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Pitch Me Podcast
The $3,000 SaaS Trap Nobody Talks About
00:24:39
Inlink.com, to expose a silent killer in small business growth: the 65% of calls that go unanswered and the $ 3,000-per-month Frankenstack of SaaS tools that most solopreneurs are drowning in. Ken’s journey is anything but ordinary. From running a...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Pitch Me the podcast where real salespeople, entrepreneurs and business owners step into the spotlight to pitch their products or service and get unfiltered real time feedback from the $38 million high ticket sales titan himself, Kayvon K. No fluff, no sugarcoating, just brutal honesty, actionable insights and next level sales strategies to help you close bigger deals faster. If you want to pitch like a pro, dominate every sales conversation and take your business to the next level, you're in the right place. This is Pitch Me. Let's get started. And we're on another episode of Pitch Me. And today we have Ken Cox. How are we doing today?
- [00:38]
B
I'm wonderful, Kevon. Thank you for having me.
- [00:40]
A
Thank you so much for being here. Always appreciate another business owner, Solopreneur, in this case SaaS, owner, founder, is that correct?
- [00:49]
B
That is correct.
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A
So you're from InLink.
- [00:53]
B
InLink.com is the company I'm here to promote today. We are a CRM and office suite. Who I really like to serve is Solopreneurs, small and medium sized businesses, but I serve clients of all sizes all the way up to some of the biggest companies on the planet, all the way down to your local yoga studio.
- [01:14]
A
Okay, interesting. So a CRM software. Before we get into that, I always love to know a little bit more about the, the business owner themselves. You know, a little bit of the journey, how you, how you got to this part in your business.
- [01:27]
B
All right. Yeah, so we founded our, our hosting company in 2000. Yeah, 99, 2000 is when we founded our hosting company. And that, that's called Hosterian and that's all fortune, like big companies, data center kind of stuff. Colocation, which most people don't even know about. Right. So that's what I do all through the day. And, but the businesses that I love serving are mom and pop, Main street and the, the, the gap is pretty big difference. Right. So we founded end link.com last year to, to bring products and services to that medium mid sized market and Solopreneur that were to take all the software packages that we had for the big companies being served by a privately held company, not a publicly held company. So I have different, different needs that I have that I can, I have different needs for your data. I don't have to sell it, I don't sell it. I'm a big privacy buff. Right. So it was important to me to create something that was affordable and easy to use for that small and medium sized business that Solopreneur Main Street America and also give you all the privacy and all the bells and whistles of the Fortune 500s.
- [02:38]
A
Okay, so let's go into a little bit more of what this is because I, I'm, I'm, I unclear. I hear CRM, I think completely different than what it sounds like you're saying. So I want to understand, you know, when we say CRM, what does that mean to you? What you know, the product we understand is smaller business owners. You know that mid SMBs and it sounded like solopreneur. So medium, small scale, $1 million a year type.
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B
Absolutely. Okay, Absolutely. That's who I really love working with online.
- [03:12]
A
It sounded like all is it retail businesses, traditional businesses, service based businesses, product.
- [03:18]
B
So a lot of what I've been doing lately, some of the verticals that have been very popular for us lately, autoglass repair technicians, guys that are doing their construction companies, pool installers. We do a lot of gyms, a lot of yoga studios, that kind of stuff too. So brick and mortar. But we also do some podcast guys. We have CRM for the podcasts and we have CRM for real estate. You name it. We've got about 67 different snapshots that we, for industry specific needs that we can just drop in there at no additional charge.
- [03:52]
A
Okay, and what does the CRM do? Like, what's, like, what's it for? Like what is it? What's the calendar?
- [03:58]
B
Books, your leads. If you do the AI employees, it'll answer your phones of AI agent, it'll do call text backs if you wanted to build a course for your, for your, for your business. Pretty much we took everything that we've ever done and put it under one hood and we're giving it away at 97 bucks a month.
- [04:19]
A
Okay, so I'm going to ask the question. Yeah, think I have the answer, but I'd be surprised if I don't. We are doing a white label of go high level.
- [04:30]
B
We're doing a white label to go high level backed with the hosting of Hosterion, backed with the support of our team so that we have, so that we're answering the end users questions, not the agency's questions. Right. Nlink is here to cut the agency out. I believe that a small business owner should own their marketing strategy and be able to deploy it. But we've also coupled that with an office product. So imagine your Google Drive, your email, your all of those products and services so you really have one throat to choke. You know, where all of your data is being stored and, and who's managing that data.
