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Sam Taggart 00:39

What’s up guys, this is Sam Taggart with the D2D podcast. And I am I’m excited to bring this guest on. But before I do that, a couple announcements. You know, we’ve got our business boot camp coming up February 28. And first so you might not even hear this by then we have another one in Denver actually moving these around Denver, Dallas, la Orlando. So next ones in the middle April, this for business leaders, you know, business, understanding technology, and we’re gonna be diving into that in this podcast where, you know, what, what’s tools and CRMs?

And what pay scales and what recruiting systems and what training and onboarding systems should you know, what’s the streamlined, Fast Track way to success so that you’re not beating your head saving in killing yourself and dummy tax as an entrepreneur. And then we have our sales Summit coming up for any sales people want to learn NLP, and pitching and closing and all the different word tracks, it’s going to help you have more success on the doors as far as just selling and being a better closer, that’s March 17, through the 20th in South Carolina.

So check out our up and coming events. We’ve got some cool stuff on the on the docket. And now bringing on our guest, we have bench one who’s a close friend of mine, and we’ve known each other for a couple years now. And he is not your door to door guy and he is not your guy that’s going to come in here and you know, just come in and talk sales talks and word tracks and stuff. You’re like, Man, I’m listening to a podcast to you know, better my sales, closing percentage is prized in the podcast for you. But this podcast can be better suited for those that are selling or business owners that want to see things from an engineers head in the sense of what tools and why software really is what runs efficiency and runs more production and runs more sales and gets things moving faster, and creates better time management and things like that, so that you’re not losing deals, you’re not letting deals sit too long, you’re providing better customer experiences and a rep experience. That is world class.

And I’ve been to a lot of companies that don’t leverage tech in the right way. And I watch companies still on spreadsheets still kind of clunky. You know, I’m a huge advocate of tech I’m, I’ve built two technologies myself my partner’s Futex I am building a third one right now. And I’m a huge advocate of having streamline systems through technology to increase production. So that’s what I want to really focus this, this podcast on. So I’m gonna bring Mr. Ben on and appreciate you having not been on the show, man.

03:24
Hey, yeah, I’m happy to be here. So yeah,

Sam Taggart 03:28
so tell me how you started with Did you always want to be a coder? Or an engineer?

03:33
Yeah, um, I actually started in sales, believe it or not, but it was phone sales. And I was one of those, you know, phone sales guys selling people, online businesses, you know, back for, I think, it was, like, thrive was love fulfillment, or something like that. And what happened was, is I ended up, you know, talking with people and helping coach those people more than selling them. And, and, and I just wanted to help people with with technology. And so, you know, fast forward, you know, I got, I got into tech, got into coding, and all self taught. And I had some friends that that owned solar company that contacted me, and asked if I could help them set up a CRM. And I just said, well, let’s just build one, you know, because I know how to do that. And, and here I am today in the, you know, just totally immersed in the door to door world. It’s totally a unique space and, and I’m happy to be a part of it. And it’s presented some major, major challenges. So yeah, like what like what you were saying before. Something I’ve learned over the years is Every company these days basically has to be some kind of software company. So whether if they’re building their own software, or just utilizing someone else’s software is going to be running your whole business, even if it’s a spreadsheet, you know, it’s it’s running, it’s running your business. And I think a big challenge in the door to door space is a lot of people who are starting, you know, starting a new door to door sales business, or even a fulfillment business or something like that. You know, they they’re thinking a lot more about sales, they typically come from a sales background. And so it’s been, it’s been an interesting challenge to, to help bridge that gap for people. And, and, you know, especially the communication perspective, and these people who, you know, don’t understand software, really, they know how to use some of it. But, you know, so, yeah, it’s been, it’s been quite an interesting go at it.

Sam Taggart 06:03
So those that don’t know, Ben, he is one of the founders of Rive, which is a digital sales, knocking app CRM proposal tool, all of the things start to finish fulfillment, you know, where’s my jobs from a installer need for solar, and was what it started at. And now they help window companies, roofing companies, etc. And it’s been really cool because you took a guy that like, I didn’t even know you did fun sales, but you took a sales organization, solar company that said, hey, there is not a really good solution, because everybody sucks it, you know, I got to integrate my knocking app to my CRM, then my marketing tool, my customer updating tool, all of those things into all these different platforms. And what ends up happening is because they’re, you know, one login didn’t work. And so D set D took out the API, and then you stopped you know, running the the zaps and then you you know what I mean, and all of a sudden, your whole system broke instead of in one ecosystem, one symbiotic software that could encompass it all from start, like lead. I got your name all the way till built on your roof, PTO, knowing what’s engineered, and that’s what Rive is, is done. And you know, very, very, very few I haven’t really seen anything else out there like that. So you know, if you’re in high school, or you’re in roofing or you’re wanting kind of a start to finish CRM, one go check out Rive work at what’s the website, where can they find you?

