69: Are You Wasting Leads? The Hard Truth About CRM Sales Systems for Entrepreneurs

Behind Their Success: Ep 69

Paden: Jason Kramer

Jason: [00:00:00] 80 percent of sales requires at least five follow ups in order to close that deal. And over 40 percent of businesses give up after just one try.  

Paden: Hello everybody. Welcome to Behind Their Success podcast. I am Peyton Squires, the host. And today we have on Jason Kramer. Jason is the founder and CEO of Cultivize, a consulting firm specializing in lead nurturing and CRM implementation. With over 20 years of experience, Jason has worked with global and local brands to help bridge the gap between marketing and sales.

Jason, good morning. Welcome on the podcast. Good morning. Thank you, Peyton. Happy to be here. 

Jason: Excited to be here. I should say. 

Paden: Yeah, absolutely. Jason. So, uh, you know, I got to know you a little bit here before we jumped on recording. kind of tell us, uh, give us a little bit about your background and what you do in business.

Jason: Yeah, sure. So, uh, I'm, I'm a New Yorker through and through. but my background started in graphic design and in marketing. Okay. started my own boutique, marketing and web development shop back in [00:01:00] 2002.

and I ran that business for 16 years and it really became one of those things where. I was good at something and I decided, okay, instead of working for somebody kind of like your story, let me try to kind of throw my shingle out there. You're nothing about sales, nothing about really running a business.

Um, and decided to give it a shot. And so for 16 years, I built that business and ran it. And then. Um, really the story, which we'll talk about today is why I wound up selling that business and then starting Cultivize about six years ago. Um, and the real, the light bulb there, which we'll get into is two factors.

One, I saw two cycles that kept happening that were sort of troublesome to me. And I knew that there was a solution for it. And one was companies spending money on marketing and lead gen going to networking groups, doing, you know, Advertising online, whatever they're doing, but they're not able to really track the true ROI if it's actually really working and bringing in not only leads, but quality leads and revenue.

And then the other factor is you spend all this [00:02:00] time, you know, getting these leads and spending money, spending time, but that we found that, and this is not even me, it's just an industry fact. 80 percent of sales requires at least five follow ups in order to close that deal. And over 40 percent of businesses give up after just one try.

 So that's why I started Cultivize to kind of help. Businesses solve those two gaps. 

Paden: yeah, totally understand that. Right. I, sales, I don't know. I've seen stats or whatnot, or, you know, on like salespeople and like, it's a massive percentage of salespeople that never even asked for like the clothes one time, let alone like four times.

Right. So, yeah, I mean, businesses just need a whole lot more processes built. 

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I always kind of like give the visual where it's like, you know, you could. Have an amazing contractor come to your house and build, build you the house. But if he shows up with a hammer and five nails, he's not really going to get very far.

So, you know, there's tons of companies out there, just independent salespeople that are not really being equipped with the right tools to make them [00:03:00] successful. And so they're struggling, you know, they might eventually get there, but they're not going to get there as efficiently and as, rewarding, right, for both themselves and the business.

If they don't have the right tools to help them do that. 

Paden: Yeah. And it's kind of interesting, you know, the more and more, you know, learning about business and speaking to different entrepreneurs, how, the conflict can be there between sales and marketing, right? Like marketing's like, Hey, sales isn't falling up with the leads and then sales.

It's like, Hey, these leads suck and they just kind of blame each other for the part. can you kind of like speak to that a little bit or what? What you've seen and something like 

Jason: that. So it's a huge, you know, for not every business, but for a lot of businesses, a big problem. partly because of what you just explained, right?

There was no communication. And so marketing be like, come up with some crazy, awesome idea in their mind about how we're going to promote this product is this, you know, service. We're going to do this amazing campaign, but they don't get the input from sales, right? So they don't say, Hey, sales, what's the biggest problems when you talk to customers that they have, what are the typical solutions that you're [00:04:00] talking about?

Right. What seems to be their emotional sort of buy in and so they feel neglected the sales team to say, Hey, like, we're the ones actually talking to the customers. Like you, the marketing folks are just, let's say that they're not doing their job, but they're doing it a little bit blind sided and well, right, they don't see the whole picture.

So they're not talking to the 

Paden: market, right, 

Jason: exactly. And so sometimes that's a factor, you know, and the way to do that is where I've seen just simple, like get people to talk, you know, and forget ego and all these other things and just say, Hey, we're. We're here for the greater good to, to grow this business and to sell things.

