Object Oriented Automation Using CRM Software feat. Pieter de Villiers

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:31
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast where we invite startup founders and digital marketers to discuss strategies and software’s to build automated marketing and sales systems at scale. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. And today, I have Peter De Villiers as a guest, who is the CEO of Mechanica. And Peter was born and raised in South Africa. He’s now living in the UK. He is an electrical engineer as your very own as well. So there’s a special place that I have for you, Peter, and you became a certified and he became a certified Infusionsoft Infusionsoft Certified Partner. In 2004. of Peter, I became one right, trailing you probably in 2015. So we probably saw the same type of curriculum. And then you started working with mecanica, as an Infusionsoft add on became the head of product. And now you are the CEO, and Peter, everyone is is here today to help us talk about custom C R m automation. All right, I know a lot of you enjoy my podcast on CRM, a lot of you CRM systems, a lot of you are still trying to figure out how to navigate that landscape. What does it look like? So I felt who better than someone who actually owns some CRM software to come and just help us navigate through this as well as let us know about your CRM system and some of the holes in the marketplace that it solves. So Peter, welcome to the podcast. How you doing?

Pieter de Villiers 2:16
I’m very well, thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Davis 2:18
Yes, yes. So I know I’ve gone through your bio, in a sense. But if you could share with us your journey into not not necessarily your journey, but your decision making into becoming a CEO of CEO, a CRM platform.

Pieter de Villiers 2:39
Yeah, so I suppose on one level, it is similar to many other decisions that I’ve made that it’s just like, let’s see what happens here. Rather than than necessarily having a very clear long term plan, or it was the same when I first moved to the UK. Someone mentioned it, I thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea. And now 25 years later, I’m still here. So, so no, so I, like you said I 2014. I, I had to shut down my electrical contracting business. And in that business, I was using Infusionsoft. But more for process management than anything else. Yes. So then, when the electrical contracting business failed, I sort of looked around is like, what am I going to do? What skill set do I have? And I certainly had enough a bit of crawling around in loft spaces and building sites and pulling in cables. And that that luck, so? So then I thought, well, actually, I know Infusionsoft quite well. And I know, two or three infusions of partners. So after talking with them, I decided, well, actually, that’s what I’m going to do. So became a Infusionsoft partner, and then use that again, primarily to help people to set up process and system management and workflow management. Yeah. And rather than necessarily just the sort of email marketing side of things. And then, through connections, I met Peter Daly Dixon, who actually came up with the original idea of mecanica, which was as an add on for Infusionsoft solving setting out to solve two particular problems. One is the Infusionsoft interface of that time, was quite complex and overwhelming and very much a case of what when you log in, you see everything. And you have to train your team on what to ignore, rather than what to use. So it’s, it allows you to or did at the time allowed you to have a customized simplified interface based on your job role. And then also to solve the one to many relationship problem, where, let’s say, for instance, you’re a vet. I might be your customer, but I have two pets. And all the history and record keeping is around the pitch. But you need to be able to communicate with me about the pets because I have a relationship to the pet. So whilst I’m your customer, I’m not the consumer of your service, or the pets are really, or real estate where I can own three properties or have to let out and there’s multiple people involved in a property, sale or rental. It’s not just here’s a contact, because most CRM systems and Infusionsoft also is contact centric, and you build a campaign, the problem is fine, the contact goes through the campaign. But what happens when that contact has to have something that needs to be managed? Then custom fields and the like, but you soon run out? It’s like, well, how many kids do we allow for how many pets do we allow for? So that and then come sort of October, November 2019, we decided to put on our big boy pants and say, well, actually mecanica doesn’t solve Infusionsoft problems. It solves business problems. And on our own two feet, because by that point, mecanica become mature enough that were initially Infusionsoft was a great, great way for us to ride. It now became a ball and chain when we wanted to implement particular feature sets and things. So we put we abstracted from Infusion Soft and launched mechanical standalone, in February 2020. And then around early March 2021, so just over a year ago, the one of the cofounders, and Pete, who had the original idea of meccanica, decided to go and pursue other things. By which point I was leading the product team, and decided to take on the whole thing and move it forward from there.

Chris Davis 7:22
Yeah, so So I love the story here because you detailed a a major I’ll say a complication in the marketing and sales space. And it’s that parent child relationship. Most CRM systems will allow you to have a parent relationship. Right? But when it comes to children, like you said, hey, look, the parent was good for the initial or end original transaction. But now all of my messaging and everything is really around the child. So if you have two pets, I really want to my communication now is around those two separately,

Pieter de Villiers 8:10
right? Because you would send me revised reminders for the for the cats vaccination, or whatever it is, but the cat and the dog would have different renewal dates for the vaccinations. And when you email me, you want to be specific that it’s the cat that needs to come for this by this date, rather than just sort of a try and worded loosely that your pet should come for a vaccination. It’s like Well, which one is it? Yeah, you can both do it. And the same with kids. I mean, nursery is a good environment of that preschool or things like that, where you have to communicate with the parent about the child.

Chris Davis 8:49
Yes, yes. And it’s not like the technology doesn’t exist. I don’t want my listeners to feel like we’re talking about something new. It doesn’t exist in a state that’s easily adaptable or adoptable, I should say, for the masses. Yeah, most if you take your average Infusionsoft user, Active Campaign, user Ontraport, whatever, just any CRM system, you take your average user, they are not going to be able to use the software that’s available that has the parent child relationship. Mainly Salesforce is the top one that comes up. Yeah, anybody that’s attempt at Salesforce, I don’t care if it’s Salesforce for small business. Get ready. Just I mean, your Listen to me, as somebody who was techie I am taking and I was on the forefront when I was at Active Campaign of developing the Salesforce integration and making sure that it worked well. Listen, man, I’m glad I didn’t have hair. I really you talking about an outdated API? Salesforce, is it the way that it pulls data in and you have to match bit to properties and objects and it, it will hurt anybody’s mind unless that’s the sole tool that you’re in. So you do have those certified Salesforce consultants, that’s all they do, go find somebody like that. Gonna use Salesforce, because you’re not going to be able to go at it alone. But why Peter? Should that type of functionality? Since is needed, I mean, you’re talking about a pet owner, how many people market to service based businesses that have this child parent relationship, and yet they don’t have this functionality which draws them elsewhere. So it sounds like this was one of the key components that you wanted to build macanta around. So do you have are is macanta more focused around objects, and then their ability to have relations to one another?

