SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm Dan Van Orden, founder of IdeaRoom, and we're proud to be the official sponsors of the American Build Federal podcast. Enjoy the episode, guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of America Builds Better. As always, I'm Jared, and I will be your host for this journey we're going to go on today. I hope you guys are having a strong week. Man, we are in the middle of the busiest time of the year. This is the greatest time of the year. If you are selling sheds, metal buildings, or pole barns, man, is the summertime not good or what? Right? So we're excited. As always, want to give a shout out to our team over at Idea Room. If you guys are in need of 3D designer for post-frame, metal building sheds, idea room can help you out. We can help you generate those leads through defined SEO. If you guys need help with marketing or anything industry related, give us a call. We're happy to help. And the team over at Shield Wall Media, we are getting ready for the Builder Show in York. By the time you guys see this, we're probably going to be getting back. But I can tell you, if we're getting back, we had a great time. And if we're not there yet, we're looking forward to it. If you guys need any industry information, I just got my copy of Plane Builder, which is right here, and I'm enjoying it. I can tell you this much what I'm really enjoying this month, and I didn't notice this before, is the little break time here at the beginning with the uh word search. I really enjoyed that. So shout out to the team at Shield Wall. These are free, by the way. Just need to sign up, they'll send them right to you. If you enjoy that kind of thing, if you enjoy magazines and trade publications, it's just got a lot of good insight. Uh, you know, Gary and the team at Shieldwall do a great job. So reach out to them. It's Shieldwall Media, and that's Frame Builder magazine, that's frame building news, that's Plane Builder. They've got five or six magazines these days. So check them out. I can tell you this much. We did the Steel Kings podcast with uh with the guy I'm gonna have on. And man, if this guy is not changing the industry for the better um in a way that I don't really think anybody is right now, um I'll tell you, Joe is a great guy. Velocity360 is the program to use if you are wanting to take the next step in your business. If you are currently working with, I mean, goodness, I'll let him pull back the curtain a little bit on all the different affiliations and all the different integrations. But man, if you're using a CRM and you're not happy with it, this is gonna be the uh the podcast episode for you. So, Joe Ignis is here from Velocity 360. I'm going to go ahead and bring him into the studio now. Joe, what's going on, man? Good morning to you, brother.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Hey, yeah, good morning. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Yeah, man, for sure. I was uh giving you guys a lead in there. Velocity360, man. You guys have had a very strong year. Company is growing, client numbers growing, impact is growing. You guys are starting to set yourselves aside as the go-to CRM in this in this industry. Yeah, thanks.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah, it's uh been a huge blessing.

unknown 4:00

I didn't know.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

I I can imagine, man. You know, uh yeah. I mean, blessing blessing the customers too, for you know, from what I hear, you guys have a very high customer satisfaction rate, which is what I like to hear.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah, yeah, no, it is. That's you know, um there's a CRM stat we did research on as we were starting to build this out. It's like eight eighty-eight percent of CRM implementations fail. And so prior to starting velocity, we actually did some consulting, so sales consulting for manufacturers, builders, and uh, you know, the a huge problem was just the CRM was a mess in every company we'd work with. And you know, all the many automations were missing, process was just a mess, and people were kind of guessing. And it's just like, well, we would build it out and we'd have, you know, companies that would double in 12 months. And it's like, well, let's just package that into software, you know. Um, let's just put all of our sales knowledge into a software, turnkey solution. This is what this will get you the end result that you want, which is revenue growth. Um, and what we found throughout that, and it's not something by design or plan, but in the way that we build it out, we now know that um the minimum response rate across all of our clients is 60% of all of the leads that come into the system, assuming they're real. Some some companies don't have a great marketing company, like Define SEO, for example, um, who might be generating some bot leads, but as long as they're like real human being leads, 60% of them respond. Um, we have enough data to confirm that that happens every single time. And if we're under that, the language um can be tweaked to to get to that amount. And then, you know, we're very um, I've been saying this a lot, we're very Dave Ramsey solution. You know, it's it's not an overhyped sensationalist type thing that like a lot of maybe others might say, but um what we say, like Dave Ramsey says, spend less than you make, get out of debt. We say get more responses, your salespeople will sell more. It's a very simple concept. We everybody knows it, it's just making it all happen with an analytics on side. I like that little ding you got there.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

