Speaker 1: 0:20

Thank you. Meet Evan Polin, the president of Polin Performance Group. A master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience, evan is not just a consultant. He's a force in sales, focusing on mindset planning and skill marketing. With 20 years under his belt, craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed.

Speaker 2: 1:12

And welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. I'm Craig Andrews, my partner in crime, evan Polin, there we go.

Speaker 3: 1:18

You got it down.

Speaker 2: 1:19

I got it down. I'm in rhythm now, brother. So we are always about accountability, Sales and marketing. We've had this on several conversations on our show Accountability is very important, correct?

Speaker 2: 1:34

Accountability is everything Okay. So now we're going to talk about today how you can use some of that accountability and track it through your CRM, track it in terms of your relationship and more. And we have a guest today who we know very well, we've had different conversations with, who has been an architect and a storyteller and everything. She's amazing. Okay, evan, do you have anything to say before we bring our guest on?

Speaker 3: 2:01

So I'm really excited to bring on our next guest. First, she's got a dynamic business that is a little bit different than what a lot of other people in her industry do. She's a small business owner who's built the business from the ground up, put a lot of infrastructure in place that those of you listening even small businesses may be able to take bits and pieces of what she talks about to incorporate into your business. And, quite frankly, I've known our guest for much longer than either of us want to admit to publicly. So very, very excited to have Alice Dahmer from Prasadah Whole being join us today.

Speaker 4: 2:38

Hi guys, hey.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Alice, how are you?

Speaker 4: 2:41

Very good, so glad to be here. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 2:46

Great to see you. So, alice, I was just briefly, briefly touched upon some of your bit of your background. Give us a little bit about yourself, your background and Prasada.

Speaker 4: 2:54

Yeah. So I was a weird kid who in second grade, said I was going to be an architect and then actually became one, even when they said there's a lot of math. I had architecture babies, I ran an architecture practice and along the way realized that that was a pretty high stress industry and had to learn the practices to have a family and run a business. And so whenever in the 2008 kind of crunch in the economy, thought, well, what would I like to do next? How can I take these skills that I have in architecture as a storyteller and exhibit designer? And I really wanted to share the tools that I had used to make my way through and not hurt anybody in the family, and share those with other professionals. And at the time, in 2009, their corporate wellness was still just a pretty new thing. People were just starting to really recognize that. But I wanted to be able to tell stories and inspire people to make change for a better experience of life. So that was kind of how it all started.

Speaker 2: 3:55

So she makes me excited. She makes me excited. I love storytelling. That's my side of the fence, by the way, buddy.

Speaker 3: 4:01

And I'll set her up to tell a story and hopefully she won't jump through the screen. But when you say corporate wellness, that's more than just chair massage.

Speaker 4: 4:10

It is more than chair massage. Yes, it is a lot more than chair massage and I actually was talking to a group yesterday and I said, you know, wellness sounds like a nice side dish, but really the programs and the trainings that we do for people are the things that if you talk to most leaders, they have. Get in there and help teams get more engaged, learn these skills so they can work better together. Because that we all you know, most of us have realized that if our teams aren't functioning, if they aren't interdependent with each other, they aren't responsive. We're, you know, our businesses, aren't going to survive without that glue in place.

Speaker 2: 5:04

So what I find interesting and kind of pivoting here a little bit into the sales piece of the conversation. Evan's a very big proponent. Evan has done sales training with me and he says one of the first things he asked me on our trust do you have a CRM? And I said what's a CRM? The first time years ago he said what's a CRM? And he said, ok, all right, it's going to be one of those sessions.

Speaker 3: 5:30

And Craig. This is why you're with me 12, 13 years later.

Speaker 2: 5:33

Yes, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. So let's talk about how CRMs help you Actually better. Yet, before we do that, evan, just so everybody knows, because we're about being the playbook tell everybody what a CRM, just in case they ended up with somebody like me.

Speaker 3: 5:50

The CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management Manager, and it's really where all of your data should lie in terms of your connections with your clients, your communicating with your clients.

Speaker 3: 6:04

You're communicating with your clients and then tracking new business opportunities that are coming in, being able to make projections in terms of where sales are coming from.

Speaker 3: 6:15

And then and Alice is going to get into this a lot with her, with what she's done with her business, which is just phenomenal, especially with the size business that she has is also being able to, once you're tracking on a regular basis, be able to go back and look at that data and go, oh, these are the things that led to higher engagement, these are the things that led to higher conversion. Geez, if these things were working before, what's going to keep us from doubling down, doing more of that to hopefully be more strategic in terms of what we're doing with our sales and marketing, to close more business? But if we've got everything in our head, if we're not tracking things consistently, it's going to be very difficult to have a good, repeatable, trackable plan over time. And again, I think that Alice is going to share with the audience you know how she came about getting it, how it's impacted her business and some of the different tools that oftentimes people aren't even aware exist but can really help in terms of scaling and growing your business.