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A
So let's go in deep in that now that we know what this is. So this is a full suite CRM product. Like a Go High Level.
- [05:14]
B
Yeah, it's a white, but we partner with gohigh level for that. We've also got some other people in there.
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A
But then you've added your own customer support on top of it.
- [05:23]
B
Correct.
- [05:24]
A
I saw, I heard something about compliance, but I could have been wrong. Something about security. Was I picking that up in the beginning?
- [05:30]
B
Yeah. I mean our office product is HIPAA compliant. We're stock to like all the bells and whistles that you would, you know, all the compliancy issues that you, you would go for. And being a hosting company, you know, our insurance is a little different than your average agency out there.
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A
So what's the difference between me just going to go and get a $97, you know, subscription with go High Level, for instance, and then going with you? I want to understand that difference.
- [05:54]
B
The biggest difference right out of the gate is going to be the support. Right. High Level Direct is primarily. They're great support, absolutely. But they're primarily geared to the reseller and to the agency. All right. They're not going to help you build your webpage or they're not going to, they're not going to update your WordPress for you. They're not going to assist you with YAKT or any of those other tools. Right. And we're, we're there to help you with all of those things.
- [06:20]
A
Okay. So this is very important. See, this is very important. So I'm a solopreneur. Let's just say this smaller business, right. And I'm in, I have, my leads are in say activecampaign for emailing. I use click funnels for my data. I'm using school for my videos, you said I'm using Typeform for my, you know, quiz funnels, application funnel, all of that. Schedule ones for calendly picking. I got to integrate this zapier into all of that. And then I'm using something like, you know, for the, I'm just thinking for the data visual board. Right. Something like a bi. I was thinking like a, you know, BI for the data. And I got all that stuff happening and we know this is all A1 and done in. In. In go High level or here in this case, let's call it in linked.
- [07:12]
B
Correct.
- [07:13]
A
Brings all that down to one place, one centralized place. Now going with you, I might still have other things that I'm using like for my website, I'm not building my full website on gohighlevel. I'm building that on like a WordPress or I'm building that on some other platform, but I still need some of that data to connect into inlinked. Is that correct?
- [07:37]
B
Correct. So we have a separate back office than High Level. Right. So we have our own back office that you go into. It gets you to your office suite, it can get you to your WordPress hosting. If you need dedicated servers or Dockers or other stuff like that, we're here to help you with that stuff too. But that's kind of way, way higher level. As you, as your business grows and you have more, I think long term you're going to have more GPU need than anything. But you know, as you, as you mature and you get out of that million dollar and you get to the 5 and 10, $20 million range, you don't have to jump providers. Right. And yeah, you're with a company that understands how to, how to manage a workload for, you know, you know, my, my largest email client is a top five biggest companies on the planet.
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A
Okay, so this is interesting. Are you using the LinkedIn, sorry, the.
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B
End, like mail, the go high level.
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A
Platform to deliver email?
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B
No, no, that's, that's part of the End link. That's part of the End Link office suite. There's CRM and Link Office.
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A
So your Linked office is, is a better deliverable delivery email deliverable system.
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B
It'll say, I mean it saves a company with, you know, call it 2000 emails. It'll save them about a half million dollars a year. Over Google or Amazon.
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A
Over Google and Amazon or ActiveCampaign or some of these other guys.
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B
This is your, this is your office product. So this is like your inbox, your where all your employees are getting their mail sending receipts. Okay. Okay. Not mass email. Like we don't do bulk mailing. We're, we're corporate, you know, email in that particular case scenario.
- [09:18]
A
Oh, okay. So corporations.
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B
So we took those tools that we do for Fortune fives and brought them down to sell them to Main Street America.
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A
I got it. So you're not stuck on Google or Hotmail as a platform to deliver email.
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B
Correct. A lot of companies today, most of your mom and pops are using like a C panel, pop, the IMAP connection or something like that.
- [09:42]
A
Yeah.
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B
So if they wanted to graduate outside of there, once they get to, you know, 25, 30, 50 employees, they need something a little more robust. They need, they're starting to understand that. Oh, as I'm making intellectual property inside of Google's ecosystem. If I've not properly protected it before I shared it with them, I'm not exactly sure what my rights are with my data.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Right.
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A
And yeah, that's where I heard the data. Yeah.
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B
And then.
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A
And this is part in link. Like, this is also part of the white lot. Like the, the white label.
