SPOTLIGHT: The Problem With Your CRM Nobody Talks About | with Ramin Heydari, CEO & President @ XYZies

0:13Hey everybody, it's Sam Jacobs. Welcome to Topline Spotlight. Topline Spotlight is a short segment, part of the Topline family, where we interview go-to-market leaders, CEOs, and operators who can tell us and share with us challenges that they faced and solved over the last year. 12 to 24 months. The goal of Topline Spotlight is to be tactical and also to meet some of the people that are building incredible businesses all over the world. So today, we're really excited to have Ramin Hedari. Ramin is the founder and CEO of XYZs, an Irvine, California-based company that he's led since 2007, coming up on your 20-year anniversary.

0:52Ramin, we're very excited for you. XYZs helps service providers and retailers sell cable, internet, TV, and wireless services using tools like AI-powered kiosks and call center integrations. Before that, he spent 20 years as CEO of Cellgate USA, so he brings more than three decades of experience in telecom sales and distribution. Today, he's focused on bringing AI into commerce through his newer ventures, smarterhome.ai and dovirtual.ai. Ramin, welcome to Topline Spotlight. Thanks, Sam. How are you today? I'm good. I'm good. You're in Bogota, and I'm in Barcelona, so we're speaking to each other, two Spanish speaking countries separated by an ocean, which we're excited about.

1:34So, well, the show today is about, you know, lessons learned and business challenges that you faced recently. But before we dive into that, I do want to give you an opportunity to tell us a little bit more about XYZs. And also because you've got these newer ventures, smarterhome.ai and dovirtual.ai. So give us a little bit more context. What does XYZs do in your words and what is the problem that you're solving and tell us some a little bit about these newer ventures. Yes, thank you. So we decided that to rename our company XYZ because we realized that, you know, we have built a lot of different platforms and a lot of solutions and we looked at the businesses and we realized that businesses, they focus on sales, marketing, operation.

2:25But why some businesses thrive and some businesses don't and a lot of, unfortunately, startups go out of business because of the attention to details. So IES at the end of XYZ, so it makes it XYZ, is that the details and how much attention we have paid to details when we build platforms that we have built and distribution models that we have built and the solutions that we provide. Since we have always been a very B2B oriented company and our solutions expanded and we have serviced tens of millions, maybe close to 100 million plus customers throughout the years, we decided that smarterhome.ai will be a better name for the consumer-facing services and products that we have.

3:24And we also have a smarterbusiness.ai. So smarterhome.ai, you can consider for a very quick understanding of what smarterhome.ai does. you can think about it like a kayak, a comparison site that compares what is the best product and the service available to a particular household at the best price. So when it comes to cable TV, internet, and home security, currently we are comparing those services and providing the customer the fastest speed internet at the lowest cost and the best security service at an affordable price. So the mission and the vision of Smarter Home in years to come is to be able to compare many other services, home services and other things for the consumers.

4:22But bottom line is that We feel that since, you know, the digital age, Google came about and, you know, everybody's searching things in Google now. Everybody's searching things in Jack GPT and many other AI systems. Now there is an information overload for even consumers trying to figure out even where they want to eat. So consequently, I think, you know, with our AI, with our manpower that we have augmented with AI and the technology that we have, we can help people to make better decisions. Because at the end of the day, we think that everybody should have a better experience in this short journey called life.

5:01and if we can save people time and money so they can spend that time and money with their family, we have served the world this life better. And that's the mission and vision of Smarter Home and the same thing applies to businesses. I love it. So let's talk about challenges that you faced. One of them I know is that you had four different sales motions recently, each on a separate tool and you didn't have a single view of your performance across multiple channels. Talk to us about how you approached that challenge and ultimately how you solved it. Yeah, that is a, it's a really, really a biggest pain point, I think, when it comes for any business that wants to grow.

5:52So I have to go ahead and take a little bit of a detour to answer that question. because one thing we have to understand is that the world went through a change and everybody knows that, that we went through a change in year 2000. We had the digital revolution, right? Many, many decades before that, we had the industrial revolution. And these were revolutions. But now with AI coming into the mix, this is not just a revolution. This is an evolution. Things are moving so fast. Things are in every aspect of life are changing. It's like a mutation. Things are changing so quickly that, you know, don't have to be Einstein to say that, you know, if you're doing the same thing, expecting a different result is a definition of insanity.