07:37
Yeah, it’s Rive. crm.com. Sam, so our YVERY ve crm.com. And we came up with that name with just by thinking of you know, you’re arriving at a place and you’re thriving. So who ride

Sam Taggart 07:52
arriving and thriving? I love that. Yeah. And so as you approach this, as you start building CRM, or knocking app, or all of these, call it sales solutions, right, the things that you looked for when getting feedback from salespeople, what are some of the frustrations that salespeople communicate to you that you say, I’m taking this feedback from salespeople? And I’m now building solutions into software.

08:19
Yeah, yeah, that’s been quite a challenge. You couldn’t get more opposite personality types. You know, engineers are are, you know, typically reclusive? And, and not very outgoing. I’m pretty outgoing. I’ve, you know,

Sam Taggart 08:39
it’s a cool guy. We’ve got some good. Yeah, I’m

08:41
a cool guy. Okay. So. But, but, but yeah, you couldn’t get more opposite type personalities in general. And so I, it’s been quite quite a challenge. Just kind of understanding what people mean, when they say things. And what I mean by that is, typically, if so, if you build someone something, um, you know, typically you’re looking for if there’s a problem with it, you’re looking for an exact explanation of the problem, right. But the feedback I typically get, if there’s some sort of issue is it’s broken, it’s buggy, it’s glitchy there. And I, and it’s, and it’s quite quite challenging to figure out what exactly is the problem to fix here. So, so that’s one thing. Now, I don’t get that feedback very often anymore. In the beginning, when we first started building this, and taking this to the market, you know, we we hit the same challenges that that I would think that you know, other knocking apps and other CRMs have hit. You know, like as far as you know, when you’re out there canvassing on your mobile app. You know, so there’s, you know, all sorts of horror stories of every single canvassing app out there about losing pins and, and when they’re in a bad service area that that things just are buggy or glitchy, right, things like that. And so, we really, you know, we set out to solve every problem from canvassing all the way through Project Management and, and then customer success and, and everything. So what what happened was in the beginning is we we really ran into a lot of the those same, those same problems that I’ve heard from about other other software in the industry. And so we focused really hard on our first year about making sure that the front end interface is, is totally bug free, totally simple. And, and it we do more work. So that it can be more simple, right. And that’s what people don’t really understand with software is, the more simple and easy something is to use, the more work was put into that from from the engineering side. And, and so you know, that that’s something that that’s that people should consider when when thinking about software in this space. So I love that. Yeah, yeah. Um,

Sam Taggart 11:34
so let me let me ask you this. I’m a sales guy. Why is software a vital piece to my success? Has it from an engineer’s perspective? I’m curious.

11:49
Well, there’s, there’s a few reasons one data, being able to keep track of data is is essential to, to sales, I think, you know, I mean, I’ve had to do, you know, I’ve had to do sales for Rive myself, I mean, I get to, it’s not like I had to, I enjoy it, I enjoy interfacing with customers and everything. But I have so much other stuff going on as as much as most other sales guys do, especially in door to door, they’re, they’re having to remember every single door, they knock every, you know, every aspect of every customer they’re interfacing with. And, and so the the biggest thing about that is just being able to access your data and, and be able to see your data in an easy, quick view. On top of that, I’m not having to not having to do a lot of data entries. So if you have like just a canvassing app, for your sales team, and then your project management team is using something else, your proposal team is using something else, you’re and then your customers especially have no idea what’s going on, unless they you know, get a phone call from one of your super busy project managers. You know, software’s here to to alleviate your problems, it’s, it’s not here to create more problems. And when you can utilize software correctly, you can completely optimize every aspect of your job. And it doesn’t really matter what job it is, if it’s sales or, or anything else. You know, being having some kind of, you know, software that will help you be more pragmatic is, is the best way to be successful. So,

Sam Taggart 13:54
love the what if I’m like, I’m old school, I just in pen and paper kind of guy, I remember where I’m at, you know, like, I see it a lot where guys are just I’m always on the go, I don’t have the time to make sure I put the data, you know, and it’s that they’re the salespeople are the first point of data. And I think this is so important for people to understand, like, you know, unless I’m a marketing company like Facebook ad, I’m doing a lead capture form, that would be the first point of data. But for most door to door sales companies, you’re our step one, and the more data and inputs, when who if notes, follow up dispositions, things like that, that you can have on customers. As a business owner, one, you know how to remark it, how to follow up how to upsell how to how to how to really optimize, you know, it’s funny how much Google and Amazon pays for data, because they are the best at marketing to that data. What ends up happening door sales come companies is they aren’t the best at marketing to that data, because they come from more of an old school archaic form of selling. And am I against door to door? No, I’m actually saying you’re getting better data than a random click and watch a web video, then you are, you know, that data, in my opinion is worth way more utilized correctly from having face to face conversation with you, even though I didn’t transact? Yeah, when a random, you know, clicked on a banner ad for five seconds and left, you know. Yeah. So I think people are under estimating the the the value that could be or maybe currently is sitting in their CRM sitting in their knocking apps from a, you know, capture standpoint, I guess, what would you say?

