Building a Comprehensive CRM: Insights from Greenrope's Founder

Thank you so much for having me. Harshit.

Sure. So we started back into originally as an email marketing company and which is a long time for a self funded founder led software company, but the idea was back then email marketing was pretty new and there weren’t that many competitors out there. And so we were one of the first movers, along with Mailchamp and constant contact with a company called Cooler email. We never went public, we never took funding and grew organically. And then about, around 2007, 2008, I realized that the market was very, was shifting and email itself was becoming a commodity and realized that we needed to create something bigger. And so I kind of had this vision of creating what I eventually became what I call complete CRM, which is a CRM focused way of approaching all of the relationships that a business has. So email by itself is an important component of that, especially in the b two b space. But you think about all the other things that come up that make up that relationship, from website traffic to phone calls to in person meetings and social media, and just all the different ways that, that you’ve got these relationships.

And so if you can create a centralized place for all of those things together, then it makes it really easy for a business to manage those relationships and then automate things with those relationships to make things easier for the team, for the business itself to manage those relationships and scale and work efficiently. And now, of course, with AI, that makes it even more powerful. So if we can leverage these tools to help businesses run more efficiently and do it in a very cost effective way, both, both for them and for their internal processes, so theyre saving a lot of time, then everybody wins. Makes sense.

Yeah, thats funny. So I decided to write that book, gosh, I think it was 2016 and it took me about a year to write. But what I found, and the landscape has changed in the Last eight years. But back then, CRM was very much a sales focused and sales only kind of approach to business. And what I was trying to sort of instill or educate the world about was that relationships are much bigger than just driven by sales. And so if you can have your customer service team and your marketing and your sales and your account managers all working together, they all can contribute to that relationship. It was in that book that I came up with the term complete CRM, so that as a way to fully understand the relationships between the business and its customers and leads.

Yeah, so it’s funny, we were talking earlier about APIs way back in the day when I was trying to figure out how to build this platform. I realized that there’s two approaches. You can either build it yourself in house, or you can use APIs to connect with other people’s businesses. What I realized, I think things are a little bit different now. There are more advanced tools that make API development and testing a little bit easier. The API driven approach to building a business can be hard because all of the companies you’re connecting with change their APIs and you can’t control it by building things in house. It takes a lot more work. You’re not going to be able to compete directly with all the feature sets that a company that focuses on one thing, we have a learning management system built into our platform. There are bigger, more powerful learning management systems out on the market. But if we feel like we can do 90%, address 90% of the market and have it built in and fully integrated with the CRM, we’re able to provide a lot more value to people that are using the CRM.

And then if they really need to use an external system, then we work with Zapier and we’ve got an API for those kinds of integrations. The having a functional, a pretty good learning management system built into a CRM is something you don’t really see that often and something that provides a lot of value, especially if you’re doing client onboarding, employee onboarding, and you want to track all of that and set up automation and everything. So that’s just sort of an example. But it was a strategic approach to how do we make something that’s really valuable that we can provide to our customers at an affordable cost. That makes it easy so that you’re not worrying about managing APIs, you’re not worrying about storing data in multiple different locations and just have one single place where you go to do all those things.

So as you can imagine, CRM is a very crowded space and you probably work with other companies that are in very crowded spaces themselves because they have to figure out a how do I stand out from, in our case, Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, even older companies like keep an activecampaign and entreport. I mean, there are hundreds of CRM companies out there. So how do we as greenrope stand out? And one of the things that we do that almost nobody else does is we offer a white label platform so companies can come to us and see that we can white label our entire platform so that if they want to resell or become value added resellers and partners to us, they can put their own brand on it, they can manage the entire relationship with their customers. So if you work with an agency, then, and not every agency wants this, some agencies are very focused on being platform agnostic, so that you can come into them with HubSpot or marketo or whatever and you can, you can use that, they will support that. A lot of agencies like the idea though, of offering their own software, their own platform, because not only does it create recurring revenue, it creates brand awareness for the agency itself so that the customers see that.

