Aaron Weiche  0:00  

Texting has shown overall to be where a majority people have gravitated towards for their number one communication channel. It’s where we interact with friends and family, coworkers, interest groups. It is an asynchronous conversation that’s easy to manage that we can do it anytime we don’t need a quiet place to engage and do it, we can do it while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. Some people while there’s at a red light driving their car, sitting in a meeting board, right? There’s all kinds of elements to it. And what started out as a strictly personal channel, I think just as anything in life, once we find something that’s easier and more efficient, and our behaviors change, we start to seek that ease across our life. And we start opening up those barriers. And I think the pandemic only fast forwarded, businesses were looking for more ways to connect and interact with customers that couldn’t walk through their door they couldn’t have meetings with so this offered a really personalized channel and I think we saw these things start to meet at a much more rapid rate to really provide kind of a no nonsense straightforward communication channel. That still a lot of businesses haven’t tapped into yet because they don’t fully understand how to or what the benefits might be to it.

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J Darrin Gross  1:39  

Welcome to Commercial Real Estate Pro Networks CRE PN Radio. Thanks for joining us. My name is J Darrin Gross. This is the podcast focused on commercial real estate investment and risk management strategies. Weekly we have conversations with commercial real estate investors and professionals who provide their experience and insight to help you grow your real estate portfolio. 

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Today, my guest is Aaron Weiche.  Aaron is the co founder and CEO of LeadFerno. A text messaging platform for businesses to close more leads faster. Aaron is an entrepreneur, founding and leading multiple companies and digital marketing agencies over the past 20 years. And in just a minute, we’re going to speak with Aaron about lead generation marketing via text message. 

But first, a couple of things you can do to help us out. If you like our show, CRE PN Radio, there are a couple things you can do to help. You can like, share and subscribe. And as always, we encourage you to leave a comment, we’d love to hear from our listeners. Also, if you want to see how handsome Our guests are, be sure to check out our YouTube channel. You can find us on YouTube at Commercial Real Estate Pro Network. And while you’re there, please subscribe. With that, I want to welcome my guest Aaron Weiche, welcome to CRE PN Radio.

Aaron Weiche  3:33  

Thanks, Darrin, appreciate you having me on.

I’m looking forward to our conversation. Before we get started, though, if you could take just a minute and share with the listeners a little bit about your background.

Yeah, I think the easiest way to sum it up is I’m kind of a digital addict. Things started to change in the mid to late 90s. And I’m gracious I was unlucky enough to be open minded and to catch on to it. And were some people who have kind of a creative vibe might find painting or woodworking or other ways I found pixel and code and that’s what attracted me to the world of technology and be able to create things and make make things and that kind of spiraled into building a lot of websites and then building apps and then constructing marketing campaigns for search engines and social media and all of those things. And then the last roughly eight years I’ve focused on the software world and just bringing software to businesses of all sizes that help them accomplish goals operate more efficiently and ultimately build a better business.

Well, you certainly have benefited from the I mean all the digital, you know boom. As far as marketing goes. I remember a long time ago when I was getting a college degree in marketing when I graduated there was like this fuzzy line and that sales and marketing were kind of like this together thing, there was not this distinct difference between when is a marketing versus when is it sales. And I don’t know if you agree, but I, it seems to me that marketing is very, very clear. That’s when you’re trying to get in front of somebody where sales is when you’re, you’re asking for the order or getting the check kind of thing. And then the web is very clearly identified the two sides of the, you know, the sales and marketing and sales is sales and marketing is marketing. You find that to be true with, with your experience,

I think there’s some interweaving of them just because how you might want to approach your sales can definitely influence what you’re doing with your marketing. I can only speak, you know, from my own experience, and that in being I’m somebody who likes to sell with a very educational format, I want to tell you everything I know about something and help you understand it, so that you can start to picture and take the position of using it and being successful. So in wanting to adapt that sales method that’s very much in how I market I try to be very transparent, very open, it’s not hard to know, where I stand on things, or how I think there’s very little of Don’t look behind the curtain, or I’m not telling you my secret recipe or anything else, I’d rather put it all out there. And if that sounds like something that can can benefit you, then you’re going to be a good fit for what I’m working on.

