SPEAKER_00: 0:12

Welcome to the sales and marketing playbook Unleashed, the premier podcast for innovative growth strategies, hosted by two seasoned experts. Meet Evan Poland, the president of Poland 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 development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services the Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency, an expert in growth 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_02: 1:11

And welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. I'm Craig Andrews and my partner in crime, Evan Poland. How are you doing today, Evan?

SPEAKER_03: 1:18

I'm doing great, Craig. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_02: 1:21

I'm doing fantastic. We're doing another day of helping our audience understand the playbook to grow their businesses year after year, and I'm excited. Um, I know what's big for you and I in a lot of cases is a lot of stuff that we do is about organization and processes and all the things that we do. And I think what we bring to the table today is a guest of ours who's going to talk about one of your favorite subjects for sure. I'm still trying to get mine in order, but you you're big on it, right? Is CRMs. Tell us all about your feelings on CRMs a little bit.

SPEAKER_03: 1:55

So I think CRMs is necessary. Um, don't know about you. As I get older, my memory is not nearly what it used to be. Uh, and I'm having a ton of meetings. Um, and if I'm not tracking what's going on, at the end of the day, I forget who I talk to, who I talk to about what, what I'm supposed to do next. Um, and I think as we bring our next guest to the stage, Ruben Schwartz from uh Mirrorin, uh, that he can talk a little about a tool that he's put together specifically for those of you out there who are consultants, advisors, the last thing that you'd ever want to be called as a salesperson if you're meeting with lots of folks, but having a hard time keeping track of the scraps of paper, of the Excel spreadsheet, if you're not tracking it at all. Um, I think our next guest could have some tools that could really help you to make sure that you can track and then make the most use and leverage your relationships. So, Ruben, welcome to the sales and marketing playbook unleashed.

SPEAKER_02: 2:59

Welcome. Thanks for having me, gentlemen. Great to be here. So, Ruben, why don't you tell us a little bit about Mimurin and um and let our audience know how you came to be?

SPEAKER_01: 3:10

Yeah, I'm I'm a software developer by training and by temperament, if you will. But I accidentally started a sales and marketing consulting company and I was helping Fortune 500 companies with their sales and marketing. And I like to think I was doing a pretty good job with that because we got repeat business, we got good referrals, but I was really bad at my own sales and marketing. And I thought, well, I'm a clever guy. Uh, I'm getting paid to sit in the room with some of the top sales and marketing people on the planet. Let me just copy what I'm helping them implement, and that'll be great. I'll be one of the top sales and marketing people on the planet. And what it took me years to realize was the right move for a Fortune 500 company is very, very different than the right move for a solopreneur. Or in my case, I had a few people on staff, but I didn't have a sales team. I was kind of the rainmaker. And the more I tried to copy what I was helping these enterprise clients do, the worse I made things for myself. And I realized looking around that other solopreneurs were falling into the same trap. They were doing great work for their clients. They knew they had to up their sales game. So they kind of turned to the enterprise sales and marketing playbook. And there's nothing wrong with the enterprise sales and marketing playbook if you're an enterprise. But when you're a solo, you're like, gosh, this is somehow this just is even worse than it was before. And I'd love to say that at that moment the light bulb went off. And I was like, aha, what we need is a CRM with the right structure and right uh philosophy for solopreneurs, but that's not what happened at all. That happened much later. I was dragged kicking and screaming to create it. Uh, but it's been a it's been a wonderful journey. And what I realized in hindsight, and in hindsight, it's so easy to see things looking backwards, but traditional CRMs are built for the VP of sales or whoever the sales leadership is to keep track of the sales team, which is a very important job that you guys probably know more about than I do. But when you're a solopreneur, you don't really have a sales team. And you're not really a sales rep, as you were alluding to on the intro. So a lot of that stuff that's really necessary and the traditional CRM just gets in the way. And at the same time, a lot of really critical stuff that you really need is not there. And so Mimorin is designed to be a whole bunch less of what you don't need and more of what you actually do need. I like to think of it as you know, you're kind of sick of walking home from the grocery store carrying those heavy grocery bags, and someone says, get a vehicle. And so you talk to a vehicle consultant, and the next thing you know, you're trying to park a space shuttle or a 747 or something like that at the grocery store because that's what the sales and marketing industrial complex will do. They'll be like, try Salesforce, try HubSpot. And those are great, amazing, powerful tools, but you don't want to take them to the grocery store, right? You just need a car.

