[0:00] Hi and welcome to Broker Tools, where we unpack the tools, systems, and strategies that help brokers optimize the way they work. In this episode of How to Use Software, we're catching up with Ben from Motii. If you have been wondering if Pipedrive is the right CRM for your broker business, this episode might be for you. Welcome to the pod, Ben.
[0:20] Cheers, Katey. Thank you very much for having me here. Looking forward to having a chat today.
[0:27] Yeah. I like to do a little background on things. Motii isn't the software. You are actually a CRM and automations implementation specialist. Would that be correct?
[0:40] Yeah. So Motii is a digital agency, right? We're a technical agency. We don't do any creative or copy, but we implement CRMs like Pipedrive and Monday, project management tools, help desk tools like Intercom, digital signing tools like PandaDoc, and a few other ancillary tools. Another good example is CloudTalk from a telephony perspective. We're experts in all of those software tools and we help businesses set up the best tech stack for their business and their industry.
[1:13] Nice. You mentioned a few tools, but when it comes to the CRM side of things, you are mostly Pipedrive and Monday. Is that right?
[1:25] Yeah, Pipedrive and Monday mainly on that side. We've been a Pipedrive partner since 2017, so nine years now. We've been Pipedrive global partner of the year. There are more than 500 Pipedrive partners worldwide and we were number one, and we're a four or five time regional partner of the year. We're also an award-winning Monday partner, a JustCall partner, a CloudTalk partner. But on the CRM side, we concentrate on Monday and Pipedrive. Those two CRMs are very different, which is why we do both of them. Horses for courses when it comes to CRM. And in the finance broking industry, it's very much Pipedrive that is the recommendation, for a number of reasons which we'll get into as we go deeper into today's call.
[2:16] For sure. One of the things I've always struggled with when I try to talk about software is that a lot of software says "we are a CRM", but as you pointed out, Monday does CRM one way and Pipedrive does it another.
[2:33] Yeah. Pipedrive is a pure sales CRM. Everything they design around the software is about making it as easy to use as possible, with a heavy focus on sales. Monday is predominantly a project management tool, but it has a CRM aspect to it, and that CRM is set up in a similar fashion to the project management tool. The project management tool came first, the CRM came second. If you have a heavy emphasis on project management or post-sales administration, or you need Monday rolled out through the business (HR, different departments, finance and so on), then the Monday CRM is probably for you. But for your average finance broker, Pipedrive is the right choice. It has a heavy focus on sales, communication, building relationships and managing dates. If you think about what finance brokers do, they manage relationships, and there are dates and targets: settlement dates, unconditional dates, finance dates, sunset clauses, everything they work towards or have to be aware of and record. So when it comes to managing relationships and dates, if that's your business, generally Pipedrive is the recommendation we'll make. Of course there are exceptions, but that's the general rule.
[3:54] Yeah. The way I like to explain the differences is jobs to be done. If you're sales-heavy focused, then Pipedrive is for you. A lead comes in, you're trying to track the journey and the life of the lead, and most of the time that's conversational: what email has been sent, what document has been collected, how it relates to this opportunity, and being able to gather it to the opportunity. Whereas with Monday, it's more project management: we've already got the opportunity and these are the tasks to be done associated with it.
[4:38] Exactly. Take Motii as an example of a business that uses both Pipedrive and Monday. We do all of our sales in Pipedrive, and then when the client signs off on the proposal, that automatically creates the job and the tasks inside Monday, where our implementation team and project management team take over. That's a really good example of where there should be a delineation between the two products and the different tasks they fulfil within the industry.
[5:10] I think it's easier to visualise this than to speak about it. Are you happy to walk through what you would take a finance broker through?
[5:23] Yeah, sure. Let's look at two things today, Katey. One, I think it's really important for people to see a tech stack diagram, to understand what is plugged into what, and why, and how. Then we can look inside Pipedrive and see the typical setup for a finance broker: what the automations look like, what the pipelines look like, what a referral pipeline might look like, custom fields. We can also talk about some of Pipedrive's native features, like the email sync, which is absolutely A-grade whether it's Gmail or Outlook, and the advantage that brings. And also telephony integration. These days it's super important to be able to send SMS, make phone calls, have the call automatically recorded, and have the transcription and summary automatically pop into the system. We'll cover all of that today. Do you want me to start with the tech stack diagram or jump into Pipedrive first?
