00:00
Hi, welcome to Power of the Network. I'm your host, Tim Logger, Vice President of Broadband here at CBM. I'm excited about our guests this week. uh I've gotten the opportunity to meet Mr. John Mitchell. He's a creator of RepFabric. It's a CRM tool that's really developed specifically for manufacturer's rep firms. uh It handles a bunch of kind of the issues that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. So I'm real excited about our conversation. uh Got a lot to dive into, so.
00:28
Let's jump right into our conversation.
00:34
John, thanks for coming in being with us. uh I know we had you in for another training deal yesterday and I'm glad we were able to take advantage of getting you in the studio. Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me. Honored to be here and excited to talk about what we're going to talk about here today. Awesome. So RepFabric, you developed a CRM tool kind of specifically uh for manufacturers reps. uh That tells me you obviously saw a gap for something.
01:03
Yeah, sure. Well, mean, for starters, was one, right? And uh really this came from my frustration when I'd get home at 6.30 at night and have all kinds of tasks to do to close open opportunities and projects we're working on and then have this sort of big data problem where every manufacturer gave me different sales and commission statements, management problems as far as like, what's the performance of our sales teams and.
01:29
different people that work for us and so on and so forth. And there was no good off-the-shelf software out there to be able to do that. so, um kind of took it upon myself, I had a background in integration software as well as actually developing apps and kind of built it as I was running the rep firm. So that's where it came from. Yeah. Okay, so uh where did the background in that come from? What got you, let's start back before you were uh fresh out of college.
01:59
Sure. What led you to where you're at today? Yeah, so uh when I graduated, I started working for what's now Accenture. It was Anderson Consulting at the time. And we were running up against the Y2K problem. So that kind of dates me. um So I ended up working for them for about four years uh doing SAP implementations, which are the big.
02:24
systems that mega companies run like Ford and GM and Merck and Pfizer and guys like that, um where it's kind an all encompassing system that manages all their sales and distribution, their products, their uh inventory, their accounting. And so I got a really good background on how big companies did it. And then the dot com boom came. And so I left Accenture to go join some friends of mine that had moved out to Northern California. And they were working for a company called Web Methods that makes integration software. uh
02:54
Then once the dot com boom sort of melted down, I had the opportunity to buy into a rep firm and kind of sleep in my own bed for a change instead of traveling where I think I had a million frequent fire miles by the time I was 30. um And so I did that. And when I got there, I felt like I needed good software to help run this business because I was kind of used to helping businesses run good software. And so we started at. uh
03:20
where one of, it's kind of a longer story, but one of my friends who was one of my customers at the time, because I was a bag carrying sales rep as well as a rep owner, um one of my friends had moved over to India and he was of Indian descent, like his parents were Indian and he was getting married over there and his wife was finishing her residency and he called me up a year later and he's like, hey, I'm starting a software and technology development firm. Would you guys rep us? And I said, yes, we'll rep you, but also I need you to build.
03:49
this software for me that was kind the foundation of Repfabric. And so just having had the background, was actually kind of fun because there's both of my careers coming together and converging on Repfabric where today we have close to, I guess we're over thousand companies that run our software and about 11,000 users. So it's not something I'm ever going to do again.
04:16
Is the rep firm still in place? It is, but I sold my interest in it in 2016, really before we went to market because I didn't want any competitive pressures or companies that we would sell to being nervous that we were somehow taking their intellectual property and so on. So I really had to divest myself from the rep firm in order to keep it clean and get customers. there's reps are obviously, as you know, very, very protective of our relationships and really our IP is our companies and
04:45
contacts that we have long-lasting and trusted relationships with. And that's what helps us be the grease that is really the way we get orders, right? And the way we get our earnings. And so I wanted to make sure that there was no conflict of interest there in order to be able to get those customers. Sure. So what were some of the key issues that you saw that what you had back at the time wasn't fulfilling your needs?
05:14
Yeah, so I kind of alluded to a few of those already, number one was just me as a bag carrying sales rep, right? I just wanted to be efficient with my time and you go make eight hours of sales calls and you got to come back and do another two or three hours of emails and you have to update manufacturer CRM systems, for example, where you're updating their funnel and their system. you know, so I'd say staying on top of all the jobs, tasks and opportunities as a seller.