SPEAKER_03: 5:48

So so for those consultants, there's no team in I. And yeah, what what what what you need for those large complex organizations or managing six, eight, 10, 12 salespeople isn't necessarily what a solopreneur needs.

SPEAKER_01: 6:02

That's exact, exactly right. But there's a sort of an asterisk on that because when you're a solo consultant, most solo consultants are getting their business from word of mouth, from referrals, from past clients, from partners, etc. And I like to think of it as you kind of have a virtual sales team, but they're not really yours. They don't work for you. You can't fire them, you can't uh, you know, you don't manage them directly, but they are effectively your virtual sales team. And most of us do a pretty crappy job of empowering them and then wondering why we're not getting the volume and quality of referrals that we'd like. And so I think an essential part of being a solo consultant is actually sales management, but in the sense of I'm gonna make sure that my partners know exactly who I want to meet and who I don't want to meet, and make it easy for them to refer people to me and also make sure that I'm being proactive about keeping that karmic wheel turning and making great introductions for them.

SPEAKER_03: 6:58

So, what what are some of the key components that in your experience you found are important for soul operating to track for soul openors to keep, you know, I keep on top of to make sure that they can be successful in running their businesses?

SPEAKER_01: 7:13

Well, I like to think of it as if you've got a relationship business, which consulting generally is, you have a conversation business. And I say this and I underline it and I highlight it because I spent years trying to deny that because I'm introvert and I don't like selling. So I was like, let me use a bunch of technology to not have to talk to people. Wouldn't that be great? But if you're in a relationship business, that does not work. And if you're in that relationship, i.e. conversation business, you basically have two things you need to do. You need to figure out exactly who you want to talk to, and you need to talk to them. And I think it's important, as you guys probably help folks with a lot, is if you skip over step one and try to talk to everyone and try to convince everyone, you're gonna have a really miserable time. And all that ickiness is gonna come to the forefront and you're gonna be going, ah, and you're gonna make yourself do it for a little while, and then you go run and hide again. So let's get really clear about who is our ideal client. And I kind of think of it as if you're a doctor on the airplane, they'll take any doctor. But if you're in a hospital, they want the specialist for this particular situation. And so many consultants, because they are really talented and they could help anyone on an airplane, they act like they're on an airplane when actually they're in the hospital. So something I don't see in other CRMs, but I built it into mine because I saw so many people struggling with this, is let's figure out exactly who your ideal client profile is. How do you help them? What's different about your approach, and make sure that you've got a way to message that consistently every time you interact with someone, whether it's you personally or online.

SPEAKER_03: 8:42

And let's open this up to a broader conversation. Craig, from the marketing side, you ever see people do the same thing in the marketing where, you know, that they want to be everything to everyone and they act like the, you know, the doctor on the airplane, where they really should be acting like the doctor uh in the hospital. And again, especially with how people are doing their searches these days, can you maybe share with our audience some of the challenges that people run into when they try to be the doctor on the airplane versus trying to be that specialist in the hospital?

