SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein joins Dopamine Digital Podcast to discuss the evolution of CRM and marketing automation and how AI is transforming the way B2B sales teams build stronger customer relationships.
Joey: Hello everyone, welcome to today’s podcast. Our guest today is Craig and he’s the CEO at Sales Nexus. Craig, why don’t you tell a little bit more about yourself and what the company is doing.
Craig: Well, thank you, Joey, for having me on, I’m excited to be here, excited to talk. Sales Nexus is a CRM and marketing automation platform. We’ve been working with medium sized businesses for 20 plus years, helping them reach new customers and make more revenue from the customers that they have. And, we got started because I was a sales manager and had to use tools like this to try and manage my sales team, andI wasn’t very happy with the options that I had. In fact, back then when we got started, Salesforce had just come on the market, and it was nice because they were, if you remember, they were the first cloud-based enterprise application – that was cool. We got a lot of benefit out of that, but it just didn’t have the little detail things that salespeople really need to be effective and to make it flow the way they work and the way they think. And that’s what we wanted to build with Sales Nexus.
Joey: Love it. And that’s pretty interesting what you’re saying. Like “we’re in the market for more than 20 years.” And it’s funny, personally myself, I’m 29 years (old). When I was like nine years old, you guys were already been around.
Craig: Yeah. And the world has changed so much since then. When we launched, there was no iPhone. And that was really a big part of our go-to market strategy. Originally, we actually built mobile apps for the Palm, which was the handheld mobile device that was most popular back then. This is before iPhone, before Blackberry. With the idea being, if salespeople are out and about meeting customers, it needs to go with them. We built all these apps for the Palm and then the iPhone came around and Palm just stopped mattering at all.
Joey: And it’s funny because you guys been around for so long, I guess you experienced all the hypes, and then some of the hype survived, and then you kind of build onto something next. Towards the market, I think what you guys like are doing is very interesting. We talked a little bit before and for which specific company is this like most interesting what you guys are doing? Is it like any one or your specific on certain types of companies? Could you elaborate on it?
Craig: Mostly we work with B2B sales teams. That could be, folks in the mortgage industry, we do a lot of business there. It could be folks in the real estate, mostly commercial real estate where there’s, selling leasing office space to businesses. But it also could be very technical industrial sales teams, where they’re selling manufactured machines and parts for machines to go into a big, billion dollar manufacturing facility. But the common theme is a sales team where the relationship with the customer is really important. You’re going to sell something that’s very expensive, there has to be a high degree of trust. Or you’re going to sell a lot of things over a long time to the same customer. Same thing, you have to have a customer that really trusts you. That’s where, from my personal experience, that’s where you had to have really good salespeople, the people that really master the craft of building those relationships. And that’s where our tool really shines, as helping you really manage a strong relationship with a customer.
Joey: Say I’m a sales rep. Let’s say someone is a sales rep and they are pretty good in what they’re doing, what you’re saying they’re a “master in a craft” and then they’re using your tool. If you, let’s the person is gonna call someone, in which ways could your tool help them towards building that relationship which you’re talking about?
Craig: Well, if you just think about in your own personal life, building a relationship with someone that you just met, could be at a cocktail party or a business function, whatever. You don’t build a very good relationship by telling them all about yourself. You build a good relationship by asking them questions about themselves, and demonstrating interest. And that’s true in business sales as well.
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And so one of the most fundamental things that our system does is it lets the customer, our customer, the business, lay the system out so that the questions that they really need to ask their customers are right there front and center. And you can, at a glance, you can see: which ones do I already know the answer, and which ones have I not yet asked, or I haven’t gotten an answer. It helps the salesperson – they’re busy, they’re nervous sometimes, they’re distracted – it helps them really focus in on, “Here’s what I really got to talk to this customer about today.” And it kind of guides them through that conversation. Now I have the answer to this question, the next logical question is this.
Joey: Yeah, I love what you’re saying because the thing is I’ve got experience with it as well. If you’re having a conversation like a sales conversation and you don’t know, you don’t have a clear structure or you might lose it. Like if you have something which you know works, which has a proven concept, I think it does give a sales rep a lot of confidence in the process.
Craig: Yeah.It’s easy to get distracted. The customer, unconsciously, will do a lot to distract you and get you off the right track. For instance, they’ll just immediately ask you, “Well, what does it cost?” and once you answer that question in a lot of sales situations you’ve already lost.
