Heads In Beds Show - How To Leverage a CRM Properly With Guests & Homeowners To Grow Your Vacation Rental Biz

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about what a CRM is, why you should use one for both owners and guest marketing and what the key parts of CRM marketing are.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingVintory CRMHubspotMailchimp🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? A wonderful little Monday. We're going to do a little recording here.

We saw the, I don't know, when I texted you yesterday, I couldn't really believe that your Celtics had scored the exact same amount of points in the second quarter as the Warriors had in the whole first half. So you got a good thing going there, it seems. I'm feeling good about the Timberwolves, but I'm not feeling that good about the Timberwolves right now. It's concerning, though. This is a very much peak to early kind of phenomenon i've seen this happen before and my dad if he was with us right now recording what he would say is he's seen this happen before in baseball in particular i feel like it's particularly cute baseball where a team

goes on this large winning streak run in the summer and then it's yeah but baseball is one in the fall so in the of course in basketball it's a little bit different right you play throughout the winter to really win in the summer that's the actual goal here yes it's fun and obviously it's fun to beat up on the team that beat you up your bigger brother the big brother comes back in and it's like oh i'm not as weak as i used to be and you can sock them to it a few times so that was the good part about it the bad part about it is i just feel like it's it obviously it's not sustainable they're good yes are they good enough to be beating a team that beat them a few years ago by 40 points no that's a one-off three-point variance type of

deal so i'm optimistic but nervously optimistic if that makes sense about my team yeah i think that that's there's always something to be said for i've i've encountered enough sports teams that didn't have the optimism there There was no reason to be optimistic. Now I really value the times and periods we have where we're at the top of the standings or we're in the top half of the standings or yeah, that's how far we have to go down top half there. So yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Also, I don't know much about the NFL draft, but I've fallen into a little bit of an NFL draft rabbit hole while realizing it doesn't matter. We will know one year from today if we there was a correct or incorrect decision made so best to just let it unfold and when it happens i'll watch along and start to hopefully hope that it was the right decision and until then i don't know more than the draft guys nor do the draft guys know more than the draft guys because they're wrong about half the time anyways if not a little bit more in the first round if you look at it historically historically. So if they have a 50% success rate and that's their job, if only half the clients we worked with got more bookings

and the other half got way less bookings and in fact, flamed out horribly, you wouldn't call me very good at marketing. And maybe these draft guys aren't very good at drafting either. Just food for thought. Well, here's the thing. They have all the technology in the world,

but they still have to use it. And I think as we talk about some technology that we have to be using here, that's right. I get one transition every other week or something, but there it is. Yeah, it is. Well, what we're going to be talking about today is technology, how technology specifically CRM technology can help you run your business. Oh, perfect. Now I think you set the table nicely there. You know what you're doing there. I've rubbed off on you a little bit, hopefully in a good way. Hopefully I don't pick up any of my bad habits, but that's a good habit that I try to flow into.

Yeah, so the idea for this episode, obviously we're talking about it before we hit record a little bit. Going through and talking about, now the obvious kind of, I don't think it's an elephant in the room, but the obvious thing that we should maybe put on Paul's hat here today would be, of course, he works at Venturi. And certainly what Venturi does at a very high level is one of these owner CRMs. But I was asking you too, before you record, like, that is one function of it. But really, we want to talk more today about the philosophy. Yes, you can use Venturi. And Paul would certainly appreciate if you did so from the owner marketing side of things. On the guest marketing side of things, it sounds like he's pretty neutral on that. We're pretty neutral. We have some different tools that we've used in the past, but we've had

some good experiences with them and some mediocre experiences with different tools. But I think the core of what we wanted to dig into was more about the philosophy. How do you use the tool, regardless of if it's HubSpot or Venturi? We have our biases here in some respects, but the way that you use the tool is really what you get out of it. What you put into it is what you're going to get out of it a little bit. The technology is just like you said a second ago, it's just a tool to get you from point A to point B in the same way that I would say that the Ford and the Chevy are both cars. It's really what's your preference maybe almost to some degree. And also how are you going to use that to get the job done, so to speak, if it was towing a boat or whatever the case may be. Yeah. I don't know what you want to start with. I guess the way that I look at it