Pieter de Villiers 10:51
Yes. So on a on a slightly more technical level, everything in Macanta is driven by the data objects, and the contacts relationship to those objects. Now, on a base technical level, the contact in mecanica is also an object. But it’s the only one that’s there by default. And you can’t delete that as an object type. But you can then go and create whatever objects you want object types beyond that, and then specify well, okay, this particular object type, these are the available relationships for it. And that then drives everything because I drive the automation, all the automation in mechanics is based around the state of the data in an object and with the intelligence of the contacts who have a relationship to that. which then allows you to say, Well, okay, it’s always the object that drives the automation, it’s not the contact, yes. So the object, let’s say, for instance, we can take a simple sales example opportunity. If you go and create that as your object, you can then have relationships to it of the prospect, the sales agent, the sales manager, the sponsor, whatever it needs to be. And therefore, when the status of that opportunity changes, I can say, okay, the status has changed. So I want to create a task for the sales agent, send an update notification to the sales manager, and send a confirmation email to the prospect. Now, that all only happens with one piece of automation, because it knows about the relationships that’s involved. And it’s driven by that object. And in the same way, you can then also say, Well, okay, if on an opportunity again, next action date is today. And so let’s say for instance, if the next action date is today, and the opportunity stage is still new opportunity, create this task, send this notification, whatever it needs to be, with the intelligence of the relationship and everything throughout meccanica, the workflow boards, everything works with that relationship intelligence in it. To drive everything

Chris Davis 13:17
in, I want to say this, again, the important part is making this functionality tangible. Yeah. And for proof of concept as if you needed it. I know, you saw it as an Infusionsoft certified partner. But I’m starting to see this object language pop up in other CRM software now, right, like I’ve, I think I was inactive campaign the other day, and I saw that Calendly is now an object on the contact record. So what does this mean everybody that, that we’re seeing, um, some of you are not familiar with CRM systems and managing your context, your marketing, sales and beyond the most basic form of a relationship between a contact and let’s say, a child is an opportunity. So you may know him as deals, I think that’s the most common terminology being used amongst the industry now. So a contact depending on your software, may be able to have multiple deals. However, those deals again, depending on your software, are not able to move independently of the contact. Yeah. So when we when we first say, Okay, I have this object that’s connected to the contact, but the object needs to go through things. At the date of closing of the deal. I want to update some fields or I want to tag the deal or do something, the contact domain contact will still have access to such data. But the contact doesn’t need to go through that. Yeah, the object itself does. So when we understand that now we take it one step further. Now we’re in mechanical land, you take it one step further. To say, my object doesn’t have to just be a deal. It can be any relation to the original contact. Yeah. And now my, what it does is it really opens up the the door for a more customized experience. Because I can send objects to automations. And the content through automations, independently but still connected.

Pieter de Villiers 15:26
Yeah. And it is. And for us, it’s that customizability that’s the key. So my counter is designed, and everything in it is designed to be like a box of Lego. And it’s well, okay, what do you want to build? Is it a square house with a flat roof? Are you building Starship Enterprise? It’s, it’s entirely up to you. But we just so so our process always, when when, when a customer comes to us and said, Oh, can we can we add this feature? Can we make it do X, we always take a step back and say, Okay, what Lego blocks do we need to facilitate so that this customer can do X, but everyone else can do their version of that, and enhance it for them rather than hard code objects or hard code automations or, or anything like that. It’s important for us that it’s, it’s configurable. And that’s why for us, it’s, but the CRM adapts and grows as your business does, rather than you fitting your business into the software that someone else has designed. Because that happens a lot. There’s the part of CRM and software where the object relationship is used a lot tends to be in industry specific solutions, because they need that. So let’s say legal claims management. But the problem there again, is, you then have to run your business based on how someone else ran their business and designed the software. And then customizable, configurable, there’s limitations. Whereas for us, it’s very much molded the CRM around your business. And then as your business grows, changes that needs whatever it is, you just swap out blocks, add bits on, move bits away, whatever you need to do, rather than sort of trying to say, okay, what are we going to need in two years time? And let’s find a tool that can do it now. I pay for it all along. We don’t use it, and then we’ll use it later. Yes. Let’s just start start small if you need to start complex, depending on where your business is, yeah, into

Chris Davis 17:41
help people understand this. I love this topic. By the way, Pieter, this is a very hot topic, very hot topic with a lot of the SaaS founders that I’m working with, trying to identify the architecture of their contact relationship management systems and how you go about it. And I want to give this example. And I’ll continue to give these because I want, I want the listeners to really hone in on it. One example is when you have multiple meetings required to close a deal, right? So those meetings now show as events. Yeah, and each one of those events can go through automations send reminders, get fields populated and updated. But the good thing is, when you go to that contact, you see every event that person has attended. Now, why is this important? Everybody who hasn’t used the CRM, because before then the event, you’d have to, the closest you could come to is the event would be a custom field name. Yeah. Right. And then you’d have to put another custom field with that event date. And now if you have multiple events, you’ve got multiple custom fields, multiple dates. Now this thing is starting to get unmanageable.

Pieter de Villiers 18:58
You’re then put in a situation was like, Well, okay, well, how many meetings do I need to allow for four works perfectly? Until someone needs a fifth? And then you have to say, Okay, which of my four past events are my overriding? Yep. Or now managing manually? Because I don’t have the custom fields?

Chris Davis 19:17
Absolutely. Oh, my goodness. So I see, of course, in the industry, I’m solving these things. So I get it. But I can’t help but think there are so many applications for this. Beyond right, just the the basics of opportunities. It also makes me think a nonprofit, because the nonprofit sector probably has the most parent child relationship environments as possible. Just real quick, do you find that nonprofits are finding your software for those reasons? And do you offer you know, like, nonprofit pricing and all of that for that?

Pieter de Villiers 19:57
Yeah, so we we, as of yet we do don’t really have a big cohort of nonprofits. And price pricing is such a strange thing. That it’s if someone is in that position, it’s really just a case of talking to us. I mean, we, we we took as a company, we signed up to the 1% pledge. So 1% of all revenue goes to goes to charities that we’ve chosen. Which which is, which is, which is a big driver and motivator for us. Because it’s like, well, as our user revenue grows, directly proportional grows, the amount of impact we can have.

Chris Davis 20:39
Yeah, I actually saw that Peter on the website, and the is doing good. Yeah. And I clicked on it. And you can learn more about the initiative. But But go ahead.

