A Conversation with Lars Helgeson of GreenRope
Founder, executive, author and world traveller Lars Helgeson joined Matthew to share his insights on business communication today. How can companies be customer-smart? How can sales, marketing, support, service and all the other touchpoints work together?
GreenRope operates in 40 countries, giving thousands of businesses a coherent answer to these questions.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Hi, and welcome. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn hosted the Future of Email Marketing. It's March 2021. And the sun's actually shining here in the Pacific Northwest. And delighted to actually get to know someone on a call. My guest today is Lars Helgeson, founder, CEO of GreenRope, also author of CRM for Dummies and quite the world traveler, which hopefully we'll have time to talk about. Lars. Welcome.
Lars Helgeson
Thank you for having me.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, you're we are we're both in the northwest during this call, and you're probably like me going, Oh, what sunshine? Yay. Yeah. Well orient people a little bit. Tell us about tell us about green milk. For starters, I want to ask about a bunch of other stuff cuz you got a fascinating background, but tell us about the company a bit.
Lars Helgeson
So GreenRope actually is an evolution of a company that I started back in 2000, called cooler email. And where we started in email marketing, and then realize one of the big challenges that a lot of businesses face really has to do with understanding how much data is generated by all the different elements of a business. And so while email marketing is important, it really has to be thought of in the context of what's happening with the rest of the business. And so rather than continuing to go down the path developing more and more just email marketing focus tools. Yeah, we tried to start over with the CRM. And so the CRM is sort of the core. And then we built the email marketing component around what the needs are for businesses in the use of their CRM.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. So emails just 1 of the ways you might connect with people, but certainly not the only one. And it's, it's not what you're all about.
Lars Helgeson
Right. Right. And, you know, email is, is, I guess, way back in the day, it was thought of mainly as a marketing tool, usually for client retention. And people that use it for client acquisition and spamming are the are the evil people that we try to stay away? Yeah, yeah. But But emails used by everybody. It's it's used by salespeople. It's used by obviously marketing team that you've got customer service people, you have event people, a lot of people that are interacting HR people in your business using email to create to communicate. Yeah. So because it's such an important medium for communication, non necessarily marketing related,
Matthew Dunn
right? All all sorts of communication. And your platform handles SMS as well, if I recall, right? Yes, it does. Yeah. Yeah. When
Lars Helgeson
when did that come into the mix? That was a few years ago. We have a partnership with Twilio. for that. We do SMS, we do MMS, we do voice broadcast. And we do telephony. So in and outbound calling and recording and transcription.
Matthew Dunn
Oh, okay. Yeah. So you really are getting all of that data. So I'm going to guess that much of what GreenRope does fits under the umbrella that I know that you talk about complete CRM. I want to give people a nickel education on that.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, it really goes back to the traditional expectation of what CRM means. And part of it is because if you ask 10 people, what they what they think of CRM, you're gonna get different answers. Yeah. So my idea about CRM is that the relationship is more than just a sales type of relationship, which is sort of the traditional way, going back, you know, 34 years where where did CRM come from? It was really a sales tool. Yeah. But the relationship has changed a lot over the years, where you have relationships that are driven by your website by your online advertising, offline advertising. I mean, nowadays, a lot of things are done with QR codes, how much are you tracking that you've got? Like we were talking before with telephony, and, and messaging, and social media, you've got all these different things that are interacting with your leads and your customers? And all of those things need to be kept somewhere? Or you're not making decisions based on actual data? So if if you don't understand your market, and I mean, especially with the younger generations, they don't necessarily like to use email as much. Yeah. So how do you communicate with them? And how do you get that data stored in your CRM, so you can actually use it. And so that, that's one of the big things that we that I really try to help businesses understand is, is really, you have to take a step back and look at your customer journey, understand what people are going to be using to communicate with you, and how are you going to communicate with them, because the medium is going to be all over the place, you're gonna have email, obviously, but you've got, like I mentioned before, the other thing, you got video, you've got text messaging, you've got, you know, all these other methods. So how do you keep track of all of that? And then how do you leverage your tools to automate the things that you can automate? And bring all of that together? So that's complete CRM is really about understanding all those different channels and pulling them together in a single unified platform in one place? Right. Right.
Matthew Dunn
Not that's, that's a non trivial challenge.
Lars Helgeson
That's true.
Matthew Dunn
And I mean, you guys have been in business for for a pretty long stretch, if I recall, right from the company profile. But how did how does Howdy, how do you rate yourself? Like, how does GreenRope? Do against your vision of what you want it to do?
Lars Helgeson
Well, so the answer is always going to be it depends on the client. The idea, though, is to if you have a single platform that does all of those things, then the challenge to the business is much, much less on the implementation side. Right? Because the devil is always in the details when it comes to CRM, right? Because you can go to a CRM company, and they will promise you Well, yeah, of course, our software can do that. You just need to buy all these different things and hire all these developers and make sure your data doesn't collide and make sure you run into our API limits and make sure yeah, yeah, and as a small business, that's not what you do. You know, you the business wants to focus on doing their business. They don't want to be software managers, they don't be developer managers. Trust me, that's what I do. It's a pain. So you want to you want to let customers companies run the software that helps them do what they need to do without having to rely so much on very expensive assets, like LIKE IT staff developers and creating that complexity of what's happening with the data. And on top of that, you have the complexity that goes along with things like GDPR and ccpa. Right? data privacy and protection and you think about A lot of companies have their software, their client data sitting in four or five, six different platforms. Yeah, yeah, each of those platforms represents a vector for losing data, which is catastrophic. Like, I mean, even think about what happened with Microsoft, and, you know, with the solar winds hack, and now the tech pack, you know, I mean, they're, they're huge problems. Yeah. So what we want to do is help companies minimize that by by simplifying the way they run all of their operations. So you put everything in one platform, and you don't have to rely on or you don't, you don't have the same risk of one of maybe 10 different applications getting hacked, and losing your data that way. So, so it's a, it's a combination of privacy, simplicity, and power. And, and security. So by bringing all those things together in one system, you really simplify all of that, and it helps you and helps you really run your business with the right tools used at the right time for the right people.
