In this episode of the MFGMonkey Podcast, we delve into the transformative power of technology in sales with expert Adam Honig. Discover how leveraging the right tools and strategies can elevate your sales success and drive business growth. Adam shares his insights on integrating technology to streamline processes, enhance customer engagement, and achieve sales excellence. Whether you’re a sales professional or a business leader, this conversation provides valuable guidance to harness technology for optimal sales performance.
How to Get in Touch with Adam Honig
If you’re interested in learning more about Spiro.AI or connecting with Adam Honig, you can reach him via the Spiro.AI website:
- Website: Spiro.AI
- Contact Through Website: Fill out the Contact Us form on the Spiro.AI site, and Adam or a member of his team will follow up.
- You can also schedule a demo: Get a Demo.
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhonig/
- Adam@Spiro.ai
- https://www.youtube.com/c/Spirohq
- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/make-it-move-it-sell-it/id1629961845
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Spiro.AI The AI-Powered CRM Revolutionizing Manufacturing with Adam Honig
In this conversation, Dustin McMillan and Adam Honig discuss the challenges and frustrations associated with traditional CRM systems, particularly in the manufacturing sector. Adam shares his experiences with CRM and how they often require excessive manual input, leading to user dissatisfaction. He introduces Spiro, an AI-driven solution designed to automate many of the tedious tasks associated with CRM, such as data entry and follow-up reminders. The discussion highlights the importance of making technology user-friendly and efficient, especially for sales teams in manufacturing. They also explore case studies demonstrating significant time savings and improved customer interactions through the use of Spiro. In this conversation, Dustin McMillan and Adam Honig discuss the integration of technology in sales processes, emphasizing the importance of CRM systems and AI in enhancing productivity and customer engagement. They explore how leveraging data can help sales teams identify opportunities and maintain relationships with existing customers. The discussion also touches on compliance issues related to technology in manufacturing and the evolving landscape of customer interactions post-COVID.
Adam, welcome. How are you, buddy?
Yeah, doing good. It’s above freezing today in Boston. So that’s always a good day for me, you know.
Yeah, well, it’s not that way here in Ohio. So, it got up to 43. We had a big heat wave and now everything’s frozen over again and we’re expecting ice.
Yeah, I’m going to be in Dayton next week.
Okay.
So hopefully it’ll warm up a bit by then.
Yeah. Dayton usually is a good 15 degrees warmer than, where I’m at up here on the lake.
Nice.
But yeah. So, you guys are planning. If I’m looking at the weather correctly, we’re going to get hammered with ice and then you guys are going to get more snow, right? Yeah.
That’s what they say. The kids are excited. They can go sledding. That’s great. We’re going to be talking about manufacturing, but they’re going to be having a good time. I don’t know what to say.
Yeah, absolutely. I love the snow. We just got back from Montana spending five days out there and it was negative 35 when we woke up. So, I enjoy both ends of it. I enjoy the water and the snow. So, it doesn’t bother me.
Yeah, you have to have the right gear, but yeah, for sure.
Yeah. We got out there, and it was pretty cold. Liz didn’t have some proper gear for how cold it was up on the mountain. So, we ended up getting her different gear and then snowmobiling. Then ended up buying more gear.
Yeah.
With a heated face mask and all that fun stuff. So, we probably spent as much on the gear than vacation, but you got to be comfortable, right?
Yeah. You’d be miserable if you didn’t have that. But a heated face mask? Is that a thing?
Yeah. So, all my buddies had these heated face masks. I think they’re called oxygen. They’re made by CEDU and it has a heated face mask. He plugged it into the sled, and they sent it to me. And before we went out, I was like, I’m not spending 700 bucks on a helmet for three days. You know, we can be a little cold. We’ll rough it. We’re from Ohio. And, last year when we rode, we didn’t have any issues. This year, we didn’t even get to the trailhead and my face mask completely froze over the sheet of ice, and I couldn’t see a thing. So, we turned around and bought a helmet. And then we get into the park about a mile and Liz flies me down and she’s like, now my face mask is freezing up. So, guess what, we turned around and bought another helmet.
So, this is what we need. Need to set up a stand that sells those things, you know, for people.
They got them.
Yeah.