6:45But it is because, you know, I see that so many tools in businesses are just adding a little bit of an AI spice to it. And they think this is the AI system that is working, but it requires a hell of a lot more than that. So as I mentioned to you about the details of the business, that detail means a lot. So how fast this evolution is happening, you don't have time to really go and correct things in the past. You have to be so on top of the game now, here and now, and you have to have everything as much as possible under one roof so you can make decisions when you're getting the data very quickly.

7:27So therefore, the biggest problem is, is the business evolving or is just growing? Because the growth in a business was celebrated when your business is growing by 10%. Nothing wrong with that. Every year is growing by 20%, nothing wrong with that. But that was also a thing of a past. When we are moving faster than fast, when things are changing, a software can be developed that could take three months, can be developed in less than two days, not even three days, then we have to go on and grow the business by, we have to change that expectation of a 10 % growth to 10x growth. When you think about things that way, then you have to think about that, what is the limiting factor?

8:11What is a stumbling block? Where is a bottleneck to this? In my business, I can talk about my business. We looked at it that we have these best products and services, but we have so many channels. We have B2B, we have B2C, we have different products and services, and data is everything to us because without the data, our compass does not work properly to know where it is north. So when we looked at the whole system, we realized that, okay, well, you know, we have one CRM that we are using. You know, I want to deviate from the names of the CRMs because it's not about the point of the brand of the CRM.

8:52I have used a ton of CRMs from, you know, back in the days from ACT to, you know, many other ones. Microsoft Dynamics, yeah. Exactly. And we have gone through all of that. And recently, you know, a very excellent, high-end, very popular CRM that we have been using. And then, you know, then we have to go ahead and connect the WhatsApp or phone lines, different methods of communication, the chats and this and that that we have. And then we have to go in and analyze the data. And then on top of that, we have to go in and get another system to go in and help us to go ahead. And then again, I don't wanna, I wanna refrain from mentioning names because it's not the point of where you're getting your communication.

9:40It's not the point of where you're getting your database from. you're getting it from somewhere. But these things are coming from multiple places. And when you try to go ahead and deal with multiple things, that's when things start to slow down and things break because then you cannot really put things in motion quickly and you cannot measure them very well. And more important than that is this, okay, now you got the technology, now you got all the ingredients, you got everything. But at the end of the day, yes, you have agenting AIs and you can have everything that you talk about in the technology.

10:20But we are still having human beings running a business. How are we dealing with that? What are we assigning to who? To what department? What are we expecting from marketing? What are we expecting from the lead gen? What are we expecting from the closer? What are we expecting from the account manager? What are we expecting from the supervisor? What are we expecting from the vice president? What are we expecting the CEO to finally see and for the lack of better word, not get bamboozled? Right? So what'd you do? How did you stop the bamboozlement? That is when Chris at work, you know, came into this solution because I was at a very high-end exhibition exhibition in San Francisco, they were there.

11:15I stood by and listened to the CEO talking about why they built Chris at Work. And at the time - What is Chris at Work? So tell me about that company. Chris at Work, if you want to water it down, you can say it's an AI-based CRM. But I think it's a, I actually suggested to him, and I'll tell you why I suggested the suggestion. I suggested to him, think about changing the name to Dream CRM. Because a CRM is customer relationship management, but this is not just a customer relationship management. This is where all those problems that I told you, that scatterness, that broken things, that things are all over the place, not everything is under one umbrella.

12:01But being under one umbrella and the team using it is one thing, but actually having an agentic AI not only policing, supervising, providing feedback to the agent. What is the success of, what's the definition of success? Definition of success, you know, back in 1952, Earl Nightingale said it very well, that after many years of studies, they came up with that success is a progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Gradual little improvements, that's what make people feel successful. Reps, they don't feel successful when they're doing the same thing and the management is asking them for the different result without really knowing where they went when things went wrong.

12:47So this AI comes in and helps them to understand where they need to improve. And I'm talking about that every stage. I'm not talking about the lead gen only. I'm not talking about the closer, account manager, the supervisor, overview of everyone. This is real time. We are not going back to two weeks ago and try to help someone to change its mistake they made two weeks ago today and then blaming them tomorrow. That has been the history and the story of situations. So we are real time here and now people have a task assigned to them at every one of those levels. I don't want to keep on repeating the levels.