Matthew Dunn
And, and a real cumulative, a Kim, that cumulative view of your market and your customers, I would guess gets more and more and more valuable over over time, because that the problem you alluded to of five and six is a small number can 12, you know, 20 different systems with fragments of you know, this is a weblog. And that's the email marketing system. And this over here is how I actually send email to people that I you know, it's all over the place. Right? Right. And you end up either keeping it in your head or on a paper napkin or something like that, which doesn't scale very
Lars Helgeson
well. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Hmm. That's, uh, you touched on on something. And it's always interesting to talk with, you know, technology and platform folks about which is this rising tide of awareness about privacy, and, and control of our own data. And finally, some, some legislation to say, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't let it just be the wild, wild west, and maybe people should have a voice? And what's stored about them? Any any comments about where you guys are headed?
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, I mean, I think that it really comes down to the company owning the data, and not relying on other systems. I mean, I think it's very tempting for companies to think well, I'm going to run everything, all my ads through Facebook, and LinkedIn. And I'm going to do all my communication through Facebook Messenger, maybe LinkedIn message, you know, inhale, whatever, which is, okay. The problem is the moment that the algorithms change, by by those companies, and the moment they decided to cut you off, because they think you're violating some terms, you know, whatever. I mean, regardless of your, of your political affiliation, clearly, we have seen how other technology companies will shut off other companies like it like parlor, where they don't believe they're in in alignment with their standards. So regardless of whether you feel like you would ever be in a position like that, it's still a risk, your data is still sitting with someone else. Whereas if you have your marketing data, your email, traffic data, your web analytics, data, all of that, on a platform, that's not going to do something like that, you know, where you've got a, potentially a massive company that could come in and just say, well, we're gonna, we're gonna bury you now, just because we want to. Yeah, you know, it's it's a, it's a, it's a risk mitigation strategy for a business to think about, where is my data? And who owns it? Yeah, and the more you actually own. And so that's why a CRM is so important, because that's your data, you own that you own the history of Who are those contacts? What do you know about them between their name, their email address, but also their behavioral history? You know, have they opened up emails the job? So what emails have you sent? When did they answer surveys? Have they watched videos have they called you and all this data that you want to own as a business, you don't want that sitting and relying on some other platform social media platform together
Matthew Dunn
easily away from where it seems to be in a way where we're maturing a bit as as the digital becomes normal and part of life in in distinguishing things that we kind of lump together? Before there was there's a point in time when someone would, someone would say, I'm trying to think of a good example. My, my dad no longer with us, unfortunately, used to, used to go to Google to search for websites instead of typing in the URL. And it makes a perfectly understandable shortcut. But you know, Google's accumulating a whole lot of data and frankly, centralization and power in that equation. And now we're starting to distinguish Wait a minute, you know, Facebook owns that they could shut me off As you said, on the show, we went through the kind of delicate office debate about, do we want to keep hosting our own email for, you know, just for inboxes? Or do we want to put it on G Suite? Or do we want to put it on Office 365 or something like that, if we do you know, who owns it, who controls the domain, those sorts of things, like we're finally starting to get a little internalized a little more sense of those underlying ownership control longevity issues, that you touched on, instead of just saying it's bits and bytes. So as long as somebody does it, that's okay. You know, companies didn't think of this stuff as an asset. Now, it's, it's absolutely critical asset.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, and I think I think the risk of loss now is, is getting pretty significant. People are seeing what can happen, you know, whether it's a phishing attack, identity theft, you know, theft, theft,
Matthew Dunn
like, you know, locked up locked up machines with a with a bounty on them. Yeah, I
Lars Helgeson
mean, it's a it's a frightening place, it's a, it's a scary world out there, there's a lot of people who have a lot of resources, and, and are happy to come after you for you know, for whatever it is that they think they can take from you. And so you have to think in terms of worst case scenario. And that's why I think it's, it's, you can't understate how important it is to really have a lock on where all of your data is sitting. How is it protected? Is it encrypted? How many other people have access to it? You know, one of the things I hear a common thing with CRM is, is there's per user pricing. And so companies will often have their employees share users share logins to save money, because they think well, I'll save 100 bucks a month or whatever. 200 bucks a month. Yeah. And, and, you know, so I can I can get away with more by having save some money by having four or five people share a login, which is absolutely disastrous. Yeah, I mean, as far as accountability, security, I mean, there's so many bad things that go with that. That's one of the reasons why we a GreenRope. Actually, we don't charge for user we only charge really interest on interest. Yeah. Because Because I don't want that to be a calculation that anyone ever has to make. It should always be something predictable in terms of cost for managing how much it's, you know, how much what does it take for you to secure your data? Yeah. So
Matthew Dunn
yeah, yeah. Interesting. Good, good. Good for you Good for you. It's not It's not easy, Mr. sidebar conversation. But it's not easy to figure out a pricing model with all the complexity under the hood of a, of a digital service of some sort. It's not easy to figure out where you hang the price tag, sometimes, and and some of the conventional things like per seat, which has been around forever, right? Like, it penalizes behaviors. And you see, not necessarily effective choice, you lose data, and knowledge if five people are sharing a login, because you can't distinguish their interactions from each other, almost by definition right there. And you don't think that's important, but it's probably quite critical. Wait, who talked to the Acme account? Oh, well, we were showing a login, so we don't know. Right?