Yeah. We were teasing. They’re like, you know, they have it on their watch. How long before these people come back and then buy a helmet? And then we only bought one helmet and turned around and bought another one. So, I’m sure there were some wagers going on in West Yellowstone adventures that day, but those guys are great. If you guys are ever out in Montana looking for a place to snowmobile, those guys are absolutely phenomenal. So, we had a lot of fun and let loose. A lot of stories from that trip. But with you today, it’s a topic near and dear to my heart CRM, which you are the anti-CRM King, I guess, which will be very interesting to talk about.
Well, I might be the person who hates CRM the most. That’s what I’m trying to figure out here. And the reason why I hate it is the last company I started. I started running a company called Spiro now, but before that, I started a company called Inovir, which I grew to be one of the largest Salesforce consulting partners worldwide. And we wound up selling that business to Accenture in 2014.
Okay.
But the reason why I hate CRM so much is that companies like Abbott Labs or Charles Schwab or MetLife would pay us millions of dollars a year to help them get CRM going. And people would just hate it. Like, I did CRM training. Some guy threw a shoe at me. He hated it so much, you know.
You’re like George Bush now.
Exactly, I’m glad you got the reference. Yes, exactly. And so, it’s this really weird experience that we were getting all this money and delivering this work that we thought was good and everybody just didn’t appreciate it because it required so much work on the teams to use the CRM.
Yeah.
It was this really weird experience, you know? And so for me, what happened was I wind up seeing a movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix.
I have not.
So, here’s the setup. It’s super easy. Joaquin Phoenix is in the future, and he downloads an AI onto his phone played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson. And she’s not in the movie, just her voice, but she can see through his camera. She reads his email. She knows what he’s doing. So, Scarlett Johansson is giving him advice all day long about what to do. And based upon what’s happening, I’m watching this movie and I’m like, Dustin, people don’t need Salesforce, but they need Scarlett Johansson telling them what to do all day.
Right.
And that was sort of the idea of what became Spiro was like an AI that instead of you having to create a contact and enter a company, and it would just do that kind of work for you.
Right. And technology is there now and that’s a tremendous point because we use HubSpot. And like I was telling you, before we got on, I’ve been in sales my whole career and I just got lucky enough that I’m able to do what I do now, but we’re still a very sales-oriented company. And we just brought on another salesperson and we’re getting them all hooked up on HubSpot. And it’s like a week to get them up and running. And I was really interested in having this conversation because I love new technology and just everything that I was reading about, you know, I’m like, well if John doesn’t have to type in all this stuff and he doesn’t have to hit a button on it, and it just automatically does it. I mean, how many hours is this going to save what he’s doing? And the same thing with all the follow-ups. I mean, so I’m interested to hear how the follow-up works and all those fun things.
Yeah, well, we can definitely dig into all of that, but I do want to mention that I feel like HubSpot, which is a great product, and great company, wasn’t really designed for people in the manufacturing industry. And the reason why I think that is because it does require all that work. And so many of our manufacturing customers, their tech skills, they are different than a software company or a financial services firm. They’ve got a different group of folks working there. And I feel like especially for more of an industrial company to have software that just does things automatically for them is so important. I remember meeting the head of sales for one of our customers who’s in the component manufacturing space like the Patriot missile and stuff like that.
Okay.
And had like a 30-person sales team doing everything on spreadsheets. And this is when we first got going. And I said, tell me why you never use CRM. And he was like, you don’t understand. My guys would never use CRM. And then I’m like, yeah, all right, you got me there.
Right.
So, that’s sort of the attitude of so many manufacturing guys out there. They’re just like, this isn’t for us. This is for some tech startup or something like that, you know?
Yeah. And really how I started my company in 2014, it was about helping manufacturers get a system set up. Part of that system was a CRM because they had spreadsheets or emails or whatever, and they didn’t have everything in one spot. So, they were good at follow-up. And you know, 90% of sales come after the first connection and in the follow-up.
Sure.
And if you’re not following up, you’re typically not getting the sale unless they have to have what you’re making. And if there’s two or three people that they’ve reached out to and there’s one consistent company that’s always following up, that’s the company that’s going to get the sale most of the time.