[6:30] I think the tech stack diagram is always good. Are you using a Miro board? I love a Miro board.
[6:37] I am using a Miro board. I wouldn't use anything else. It's my favourite piece of software. It's the best way to explain things sometimes. 100%. I've got no idea how I survived without it before. And I've got no idea how I survived without the AI notetakers that are now in every meeting I do, being my faithful assistant recording everything I forget and summarising it, doing all that work I used to try to jot down on notes and bits of paper and frantically scramble to write during the call. So, let's dive in and have a look.
[7:13] Okay, so what you're looking at here is a typical tech stack diagram for a finance broker in Australia. We've got a website up here, Brightpath Finance for example. I can see they're using WordPress, which is probably the most common CMS, and Gravity Forms, which is the most common form builder, at least for WordPress sites. If someone goes to the website and fills out a basic form, or even a more complex form that captures a whole bunch of information about what they're looking for the loan for, whether it's mortgage or asset finance, whatever you do, that immediately creates a deal inside Pipedrive. This is an applications pipeline; it would immediately create a deal over here in the Lead-In stage. That's the first connection: your website straight into Pipedrive. Nobody needs to double handle anything. While we're talking about the website, you can see Calendly here. Calendly is a booking tool integrated with your Outlook or Gmail calendar. You can put a Calendly widget on your website and encourage people to make a booking with you to discuss whatever you want to discuss. It allows them to control the timing of the meeting without three, four or five emails or phone calls back and forth trying to schedule a time. They go in, Thursday 2 p.m., perfect, and they're booked in. Then all the reminders, including email and SMS, are sent out automatically.
[9:00] We've got Pipedrive sitting at the centre of the tech stack diagram. For finance brokers it's nearly always Pipedrive. It just makes more sense than any other CRM. The key reasons: one is ease of use. Pipedrive is broadly considered the easiest to use of the major CRMs. And we spoke about relationships and dates before, so I'll show you a couple of things inside Pipedrive about managing relationships, particularly with referrers. That's super important for finance brokers. If you've got people who are constantly driving business to you, maybe accountants or financial advisers, you want to make sure they're looked after, that you touch base with them, that they feel the love. We'll look at managing those relationships inside Pipedrive. Over here is Office; this could easily be Google Workspace or Gmail as well. Pipedrive has a very deep two-way sync integration with Outlook and Gmail. You can send an email from Pipedrive or from Office and it will show up in the other. I'll show you that when we jump into the system. Often there's an integration to Xero. Not all the time, but Xero is ubiquitous when it comes to accounting software, and it's often plugged into Pipedrive in this manner.
[10:23] Now, I've got an example here of Finsure. Finsure uses Infynity as their CRM. I've got a bunch of other aggregators and finance industry software sitting up here: Fintelligence, Youx, Connective Mercury, Salestrekker, MyCRM by LMG, Broker Engine. You can plug any of them into Pipedrive. Instead of Finsure, we could be plugging in Salestrekker, for argument's sake. I'll use Finsure as the example. The integration for Finsure is pretty good; it allows us to do most things we'd like to do. Some of these over here are very good from an integration perspective and some are very poor. It just depends on which one you're with, and some put more effort into their integrations than others. I can see you smiling away there.
[11:24] Let's be honest, if you are a broker watching this, you know integrations are not always the best with every aggregator, but as you said, Finsure is doing well for some of the things, and you just have to work alongside what is there.
[11:44] Yeah, exactly. I've used Finsure because they're a good example. They have a lot of what we call endpoints, the ability to pick up on certain things and push certain data backwards and forwards, which is really important from an integration perspective. They constantly work on the integration, so they're what I'd term a good partner in this sense. Now, an example of what you might do, if you're wondering what the point of this integration is: in this applications pipeline, which will be pretty typical for a lot of finance brokers, we've got Lead In, Assigned, Send to Back Office, Pre-approval Docs, Quoted, Workshopping, Application Submitted, Pending Extra Docs, Unconditionally Approved, Ready for Settlement, and once it's settled, we mark it as won. When the lead first comes in, we capture as much information as we can about the person, the company, and what they're looking for the loan for: asset finance, mortgage finance, and so on. Once we've got enough information, we might push those details across to Infynity. When I move the deal across to Send to Back Office, it'll push as much information as I've captured (person name, email, phone, maybe some information about income) across to Infynity. Then as we progress the deal and enter information in Infynity, for example capturing income or partner information, we can push that back across into Pipedrive, and vice versa. The point is that it saves you double handling this information. Pipedrive is your communication tool. It's where you interact with the customer most commonly. The emails automatically come in here, you can make phone calls and send SMSs out of here. And you use Infynity or your other aggregator and back-end CRM to capture the more detailed finance questions that need to be answered for the lenders on the other side.
