00:12

Hello friends Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast. The show where we try to help you, the IT business owner, run your business better, smarter and faster. We do that with talking with other MSPs in the channel, other techs in the channel and vendors in the channel and we're doing that today. We are continuing with our summer series for the Connectwise Pitch It program and I am joined right now by the man of summer, Sean Lardo. Sean, how are you?

00:41

I'm doing great, Marvin. Thanks for asking. All right. I'm good, I'm good. Well, let's see. This is, we're what? We're more than midway through all the contestants here. How do you think the program's been going so far? Honestly, it's going great. These guys have all stepped up. They've really pushed. From last year, there's more activity. There's more collaboration.

01:09

Granted, there's more vendors too, so maybe that's part of it. And there are about five repeats, which we're going to speak with one of the repeats today from last year. So yeah, no, I couldn't be happier. It has been a good, it's a good mixture. And because they represent so many different pieces of the industry, it makes it even better. And they've all gotten better as a pitch as well on these interviews. So thanks to groups like you, Poco and everybody else. It's improved their skill set. All righty, great.

01:36

Well, let's keep rolling here and real quick, because not everybody that's listened has heard of the program. Somebody might be listening for the first time because of this vendor. So can you real quick give us an idea of what Pitch It program is for ConnectWise? Sure. So as you mentioned, it's a ConnectWise sponsored, uh, Star Tank competition. We're looking for the best innovators that are vendors, small start vendors, of course, that are able to support the mission of ConnectWise.

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with the ecosystem by supporting the MSPs. They are, and again, it's a competition. We have 26 vendors in. Right now, they're all working towards becoming one of the three finalists, which those three finalists will be determined at the end of August, first week of September, when we do the virtual live pitch off with Matt Solomon and group on the channel program. Now they have become three finalists, that's what they're working for. Three finalists will then compete in November, on November 8th at IT Nation Connect in Orlando.

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on stage in front of the crowd. And the goal for that at that point is first to have a good presentation, of course. But most importantly, become the first place winner for $70,000 or second place, 30,000, which is great also. Or third place, yep, I don't know yet. Well, we have to- Set of steak knives. Set of steak knives, whatever's on sale. But all three finalists do get a free booth or connect. So they do win something for coming to one of three finalists. But yeah, that is what it's all about. And yeah, no, that's it.

03:03

I'm done. See? Alrighty. Well, you're not done yet. I need you to be the person that introduces our vendor today. Absolutely. He's actually, this man has become a pretty good friend of mine. He is very passionate. He had to, he is an immigrant that had to build himself up in New York even, and best place to go, I think. But without further ado, and oh, by the way, he's an MSP, just so we're clear. Okay. But let's bring on Walter Contreras

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Binox MSP. What's up, man? What's up guys? Thanks for having me. It's the introduction is always awkward to me We're going to say about each other, you know All right, well Walter nice to meet you as well we'll say goodbye to Sean. Sean We will see you later and I'll have a conversation here with Walter. Goodbye. Good luck Hi Walter with Binox MSP

04:02

That's the vendor program that you're pitching, but you're also an MSP in real life. I am. We're still actively running our MSP in Long Island, New York to be exact. It's a phenomenal time to be an MSP in my opinion. It is, it is. I'm loving it myself. Real quickly, tell us about Binox. Sure. Look, Binox, it really came out of a need for me.

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You know, I had so much scar tissue from CRM systems, lead generation systems that I said to myself, okay, enough is enough. I have got to go build something for my community. And there wasn't really anything out there when I looked around. And so, yes, there are fantastic CRMs out there, but none of them are geared toward our community. We make it work, but doesn't really work, right? We'll suffer through the pain.

05:02

I myself have been working with a couple of them for years, but what Binox really is a revenue growth platform. And we start from the lead, because we believe that the most important thing is your list of prospects, customers, etc. And what do you do with that lead is the next question, right? And so in 2023, I'm a firm believer that data is the new gold.