I mean, you got to make it easy for the customers, right?
Yeah, and you got to make it easy for your salespeople.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, sort of our kind of insight, if you want to call it that is like you said, like the technology is there. Why doesn’t the software just do things for you? So, we connect to email, right? And so, we have access to the team’s emails, and it sees emails coming in from companies that are obviously customers.
Sure.
Why doesn’t it just go ahead and create those contact records itself?
Sure.
How about having it read their email signature and get the title and the phone number and stuff like that and stick it in the contact.
Right. And how are you sifting out? I get 900 junk emails a day that we don’t want in our CRM. So how do you sift all that stuff out?
Yeah, for sure. So, what we do when we start working with a customer is we import their customer master from their ERP. So that we know who all of their customers are. And so immediately we can figure out what the domains are for all of those companies and what the emails that should be coming into the system based upon that. And then once the sales team starts emailing with prospects, again, based upon the language that they’re using, there’s a very different email that you’re sending to a prospect than you’re getting for like selling you a new face mask or whatever we were just talking about, right?
Right.
And so, Spiro is able to detect the two of those based on the content.
Okay.
It’s very accurate that way.
Interesting. So, I guess tell me about the follow-up and all the other things that CRMs help with.
Well, I mean, like you said, ideally, CRM, well, let me take this step back for a second. So, CRM, we kind of feel like it’s a failed product because really all it does is take the data that somebody types into it and give it back to you. Well, again, since Spiro is creating data on its own, we’re going to then use that data to make sure that we’re helping you with whatever has happened. And there are number of different ways that you can think about this. And this isn’t just a Spiro thing. If you’re a tech person, you can kind of set things up to do this yourself too. But imagine if you have a list of all your customers and you could automatically have them organized into tier A, tier B, and tier C based upon sales.
Sure.
It just automatically happens.
Right.
And then you say, well, I’d really like to make sure that I’m reaching out to all my tier-A customers every month. Stay on top of them. Make sure they know what’s going on and stay in good contact. Well, you know, the software knows who they are. The software knows who you contact because it has access to your email and so on. And if it sees a gap in that, it can just automatically say, hey, Dustin, what about staples? You haven’t talked to those guys for a while. Let’s go ahead and give them a call.
Okay.
Again, when I describe it that way, does it seem like it’s a hard thing to do?
Well, no, I mean, you’re able to do those things with other CRMs, but you have to manually set those things up.
Exactly.
And that’s typically what doesn’t get set up is all the workflows, either people don’t have time to do it, or they don’t know how to do it, or they don’t have the budget to pay somebody else to do it for them.
My favorite thing that people do is put reminders on their calendars. Do you see folks doing that? I’m just going to put an 8 a.m. meeting to call Dustin because I really have to make sure I’m going to follow up with them.
Sure.
That’s like classic behavior.
Right. Right. So how does Spiro help with that?
So, the problem with doing that is, let’s say, I want to make sure I follow up with you next month. So, I put a reminder on my calendar to do that, right? Well, what happens if you actually call me between now and then because you need something? Well, do I still follow up with you or not? I’m not really sure.
Right.
And what happened when I hit that reminder? So, what Spiro does is it has a feature that we call the assistant. And you basically tell the assistant the Cadence that you want to follow up with people in. How often should I, at a minimum, be speaking with Dustin? And since it has the interaction history, it can be like, well, it’s been 30 days. I’m going to remind you today. So, it’s like reminders that automatically adjust themselves based on the data. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it’ll track a phone call that you make because you’re making the phone call through the system, or how it knows.
Yeah, yeah, check it out. So, we have a built-in VoIP calling solution as part of Spiro.
Okay.
Every call that’s originated through the platform, we transcribe it so that Spiro knows the content of the conversation that you’re having. It can draft a follow-up email for you based on the conversation that you had. Like, this is a good idea, right?
Wow.
You have a conversation with a customer, you talk to them about a bunch of stuff. Don’t you want to document it and put it out there to make sure you get it right?
Right. Absolutely. Yeah.
Imagine if the AI could just do that with you with the click of a button.
Yeah, I’m on your website and I’m on platforms and I’m trying to go to the Spiro assistant and that and for some reason, it’s giving me some trouble here.