Lars Helgeson
Right. And that happens more than you'd like to you'd like to admit, in other companies out there, which is, you know, one of the things we want to simplify that. The other thing that we've kind of made, the choice about is not to charge per feature. So the only thing that we charge in addition is for the network costs to do the SMS, telephony like those, those kinds of things we just pass on. But yeah, sort of tangible cost. We don't charge it. We've a learning management system. We have a project management system, we have a survey tool and event management system, all these different things that are built into our CRM that well charge for. Yeah. And which is in in stark contrast to most other CRMs out there. I know that Microsoft CRM pricing manual is 26 pages long. You know, if you got to read a 26 page document to figure out how much they're gonna bill, you. There's, obviously there's a risk of upselling being. But, but, but I think it's you know, people like things that are simple. Yeah. And I want I want everyone I mean, especially our customers, but everyone should be able to have access to the tools that they need, and not have to make that decision of, well, I could save 20 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month or 100 bucks a month, if I used this other separate software. Yeah. You know, that would be able to do this function. And then you know, if it's a separate piece of software, then you've got to figure out the API connections and the cost to build the connections there. And what happens if there's a data collision for us, because we do all that internally. I don't want that to be a decision that someone has to make of like thinking well, is it worth it for me to pay an additional X dollars a month for me to be able to have access to the project manager or to the the learning management system or the event management system because all that data should be feed into the CRM, the CRM.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's a substantial bar you set for yourself in fulfilling all of those functions for a company. Any any comments on how you how you get there and stay there and keep up.
Lars Helgeson
It's hard. Yeah, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. I mean, there are companies that that's all they do. There are companies that all they do is project man, writing is all learning management. Yeah. I mean, there, there are focused tools in those in those, you know, different industry verticals. Yeah. But it's funny, because I would just read an article, there's a guy, there's a guy named Chuck Shafer, who's worked with him for a long time. But he just wrote an article about RFPs and CRMs. Really, and, and it was really interesting, because he said, and we've seen this where people think about what they need for their CRM, and they think very feature focused, I need a CRM that does X, Y, and Z. And they think, you know, I need to be able to do this with it, you know, and rather than thinking about how they're actually going to use it, and what the output is going to be, they think in terms of I need this feature. And the reality is that users of CRM, typically and on average, use 30% of the capability of the CRM. Yeah. Because so much of this other capabilities, stuff that the features that they asked for, they never use. It's just, it's just something that they think that they need, that sounds good, or they you know, someone maybe have mentioned it in a meeting or something. And they say, Oh, we need to have that.
Matthew Dunn
Or it works for this particular niche industry, but maybe not many others. And then, you know, one of your one of your dilemmas one of my dilemmas running a running a software company is trying to make a sensible, you know, user guided choice about what gets the work and the focus, because you can't do it. All. Right, it becomes unusable if you do it. All. Right. And that's a disaster as well. Yeah, not a trivial challenge of I mean, as soon as you say, CRM, of course, there's a there's a Salesforce shaped cloud out there on the horizon. And I've got to say, I'm not No, I'm not knocking Salesforce. I used it years ago. But I don't think you could pay me enough to sit down at a desk and say, I've got to use it all day now. Like it just made me It made me nuts. It was almost incomprehensible, and didn't help me get work done.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, I mean, Salesforce isn't bad if you're a fortune 1000 company, and you can hire a system integrator to design it and make it work exactly how you want your business. Yeah, right. Because the platform is very powerful. But it just, it requires so much engineering work to make it work. It's not worth it. If you're an SMD. You can you can do everything that you need and something for a fraction of the cost. I mean, it literally will cost at least 20 times more to do it that way on Salesforce. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. I mean, it's really more of a toolkit for consultants to design your CRM than a CRM that you fire up and use. Right? The box. Yeah,
Lars Helgeson
a good CRM should allow you to customize it to meet what you need. without the use of developers developer resources, you should be able to make it work.
Matthew Dunn
Lovely. You know, I
Lars Helgeson
know we talked that we're talking a lot about email here. But as that email communication has to be tracked and managed through all those different interaction, yeah, you think about the complexity of Where are you going to store the email communication that comes out of all the different things that you do? Right? You've got the simple newsletters that you might send out. But what happens when you have the sales enablement process where you have a salesperson that needs to trigger a drip campaign or a series of logic driven messages that are personalized to their target? And do lead nurturing that way? Where does that? Where does that data? How does it get executed? Where is it stored? What happens with where do you track what people do with those emails? Yeah. And then think about things like email mark, or event manager. So you know, what happens if you're going to have if you host a zoom webinar? Where's that data going to go? And how are you going to keep track of the people that register or attend? And so you want to have a single tool that unifies all that together and doesn't have the complexity of, well, we're going to have to buy this software and link it and buy the software and link it and then
Matthew Dunn
yeah, Neil, and you'll never actually make a coherent view out of those out of those different packages. Yeah, that's, I mean, it's it's a totally sensible argument. In some ways, it seems to me. That's the that's the huge enterprise size target that Microsoft is starting to aim at now in this you know, post Satya Nadella as your centric Microsoft not not the office and Windows version of the company, but I think they call it global computer or something like that, like their their bid and fair to have enterprise scale companies do that kind of thing across all of those myriad touch points, although there there will definitely be some high paid consultants involved. Sure, get the job done.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, you know, it was really funny I was I was here in Bellevue to speak at a conference a couple years ago. And there was a VP of Marketing from Microsoft, that was a keynote speaker. And he stood up there. And he talked about this grand vision that Microsoft had to someday be able to combine web analytics data and email marketing data in the same system. And I thought, is this the great vision? Because I know of at least 20 companies that did this 10 years ago, including yours profitably, and well, yeah, including ours. But yeah, I mean, companies, like like, HubSpot has done this for, you know, they're on the same track. As as MailChimp, even has done this for many years. You know, and so it's a, it's interesting how I think the enterprise space just thinks about things a little bit differently than the SMB space, which is kind of where we've stayed focused.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, they do on an enterprise, I've got enterprise software, including Microsoft on in on the on the resume in the background on, it's a very different target, and a very different mindset. And critically, the decision maker isn't always the user, which in your case, SMBs is much more likely to get yelled at by the user, you know, the, you know, this, this CIO, choosing a platform for 1000s of people in the company through a lengthy RFP process, like you're a long ways away from the desk, where this is actually gonna get you fired up and used and you are trying to solve a scale problem that's really quite different, as well. But yeah, and and at the same time, now we got we're at the stage where even a small business has an appetite for I want the tools like the big guys, the digital tools, like the big guys, right? It's reasonable for a small business to say, you know what, I'd like a single view of the customer. And I'd like my service and my sales and my marketing to all dot back to the same place. Man, that would have been science fiction not that long ago.