Right. And so the better do that, we need to really work collaboratively as a team. But I think that, you know, once you have that in place, Paytm, the other thing you really need to have is some type of CRM system where you could connect the marketing efforts, meaning your inbound stuff, right? Your, your social media, your AdWords, the trade shows you're going to, uh, anything you're doing direct mail, all that can funnel into your CRM in a way.[00:05:00] 

Where you know exactly where those leads are coming from, but then the sales team is also using the exact same CRM to do what they do. And now you have, if anybody's listening, they don't see me putting my hands together, but now you're bridging the gap, you know, putting everything together so that you can actually see, know, very concurrently.

Okay, this is generating a lot of leads, but it's really not generating high quality leads and it's not the fault of the sales team because the sales team is saying, hey. We're calling these people. The phone number is bad. The email address is bad. They're not returning a call. We don't even get one conversation with them.

So clearly there's something going on with the marketing side with the targeting and it's not really working. And so those are the two fundamental things that we know. For sure. Can make a big impact. 

Paden: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, and, and all of that, you know, all of that you talked through through sales and marketing and everything you talked about there, it's like, it's really taken, it's just taking all of that to a higher level of intentionality and a [00:06:00] higher level of, I don't know, just professionalism, right?

It's like, Hey, you know, if we, we want to grow this bigger and better business. We got to implement all these processes right and implement all this structure that it's going to allow us to do this efficiently and not and, and, you know, entrepreneurs in their first few years or whatever you hear, you know, you hear people talking about stuff even in this, you know, granular and detail of all this stuff we need to track like it, you know, can kind of blow their minds.

Jason: Oh, absolutely. And I think that's, you know, a great point is that while this might sound very technical, I think kind of starting just at the basic level, You know, for your audience, you know, my definition, because I'm in the world of CRM people, like, well, what is, what is that? Right? They're like, oh, I have, cons MailChimp.

That's a CRM. That's not a CRM. Right? and so they, so to me, a definition of a CRM is that it's going to be a place to store your leads. Your current customers, your past customers, even potentially vendors and strategic partners in an organized [00:07:00] way that's segmentable so you could actually find those people and be able to communicate to them with different messaging.

The second part is it's going to have an outbound email marketing component built in. So you could actually see what is happening with the leads that are in the CRM, who's opening up emails, who's visiting the websites, there's website tracking in there. so there's a way to build almost like this history, if you will, if you visualize like a timeline of events.

What is that person doing? And the third piece that's critical is sales functionality, right? Having like a pipeline to manage your dashboard, having a place for tasks to, to exist for the sales team, to follow up with people, having reporting to know, okay, how long does it take to win business, to lose the business?

Where are we at? What's our projected revenue? If you don't have those three components, you really don't have a true CRM. Now, the thing I'll add to that, because I know there's different size businesses listening today. You might have like an ERP system, like [00:08:00] if you're a bigger company, you might have a Salesforce or like a NetSuite.

If you're a smaller company, you might be using like Google Sheets or you might be using like Pipedrive or something like that, or you might even having a quoting tool like QuickBooks, right, to do quotes. And then you might be using like MailChimp to do your email marketing, you might be using like Countly to book your calls.

And so you have like all these different technology, but nothing's talking together. And so it's not to say that you can't use those different pieces of technology. But there are ways to bridge the gap and put them together in a efficient way to make that data more effective. And not only that, Peyton, another thing too, which the audience might kind of, a trigger might go off as I say this.

When we talk to prospective clients, we ask them to outline, what does a typical day look like when you're, when you're dealing with like your sales and your marketing? And we sort of roadmap that and just write it down on a paper, if you will. And what we find is a lot of people are spending a lot of time doing double data entry.

They're exporting things from [00:09:00] one place, importing to another place. The next thing you know, you're spending 5, 10, 15 hours a week manually doing things that could be automated. And now you can free up that person to do more important things for your business, actually say something else, right? Um, then just kind of pushing paper, if you will.

So it's not only about making your sales process more efficient, it's about making the business more efficient as well. 

Paden: Yeah. you know, I've gone through a lot of this type of stuff and we've done a lot of like CRM work and stuff internally. 

it can just be, yeah, I mean, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to think through all that and all the different tools, you know, there's like unlimited tools out there.

