Shed Geek Podcast

STEEL KINGS: From Lost Leads to Loyal Buyers with Velocity360

• Shed Geek Podcast • Season 5 • Episode 91

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Your inbox is full, your lot is busy, and buyers are slipping away while messages sit unanswered. We sat down with Velocity360’s Joe Ignace and Brandon Tobin to solve the most expensive leak in sheds, steel buildings, and pole barns: slow follow‑up and scattered systems. They lay out a practical sales equation—leads × conversion × average price—and show how to raise the middle term by reaching new inquiries in 60 seconds, following up for days (not minutes), and keeping your best sellers focused on real conversations.

We walk through the “digital lot greeting,” a simple shift that makes online buyers feel the same welcome they’d get on your gravel. Velocity360 centralizes texts, phone, email, and Meta messages in one place, with a native phone system that auto‑texts missed calls, drops voicemails, and assigns leads to the hungriest rep. Once a prospect replies, automations pause so the personal touch takes over. After the sale, a second sequence captures reviews and photos—fuel for local SEO and the next buyer—without another tool or login. E‑signature, calendars, and review replies are built in, so you can ditch stacked subscriptions that drain budget without lifting close rates.

If integrations worry you, we cover how webhooks connect to 3D configurators like Idea Room, Shed Pro, Meta, and Google—plus the reality that open partners make it easy, and closed platforms can be worked around. The payoff is clarity: an analytics dashboard that shows which ads and sources actually convert, letting you double down where ROI is real. Whether you’re a single lot or a 33‑location network, permissions, routing, and white‑glove migration make the switch manageable. The question isn’t how attached you are to your current setup—it’s whether your CRM actually drives revenue.

Ready to stop letting great leads die quietly? Tap to listen, then try a demo at velocity360crm.com. If this helped, follow the show, share it with a builder who needs it, and leave a quick review so more owners can find tools that actually sell.

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This episodes Sponsors:
Studio Sponsor: J Money LLC

Shed Hub
Making Sales Simple

Jared:

Hey, what's up guys? This is Jared, and that's Eric. We are the Steel Kings, back at you with another episode of the podcast, ready to talk to you about something really exciting today. As always, the guys over at J Money will help you out with financing your home improvement projects, your backyard sheds, your metal buildings, your pools, your doors, your windows. Check out the team at J Money. They will get you what you need to help your customers out. If you are bending steel in the carport industry, if you are bending tubular steel, check out the folks at VersaBend. Cold Spring Enterprises has made the tool. It's the one that you need. It does all the bins in one precise movement. Wendell and his team are doing a great job. Cold Spring Enterprises, give them a try. They want to learn more about your business. Cold Spring Enterprises, Versa Bend, check it out. Eric man, my brother, how are you? We are back with another episode. We are in full-on record mode. I cut you off, man, when we were getting ready. Peek behind the curtain says, as soon as the countdown happens, we go live. Eric was talking. I turned on the countdown and he went away.

Eric:

I heard you I didn't have much to say. I haven't seen my wife in six days, and one of the cats got outside, and I am loathing to tell her that. I said I'm trying to lure the cat back.

Jared:

I said, as soon as soon as you said my wife's been gone for six days, I said, Oh, and you said she'll be back. I said, That's a good thing. I didn't mean that it was a good thing your wife had been gone for six days. I meant it was a good thing that she was coming back.

Eric:

Oh, we missed her at the house.

Jared:

So yeah, yeah. So, bro, we have got a really good one today. So everybody knows the Steel Kings are really deep on tech first. We want to get everybody involved with SEO and all these things. We want you to have a really cool website, we want you to get on Meta, we want you to get on Google, we want you to have all the things. What a lot of people don't have is a way to organize and streamline their sales process. And I think, matter of fact, I know we have found a very, very, very good solution. We have the team from Velocity 360, and in fact, we have one of the panelists from the Shed Sales Summit. So we've talked about yeah, he was one of the keynotes. We have had so uh man, what a great time we had at Shed Expo. So the last several episodes have been all about Shed Expo, who we met, what we talked about. This is another one. So you just saw the episode with Craig Felker at J Mag. You saw our follow-up episode from the Shed Expo and the and the uh um the post frame show that we did in Dayton. We recapped. Now we're getting into interview mode with who we've met, the products we like. We did the hat thing where I took off all the hats and I said, we're gonna interview and we're gonna talk to all these people that we met in the industry, and we are going to verify and find out who you all should be using to make your businesses grow in 2026. Eric, we're gonna talk to Joe and Brandon from Velocity360. These guys are on the cutting edge, right?

Eric:

Yeah, for you know, for being CRM guys, we know from the get-go, um, the age-old problem of I can't move my Facebook marketplace messages around to meta and going into that side quest. It's you if you're a C if you don't have a CRM, you need to peel your eyes and preferably get to a screen, meet these guys, um, they're gonna talk about their product. Uh great.