Cool. Well, let’s talk about your text message marketing, and how that works. You know, I can remember the first time texting, it was on a, you know, like a flip phone. And there was like, you know, three letters to a key, and I was gonna, like, why would anybody do this? And then smartphones came along, and all sudden, you had a keyboard. And, you know, the the messaging became more of a possibility. So I guess my my question is, you said, you’ve been doing the the text marketing for about eight years. Is that right?

The text messaging business just for the last two years now, the software side of things for eight years, my previous startup we sold, and that freed me up to start work on this next venture.

Got it? So text messaging, let’s talk about some of the the advantages to text messaging. Yeah, so marketing tech, yeah. text message marketing.

Yeah. So interestingly enough, and I think most people can think of this within their their own world in their own life. Texting has shown overall to be where a majority people have gravitated towards for their number one communication channel. It’s where we interact with friends and family, coworkers, interest groups. It is an asynchronous conversation that’s easy to manage, that we can do at any time, we don’t need a quiet place to engage and do it, we can do it while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. Some people while there’s at a red light driving their car, sitting in a meeting board, right? There’s all kinds of elements to it. And what started out as a strictly personal channel, I think just as anything in life, once we find something that’s easier and more efficient, and our behaviors change, we start to seek that ease across our life. And we start opening up those barriers. And I think the pandemic only fast forwarded, businesses were looking for more ways to connect and interact with customers that couldn’t walk through their door they couldn’t have meetings with. So this offered a really personalized channel. And I think we saw these things start to meet at a much more rapid rate to really provide kind of a no nonsense, straightforward communication channel. That still a lot of businesses haven’t tapped into yet, because they don’t fully understand how to or what the benefits might be to it.

Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about you know, just the, the nature of the text, you mentioned how it’s kind of like something everybody’s gravitated towards. I know for myself, you know that it’s very true. I mean, it’s the it’s the go to communication for especially friends or family or you know, whatever. It’s kind of that if you really want to get a hold of me just shoot me a text kind of thing. So, that mean the case. How How are you I guess opening the door or making the connection. Is there a is there a sequence prior to texting or or are you finding texting cold? To somebody who’s not expecting a message to be a viable option?

Yeah, so we take a little bit different approach with this. Interesting enough, if someone asked us what our primary focuses or our primary focus is conversion, meaning we want to take people that are prospects to you that might be on your website, see other pieces of your marketing. And we want to turn them into being a known lead where they present themselves with contact information. And what we found in in researching that is that text messaging was emerging as the lowest barrier to entry to starting a conversation. So one of the things our software does is places these call to action buttons on every page of your website that basically you can fine tune and customize. But you’re getting across like, Hey, do you have questions, you can just text us want to know more want to talk to an expert text us? You know, just different elements within those call to actions to let people know, hey, we’re super approachable for questions. It’s not taking time out of your day, you don’t have to do a major commitment. You can just quickly start this conversation by asking a question, and we will respond to you over text. So the majority of the start of our conversations for our customers is a customer reaching out because they’ve already landed on that business’s website. We also integrate with like Facebook Messenger. Google has a product called Google Business messages that show up in your Google business profile. So we’re looking at multiple ways where messaging might be the very start of a conversation, ask that first question as a prospect. And we’re just helping them market and put that front and center that that is as easy as can be. And then once it’s in the business hands, they use our app to either respond to them, or to start to move them to another channel, book an appointment, set a call time, meet in person, whatever that might be with them. But we’re really focused on how do we take someone from being as we call it being a lurker, they’re just lurking around your marketing lurking around your website and turning them into a lead where you know who they are, and you have a personal connection

to them. I like that the using it as a conversion tool, as opposed to I can’t tell you how many times I get like a unsolicited texts, and it’s the full offer. It’s not like, Hey, Aaron, how are ya? It’s a hair. And as Darren I’m a little bit a little bit a little bit of a, you know, I’m like, you know, how did this even come to be kind of thing. And I think there’s plenty of whether it be political or other entities or, you know, organizations that have taken liberties with, you know, because they have my message, assuming that that, you know, I want more thing, but I think if I’ve been your website, and I’ve been lurking around in in our most of your texts, or they inbound from somebody because of the the opportunities you you’ve got on the websites that say, Hey, for any questions, just Texas.