Oh, 

Jason: yeah. Tens of thousands. Yeah, and Oxford 

Paden: jumps on one. Plays with a little bit and, you know, and then moves on to the next thing or, and it's, it's often, I think people, yeah, just, there's so much confusion and stuff going on the market around all that kind of stuff that you just don't even know where to go or where to begin or even, 

Jason: yeah, it's just a great way.

And I'm glad you [00:10:00] mentioned that. If you go to after the lead. com, which we'll talk a little bit more, but that's a place where we have a ton of resources. One of the resources we have there, which is a free download is we call it the ultimate CRM research guide. It sounds a little, maybe cheesy, but, we say it that way specifically because it's not comparing any specific software, it's saying.

To your point, here are the things you need to do before you even look at the shiny object. Before you go do a free demo or you sign up for a free trial of HubSpot or whatever you're doing. Before you do any of that, this playbook outlines all of the critical steps, identifying the business goals, the sales goals, the marketing goals.

You know, what are the problems that you're identifying with the business? Who's going to use the technology on your team? Right. What kind of reporting do you need? Who's going to train us on how to use the technology, right? And so the, what we find is that a lot of people are to your point, downloading free software, trying something for free, signing up as it's only a hundred bucks a month.

And like, who [00:11:00] cares if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but they're not going into it with a strategic plan. They just, you know, it's like the kid in the candy store. Oh, mom, that looks great. Hey dad, can I get that lollipop? Right. It was so shiny and bright and colorful. But you may not even like the flavor of the lollipop, you know, so it's not necessarily going to actually help your business if you don't know why you're even trying to use that tool at all. So that's a great, we'll talk more about other things we have to give away at the end of the show, but that for sure, is perfectly to what you were talking about.

It'll eliminate all that confusion and give you some focus. 

Paden: Yeah. Yeah. And that's great. And, and once again, it's just, you know, like everything, it's, it's making a plan, being intentional about everything doing and not, you know, not just being emotional and grabbing stuff and trying to solve problems for us there.

Yeah. 

Jason: And not getting software because your best buddy, you know, who owns another company. That has, it's totally Salesforce and you go spend 80, 000 on Salesforce. And you're like, what am [00:12:00] I doing? Like, this is like, I 

Paden: just needed to track my clients. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Paden: so, you know, uh, you know, turn the conversation to you a little bit more, Jason, like, so you said, uh, you had kind of grown a business and sold 

that.

Tell us, tell us a little bit about that. 

Jason: Yeah. So, I mean, the experience I had, you know, starting that first company was. The, the reflection I have now is that I was learning as I went, you know, I didn't know. And back then it was completely different. You know, there's obviously way more resources today than there was, you know, 25 years ago roughly.

But, I didn't know there were business coaches out there. I didn't know there were sales trainers and sales coaches. I didn't know there were all these different people that can help me, you know, figure things out a lot faster pace than it took me to figure it out on my own. You know, so that was like the, sort of like the biggest lesson.

If I reflect back of like, wow, and I eventually did hire all those types of people and brought in experts to help with the business. But that wasn't until a few years later that I did that. So if I had [00:13:00] done that in the beginning, you know, I could have definitely fast forwarded, you know, the success of the business quicker.

Right. Having all of those people that have done it before they failed before they've learned. and so I think that's really, you know, kind of paramount. the other thing I will say to you just in terms of now, this being my second business, as even being a marketer, I think that if you are very sort of, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but if you're very generic in how you describe what you do and who you can do it for.

It's going to be virtually impossible to market yourself. And so, you know, even with like, you know, the CPA work you do paid in and, and truth be told, I don't know exactly about your clients, but like I've met marketing agencies who say, well, we do advertising for anybody. And then I felt, you know, advertising needs to say, we only help.

Construction companies that specifically do painting, right? And it's like, well, we only help dentists that only do like this type of work, right? And when you get super narrow niched and [00:14:00] not to say you have to only have one niche, right? You could have, you could help contractors, you could help plumbers, you could help all these different people, but you have specific niches.

It allows you to be a lot more effective in your marketing and to stand out and to have a very clear, direct message. You know, to that audience. And so that would be, I think, another lesson to having worked with literally hundreds of companies over the last 25 years is the ones that really struggle and don't see results can really focus in on, you know, who they want to help and how they're going to help them.