Especially in a business, long sales cycle kind of a situation where they already have a supplier and you’re trying to displace the current supplier. They’re just, “Are you going to save me money or not? No? Okay, well I don’t want to, I’m not interested anymore.” Where really what you were trying to do is show them I’m offering a more valuable solution. It may not be cheaper, but it’s more valuable. You’re not going to make that sale by talking about price.
Joey: They just think about the cost instead of thinking about what kind of value it can bring. I think that you were mentioning there’s like an interesting launch coming up,
Craig: Yeah, we have a big launch coming up very soon before the end of the year. We’ll be beta testing here even in October. And we’ve just rebuilt the entire application from the ground up and really baked AI into the whole process. It’s super exciting. We’re still even learning ourselves what can be done with the AI now that once you give it all of your customer data, there’s just so many amazing things that it can do for you. Simple examples like, like we’re talking about; I’m a salesperson, I have 20 customers that I sell this particular product to every month. They place a new order. I have a long time relationship with those customers, But there’s probably 20 more customers in my CRM that might be buying some other product from my business. And I just never thought about telling them about this second product.
Now that AI will find those for me and say, “Here’s 20 more customers that you should sell the same thing to”. And put them on an automated messaging sequence, and warm them up for me and all of that stuff. And it just happens automatically. It’s just so cool.
Joey: And so in your system, it kind of spots the opportunities which are there, based on interaction you had with your customers. That’s super, very interesting. And based on AI, you guys are like, there’s a lot of AI coming into your service as you speak with the new launch coming up. And then my question to you is, because with AI, there’s been a lot of said about it and a lot of things they are saying, which is going to happen in the future. Where do you see AI going in the next two to three years.
Craig: I don’t think the landscape’s gonna change a whole lot. In other words, there’ll be a lot of solutions like us that update their application to include a lot of AI. There will be more and more adoption of the chat GPT type of just having that little assistant off to the side to help you do whatever you do. There’s a lot of stuff related to media. That’s getting pretty amazing and powerful and kind of scary. But I think that in the business world, we’re all going to end up needing to do, especially in the case of what we do CRM, Which is – it’s your, information that your business owns about your customers. This is highly confidential information that you do not want anybody else to have access to. I think what’s going to evolve is in those kinds of situations, you’re going to have solutions emerge that allow you to own your own AI for your business.
And that becomes a strategic asset as a part of the business. When you’re exiting, you’re selling your business. You’re not just selling your customers and your revenue and your business processes, but you’re also selling this AI that does all this stuff for you. That’s really, number one, it’s confidential and proprietary and it’s learned about your business and how you work.
Joey: Yeah, very nice. And you’ve been in the business for quite a long time, as said in the beginning of the podcast, and during your business and during all the years, you’ve experienced probably a lot of lessons, a lot of challenges which you overcome. What are some of the main challenges or some of the challenges you have faced during growing the business? What’s something which just pops up into your mind right now, and how did you overcome it?
Craig: In the business, it’s been a long time and I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way. All of the normal things that any business owner has to wrestle with: how to hire good people, how to manage a team, all of that. Those have been fascinating things to get good at, and those are the kinds of things that you can apply to your personal life as well. For the rest of my life, I will be better at working with other people because of what I learned as a leader.
But in terms of challenges for the business, the biggest thing that we’ve always wrestled with is – we’re a very small player in a massive, massive, multi-billion dollar market, up against multi-billion dollar competitors. And we do well, we hold our own, we steal their customers away on a regular basis, and we keep them much longer than our competitors do. But marketing, in digital marketing in particular, against those much richer competitors, they can just outspend us – that’s always a challenge. Always.
You show me five digital marketers guys that maybe have been doing it for 10 years, and they have a lot of experience and expertise. Probably only one of them has enough expertise to really get down into the weeds enough for us to help us be successful, because it just takes that little extra bit of expertise to find those little niches where we can separate ourselves from everybody else who’s spending a thousand dollars a month on their Google Ads campaign.
Joey: I love what you’re saying. Like you’re spending in a market and there’s a lot of competition. You learn so much, which you can also in the end apply in your personal life. And because there’s so much competition, it can be challenging, but at the same time, you get forced towards what you’re saying, to really dive into how can we improve our own value? We can serve our customers better and we can really grow. because there’s so much competition. It really forces you guys to also grow and be in your A-game,
Craig: Yeah. Of course we’re a software company, so we always have our own great ideas about how to improve the software. And our customers have a lot of great ideas and we have to take all of that and distill it down and prioritize and all that. But just as much, if not more is coming from the marketplace. Our competitors are innovating also, and we have to keep up with the Joneses as they say.
Joey: Talking about this, what are some of the ways or channels you guys are using to acquire new customers?