SPEAKER_02: 9:14

So it's a it's a double-edged sword. You're absolutely right. Both of you are absolutely right. It's a double-edged sword. I I I I know, but I like hearing you just wanted to hear me say that you were right. I got you. I got you. But it's a double-edged sword. You know, and a lot of times people are searching the internet now for what they want, not necessarily just for anybody in general. So, in a lot of cases, the the understanding what your ICP is, your ideal client profile, allows you to kind of create a range that's very important. To the to the example you guys used, if you make that range a little too big, it goes to one of the other shows that we did in which you might end up selling sushi in a gas station, right? It's just it's just magically just popped up here because it was a great idea, and all of a sudden now everything's out of whack. So at the end of the day, yes, we have clients all the time, and a lot of times our consultation into things is to say, who are you talking to? Well, it doesn't such not really, because based on what the data says, data, data, data, based on what the data says, that's not who's looking for you. And so we help them bring that profile into a range where it's easy to understand and simplify. Our big word in 2026 is simplify everything. Because a lot of times what happens is as creatives, especially as creatives, we throw things to the wind and all of a sudden we can just do so many different things. As programmers, the same thing, we just start doing things and all of a sudden things go wild. So, Ruben, I totally feel you for the introvert thing. Evan will tell you. I at one point I was an introvert and he got me out of it because he goes, You gotta sell, bud. You gotta he didn't want to be a homeless introvert, so he got it got got out of his shell. Very quickly, right? And so ultimately, yes. I love everything you're saying about the ICP. Yes, you must have that in place. People generally have an idea of what it is, but we just help them refine it so we can make CR assistance like this work.

SPEAKER_03: 11:01

And and and as somebody who you know has a small business, this is probably even more important for the solopreneur than it is the mid-size and larger businesses. The solopreneur only has 40, 50, if you're driving yourself crazy, maybe 55 to 60 hours a week to work. We can't waste our time chasing after all kinds of opportunities that aren't a good fit, chasing after all kinds of referrals partners, strategic partners who are never going to refer us a really good opportunity. So we really need to be laser focused in what our offering is, who's gonna help get us there, and the conversations we want to have. Otherwise, we're going to be very busy but very poor and very frustrated in what we're doing. And again, even for you solopreneurs, when Craig and I talking about sales and marketing being on the same page, it's probably even more important for you than it is for the larger organizations because you don't have the time and resources that they do to be running in the wrong direction. So ru Ruben, as folks are you using the CRM that you built in your system, are there ways that they can look at and kind of help kind of better clarify those things, track who they should be having more conversations with and what they should be doing? And is there a way using your software that people are able to better get their hands around those these kinds of things?

SPEAKER_01: 12:29

Yeah, there's actually a whole screen around who are you trying to reach and what's that message? What's your elevator pitch? What should your website look like? What might a lead magnet look like? Uh, what does a customer success story look like? Uh, what does a quarterly content calendar look like? And basically it's all ways of taking the same words and rearranging them slightly differently. So you can attack it from any angle you want. And I usually tell people some people know exactly what it is. Maybe they've worked with Craig already, and they can just go through and go, here we go. And then it populates all the other things. Most people get a little stuck. And so I always encourage them to go to the client success story tab. It's got the same words arranged in slightly different order. Call your favorite clients and go through it with them. Ask for their help. Five, 10 minutes, and you're gonna have much more insight than banging your head against the wall for hours, weeks, months, years, some people never get really strong positioning. And then to the point you were making, they struggle. It's a vicious cycle. And so let's get really focused, let's do that. And then we can do some of the other actual CRM stuff, the actual relationships built on that foundation. Because as you were saying earlier, if you're trying to talk to everybody, especially when you're a solo, you just don't have time. And most of us don't have the skills or the expertise or the energy for this, right? It's one thing when you have a corporate sales and marketing department, people who love marketing, people who love selling, and that's what they're into. We don't want to be doing that. This is the stuff we got to do in our quote unquote spare time to get to the actual client work, which is what we generally care about.