is the first thing maybe to decide is not exactly what tool to use, but rather how am I going to structure what are the actual benefits? So maybe we start there and then we can talk about like data structures and things like that. What is like the CRM? If someone hasn't heard that term before, maybe we can go all the way back there. What does it actually do for a vacation business? It is, I think at the very basic level,

you are ensuring that you have a centralized location where you're keeping all of your customer information. Now that could be the contact information, first name, last name, phone, mailing address, email address, all that good stuff. Or it could be, you know, it could go much deeper into that for preferences of how they want to be communicated with. In the case on the homeowner side of things, it's what kind of home do they have? What are the specifics of their home? How deep you want to go with the information you're putting in your CRM really depends on how granular you want to get with the outputs you're actually using there. I do, I think in a lot of cases, and this is something like going back much further to the track pulse side of things. This is this in a lot of cases, a lot of people are just managing this in a spreadsheet or post-it notes or things like that. And it is it's an opportunity to take a lot of what you do manually right now to, all these fields of information go right into a profile specifically for this contact. Moving forward, I can communicate and I know how to communicate with this individual, again, whether that's on the guest side or whether

that's on the owner's side. So I think, again, complexity, there's a lot more complexity there, but at a high level, it's really just that repository of your contact information for guests and potentially owners there. You don't notice this problem at first when you have one property or two, three, four properties or one person. You're like, yeah, I can just use my email inbox. What's the big deal? You don't even think about it. And then the moment you had a second person, it's not that bad because you can split it. Okay, Paul, you take those leads or you take those homeowners. I'll take these. Okay. The moment you get to these bigger levels, and we've seen clients who work with gone from 20 properties to a hundred properties.

I've heard people say this before, where there's like little levels where things break inside of a company. And I've heard it say like six, like when you go from like zero to one to two to three to four to five to six, it's not really that different. Like you just get more stronger and stuff like that. The moment you seem to go to seven, eight, nine, 10, it's like things start to break because it's, oh man, this person talked to this person about this thing. Or what's happened to my company, for example, is two people do the same thing. Two people do email marketing.

Two people do PPC. Two people do design and so on and so forth. And then it's, ah, it used to be if it was a design problem, we would just go straight back to this person.

That's no longer the case anymore. Anyways, I say all that to say that's what happened in my mind too with like communication, both on the guest side and the owner side. It used to be you plus one other person,

maybe one other third person after that. But everyone had had their lane it was so clear and so obvious what their lane needed to be that there was never any significant stress right about what needed to get done and how communication needed to work then you get to six eight ten twelve people whatever the case may be or 100 properties or there's some this little point where things break and that crm doesn't become just useful or like nice to have or oh it's nice to scroll back and see what happens nice little maybe quality of life features. It becomes, I have no idea what's happened because it was done in Paul's inbox and I don't have access to Paul's inbox without the CRM sync.

I'm useless. I'm calling the person. And honestly, they're going to think we're incompetent because I'm going to call and go, hey, John Doe, I know you acquired about potentially listing your home with us. Could you tell us more about the address and the size of it? And he's going to go, I already said all this to Paul, right? That's what the CRM I think does from a functional standpoint. Is it like the, we had in our notes, like streamline communication and personalized

experience. I think the function of that means that you're actually going in and you're like saving notes and you're having actionable information so that Paul can, we don't want this to happen, but this is always the analogy I give to people. Paul gets hit by a bus, Conrad has to hop in and work all of Paul's leads. How does he do that? He does that by having all the notes and everything in one place. So then when he then opens up that thread, he goes, yep, John Doe, you're at 123 Main

Street in blah, blah, blah city. We've already sent you a quote for $84,000 of projected gross rental income. That could be a homeowner example. On the guest side, of course, it could be, hey, I know you stayed with us two years ago. You stayed in this house with 14 people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Getting all that data in one place makes it so much easier to pick things up with multiple team members and roll with it. So that's the way that I see it. And without it, it's again, you don't really know how acute the problem is until you have one of these systems maybe working to your benefit. And then

you realize how much better it is, is the way that I think about it. It is. And I think you're like, you're getting into some of those very detailed use cases. But I think that is that's where when you're really getting the most out of the CRM, you are understanding that full functionality. It's not just, okay, I'm, I am, I'm just taking in the contact information and then communicating with them. Very important. It is, you want to be able to communicate with these potential homeowners,

potential guests through the communication channel that they prefer. If they want to text, you want to be able to text back. If they want to text, you want to be able to text back. If they want that email, you want to be able to email back. If they want to call, you want to be able to do that all right within that system there. So the ability to manage multiple communication channels is important. But then again, what you're actually communicating. There are a lot of these CRMs in the hospitality space because we have so much information that we really want to understand about people we're communicating with or marketing to. You may have, what is their travel preference?