Really?
Because I was trying to, I don’t know if it’s doing it for you or it’s something that’s not doing for me properly but
Well, I am planning on redoing the website, so.
Yeah. I was trying to go to Spiro assistant and Spiro integrations just to kind of walkthrough. But for anyone else that wants to look at it, it’s Spiro.ai. So, S P I R O dot AI.
Yeah, I mean, everything is trying to be AI these days.
Yeah.
It’s awesome. I think we’re living in a really exciting time. Our goal with AI is to do two things. One is to automate all the bad work that salespeople need to do.
Yeah.
Back in my day, maybe in your day, Dustin, we used to do call reports. Do you ever do a call report?
Yeah. I live off a call report.
Right. So now today, the software can just do them for you.
Yeah.
We’ve got this feature that we call the executive summary that basically every week just says, okay, here’s everything that happened with the account based upon orders, based upon leads that you’re working on, based upon conversations that happened and boom, here’s the summary of it. And anybody can go see it at any time.
Yeah, I mean, on a super high level from what we’re discussing, it sounds a lot easier than using any CRM that I’ve used. And I think I’ve used them all over the last 20 years or whatever.
I’m sorry to hear that. Usually, we call ourselves the anti-CRM-CRM. And sometimes people joke that if you combine Spiro with a CRM, you kind of get a big explosion. But I can’t verify that. That’s just a rumor at this point. And frankly, I’d love to call us something besides CRM. It’s just the crazy thing is that people keep googling for CRM.
Yeah.
And that’s often how they find us. So, we need to keep CRM in the product description somehow.
And the one thing that you touched on in your little bio was staying away from the CRM hype. We fell down that rabbit hole with an ERP system and a WMS system where we read an article that was the top five best WMS systems, and they were all bad. And I feel like people do that with the CRM too. Exactly what you’re talking about is people, who don’t know what to do. So, they get on and they Google best CRM to use, and there’s somebody that pays to be on a list and they’re either number one or they’re number five. So, it’s interesting your take on it. And it’s so different that I love it.
Yeah. I think it’s a really good point and we have a lot of customers. So, we have a customer who’s in the ball bearing manufacturing business.
Okay, yeah.
They were recently acquired by a private equity fund to help them expand nationally. And the private equity fund came in and said, well, how come you guys aren’t using Salesforce? And, you know, like, isn’t that the standard for CRM?
Right.
And our customers like, well, you know, we could use Salesforce, but then we’d need to hire all these extra people to go with it.
Right.
And the P.E. fund immediately was like, yeah, no, we totally get it. So.
Right. So, I guess let’s go down that rabbit hole a little bit with what are your case studies saying like time savings and headcount savings are you showing on average?
So, the way that it works for a lot of our customers is that they have a field sales team as well as an inside sales team who both touch customers. And they also have other departments, maybe like a service department, maybe the accounting department touches customers for payment and stuff like that. And when you are a field salesperson, you’re going to go do a site visit, which is what you should be doing.
Right.
You need to be prepared, right? You can’t just show up and wing it. So, you need to call your inside salesperson. You need to get the 411 there, you need to make sure there are no service issues, need to make sure they’re paying all their, I mean, that takes hours to do just for one meeting with a customer.
Sure.
And so, part of the big justification for Spiro for a lot of these companies is, hey, let’s take all of that internal conversation that we’re having about customers and put it in the system so that when you arrive a little bit early for the meeting, you can just read it all on your phone. Get completely caught up without having to spend that extra time doing it. So, with this ball-bearing company in particular, we did an exercise where we tried to figure out how many hours were they spending internally per person per week talking about customers.
Right.
And you know what it was? Four hours.
Wow.
Four hours per person. Now obviously, customers are the lifeblood of your business. You want to really be focused on them. But imagine if you could actually be talking with customers instead of talking about them, you know?
Sure. Yeah. That’s a great point. If they can give you a summary of everything that’s been going on over the last X number of days or whatever, it definitely saves you a tremendous amount of time. I mean, John’s doing that right now in HubSpot. I mean, it’s his first two weeks. So, he’s literally going through every lead that we have, every contact, every deal, and reading every single one of them to get caught up. And it’s unbelievably time-consuming. So, it’d be interesting how Spiro would help with that.