SPEAKER_02: 13:57

Yep. And I love the fact that you that you brought that up there because the one thing that we always advise clients on, and I know Evan and I both have done this, is understanding what your timeline looks like, right? Everything about what we all do is very strategic. And it's very important to stay strategic because it's too easy to verge off of that strategy and do what feels good or activity that means nothing to anybody, really, and now you've wasted a whole day doing busy work. And I think that having a CRM in place allows you to have a nice focus. And I love the fact, you know, when we talk to clients about other CRM systems and things like that, they go, We don't have the budget for that. And I said, That's okay, do something. And you could actually providing a platform that's probably a little easier for them because the last thing clients really should be doing is trying to relearn a new software instead of doing what they do for a living. And and a lot of times, if you don't have the right people in hand in terms of helping you with the CRM, you've now just dedicated two weeks to a month just to get things organized. And that's the danger part for anybody. I know from a sales perspective, you're talking a lot in terms of what they should be tracking. Uh, maybe at some point you could tell people you could tell our audience here in terms of the basics of what they need from a sales perspective on their CRMs.

SPEAKER_03: 15:15

So, and then yeah, Ruben, after I go, you know, anything I've missed, and anything that you may suggest a little different, would love to hear. For me, first just just looking at a revenue point of view, I want to look at who my client is. I want to look at how did I get in front of that client? If it was a referral, who was it a referral from? And how did I initially meet that person? Was it from a campaign? If so, which campaign? Was it from you know an inbound lead, but how did I get in front of the opportunity? What is the dollar value of the opportunity? And also within that, what is it that we did together? What was the product, what was the service? So again, we can keep track of if I offer three, four, five different things, you know, what am I selling more of? And then from there, adjust the basics the person's name, email, phone number, company, and then I will also layer in there some things. I I like to call them the fuzzy file. So, okay, with Ruben, is Ruben a phone person, an email person, a text person, a Zoom person? If I need to connect with Ruben, is he better early in the day, late in the day, early in the week, late in the week? You know, do I talk to him about big picture stuff, or do we dive into the weeds? So that if I can go back and look at those notes, I can know how to best get in touch with them, what that looks like, um, which is going to make that whole interaction a lot easier and get me to work smart versus just working really hard. So, Ruben, what are some other things that you suggest that people track?

SPEAKER_01: 16:57

Well, I think that's all great stuff. Um, I also like to track things like their LinkedIn profile. If they have a calendar link, make sure I've got that. So I'm not phishing through my email trying to see if I have it. Um you kind of alluded to this, but every contact should have a field for who referred them, which may or may not be populated, but somehow you got to track all that. And once you have that, you kind of form the web of people and you can see exactly what you're talking about with hey, here are the people that actually referred me a bunch of business. I better make sure that I'm staying in touch with them versus just sitting there and praying and wondering why they haven't referred me anybody lately. Um, that's also super helpful when I'm actually talking to one of those super connectors. I can see, here are all the people they've sent me recently. And I can tell them, here's what happened when I talked to Evan, here's what happened when I talked to Craig, I haven't talked to Susie yet, but we're scheduled for next week, et cetera. And that gives so much positive reinforcement to those people who are sending people to you because most people can't do that. And you, you know, you're kind of like you send people off into the void. I made a connection for somebody a year ago, and one of the people on that email thread wrote back uh a week or so ago saying, hey, should we get together? Ruben tried to connect us. Well, that's not somebody that I'm, you know, really eager to connect again because it didn't work out very well. Um, if we can take care of our referral partners, that's gonna really encourage them. I think it's really important to know when did I last talk to this person and when am I next due to talk to this person? It's not an activity date. There might be other tasks and other things going on on different dates, but because we're in a conversation business, I want to know when did I talk to them, when am I gonna talk to them again? That's one of the big things for me. And it's something that I found in a lot of the other CRMs, they have sort of like last activity, next activity, but it could be an email, it could be something else. And I was an expert at, you know, sending off a quick email or a batch email, me like, oh, check, check, check. I did all these things, kind of like you were talking about. Like you did a bunch of stuff, but it didn't actually matter. But I felt good because I wasn't behind on talking to people. But really, when you're in that relationship business, you got to have the conversations. And something that I learned as an introvert is that if you set all this upright, then you're kind of like the doctor talking to your patients. And it's actually fun, even if they don't need surgery right away, because you're just sitting there diagnosing, having a good conversation, or if it's a referral partner, you're having a good time talking about that. You're not in that pressure zone of, oh my gosh, I don't have enough people in my waiting room. I better close this person, even though they don't really need surgery. Yeah. Which is where the ick factor comes in. So I think that that's really helpful. And having that next conversation date be something that has a default based on the characteristics of the person that is not never talk to this person again is really important. Because what tends to happen, what happened to me with Salesforce and HubSpot, and I've tried dozens of these tools, they all have a field that you can enter that date into. And what I realized in hindsight is if for some reason you get logged out and you forget to enter that, your sales manager is gonna yell at you on the in the Friday sales meeting, and you're gonna get back on track. When it's just you, that person is poof gone in a cloud of smoke and never to be seen again until it's too late. And I'm pretty OCD about filling that in, but I can't tell you how many times, even if it's only 5% of the time, 3% of the time, over the course of a year, that really adds up into people who just disappear for no reason. So make sure that whatever system you're using says, hey, I want to talk to Craig every 60 days or whatever it might be. And I might change that depending on the last conversation I had with him. But Craig should never disappear unless I decide I don't want to talk to him anymore for some reason. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 20:33