And then when the, when the customers, customers receive emails and messaging, they can turn on branding that says powered by the agency having that little bit of a unique twist on CRM allows us to stand out. And so we do some very targeted keywords for people that are looking for that. I mean, that’s a very niche kind of a market. And so the idea is we want to get as much awareness and interest in that particular niche for people that want to value add, white label, resell, a CRM platform, and then for a few other CRM platforms out there will do some competitive ads. And that’s really the majority of the work that we do, because as a small company, I can’t put an ad out there on generic short tail keywords like CRM or marketing automation. I mean, Salesforce could afford that. HubSpot maybe can afford that. I can’t afford that. I’ve got 15 people, I’m a founder led company. I don’t have any vc or anything. I have to be very conscious about what I spend my money on because we use our own system to track, we know exactly how much every campaign drives, what the customer acquisition cost is, lifetime value, all that stuff for all the different channels and everything that we do, we monitor that closely month by month and channel by channel.

We’re very conscious of all of those different channels. But we have found that that inbound marketing strategy really is what’s worked best for us. Because CRM is such an intent driven product, it’s very difficult for something that’s as complicated as a CRM to create demand for that product. There has to be awareness in the market for it. And a company has to say they have to come to the realization we need a new CRM, either because their existing systems that they have that aren’t CRMs aren’t working and they’re scaling up, or the CRM that they have is really frustrating to them and they want to change to something new or better.

Yeah. Yeah, no, it is. HubSpot’s a great company and they’ve got great software and, you know, I’ll never say anything bad about them. You know, I think we, we compete with them in the sense that we offer more. We offer a lot, there’s a lot of overlap. We do offer a lot more than they do in specific areas. Like, like they don’t have a learning management system, for example, but we’re also a lot cheaper because we’re a smaller company. They’ve got a lot of investors and big expensive buildings and all that stuff that we don’t have. We’re a fully remote company, so we’re able to offer more capability for generally about a third of the price of what they offer.

I think trying to get people to write articles about us, that’s really been a helpful thing in getting awareness where people will write articles about best small business, CRMs, things like that. So we try to get awareness. And again, that’s a challenge because if you’re writing an article about CRM or marketing automation, you’ve got hundreds of companies that are vying to be in that article because they want the SEO juice too. We try to reach out as best we can and create as much awareness as we can, knowing that it’s a challenge. And so we get some articles written about us and that tends to be, from an SEO perspective, that tends to be what gives us the most bang for the buck in terms of finding some key authors, well published, very high ranking websites that will mention our platform.

That’s a, that’s a really good question, because in focusing on the agencies, we have to make sure our platform is flexible enough to support all of those agencies customers and an ad agencies customers are going to be in every possible market out there. And granted, there, there are going to be some super specific things that we can’t, you know, that we’re not made for a particular application. But when it comes to capability, we’ve got clients in government, education, manufacturing, other agencies, consultancies. I mean, it’s all over the map. And the reason why we did that is because we designed the system from the ground up with that in mind. So there’s a lot of flexibility in it, which means that if you’re first starting out and you don’t know anything about CRM, there’s a lot to learn because you’re setting up a whole business on it. But the nice thing is that once you figure out how to make all the pieces fit together in terms of making it match your business model, it has the capability to do everything that you want. We’ve got advanced things like custom objects, we’ve got workflows and the automation journeys with all kinds of branching and logic rules and everything that you can build into form and follow ups and text messaging and WhatsApp and social and like all those things.

And if you’re a business owner and you’re trying to just drink from the fire hose all at once and try to figure all that out, it can feel overwhelming. So we work really hard with our customers, and whether that’s an agency or people that come to us direct to really it focus on the educational side of it because there’s so much more to it than just uploading your contacts and just start emailing them. There’s, there’s just, there’s so much more complexity in understanding what those relationships are and how they work. And it requires a really deep understanding of what you’re actually selling. And so we, so we spend a lot of time with our customers, helping them with that.

Yeah, we do a lot of video. We do webinars. I host webinars myself because I, because I enjoy that part of it. I enjoy the education. Every month I host a webinar for our customers and I love to hear feedback from them. And it’s an open, it’s an open thing with Google Meet where everyone can ask questions and talk and whatever. And I, and I enjoy that kind of, it’s sort of like a virtual town hall kind of thing, you know, and I, and I, I keep up with what’s happening in technology and how we’re, what we’re doing to respond to it. So sometimes we talk about changes in technology. We’ll talk about big events like, you know, security related events, things that, I mean, like, like news kind of things, and then talk about new features that we’re building, why we’re building them, how they use them and direct them to help resources that we have. Because we, we write a lot of white papers and we do a lot of educational video content. So, because I think that’s an important part of understanding the technology.