That means somebody entered the store, you know. I have to make sure as I'm sitting in the office here. I mean, that was like right on the money, right? It's like you said that, and it was like I can I can tell you this, man. What what impresses me is you guys are not just doing what you've been doing, you constantly make this thing better. I mean, I I have been blown away because I was an early supporter, right? I I loved it from the second I laid eyes on it because it's tailor-made for what I love, which is lead gen. I love lead gen. Um, I think this industry longs for real lead gen, thoughtful lead gen that generates massive amounts of leads that can close. And it's a really a perfect marriage, right? I want to dump all my leads into something like Velocity 360 so that we can work together to close more deals for clients. And that's why I've just been recommending it as a solution for the last basically year because I've seen the results, I've seen customers say, Hey, we're happy with our results from Velocity 360. It's way better than we thought it'd be. Because before we were using something that was completely broken. Completely broken.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Yes, we we have a lot of people who, you know, they'll come from a like a go high-level self-created or like a different company agency or something that, you know, quote unquote set it up and then, or a hub spot or a pipe drive or just whatever, whatever thing. Um and we just find that there's a lot of pain points surrounding that like it was set up from a marketing perspective for per se, like a good place to maybe store some data, but like not in a way that supports the sales team actually converting the leads. And when people, you know, usually first off, a lot a lot of people, CRM is kind of a new thing, and they're just like, well, I just track my leads here. It's like, and then this is kind of the process that sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't. And there's but there's a there's a lot of stats and there's a lot of you know conversion metrics that are really important. And I think when I ask people, hey, what's your current response rate? What's your conversion rate by lead source? You know, what's what's your conversion rate by product type? Um, these these are analytics that people have no idea the answer for. Um, and because it's a very difficult thing to tackle. You've got a marketing company you might be working with, you've got salespeople who maybe don't like taking notes. You know, their job is not incentivize to put in you know data into a CRM. It's to close sales and talk to people. So getting the adoption is very difficult. And so, like one of the newer parts of the solution that we didn't start with, but now we have just because it has to be there, is sales reps don't have to drag and drop you know anything. It just all happens based on their activity, which sales people love and and sales managers love and owners love, because you can actually see is the lead being worked in the correct procedure, right? Because there's a human element, obviously, to this. There's a tech side to sales, there's a human element, you know. Um, the human element, you know, we have partners to help go coach and go train people. There's, you know, Lauren Miller and and uh Steve Bailer, and there's making sales simple. You know, there's all these training opportunities, the human side and the procedure, but we got to make sure that everybody's doing it because we're hiring people. We've got a lot of young people entering the workforce. You might be training, you might be expanding, and you don't know where people are coming from. And but the beauty of Velocity is you can come in and you can have your process laid out and the best templates starting, and then just be training them on your scripting. And if they make a call, we can actually track that. If they get a secondary response or first response, we can track and put them in the right stages so we can actually see does the sales rep follow up with the lead? Which that's a huge problem in the industry is somebody, and it's it's not because they don't want to. Um, I mean, you know, I'm assuming that it's not because they don't want to, it's because it's they're maybe lost or there's a lot of moving parts. There's maybe too many leads, they can't work them all. And maybe we need a different workflow or different solution, right? Um, for that. But we're able to identify where the main loss of sales is, where's the biggest leaky part of the bucket, right? And and just knowing that as an owner or sales manager means you can do something about it. Doesn't mean there's any, you know, it might mean that you have a leaky bucket now, but you know, everyone we work with is a great business person. Like they got to the success that they're at because they're good at business. If they have visibility, they make great choices. So we're able to give them that visibility um through everything that we set up, the way that we we build the architecture out.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

What you're doing, what you're doing with a CRM is you're really it's a CRM plus. It's not just a CRM. You know, it's not let me let me stress that to you. It's this is not just a data hub, you know. This is not something where you just have your customers' information and this is where it lives. It is that, and it's very good at that, but it also gives you all of these, you know, I said booster, you know, I like to say that kind of thing. Like it's your CRM plus boost, right? Like there is a there is an analytic tool here. The analytic tool is is powerful enough on its own, but when you start to put in the things that you have with automations and different sales incentives that it teaches, I mean it learns the process, right? You can set up all of these automations specifically to a specific client can do pretty much whatever they want with your white glove service.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Yeah, yeah. So they'll come to a sales meeting, you know, and they say, How does this work? It's like, well, we have a blueprint of what we recommend. Let me ask you these five or six questions called the no test. If you answer no to these questions, we know exactly what you need. This is what we're going to recommend. But you know, you're in the driver's seat, you get customization, and how do you want it to work? And you kind of tell us your rules for how we auto assign. Like one of the workflows that kind of gets maybe breezed over, but so valuable for sales organizations that's really difficult for a lot of for a lot of organizations is auto-assigning leads. A lot of organizations are assigning leads manually, you know? And so one of one of the things we'll ask is like, how do you assign your leads? Do you automatically, or is it manual? Well, it's manual, it takes forever. And it's like, well, do you get to every lead within 60 seconds? The answer is no. Well, if you get to every lead within 60 seconds, increase your um close rate by 381%. So obviously a manual assigning method does not work if you're trying to increase your conversion, right? If you're if we ask people, hey, do you know your response rate and you don't? There's so much revenue on the table. Your response rate's likely below 60%. Um, you know, and so yeah, if we just increase responses, then we'll increase sales. You know, do you do you do you know if every lead has been called? Lacking that visibility means that you're spent money and there's a good shot that you have no idea what's happening. It's like that's not a great way to manage a business. It's like building a building, but not knowing if you put screws in the you know, studs. It's like, would you do that? It's like, no, like you spent money on the wood and the screws, gotta make sure the screws are in there, right? It's the same thing with sales. So we we want to manage our sales process, our sales operations the same way we do our building operations, right? Visibility on every part, quality control, quality metrics, training, you know, and having a system to automate all of the manual tasks that it used to be manual at least. And you know, because of the modernization of technology in the industry, it's just like it's a lot to take in. Like I completely empathize like the way technology and AI, because we're in it every day, like it's even hard for us to keep up. You know, we do this every day. So if you're you're a company who's you know just great with people, great at great quality product, you know, right? You've been doing this for a long time. It's it's a lot of work to modernize. And that's what we're just trying to make easier for people because um the the market is going more digital and more digital and more digital, and it will go more digital and more digital and more digital. And you know, there'll always be, I think, people going to lots, and you know, it's gonna be different by demographic and stuff. But um, you know, we see we work with companies that they do ads, they have a 3D configurator, they close digital sales, and they close a lot of them, you know, so it's out there to be closed. You know, the best ones are you know, following this process.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