Pieter de Villiers 20:47
Yeah, so so that’s what we’re doing there. But we do find so it’s, it’s so it’s so very the application. We’ve got charity here in the UK, who, it’s quite strange that we need a charity for it, but they provide outdoor play sessions for kids. And, for me, growing up, we just played, we didn’t need someone to arrange it for us. But but they have, for instance, they their system is set up that obviously you have the contacts with all the parents, you have the sessions with the kids who attend the sessions. And then you have the child profiles where the parent has a relationship, because the parent has no relationship to a session, because they don’t attend, only the kids have a relationship to that. But then the parent and the child have a relationship to the profile. And that works well. And again, with a child and parent, we do also in the system allows them to link the parents and the children directly. So regardless of any other objects that’s going on direct contact, a contact relationship. So you can see this, if I’m in the system I’ve got, you can see my two daughters, if you look at the daughter, you can see who the parents are and who the sister is, and that sort of three dimensional links, then you get in here work works quite well for those kind of clubs and, and groups. But it’s quite interesting, I always find that, if I always describe it, it’s a bit like reading the matrix. Because and Dan Kennedy always said this, about marketing. And I think that there’s a lot of it that comes into the structure of business as well is that your business is no different. And your business is not too complex. And if you just if you can just step away, so I’ve now described, so far, we’ve looked at opportunities or deals, where we have the sales agent, and whoever we have, we’ve got the sessions where we have the kids and the facilitators, but then that’s actually no different other than labeled to a legal claim with the client and the solicitor and the file handler connected, or an electrical contracting job with the client, the engineer on site, the apprentice, they’re all structurally the same thing. We just label them differently within our own businesses. And that’s, that’s one of the things that that that we at least feel is great about mechanics is the fact that you can have all that functionality and you don’t have to put up with well. So for instance, in in most CRMs, it would be called a li a deal or an opportunity. Yes, you sort of think well, actually, no, it’s not an opportunity. But I’m I’m forced to use that functionality and that terminology and the labels and everything that’s in there, and try and map it to my business. Whereas for us, it’s much more a case of well just map the software onto your business rather than the other way around.

Chris Davis 23:56
Yeah, and I have to say, one of my biggest gripes with any any type of CRM software is the fact that they allow you to capture information, but don’t allow you to easily see it. Right? It’s you can cap you can create a form and capture the information and it’s on the contact record. But if I want to see information across many contacts, yeah, right. Or if I want to quickly just see different variations of how my data looks. It gets really hard. So when we start to take an object oriented approach to this now, when I do go to a contact record, I do have a more comprehensive view of what’s going on easily right, Peter? Because now you know, from Infusionsoft and other platforms fall into this to left to other means its tags and custom fields, and most people don’t have a consistent naming company. Imagine, yeah, most people are not very structured in their creation of tags and custom fields. And before you know it, they’re looking at the contact record cross-eyed trying to determine what is it that I’m looking at here? What took place, the tags aren’t time stamped, the custom fields don’t aren’t grouped it in,

Pieter de Villiers 25:21
or they’ve been overwritten.

Chris Davis 25:25
So, so Peter, we also insert, not just ability to easily view what’s taking place, but maintain that data. If I have one field for most recent webinar, right, I lose that data. The minute somebody registered for another one,

Pieter de Villiers 25:45
yep. Rather than creating another instance of the webinar registration object, which then tells me which one you registered for, I can add the source. If I collect that information, whatever it is, and you can then see, okay, this person has attended, they’ve registered for four webinars only attended two of them. And, and how, however, you you, you want to run that?

Chris Davis 26:09
Yes. Which is another great example, I want to jump in here. You gotta be going, Peter, I’m trying to I want my I want the listeners to envision what Peter just said, you’re running webinars, you run multiple webinars. And now that these events are our as objects on the contact record. What if everyone just dream with me, instead of having to tag every attendee having to do all this, I can search for my context, by event name, date, and status. Peter, is that not everything that you usually have to manually program into your CRM system, you have to create the non attendee tags, because the status doesn’t sync over. If it were an object, and the object was webinar, I want to see all my contacts who have this object, and then this status of that object, it seems to me so straightforward. And it seems like the logical next step for the CRM industry yet nobody is really taking this step. I see you doing it in mecanica. Why Why? Why are you not following the norm? And what is the the risk here? trailblazing This is

Pieter de Villiers 27:28
why we do it is because there’s sort of two things at play. The one is, we hit our own head against the brick wall of having to deal with contacts and tags enough times when as infusions of partners, when dealing with our customers, that it was just the whole time well, there has to be a better solution. And then solution created. The other side of it is also that every single feature that we can to has today, is there. Because a user asked us can we make it do this? We didn’t sit in a dark room and think, Okay, if we build a CRM, this is what it should have. Yeah. And it is just so it was quite interesting. In February 2021, when Macintosh as a standalone platform was a year old, I sent an email to the team of and to our customers of everything that mecanica launched without in February 2020. Yeah. And I think it was less like 86 features that he didn’t have when we launched. And those are all features that have subsequently been requested. Because we can’t come up with all the good ideas. It’s our job to take the good ideas and translate them into the DNA of mecanica. Yeah. But it’s our users and our customers who come up and say, well, actually, it would be really good if this. And this is the use case. Why? And it’s quite it’s quite interesting. Macanta, we took quite a strong decision at the start. There are no tags, the concept of tags doesn’t exist. Wow.

Chris Davis 29:13
Peter. Oh, no. Hold on that. I think I’ve experienced like a form of trauma when you said that. No tags. No, you know, so. Alright, I’m back. Continue why why? This is very so.

Pieter de Villiers 29:30
So the reason for it is partly the naming convention issue. And the fact that people just make up tags on the fly and six months down the line, no one knows what they mean, what they trigger where they fit in, or anything. It just becomes unmanageable really quickly. And the other issue is, so I can tag you that you registered for a webinar. But when you register for a second webinar, Unless I create a new set of tags for every webinar I run, I can’t tag the fact that you’ve attended a second webinar. So and therefore, there’s always this push and pull with tags. And in the Infusionsoft sort of ecosystem there, they became known, at least to the people I speak to, you either have data tags, or you have trigger tags, data tags is the thing, are you registered for a webinar, it doesn’t do anything, it just records the fact that you registered for a webinar, because we’ve run out of custom fields, and trigger tags is to start or stop a campaign sequence to move you around in the campaign. Now, because Macanta has automation doesn’t rely on the contact having a tag or anything. And because we don’t have an arbitrary number of field limits per contact, or per object or anything, there’s no reason to have data tags, because you just, if you want to store the information, you build the data object, and then you store as many of those as you like, and your data object can have as many fields that you need it to have. So there’s no restriction there on the because it’s also with that information, you can export and you can do something with or more whatever. And then the automation. So we don’t have a campaign builder, like Active Campaign or Infusionsoft, where it’s a flow in the sequences and everything. So for us, it’s all to do with the state of the data. And does the data meet for us? We call them trigger conditions, like does it meet the condition paired with an action? So let’s say for example, I want to send I want to send a, an email to a prospect and create a task for the sales agent, if a new opportunity or lead is three days old. And the opportunity stage is still new opportunity. Yep. Okay. Now normally, what you would do in that case, is I drop into a sequence, wait for three days. And if a tag is applied, I get called out if it’s not applied, it runs. Now there’s a there’s a second compounding issue, what if there are two opportunities with me connected to them, I can’t be in an AI as a contact can’t be in the sequence twice. At the same time, so what our automation does is you just if you can describe it to someone sitting next to you, you can tell them a counter how to do it. So in the example, we just say, if the opportunity stage is new lead, and the date created, is minus three days. Take this action, there’s no sitting behind a timer, we just check, is there a need? Are there opportunities that meet those criteria? Take this action, because what that means is if on day two, you change the stage from new to active, it doesn’t meet the criteria anymore. So just it’ll just be ignored for that particular automation. And that’s how everything works. It’s just If This Then That. So if you can say to someone, if nothing’s happened to that opportunity for three days, send an email to the prospect and create a task for the sales manager. Or you can tell them a counter to do exactly the same thing. Yep. And that’s then mechanical and just says constantly, all the new opportunities that meet that criteria. Take this action. Yeah. And yeah.