And they're just like, Hey, I'll work with anybody, you know? And I think the model, the mode of working with anybody is extremely, extremely difficult to be successful. Let's say you can't be. It's, it's much, much harder. 

Paden: Yeah, that's, uh, that's some great, you know, great couple of points to you there, the first one, you know, talking about in your first business and asking for help, right.

Or, or, you know, realizing there's other resources out there besides, you know, you, same here, right? You know, I started my business over 10 years ago and [00:15:00] I would say the first 6 or 7, I just basically ran everything in isolation. And, you know, I read a lot and do a lot of podcasts and stuff like that. So I was learning information, but like, it's amazing when you actually start connecting with people and opening it up and realizing people as the resources help, I could build my business so much faster now, you know what you, I think every entrepreneur that's had some level of success and built their business can always look back and like, man, I wasted so much time.

And, you know, if I knew what I know now, I can do it. and then the other point you talked about. You know, as a marketer, and niche marketing, right. I agree. Right. Like if, you know, so I'm in the tax world and, you just say, Hey, we prep taxes for people.

Okay. It's great. Like, but, but you're right. Like there's nothing that differentiates you. There's nothing that makes you stand out. It was like, there's nothing different between you and the 10, 000 other people out there. And your messaging is exactly the same. So like, why would anybody care to listen to anything you have to say?

Right. [00:16:00] And, that's a really bad thing in my industry is if you know anything about the CPA. Firm industry is that, everybody is generalist, but the vast majority of people are generalists and they do taxes for literally anybody and everybody. And so they, uh, you know, they get all their work bottlenecked and in three months, and they do all this work and all these different industries for all these different people.

And it, really just focuses on compliance work and there's really no strategic, valuable work going on there other than putting numbers and papers and, and, and filing the taxes. and that's been a huge development in me and my business of, man, we can do this a whole lot better and actually add strategy and advice and planning So, but once I found that and found that messaging around tax planning. the marketing really starts to work. 
 

Jason: absolutely. Because at the end of the day, right? Anybody, you know, out there that's selling something is solving a problem, right? Even like Amazon, right? So like Amazon's got like, you know, gazillion products, right?

[00:17:00] And like, you're like looking for something specific. Like I need this, I need that. Or I like, this is why I need a new pair of shoes because my shoes ripped. So you have a problem, you're looking for a solution and like. They need to be waterproof. They need to be whatever. Right. And so, product advertising is sort of like no different.

And sometimes it's, it's simple, right? Because you know, exactly what you need to find something. Um, that you can, you could, find to get that solution. and I think it's really come a long way and people now are even being so specific, like even for example, for my business, We don't work with every CRM that's out there.

Like you say, there's tens of thousands of them. There's no way we could be a proficient and experts in all of them. So we're really good at HubSpot. We're good at a product called Sharpspring. There's a new tool with constant contact that's out there and some, you know, things like Clavio and email marketing tools.

And so if you search, let's say Sharpspring consultant, we're at the top of the page and we're, we get a lot of leads that way because we're like the only ones in the world, quite frankly, that are maybe us and two other people that are at the level we're at in terms of this one particular [00:18:00] tool.

And so. We're able to sort of dominate, right, that market because of our, you've had 15 years of experience using this tool, and so we get clients from all around the world. now that being said, people are smart, they're savvy, right? So, you know, you're going online and you're not searching for like, I need a painter for my house.

It's like, I have like a textured ceiling and I'm looking for somebody that, you know, has experience in, in. Creating a smooth ceiling and then repainting it, right? And then you might find like articles or blog posts or whatever on a painter's website that like shows examples and Testimonials about that specific thing.

And so, you know, that's where it's and now with AI, it's just only gonna get more More sophisticated, you know, to be able to do that. 

Paden: Oh yeah. It's gonna get so much more niche and more sophisticated. Right. And, and the ability to create a blog post instantaneously, uh, with good information is, uh, you know, it's kind of, you 

Jason: are already right.

I [00:19:00] mean, But, uh, you know, I think there's still that human element where. You kind of have to have your input on it and when I, talk to people about AI that really haven't used it, 

 And they're like, holy cow.

Like I didn't know, like I've heard about it, but I didn't know it could do this. You know, it's like, it's like their mind just melts in front of you, you know? 

Paden: And it's, it's amazing. You know, I really started playing with some of those tools. I don't know, a year and a half ago, two years ago. Um, and yeah, you know, first interactions with AI, you're like, Oh my God.