Yeah. The other thing that Spiro does, which is sort of an unusual benefit, I’m going to just put it out there. It’s a new thing that we’ve been seeing happening. So, one of the things that Spiro does is it captures all of this communication automatically. And then you can literally ask a question like, what do I know about Dustin? And if it had this conversation, it would be like, well, he’s really into Yellowstone. He really loves snowboarding, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so, from a rapport-building perspective, when you’re about to get ahead of in touch with you, I mean, you were dealing with a lot of people. Maybe you’re pretty good at remembering all of that kind of stuff, or maybe you need a refresher.
Sure.
So, imagine if you could just ask the software, hey, what’s this guy all about?
Right.
And it’ll give you the uptake on that.
Yeah. And now, I mean, you call it old school with all the stuff going on. You’re getting on and you’re looking up Facebook, you’re looking up LinkedIn, you’re looking up all the things just trying to do as much research so you can build quick rapport and have a commonality and all those things before you ever get to the customer for the first time you meet him or you should be I feel. So, that’d be really interesting if the system you could ask it, and it would pull those things. Obviously, with everything else like AI, you have to make sure it tells you about the right person.
Right.
You don’t want to. So, you know.
There are other Adam Honig’s out there. One of them was a professional basketball player but in the Israeli league.
Okay.
So, don’t confuse me with anybody who can shoot a basketball.
Right. Yeah, me either. I wasn’t built for shooting basketballs. But yeah, I find it intriguing for sure.
Now, check this out. So, one of the things that we do is we integrate with about 25 different ERP platforms, NetSuite, SAP, a bunch of Infor, a bunch of Epicor, Sage, and so on. And we bring all the order data into Spiro. So first of all, the sales team doesn’t have to look it up themselves. They can just find it super easily. But then based on the order history, Spiro can also spot gaps. And let’s say you’ve got a customer that regularly orders every quarter or so from you and they didn’t last quarter.
Right.
How long is it going to be before you can manually figure that out?
Right.
Well, imagine again if the software could just be like alert, these guys usually order by now and they haven’t.
Right.
What’s going on with them?
Right. Interesting. Yeah. And that is a huge thing that even with following up with people, things can fall through the cracks.
Yeah.
So, you just get so focused, laser-focused on what’s right in front of your face right now. You have to have systems to help you be more productive.
We have this customer who’s in the maker of electrical conduit. I was in their plant this summer, super interesting to take like steel, kind of stretch it all out, get it all covered in rubber and stuff like that.
Okay.
Really cool stuff. And they were doing this process manually where every month the finance team would go through their 10,000 customers and try to figure out which one hadn’t ordered recently, and they should get that information to the sales team.
Wow.
In this process, it would take them like 25 days to get that work done, at which point it would be almost time to start the new report.
Right.
And so now that’s one of the things that Spiro is just doing them for them on an everyday basis, just being like, you got to reach out to these people because their buying pattern suggests that they should be ready to go, and they haven’t ordered.
That’s awesome. Yeah, I mean, for us, we’re small enough that it takes us about three minutes to understand who has and who hasn’t purchased. But when you’re dealing with 10,000 customers, that’s invaluable.
Yeah, and it’s a really good point. I actually have developed this theory, Dustin, I’d love to hear your take on it, that if you really have like a smaller sales team, and I’m talking about like under, let’s say, seven or eight folks, maybe you don’t even really need zero. Maybe it’s just enough to have everybody talking with each other. But I feel like there’s some point around six, seven, eight people that it just becomes completely unmanageable without some sort of system, you know?
My opinion is when I was selling just as a manufacturer’s rep and that was what I did. I just sold. There’s no way I was going to be successful without a CRM of some kind. Rather, that CRM is even a spreadsheet.
Yep, yep.
And when I was selling. When that’s what I was doing every day. I kept a call log. I also used CRM. I also had my phone hooked on the CRM, so it records all my calls. And I documented absolutely everything. And without that system and follow-up, I don’t know that I would have been successful. Because my brain doesn’t work that way. I can’t keep it all unscrambling. And I have a horrible ADHD. So, I’m all over the place all the time. And without a system, I don’t do what I should do. I live off of a calendar. If it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t exist. I mean, I could have a funeral to go to and I will not remember to go to it. So, for me, a CRM of some kind is a must if you’re going to be successful. And I’m sure there are people out there that operate, that don’t use a CRM that is crazy successful. One of my best friends was like that, but I just never could do it.