Chris Davis 33:48
I love it. It reminds me It reminds me of database structures. Yeah. Because a lot of databases operate like that, where you can define the criteria. And then once it does, it goes into a certain portion of that database and move over. How do you how do you all give visual insight into things that are upcoming in mechanics. So I can see when you’re saying that, I can see a case where perhaps tomorrow deal meets that condition. And maybe two days later, something else has come in? Do you guys kind of have that forecast. And I remember when I was using Infusionsoft and you will go to the contact record, it will show you what campaigns they were in, and it was show you what, what actions they’ve executed, and then which ones were coming up and upcoming. So you can rectify anything or you know, do some checking.

Pieter de Villiers 34:41
Yeah. So because of how automation run, nothing is really upcoming in that sense. Because in in the Infusionsoft example, you would see there’s a three day time and then there’s an email, then there’s a two day time and then there’s an email. But we don’t have that because we don’t know whether the data is going to meet the criteria in three days. All right, so you’re not set in that sequence. But going back to your database example, on a strict technical level, when you create automations, in mecanica, these trigger conditions, you’re essentially creating SQL queries, yes, that we then just run in the backend. And you do the same for widgets on the dashboard. So you can say, Okay, our automation is, if the stage is new lead, and the lead creator date is minus three days, so three days ago, that’s when the automations going to run. But I want to try and catch those earlier. So I can build a widget for the dashboard that says, show me all the deals or leads where the stages new lead, and the date created, is minus two days. So it’ll show on my dashboard a day before the automation happens. So I can decide to get in touch and try and avoid that automated message. See, yes, yes, yes. Because the way we look at the dashboard widget is, depending on what they are, your job is either to get the number down to zero, or to get the number as high as possible. So deals closed, I want to get that number as high as possible. New deals, I want to get that to zero every day, because that means I’ve engaged with them, and they now are an active deal. I don’t want that number to sit there and drive up. So that’s really and again, you build those queries for the dashboard, you just go in and say, Okay, for this widget, I want to see leads that meet this criteria with all your and or rules that you need. And then you can also then from a business owner perspective, you can then decide, okay, when someone logs in, do they see all the deals? Or they do they only see their own? Yeah, so the ones that me as a logged in user has a relationship with, but the sales manager can log in and see everyone’s deals.

Chris Davis 37:03
Yeah, that makes sense. Tell me this, as you’re, as you’re describing it, I can literally visualize it. Right? And I’m seeing being able to come in and say, Okay, I’ve got this, this this upcoming. When it comes to the the creation of these objects, the creation of these events? How do you guys handle that? Am I able to integrate webinar software now? And it will create those events? For me? Are you guys doing something different through API?

Pieter de Villiers 37:38
Yes, so the, the data object types of let’s say, webinar, you just go in and create, and you just go and say, I want this field and this field and this field, and you get to design the interface. So four columns, sections, subsections, depending on how complex your information is. And then you can use either we’ve got an open API, or you can use up here, or integratively, or Integra mat, I think it’s important make it is you can use any of those platforms to so we’ve actually got SAP here and integratively integrations, we’re busy building a public one. So you can then for instance, pull webinar registrations in. So one, one example that we put in place for a client is they create the event in mecanica, with a presenter and an event admin, and then that does a couple of things. It creates the event in event espresso via an API. And if the event type is webinar, it also creates the event in Go To Webinar and brings the registration link into the counter. So my counter then sends out the email saying, Hey, here’s a new event register for this webinar. If anyone then clicks on the link and registers in Go To Webinar, they get connected with an attendee relationship to the object in meccanica. Got it? And then and then if they don’t show up, then you can just update their status if it’s a live event, just go Yeah, attended, attended, didn’t attend didn’t attend. And that can drive other automation around those databases.

Chris Davis 39:20
Interesting. And when I create that event, or that object, I should say I can, I guess there’s probably a selection where I can say create multiple events instead of updating the same one.

Pieter de Villiers 39:32
Yes, yeah. Yeah. So So you, you can you can decide so for instance, it’s just whether you have an ID or not, so you can update it if you have the event ID and then everyone gets connected to the same but let’s say for instance, that that works for a webinar. One too many. But let’s say for instance, you want to run your podcast where bookings guest bookings, for that every time someone booked to be on your show you Want to create a new one? Yes. Because everyone’s you’re not having 20 people on the same pocket.

Chris Davis 40:05
And technically, the idea is different. So the event or object would be different, just like a contact when the email is different, a different object is created. Oh, man, that is, I tell you. So everybody, I intentionally stay ignorant to a lot of the software when founders Come on, because I want to be wowed and excited just like you are as you’re listening. I have to say, Man, I really do think that this is the way that all CRM software should go. It’s got to be object oriented. I dare dare I call it object oriented automation.

Pieter de Villiers 40:47
That’s exactly what it is.

Chris Davis 40:48
I know my software developers are like, wait a minute, we got to get you do that. But I think this is it. I think, Peter, we’re officially officially putting object oriented automation on the map. And I believe that it needs to be something adopted, because it just makes more sense, the more comfortable and the more activity that’s taking place online. It has to be captured this way. Yeah. Tags, custom fields. They’re good. But in the form of tracking events, they’re outdated. Yeah, they really are. So I think that there’s a decision to be made. And again, I see some software trying software companies trying to make that decision. It’s refreshing to see that you’re here. Peter, this was great. Man, I thank you for coming on. I was hoping this would be good. And you You exceeded my initial hopes. If anybody listening wants to find out more about macanta and they’re like, look, wait a minute, this is what I’ve been looking for. I need this. I need this today. Where should they go? Is there a webinar a free trial? Where do you want them to go? Yes,

Pieter de Villiers 42:01
you can. Couple of things, you can go to the website macantacrm.com. And get in touch with us there. We’ve also you can join the Facebook group, I do a lot of what we post in there, mostly our live builds. So we do we do offer a service where we do the configuration for people. And I do those as a live stream to the Facebook group, because then you really get to see it from inception. How we get from well, this is the business to this is the structure in the system. And this is what he does and how it works. So just there, get in touch with us that way or find me on LinkedIn, and quite easy to find. And just get in touch. Happy to out happy to have a chat.

Chris Davis 42:47
All right, great. Well, we’ve got macantacrm.com. That’ll be in the show notes for everybody to connect. Peter, again, thank you for coming on to the podcast, giving us such wisdom, guidance, knowledge. And thank you for the software man. Thank you for the software trail. So

Pieter de Villiers 43:08
that’s great. We’ll keep pushing.

