SaaS
Introduction
Craig Caryl is the co-founder and CEO of Smart CSM. They developed a software product that makes buildings smarter, enabling the operators to bring their data online all in one place. SmartCSM was built to solve the problem with paper in everyday building infrastructure management and Craig shows how he is running cold business calls to win customers.
The software makes teams smarter by empowering facility managers of commercial buildings to bring and manage their building infrastructure data online.
In this episode we focus specifically on how Craig is running cold calls and how he has been teaching himself the necessary sales skills to find first customers for his SaaS product….
See how this CEO is running cold business calls to win leads…
Pathmonk: What metrics do you actually care about from the website?
Craig Caryl: We could care about conversions, traffic, MQL, SQL, so, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, all of which has measurable through, that traffic conversion.
Pathmonk: Is there something you learned with that very specific user group, on how to improve conversions on the website?
Craig Caryl: We have right now is we don’t have a sandbox where people can come play it. It’s some feedback that we’re getting and were just speaking about it this morning in our company meeting about creating that sandbox so people can come and experiment on a very simple version. Whenever you’re changing the way people work, people are not visionaries. That’s why you have serial entrepreneurs that are visionaries and people that buy from serial entrepreneurs (…)
Pathmonk: I would be curious, how do you educate yourself as a founder? Are there specific blogs or books or people that you would be looking at or what’s your approach today?
Craig Caryl: No, it’s all the above. I mostly talk to my clients. I talked to potential clients. I find that I tried to find out their pain points. I start out every sales call, number one, qualifying the size of the property and the staff. Cause that gives me an idea of how much I can save them. Also I want to know what’s your pain point within these parameters that I can help with. Tell me about, trying to find a information, trying to find breaker panels, trying to find effected areas. I begin to get into their head. As I’m going through the software, I show how our software directly addresses those problems.
Pathmonk: You mentioned the business calls and the stepping up to people a couple of times now. There something that you learned for yourself that makes a successful cold call? I know there’s a lot of stuff online, but maybe something from your real experience in that particular vertical or what did you learn makes a good cold call for you?
Craig Caryl: You have about 20 seconds, you have about 20 seconds. Now a facility manager is getting about a hundred phone calls a day from people like me. They want to talk to about three of those people, but they have to take all a hundred phone calls or listen to those a hundred messages. You have a 15 to 30 second window where you actually have their attention before they shut the lights switch off and they’re just about to hang up on you or figure out how to end the call. You need a, what they call in Hollywood, a log line or an elevator pitch. You need something that’s so profound that sets the hook immediately, that makes them think, okay, what, I’m going to keep my mind open and I’m going to listen for another minute and maybe another minute after that. Eventually agree to go through a demo. For us, the log line is Google maps for MEP or BIM for dummies. BIM is basically a community CAD design software that’s very complicated. We describe our software as a very simple version of it.
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