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah. Right. That's kind of cool. That's kind of, but it's a game changer for a business to have everyone in the same platform. Yeah, that's a big part of our platform is a support ticketing management system. And really, you know, when you have customer service people interacting with the same platform that the the sales people, yeah, now a salesperson can go into a contact record someone that they're trying to sell. And they can see a history of every support ticket that's ever opened up every chat that's ever been made between them and a customer service person. Well, they can see history, though, of course, of all the email traffic in the web analytics data, the videos, watch the surveys answered, the forms filled out the calls made in and out and text messaging, the events, they've attended, the webinars, they've attended, all of that, automatically synced together into one system. And that's, that's, that's what we want that I mean, we built that. But I want to help companies get to the point where they are all everyone in the company is using that all together? Well, well. And you can do things like lead scoring that cross across all those different channels. So you could say, if I'm a salesperson, and I want to do lead scoring, and I want to find out who my most interested leads are right now, maybe I have half an hour to make a call to a couple people, I'm going to target the people who are most interested in. Now we can do scoring, and see across all those different channels, who is the most engaged. And that kind of insight really helps a salesperson be better at sales? And conversely, if you have a marketing person who can see across all those channels, and they can see what's actually driving interaction, what are the statistical correlations between these different actions and conversions? You're not just measuring because everyone thinks about that in terms of email and web stuff. Yeah. But once you start to take into consideration the phone, text messaging, the support, ticketing issues, the live chat interactions, the webinars, once you pull all that together, yeah, now you have a picture of who your leads are. Now you can understand consumer behavior. If you're just going off of web, and you know, who's on your web page, and what they did with your emails, you have a sliver of a picture. And, and you're not going to make the right decision and you can't target people, you can't really personalize from just that interaction, because there's a lot more to the relationship than what did they do with my email? And where are they on my webpage?
Matthew Dunn
When? Agreed, Agreed? Agreed? That's I love the perspective, it also seems to me that a lot of companies end up with a better view of their prospects than their customers, right? Because if you've got the somewhat conventional approach, and I'll get this email marketing system, this web analytics system, you know this for my sales guys, this from a customer service, you know, help desk or whatever, all separate, all separate, right? You end up with a ton of data at the at the sort of front end prospecting and sales and it almost never gets transferred over or correlated. Right in into the view of Oh, wait, these guys are actually paying us these are live customers that the the service and support that you mentioned doesn't always get the customer doesn't always have a voice about the customers when in fact, they're the ones keeping things rolling with your real life paying customers.
Lars Helgeson
Right? Right. So how do you
Matthew Dunn
how do you help people grapple with the data, overwhelming amount of data and turn that into, you know, not just noise but a signal?
Lars Helgeson
Well, you have to understand the the the customer journey, because you're accumulating all that data. And the key is you have various different user stories inside your organization, you have marketers who are going to use that data differently than a salesperson who's going to use that differently than a support person. So you look at how your users are going to be interacting with the platform. And that's that's actually how we design the system was around those functional areas. So if you have a salesperson, you think about how are they going to what sort of data then do they need to see, they need to see their pipeline, they need to see their overall statistics, they need to see what is coming up in their schedule, and things like that marketing, people are using things a little bit differently. So they have different kinds of reports that they're going to use, they're doing different types of campaign optimization and personalization tools. And so in each of the elements, at least in our system, they're designed around the actual use case of the user. And so when you go in, you can you can very easily go and find the data that you need, pick it out and do the analysis or do the writing or do what do whatever it is that you need to do. Yeah. And so but a lot of that comes down to education, educating users, and it comes down to really understanding your target market, and how are you going to be interacting with your target market. And so there's very, education is a really big component around what we do, partially because we do things a little bit differently in that everything is all integrated. So we like everyone to understand where they fit in the puzzle. I don't like organizations where you put somebody in a corner, and all they do is their little job, and they don't think about how they impact the rest of the organization. I don't think anybody likes to work that way. I'm sure maybe some people do. But But I think everyone wants to feel like they're contributing and part of a team. And they want to see that impact that they're making. And I think siloing software is going to do the same thing as siloing, a person where I'll put, we'll put, they're working in their little corner, and they're generating data in their little corner or in this little software piece that where that data doesn't really go anywhere. And the relevance of that data really is not it's not very high, because it's it's, it's stuck in a little environment where only a few people can use it. So we want to help companies broaden the way they see all of the data that they're generating, and not get lost in it. But like you said, find the signal through the noise, what do they need to pull out, and then be able to extract that data and use it? And so like I said, there's a lot of there's a lot of training that's involved, because not every business is the same. And so we need to help encourage and coach Coach that through.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, nice. that's a that's a heck of a bold it's a it's a bold agenda. I actually I really like it. There's that. I've got a I've got a young friend who runs a photography, business, wedding photography, she does she does very well at it. But she adopted a platform called 17 hats when she first launched it. And I and she said, I love this. It's It's everything. It's my sales, it's my e commerce, it's my CRM, etc. And I'm not familiar with the platform, but I remember she said, this thing just saves me time, because I'm not running around between all of these boxes. It's all in one place. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Sounds like, Yeah, probably smaller scale.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, exactly. So that's great. I mean, to have a tool like that. And when it's written for the entrepreneur, the startup, you know, the one person job, you know, they don't need the advanced tools. Yeah, they can, you know, the the automation, the predictive analytics, like she's not going to go in and do all that analysis.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. Right. Because
Lars Helgeson
it's not it's not really her. I mean, she's so relationship driven, and it's just it's her by herself, right. But as you start to scale up, if she was an organization of, say, five or 10 people, where you have management layers that need to watch over and take them, you know, monitor what are what are what's everybody doing, you know, yes. What are my funnels look like? You know, it's, it's a different kind of an animal. It's a different kind of a, it's a different problem, and it needs a different tool. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
What's the tell? Tell me a bit about the the market for your company on size, size of customers, types of businesses, what do they look like?