You know, and and you know, I I I will take one percent of the credit, right? I'll take one percent of the credit of trying to get velocity 360 plugged in with idea room, right? That was a huge, huge, huge.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

You made an introduction, you walked me over, and you're like, hey, Dan, shake this guy's hand. So, you know, there was a there was a big one. I mean, we were we were attempting to, and it was a little, you know, is you know, so it you you helped make that happen. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

I can tell you, I can tell you, if you're using Idea Room in any capacity whatsoever, the analytics and touch points that Joe has with Velocity 360 is something that you want to learn more about. I'm telling you from a, and you guys know how I feel about Idea Room. We use it here at all of our businesses. Idea room has been great to us, obviously helping us out here with the podcast and different things as well. But we're doing that as a give back to the industry. We want people to know who's on their side, we want to know who's using US support. We want to make sure that you're getting to which you're paying for every lead that comes through, that 3D designer. Well, and and to be fair, Shed Pro's there too. Working with Smart Build, we're working with all of these 3D different configurators, and Velocity 360 is working on integrations all the time. That's why the progress that Joe and his team have made over the last 18 months is so impactful to the industry because they're finding, and correct me if I'm wrong, you guys can work with anybody, but certainly this industry is benefited from Velocity 360. Everyone inside of this industry is benefited from the growth that you guys have had because you guys have continued to build it. You weren't just satisfied with just okay, you want it to be the very best.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. Like one of our one of our focuses throughout this year, I've been reading a really good book on wisdom and like you know, this this really good PR company and some of the things. And so, like, we're hiring somebody who can, you know, answer phone calls easier for support, you know. Like there's there's things like that. I think when you get when you start to grow where it's really easy, like we want only form, and we do want forms, we want tickets, and so it's it's mostly for tracking, you know, but we also want someone to be able to answer the phone. And we want also like if it's midnight and you need something, we want to have an AI that you could, you know, query about anything you need to, right? So we're we're building out it all, right? Because I think you need everything. It's not about one thing's better than everything, it's about giving people, giving your audience or client base what they need and what they want. And a certain percentage, they really need to talk to somebody on the phone. A certain percentage is techie and they want to ask AI and they don't want to quote unquote waste their time on the phone with somebody, right? Um, but some people are old school and they really need you to walk them through what's going on, right? So so it's all about um helping the end user. And we work with a lot of non-techie people, helping modernize this and make it simple for their sales reps. Their sales rep basically use a couple features and they're they're sales managers and owners. We train on a few other analytics features, and and we generally handle setting everything else up because otherwise it's learning a master's degree in you know, HubSpot or high level, which you know, it's like it's a lot of coding, it's a lot of API, JSON, webhooking, um, you know, which for the average bear who's a sales manager, who might be over the CRM right now, who's listening to this, it's like your job is to grow revenue, not manage a CRM. It's like that's what you signed up for. But sometimes people, because of nobody knows how to work this software, but you're the person who's over the thing, it's like that ends up happening. And so when we can offload that, we see sales organizations excel.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

I think get get something out there too, right now, while you're talking about the competition. I don't feel like there is a competition of what you guys do for sheds, steel buildings, and pole barns right now. There's other CRMs and they're expensive. And to do a CRM is going to cost you money. Like, let me just be very transparent about that. Whether it's a go-high level that you're doing by yourself, which is a terrible idea. Let me stress this to you awful idea. If you don't know how to use a computer, then don't ever do that. Never, ever, ever do that. It is a terrible idea. There are solutions out there, they're all expensive. And if you want to get outside your comfort zone for a quick second, call Jonah's team. I'm telling you, it's worth the consultation up front because I've yet to find someone who number one finds a better deal, number two, finds something that can do as much as Velocity does. And certainly from a ground up type of perspective, a lot of the clients that we're working with don't have a CRM at all, right? They just don't have one. If you don't have one, you have got to graduate. You are never going to be able to take the next step in your business without one, period. And this is going to have you take the next step, and it's also going to give you tools, help, all the things that you really need to take the next step in your business. And from a guy that's been doing this a long time, it means something to me when a product comes along that is so tailor-made for our industry. And I say that because it's the truth. I really feel that in my heart. That if you I don't know, I've not heard one person tell me that it doesn't work. That's the craziest thing about it. It finds the flaws, I would argue. It finds what's broken and helps you fix it.

