Empower Your Healthcare Business with Sales Pipeline Saas for Healthcare

How to create outlook signature

the following message is brought to you by balsamic balsamic have decided to support the sas district community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners this episode is sponsored by the product onboarders a startup that helps b2b sas product owners identify conversion killers in their onboarding process so they can increase happy activated users and gain more paying customers the service is a straight shooting review of a user's journey from the marketing site through to the first run experience they even record a walkthrough from the point of view of a user taking the steps a sas needs to make them to get value from the product when they find friction and glitches they recommend ways to overcome them the more reviews they do the more they believe small actions can have big payoffs some customers have even seen a 27 uplift in form completion from implementing just one of their suggestions if you're looking for actionable tips you can put in place for your startup or be provided introductions to trusted tools and experts who can execute visit theproductonborders.com if you'd like to receive a promo code for balsamiq or even just thank the folks at balsamic for supporting our community please check out our show notes where we include a link to that promo code specifically for the sas district community thank you all [Music] hello hello everyone this is your host akil jabbar and welcome back to another episode of sas district in today's episode we'll be talking about how to build a sas company for the healthcare and work safe industry today we have our guest peter jerusic joining us peter is the founder of luminous communications the consulting md of easy referral and most recently the co-founder and ceo of buddy solutions his base of experience includes strategic planning business workflow design raising capital board governance sales management international sales and most importantly customer engagement peter describes himself as always managed to attract talent the teams he has recruited have always helped every company meet and surpass their goals he has helped build successful businesses for over 30 years and his passion has always been the existing customer and the potential customer so welcome peter glad to have you on our show today thank you pleasure thank you for those kind comments for the introduction no way so i've read a little bit about your background including you've held several positions positions such as the sales manager at sony you were the vp of sales and i t of marketing and i t at denon and held many other leadership roles can you tell us more about your your background and how it shaped your skill set to start your own entrepreneurial journey yeah my pleasure i mean i've been fortunate for one thing um but in my early 20s when i was 20 i was at the university of calgary i'm not sure what i was going to do with my life i was taking psychology rocks for jocks um and it always had somewhat of an interesting business but i was also working uh part-time at a sporting goods store called abominable sports and that was my first real exposure to to business the world of retail and i loved it um and so after a relatively short stint i was offered the job of assistant manager which would have meant that i would have had to leave the university of calgary while you know working in a sporting goods store with a lot of young people um was was very much of interest especially as i was an avid uh sportster um so i left school and i spent a year and a half working at the sporting good store it was taken over by a large conglomerate out of out of toronto um they moved me up to management i started getting business experience um and that was it i never went back to school i've always been a lifelong learner i learned about all the industries i'm uh i'm involved with um and uh but you know from there i went on to you know help a number of companies that were just starting up one in particular was in um the central part of bc on a lake called shoe swap lake and it was new startup uh company called three boys houseboats and they wanted me to help do their sales and marketing um and they were going to rebel revolutionize the houseboat business and we did over the next three years ending up with a fleet of over 700 boats from there i just you know kept going kept finding companies that you know needed help you got it and then from there you just moved up to different roles you know worked from sony to then on and then kind of from there decided to shift and start your own business at some point yeah well in 1996 i went to toronto to help start a bottle of water company with some friends who had uh made the mistake i had found quite often or calm and they'd spend all their money uh on marketing in the wrong areas when they had no money left no money left for sales no money left for uh marketing so uh they flew me out to toronto for ostensibly a few months um it ended up being 18 years i spent 18 years learning in toronto was very different working in toronto than calgary it moves at a completely different pace which i loved and agile market decisions are made quickly with lots of opportunity and when we arrived it was the early years and of um a bottle of water my friend said you're going to toronto to sell bottled water on the shores of lake ontario i go yep and i arrived uh immediately formed a sales team i realized that one of the best ways for marketing when you didn't have any money was to affiliate yourselves with uh special interest groups such as the jewish community we volunteered free water in the jewish walk for israel or the walk for israel the uh jewish community association and others i recognize that that would probably lead to loyalty and provide us business opportunities which it did we also i also approached the toronto maple leafs uh toronto blue jays um to act as their uh sponsor uh with free water um and uh in those days