05:43
was time consuming and difficult. And that wasn't really working, that was working in the company, not on the company. And working on the company were things like, what's keeping me up at night as a manager? Am I keeping my lines happy? Are they satisfied with our company's performance? Are sales teams operating efficiently? Or do I have a salesperson who's not performing at the level they should be? And how am going to coach them through that problem? um
06:10
Other examples that most of us as rep firms are really kind of small businesses, small and medium businesses, and yet we have a very complex big data IT problem in the amount of data that we're receiving from our manufacturers because it's all in all different kinds of formats, whether it's a quote, an order, data sheets, price lists, certainly sales and commission statements. So you've got this big data problem that you're trying to synthesize so that you can get a single view of the customer.
06:39
Again, there was just no software that kind of in all in one could do those things, help you both with your managing your own funnel and your own bag carrying efforts all the way through to, you know, kind of giving you the single view of the customer who, how can we did, you know, $60,000 with that customer last year in this particular manufacturer's products and this year we've only done 10. Why did we lose that business? Right. And certainly as rep owners, you're looking at that kind of stuff.
07:07
but can you help your sales team be aware of that so that you can take those corrective actions and go win that business back? And so I just needed like an all-encompassing nervous system for my rep firm. I had enough of a software background that I could go out and kind of design it and have some folks implement it back in the time when an offshore developer was pretty inexpensive. And so we hired a bunch of people to go do that. Yeah, I think with any system,
07:35
it's probably only as good as the information that you're able to put in it. For sure. What are some of those implementation challenges? I know a handful of years back we switched to a different CRM and one of our questions was do we keep all the old info and don't put into it? do we not? Do we start over?
08:00
And bad data is just as bad as no data. and especially in the AI era and agentic era, bad data is the worst thing that you could have, right? Because it's going to disturb everything, right? So as far as the question goes, we've seen it all. We've got five people on our data and implementation team that literally just help companies clean up their data in order to have a good user experience when they first start with our software.
08:29
em And so we've done things where a lot of times you're pulling from different data silos. And a data silo would be where you've got something like a contact list in your marketing system that's different than the contact list that your salesperson has in their Outlook or in their Gmail contacts, which is then different than the old Act or CRM system that you might be running because they're not all talking to each other. And that might be very different than your quote system.
08:58
right, which has its own set of contacts. And then that's even furthermore different than your sales and commission tracking system or order tracking system that might have different companies and contacts to go with it. So what our data team does is really grab as much of that information. We've written a ton of tools to be able to really synthesize that into a single good list of companies. And then we hang everything else off of that, like the contacts, the in-flight opportunities, the prior sales by manufacturer, and so on and so forth.
09:28
It is a project that usually takes for most companies about 30 days to kind of go from start to finish. And then our integrations will keep all of those things aligned so that if you add a new company or new contacts uh in your outlook, for example, they'll sweep into Repfabric or vice versa. If you take on a new line and you want to add their customer service and regional sales managers, those will then pour it over to everybody's outlook so that you're not fighting what I would call like the pebbles in your shoe as a salesperson.
09:57
It's like, oh yeah, I want to go call customer service and order a sample of this, but I don't have that phone number in my phone right now. So we kind of eliminate a lot of the drag there by having those integrations by default. And so that also then leads to better adoption because tracking things that uh are meaningful under that kind of uniform look of the customer becomes a lot easier.
10:21
And my head is spinning, frankly, right now. I know. Sorry for that. I little bit too much detail. No, I'm thinking about some of just the weird little challenges that we deal with day to day. I mean, I can tell you some of our most challenging ones were where there's no system, right? Yeah. And you've got 35 salespeople who, for 20 years, have kept all their individual contacts co-mingled with their personal contacts, their kids' basketball coach and church group and so on and so forth.
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co-mingled in that and we've had to basically distill those things down, deduplicate them and synthesize them into a good companies and contacts list and then we could begin the implementation. So we kind of lived through a lot of that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Getting rid of the data silos is step one. And so many times people maybe move companies or whatever, their cell phone number they keep. And so you end up with so many different things.
11:21
ah I know they use Salesforce, but they don't use it for like contacts. They track quotes and do different things from a manufacturing perspective, they don't track. Everybody's got their sales contacts on their phone and a lot of times they'll call me, hey, you got so-and-so's number. To me that's just mind boggling. It kind of goes back to, if anything, as humans, our relationships and our contacts.
11:50
are really the intellectual property that we have, certainly in the rep business. And um to not have that in a place that you can leverage it with email marketing outreach and um kind of like, follow up on this order kind of thing for someone who's maybe not you. If you're the person who's writing the order and chasing it inside, m if you don't have that person's contact information, how are you going to effectively do that job?