Lars Helgeson
We are all over the place. So we have startups. We have government organizations. We have universities, we're in 40 different countries. So yeah, so we're spread out all kinds of different industries applications, from manufacturing to Transportation and Logistics to law firms to agencies, ad agencies, marketing, consulting firms, wow, all over the place. And the nice thing is that we scale up to I mean, some of our organs, you know, you're talking about a government organization that has hundreds of users. Yeah, hundreds of 1000s of contracts that they're managing. I mean, that's a it's a different type of a solution. I mean, it's the same software, it's set up differently than, say, a small company that has two or three people, it's using it for different in different ways.
Matthew Dunn
I see. Wow, that's, that's a that's a heck of a range to cover. With design and development as you continue to evolve the product.
Lars Helgeson
It is it's, it makes things I mean, I think you understand the how hard it is to make something that can handle something that's so complex, also not intimidating to a startup. Because if somebody comes in and you know, there may be there's maybe one, two or three people working in the company, then how do they How do they use the same platform? Yeah, as a company that has hundreds of years,
Matthew Dunn
hundreds of users? Yeah, yeah, I know,
Lars Helgeson
that we both. So we have clients in that whole spectrum. And
Matthew Dunn
you said multiple, you said 40 countries. So you've, you've had to grapple with multiple languages in the in the user, you know, user interface user experience as well. Yep. Yep. documentation to?
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, the the documentation is mostly I think we've got English, German, Spanish and Russian right now. Okay. So but and for the rest of the rest of that it's Google Translate.
Matthew Dunn
I hear you, we just we actually just went through the localization of our, our component four that sits in email editors puts real time content inside the email editor. And we had enough demand to localize that localizing meeting the software term, if you don't do software all day, localizing habits speak different languages, so users aren't aren't lost, and all stuck looking at at English, which is our little, our little bit of imperialism. Thank you, internet. And it's not trivial to get all that stuff. Right and tight and meaningful on it's not true. non trivial. Yeah.
Lars Helgeson
I mean, we go through I mean, things like tickets, you know, like a support ticket is booked right into a train ticket. Yes, yeah. in different
Matthew Dunn
languages. And you can't just drop a single word or two. Yeah, you know, God bless Google Translate, but you can just drop a single word in there and expected to get it right. There's no context like, your Ticket Ticket example is right. On the mark. He mentioned, you mentioned Russia and a couple of other domains. Do you do you have to do you have to keep data in data in place for some customers?
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, we do. Yeah, so it's, it's a little tricky. You know, the, the Privacy Shield is something that has been a big issue, that maybe your listeners may or may not be aware that. So GDPR was a big thing, for protecting the security and privacy of data for Europeans citizens. And a big part of that was the Privacy Shield program, which was something that was a it was a agreement between the EU and the United States, that would say that if we had data in the United States, and we as a company, were willing to sign up and say, Yes, we will protect European citizens data, we will not share it. And you can trust us. And we're willing to put our company's reputation and brand and money on the line and say, we will not save your we will not sell your data. Right? Right. European courts struck that entire agreement down, because they recognize that our intelligence agencies are taking the data from the transatlantic cable and sniffing it, whatever you want to call it. But the data is no longer secure. They don't believe that the data is secure in transit between the EU and the United States, because of that known, whatever that term is you sniffing I guess, but taking that data in transit away, and so on, which caused which has caused us a fair amount of headache, the Privacy Shield program is still in place, even though the EU courts have struck it down. And so, you know, we try to you know, obviously, we encrypt all of our data in transit and everything, but you know, now, things have to be done over there. And they can't be transmitted, transmitted from over there to here and still be in compliance. Anyway, there's, I mean, and you think about all the other things like the Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and South America, and yeah, this is everyone's all over the place. So so we have to be very cognizant of that. And it's a it's a, it's a lot of work. That's a big lift. And
Matthew Dunn
now you guys, do you sit on top of of a commercial cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, something like that. Run your own. Yeah. We
Lars Helgeson
have all Wow, good for you over on metal
Matthew Dunn
that's uh that takes work and and and the redundancy and you know, generators and all the other stuff. I'm guessing you do a lot of colocation, just in terms of hosting facilities. But while you're on metal, good, good for you. I haven't I haven't done that in a while. For what we're up to, like a cloud you Okay, good. We're good with that. But it comes.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, there's there's a, there's pluses and minuses. Yeah, the day is when we have to buy hard drives, like, I still, we still have to buy hard drives. You don't have to buy hard drives, they just put you on a different box. And you don't notice
Matthew Dunn
that they just send you a bigger bill. And it
Lars Helgeson
was Yeah, right.
