Podcasts about fattmerchant

There's a moment in every entrepreneur's journey when clarity hits, and for many, it's realizing the potential of data-driven business insights. This week, I'm excited to have this conversation with Suneera Madhani, the founder of Stax and CEO School, who used it to predict market trends, understand customer behavior, and streamline operations. This strategic shift propelled her ventures to success and now guides the growth of her current fintech enterprise Worth AI. About Suneera MadhaniSuneera Madhani's entrepreneurial journey began with her founding Stax (formerly Fattmerchant), a revolutionary payment platform she grew from a fledgling idea to processing over $5 billion in payments. Her innovative approach to blending technology with financial services not only transformed how small businesses manage transactions but also was got her recognised by Entrepreneur Magazine among the 100 Most Influential Women. A recipient of many accolades, including a spot on Fortune's prestigious 40 under 40 list, Suneera is driven by a passion for empowering women in business. Her commitment extends beyond her ventures, as she continually seeks ways to help women entrepreneurs have it all. Today, Suneera leads Worth AI, leveraging artificial intelligence to further innovate business operations.Key Insights:Don't Skip Data Standardization. Standardize the data collection and analysis processes across your business to ensure consistency and accuracy. This makes it easier to compare metrics over time, leading to more informed decision-making and improved strategic planning.Focus on Execution. Put extra effort into the practical implementation of ideas and plans. Effective execution involves monitoring progress, making timely adjustments, and holding the team accountable, which are crucial for turning visions into reality and achieving business goals.Be Intentional with Growth Strategies. Clearly define your growth objectives and develop targeted strategies to achieve them. This includes identifying key markets, setting measurable goals, and allocating resources strategically to maximize ROI and sustain long-term growth.Simplify Business Processes. Look for ways to simplify operations to improve efficiency and reduce costs. This could involve cutting unnecessary steps, automating tasks, or reorganizing teams to better align with your business goals.Empower and Inspire Teams. Foster a supportive and motivating work environment that encourages innovation and collaboration. Empowered teams with a clear sense of purpose and commitment are more likely to contribute positively to the business's success and adapt quickly to changes.Suneera's best advice for entrepreneurs:“If you can do it once, you can do it better.”Connect with Suneera Madhani:InstagramXLinkedInWorth AICEO SchoolFollow Beyond 8 Figures:LinkedInXWebsite

This week David is interviewing Jim Douglas who is a Managing Partner at Fulcrum Equity based in Atlanta, Georgia. Fulcrum is a growth equity platform that focuses on software technology and healthcare services in undercapitalized markets. Jim has been actively investing for years and I am truly fortunate to have him on the show.Prior to joining Fulcrum, Jim was CEO of Vesdia, a pioneer in loyalty and card-linked marketing for financial services, airline, and hospitality companies, which merged with Cartera Commerce and sold to Raketun. Before Vesdia, he served as CEO for Atlanta-based Visionary Systems, Inc. (VSI), a provider of decision systems for credit providers and retailers that was sold to Trans Union. Prior to these roles, Jim served as the Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Financial Officer with CheckFree Corporation, the leading provider of electronic billing and payment services to financial institutions. He has also held the role of Vice President and Corporate Controller of Medaphis Corporation, a leading provider of medical billing and management software and services for physicians and hospitals. He began his career with KPMG in the Financial Services practice after graduating with a BBA in Accounting from Georgia State University.Jim is currently a board member of Kobiton, Dropoff, SureFire Local, Kevel, Digital Hands, Vertify, and GoPivot. He has also served on boards supporting the growth of successful Fulcrum exits in Fattmerchant, QASymphony, Prevalent, LogFire, ALS Resolvion, and outside of Fulcrum GroBanking, FactorTrust, and Paymentus. In the community, Jim sits on the boards of Venture Atlanta, ACG (Association for Corporate Growth), and UNICEF Southeast Region. What You Will Learn:Growth Equity StrategiesCapital Efficiency and ValuationDiversifying a Portfolio with Services and SoftwareInvesting Through Market Cycles

Stax, formerly Fattmerchant, is consistently featured on Inc.'s Best Workplaces, one of Suneera's proudest accomplishments. Today's Wine Down Wednesday episide features a throwback of Suneera sharing how she established mission-centric values that have led to building a culture that drives business success with over 300 employees. Join us for the exclusive CEO School Conference September 16-18, 2022: Register Today: www.nothingbadhappens.com Follow @ceoschool on Instagram for inspiration and exclusive behind-the-scenes you won't find anywhere else. This episode is sponsored by The Club, a Quarterly box and digital monthly community to help you level up and leadership and life. Learn more today at https://join.theceoschool.co/  

Philip Lewis is a Partner with Fulcrum Equity Partners, a company that makes equity investments in rapidly growing businesses. He also currently serves on the Board of Directors for Kevel, Stratasan, Advantum Health, GoPivot, and LiveSource. He previously served on the Boards of Stax by Fattmerchant, MFG, and Resolvion. Before joining Fulcrum Equity Partners, Philip worked with SaaSOptics, implementing operational cadences and working with the team through its nine-figure exit. Prior to this, he served as CFO of RivalHealth and helped guide the company through its merger with gBehavior, now branded as GoPivot. In this episode… There are many factors that impact a business acquisition. During the due diligence process, there are financial, organizational, and leadership details to work out. But now, a new question is joining the list: What is your business' privacy and security strategy? Fifteen years ago, people didn't put much thought into privacy and security when buying or selling a business. They weren't concerned about ransomware and cyber breaches. Now, it's at the forefront of everyone's mind during a transaction. Business owners want to know: What does your security perimeter look like? How effective is your mobile device management? Do you have multi-factor authentication?  In this episode of the She Said Privacy/He Said Security podcast, Justin and Jodi Daniels are joined by Philip Lewis, Partner at Fulcrum Equity Partners, to discuss the importance of a company-wide privacy and security plan. Philip explains how your security plan (or lack thereof) will impact a business transaction, why multi-factor authentication matters, and the first steps to creating a more secure business.

In today's episode, Suneera talks about balancing having a family and being the CEO of two companies. She highlights how you don't have to choose between family or business, you can have it all despite outside opinions. She walks us through how she got her company, Stax, from startup to eight figures in revenue while simultaneously launching CEO School, a community of women upleveling and investing in themselves. Suneera prides her success on prioritization and productivity explaining how she had to learn how to say no to the things that weren't allowing her to achieve her goals. Memorable Moments: 5:32 As women, we're constantly having to choose our identity and we don't have to choose our identity, and I was falling into the same trap that most women we fall into, which is the “this is what I'm supposed to do” mentality.8:02 It's not about anyone else's level of success or definition it's yours. So sit down, write down. What does it all look like for me? And then go do that11:53 Give yourself grace and be willing to fail and learn, but you have to be willing to show up. So you have to take the first, the first step and that's how growth happens. It happens when you're uncomfortable.So get comfortable getting uncomfortable.14:33 Wherever you are, and this may not be applicable to your business or in your life today, but there are experts who can help you get to your goals faster.15:55 Success is not just defined by the number in your bank account. Follow Suneera:⭐Follow her on Instagram: @suneeramadhani ⭐Follow CEO School: @ceoschool⭐Follow her company Stax on Instagram: @staxpayments⭐ CEO School Podcast Connect with Allison: ⭐ Connect on Instagram @allisonwalsh⭐ 2022 Goal Setting Masterclass: https://bit.ly/2022goalsmasterclass ⭐ JOIN THE SOCIETY: www.shebelievedsociety.com (use code 2022 to access the Society for $22/month)⭐ Purchase your 2022 Planner: Digital Download: https://www.allisonwalshconsulting.com/product-page/90-day-success-plannerHard Copy: https://amzn.to/3quSYpgCheck out Allison's episode on the CEO School Podcast: https://theceoschool.co/how-to-scale-successfully-as-a-multi-passionate-entrepreneur-with-allison-walsh/ 

Get a behind the scenes look at how Stax (formerly Fattmerchant) worked with NMI to build a next-gen ISO, as James interviews Jacques Fu of Stax and Jen Sherman from NMI. And stick around after the interview for Patti's report on new small business formations in time of Covid.

In today's episode, we are joined with a very special guest with an inspiring story... the founder and CEO of Stax by Fattmerchant, Suneera Madhani. She's sharing how she built an 8-Figure Company. This is an episode you won't want to miss!   In this episode, you'll learn:   • How Suneera's childhood impacted her entrepreneurship journey   • What's next after you've already built an 8 figure company   • How to take your first step on your entrepreneurship journey even if you're feeling doubtful and scared   Learn more about my 1:1 coaching: www.jaclyndigregorio.com/coaching   Connect with me!     If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot and tag me on your Instagram stories - @jaclyndigregorio   Instagram: www.instagram.com/jaclyndigregorio Website: https://www.jaclyndigregorio.com/   Connect with Suneera: www.instagram.com/suneeramadhani

This week on Inspired With Bell... Krystal Little is Chief of Staff at Stax (formerly Fattmerchant) - the industry's only complete all-in-one solution for managing everything in the payments ecosystem. Since joining the fintech almost 3 years ago, Krystal has been instrumental in the company's evolution and recent rebranding, where she consolidated Stax's technology systems to one, helping the customer service team achieve a 98% client retention rate. Outside of the office, Krystal is passionate about giving back to her community and inspiring the next generation of women in tech careers.

Suneera Madhani, the Founder and CEO of Stax (formerly Fattmerchant) is our special guest on this the 101st episode of the Leaders in Payments Podcast. She is the second guest in the Women Leaders in Payments month sponsored by American Express. Suneera was raised by immigrant parents who were also entrepreneurs. Much of her personal and professional inspiration comes from her parents. She attended the University of Florida and after a short stint at a consumer-packaged goods company she started her career in payments. In 2014 she founded FattMerchant with her brother. They have recently rebranded to Stax and raised over $100 million. They process payments for over 25,000 merchants and are based on Orlando, Florida. Suneera has some great advice for women in payments including being bold, taking a risk, & being authentic and your true self.  