Yeah, that’s usually the start of it. And it also opens up a number of different things. So one, my previous company, we worked with about 25,000 businesses collecting customer feedback and online reviews globally. And we had a text feature in that product to ask for feedback or to ask for a Google review, or Facebook review, using text messaging. And I was surprised how many businesses were like, That’s great, we’d love to use that we don’t ever customers mobile numbers. So they lacked a process somewhere where they were capturing that important piece of information from a customer. So that was one angle where I looked at like, well, then you don’t have to overcome that if the very first interaction comes over text messaging. The next items that I looked at is one of the kind of I guess, ways to grease the skids in conversion is offer people options, right? Just as in paying for anything, the more options you have to pay for it, loan types, credit types, seller financing, whatever that that might be, the more flexible is to try to make that deal happen because you have options. same holds true with communication. And when you can appeal to people who then they have the choice to say, Oh, well, I can call them I can email them, I can fill out a form or I can send them a text, you’re just adding one more possible inroad to coming into that business. And when you offer texting and they do it, you know, one, they’re starting it so they are opting in by the action they’re taking. We even include a small disclaimer that says you know, by submitting this request for reply via text you are agreeing to receive messages from from this business. So now you’ve gotten that consent and that keeps you out of that trouble that you know, we definitely see things tightening up in in the mobile carrier world with cutting down on spam They’ve, they’ve seen what’s happened with email, they’ve seen the explosion of SMS, as a product and things are only going to get tighter. So it really behooves your business to do things the right way, capture that permission. And then you have just this direct contact to that consumer at any time that you can leverage moving forward. So while a lot of our focus is there, we then have customers doing so many things on keeping their customer updated and informed, making them aware of deadlines, timelines, sending them reminders, right, we’re all very familiar, where we’re getting an appointment reminder from our dentist, or chiropractor or medical, they’ve used that for a long time. So these, there’s all these other utility type features that you continue to use text for through the relationship. And it’s just great for quick touch points and to reach out further down the road, right, because we all know like getting a customer, the first time is where it’s the most expensive. And then after that, getting them to easily refer you or getting them to come back and utilize you again, like that’s where you want to develop that repeat business. So if you’re engaging with them like this, and now you’re a saved contact on their phone, someone asked them, hey, who would you you know, use I have some commercial real estate business, who you use with yours might be like, Oh, let me just text you Sarah’s information, text, you John’s information, really easy to send that contact file across. So even though our focus is on the front, we see businesses really use this all across the board and the entire customer experience with what works best for their customer. And they really start to find some of their own efficiencies. But you know, it’s probably pretty easy to understand, in the same amount of time that you can take and adhere yourself to one phone call, you can manage anywhere from six to 10 text conversations, because of it being a synchronous. So when you start to get into efficiencies, and there’s features that promote that you can be far more efficient as a business person when you use a business grade texting app as well.

Got it? So a couple of thoughts are so the the conversation, is there a any kind of like rules of the road? As far as you know, how long the text should be? How frequent you should text? How you know how to start the text? Or? Or do you have some sort of is it? Where do you keep it kind of conversation like you would text a friend or family member kind of thing? Or what? What’s the guidelines? Are there any guidelines here?