Where do they usually travel? What do they usually do for activities? else that people can partake in, it really does help you build a much better persona of the people that are interacting with your business there. And again, that you can take that, extrapolate out some of those specific things. Okay, these people are family travelers, these people are business travelers, and put together some very, I think, concentrated and customized messaging opportunities that hopefully are going to end up with more conversions and a better performance rate rating or ranking as you're looking at those individual marketing pieces there. Yeah, I think that in my mind, that definitely flows in more on the guest marketing side of things. And I'll be honest, most of our

clients don't do a great job of collecting a lot of that data or doing much with it. Or we just don't know. We're lucky, honestly, if we get stay dates and we might get a property name we might get pet friendly hey they brought a pet they didn't bring a pet and so on and so forth but it's very rare for us i can count on one hand the number of times that people have all this data centralized and organized in one place and it's not just like random notes too that's another thing too where you're trying to go and make all the data that paul's talking about it's like going to go actionable you have to have it formatted in a very specific way because you're going to take a list and then put that list into your email marketing tool we'll just use MailChimp as an example you have to be able to import in there they did go to the golf course

on site this property or they did bring a pet yes or no it's a binary field yes or no that sort of thing not like random again notes in there where it's just yeah Paul and his you know wife and three kids like that's useful don't get me wrong that serves a lot of function in the CRM, when you're looking back notes and things like that. But it doesn't really make it that effective from like a numbers and sense like very binary dollars marketing angle where it's I'm going to segment out of this 10,000 people list that person list that I have, I should say, I'm going to segment out the 4000 people that are specifically interested in this particular thing, and then send them a specific offer or special or a piece of content or whatever about that topic. That's where I think you can get into some trouble if you don't do it the right way and to be fair this when we talked about this before we hit record all this crm stuff we're

talking about is it really isn't easy to get oftentimes from the pms i haven't really seen one yet that really i feel like works really well there i know you mentioned track is maybe has a better system in that respect i've used it with enough experience to tell you i know that when we'd worked with some of their clients before, they were still pushing like email marketing data into a different system, like a Brevo and they were white labeling and things like that. So it wasn't even necessarily like an integrated system. There was like a CRM layer, there was a PMS layer, and then there was an email marketing layer and they weren't all on the same page. I don't know if you want to speak to that for a second before I tell you what my conclusion is when we encounter these situations. Yeah, no, that's, I think that is making it all

work together is really the key. And they do. I think the, some of the functionality, again, going back, it's a little ways in the going on. I'm talking four or five years back since I've been deeply back in that system. But it is, I think a lot of it is you do, you have to do a lot of that upfront setup, making sure that you are tagging things properly. Because you can't, there is usually in most of these systems, there's the opportunity to tag, but is everybody tagging the same way? And I think we can get a little more into that,

into the data quality, data health side of things, that discussion. But that's what it comes down to. If you're not uniformly using the system, if you have people just go, I'm using it this way, I'm putting their information over here, I'm putting it in the notes, I'm putting it in this field. That's when all of a sudden, it's a disparate system, to say the very least. And when you already have a different email marketing system, and technically a different PMS that is, yes, housing the CRM, there's going to be a lot going on there. So having those systems that can talk in a streamlined fashion is going to be important.

And making sure, again, that everybody on your team is on the same page with how they're using it. That's where the success and not failure per se, but I would say more opportunities to get better use out of your CRM. It is that's where those are left on the table when people just can't get on that on the same page with how they're using where they're putting that information. It's easier for me to do it here. Not about the ease of use. Ultimately, it's long term ease of use for the entire company if we're all using it the same way there. So yeah, that's I would say that there is when the systems themselves internally aren't talking that well. We're going to run into some problems there. I posted a essay from James Clear. I don't know if you read any of his stuff. Last year on LinkedIn,

and it was this essay about entropy, which is that over time, system gets more and more disorganized and random. And my bio in Basecamp is in a daily fight about entropy, which is that over time, system gets more and more disorganized and random. And my bio in Basecamp is in a daily fight with entropy, which is a very like niche humor sort of thing to say that everything will return to disorder and chaos if you let it. And if you don't fight back against it, that is what a CRM is. So a CRM is disorganized. People are going to use different tags, the wrong tagging system. Hey, guys, we talked about the tagging system and yet everyone's still going and tagging things the wrong way.