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And so for that reason, providing you with humanly verified data from those leads and giving you all the information you need to go after that lead, it's really key to us. Right. So, you know, you bring that lead into our CRM system, which is 100% designed to work with your PSA by directionally, right. So if you're a ConnectWise user and you get a prospect to say, yeah, Marvin, I'll talk to you.

06:00

You know, as soon as you save that opportunity, it goes into ConnectWise, it goes into Binox simultaneously. So now you have it into place because you eventually got to quote that opportunity. And most of us are using some sort of a quoting tool in our PSA. So our bi-directional synchronization with our CRM really separates us from the rest, right? And then things like marketing automation, all of its built into the platform.

06:26

All right, so I hear a lot of different things there. I want to go back and start with what you started with where you said it starts with the lead. So how does Binox help with the lead process? Yeah, so look, I was one of those guys, I see you've been doing this for a while too. And, you know, 15 years ago, I was poking into sales, Jeannie, what is now I think is they're in their fifth name change. Yeah.

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data axle and great company and all, but the reality is that the data is overused for so long. That when you look at the data, the quality is not the greatest from some of these companies, not just them or others. So what we wanted to provide is a way for you to search criteria. So let's say you specialize in medical facilities or dental or whatever, you could do those searches within our platform and we're going to give you contact information based on human verification.

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For those of you who are doing a lot of those co-manage IT deals, you can look for contact information, CTO, titles, all sorts of things. So we provide the data and then you can do with that data as you please. We even integrate with other CRMs. All right. So I'm not going to ask you how you get all that information. That's part of the secret sauce, I understand. But basically, what it sounds like is,

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we're not going to have to help you scrub or clean the list, correct? That's the main thing. We want to remove all that manual work from the searching, canvassing. We build so many tools inside of Binox. One of those, I'll give you an example, we have something called website reveal. So a lot of us do marketing, but we don't know how effective it is. We'll look at a report that says open rate. Who cares about that, right?

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What I care is about people visiting the pages that I really want them to look at. So WebReveal will tell you who landed on your website and it will give you the contact information for those people. You can retarget them or reach out to them. Don't be too creepy, by the way. Don't tell them, you know, you were on my website. But it does help you with a couple of things and even making sure your marketing is working. So things, we have a lot of tools like that in Binox to help you.

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avoid the manual labor of looking for leads. All right, I was going to ask about that a little later on. I'm glad you went to it first. We'll circle back because you mentioned that there's a lot of integration, and this is sales and marketing. So in terms of the marketing stuff, what types of things can you do and what does it tie into for us as the MSP? You know, interesting you said that. We're building partnerships as we speak.

09:18

One of those, so we have a full-blown automation system for marketing. So anything from single email blasts, the complex campaigns that were run for years even, those could be built inside of Binox, give you those templates, you do as you please. But we're building partnerships, for example, we're announcing our new partnership with MyMatrix, where you're going to be able to send leads into MyMatrix.

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and maybe even use their marketing campaigns inside of Binox. So we could do anything that any modern CRM automation tool can do and more because we're looking into, maybe we'll get into it a little bit, a little bit of AI. Interesting. So some of the things I looked at when I was, you know, trying to prep for this is you guys, you know, you mentioned getting information, contact information, emails, even social media profiles.

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uh, firmographic information. What is firmographic information? Well, it's the firm's info, right? So how many employees, what was the structure of the business? How many locations they have, you know, I could be a guy in New York looking at a company and it says headquarters in New York, but the CFO that I want to talk to might be in Minnesota, right? So if I call the New York office, I'm not going to get that person. Right. So giving you direct numbers, mobile numbers, in many instances that

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That to me gets you closer to the lead, gets you closer to having an appointment. And that's the intention of Binox. All right sounds great. And you said that this is bi-directional, so that's great. I'm going to guess that there are a lot of MSPs that are thinking, well, if I use this tool, I'm not going to need a sales department. I can do all of this in Binox. How much of that do you think is true?