Can you have it all – family, community, and work? Our guest is Suneera Madhani, Founder & CEO of Stax by Fattmerchant. Her answer to this question is an unapologetic YES. Suneera shares her powerful personal story as well as a practical framework she calls the "3 Bucket Principle" for integrating work with life and prioritizing the things that matter most. "Your story is yours to design," and if you care about the goal, you'll focus on the system. Suneera shares how to say NO more often so that you can say YES to the things that matter most. She also talks about how to double down on you strengths and enjoy your work more while driving considerably more value. Leadership On Purpose is hosted by Blake Bozarth, Founder & CEO of CoThryve

Suneera Madhani, Fattmerchant’s Founder & Chief Executive Officer, is a payments and technology innovator who has catapulted her business idea from startup to processing over 5 Billion in payments — disrupting the payments ecosystem as the “Netflix” of credit card processing (Fast Company). Suneera’s inspirational startup story and her success in raising 20 million in venture capital as a minority woman - has been featured in high profile publications such as Forbes, Fast Company, Yahoo Business, Tech Crunch, Huffington Post, and the countless others. Suneera is a regular contributing writer for Forbes, Fortune and INC Magazine as well as a key note speaker for conferences such as Money2020, Collision and Tedx to name a few. She’s been recognized as 2018’s The Most Influential Woman in Payments (Payment Source), CEO of the Year (Business Journal), Top 40 Under 40 (Business Journal), Entrepreneur of the Year (Business Leaders Award), Women to Watch (Entrepreneur) and Ernst and Young’s winning women of 2019. We discuss Fattmerchant and the 'Netflix of Credit Card Processing,' Using Rejection as a Spur to International Success, CEO School Podcast and the 2% Club, How to Run a Business with a Social Enterprise at it's Heart and so much more. 

Jacques is a serial entrepreneur, CTO and co-founder of Fattmerchant, and an angel investor. We discuss the lifecycle of a startup from idea to bootstrapping to investment rounds to exits. How can you position your young business to be ready to take funding? Then we flip the script, and we discuss how you can best get involved as an investor. There are various vehicles including crowdfunding and angel investing syndicates. This isn't exclusive to the sharks and megarich of the world! The risks are very high, but there is a lot of potential reward along with being part of the story of the potential next great company.

Suneera Madhani is the co-founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a payment technology company that makes it easy and affordable for businesses of any size to accept modern forms of payment, track data, and stay competitive. The SaaS Podcast is sponsored by: Gusto, an easy, online payroll, and benefits service built for modern small businesses. In other words, a people platform — one place to pay and take care of your hardworking team. Exclusive Offer - Get 3 Months Free! Show Notes: https://saasclub.io/276 Learn More About SaaS Club https://saasclub.io Become a Premium Member: http://thesaaspodcast.com

Suneera Madhani is the co-founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a payment technology company that makes it easy and affordable for businesses of any size to accept modern forms of payment, track data, and stay competitive.The SaaS Podcast is sponsored by:Gusto, an easy, online payroll, and benefits service built for modern small businesses. In other words, a people platform — one place to pay and take care of your hardworking team.Exclusive Offer - Get 3 Months Free!Show Notes:https://saasclub.io/276Learn More About SaaS Clubhttps://saasclub.ioBecome a Premium Member:http://thesaaspodcast.com

Today's guest is Suneera Madhani, the founder and CEO of Fattmerchant -- a payment technology company that has revolutionized the payments landscape as "the Netflix of credit card processing." Suneera catapulted her business idea from startup to $5B and has been named the Most Influential Woman in Payments, CEO of the Year, one of Florida's Most Influential Business Leaders and Fortune's 40 under 40.In addition to building and growing Fattmerchant, this mom of two is also working to pull other women up through the leadership ranks and to even the playing field for female founders with the CEO School. In this episode we cover:Who you become on your way to real success How to cultivate an ongoing sense of self confidence A 3-bucket method to living life with less guilt and more fulfillment The unique challenges South Asian women face on the road to success and self confidence RESOURCES:Websites: Fattmerchant.com | CEO SchoolInstagram: @suneeramadhaniJoin The ClubAdditional Resources--Support The Self Worth Edit:Buy Me a CoffeeLeave a 5-star rating Join monthly newsletterFollow on Instagram

In Clear Focus: Bigeye discusses the growth of payment technology company Fattmerchant with the company's VP of Marketing, Mason Dorner. Sharing some of the tactics that have made Fattmerchant a poster child for Central Florida's tech community, Mason outlines his team's structure, marketing technology stack, and his personal philosophy for keeping ahead in a highly competitive industry. Mason also reflects on differences between performance and brand campaigns for high-growth companies.

Do You Do What? In today’s episode of The Dental Practice Fixers, we talk about a huge problem that most practices have when it comes to new patients. It’s probably not what you think! Do You Do What? Then we have some fun on our secret shopper calls by asking about a procedure that doesn’t actually exist. The thing is, this actually creates a great opportunity to schedule a new patient, but no one got it right! Please listen so you don’t make the same mistakes in your practice! If you have a question that you would like answered on our podcast, or if you would like us to call YOUR office, please email us at podcast@madow.com. You might be the office that gets it right! GET A FREE DENTAL PRACTICE SNAPSHOT Highlights from "Do You Do WHAT?" 0:09 - Dr. Rich Madow opens up welcoming everyone to 2021.  The first podcast for the new year. 0:50 - Rich was listening to some music and tells us about the one called "Dumb Things" by Paul Kelly and The Messengers.  Find out this relates to Dentist Practices today.  Have you done dumb things?  Check out the latest webinar by Dr. Rich Madow called: Dumb Things That Smart Dentists Do. 2:45 - One smart thing a dentist can do is to sign up for FattMerchant. Don't keep paying over charges for your credit card processing fees.  Switch today to FattMerchant and start taking your first steps to better credit card processing. 4:05 - Dentist are always looking for new patients.  BUT.... there are some problems with new patients fixes.  The Madow Center Coaches look at the whole picture.  Direct Mail approach used to be KING.  Why did so many dentists do well with MailPro and other did not.  Phone tracking was set up to see what the issue was.  The front desk person was getting the phone calls.  Some were converting to new patients and others not.  Some many variables. 8:01 - Madow offers a dental snapshot that helps you to find out some issues to way the new patients are walking out the back door.  Most dental offices find by the dental snapshot that only 30% are retained as new patients.  The rest are out the door. Are you interested in having a dental snapshot of your office? Click here! 13:07 - Rich makes his first secret shopper call.  Question will be the same: What is a excavation? 15:50 - Rich shares his thoughts on what the front office dental person had to say and how she handled this call.  Rich gives some great suggestions on things she could have said to get that new patient in to the dental office. 18:00 - Rich makes the second secret shopper call. 21:26 - This call was right away put on hold and then was so short.  Check out what Rich had to say about this caller. 21:57 - Rich makes the third secret shopper call. 24:50 - This caller asked some extra questions for Rich to answer.  She really tired to help answer and find the solution but never tried to schedule the appointment.  She even pushed Rich to go back to his other dentist. 26:34 - Don't forget to check out the Dental Practice Fixers Podcast!

New Patient Telephone Flow Chart In 99% of our mystery shopper calls, things don’t end up very well. Well – don't worry – in this week’s episode we present a new patient telephone flow chart guaranteed to get potential new patients off the phone and into the appointment book. It’s called “The ALASKA System” and you can’t afford to miss it!  Then, you guessed it, we do some secret shopper calls and everything goes horribly wrong! One thing’s for sure – you'll learn a lot when you listen, so don’t miss it! If you have a question that you would like answered on our podcast, or if you would like us to call YOUR office, please email us at podcast@madow.com. You might be the office that gets it right! GET A FREE DENTAL PRACTICE SNAPSHOT     Highlights of "New Patient Telephone Flow Chart" 0:18 - Dr. Richard Madow opens up the podcast by saying how wonderful it would be to have a telephone flow chart to answer any kind of question that comes up in your dental practice. 1:25 - Want to save money for your dental practice?  Switch to FattMerchant for all your credit card transactions and save tons of money.  Check out madow.com/save 2:53 - Rich talks about the last 75 episodes of the Dental Practice Fixers Podcast but never talked about a flow chart for making telephone calls.  On this episode Rich will talk about the flow chart to use for just about any phone call.  Have you hear about the ALASKA flow chart?  Check it out.  Rich goes into all the details for "The ALASKA System". Here is a break down: A - Answer | L - Listen | A - Analyze | S - Solve | K - Kindness | A - Action/Appointment 16:06 - Rich suggests to use this in your next dental meeting and go over it as a team.  Most patients are running out the door.  Use this system to stop that from happening. 16:58 - Rich talks about the Dental Practice Snapshot to learn more about your dental office.  Learn what is working and what is not.  Check out madow.com/snapshot. 18:01 - Rich makes the first secret shopper phone call. The question is "Do you do tooth whitening?" 19:01 - Dr. Madow talks about what happens and what she really didn't do well.  Did she even ask who he was? Check it out. 20:00 - Rich makes the second secret shopper call. 23:29 - This caller was over 3 minutes on explaining all the details but didn't want to schedule him in.  Way too detailed!  Listen to what Dr. Madow had to say about this caller. 24:51 - Rich makes the third secret shopper call. 25:50 - This caller almost had Rich scheduled but only asked the yes or no question.  The fee wasn't necessary to share.  This caller was better than the other two.  Grade: C+ 26:53 - Everyone on the team should know how to make these calls and how to use "The ALASKA System" for the telephone flow chart.  Rich thanks everyone for listening to the Dental Practice Fixers Podcast.  Don't forget to subscribe!  

Can imposter syndrome and a 7-figure business coexist? My guest today on the Permission to Offend podcast is Suneera Madhani! Oh my gosh are you in for a treat! Suneera is the Founder of Fattmerchant, Co-Founder of CEO School, daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Fortune’s 40 under 40 and Forbes’ named best places to work in 2020.   In this episode, Suneera lays it all out how giving herself permission to believe in her big ideas led her to founding a wildly successful financing business, becoming one of the 2% of businesses with female founders that hit 7-figures, and now teaching other women to do the same through CEO School. Her story and all the business gems she drops are incredible! And even through all her accomplishments, she still battles imposter syndrome. #relatable As you’ll hear in this episode, Suneera had so much value to share and such an inspiring story - I could have talked to Suneera for hours! Grab your journal, it’s a noteworthy conversation! Questions Suneera & Rachel Explore in Today's Episode  - What needs do your customers have that you may be overlooking? - What business school fails to teach you -   How do you learn to be a CEO and step into the CEO mindset? -   How do you use failure as fuel for learning that leads to success? -   What is Suneera’s secret to success and energy as a mom and business owner? Hint: it’s not “balancing all the things.” This episode is brought to you by the Faith Activated Journaling Experience. The Faith Activated Journaling Experience is a year-long experience for the strong, ambitious woman who wants to activate her faith, reclaim her worth and build her wealth through journaling in just 5 minutes per day. If you want to manifest more freedom, gain more clarity, and earn more money, the Faith Activated Journaling Experience is right for you.   Rate, Review, & Subscribe on Apple Podcasts “If you want to live your best life, listen to Rachel Luna, this woman knows her stuff!”