12:18
and continue to grow those long-lasting and trusted relationships with your customers. So yeah, it's a problem for sure. And most companies, in terms of data hygiene, most of them at best are maybe a B or B plus, ah but we've dealt with the F's before. Well, yeah, implementation seems to be an issue even for us. um
12:46
looking back over the years, putting the information into the system, I mean, it's valuable. It needs to be there. But do you want your guys outselling or do you want them putting, filling in data? I'm glad you asked. No kidding, right? That's always the thing. If you think about computer systems in general, it's like, I'm going to put some stuff in the front and I want to get some stuff out of the back. And historically,
13:14
the stuff in the front entry has been painful. Yet at the same time, you don't get that meaningful uh customer profitability analysis and up-down reports and things like that unless you've gone through that sort of pain of getting that data into the system in the front end. And I think a lot of the new tools with AI certainly assisting are making that drag factor much, less than it's ever been.
13:42
In the case of our software, within the next year, the drag factor will reduce to probably zero. uh So give me a little more definition. We talk a lot about AI and all the things that it can make better, make faster, make easier. what's a specific example for me as a sales guy that makes my life easier? Sure. So I go out and I make a sales call. And I need to recap by manufacturers what it is that we talked about.
14:12
So that I can remember and I can take the actions that I committed to to my customer to go do and do that in 60 seconds after the conclusion of sales call as I'm driving on to my next account call, right? You know that the math of this at this point really just makes sense where you know industry studies show that the cost of a sales call to go talk to your customer in person for an hour is somewhere between 400 and 650 bucks per sales call.
14:41
You're asking for one minute after that to recap what you were able to accomplish and when you need to follow up next Thursday on this particular task to go order them samples or some catalogs because their catalog room with that distributor is empty for this particular manufacturer. And all of sudden it becomes way more useful because those things are now sinking out to your Outlook and Gmail task lists for you to go do and you can delegate them to others and people can see it.
15:08
And now you know that, I've called in this company on your behalf, Mr. Manufacturer, 16 times this month, right? Talking about these various new products. So you're starting to sort of capture that, uh you know, the what have you done for me lately for your manufacturers without a lot of drag, and it's totally verbal. Yeah, that's one we struggle with. Right. uh You know, because that's always a question. ah But I remember specifically, know, Tim Drake, our uh
15:38
VP of our utility group, we were in a meeting with one of our manufacturers and he was able to say, we've made 874 calls on your behalf in so much of a time or whatever. But not everybody uses it all in the same manner. And I think that's where the AI stuff is really starting to help. So in our case, what we're doing is we're taking those notes and transcribing them and then using an AI to analyze that information.
16:06
so that it will create those tasks and it'll create the elements that normally you would have to enter into a CRM by hand, right? And so kind of taking that drag factor out without disturbing the workflow, what we find is a lot of our customers are really excited about that because they're capturing things that they would have forgotten about. Oh, I forgot to order samples for that particular thing that we talked about, or I didn't bring up the new XLR series product launch that we were supposed to.
16:33
And I think manufacturers today are becoming more dependent upon that. My business partner, Scott Stockham, he's an ex-manufacturer that ran a huge P &L for Lixle, which is a major plumbing company. Some of their brands include American Standard, for example. And he would say that when he would launch products, he never really could understand whether or not his manufacturer reps were promoting those products for this brand new product that he went and spent $2 million in development.
17:02
because it was always unclear. And now the clarity for you to be able to say, we went out and we promoted that XLR series 26 times out of the 40 times we discussed you, your line this month at these contractors, not necessarily even at the distributors. um Now, that's easy data to capture. Whereas in the past, it would require someone going in and hand typing at the end of the night, here's what I did. All that's gone.
17:30
And so those are practical ways to use AI that you don't even have to worry about the fact that it's AI. You're just getting the job done. And that's kind the ultimate thing is AI shouldn't be in your way. should be helping you. What's the physical process? Currently how we do it, and I'm sure we're using one of your competitors, and I'm sure there's things I don't know about the system.
17:59
We make a sales call and if we're doing our job, we're talking about multiple different lines. We're not just selling one product in there, so we might be talking about five different products from five different So uh we're done with the sales call and then we've got to log that call, tie it to the manufacturer, you can talk into it or type it or whatever, but then got to repeat that five times now for every
18:28
every manufacturer and it maybe needed to be worded a little differently because you kind of want it to fit where it's going to be targeted to. But what does your process look like? I got in the car, I've done a great job and I talked about five different things. I just talking something, telling it? What's the process? Give me a couple of your lines. uh PLP, uh Lytera and Duraline. uh Duraline recap. We discussed the new XLR series.