And you have to actively fight against the disorder and no software is going to save you from said disorder because it's the human, the humans using it can be the problem some chunk of the time. So that's a very weird entry point into my response here. But it's Rob on the inventory side of things, worked with him a decent amount over the years.

He used the word hygiene. I think that's actually maybe a little bit better word because that actually makes you realize like we have personal hygiene. We take showers and we brush our teeth and so on and so forth. And no one would ever accept that someone just be like, yeah, I'm just not going to brush my teeth forever. Like you'd be like, that's not good. Like you were, your teeth are going to fall out of your head. That's what CRMs need as well. CRMs need their teeth brushed to take a shower and they need to occasionally go to the doctor and do a deeper dive until, hey, this weird like pain in my side that's been here for nine months. Can't figure that out.

Yeah, there might be something wrong with you. So I'm with you 100% though. And on a more serious note, it's which is that everything's going to get out of order in the CRM the longer that you go without going back and pushing against it and pushing things back into order, eliminating the entropy from your CRM system, the more wild it's going to get. And again, like to your point, it doesn't really matter what system you're using. These things will happen over time. So I don't know what the right cadence is.

It probably depends on the size of your company, what resources you have and so on and so forth. But going in there once a month and doing, hey, let's make sure nothing went really sideways in like our core fields, like check in, check out, name, email, like those kind of things. The things that really matter might be worth monthly reviews potentially on a quarterly basis it might be worth diving in a little bit further and being like how are we tagging categorizing everything i always feel like this is useful to everyone's while i'll go through this with clients on new site launches that's particularly acute right you sign up for the email list and i do the plus trick on gmail so i sign up for the email list then i go go Conrad plus. And today that we're recording, it's March 4th, which is going to come out much later. I'll put,

you know, less March 4th, 2024 at buildupbookings.com is my email address. Then I go look in the system and be like, where's this flowing into? What automations am I getting back out of it? Did I get the welcome email? Like I should, and so on and so forth. Just that kind of like quality control testing type stuff back in the CRM world is really important because especially when you have a lot of automation, I have a client that I just started working with, 119 automations in HubSpot. And like a lot of them make sense to me. I was able to make sense of a good chunk of them,

but there's 25 in there that I'm just like, I'm not exactly sure when this fires. And like, it's firing pretty infrequently, but it is firing. Like how does someone get into this list? What does it mean? And so on and so forth. It can be really complicated.

Even if you start with one or two or three systems, maybe per owners, and then two or three systems per guest, that's already six. Then you add more people into the fold and it can get sideways pretty quickly. So I'm with you a hundred percent. The hygiene is critical and the sooner and more regularly you do it, just like personal hygiene, the better off, the healthier you're going to be, right? As opposed to waiting and waiting for things are a huge issue. No doubt about it. I think anybody who's heard the phrases, good data in, good data out, bad data in, bad data out, if you don't know where those are from, this is the kind of CRM conversation right there. And it is. And I think that's where, especially more so on the owner side of things, where, let's face it, that's how a lot of people are getting this information. that's how a lot of people are getting this information. Unless you have someone actively signing up, you're going to go look for, you look in county records, you're going to look for

absentee owners. You're going to look for some of this information. Now it is, you want to bet that information a little bit as you're putting it into your CRM or try to cleanse that data just to make sure it is. You don't want to just launch it out right away there and say, okay, this is all perfect information, perfect data, anything like that. And it's even on the Venturi side of things, we work really hard to make sure we've got all that short-term verified owner information and all that information. We're still, a lot of what we're trying to go after is coming from county records. Now, King County, Seattle may update their records every week. And Hennepin County in Minnesota here may do it every other year or something like that.

