 What we gather out of our data is we're able to talk in different terms with our customers and tell them where they are with our business up to the minute and help them improve their business. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, alongside my co-host, Beth Pompnyglov. And today, we're talking about data, specifically how you can connect the dots between the data and the different parts of your organization to make better decisions, whether that's product development, marketing, sales, customer service. Data is becoming a bigger and bigger role of a lot of manufacturers. And we want to talk about that today with a really great guest we have lined up for you. We are really excited to welcome Bob Sanders. He is the director of sales at Sholdice Designer Stone and Fusion Stone. His company is spending lots of time in the data and making it work to improve their customer experience, improve their manufacturing. He's got lots to share with us. Bob, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you. It's great to be here. Appreciate it. Before we get started, why don't you take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do? Yeah. Well, my name is Bob Sanders, director of sales at Sholdice Designer Stone and Fusion Stone. I'm about five days away from my 18th year with the company. So I'm very excited for that milestone. One thing in our company is we have a lot of long-tenured employees as well as the new crop that are coming up to teach us new ways and things like that on how to do business and how to talk data and things like that. The industry we're in is a very old traditional industry within the masonry world, within the building supply. And we try to find new ways of doing business and connecting with our customers. Well, who are our customers? Who do you market to? Well, I love that question because we have two segments to our company, Sholdice Designer Stone and Fusion Stone. On the Sholdice side, we are the traditional masonry side that requires a mason. You're installing the brick in the stone, whether it's on a home or a government building, a school, office tower, whatever that is. And you require specialized trades for that. And that industry has been around forever. And the other segment to our company is the one thing we always wanted to do is try to talk to the consumer, try to talk to an end user because our product is typically funneled through the architecture community, through the trade, through a builder, etc. With our Fusion Stone, we created a do-it-yourself product that is masonry, a thin stone that's mechanically fastened or it's screwed to the wall. And we are about 12 or 13 years in on that product line. So what it's enabled us to do is talk to all segments of markets. So we talk everything from the architect to a builder to a designer to the mason to our consumer now and all through then through our dealer networks and our distribution. So what it's really done for our company is we're educated on all aspects of the building industry, whether it's commercial, industrial, institutional, or residential. So we're very fortunate to have our feelers out to all sorts of customer groups and markets out there. Bob, a lot's changed with COVID and I know that's like the topic of everyone's conversation, but I'd love to hear what are you all doing from a marketing and sales standpoint that's helping you to fulfill demand as well as reach new customers? You know, before it's a conversation we've had for some time before COVID hit, is there a better way out there? Is there a more effective way, you know, with markets changing and the consumer changing and the consumer becoming much more educated on your product sometimes before you even have face time with them? What it allowed us to do was to sort of, it pushed us into that corner and realized, you know, with our external sales force, our inside customer support and with our marketing, you know, we had to pivot fairly quickly like most people did on how to keep in contact with that customer because that customer that we were very used to in a traditional way of a, you know, still the phone and email, a Zoom or going into their office, a lot of things changed and we had to utilize different ways to still make contact and a lot of our customers, they went home. They went home and set up that home office and they became a little harder to reach out to and so those challenges it forced us a bit to get in more into social media, more into, you know, direct links with emails and things like that, you know, traditional old school ways of using the phone and, you know, it's once we, you kind of had to reestablish your communication link and then once you reestablished that then you found with each of your customers how they wanted to be, they still wanted to hear from you. They typically don't reach out to you, it's our responsibility to reach out to them and so we found it in a multitude of ways of reaching out to them through that. So if we can, let's talk about the data that you learned from those big pivots. What is the data telling you about your outreach communications, the ways that you had to change to stay in connection with your customers and how are you integrating that as you go into this next year? Well, we've been working through data for several years now and 2020 into 21 has been our deep dive, let's put it that way through our business intelligence and it paints various pictures. You know, it's what you want to extract from that and how you connect that information and what it's told us because we've had to rely on that data in some aspects to help tell the story on what was occurring in the last 18 months and we monitor everything. You know, we monitor whether we're speaking to a customer, the orders that those customers are placing, the orders that maybe they're not placing and why, you know, the competitive nature, we track competition and what they're doing, not doing and we compare ourselves in a lot of different aspects. We're very much an out-of-the-box type of company that likes to do our thing while keeping an eye on others and the one thing that we've really learned is to embrace through the data, is to embrace the different ways of doing business and I think COVID has forced many us into that. When you come from such a traditional industry like ours, it's a relationship-based industry. It's a lot of older generation within the industry, whether it's trades, masons, builders, etc. And it's how to embrace them and with the younger generation that are bringing in wonderful new ideas on how to speak to customers and how to utilize the data in speaking to your customer. You know, the data doesn't take away from that relationship. It doesn't take away from that personal relationship. If we used to see a customer once a month and it's a debate we've often had, do we need to see that customer once a month? Maybe that customer we can speak quarterly and provide better information to help them drive their business and utilize our company to help them within their problem solving, the challenges, products that they're looking for and things like that. The data, at the end of the day, we want to be better today than we were yesterday. We want to grow more today than we did yesterday so the data helps point us in a multitude of directions. Bobby, he mentioned data. Are you collecting that via your CRM or your ERP or your Google Analytics? Can you give me an example? Maybe tell us through the lens of a story. Give me an example of, hey, we looked at this particular data on this customer using X, Y, and Z. So our ERP is connected to our CRM. We utilize business intelligence, which we call Stone Man Intelligence. It's a company-wide program that we have. You could look at it and say, oh, my goodness, info