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and they said they're interested in getting a price list. Can you send over this uh and follow up next Thursday? Create a task, send it over, follow up next Thursday. For PLP, we discussed the new lighting uh shelves and hangers, and we want to get them some samples, take a task to order those samples, follow up next Thursday. It's like that kind of just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and just whip it out. And then when there's more nuanced conversations, what
19:25
we are doing is basically not using the raw dictation, but really distilling it into it so that the vice president of sales could read that at that PLP, for example, and see that it's like a well-written, well-understood thing. So that's kind of, you example of the post-processing that happens. Because that's one of the things too for like, uh you know, we don't want to send a report to a factory that says,
19:51
stopped in to see Bob dropped off catalogs and donuts. What do we actually do? so we hopefully try to train people to put the content in that it's deliverable. We still got to sort back through it and check it, but we want it be deliverable to where a factory would appreciate it. Right, exactly. So hey, we did talk about that new product launch at this customer location and they said the widget needs to be green
20:21
to pass UL on our panel, right? Like that kind of feedback is the kind of stuff that you would naturally kind of float up. So what's your feeling on just manufacturer reports, call reports? So we work in a lot of different markets. Some markets uh have no manufacturer reporting that they have to do. Other markets have tremendous manufacturing reporting that they have to do and often in the manufacturer CRM systems, not even in their own.
20:51
And so we've got a variety, you know, think as companies, know, more and more of bigger manufacturers, they're, run by people who make data driven decisions. And I think it's only going to increase because of that. So manufacturer reporting is going to just, you know, be a fact of life of being a salesperson in general, whether you're a rep or a direct seller. So let me ask you this then, if you're not required,
21:20
There's no requirements for reporting. Should you be anyways? So when I, when I put my rep owner's hat on, what I would say is we would do that by default just because if someone's sending me a commission check and they're not seeing their sales grow and we're not talking to them and communicating to them what's happening in the market, then that's certainly a risk that that relationship may sour.
21:49
And we might get fired from the line. And how many times do you grow the line and all of a sudden the checks start to be pretty significant and then it's like, okay, are these guys really earning that? Right. But again, and that's where that activity capture, not even so much the NBO opportunity funnel is equally important, right? Because what activity is, is these are my at bats, right? And then when I get a base hit, it might be a single double, it might be a home run.
22:19
The reason I had those is because I went out there and pitched you 40 times to get 10 opportunities and closed five of them, right? And that's how you really create a repeatable sales process that you can continue to refine. kind of the second layer of AI is the AI manager that can come in and say, here's the components that show that this is a winning deal ahead of time, right? So they talk about things like prescriptive selling.
22:47
ah and kind of focusing on the right jobs, projects, and opportunities, not necessarily all of them, but just the right ones, those impact ones. And so um I think there will be a level of augmentation, and we're already starting to do a lot of this in our analytics modules, to say, hey, go focus on these winning deals, right? And keep those things moving, because that's certainly where...
23:14
another layer of augmenting the salesperson is what AI is going to be able to do for you. Yeah, ah I agree. We have different schools of thought within our organization of those reports. I appreciate them. From another perspective, just from a sales managing perspective, if you're one of our sales guys and at the end of the month you've got to have certain things on this.
23:42
PLP report, for example, is in the back of your mind, you're going to pressure yourself to like, I don't want to be the guy that, like, I didn't do anything for them all month, right? So your homework's not done. Yeah, so I feel like there's a little bit of an incentive there, know, a little pressure that kind of forces your salespeople to go do what they're supposed to be doing. So I do like that. But then there's, you know, the other school of thought where,
24:11
We need our people to be selling and not spending so much time just on, you can make yourself look good and not do anything. We don't want that. We want people out being effective in selling. I think those people tend to get smoked out just based on the numbers, right? The numbers not performing. And when I kind of zoom out, where I think what I see, and I reflect on my time as a manufacturer's rep and as a seller, a bag carrying seller,
24:40
I look at it like, what do you keep in this bag you keep talking about? Yeah, I know. Yeah, really. I feel like I need a bag. I can't show you, but it's good stuff. No, but what I see is when I think about my best relationships, right, and those were the people that, I'll give you an example, Sherry, who was a very, very tough buyer at one of my accounts, that most of the other salespeople really were challenged by her, right, because she's very low tolerance.
