Your Virtual Sales Assistant (Episode 10)

Harris gives an update on Intro CRM. Spoiler alert: It’s big. Hear more about Intro CRM’s evolution into offering sales done for your platform.

⚠️ Please note: This is an old episode of the Pipeline Meeting podcast. In August 2022, the show relaunched in a new format. For the most recent episodes, please visit the podcast page. 

Show Notes

Show Description

Pipeline Meeting is a sales podcast for founders and sales leaders. If you are looking for actionable steps to close high-ticket deals, you’re in the right place. Tune in for help with things like cold outreach and qualifying inbound leads. We regularly feature guests and experts to take our business to the next level. Pipeline Meeting is hosted by Harris Kenny, the founder of Intro, a company that provides sales as a service.

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Episode Overview

Harris Kenny: (00:20)
Hey there, it’s been a little while. And a lot has changed since you last heard from me. There’s too much to cover in a single episode of this, but I want to give you a quick overview of what I’m going to talk about today. I’ve been hiring new people. The team has grown pretty significantly. We’ve been bringing on new customers. And both of those things are driven by the main change, which is that we have expanded what Intro CRM does for people and this new combination, uh, I really think, is solving a need in the market. I think people really are interested and I’m going to tell you more about it because, uh, I it’s been a revelation honestly. And the interest in it has been very high and the delivery of it has been going really well. So let me start there.

Introducing Concierge Services

Harris Kenny: (01:13)
Over the last six weeks, I’ve been rolling out concierge services for Intro CRM customers. And I want to take a step back and tell you about the Genesis of this idea, because it’s important to understand where I started with this and where it is right now. When I started this project, you know, I’ve been working with founders and entrepreneurs for nearly two years now, and I noticed that they didn’t keep up with their sales tools. I thought the problem was the complexity of sales tools like HubSpot and Salesforce. So I went to build a simple one.

Harris Kenny: (01:51)
I’ve had over a hundred people go through and use just the software product. And there were some people who I really thought would use it. And didn’t, and it made me question a lot of assumptions I had made, including the biggest one, which is that I’m not sure if people actually wanted another CRM option. I don’t think so.

Harris Kenny: (02:09)
I think the problem is that they don’t want to do the sales work at all. Or they did, but they didn’t know how. There was something that wasn’t working in the testing and yes, the product needs a lot of work. But my gut was just saying that there was something I was missing in parallel. I was noticing that there was a lot more interest in the coaching side of Intro CRM, where you get the software, but it comes with coaching, helping you think through what to do with sales, even though it was much more expensive, 10 times more expensive than just a software seat license.

Moving Past Empty SaaS

Harris Kenny: (02:42)
Building on these concepts of, you know, empty SaaS, which I’m going to link to a blog post that I wrote with Randalyn, who’s been helping me with copywriting. There’s a few concepts in there that I want to expand on more in the blog post that I’m going to talk about here.

Harris Kenny: (03:00)
But the idea is basically empty SaaS—that Tyler Tringas at Earnest Capital talks about, which is that when you buy a software product, a software as a service product, and you log in and it’s empty, all the work is on you as a user to get value out of that tool. And this idea of “done for you” products, um, where, you know, the company actually helps you get that job done, applying that to sales. Which is to say concierge services that help you do sales, literally help you find new leads, literally help you qualify leads, literally help you generate proposals. That’s what we’ve been delivering on. And it’s been going very well. The pilot projects, customers have been really happy with the results.

Harris Kenny: (03:43)
Uh, I’ve been able to scale up. I’ve got four contractors that I’ve brought on to help me that are now part of the team. If you go to introcrm.com/about, you can see the team there and they’ve been doing really good work. Good work with minimal guidance and frankly, minimal operating procedures, documentation, anything like that, because we were just very in the beginning here, I mean, this is as inefficient as it could possibly be without any structure or set up and it’s been going really well. So that is the direction that I’m taking this product. I think it’s a continuation of our goal in the first place, which is a simple CRM and the simplest CRM is the one that does the work for you. I think that tracking deals and closing deals is vitally important for starting and growing a business. And I’m really happy about the direction that this is going.

Harris Kenny: (04:39)
So if you are interested in learning more about this, feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on Twitter @harriskenny. You can also visit introcrm.com. I’m starting to roll out the new messaging there. I I’ve got a lot of work to do. We’ve been very busy getting the company repositioned to deliver on this promise and it’s been going well. I am really curious to hear what you think. If you’ve been following this podcast, you’ve been following this journey and there’s a lot that’s changed really since I started working on this, but fundamentally I think I’m solving the same problem. I just think I’m solving it better than ever. And the CRM is going to continue to be part of what we’re doing. And that is the tool that we’re looking to build out in the long run—and integrate these services more deeply into the tool.

Slack Integration

Harris Kenny: (05:30)
But at the same time, we’re also recognizing that customers have other places that they prefer to work. So I shipped a Slack integration that allows people to interact with us using Slack connect, which is shared channels between organizations. We create tickets for jobs based on that and generate those deliverables that, uh, that Intro CRM customers need. Uh, anyway, I’m going to go into a lot more detail, but I wanted to just get this out there. I wanted highlight that blog post, you can read a little more detail on the site, find that in the show notes below, and I’m going to be updating you with a lot more information as quickly as I’m able, because I’m juggling a lot right now. Uh, as, uh, as we build this out.