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Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
#170 - "Most Sales People Suck at Their Job": How Siro’s AI Is Turning Sales Reps Into Top Performers with Jake Cronin
00:51:36
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- [00:00]
Jake Cronin
Most salespeople suck at their job because they don't get any coaching. But now you can hear what the top performers are saying in the home. You have to look at the tool as coaching. Luckily, he was in the pilot group and this company was trialing zero and they found there's silly little sentence he adds in during his close and it sent his same day books through the roof.
- [00:26]
Wilson
Are you going to leave me hanging? You're not going to tell us what that line.
- [00:33]
Sam
Wilson just wrapped up the year in the low 20s and we were pumped. I mean, most of the industry did not have that same level of success. And when I think about who was a huge partner for us, like top of the list was service scalers. We've been working with service scalers for a couple years now and they've helped us drive best in class SEO, best in class PPC and dominate LSA and GMB marketing. They've been a huge partner for us and we're really grateful for that partnership because it's helped us to take down 46% year over year growth. As we think about our budget next year, we're aiming for the low 30s and one of our most strategic partners is going to be service scalers. They're going to help get us there. They're going to help us stay ahead of AI. They're going to help us keep our SEO relevant. They're going to help keep us on the top, exactly where we want to be. So make sure you check out service scalers.com. sam and his team over there is just a bunch of killers. So thank you service scalers for your partnership.
- [01:26]
Wilson
Welcome back to owned and operated. Today we have Jake in the house. What's going on, Jake?
- [01:33]
Jake Cronin
Howdy. Happy to be here.
- [01:35]
Wilson
Jake is in Park City right now and I'm extremely jealous. We talked offline about. He's out there doing. Are you ski or a snowboarder?
- [01:43]
Jake Cronin
I'm a snowboarder for now. Yeah.
- [01:45]
Wilson
Ooh. Just, you know, you get a little older and then the bones start to hurt when you fall and you. Everyone goes skiing for a reason. There's a bunch of old men skiing and not too many of them snowboarding.
- [01:54]
Jake Cronin
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think this, maybe this is my last year. And then we'll, then we'll make the transition.
- [01:59]
Wilson
You give it a try. Yeah. So Jake, you. You're part of Ciro Siro. How do you say that?
- [02:06]
Jake Cronin
Zero. It's like Siri, but with an O.
- [02:09]
Wilson
Zero. Tell us about Ciro and give us just a really High level feel for what Ciro is and what you guys are doing in kind of the home service space and even broader in the customer facing space.
- [02:21]
Jake Cronin
Yeah. So for, for the longest time your customer support calls have been recorded. This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes.
- [02:29]
Wilson
Right.
- [02:29]
Jake Cronin
And your, your zoom calls too. Like if you're all right, whenever you're buying software, the, the vendor's probably, probably on a zoom call and there's probably some note taker there recording it so that people can train, reflect, remember what they said, you know, as a note taker or the many applications, we are bringing that to the in person world. So the face to face conversations, well, it's a, it's a massive paradigm shift right now where this data recordings of your in person conversations have never been available before and now technology has just recently gotten good enough to do that. There's a bunch of technical reasons for why recording in person is really, really hard. From the obvious ones like battery life up to, and Internet connectivity to the processing of the audio is much harder. And there's a slew of other technical challenges. So it's just become possible to get these conversations digitized, which unlocks a ton of use cases of what you can do. And the one that we're focusing on is sales coaching and training for now. And then there's a bunch of other, we'll say use cases that get unlocked when you have this treasure trove of data. And then the second exciting paradigm shift, which I'll just tack it on as well. So one is this mountain of data is finally being captured and the second is, you know, everyone's heard of AI, ChatGPT, Anthropic, all of this, you know, the LLMs, Deep Seq, this crazy new wave of AI that's really just happened like over the last year and a half, two years, which makes computers really, really good at synthesizing like massive pieces of information. So like you have a whole book, you can summarize it down, take numbers out of it and start making meaning out of mountains of data. So those two paradigm shifts to coming together, the availability of this data, plus this new technology that's really good at processing long unstructured conversations is completely transforming the way that you will currently coach an in person team, contractors, sales reps, and then increasingly the way you make strategic decisions for your business.
- [04:38]
Wilson
Yeah, I mean, I know, I'm personally super excited about it. It's huge and it's crazy to be able to now have that data at our fingertips and then be able to Actually do something with it. Because I feel I'm a huge data nerd, and I feel like I always have all this data and it just sits in my head. I'm like, I know that I have this. This data, but I just don't know what to do with it. And now we have the ability to just almost query, right? Say, hey, what's going on with this? Why am I not doing that? And then having answers back of, you know, something. The AI program going through all that data and then summarizing for that for you in, like, seconds versus me trying to go through spreadsheets and, like, create this and be able to drive that. It's absolutely, absolutely incredible. And so talk. Tell me a little bit about your background first. Your background and Cyrus background on how. What is your background in. And then how did you get to CSIRO and where was it at? And because this AI technology is new, right? Newish. Over the last year and a half, we've seen the kind of shift. So let's work on that first.
- [05:41]
Jake Cronin
Yeah. Oh, boy. If I rewind all the way back to when I was 18, when I was born.
- [05:47]
Wilson
No, I'm just kidding. Like, just like college, moving on, or if there's anything big.
- [05:52]
Jake Cronin
The inciting incident was really when I was 18. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna do like, okay, kick off there. And the reason is that's when I was selling Cutco knives. Have you ever heard of Cutco?
- [06:01]
Wilson
Oh, yeah.