Yeah, I definitely think there’s things that you want to think about. As far as tone of voice or communication style, I always tell people, business casual is a term that we understand when it comes to dress and things like that. And I think it applies to text conversation, you still want to have that business element and aspect to it, you probably want to avoid as much as possible, especially early on your use of acronyms, your lol ing, rolling on the floor, laughing You know, any of those kinds of things and expecting your customer to always know those. You know, I’m in the space. And there’s still times where I have to ask one of my teenagers like, alright, what is this one? I’ve never seen these letters. What does it mean? Is it bad? Things like that. So definitely keep any business forward. But it is a very personal channel. And that’s, that’s one of the things that we see and hear from our clients is, these leads feel like they warm up so much faster, because we’re connecting through something that is more of a personal and more of a real time channel than if they fill out a static cold form on a website. And then I’m emailing them back. And then things are, you know, very business centered, and doesn’t have that relationship side, which as we all know, in any aspect of real estate, the relationship ship side is a massive driver to what takes place and getting things accomplished, turning them into repeat and referral

business. Right. So you mentioned, like for a business that doesn’t have records, or they don’t have mobile phone numbers for their clients? Supposing they do it, is there a right way to start engaging your clients prospects? I mean, let’s just say they’re not going to the website. You know, it’s more a matter of just trying to, you know, establish this line of communication.

Yep. I would say, you know, based on your communications and interaction, I would definitely find a way to be proactive and get permission, then give them a reason why it’s going to be beneficial for them to give you that information. So, you know, on one side, when you set something up like our tool, now you have something in place that’s going to drive that. But if you need to retro actively go back, you definitely want to have that permission and have it in a way that you start it so maybe you create a quick online form and just say hey, from time to time, you know, we might want to reach out to you with something we think is of interest to you more conditions you might be interested in, things like that. If you can outline, you know, we likely wouldn’t do this more than, you know, twice a year, things like that. So people understand great, they’re not you know, I’m not signing up for something that’s going to weekly show up. And ultimately, I’m going to mark it as spam or ask them to stop sending me because this is such an important personal connection. You don’t want to burn that bridge. And it’s one thing I point out to a lot of businesses they instantly think most of our minds in wanting to sell goes to one too many. Great, how can I build a list of 101,000 10,000 and shoot them a message every week or every month? Well, what we fail to realize is put ourselves right back into the shoes of being a consumer or being a buyer. And how much do we love those messages? Like we really don’t, there’s very few of those that ever stay subscribed to. And then once they cut that off, you lose that channel. So I really tell businesses to focus more and think more, how can I use this to my advantage in one to one where I know the customer? Well, I know what’s important to them, I know what they’d be interested in. And I have times where I do want to touch base and keep things in front of them. So how can i Master this to use this as nice little reach outs to stay on their radar? Stay up to date, let them know, I’m thinking of them, and be able to play something that you know feels really well positioned to what their interests are? Or what they’re looking to do or invest in or their past history and working with me.

Know, I like you mentioned this multiple times the one to one, I was kind of curious about this, when preparing for the the interview? Is the are the the your customers that are utilizing text with communicating with their clients? Are they doing it one on one? Is it literally on the keyboard of their? of their computer to the to their clients phone? Or is there any AI involved? Or is there a wonder, is there ever a one too many?

Yeah, right now we don’t have a one to many, we are focused on the one to one, the what a couple of things to point out that are on the efficiency side. One, you can transfer conversations between any of your team members. So if you have five, or 10 Different people on your staff, if somebody is a better fit for someone else, or they need to take something over or do a next step for you, you can transfer that entire conversation to someone else. So right there is a huge benefit over using like your personal texting app on your phone. Because now you’re able to move an entire conversation, you can type notes into it so they can see why you’re transferring it and what what you’d like them to do. For anyone that has multiple people on their staff. Now you’re centralizing and securing these customer conversations and customer data instead of it living on their phones. And it makes it really easy to sync to your CRM or your customer database, so that those conversations and those contacts are secured and sitting in a in a centralized area. So if you have more than one staff member, that aspect alone should definitely be of interest to you. And then efficiency wise, there’s things so we have a feature called the shortcuts that allows you to save messages, save questions, links, things like that. So you don’t have to type out things that might be repetitive or that you commonly ask in a pre sales environment. Link to a listing that you might keep getting inquisitions on or asked about. So you’re able to just send those within a couple of taps or a couple clicks, we have both a desktop app and a mobile phone app, those are synced together. So you can work however you work best between those items, you can send messages quickly and easily with it. So instead of trying to send everyone you know, a giant message and hoping there’s a piece of it, that interact with them, and that a couple percent of your list, find it interesting, we find it better spend a little bit more time, even if you recreating the same message, send it individually. And maybe there’s one small thing where you like, adhere to them, personalize it, address something with them to make them feel like this was personally crafted and well thought out, not just here’s a please by message, which again, usually doesn’t go over well. And a lot of times just get you gets you closer to being blocked, which is the last thing you want, because that cuts off your entire future of using it

makes sense? Is there any numbers you can point to as far as like, increase in conversion rate based on you know, pretexting versus now? Somebody’s using texting?