Chris Davis 43:09
Yes, please do. Please do. And I’ll see you online. Cool. Thanks, Chris. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:31
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast where we invite startup founders and digital marketers to discuss strategies and software’s to build automated marketing and sales systems at scale. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. And today, I have Peter De Villiers as a guest, who is the CEO of Mechanica. And Peter was born and raised in South Africa. He’s now living in the UK. He is an electrical engineer as your very own as well. So there’s a special place that I have for you, Peter, and you became a certified and he became a certified Infusionsoft Infusionsoft Certified Partner. In 2004. of Peter, I became one right, trailing you probably in 2015. So we probably saw the same type of curriculum. And then you started working with mecanica, as an Infusionsoft add on became the head of product. And now you are the CEO, and Peter, everyone is is here today to help us talk about custom C R m automation. All right, I know a lot of you enjoy my podcast on CRM, a lot of you CRM systems, a lot of you are still trying to figure out how to navigate that landscape. What does it look like? So I felt who better than someone who actually owns some CRM software to come and just help us navigate through this as well as let us know about your CRM system and some of the holes in the marketplace that it solves. So Peter, welcome to the podcast. How you doing?

Pieter de Villiers 2:16
I’m very well, thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Davis 2:18
Yes, yes. So I know I’ve gone through your bio, in a sense. But if you could share with us your journey into not not necessarily your journey, but your decision making into becoming a CEO of CEO, a CRM platform.

Pieter de Villiers 2:39
Yeah, so I suppose on one level, it is similar to many other decisions that I’ve made that it’s just like, let’s see what happens here. Rather than than necessarily having a very clear long term plan, or it was the same when I first moved to the UK. Someone mentioned it, I thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea. And now 25 years later, I’m still here. So, so no, so I, like you said I 2014. I, I had to shut down my electrical contracting business. And in that business, I was using Infusionsoft. But more for process management than anything else. Yes. So then, when the electrical contracting business failed, I sort of looked around is like, what am I going to do? What skill set do I have? And I certainly had enough a bit of crawling around in loft spaces and building sites and pulling in cables. And that that luck, so? So then I thought, well, actually, I know Infusionsoft quite well. And I know, two or three infusions of partners. So after talking with them, I decided, well, actually, that’s what I’m going to do. So became a Infusionsoft partner, and then use that again, primarily to help people to set up process and system management and workflow management. Yeah. And rather than necessarily just the sort of email marketing side of things. And then, through connections, I met Peter Daly Dixon, who actually came up with the original idea of mecanica, which was as an add on for Infusionsoft solving setting out to solve two particular problems. One is the Infusionsoft interface of that time, was quite complex and overwhelming and very much a case of what when you log in, you see everything. And you have to train your team on what to ignore, rather than what to use. So it’s, it allows you to or did at the time allowed you to have a customized simplified interface based on your job role. And then also to solve the one to many relationship problem, where, let’s say, for instance, you’re a vet. I might be your customer, but I have two pets. And all the history and record keeping is around the pitch. But you need to be able to communicate with me about the pets because I have a relationship to the pet. So whilst I’m your customer, I’m not the consumer of your service, or the pets are really, or real estate where I can own three properties or have to let out and there’s multiple people involved in a property, sale or rental. It’s not just here’s a contact, because most CRM systems and Infusionsoft also is contact centric, and you build a campaign, the problem is fine, the contact goes through the campaign. But what happens when that contact has to have something that needs to be managed? Then custom fields and the like, but you soon run out? It’s like, well, how many kids do we allow for how many pets do we allow for? So that and then come sort of October, November 2019, we decided to put on our big boy pants and say, well, actually mecanica doesn’t solve Infusionsoft problems. It solves business problems. And on our own two feet, because by that point, mecanica become mature enough that were initially Infusionsoft was a great, great way for us to ride. It now became a ball and chain when we wanted to implement particular feature sets and things. So we put we abstracted from Infusion Soft and launched mechanical standalone, in February 2020. And then around early March 2021, so just over a year ago, the one of the cofounders, and Pete, who had the original idea of meccanica, decided to go and pursue other things. By which point I was leading the product team, and decided to take on the whole thing and move it forward from there.

Chris Davis 7:22
Yeah, so So I love the story here because you detailed a a major I’ll say a complication in the marketing and sales space. And it’s that parent child relationship. Most CRM systems will allow you to have a parent relationship. Right? But when it comes to children, like you said, hey, look, the parent was good for the initial or end original transaction. But now all of my messaging and everything is really around the child. So if you have two pets, I really want to my communication now is around those two separately,

Pieter de Villiers 8:10
right? Because you would send me revised reminders for the for the cats vaccination, or whatever it is, but the cat and the dog would have different renewal dates for the vaccinations. And when you email me, you want to be specific that it’s the cat that needs to come for this by this date, rather than just sort of a try and worded loosely that your pet should come for a vaccination. It’s like Well, which one is it? Yeah, you can both do it. And the same with kids. I mean, nursery is a good environment of that preschool or things like that, where you have to communicate with the parent about the child.

Chris Davis 8:49
Yes, yes. And it’s not like the technology doesn’t exist. I don’t want my listeners to feel like we’re talking about something new. It doesn’t exist in a state that’s easily adaptable or adoptable, I should say, for the masses. Yeah, most if you take your average Infusionsoft user, Active Campaign, user Ontraport, whatever, just any CRM system, you take your average user, they are not going to be able to use the software that’s available that has the parent child relationship. Mainly Salesforce is the top one that comes up. Yeah, anybody that’s attempt at Salesforce, I don’t care if it’s Salesforce for small business. Get ready. Just I mean, your Listen to me, as somebody who was techie I am taking and I was on the forefront when I was at Active Campaign of developing the Salesforce integration and making sure that it worked well. Listen, man, I’m glad I didn’t have hair. I really you talking about an outdated API? Salesforce, is it the way that it pulls data in and you have to match bit to properties and objects and it, it will hurt anybody’s mind unless that’s the sole tool that you’re in. So you do have those certified Salesforce consultants, that’s all they do, go find somebody like that. Gonna use Salesforce, because you’re not going to be able to go at it alone. But why Peter? Should that type of functionality? Since is needed, I mean, you’re talking about a pet owner, how many people market to service based businesses that have this child parent relationship, and yet they don’t have this functionality which draws them elsewhere. So it sounds like this was one of the key components that you wanted to build macanta around. So do you have are is macanta more focused around objects, and then their ability to have relations to one another?