- [06:02]
Jake Cronin
Okay. So I did that. It was honestly life changing for me. I'm from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Everyone's working a minimum wage at Hershey park, and it's not that fun to do that. It's hot. I wanted a bit more flexibility. I got this mailer in the. This letter in the mail saying you can make $15 per qualified appointment. I was like, I don't know what that means, but it's more than like, $7. So I was selling knives, and I ended up making more money per month that summer selling knives than I later made at McKinsey as a business analyst. And McKinsey, that's the number one consulting firm in the world. Yeah. And you rewind back. I was 18, no college degree, like, barely had a high school degree and was just. Just cr. It. What that did for me is it showed me that you don't need to be a doctor, a lawyer, a banker to make a great income. There are so many other ways to live your life, so many other professions, and especially so many that allow you to bet on yourself and have like complete control over your life versus a lot of these other careers are more of like, you know, golden handcuffs where you're sort of, you get good income but your lifestyle is very locked into a rigid routine. So. So that was the inciting incident. Learned about field sales in college, however, I studied computer science engineering, built a bunch of apps. The first app that I built was to, to help Cutco. So I built a. Think of it as like a, a really simple CRM for knife sellers. It was an app to track your calling.
- [07:27]
Wilson
So let me ask you real quick right there, was that, was that meaningful or was that on purpose? Because I mean like that's the biggest, best mix is like hey, you have a person who understands sales and tech and, or sales, excuse me. And then you have somebody who also understands tech. It's like the ultimate right? I wish someone would have pushed me in that direction. But like was that on purpose or did.
- [07:49]
Jake Cronin
Very fortunate.
- [07:51]
Wilson
It was just fortune.
- [07:52]
Jake Cronin
That's so fortunate. I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. This is actually one, one more layer of the story that I don't usually tell. I actually thought when I was going into school that I was, I was too old to be a software engineer. I thought that every software engineer was already like building apps by age 10. And I was like, ah shoot, I missed the boat. But I was, I was studying abroad in China and I was in an immersion program where you aren't allowed to speak a single word of English outside of the one hour a week like meeting, otherwise you get sent home. And this was like government sponsored program. Like they weren't messing around. And my Chinese was so bad that I had no friends. And so every hour outside of class I was just sitting in a coffee shop and I was like, screw it, I guess I'm going to learn to code just because it's fun. And that's how I started building apps, building this app for Cutco. And then that was a domino effect which, which eventually led to founding zero. And then maybe there's one more plot point that I'll add in. Like just before founding Ciro was I liked building apps. I was working in consulting, however at McKinsey, doing all sorts of stuff. I just wanted to see more of the world, wanted to understand what are the most interesting problems actively being worked on in the world. So I was working in oil and gas, I was working in utilities, I was working in big tech. I was doing projects on like, you know, mergers and acquisitions. I was working on some strategy over here. I was doing tech implementation Tons of stuff. And for all of the, in all the different clients I was serving, projects we were working on, none of them seemed more impactful than the kind of stuff that I was doing with my little Cutco app. It's like no problem seem more overlooked than the problems that I saw firsthand at Cutco, which are, you know, cut codes. A very unique company, but the problems they face are the same ones that everyone in the field sales and services world face. I don't know what's going on in the field. You get very messy data because you're sort of entering the field connection is bad. And the software is generally not the same par as, as what you get in the inside sales world.
- [09:47]
Wilson
Yeah, data into data out too. Right. You only get good data in if your sales tax are putting good data in.
- [09:53]
Jake Cronin
Yeah.
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Wilson
So. And that they're directively incentivized by making sure that their data in is in a format that is, is beneficial to them. Right. So that's very interesting. Okay. And so then rolling into what, 2016, you guys started up 2020, summer of 2020. Okay, 2020.
- [10:13]
Jake Cronin
Yeah. And that was, you know, that was like two years into consulting. I was like, you know what I, it was, it was kind of funny that that little side app I was building in college, it started making a little bit of money and it gave me just enough confidence to quit my job and go full time and solve the biggest problem I could find in the field sales world. So I knew there were big problems to be solved. I knew the world was big and it was generally underserved by technology. There's just not enough companies, not enough engineers working to help build stuff for the field sales world. So I spent a while looking around like six month months exploring different ideas. Maybe I'll build a CRM. Maybe if it's a gamification tool, maybe we need better data enrichment. And then finally landed on a, built a FIGMA design. Like a little, just, just a mock up of an idea to record conversations to make the feedback loop faster between a manager and their field sales team. And, and that hit someone. The first client, it was actually this company called Active Environmental. Connor Rugio took my, my cold LinkedIn message and said, you know what, we'll do it. And, and then, so they signed up. We built the product in like the MVP in like three months. And, and then everything kicked off from there. So the end really the, the problem that we were trying to solve was that most salespeople suck at their job because they don't get any Coaching. I sucked. Luckily, I was like, so much into me to get me better, and I still was mostly me just banging my head against the wall until I got it right. There's not really a great system for getting better, mastering your craft.
- [11:47]
Wilson
Yeah. It almost feels sometimes like sales is. I know it's not, but it feels like it's a. It's an art. Right. It's a mix of kind of psychology and pricing and like there's just so many aspects to it that the ability to be able to coach actively is so important. And. And so. So walk me through this. This first. This first position. Right. Or this first sale. What did this company do? Because, I mean, what I want to understand is I always find the transition from, you know, what we found it kind of through these interviews is that there's a lot of companies who are moving into the home service space, but they didn't originally start in the home service space. They started in healthcare, you know, recording calls for or recording the doctor talking to patients to do automated X, Y or Z. And then at some point they figured out, hey, you know, the home service industry's blowing up. Let's move into there. Like, what was your golden moment where you. Where you saw home services and you said, this is. This is it.
- [12:45]
Jake Cronin
This is it. Yeah.
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Wilson
Yeah.