There’s, when it first came out, way back, I mean, people were talking, have been talking about AI for a long time. I think it was the commercialization of chat GPT that really made it something that could go into the day to day operations of what people do every day. If you’re writing marketing content or sales content, having AI help you is something that makes you more efficient. It’s a tool. To that end, we made it very simple inside of our platform, if you are. So there’s a lot of different elements, but one in the content generation side of things, if you’re a salesperson and you’re going to sell someone a particular product or service, you can say, I want to sell this product to this person and I want to focus on these points. The AI, when we make our integration call to the AI, it automatically grabs all of the relevant data about that contact that you’re sending a message to and sends it to the AI along with your request, so that it will personalize that content, that message that it’s going to build for you, and it’ll make three versions that you can mix and match and do whatever.
But having the context specific content generation so that, you know, like if I’m sending a message to harshit and I know that what your past is, and I know you’re, you know, maybe we have, we’ve met before, these are things that we’ve talked about, it will write the content with that context in mind. So it’s not just putting something into chat GPT and saying write a paragraph selling an electric bicycle, because that’s not going to be, it’ll be okay, but it’s not going to be really personalized. So on the content generation side, we have, that we also have with the newsletter generation, we’ve got a designing template, an email design tool and a landing page design tool. And you can just tell it, pick a template for me and put content in it and it’ll build a whole newsletter or a whole landing page for you in about 20 seconds. Picking images and templates, all that stuff. We’ve got an automatic blog generator, so you can just give it a bunch of topics. It’ll randomly pick one and it’ll create the image and write all the content and you can review it and post it.
So having AI write your blogs makes things pretty efficient as well. So on the content generation side, we do a lot and then we also do some on the aggregation of data and presentation. So when you go in, if you’re a salesperson, you can say tell me about my day, what do I have coming? And so the AI will speak to you and tell you on the user interface, it’ll say well arshit, you have three meetings today. The first one’s at nine, then you’ve got another one at 10:00. And don’t forget this is due today and all of that. You know, you have these overdue opportunities, things like that. So having that information available, both audit audio and then written when you want to, helps you, like if you’re looking at your own day. But then also if you want to summarize a contact, then you can say tell me about this lead and it will speak to you and tell you these are all the leads that are, you know, this is everything that we know. They’ve been to this website, they’ve filled out this survey, they’ve, they’ve been through this learning course, you’ve talked to them on the phone about this, blah, blah, blah.

It summarizes the whole contact for you. Having AI help you do all of those things just makes you more efficient. That’s really what we use it for is that aggregation of all this data to make it easier for you to make content and then interpret all the data that you’re gathering.

So we don’t like cold emailing because that’s spam. I mean when you say cold email, I’ve been in the email business for 25 years and we’ve always had a very strong stance against it. If you want to use a different service and drive people to a landing page where they actually opt in to give you their information, then we’re all about it. Because then there’s that opt in. But we do not allow rented or purchased lists on our networks because we have very pristine reputations because we enforce that policy very strongly. That’s not to say that hard stop cold emailing doesn’t work, but if you do it on your brand, especially the way Google and Microsoft and Yahoo are getting smarter about blocking and establishing a reputation for your domain, you start sending out cold emails, you’re going to get blocked, you’re going to get spammed and that’s going to affect your business in the long run. So again, I don’t recommend doing it. I think that an inbound strategy is a much better way to, you know, throw targeted ads up to people. But if someone was absolutely convinced and, you know, if you’re doing, if you’re doing very targeted, high value, where you call somebody first, then, and follow up with an email kind of thing, then the risk is a lot lower.

But you start scaling that to hundreds or thousands, it’s going to catch up to you and you’re going to commit brand suicide. And we don’t like to see our customers go through that and we try to warn them as best as we can. Obviously, I can’t tell people what to do. I’m not in charge of them and their business. But I strongly suggest, having done this for 25 years and seeing the pitfalls of spamming, sending out lots of spam, that it does catch up. And so, you know, and that’s the same reason why LinkedIn doesn’t want you to send out tons of invites and tons of emails to tons of everybody, because then it pollutes the whole environment and the world is hard enough to have to filter through a ton of spam in your inbox.