Speaker 2: 7:21

And I think that in our pre-recording conversation that we had with Alice, you really impressed me with the dedication because a lot of people cheap out on CRMs, right, you decided not to Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 4: 7:35

So when you're an architect and you are trained as an architect, you are all about systems and you know that you have to have systems in place, because systems build the foundation of any building. It's like the structure of a building and so if you are going to go higher, if you were going to expand, if you're going to be able to keep track, you have to have those things in place. So that training and you would think, well, how does being an architect actually have to help you be a business owner? But from day one I was like we have to have a place where everybody is keeping the information the phone number, the email address, the person's name and what company they're working at in one place. Even if I only had two people on my team, and even for me, I needed to have a place where I was documenting that. Otherwise, you talk to somebody, you learn that their kid is in second grade and plays baseball or whatever. You've lost that data if you don't have a place to store that.

Speaker 4: 8:26

Because people were super impressed in year three when I would say and at the beginning I was talking to a lot of insurance brokers, I'm talking insurance broker. They'd be like what are you talking about. You're like no, we don't need that, right? Sherry said didn't need that. Year and a half later, bob from organization calls and says hey, we're really interested in learning about your corporate wellness programs. And I said how's Sherry? Is Sherry still there? He's like oh yeah, sherry's there. I was like tell Sherry. I said hello, I really enjoyed talking with her last year. So I had this click, click, three clicks and I had all that information. That is the most basic level. The second level was that every single email that went out from our organization for me or my team was tracked back to that person's contact.

Speaker 4: 9:08

I could see that, oh, sarah had sent them an email or somebody else on my team. So I had the whole entire history of interactions with that person immediately there. So we used capsule originally. That was the easiest one and it was just. It was just the way we work. There was no question on my team. Everybody knew their emails logged in to those correspondents. So we had that information and it was very valuable because in our industry people will be a kind of HR assistant at one location and we've been around long enough that those HR assistants are now running HR departments.

Speaker 2: 9:41

Wow.

Speaker 4: 9:42

Remember and say, oh my gosh, and they would be like I remember that yoga class that we did with you guys or when we had that program about mindfulness, and I'd say, yes, and so I had that data. So that is just invaluable. It's kind of a no brainer that we would, that we would do that.

Speaker 2: 9:57

There's that data word, there's that data word Evan.

Speaker 2: 10:00

There's that data word Right. So Evan and I talk a lot about how important data is from a marketing perspective and he uses data from a sales perspective and you're showing signs here of absolutely killing it from the perspective of using both of them to grow your business. Are there situations where you might have found a more effective way in terms of getting clients to understand who you are and what you do from the correspondence that you've had? I know you mentioned doing the yoga before. What type of things are you doing to keep them in top of mind from that?

Speaker 4: 10:34

Yeah, so you know, at the beginning we had a whole bunch of different tools. We had our constant contact, we had our capsule system, we had all the different pieces. We have to build kind of custom landing pages for our clients so they can see their whole variety of wellness offerings. And so as we started seeing what those pieces and parts were that we needed, that's when we made the jump to HubSpot and so through HubSpot we have all of our email systems so I can see in a person's contact which emails did they click on, which links did they click on. So I can go back to an HR director and we will have been sending, you know, whatever the rhythm of emails that we're sending them. That's just the general email list, but I will see that that person has been clicking on breathwork, but that person has been clicking on another one of our topics. So when I'm going to send an email and I'm going to, or if I know that we have, we have Prasada talks, which are like our version of a podcast. So if I know something's coming up on burnout, I can click and see anybody who clicked on that link around burnout and I will then follow up.

Speaker 4: 11:40

So it's the segmentation. We've not gotten all the way into the segmentation of if you click this, you get this trick. Well, we're not quite there yet, we're not quite big enough for that, but we are definitely able to see kind of what the interests are, depending on where people are clicking. In HubSpot you can also compare emails, which is awesome. You can take your last five newsletters and say which ones did best and who clicked on which thing, and that again gives us data. We were doing that this morning. All of our social media. It's posted LinkedIn, instagram, facebook so we can pull up a person, we can pull up an account and we can sort of say is it worth?

Speaker 3: 12:21

is it worth doing this Now you're going to tell me, having all of that information makes it easier to sell them.