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Jake Cronin
We actually so active was. They were pest control company.
- [12:49]
Wilson
Okay. It's the first one. No, that's awesome, man.
- [12:52]
Jake Cronin
Yeah. So we started out, we were doing pest control, solar roofing, and then that pivoted us into home improvement, which then pivoted us into home services. So we sort of got a. The more recognition that we got, the people who most needed the software started to hear about us and kind of kind of pull us in. So, I mean, I wish we had home services day one, but it took us quite a while to figure out that that was where there's so much need and application. 0 can completely change your. The. Some people call it standardization, other people just call it just performance and the service of your. Of your field sales team. So. So it took. It took a little while. Like three years. I put a number on it. Three years for us to find our way into home services. And then it was like instant. Like, yeah, this is instant adoption.
- [13:38]
Wilson
Yeah, this was. This is where we go. Yeah, very cool. And. And so looking at. At your background and looking to where you are today, kind of. Do you feel that that Cutco mixed with the China mixed with, you know, learning how to program got you to this. This point in time, or do you feel like you would have found this some other way.
- [14:00]
Jake Cronin
That's. That's hard to say. That's hard to say. I think I needed the mixture. I think. I think that that brought me there. You know, maybe the biggest one was the. The Cutco stuff. It's. It's the. As an entrepreneur, you face rejection and uncertainty all the time. And at least that's how I've felt building a company. I'm constantly underqualified for my role. Constantly. The same way that, like, you, like, graduate, you know, you're. You graduate training at Cutco, it's like I'm now supposed to go talk to a real customer. Like, okay, like, let's just give it a shot. So you get this kind of blind confidence and ability to face rejection, I think is critical to just keep going and learning. And that's. That's probably the. What I think is the most important is I. Friends want to start companies. They're asking for advice, they're kicking things off. It's just like, you've got to commit to at least yay time. Like, pick a number. Six months, a year. Like, how long do you want to do this? And you've got to stay locked in the whole time. No excuses, no giving up. You just got to keep going. And I think that's what Cutco, a little bit of China stuff. You know, learning Chinese was freaking hard. I think these kinds of, like, hard things that you do, I think, help train you. Some people do physical challenges. There's all sorts of different challenges, I think train you for the starting a company, which is maybe it's akin to an endurance sport in that way. Like, you just got to keep going.
- [15:14]
Wilson
Yeah, I. I always say that owners are a bit masochistic in the sense that, like, you just have to, like, some of the pain, because it's a lot of pain. The highs are extreme. Extremely high. I mean, you're winning, you're winning. It feels so good. But when you're lucid, it is. It's a rough day. I mean, it is painful.
- [15:30]
Jake Cronin
Everything sucks. I'm terrible as a person. Yeah.
- [15:35]
Wilson
Yeah, exactly. So, okay, very cool. So you guys in 2020, started side zero. You started zero. It's. You got your first sale. It's doing it. It's moving. Were you guys. Or are you guys. To this day, when we can. You know, I don't. I don't know how much you want to talk about this, but are you guys bootstrapped? Like, what. What does that look like? Because I know a lot of tech companies that Go out and they raise just a monster seed round or something, you know, $10 million on, on a back of a napkin. What does that look like for you guys? Are, are you, you know, 50% owner or whatever?
- [16:11]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, at this point we're, we're VC back. We're kind of like the classic VC trajectory. But, but it did not start out like that. That was only about a year and a half ago that we started getting VC money and we're about four and a half years in. So the first three years was just no salary, like burning through savings, living at home, just me and my co founder just grinding, grinding, grinding. It was hard. And then you, then you face this question as an entrepreneur, like do you take VC money or not? It's like a big decision. Um, and I think the decision like the decision criteria in that fork in the road is how important is the speed? Because you definitely lose a ton of ownership. You have, there's all this baggage when you raise VC money. These like high demands, like the, the path to like personally making money as a founder. When you're taking VC money, like the bar is just way higher. You gotta earn all, at least all the money that you've raised before you make anything, all that kind of stuff. And I, and in our space we saw that the tech, the paradigm shift was so clear. Not only can we finally record these in person conversations, but also with large language models, the AI advancements, there's just too much to do. And if we bootstrap, it's going to take us 10 years to build like a decent tool. If we get VC money, we can hire a dozen engineers now and we can build what the industry needs like today. So it's, it was, for us, it was the urgency that we just can't wait to build this tech. People want it now and that's, that's why we raised money. So now we've raised, raised a seed round and a series a round. The summer of 2023, like in like four months there was kind of like back to back and we've raised about $25 million to, to date now which has been, it's good, it's, it's, we're very privileged to have awesome investors. This ecosystem that's willing to take a big bet on companies like us so that we can invest up front and spend all this money to build software to start getting in people's hands now versus if you bootstrap, you gotta, the software just moves away slower.
- [18:13]
Wilson
So yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely Dry powder to get you moving quickly. And so with that, what can you talk about? What were some of the big, like, what did you, I'm always curious, what did you use that money for? Right, because 25 million for all of us just to show up in your pocket after, like I'm saying like after a day. But I understand, like it's a four year process. You had to build the MVP and you had to get there. But at some point you did have a large chunk of capital come into the bank account and then you had to deploy it. And so when you were looking at like that deployment of funds, like how, where did you, where were you thinking about putting that and where did you see the most value? Looking back like a, I mean summer of 23, so a year and a half, where did you see the most value with where you put that money?