[14:12] Perfect. And when you say push, it means you've set up the integration automation between their API and Pipedrive.
[14:20] Exactly. So the information can flow. And again, in this example Finsure has great APIs and endpoints that can communicate back and forth. Some are only single-direction sync, so it's obviously aggregator dependent. But that's where the automations are very valuable.
[14:46] Yeah, exactly. Think about the automation as trigger and action. A trigger can be moving the deal into Send to Back Office. The action is sending the information across: name, address, phone, details around the loan, landing in the custom fields over there.
[15:20] Ultimately what you've created is: if this happens, then do this.
[15:26] Exactly. And it's configurable, so you're not locked into only one path. Some people don't have this stage; they prefer to click a button inside the system because they might not want to push across until a later stage in the pipeline. It doesn't have to be a stage. It could be a button you press in the system, or a button you press that notifies a manager to approve or review the information before sending across. There are a lot of options. Ultimately, how do you want to make it work for you?
[16:07] Exactly, within the restrictions of the finance industry software. For things like CloudTalk, Calendly, Pipedrive and Xero, there are generally no restrictions on what you can do, because they're all latest or close to latest generation software. Their APIs and endpoints work perfectly, and it's very easy for us to do exactly what the client wants. Sometimes, as we spoke about, with finance software you can do most of what you want, or sometimes a little bit of what you want, but rarely absolutely everything. That's most often because a lot of them are a generation or two of software older. It's also resources. CloudTalk, Xero, Pipedrive and Calendly are massive SaaS companies with huge numbers of developers and resources, sold worldwide. Because of the regulatory environment someone like Finsure operates in, they're limited mostly to Australia, probably (maybe they go outside Australia, I'm not sure), so they don't have the sheer client base, which means they can't invest as much as Xero or Pipedrive, which are billion-dollar or multi-billion-dollar companies.
[17:40] Yeah. And what I've also learned is that it's really about safety of data. Just because you can push and pull information, there are a lot more client protections in place, because as an aggregator you're responsible for the data you receive, and that's a level of accountability they have to protect, especially for banks.
[18:07] 100%. They operate in a much stricter regulatory environment. Obviously Pipedrive, Xero and Calendly have to adhere to something like GDPR, but the regulatory environment that Finsure and the like operate in is much tighter and much more heavily regulated. The one we haven't touched on here is CloudTalk. CloudTalk is one of a number of telephony platforms you can plug into a tool like Pipedrive. You've got JustCall, Aircall. Our preference currently is CloudTalk. We think it's one of the easier to use of the major platforms, and it's extremely AI-forward, with a lot of AI features that are super easy to use. Things like outbound voice agents, for argument's sake. This is going to be big in the finance industry in the next few years. It's not to make the initial sale, but where you're leading a customer through an application and need to capture information. Not every customer wants to jump on and fill out a form, and not every broker has time to make 30 phone calls to 30 different clients and ask 30 different questions. A little way down the track you're going to have outbound AI voice agents making phone calls; they'll most likely identify themselves as a bot (that would be our recommendation) and ask the customer questions about the application. Some things will still need a form filled out and signed, but you'll be able to have your outbound voice agent progress the application through the pipeline. I think that's a significant change that's about to happen to the industry.
[20:16] It's already happening. I've seen a few already in play. I really liked listening to one because I knew it was AI, but you could hear the little click-clack of a keyboard in the background. It was insane.