Jared:

If you're processing more than probably 20 leads a week, you are in desperate need of a CRM. You can't maintain, and I'll let Joe and Brandon go into their talking points. Joe is the CEO, he's the founder of Velocity 360. This guy was on the Shed Sales Summit. He was a he was the uh one of the keynotes, and Brandon is his partner um over at Velocity 360. Without further ado, we're gonna bring them in. Guys, welcome to the podcast. We uh we got to hang out for a little bit before we do we always do the pre-show kind of hey there, how's it going? All that kind of stuff. Guys, introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about you, and we'll get into the product, man. I'm gonna show you show some cool stuff and go from there.

Joe:

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having us, guys. Uh yeah, I'll be your brief. Um, you know, Joe Ignace, if we haven't met, looking forward to it some point soon. Um, live in Knoxville, Tennessee. So if you're at the Shed Expo, my office was six minutes from down from where you were uh the whole time. Nice. I live about 12 minutes from there, actually. Yep. Nice. Uh I grew up in Tennessee mostly, went to UT, and uh, you know, I did a bunch of door-to-door sales, uh, owned a consulting business before this, and uh loved love being in the shed industry. I love awesome Christian-owned businesses, and I love seeing them win. I just really believe it makes the community, their local church charities better. So thanks for being here. I really appreciate it.

Jared:

Yeah, absolutely, man. Brandon, tell us about you, brother.

Brandon:

Yeah, man, it's our pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, and uh yeah. My name is Brandon Tobin, um, chief revenue officer, kind of like the co-founder of uh Velocity 360. Uh Joe and I had a uh similar background. Uh, we'll probably get into some of that earlier about how we met. But um, I'm a little older. I've been selling software since it was CD ROMs on the computer. Oh man. And uh when I met Joe, I bet I'd been selling for like 10 plus years and just getting higher up in corporate, and like you said, it felt soulless, and uh it felt really good to get back to helping uh David's instead of Goliath's.

Jared:

Yeah. We talked on our last podcast. We look we talked on our last podcast about finding who you are to make yourself better. And it sounds to me, Brandon, like you are a testament of that. You were looking for something that made yourself better by being who you really were designed to be. Is that fair?

Brandon:

That is exactly right, if I may, to rest on that. Absolutely. Go ahead, man. Yeah. I wanted to get out of corporate sales, and I wanted I had a heart for teaching and education and coaching and consulting, and tried for two years, you know, I paid like different, you know, cohort models, you know, the giant group things, and those were never worth anything. I tried going to like seminars and retreats, one-on-one coaching and consulting as a client, you know, kind of like vetting out these different options of I might like to work here someday. And none of them were it. And uh, I just happened to host a bunch of students at my house one summer who were college students selling books with Southwestern door-to-door. That was uh the similar background that Joe and I had. And just in like 10, 15 minutes on a Sunday through my TV to this group of 20 college students, I heard him drop more free, valuable knowledge truth bombs about sales and mentorship. I was like, this is the guy. This is who I've been working with you for. This is better than what I just spent two years and 20 grand looking for this. I'm gonna go work with that guy. Yeah, a lot of a lot he dropped some alpha on the team.

Joe:

Yeah, yeah. Thanks, man. I appreciate that.

Jared:

Well, 20 grand spent. Yeah, I can tell you, man. I can tell you, anybody who anybody who's building the business that y'all are building right now with the kind of complex, and I say that in the in the in the grandest of terms, right? This is all stuff that you can spend so much money looking for, you can take all the wrong turns, you can do all the wrong things, just do it. You know, to me, velocity 360, we're gonna start talking about the product. To me, it solves so many things that people are looking to solve, right? You know, Dayton Barns is part of that, right? We were talking on the call prior to this about we've got our demo booked for next week. Why don't you book your demo for next week? That kind of a thing, right? Um, you guys can check it out. We'll have a link during uh I'm gonna send it over to the team at Shed Geek. Um, basically walks you through the modern shed dealer solution, your ideal sales system. It talks about all the things, the dilemmas, all the problems that a shed company or a dealer might face. I can tell you, I've seen it, it's awesome. Okay. I Joe, walk us through some of the key points. I want to know a little bit more about the AI features. We are not huge proponents of AI. The Steel Kings have been, yeah, we've been very like dipping our toes in the water with AI, right? We our community, the plain community, a lot of the listeners here are not even tech savvy, right? You have to understand that first and foremost. And to give them artificial intelligence on top of technology, that's like the graduated version of technology. Tell us how it works, tell us the benefits, tell us why, the why behind it, right?