there was no such thing as sponsorship we uh we ended up having our water cooler and the dugout of the three of uh the toronto blue jays the first product placement there ever um the toronto uh made police became great friends of ours we are able to say we're the official water of the toronto blue jays the toronto maple leafs we did the same thing with the canadian ballet numerous organizations in toronto essentially by the end of the year we had the keys to toronto and 16 months later we had 12 000 customers wow now you so you helped many twice yeah you don't just help you know you started with that one company and then from there you started working with many many different startups and you probably see that problem over and over again where you know they have troubles with sales they have trouble with marketing just able to survive and pay the bills um is there a common denominator that you see there that you or maybe specifically in the sas world of an example you can share yeah without question i'll give you an example so typically there's not enough money set aside for marketing and sales there's no sales experience in the company um they often hire friends or associates they believe would make good salespeople um they take too long to make decisions when it comes to the sales staff or the efforts they're looking at and they have no kpis around sales efforts um whether it's the number of contacts outbound calls etc so um an example of that was in 1996 i joined uh a sas company very early one of the first um called uh amicus attorney software um which was it became sas but early on it was desktop and then real group where it was just still being talked about but essentially the same problem the gentleman you know fellow the random company highly intelligent lawyer um but he thought that lawyers would be the best people to sell to lawyers none so um you need to be able to close right you need to be able to engage you need to understand the business of of of listening and um you know one of the things i often find that happens is that within experienced sales people they don't really know how to approach it they don't know how to do how to you know you do a needs analysis etc so it's common i've seen it um in in many many companies yeah so you gotta find the right sales people you gotta find a sales manager that understands how to scale a sales team how to build a playbook how to use the latest tools i mean links in right now is becoming one of the foremost tools for managing sales um especially linkedin navigator um and um so you have to understand where um where the future is you have to look to what's what's leading edge for example there's new um sales tools called um playbook tools where you build an actual playbook um on how to market through um through linkedin navigator how many touch points etc are there outstanding tools um another common mistake is they don't use crm tools right customer relationship management how do you track your kpis or your leads or your prospects without a proper um tool like salesforce or zoho um you know etc so um just if i may offer one more thing i find it quite interesting as you know these days you can fill out a form online and you know within moments your phone will ring from the sales person in many cases not in all cases and what is shocking to me is how many times somebody calls me and they don't know where i am they haven't been to my website um and uh you know one of the things i did amicus attorney is i gave ever gavel and gown software i gave every one of our inside sales team um a pocket economist for every state um that they um covered in their territory because i wanted them to be familiar with the sociological the geological uh geographical uh nuances uh and they should be aware of the news too because you want to know what is in that what is affecting that that company that person what sort of industries they are and it made a profound difference and when you're hiring somebody for a sales role are you hiring a manager first are you looking higher because that's always a challenge right are you hiring you know somebody who's entry level and then you're you know training them or if you don't have that background and experience like somebody like yourself are you looking to bring on a manager to take that over for you um if you're struggling especially as a software company well let's say you're depending upon your budget good question uh if you're hiring if it depends on budget all right if you could afford to you shouldn't have a sales leader you know you could you don't have a great budget but your first sales person needs to be experienced you don't want to teach anybody how to sell but yeah and you also unless you have that background yourself you want that person ideally to take on the role of um sales manager as your cash flow improves to hire other sales people because that individual will have developed the playbook yeah makes sense and understanding so makes sense and so you also worked as the uh vp of uh business development at absorb software where you managed to grow the sales i think from 700k to 4.2 million um can you share what the story has around there how you accomplished that and what were the strategies that worked then well that's a lot it's one of my favorite stories i i i met the two founders of uh one of the co-founders of absorb walking my dog and i just finished a management bio um in toronto um of a large company group the danny water division i was living in calgary with young kids and i was on an airplane uh four days a week i was super elite in three months um so that was not healthy when i was getting divorced wasn't good for my kids so i walked away from that and mike and i were walking one day and he says what are you um what do you want to do i said no i think i could sell your software i didn't know anything about learning management systems i didn't know anything about adult-based training i didn't know anything about bloom's taxonomy which was a training tool so i met