Brendan Pfahlert

SUMMARY

What are the primary distinctions between outbound operations in Australia and the US, and how does Rev Ops operate?

Rev Ops is the coordination of sales, marketing, and customer service operations to provide cohesion in data analysis and uniformity of terminology within teams. Outbound operations in Australia are well-known and have a lower volume than in the US, which is less developed.

How has a small to medium firm in Australia made the shift from a pure sales or marketing play to a product-led growth model?

The change has been about developing more sophisticated methods for gathering data on who is using the product and attempting to identify the most pertinent individuals for outreach. For larger businesses, it has been difficult to include everyone who signs up for a free trial in the sales process. However, doing so demands treating every customer as though they are the most significant one.

How is the company using Connect and Sell to interact with potential customers and acquire information about the company?

By slightly altering the settings to connect on live voice, speaking to a larger spectrum of people, and gathering information for follow-up conversations, the company is using Connect and Sell to engage with potential clients at a high velocity and gain intelligence on the company.

TRANSCRIPT

Ricky Pearl: Today on a Couple of Pointers Podcast, we're lucky enough to have Brendan Pfahlert Revenue Operations Manager for File Invite. Welcome to the show.

Brendan Pfahlert: Thank you, Ricky. Good to be here.

What do you do and what does File Invite do?

Ricky Pearl: For the sake of the audience, explain it like we're five, what do you do and what does File Invite do?

Brendan Pfahlert: My job here at Final Invite is really to tie together what we are doing in sales from an operations point of view with what the CS team needs from us what they're doing, and also what the marketing team is doing. So we're all pointing in the same direction and operating off a sort of common understanding of who we are dealing with and the strategy behind it.

Brendan Pfahlert: What we do here at File Invite is if you think about any time someone's asking you for a lot of documentation that's the type of situation we get involved in. A lot of the time people are asking you for information by email, not because they've made a conscious decision to use email, but it just happened to be the tool they had available when setting up the business. So we work with for example, one, one in three brokered mortgages in Australia. We work with vehicle financing companies, commercial financing companies. Anytime there's a large amount of customer paperwork that you need to collect we have a portal solution designed to click that information so that your customer gets a much better end user experience and you save a whole bunch of time not having to rename things and juggle 'em around, and it goes straight in the CRM.

Rev Ops Manager

Ricky Pearl: I completely appreciate that use case. Now, I'd love to dive in a little bit into File Invite. But this word Rev Ops Manager, or Rev Ops in general, I reckon is one of the least understood in sales.

Brendan Pfahlert: Agree.

How would you describe Rev Ops?

Ricky Pearl: So how would you describe Rev Ops?

Brendan Pfahlert: It's stepping above just sales operations or marketing operations or CS operations to really understand not only what does, what do the individual teams need, but how are they working well together? How are they using a common language? And by that I mean what, when they're looking at data they're looking at it in the same way so that the story is cohesive across the customer's journey.

Ricky Pearl: It's brilliant and you had the benefit of helping file invites expand internationally.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yes, I did. So final Invite was originally a tool that was built for a specific use case. We launched it thinking a whole bunch of web agencies were going to purchase it. And what we found actually was Australian mortgage brokers desperately needed the tool. And so after a couple of years operating in the Australian space, we decided we would take the the platform to the USA. We set up a an office in Colorado, in Denver. And we went to talk to mortgage brokers in the US only to really find that there was some other parts of the market over there that were better served by what we're offering.

Ricky Pearl: Interesting. So you're doing one in three mortgages in Australia, and what's the main ideal client profile over there?

Brendan Pfahlert: In the US we're working with a number of different customers already. So we're working with a lot of people and our outbound focus at the moment is particularly on commercial financing, so that could be anything from a large multi-family tenanted apartment building to heavy equipment to vehicle leasing.

Brendan Pfahlert: We're also working a little bit in the education space. So one of our customers helps run about 120 different universities online education platforms. So there's a couple of places where we are very strong, particularly from an outbound focus, but the tool being fairly industry agnostic means that there's all sorts of interesting use cases that pop up from time to time.

Ricky Pearl: I reckon there aren't many professionals in your position that have seen a startup from New Zealand expand into Australia, expand into the US and I'd love to dive into some of those differences.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah, there's certainly a few New Zealand firms out there now starting to get a footprint in the US, particularly in Colorado. The famous, more famous ones, being companies like Xero and Vend. But there's not a huge number. That's probably good correct statement.

Ricky Pearl: I think Xero's big enough that Australia's already claims it as their own

Brendan Pfahlert: Okay. Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: I obviously have a particular focus in outbounds. When you first set up your outbound operation, was that in New Zealand or was that in the US?

Brendan Pfahlert: It was a little bit of a mix between the US and Australia. We don't do a lot in New Zealand. We, I think less than 4% of our revenue comes from New Zealand. So while we're New Zealand headquartered, it's not really a focus for us. And initially we probably tried a fairly similar approach in both markets and things evolved slightly from there.

Ricky Pearl: Okay. What would you say were some of the main differences between your Australian outbounds and your American outbound?

Brendan Pfahlert: I think one of the biggest ones is probably volume. In Australia we it's a much smaller market. We also have the advantage there of being a fairly known commodity, particularly in the mortgage broker space. So we can go to customers, knock on their door. Even some of the banks and chances are they've heard of File Invite, they know who we are.

Brendan Pfahlert: And even if we go outside of mortgage brokering in Australia, there's going to be other, if someone's purchased a house in the last couple of years, there's a good chance they know, if not us in particular, the type of solution we offer. In America it's a much bigger market. It's a lot less mature of a market.

Brendan Pfahlert: And we've got absolutely no name recognition there when we started off. A lot harder to knock down the doors of some of the larger organizations.

What were some of the things that you tried there that maybe didn't work?

Ricky Pearl: What were some of the things that you tried there that maybe didn't work?

Brendan Pfahlert: I don't know if it's so much things that didn't work. It's just where did we focus our energy and how did we focus our attention? In America, we use Connect and Sell a lot more aggressively. So we are attending a lot of events. We're getting contact lists of everyone who attends those events and we are using those to start discussions.

Brendan Pfahlert: And so by using a tool like Connect and Sell, we can ring a hundred people an hour per rep and speak with people that may have heard of us. We almost, we are talking with people across the spectrum there. So we are, we're talking with people who have 10 users. We're talking with people who might have a couple of hundred users. Whereas in Australia, because we're a bit more of a known brand and we've got a comprehensive self-service product that can look after that lower end of the market. The smaller organizations can just go to our website, do a free trial. We're not targeting them quite as aggressively as we are in America where they haven't heard of us. We are being a little bit more strategic and we're talking to more of the bigger organizations there that have much longer sales cycles.

Ricky Pearl: There's so much there that I'd love to dig in. But a few of the interesting things you've brought up, I'll put connect and sell on the back burner for now, although I do wanna dive in. You're mostly using outbound, your outbound team in conjunction with attending events, which would broadly fall under marketing. Is that because they've got you and they've clearly set up in a revenue operations they've looked at revenue from a revenue perspective as opposed to a sales perspective in a marketing perspective. Is that how you outbound landed up being a function more of marketing than of sales?

Brendan Pfahlert: It still is a little bit more of a function of sales, I would say. It's quite interesting what we've found is that the problem we solve is out there and it's always a discussion in organizations. Where do you put the SDR team? Is it in marketing? Is it in sales? They're really are just knocking down the door and getting people to understand who we are and what we do.

Brendan Pfahlert: And so there's an argument to be made for putting it in the department. I think as having a Rev Ops team and function allows us to not really care who they report to but more just care about what is the job they're doing and are achieving that.

Ricky Pearl: The use case of your SDR team as going outbound to people who have attended an event or shown some kind of intent or interest. Almost handling MQL, so to speak, is a perfect use case and so often missed because they siloed in sales or marketing. But it's really fantastic to see success when it's done right.

Brendan Pfahlert: And the place we're hoping to move to as well is getting a lot more PQL. So as we get more and more people using our self serve product we're finding some of those people are members and sometimes multiple people from the same organization. And that's again, another easier way to start a conversation than a pure cold call.

How's that transition been from a pure sales play or pure marketing play to a product led motion?

Ricky Pearl: That was the second thing I wanted to discuss was you mentioned that you're moving to a product led growth model for your for your small to medium enterprise within Australia. How's that transition been from a pure sales play or pure marketing play to a product led motion?

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah, so we've always had a self serve product that people can go and sign up for a free trial on. I suppose one of the things we probably haven't done a great job of in the past is identifying who on that, who in that journey should be the ones we are reaching out to. And so it's really just about becoming a little bit more mature about how we are measuring information on who's using our product.

Brendan Pfahlert: How they're using our product and trying to surface the most relevant ones that we should. Who are the top 10 people we should call today that have actually heard about us, that are actually using us as opposed to just going after everyone as if they were exactly the same.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. It's a, we are seeing more of that as, and it's maturing and it's fantastic to talk to professionals that are actively pursuing those kinds of that product intelligence to know how you can tie that into your revenue operations. As opposed to just on registration or after six months saying who's actually deriv getting impact?

Brendan Pfahlert: The tricky one to actually capture, if I'm honest, is all of the people who are in the sales process for one of our larger accounts that are signing up on their Gmail accounts for a free trial just to, poke around and see what's happening there.

Ricky Pearl: Very interesting.

Brendan Pfahlert: So it does mean you have to treat everyone as if they are the most important client in the room, regardless of what their, email address looks like.

Ricky Pearl: Offline, I'll show you a great way that you can go from private emails to people's LinkedIn address profiles because they usually use their private email address to sign up to LinkedIn and then you'll be able to see where they work and work back down from there.

Brendan Pfahlert: I like it

Ricky Pearl: Now, Back onto that. Connect and sell.

Connect and Sell to engage with them at a very high velocity, presumably having a lot of conversations within the time that they're on the phone

Ricky Pearl: So you've got this really strong use case. You have people attending your events. They potentially heard of your brand, maybe engaged in high level conversations. Your outbound team is then using Connect and Sell to engage with them at a very high velocity, presumably having a lot of conversations within the time that they're on the phone.

Ricky Pearl: Is that how it's working for you?

Brendan Pfahlert: That is, and what's interesting about that is while we were having a lot of conversations, we've actually made a slight change to the settings in Connect and Sell. So rather than connecting to the specific person that attended the event, we've actually opened it up a little bit so that now we just connect on Live voice.

Brendan Pfahlert: And what that's allowing the team to do is talk to. Whoever answers the phone and potentially either get more information on the person they're trying to reach, or if they don't reach the person that went to the event, maybe even find out who a better person at the organization to approach is.

Brendan Pfahlert: Because one of the big challenges with the organization and the sales approach is that there's often not someone dedicated to looking after the area that we helped solve. It's like I imagine back in the day there was some poor person having to go knock on doors and say, who looks after your fax machines and people going, what's a fax machine?

Brendan Pfahlert: We don't have anyone that looks after that. We're all good. Thanks. So I feel like we're a bit of a pioneer in a lot of organizations because there's no one who's responsible for the technology bit that we sit in.

Ricky Pearl: That makes sense and you're probably a pioneer as well being revenue operations because that in itself is a pretty unique and new field

Brendan Pfahlert: It is. Yeah. And it's an exciting one to be in. I think both,

Brendan Pfahlert: uh, both being in a growing category of organization and a growing role within that the tech industry.

Ricky Pearl: Now let's just talk you, you mentioned the slight change you in how you were using connect and sell as opposed to having their agent say, how could I please speak to Brendan? Was just as soon as there was a connect they put your sales rep on with the person they were speaking to. Did you notice a change then in how many gatekeepers that you were getting through, or intelligence you were generating on that?

Ricky Pearl: Through having a conversation with that gatekeeper?

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah, so we speak to a slightly more people and we speak to a wider range of people. It's probably still slightly early days to draw any conclusions from it. But the team certainly feels, even if the conversion rates might be slightly lower, which is to be expected when you're speaking to more people that are not the target person you're after the, it's not taking them too much longer to sit.

Brendan Pfahlert: They're sitting there, they're having more conversations. So I think they enjoy that a little bit more as well. And the ability to gather intelligence on an organization so that the next time you ring up, you potentially already know. Do they have the problem that we solve, which they should because otherwise we shouldn't be calling them.

Brendan Pfahlert: And how are they currently collecting their documents? Hopefully we can answer that question, those follow up calls. We already know the answer to that question.

Would they be documenting those conversations as well in a CRM? Is your full tech stack enabled?

Ricky Pearl: The difference between volume and intelligence, right? Is that it's hard to take that away from the person. Would they be documenting those conversations as well in a CRM? Is your full tech stack enabled?

Brendan Pfahlert: They would, so we use Outreach as our sales engagement platform. And so all of the information from Connect and Sell will feed back into Outreach.

Which CRM are you currently using?

Ricky Pearl: Now which CRM are you currently using?

Brendan Pfahlert: We're using HubSpot

Ricky Pearl: Oh, I've got a lot of questions for you. A lot of questions for you because obviously there's no native HubSpot outreach integration that also tracks activities.

Brendan Pfahlert: Correct.

Pain point or not a problem?

Ricky Pearl: Has that been a pain point or not a problem?

Brendan Pfahlert: It's not too much of a problem because, you again go back to the question of are the SDRs, are they marketing, are they sales? That kind of pre full sales discussion so they can use that to, to get their conversations and get us in front of the right people. As soon as we start to have those conversations with the right people, and we're collecting some of the relevant information, we can start to then bring that stuff into HubSpot and we hand that over to the account executives and they work out of HubSpot,

Ricky Pearl: Those notes based on the intelligence that they've gathered from gatekeepers, maybe some of the people that they've spoken to who weren't the right people, do they then just manually upload all of that information? Make a note as part of your handover?

Brendan Pfahlert: Where it's relevant. They do.

Ricky Pearl: Okay. I, these are the things I love to see, right?

Ricky Pearl: Because there's no perfect solution.

Brendan Pfahlert: No, there's not. And you definitely, without having that, that strong integration, you're definitely losing overview of some of the activity. One of the reasons we decided to move to a tool like HubSpot was that the marketing team was already using it. And one of the questions they could answer when they were using it was, if I run these two ads, which one's gonna get me the most people clicking on it and coming through safe to a free trial and File Invite. What they couldn't answer was not which ad is the most effective at getting people to click it, but of the two ads, which one's the most effective at getting to people to click it, who are then gonna go through the process

Ricky Pearl: Yeah.

Brendan Pfahlert: And sign a deal and become paying customers?

Brendan Pfahlert: Because at the end of the day, we wanna optimize for revenue generation and actually getting paying customers rather than just who's gonna click on the pretty colors on.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah I love that focus on revenue and it's so important. One of the things that we've seen very often is outbound leading to inbound. I think it was this week, we sent a, an email off to a client for one of the major retailers in Australia. One of the billion dollar groups. And within 10 minutes of sending them a cold email, they visited the website, clicked on the request to demo and on our inbound lead. Would you be able to gain that intel and that insight without that integration? Or is it one of those things you don't really care as long as they're coming into the business?

Brendan Pfahlert: We don't really care as long as they're coming into the business. So yeah, there can be an issue where sometimes this you. You're measuring too much or putting too much effort into measuring things when you could be putting more of that effort into targeting people better or doing better outreach or targeting the right people.

Brendan Pfahlert: We're all on the same team here, so we, we don't argue too much about whether that was created by marketing or created by sales. But we do like to jump into some of the individual deals and see exactly how they came in this.

Does Rev Ops have the say in compensation?

Ricky Pearl: Often where the conflict comes in is clearly from a business perspective, who cares as long as this client is coming in and it's gonna help generate revenue, our systems are working. Yes, you maybe want some intelligence into which part of the system's working better so you can make good financial decisions.

Ricky Pearl: But whether genuine conflict often comes in, it's just through misaligned compensation package. Does Rev Ops have the say in compensation?

Brendan Pfahlert: I think we, we have input when needed but not a direct say in compensation. Particularly not across teams. So I've certainly had input into the SDR function and helped build out that function. But the marketing team, I've only recently started bringing them under my wing from a Rev Ops perspective.

Ricky Pearl: Amazing. Now I'd love to hear some of the differences between the US and Australia.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah, I think one of the biggest ones is when you ring someone up in America, you can get away with saying things like, hi, this is Brendan from Far Invite, can I have 27 seconds? With the appropriately phrased chuckle in Australia, you're much better off just ringing up and saying, Goodday, how's it going?

Ricky Pearl: Yeah, all of, I see so much of this advice on LinkedIn. Do it this way, do it this way, do it that way. And I was like, it just doesn't work here. It just, could you imagine calling somebody on saying, could I have 27 seconds of your time?

Brendan Pfahlert: Look, I have done it and I have tested some of these things myself. I even quite liked Benjamin Dana. He's Hey, I wanna be honest. This is a cold call. Do you wanna hang up now or can I, give you my elevator pitch or whatever the

Ricky Pearl: I think those all stem from a classic Sandler approach and all of these permission based openers, and at the moment there's this huge push in the US like death to permission based openers. Whereas like in Australia, you could call up and say all of the fatal flaws in the US you could phone someone and say, Hey, Brandon.

Ricky Pearl: I am calling from this company and I would like to talk to you about X, Y, Z. How's your day been? Like, just, three classic failures within the opening lines, and you could still have success here.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah. I wonder too how much of that there's probably a combination of factors that have led to that. One is I think some of the information you get on phone number databases is a little bit more comprehensive in the US depending on who you're using. And so I think you're getting through to cell phones a lot more often in the US.

Brendan Pfahlert: They're trying to decide if you're someone worth talking to. A lot more than in Australia where the phone numbers aren't out there as much or they're not getting approached by as many people. So when someone rings them up, they're less likely to go, okay, who is this? And do I need to hang up on them? And more likely to be like, oh, my phone's ringing.

Brendan Pfahlert: That hasn't happened in a while.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. Definitely a stronger sense of privacy here as well. They genuinely, we get a lot more, how did you get my number in Australia, in the us Nobody cares to ask how you got their number because they just assume everyone has their number.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah. It reminds me of Zuckerberg's Senator, we sell ads. It's yeah, the information's out there guys.

Optus Leak

Ricky Pearl: My latest when they ask how do we get you information, we just say the Optus leak

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah. Actually that's, that, that's that's something a lot of our customers have been speaking about recently.

Ricky Pearl: Imagine. So you collecting a lot of private and confidential information, you're a core part of that solution.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah, there's the Optus leak in Australia and in the US there's been some changes so that a lot more organizations are now being deemed to be financial services organizations, and so they're now subject to some legislation, which, depending on how you read it indicates that send, collecting customer information by email may not actually be legal anymore.

Brendan Pfahlert: So there, there's potentially some big changes coming in the world.

Ricky Pearl: Tho those tailwinds are gonna support your business. Let's hope. Let's hope that does come through.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah. It's something that, I think it's a part of many people's businesses that they haven't paid attention to. I think similar to when you're talking about talking to someone in Rev, sometimes things get done for a particular department just because that's the way they've always been done.

Brendan Pfahlert: And I can see File Invite's as a solution kind of fits into people's business in the same way they've always collected information by email. Not because anyone told them to, but when they showed up for work and they needed to get the information, send me an email has always just been there in the back of your head.

Ricky Pearl: Of course, unless this is a strategic implementation from above saying this is how we collect no different to sharing passwords, unless you've been specifically told, you will use this password management system within our organization, everyone will default to how they've always done it.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah. And it's leading to humongous losses from many organizations around the world as they suffer the consequences of breaches and and other nefarious actors.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah, and I could imagine the friction to purchase as well is often just too big, right? If I had to, I'd, we've once filled in, there's a system in Australia that you renters will often use. And they want, it's just such a painful process, right? So if you helping with that's pretty amazing.

Have you looked for different data providers or have you found that they're all quite similar in this region?

Ricky Pearl: Tell me, data, you mentioned there's a lot more access to data in the US than in Australia. Have you looked for different data providers or have you found that they're all quite similar in this region?

Brendan Pfahlert: We've used a few different ones and they're broadly similar. There are a few regional differences, I think, between some of the different tools. And I think the prob the, we've settled on the ones we are using for the time being based on our requirements and the way we're going after the slightly different markets in a different manner.

Are you employing New Zealanders in the US 📍 or have you found local team members?

Ricky Pearl: Now cultures of the team. Are you employing New Zealanders in the US or have you found local team members?

Brendan Pfahlert: We have some local color audience. Cultural differences. I think one of the biggest ones that if you are moving to the US from APAC that you should be aware of is that America is a much more litigious country. And so just bearing that in mind as you make decisions, it's always important to hire the right people and know that there are different legislative requirements and abilities to operate businesses in different ways depending on the state you're operating in. And you do always need to be mindful that you don't wanna be sued.

Ricky Pearl: Yeah. I imagine the legal landscape for HR in particular in Australia would be quite different too.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah. So we don't actually hire anyone directly in Australia. We operate out of New Zealand. So yeah there's not much I've learned there. It's all stuff that I've known from living here for many years.

Ricky Pearl: I think New Zealand would be pretty similar to Australia in that regard or in most.

Brendan Pfahlert: Imagine it is pretty similar.

Ricky Pearl: Staff are looked after, which is an amazing thing. You're accountable in many which ways. But there there isn't that same risk that you have in the US where you could be sued for everything

Brendan Pfahlert: Yep. Yeah.

Ricky Pearl: Where at least threatens on a daily basis.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah. And I think our US colleagues enjoy the fact that because we are from New Zealand, we've probably got slightly more lenient lead policies. We've recently introduced a wellness day, so once every quarter. We give the entire company the day off so that no one's trying to book a meeting with you.

Brendan Pfahlert: It helps have everyone taking the same day off and you can really spend a day just to focus on yourself and unwind. Because, working in a startup is quite a high pressure environment. And we're often rushing to get too many things done all at once conscious that we can't boil the ocean.

Brendan Pfahlert: So , you need to step back, focus on what are the important things that are gonna move the needle and having some time off to go to the beach and relax. Can sometimes help with that.

New Zealand Start-up culture

Ricky Pearl: Absolutely. And I've worked with a few New Zealand startups and I absolutely love the cultures, particularly how it relates to sales. That's what I'm exposed to. And I think in general, the culture, the sales culture in New Zealand is far more enjoyable to be a part of than, let's just say some of the cultures in San Francisco.

Brendan Pfahlert: I imagine that's true. And I think one of the things too that's helping to, is bleeding over from New Zealand into the US is our sales culture. We try and treat sales as a team sport here because it's never just you doing the deal. And if it is, you probably should be told off because there's probably a point during, in the sales process, we should be bringing in someone to have a chat with our head of product or our revenue director, or one of our tech guys on API integrations.

Brendan Pfahlert: And if you've done it all by yourself that's probably not a good thing.

Now what's next? What's next for your sales team? What are the big challenges that you're currently trying to solve?

Ricky Pearl: Absolutely. Now what's next? What's next for your sales team? What are the big challenges that you're currently trying to solve?

Brendan Pfahlert: That's a good question. I think it's a little bit of more of the same. We've had a really good year of growth in the us. We've grown a hundred percent year on year. So if we can just continue that momentum think we'll all be pretty happy.

If you were to give some advice to sales leaders that are looking to take their business over to the US what would be some of the top level lines of advice you'd give?

Ricky Pearl: And if you were to give some advice to sales leaders that are looking to take their business over to the US what would be some of the top level lines of advice you'd give?

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah, I think it's probably talked to the people who can help you because they've either been there before or that's their job. So there's a number of New Zealand software companies that are setting up base in the US and Colorado in particular. There's quite a lot. And there's also organizations like New Zealand Trade and Enterprise who can help you with beachhead advisors and other advisors because they've helped many companies go through similar processes in the past.

Ricky Pearl: So broadly, community and ecosystem.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah try and do it all yourself as people have been there and done it before. Lean on them.

Ricky Pearl: That's really sage advice. And if you were to give any advice to US based sales leaders that are looking to open up their APAC region or their ANZ region in particular,

Brendan Pfahlert: Talk to Ricky. He's probably a good.

Ricky Pearl: That's not why you are on here, but I'll send you, I'll send you your checks in.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah I think Understanding the different culture that we have in this part of the world, which is a little bit more laid back a little bit more relaxed, or at least appears that way. It doesn't mean that's always true. But we come at things a little bit softer, especially to start with.

Ricky Pearl: Amazing now to end off. If you could just help describe your ideal customer profile or the pain point that anyone listening to this that might be experiencing that, if they are experiencing that pain, they should probably seek out your advice or File Invite support.

Brendan Pfahlert: If you are collecting multiple documents as part of any onboarding process, whether that's onboarding new customers, new staff and you're doing that by email, you need to get onto File Invite sign up for a free trial fileinvite.com and the rest will take care of itself. There are hours every week wasted by your team organizing documents, dragging them out of inboxes, renaming them, getting them in the right format.

Brendan Pfahlert: We can automate all of that. I know we spoke before about integrating tools like Outreach and HubSpot. There's some really cool stuff you can do once you start to automate things like document collection. So for example, we are working with a company called Fortero in Australia. They've got an automatic fraud detection system, so you can upload your documents into the customer, can upload their documents into File Invite.

Brendan Pfahlert: Now that we've got those in a proper digital system, we can integrate other tools like Fortero and scan them for fraudulent activity and return those documents to you, not just as documents you now have, but documents that have been checked for fraudulent activity. There's a whole bunch of cool stuff like that you can do once you start digitizing your systems properly and not just having them electronic.

Ricky Pearl: Nothing seems more relevant for this day and age with people working from home and you're relying heavily on digital documentation for proof. If anyone's listening has those challenges, definitely head over to the website, give it a try, and let me know what the sales experience is and I'll be able to send that feedback through to Brendan.

Brendan Pfahlert: Absolutely. As always, it's a work in progress.

Ricky Pearl: It always is. I saw a picture the other day of the past and the present and the past was I really feel like, I dunno what I'm doing and the present is I know that everyone feels like they dunno what they're doing.

Brendan Pfahlert: Yeah, that's probably an accurate description.

Ricky Pearl: It's been real absolute pleasure chatting to you and I'm sure anyone listening to this is gonna get a lot of benefit from it and I'd love to have a chat with you again sometime soon.

Brendan Pfahlert: Sounds good. Thanks Ricky.

Ricky Pearl: Thanks for being on.

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