[20:31] One of the best I've heard is one of the CloudTalk off-the-shelf voice agents. We were setting something up the other day and there's a deliberate stutter that goes in to make it sound more human, more real, and it really does. As for how CloudTalk and these other platforms work inside the system: this is a demo environment, not necessarily for the finance industry. I'll click into this deal in the Quote Sent stage and go down into the person. Here's Ellen Ripley, the person. I click on the phone number and pop the dialer. This is the JustCall dialer; JustCall is one of the telephony platforms I mentioned. By clicking the phone number I could make an outbound call. I can also send a message using one of my message templates, like this overdue invoice template: "Hi first name, invoice from Motii is overdue...". This is a real template we use to chat to our customers about overdue invoices. You don't have to type it out, and you don't have to make an effort to record the phone call. The transcription comes straight into the system, the recording comes straight into the system, the summary comes into the system, even the call sentiment. It all populates automatically. If I make a phone call, I can also choose a call disposition. For example, I finish the call and want to lose the deal; maybe it didn't go well, they declined, they said they're not doing anything. If I press this button, it automatically marks the deal as lost inside Pipedrive without me doing anything else, and you can mark up any notes around the opportunity if it's lost. That one was selecting the lost reason as well as losing the deal, and you could put manual notes in as well. It's highly configurable. Overall, this is what we're looking at as the most common tech stack in the finance broking industry: your website feeding into the CRM; your CRM connected to a booking tool like Calendly; integrated with your email and calendar, whether that's Office 365 or Gmail; a telephony integration like CloudTalk to make sure everything's recorded; integration to your finance industry back end, in this case Infynity for Finsure; and your accounting platform. Obviously some businesses have other things going on, but this is the most common tech stack you'll see.
[23:33] Nice. Ultimately this is the beginning of what we call your workflow automation, because you can capture a lead from the get-go from your website or calendar booking, or even on the run. I understand Pipedrive in particular has a pretty good mobile app.
[23:57] Pipedrive has an excellent mobile app. It's one of the top-rated mobile apps for CRM in the App Store and the Play Store, so it makes it very easy to do everything on the run. It also has a really good automations engine. You mentioned automated replies, for example. If someone submits a form on your website, it creates the deal here (this Yamato Group), and we can set up an autoresponder that sends a reply email automatically without a human being involved. Often we'll delay it by, say, 5 minutes to make it feel a little more human, because if you bounce it straight back, the people on the other side know it's a robot responding. As you move the deal through the different stages of the pipeline, you can create notifications for brokers, automatically send emails to prospects, update custom fields, and set up sequences. For example, if I mark this one as lost, I could automatically enter Annabel into a lost-deal journey. That might just be automated outreach once a month, sending her our newsletter. Or if she was lost for a specific reason, maybe lack of savings, we could start an automated journey about how to quickly increase those savings, so she feels the love from us, that these guys are genuinely here to help me achieve my goals.
[25:47] Yes. And one of the other things I noticed is PandaDoc or those types of signature software. It could be a new stage, or a credit guide where something needs to be signed or confirmed. When somebody reaches a stage you can automate that as well.
[26:10] You can. I could drag PandaDoc down here, for argument's sake, and connect it. What that looks like in Pipedrive: if I come across into this demo environment and click here, you can see this PandaDoc panel. From here I can create a proposal that is automatically populated with all of this information. If I click plus Document, it opens up in PandaDoc. I choose one of my templates (let's say this proposal template), assign the signature, add one of my team who I want to stay across this proposal, and click Start Editing. It pulls all the information from Pipedrive (person name, email, phone, company name, address) and puts it straight in. Here's the front page of the proposal, "Proposal for Vanguard, prepared for Alice". It's got a little GIF running in the background to make the proposal pop and feel alive. It pulls all of the information out of Pipedrive and pushes it into that proposal template. Any questions on that PandaDoc flow?
[27:39] Yeah. And the beauty of having all of this as part of the automation is that when it gets signed, it sends a notification back into Pipedrive.
[27:49] Completely. You could automatically win the deal. Take this deal for Ellen: if Ellen signed off on a PandaDoc proposal, rather than me manually winning the deal, it can be marked as won automatically, which can set off another whole sequence of automations, notifications and emails. Maybe what I can show you is, in this finance broker account, what happens when a deal is marked as won. The settlement date automatically populates with today's date, the 10th of September. You can see these other dates too. Some are manually populated, some are automatic. Unconditionally Approved is populated automatically when the deal moves into that stage. The settlement date populates when the deal is marked as won. Off the back of that we trigger a whole bunch of automations. If I click on my automations, we've got a settlement date of the 10th of September, today. Scroll down a little and you'll see these ones: automations based on the settlement date. These are communications to our client who has settled on the property or asset. After 3 months we send an email, after 4 months another, 6 months another, then the 12-month anniversary email, then the 18-month email, then the 2-year anniversary email. All of this is automated because we know this is where brokers tend to drop the ball. They close the client, they settle, they move on to the next prospect, and that previous client gets forgotten. What you can do is build up your pipeline of happy customers who remember you and refer their friends, or maybe they've bought one property and are now in a position to buy another. If you're in contact with them, you'll be first off the rank as the broker they approach when it's time.