25:09
very smart, you better know your stuff and don't waste her time. And we developed a great friendship to the point that it was, I would term it like whispery conversations. I could call her up and say, hey, hey Sherry, I'm going to stop by. I just got this cool bag of Jamaican coffee that we brought back from the Caymans. I know you love coffee, right? And she'd be like, oh, okay.
25:33
Yeah, it sounds great. I'm really busy, I'll leave I have these four orders for you I'll just leave them at the front desk just drop it off and go right when you have that level of intimacy with your customers I probably had like 20 to 25 maybe of those relationships and I think what's gonna happen is We're gonna get enough minutia out of the way with AI that you can have a hundred of those kinds of relationships Right. Yeah, and ultimately it might make us better Better sellers and better humans because we can focus on the relationship side of it
26:03
not so much the minutiae side of it. as part of that, uh everybody knows the salesperson that really, let's say, doesn't have a lot of uh engaging personality and sells on just data and specs and so on and so forth. And I think those people are going to struggle in that relationship world when AIs are talking to AIs to go figure out, hey, this is the right part to use.
26:32
That's not even a decade away, right? That's probably a years away. I kind of think of AI as kind of a one-sided operation at this point. You may have a chatbot on your website that helps you find what you're looking for or whatever, how do we... You talk about AI working with AI, that means we've got to have something AI that's going the other way.
27:02
What are we missing from that standpoint that, or is it there yet? guess I don't What I would say is like, I would kind of, again, I tend to zoom out here and I think.
27:13
Are you worried about AI taking your job? No, no. I uh think relationships are going to be important. um I um the one caveat there I guess would be communication. It's up to us to communicate whether it's with customers or with factories or whatever. um
27:41
you know, an AI can probably out communicate us frankly because there's no fear of somebody you don't know or, you know, those types of things. And it can just be so automated that it happens. you know, short of communication, I don't, I don't think we would be. Yeah. I, I, and I totally agree with you, right? I think in my opinion, if you, if you consider jobs, what is a job? It's, it's a bundle of tasks that you do every day, right? And for those tasks you,
28:11
talk to systems and products and so on and so forth. And so I think what will happen is AI, for what it's good at, is going to pick a certain set of those tasks and do them for you. But you're still going to be the grand coordinator of your AI sales assistant that you're kind of through, doing your daily work with.
28:37
And again, a lot of that stuff is the minutia pieces. So for example, you know, there's a lot of folks that are quoters and order takers, meaning that they have to process an order that a customer sends over in the manufacturer system or create a copy of the manufacturer's orders that they got notified about for customer service reasons or order and commission tracking reasons. But a lot of that kind of stuff, that work we're already doing, right? We're already using AI to just
29:05
do those things. Like, let me prep this price and availability quote, boom, do it all in Outlook instantly. um And then likewise, hey, here's a new order. Let me enter the order, all the part numbers, all of that stuff done, again, just right through your regular communications. um And so those kinds of tasks, those are already going away. So how are you going to repurpose the person who used to do that stuff? And that's where the folks have to become truly like demand generation.
29:34
folks, right? Less clerical work. And so those are the jobs that I'd say the tasks that will go away that free people up to do better, for instance, better data analysis. Like, hey, here's an up-down report on which companies we used to buy this much tray cable from us, and now they don't. What happened there? Let's go recapture that. Let me point out to my salesperson that this is a task that you should go do. And so um I don't think everybody's going to
30:03
lose jobs to AI, I think the jobs will change and they become tools, right? Like when carpenters, when power tools first came out, carpenters weren't out of a job, right? They were just more efficient at the job they were already doing.
30:21
Just want to say thanks again to John for taking the time to come in and visit with us today. As you can see from our conversation, I think we could go for a few more hours. So we're going to have to have John back on the show. I've got a lot more questions for him. And he's a sharp dude. knows what he's talking about. And I think he can help you if you've got CRM issues, looking for a good product. I'd certainly reach out to RepFabric. Remember, if you're needing help with the project or
30:50
looking for representation here in the Midwest. Look no further than CBM. You can find us right here at cbmrep.com. Give us a like, comment, subscribe, you know, give us some feedback. If there's something you want to see coming up on future episodes, let us know. Thanks again for joining us on Power of the Network. And until next time, we'll see you next time.