Joe:

Yeah, no, for sure. So, so every business, you know, if you were at the sale shed sales summit, it's really it's very simple. Leads times your average conversion rate times your average price equals your revenue, right? So um, when we're working with people, they have all these leads, they have all these past clients, and they essentially have a black hole that happens, they get them all, they have them in some, you know, overhyped HubSpot version or an Excel sheet, or it's just they don't even have a place to hold everything. And the thing is, if you're not following up with your leads like in a good way, not like a salesy way, but like 14 touches when you get them over, you know, the next several weeks, um, you're not maximizing the responses. And there's just revenue on the table. And so um a lot of people we work with aren't bad at sales, they're just not following up with digital leads in a way that actually helps them convert. It's amazing how many times I'll go into a uh secure storage set or Dutch Boy Barns, a couple of our clients, and I'll see on the 12th message someone's like, I'm ready to buy, essentially. Um and then they the salesperson picks it up and then they go close the the thing, right? So the basic concept behind this is that um with the right touch points, the right follow-up, we can convert the most possible leads. And it's all about intentionality. And so when I work with shed dealers and manufacturers and people in this industry, we're what we're doing is trying to make something that feels so complex and disjointed into something simple that you use every day. And it's just right on your phone or right on your computer, depending on how you do your business. And you essentially live in like this one little tab called conversations or this one little tab called opportunities, and it drives all of your text messages, phone calls, emails, Facebook messengers, you know, from your Facebook page, whatever, and all of your leads into the same place. So you just don't miss or lose anything, and you can follow up with the hottest leads because what we want to do is we want to automate the tasks that create the least ROI. So you can have your salesperson closing the highest ROI revenue, right? Return on investment um leads. So it's better to have your salesperson closing than it is for them to cold message a bunch of people who are unresponsive. It's still valuable to follow up with those leads who are unresponsive, but you want to have a system that costs less, right? Without with a lower opportunity cost um to do it for you. And that's the basic concept. If you follow up with the leads correctly, you close more. Get your salespeople not following up with everybody, but catching the people who respond, close all those people. And if you, you know, do it to enough leads, you'll close them all, as many as you can, at least.

Jared:

I think that's what impresses me the most about the initial overview of my introduction to Velocity 360 has been the major difference between all of the canned products out there that are kind of we talk about this a lot on the podcast, so to bear with me for a second. There are you said it, the HubSpots, the Salesforces, all of these straightforward CRMs that are made for whatever industry they're applicable for. To me, you guys have found the perfect solution for our industry that's portable buildings, sheds, steel buildings. This is a really, really, really strong solution. And when I say that, I say that in the deepest vein of my soul that we talk about it all the time. Customers are not getting the follow-up, they're not getting touched, they're not. I beg you guys all the time. If you're out there and you're making sheds and you need lead service, send them to me. I'll sell them for you. You know what I'm saying? Like, why? I mean, I'm looking at this, right? And we're gonna share the link with you guys. The problem. I want to read this one. This one screams at me. I love the layout here, too. Problem solution. Problem one the sales team, the sales team wasn't following up with leads they paid for, meaning the company buys the leads, the sales rep sells the product from the leads that are generated. Leads times close rate times average sales price equals revenue. Joe hit on that. I love that. Messages from interested buyers sat unanswered for days. You're losing sales every time you don't answer a message. If you have messages coming in and you're not answering them, you might as well just kiss that sale goodbye they bought from somebody else. The owner has no visibility into what was happening with the leads. I can tell you, this is a beyond common problem. This is like the problem in our industry. Period. We get calls all the time from people who are not getting help when they reach out to your business. And by your business, I mean the person who's on the other end of this podcast listening right now. I very rarely get into uh lecture mode right now. I'm lecturing you. If you're listening, I'm lecturing you because you're not doing good enough. I promise. I promise you're not. The solution, however, is velocity 360. Touch new leads within 60 seconds, follow up with leads for 75 days, develop internal notifications via SMS. So these are text messages to the sales team, and flow the leads to the hungriest salespeople, all within the velocity 360 platform. Talk to me about how that specific part of it works. That to me is the meat and potatoes of what we're talking about for shed guys.

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Joe:

Yeah. And uh Brandon, you can touch in here as we go on this phone system part. So, one really unique feature that we have in Velocity360 that even a Hubspot doesn't have is that we have a built-in phone system. And so, you can run, you know, any type of phone, you know, call trees you want, like press one, it goes to the salespeople, press two. You can have different phone numbers for all of your different reps. And because we have that built in natively, if there's a missed call, right, we can trigger that. If there's a um, you know, a message, we can we can auto-follow up with a text or even drop a voicemail um and all these different things. And so when we when we talk about getting to a lead within 60 seconds, that means your 3D configurator gets submitted, or they, you know, fill out a form on Meta or whatever it is, your website form, and that flows into the system. And the reason you want to do that is it increases your closing percentage by 381%. You can catch them within the first 60 seconds. But the problem is if your salespeople are doing the right thing, they're probably closing someone when the lead comes in, or it's like 10 p.m. at night and you're sleeping or whatever, right? So there's clear limitations of time, and so you're just not going to be able to get to everybody in 60 seconds. But if you get to everybody in 60 seconds, you'll close the most leads. So you need something to do that for you on autopilot, whether you're sleeping or your salesperson is sick, right? Or whatever. And so those phone numbers give you the visibility because even if the salesperson's sick, you can see that it's being followed up with. Does that make sense? So there's a myriad of reasons where the lead would get dropped because of human error, forgetfulness, exhaustion, whatever. So that you know, that just runs on autopilot. And we like it to run for seven days in a row and it follows up with them three times a day, a voice message, an SMS, and an email. And these need to be designed not in a salesy way. Like no one likes a you could use card salesman where they're like, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, closing hard or whatever. It's more like, oh, you know, I noticed you had that 3D thing configurator. I, you know, I reached out yesterday. I'm sure you've just been busy. I just really appreciate you that you reached out and I'd love to help. Um, you have a good time for five minutes. And if you just do that enough, you know, and especially the first 60 seconds, they stop shopping and they're impressed. Wow, you got to me within 60 seconds. None of these other guys did that.

Eric:

Yeah.

Joe:

And then they want to engage with you because they know that you're important to them. And every single shed builder I talk to, if they if someone walks on the lot, they want them to feel important and they want to have a quality process and a great end result with that client. And we can capture that and make them feel that way with these workflows, right?

Brandon:

If I can chime in right there, something so good that came from Monday, the sales summit portion of the Shed Expo. Uh, somebody asks, like, hey, what's one of the things we could be uh doing skill development training, working with our sales guys on? And they said, Well, if you have a lot, the main thing you want to nail is the greeting. You know, do not ignore somebody, do not make them walk around, big smile, handshake, thank you so much for coming to visit. What can I help you with? Nail the greeting, right? I think everybody on the lot has that down. That part's fun, but everybody almost everybody's missing the digital version of that, right? And you kind of joked about like the used car buying experience, but I was just shopping for uh a car, and it was actually a good experience sometimes when I said I was interested and immediately got a text message, an email. It's like, hey, here's the Carfax report, here's the answer to all the questions, here's a video of it so you can see what it actually looks like. Um, and this was like you know, 10 o'clock on a Sunday night. And I was like, this is great uh customer service, this is a great customer experience. You want to have that for your customers, um, but also to the point of uh and your digital customers too, not just your walk-ons and a lot. Um, acknowledge them, right?

Jared:

Let me say this part of it, because I lectured, so I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt version of this same story. If you're sitting on a shed lot and you are busy and you are you're alone, right? Most of these guys are sitting in a shed alone or they're on the they're on their shed lot by themselves. Think of this as your assistant. Think of this as the assistant that you should have hired six months ago, and you can't afford to hire them. But this is the assistant that does more than just contact your customers. This is the system, this is the assistant that organizes, funnels, helps you build revenue every minute of every day of every second, right? So when you say things like, Well, I can't afford it, you can't afford not to try it. Okay, you can't afford not to take the next step in your business. We talk about this a lot on this particular podcast. There are times in your life when you have to make a decision. And very, very, very infrequently do you have an opportunity to do something for yourself that can make you money almost immediately? Okay. Plug-ins with Shed Pro, plugs in with Shed Suite, plugs in with Meta, plugs in with Google Ads, they'll do custom APIs. If you've got other things out there, they can probably make it work. Okay. So there's not really an excuse of, well, it's not gonna work for me. It probably will, it most likely will. Okay. And I want to stress that up front that we get that a lot, right? We had so many people come up to us at Shed Expo. Oh, who would you recommend for this? Who would you recommend for that? Blah blah blah blah blah. This is one I'm putting my name on, guys. You can write it down, okay? You can listen to it and hear it from me first. If you're using Shed Pro and you're not using Velocity 360, you're probably missing out because imagine that build comes through, and then automatically the customer knows within 60 seconds that you're looking to hear from them. Really appreciate that 3D design that you just sent in, and that goes out while you're on the lot talking to somebody, right? This is automatic. This isn't press a button. This is comforting to know that it's relaxation, right? I mean, to me, it's peace of mind. I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about when we set up our automations, right? We've got we've talked about this. We have a custom built CRM. Custom built CRMs aren't for everybody. That was thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in man hours, okay. This is gonna be quick and simple and easy, it's already ready to go. Joe is just telling me that's portable and scalable. Yeah, yes. I've got a just telling you about that.