11:14

But look, I think this came around a lot during the topics of generative AI with my team. And I've been speaking about AI for like about a year and a half now in terms of what it will do to the sales process. I think we early. However, I don't believe that there's a replacement of people. I believe there is an enhancement of what the human capacity is. And what I mean by that is I'll give you an example. You and I are older and, you know, we're

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we were trained differently on the sales process than let's say the new generation of salespeople. New generation of salespeople, if you bring them to an MSP and they don't have a CRM, they don't have a tool to automate things, they're going to leave, right? Because they're accustomed to having tools, to having systems to process things faster. So I believe that that's the opportunity, right? Having a system that doesn't stop you from making progress like some CRMs right now.

12:11

that it actually helps you make progress and it keeps you in front of those opportunities and especially the ones that matter the most. That's where the noise selection comes in. I used to have other CRMs where I would go in and I would go like, where do I start my day? That was a big frustration for me. Who do I call first? The guy that's $5 a month on one Office 365 license?

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or the $3,000 MRR deal that's been sitting there that I haven't called yet. Very interesting. Very interesting. Walter, I know there's a lot that I could be asking you to go in because between the lead generation, the sales CRM and the thing that you mentioned, the website reveal all seem like great tools that we all should be using as part of our business. Is there anything that we missed in all of that?

13:08

We have a browser extension and all these tools are included by the way. There's no extras. And so we have a browser extension that whether you're browsing somebody's website You can just click it and it'll tell you who works in that company So if you're somebody gives you a referral, but you don't know I mean people say call this guy, right? But you don't know that's the person that makes the decision So you go to the website click on the arch a browser extension and you see a list of

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everybody and if you go to LinkedIn, most of the times people will pay for LinkedIn, which is great. However, some people don't and when you click on their profiles, you're not going to see their information. But with our browser extension, you click on it, you see all the information. Very interesting. It helps you facilitate that. Yep. That sounds quite interesting because I'm one of those people using LinkedIn a lot lately and trying to decide, do I put out that money?

14:05

And what's it going to get me? But this sounds pretty awesome. So congratulations. And I assume this was completely born out of your experiences as an MSP and all the frustrations and stuff like that. How has it been, you know, showing this to other MSPs and how many have just been wowed by the experience? That's what we get the most. Yeah.

14:32

We get these skeptics that say wait a minute. Hold on. There's too many things You know, you know, and it could be overwhelming. That's why we always assign somebody to walk you through the process You know, you'll have a teacher with you for you know, ten sessions at a time to walk you through it set it all up but I will tell you that for me was always about taking action and Most of the systems I've seen that actually deter me from taking action and so in Binox.

15:02

If I go to LinkedIn and I see somebody, I can just click that button and start calling because we have a built-in dialer inside of the CRM. I don't have to go buy a dialer. It's in it. It's inside. If I want to, people say to me all the time, I wouldn't text anybody by the way, unless you have their permission, but I could tell you that there are deals when in an MSP deal might be five, six phone calls, six meetings, whatever.

15:29

I have a relationship with that person. I have asked permission to text them an SMS text right from Binox. Cause we have that integration. It's a phenomenal way to wake up a deal that's dead. You wouldn't believe it. Like, you know, cause people get emails, hundreds of, right. And you email about following that your, your typical, are you ready to approve that deal email will go to the lost, right. But a quick text is a different connection.

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And so for us, it's all about the connection. We want to make a connection with the prospect and to create that relationship. And I believe that that's where these tools are for. That absolutely sounds fantastic. And Walter, I certainly wish you the best. And this is a long journey, I know, for you this summer. A lot of interviews, a lot of pitches. But we look forward to seeing you in Orlando.

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Hopefully you'll be among the final three and we'll chat some more Absolutely and thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Well, thank you for taking the time and folks That's going to do it for this Walter Contreras with Binox MSP Binox msp.com you'll want to go check that out and See them in Orlando at IT nation. That's going to do it for this vendor spotlight We'll be back with a few more and until then… Holla!