15:53
Yeah, yeah, interfacing with someone in person is, is the best way to capture any sort of analytics with that you know, about them. So, and we’ve seen that in in Rive, we have, you know, customers who will hit us up after they’ve been on the platform for about a year and, and ask us, if, if they are able to see anything that’s been that’s been given a proposal or, you know, some kind of a field like that. And so we’ve actually supplied some, some functionality towards that, to where you can, you know, filter by dispositions and statuses, and then export, you know, do a mass export of that data, and then we’ve seen companies literally take that data, and sell it to maybe a third party who does, you know, insight, phone sales. And, and, you know, there’s so much you can do with data, data runs the entire world right now. And, you know, all of the biggest software companies, I mean, all of the biggest companies in the world, you know, they’re the, the majority of their income comes from data. And, and the majority of their spend is on data, as well. So, you know, that’s just, that’s definitely something to consider. And, yeah, the, the CRM itself is, is a great way to, to capture that data and be able to export it and do whatever you want with it. So,

Sam Taggart 17:31
so let’s talk about the importance of project management and watching how some of these companies struggle, you know, like your solar company, or, you know, you work with all solar companies. So you see, some solar companies boasting seven day installs, or 15 Day installs. And some companies realistically, it’s for six months, right? And saying the solar company you really built this for is the fastest or whatever. I mean, there’s other logistical elements of this. But I’m just asking, have you noticed a decrease of cancels increase of speed? Like, how technology is helping the project management side? And really silos? And who’s doing what and moving that along? Like, what Where have you seen that optimization?

18:19
Yeah, so So if I, if I could just go into a little bit of what Rive offers. On our canvassing app, we have, we have property data that we have on every property in the United States. And so you’re able to get the name of the person their address, you know, various things about the home that just get saved as soon as you have any, any sort of interaction with that person. And that is saved on the history of that record forever. So let’s say you sell this person, you, you add all sorts of notes, you update a bunch of fields, you get it through the sales process, it’s into the project management hands, project management can then see the full history of of everything on that customer. So they can see like okay, you know, any relevant data that we had on the property already, such as maybe, you know, when the house was purchased, or, or, or something like that. And then they’re able to also see, you know, the sales reps journey through that AI as far as updating it, you know, changing dispositions, leaving New Notes, you know, adding information from the proposal, anything like that, and then they’re also able to communicate with the sales rep on on these accounts. And so let’s say you know, a sales rep signs a customer, you know, right off the bat. Project management needs to know about that and needs to get the process started immediately. And, and and really reach out to the customer. I’m kind of a side tangent here, one of the biggest concerns I have, regarding most of the verticals we’ve worked with in the door to door industry is cancellations. And, you know, as you know, there, there is kind of a stigma around door to door sometimes, you know, and, and, and so customers might, you know, already feel a little uneasy. And, and the, the, you know, a lot of these verticals like solar and roofing, and, and, and Windows, you know, it’s a big expense for their house. And, and so these customers are signing these documents, you know, getting some kind of, you know, 40 to $100,000 loan. And, and, and then they typically, a lot of the time, I don’t really hear from people much after that. And so they’re reaching out to the sales rep. You know, they’re trying to figure out a way to, to figure out where they are. They just, you know, spent all this money and made this huge decision. And so the great thing about Rive and interfacing both the project management side, and the sales side is that if they do call in to the sales rep, sales rep can look up their account, be able to tag project management and say, Hey, here’s the customer, they need a call right here. And just go ahead, it saves everything to the the account, right, their project manager gets a notification. They’re like, Oh, wow, yeah, I didn’t realize this was in my pipeline yet. I haven’t gotten to it yet. But it looks like we need to get started on this customer. Um, so I’m on top of on top of Rive, me and my buddy founded a company called portal CX. And, and I know, you’re going to be having him on your podcast here soon. And what we did with Portal CX, is we we set out to solve that problem of the customers getting updates and getting, you know, getting that, you know, feeling good about their purchase, feeling good about, about working with that the company that they’re working with, and, and getting an easy experience, you know, from that. And so we hooked up portal CX derive. And we actually looked at data over 90 days. So after we hooked up portal CX derive, we got about 90 days worth of data. And we’re able to look at the same companies 90 days before that. And we saw a cancellation rate. Because we can see that in Rive we can see the data and privacy see when when accounts get cancelled. And we’re we found about 20 to 30% cancellation rate pretty much across the board in the previous 90 days. And then after we hooked up portal CX, which is the the automatic updates, the you know, the customer portal, that’s basically your, your Domino’s tracker for your your project.