- [18:56]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, and like, you know, me and my co founder were both incredibly frugal people. Like just like don't even take the subway because it's too expensive. Kind of like incredibly frugal. And when we needed to because we had no money and then suddenly we were making our revenue was like quite good by the time we got to the seat in the Series A, that's where we were able to raise them pretty quickly. But suddenly your entire mind shift mindset needs to shift because you have all of this money and you don't have that money just to sit on it. Like the whole plan is you only raise money if you are ready to aggressively spend it and strategically spend it. So it's an important question you just asked. Luckily in software it's not too like you're pretty much going to put it on people. Like you're not going to be buying a big office. You don't have to buy big hardware. You have to buy trucks and, and machines. It's for us, we're building software. We just need to hire the people. But then there is the question of, okay, how much are you hiring engineers? How many salespeople you're hiring, how many customer support you have to build up like a healthy business so you don't get too like lopsided like a massive sales team, but only two engineers, so you can't keep up things like that. Luckily, one of our, one of our investors, Index Ventures, has some really like, really robust data around team composition as companies grow. So they published this book called Scaling Through Chaos, which is awesome for anyone who's building a software company that basically says like, hey, here, here's usually the composition of a Team. By the time you're at 10 people, 50 people, 100 people, it's like, okay, we should probably be about 50% engineers right now, about X percent salespeople. So it gives you some, some guidance that top down guidance, guidelines and then also bottoms up like you're just in the trenches every day. And it's like, man, we need another engineer bad. Okay, so we're going to hire another engineer. Oh man, we need customer success because we are getting pummeled by phone calls. Okay, let's, let's hire someone in. So that I didn't find it particularly, particularly hard. Hiring, however, is hard. I don't know about that. Yeah. Hiring so difficult.
- [20:52]
Wilson
Yes, we, I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast is going, yes, we all agree. I mean home services hiring is an absolute nightmare. I mean nobody, you know, for every five contractors that retire, it's something like 1.8 or something is actually getting into the business.
- [21:06]
Jake Cronin
Yeah.
- [21:07]
Wilson
So yeah, but I mean that's amazing. That really is. I'm, I'm always so I spent about 10 years in the North Bay above San Francisco and so I always like was surrounded by this VC funds and all that kind of stuff. And it's always such an interesting topic to me just because I never did it but always got to, to see it, see it from up close and personal. So really neat, really neat to hear that story. And so now you're running CSIRO and you're getting all this data, you're helping out, you know, home service businesses and Frontline to understand what's actually happening in the field and give them coaching on kind of how they're doing their sales pitches and, and trainings. I mean I view you kind of right. You get to see this data that once again, I'm a data nerd. You get to see this data that I never get to see. What are some, have you, have you had any big takeaways? So for example, we were talking with Avoca, they do something similar over the phones. And then you give your CSRs, you know, the same kind of coaching and he was talking about how the best over the phone sales happened at like 158 words per per minute or something like that. But just like these really cool metrics that I never get to, to actually like quantify. Is there anything that you have seen that you were just like, man, this is a super cool metric. If you're a salesperson out there trying to sell anything, you got to look at this.
- [22:38]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, there's, there's a lot of Cool stuff. And, and just to underscore your point, you know, we had this one company the other day who they're solid performing company but they have one stud who's crushing it. Especially that the same day sale. And then they just don't know what's going on. Like the rest of the team can't replicate it. So they looked at a few of his conversations and they found there's one specific silly little sentence he adds in during his close and it sends his same day books through the roof. So they're like, okay, great, let's just try out having everyone on the team say this. Like everyone. You just have to say this line during the close. And in one week their close rate or their, their same day book rate went up 17%. And it's just amazing. Like sometimes it's like the boiling point.
- [23:28]
Wilson
Wait, are you going to leave me hanging? You're not going to tell us what that line is? Is it. It's trade secret for them. I mean I wouldn't blame you.
- [23:36]
Jake Cronin
Is that being a company that has all this sensitive data, we do have to be very fair enough, create secrets. But every company has these things where it's like, it's, I think of the boiling point. It's like you go from water and then you heat up one more degree and now you're boiling. Now you're, you're vapor. Sometimes it's one small tweak to a closing line and you have a massive step change in your. So you gotta identify those types of things.
- [24:02]
Wilson
Yeah, it's really cool. Cause I mean you can. I read a lot of sales books back from, you know, the gurus throughout, you know, the 70s and 80s and they talk about, well if you use this word versus this word, you don't use the word problems or with, with men, you don't use the word this with women and it'll increase your sales percentages. It's actually interesting that we get to, to see that in real time and see these kind of psych psychological tricks if you call them but these really, I don't even call them tricks but like these buzzwords that actually drive real sales. I mean are there any other huge success stories like that that you could share or at least give us the 32,000 foot view on because I mean, I love this. This is so cool.
- [24:45]
Jake Cronin
I'll riff on a couple of things. So one takeaway is as a business owner, like some people, some of our companies are more like laissez faire and some are very process oriented. But even the people with really strict processes, almost militant, they'll implement a process and then they'll see. And when they start tracking it through Zero, they'll realize that people are not following the process. Like, people. Yeah, not. It's like, okay, of course. You go in, it's like, is my part job okay? It's like, wait a minute, why aren't you asking if your part job's okay? You realize half your team is not asking that. It's like, that's just. If that's. You can't ask that basic step. What other parts of the process are you not following? So following the process is one of the takeaways that every customer will universally have once they get on zero, is that people are just not following the process the way you thought. Which makes sense because no one's ever been able to hold people accountable. And if you're in the home, you might just forget innocently. Yeah, just forgot to ask that. I was distracted, but there's no feedback loop to tell you, hey, you forgot to. You forgot this step. You forgot to ask for a Google review at the end. Like, you gotta do that. So that's, that's one, One cool piece. There's one other little anecdote. This is less data oriented, but this is my favorite type of story because it's. Because it's about an individual. Like this type of tech, this recording and AI tech like Ciro is a. It's. It's transformative for business owners, but it's also transformative for the individuals who are on the front line. And that's ultimately why we founded Zero. Our mission is to make field sales the most accessible path to financial freedom. So my favorite stories come down to the individuals. There's this one dude, he was working at us. This is a home improvement company, so not, not quite home services, but he each got three months without closing a sale. Like three months of eating these expensive leads and not closing a sale. Just donut after donut after donut. And luckily he, he was on the verge of getting fired. Luckily he was in the pilot group when this company was trialing Ciro. So he was one of the, you know, 50% of his office was on Ciro, 50% off. And, and so he's in the pilot group. He. He's trying it out. And within one week, he started listening to his peers, just hearing how they sounded in the, in the field. And he closed his first deal, kept doing that, kept just, just listening to what other people sound like. You know, you hear these things.