13:32Those levels exist in every business. and everybody has their own job description and everybody has to see what's happening under that umbrella so they can see it. But then now here you go. You're gonna have all this data that you have from your data analysis. You have all this information that is going right or wrong. Then you need to go ahead and actually now export this to chat GPT or cloud to go ahead and analyze it for you. So imagine if you don't need to do all of those. You go to one place, you get all your leads. You go to one place, you assign the task to your employees. You go to one place and your employees get coached for the right and wrong.

14:13And they have, the grading is not like, okay, after six months, we're going to go in and do an employee evaluation. The grading is always there. You want to be an A player? Here's a dashboard for you. It tells you, based on the settings that are set, your A, B, or C. If you want to go from C to B, from B to A, this is how you do it. and so it is not like you know after three months somebody's taken into an office oh you know you did these things wrong no it's a state of obvious it's there they're being coached they want to improve they want to feel successful so every day they do things and when they see that is rewarding to the employee so that's why i call it the dream crm it's in the works and it still is you know being improved and of course you know what's the definition of the good successful thing is a kaizen constant, never-ending improvement.

14:58And that's what they do. Continuous improvement. Yes. And another very important thing, Sam, to note, and I talk about this very passionately because I have lost, our companies have lost millions of dollars, millions of dollars. And some bigger companies, probably billions are losing still because you buy these platforms and they're all fancy schmancy. And they say, they do all that and they're incredibly amazing. And then you're getting involved. And then you're like, well, what happened? I thought he's doing all of this thing. Then they get their customer support, their customer service. It's like, can I actually get the salesperson who sold me this to come to this customer service conversation, please?

15:44Absolutely not. No, this is, you know, okay. But this is not doing that. Okay, get the enterprise service. Fantastic. No problem. Here's the enterprise. I'll pay for the enterprise. But, oh, that particular thing that you were looking for is in the works. And, you know, this has been, yes, we are faster than fast growing in a very evolving technology industry. But Chris's work, you know, they come. They say, okay, first, let's really do this. We have this. You want this. We are there with you. Every week, week over week, I'm here with you after several months. Maybe the first week is a sales pitch.

16:25Maybe the second week they're still trying to look good. But when it goes week over week, every week you get your deliverables. They hold your hand. They walk through with you. And when they say your success is our success, they mean it. So for the past several months, four or five, close maybe to three, four months that we are working together on this project, I feel like we have made progress with them than we have made with, in the past 30 plus years, I've worked with many companies, I haven't yet seen anyone to walk the talk, but they do. I love it. I mean, let me ask you, we're almost at the end of our time together, but let me ask you, you've been doing this a long time and you've been leading organizations for a long time.

17:12When you think about the biggest lessons learned from leadership? What do you, because you've mentioned a bunch of great, by the way, I hadn't heard that definition of success before, so I love that. What was, the guy's name was Earl, is that right? Earl Nightingale. Yeah, he's, Earl Nightingale. Yeah, and if you want to listen to a YouTube video that you will enjoy, and I'm sure you're going to listen to it many times, as I have, it's called The Strangest Secret. Okay, I'm going to Google that. By Earl Nightingale. Yeah. So give us parting words of wisdom. What's a lesson of leadership that you've learned after building companies for the last 30 years?

17:55I think it's a fundamental understanding of the sentence that future belongs to those who can see it before it becomes obvious. so one may say okay so should i go buy a crystal ball you have it in your hand it just requires sitting down as a leader and reflecting not just reviewing reflecting and then really making peace with yourself that what does success really look like at the end of this progress that i'm making when I get there? Am I really happy with that? Great. How can I make this journey really fun by thinking ahead a little bit? You don't have to necessarily see the entire future, but if you plan for it very well and attention to details before execution, it will make the journey really, really enjoyable.

19:06I love that. Ramin, if we want to engage with XYZs or some of your new products, what's the best way to become a customer? What's the best way to connect with you? What's the best way to reach you? My email address is ramin, R-A-M-I-N at xyz.com. But the best way to get ahold of us, xyz.com. And that's xyz.com. Ramin, thanks so much for being our guest on Topline Spotlight today. It's been great chatting with you. Thank you, Sam. Talk to you soon.

19:46Okay. And against all odds, you're still here. Look, if you want more Topline, check out the Topline newsletter at topline.beehive.com. Beehive is spelled weird. It is B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com. Topline.beehive.com. or if you're a video person, because video is great, check us out on YouTube. Topline-media is what you want. Have a delightful day, everybody.