Suneera Madhani is the Founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a revolutionary payment processing technology company helping businesses around the world accept modern forms of payment, stay competitive, and track data without breaking their budget. She is the co-host of the CEO School podcast, a show dedicated to helping more female founders break through their financial glass ceilings, skyrocket their sales, and achieve $1-million - or more - in annual revenue. Her inspirational story of building her fintech business from the ground up and raising over $20-million in venture capital as a minority female founder has been featured in countless media publications, including TechCrunch, Forbes, and Fast Company. She has been recognized as The Most Influential Woman in Payments by Payment Source in 2018, one of the Top 40 Under 40 by Business Journal, and one of the Women to Watch by Entrepreneur Magazine. Suneera joins us today to share the humble beginnings of her company, Fattmerchant and what inspired her to launch the revolutionary payment platform. She explains how her payment platform works, why she decided to offer a flat-fee processing option, and how it impacted the way companies continue to conduct business. She shares her experience of repeatedly being rejected by colleagues and potential business partners about her business idea and why she finally decided to ‘bet on herself' by taking the plunge into entrepreneurship on her own. We discuss Suneera's ‘3 Bucket Principle' for achieving work-life integration and why she doesn't believe in the concept of work-life balance. Suneera also shares the inspiration behind launching the CEO School community and podcast and her mission to help more female founders disrupt the 2% club and break through the million-dollar-revenue mark. Key takeaways include: Launching an innovative payment technology as a female founderHow Suneera honed in on the customer experience and pain points around accepting modern forms of paymentThe challenge Suneera faced when pitching her business idea to her former colleagues and potential partnersThe importance of getting comfortable with rejection and continuing to persevereHow staying resilient and solution-oriented helped Suneera's company continue to grow year over yearHow the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Suneera's company and their strategy for continuing to grow despite the economic downturnAligning yourself with your company's core values and missionSuneera's ‘3 Bucket' Principle, how she uses this principle to juggle her work-life and home-life, and why she doesn't believe in the concept of work-life balanceThe inspiration behind the CEO School community and podcast and Suneera's mission to help more female founders break through the ‘2% club'Why it's critical for entreprenistas to be willing to take risks and avoid perfectionismHow Suneera manages her time to accomplish her goals Resources Mentioned: GiftHub Connect with Suneera Madhani: FattmerchantCEO School PodcastFattmerchant on LinkedInFattmerchant on InstagramFattmerchant on FacebookFattmerchant on TwitterSuneera Madhani on LinkedInSuneera Madhani on InstagramSuneera Madhani on Twitter Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of The Entreprenista Podcast - the most fun business meeting for female founders, by female founders. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeartRadio | GooglePlay Be sure to share your favorite episodes across social media to help us reach more amazing female founders, like you. Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn and for more exclusive content, tips, and insight, join the Entreprenistas Facebook group and visit the Socialfly website.

    Suneera Madhani is the Founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a revolutionary payment processing technology company helping businesses around the world accept modern forms of payment, stay competitive, and track data without breaking their budget. She is the co-host of the CEO School Podcast, a show dedicated to helping more female founders break through their financial glass ceilings, skyrocket their sales, and achieve $1-million - or more - in annual revenue. Her inspirational story of building her fintech business from the ground up and raising over $20-million in venture capital as a minority female founder has been featured in countless media publications, including TechCrunch, Forbes, and Fast Company. She has been recognized as The Most Influential Woman in Payments by Payment Source in 2018, one of the Top 40 Under 40 by Business Journal, and one of the Women to Watch by Entrepreneur Magazine.   Suneera joins us today to share the humble beginnings of her company, Fattmerchant and what inspired her to launch the revolutionary payment platform. She explains how her payment platform works, why she decided to offer a flat-fee processing option, and how it impacted the way companies continue to conduct business. She shares her experience of repeatedly being rejected by colleagues and potential business partners about her business idea and why she finally decided to ‘bet on herself' by taking the plunge into entrepreneurship on her own. We discuss Suneera's ‘3 Bucket Principle' for achieving work-life integration and why she doesn't believe in the concept of work-life balance. Suneera also shares the inspiration behind launching the CEO School community and podcast and her mission to help more female founders disrupt the 2% club and break through the million-dollar-revenue mark.       “There's no such thing as a work-life balance. It's really the work-life integration.” - Suneera Madhani       This week on SocialFly's Entreprenista Podcast:   Launching an innovative payment technology as a female founder How Suneera honed in on the customer experience and pain points around accepting modern forms of payment The challenge Suneera faced when pitching her business idea to her former colleagues and potential partners The importance of getting comfortable with rejection and continuing to persevere How staying resilient and solution-oriented helped Suneera's company continue to grow year over year How the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Suneera's company and their strategy for continuing to grow despite the economic downturn Aligning yourself with your company's core values and mission Suneera's ‘3 Bucket' Principle, how she uses this principle to juggle her work-life and home-life, and why she doesn't believe in the concept of work-life balance The inspiration behind the CEO School community and podcast and Suneera's mission to help more female founders break through the ‘2% club' Why it's critical for entreprenistas to be willing to take risks and avoid perfectionism How Suneera manages her time to accomplish her goals     Our Favorite Quotes:   “What's going to get you from here to six-figures is not what is going to get you from six to seven-figures, and it's going to be different getting from seven to eight-figures.” - Suneera Madhani “You have to find a way to know that you're getting to your destination no matter what is coming your way.” - Suneera Madhani “Abundance comes when you're not seeking it.” - Suneera Madhani     Resources Mentioned:   GiftHub     Connect with Suneera Madhani:   Fattmerchant CEO School Podcast Fattmerchant on LinkedIn Fattmerchant on Instagram Fattmerchant on Facebook Fattmerchant on Twitter Suneera Madhani on LinkedIn Suneera Madhani on Instagram Suneera Madhani on Twitter         Say “Hello!” To DigiCards™   Are you ready to take your virtual team meetings to the next level? 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Use the coupon code: Entreprenista10 to receive 10% off your first order.     Become An Entreprenista!   Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of The Entreprenista Podcast - the most fun business meeting for female founders, by female founders. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.   Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeartRadio | GooglePlay   Be sure to share your favorite episodes across social media to help us reach more amazing female founders, like you.   Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn and for more exclusive content, tips, and insight, join the Entreprenistas Facebook group and visit the SocialFly website.  

Suneera Madhani is the Founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a revolutionary payment processing technology company helping businesses around the world accept modern forms of payment, stay competitive, and track data without breaking their budget. She is the co-host of the CEO School Podcast, a show dedicated to helping more female founders break through their financial glass ceilings, skyrocket their sales, and achieve $1-million - or more - in annual revenue. Her inspirational story of building her fintech business from the ground up and raising over $20-million in venture capital as a minority female founder has been featured in countless media publications, including TechCrunch, Forbes, and Fast Company. She has been recognized as The Most Influential Woman in Payments by Payment Source in 2018, one of the Top 40 Under 40 by Business Journal, and one of the Women to Watch by Entrepreneur Magazine. Suneera joins us today to share the humble beginnings of her company, Fattmerchant and what inspired her to launch the revolutionary payment platform. She explains how her payment platform works, why she decided to offer a flat-fee processing option, and how it impacted the way companies continue to conduct business. She shares her experience of repeatedly being rejected by colleagues and potential business partners about her business idea and why she finally decided to ‘bet on herself' by taking the plunge into entrepreneurship on her own. We discuss Suneera's ‘3 Bucket Principle' for achieving work-life integration and why she doesn't believe in the concept of work-life balance. Suneera also shares the inspiration behind launching the CEO School community and podcast and her mission to help more female founders disrupt the 2% club and break through the million-dollar-revenue mark. “There's no such thing as a work-life balance. It's really the work-life integration.” - Suneera Madhani This week on SocialFly's Entreprenista Podcast: Launching an innovative payment technology as a female founderHow Suneera honed in on the customer experience and pain points around accepting modern forms of paymentThe challenge Suneera faced when pitching her business idea to her former colleagues and potential partnersThe importance of getting comfortable with rejection and continuing to persevereHow staying resilient and solution-oriented helped Suneera's company continue to grow year over yearHow the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Suneera's company and their strategy for continuing to grow despite the economic downturnAligning yourself with your company's core values and missionSuneera's ‘3 Bucket' Principle, how she uses this principle to juggle her work-life and home-life, and why she doesn't believe in the concept of work-life balanceThe inspiration behind the CEO School community and podcast and Suneera's mission to help more female founders break through the ‘2% club'Why it's critical for entreprenistas to be willing to take risks and avoid perfectionismHow Suneera manages her time to accomplish her goals Our Favorite Quotes: “What's going to get you from here to six-figures is not what is going to get you from six to seven-figures, and it's going to be different getting from seven to eight-figures.” - Suneera Madhani“You have to find a way to know that you're getting to your destination no matter what is coming your way.” - Suneera Madhani“Abundance comes when you're not seeking it.” - Suneera Madhani Resources Mentioned: GiftHub Connect with Suneera Madhani: FattmerchantCEO School PodcastFattmerchant on LinkedInFattmerchant on InstagramFattmerchant on FacebookFattmerchant on TwitterSuneera Madhani on LinkedInSuneera Madhani on InstagramSuneera Madhani on Twitter

August 21, 2020 FattMerchant Suneera Madhani and Dr. Dan P. McAdams

Suneera Madhani is the founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a payments processor that was deemed the Netflix of credit card processing by fast company and to date has processed over $5 billion in payments. Suneera is a regular contributing writer for Forbes, Fortune and Inc. magazine as well as a keynote speaker for conferences such as Money 2020, Collision and Ted X.   Suneera Joins Her Life By Design to talk about how she built Fattmerchant from a startup to over $5 billion in payments processed and how she raised $20 million in venture capital. We talk about how to juggle life & business and how to build culture and establish values in your company. We also talk about why there are fewer successful female entrepreneurs and what we can all do to change that.   [2:39] Who is Suneera? [8:14] Raising VC Funding [13:46] What to watch for when your company is growing fast [18:23] Building teams [26:25] Work-life integration [33:24] Team Management [40:16] What is ICON Method? [47:39] Think BIGGER!   To connect with Suneera Madhani:   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suneeramadhani ICON Method: https://www.instagram.com/ceoschool Fattmerchant: https://www.fattmerchant.com   To connect with me, Christina Galbato:   Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/christinagalbato  Website: http://www.christinagalbato.com  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/christinagalbato    Join the Her Life By Design Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/herlifebydesignpodcast/

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. There are so many fees in the credit card processing market. Fattmerchant, which started almost a decade ago, set out to simplify things with the market’s first subscription, all you can eat, pricing for merchants. As the firm has matured, it’s grown into an integrated payment technology provider that continues to simplify the payment experience for SMBs by bringing various payment technologies together via API. Now, Fattmerchant has introduced a new partership with Finix on a new product called Flex which further empowers software firms to start processing payments immediately within their platforms. Fattmerchant President Sal Rehmetullah joins on on the podcast to talk payments, the evolution of Fattmerchant, the new Flex product and where the payments market is headed in the future. Here’s my talk with Sal.