So I think anytime you're putting data in a mass scale in your CRM, trying to figure out a way how to tag it appropriately or get an email sequence out right away to just make sure, verify the quality of that data. make sure, verify the quality of that data. And I think that's, and anything we're doing on the marketing side of things, your marketing efforts are only going to be as good as the data you're pulling from, the data you're putting into that CRM. So it's universal across homeowners and guests. I think on the homeowner side,

we just see it a little more because it is, it's not everybody who's doing the searches for lodging. It's not everybody who's interested in travel. We have that more niche audience that we're going after. So having to be a little more particular with that data is really important there. Yeah. And most, let's be honest, right? Most guest data that you're marketing to on the CRM or email marketing layer is opt-in, right? Like it's for the most part, it's like people stayed with you or they went on your website and they signed up for your email list. It's a very different, I would argue,

it's almost like a B2B, B2C type conversation in respect, right? When you're marketing to a homeowner, it's almost like I'm approaching you to form this business relationship where you trust me with your home, let me manage your home. Here's all the benefits and reasons

why we should work together. As opposed to a guest is, yeah, they're like their own personal self looking for a business to fulfill their needs, but they're a little bit more fluid about who they book with. I could easily see a guest is, yeah, they're like their own personal self looking for a business to fulfill their needs, but they're a little bit more fluid about who they book with. I could easily see a guest booking with two or three different property managers coming back to the same destination all the time. And I know there's many people I've spoken to in my personal life that are not loyal at all to any particular company. They go, yeah, we, last time we stayed, we went here. And then

the last time we stayed, we went over here just because it was a little bit of a better deal and they really aren't loyal at all. Whereas I think the marketing side of things, what we're trying to do on the guest side is build that loyalty. We're trying to say, Hey, you had a great experience here before you're going to have a great experience here again, if you go ahead and book with us again, and here's the promises that we're going to make you in order to get you to stay with us again. So I think that's like the nuance I would say there. And you're right. Having quote unquote bad data on the guest side of my mind usually just means like non-enriched data or not really useful data. The other thing I would say is like old data. So again, i think we talked about this on a previous email

marketing episode client comes to us and they save a list of a hundred thousand people and on the surface i go great and then we start to dig under the surface a little bit and then realize they'd never have cleaned the list so there's people on there from maybe they've been around since 2014 there's people on the list now that are 10 years old that haven't opened an email in some time and maybe they stayed in palm springs one time they had a great time in palm springs and they're just not going to come back for whatever reason there's a one-time birthday party for their friend and that friend has moved to florida and it's just like never going to happen again so they have that kind of email on the list that's just like a zombie email at this point yeah or they have

stuff that's like they ignored for a long time whether it was through a crm or whether it's through an email marketing tool i'm using these things a little bit interchangeably. Maybe we can delineate those really quickly. And yeah, they're not going to come back into it. So having, I think, like you said, the accurate data means different things on the homeowner guest side, but having it available to you does help quite a bit. So let's go down those two paths then. The idea of, is a CRM an email marketing tool and vice versa? I would say, for the most part, I don't see these tools often being used in conjunction

with each other. Now there are all-in-one platforms out there. Again, I think Venturi might be a good example on the homeowner side of mostly a CRM product with a lot of other obviously associated fields with it. But it's not necessarily attempting to be an email marketing tool necessarily, where if you had a list of 1,000 homeowners, you would be sending from that, correct me if I'm wrong on that. Whereas MailChimp will build themselves or call themselves a CRM, But really, I would argue they're not really that great at that. It doesn't really have a typical sales function. Then to give like a third example, a company like HubSpot does have it all in one because they have these different tabs and interfaces and things like that.

And HubSpot, where if you pay the piper and give them all the money, they will give you a pretty integrated marketing and CRM tool set. So maybe you could talk between those like different examples of what a CRM and what an email marketing tool is because they're similar, but it's not exactly the same thing in my mind. I would say looking at a CRM enhances email marketing software.

And I think that, no, just looking at the kind of the examples you gave, yeah, HubSpot runs through, but typically if you're leveraging HubSpot, you're doing it with a third party system there. Cost wise, you hit the nail on the head there as well. It is I think that a lot of the when I think email marketing software, I think I'm going to send newsletters out of here, I'm going to send a lot of different types of email marketing. Whereas I think, generally speaking,