unknown 18:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

And that's our that's our goal. Like we've we've we've grown quickly, which has been great, but like we've actually been, you know, I was just telling you before this, we we basically spend no money on ads and we spend no money on a lot of marketing tools because we want the solution to work the same every time. And so what we've been, you know, and it's like we're not perfect. Like we've had clients we've worked with where it's been maybe a little rocky at the start or maybe miscommunication. And and that's you know, we want to know that we want to be on, we like we very much value honesty with our clients. We want them to tell us how we can get better, and we build feedback loops, right? And so to build a really great product, you want to have a good feedback loop of what's good, what's bad, what's ugly. And we're always improving. Like we just updated the user experience to where it's so much easier as a sales rep to just find your little three things. We highlight those, make it really easy for the sales rep, you know, as we're onboarding more and more locations. And it's like, yeah, we just want to make it easy for people to do what they do best. And, you know, our mission is um to support local businesses. When the local businesses win, you know, they're the community wins. They're they're giving to a local church, a local charity, they're hiring local, those people have kids, right? Like they're they're making the world a better place. And I tell people on every single sales call that we have like we don't work with cigarette companies, not judging people who smoke cigarettes. We don't, you know, we're not judging that, but like cigarette companies just kill people. You know, we just know that that is the direct result of their product. We want the direct result of our product to make the world a better place. And, you know, we we are lucky enough to have found an industry where every business owner we work with is patient, kind, and you know, wants to make the lives of their people, their clients better, their communities better. And it's a great place to work. I just love it. You know, it's so fun to see the see these companies succeed. And like from our first client that we worked with, to go from, you know, hey, we've never, you know, maybe run in this particular direction or this, you know, profit margin. And now for the first time ever, after six months using this, we are, we are, we are wow, this is so positive. We are finally where we want to be. And it's like, that's yeah, that's so fun. You know, I'm a big believer in helping others. And if you know, the pursuit of helping others is is really what you should be doing with business. And if you don't, if it, you know, it's hard to run a business consistently that gets better and makes the experience better for everyone if you don't have the pursuit of helping others as the central focus, because then it becomes yeah, how do I, how do I basically extract value from others versus give as much value, you know, um things like that. So that's what we're always trying to do. Um, we, you know, and we I'll say this, you know, we are not the cheapest thing in the whole world when it comes to like like you can get real cheap CRMs out there where you just get a vanilla version and then you have to like go customize, right? So just be just be quick. We are a quality um tech product. We happen to be um a lot more affordable than you know, HubSpot and these big you're not the most you're not the most, you're not the most we're definitely not the most expensive, but like you know, we sell a result. That's the biggest difference between us and anything else. And like there's a lot of CRMs, there's a lot of technology, and they were written or created by tech people who are not salespeople. They don't speak shed, they don't speak steel buildings, they don't speak pole barns, they don't understand, you know, how to convert the leads that you know we're generating in this industry, right? They don't get it, and that's and that's fair. They don't they don't. They don't focus on it. That's all we do every day. And if it's a marketing company that does like a high-level spin-off or whatever, a lot of times what we hear, you know, not going to shout any of them out, but we hear that it's not supported well or they only have one person there. And they've got like 100, 200 clients. And it's like, that's not what they do every day. They're great at marketing, you know, and we're not great at marketing. You know, we don't do ads, we don't do your website. We partner with great people like you, Jared, or, you know, our Shed Pro or Idea Room or whoever, right? Like we partner with somebody who's good at generating leads and we solve the problem of sales conversion, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:31