Speaker 4: 12:24

Having all that information does make it easier because because? So what's fascinating is when we were doing exhibit work, you had to do companies just to give money for people to do exhibits, but then they realized, like we better do some testing, and so it was very interesting to see the small group that you could ask to get general information, and so trends tend to show up even in pretty small groups. I don't know if you found that, craig, so we sometimes we underestimate, like well, that was only 20 people, but the trends tend to bubble up even in smaller groups. So we can see. Oh, when we, when we put a question at the beginning of that post, we were getting a lot more. You know, engagement inquiry People would say that they saw it. We could see who clicked on it, impressions, engagements, that kind of thing on LinkedIn. So, yes, we are able to see that.

Speaker 2: 13:17

And I think Alice makes a great point here for the listeners to really understand You're supposed to. Marketing and sales, technically, is an art and a science, right? So you don't have to go out and test this on 3 000 people, yep, right, you can test this on the 20 or 30, get an idea, test a little bit more now, expand it to 40 or 50 and see if those trends continue, and so forth and so on. And now when you know you have a good, you've built that up to a good spot, then you go all bore with it. Because you know that you have a good, you've built that up to a good spot. Then you go all bore with it because you know that you have failures and successes. Hence the data, data, data that allows you to move forward in what you're really trying to accomplish.

Speaker 2: 13:58

We run into clients all the time and pay-per-click has a place, believe me but we try to push them against doing pay-per-click because you could be throwing money out a window and have no idea why. Anything has happened, none. And then they call me and they go craig, I'm spending all this money, nothing's happening. I said me either, I wouldn't have done that, I would have done it differently, right? Um, and so you're showing, you're showing the audience here. It's really important. You know we've been preaching for episodes about the importance of data and now, evan, I've been an opportunity as brought to the occasion of how can you use that data to try to sell better right. His tagline is sell smarter right. Part of selling smarter is having the information so that you leverage your wins more often. Evan, what's your take on?

Speaker 3: 14:47

that so well. First, I think the other important point for those of you listening is you don't need to be a multi-million dollar company with dozens of salespeople for a CRM to be useful. If you are communicating with multiple people over you know a longer period of time, if you want to get feedback, if you want to know how to work smart, not just work really hard, crm can be useful whether you're a solo one person practice or a very, very large organization. Don't think this is just for those largest, most complex organizations. Anybody can be using this.

Speaker 2: 15:29

You were going to say something else.

Speaker 4: 15:31

I was gonna say and the great part about HubSpot and we really went through a process of like we knew we were ready to grow, we got.

Speaker 4: 15:38

We got a good 12 years out of just cobbling them all together.

Speaker 4: 15:42

But that's a lot of mental energy to make sure and they all sort of keep shifting and changing. The thing and why we went with HubSpot is number one. You can have a free version of that if you're just getting started and then you grow depending on your number of marketing contacts, and that can change if you've got a group you want to send to. And then there's also a whole series of different suites so you might just decide you need the one suite and that's X dollars, and then you can add incrementally as you grow. And the other thing that really impressed us with HubSpot is they're on the rise, we're paying a monthly fee but they're continually adding AI to it and so we're getting that benefit because they're a company that's figuring it out and while it is a high cost and I hear people say nope, nope, not going to pay that monthly cost I would be having to hire another person or another organization with that expertise in order for me to be able to have that data in order for me to be able to make decisions.

Speaker 2: 16:36

So let me ask you, in terms of Well wait, craig.

Speaker 3: 16:40

first I need to bring up one very important point HubSpot. We don't currently have any CRM sponsors, so if anybody from HubSpot is listening, please reach out. We are happy, open for sponsorship. So just want to. Hubspot is listening, please reach out, we are happy, open for sponsorship.

Speaker 2: 16:54

So just want to put that out there, absolutely, absolutely. So before we jumped on the call today, alice, you were talking about the concept of whole being. Can you kind of explain to the audience in terms of whole being, give us your definition of it?

Speaker 4: 17:06

Yeah. So people have heard of wellness or wellbeing, and I call whole being the evolution, because what we are recognizing is that people have components of. Originally, wellness was about your physical wellbeing. I remember when we started in 2009,. We people didn't want to talk about stress. It was still like a little bit older generation that didn't want to, didn't want to say they had stress. But there's physical wellbeing, there's mental, there's emotional, there's relational, there's intellectual and there's spiritual, which is more around purpose. So even within the legal industry, everybody is starting to understand that there are many, many more things related to well-being and wellness, and that's the term whole being, it's the, it's the wellness and the well-being of the entire person.