him and his partner and they showed me the application i could clearly see it was superior interesting learning management system space very crowded 400 systems little calgary based company no money for marketing um so i made a deal i said i kind of deal i said look i'll work for you for free for a year and you give me a certain percentage uh at the end of the year for if things work out so um their sales person they had hired was a calgarian friend who worked there for six months without closing one deal they had three uh customers uh one in the states and two in canada not not of significance and they were focusing on the oil and gas sector here in calgary because they knew it um no we can't go there we have to pivot um first thing we need to do is do lead capture on our website um and um one day and it was a good website these guys had built we got mike sent me a lead and he said here peter this is a gmail account it's probably not really um a real prospect so i looked at the name i did researched and found uh a gel he was real i i can't recall his first name his last name was furnish brother of neil furnish was mary delton john and he was head of marketing for uh marketing and development education for virgin mobile so i contacted him set up a demo when i learned the application i learned um what to do how to do proper demos i learned that a long time ago and we we just heavily discounted a product made a deal on the condition we could get testimonials from him and that was key second thing we needed to do was examine the sector and see where the thought leaders were uh influencers etc so there was a company called brandon hall which gave out awards for learning uh applications so we need an award so we uh i focused on awards and within you know a year or so we received a couple of bronzes and silvers for our application and that brought to us um notoriety we started getting more leads i was the guy doing all the sales um but then as things improved and we had we had fascinating businesses like lufthansa rolls royce et cetera i loved engaging with those companies um we were able to hire more sales people and and get more leads uh and close more business the interesting thing is you know all of that business pre-coded we only met one customer once everything was done online through demos and that's another absolutely important part of the sas world is in doing a demo many people you know you what should you start with should you start where you start starting in the middle the beginning the middle or the end start at the end start with a wow factor hit them you don't have to go through the application think piece after piece find out what solution they're trying to solve or problem they're trying to solve and then present it to them right away and then take it back as to how you get there yeah i like that yeah a lot of people focus on the top of the funnel right and not worrying too much on the the demo yeah makes perfect sense because that's when you're going to close them and then you also started your own uh firm a business consulting firm called luminous communications for you know working with smbs across canada what else has been your expertise in helping business owners grow um and how are you help how are you helping them grow what was kind of your strategy there well you know i write a blog called look inside the box okay well you know there's a common term called look outside the box for to find opportunity i think it's right in front of you i think it's already there you just have to say change your perspective right and then look at it from a from a different way um you also be aware of trends what's taking place and do research like do research uh one company i worked for when they were building a sas products and this is the first one in the world i thought that's highly unlikely and sure enough it wasn't um so don't make assumptions um and um you know i think the the you know be passionate about your business like you know hang on to it and and just be prepared to go hang on to it that's really relevant but um you know do the things that you think can't be done and you know don't be afraid of breaking the rules because when you're a startup you have to right you know you're successful when you no longer have to break the rules make sense so you know it's it's it's part of um it's part of growing the business like in 2013 when i was running luminous i um we had a flood here in calgary um and it flooded the whole downtown core uh many people lost their homes jobs were shot uh it was devastating it was quite a flood and so i was sitting at my desk that day and thought there you see that there's four concerts scheduled during the calvary stampede they no longer have a place to play maybe we should put on a benefit concert i've never put on a concert in my life six weeks later we had 40 000 people at big band stadium a national broadcast with a full tv crew 14 cameras nickel black had [Music] turned their plane around from brazil and agreed to perform we had 13 artists multiple sponsors we raised 2.2 million dollars um and i had no music experience um you know it was just you know if you want to do it you can you just have to be committed to it is that helpful yeah yeah definitely and are you still taking on consulting clients of that firm or did you stop running that business to focus on your new venture no i stopped i stopped that about a year and a half ago i'm managing uh managing director of a medical referral company called easy referral based out of edmonton alberta it's an application that was developed by a doctor uh he had a patient that went to the emergency at the royal alex she was triaged and her um referral was sent by a fax machine to a specialist who was away uh so it wasn't looked at her pain worsened after a few weeks she went back to see denny or dr vincent he immediately had her an ultrasound the next day and the cancer had spread everywhere she died a year and a half later and after denny um flew her to ghana to say goodbye to