Right. And I think that you touched upon something really crucial there. We're all in the relationship business, whether we're introverted or not. I get that. We're all in the relationship business. And what you outlined there was really the opportunity to just have conversations. So even as an introvert, you're you understand that conversations aren't a big deal when you don't have the pressure of having surgery on a plane.

SPEAKER_01: 20:56

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: 20:56

And I think that that was part of the sales training that Evan delivers is the opportunity to just have conversations. Eventually the stuff will work itself out, but you're offering a way not only to have a conversation, but also have a way of monitoring it, which brings the conversation back. And after a while, this stuff comes back together and becomes a nice little nucleus of operation of actual activity, which I love a lot.

SPEAKER_01: 21:19

Yeah, kind of going back to that doctor analogy, because I think this is really important because I struggle with this so much. I just want to reemphasize, right? If if you're acting like I'm a doctor doctor, but really I'm a I do knee surgeries, and your waiting room is full of patients, you know, 5% of whom really need knee surgery, and most of them have nothing to do with their knees, you're gonna be really frustrated and you're not gonna make a lot of money. But if everyone knows you're the knee doctor who fixes skiers who busts their ACL on the slopes or whatever, and your waiting room is full of those people, suddenly it doesn't feel like selling, right? You're just treating people who are desperate to help your help. And you're gonna have a lot more fun. Totally. If you're not having fun, that is a sign you're doing it wrong. Something I realized. I was like, well, it's just supposed to suck, you're just supposed to power through, right? And I mean, all some days are always better than others, but for the most part, even for people who don't like selling and are introverted, if you're not having fun doing this, that means you're not setting this up right.

SPEAKER_03: 22:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:21

And you're gonna burn out and not be in it for the long term if things don't change. And even if you get in front of that ideal client that should be an easy layup and a fun conversation, you're already bringing that bad energy, so I'm told, to that conversation. And it's not gonna go the way you want. So make sure you're out there having a good time while you do this.

SPEAKER_02: 22:40

So I'm gonna put you under a little pressure here, Ruben. Um, while Evan and I take a quick little talk break here, I want you to think of three or four things that you want to leave our audience with. Okay. Awesome. We're gonna give you a quick breather to think about that, and we're gonna come back to you. So, Evan, why don't you let everybody know where they can find us and all the fun stuff where it comes with being with the playbook?