Yeah, I mean, there are so many stories. I know there was. It’s funny, there was, there’s one that kind of stands out to me. There was a, there’s a manufacturing company in Switzerland who’s a client, and we, I work with one of our reseller partners that’s based, that’s based out there. And I remember they had a very complex integration with dynamics and an ERP system and manufacturing. And, you know, they had a. And they still do. I mean, they’re a very busy company. But I remember going there to meet with them, and they took me on a tour and they had this long timeline because they’d been in business for over 100 years, and I think this was 2017 or 2018, where they had this long timeline on a wall, and on the wall they had Greenrope. And it was on that because it was such a pivotal moment for them. They’ve been really struggling. They were losing market share. They were dying. We came in with our technology and basically saved their company. And now they run at full capacity, and they have since we came in, and that’s just through all the marketing automation, the CRM, they had a bunch of salespeople who they wanted.

The salespeople did not want to be held accountable and they went in, and this is very difficult to do in Switzerland, but they laid them all off. They fired all of them because all of them refused to use the CRM. And so they did the right thing as a business to not be beholden and controlled by their sales staff. They replaced them with just a couple salespeople. They had, I think, ten or twelve, and they replaced them with one or two, used all of our automation. And it was just such a heartwarming. I mean, it’s sad, of course, that those people left, but for everybody else in the company to see the growth and how happy they were and vibrant the offices are, and they had so much business coming in, it was really great to see. And when I was talking to their vp of sales and their CFO about how valuable we were in that whole transition, it really, it was like one of those moments where I really felt like we’d made a really big impact. And I mean, there are tons of other stories like that, but that one was just one, because I remember standing there and seeing the wall and this long, long timeline and Greenrope being on that timeline.

That integration, like, from a user’s perspective, one of the things that I’ve learned is to never underestimate the amount of effort it takes to manage integrations, because there are always going to be people that come to you and say, oh, we’ll just build this integration, it’ll be really easy, and it never is. It always takes way more time. And it reinforces why I took the approach of trying to build as much as I could in house and have it integrated directly inside of the Greenrope CRM. Because by removing the complexity of those API calls and managing those interfaces, it saves so much headache. That was one of those things that really, over time, and I feel very, not that my ego really craves it, but it feels nice to be vindicated, to see case after case after case of companies that have tried to do API driven integrations and severely underestimated the cost and schedule and or just the fact that it just doesn’t work. And to be able to have all the things that we have built in to make all those things work is really, it feels really good. So that’s one big lesson, I think, from a company management perspective, I think it’s really important to make sure that you’ve got the best people on your team and how important it is to have an open and honest culture and one where everybody feels safe and just the pure transparency.

When we meet, I share, I openly share our financials with everyone in the company. We don’t talk specifically about how much everybody makes, but we talk about, this is, this is the p and L. This is where we’re at. These are all the expenses. And part of that means that we get good feedback from the company where they say, well, we’re paying a lot for x, maybe we should try a competitor that could be cheaper. Or maybe we don’t need this because it’s a lot for the service. Really, isn’t that needed? So that transparency gives buy in to everyone in the company, which I enjoy. I see our company, and this sounds super cliche, but I see the company as a family. I care about every single person, like someone in my family. So having that culture is super important.

You know, I think that everything is going to focus more on user experience. Trying to make the user experience easier and more intuitive, I think that’s the ultimate challenge as companies start to scale and add features. How do you add those features in a way that doesn’t overwhelm someone? Because a Boeing 747 has a ton of features. But if you’re a beginner pilot and you try to fly that thing, there’s no way you could, you can’t figure out what all those dials do. So we need to. And it’s a constant, iterative process. We listen to our customers, and if they get stuck on something or there’s something that gives them a little bit of friction, trying to figure out how to accomplish something that they want to accomplish. We work with them and we ask them, what can we do to make it better? And if someone says, I would really love it if your CRM did x, then we will sit down with them and we’ll write the user story together and we’ll come up with screenshots and the whole thing. And so when someone makes a request like that, I do push back on them and say, I really want to know why, and I want to know what that actually looks like to you.

How is that going to make you happier, more efficient in your day? And then that helps me really understand what is the problem that we’re solving. And so I think that CRM itself is a very mature space. There’s been a lot of, I mean, there’s been evolution of technology, new things that come in like AI, but ultimately they’re all just tools to help us save time. And the more we focus on that, the more value we can bring to our customer.