Eric:

Yeah, I've got a practical question. Um, if you manage a team of let's say 10 sales reps, you know, and it gets everybody hot in there, you know, it's touching all is there a divvy, you know, what's the divvy look like if you've got 10 reps and you get 400 leads, the lead sticks with the rep, and can you hide each other's deals from each other in in the sense of like they're not all being worked on the same screen, but can you filter by rep and then have permissions that set you know that person can't view other people's?

Joe:

You nailed it.

Eric:

Okay.

Joe:

Small, medium, large, yeah. I mean, we just we just started working with the 33 location, you know, shed company. So it's like we we can do small, medium, large. And you know, whenever someone asks me, like, can it do this? Here, here's the answer that if everyone wants to write it down, if they ask you guys, you could ask her, How do you want it to be?

Eric:

Yeah, okay, that's a good question.

Joe:

How do you want it to be? Okay, yeah. So so one location go ahead.

Eric:

One one location wants it this way. Exactly. Yeah, this location wants okay, a little bit. This guy's only one person.

Joe:

Yeah, exactly. So we have a white glove customization migration process. So wherever you are, whatever you're using, if you've got an Excel sheet, if you've got a bunch of paper, if you've got a Hubspot, if you've got a you name you name the software, part of our white glove migration is you don't have to lose everything you've built. We'll actually move the workflows, we'll move the campaigns, we'll move the contacts, we'll upload things for you because we know how difficult that can be. But the thing is, is what I always tell people is if your current systems are only 80% of what you want them to do, and we can do 100% of what you want them to do, it's worth the headache of the switch. And switching software, I will just be so straight up with everyone, it is a pain in the butt to learn a new software. And if you've got some, you know, non-techie people, it's a pain in the butt to get them on board and excited. But what everyone gets excited about is closing more deals. And if your CRM does not drive revenue, does not drive increases in conversion, it's a glorified Excel sheet. And what I tell people is that this is an ROI type purchase, an investment. It's more like getting a um buying a bunch of rentals that you know have rental income. Does that make sense? That's what this is. You you anyone would spend a million dollars to make 10 million, right?

Brandon:

That's what it's also like it's almost like an insurance policy in some ways, too, because it's like, why would you spend so much on a nice website on a great ad campaign generating all these leads and interesting stickers? Yeah, just to watch them fall through the cracks and only close one out of 10. Right. You could be closing half of them. I mean, sure. Exactly. Exactly.

Joe:

And it's you know, and it's it's simpler than people, you know, it really doesn't have to be that difficult. I just think these companies that have been around for a very long time, they were built on old systems. They, you know, they they try to integrate with everything, but ours is more like, look, you sign into one place. You know, people tell me it's like, gosh, one more login, and I'm just gonna like go crazy. You know, I I had a client or a prospect I was talking to, and she's like, you know, sometimes at night, she's like a top producer lot up in Wisconsin or whatever. And um, she's like, Sometimes I just wake up at night thinking, did I remember to follow up with that person? And it's like that that that bothers me so much, you know, uh, because it doesn't need to be that way, you know. And by the way, we don't cost a million dollars. We're very affordable. We like to talk in terms of sheds. It's like a shed or two, depending on how complex your thing is.

Jared:

We're talking, we're talking hundreds, we're talking hundreds here. I mean, there's hundreds that we talk about, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, your per month commitment is probably in the hundreds, right? It varies. So the reason we're not gonna break down every single cost parameter, that'll be the first question I get is well, Jared, you hyped it up, but it must cost a lot. I'm telling you, you can do a free consultation with these guys, book your demo wherever you want, check them out, because I'm telling you, you're gonna want to hear what they have to say regardless about how they can affect your business in a positive way. There are so few things that I believe in wholeheartedly. I believe in a very high-functioning CRM. Right? Absolutely believe in it. Yeah, Eric, jump.

Eric:

Let me ask you another practical question that business owners might want to know. So, so let's say your company gets a hundred leads a day, they come in. Um, we let's say we want the Facebook arrivals to have a different string than the website leads or a CRM form. Um, let's say no matter where they come from in the funnel, they get hot and then the rep over takes it over. And so now it's you can remove it from automations, and now now the rep is just so now they're not gonna be getting because here's a concern from a manager standpoint. Now I've got this guy kind of dialed in, I'm gonna sell the building. We've got to cut off all the extras because now I want it to be a personal touch, and so kind of walk through is that like a switch or like what there's something, you know. Obviously, the answer is yes, but yeah, yeah.

Joe:

The answer is yes. Generally, we set that up to automatically happen. If they respond, it shuts everything off. Don't do it, you don't have to do a single thing except just do your thing. And you also like if you want a manual switch, you can you can go click a button if you wanted to per per lead. Per lead, that's right. So if the lead responds, all all things can be paused immediately, and you don't even have to lift a finger.

