Hey, what's up, Toby? We are on again for another
week to this week's topic. Yeah. What's brewing?
Being sass fished. Sass fished. It's like cat
being catfished. Oh, yeah, yeah. I know you're
in the dating pool. Yeah. For those, maybe I'm
getting catfished a lot more than I know. For
those of us that are over 30. and may not be
up to speed on the latest. Talk to me about catfish
first, and then let's talk sass. Yeah, catfish
is basically you get a picture of something,
someone, and the image in real life, or IRL as
the kids would say, does not match. There is
a total mismatch. And the thing is, is I think
this happens with... So you think that there's
groups of young Korean men also pretending to
masquerade as attractive young women in the SaaS
software space? What I specifically see when
you go to these people's websites, it is so pretty.
It's so elegant. So elegant. It is so wonderful.
Yes. And the video that they have on how this
thing works. I mean, it is it can get you going.
Yeah. Just like that. Just like that fake picture.
That's right. And that's ultimately what it ends
up being like. We end up buying. These products
and sometimes companies spend a lot of money
like sales force. Yeah They might be the number
one sass fisher out there, dude. Yeah, they're
they're creative team does a spectacular job
if Oh if products work the way that the creative
videos Unfolded I would love working with technology
Maybe it's as simple as if you have actual like
animated characters you're screwed That's the
indicator. It's like on an app when it's like,
I like older men and walks on the beach, but
nights in watching Netflix, you're like, yeah,
no, that's fake. That's really fake. Well, it's
just interesting. And it's funny because it leaves
so much up for interpretation. Yeah. So you literally
can do nothing more than just get very excited.
about what you think this will do for your pain,
right? And the person sitting next to you, your
colleagues, has a completely different pain that
they're going through in their day -to -day,
but it's gonna solve their pain, too. And it
might not solve anybody's pain. I love that,
because you're right. In the advertisements,
with the exception of prescription medication
on television, where they have to disclose horrible...
Can you imagine if SAAS ads had to disclose all
the horrible side effects? You know, may cause
ocular bleeding. It's right. The office. Side
effects. Side effects include not getting your
clients to use the system. Major frustration.
Very pissed off at the tool. That's right. They
may stop your calls. Yeah. Use if you're allergic
to accounting software. Maybe that's what we
should be lobbying for, Chris. Maybe we found
our purpose here. What is ours to put in the
world? No, you're right, because it is. It's
just painting a picture of grasses greener. And
that's what advertising is about. And so Saz
Fishing, they hook us, Hookwine and Sinker. Very
effective advertising. They've really got more
pain points dialed in. They understand. who their,
you know, ideal customer profile is, their ICP.
Talk to me more about, because it sounds like
there's a reason this is top of mind. What brought
this up in mind this week? Did you get help?
Well, okay, so I went, my niece graduated, went
and hung out with my brother. He was talking
about a SaaS product that he owns, that he uses,
Smartsheets, right? He was going to see, he told
me, he's like, they're going to replace it with
Rike. And I was like, what in the world? Cause
it was driven by his IT IT company or the IT
org. So they're cutting costs. And so they, they
were hook line and sinker on Reich because it
actually probably will solve a problem for someone
somewhere. But my brother's like, look, it costs
me a thousand dollars for my license, you know,
a hundred dollars a month. But my, but my view
license are free. And like, if I go to Reich,
first of all, work cause it's different software.
Second, like it's a different use case. It's
a workflow tool versus a spreadsheet -ish tool,
right? Like it's just, it's different, different,
different use case. He's like, if I was to go
to Reich, I was like, they cost me $30 ,000 a
year because it's, you know, sure the annual
cost for my, for my license is three six, but
it's 36 for every user and a thousand people
use this thing. And he's like, yeah, that got
to work. It's just, it's pretty funny. It's kind
of the, it's kind of the difference too. Like
a mechanic might say it's a hell of a lot easier
to work on a little Cessna than the Boeing 737.
But you go, yeah, but we have a thousand people
to, well, you know, we have hundreds of people
to move around and the Cessna is not going to
get us there. I love that. I love this. What
an interesting contrast because you're right
to one ear or to one stakeholder. It absolutely
resonates with their pain point. So often in
enterprise, it is a cost containment thing. Yeah.
Wow. And those are two radically different products.
Oh, it's totally different. Totally different.