And, um, the, the applications are literally endless. Um, but it is interesting, you know, when I, you know, I first see the tool, I'm like all excited or whatever and looking around and man, it takes humanity a long time to actually start implementing tools. Um, you know, that is such a game changing tool and you see businesses really starting to invest and, and, and use AI and lots of different tools, but it still seems to take, you know, 5 to 10 years for the, you know, the, the average person to be like using that stuff in their daily [00:20:00] lives.

it's kind of interesting, you know, we found a lot of different ways to, to, to use it really in our, you know, in our industry, which is research and, 

It's basically replaced Google for me,

Jason: So one thing I've been playing with is specifically, let's say, chat. GBT is so you need to teach it, right? You need to like, it needs to understand like who you are, what you know, what you're all about.

And so one thing, there's a couple of things I would recommend. One is. Build like a persona for yourself, right? Like these are like my hobbies. These are my personal interests. This is my, my title. This is the company I work for. This is what we do, you know, maybe like, and then you can say like, you know, how we're different than our competitors, or if you could ask it to do that.

Right. Um, and so you build this profile and you save it. Right. And so it's, it's saved in there and then you do the exact same thing for the company. Right. This is what the company is all about. Right. and what, what's interesting that I've started experimenting with. Is if you don't use neuro strategy, which is all about, you know, neuroscience and about the way people think.

And, and, sort of influencing, not only influencing a decision, [00:21:00] but using specific words in the order of words to get them sort of take action or take notice. And so. When you tell it to do those things and to use those frameworks and I just did this the other day, which I thought was kind of interesting.

We had a situation where we were about to bring on a client and, you know, there was something that they were a little like unhappy with. So, like, obviously, I was trying to make things right. And I had a pretty well written email, but out of curiosity, I said, Hey, Chachabit, take what you know about us and about me and sort of the neural strategy we use that you've already saved.

And I wrote the whole, you know, maybe like a paragraph long of the situation with this particular prospective client, why they were unhappy. What we were doing to, make them happy. And I said, you know, how would you save this deal? Basically is what I said. And I wrote back to some amazing email, like, granted I had to tweak it, but I wrote back this amazing email, which I was like, Holy cow.

I was like, this is an interesting perspective. Like I want to have gone that way, you know, because [00:22:00] I said, these are the concerns they have. And so it addressed those concerns in the email in a very thoughtful, articulate way. and needless to say, I sent that email within like an hour. I said, okay, let's, try to work this out.

And, you know, we got on a call and things are moving forward, you know? And so that could be something too, where people may not be thinking about that. Right. We talked before about how salespeople give up or they get frustrated. Well, if you have good notes and you really paying attention and listening to, to people that you're talking to and trying to sell to, chat should be, that could be a good tool to help you kind of navigate, you know, not say you're going to use it for every.

Communication, but, 

Paden: you 

know, 

Jason: if you're in a pinch, it might be something at least getting some ideas from, 

Paden: yeah. And, I mean, it's not going away guys, uh, your ability to be able to prompt and work with AI is going to be a major skill, uh, especially in the near future. So you better start playing with it, you know, and the interesting thing enough is, you know, I've kind of built through my social [00:23:00] media and kind of podcasting and kind of a personal brand and what, that chat GPT, GPT and, and perplexity and whatever, they know a lot about me just from all my content I've put out.

It's amazing is, if you put out enough stuff out there on the internet, ask it, who's Peyton Squires. The in depth knowledge there is pretty insane. 

Jason: And that's the other thing too, just not to kind of hone in on this. We can move off the topic, but people should know if they don't know when you use a tool like chat, GBT, everything you put in there, it's all public sort of knowledge, right?

Public index, right? So like if you put anything proprietary about your business or about something you don't want anybody to know in the world, I don't use chat GBT because like it's going to be out there for the public consumption, you know, so it is. That's something that not maybe everybody knows, and I just thought it'd be important to say 

Paden: that.

Yeah, no, yeah, that's, that's important, important piece to drop there. Yeah. Right. So, you know, turning, turning back to you again, Jason, I guess a question I like to ask people is just, so leadership, right? You know, you built a business, sold [00:24:00] one, CEO of another business.

has your leadership Style developed or changed. what have you kind of learned as a leader through? 

Jason: Well, I think patience is like a, is certainly one thing, to also know that you could have the best people on your team, but they're not going to do things the way you would exactly do it.