- [10:14]
B
This is not part of the white label. This is not part of Go High Level at all. This is a completely separate. This is an office product that Nlink deploys.
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A
So when I buy from you, I get access to all of this.
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B
Correct.
- [10:26]
A
Okay. I want to just make sure I.
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B
Understand that the CRM is, is part of that. So our SoHo package comes with five office products and a full deployed, Go High level white labeled Solution.
- [10:38]
A
You're a SoHo product.
- [10:39]
B
You said our small office home office product.
- [10:41]
A
Okay. I love it.
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B
Small office.
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A
Okay.
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B
So it gets you five email accounts with Google, not Google Drive and End Link Drive, very similar to Google Drive. So you can share and collaborate and all those things. But you know, it's in a spot. It's not going to be using your data against you. We don't use it to pull and make ads. Right. We don't do any of those kinds of things. So it's pure. You know, I'm an old school Internet guy. Right. I grew up before we could target you with ads. So I like that kind of ecosystem and that's the kind of ecosystem that I built for my clients.
- [11:09]
A
Yeah. Okay. And how are you selling it right now? Like, like how many users podcast? Podcasts.
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B
I'm on podcasts every day.
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A
Are you podcast and it's working?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Love it, Love it.
- [11:22]
B
We do a, we do a Tuesday webinar. Right. It's a little slow right now. We launched in January. We do a. Every. Every Tuesday at 4pm Central. We do. You can come on, go to. We do Zoom and we like set up a bogus phone number and call it right now. I think a big gap for those people are answering the phones. Right. 65% of all calls go unanswered. So, you know, we do the podcast and we do some traditional marketing campaigns too, obviously. Right. Like, hey, how many calls are you missing? And that kind of thing to the procurement managers of the planet. And it's, it's a good time.
- [11:53]
A
So miss, when you say missing the calls, the who's missing the calls.
- [11:58]
B
So there, there's a big gap when you talk to the Main Street America front desk staff. Right. There's. It's transient it's turnover, it's high turnover and all those things. So one of the things that I really like to do is say, hey, let's have the front desk person stop answer being the first person to answer the phone and let's let an AI employee answer that phone. Answer 80% of all the questions that they might have, send them text messages. Right. And what we see is that generally sales go up a little bit because they're always getting the right text message, they're always getting replied to. And then have that transient front desk person spend more time with the clients that are there and face to face and stuff. And that's.
- [12:38]
A
What program do you do use that off of?
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B
We're using the end link CRM for that.
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A
Yeah, that's your in link.
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B
And we partner with Twilio's the partner on the backside for that. And it's a, it's a really nice 2024. I would not have tried to sell that product at all. But in 25, it's there, it's solid, it works. I've got it set up in my own companies. My, my wife's company uses it and.
- [13:01]
A
We got to dumb this down because it's, it's not confusing to me. But I can tell you right now, half the audience has no idea what.
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B
We'Re talk so traditionally on phones. And you know, forgive me because I've, I've worked with, you know, back offices for Sprint and AOL and all those guys, but interactive voice recordings are what we're used to. Right. Press one for this, two for this, three for this. And it's very binary decision making. So you come up with your entire script and go. But an AI employee, trademark pending.
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A
Is.
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B
It could answer the phone with AI you tie it with. It's actually integrated with chat GPT, you use your keys there and it will answer the phone as your AI employee answer any questions that come up. We can train these now in like 20 or 30 minutes with your website data. Yeah, really quickly and answer the phone it will send. So are you open this today? Right? Yes, yes, we are. Would you like me to text you a link to our calendar? How do I sign up? This is how you sign up. Would you like me to text you an onboarding form? I need to cancel my service. Do you want me to put you on hold and let somebody call you back next week kind kind of thing? Right.
- [14:16]
A
Let's just, let's just put this perspective. I like to make it like so clear because I feel if I can have it if it's clear for me, it's clear for everybody, right? If it's not clear for me, how can it be clear for anybody? You and you said auto glass or some glass. What do you say?
- [14:30]
B
You're, you know, auto glass technicians are.