Speaker 2: 17:55

I love that. I love that. I know, evan, when you had your goal setting, that was some of the points that you hit upon in terms of, you know, making sure that the salesperson, or whoever it might be within the company, kind of has that whole, that whole perspective of themselves.

Speaker 3: 18:10

Yeah, and I think Alice and I are on the same page with this. If you're only focused in one or two areas, you're only focused on work, you're only focused on how much money you make, lots of other parts of your life can fall apart, and the more well-rounded you are and the more that you, with mindfulness, put attention towards all of the different parts of makeup well, what makes up who you are the better off you're going to be as a whole person.

Speaker 4: 18:37

Yeah, and the beautiful part is that this is not. I mean, some people think like, sometimes I'll say who's paying the woman to teach us how to breathe? All of this is based in the science of positive psychology, and positive psychology really sort of became official in the in the late 90s. But it's what are the things that successful people are doing to where they continue to be successful. And so you know, I have lots of books behind me, but there is so much research and all of the tools that we are giving people in the strategy are science-based, metric, metric-related, researched, you know, for many, many decades. So it's those skills and strategies. Just like you learn any other tool, you can learn how to do those tools, and we're never going to find balance.

Speaker 4: 19:21

This is a big conversation the life-work balance. I call it life-work balance versus life balance. You can't control the outer world. That's like imagining that you could control the weather, but you can look at the calendar and go, ah, it might be, it might be rainy today. I'm going to bring an umbrella, I'm going to be prepared.

Speaker 2: 19:39

There you go.

Speaker 4: 19:40

Those are the tools that we give people. Change is happening. Marty Seligman, who's in this area, writes a great writes a great book called tomorrow, tomorrow, mind, and he's like we, we are experiencing changes happening faster than ever right now. I mean, I'm sure you guys are seeing it, I mean you see it with all the different industries. That is just the way that it's going to be. What we have now is we have all the skills to figure out how to manage that change, and I call it harvest it for growth, because there has never been a time where we need the human mind, for creativity, to drive what's happening with AI. Wow, we have to have people who are fantastic decision makers, we have to have people who are creative problem solvers, and so the worry you know so much of the fear right now is like, oh my gosh, I'm not going to have a job. Ai is going to take my job. Ai is just another fantastically, it's a Ferrari of a tool, but we still need a driver. So we better be investing even more in our teams to develop the capacity, the human mind capacity to see how we can use this tool more than ever.

Speaker 4: 20:51

I will say the other thing that really happened when people invested in their teams, invested in giving them the skills and strategies people who had done that before COVID, because the big issues right now are retention and people not being engaged, people not problem solving and people being in fear. When people had those programs in place before COVID happened, they came out the other side. They kept their staff, especially in the legal industry. Their people did not have the burnout, they did not lose the people. They did not have the you know, the dissent when they didn't have that in place. So they fared way better. We should expect that we're going to have some major changes over the next 10 to 20 years and so this investment in your team and how they function and again, this is not rocket science, the stuff we are teaching these strategies not difficult In an hour. We can really make a huge change in an organization, maybe for our listening audience.

Speaker 3: 21:48

what are some symptoms or what are some characteristics you see in healthy workplaces versus workplaces that maybe aren't quite as healthy?

Speaker 4: 21:58

Yeah, in a healthy workplace. I did a program yesterday where we were talking about character strengths, and so, in a healthy workplace, whenever you start feeling that you are not able to handle all the tasks and all the projects that are landing on you, and in healthy organization, I reach out and I say hey, evan, we've talked about five projects. I'm really having a hard time prioritizing and I need a little help on this budget and I feel comfortable because I've built trust with you and I have the confidence that you're going to say like Alice, yeah, let's pop on the, let's pop on the phone for five minutes and do that.

Speaker 4: 22:30

That you're going to say like Alice, yeah, let's pop on the phone for five minutes and do that. In an unhealthy organization, I'm going oh no, I start the downward spiral, I'm not going to get this done. I don't have the resources. I might get fired and I start getting more and more and more in that funnel and I don't reach out for help, I don't ask for the support that I need. And that is the biggest thing If I have trust, if I have had a relationship with you, if I have connection, if I have learned your skills that you're really good at persevering, you've got humor and I've got creativity and leadership, and I'm going to know when I get in a situation where I need those skills.

Speaker 4: 23:07

We had a group yesterday and there were 21 character strengths. We got in a circle and each person had decided what strength they wanted to offer the group and so we read off curiosity, leadership and they stepped into the center so the whole team could see and the one woman, one of the character, one of the character traits is love, and so when the woman stepped into the center for love, everybody's like. Oh so we so like you need a hug Like that's valuable.