Yep. Yeah, so the two high level things to think about that you’re doing when you use a tool like ours is. One you are now placing our buttons or what we would call a floating call to action, so they’re always visible on the screen. No matter if you’re on mobile tablet or desktop. You’re always going to see the prompt to text you to contact you ask a question. So it’s always in front of the so the user does didn’t have to hunt, go to your header, go to your footer, where’s the form on the page, any of those things, so you’re making them aware of their options and to contact you right in front of them at all times. The second thing is you’re adding a channel like text messaging with that low barrier to entry and saying, Great, I can ask this and they’re just gonna text me and answer how I can get the info. And there’s no cognitive load for me, I don’t have to run out of a meeting to take a phone call, I don’t have to play voice tag, voicemail tag any of those kinds of things. So the combination of those two things, what we usually see on the low end is a 10 to 15% increase in conversions. And on the high end, we’ll see some businesses two and 3x. Where we see that and where you see those range in those numbers, if somebody is more of a smaller business, and they’re getting, you know, a handful to dozens of leads a month from their website and digital properties, you can also write that there’s some options that we can talk about, but people can text you through your landline, if you have an existing landline, possibly, you can use if we distribute you a texting number, you can put that on billboards. So new leads can come in directly from seeing a billboard, you know, signage at the property, things like that, as well. So within that, they can come in that way as well. So somebody who’s doing, you know, single digits to dozens, those are the ones that we see have an opportunity to sometimes two and 3x, just by making it easier to ask questions, and putting a call to action in front of them. And it really makes the business more approachable than anything else than knowing I’m not gonna get bombarded with this formal process and a sales pitch and all these other things, I’m gonna get a text reply, which I can choose to ignore, delete, block, or take interest in because you’re making it really easy to work with you. And then so somebody who’s maybe, you know, doing higher 50, leads, 75, leads 100 Plus leads a month, those are the ones that we see usually fall more into that 10 to 15%. And, you know, on up to like a 30% range where they already have quite a bit of inertia and a lot of leads going on. And now they’re just grabbing more of those by making it a little easier and offering this additional channel.

It makes a lot of sense. I just sent her thinking about my like, my personal experience with, you know, just the ease of communication. And if it’s something that’s timely and valuable, you know, spot on, you’ve got you’ve got the attention of the person, and there’s probably an easy call to action to take care of whatever it is, or to, you know, engage in the solution that’s been presented. And I’ve got, I was kind of curious, I have I’ve got clients tend to be on the younger side that I mean, they will text me all day long to my personal phone before they would ever email me. You know, and I’ve, I’ve adopted to that. But the present moment, there’s a more matter of trying to convert that over to the emails from my assistants to be able to see what’s going on. I’m curious, is this Do you find this to be age focused as far as the acceptance or the willingness to engage in the text? Or is it up and down? The ASPCA?