[30:22] Yeah. Ultimately you're trying to stay top of mind. I also call this a clawback prevention system, because usually, when you're not communicating or keeping in touch to some level, clients feel forgotten about. As humans, we don't want to be a statistical number. Though some things are a transaction, there are systems and processes we can put in place to make sure you have longevity with the client.
[30:56] Absolutely. Something as simple as the 12-month anniversary email is a really good example, because it's a significant milestone and a lot of people forget their settlement date was 12 months ago. It's often the purchase of their first house, and getting a little reminder 12 months down the track ("it's the settlement birthday", or whatever you want to call it) engenders good feelings in people. Those emails can have a significant impact on referral business and on making sure you're top of mind when they decide to buy an investment property.
[31:40] Yeah. Obviously when you're building out a workflow, it comes down to what you need in your business and how you want it to go. Setting up a pipeline, this one is one pipeline, but you can break it into different stages: if you're doing servicing, that's one pipeline; if you're doing deal processing, that's another. That way you can incrementally see how things are going, and as you're pointing to, there are automations that can be fully customised based on the triggers you want.
[32:21] Completely. And it's not only sending an email or creating a notification; you can also, like we saw, automatically update a date inside the system. You can also have required fields. If I try to move this deal to here, the system says, "Hey, you're not allowed to do that until you tell me these pieces of information." What this does for brokers, particularly larger brokers with 10, 20, 30 brokers working their leads, is address the biggest gap they have, which is data. It affects them in two ways. Data segmentation for reporting purposes: they can't get accurate reports because their brokers aren't filling out the required information. For example, here the probability estimate of 35%; if that's not filled out, it affects your forecasts. Industry (we've said Energy and Services here) allows us to run a conversion rate on how successful we are within that industry. So required fields support data segmentation for reporting, but also for marketing. Let's say we find through our reports that we're very successful in the energy and services industry. We want to create a campaign around that. The first port of call is to find all the energy and services clients we've ever sold to inside the system, and reach out to them: ask for referrals, ask for testimonials, see if they can record a two-camera video talking about their experience with us, whatever that looks like. What you need to be able to do at the click of a button is slice and dice your database into those segments and cohorts so you can get the reporting you need and do the marketing you should be doing to the areas of the database where you're having success.
[34:32] Yes, that would be a good thing to talk about, because Pipedrive has pretty good reporting dashboards as well. You can build those out so you can have a dashboard and look at how well you're doing from lead to conversion.
[34:47] I'll show you an example. In here we have the applications pipeline, where we have both asset and mortgage finance running through the same pipeline. If I only want to see my mortgage deals, I click this button and I've isolated only my mortgage deals. We have another pipeline, our referrals pipeline, where we're trying to onboard accountants and financial advisers to pass us business. The reason I'm showing this, to your point before, Katey, is that we want to report on this. It's not enough to bring someone on board as a referrer, label them that, and hope they send us business. We want to measure whether they're actually doing that and reward those who do it well. So we click on Insights in Pipedrive, which is the BI platform that lives inside Pipedrive. I'll click on my referrals dashboard. These two are a good example of how you can measure the success of the different businesses and people that provide you with referrals. We're looking at referrals provided over the last 12 months. Rolls Accounting has provided 32 referrals, Wise 11, AFPS 10, and so on. Rolls is by far our biggest provider of referrals, and Jason Abbott, who works for Rolls, has provided 29 of the 32. Down here we can see the conversion rate for those Rolls referrals: about 50%. So we know when Rolls or Jason Abbott provides a referral, we have roughly a 50% chance of closing it, and they provide about 30 a year, so two and a half per month on average. You can then run further reports. If it looks like Jason or Rolls are dropping off and we're not getting the referrals we were, we can reach out and make sure we fix whatever the reason is. Scrolling further, Rolls has provided $4.1 million worth of referrals in the last 12 months, Simply Better about $1.2 million, and so on. Being able to visualise this data, have it populate automatically, and then maybe buy Jason a trip to Bali at the end of the year or a bottle of champagne, whatever we want to do to recognise the part they've played in our success over the last 12 months.