Matthew Dunn
This storage cost me again, whoa, hang on a minute, let me do the math on that when
Lars Helgeson
we do a lot of computationally intensive work to further some of the scoring and predictive analytics tools that we have. And so yeah, if we were to put that on the cloud, the amount of CPU usage would probably scale things make it very expensive.
Matthew Dunn
But that I don't have the math background to be an honest to God, data scientists, but the rapid evolution of of big data, and this last year's phrase rapid evolution of big data, and the growth of tools to start making meaning out of all of that stuff is like that's pretty, that's pretty darn fascinating. What do you think of Salesforce buying Tableau?
Lars Helgeson
Um, I think it's a good for them. I think it's a good combination. You know, the I mean, it's, it's, again, you're you're buying it's more of an enterprise level solution. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, Tableau is very powerful software. Yeah. But you got to know how to use it. I mean, it's, if you're a data scientist, you're I mean, and to be honest, like, you know, most small to midsize businesses don't really, that are not there. You know, I mean, I mean, the problem is actually accumulating the data in the first place. Yes. You know, if you're, if you're doing all that analytics on a sliver of the data, you're, you're you may really understand that data, but you don't understand your customer. Yeah. And that's, and that's really where we try to focus is to help the businesses truly understand their customer. Because that's, that's what makes customers because companies live or die. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely you're absolutely right.
Lars Helgeson
All the all the data analytics in the world did not say if Toys R Us, or Sears, or Kmart.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, good point, or or pair one, or you could we could keep ticking down. Yeah, kick ticking down the list. And then by you know, by contrast, you talk about the companies that haven't had made the curve I use said, you're in Seattle now. I watch with with no small degree of awe as Amazon continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I thank God, they know a lot about me. Oh, my word. You know. And we've got an Amazon account from 97. They know a lot about me. Yeah. And and now in just now in the middle of pandemic, when people are like, Oh, I need groceries and this and like, more and more stuff, coming from them thinking, wow, that's got to be a, that's got to be an incredible first time problem, the scale that they're working at? Oh, yeah.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, it's, it is amazing. It is truly amazing. I mean, like or dislike amazon for What the? Yeah. Or how they do it. Truly, from an engineering perspective, it is, it is incredible, what they've been, what they've been able to build, it's just yeah, it's just it's, it's just stunning. It's like, even if you did a freeze frame monitor said, I'm going to stop being a customer or something like that, there's still a ton to learn from how they've done that. And, and, and at the evolutionary pace, like the pace of growth that they've had in the past few years. But a good a good CRM platforms should help a small business be able to capitalize on those on those same data streams to it's not. I mean, for as impressive as as what Amazon and Google and Microsoft, what they've what they have been able to do at the enterprise level, a small business should be able to take advantage of similar types of tools. I mean, it's not at the same scale, obviously. But if you can gather that data together, and really, because it's really about understanding your market, it's really about understanding how to best serve your customer. And Amazon has done an incredible job at knowing how to serve their customer. Yeah, yeah, a small business can do the same thing. If they're able to pull that same kind of data in. Amazon is continually paying attention to how people are using their app, how they're on their website, what are they ordering, you know, their their delivery times their, their supply chain and all that stuff. But that's all driven by analytics. A small business can do the same thing if they have the right software.
Matthew Dunn
Well, I mean, he wouldn't have occurred to me as an analogy, but in some ways, you know, the core proposition, the thesis you're talking about for GreenRope is is dead, like get your own Amazon right one of the one of the things about Amazon is they do have, they do have my shopping and my buying and my returning and like they've got all of that in one spot. And that's you're saying do the same thing for a small medium sized business think the same way. Like the complete lifecycle of your interactions, your long term life with the with the customers that actually make your business run.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, I think another similar analogy is like Zillow. Right? Zillow has really expanded in the real estate market. Yeah. First, they were just sort of like a convenient MLS. But now they're doing loans. They're doing transactions they're doing I mean, they're, they're replacing realtors. Yeah. And by understanding the entire customer journey, and replacing it with software almost exclusively. And it's a it's an interesting case study in how it's transforming an industry, through technology through that integration of the user journey. And so customer journey. So each of us if we think in terms of Well, how do we address the customer journey? Are we looking at just a very specific piece of a customer's journey and doing whatever it is they're trying to do? Or are we trying to sell something that can really address the entire customer journey? And then do we have the software to track them as they go all the way through those steps, right, from initially finding out what it is that you do, to making the decision to having them actually purchased from you through fulfillment, and then eventually turning them into advocates for your brand? How do you use software to track that entire journey? And that's, that's what we want to do with with one piece of software. We want to do that.
Matthew Dunn
I wouldn't, I wouldn't have thought Zilla, but you're you're right. They really have. They bought Redfin A while back and it started giving broker footprint. But yeah, they really are starting to change that industry that didn't want to change for a very long time. Right? Of course, there's no houses available. So at least there aren't here. And everybody I talked to said, Yep, no, no inventory. When you talk to a realtor, it's got it's kind of fascinating. On DOD back to emails, it's nominally that's what we talk we're gonna talk about at some point, but back to email for a second on because you started as an email company, how have you seen that particular channel? evolve for both, you know, customers, using your customers using email to communicate with their customers, and that end user experience as well of what do I use email for?