That's what I like. I mean, you know, in this industry, right, integration is everything because nobody has figured out how to do everything all at once. There are people out there that are trying it, and unfortunately, it just doesn't tend to work. What Joe and his team does is pun intended here, they fill the gaps. Okay. They start to really fill the gaps of where your business is lacking, whether it be idea room, and I'm reading it, idea room, shed suite, shed pro, digital shed builder, my shed, smart build, shed app, cow, sensei, sheds for sale, integrations with Facebook ads and Google ads and and all of these. I mean, and on and on and on. Open API. So if you're using something that's unique to you, if you have built something that is unique to your business, it's very possible, almost guaranteed, that they can figure out some way to get the information into Velocity 360 and give you a better return on that specific investment. You know, idea room, I want to give the stats right now 47.5% average lead time response increase, 25% average revenue growth. Those are huge numbers. And when you plug it into something like what we do at Defined, when you're working with clients that need high-level lead gen, and I'm talking 50 plus leads generated a day through idea room, and you can do that with the right sales funnel built going into Velocity 360, it will pay for itself in no time. And it makes your business more efficient.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Yeah, yeah, 100%. It makes you don't need to hire as many salespeople. So there's a lot of you know, there's a few things. So when you look at how to make an investment in a tool, right? I mean, one, you've got to what's the end result of the build-out I'm trying to have, right? Like that's that's first off, you got to have an end goal um to determine if if this is the right product or company for you, right? Are they gonna build it out to where I want to be? And then what you look at is what's the ROI on the thing, right? So for example, if you're using idea room, you know, and you increase your response rate by 47.5%. First off, if you don't know your response rate, then you're flying blind. And so you probably there's there's we you will definitely grow revenue if you work with velocity. If you grew 25% in revenue, quantify that. What's that? What's that number for your business? And then when you look at like what the investment is, you know, on Velocity, for example, we have a one-time setup fee and then you know, subscriptions depending on the size of your business, because it it scales with support, because we have US-based support. Okay. And compared to like a high level, high level subscription is gonna be less than us because they do Indian support. Okay. Like so, so there's differences there. So you pay people happily pay us more for a higher subscription to have a US-based person who speaks shed and speaks sales, you know, answer their phone call or deal with their support ticket or whatever, right? Like that's what people really care about. It's a quality over quantity. It's like um type business. Okay. So is it gonna get me that those results, you know, and and how are they gonna do that? Right. And so we we always break down the exact steps and exact process of exactly how we do it. And and most of these other companies, I just feel like they let's kind of throw it together. It's not the same process every time, it's a little disjointed or whatever, um, which leads to inconsistent results, right? Because we do the same process customized to you, right? Language is customized, like some of the preferences are customized, right? Um, you know, that leads to success. And then it's also what's the cost savings for you long term. So if if one sales rep right now, and this is a sales velocity thing, right? So this is a sales ops capacity number. Okay. So that's I'm sure a lot of people listening know what that is, but if you don't know what that is, sales ops capacity is just how many leads can your sales team like process. So if you have a thousand leads but one sales rep and they can only process a hundred per month, you're you're over you have 900 too many leads that you should bring back your marketing spend or hire nine more sales reps. Okay. So when you increase sales op capacity, your salesperson goes from 100 leads. Now they can work 500. You only need two salespeople. What's the cost savings worth? Because that's also, yeah, it's just something we put on our website, you know, because we want to track more data with it, you know, as we go. Because I don't like to market anything that we don't have a bona fide stat for. But over time, we're gonna start asking people how many sales reps do you have? What's the capacity with velocity of how many leads? So we can start getting a stat because I think the industry needs that. They need to know what's an average sales ops capacity, how many sales reps do I need based on the number of leads so they can scale their marketing budget, right? So we take a salesperson from let's just say, in this hypothetical example, from 100 leads to 500 that they can handle in a month, because everybody gets followed up with their entire job is to talk to the hottest leads who are already responding instead of calling 500 people 10 times, 10 days in a row. It's like obviously you can handle more when you don't have to do as much manual and you're just talking to the hot leads and sending them quotes on your Shed Suite or Idea Room or Shed Pro or whatever point of sale software that you might use, right? And that's their job now, not manually wasting time chasing people who don't answer, talking to the most interested people closing, right? And that's the best use of a salesperson's time. So if you hire eight less sales reps, how much does that save you? So there's all these things that add up to the value velocity, right? Especially, and that's over years and years and years. You build it out once and it's working, right? You know, it's working. It's not a one-year thing, right? Like it keeps going. You know, we build this out, we build out the eight integrations, right? And we know we update it as maybe integrations or you know, webhooks need updated, but like that's what we pay us for, right? Is to make sure it keeps working. And everybody just wants their CRM to work, by the way. They just want the lead to convert. They really don't care how it works, they just want it to work, you know, and that's what I I we can confidently say that if you work with us, it will work. And that's what you're saying at the beginning of this call. It's like it's the same result every time. That's what we want. That's why we track the case studies. Every single client gets a case study, every single client gets gets on the website and has a video of how it's going. We track the analytics and train them on the analytics every single time, like every time, no matter what. Um, and it's just a matter of time until they basically show up there.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