Whereas I think, generally speaking, that most of the emails that go through a CRM are going to be transactional. They're either going to communicate directly with who you want to communicate with in the platform, or you can run some type of workflow based on triggers, automations that are going on there. But most of that does end up going through a third-party email marketing software there. So yeah, Venturi is probably a little unique in what we're able to do within the platform. I don't think that it's necessary to have the two intertwined always. But again, I think if you want to have

better email marketing efforts, the way to do that is to leverage the data that you have in the CRM system. Yeah, I guess I wouldn't say that they're one in the same. They're probably people who have absolutely no email that goes through a CRM system. I think that's missing the point. It's missing the technology. If you're taking it into another system, or if you've got an API or a ZAP or a webhook or something like that, I think that's where you can add as much functionality to the CRM as you want to, with all those technological opportunities, the integrations, the webhooks, anything like that. So you can cobble yourself together something that looks like a CRM with email

marketing software in it. But for the most part, I do. I think that those systems run independently of each other, and then they collaborate to help you on both the guest and the marketing side. What do you think about that? Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right in that one enhances the other, and your email marketing will typically work a lot better when you have more available information at your fingertips and a CRM does a good job at that. Ultimately, these all-in-one tools, like I'm all for it. I guess I'll be honest to you, like my struggle with HubSpot is not the quality of the tool.

It's just the cost. Is HubSpot, again, roughly 10 times better than using, like we use PipeDraft and MailChimp, for example, with our own agency. And now we have a client that uses Close for their CRM, a vacation client on the guest side, and then they use MailChimp on the marketing side. And I'm like, that stack is fine. That works really well. These things sync over. There's to your point mentioning Zapier and things like that, that there can a lot of syncing can occur. Is it cleaner to have everything HubSpot or an all in one type tool? I think so, but it does come at a significant cost. And maybe the unlock out

there is someone who does HubSpot a little bit less expensively, or it doesn't do all the functionality, but it's like what most small businesses need. I took a look at less annoying. Have you seen them before? It's called less annoying CRM. Yeah, it's so their marketing positioning very interesting, because it's maybe we're not the most well featured. But like, we're simple, we keep things very easy to understand. And we're 15 bucks a month per user no matter what. So it's just like, you're never going to get a crazy bill from us it's fair software at a fair price like the base camp model which i find very appealing myself personally from a software perspective and i just thought the name is just absolutely hilarious less annoying than the crm

it's not annoying but it's less annoying you know what i mean than many other crm platforms because to be clear housebot can do it all right like a to z front to back six ways to sideways to sunday they can do every single function a crm would want you to do. And yeah, it can be a little bit overwhelming in there. This is going way back. But the first email marketing CRM type all in one tool that I used was called infusion soft. I don't know if you ever made your way into that world. If you did, then I apologize in our dance. Right? Again, great system had every function under the sun from a CRM and email marketing perspective, excuse me. And the joke around the office was that it was called confusion soft, because it was just so confusing to use,

you needed like, you had to go through this like training to get understanding. And by the end of the training, it was like 13 hours of training. And we knew how to send one email, add in one record, get do a list export and do tagging, there was like three things and four things that we learned over all this training. I'm like, Okay, that's good. And I'm like, when's the next video? What's the next training? And there really wasn't more training. And I was just like, this is a disaster. That makes it very challenging. So going back to our original commentary about like, why are people not using this? Because there's a learning curve. And the more complicated a CRM you might choose in your business, occasional business, whether it's

homeowner or guest, and the lack of adhesion or using that system, the further off track you're going to get. And you were speaking to that before we record, not to put anybody on blast, you don't have to say names, but like you frequently go into the CRM platforms and realize that people aren't using it to its full potential and they're not going to get the benefit if they don't use the system properly, right?

That's, and that's the whole thing. You can have this nice, beautiful system and it has all the bells and whistles, but if your team isn't using it, then you're missing, then you're paying for something that you literally don't need. And that's, I, that's the downside to, I think between that and maybe when I see, just take

it back to the email site, when I see three different email marketing softwares, so you're using MailChimp for this, you're using Campaign Monitor for this somehow, and you're using like a GetDrip for, for Drip emails. How is that system coming? How are those systems coming back and centralizing in that CRM? Or are they doing that? And I think that kind of all plays into that as well, is that it's nice to have all these shiny objects.

But if that's all they are, if they're not actually adding to your bottom line, if they're not creating a better ROI, if they're not helping you close deals, if they're not helping you give people a better, more personalized experience, whether that's on the owner side or the guest side, then what are I think that's really identifying as you're evaluating the CRM. What do I use it for? Is there anything else that I use something else in the same capacity? Like, how do I get the else in the same capacity? Like, how do I get the most of the software? And I hope that people do that. But it is when you're adding on the PMS, and you're adding a CRM, and you're adding all this, all these big softwares, it gets a little bulky. And there's a reason Don Yaskowski is doing PMS Pros is that it is tough to get the training that you need and to really get the most out of the software. So to have a more dedicated person, and again, track's great, streamline's great.