[37:40] Nice. Speaking about the automations, because I'm aware we went off on a bit of a tangent...
[37:49] After we discussed automations initially, I'll go back to the automations area here. When Motii sets up Pipedrive for finance brokers, the most common thing we do is duplicate our demo environment template and sell them the template. Then we sell them 10 hours of customisation. It's a really cost-effective way to get up and running. You get a system fully set up with all your automations, pipelines, reports and dashboards, ready to go. You could just run with that and do it yourself if you want. That's one option. But most brokers then buy 10 hours of customisation where we work with them to customise certain things. For example, these settlement date emails that go out on the 12-month anniversary: we'll customise them so you might not run seven of them like this; you might want one every two months, with different content. We also supply the content for those emails, but we encourage you to edit them so they feel like they're coming from your business, in your language. Some of the other automations update the referral when the deal moves into the Application Submitted stage, so if the person has come through a referral, we can automatically update the referral as long as the system has that information. Another updates the submission date when the application moves into Application Submitted. This is stuff that goes on quietly in the background, keeping your system up to date, so your brokers don't have to spend hours doing busy work. They can get on with selling and not be neck deep in administration they don't enjoy.
[39:53] Yeah. And why do it if a robot can do it for you?
[39:59] Exactly. And you can always override it. For example, in our applications pipeline, let's say Ben Garrick went unconditional on the 3rd of September, a week ago, but we forgot to move him into Unconditionally Approved. So we move Ben across, and you can see some required fields. It's saying you can't move into that stage until you give us this information. The system has automatically updated the Unconditionally Approved date to the 10th, and we can go in, edit it, and change it back to the 3rd, which accurately represents when it actually occurred.
[40:54] Yeah. The key thing is that having Pipedrive gives you that history of activity. It tells you when something was sent and when it wasn't, and you can track and measure what happened over the lifetime of an opportunity, and sometimes separate what is an opportunity from a contact, because some people think of leads as people and deals as other things. If you wanted to walk through that, it would probably be helpful.
[41:34] Sure. We've been mainly focusing on this applications pipeline. Each of these cards is what we call a deal in Pipedrive; it can also be called an application, but in Pipedrive it's a deal. Take Ellen Ripley: the mortgage deal value is $1.7 million. Ellen is the person applying for the loan. The deal is the loan we're trying to get approved for Ellen. This might be the fifth loan we've got approved for Ellen, which would mean four deals previously in the system: one person, Ellen, and four previous deals. I'll find Ellen using the universal search and isolate the person. In here I can see the deals Ellen has. She's got two open deals at the moment: a $1.7 million mortgage and a $600K asset finance deal for what looks like an Isuzu truck. If I click here I can see all the deals Ellen's ever had; they're the only two, and both are open. The reason I'm showing this is that Ellen is the person. The deal here is the Ellen Ripley mortgage; the other is the Isuzu, for some type of truck or machinery. The deal is the transaction we're trying to close, in this case the application for the loan. There's a degree of separation there. A deal is not a person; a deal is a transaction.
[43:30] Yeah. Being able to record, manage and understand what's happening at the different levels of opportunity is really important.
[43:40] 100%. Making sure the hierarchical structure is correct in any CRM, not just Pipedrive (it applies to Monday, HubSpot, Salesforce, all of them), is critical. If you don't get the hierarchical structure correct when setting up the CRM, you're in for a world of pain, because it simply can't work. If you have the transaction directly tied to the person, or you don't have a person object and only have the transaction object, it's just not going to work. We spoke about relationship management before, so I'll give you a good example inside Pipedrive. We saw before that Rolls Accounting is the biggest referrer. In Pipedrive we might want to look after a list of tier one referrers: the referrers who provide maybe 50, 60, 70, 80% of our loan book. We need to look after them. If I come into this account, click on Contacts, and then Contacts Timeline, which is a unique feature inside Pipedrive, these are my tier one referrers. There are 47 people in here. I can see all the interaction I've had with them over the past few months. This red line is today, and out to the right is the future. This is September, this is August, this is July, this is June. Take Erin here: we've got a future task planned. We made a phone call to her on the 3rd of September, there was a note taken in late August, a follow-up done on the 31st of July, and a site visit on the 8th of July, amongst other things. We can see whether we're looking after these referral contacts and staying front of mind with them. Up the top I've got my cadence set to monthly, and the system's telling me that of the 47 people, I'm doing a really good job. There's only one person, Alysia, who is out of cadence; she hasn't been contacted since the 18th of June. So we should do something about that. If I'm a sales manager, I would add an activity for tomorrow and assign it to, let's say, Tom, and hit save. When Tom comes in tomorrow, I've created a phone call activity for him to contact Alysia. We talked about Pipedrive being very good at relationships and dates; this is the relationship side of things, which Pipedrive handles really well.