overload, but everything that comes into the company is pulled through in those various programs, which ultimately lands in the business intelligence. And it's broken out behind the scenes. Obviously, it's been written to accommodate what we require and from analyzing everything from sales and quotations and product development and marketing and competition. And so we have multiple dashboards that we pull that information. So you're getting information from your CRM, from your ERP, from online, and then you're putting into one centralized dashboard. Are you then viewing that as a team, or is that individually, you've got, hey, you're in sales, so you're really looking at these parts of it, or is it a part of the way that you all are doing business now, where you're actually reviewing those dashboards together? I'm trying to get a picture of how it's like grabbing the data and doing something with it. What does it look like? Great question. It's a great question because sales and marketing has a specific dashboard. Production, in all the elements within production, they have a certain dashboard. So finance, a specific dashboard. Management, we cover all aspects of those dashboards. Our external team, our sales team, they have a dashboard dedicated to what they require through that day. So how we monitor it, we monitor it individually, specific to our dashboards, and we meet every morning to review all aspects of the company. And that is sales, in marketing, production, customer service support. We touch on all of that over kind of a quick 15-minute roundtable with many members within administration and management, and then other times through the week when you deep dive specifically into certain aspects of that information. So I'm imagining that these dashboards are also a big part of your annual strategic planning. Can you give me an example of something that you're going to start doing and something you're going to stop doing in 2022 based on data? Yeah, that's okay. It's an interesting question because we're coming into our 75th year as a company. We're a third generation. We're a family-owned business, and we stretch coast to coast in Canada, and a good chunk of the U.S. Our products are on trucks every day, heading somewhere. In old ways, older traditional ways, you've always used that in some form, but a lot of decisions are made on your gut, emotional feel, what you think, what you hear, and a lot of times that's how companies are built, and you integrate the data. You always want reassurance when you've made a decision, and data helps support that reassurance, but it's also that you want to be cautious because you want to make sure that you don't lose that driver, that entrepreneurial spirit, where a lot of times it does come from your gut or your head, and you still want to run with that idea or that new product idea, but you have a keen eye on data and what it's telling you. I think to your question, Beth, I believe our decisions today, especially in product development, are made more on data support as opposed to just a round table. What does everybody think? You're facing it on actual metrics and actual numbers that have been measured and tested over a period of time. You're moving it from an art to a science. In any company, in ours specifically, you collect so much information. There's so much information that comes in minute by minute into our company, and you have to be able to decipher that information and where it's going to help you be better, essentially, because most employees on this property are contributing to that information. They're collecting all of that, and they're facilitating it and entering from external sales to production. Everybody at every second of the day is putting something into that business intelligence. If you had to distill it down, Bob, in terms of the benefit that this type of process has brought your organization of integrating, and as you said, everyone in the organization is using this data and this business intelligence to make better decisions, if you had to distill down the benefit that this has brought your organization, what would it be? Is it, hey, you make decisions more confidently? Do you make it with better speed? Is there better alignment? What would you say is the single biggest benefit that this has brought you and your organization? I think one of the biggest things it's done is we become more transparent within the company, within ourselves. I like that. You get siloed, and if it's a sales thing, you have the sales group talking about it. If it's marketing, you're talking with the marketing, etc., etc. What the data collection and business intelligence, it's how you embrace it, but it forces you. You need collaboration now from all aspects of the company. When you're developing a new product, in the past, as I said, you might round table it and say, what do you think? Today, you need to have finance. You need to have marketing. You need to have sales. You need to have production. Production might put their hand up and say, we can't do that. I think the biggest thing is we've opened ourselves up more within the management group and within the employees as well as to what we're doing. I also believe it's made us more efficient. It's more effective. Everybody's busy. I know it's a cliche, but everybody's busy. When you speak to your customer or drop by to see them, you don't want to waste your time. You're there for a reason. You're not just dropping by to drop off a coffee for them and say hello. Sometimes that works, but they're busy. What we gather out of our data is we're able to talk in different terms with our customers and tell them where they are with our business up to the minute and help them improve their business. When they improve, we improve. It's a long trickle-down effect. We've definitely seen the benefit from the investment of obviously dollars and time and people into this on how we manage our company today. What advice would you give to a manufacturer who wants to start measuring more, wants to start making more database decisions, but is still in that gut feel round table phase? Where do I start? What do I measure first? What would be the most impactful? Really where we started is through CRM. It's those everyday conversations that you're now logging, tracking with your customers. Those conversations, old school ways, the sales rep would have a notebook and they'd write things down or make a note in their phone, but often that information didn't go anywhere unless you happen to talk to your manager or your fellow employee and it just becomes lost. My advice is I think CRM is a must-have in any company is to collect those conversations, collect that information and build that profile and build that file of your customer. You know your customer very well, but get that file going and understand from that and then from there, then you explore a business intelligence platform that you can now start to pull through all of that information that gets dumped in the business intelligence and it starts to segment things, but I believe the biggest thing we did was when we dipped our toe into CRM, it's like okay, but like anything change and new ways it takes a bit and I can't imagine not having it today. Yeah, that's great. This has been great, man. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If someone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Probably just through shouldice.ca. They can find us through that fusionstone.ca. You can find me definitely through any of those aspects. That's great. We'll make sure we link to that on the show notes as well. For our listeners, if you enjoyed this content, make sure you go to venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams, alongside Beth and Papi Glove. Thanks, everybody.