Doesn't mean they're doing it incorrectly. It's just, you know, they have their own, their own style of doing things. 

so that's something that's really important, I think, to, to recognize. and then also, you know, it's about. working with clear expectations. So what I mean by that is I'm the type of, you know, business owner where I'm going to get back to everybody the same day, you know, I work nine to five, but if it's, you know, you know, something important comes through and I wasn't able to get to that email at six o'clock, six 30, I'll still respond.

otherwise we'll wait till the next morning, but I'm always getting back to people. And one thing that I always stress with my team is that generally people start talking to me first before they meet [00:25:00] the rest of the team, right? So I'm handling all the business development for Cultivize.

And so I said, listen, I said, people are used to and accustomed to this, of reactive conversation, meaning, you know, it's not being days where I'm getting back to them, which I can't stand when people do to me. And so. tell the team, I was like, listen, you have to get back to people the same day, it's just important because then, you know, they think, okay, well, Jason's always getting back to me right away.

Why is it taking you, you know, potentially a few days to get back to me. And so that's something that when we bring new people on, we're always telling them we're a small team of six paid. And so we're not like this huge company, but, you know, anytime we bring new people on, I would say, listen, we have to have clear expectations, you know, and if you're doing other things, right, because we do work with some freelancers.

that's okay, but I need to know like if, hey, if you're going to be on vacation, you're have this big project coming up and you're not going to be available. I need to know these things so I can manage expectations with the client or with myself. And so know, a couple of big lessons that, have come through just in working with other people, over the years.[00:26:00] 

Paden: Yeah. Yeah. You talk about managing expectations, right? Like all. human sadness or whatever comes from like miss expectations. Right? you talk about expectations internally with your employees or expectations with customers, you know, externally. We've actually started through our new sales process, a kickoff call when we bring on a new client and our kind of new planning system is that that whole kickoff call is just expectations that I mean, we're, we're asking the client some, some basic questions, but the whole, I mean, a big part of it is like, Hey, we're going to do a job for you, but we need your help to be able to do that job.

And here's how we communicate. And here's what like. just 100 percent what to expect from us and what we expect from you. Um, and that way everybody's clear. Right. And, it really sets the X, you know, a clear, vision of how the relationship and partnerships supposed to work. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Paden: And I think high quality people really appreciate that too. 

Jason: Yeah. Well, it shows you're organized too, right? And that you're [00:27:00] not, you know, I think that's the big, big factor is that you're, a planner, right?

You're not just sort of like shooting from the hip because who wants to work with somebody that's going to shoot from the hip? You know, 

Paden: yeah, not in my industry, 

Jason: not in your industry though. 

Paden: So, uh, one last question here for you, Jason. if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice when you were younger, say, say you're starting your first business, what would that piece of advice be?

Jason: Um, I think it would be kind of what I talked about earlier, actually to niche, right? Niche, niche into something specific, you know, that first company I had. There was nothing niche about it at all. Nothing unique about us at all. The only thing that you could say that was niche is that, you know, all of our customers were in the tri state New York area.

But that's like, I mean, that's not niche. But that was like, that's sort of the only similarity in that 90 percent were service based businesses, but that's millions of companies that are potential prospects. So that would be the one thing I would have looked at because listen, I came from the agency world.

So like my mentality was like, Oh, like I'm doing work [00:28:00] for, all these other companies have nothing to do with each other, completely different industries, different markets, different verticals.

And so like my mentality was, okay, I'm going to build my little boutique company. The same way the agency model works, I'll do everything for everybody, you know, because that's what the agencies do. And so that would be the one thing I would certainly change. 

Paden: Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, that's, that's great advice.

Um, it, and, and I think what keeps people from doing stuff like that is really just like scarcity, right? Scarcity mindset. You know, when you're starting out, right? you're just trying to make money. You're afraid to tell anybody know about anything. Um, and you're not clear of, what you're even doing or what you want to do.

Right. And so you end up in all kinds of projects and stuff that probably, you know, you're beating your head against the wall or they're not, some of them maybe even turn out not to be profitable because it's like, not even like you had to figure out how to do all this stuff because it's not in the wheelhouse.