- [27:06]
Wilson
I'M rooting for him. That's awesome.
- [27:08]
Jake Cronin
You hear it's like, hey, you got it. Like use this line, bring people in for a team meeting. You talk about what good service looks like, lines to use. But it's like, ah, it's, that's not how it really works in the home. But now you can hear what the top performers are saying in the home through the recording of the conversation. And this dude, after two months worked his way up to number one on the company leaderboard. Just like a crazy turnaround story and that transforms his financial. Yeah, that's my favorite story.
- [27:36]
Wilson
That's absolutely transformative. That's, that's amazing. And, and so you did touch on an interesting point that I did want to ask you about and that was right, you have either technicians or you have sales people that are going into homes. But this is also an accountability software. Right? The, the kind of goal of the software is for coaching, but it is adding an accountability that has never been in the field outside of ride alongs. Right?
- [28:02]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:04]
Wilson
How, how difficult have has it been to get buy in from the team to, to implement it? Because right now you have, you kind of have Big brother sitting, watching and if you're not necessarily a sales position, I mean how, how has implementation been successful for you when kind of running into those, you know, kind of those harder. I don't want to say harder use cases but like more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [28:34]
Jake Cronin
Oh yeah, yeah. This and this. The big brother question without a doubt comes up every single time people hear about this topic for the first time. It's like, okay, like this is cool but like, like this sounds like this is something that you would use to police your, your field team. They're not going to be happy about that. It's like, well it's like anyone who's a good people manager will know that if you are micromanaging your team, they're not going to be happy you're going to lose your team. It's like the good management principles still apply. You have to look at the tool as a coaching tool. One way that you can use it, the way you're not supposed to use the tool is you look at.
- [29:12]
Wilson
That's always a good way to start.
- [29:14]
Jake Cronin
The not recommended approach is you look at the recordings and you're just waiting to like breathing over someone's neck virtually like waiting to like ping them on what they're doing bad. But it's like, is that how you actually give people feedback when you're doing a ride along? It's like no you're not. You're not just pestering them the whole whole time. You're focusing on often encouragements and broader strategic ways. It's like you're not criticizing this one person but you're realizing that there's a trend now of your folks like generally not asking for Google reviews or generally being a little too soft when they get the yeah, my spouse at home, like I don't want to consider buying a whole new H vac machine now. Like you know, come back in a few months. It's like you know, you can just push a little harder now. You can refocus your training. So this is not a big brother tool. This is a tool to have visibility for the first time into what's going on and then what you do with the visibility is up to you. And what good managers, people who use this tech properly do. It's the same good management principles. You're encouraging a lot of carrot, a little bit of stick when necessary and it's helping you make better decisions as a leader.
- [30:17]
Wilson
Just answer the phone is one of those phrases that's always easier said than done. I know it was hard for me in my business because the phone always, always rings while you're out in the field trying to get something done or it's 8pm and you're trying to get your kids to bed. Well, I have the solution for you. I'm extremely excited today to announce quick staffers your go to solution for building a high performing cost effective customer service team. We are placing CSRs who have been pre trained on proven home service SOPs and scripts. The same ones that Wilson and I use in our business. For a limited time we're offering 500 hundred dollars off your initial placement cost for the first 10 signups. See link in the description below or head over to quickstaffers.com for more information. I mean the carrot part is, is, is huge too I think is if I was in the field as a salesperson that had a commission structure like I want that coaching. I want to know what I missed or what I'm doing bad or how I can get better because like the guy who almost got fired to first in sales, right? If I'm able to, to increase my sales in a commission role like I mean that's the holy grail if, if somebody's giving me that coaching that I couldn't get before to really be the top tier talent and make great money. I mean I always say it in my business, I say to my, to everyone I want you guys to make a million dollars a year on commission. Right. Because that means that you're, you've made a ton for the business and we're happy to pay you. But they always say well how do I get there? How do I get there? And this seems like an awesome tool to be able to utilize to say hey this is, this is you, you know, we needed you to do this. Or the software thinks that you messed up here and if you pushed a little bit harder it would have got you over the line. Does it have any kind of guardrails in there where like it, it'll ping me as the manager and say hey we got an objection but we didn't push back against it or like talk a little bit about actually how the software works to guide I guess managers into knowing what the people are doing.