During? That’s a great question. I think there’s some like, you know, most people, I think, probably have some misconceptions there. So this is really good. And yeah, we actually performed our own survey on this. We had the same questions. There’s a number of things where if you haven’t noticed, I’m, I’m opinionated. So I love to do surveys to find out like, is my opinion right or wrong? Do I have something else to back it up? Besides my own voice and thoughts? So what we found in this is really all the way across the board except for 65. Plus, when we asked how do you prefer to communicate? Everyone 64 down all of those age groups. Texting was number one, then followed by phone calls, and then email, a couple of variances that we saw, we saw a phone just barely ahead of texting for the 65 Plus crowd, it was only a couple percentage points, where there was a differentiating factor. And then all the way down to the youngest group, right, the 18 to 24. Crowd, texting still in the lead. But what we saw make even more of a erosion was messaging off of other platforms. So your Facebook message matters. Yes, Instagram messages that things like that, where they had, you know, twice as high of a number in that area as every other age group. And the biggest area where there is separation for texting was the couple of age groups that make up like the you know, 3035 to 64 crowd is where we really saw those are the ones that preferred texting by far and away double digits, over over phone calls. Right. And when you think into that, you think, you know busyness of life and career and possibly, you know, family status, personal things and whatever else. You know, it really starts to makes sense, because texting is our most, you know, manageable communication channel that’s there, right we’ve, most of us have already long lost control of our email inboxes. And having to go in there and wait. And, you know, find when someone has replied to you amongst all the other things that are coming in from the years or decades of that email address being in use, I constantly hear from people that maybe one of their biggest pains on earth now is like listening to a voicemail. It’s it’s funny where we’ve arrived on that, because I can remember putting so much time into crafting your greeting message to receive a voicemail and being creative or fun or whatever else. And now, there’s so many people that you call and they’re like, you know, don’t leave a message, please text me if you need some, right? Like, I don’t want to have to retrieve these at all, even if I can just read the voicemail. And to your point on getting staff to be able to transpose because it totally makes sense, right? That one thing I tell people, our job is to start conversations for you. That’s our number one job. And if we get that conversation started, and you want to turn it into another communication channel, because that’s what works best for you or best for your process or best for the customer, by all means do it. So if you take the initial question, you answered over text, and then your next move is to try to move it into another channel. Again, a business texting platform works great, because now you can have office staff that also has access. So now you can assign it to one of your assistants and say, you know, hey, I’ve already answered a couple questions. Now let’s get an email out to them with a packet of information that they need, please do that today. And now they have access to see that conversation, have that information, transpose it while they’re sitting right at the their computer, and keep that process moving for you in a way that feels very seamless to the customer. And it wasn’t a bunch of effort for you to screenshot it printed out, copy, paste it do anything else, it’s a much more aligned workflow for you.

Hey, you mentioned the email thing. I’m kind of curious with, you know, a lot of this stuff, I feel like there’s almost like a duplication. I mean, that the text is the instant feedback kind of thing to where I can get somebody’s attention, I can get a response. Let them know, Hey, I just sent you an email or something like that. But do you do you find the need to duplicate meaning like if I because again, I’m just thinking of this one particular client where I could send them emails all day long every day and never get responses? Send them one text, I get an instant answer. And to where, you know, I’m still like, if there’s an attachment that I needed him to sign or something like that, I’ve got to send it to him via the tech. So you’ll see it kind of thing. Do you find? Or is there any kind of rule for, you know, sending it both ways? Or is it just kind of a more of like the exception to the rule?

Yeah, I guess I really look at it, as always determining one of my biggest golden rules I just wrote a article kind of breaking this down is like being easy to work with. And when you are easy to work with, that’s what really gets someone to be committed to you refer you rave about you all of those things. So I think in that situation that you just outlined, you have something that maybe needs to travel over email, because of how it needs to be interacted with, or you want them to, you know, have it in a searchable way, whatever that might be. But if you do that, but then you’re using the ease of prompting them through the channel that they’re paying way more attention to, and they’re seeing your message, right text messages, you know, 95% of text messages are read within the first three minutes of receiving it. And that is 95%. Yeah, and that crazy. And that is not true for email, at all right, like, but much, much, much lower many things ever, you know, unread. So when you use that combination, it’s like this is the best delivery method for us to get this in your hands based on what it is. And that way you, you know, always can have access to if you want, but then we’re giving you this nice little nudge that it’s there or to go check your email or whatever else like you’re just making it very easy for you to work with. That’s there instead of you’re wondering like, oh, did they see the email come in? How often did they check their email? Did it come in with 12 other things and they just somehow missed it? Or they accidentally clicked delete when they’re just deleting a bunch of things. So yeah, there’s definitely some combinations within those things. And you know, when you’re talking about best practices before, one of my best practice things in communication is proactive communication. So when you’re able to tell people like hey, I’m going to be sending you this over email when we do send it I’m going to send you just a quick text to let you know that it’s there. Just respond and let me know that that you you’ve got it and that you’ve received it right and now you’re having that micro communication and a channel that works best for them. And the other stuff that’s more of a resource or or long term or in how they might need to be accessing it is available in that other channel that If you just relied on them to let you know via email, you might not ever know if they received it or replied or anything else.