Brandon:

The answer is how do you want it? Right? It's like the answer is how do you want it? Do you want a kill a kill switch as soon as they're engaged to happen automatically? Cool. Do you want someone to have to push that button where it's like remove them from every workflow? I got it on a lead lead-by-lead basis. That's fine.

Eric:

Okay, no, uh, follow-up question, and then there's a once the lead converts to a deal, you've got their money. Then there's a secondary flow that you can set up, like follow-up, ask for a review. Okay, we can set up.

Joe:

Like whatever you want to have.

Eric:

Send us a picture and uh and an honest review. Got it.

Joe:

Yeah, yeah. And they can just fill it out. And then we actually have um you can respond right on the platform, just like where all your messages are, and you can like fill out a response to the review right on the platform too.

Eric:

Just uploads it to Google or another, another practical question. Um, the answer is yes, I know, but just ask me for the business owner out there. This is for the business owner who will want to know these questions. DocuSign integration or some sort of e-sign it okay, built in.

Joe:

So you don't need DocuSign. Please, if you work with Waffle 360, save the money, like whatever hundreds or thousands you're paying for DocuSign, you just don't even need. We have eSignature um on the platform if you wanted to have different things.

Eric:

Um, so do you guys integrate with Sensei?

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Joe:

Yeah, uh, let me let me get back to you on that.

Brandon:

Uh so so there's some that are up and running already. But yeah, Sensei, Idea Room, and there's a couple that are like on the docket, and it's gonna be very easy to do with them.

Jared:

See, the problem, the the problem, and and I'll give a plug to both. We we obviously are idea room guys. We we love the team, Dan, and the guys over there at Idea Room. But Sensei's cool. Sensei has its own CRM though, so it's hard. To me, when there's over They don't let you not use it. It's it's not super user-friendly. I mean, I can tell you if you if the guys from Sensei ever get a hold of this episode, come talk to the Steel Kings. We can give you everything you need to know about making that thing.

Joe:

But is it is it sensei labs?

Jared:

It's Sen. Um.com. No, no, no. It's Sensei Sensei CRM. I mean, they are a C, I mean it's Sensei CRM.com, they are a CRM company.

Brandon:

And it's similar to Idea Room, right? Similar. It's yeah.

Jared:

I mean, that's like saying that's like saying like big K, like generic cola is the same as Coke. Because Idea Room is the Coke. Okay. Okay. They are the to me.

Brandon:

So if if that's the Coke, I sat in on the idea room workshop and I I applaud Jordan. I think she was like their VP of sales or marketing or something like that. She was very candid and up front. She said, Hey, this is what we do extremely well. This is what we're gonna do. We're not gonna try to do 10,000 other things, you know, it's gonna dilute our focus. Like, she's like, we're not gonna be the you know, top, middle, bottom, end-to-end of your entire funnel. So if that's the Coke, and they're being honest, of hey, we're not the CRM guys, I doubt Sensei.

Jared:

Coke is not coke, is not water, okay? Coke is not energy drink, it's a soda, it's a cola. You know what I mean? Like, if you want to, if you want to use it in that analogy, to me, yeah, um, you know, and I I love Sensei. This is not a crack, okay. Sensei is an affordable option for metal building guys to have a 3D platform that goes into a CRM. Rising tide raises all ships. We like sensei. We pay for it currently. We have it, okay? We don't use their CRM for, we just don't. We have our own. We've got APIs that go into our CRM from Sensei and from ID room and all that other stuff. The guys at Velocity 360 can also do that while also giving you additional verticals for things like e-signature. Glad you asked that question, Eric. There's so many things that can probably be done. Brandon said it. Just ask the right question. Okay, the answer is probably gonna be yes. Now, everybody's gonna be like, Well, you know, Jared, how much is it gonna cost? And the answer to that question is it depends, okay? It depends on how many integrations you want, it depends on how many current flows you have on your website. All of these things matter because they require more what work. Okay, and nobody works for free.

Brandon:

If I could jump in there real quick, yeah, that's something that I'm I've been passionate about because we used pipe drive in the very beginning stages of our business before we had our own software, and then we used HubSpot, which was pretty good. But every time you turned around, it was another $250 a month. Before we knew it, it was like seven, eight hundred bucks a month for a couple of users. And we heard that story a lot at the Shed Expo is either, hey, I have no system, it's an Excel spreadsheet, or somehow I'm they were paying for HubSpot and Ring Central and DocuSign and Calendly, and hey Rosie, the AI thing, and like 10,000 other things, and it was you know, three, four, five thousand dollars a month. Uh, somebody had 40,000 contacts, and just for having that many leads in their system, HubSpot was charging two grand a month, not to mention their users just to have them. Yeah, so that's something that you know the vast majority of our features are included in every plan that we have, and most of them, almost everyone gets unlimited contacts and users. It's just basically based on how many, how many users are in their team and how many locations they have, how many sub accounts that they would need. Yeah. Um, so it's very affordable and scalable. Like we were very uh intent on that.