- [32:16]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, yeah. So you've looking at it from a manager point of view, you've got your like called the ride along replacement. It's like how can I conversation by conversation hear what happened but do this virtual ride along. We'll call it in like two minutes. It's like how can I look at this three hour long conversation and just get the gist of it really quick? And that's one use case and how that'll be powered is well industry to industry. We have certain prompts configured and we'll see right at the top of the conversation, hey, here's broad strokes would happen. Here are the products and services that were offered. Here's what the technician or the rep did like really, really well. So you have something to, so we encourage you as a leader to constantly be praising people for doing the right things, reinforce the right actions. Sometimes we can also call out what they did poorly and also other things that you might highlight on a case by case basis. If there's like specific things you're looking for, hey, we have an initiative to drive like our, you know, our Google reviews. So like we want to, I want you to grade one to five how well this person is doing their Google reviews. So you can get that kind of stuff. That's at the micro level, micro level coaching. Do ride alongs in three minutes. Otherwise when it, when it takes you hours. And then there's a macro. The strategic, you know, you're looking at dashboards, you're looking at numbers, you are seeing what are some of the things you might, you might do. One of the big pieces is process adherence is one of the hot topics or care about. It's okay. We, we're bringing on these, these New technicians. We just tweaked our process. Are people doing it? So you can ask your, your frontline management, you can ask for some folks in the field, but you're just getting skewed anecdotal feedback. Now you can look at a dashboard and say it's like, yeah, people are like 95% of the time ask if their part job's okay. People are 95% of the time, like hitting the company story to build that trust early on. People are. So you get it, get that process adherence upfront. And there's a few other like common use cases that managers are. That we built 04 to enable at the kind of the macro level.
- [34:12]
Wilson
It's very interesting that you look at it from a micro macro that's. That's really neat. I'm trying to think like what processes have we put in place that, that we just assume are working, but really, you know, the dashboard pings and it's like, ah, 15% adherence.
- [34:31]
Jake Cronin
We use the analogy that sometimes implementing zero and I don't even know if it's good for me to say this or this is this type of tech. It's kind of like walking into your basement with a flashlight. It's like, oh boy, I didn't realize it was that messy down there.
- [34:43]
Wilson
Yeah.
- [34:44]
Jake Cronin
And. But, but it's sort of like a necessary thing to start making the improvements. It's like before it was impossible to ever see that thing, to have this visibility. Now it's possible. And it's like, are you brave enough to go in the basement and turn on the flashlight and see what's going on?
- [34:59]
Wilson
No. The answer. No. No, I don't.
- [35:01]
Jake Cronin
No.
- [35:01]
Wilson
I'm just kidding. That's really awesome. So, okay, you guys have this, this incredible software runs on the back of service time. Is that correct?
- [35:11]
Jake Cronin
Yeah. So we have Service time is a product called Sales Pro, which is powered by Ciro. So it's our product under the hood. And then. And that's really what we sell to all of the all Service Titan customers. It's got a really tight integration, so it works quite smoothly. And then we also, for folks who are not on Service Titan, this is primarily our folks in other industries like our, you know, the pest control industries and the home improvement industries used zero property.
- [35:35]
Wilson
Okay. So that's. It's actually the Sales Pro. It's what's under the hood of Sales Pro. That's neat. So moving forward, right. Looking into the future, because as we talked about a year and a half ago, that was the shift really. John And I started the podcast a little about a year and a half ago. And I remember In January of 2024, March of 2024, we were talking about the first, you know, chat GPT that came out and how we're using it. And it was like, yeah, we use it to like rewrite some emails and send out some mailers and just really basic stuff. And now like going into 2025, it's absolutely changed the fabric of how we do business across the board. With a big portion of that being coaching. What do you see as kind of either a roadmap over the next year or upcoming developments for zero in the next? You know, I would say even just a year.
- [36:28]
Jake Cronin
Yeah.
- [36:29]
Wilson
Because I don't think we can, we can't. I have trouble viewing AI over, you know, three years. So just the next year when, when.
- [36:37]
Jake Cronin
We founded the company in 2020 as well, like this tech wasn't around. So we had the dream of creating an AI sales coach. And it's like, yeah, maybe in 10, 20 years we'll do that. At first it's gonna be like a basic virtual ride along kind of stuff.
- [36:49]
Wilson
Yeah.
- [36:49]
Jake Cronin
One day we'll get there. Then LMS came out and we're like, oh, we're gonna do that this year. Now it's like, what's next? Like the whole roadmap came way up.
- [36:56]
Wilson
Yeah.
- [36:58]
Jake Cronin
To, to, to first ask you a question, then I want to, I want to hear your answer first. What are you most excited abouts if you let your imagination run wild on this type of tech and data when they're combined?
- [37:09]
Wilson
I mean, the, my. What I'm most excited about is, I mean, I've really loved kind of this, this avenue that you're in right now is this coaching avenue that's been amazing. Like hands down, CSR coaching, field staff coaching, sales coaching. That's been wonderful. I think for me personally, I'm very, very excited about the day where I can ask an LLM like, hey, like, go find this data in Service Titan for me. I don't even want to pull and export. I just want you to find it like, hey, what's my gross profit this month? And then boom. And so I was talking to some people who, who are in this field and they said, hey, Jack, you're actually farther away than you think. Just because. Right. That's so there's no parameters on that. It's just so broad. And we can't give you that data until we're sure that that data is good. Right. Because if it starts spitting out bad data to you or it doesn't understand, then you're in a world of hurt because you're thinking that, hey, your gross profit, 60%, but it's really like 30. So. But the day that, that I can kind of remove that, I guess the, the factor of like, okay, let me export my books, let me export my labor, let me export my, I guess, material cost and then ask it, like, I can do that now, I think, but the day where I don't have to do all those moves and I can just say, hey, where is it? What is it? Oh, yeah, like a chat bot that just knows my entire business life and all my data in one spot.
- [38:43]
Jake Cronin
You had like an analyst army just like ready.
- [38:45]
Wilson
Exactly.