All these companies do a really good job of putting you through the system in their way. But you might not use it that way. You might not do it. You may do things a little differently. You may have a very unique case in how you're doing these things. So I do. I think that the more you can bring, not bring it on under one roof per se, it's not all in-house, anything like that. But you do have to figure out the way, how you're using the system, why you're using different parts. And if you don't need different parts, then again, you part ways. And if it's not adding to a better experience for

your owners or guests, you probably don't. Or yourself internally. I think that's the third thing we've maybe danced over a little bit, but it's got to help your team internally too. If it's making your job more difficult than something that's more simple, then again, you evaluate on what the needs are for the CRM for your business. Yeah. I think that's the key, which is understand what your deeds are and also like commit to the understanding that there's going to be a process that you have to go through from point A to point B. And it's hard to, because you're changing in the case of an existing company, you're changing habits to get people to buy into the CRM. Like you, the CRM salesperson, right? Let's be honest on the marketing side, we're going to sit here and

tell you there's all these benefits. But the real work to be done is just a grind, like the day to day. Like, all right, I got eight phone calls today. I got seven emails from guests. Like, all right, got to get those things in there properly and tagged and formatted, submitted. Got to commit to that. I'm going to get a call today and then a call on Friday from a homeowner who's interested. Got to put them in there, all their information, the address, the property details, three beds, two baths, and so on and so forth.

Got to tag them properly so they get the drip sequence and those sorts of things. And yeah, a lot of this stuff is tedious and there's really no reward for doing it well in the short term. It's, I saw this clip the other day when someone was talking about going to the gym. So go to the gym one time, nothing happens. Go to the gym two times, nothing happens. You might notice something maybe 40 days later is when you might actually feel or notice something different.

But the first 40 gym sessions are completely meaningless. They don't actually make you look actually feel or notice something different. But the first 40 gym sessions are like completely meaningless. Like they don't actually make you look any different or feel any different. Maybe the number change a little bit on the scale or something like that. Whatever your objectives are, that's what this is, right? Like you're not going to notice it until like maybe 40 interactions later. And that could be months later. That could be nine months later. You're like, man, this guest called again.

I answered the phone and I knew everything they were after because of all this information I had. How awesome. Or this homeowner, and Brooke talks about this all the time. I love it. This homeowner came back in and half the leads that I think Venturi has tracked is closed in their system have been people that were already in these long-term nurture sequences. So you're putting in this long-term nurture sequence and guess what? Nothing happens. And then six months later, they call you back, you get the lead and it's yes, that CRM helped me earn this revenue,

but you don't realize it right away. So I think that's also part of the challenge is just sticking with it for the long term, and doing it when no one's clapping for you and celebrating for you. Correct. I think that was always the most fun thing to and it's still it's to this day, it's the most fun thing to see is the people who Yeah, they've gone through they own, they're doing a transition, they're going through the first couple of weeks and it's tough in the first three weeks and it's tough in the first month. And then all of a sudden you start to see, whether that's on the guest side or the owner's side, that hockey stick growth or something like, oh, I just closed two leads on the owner's side and I haven't closed any in the last three months. Wow. Now I understand that it is, I would say to get the most out of your CRM, you got to see a

win in the CRM to actually build your confidence that, okay, this system is helping me. Because I think if you're not seeing that win, you're like, I can do this without. And I think you are missing out on some functionality that would help you if you're willing to stay the course and really give it that opportunity to thrive and shine and help your business grow. But again, when you don't, when there is that SaaS trough of disappointment or that marketing agency trough of disappointment in that months three to five range where maybe you saw the big growth right away and it leveled out, or maybe it just took a little while because again, it's technology and it's not going to immediately impact your business. It is going to have more of a long, hopefully a long life there

where long shelf life there, where you can see the long-term value. And it is, it's making your job easier. It's making the communication easier. You're realizing these things as they're happening. I had that again, it was one of the cool things to hear some of those call agents on the reservation side saying, oh, now I have all this information. Of course, I'm closing X, Y, Z. I'm 10% more, 20% more, 30% more in bookings. This is what's happening. I think that's tough with any SaaS solution you're using is to really get that buy-in and go, I would say you almost have to go above and beyond on the buy-in just to get to that level of, okay, I'm using it in my business. It's a part of my business. I don't think you can think about churning unless it absolutely