Craig: We mainly do digital advertising: Google ads, Facebook, LinkedIn. Historically we’ve done a lot of educational content type stuff, and we’ve done really well with video on YouTube and things like that, related to that. Having as long a career in sales as I do, I’m able to teach customers about the best practices of sales and sales management as much as I am about how to use our software. That effort always works pretty well for us, because what I find is, a lot of businesses that jump into a CRM, they’re hoping for the software to solve what’s really a training or expertise problem. And it can to a degree, but only if you plan it correctly.
Joey: And this is what also makes you guys unique, because what you’re doing is not just a CRM where you can see all your leads and everything is like really there. No, it’s not just that. It’s like the sales expertise you’re having as well, which makes it super unique in the market.
Craig: Yeah. In fact, one of the things that’s coming in our new version is the system, the AI, will automatically recommend training videos and other content for each sales rep based on their behavior. If they’re making a lot of calls, but they’re not setting a lot of appointments, they’re going to get a video that shows them how to be effective in setting appointments, But if they’re making a lot of appointments, but not closing deals, they’re going to get a different video. And the sales manager gets data about all of that so they can really now help educate and raise the game of their sales team just by using the CRM.
Joey: Very nice. And it makes the process so much easier because then when you’re having sales reps, the main thing is, you have to have good sales reps, but the main thing are they open to learn, Because if you’re providing all this value and everything is just there and they’re open to learn, there’s no way they’re not going to grow.
Craig: Yeah. In today’s market, salespeople know that they have to be innovating all the time. But, they’re also not highly technical normally. You have to make it easy. You just got to say, “Here, do this now.” And if you’re adding value, giving them some ideas that they can use in their next conversation with a customer, then they’re all over it.
Joey: Yeah, amazing. And during your lessons, during what you’ve learned in the last like 20 years, even more than that, cause there’s a lot of entrepreneurs watching this podcast right now. And I think you have a ton of experience, and in all the experience you’re having, what’s one thing if you’re standing in your shoes right now with all the knowledge you’re having, you would do differently. If you put yourself back in time.
Craig: Just technically speaking, I would say we made a bad decision by choosing to focus so much on the mobile app part of our application in the beginning. Cause like I said earlier, the market changed and we had wasted a lot of our initial capital, to build something that we ultimately didn’t get to monetize.
That was our big biggest early strategic mistake. Just sort of personally, I have, learned the hard way that you have to focus on hiring the right people. And it’s so hard for me anyway, to say no to hiring someone because there’s a job that needs to get done. Rather than saying, I’m going to wait and find the right someone. That was a hard lesson to learn, and I wasted a lot of time and money doing it. But now it’s like, there’s a phrase that you hear people say all the time, “Hire slowly, fire quickly.” I’m a big believer in that, at least the hire slowly part.
Joey: Makes sense. And I think you can apply this also in other areas of your life. If you do something, it has to be whatever you’re doing. Let me know how you think about this. It has to be like a 100 % yes. And if you do something and it doesn’t really feel good, you hire someone, but you just need to get the job done. If it’s not a full like 100 % yes, it’s gonna translate in certain consequences for your business,
Craig: For sure. Yeah. And it’s very tough, as a new entrepreneur, you’re forced to make so many decisions that you’ve never made before. And you’re just kind of ignorant and you don’t feel, you don’t have that real confidence that you’re referring to, about anything, I was lucky. I had a mentor, when we first started that was tremendous in helping with those decisions. I think that’s a really smart thing for an entrepreneur to do, is go find a mentor who has been there and done that so you can just have a reality check for those moments like you’re referring to.
Joey: Yeah, if you’re growing and especially as an entrepreneur, because if you’re just working as a job, it’s not, you can just do your task and that’s it. But if you’re an entrepreneur, there’s so much responsibility. In this responsibility, there’s so much more, maybe you can say it’s pressure, even then it’s more important to have the right people around you, which can make you be in the right mindset in moments of pressure. What you’re saying, like have a mentor around you.
Craig: Right. For me, it’s always accounting. That’s the one thing that I just have no patience for. I’m not interested in it, all the bookkeeping stuff. But little decisions that you might make in a, quick meeting, how should we code this expense? You make a quick decision. And then, a year later, you’re trying to run your books and do your taxes or raise money or whatever else, and that comes back and bites you.
Joey: Yeah, and if you have like, let’s say Harry Potter, and you have like a magic wand, Harry Potter style and with this magic wand you could solve any problem like with this with a finger snap in your business right now. What would you choose with this Harry Potter magic stick?