Pieter de Villiers 10:51
Yes. So on a on a slightly more technical level, everything in Macanta is driven by the data objects, and the contacts relationship to those objects. Now, on a base technical level, the contact in mecanica is also an object. But it’s the only one that’s there by default. And you can’t delete that as an object type. But you can then go and create whatever objects you want object types beyond that, and then specify well, okay, this particular object type, these are the available relationships for it. And that then drives everything because I drive the automation, all the automation in mechanics is based around the state of the data in an object and with the intelligence of the contacts who have a relationship to that. which then allows you to say, Well, okay, it’s always the object that drives the automation, it’s not the contact, yes. So the object, let’s say, for instance, we can take a simple sales example opportunity. If you go and create that as your object, you can then have relationships to it of the prospect, the sales agent, the sales manager, the sponsor, whatever it needs to be. And therefore, when the status of that opportunity changes, I can say, okay, the status has changed. So I want to create a task for the sales agent, send an update notification to the sales manager, and send a confirmation email to the prospect. Now, that all only happens with one piece of automation, because it knows about the relationships that’s involved. And it’s driven by that object. And in the same way, you can then also say, Well, okay, if on an opportunity again, next action date is today. And so let’s say for instance, if the next action date is today, and the opportunity stage is still new opportunity, create this task, send this notification, whatever it needs to be, with the intelligence of the relationship and everything throughout meccanica, the workflow boards, everything works with that relationship intelligence in it. To drive everything

Chris Davis 13:17
in, I want to say this, again, the important part is making this functionality tangible. Yeah. And for proof of concept as if you needed it. I know, you saw it as an Infusionsoft certified partner. But I’m starting to see this object language pop up in other CRM software now, right, like I’ve, I think I was inactive campaign the other day, and I saw that Calendly is now an object on the contact record. So what does this mean everybody that, that we’re seeing, um, some of you are not familiar with CRM systems and managing your context, your marketing, sales and beyond the most basic form of a relationship between a contact and let’s say, a child is an opportunity. So you may know him as deals, I think that’s the most common terminology being used amongst the industry now. So a contact depending on your software, may be able to have multiple deals. However, those deals again, depending on your software, are not able to move independently of the contact. Yeah. So when we when we first say, Okay, I have this object that’s connected to the contact, but the object needs to go through things. At the date of closing of the deal. I want to update some fields or I want to tag the deal or do something, the contact domain contact will still have access to such data. But the contact doesn’t need to go through that. Yeah, the object itself does. So when we understand that now we take it one step further. Now we’re in mechanical land, you take it one step further. To say, my object doesn’t have to just be a deal. It can be any relation to the original contact. Yeah. And now my, what it does is it really opens up the the door for a more customized experience. Because I can send objects to automations. And the content through automations, independently but still connected.

Pieter de Villiers 15:26
Yeah. And it is. And for us, it’s that customizability that’s the key. So my counter is designed, and everything in it is designed to be like a box of Lego. And it’s well, okay, what do you want to build? Is it a square house with a flat roof? Are you building Starship Enterprise? It’s, it’s entirely up to you. But we just so so our process always, when when, when a customer comes to us and said, Oh, can we can we add this feature? Can we make it do X, we always take a step back and say, Okay, what Lego blocks do we need to facilitate so that this customer can do X, but everyone else can do their version of that, and enhance it for them rather than hard code objects or hard code automations or, or anything like that. It’s important for us that it’s, it’s configurable. And that’s why for us, it’s, but the CRM adapts and grows as your business does, rather than you fitting your business into the software that someone else has designed. Because that happens a lot. There’s the part of CRM and software where the object relationship is used a lot tends to be in industry specific solutions, because they need that. So let’s say legal claims management. But the problem there again, is, you then have to run your business based on how someone else ran their business and designed the software. And then customizable, configurable, there’s limitations. Whereas for us, it’s very much molded the CRM around your business. And then as your business grows, changes that needs whatever it is, you just swap out blocks, add bits on, move bits away, whatever you need to do, rather than sort of trying to say, okay, what are we going to need in two years time? And let’s find a tool that can do it now. I pay for it all along. We don’t use it, and then we’ll use it later. Yes. Let’s just start start small if you need to start complex, depending on where your business is, yeah, into

Chris Davis 17:41
help people understand this. I love this topic. By the way, Pieter, this is a very hot topic, very hot topic with a lot of the SaaS founders that I’m working with, trying to identify the architecture of their contact relationship management systems and how you go about it. And I want to give this example. And I’ll continue to give these because I want, I want the listeners to really hone in on it. One example is when you have multiple meetings required to close a deal, right? So those meetings now show as events. Yeah, and each one of those events can go through automations send reminders, get fields populated and updated. But the good thing is, when you go to that contact, you see every event that person has attended. Now, why is this important? Everybody who hasn’t used the CRM, because before then the event, you’d have to, the closest you could come to is the event would be a custom field name. Yeah. Right. And then you’d have to put another custom field with that event date. And now if you have multiple events, you’ve got multiple custom fields, multiple dates. Now this thing is starting to get unmanageable.

Pieter de Villiers 18:58
You’re then put in a situation was like, Well, okay, well, how many meetings do I need to allow for four works perfectly? Until someone needs a fifth? And then you have to say, Okay, which of my four past events are my overriding? Yep. Or now managing manually? Because I don’t have the custom fields?

Chris Davis 19:17
Absolutely. Oh, my goodness. So I see, of course, in the industry, I’m solving these things. So I get it. But I can’t help but think there are so many applications for this. Beyond right, just the the basics of opportunities. It also makes me think a nonprofit, because the nonprofit sector probably has the most parent child relationship environments as possible. Just real quick, do you find that nonprofits are finding your software for those reasons? And do you offer you know, like, nonprofit pricing and all of that for that?

Pieter de Villiers 19:57
Yeah, so we we, as of yet we do don’t really have a big cohort of nonprofits. And price pricing is such a strange thing. That it’s if someone is in that position, it’s really just a case of talking to us. I mean, we, we we took as a company, we signed up to the 1% pledge. So 1% of all revenue goes to goes to charities that we’ve chosen. Which which is, which is, which is a big driver and motivator for us. Because it’s like, well, as our user revenue grows, directly proportional grows, the amount of impact we can have.

Chris Davis 20:39
Yeah, I actually saw that Peter on the website, and the is doing good. Yeah. And I clicked on it. And you can learn more about the initiative. But But go ahead.