has broken your business. I don't think you can think about churning a CRM PMS for 12 months. I truly think that if you're not committing to a full year of really doing everything you need to do to get the most out of your software, then maybe there's smaller solutions that you get to. You tiptoe into more of a technology solution as opposed to the full blown CRM or the full blown property management system. And while that tech stack can be beautiful and great and hopefully make your jobs a lot easier, the last thing you want to do is actually see the balance book go the opposite way and you're going hockey stick growth on the other side of the left-handed hockey stick growth, we'll say. Yeah. Yeah, that can make it challenging for sure. I think we've

beat this topic a little bit sufficiently at this point. So I know we got a few more minutes here and we can wrap on our side of things. But yeah, ultimately, the way that I'd close it out is, yeah, just like doing the boring work. This is what this is, the CRM side a little bit. And there's different things to put in place. Like, again, automation. I think it's getting the data right, keeping the data clean.

So that's a system. How do we install a system once a month, once a quarter? We're going to go through and dive through this stuff and make sure it's all accurate. right, keeping the data clean. So that's a system. How do we install a system once a month, once a quarter, we're going to go through and dive through this stuff and make sure it's all accurate. Have maybe two people check it. Person one checks it, person two validates it, that sort of thing. Go through, you use that data to then build your marketing plan off of, whether it's homeowner or guest marketing, it's going to follow the same system, right?

Who's the messaging? What's the person that I'm sending the message to? What am I saying to them? How are they going to benefit from this? And so on and so forth. So there's kind of layers to pick apart there. And then if you bring it all the way back, it's okay, then the ongoing benefit I'm going to see from this is all these different pieces that are going to fall into place once I'm actually doing better marketing. And again, my kind of final

thought here, we did our direct booking benefits episode a little while ago. This is where I think doing the action of the direct booking activities really start to benefit you because you're actually building your own marketing list in your own little marketing empire, so to speak, right? If you rely on a listing site for all your bookings, you're assuming that there's always going to be fish in the pond that you're choosing to throw your line into. When you go and do this type of activity, maybe this is the analogy that I think of. You're stocking the pond with your own fish. You're putting your own fish into your own pond, and then you're giving yourself the chance to catch those fish and make it be fruitful for you from a return on marketing dollars perspective.

So if you're willing to do this work, this is one of the few things that we do in our business in my mind too, that actually benefit you significantly over time. Even when time does not increase, benefits from said time increase, right? So you spend an hour to send that first email newsletter out based on the CRM data that you have

for all your pet friendly guests. First email you get out to 100 people, you might get a booking, you might not, you probably won't if I'm being honest, statistically speaking. Two years down the road, you're sending that same email out, it's going to 1000 people. Two years down the road, you're sending that same email out, you've grown and now you're sending it 10,000 people, it's going to take you about an hour, two hours each time to send that email. And by the time you're in year four, you're going to see 12 bookings of email and you're going to go, wow, why don't we send more emails? This is really profitable. So I think this is the foundational pieces that get you from point A to point Z, like we talk about and like we go through sometimes in this show. So I think that's

the way to think about it. And we could put a bow on this one. One thing that I think the listener can do, Paul, this would be an activity that we could put into our CRM if someone were to do it, which is what they could do is they go to their podcast app of choice. Again, iTunes, Spotify, where we get the most listens of those help us the most, but any podcast app that you may partake in yourself personally, you leave us five stars and then you can email us. You can email me specifically Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com that you went ahead and left a five star, take a screenshot, something like that. Obviously post about it, tag us in some way so we can take a look at that. I could then save that information, put it in the CRM that you are a five star podcast listener,

which is the highest of honors that we can bestow upon somebody inside of our CRM. And you're going to get some benefit out of that too. Who knows, maybe there'll be something down the road that you're going to get that you might benefit from. So anyways, we joke, but we do appreciate the podcast reviews if you have time to check those out. Either way, we hope you got a lot of value out of today's episode talking a little bit about CRM starting initially at a high level and then doing a deep dive. So if you've played it this far, we appreciate you. We thank you. And we will catch you of course, on the next episode of the ads and bet show. Thanks so much.