Alex Kraft covers his recent blog on “Adaptability”

Well, I hope I can live up to it with my future articles. Adaptability is one of my favorite themes, and I really enjoyed researching it and writing about it for your site. Basic concept, it means to me being flexible and paying attention to your market and the things around you, such as your employees, your customers, your competition, and being self-aware to be able to be critical of your company. and how you fit in that environment.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. He was like a father to me.

Absolutely. And I was very fortunate. Some in my family think it's just because I was the oldest, but I was fortunate that we lived close and I spent every summer with my grandparents. He taught me how to play golf. We it was very we had a very special bond.

Yes. And it's, I don't know. I don't know what. necessarily drives the opposite being rigid. But from my experience, I think one of the things that does drive it is the being afraid to admit that you're wrong or, yeah, I think like that is really what drives it to me is like, you know, we've all been in meetings with, and you know, from being with customers, if you're doing a good job or not, if you're truly paying attention. And I just don't understand. I mean, it comes from number one to like caring about improving. And if you really do want to be the best and if you really, really are competitive, I mean, these budge words that everyone says all the time, if you really care about improving and being the best, then you can admit when you're not performing well, because if you care, then you, you fix it. You know, how many times have we been? a part of the same meetings or in the same situation where nothing has changed.

And that's the kind of stuff that drives me literally insane.

It is. And also what I love about that statement is that when you're focused on yourself, that's obviously what you can control. Like we always get wrapped up in what the other guys are doing. We can't control that, you know? And so there is an empowerment that comes from just focusing on your effort and the things that you can do.

That's right.

Yes, definitely. And I've had to really kind of reteach myself how to sell since starting Heave. And it's been very eye-opening. It's very, yeah, I wish I would have done it while I was still in the dealer world. It would have opened my eyes to different things. But, you know, I did it now. Number one, your solution might not be for everyone. That is incredibly powerful. And I think selling has changed too. It's not about convincing. And I think the old school world of selling was who can convince the customer? Who's not going to take no for an answer? And it just creates so much resistance with customers. It's more about, like you're saying, it's positioning. It's first understanding what the customer does and what they could hire your product or company to do for them. You have to understand that first. Otherwise, if you just use the canned presentation, you might be wasting your time and their time.

No, and it's the definition of being adaptable, right? You have to be aware that the customer journey and the customer expectations are completely different. So if you train your sales team, like in the equipment business, if you hire, People put them in sales and then tell them to just show up on job sites. That's not going to work that well, I don't think. You have to be adaptable.

Yeah, today there is a tremendous, I think another way of saying it is access. There's so many different ways to access people. Better word. And that's positive and it can be negative. It can be, because there's so many different routes and access points, you can be drowned out, you know, and so it's once again, being adaptable. This is the best access point for these customers. This is the best access point. Once again, not everybody is the same. Yeah.

That's right.

That's true. People don't like to admit that. But I always the whole relationship thing is funny to me because, yes, it is necessary. But what makes me laugh about it is usually it's it's that phrase is mentioned by people who already have all the relationships. So what they're kind of saying is. All right. Well, these are all my customers. Like, how are you supposed to start a relationship? And that's one of the funnier things when you ask the successful salespeople in this industry, tell me about this customer. And they usually have a really good story about how they never could get in the door at that customer. And then things broke their way. The guys who are talking about relationship are the ones that don't want anybody else to start building one with that customer.

Different variations, right? I used to walk through snow with no shoes on to school and all that stuff. These guys have it so easy.

Yes, exactly. And they don't want anyone else to come in on their territory.

Yes, a little bit. But we're giving tremendous opportunity to our users to start relationships.

And what's so funny is we've had certain cat dealers use it. And the power of a customer placing a request on Heave and getting an immediate quote with a cat logo is incredible. And that's the funny thing is that when you talk to customers, you know, they and that's kind of what led me to start. the business was I was always kind of amazed that like a brand like Cat, I looked across, I'm like, they have the leading market share in North America, yet it's still not easy to buy a Cat. Like, why wouldn't it be? Why would, if you have 20 year relationships with customers, why wouldn't you have a vehicle where a customer could just be like, all right, send me five more of that. Send me three more of that. Yes, they might make a phone call and do that. But why wouldn't you have that type of capability for the larger market?