And that's the first, you're the first person, specifically in this industry, probably at all, doing a CRM that does that. I mean, I I've not seen another one, not even close. Yeah, that that tells you a lot about what you guys are doing. You care about your clients. I want to I want to give some more stats. White glove, turnkey setup. Do not waste months to configure complex software. If you are considering doing a CRM that you have to self-integrate, stop it right now. Stop it, take a step back. And if you don't know what you're doing, contact Joe and the team at Velocity360. I can tell you they handle every API connection and pipeline build. They'll deliver a finished engine ready to close for you with turnkey configuration, white glove onboarding, big part of here, 100% US-based American support. Okay. I cannot stress to you enough as somebody who has been on the other side of this. This is huge for you. Because if you do have something that needs to be done, you're going to be speaking to someone who can understand you and will take your concern or your need as a first-level concern or need and really address it in real time. This is what's important about working with the right integration partners. It's why we recommend companies like Idea Room, companies like Velocity 360. And to be honest, there Cal. Cal is another company that we really like working with that works really closely with Velocity 360. I can tell you, when you put together the right tools for your business, that's when you really start to take the next step as a business owner and you can really start to overview what's going on in your business. Just like Joe said, you know, if you have a thousand leads and you've got sales reps that can take a hundred leads and you've got 10 currently, if you could increase each one of your sales reps' quantifiable ability to work leads by even a hundred percent, you've now cut your need for that workforce in half. And our goal here collectively is not to say you work double the leads and double sales, by the way. Correct, correct. That's what that's what I wanted to get to. That's what I wanted to get to, right? If you have 10 reps and all of a sudden they can work 200 leads instead of 100, the need's not to get rid of those people, the needs to drive more leads. You will close more deals and you will make more money. And that's where this really comes into play. Because what we're doing at Define is creating lead gen at a massive scale, and we want it feeding into something like Velocity 360. Because again, every one of those leads costs your company money. It's going to take time for your sales rep to work them. And what if they were only on the phone closing deals? Every time you walk through your sales floor, you are literally closing deals. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Sales managers, dealers, owners, they all have the same stat that really matters revenue per salesperson output, right? So if you're a dealer, you want, you know, a million, two million in shed sales by yourself, right? Like every year to happen consistently, right? And if you can just get it down to the math of this is how many leads and this is my close rate, like you can just have your business and run it and you could scale locations if you wanted to become a dealer network. If you're an owner, you know, a builder and you've got a corporate sales team or dealers, right? Like you want the revenue per dealer or revenue per corporate salesperson to go up. Like that's that's what this is doing, right? And it does that because we increase the conversion rate, we increase the leads capacity. So sales velocities, leads times conversion rate, right? Times average price, which you know, you guys are setting that, divided by sales cycle length. So we're decreasing sales cycle length because we're getting the lead to conversate faster. We're increasing conversion because we're faster to the lead. They shop less. We get them on the phone, we build trust, right? And we make the salesperson more effective because they're less exhausted chasing people who don't answer. Okay. And then you can increase leads. You can now increase your marketing spend because we track conversion rate by lead source. So if we know your marketing spend on Facebook is getting you a 5% conversion and your Google is getting 15%, and your idea room or your Shed Pro or whatever is getting 30%, you dump everything into the highest conversion metric, right? And so your conversion rate goes up. And you know, if you want to increase the number of leads and like have distribution, there's a math formula for that too. But that's the whole point. And so if you don't know those four numbers right now, you should you should probably talk to us. We would be happy to help you. Um, there's revenue that we could help you convert.

SPEAKER_00 32:57

That's the point. This is like, I love when Joe and I get on here because we get to the meat and potatoes really quick. If you're in the shed game or steel building game specifically, you know there's nobody talking like this that's trying to sell you a CRM. Number one. That's the most important thing. If you take nothing away and you're in the shed or steel building game, there's nobody that talks like this that knows his stuff up one side and down the other. And it's because, quite frankly, he's worked with the best people in the industry. The most knowledgeable people have worked alongside Joe. Joe's learned, right? Joe has taught me things. I mean, honestly, check out Joe's book. I have my copy, it's actually over there. Hand it to me real quick. Joe's book. Right there. We'll give him, we'll give you a plug right now. The problem with potential. Right there on my on my right here. Thank you. If you're if you're if you're in the market for a book, the problem with potential, check this out. So seriously, this is on my bookshelf right now as we speak. So I can tell you, I have learned a lot from Joe, and Joe is taking what he's learning by spending time in the industry and giving that not just to his tool, but to you as his client. Okay. And he's, I mean, honestly, man, I could hype you up all day because you've been really good in the encouraging. You've been really you've been really good to us, right? You know, you did you did the shed sales summit last year, you know, you did the shed sales summit last year, and I have just watched you just take this business to a completely different level while helping people, and that's what I'm all about, man. I am get out in your community and do something good for somebody else, man. You're doing it, you're living it through the business because you're helping small businesses, you know, fill the gaps. You know, it's funny because that's the name of your previous business. Or is it still a business? I'm not really sure. No, filling the gaps, yeah, filling filling the gaps, right? I mean, really, honestly, I always describe shed business, steel building business, pole barn business, any business really is like a functioning machine, cogs and gears and turning wheels. This is where you start to really plug in those finite little gear mechanisms that make everything just work so much more efficiently. And I've watched you do it, man. And it's very rare that you can literally say it works that way every time. It really does.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

