagine. I mean, I think our world is going to be changing when we think about how sales is done and how CRMs can enable that. And I'm sure you're seeing some exciting things right now.

10:17Yeah, it's really a cool time to be in the industry because AI is just a tool. It's an amazing tool, but you want to know how to use that tool the right way. And there's so much unknown information and there's a lot of chaos in the industry. But if you really think about it, your enterprise data, which the majority of that's going to live in a CRM, is really kind of the missing piece to the AI conversation right now. Because you can go ask AI a lot, and the large language models have learned over all the information on the internet, but guess what they don't have access to? Your client data, your sales data, your marketing data.

10:51And so if you can correlate those two together, AI can really start adding value to your organization. but what's the problem? Do you trust the models? Do you trust the tools? Do you want to expose your private customer information to these tools to be able to help you? And that's where the tools like Salesforce and HubSpot fit in to provide a trust layer between your data so it's protected, but you're also getting the advantage of the AI tools that are out there. So there's many reasons you want to go with these larger tools and these larger providers. And that's one of the big ones when you think about AI and focusing on that.

11:29And there's many other reasons you would want to. So I'd be very wary of some of the smaller providers because - Don't do it at the risk of cheapening your relationship with your clients or potential customers. You don't want all that customer information out in the world because you just, number one, violated a lot of your legal agreements more than likely. But more importantly is what you said, you just lost trust with the people you serve. and that, you know, you lose trust, you lose everything. Yeah, yeah, certainly. Like, you know, if I had a meaningful and it felt like a personal relationship with someone and then all of a sudden they're communicating with me in a way that's clearly not them and not their voice and they're trying to pass it off as if it is them, you know, maybe I'm a little too sensitive to that, but I'd probably be borderline offended, not offended, but I just, I'd feel disappointed a little bit, I guess.

12:22Yeah, yeah, you want that human aspect, But you once again, it's kind of like the bad example I use of really good golf clubs and Tiger Woods hands. You want these AI tools to help enable those sellers and those producers so they can be real humans, but have real information at their fingertips to be more relevant, add more value, do it faster, all those kinds of things. So being able to answer questions like, you know, why does Bob close deals faster than Lucy? You know, show me the last five deals that had these characteristics and what we did to help close those so that that producer can use that information and say, oh, you know, I didn't get the CFO involved fast enough or whatever it needed to be.

13:04That unlocks and reduces the friction in the sales cycle. And it's extremely powerful. And they didn't have to spend hours and hours of data research or anything like that. You have a very sizable team with fast slow motion. You have a huge roster of clients. Can you tell me a little bit about the company itself and what engagement with fast slow motion looks like? Yeah, yeah. We specialize, and like I said, helping small businesses become big businesses using CRM platforms. So we're small business consultants that know how to leverage technology to get the most out of it. So I'm personally and our team is very passionate about helping smaller growth businesses grow up the right way.

13:48And we feel like they're grossly underserved. They need the high level McKinsey level consulting, but they can't afford it. And they need the powerful tools like Salesforce and HubSpot, but don't know how to use it. And we kind of bridge that gap between the two to put the right processes in place. So it's not about just doing technology consulting and tell me what you want, order taking kind of stuff. It's a, all right, let's talk about your business. Let's talk about your problems. Let's talk about your sales process. Let's put that in place quickly and then start getting the results out of that and start iterating on it.

14:22And so that's what we built the company on. We're a little over 10 years old now, and that's who we are and that's who we want to be. So we don't want to be anybody else. And like you said, we've had the privilege to serve almost a thousand clients so far. We've done thousands of projects and we just pride ourselves on knowing that we've made every mistake possible. And that makes us highly qualified to hopefully not make those same mistakes. Yeah. To our friend, John, that's been listening to our conversation and they're intrigued and wondering if they might be a good fit for you, might be a good fit for them.

14:54Where would they go from here? What would they do? And, you know, certainly if you have any resources that you'd like to share, you know, let's love to share it. Pass that along. Yeah, the easiest way is just go to fastslowmotion.com and you'll see access to our website, which has a ton of information, access to all our social channels. We're very active on social. We have our own podcast if you want to check it out. And so you can kind of get to know us before you talk to us. But go on the Contact Us page on the website and we'll get back to you really fast and would love to have a conversation with you.

15:24Like we said before in the conversation, if we're not the right fit, we'll help you find somebody that is the right fit. and we want to help the people that are ready to be helped and that we can add value to. And that's why we get out of bed every morning and that's what we love doing. Yeah, it really is a great industry. And again, we're helping good people do good things, make big impacts in the world. So I appreciate you. Again, your website, fastslowmotion.com. Congratulations, by the way, on the podcast, which again, it's all linked up at your website as well. And then of course, when you get there, you'll find everything that is quite a bit there.

15:59And also I'd say that your LinkedIn profile is a pretty good follow as well. So you share some good stuff there. So John Burdett, President, CEO, Fast Slow Motion, the website, fastslowmotion.com. John, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Josh. Really appreciate it.

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