Because as we all, anyone in the equipment business, you know, the longer it takes to get that deal signed and funded, the more chances for it to go wrong. It's happened to me a hundred times, you know. Even just from a customer signing a contract and it takes two weeks to get the finance approval and the funding, you've now lost the deal. Somebody else has come in, given a better price. And I just thought it was kind of crazy.

It is. And that's what customers want. I think in one of the blog posts I wrote, I've been in the industry now, what,18 years? I have relationships with customers. And one of my good friends is a contractor in this local area. And he used to be a salesperson. I mean, we've talked, I actually asked him in the very early days, like I showed him kind of like a prototype of Heave. And I, you know, this is what I think it could look like, you know, do you see value in this? And, you know, so he was helpful in kind of shaping the early product. And he confessed to me, he put in a couple of orders the other day for rentals. And he said, he's like, you know, I used to be a salesperson. I was trained to go cold call. And he's like, I own this company. I don't have time to see salespeople. He's like, we're fighting for every job that we can. And so I get in the office super early. I look over a couple of things and then I got to go drive our jobs.

And then if I'm not on our jobs, I've got to go be bidding work and try to build relationships with the GCs. And so he was explaining the whole process to me. And he's like, so if I ask a salesperson for a quote, You know, a day will go by, two days will go by, then they'll call me and say, hey, let's meet for a beer. I have two kids. I don't want to meet for a beer. Just give me the number that I asked you for two days ago. And so that happens quite frequently. But here you have a customer saying, look, I just want the communication to go this way. And that's the vehicle that we can provide. Any dealer can use our product and we can help them communicate much faster and more efficiently with the customers on the terms that the customers want.

100%.

It's a work in progress. What we have to do is prove value. And we can't force dealers to move faster than what they're comfortable with. And so, you know, what you have to, like any tech company, you have to find what people refer to as early adopters. And there are plenty of those people. There are plenty of those salespeople, plenty of those dealers who do see the value immediately. They see it connects all the dots for them. And we've been able to find those people. One of the things that I was blind to when I was in the dealer world was because and before this, before this conversation, you and Ron, it just showed me actually how to look at some analytics tools on Google Analytics. So, but it just shows you that I was not the most active on social media prior to starting a tech company, but. I didn't know how many salespeople use Facebook Marketplace to list machines to sell.

And so I started paying attention to all these different channels. Obviously, that is the definition of an early adopter. So I just started calling every salesperson I ever saw list a machine for sale for their dealership on Facebook Marketplace. And it was the easiest conversation you can imagine. Right. They're they're already were looking for other avenues. They did not. They wanted to get their name and their equipment out there in other ways, as opposed to just showing up at contractors.

Yes, you're correct.

is nuts. I have three children myself. My youngest is seven. And it's amazing to me. We'll go somewhere. And my seven-year-old would be like, dad, what's the Wi-Fi? It's just, it's insanity. But so in the early days of Heave, like back to your original question, how do you get more dealers to see it? And this is goes part of me being adaptable and me trying to learn is that I spent too much of my time early on trying to convince people that I knew to use Heave. And I stepped back and I realized, I'm talking to salesmen who are 55 years old, because that's who I knew, and who have been very successful selling equipment the old way. And I realized that that's probably not our user. And that's okay. And then I started searching Facebook marketplace, and I started searching LinkedIn. And there are an incredible amount of salespeople under the age of 35 in this market. And that's who we just started connecting with.

And within 60 seconds, they're like, yes, I want to use this. This makes a lot of sense and it will help me sell and rent more.

No, it's not at all. And, you know, and so you can we get compared to certain companies in the market and our price point is in line. You don't really lose out on anything by trying, quoting deals on heat. There's nothing to lose, really. I mean, it requires really no effort whatsoever. So we've built in, and this is part of the development of our product that I'm proud of, is so when we first came to market, a salesperson would get an alert. They could quote a deal. And by the more salespeople we added, In an area, deals were getting quoted faster, but still it was done manually. And that's not necessarily the best experience for a customer because if you think about it, a customer is looking online. They're looking for something right now. And so what we did was we built the capability into our product where we can tie into a dealer's inventory. And so a customer goes online. requests a quote for a specific machine.