So, you found it personally helpful.
Absolutely, yeah. And if I could have had something like this doing all the heavy lifting for me, I would hate to see how much more productive I would have been.
Yeah. I mean, I always think about it like if we could just help everybody have an additional conversation per week.
Yeah.
I mean, that’s a really low bar, right?
Yeah.
If you just had an additional 50 conversations during the year.
Yep.
I mean, that’s going to bring in some business. There’s no doubt in my mind, you know.
Yeah, absolutely. And statistics tell you, and they’re changing all the time, especially with all this stuff going on that you have to touch somebody between six and 12 times before you get an opportunity out of them. And that number is probably going up just because so many people get junk emails, so many people get phone calls, and nobody wants to pick up a call phone anymore. Personalized visits are almost non-existent after COVID. I mean, they’re starting to come back, and people are being more open. But it’s just a really interesting time where old school sales where you could just stop in some places, virtually gone. I mean, if somebody just stops into my office, I’m not talking to them. I got 900 other things to do besides stop what I’m doing and reshift for somebody that I don’t know.
Yeah. What I find with our customers is that they tend to do almost all of their business with existing customers. And that is the idea of breaking into new customers is great, but we have a certain capacity. We’re going to really focus our energy on our existing customers. Maximizing the business we can do with them. And so even in that case where you’re not breaking into new customers, just everybody knows their top customer, but who knows the number five? Who knows the number nine? And these guys are probably doing pretty good business with you, you know?
Yeah, absolutely. And we talk about that all the time. Your existing customers should be doing more business with you if they have a need, right?
Yeah.
But most of them are holding something back or they want to diversify or whatever. But yeah, I just encourage people to go to the website and check it out for sure. Get a demo. I would love myself to do a demo with this just to see how it works and maybe play around with it a little bit. And then maybe even jump back on another podcast, and 30 or 60 days to give a review of what we found and how it worked and all that fun stuff.
Sure. Yeah, that’d be awesome. Anybody wants to see a demo? We do demos all the time. We’ve got videos on the website, showing the product in action as well. But there are some super interesting things that we’ve learned too. Let me just give you this one example. So, we had a customer who was concerned, a medical device company, that was concerned that their reps were spending time with the wrong accounts. And they basically helped us invent this thing where we track the number of activities by the amount of orders that they’re getting.
Okay.
Because they had this theory that their reps were spending a lot of time with low-potential customers, right?
Okay.
And it turned out that actually across like a 50-person sales team, there’s a wide disbursement, but there were definitely people who were spending time with customers maybe because they were complaining a lot, or they were exercising them for quotes, and they were never really getting business with them, but they were putting all this effort into the account. And from a sales management perspective, the takeaway from us was, well, if we could redirect the activity at the right accounts. It’s going to have such a big boost in the sales game, right?
Sure.
Because like stop dealing with these guys who are just wasting our time all the time and let’s shift our focus here. And that also turned out to be a pretty big benefit of the platform, just really having to correlate those two different pieces of data.
Yeah, and I love that. And we tried to use and I keep saying HubSpot because that’s what we’re using. This isn’t bashing HubSpot by any means. I mean, I actually love HubSpot, who knows? Maybe, I’ll love Spiro more, especially if it does all these things for us. And we don’t have to spend hours creating a workflow to make it do what we want to do. But we were in the same boat where probably four years ago, we really hyper-focused the company on converting, warehouse services, and then manufacturing services. And I founded the company on manufacturing services where we would go, and we would have a widget made for somebody and kit it and sell it to them. And then through COVID, those numbers started dwindling for many different reasons. And we were quoting a tremendous amount in that space, but we weren’t really winning a lot, we didn’t have a system giving us any data. It was just us going, we’re winning less, or our margins are less here and why is that? We should have recognized that months earlier probably to shift and understand more converting. If we’re cutting our own material and doing that more, we touch an item, the higher our margins are. If we had some data to actually look at instead of just a gut feeling after a couple of months. Who knows what that would have done for us?