Speaker 4: 23:30

Sometimes you just need a hug.

Speaker 2: 23:33

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 23:33

Go over to her desk and she's going to help you. And in that moment they became more of a team.

Speaker 2: 23:41

And so I think the thing that's you know, evan, and I have kind of gotten on our soapbox here about is the call for being more authentic is now right. So, from a sales and a marketing perspective, we're preaching about the authenticity that needs to come forward, and now you're talking about it from the internal perspective out right. So most of the stuff that we're doing is outside in. You guys are inside out, which is a beautiful thing. So what I'm gonna do here, alice, I'm going to prepare you, as I kind of go into my spiel a little bit, for the three tips that you're going to give our audience and, as you think about it, I'm going to remind everybody that you can follow us on LinkedIn. All your favorite podcast points you can comment, listen, you can, I'm sorry, comment, like, share all of that stuff. Evan, do you have anything to add before Alice gives her her, her tips for us, our audience?

Speaker 3: 24:36

So I'd say for anybody listening if you're listening to this episode, go back and listen to it again, Both Alice's tips in terms of a healthier work environment as well as the importance of a CRM. Get ready, we're going to have a couple of great episodes coming up and again like, comment, share, give feedback. We're starting to provide resources for folks on LinkedIn who are commenting, liking, so please follow us wherever you follow all of your favorite content experts.

Speaker 2: 25:05

Like us.

Speaker 3: 25:06

Like us.

Speaker 2: 25:07

Right, yeah. So, alice, tips for our audience, or whatever tips you want it to be, we're all for it. Let's hear it.

Speaker 4: 25:15

Yeah, thank you. I think the first tip is that what's inside really matters, and so how are you helping your team learn the skills in a consistent way around this whole being? And it really makes a difference whenever your company has, from a values level at a high level, said we have a wellness program, we have a whole being program. We've got you, we've got a way we're going to consistently be giving you these skills in a variety of different. You want to watch an on-demand video, you want to show up to a live thing, you want to do a monthly challenge, but you've got a program that's really committed to supporting people, that's very public and actually a really well done program. There's a lot of really kind of not so great wellness programs. I think the second thing is do not underestimate what a group. When they are in a room together for an hour, what can happen in that room. I mean, we have seen it over and over again groups that they said these people don't talk to each other, they don't even like each other, they're not gonna, and at the end they're laughing and they're. So we have ways to where people can real build real authentic connections in a very short amount of time. That can make a massive amount of difference when you get in that in that tough point in your organization.

Speaker 4: 26:30

Third thing is three breaths. The breath is the key. Breath work you heard it here Breath work is the new thing. We focused on yoga for a while and then people like mindfulness. Breath work is the thing that's really going to revolutionize. So we're really excited about the simple techniques. Taking three breaths inhale, exhale, and then one in the middle of a meeting balances our nervous system. There is a chemistry that we're walking around in with every day and we can affect that in a very, very positive way with a very small amount of effort.

Speaker 2: 27:03

I love it, I love it, and so here's your chance for your shameless plug for Prasada.

Speaker 4: 27:09

Awesome. Thank you so much. So we are. Our website is wwwprasadaholebeingcom, and so people can reach us there. I can be reached at aliceprasadaholebeingcom. I love any sorts of questions. I really my life is committed to serving Prasada means an offering of grace. So our whole team of experts is really here to help support people and all the work that. You know, people are making important decisions every day, so, however, we can support people.

Speaker 2: 27:46

Awesome, awesome, evan. Any last points before we sign off.

Speaker 3: 27:49

Alice, just really want to thank you for joining us today, for the tips that you've given our audience and you know we appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 27:56

Thank you for joining us today for the tips that you've given our audience and you know we appreciate it. Thank you, thank you guys so much, and listen. You guys know we are the playbook. We're giving you guys the answers to grow your business. If you haven't figured that out yet, you're not listening. We're bringing guests that just deliver knowledge on you. So again, I'm Craig, evan and Alice. Thank you for joining us and we will talk to you guys next time.

Speaker 1: 28:19

Bye-bye now. Thank you for joining us on this exhilarating journey through the world of sales and marketing. Remember, the playbook is in your hands and the possibilities are limitless. Keep exploring, experimenting and innovating, and watch as your business reaches unprecedented levels of success. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed on all major podcast platforms, and follow us on YouTube, facebook and LinkedIn for even more exclusive content. Until next time, keep hustling and keep winning.