If a dealer has a machine that matches like an hour range, the size class, it is immediately quoted to the customer, immediately with the salesperson's information. So now the dealer doesn't even have to quote the deal manually. It just is quoted immediately. The salesperson gets a copy of who the customer's information was, phone number and email, and we're off and running.

No, because it's a business system. Exactly. It's not a sales system.

No.

is. And I love when people try to compare us to like a CRM system. And there's a, we're not at all, although some people still try to classify us that way. But the main difference to me, and I'm glad that you kind of talked through that track, is that we, the Heave platform is outside in. It is customer driven. CRM and business systems, they are dealer hours. So a CRM just contains data that's entered by people at the dealership. I called on this customer and we all kind of know CRM is the arch enemy of the salesman. They don't want to enter stuff in there. But that's the major difference is that the only way, the information gets into our system is because a customer went to our site and started the process. The customer said, I want quotes on this. I want to rent a machine. I want to buy this machine. That is the most accurate data. It's customer driven.

It's not, you know, I've so many instances, you know, you have a salesperson who's the notorious sandbagger. So they don't want to show all the deals are working on because they don't want to be asked about. But they showed they're working on two deals. And then at the end of the month, they sold eight machines. And then the other guy who's not necessarily performing well. So he wants to show that he's on more deals. So he puts in 15 deals he's working this month and he sells none. And so that's like the age-old problem of sales management in our industry, where you can never get an accurate forecast because it's getting manipulated one of two ways.

A hundred percent.

Is that are you asking me that question? Not really. No, exactly.

No. No. And and I will say that when I ran the dealership. We didn't have a really good formal training program either. So I'm not saying that I was any better. It's just, yeah.

Right.

That's right.

Pressure's on, I guess. But I do, I love, I find it very interesting the people that are at the top. of their game and they are adapting still, you know, that's what kind of started it for me because, you know, it's the, those people that are never satisfied, you know, that, you know, always want to stay a step ahead. Like that, that's the really interesting part to me. And that's what kind of, I wanted to zero in on.

Yeah, I would agree.

Yes. And there are tools available today that can help.

That's true.

Yeah, it took me a while to be okay with failing. That's another buzzword, failing. But yeah, it's just being comfortable in your own skin to where you don't have all the answers. And you just learn over time. I mean, I've been on the receiving end of some very tough customer conversations too. And what you learn is that when you accept it, those meetings go a lot better than if you're going to sit there and dispute or try to minimize the situation.

No.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, Domino's was fascinating. I didn't know that much about Domino's before I wrote that article.

Loosely new. It's funny. Everybody knows the pizza tracker and all that kind of stuff. But to research where that company is today is remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. And they're viewed as a tech company. They make pizza. It shows you.

I don't.

Was it really?

Real estate. That's

We've got, we're already working on the next few innovations with our product that I'm excited about that. Yeah, we're, and we, and it comes from customer feedback. It comes from dealer feedback. You know, we, we added three or four key features just for the salespeople who use our product because they kept mentioning certain things about what they, I call it constructive, not what they didn't like. Because we don't have a company unless dealers and their salespeople sell and rent more equipment with our help. I mean, it's pretty clear. We're not in it to just take a fee for them to have the same revenue, same amount of machines moved. It has to work for them, for us to be successful. And so we listen. And that's what helps our innovation.

And it's such an easy one. But no, I just I enjoy the conversations that we do have. You know, it's always a joy to come on. Talking about the business, I've always been, you know, it's funny too, because we're talking about just the youth movement in the industry. And one of the things that always stood out to me in the very early days when like Mets Kramer introduced me to you is that here is an individual who's not under the age of 40, who is constantly talking about. the innovation and the need to be adaptable, the need for change. You're in the small percentage of the industry. I've always been very impressed by that.