SPEAKER_03: 22:59

Sure. And this episode is just an example of us bringing the playbook to you, giving you the answers before you ask the questions. So, whether from a sales perspective, a marketing perspective, you know what steps to take to make 2026 even better than 2025. So, some places that you can find us if you're really glutton for punishment, you can go on YouTube and you can see our faces uh and get the visual along with this. You can go to Apple, Spotify, anywhere you get your podcasts. We will also, after we record the episodes, post clips of the episodes up on LinkedIn and you can catch those. We would love you for love for you to comment, to share, to subscribe. If there's topics you want to make sure that we cover, just drop us a line so that we can make sure that we're giving you the content that you're looking for as we jump off to a great 2026.

SPEAKER_02: 23:53

All right, Ruben. Was that enough time for you? Sure. All right. Two to three things that you want the audience to remember when it comes to mirrorman. Uh, I hope I said that right. Mirrorman, mirror, mirror it.

SPEAKER_01: 24:05

Memory. That's probably the one thing I want the audience to remember. Go to memory.com because you can do all the stuff there. Um, go to memory.com, that's M-I-M-I-R-A-N.com. And of course, you can sign up for free trial and all that stuff. But even if you're you've got a CRM and you love it, there's a bunch of other resources there: proposal templates, lead magnet ideas, free trainings on positioning, uh, etc. So a lot of resources uh at memory.com. And uh at some point this year, I'm gonna be restarting the Salesfor Nerds podcast, which you can also find wherever you you you're listening to this podcast. But in terms of if you're listening to this, what should you be doing in the next half hour when you get back from your jog or your bike ride or off the treadmill, wherever it is you're listening to this, make sure you've got a really good sense of who that ideal client profile is. And if not, call your favorite client, and then you can always go to the second, third favorite client and so on and work through that with them. And you can follow the free training uh uh and memory.com if if you want, but just talk to them about kind of what did they get from you? What were they struggling with? What did they try before they got to you and and how was yours different? What did they get after they worked with you? And then think about well, how am I actually coming across in the world? Am I coming across in the world as somebody who does all that? Or if I look at my website, my LinkedIn, if I think about my elevator pitch when I'm in a Zoom room, does it reflect something probably much more generic? So do that. And then the other thing is block off time in your calendar to have these conversations. We've talked and talked and talked about the importance of conversations. And of course, for many of us, it's like, yeah, I really need to follow up with my people. Uh, and then you get to Friday afternoon and oh, gee, I ran out of time this week and I didn't do it. Well, let's start by putting it in the calendar. Make time to talk to your clients. Most of us are pretty good at doing that, I think. Make time to talk to your past clients. Make time to talk to your partners and your prospects. And of course, sometimes life happens and things get a little squirrely, but by default, this will happen instead of requiring some kind of miracle alignment of the stars for it to happen. And as you get in the habit and the practice of having these conversations, you start to realize, hey, this is actually really fun and it's really effective, and I'm gonna get better and better at it, versus, oh my gosh, I hate talking to people. I don't like selling, it's all icky. Uh so make sure you you install that. They call it a consulting practice for a reason. You got to practice, but it should be fun. And just when you have those blocks of time, make sure you have an easy way to flip through the people that are in that category that you need to talk to. And as Evan was alluding to at the beginning, make sure you know what you talked about last time, what you might need to talk about this time, and make sure you write it down so you can remember it later.

SPEAKER_02: 26:37

I love it. I love it. Anything that top that off, Evan? I think that Ruben covered it. Awesome, awesome. I'm Craig Andrews, Evan Poland, Ruben Schwartz. We appreciate you. Uh, and if anything, let's leave you guys with a question here. In the comments, let us know if there's anything about your CRM that could be better. How about we do that? Anything about your CRM that could be better, put it in the comments, let us know. We'll get back to you guys and we'll keep you comments and we'll give you feedback on it. Uh, you I Z, as Ruben brought up, you there's ways to reach out to them if you have a further question. That's the playbook. Again, delivering you guys the answers to how to grow your business. We bring guests, we bring insight, and we have a website that'll tell you guys all the stuff that we've done from episode from episode. Until next time, as we always say, keep winning. Talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_00: 27:31

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.