Now, this is fascinating, just the, as I think about, you know, the ways that I’ve seen text misused, but I’ve also seen the way, I’ve used text and it’s had a positive interaction and just trying to, you know, accelerate that. So tell me a little bit about his lead for No, is that the, the the text platform that you guys? Is that what it’s called?

Yep, yep. So that’s what we built to handle all these features, and be able to deliver a number of the things that that I’ve talked about, and that I kind of like, I want to state one thing that I really like, about your comment, Darren of all the ways people use things wrong. And there’s a great saying that I wish I knew who to attribute this to, but I definitely use it all the time in spending years now building software. And that’s just the simple statement of a fool with a tool is still a fool. So you still need to have that right mindset. And when you have that right mindset, this can be extremely advantageous, it can be a difference maker for you, from your competitors, can be a difference maker in your customer experience all these things, when you do it, right. And when you understand the value of the one to one communication, finding efficiency in that, instead of automating right, there’s so much that’s come along with chatbots. And we’ve seen a big resurgence with it. If anyone’s familiar with the evolution of chat GPT that’s come out to end 2022. Like, the AI stuff is definitely getting smarter. But really is we know, at the end of the day, people are still reliant on humans to solve their problems, provide guidance, provide expertise. And the easiest, that you make that happen for someone where they don’t have to go through a call tree and press buttons and leave a voicemail fill out a form that they have no idea where the form is going to have even looked at. I mean, how many of us have filled out a form on a small business website and never ever heard from that business. I just had an experience last month where I reached out to like a paint chip auto paint chip repair, they asked for like photos on their forum. So I sent here’s the two three spots where I have some chips on my hood, and I want to get a quote on getting repaired. I never heard back from them. The next month, I got their monthly email newsletter, and I was just blown away. That’s like, alright, somewhere in your process, you’ve got me into your marketing funnel. But you’ve completely abandoned me on the buying funnel, which you know, just shows how discombobulated things can be sometimes. So yeah, so there’s a number of features, we have a number of articles and information on our blog, where we really try to highlight the right ways to use it, how to have the rights to to strategical mind about it, so that you’re using this to your advantage, and really winning with it. Our little thing is win right now. We think you can win all kinds of micro moments with your customers when you use texting the right way.

No, definitely don’t be the fool with the tool. They’re totally. Hey, so just to understand, does your software then does it have an API or does it plug into like if somebody has like some sort of a some data management kind of system they’re using? Okay,

yeah, so we have two two different options one is using, there’s another piece of software called Zapier. Zapier is really commonly known because it’s a no code connection. So it’ll connect two or more pieces of software. So most commonly, we see that in our world where it’s based off of a trigger and action system. So the trigger is when a new contact is created in lead for know from someone submitting a question. A new contact file is created in like their CRM, like HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever that might be MailChimp. And there’s like over 5000 pieces of software that also have an app and Zapier. So that’s a really easy, low cost way that you can find people with, you know, a much lower level of technical aptitude to make two pieces or more of software talk to each other. And then we do have an API as well if someone needs to do something custom, or maybe they have a proprietary CRM or customer database in house that they can do that with but I’d say with anyone buying software, knowing what your software can talk to out of the box or utilize a tool like Zapier should be part of your purchasing process in this day and age.