- [14:33]
A
An auto glass technician. Let's just say they have a small shop, right? Couple employees, they're on the road, but they have Susan that sits at home at the head office. Susan only comes in at 9 and she leaves at 5, and she takes her break at 1. And Susan can only answer the phone one time and people are calling, emailing. And sometimes Susan isn't perfect. She has a bad day and comes in with a bad attitude. It's. We're humans. It's all good. No, no offense, Susan, we like Susan, we respect her, but that's just the reality of the business. And the owner of that business is out. He's working, he's installing. He doesn't. He's just like. The last thing I need to do is worry about all this we're talking about. You'll come in, you'll implement a system where every lead will come in. And then that system is powered by AI. So every lead that calls, every lead that get reached out, every lead that emails, text, we will be responded to. So you don't have to worry about Susan and having a bad day and you don't have to worry about what happens on the weekends. There's a 24 7. I'm going to use the word AI employee as working your CRM. That alone, if you've done nothing else, that alone surely. Does that get you more business. Think you'd have to be living under a rock to say no to that, right?
- [15:38]
B
Yes.
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A
Okay, absolutely. And then on top of that, now you're helping them with. Okay, how their email. Like they're the emails they're using, the data they're using.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And then maybe some marketing advice maybe in there or some.
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B
Absolutely. Yeah. We want to be one throat to choke, right. So you, for your Internet stuff, you come to me, you come to Nlink. You need websites, you need phones, you whatever you need. We want to be your one throat to choke if you need.
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A
And you'll fix all the. You'll fix all the solutions for that?
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B
Yeah. So a typical stack, if you get our unlimited AI employee package, it's $500. But you come to the Tuesday webinars, you generally get a pretty steep discount. That's 500amonth for unlimited AI employees. You get two onboarding sessions. We set Your phone up. We set your Google review AI up. We show you how to do your, your funnel AI, we show you how to do your conversation AI, we get.
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A
All that one to one. Or is this group one on one, one on one, one on one. So I'm going to pay, I want to be very clear. So I'm going to pay you $500 a month or if I go to the webinar and wait, I'll get a discount, some sort of discount. Love it. But I'm going to spend 500 bucks a month with you. And you're going to set up all my AI agents.
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B
Not all. We're going to spend two hours with you showing you how to do it. One of the problems that we ran into really quickly with an AI employee answering the phone. Same same problem you're going to have with a real life employee is the guardrails. Right. The, the difference is whenever I got to correct my AI employees, there's no emotion. Right. There's no little girl that's just out of high school answering the phone like, hey, you kind of did this wrong. You just log in. And it's important for the, for the business owner, whoever's managing that AI employee to be able to make quick changes. And we want to make that super simple for them. So that two hours. We're going to set up as many agents as you as we can. And we generally get the phone, maybe an email agent, maybe your Google phone. And Google reviews are the absolute necessary. Right.
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A
When you say Google reviews, tell me what you mean by Google reviews.
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B
So the, the review AI is going to watch your Google and watch your Facebook for reviews and then answer those reviews.
- [17:49]
A
Wow.
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B
Using AI instead of the, the can't kind of. Thank you. So, and, and we. Depending on your tonality and stuff like that.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
Right. We want to just cater that to how your business would talk. And it does a really great job. So you know that every review is getting answered by somebody now.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I like ethical work, especially in AI. So I typically tell people, let's name your AI agent something AI so that whenever they're replying, whenever they're talking to somebody. Yeah. They know it's real right out of the gate and they know how to get to a human and close that loop fast.
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A
Okay, so what's the. It's to me, I get it, but it seems like it's still. It seems like it's a lot of work or complicated or overwhelming. Right. So what, what would you say, like the elevator pitch here is if we were to say like, you know, you're in the elevator and I'm your ideal client, which is a small business. Say I'm a small business owner. I have cr. You know, we talked about this. Right. My data is half. It's here, it's on five different platforms. My systems costs. Right. Just my SAS cost alone is $3,000 a month.
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B
Right.
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A
To run everything. Right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You're coming in and what's the, what's the elevator pitch?
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B
So I mean you're gonna have to do it anyway at some point for, for the new guys. Right. If. Or my elevator pitch for a guy that has a small business right now is you're missing 65 of your calls. We need to get those answered. But the, the solopreneur getting started is you're gonna have to do all this stuff anyway and we've dropped the price. It's such a commodity price. And, and software is going to drop. AI is going to drop the price of software across the board. You don't have to implement every single piece. Like just start looking at your gaps, fill your gaps. And, and with Nlink we have so many tools, we fill almost all the gaps. I can't think. There's not many gaps. We're not accounting software. Right. You still got to connect it to QuickBooks or whatever thing else you need. But your entire online Persona, presence, all that stuff, we've got you covered. And you don't have to go to a marketing agency over here or and a web hosting guy over here and a developer over there and a UI guy over here or a one stop shop. We've been doing it for 25 years.