Right. Um, and, and most importantly, it's like. When you niche down and get really good at, you know, this one specific thing, [00:29:00] you can add a ton of value to the right customer, right? If you can find that right customer, you can add, you know, 10x the value because you are so good and efficient at solving this one problem.

and you can charge 10 times more or whatever, as instead of being this person that solves the same problem everybody else solves, and it's not that valuable of a problem to solve. 

Jason: And think about it even like wherever you're living and listening, you know, the local restaurants in your neighborhood, you know, you probably, you remember the ones that are specific.

Hey, they have amazing dumplings at this place and they have like 10 things on the menu, but the food's amazing. Versus like. the diner that's got a thousand items and the food's just okay. Right. That's not as memorable. And so, yeah, like a 

Paden: restaurant that has this one item, like, Oh, that's the wings place or that brings in all the business.

Right. 

Jason: Exactly. And that's what they're known for. and quite frankly, I personally don't like going to restaurants that have been a huge menu because to me it's like, okay, they don't have a really. Found their niche of what they're really good at, you know, so I'd much rather go [00:30:00] to a, even, even a specific cuisine.

Like I'll go into, not that I go to these places, but always like strikes me as weird as like, you go into an Italian restaurant, but then they have like cheeseburgers on the menu. It's like, wait a second. Yeah. Right. Right. Like, okay, fine. It's on the kid's menu, but it shouldn't be on the adult menu. You know, like, we're like Mexican food at an Italian restaurant.

You're like, what's going on, you know? 

Paden: you're right. And weirdly enough, you know, I evaluate businesses and stuff like, you know, when I walk into them and kind of in my head and like, yeah, same thing. I, same thing. When I walk into a restaurant, it has a ton of stuff on the menu. I'm like. There's no way this place is like profitable.

There's just no way. It's like, you can't do all this. Like you think from an inventory standpoint, like at restaurants, one of the toughest businesses to be in to even begin to make money. And not only 

Jason: that, but you got to start questioning, like, how's the quality of the food and like, if they have to have so many things on the menu, and if it's not that busy, especially, it's like, yeah, then it's like, how long is that stuff 

Paden: set in the freezer?

So Jason man, this has been an amazing conversation. what's the best way people can kind of connect with you? Get to know more about you, 

Jason: So [00:31:00] I'm on social media.

You can find me there, uh, Jason Kramer. But easiest way is to go to after the lead. com. That's after the lead, uh, all my socials there, you can get in touch with me. like I said, we have tons of resources. Another thing we didn't really talk about, I just built a new tool, called profit path, which is on that landing page as well.

After the lead profit path is to help these really smaller sort of startup businesses get on the right track. So it's a interconnected Google sheets to keep track of your leads, your contacts, your, your sales pipeline. It's got some really cool reporting in there. And then for your audience paid in, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to give them, it's only.

200 bucks. It's like a lifetime, you know, thing. There's no subscription. There's no monthly fee, no annual fee. and with it comes coaching from me personally. So for a year, you're going to get free coaching every month on actually how to not only use this tool, but also the things we're talking about today, like giving my advice about just business in general, about marketing, you know, high level, [00:32:00] all these things.

but if you're an audience, I'm going to create a coupon code. You can use BTS. So it's B T S, uh, to save 50. So for 150 bucks, you're going to get a tool. That's took me several months to build. That's pretty complicated in terms of the way it's built, but it's super, super easy, takes five minutes to set up and 10 minutes to start using.

If that, to put everything in there. So after the lead. com is where I would go to find me and all those great resources. 

Paden: Yeah, that's awesome, Jason. I appreciate it. Uh, listeners definitely check that out, you know. CRM system there. It sounds like he's got some pretty cool tools and coaching, right?

Coming out of it. So you need some marketing help. definitely check out Jason at after the lead. com. 

Jason: Thanks Jason. Anything else you want to leave, uh, the listeners? just to say, for wherever you are, whatever time you're listening, enjoy the rest of your day, keep positive and, uh, and try to be.

practical in the way you're trying to niche your business. I think that's something that, you know, I think we both agree on can be a huge pivotal change. [00:33:00] Yes, it's scary, but if it's done with focus, it can really be a very pivotal to, to changing things in a very positive way. 

Paden: Yup. Absolutely.

Listeners we'll catch you next time.

Speaker: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate, review, and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people as we're trying to accomplish our goal of help creating more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs. You can follow us on social media by searching for me, Payton Squires, or going to padensquires.com. On the website and social media, we're always sharing tips of personal growth, and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks guys.