So I think I think where this comes from, you know, I was just blessed with an opportunity door-to-door sales for seven years. I yeah, but most people probably wouldn't call that a blessing, but mad respect for you for that, you know, and and it's a type of organization where it's a straight commission, you go, you know, basically buying books and then reselling them at you know the retail price you wholesale. And but but it's all on you. And you know, you're you're it's literally you're running your own business as an 18 or 19-year-old in college. You know, that's kind of where the where their recruiting was. And um, you know, I sucked at sales at first. I I remember uh it's if you if read the first chapter of that book, you know, it kind of talks about my first week ever selling. And, you know, I wasn't too good at it. I was actually one of the bottom people in the group at first. Um, and I broke uh I popped a tire day two. Um, but I remember my sales manager at the time who was training me. He's just said, you listen, you know, life's 10% what happens and 90% how you react to it. And he told me this story of his best week in sales ever. Um he tore his MCL on Tuesday, didn't know it, um, but he sold his best week in sales ever. And on Sunday, he went to the hospital. He told me he tore his MCL. So he had his best week in sales ever on a torn MCL. And I had a pop tire and could walk, and I was fine. You know, we fixed it, we had a donut on, and I was gonna get the tire fixed tomorrow. And it's like, right, life's perspective, right? So it's perspective. It's it's we we look at our business from a perspective, and that perspective is analytics based or firing from the hip and gut, right? And we think the market dictates our conversion rate, or we think we dictate our conversion rate and our processes. And until you go to that, we dictate the conversion, you know, like, yeah, there's market factors, right? Macroeconomics exists, but microeconomics exists too. Just because, you know, maybe the demand shrinks a little bit, there's still people buying, right? And so it's about converting the people who are there, right? And so maybe you have a little less leads, but if you have a high conversion, you know, it doesn't matter as much, it doesn't affect you as much. And so I've I've always been somebody who's how do you build a bulletproof sales process to make you bulletproof during whatever's happening in the world? Um, my best summer selling books, I had a 53% chance people would let me in their house, 35% close rate. And I knew all of this because it's all numbers. It's all numbers, yeah, right? Yeah. And, you know, I built out a process and anywhere in the world, I like I go anywhere in the US and I could do the same thing. I could sell quarter million books in 12 weeks. Doesn't matter, as long as they're above, you know, a certain income level, 50K median average income or whatever. Um, and I could do that and I could train anybody to do that. It didn't matter what was happening. Like the COVID year was my best year. Everybody thought it would be crazy to go door to door during COVID shutdowns, you know. It's like, but we did. It was great, it was the best year, you know, and and the next year was a great year. It's like we grew, you know, and it's like I my organization grew every year, no matter what. It didn't matter what was going on. If we were down head count, it didn't matter because there's always a way, you know, to figure out, right? And so I when I was doing consulting and things like that too, it's just it's all mentality. Like I remember working with a lawn care company. That's how we got started in the consulting space sales, right? And uh, we made some tweaks. He went from 60,000 a month to 600,000 a month in two years, you know, and it was it was small things. It's like, well, what do you do in the off season? Nothing. Well, why don't you plow snow? It's like figure out how to do something smarter, right? You got all this equipment. It's just like think through. It's like, oh, the market, it's like, no, it's not. It's like, how are you, you know, taking what's happening in the market, the 10% of how life comes at you, and and doing what you can control, right? And you can control, right, what gets said, what happens to your leads and where the leads come from and where you spend your money, you can control all of those things. And so your success in the business clearly does not happen by accident. It happens by a successful person like you listening who has a successful business. And so if you believe that you can control the growth of a business, right now, you may not have like I don't have all the technical everything to run my business, just like you probably don't listening to this, right? So it's about building a team and getting the right people around and working with the right companies and things like that, right? Um, who who know how to get the results. But yeah, that's that's what it comes down to is like, do you believe that you can control the sales conversion rates and you can actually make a difference in your statistics or not? Because if you're not tracking them, you may not believe that you can even make a difference, that it's all chance. And if if it is, you do believe it's all chance, I would encourage you to look, no, rethink that. And it's it's not chance. You know, there's there's a reason you know, big companies like Google exist. You know, there's there's a go-to-market strategy, there's a way to do ads, there's a correct way to do things that leads to the results people want. Um, and I just find a lot of times, you know, like we work with companies who've been struggling with the CRM problem for for decades. Literally since they started, they don't have a solution for a CRM problem. And we do it in, you know, if it's a larger company, maybe more like 60 days than 37, you know, but generally 37 days if you're a mid-sized or smaller company. Um and it's salt and it's just working. And it they don't have to think about why is my CRM not working every day? You know, right? Maybe there's some kinks where they got some support, but like other than that, like it's all the leads are getting worked for the first time ever. Always. Doesn't matter if they have turnover, you know, they can transfer the phone number if somebody leaves their organization. There's all these things, you know.