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A
So the elevator pitch is as a result of, as a result of 70% of your phones being not answered. We're going to build you a full AI 247 answering an email machine. That's. That's all that really matters. Right?
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B
That's it. Yeah, well, it's, it's a bread but. And you know, I don't have to. I'm super fortunate not looking to onboard thousands of customers. I, I've, I know what growing pains are. I don't like them. You know, we like a good, solid, steady growth business and that sort of thing.
- [20:38]
A
So how many clients are you like? You know, customers. New subscriptions are you bringing on right now on a monthly basis?
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B
New subscriptions? Yeah, we're bringing on like five a week.
- [20:47]
A
Five a week. Okay. And then, and what's the churn rate?
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B
I don't have the churn rate. Off top of my head, it's mixed in with all my other numbers. My Overall turns about 2%.
- [20:57]
A
Okay. Okay. Why would someone churn on something like this? Because it can't be expense wise. Because it's a cheap.
- [21:04]
B
It's not expense, it's. They gave up like they stopped doing it.
- [21:08]
A
They just didn't do the work.
- [21:09]
B
Yeah. The other one is they've been sold by a web developer or some marketing firm and the marketing firm needs to take it all under their belt. Right. For whatever reason. Right. So and if that's the case and they're using go high level, we'll give you your go high level transfer code and you can move all the, all the go high level stuff over. But some of the stuff that we do specifically won't go right. Like your web hosting if we're doing.
- [21:37]
A
Your workflow, web hosting, the email hosting obviously.
- [21:40]
B
Yeah, stuff like that won't transfer over but your go high level CRM pipelines, workflows, all that stuff.
- [21:46]
A
If you know DMRK and all that with their emails for deliverability and all that. Do you make sure that that's all set up and working if you're with us?
- [21:53]
B
Yes.
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A
Okay.
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B
Yeah. We've got a 24 hour support team that's here. So it's just, you know, on the onboarding we do all of that. Right. And then you know, if you have a problem just jump in the chat and.
- [22:08]
A
Where can people find you? Just so we have a. I have a better understanding.
- [22:12]
B
Nlink.com I N L I N K I like to think of that as the Link between Web 2.0 and 3.0 services and. Or if you want to know more just nlink.com and more about me is just pencox.com yeah.
- [22:24]
A
So inlink.com is where if you are a small business owner, you're or solopreneur your systems are in different multiple sauce, you know, software products and. Or you want to replace it because it's kind of seems like there's a lot here and. Or you want to replace your front staff or empower them to do better with their job by empowering them with AI product that will be able to answer the phone 247 answer email 247 and Google review 24 7. This is a place to go.
- [22:58]
B
Absolutely.
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A
One stop shop. I like what you said. A chokehold on everything.
- [23:01]
B
Would you say one throat to choke.
- [23:03]
A
One what? One throat.
- [23:04]
B
One throat to choke. That finger pointing game. Right. Like oh, it's not my fault, it's their Fault. Why didn't this campaign work? Or, you know, the email's not going through over here. It's exhausting to chase some of those things down.
- [23:15]
A
And you guys have set all that up or you teach how to do that.
- [23:19]
B
We do it. I mean, if you're a client, then we do it all with you.
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A
What I'm saying, if you're a client, you keep. But like, you'll do it all with me or you'll do it for me?
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B
We, we're happy to do it all for you. Not for 90 to $7 a month, depending on what the scope of work is. Right?
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [23:35]
B
So with, with the 97, you're going to get the software and you get one one hour of onboarding and then technical support. So if you're running into an issue and you need to solve that issue, then we'll. Then we do that at no charge on the onboarding. Some of those things can get a little. Setting up a campaign would be an additional.
- [23:53]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, it's. There's a lot to it. And that's why I didn't think you can be doing that for $100 a month.
- [23:59]
B
Correct.
- [24:00]
A
Yeah. Well, that's. That's it. Any last words for the audience here?
- [24:06]
B
Get to work.
- [24:07]
A
Get to work.
- [24:08]
B
Get to work.
- [24:09]
A
I love it. That's another episode of Pitch Me, and you've just listened to Pitch Me with kayvon K, the podcast where sales are redefined, objections are destroyed, and and high ticket closers are born. Want to take your pitch to the next level? Subscribe now, leave a review and join the Pitch Me community. And if you're brave enough to pitch live on this show, head over to ww PitchMePodcast.com and apply today. Until next time, keep pitching, keep closing, and keep connecting.