her extended family at his own expense he promised to fix the referral program and build a digital application that where clinics can send referrals digitally back and forth and the patient is always in the loop um so i've been running that for the last three years and it's been interesting especially since uh covid has hit yeah yeah i can imagine what what would you say are the have been the biggest challenges with scaling easy referral both say pre-covered and post kobe so for the last three years when you first started working there then what are you seeing now [Music] uh well the medical market's a difficult market medical offices are use a lot of legacy systems and it's strange to think in a world a vertical like this where there's great advancements and people are talking about ai and machine learning etc they're still using the fax machine um many doctors don't have websites many doctors you know burger health care record system where his eyes resides on their own server uh which is kind of appalling considering that doesn't meet the healthcare uh privacy standards in or in canada of the united states but they're they're very busy you know the medical office opens at 8 30 closes at noon they have their lunch um opens at one o'clock closes at 4 30. they're not really interested in learning a new system or migrating et cetera and and then canada the real challenge is medical care is run by government and government is slow to move bureaucratic et cetera um we've had traction in private uh practice but it's a um it's a slow slow sale um pre-code what was interesting what's happening about covid is the doctors um immediately lost their source of revenue um you could do a telephone consult in alberta and get twenty dollars well my doctor said a consult with a senior assistant might take an hour uh one of easy referrals clients in toronto 21 ophthalmologists who see who receive uh 2000 referrals a week lost all the revenue so um that's a lot right you've got staff to support etc so we immediately pivoted um created and it also made patients didn't have care and when there's issues around concerns around your vision those can be quite concerning so we immediately provisioned an e-assessment uh portal which allowed patients to upload uh images of their eyes we included instructions how to take proper pictures of their eyes do an eye exam and within a month we had delivered over hundred uh e assessments one of the other things that's helped with covet is uh doctors announcing i've got time to look at this i've got time to examine a different method or i need to be prepared for the you know the second wave or the next time this happens because you know this this legacy way doesn't work anymore interesting so you're saying that there was actually a drop off i thought there'd be the opposite effect in which there'd be more uh you know revenue and more people coming in for you know to see doctors oh no there was more no no i just meant that the medical doctors saw the drop off in revenue we've actually added clients during coven got it got it makes sense and then you've now recently launched in co-founded your new venture a buddy which is a tech solution for workplace safety uh what's the story behind launching this new business and the problem you're looking to solve here well who's crazy enough to start a new business during pandemic i am um so about a year and a half ago i was approached by an associate of mine spent uh 25 years in the safety industry and he called me up and said peter do you know anybody that can build an app i said there's plenty let's talk so we had lunch and he wanted to know uh it was all possible to take a picture of a work site and then using artificial intelligence look for flaws or danger points et cetera so if you take a picture of a excavation with um a ladder in it and other things around can you look for the hazards i said a little bit but it's not not going to be terribly sophisticated or extremely accurate so i had some experience with understanding the world of safety when i was at absorb because many people many companies use online training to manage certifications you must many workers have to have certification to enter a work site or to do a job so i started examining the gap between technology and safety and it was large it's profound i saw that many um many processes were oral-based paper-based and the other thing is everything was reactive not proactive and as paul said safety policies are written in blood so i left examined i talked to more safety individuals and i developed this idea for an application that would uh help more people get home safely every day because 99 of all accidents are preventable um and i looked at the statistics and i saw the numbers six thousand people die every day at the workplace every day around the world yeah um it costs the united states um 62 billion dollars a year alone for workplace loss related injuries and there's over 638 000 accidents every day um so i thought and why haven't you know and the sad thing is those numbers that come from the international labor organization haven't changed since 2012. you would think with improved communications uh digital processes the number would come down but it doesn't because the one thing that's involved in every single accident humans human errors are the cause of all accidents um now there's some weather related issues you know tsunamis etc but that only accounts for less than one percent so um we've we've designed our building and are currently looking for funds for our application called buddy it's called buddy because we're your work buddy uh we have a marketing team we did lots of research to come up with our uh our brand and our name uh we have an extremely profoundly strong deep bench both from a psychology perspective safety perspective um we have committed users we have companies that have committed to trial it um the national research council has recently uh said they would likely put forward a project uh for us and when they put a circle