[46:31] Nice. And at the end of the day, the value of having a CRM, and why you implement one, is not only to track your leads and close sales opportunities, but to have that reporting data and know where future opportunities are, because the better data you collect, the more you can say, "Hey, I might sponsor a football team in my local community," because you have the data, and it's also backing another resource for marketing.
[47:08] Yeah, you can see that the lead source "football team" is highly successful, or not. You can see that in a certain industry, maybe mining, you're doing really well or not so well, and you can market to those people to take advantage of whatever inherent advantage you've got. So you've got data segmentation for marketing, data segmentation for reporting, the pipeline you run your prospects through, and all your contacts, with a focus on dates and relationships. What I want to show you now, probably the final piece of the puzzle, is this Ellen Ripley deal. Pipedrive has a record of communication section, which is the history of everything that's gone on in this deal. At the top we've got a couple of notes, some emails, some planned activities. As we scroll down, there are more notes, an attached file, an email from 14 days ago, some activities, an SMS sent on the 21st of May, and some emails sent 5 months ago. This populates automatically. So if you have a team of 10, 20, 30 brokers and one of them leaves, someone can step in, see absolutely everything that's gone on (every SMS, phone call, email, note) and pick it up and run with it seamlessly. If I click on Email, for example, and choose an email template to make this easy, this is populating from a template. If I hit send, it's actually sending from Outlook or Gmail, not from Pipedrive. It relies on the sync. When I hit send, it shows as a sent email in my Outlook sent folder. Conversely, if I send from Outlook, it shows up as a sent email here in Pipedrive. Pipedrive is just the interface you're using to send the email; it's all happening inside Outlook, and Pipedrive relies on the sync to make those emails appear where they should in both.
[49:54] Which is really handy, because that's that level of tracking and measuring, and knowing this particular email correspondence relates not only to this person but to this deal. And if you wanted to see the history without wading through so many emails, you could see the storyline.
[50:16] Yeah, 100%. If I go back and only want to isolate the emails, I only see those emails. I'm back here in August last year, and as I scroll down I'm back in June last year, and so on. There's much more to Pipedrive than what we've shown today, but for most brokers it doesn't need to be complex. The most important thing is building a nice, easy-to-use system, and Pipedrive allows you to do that. Like I said at the beginning, it's the easiest to use of the major CRMs, and Pipedrive puts that front of mind for all their designers and developers. Whenever a new feature is released, they make sure that ease of use is maintained. Nothing is ever more than two clicks away; you can find any piece of information within two clicks. At the end of the day, ease of use in a CRM or any software tool drives adoption, and adoption means clean data, better data segmentation, better reporting, better marketing. You can have the best system in the world, but if it's not easy to use, the humans aren't going to use it, and your data is no good, your marketing is no good, your reporting is no good.
[51:45] Yeah. At the end of the day, we're here for growth. Ben, if people wanted to reach out and learn more about what you offer and what the team at Motii does, how do you pronounce it? I apologise.
[51:59] That's okay. I pronounce it "Moti". Some people say "Motty". It doesn't worry me too much. You can go to moti.co and see our website; finance and payments is one of the industries we serve. You can go to the contact page and fill out the contact form, email us at hello@moti.co, or email me at ben@moti.co. The easiest thing is probably to go to the website and the contact page, or email me directly.
[52:47] Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us on this pod chat. Again, if you have questions about Pipedrive, feel free to put them in the comments below or reach out to Ben at Motii.
[52:56] Cheers. Thank you very much, and thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. You're welcome, Ben. No worries. Cheers. Bye-bye.