You definitely don’t want to have to recreate all the gains in another Yes. I mean, that’s that’s the thing. I think that’s so frustrating is all for all the promise that digital provides. And, you know, all the good. There’s still a a canyon between the the systems have actually talked together and work together. And I can’t tell you how much time is spent in our business of, you know, duplicate data. entry kind of thing. And it just, it’s mind numbing,

it totally is. And we can only hope that as things continue to progress, people continue to build with that mindset. But you have so many legacy pieces of software that are much slower to adapt to that. And you just even have old school, right? I mean, inside of every industry, right? There’s all kinds of old school thinking within the commercial real estate industry, right? Like this is how it’s always been done, right? You know, that resistance to change. It’s no different in software, where some of them thought, Oh, the best way to defend our business is to create a moat around it, where like, we’re not letting anybody in and we’re not letting anybody out. So but now, you actually ended up seeing the opposite, where the more flexible your software is, it makes him want to use it more, because all right, so I can connect this to all kinds of things. So I’m eliminating manual work and repeat entry. And then having these things in silos when I actually want to get to, you know, one record of truth about this customer somewhere within my ecosystem.

Now, I like to be easy to work with. That’s good. Hey, Aaron, if we could, I’d like to shift gears here for a second. By day, I’m an insurance broker. And I work with my clients to assess risk and determine what to do with the risk. And there’s three strategies we typically consider, we first look to see if we can avoid the risk. And when that’s not an option, then we look to see if there’s a way we can minimize the risk. And when we cannot avoid or minimize the risk, then we look to see if there’s a way we can transfer the risk. And that’s what an insurance policy is as a risk transfer vehicle. And as such, I like to ask my guests, if they can look at their own situation, could be their clients, the political environment, interest rates, you know, whatever, whatever it is in your world that you would identify, and what you consider to be the biggest risk. And again, for clarification, while I am an insurance broker, I’m not necessarily looking for an insurance related answer. And so if you’re willing, I’d like to ask you Aaron Weiche, what is the Biggest Risk?

So here’s the first thing that comes to mind to me. And that is not being connected to your customer. So to me, in all kinds of aspects I’ve talked and written about this recently, with so many people looking inside of so many industries, with a downturn slowdown, whatever that might look like. Those are the kinds of times where you need to be more connected than ever to your to your customer, so that they understand the value you still bring. As you change and adapt how you might deliver, or price or what’s going on in the market, things like that. You need to have that personal connection with them. If you haven’t been keeping in touch with your customers, if you’re not staying top of mind, if you’re not solidifying the resource you are and how your expertise helps them out no matter what the market looks like timing opportunity, any of those things like it’s just slowly eroding the chance away of once that opportunity might surface for them because too much distance has built up. So I’m just a massive proponent in running your business where you really know and understand your customers and you’re finding the right touch points that enrich their relationship with you keep keep you in contact and keep you connected with them. So that you’re always just a text or a phone call away from what their need is. And they really feel like you you’re a valuable resource in a relationship and a connection sense instead of just a transactional sense.

Now, those are some words of wisdom there be a resource up the floor with a tool. Yeah. So hey, Aaron, where can listeners go if they’d like to learn more or connect with you?

Yeah, so I have to thank my parents. I think I’m the only Aaron Weiche on Earth. Thanks to that awkward German spelled last name. So if you just Google Aaron Weiche, you will run across a whole slew of things for me over the years videos, whatever else. To be more specific to learn about lead for unknown business texting, it’s lead for no.com. As I shared, I invite you go through our blog, we have 50 plus articles we’ve written in the last couple of years research. So you can really dive into and get a feel for how it strategically aligns with your business and starting to envision how it helps. You can request and schedule a demo that only takes 20 to 30 minutes right from our website so you can get a test drive from myself or someone else on the team to see how it works for you. And then I’m definitely a Twitter Holic. So connecting with me on Twitter at Aaron Weiche. You know, Elon still hasn’t put it into the ground yet. So I’m still there. I share thoughts weekly and engage with with people there. And then of course, LinkedIn as well if people want

to connect there Awesome. Well, Aaron, Waikiki I cannot say thanks enough for taking the time to talk today. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Learned a lot, and I look forward to doing it again soon.

Appreciate it. Darrin, thanks so much for having me. All right, for our listeners.

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