SPEAKER_00 40:28

So hey, if you had one, no, if you had one fewer thing to worry about in your business, how much easier would your day be? This solves a lot of problems, it fills a lot of gaps. It's gonna make you more honest, not just about yourself, your personal performance, the performance of your employees and staff and sales members. It will help you coach better, it will help you buy better, buy better leads, train better staff. I mean, I can go on and on, and I can tell you this we will have Joe back. I wanted I want feedback. If you're using velocity 360, reach out to me, right? We want to know how it's going. We want to hear how it's working, and we want to hear how it's helping your business. Because to this point, we want another testimonial in the pipeline that says, man, I'm doing great because I'm using Velocity 360. Joe, you got anything for us as we finish out this week, brother? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Um, if you go to Velocity360, click case studies, you'll see a bunch of shed and steel buildings. It'll tell you if they weren't use ideal room, shed pro 3D configurator, proprietary software, whatever their suite of services is, um, to get you the best um inkling of how their tech stack you know leads to the results. But uh yeah, go check it out. You know, we have integration partners with a lot of people. We we're we're starting to track stats. If you're using, you know, X software plus velocity, what do we see the results are? So if you're using one of those softwares, you can reasonably know what what everyone else who uses that software will get. Um yeah, we just want people to win. So however, we can make that happen, you know, make that easier for people. And that's that's why we do so much on the case study side, is we it's when you tell somebody, hey, you know, the average person increased revenue 25%, they increased their you know, response rate 47.5% plus percent. And if your shed pro 217%, it's like those are wild numbers, and it just sounds so fake. It just sounds like sensationalism. And that's why we have to have the videos, because if we didn't have the videos of people actually saying that's exactly what's happening, you know, it'd be hard to believe what we're saying, but that's why we do it because just be, you know, some I think people think things are too good to be true, which I agree. I think there's a lot of bad companies that kind of burn, like it's the one bad apple spoils the bunch, you know, method. And it has happened. There's a lot of people in this industry who have been burned by a bad CRM company that promised them the moon and delivered the fence, right? Like that little analogy. And so when people start working with us and it actually is working, you know, it's like again, like it's still tech, like it's not it's not perfect, right? It's not no tech is perfect. There's always things that need to be improved, fixed, whatever, right? But we we obviously always do that for our clients quickly is within 24 hours of the goal, right? Um, but the the whole point being is is just because there's been a bad experience doesn't mean there's not a good one. It doesn't mean that what we're saying is happening and what others, what our clients say verbally on a call and leaving the Google review and like right all the quotes, that's their words, not ours. And that's why we do that, because we want people to know that you know they can they can trust the results. We're not just making this up out of thin air. Um, yeah, you know, and and what I always tell people is look, if you watch all of those case studies and are not convinced that this will work for you, then fair enough, we should not work together. You know, if you do the research, we we've developed the system in a way that you could do all of your own third-party research and know for a fact uh the what the result is going to be for your company. That's how we want to be at. It's not a pushy sales strategy. We're very light closers, you know. And we tell people if you don't get a lot of leads right now, you need to probably start getting some leads and start maybe if you want velocity, start building out with defined SEO or somebody in tandem to start getting your leads up. Because if you've only got five a month, your need's not there for velocity yet. It's not, and that's okay. Um, but if you want to scale and grow, you know, then it's gonna be there because once you start getting 10 leads a week, 20 leads a week, if you're one person, you know, if you have 10 people and each person's getting 20 leads a week, you add that up over a year and they're working 500 leads, you know, it just gets insane. So anyway, you get the idea, but I appreciate being on here. And you know, if you guys want to chat with us, um, go to velocity360crm.com. There's an industry drop down. If you sell carports, sheds, metal buildings, post frame, pole barns, barn dominiums. We have clients in all of those sectors. Some of them sell multiple, you know, they sell sheds and pole barns and they sell carports and garages, and they'd sell multi. And so if you have multi-products, we're we're great with that too.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

I can tell you, man, velocity360crm.com is where you're gonna want to go. You'll learn more about the product. The case studies tab that Joe was referencing is right on the homepage. You can hear it directly from their clients' mouths. Joe doesn't need to sell it anymore. His clients are selling it for him. I can tell you, as always, huge shout out at the end of the episode. Thank you, Joe, and the team at Velocity360 for giving us some time, giving us uh some more information on how your product's grown over the last year. I want a huge thank you to Idea Room, Define SEO, Shield Wall Media. Thank those guys, those teams. We're doing some cool stuff. We're gonna be back at you next week with another episode of America Builds Better, and we'll share something else. But I'll probably be sharing success stories along the way with Velocity 360. You guys hear it a lot. I'm glad Joe is here today to tell you straight away. I can tell you this much get out in your communities and do something good for somebody else. It will make you feel better. And right now, in the world we live in, nothing makes me feel better. Y'all have a great week, and we will see you soon. Thank you for checking out America Builds Better. If that episode inspired you up, make sure you hit subscribe button. We are dropping out of the content.