- [38:47]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, that's, that's pretty cool. Yeah. So we, and I have it. I share your optimism for the future. I think we are. We have this mountain of data. Right. That we now have access to. What are we going to like, end this, this tech, these large language models that are really good at processing that data as well as the rest of your business data. Okay, what do we do with that? Well, our first use case that, that we built at Ciro was coaching. How do you make people better at the craft of sales? How do you ensure that folks are following your process, ensure customer quality? And even when things like customer complaint comes in, like, let's diagnose what happened, do a postmortem, a proper post mortem. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's the current stuff, what's coming. We are, I can't get into too much detail, but we are just like, just scratching the tip of the iceberg for the use cases. A few things that I'll tease are, I'm excited. One, one that we're, that we're working on now is it's really exciting is it's cross sell and rehash, we call it. So imagine you've got folks in the field all day long and you have. Do you do any cross sell work now at your business?
- [39:55]
Wilson
Yeah, so we do plumbing to H Vac, H Vac to plumbing all the time.
- [39:58]
Jake Cronin
How good are people at saying like, oh, yeah, the worst?
- [40:01]
Wilson
Yeah, it's one of our hardest things to drill in is like, hey, you know, as you're walking around the house for plumbing, like, take a look at their H Vac system. Just like glance at it and then if it's old, hey, is anybody doing the maintenance on these things? I saw they were kind of dusty, like, what, what's the deal? Would you Be interested in having a H Vac guy come out there. Super easy, low lift. But it just doesn't happen. No one feels comfortable saying it.
- [40:27]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, yeah. So that. So piece number one, the process piece. Like, hey, just. You need to say this line. You need to at least ask, like, you can get that through. Through this type of tech today through zero today. And then there's this subsequent problem. Like, yeah, someone they sort of gave. Like, it's like they express a little interest. Maybe there's an off comment that, like, it's like, you know, you're. They're working, you know, someone showing the back of their house. Here's the H Vac machine. Yeah, it's not working. It's getting real hot. Oh, yeah, Wiring there. Yeah, these outlets are always, like, screwed up. I don't know. Like, that set line that was thrown out is gold. And the technician missed it. Why? Because they're focused on their job. Their ears, like, they can't hear everything that's being said. And now that we have this data, we could surface to you these hot leads every time they're ready to go and we just send it right to you. You give them a call up and you just get a free lead that's hot and ready to go.
- [41:15]
Wilson
That's a good one.
- [41:16]
Jake Cronin
The exciting ones coming.
- [41:17]
Wilson
Yeah, I could definitely see that because that happens more than I think technicians realize as. As an owner who. It really is focused on both of those. When I do have to run calls in the fields. You catch those. I catch them more often than not, but I know they happen and they slip through the cracks in the other instances. So that'll be a good one. Especially if it's hot directly to kind of a different line versus going. You know, because then. Because then on top of it. Right. The tech wants to. Oh, I'm still have to fix this unit. I don't. Like they're not taking the time to actually follow up and close that lead and get someone out there talking to dispatch and talking to, you know, the CSR to line it all up so to have it bypass the technician so that they can focus on what they're good at, fixing the unit. And then now you have this lead ready to go that you can follow up on or do whatever would be. That would be amazing. I mean, that's a. I'm a customer.
- [42:13]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, that's. That one we're really pumped about. And then there's. How much do you. How much do you spend on. Don't give me a number. But how much do you think about marketing? What are your, how much are you driving marketing campaigns and how, and how metrics driven do you think you are with your marketing?
- [42:27]
Wilson
We are moderately metric driven. We think about marketing a lot. I mean we're definitely on the higher growth on a year over year than most H vac companies. And I think that's because we focus on marketing and push marketing really hard and like that's our main focus is getting into more houses which is how we're grabbing market share and growing in a, in a rough market.
- [42:51]
Jake Cronin
Yeah. And then, and then one follow up question and then I'll, I'll say something is how, how's your visibility into what your competitors are doing? How are they, how do your customers think about your competitors versus you? What's their, how do they think about your brand versus the brand down the street? Whether it's trust in the business, pricing, a new offering, how, how much are you aware of, of what's in customers heads?
- [43:13]
Wilson
0%. I mean so we're smaller. I know John thinks about it occasionally because like they do a lot of branding campaigns. They spend, I'm probably millions on it. We just, we are so small that we don't, we focus on lead generation more than branding. So I would be really interested to actually know what people in, in the area think of our brand when they see, you know, our truck roll by. Yeah, definitely.
- [43:40]
Jake Cronin
It's. And then now, so now I'll say the other feature that I'm pretty excited about, this one's a little farther out. What if you. Well, I guess. Sorry, one more prompting question.
- [43:50]
Wilson
Yes.
- [43:50]
Jake Cronin
Have you ever felt like you were getting undercut by a competitor where it's like, you know, sales are just like, you're just like sort of not making the sales you used to and then it's like oh, these guys are offering this deal. Oh like now we're on our feet and we have to react to it. Does that ever happen?
- [44:05]
Wilson
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, we will generally is we'll go up against a competitor who we haven't gone up against in a long time and we'll get a bid back. And they say oh you guys are way higher. And we're going what you know, we're, we're competitive against this guy, this guy, this guy and this guy. And then someone comes in with a killer deal and will, will undercut us.
- [44:24]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, the, the future that I'm excited about is where you're basically, you can, you're constantly aware. Like imagine you were just listening all day, every day Waiting for competitors to be mentioned and exactly how they're being mentioned. Oh them, okay. They're, they're, they're, they're pretty premium. Oh, these folks, oh, they're constantly like lowering the quotes and being able to get through this right away proactively so you can make strategic decisions about marketing and positioning against competitors and just reacting quickly, reacting on your toes versus you know, things taking months to months to learn. That's, that's where I think about one of the use cases of leveraging this mountain of data to drive your business owner level strategy. How is, how's your brand being perceived by customers versus the, the other folks down the street? Customer. As a marketing campaign we should probably land one and counter position it immediately. These types of insights which just, that's a science fiction right now. You, there's no way you can have that kind of boots on the ground intelligence until you have access to this data. So that's, that's another one I'm excited about.