What does it take to have an SaaS success story? It takes more than capital and experience for sure. At age 24 and with no experience, Suneera Madhani launched Fattmerchant, a payment technology company aiming to integrate all the solutions her competitors offer into one single platform. As a visionary leader, Suneera revolutionized the payments landscape. She was recognized as 2018’s Most Influential Woman in Payments, among other accolades. It started with just an idea; today, Fattmerchant is processing billions of payments, reaching 6,000 customers all over the world, and enjoying 2000% growth every year. How did Suneera do it? Find out in this episode.

Joining me today is someone who is taking on merchant processing, an industry that has been around for YEARS. Well, she came up with a brand new model and she nearly gave her idea away 8 times. She finally realized she had to go build it herself. If you’re an entrepreneur (especially a female entrepreneur) wait until you hear how she bootstrapped her business. Suneera Madhani is the founder of Fattmerchant, subscription-style merchant services. Suneera Madhani is the founder of Fattmerchant, subscription-style merchant services. Sponsored byHostGator – Ready to take your website to the next level? Whether you’re a first-time blogger or an experienced web pro, HostGator has all the tools you need to create a great-looking website or online store. A wide range of options includes cloud-based web hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated servers. Founded in 2002, HostGator is the perfect web partner for business owners and individuals seeking hands-on support. Visit www.hostgator.com/mixergy to see what HostGator can do for your website. ClickFunnels – Anyone in my audience who goes to clickfunnels.com/mixergy will get a couple of things that I’m excited about. Number one is a free trial so you can actually try it and use it. Number two, you’ll get the funnels that we created to build our business. Use it as a template which you can improve for your business. Go to ClickFunnels.com/mixergy to get started. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

Visa and Mastercard plans for revising interchange, originally scheduled for April, now appear to be on hold, probably until October. Sal Rehmetullah, Founder and President of Fattmerchant, explains how many of the planned changes aim to broaden card acceptance, particularly in merchant categories dominated by cash, check and ACH payments. Patti reports on how consumers and merchants are embracing contactless payments, and James describes pricing strategies for cash discounting.

Suneera Madhani, CEO of the digital acquirer Fattmerchant, tells PaymentsSource how the coronavirus pandemic has affected how her employees go to market with new payments technology — and how making the shift to digital helps both the acquirer and its clients. We also discuss the growth of specific payment categories such as virtual gift cards, which are seeing fresh adoption among small businesses that have otherwise closed their doors.

Ronne is joined by Suneera Mahdani who shared her early life and how she started her company. After graduating from college, Suneera discusses her journey from working at a consumer goods company straight out of college for three years and realizing that the corporate world wasn’t for her. She was later recruited by a payment-processing company. After she analyzed how the business works, Suneera decided to start her own. To become a successful entrepreneur it isn't as easy as 1-2-3. It takes a lot to make it right.  Suneera provided a few pointers on how to become a successful entrepreneur: Give yourself hard deadlines – Don’t chase things that are never going to come into fruition. Listen to all the feedback you will get, no matter who that person is.  Execute your ideas –  There is ALWAYS a step-by-step process In order to turn all of your ideas into a well-established business.  Running a business isn't a vacation – You have to brace yourself and think about it deeply if it is what you really want. It entails a lot of responsibility. Reflect on why you are doing business – There's more than the revenue that makes a business successful. Is it your passion? Is it something you really want to do? You have to consider such questions. Also, she gave us some tips when starting your business: Make sure your business can accommodate investors – show the investors that their investments will be returned. Generate proof that their hard-earned money can gain some profit while it is in the business' hands.  Have a large market – investors are looking for big opportunities. Be passionate – Have a good team. Know where your zones are. Meet investors in person – Find where your networks are, find where the experts and find out where they go. Go to events and socialize. Follow Suneera in Instagram at @mombossco,  and know more about the services her company offers at fattmerchant.com   

Suneera Madhani is the CEO and Founder of Fattmerchant and Mom Boss Co.  Fattmerchant is a transparent, subscription- based model with its' integrated payment platform called Omni. Now processing 5 billion in payments, Fattmerchant is recognized as the top 5% of Fastest growing companies in America by INC.  Suneera’s inspirational startup story and her success in raising 20 million in venture capital as a minority woman - has been featured in high profile publications such as Forbes, Fast Company, Yahoo Business, Tech Crunch, Huffington Post, and the countless others. Suneera is a regular contributing writer for Forbes, Fortune and INC Magazine as well as a key note speaker for conferences such as Money2020, Collision and Tedx to name a few.  Also at Mom Boss Co, Suneera shares about her experiences from being a bad ass CEO and business owner to being an incredible mother and wife which includes sleepless nights, 6 am workouts, breastfeeding, diapers, in-laws, and chores to running a boardroom, shareholders, employees and investors! Suneera shares the fed up moment that made her decide to start her company from scratch and become the powerhouse mom boss that she is today. Check out https://thetaoofselfconfidence.com for show notes of Suneera's episode, Suneera's website, resources, gifts and so much more.

We’re joined by Suneera Madhani, Founder and CEO of Fattmerchant, a payment processing platform that has been dubbed the ‘Netflix’ of the credit card processing world by Fast Company. Suneera was named the ‘The Most Influential Woman in Payments' by Payment Source and has also been featured in Forbes, Fortune, INC Magazine, Huffington Post, and multiple high-profile publications.   With over $5 billion in payments processed to date, it’s easy to focus on Sunnera’s success but like any entrepreneur knows, the road to success is never easy. Ridiculed and underestimated as a minority woman, Suneera takes us behind-the-scenes of her epic journey to becoming the powerhouse that she is today. From how she bootstrapped her business to raising over $20 million in venture capital, Suneera is sharing it all on The BossBabe Podcast.  Get that glowy, dewy skin for yourself. Learn more and take the quiz to find your ultimate Glossier skincare routine. Plus, all new customers will get 10% off their first order on glossier.com/podcast/BOSSBABE

Getting paid is an important part of life for employees and businesses alike.  On this episode of SOUTH POD, I sit down with President and Co-Founder of Fattmerchant, Sal Rehmetullah to talk about how his business is simplifying payment processing for businesses everywhere.

The chief strategy officer for the Orlando, FL-based payment technology company delves into the proper payment processing strategies for small- and medium-sized retailers. FattMerchant, which says it was the first firm to market subscription-based payment processing plans, offers a one-stop experience to operate all things payment-related.

On the second edition of Hylant Presents Corner Office Rachel and I sit down and catch up with a guest many of you are already very familiar with. CEO and Founder of local Tech powerhouse Fattmerchant, Suneera Madhani.  Suneera and her crew continue to grow this local Orlando success story into one of the largest and most successful payment platforms nationally, now employing over 100 at her downtown offices. In this episode we hear about where Fattmerchant is today, the daily juggling of being a CEO, Mother, Wife and Community cheerleader (be sure to check out her blog Mom Boss to learn more) and her thoughts on the recent disbandment of the Central Florida Tech Alliance. We appreciate you Suneera, thanks for taking some time out of a very busy schedule to sit down with us. My thanks to Rachel Dobbs of Hylant for co-hosting and supporting This Is Orlando. Corner Office is a monthly feature focusing on the view of Orlando through the eyes of local executives in the community. You can find out more about Rachel and Hylant by clicking the links. Thanks as always to Carlos Ivan who has been busy scoring and sound designing a feature film, working full time, producing This Is Orlando and raising two kids. Just another day in paradise right amigo? Be sure to check out some of Carlos work by clicking the photo below. How he finds time I’ll never know. You can find This Is Orlando wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe and find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram too. We welcome comments, suggestions and episode ideas. Just email me at RWCOBLE@GMAIL.COM

Fattmerchant is an integrated payment technology provider that revolutionizes the payment processing experience for business owners through real-time data analytics, transparent subscription pricing, and award-winning customer service. Instead of percentage markups and hidden fees, Fattmerchant offers business owners the lowest cost of interchange for a flat, monthly subscription saving members thousands of dollars each month. In addition to these savings, members also benefit from real-time insights and analytics to drive their businesses. Through Omni, Fattmerchant’s robust integrated payments platform, members can view sales and customer information, integrate directly into their ERM and eCommerce solutions, access merchant management, and enjoy a robust marketplace of additional applications. Their real human team is always ready to answer any call, email, or chat. The Fattmerchant payment experience simplifies the most vital aspects of running a business in one convenient location - no hassle, no headaches, and no strings attached! https://fattmerchant.com https://twitter.com/fattmerchant https://www.facebook.com/fattmerchant

Today Suneera Madhani, founder of small business Fattmerchant, joins ASBN's Jim Fitzpatrick. They discuss Fattmerchant's rapid growth in a competitive market and the importance of transparency in your business transactions. Based on Suneera's experiences, it is such a vital tactic for business growth, yet often overlooked.

How can you increase your sales by 15% in one year just by communicating more with current customers? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, I'm joined by Todd Hockenberry, who is the CEO of Top Line Results and co-author of the book Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound.  Todd is an expert in helping companies increase revenue and sales by improving the customer experience, and in this week's episode, he shares why simply improving communication with your current customers can increase sales by, on average, 15% - all within just one year. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Todd include: Top Line Results helps B2B, and particularly industrial and manufacturing, companies adopt inbound principles. Customer experience is a discipline of marketing applied after the sale, and very few marketers or businesses get it right. Great customer experience starts by getting in the heads of your customers and understanding how they view your company, product or service. Harvard Business Review did a study and asked customers how long they wanted customer service people to be empathetic, and the answer was seven seconds. They want to hear "I'm sorry" within the first seven seconds, and after that, they don't want you to apologize anymore.  Customer service can actually increase customer loyalty in the long run by fixing problems. If you've got good systems, CRM, and a good centralized view of the customer, along with people that are focused on that, that are paying attention to the customers after the sale, you can drive a lot more revenue just by being there and by being helpful and extending that thinking of inbound all the way through the lifecycle. One company that does customer experience very well is Fatt Merchant. They do it by building a customer-first culture in which someone from marketing participates in every single meeting that the company has and serves as the voice of the customer. One reason that many companies fail to deliver exceptional customer experience is that their marketing departments are measured solely by the number of leads they generate and not by any metrics relating to the post-sale experience. Todd says that over the ten years he's worked with clients on customer experience he sees, on average, a 15% increase in sales just by focusing on improving the experience of current customers. One of the keys to delivering great customer experience is having someone who owns it. You also need a good tech stack, including a CRM and marketing automation platform, that can provide your team with a "centralized view of the customer." Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Top Line Results website Connect with Todd on LinkedIn Follow Todd on Twitter Get Todd's book Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound Listen to the podcast to learn what you need to do to ensure your company is delivering a top-notch customer experience. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Todd Hockenberry who is the owner of Top Line Results and the coauthor of Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company's Future Using Inbound. That's available in just about every book store I've been to as well as on Amazon. Welcome, Todd. Todd Hockenberry (Guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. It is definitely my privilege to be on the Inbound Success show, and anything I do with IMPACT is always a lot of fun. Todd and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Oh, well we love working with you too. It's a love fest today on the podcast. Todd: Oh yeah. Kathleen: You know, I've obviously had an opportunity to get to know you, but I would love for you to talk a little bit more about yourself, your background, your company, and your book so that my listeners can learn a little bit more about who you are and what you do. About Todd Hockenberry and Top Line Results Todd: Sure. Top Line Results was founded almost 10 years ago. A couple weeks it'll be 10 years. My wife and I founded Top Line Results because I got fired, I lost my job, and I decided I was sick of working for other people and I was going to go do it myself. So what we focused on for really the last 10 years is helping B2B and particularly industrial and manufacturing companies adopt what we're talking about as inbound principles. And I had come across inbound principles probably about early 2000s, actually I was working at a turnaround. A company was dead and buried and we were trying to turn it around, but I didn't have a big budget, so I was doing early SEO content creation in vertical niche industrial markets when nobody else was doing it, and we saw tons of success. So I kind of started doing inbound before it was called inbound, so when I saw it and I ran across HubSpot, it just was natural to jump in. So when we started our business, that's what we started to do. We started to teach industrial and manufacturing and B2B companies how to use content, how to optimize it, how to create campaigns around content, how to connect with modern buyers using digital platforms. And that's really what we've built our business on. So we've been very focused on our target persona, which is kind of the, I would say the 15 to $100 million industrial manufacturing companies. We've gone a little bigger than that lately, but we really are consultants now and advisors and coaches on these issues. We're small. It's my wife and I and my daughter, and so we're not a delivery agency as much anymore. We just don't have the bandwidth to do it, so we really focus on teaching, and coaching, advising, and consulting with people on how to do these things. Kathleen: Oh, I feel like you and I could do an entire separate podcast on family businesses- Todd: Oh yeah. Kathleen: Because I had an agency for 11 years before I joined IMPACT and I started it with my husband, so we worked together for 11 years, and we actually got married when we started the company, so we had never been married and not worked together, and I, to this day, always say to people that my proudest accomplishment in life is that I didn't get divorced in the 11 years that I worked with my husband. Todd: Congratulations. I would say the question I get asked a lot is, people look at me and say, "How can you work with your wife?" And I say, "Really, it's the other way around. How could she work with me?" But the answer is that we are different in terms of the skillset we bring. We have different personalities, and when we're in her world, which is more technical and detailed, she's the boss, and when we're in my world, which is more kind of the strategy and sales and marketing side, then I'm the boss, so it works. We don't play in each other's sandbox, so that's what keeps us going. Kathleen: You know what? That's exactly what worked for my husband and I. That and also our offices were never right next to each other. When we had our office space, we had about 13 people in the agency, so we were in an office suite. His was on the opposite end of the suite from mine, so we tried to be as physically far apart as possible and also not have any overlapping responsibilities. Todd: Got you. Kathleen: So there's something to that. Todd: My wife and I share an office, but I'm out of it a lot, so I think I give her some quiet time she needs. Kathleen: That is a good thing. Interesting. Well as I said, that could be an entirely other episode, but for this episode, I was actually really excited to talk with you because, like you, I've been in this digital marketing, inbound marketing space for a long time, and one of the things I've noticed is that it's definitely an echo chamber, and a lot of us spend the bulk of our time if not all of our time focusing on how are we going to turn strangers into customers? And many of us started as HubSpot partners, and there's that whole "attract, convert, close" cycle, and we're so focused on that that we forget that a big piece of marketing is customer marketing, and that you really have to look at the whole lifecycle of the customer experience and the whole business because most businesses do have repeat business. They have customers that come back. Or they're SaaS, where you want them to just stay with you and prevent churn. And I think as marketers, we do ourselves a really big disservice by ignoring the post-sale period, so I am so excited because I get to pick your brain on this topic of what happens after you make the sale, because this is very much what you covered partially in your book and you've talked about a lot. So I don't even know where to start. Customer Experience & Inbound Marketing Todd: Well first of all, I think you're absolutely right. I think you nailed it. Inbound clearly started out as a way to attract, right? That was the beginning. And while that's still important, it's gotten a lot harder. There's a lot more content out there. It's more difficult to just throw a whole bunch of content out there and see the kind of success you're looking for. There were two ways I discovered inbound success, and I love the name of your show because I think there are two ways to think about that. It's about using inbound marketing or inbound tools to be successful, but inbound success to me is about what happens after the sale. And you'll see a lot more books and a lot more talk about customer success being a job, and you see these functions, it really came out of the SaaS world, and I learned this from HubSpot. When I was working with Dan Tyre to write the book, we interviewed a bunch of HubSpot people, and one of the sharpest people I met was Mike Redbord who ran customer success for HubSpot. And they talked me through the process where they would understand essentially everything that was going on with that client well before renewal time came up. So this was a complex ... because it's software, they had a lot of data and they could automate a lot of this. But the reality is what I discovered was that it was a discipline of marketing applied after the sale, which most people didn't think of. I go to client where they're, say, an industrial company, and I'll ask them, "Well, how do you communicate with your customers?" And I'm not kidding, I've actually had customers tell me this. They'll say, "We don't know where all of our equipment is. We don't even know who they are." So how could you possibly market to them if you don't know who they are? So the gap, I think in a lot of companies, between what they could be doing and what they should be doing is huge, and I think it's a huge opportunity to grow your business. And if you go back to the old cliches, it costs seven times more to get a new customer than it does to keep one. This is what we're talking about. Use everything you know about marketing inbound and apply it to your customers after the sale. So you asked me where to start, you said you didn't know where to start. I think I know where to start. This is where I would have started and what I teach my clients to do to start. Start with your mindset. You've got to get your mind right around this and realize that the way you're viewed is not the way ... The way you think you're viewed or the way you want to be viewed, your positioning, right? That's in the mind of your customer. It's not in the mind of your marketing team or in the mind of your sales team. It's in the mind of your customer. So you've got to get out of your house, get out of your company, and go there, talk to your customers and understand how you're perceived. I'm an old sales manager. I used to run sales teams, and I used to just lose my mind when I would hear from a customer and they would say, "Oh, we just bought one of those. We didn't know you did that." Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: Oh, I hated that because that's just being lazy. And I would say to most companies that I run across that other than the SaaS companies who seem to really get this because they want to produce churn, and that's a natural, right? You've got to get that recurring revenue. Or anybody that's in that recurring revenue model, they kind of get this. But if you're selling, say, capital equipment like a lot of my clients do, their next sale may be three years down the road, right? And that's important, but it's an easy sale to get if you just do your marketing between the sale and the next one. And it starts with that mindset where you've got to put yourself outside of your own world and put yourself in their world and understand what's going on from their perspective. And ultimately, this is all about adding value all the way through the life of the company or the life of the relationship. Everybody has customer service departments, right? But I still see a lot of people, and I think a lot of customer service companies and leaders think of their customer service as, "Well, if something's broken, then help them fix it." And it's the opposite. That's a reactive mode. It's really about today, it's like, "Keep me happy as your customer. Keep me satisfied. Keep me on track. Make sure I achieve my goals. Make sure the promises you made to me in your marketing and sales process I actually achieve those goals. Hit that ROI." And I've been reading about this and studying it a lot, and it's interesting because we hear a lot about empathy and we hear a lot about customer service and after the sale being about empathy, but Harvard Business Review did a study and they asked customers how long they wanted customer service people to be empathetic, and the answer was seven seconds. So after seven seconds, they don't want to hear, "I'm sorry." They don't want you to apologize anymore. They want you to do what? Kathleen: Fix it. Todd: They want you to fix the problem. Solve the problem. Exactly. That's all they care about. And if you look at other studies, you can see that customer service can actually increase loyalty in the long run by fixing problems, not shuffling them around to seven people, not getting an answering machine, getting a real person, being able to get connected via email or chat or after hours, right? These things, you build a system. And those are all inbound things, right? They're all ways to communicate and connect and share content and be helpful, and if you really absorb this mentally, that this is what you're there for after the sale, then you can build a system that'll take care of those customers in a way that's just fundamentally different than they're going to see most other places. And we all have to realize that everybody's expectations today are like Facebook or Amazon. Amazon's probably a better example. You want that kind of level of service. Or Zappos or these retail companies. And if you don't give that to them as a B2B company or an agency, whatever you are, I think you're going to be at a big disadvantage. And again, the goal is to be in front of them being helpful with the right information at the right time. And again, if you've got good systems, CRM, a good centralized view of the customer, you've got people that are focused on that, that are paying attention to the customers after the sale, again, you can drive a lot more revenue just by being there and by being helpful and extending that thinking of inbound all the way through the lifecycle. Kathleen: I love that you talked about it being a mindset or a culture, and you mentioned the name of the podcast, which is interesting. So it's called the Inbound Success Podcast. It's not called the Inbound Marketing Success Podcast, and there's a reason for that, and that is that to me, inbound is not really about marketing. It's a mindset. We actually have ... at IMPACT, we wrote the Inbound Manifesto last year, which, if you tweet me and ask for a copy, maybe I'll send it to you. But we describe it as being a mindset and a culture and an attitude, and it doesn't have anything to do with marketing. It has to do with a belief that if you are helpful and authentic and trustworthy and honest, that that will come back to you in spades in the form of business, in the form of other good things. It's sort of a "pay it forward" mentality, and you can apply that to marketing, you can apply that to customer service, you can apply it to really anything. But what I think is interesting is that you touched on something that I really believe, which is that yes, we as marketers tend to neglect this stage in the customer lifecycle. I think it's because in many cases, the way we're measured by the organizations in which we work is fundamentally flawed. A lot of marketers are measured based on how many leads are you delivering to the sales team? So if you're just going to measure your marketing team on the number of leads they're delivering, why would they care about what happens after the sale? There's no incentive there. Now, I say that. I mean, a really great marketer will advocate to have a role post-sale, but I think the incentive system is off. So I know I have people who listen to this podcast who are marketers, but I also have people who are business owners, and I think for business owners almost even more so than the marketers, it's important for it to start at the top with the belief that marketing isn't just to deliver leads. Yes, that is an important part of the job, but you've got to measure success on more than that. It has to factor in what happens after the close. Todd: I couldn't agree with everything you said more. You're absolutely spot on as far as I can tell and in what I believe. And a couple things. One, how many of your business owners out there have their marketing sales and service people sitting in a room together working on anything together ever? Most of them are separate departments with ... I've got one client that has those three different departments and they all have three different systems to manage the data with the customers. They don't talk to one another. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They don't have any idea what's going on. And it's a big, successful company. So it's pretty common. So that goes back to that mindset and that belief, these people. That it's all a continuum. It's one connected thing and they're not separate departments because as far as your customers are concerned, they could care less about your departments, your bureaucracy, your processes, your rules. They don't care. They don't care. They want help. They want problems solved, they want to move forward, they're busy just like you are, and they don't care. They don't want to deal with your nonsense if that's what you're giving them. But let's go back to the beginning. That's why we wrote the book, what you talked about, your Inbound Manifesto, which is great by the way. I've seen it, and the idea that these are beliefs and principles, that the idea that modern buyers want to be helped first. That doing the right thing is helping them regardless of the short term economic interest in front of you. Treating people like human beings, right? You're not marketing to a demographic. You're talking to another person. I tell business owners all the time, I say, "Shop yourself. Look at your own marketing. Would you want that to be the way you're treated?" Kathleen: Right, and oh, by the way, all the things you just said about being helpful, treating people like humans, that will never go out of style. There's never going to be a technological advancement or a trend that makes us say, "Well, we shouldn't be helpful and we certainly shouldn't treat these people like humans." Todd: It's not new. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: It's not new. My daughter's in college and she's reading Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's the same stuff. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: That was from the '30s. It's not new. It's just the way human beings want to react to each other. But we've been throwing all this technology and all these tools at ourselves and we think that's the answer, and it's not. Success is us. It's being human and connecting with other people and helping them solve their problems. If your technology amplifies that, helps it, great. But it's not a substitute. It just is not. Now, if you're talking about transactional sales, I would say that Amazon is a real thing and in terms of, say, basic shopping, if I never step foot in a store again for the rest of my life, I'm happy. But if I'm buying, say, I was going to say a car, but that's not even good because my wife would buy a car online. But for a lot of sales, for professional service, any kind of complex sale, you're still talking about people and that's not going to go away. Kathleen: Well and even if you take Amazon, there are elements there that speak to what you're talking about. Helpfulness. This is why Amazon created Prime and eliminated shipping for a lot of things if you became a Prime member because they realized that that was a pain point for people, and there are elements in Amazon's business model that are purely about helping people and having a better experience as the customer. Todd: Sure. And the personalization and the specific recommendations are awesome. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: But this is why we wrote the book. This is why Dan and I wrote Inbound Organization, it's because we wanted to take these ideas of inbound, and Dan's a senior HubSpot guy, I think he was the sixth employee, he's been around forever, so I've been doing this for 10 plus years, so we've been around this idea for a long time and have a lot of experience with companies that have done it well and not done it well. And we want to take these ideas and tell people essentially that these ideas aren't marketing anymore, and they're not even sales anymore. It's just your business, and we need to get back to these foundational principles and apply them across your entire business. We talk about legal departments being inbound and we talk about accounting and finance being inbound, think about every time you work with a potential ... somebody you bought from, and they made it hard to pay you, right? Kathleen: Ugh. The worst. Todd: How crazy is that? Making it hard to pay you. Or legal departments that just, if you go through this complex sales process and the legal departments throw up a bunch of red flags. Everybody sees them as like the terms of use. You just click the button. Nobody reads them. How bad is that? I mean, come on, lawyers. Can't you do better than that? Can't you somehow boil that down into a paragraph of real stuff that you've surfaced the garbage and don't try to feel like you're putting on over on me? That's starting to apply inbound to your entire business. And don't even get me started on IT departments and how bad they are being inbound. Don't even get me started. Kathleen: Yeah. You know, one little anecdote. When you were talking earlier about how customers don't care about your processes and all that stuff, they just want things to be fixed, all I could think about was actually IT, and I worked at this job about 15 years ago, and I'll never forget. We had this IT guy who was just the nicest guy as a person, but every time there was an IT problem and I would go to him and be like, "There's this problem." He would launch into a five minute long diatribe about why Microsoft, their business model made it so that these things happened, and I just remember sitting there, in my head I'm going, "La, la, la, la, la. I don't care. Fix it for me." And that's exactly I think what's happening most of the time. What Does Best In Class Customer Experience Look Like? Kathleen: So assuming that I'm a business and I have this mindset and I believe, but I really want to do this right and tackle the post-sale stage and give my customers a great experience, can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? And let's zoom in from the hundred thousand foot view way, way down to, like, what are some companies actually doing to nail this? Todd: That's a great question, Kathleen. There's a great story in our book about something called Fatt Merchant, F-A-T-T Merchant, and that's their website, fattmerchant.com. If you're into payment processing, they're digital, online, amazing company. It's a startup here in Orlando. The lady who runs it, Suneera Madhani is an amazing person and just building a great company that has a culture that's just ... and you would recognize it, right? You walked into their office, it would feel like being in the IMPACT offices. Just totally absorbed in inbound. Their motto is 'The best damn experience', and it's on their walls, it's in every room. And everybody in the company's goal is to create the best experience for their customers possible. Their competition, there are some online competitors, but there's a lot of old line financial firms, so they're competing with these big, old time firms. And they're doing this by ... the way they do it culturally is they have a marketing person in every meeting in the company. It doesn't matter what department it is, there's a marketing person in there and they represent the customer. And they advocate and make sure that the best interests of the customer are being accounted for and that everybody in that room is solving for the customer regardless of what it is, whether it's a financial meeting, a product development meeting. Doesn't matter. They're bringing the customer in there and making it a real thing. Again, that gets the mindset and saying that, "This experience is our promise and that our practice internally and culture is we're going to live by that and nobody's going to be exempt from making sure that every decision we make is going to be in the best interest of the customer." Kathleen: That's really interesting, but I have to admit that the prospect of having ... I have a marketing team. I have seven people on my team, and the prospect of having to put one of them in every single meeting in the company is terrifying because then I would think, "When will we ever get our work done?" So I'm curious, operationally, how do you make that happen? You need to have [crosstalk] marketing team. Todd: You need to have less meetings. Well, again, I'm not sure that's exactly how everybody should do it. Certainly the point is ... I think a couple other things. I think business owners need to elevate the marketing function to a higher level in most organizations. I mean, again, in my world, we're dealing with traditional companies, marketing is kind of a back water, all those guys to the trade shows, or they outsource the website stuff to people like Impact, right? It's back water. They are not looked at as production, or engineering, or design as kind of running the show. And a lot of business owners come from that background. What I see, and it's going to take time, I see more and more business owners are going to come out of the marketing disciplines and the sales side and they're going to just know this stuff in their bones because I think the reason that'll happen is that the idea of this customer experience, and the customer journey, and customer success, being a competitive advantage and really one of the few ways companies are going to be able to differentiate moving forward, that will necessitate more leadership in companies coming from that discipline, whereas in a lot of technical fields, product superiority was what won the day. So engineers, designers, developers ran the companies. Today, I mean, tell me you can't find an alternative to anything. Tell me you can't find 15 alternatives to anything in five seconds. Ask Siri, ask Echo, whatever. Look on your phone, do a search. You're going to find a million alternatives. So product isn't the winner anymore as much as it used to be, and in many cases ... and again, if you think about overseas competition, again, product doesn't win anymore, so the experience and the relationships, these marketing and sales-related things become more and more important all the time to basically build differentiation. And companies won't be able to win on product features anymore. So I think the shift in leadership which will bring the mindset will help, but for you old time, you engineers and you product folks who have been around and done this and you're going to becoming from a technical side, I think it's a mindset, it's eating some humble pie and saying, "I don't necessarily know what's best for our customer all the time." Sometimes our marketing people who are out in the field talking to those customers, and watching their behavior, and seeing what works and what doesn't work, they have something to say too. So leaders need to elevate those people that really understand the experience and are seeing your customers to a higher level and to a more prominent place in the organization because again, engineering can engineer something awesome, you can build it wonderfully, but if the customer service people or the after the sale process ruins the experience, they're not coming back. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They don't care. They'll go find somebody else. Kathleen: Yeah. So what are some specific things that you've seen companies do, marketers do within companies to improve that customer experience? Todd: Yeah. It starts with understanding the persona and really digging in and doing basic blocking and tackling, interviewing to understand the persona, map the buyer journey, and then do your thing. Build content that matches that journey. Think of your customer in terms of persona. Again, you can connect the dots. If they had this problem and they bought this solution, then they have these commonalities with other customers. Create great content for them. When's the last time an inbound marketer sat down and said, "I'm going to create an amazing video for my customers."? Or, "I'm going to create an amazing Ebook or an amazing tool for my customers."? Kathleen: Now, when you say content for customers, are you thinking content that helps them use the product? Because when I hear that, I think, "Oh, there's plenty of companies that have ongoing tutorials and things that help you get better use of their product." Or are you thinking about content that addresses other pain points? Todd: Yeah, I think you've got to think like a business owner. Think in business problems. The people that are buying your products or services, you should know their range of business problems that they have, and you should know how to extend the solution you sold into the next ones, the next sale. Think about the next sale. So create content that helps position you as the person or the company to come back to to solve that problem and extend the trust they gave you. They're basically buying from you, so they're saying, "I trust you." So therefore, you need to extend that. Again, I think things like training and product usage things are table stakes when it comes to this. You've got to have that. I'm talking about basically saying ... I'll give you a great example. The example we're talking about right now is a good one. How many inbound marketing agencies out there today offer a customer success program for their customers? Do you go to the leaders and the owners of your customers and say, "I can help you keep, retain, upsell, cross-sell, and extend your relationships with existing customers, and here's how I'm going to do it."? I haven't seen too many that do it. Most of them are still, "Hey, generate some leads. Get me more people to my website. Get me some top of the funnel stuff. Convert people so I've got more sales qualified leads." But how many walk in and say, "We can do all this stuff and we can help you grow your business with your existing customer base."? I do. I do. But I don't think a lot of other people do. Kathleen: So when you work with clients to do that, can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies that you advise them to use or give some examples of ... I would actually be really interested in, do you have any examples of where you've put that kind of a program in place and it's really generated measurable results? Todd: Yeah, I've got one client that we've worked with for a number of years, and they had a series of dealers where they sold some direct, but they also sold a lot through this dealer network, essentially just think of it as a distribution network. Well, they were frustrated because they had some dealers that were doing well and some dealers that weren't. It's kind of, you get a normal distribution of dealers, right? So what we did is we created a dealer health check system for them where we went through and we talked to the dealers and we looked at the behavior and the characteristics of the dealers that were successful. We created basically a check, they could create a score for these dealers so they could see which ones were successful and which ones weren't. Todd: Some of the obvious things were how much are they selling, how often are they buying, basic numbers like that. But we also included things like are they following the blog? Do they open emails? Are they consuming the content that we're creating that should be educating them about the opportunities and products and the customers? And then we also dug into CRM. How many communications were going back and forth between the sales people and these distributors and dealers? So we created this, basically we took all this data that we had and all the information and we created this health check system so it would show our client salespeople which ones were doing great, so then they wanted to keep pushing them and extend that, which ones were at risk, and which ones were really failing. So instead of guessing or wasting time, they were able to come up with a plan to use, again, some automated content as well as personal outreach to help those ones that were kind of in the middle, that's what we focused on. Getting the ones that were kind of in the middle that were doing okay but had some issues, move them up. And they've seen probably ... the latest I heard was probably about 15 to 20% increase in sales for that channel since they've started this, and it was about a year ago. So that is kind of combining things like CRM, content, sales teams. Putting it all together in a way that can give you a picture of what's going on, again, after the sale. So that was just one example. I've got lots of examples where companies have gone in and really, they don't do any marketing to their customers. Their after the sale marketing is basically, "Well, when the phone rings, we'll answer it." And I saw story after story where people just started a basic email campaign, just a really basic email campaign, like, "Here's what we're doing. Here's our new products." And all of a sudden, the phone rings, they get new orders. That's very common. I would say on average when we do that, we would see 10 to 15% improvement in sales just working with your existing customers. Not adding new ones, just applying these ideas to an existing customer base. I would say on average over the last 10 years of doing this that it would be 10 to 15% average increase of sales in the first year. Kathleen: Wow. Just by starting to reach out more. Todd: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Just paying attention to your customers, being intentional about it, using what you know about them to create content that would be interesting. If they bought this, then they might be interested in this. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: If they bought this to solve this problem, then they also have this problem, so therefore, let's talk about that. I don't think it's all that complicated, I think it's just taking what you already knew about inbound marketing and inbound sales and just moving to the after the sale piece. Kathleen: It very much reminds me of how a lot of SaaS companies, software companies, have the concept of a product qualified lead. You talked about looking at engagement data and stuff, and I interviewed somebody several episodes ago about this, and in the SaaS world, they have, as you've pointed out with HubSpot, they have this wealth of data on how much people are in the product, how they're using it, and they can surface areas where maybe things aren't going so smoothly. But the best SaaS companies, especially the ones that are going from premium or free trial to paid versions, look really closely at that during that period to then try to upsell their customers, and I think that other industries and companies don't do nearly as good of a job at that, and I think we can all learn a lot from the concept of a product qualified lead. So we have people that are "already engaging with our product", and that product could be something that they purchased from us, like a thing, an actual tangible thing, or it could be a service. Like IMPACT, we're a marketing agency, how are people interacting with our service? What are the telltale signs that they're product qualified? Meaning they might be qualified to purchase something additional or to engage at a different level with us? Most companies fail abjectly at doing that. Todd: Sure. And if you're in the software business, a product qualified lead, if you have a popup that says, "We have this ad on." Right? And if you click it to get more information, there's some automated things, and if you sell equipment or even if you sell professional services, things like that, you don't have that kind of built in thing, so you have to create that. You have to create that product qualification, and you may know that if somebody's asking for accessories or follow on parts or upsells, you may have a good sense of it, but you should also know. You should know pathways for people. I had an example where a client has a piece of equipment, it was a pump. Really basic stuff, it was a pump. But they were selling it to contractors, and very quickly we found that by buying this one product to do this one job, it allowed them to do another job that they could also do. So instead of just pitching the pump on the special occasions, it was a business development opportunity. So anybody that bought that pump, we started to create content to share with their customers about how they could grow their business. If you have this to do this job, you can also do this job, so here's a way you can help grow your business. And again, that's adding value with, again, content, what you know. You have to kind of create that product qualified lead and it's out there. And I've seen it in every product I've ever been around in terms of selling. From very high end capital equipment to working with my clients with software. Metal roofs. You name it. It doesn't matter. There's always something new and there's always something down the road you can help somebody with. If nothing else, create raving fans. Get them talking about you. Get reviews and ratings, get them to give you referrals. If nothing else, you can get that. Structuring Your Company For Customer Experience Kathleen: I imagine that this has some implications for organizational structure because if you are bringing a new customer onboard, and if it's not a totally transactional business. In other words, if you have some kind of an ongoing business relationship with that customer, then I imagine if all of a sudden your marketing department is getting involved in marketing to that customer post-sale, you have to make sure that from the customer's standpoint it feels like the right hand is talking to the left, and they don't have this disjointed experience. So for example, if they have ... in our company, you'll have an account representative who deals with you on a day-to-day basis for your marketing, but then we have a sales team, and we have a customer satisfaction person, and then we have our marketing team. So how do you structure the company internally so that from the customer's standpoint it feels like a seamless experience and everybody understands what the touch points are and you're not competing with 10 different emails from different departments in the company? Todd: I would say obviously there's a range of answers for that depending on where our companies are today. So let's take a company that's not really doing this right now, and then we'll come back to your example of IMPACT. If you aren't really focused on ... if you have that traditional customer service department and that's your after sale focus, look at your expense reports. How much are you spending on sales? How much are you spending on marketing? Compare that to how much you're spending on customer service and after the sale work. Look at your hours, or if you can do it, figure out the resources you're applying across the buyer journey. The whole customer lifetime. Look at where your resources are going. And I bet you a significant portion if not 10 times more of your money is spent on generating new business than it is to keep old business or existing business. And everybody knows the cliché, I've said it once already. Seven times more to get a new customer than it is to keep another one. So if you're smart, you would flip that around. You would spend more on after sale managing your customers than you sell on front end stuff. Now, I'm not naïve enough to think that's going to happen any time soon, but the reality is, you should be moving resources towards keeping your customers happy, customer success after the sale. So if you're not doing this well, you need to look at that and start allocating resources that direction. I think if you've already got a structure like the one you just described there, Kathleen, about IMPACT is not an uncommon one. I think the key I've seen there is that somebody owns the process. Somebody owns that customer and is responsible for making sure all those pieces are connected. So if you've got an account manager, their job is to work day-to-day with that client and deliver what you've promised, right? So it's hard for them necessarily to step back and think about the next step in the future. That's probably your sales team or it could be your customer satisfaction team. And again, I don't know how you're coordinated, but somebody has to own that customer for the life of that customer. Somebody has to be looking at the entire thing and saying, "Okay, here's what's next." And I see chief revenue officers, which may fit that bill. I see more titles around that that are showing up, and I would hope that that's the goal, to get to a place where somebody internally owns that relationship top to bottom or owns all of the relationships top to bottom and then is coordinating elements to deliver the right value at the right time at the right place. They can't be walled off from one another, whatever that looks like. You've got to have communication back and forth. And a lot of people that have worked with HubSpot, you'll see this, you use HubSpot, right? You'll see emails coming out six months before your renewal is due and you'll get a phone call from an internal person that's asked about how you're doing. They may stutter, they're going to see if you're doing well or not, right? And if you're a partner, you're going to hear the same thing. "How's it going with these accounts? The renewals are coming up. What do you want to do? Let's work together." Somebody's owning that. I think that's the key thing. If somebody owns that outcome, the outcome being the ongoing relationship, then I think you're going to win. Kathleen: It certainly seems also that you would need to have the right tech stack in place because you can have somebody own it, but unless all of your different players have really good visibility into what have the communications and the touch points been, then it could get very messy, very quickly. Todd: It's actually impossible if you don't. Kathleen: Yeah. So having a good CRM, and then I would think, I'm sure you and I would preach the same thing, having a marketing system, a marketing automation system that is fully integrated with your CRM so that the sales people can see what marketing is doing, the marketing people can see what sales is doing, and your customer success people obviously bridge all of it. Todd: Exactly. Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: We would call that a "centralized view of the customer," where everybody can see it and know what's going on. And again, it sounds so basic, it sounds easy. The problem is a lot of companies I deal with have been around a while so they've got a lot of legacy systems. Those IT guys have been there since the '90s and they're used to servers and buy in software and they don't like the cloud. They've got all kind of biases, right? And they don't want ... they want these walls and they don't want information to get out and get shared because they're afraid of getting hacked, or losing it, or all these concerns. And they're legitimate, but there's answers. And if you don't have that centralized view of the customer, I would say, talking to the leaders of companies, I would put that right there at the top of your strategic initiatives. And if you don't have it, it makes it that much harder to deliver a great experience, which is the ultimate differentiation moving forward. Kathleen: Yeah. If you don't have a good customer list. I love that you said that at the beginning because it's true. It is so true. It sounds crazy, but I'm not going to name names, but I know a lot of companies that people might be very surprised to hear can't produce a list of their customers. Todd: I had a client a couple years ago that sold equipment that started at $250 thousand and went to well over a million dollars, and when I asked that question, "How good is your customer list?" They said, "We're not sure where all of our equipment is." Kathleen: Yeah. Todd: They didn't know where it was. I guess I was stunned. It's common, so again, that centralized view of the customer, it needs to be at the top of the list for leaders and owners. It sounds so basic and so rudimentary, but it's not. It's the beginning. You talk about the tech stack, that database is your business, and if you don't have it, then you can't build on it, then you can't build that experience. Or if you do, it's all over the map. One person may do it well, and over here it's not done well. Or this department does it well and this department doesn't because there's no connectivity. What's The Impact On The Bottom Line? Kathleen: Absolutely. So it's interesting as we're talking and I'm thinking about this whole conversation, the biggest takeaway to me seems to be that if all you do is get a good handle on who your customers are and start initiating regular contact with them, you have a good chance at increasing your sales by 10 to 15% within a year. Todd: Yeah. I mean, we would tell people follow up on your quotes, make sure you stay in front ... the basics. It's just, don't neglect those things. Those are relatively easy to do and just do those basic blocking and tackling. You're not going to go backwards if you do that. Number one, you're going to surface issues if you're talking to people and you're communicating with them, you're going to surface potential issues earlier and you're going to be able to deal with those. You're going to find new opportunities. If your sales team and marketing team are using content well, you're going to open up new opportunities and you're going to do something most companies aren't doing. So you're going to create differentiation right there in the after sale experience. So again, I think it's one of the easiest ways to grow your business without upsetting the apple cart or making a gigantic investment. Kathleen: Yeah. Agreed. So interesting. We could talk for hours about this. Todd: Sure could. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: But we don't have hours. So a couple of questions before we wind things up. My regular listeners know I always like to ask people, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Todd: Well, there's a bunch. I mentioned FattMerchant. FattMerchant.com, it's a shameless plug for them if you need financial, payment processing services, they're awesome. Another company that was in our book is called Cerasis, C-E-R-A-S-I-S, and that's Cerasis.com. They're in the fleet management and shipping world. They compete with people like FedEx and UPS and they're amazing. They've created this amazing ecosystem and community around their business in a very traditional world where they're connecting people that are trucking companies with people who need to ship things. They are a wonderful example of it. And there's lots of individuals out there that are doing it well. On my podcast, it's called The Industrial Executive, I just interviewed Justin Champion, who is one of the inbound guys who runs the academy. In terms of a practitioner and teacher of inbound and inbound marketing, he's right up there at the top of the list. He wrote a book called Inbound Content, and he's just come out with a new blog strategy class and a video marketing class that I think are amazing. Kathleen: I love him. He's been a guest on one of our podcasts here at IMPACT. He's great. Todd: Yeah, big fan of Justin. And of course, IMPACT. You guys are at the top of the heap when it comes to agencies in the inbound world. You've been around it for a long time and I still read your blog all the time, and all the vlogs, so I'm still paying attention to what you guys are saying because I'm always learning from you. Kathleen: Well that is high praise coming from you, so thank you for that. If somebody is listening and they want to learn more about this whole topic or get in touch with you or if they want to buy your book, can you rattle off a few different ways that folks can get in touch with you online? How To Connect With Todd Todd: Sure. I'm easy to find. Todd Hockenberry. @ToddHockenberry is Twitter, LinkedIn. Happy to connect with people on LinkedIn, just search for my name. The book, InboundOrganization.com is our website for the book. Tons of info there, you can connect with all of our social accounts there. We've got a really cool thing on that website. It's InboundOrganization.com, no spaces. It's an assessment. You can take a 33-question assessment to see where you are in terms of your adoption of the inbound ideas across your entire organization. So it's free, you just fill it out and we'll send you the results, and it's been very interesting seeing the hundreds of people that have done it to kind of see where people are doing well and where they aren't. The answers are pretty insightful and a lot of the people that we know do it really get a lot of good feedback, so check that out. You can find me just Top Line Results or Todd Hockenberry, I'm all over the internet, and I would love to connect with you and answer questions and help you in any way I can. Kathleen: Love it. And I will put all those links in the show notes. And I'm assuming if they want your book, they can just go onto Amazon and get it there. Todd: Yeah. Amazon's great and a lot of Barnes & Nobles carry it, and a variety of other places you buy books. Inbound Organization. Check it out. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Great. Well thank you so much, Todd. This has been fun, and I'm now inspired to take a closer look at how we're communicating with our customers at IMPACT. If you're listening and you enjoyed what you heard today or you learned something, take a minute, go to Apple Podcasts, and leave a review. It makes a big difference for a podcast like this one. It helps us get in front of more people, and I would be so personally grateful if you could do that today. And if you know somebody who is doing really great inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love for them to be my next guest. Thanks again, Todd. It was great chatting with you. Todd: Thanks for having me. It was my pleasure to be on Inbound Success, Kathleen, and I wish you lots of inbound success. Kathleen: Thanks.

Suneera Madhani had an idea that would change the payment processing industry, but when she told her then-bosses, they literally laughed in her face. Just several years later, Suneera heads up her own company, FattMerchant, that handles $2 billion in transactions and has also managed to modernize the entire payment processing industry. In her blast-off to fame within the tech world, she has attracted the attention of every major business publication, earning accolades and recognition along the way, all while raising two daughters with her husband. Oh, and did I mention she's only 30? *insert shocked emoji face* I loved diving into topics like entrepreneurship; trusting your gut; upending the status quo; and work life "balance" with Suneera. She's a wealth of knowledge on entrepreneurship and is equally open about her journey as a new mom. Follow along on Instagram for more daily stories and interviews! --> @SonniAbatta and @MomBossBlog

Every company, regardless of what they sell, is impacted by technology. From the technology you use internally to track sales to the chatbot your clients use to talk to you, technology has the potential to create a superior, remarkable, and memorable customer experience. [1:29] Question: What do Inbound and Technology Have to do with One Another? Every piece of technology you use and your customers use to interact with you should be simple and accessible. Technology should be simple to use out of the box, easy to set up, and easy to figure out. The easier it is to use, the happier your customers are going to be. And the same goes internally. Giving good people bad systems is a recipe for employee churn. You should also be leveraging technology to automate redundant and low-value work. Things like follow up emails, lead intelligence, lead notifications, sending emails through the CRM, and meeting tools are all opportunities for your internal technology to support and enhance the customer experience by supporting your employees. You should be using technology to create a centralized view of your customer. Externally, tools like chatbots, knowledge bases, and conversations are opportunities to curate your customer experience. Technology should be enhancing the experience of your customers, clients, and leads. “Inbound thinking pervades everything for us from product development to customer service to technology. We built the product based on the specific feedback of our members and the problems they wanted to solve and the relationships we have, and how we make their lives easier, so we end up having a sticky connection with them and their struggles. It all goes back to the inbound idea. It’s all about people and relationships.” Liz Connett, Fattmerchant [20:43] Dan’s Rant This is the year. Now is the time. [21:00] Todd’s Truth A centralized view of the customer is a must.   [21:23] 3 Takeaways This doesn’t have to be hard. There is a lot of great software and tools out there There is a huge risk if you ignore the role of technology Shop yourself! Links Industrial Executive (https://www.top-line-results.com/theindustrialexecutive) Is there a marketing person leading the IT team? - https://seths.blog/2018/11/is-there-a-marketing-person-leading-the-it-team/ Take the Inbound Organization Assessment (https://www.inboundorganization.com/inbound-organization-assessment) We’re extending the MSPOT contest! You can download the MSPOT template, submit it for review, and anyone who submits an MSPOT will be entered into the contest. The first-place winner will win an hour to review their MSPOT with Todd and Dan! Download and Submit Your MSPOT (https://www.inboundorganization.com/mspot-review)  P.S. Are you enjoying the podcast? Did you read Inbound Organization? Taking a quick moment to rate and review Inbound2Grow and Inbound Organization on whatever service you use is the best way to let us know how we’re doing. Your ratings and reviews make a big difference, and we appreciate you taking the time to provide your feedback.   Thanks to Rebecca Miller our podcast editor, social media coordinator, and blogger and to Zachary Jameson for producing the audio for the podcast. Check out Zachary on Upwork if you need podcast audio services.

In this tech spotlight episode, I'm highlighting a disruptive product that helps accounting professionals provide exceptional service to their clients. Today's episode highlights Suneera Madhani, the CEO of FattMerchant. FattMerchant is disrupting the payments ecosystem with their simple yet robust and affordable technology. In four short years, they have processed over $2 billion in payments and work with thousands of merchants. By eliminating hidden processing fees and introducing a subscription based model for their clients, they are saving small business owners thousands of dollars. And saving accountants several hours of reconciliation nightmares. In this episode, you learn about: Suneera's career journey from studying finances to launching her own business What makes FattMerchant so innovative and cutting-edge How FattMerchant saved one client $70,000 in credit card processing fees in one year Resources mentioned: Suneera's Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn FattMerchant This episode is brought to you by Money & Mimosas. Click here to learn about our 2019 CPA Partner Program.

In this episode, Dan and Todd explore how an authentic, inbound company culture fosters and allows employees to provide excellent customer experiences. While there are no shortcuts for creating a company culture, your company culture is an essential part of delivering the best customer experience. Show Notes [0:40] Question: What is the Connection Between Company Culture and Marketing Execution?  Inbound Organization begins with a case study about a payment processing company, Fattmerchant, who made their mark in a traditional industry by thinking outside the box and becoming an inbound organization. Fattmerchant built a company culture that helps their employees provide, “the best damn experience.” You can feel the difference an inbound culture makes when you go into companies like Fattmerchant and HubSpot because they’ve built a company culture that permeates the business. And that culture isn’t something you can fake. It must be authentic. Having an authentic company culture is a key part of how you deliver outstanding customer experience. By hiring for people who fit your culture and building your culture into every aspect of the business, you create an environment that fosters and allows your employees to provide the kind of customer experience you are aiming for. [13:53] Dan’s Rant Dan gets asked on a regular basis how they do it at HubSpot. The short answer is that people treat customers the way that they are treated, another reason why company culture is so important. [14:38] Todd’s Truth A modern buyer values a relationship with a company that shares her values without sacrificing any quality or utility. Buyers want to do business with companies that share their values and companies live out their values through their culture. [15:26] 3 Takeaways Check out Dan and Todd’s speaking schedule on inboundorganization.com. Buy the book, if you haven’t already. Here's the link: http://a.co/1UTyN96 Leave a review, we really appreciate it! Links Take the Inbound Organization Assessment (https://www.inboundorganization.com/inbound-organization-assessment) https://www.inboundorganization.com/resources-and-articles https://fattmerchant.com/

Steve Karp is the VP of Strategy at Fattmerchant and has 20+ years of experience working in startups, growth stage private equity, Fortune 500, and management consulting environments across the FinTech industry. Follow Fattmerchant on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Paul McKenzie is a 25 year veteran of IT and telecommunications sales and marketing. He started his […] The post Steve Karp with Fattmerchant, Paul McKenzie with Altus Telecommunications appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

On today’s episode, I talk to Suneera Madhani, the founder and CEO of Fattmerchant. I met Suneera when she was going through Starter Studio, a tech accelerator in Orlando, FL, and when her team was preparing for incredible growth, she asked for my help to align her team. My purpose in life is to help teams increase their cohesion and effectiveness, ultimately driving organizational performance, and a lot of that involves growing individual self-awareness to create more self-accountable team members who then communicate and collaborate more effectively. AND, there is also the critical element of aligning your team on the core elements of your organization. Why do you exist, what do you do (and what do you NOT do), what is your vision of the future, how do we align decisions to maximize the likelihood we get there (AKA strategy), and how do we treat each other along the way (AKA culture). I use the framework from Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything to create a playbook for executive teams. In my interview with Suneera, we discuss everything from self-awareness to recover from defensiveness to finding your true purpose as an organization to how a viral article in Fast Company broke Fattmerchant, but ultimately prepared them to align strategically in preparation for scalability and 10x growth. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to grow a company, or a leader who wants to create a kick ass culture, you don’t want to miss this conversation. 

Revolutionizing the payment solutions industry by offering a transparent subscription based merchant services model that offers financial and strategic value to the every day business owner. Why get FATT? Fast access to funds, affordable, secure transactions, and supportive customer service. Frustrated with your current credit card processor? We completely understand. Trust us, we've been there. […] The post Pensacola Business Radio: Spotlight Episode-Sal Rehmetullah/Fattmerchant appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

About Fattmerchant: Fattmerchant is a subscription-based merchant service provider offering unlimited payment processing at direct cost for a flat monthly membership and no contract. Suneera Madhani, CEO of Fattmerchant, founded the company in 2014 after working in the credit card processing industry for four years, wanting to create and sell a product that was transparent and provided value to the everyday business owner. Fattmerchant offers credit card processing for every business type, without adding mark-ups or other fees, and providing free equipment, no contract and no ancillary fees. Want to learn more about Fattmerchant: https://www.fattmerchant.com/