Yeah, I think it’s so hard to see the trends when you’re in them too though.
Yes. Yeah.
Getting something that helps you step away from it and take a bigger picture view.
Sure.
That’s thing and there’s a lot of variables that go into this kind of analysis, you know.
Yeah, absolutely. What else is the platform are you seeing helping manufacturers with that other CRMs or not?
Well, a big part of the product, and this is kind of a newish feature for it, is helping people quote more effectively.
Okay.
So, if you’re going to be, you know, we have customers like our friends who are in the ball bearing business who are really shipping standard products, but if you are making something to spec and being able to capture the right information to put out a quote that’s engineered to the customer’s needs. That’s something that Spiro has also been really helping people with. First of all, it’s since it’s capturing the conversations, it’s really hard to really easy, excuse me, go back and make sure that you’re getting everything right when you’re putting together the quote.
Okay.
And then secondly, because we bring in the product catalog and the inventory from the ERP platform. We step the salesperson through the process of generating that quote, getting it all automated. So, you’re not filling in a spreadsheet or a Word doc or something like that and then pushing all of the data back to the ERP to make sure that everything’s set up properly.
Right.
So, this is something that for the past year or so has been seeing a lot of successes for a customer.
With a standard product, quoting standard product.
Quoting standard products and quoting engineered products as well, based upon the spec.
Interesting. Okay.
So, I was just on the phone with a customer who’s in the portable HVAC business. Basically, they build things based upon the configuration of the spaces that they need.
Okay.
So, they need to know the cubic volume of the spaces they need to know any interference and all this stuff to spec out what the solution would be to meet the customer’s needs.
Okay.
So, they’re obviously having a conversation. Spiro is automatically capturing that data, and then they’re adjusting it, so they know what kind of, and I’m making this up because I don’t know the business details with the compressors or whatever the kind of technical HVAC components are to make this solution work for it.
Sure. Yeah. I don’t know, we’ve had this conversation about AI more and more, and I’ve said this on more than one podcast. One of my really good buddies has an AI company, and I may have logged in the chat one time in the last year or two, and I’m like, I don’t even know how to use this thing. And I was just like, you know, I just dismissed it and moved on with my life, and then he really pushed me to use it, spent about two hours on the phone with me and it has changed things. I mean, you definitely have to pay attention, but you can definitely do more with AI than what you could without it. And it’s more accurate. Now, there have been instances where I’ve found some things that weren’t accurate, and you have to change it. It’s not perfect by any means, but it is a lot more efficient than paying seven virtual assistants to do something for you.
Yeah. I mean, I think that definitely AI is smarter than your average intern at this point.
Yeah.
It’s not like a fully qualified employee, but it’s better than the intern in most cases.
Yeah, and it’s interesting how it learns. I mean, that’s the thing that really blows my mind is it learns from the data that it’s gathering. And now we’re using ChatGPT, and we’re using another system called SaleSage.AI. And that’s really integrated into our company. And we have all of our documents in there where somebody can ask them a question and it’ll give an answer instead of them searching 900 documents to figure that out. Now the one thing that we deal with and so many other manufacturers deal with is NIST and ITAR and all the other regulatory bodies. How is this going to affect those things? Is having a closed-loop AI system violating anything? What risk is there? Specifically, to ITAR, NIST, and the different levels of the NIST.
Well, it’s a really good question. We have customers who have ITAR requirements. And I don’t believe the commercial AI platforms are generally ITAR compliant. Because I think you really need to make sure that only US citizens are involved in those platforms.
Right. Yeah, you don’t want to load drawings on the ChatGPT.
No.
You’re violating something there for sure.
Yes, yes, yes.
So, no Patriot missile documentation either, I would say.
Right. But with your guys’ system, it’s got to be a closed loop system. And I’m assuming that it abides by all those regulatory bodies?
So, we do offer an ITAR version of the platform.
Okay.
It doesn’t have all the features in it because you just can’t do some of the things that way.
Okay.
Because the technology is just not available. We definitely have very strict data privacy control over it. None of the data on our platform is used for any purpose except helping the customer with their needs.