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, the evolution really has been in targeting and, and making sure the message is relevant and timely. And that really has come in with the integration. I mean, we still do email newsletters and making sure that the content is relevant that we, you know, the D or whatever, but also in the, in the nurturing campaigns so that when somebody first comes in, if they're interested in it, from our perspective, we use it obviously, for when people are interested in using our CRM, we paint we tailor the message that they receive, to what role they play, and what sort of industry that they're in, because they're going to high level of personalization. Right? And that's, and that's very important. I think, for every business, it they the whole customer journey needs to track the need of the customer. The customer, really, I mean, it really comes first. But if someone comes to you, and they say I'm interested in using your product or service because of x, and then you send them an email that says, Hey, aren't we so great at why they look at that and say, well, you're not listening to me, I'm going to go find another customer, another company vendor who will. And so what we want to do is help people understand help businesses understand how to how to manage all of that, so that when somebody comes in, you're keeping track of where they're coming from. And that's truly the evolution of email is that message being absolutely targeted to that person's interest. And so using using things, even things as simple as when you do ads on Google, the ad on Google that you put on the AdWords, whatever the campaign, if that language on the landing page doesn't match the ad that they click on, you're losing 30% of your audience simply because the language doesn't match in using the same key phrases, keywords, whatever. The same goes with the follow up emails, the follow up messaging that you're sending them personalization has to do with what campaign did they come from? Did they come from the campaign that was interested in that where you were talking about this particular feature or this particular messaging, or this particular target market segment, whatever it was, that consistent message is what gets people to engage. People have been using email now too long for you to rely on. Bam, or this this generic target blasting approach. Yeah, you're messaging to get them to do stuff. They're just used to they've seen the Nigerian prince email now 5000 times they're not going to buy it.
Matthew Dunn
Well, and and do your first name does not move that just doesn't move the dial anymore. Like, yeah, I know that's done, I literally don't see it. Right. It's like don't don't bother serious, don't bother with that.
Lars Helgeson
Right. And that's, and that's why you want to be able with the with the targeting, you want the messaging to reflect what you know about the customer. And so we use what we call it in our system is dynamic data, meaning that we know that if someone is interested in, say, the marketing element of our CRM, the message that they get in the follow up, put the marketing related information at the top, because we know they're marketers, they're interested marketing, if someone's coming from sales, we put the sales at the top. So because we want the above the fold content to be relevant to what they're looking for, every single business can and should do this, they should think in terms of where are people coming from? And what are they going to be interested in? And how do I send the content to them, that's going to be that's going to resonate with them at the top of the message that they receive, so that they feel like we're listening to you and we have a solution for you. And so
Matthew Dunn
we're always, we're always in, we're always in a bit of a struggle with let's call it marketing uses of communication technology. But to reconcile scale and personal scale and personalization, to say, I'll talk this way to marketing folks this way to people who are looking for, you know, service solution, we're still doing some grouping kinds of decisions, right? We're not truly tailoring a one to one. Because you don't you don't have time to sit down, you can't sit down and write a single message to every single prospect. And at the same time, we're trying to look like we did. Fair. And it's Yeah, it's like it's a it's a constant resource, a resource management design, tension to get those to get those two things to reconcile. It seems like we're getting better at it.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, it's it's really about doing your homework first, you know, the idea is you you set up your automation sequences first, and you think about when someone goes through the customer journey, what do you know about them? And how are you going to personalize based on what you do know, do you send a different message to males versus females high income versus low income people in a particular geographic area or not? people that are interested in a certain product or not. So you put all those rules into the content. And then also, you can put them into the timing of the of the messaging itself. So you can you can say, you know, if this person is interested in this particular thing, maybe they're going to be more likely to buy sooner, so we're going to increase the cadence of the messages that we send to them. Whereas if we're talking about selling maybe to engineers that have a long sales cycle on a particular product, they're more thoughtful, they're more, they're going to be a little bit more left brain, you know, they're going to be more analytical. So the messaging is going to be different, and maybe we're going to space them out a little bit further. So understanding your target market, will, there's the there's and then and then having automation based around things that they do. So if you want to wait until someone does a certain thing, like maybe send them an email, and you're gonna wait until they fill out a forum before you trigger something else. Or the next one. Yeah, yeah. Or you wait until they click on a link or you wait till they watch a video or whatever it is that you have that logic built into that personalization, personalization. Yeah, understanding the customer journey, you can build that first. Once you do that, then you start sending people down those journeys, and you wait to see, then what's happening. When they do you start to generate data, and you start to see, okay, well, we're seeing people are taking this action, but they're not taking this action, and then you really start to learn about your customer. But that's a, you're building a system. And that really is the special sauce that a business is going to create. Because you're generating knowledge, you're generating intelligence about how customers are interacting with your brand. And maybe that means you modify your brand, maybe it means you modify the way you contact, you talk to people. But in any case, you're molding your business around your customers, and not just trying to hammer them if I if I send them 20 emails a day, for the next week, they're going to buy my thing. Yeah, that's it's not going to work that way. You have to you have to you have to be listening and and and we all know what that's like to deal with companies that are interesting, and the frustration points that we're at, so that we have with them. So that's that's what we want to build is this ecosystem with this business intelligence driven way of interaction
Matthew Dunn
That's I like I like the way you put that. Yeah. And it's much more about listening people. businesses tend to buy. broad statement, not fair. businesses tend to buy stuff that talks more than they buy stuff that listens, because it looks like it's going to do something. And I, I, I still cringe about companies that invest zillions of dollars in, don't make it up to make the point, email marketing, and then they they spend diddly on their content. Like, I don't care if the tool can send out a billion if it's a bad message. Who cares what the tool can do? Because you're the guy getting the message doesn't care what you use to send it. He cares what he sees, and reads.