Joe:

Yeah, and I want to mention one thing back on the API thing, and then I'll mention something about the affordability piece. But um for the API stuff, like idea, any 3D configurator, here's how integrations work. I just wanted everyone to know how integrations work. The dev team of whatever software either plays ball or they don't.

Jared:

Yep.

Joe:

That's actually how they work. So if you use Sensei or Idea Room or whatever it is, if they want, if you want to connect with them and you're a client of theirs, they're almost always gonna say yes, and then they'll work with our dev team and we'll do what's called webhooking. It's just a special way of doing API integrations.

Brandon:

And we're digital handshake.

Joe:

It's a digital handshake. The only so the only time we can't do it is if the developer of whatever software you want to integrate says we don't do outside integrations because we want you to use only our stuff. Just so everybody's really transparent there. Net suite is a an Oracle product. They are like Apple for that. Okay, right, proprietary Apple prior, you know, they only want to integrate with their own stuff. We don't integrate with Oracle, not because we wouldn't, but because Oracle says, I'm not interested. We want everyone buying our stuff at this high price. So that's how it is. So if we if someone's not gonna integrate, it's just it's not that we're not willing to. Our stuff open API. Um, yeah, it's it's because the other software is like, eh, no, we don't want that. We're we have a business model designed to um it's being called being held captive. And so, and that's okay. And some people love that and they love to go all in on a certain thing, and we're not judging those people, it's great. And if it helps you grow your business, that's that's aligned with our mission. We want you to win. And we're not saying that you everyone should switch. What we are saying is that's how APIs work. And if someone wants to API integrate, you know, we talked with like you know, the Shed app and Bob Oxley and all these people at the conference, we're making these connections, and we'll do on our on your behalf, we're gonna work to build all the API integrations, work with their dev teams and all of that. All you have to do is ask them, and then everyone that we talk to, which is essentially almost all the Shed industry software companies, said, Oh, yeah, we're super open to integrating. Sounds great. And uh, so that's where we're at.

Jared:

It's a value-added prop for everybody, right? Right. I mean, everybody can share in that. You know, the the you you mentioned Bob, and I thought their marketing piece was really good. Ditch the duct tape. Yes, because to me, that's that's you know, to me, that's a perfect symmetrical messaging for you guys, actually. I mean, not that it's not it's Bob's, so I gotta give a shout out to the Shed App, you know. Uh, I'll I'll give them a their free plug here. Uh Shed App, they gave me a hat. So shout out to the guys at Shed App. I can tell you this you will not benefit more than organizing your leads. Again, Joe hit the nail on the head leads into revenue, right? Leads will turn into revenue if they're worked properly. Okay, you have to understand how that flow is going to work for you. And if you're limited on your bandwidth and you have the leads available, you are missing out on revenue by not servicing them properly. The Steel Kings are guilty of this, okay. We've experienced this in our lives. That's why we had a CRM, okay? Now we have figured out, and it's a very good possibility. I'm just gonna say it here publicly. We have been very forward-facing about the fact that we have a and and the guys here at Velocity 360 have seen it, they've seen our CRM, they know that it's real, they know that it's legit, they've seen what it can do. Now, the give back to them is gonna be can you make it what we have now? And if you can make it to where we have it now, man, I can tell you everybody who sells steel buildings wants a piece of that period right now because right now there are so many things that we can do with a CRM to maximize our ability to sell buildings. So everybody that's listening to this, uh most everybody, is probably in the business of selling buildings, sheds, steel buildings, pole barns, whatever it is that you sell, tiny homes, makes no difference. If you have an assistant in a tool that helps you pipeline and funnel leads and sell more buildings, isn't that what you're all about? And if it sold you one more building and it paid for itself every month while also removing the cost of other outside things that you don't necessarily need to be successful, would that benefit you? I think the answer to that question is yes.

Eric:

Yes, of course, yes, I think it's overwhelming yes.

Jared:

And I very rarely get lecture. I mean, this is like the first time in a long time. I've been like lecturing you, I'm telling you, call to action, listen to what I'm saying, check these guys out because it will be of value to your business. If nothing else, just hear what they have to say. It's not gonna hurt you to do to schedule a free demo, they're not gonna take it personal. They've got plenty of people lined up to say, we want to hear what you have to say. We're just getting a sneak peek, we're getting inside baseball right now directly from them. Yep. So listen.