Craig: Hmm, interesting. Well, I mean, right now I probably would say just to get our new version finished and out into the world. Because we’ve worked really hard on it it’s going to be so amazing. I just can’t wait to share it with other people.
But beyond that, a little bit more long term, I’d say, I want to… like you asked a great question earlier. What’s the AI world going to look like in three to five years? I want to get past the next three to five years because I think so many people are so ignorant about how AI really works that everyone’s a little bit misled about what’s coming down the pipe. There’s a lot of fear about it, a lot of confusion. I think it’s AI and so it’s different, but at the end of the day, we’re going to look back on it and know that this was just the early days. Just the same way, when the internet was invented or the iPhone was invented, people had all kinds of predictions about what was going to happen. And here we are now years later, and we’re a lot more educated about what it can and can’t do, and what the best practices are in your business.
Like I mentioned earlier, people just don’t know that confidentiality and AI is going to become a massive thing. I mean, if you just think about the lawyers that are sitting out there waiting to file liability suits based on sharing confidential information with an AI, it’s just, it’s going to be insane. People are gonna need to solve that problem. And so, I wanna get past the next few years so we can, then the AI magic wand can really be waved around.
Joey: I love what you’re saying. Like some people are afraid of it, and think with every big thing in life, people are afraid. And you only have the option, do you actually embrace it or like, are you afraid of it? if you’re afraid of it, you’re going to miss out because there are people who embrace it and take the opportunity when it’s there. And you’re also mentioning there’s going to be the launch, which you’re very excited about. Do you know the exact timeframe, which the launch is going to be there to share with the people who are watching this podcast.
Craig: We will be launching our betas by the end of October. How soon we get out of beta, I’m not 100% sure yet, but I’m confident in saying that we’ll be launching, sometime in December, before the end of the year.
Joey: Alright cool. And you already talked about it briefly but what are some of the main goals for the next 6 to 12 months? Which you really want to work towards?
Craig: There’s a lot of great ideas that we’ve had about the product that we have to put on the back burner so we can get the first version out, there’s a lot of that. But most importantly, it will be, now we have real people using the product, giving us feedback and we’ll need to be able to take that feedback and implement solutions and ideas based on that very quickly. In my mind, if we can do that well, then everything else takes care of itself.
Joey: Very nice. Learning from all the people you are serving and improving your own products along the way.
Craig: Yeah. It’s amazing how when you get a good user group engaged, where they’re really talking to you and speaking honestly, both the good and the bad. It’s amazing how quickly it can become clear. Okay, here’s the short list of five things that if I just fix those or improve those, that’s tremendous leverage to grow the business,
Joey: Yeah. And for the people who watching it, I think there a of people who are watching it right now. They are entrepreneurs and they have like, maybe not have the experience as you have. And if you would give advice to these entrepreneurs, just something they can take away from this podcast. Just one thing, they can take away and learn from it today. What would you give to them?
Craig: Just dream big. Whatever you think you’re going to try and do, do it bigger. Don’t scale it back because you don’t have enough money or you don’t have enough time or enough resources or whatever or you’re just afraid to take a big swing. Just take the big swing. That’s how you may end up with a smaller thing because reality slaps you across the face. But it almost never blows up into something big when you start off shooting for something small. It’s much more likely that if you shoot for something very big, you’re going to end up with something in the middle somewhere, just think big.
Joey: I love what you’re saying and there’s this saying right like reach for the stars because if you reach for the stars gonna end up at a nice place. If you think big, just think like as big as possible something which really inspires you. It forces your brain to connect to think in different ways, There’s just different thought patterns going on, And if you think in a small way, you don’t see the opportunity when it’s there because your mind is just limited. If you think in a way which is limited, you’re going to attract, you always will attract limited opportunities if you will think small.
Craig: Well, and especially in tech now, there’s so much capital out there that raising money, it’s really more a function of how big do you want to dream? and then secondly, with AI, the, creation of the product itself is so much more dynamic and fast and everything else because the coders can do a lot of it with AI. The possibilities are just, it’s all accelerating at an accelerating rate, as they say.
Joey: Very exciting times where we live in right now. And for the people watching, what are the ways they can connect with you or the company?
Craig: SalesNexus.com is the best place. And then I’m on LinkedIn, Craig Klein. I’m on Twitter or X, Craig Klein. Those are great places to connect with me directly.
Joey: All right, great. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. I make sure to put all the links in description down below, everyone who’s watching the podcast, make sure to check it out. And yeah, thanks for watching and see you in the next episode.