You got to step back and take the 30,000 foot view. You really have to have a good understanding of your, of your business process and all of it. So customer journey mapping is something that’s been around as a concept for a few years now, but it is so vitally important to understand what your business process looks like and then figure out from there what you need your CRM to do in terms of both managing data and then process and having automation built in. And that really starts at the, at the top, the senior levels, the CEO, the C level execs, or if it’s a small business, you’re the founder or whatever, you need to take that time to really understand what that process looks like. And you go from that to finding out what your CRM should do. You don’t go the other way around. You don’t say, well, I really like CRM XDev and I’m going to try and make it fit into my business model because that is a recipe for frustration and it’ll never do what you want it to do. If you start first with your requirements, and then you should be able to get a demo with someone who can show you how their CRM and marketing automation tool would accomplish what you need.

And then you should get a free trial to be able to mess around with it. And you should feel comfortable that it can do all those things, because if it can’t find a different CRM, there are hundreds on the market. And so my recommendation is always, if you’re looking to take a step back and do requirements driven analysis of what you need your CRM to do, start first with what you need it to do, and then make the software do it.

I’m ready.

Ah, that’s a good one, I would say. Probably being a little bit of a workaholic and taking things personally. If someone, if someone is upset about something, even if it’s not even our fault, I take it personally because I started the business and, and I’m not gonna lie. My ego is wrapped around what I’ve built, and I don’t mean I have built, because obviously I didn’t do it myself. There’s a team of us that’s been involved, but from the very beginning, I’ve invested 20 some years of my life in my business. And so if someone says something negative about any part of it in any kind of way, I take it personally. And so, and my reaction oftentimes to do that is to sit down and I still code. So I’ll still write. I’ll write code, or, and I’ll be like, well, I’ll show them how to, you know. And so I think that’s probably my greatest weakness, is still taking things that people say personally about the things that I spend so much effort on.

My first career that I. That I always wanted. I wanted to be a garbage Mandev. I was. I was six years old, and I, and I. Every morning I would get up so I could watch them come down with their big trucks. And back in those days, they had, the guys would get out and they would pick up the metal cans and they’d throw them in. And I just thought that was the coolest thing. And one morning, my dad brought me out there and I got to ride with them. And I just thought that was the coolest experience. And, you know, I’m not sure what about it? Washington, sort of an exciting, big machines, you know, as a little kid seeing that. But it just, it just was, I think. I think what it was was these guys all worked really hard, and they were doing something that a lot of people would not really enjoy doing. And they were always happy and smiling and just eyes. And so I think that was, as a kid seeing that, you know, for a long time, I just, I wanted to be a garbage man because it was such a, it was such a cool thing.

Yeah.

Oh, I have, I have always been fascinated with astronomy, and I’m a big Carl Sagan fan and physics and things like that. I wish I had more time and knowledge of all of that. When I was first out of college, I was in the air force, and I spent two years working in the space program. And it was really cool. I got to work with Apollo scientists and satellite design and development. It was really cool. So I’m always fascinated by astronomy and cosmology, just all the things that happen in the universe around us.

Oh, that’s a good question. What was my Last search? Actually, I think I try to also stay up on current events and, of course, what recently happened with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. There’s a lot of, one of the things I find really fascinating about our culture is how it’s changing the reality of the perception of what is truth and how when there’s just a very big news story like this, there are so many, they’ll call them conspiracy theories, but so many different ideas of what people think may have either caused it or what actually happened or who was behind it. And so, and I think it actually plays into what we do in having an understanding of the difference between perception and reality and trying to get a better grip on how do we educate people about what it is we do in an impartial kind of way. And, you know, and there, there are people who will say, if you, even if you are apolitical, you are still making a choice. And I think it’s a very dangerous, risky thing to do if you’re in business, to step into one or other, either political, political affiliation or political, you know, especially in the United States.

It’s a very highly charged topic. And so, as a business, I think one of the things that I always think about is, you know, we’ve got our personal ethics, and everyone is going to have different opinions. And how much of a role does that play in our role as business leaders, both for our employees and for our customers and as thought leaders. And so, to me, I believe the most important thing we can do is search for a truth and come as close as we can to the unadulterated, pure, uninfluenced truth and understand why we do what we do and have those nuanced conversations. And I think it really comes down to asking questions. And so that’s really, I think when I was searching, I’m searching all sides of a topic, all sides of an argument to understand what does everyone think about this? Do people who are highly, in that particular case, if someone is very strongly a supporter of him or a detriment or anti him, what are the different arguments that you hear on all those sides? And so I try to be as thoughtful as possible when it comes to understanding things like that.

So that’s really what it comes when I’m searching for information. It’s really about trying to learn as much as I can.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.