Pieter de Villiers 20:47
Yeah, so so that’s what we’re doing there. But we do find so it’s, it’s so it’s so very the application. We’ve got charity here in the UK, who, it’s quite strange that we need a charity for it, but they provide outdoor play sessions for kids. And, for me, growing up, we just played, we didn’t need someone to arrange it for us. But but they have, for instance, they their system is set up that obviously you have the contacts with all the parents, you have the sessions with the kids who attend the sessions. And then you have the child profiles where the parent has a relationship, because the parent has no relationship to a session, because they don’t attend, only the kids have a relationship to that. But then the parent and the child have a relationship to the profile. And that works well. And again, with a child and parent, we do also in the system allows them to link the parents and the children directly. So regardless of any other objects that’s going on direct contact, a contact relationship. So you can see this, if I’m in the system I’ve got, you can see my two daughters, if you look at the daughter, you can see who the parents are and who the sister is, and that sort of three dimensional links, then you get in here work works quite well for those kind of clubs and, and groups. But it’s quite interesting, I always find that, if I always describe it, it’s a bit like reading the matrix. Because and Dan Kennedy always said this, about marketing. And I think that there’s a lot of it that comes into the structure of business as well is that your business is no different. And your business is not too complex. And if you just if you can just step away, so I’ve now described, so far, we’ve looked at opportunities or deals, where we have the sales agent, and whoever we have, we’ve got the sessions where we have the kids and the facilitators, but then that’s actually no different other than labeled to a legal claim with the client and the solicitor and the file handler connected, or an electrical contracting job with the client, the engineer on site, the apprentice, they’re all structurally the same thing. We just label them differently within our own businesses. And that’s, that’s one of the things that that that we at least feel is great about mechanics is the fact that you can have all that functionality and you don’t have to put up with well. So for instance, in in most CRMs, it would be called a li a deal or an opportunity. Yes, you sort of think well, actually, no, it’s not an opportunity. But I’m I’m forced to use that functionality and that terminology and the labels and everything that’s in there, and try and map it to my business. Whereas for us, it’s much more a case of well just map the software onto your business rather than the other way around.

Chris Davis 23:56
Yeah, and I have to say, one of my biggest gripes with any any type of CRM software is the fact that they allow you to capture information, but don’t allow you to easily see it. Right? It’s you can cap you can create a form and capture the information and it’s on the contact record. But if I want to see information across many contacts, yeah, right. Or if I want to quickly just see different variations of how my data looks. It gets really hard. So when we start to take an object oriented approach to this now, when I do go to a contact record, I do have a more comprehensive view of what’s going on easily right, Peter? Because now you know, from Infusionsoft and other platforms fall into this to left to other means its tags and custom fields, and most people don’t have a consistent naming company. Imagine, yeah, most people are not very structured in their creation of tags and custom fields. And before you know it, they’re looking at the contact record cross-eyed trying to determine what is it that I’m looking at here? What took place, the tags aren’t time stamped, the custom fields don’t aren’t grouped it in,

Pieter de Villiers 25:21
or they’ve been overwritten.

Chris Davis 25:25
So, so Peter, we also insert, not just ability to easily view what’s taking place, but maintain that data. If I have one field for most recent webinar, right, I lose that data. The minute somebody registered for another one,

Pieter de Villiers 25:45
yep. Rather than creating another instance of the webinar registration object, which then tells me which one you registered for, I can add the source. If I collect that information, whatever it is, and you can then see, okay, this person has attended, they’ve registered for four webinars only attended two of them. And, and how, however, you you, you want to run that?

Chris Davis 26:09
Yes. Which is another great example, I want to jump in here. You gotta be going, Peter, I’m trying to I want my I want the listeners to envision what Peter just said, you’re running webinars, you run multiple webinars. And now that these events are our as objects on the contact record. What if everyone just dream with me, instead of having to tag every attendee having to do all this, I can search for my context, by event name, date, and status. Peter, is that not everything that you usually have to manually program into your CRM system, you have to create the non attendee tags, because the status doesn’t sync over. If it were an object, and the object was webinar, I want to see all my contacts who have this object, and then this status of that object, it seems to me so straightforward. And it seems like the logical next step for the CRM industry yet nobody is really taking this step. I see you doing it in mecanica. Why Why? Why are you not following the norm? And what is the the risk here? trailblazing This is

Pieter de Villiers 27:28
why we do it is because there’s sort of two things at play. The one is, we hit our own head against the brick wall of having to deal with contacts and tags enough times when as infusions of partners, when dealing with our customers, that it was just the whole time well, there has to be a better solution. And then solution created. The other side of it is also that every single feature that we can to has today, is there. Because a user asked us can we make it do this? We didn’t sit in a dark room and think, Okay, if we build a CRM, this is what it should have. Yeah. And it is just so it was quite interesting. In February 2021, when Macintosh as a standalone platform was a year old, I sent an email to the team of and to our customers of everything that mecanica launched without in February 2020. Yeah. And I think it was less like 86 features that he didn’t have when we launched. And those are all features that have subsequently been requested. Because we can’t come up with all the good ideas. It’s our job to take the good ideas and translate them into the DNA of mecanica. Yeah. But it’s our users and our customers who come up and say, well, actually, it would be really good if this. And this is the use case. Why? And it’s quite it’s quite interesting. Macanta, we took quite a strong decision at the start. There are no tags, the concept of tags doesn’t exist. Wow.

Chris Davis 29:13
Peter. Oh, no. Hold on that. I think I’ve experienced like a form of trauma when you said that. No tags. No, you know, so. Alright, I’m back. Continue why why? This is very so.

Pieter de Villiers 29:30
So the reason for it is partly the naming convention issue. And the fact that people just make up tags on the fly and six months down the line, no one knows what they mean, what they trigger where they fit in, or anything. It just becomes unmanageable really quickly. And the other issue is, so I can tag you that you registered for a webinar. But when you register for a second webinar, Unless I create a new set of tags for every webinar I run, I can’t tag the fact that you’ve attended a second webinar. So and therefore, there’s always this push and pull with tags. And in the Infusionsoft sort of ecosystem there, they became known, at least to the people I speak to, you either have data tags, or you have trigger tags, data tags is the thing, are you registered for a webinar, it doesn’t do anything, it just records the fact that you registered for a webinar, because we’ve run out of custom fields, and trigger tags is to start or stop a campaign sequence to move you around in the campaign. Now, because Macanta has automation doesn’t rely on the contact having a tag or anything. And because we don’t have an arbitrary number of field limits per contact, or per object or anything, there’s no reason to have data tags, because you just, if you want to store the information, you build the data object, and then you store as many of those as you like, and your data object can have as many fields that you need it to have. So there’s no restriction there on the because it’s also with that information, you can export and you can do something with or more whatever. And then the automation. So we don’t have a campaign builder, like Active Campaign or Infusionsoft, where it’s a flow in the sequences and everything. So for us, it’s all to do with the state of the data. And does the data meet for us? We call them trigger conditions, like does it meet the condition paired with an action? So let’s say for example, I want to send I want to send a, an email to a prospect and create a task for the sales agent, if a new opportunity or lead is three days old. And the opportunity stage is still new opportunity. Yep. Okay. Now normally, what you would do in that case, is I drop into a sequence, wait for three days. And if a tag is applied, I get called out if it’s not applied, it runs. Now there’s a there’s a second compounding issue, what if there are two opportunities with me connected to them, I can’t be in an AI as a contact can’t be in the sequence twice. At the same time, so what our automation does is you just if you can describe it to someone sitting next to you, you can tell them a counter how to do it. So in the example, we just say, if the opportunity stage is new lead, and the date created, is minus three days. Take this action, there’s no sitting behind a timer, we just check, is there a need? Are there opportunities that meet those criteria? Take this action, because what that means is if on day two, you change the stage from new to active, it doesn’t meet the criteria anymore. So just it’ll just be ignored for that particular automation. And that’s how everything works. It’s just If This Then That. So if you can say to someone, if nothing’s happened to that opportunity for three days, send an email to the prospect and create a task for the sales manager. Or you can tell them a counter to do exactly the same thing. Yep. And that’s then mechanical and just says constantly, all the new opportunities that meet that criteria. Take this action. Yeah. And yeah.