- [45:28]
Wilson
That's, that's exciting. And, and in time, in terms of timeline, what do you like, are we looking at like three years out or are we looking at within the next kind of year? Ish. Three sub three sub three. That's awesome man. I love it. I think this is, this is incredible. And this has to be an extremely fun place to build in. Are you enjoying? Oh, so lucky. I feel like I could see the passion.
- [45:56]
Jake Cronin
Well, it's cool because you like, you start like when I started the business I just, I, I knew the experience that Cutco gave me and how so many folks has such a bad experience. People telling me, oh that's a pyramid scheme. Oh yeah, I worked that company. It sucks. You just didn't get the support. It's like for me it was honestly life changing and so many people get op like the opportunity to be in these jobs with really high earnings potential, high potential trajectories. If you're able to stick it out, get the support you need to get through it. And so being able to build a company that is like every day we get another success story from someone whose life was changed and it's really, it's really fun. Yeah. So I'm a lucky guy and it's fun to be building.
- [46:44]
Wilson
And with that, I mean like, I think you're the quintessential like entrepreneur and we get a, I mean once again we're very fortunate podcast to be in the space. We really love home services. But in general, like if you were to give any kind of advice to an entrepreneur coming in who is just wanting to start a business or wanting to grow a newly started business. Like what is just some really general advice that they're looking at. I know that's a super broad question. I mean, I have mine for like home services. Like, here's my go to, don't do this, do this. Do you have any of those up your sleeve there?
- [47:22]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, there's, I mean, there's some really tactical ones based on your type of business.
- [47:26]
Wilson
Yeah. Get rejected often and early and then grow that muscle.
- [47:31]
Jake Cronin
I think the two that I think are probably, I think are pretty universal because I've just, I hear them from all sorts of gurus in different spaces. They ring true for me. One of them is if you're starting from zero, like set a time frame so you don't give up. It's kind of like, like, it's like training for like a race or something. It's like if you're doing a really hard thing, you might just quit after a week or a month or once it gets hard. But if you commit mentally to six months or I'm gonna give the next 12 months, I, I planned out my financials. I know I can do it. I can avoid taking salary for that long and just lock in. So you need to be able to lock in, plan like, you know, give yourself a certain amount of time, ensure you're financially able to dedicate that much time. And the second one is, the second one is just face the rejection, like over and over again. Like, like live for the rejection. Like it's, it's going to happen. You have to seek it out.
- [48:24]
Wilson
So what, what's your view on burning the ships? Right, there's burning. I'm, I'm a ship burner. So I burnt all my ships. Everything's tied to this, this business. And, and I don't think I would have stayed in it even if I set a time frame if I didn't burn the ships early on. Because my story is that everybody quit day one. I wasn't an H Vac tech. I had to be an H Vac tech. Like this whole, like nightmare of a story. But, like, the ships are already burned. What's your feeling on, on burning ships, getting into something like this?
- [48:53]
Jake Cronin
Yeah, that's a good one. I, I think it can be helpful. I didn't have all the ships burned. Like, it's like I left a cushy job and I could have, like, they would take me back. Like, I didn't have, I could have like cussed someone out on the way out, so they wouldn't hire me back. That would have, that would have burned the ships. But I had, I had a safety net if I needed to. Maybe it was. Maybe the way that I burned the ships was I just told everyone I was going to do this thing and so that I had like, my social reputation, like on the line. That, that's kind of, kind of locked me in that. In a peer group. And I was an accelerator and it's like, hey, we're these six months, everyone's building a business. So I had, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you're running a race or whatever, there's people around you. And so I wasn't. You're alone building your business, but at least there were other people alone with me, which, which helped. So that's, that's a third piece of advice I'll say is like, gets. Get some buddies, get some founder friends. Like, you have to have that circle of people around you to at least provide that emotional support that you're not totally alone.
- [49:49]
Wilson
Yeah, no, that's a good one. I, I say that one a lot is build a community. It's extremely important. I wouldn't be where I'm at today without it either. And you know, on the ship burning thing, I, I don't know if burning the ships is right either. I don't actually have a viewpoint on that. I was just curious as to yours because, you know, it is what it is. Some people don't need to. Yeah, awesome, man. This has been a fun conversation. So where can people find out more about you and Ciro S I R.
- [50:17]
Jake Cronin
O AI Ciro AI. And it sends you in. If you're on service titan, we've got a link to send you over to Sales Pro or just talk to your service titan folks. Otherwise, go to C, click, book a demo, and you'll get one of our friendly folks on the phone.
- [50:31]
Wilson
What about you, Jake? If. If they want to find you. Are you on social media? Are you becoming your own guru influencer? Where are you at?
- [50:38]
Jake Cronin
Not. Not yet. My. My influencer journey is maybe done yet, but you can find me on LinkedIn and I do see my. My LinkedIn DMs. So it's. It's Jake Cronin and CEO at Ciro, so you can't miss awesome.
- [50:50]
Wilson
Well, Ciro sounds like an awesome product. I mean, it's. It. You're. You're tracking all of your technicians and all of your salespeople in the field. You're getting great data back from them. You're using that on a micro and macro level to coach. I mean, it sounds like. Like some really cool things are coming down the pike with you as well. And I'm really excited to see where we are a year. We're going to bring you back on and I'm going to ask you the same questions.
- [51:13]
Jake Cronin
Oh, yeah? Yeah. Start. Start collecting your data because there's so much that you can do with it. If you're not recording now, you should start recording.
- [51:21]
Wilson
Awesome, man. Well, thank you for coming on today, and we'll talk to you soon.
- [51:25]
Jake Cronin
Thanks for having me.