Joe:

Yeah, and I'll mention one thing, guys. When it when it comes to you know all of these things, that you know, we know it's uh it can be daunting, all the tasks and stuff, and that's why we have that white glove to help people move. And almost everyone we work with that with, you know, I guess if they don't have any system, then they maybe don't have this. But if you've been building on a system for a while and you have like this emotional attachment to it, and you're like, This is my baby. Uh what I always tell people is look, if it grows revenue, do you care? If you were could grow if you could grow your rev revenue 25% in the next six months, isn't that amen? You know, yeah, um who cares what the system is, right? If it does the work for you, that isn't that your goal of the system in the first place, and so just don't miss again the business leads times conversion times average price. We're gonna grow the conversion rate, and and then you can scale your leads, you know. And one of the things we haven't mentioned is the analytics piece, guys. We like to build an analytics dashboard where it tracks every source of lead by like Facebook ad or Google ad or Shed Pro or you know, whatever 3D configurator or whatever you're doing, and it tracks the closing percentage by those lead sources so you can make sure you spend your marketing dollars well. And that's one of the most helpful things when we're working with secure storage sheds. Um, is he could actually figure out which ads were performing well. And uh, that's how we got connected with Shed Pro because their leads were converting at a much higher rate in that particular instance. And um he doubled his marketing down and grew a ton, and it was awesome.

Eric:

Well, we're getting our dep we're getting our demo next Tuesday on our next episode or maybe in two, we'll we'll recap it.

Jared:

Yeah, and and to be honest with you guys, if you have any questions for the guys over at Velocity360, it's velocity360crm.com. Give these guys an opportunity to help you out with your business. One way or the other, they're happy to take a phone call and book a demo with you. Um, dude, Joe and Brandon, you guys have been great. I hate to run on you, but we've been on here about 40 minutes. That's about where we cap it. But I can tell you, dude, we're we're happy to have you guys back on. I think we we want to show the people something at some point. I we'd love to have you back on, see what kind of response we get, reach out to the team over at Velocity360. But if we can demo this thing live, I'd love to show it to people. Um, I know I'm just throwing you guys a curveball there, major league, but it's one of those things where if we can help you guys out, we'd love to. We love the product, we love what we've seen so far. Um, you guys got anything on the way out? Got anything you want to share with anybody?

Joe:

Um, thank you so much for having us. You know, and I I encourage everyone here, if it would be helpful, especially for the show, like write in your questions. Can it do this? Can it do that? And if we do that podcast, we'd love to be there. I'd be happy to just go through all those questions and show them exactly how it works, and we can get into the details of what everybody would probably be concerned about. Um, and then they can they can all see it for themselves, and uh that would be something that's hopefully as added value as possible for everybody who would be interested.

Brandon:

Yeah, that would be awesome. We would love to come back for that. And and just to kind of wrap things up on a human note, you know, we're not just all about sales and robots and revenue. Like the reason we love working with people in sheds, metal building is they're they're patriotic, conservative, Christ-centered, you know, just good people, and that's who we want to help win. And I think there's a lot of fear of oh, AI or automations is gonna you know take people's jobs. And that's not what's happening here. Like on a Saturday or during the busy season, you know, you wish you could hire a bunch of salespeople to keep up with that surge of demand, but then you would just have to fire them again when it gets slow. So instead of over hiring and then firing, like have have some air support for your salespeople, have a good system that helps pick up that slack when it's too busy for everyone to get to it.

Jared:

I'm sitting here thinking, okay, so Eric is texting me. I'm I'm I'm pulling the curtain way back right now. Eric's texting me. Eric's getting super excited. He's like, I know, I'm I we gotta think about this, right? We gotta think about this. So we're seriously taking this seriously. The Steel Kings are dead serious about we love our CRM. We have built it. It it you said it, Joe said it. It's your baby, but if it can make you more money, would you throw it in the bath and watch it go down the drain? And the answer to that question for the Steel Kings is probably yes, we would. We would we would watch it go right out the door and we would never care about it again.

Eric:

What I can tell you is we try to sell, we try to sell it to somebody so we can.

Jared:

Do you know why I like it? Do you know why I like what you guys are saying and why I like it the most? And this is probably the single biggest sales point I will give to anybody that's listening to my voice. I'm thinking about the seven or eight people in this office space, and it could make their jobs easier, easier, yeah, 100%. It could make their jobs more streamlined. And by the way, I've got a cube or two I might want to fill. And if I have more revenue, that allows me to add more people when we are busy, and this will help them and streamline the process and make it easier for them to close deals, which makes it easier for me to do podcasts, quite honestly. Me and Eric want to do podcasts, and and do we want to empower people to do great things. So we're gonna finish up on that note. Joe and Brandon, it has been honestly a great conversation, and we got to have it again. So I am gonna finish up this episode of the Steel Kings podcast. I'm Jared, he's Eric, Brandon and Joe. Get out in your communities and do something for somebody else. It will make you feel good, I promise. And we'll be back at you next week with another episode of the Steel Kings podcast. Until then, peace out, guys. We'll talk to you soon later on.