around a number what for a budget uh once they'd um done their due diligence and um yeah the other interesting thing about coven is covert has changed the relationship between the worker and the employer forever um it's now and it's expanded the market because workers now include every office worker the safety industry used to be um you know those on site those on construction sites those and mines those um driving long-haul trucks but it now includes every worker in every office and we make sure that or we will make sure that workers every day are on all day are alert to risk so we're helping the worker look after themselves monitor themselves and make sure their mind is on task make sure they're not distracted make sure they're not overlooking potential hazards et cetera so um and you know and now like if exactly for example i was talking to um the head of uh safety and education at the sheet metal air rail transport unit in the united states in washington a few weeks ago over two 000 members they're very concerned about the health of their uh members very concerned sure um you know the construction industry uh suicide and depression and drug abuse is a is a big big problem also with the um legalization of marijuana uh that's changed things too um when what's interesting about you know marijuana being legalized is not the marijuana that's being sold isn't organic what i mean by that's not because it's not being grown but it's synthetic it's been synthesized it's much stronger so we'll see hopefully hopefully we'll be successful looks like we have good traction and i'll employ all the things i've learned over the years which is primarily you'll get good people yeah definitely and in terms of the new construction market specifically so that's probably an area where i think you can you know probably be more effective what's your take on an opinion on the growth of the landscape of that market both say in the short term and long term because i imagine there's been a lot of a slowdown right in these last few months and in terms of new projects new construction going on well yes and no as an example we've been invited there's a new bridge that's being built from between detroit and windsor called the gordie howe bridge it's one of the largest mega projects in north america uh 2500 uh employees there workers uh we're going flying out on for tomorrow actually to go to a we've been asked to uh bring buddy and show it to um all the companies that are working on site there at a safety barbecue on friday um and there's other makeup projects coming but i didn't really answer your question sorry what i should say is uh we believe that i mean the housing construction commercial construction will likely dip to a certain extent but excuse me but there's going to be so much money popped back into the economy by government for stimulus on things like dams roads um you know airport expansions uh et cetera so i believe in the world of larger industrial projects you will see those move ahead um i think you know new house construction and uh um multi-unit buildings will definitely slow down makes sense so just a little shift in terms of where where the money is being allocated um kind of follow last kind of questions here peter uh do you have any favorite resource or person or mentor you fall that has been instrumental to your success and maybe suggest to our audience to of sas founders to check out and learn from yeah one man for sure i met it when i was 29. i learned a lot on my own but our company spring valley water the president company found this gentleman in florida named c richard wildman w-e-y-l-m-a-n um we uh we flew him up for i can't remember a three to five day training session he taught me everything i know about sales um just truly inspirational very you know you know common sense things that you just wouldn't have thought of that i always you know things i always employ uh yeah in my everyday life uh um so you can check him out he's easily found he's a very interesting man self-made millionaire by the time he was 19 he lived in 20 different foster homes he went on to co-found the rob report um i ended up owning the third largest successful rolls-royce dealership in the united states um is a very very well-known speaker and consultant and he's his website materials are well worth checking out and another gentleman i think we're all aware of is i like you know simon sinek as well i think he's you know the you know lots of uh um lots to offer sure yeah simon simon's great so i'll add both of those those people in our show notes richard wildman and simon sinek for people to check out if you don't know already um peter how can our audience get in touch with you and learn more about what you're working on sure if people want to help what we just want to ask me for advice i'm happy to provide i don't charge for it um it's amazing what comes from conversations uh i'm really good at you know finding out they're looking for strategic relationships and opportunities that didn't um uh weren't in your mind before so you can reach me and peter at buddyb-u-d-e-e solutions.com peter buddysolutions.com or follow me 403-617 [Music] awesome thank you for sharing that so people if you guys are interested give him a cold call he'll he'll gladly uh take your call it'll be a warm call it'll be a warm call yeah they could they can say sas district cool thank you so much peter i really appreciate it and uh akil my pleasure thank you be safe and thank you for asking me to um be your guest i very much i'm honored much appreciated cheers thank you all for watching this episode and joining sas district today don't forget to like subscribe and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the sas industry if you're a sas company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business get in touch with us at horizon capital and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals if you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all thanks again and see you on the next one