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, I had, I had the same conversation a few years ago with the guy that worked for Sweet Tomatoes. They were on there using I think an Oracle product and spending a huge amount of money on the product. And their messaging was not effectively reaching out to their audience and driving people to their restaurants. And yeah, now they're closed. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, which is too bad, because I think it could have been avoided. But, you know, I think big companies will hold on to this big technology, these big providers, because they think bigger is always better.
Matthew Dunn
Well, and it becomes a there's a rule, and I forgot the name, I forget the name of the rule. I just read it the other day, there's there's a rule that says institutions will actually fight to preserve the fight to preserve the problem that they address. And I think the same is true of same becomes true of systems, particularly if they're expensive. Well, we, you know, we bought a big widget system. So we must really have a widget problem. What do you really have widget problem? Or do you need that thing anymore? Should you keep paying for that thing? Or is it doing the job? And it's it's it's tough because you get people who've put their career, their rep on the line to say that's the right thing to do, or to buy or to invest in? Yeah. And it's tough. It's tough to unwind. Plus, you don't realize what your dependencies are after certain point on that, right. Yeah, yeah. A couple of party questions, because I tied up like an extra half an hour of your time, which I appreciate. You got to travel 60 countries. I think I saw 7272. Wow. Any any tops. I mean, I'd love to hear about all validity tops off the list.
Lars Helgeson
Then great ones. About 15 years ago, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. That's right. Yeah, it was about a week. And East Africa. Beautiful. The people are incredible. Yeah, I have to say, I had a great time when I was there. My sort of my ancestral homeland is Norway. So I enjoyed going back there. Yeah. We do a lot of business in Germany and Switzerland. So I enjoy going there. We have some employees that are in Eastern Europe and Belarus and Ukraine. Yeah. So I go there. I enjoy that. Iceland is beautiful, beautiful country. Oh,
Matthew Dunn
I loved Iceland. Yeah, I got to be there as well. spectacular. Yes. Hard. Is it been harder in a pandemic to not be able to scratch that travel edge?
Lars Helgeson
Yeah, and in fact, so the the differences the travel is just different. I'm not going as far as I've been living in my good doing a lot of camping and my foreigner and you know, just sort of going in the mountains and taking the driver runner. I do yeah,
Matthew Dunn
I drive I drive a Gx 470 which is the same same platform and it's my it's my rig.
Lars Helgeson
I got it I kind of customers did some custom stuff to it so I can sleep in it and go camping and
Matthew Dunn
I'm in the middle of that on mine. I swear and I like literally that's tonight's project. You finally put the deck part in right so you're not doors guys. Well, obviously. Yeah, Yeah,
Lars Helgeson
I do. I enjoy hiking and and maybe I like the sports too. I like snowboarding and surfing and paddleboarding and all that stuff too. But yeah, it's just nice being outside.
Matthew Dunn
Oh, yeah. You know if you're if Seattle's becoming kind of home base, you'll have to come up and ski Mount Baker. It's Yeah, it's I mean, it's cascade concrete. Right. And Northwest snow is never gonna stack up to Colorado or Utah. But Baker's pretty darn cool. Yeah, cool. Wow. 72 countries. I have a neighbor who's Danny's almost 80. And I think he said I'm he's keeping it the one cut one country per year of his life pace. But aside from him, I've never met anybody who's been to as many countries as you just mentioned, that's really impressive.
Lars Helgeson
It's I really enjoy it that the different cultures that you meet the different people that you meet are just so man,
Matthew Dunn
right?
Lars Helgeson
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's funny because when you boil it down to people that there are some a lot of simple things that connect all of us, that we suffer from the same difficulties, the same kinds of decisions. The stresses, the ups and downs, the losses, the winds, you know, all of those things we share so much in common. Yeah, and I think I think a lot of times our news and our politics will try to separate us from, from the humanity, of people who are in other countries who are just like us. And you know, they're trying to figure out how to survive, how to live how to make the best lives for themselves, and their families and their loved ones. And that's, that's no different from us. They speak different languages, they may look different from us, but they're, but humans are fundamentally very similar, I think, in in what what we're trying to do, and we all see ourselves as the protagonist of our story, and trying to make the best for ourselves, I think when you travel, you see that you see different kinds of people. And that's not to say that everyone's a good person, or, you know, you obviously, you have to be careful and safe when you travel. But especially in some countries, but you know, you think when you approach that from a sense of, of respect, and wanting to learn about other people and other cultures, the experience is so much it's so eye opening, and it just, it just changes your world, it changes the way you see everyone and every thing and and it's really, for as big of a planet as it is and the fact that there's 7 billion people here. I think that once you travel and you and you expose, you're exposed to these different kinds of cultures and things and religions and everything else, you see so much of a common thread that that binds us all together. And, and I really, I really enjoy that I enjoy the seeing the things that you know, I mean, I think if anyone's ever been to Angkor Wat, and walk through that that temple in Cambodia, I mean, it's it's, it's incredible, as much as it is going to the killing fields in Cambodia, which are moving in such a different kind of a way. You know, and so when you when you see these, these things, you know, seeing these massive churches or temples that have been built these huge things that have been created by humans. It's truly remarkable what people have have created. And so it's a it's a very humbling experience, I think when you when you run into so many different kinds of people and experiences all over the world. And so I'm, I'm very grateful that I've had the chance to do that and, and work from anywhere as I've traveled. So it's been, it's I if people haven't had a chance to travel in their lives, like it's one of those things, I would recommend everyone if you if you have an opportunity to go do it.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was eloquently put really was no thank you. It was that's that. That was that was wonderful. I'm going to wrap it up and get Lars off the hook here. But Lars it was a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for making the time today.
Lars Helgeson
Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, I'm gonna call wrap on recording. Thanks. Oh. Where's that stupid recording button?