23:14
We looked at that the next 90 days, and those same companies that were having 20 to 30%, cancellations, went down to 8% and 14%, over the next 90 days.

Sam Taggart 23:25
That’s like millions of dollars for a lot of

23:27
millions of dollars. Yeah, and so and so. And so yeah, that I mean, just speaking to how software can can solve problems, you know, the sales rep, all the sales rep had to do was click a button, add in a little, a few data fields, and then maybe tag on that account and and then you know, run the installation agreement, all as automated as possible. And then, and then automation kind of handles the rest is as well as you know, project management pushing it through. I mean, it’d be awesome to have some sort of some sort of AI that just interfaced with all of these systems and just push everything through automatically. But we don’t want to we don’t want to remove project managers from from the space race. We still need human interaction there.

Sam Taggart 24:18
But it’s but yeah, getting close to where virtually an AI is making it to where and that’s what’s cool about Rive and portal is you have built up sequences that then auto trigger texts, auto trigger updates, auto trigger to where if project managers not smart enough to call Hey dude, just want to let you know permits have been ready. Like then what happens like most of the time, most business owners don’t have good enough SOPs and a good enough organization to actually make sure he made that call at the exact seconds he’s supposed to make an a call, where if technology did it for you. You’re like worst case scenario maps did

24:55
it all right. So

Sam Taggart 24:59
super super important, it could save you employee costs. It could save you inefficiency. I mean, this was crazy. It’s like, I don’t think people understand how much technology can eliminate employee overhead. Like, right, right? That’s,

25:17
yeah, and the whole thing about technology, it’s not about and this is something I really want to, like, you know, really harping on is, technology isn’t there really, to help you do more with less. And that’s what a lot of people think of is like, oh, okay, like, I can then fire project managers or, or anything like that, like, it’s, it’s help, it’s there to help you do more with more, um, you know, so basically, technology is there to take what you have, and give you the ability to do more, so that you can have more revenue, so that you can hire more so you can so you can provide more employment, and that that’s really something that I learned from, from reading this book called the Phoenix Project, I would recommend every every business owner that listens to your podcast, or works with you to read the Phoenix Project, and it’s, it would really, really help just exponentially help every every business owner out there, understand. Understand what we’re talking about how, how software challenges can be faced, and, and yeah, and, and the, the whole thing, the preface of the Phoenix Project is, is about doing more with more. And, and, you know, alleviating bottlenecks and, and all sorts of things. So it’s not just applicable to software, it’s applicable to any kind of company out there

Sam Taggart 26:44
doing more with more, that’s gonna be my new mantra. It’s like doing more with less, it’s like, how about just doing more with more having abundant, bigger mindset around right, optimizing the more and stop thinking have to do cut? Like, no, just grow? Grow? Yeah. Yeah. Because yeah, the word less means a little bit of a scarcity in there. That’s fine. Right?

27:08
Yeah. You’re you’re thinking about, you’re thinking about the scarcity, right? If you’re thinking about more with less, you’re, you’re giving power to your fear. Right. So, so yeah, technology’s here to help you do more with more. It’s, it’s and and that’s what we’re trying to do at Rive, right.

Sam Taggart 27:33
Well, dude, I appreciate I appreciate you being on and guys, if you’re listening to this, like, obviously, it’s like, this isn’t John Maxwell’s podcast. This is Jordan Belfort speak like, What’s crazy is this is the behind the scenes stuff that makes people like me or Jordan Belfort do what they do like without, if I didn’t have a CRM, if I didn’t have a marketing tool, if I didn’t have a data points, you probably wouldn’t even know what this podcast was, you wouldn’t know how to even hear this, you wouldn’t know this podcast wouldn’t be existent. If it didn’t have the podcast app and the Spotify app, it was built efficiently to make you have a good user experience to want to keep listening to these podcasts. You know what I mean? Like, like, I think we underestimate the power of, you know, how much we’re using technology, and how much technology plays a part in business and entrepreneurship, and sales. And so, yeah, is there any other last little advice or thing you want to share? Or forever?

28:28
Um, you know, just keep plugging at it. Everybody, keep, keep working at it.

Sam Taggart 28:33
Keep on keep it on. I love it. Hey, guys, Dr. Ry ve crm.com, make sure to go check them out schedule a demo with Ben. He’s definitely the one to help you out. And he does a really good job. I mean, I’ve had clients that have used them, they’ve loved them. And they have a really cool full stack feature set that very, very, very few people have. And so if you’re looking for an alternative solution, that would be a great person to connect with. If you’re a solar installer, roof installer, sales organization, whatever that looks like. Make sure to go check them out.

29:07
I appreciate it, Sam. Hey,

Sam Taggart 29:09
thanks a ton my man.

29:10
All right. Well, yeah. Okay, talk soon.