Chris Davis 33:48
I love it. It reminds me It reminds me of database structures. Yeah. Because a lot of databases operate like that, where you can define the criteria. And then once it does, it goes into a certain portion of that database and move over. How do you how do you all give visual insight into things that are upcoming in mechanics. So I can see when you’re saying that, I can see a case where perhaps tomorrow deal meets that condition. And maybe two days later, something else has come in? Do you guys kind of have that forecast. And I remember when I was using Infusionsoft and you will go to the contact record, it will show you what campaigns they were in, and it was show you what, what actions they’ve executed, and then which ones were coming up and upcoming. So you can rectify anything or you know, do some checking.

Pieter de Villiers 34:41
Yeah. So because of how automation run, nothing is really upcoming in that sense. Because in in the Infusionsoft example, you would see there’s a three day time and then there’s an email, then there’s a two day time and then there’s an email. But we don’t have that because we don’t know whether the data is going to meet the criteria in three days. All right, so you’re not set in that sequence. But going back to your database example, on a strict technical level, when you create automations, in mecanica, these trigger conditions, you’re essentially creating SQL queries, yes, that we then just run in the backend. And you do the same for widgets on the dashboard. So you can say, Okay, our automation is, if the stage is new lead, and the lead creator date is minus three days, so three days ago, that’s when the automations going to run. But I want to try and catch those earlier. So I can build a widget for the dashboard that says, show me all the deals or leads where the stages new lead, and the date created, is minus two days. So it’ll show on my dashboard a day before the automation happens. So I can decide to get in touch and try and avoid that automated message. See, yes, yes, yes. Because the way we look at the dashboard widget is, depending on what they are, your job is either to get the number down to zero, or to get the number as high as possible. So deals closed, I want to get that number as high as possible. New deals, I want to get that to zero every day, because that means I’ve engaged with them, and they now are an active deal. I don’t want that number to sit there and drive up. So that’s really and again, you build those queries for the dashboard, you just go in and say, Okay, for this widget, I want to see leads that meet this criteria with all your and or rules that you need. And then you can also then from a business owner perspective, you can then decide, okay, when someone logs in, do they see all the deals? Or they do they only see their own? Yeah, so the ones that me as a logged in user has a relationship with, but the sales manager can log in and see everyone’s deals.

Chris Davis 37:03
Yeah, that makes sense. Tell me this, as you’re, as you’re describing it, I can literally visualize it. Right? And I’m seeing being able to come in and say, Okay, I’ve got this, this this upcoming. When it comes to the the creation of these objects, the creation of these events? How do you guys handle that? Am I able to integrate webinar software now? And it will create those events? For me? Are you guys doing something different through API?

Pieter de Villiers 37:38
Yes, so the, the data object types of let’s say, webinar, you just go in and create, and you just go and say, I want this field and this field and this field, and you get to design the interface. So four columns, sections, subsections, depending on how complex your information is. And then you can use either we’ve got an open API, or you can use up here, or integratively, or Integra mat, I think it’s important make it is you can use any of those platforms to so we’ve actually got SAP here and integratively integrations, we’re busy building a public one. So you can then for instance, pull webinar registrations in. So one, one example that we put in place for a client is they create the event in mecanica, with a presenter and an event admin, and then that does a couple of things. It creates the event in event espresso via an API. And if the event type is webinar, it also creates the event in Go To Webinar and brings the registration link into the counter. So my counter then sends out the email saying, Hey, here’s a new event register for this webinar. If anyone then clicks on the link and registers in Go To Webinar, they get connected with an attendee relationship to the object in meccanica. Got it? And then and then if they don’t show up, then you can just update their status if it’s a live event, just go Yeah, attended, attended, didn’t attend didn’t attend. And that can drive other automation around those databases.

Chris Davis 39:20
Interesting. And when I create that event, or that object, I should say I can, I guess there’s probably a selection where I can say create multiple events instead of updating the same one.

Pieter de Villiers 39:32
Yes, yeah. Yeah. So So you, you can you can decide so for instance, it’s just whether you have an ID or not, so you can update it if you have the event ID and then everyone gets connected to the same but let’s say for instance, that that works for a webinar. One too many. But let’s say for instance, you want to run your podcast where bookings guest bookings, for that every time someone booked to be on your show you Want to create a new one? Yes. Because everyone’s you’re not having 20 people on the same pocket.

Chris Davis 40:05
And technically, the idea is different. So the event or object would be different, just like a contact when the email is different, a different object is created. Oh, man, that is, I tell you. So everybody, I intentionally stay ignorant to a lot of the software when founders Come on, because I want to be wowed and excited just like you are as you’re listening. I have to say, Man, I really do think that this is the way that all CRM software should go. It’s got to be object oriented. I dare dare I call it object oriented automation.

Pieter de Villiers 40:47
That’s exactly what it is.

Chris Davis 40:48
I know my software developers are like, wait a minute, we got to get you do that. But I think this is it. I think, Peter, we’re officially officially putting object oriented automation on the map. And I believe that it needs to be something adopted, because it just makes more sense, the more comfortable and the more activity that’s taking place online. It has to be captured this way. Yeah. Tags, custom fields. They’re good. But in the form of tracking events, they’re outdated. Yeah, they really are. So I think that there’s a decision to be made. And again, I see some software trying software companies trying to make that decision. It’s refreshing to see that you’re here. Peter, this was great. Man, I thank you for coming on. I was hoping this would be good. And you You exceeded my initial hopes. If anybody listening wants to find out more about macanta and they’re like, look, wait a minute, this is what I’ve been looking for. I need this. I need this today. Where should they go? Is there a webinar a free trial? Where do you want them to go? Yes,

Pieter de Villiers 42:01
you can. Couple of things, you can go to the website macantacrm.com. And get in touch with us there. We’ve also you can join the Facebook group, I do a lot of what we post in there, mostly our live builds. So we do we do offer a service where we do the configuration for people. And I do those as a live stream to the Facebook group, because then you really get to see it from inception. How we get from well, this is the business to this is the structure in the system. And this is what he does and how it works. So just there, get in touch with us that way or find me on LinkedIn, and quite easy to find. And just get in touch. Happy to out happy to have a chat.

Chris Davis 42:47
All right, great. Well, we’ve got macantacrm.com. That’ll be in the show notes for everybody to connect. Peter, again, thank you for coming on to the podcast, giving us such wisdom, guidance, knowledge. And thank you for the software man. Thank you for the software trail. So

Pieter de Villiers 43:08
that’s great. We’ll keep pushing.

Chris Davis 43:09
Yes, please do. Please do. And I’ll see you online. Cool. Thanks, Chris. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends