We have the CEO of American Truck training here today.
And I really think this story is so fantastic
because this customer has been with Insightly and grown with Insightly
almost since Insightly became a company.
So let’s explore more during this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks so much for tuning in to Closing time today.
I’m Melinda Prescher, Insightly’s director of Product and Customer Marketing.
And today I have the pleasure
of hosting a special customer. Spotlight edition of Closing Time.
Whether you’re a weekly listener, an Insightly customer or both,
you’ll find useful takeaways on how to get the most from Insightly.
All right, Now, without further ado,. I want to welcome our guest, Mr.
Jerome Redmond,. CEO of American Truck Training.
Thanks so much for joining me today, Jerome.
I’m glad to be here.
We’re really so excited to have you and to kick things off.
Let’s have you talk a little bit
about American truck training and how you got started with Insightly.
Sure.
So basically, American truck training is a commercial driver’s license group.
So we train the big truck drivers.
We got started with Insightly back in about 2012
when you guys were fairly new,. I think, to the industry of CRM as well.
And, you know, I researched the Internet and found what I felt was the best fit.
And we’ve been with you ever since.
And it’s just been a joy because to watch not only you guys grow,
but I was able to grow alongside you and build our company to
to having, you know, tens and tens of thousands of leads
that we work and thousands of folks we’ve trained.
And it started from zero with you.
I mean, Jerome, your story is really good because it shows how in partnership
with Insightly, you’ve really been able to do some great things with your company.
I’d love to have you dive a little deeper into how Insightly has helped you grow.
Well, here’s the big thing I want people to understand
is that I this was also my first real business, too.
So I’m a guy with no formal education
as it relates to owning and starting a business.
Insightly allowed me to start a business.
I want to make that clear.
It was simple enough to where I can start a company, not know what I’m doing.
Yeah, and.
And build it into what it is today, you know?
And now we’re expanding into the markets like Houston,
and we’re also expanding into a markets like Tulsa
here, just literally found the property the other day.
And so this is all built from Insightly
so you don’t have to know anything about business.
You don’t even
have to know anything about, Insightly will help guide you and give you a
reference points through video, through Insightly University,
all these things that all these extra things that you can learn from your
success manager or from Insightly support, or you can just,
if you’re like me, a self-starter, you can just grab some videos
online on YouTube and listen to it and know how to do it within minutes.
You know, it’s really great to hear that Insightly has helped
support your success as a small business owner and help you grow.
I think for you specifically, you’ve also mentioned that you’ve had some
really great leadership opportunities, even beyond your company,
that have really helped you expand the profile of what you all do.
And I’d love to hear you talk about that. Sure.
So if I were famous for something, you know,
it would be I utilize my resources, any resource I have.
So I leverage Insightly to give me back, to buy me back some of my time, obviously.
Right.
And with that time, I was able to serve on the board of directors
for, and I still serve on that board,
for the Commercial Vehicle. Training Association.
And what that is, is the association for all trucking schools
throughout our nation.
And because of our success, you know, with the help of Insightly,
I was deemed as a leader in the industry, didn’t
think of myself as a leader in the industry, maybe a leader
in my block or in my in my city, but in the nation.
And that opened the door for me getting to speak to
Congress through the Ways and Means Committee,
literally on the same day they voted in the last Speaker of the House,
which was a lot of turmoil above that.
I won’t go into all of that detail, but it was great to sit there
in the halls of Congress,
give a speech and
spend literally 6 hours going back and forward.
And now they’re looking at very highly likely passing this bill that will allow
folks to get more, you know, help folks get paid for training.
And it’s just been great.
And then also the other board. I chair of, the chair of I’m sorry,
but I’m on this board for the state chamber of Oklahoma,
which is another similar political type deal.
Where it’s the biggest and the best
companies in the state of Oklahoma sit on this board.
I mean, multibillion dollar corporations.
Then there’s me, which makes me laugh because I’m like,
they know my company doesn’t do billions, right?
But I’m still on this board.
And some would say, hey, you know, well, Jerome is maybe because of this,
maybe it’s because of that.
Well, honestly, your company, in my personal opinion,
is only as good as the tools used to help it grow.
And if in my case, it was Insightly that helped me
grow my company to like I said, a multimillion dollar corporation.
Jerome, you bring up such an important point
about how important it is to have the right technology in your tech
stack to help you do the things you need to do to run your business.
And so I’d like you to talk maybe do a double click.
On how Insightly has really helped you and what are you actually using
within Insightly to to help drive great experiences for your customers?
Sure.
Well, some of the newer technologies, like AppConnect,
I suspect that a lot of other business owners are looking for ways to save money
and cut down on their expenses.
So in a lot of companies, what they do and I just I won’t mention a company,
but I heard of a major company laying off 346 people today, whereas
what I did in my case, instead of doing, you know, some massive layoff or something
like that,. I was able to utilize AppConnect
and some of the other components to help my workflow
to where it’s made us more efficient, so I don’t need,
so as a, say for us if someone did leave our company,
I didn’t have to replace them with someone.
I allowed the apps that I utilize with AppConnect to fill in the gap.
If that makes sense.
I just want to make sure that the folks around can understand that
it’s not so much just adding AppConnect it’s
what AppConnect can do to kind of help save on expenses.
And help create a better workflow and more efficiencies within your company.
For instance, RingCentral.
RingCentral is our voice over IP phone service that we utilize.
I had no idea that by just looking at AppConnect
and as I was researching RingCentral, part of my decision
for going to RingCentral because it was a direct connection.
So being able to take my phone calls in and out
from Insightly through RingCentral was great.
And then so now my calls are recorded and added into Insightly.
And now with the help your team was able to code it right
to make sure that even my text messages go into Insightly.
So that’s just one thing that we utilize
to make Insightly work even better for us.
You know, Jerome, one of the things that we talked about before is just how
Insightly makes it really easy
to stay on top of all of the activities that your team has going on.
You’re really busy.. Your team is really busy.
Talk a little bit about task management.
Sure. Sure.
So one of the things that is really great
for my sales team and as far as me as well is that we use tasks.
And tasks, how it works is that you, whenever you get off the phone
call with a person or you finished up text messages, you can set a task
for your next thing that you need to do with that particular client or prospect.
So you set a task and the task can remind you when to work with that person again,
or have another conversation about what we’re selling.
And if I want to check in on a deal,
all I have to do is select where I can follow that task.
And so any time that task has some type of change
or adjustment, let’s say, for instance, the salesperson says, Hey,
I’m going to call that person or they’re going to pay for school
or whatever this situation or whatever the thing is that they have to remember,
it also emails me and keeps me apprised of what’s going on.
So it’s kind of nice.
I don’t keep asking that person.
Oh, how is this deal going?. What’s going on here?
What’s going on? Well, it just sends me an email, just sends me an email.
And as a business owner, you know, we’re religious about our emails, right?
So I’m getting constant emails from my team.
That’s not actually from them, it’s from Insightly saying, Hey, Jerome,
look what Joe over here is doing with this with this lead.
I just want to keep you in the loop, okay?
And I’m like, Thanks Insightly.
Jerome.
I think the other thing, in addition to tasks
that is really helpful is everybody is just so busy today.
We have things coming at us from all over the place.
You mentioned trying to make sure not only you’re staying on top of the business,
but that, you know, making sure you know what’s going on with your team.
What about other things like managing calendars and so on?
Is there anything you’d add there?
Sure.
Well, managing calendars for us
has been a really good thing because I’m a very visual person.
So when I see, like my team’s calendar, it obviously lets me
know that they’re busy.
And so we utilize colors and other spreadsheets and other things
that we’ve had for that represents each salesperson.
So like one salesperson is green, one salesperson’s yellow, one person.
So in Insightly,. I can customize the color of the person.
So whenever, whenever I go to look at the calendar and say, Joe,
the salesperson is in yellow, I can just see if there’s a bunch of yellow.
I know he’s okay, right?
If there’s not a
bunch of yellow that I know, he might need to step it up a little bit.
So we use events as our calendar for our appointments.
So when they set an appointment, person comes in,
I can tell on the calendar
who’s where and who’s coming.
And so if the calendar is a little light coming up in the next day or so,
I can actually say something about it to our team and say, Hey, come on guys,
let’s get some more on the calendar and or maybe possibly
sometimes write a SPIFF or some type of
bonus to kind of get them to move a little bit.
That was great.
So, Jerome, we hear so often that customers really love
the flexibility of Insightly and just how easy it is
to customize Insightly to the unique needs of their business.
I’d love to have you talk about
how you’ve customized Insightly and make it work for you.
Really good question.
We have been able to do a lot of customization.
The one that really strikes out is, the way my business is built is
you can kind of summarize it into three different main revenue sources,
cash customers your B2B business-to-business,
you have your financing, and then you have your like grants
and things of that nature, agencies that help pay for school.
And so with that, you know, you have those buckets.
Then for me,
I like to get a little technical, but I won’t go too technical now for this.
But I have so many dropdowns from each one of those to be able to,
so my sales team can select, you know, a specific either
company specific way to go, specific way of financing.
And now it’s all easy for me to just click a button and see a report on
everything that’s happening
within my company so I know exactly what’s going on with finance.
I know exactly what’s going on with B2B,. I know exactly
what’s going on with my agency folks because I can say, oh
20% of my business is coming from this bucket.
Oh, only 5% is coming from this one.
You know, maybe I should figure out what to do and get that 5% up.
So it’s just, and
the crazy thing about it is we’re not done yet.
There’s still plenty more to to add into Insightly
to make things even better for our company and give us more visibility.
That’s great.
Jerome, thank you so much for these insights and for joining the show.
If our audience wants to learn more about American truck training,
how can they do so?
Well, Easily.
You can go to AmericaLovestrucking.com.
That’s Americanlovestrucking.com
Learn more about how to get your commercial driver’s license
and how we put people to work and serve our community.
And thanks so much to all of you for tuning in.
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