Right.
So, we don’t train the data on the customer data. Don’t sell the data. It’s completely owned by the customer. But for ITAR and NIST, they’re their own beast.
Yeah.
So, I’d be very cautious about AI with that for right now.
Sure. And what about within your system if you have an ITAR customer or you’re dealing with C folders type drawings, how does Spiro handle those types of items?
So, we have a special ITAR environment that we created which is built on the Amazon Web Services Government Cloud. Which is the standard for all the ITAR applications. And we restrict any data from leaving The Sandbox. So, everything happens essentially right in that environment. Otherwise, it doesn’t happen.
Right.
So, that’s the best way to control it.
Sure.
But it’s tricky, right? Because you need, not only do you need Spiro or something like Spiro to be ITAR, but you also need ITAR-compliant email, right?
Yeah.
How are you going to get that? So, Microsoft does have an Office 365 ITAR version, which we connect with. But of course, you could just email anybody in the world from that environment too.
Yeah. We have a little line at the end of our email that keeps us compliant. This is as far as what our folks are telling us. So, it is interesting. Whether you’re ITAR compliant or ITAR certified and know all those different things. I think you screw up you’re going to jail no matter what.
Yeah.
But it is especially the more and more the government’s pushing because their manufacturers are down 60% from what they used to be in there. It’s a big push to get more manufacturers to play with the government and they’re just so hard to work with that. There’s low-hanging fruit elsewhere, but that’s a different conversation for a different day. What about warehousing and logistics and things like that? Have you guys worked with many of those types of companies?
So, we do have a number of freight forwarders on the platform as well, but it’s not really our focus.
Sure.
Our focus is really on B2B manufacturing companies.
Yep, perfect.
But when we started the business, we sold to a lot of different kinds of companies to try to figure out what our niche would be, that’s why.
Yeah.
We actually have a minor-league baseball team using Spiro as well.
Okay. When you’re small, you know, my Vistage Coach already said, you’re kind of a prostitute. You do whatever you need to do to bring in revenue. And it doesn’t matter what it is. If somebody is going to pay you to do it, you’re going to do it because you need the revenue. And then when you get a little further down the road, you can start being a little pickier, but you’re just trying to keep the raft blown up from sinking. And it doesn’t matter if it’s oxygen or it’s nitrogen, you’re putting it in the raft if it’s going to keep you on top of the water.
Yeah. There’s no harder leap to make than from zero to one.
Yeah.
You know, that’s the thing.
Yeah. And then a million to the next is probably equally as hard, I would say. So, I don’t know. I love the startup. I love your guys’ input on it. I definitely want to talk to you more about the details of how it works and if we do this through it and this is fun for somebody to watch or go through it with us, or they can schedule their own demo directly with you. Why don’t you tell everyone? We’re going to publish all this. I have all of your information. So, in the description of the podcast and on our website, MFGmonkey.com, you can find Adam’s information. All the links back to his website, a link to get a demo, all those fun things, but I don’t want you to go ahead and tell folks where they can get ahold of you.
Yeah. Well, probably the best thing, of course, to do is to check out our website, which is Spiro.AI. Spiro takes its name from the Latin word Spirare, which means to breathe like aspiration. And we’re trying to breathe new life into this really hated area of technology.
I like it.
So, you can check us out on the website. You can also hit up hit me up on LinkedIn. Adam Honig, I’m the guy who is not a professional basketball player. So, you should be able to find us pretty easily there. We’ve got tons of videos and all kinds of information about the platform, even some stuff to think about if you’re using a different CRM and you want to know how to get the most out of it. We’ve got some information for you there too.
Perfect. Let’s schedule time off the air for us to do a demo. I’d love to get John involved in it. And then if you’re okay with it, we’ll use it for 30 days, or 60 days, or something. We can talk about that later and then do a follow-up podcast. I think that’d be fun. As you can tell, I’m a nerd for CRM. And if I can get away from manual entries, I’m all for it.
Right on, I like it.
Cool, man. Well, thanks for coming on.
Alright Dustin, great talking to you there, thanks.
Yeah, you too, bye.
For more insightful conversations like this, visit MFGMonkey.com. Listen to this episode and many others on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.