Yeah. And both are good, and both have their
place, and not going to work. So why do we keep
falling for this? Yeah. I think number one, the
demo mirage. Oh, brother. Yeah. He'd lean into
that. Talked about the shifting heat waves over
the sand here, the demo. I mean, you can demo
stuff to look really, really good. One, because
you're not grounded in that tool. Right. And
so whatever they show you, again, you let your
mind go into this fantasy world of it's going
to be amazing if all the things could do the
things. And it doesn't work that way. No. Because
you got to get you got to get people to adopt.
Yep, and I do think that when you are looking
to change a piece of software You are actually
looking at pain in the wrong area you need Say
more about and and what I mean by that is your
pain is You're not getting notified or part of
the business is broken down because a bad process
And you're not because your process doesn't serve
you and it basically hurts you, you're looking
to fix something that's not really a problem,
or wouldn't be a problem if your workflows were
clean. It's the same problem you're going to
take over to the new product. Oh, 100%. And basically
just give yourself a year, probably less, because
you don't have adoption. Totally. It's like my
house is cluttered, but if I buy a new house
of the same size, yeah, then you're going to
take all your clutter. 100%. That's great. The
other, the other, the other reason why, uh, why
we get baffled by this is executive FOMO. Oh
Lord. And what I mean, what I mean by that is
if you go to your executive and you say, you
know what, I'm going to go do a transformational,
some transformational work in the industry. And
I'm going to give you two options here, Toby,
you get to pick. Number one. We are going to
transform our Salesforce instance that we already
have and it's going to take two years and we
just need a hundred grand. Yeah. That's your
option of one. Option two is we're going to move
to Ryke and Smartsheets because my golfing buddy,
he could do some things. It's going to be transformative.
Oh yeah. Which one you go with? Golfing buddy
for the win. Option number two. Oh, Chris. I
don't know. I may have brought this up because
it's one of my favorite stories. I had a client,
though, that came back from Christmas break and
it was the senior executive. And he said, caught
up with a friend over the holidays skiing. We're
going to implement S .A .P. Caught up with a
buddy over the holidays skiing. We're buying
S .A .P. They had about a five hundred person
industrial manufacturing. They did chemical manufacturing.
Their actual entire finance team was like five
people. I mean, SAP for the win. Yeah. Hey, if
it's good on a ski hill, it's it's good on the
shop floor, baby. So, yeah, FOMO, baby. All right.
OK, let's talk about red flags. Yeah, what else?
What else? Red flags. Oh, hit it. Ways that you
know that you're being sass -fished. It's a no
-code, low -code, pro -code, something -code,
maybe -code solution. It has anything but code.
I've messed around with quite a few little low
-code, no -code things, and I stretch them pretty
far, and I'm like, all you are is a form in a
database. Like, it's fascinating. And, you know,
they're going to get better. You got people have
to buy but can you imagine if Microsoft would
have taken their access product from 97 and Just
continued to make it more elegant Like micro
to your point it was forming a database and then
it had reports on the other side Yeah, that's
all so much of this is but it's prettier faces
You know, this is where and I'm gonna bump in
my ignorance fast But this is where Ruby and
JavaScript and some of these much more visually
appealing languages do a tremendous job when
the basic functionality is the same thing we
had 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Another red flag
you see. Another red flag. If you go to their
website and they show you a video or a picture
of their interface, just ask for that interface.
Do a little show -and -tell. Say, I would like
to see where that's at. I almost guarantee you
with about 80 % confidence that most of them
are made up on Figma and do not exist in reality
in the UI. Our graphic designer has imagined
a world. I agree. I agree. That's great. Next
red flag. It will solve all the problems in the
world. Every single one. One for you and one
for you and one for you everybody and you get
you get a you get a solution and you get a solution
Everybody gets a solution Yeah, maybe maybe that's
not 100 % accurate. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is this
is the other thing When the add -ons or the extra
items get very expensive I agree And this is
ultimately my problem with Salesforce. I actually
love Salesforce. I think Salesforce is fantastic.
And if you have a team that does Salesforce and
does Salesforce well, it will serve you very
well. It will be very clicky. And it will feel
like it's taking a lot of time, but the way that
they collect everything is brilliant. But if
you want to have a good Salesforce instance,
you better be paying. You're going to have to
drop at least 250 grand on labor to support it.
Chris, I think that this is, you know, this is
when we start to talk about what makes a product
enterprise grade. Yeah. And I was joking about
SAP earlier, because that's not how you should
be selecting multimillion dollar systems. But
whether it's a sales force or whether it is an
SAP or whether it's a tableau, there's some really
spectacular tools. But it requires somebody to
invest not just days or weeks, but literally
years. to understand the nuances, right? The
richness that these tools promise also requires
a richness of education for somebody to be able
to unlock it. And beyond that, getting to elegant
is much more difficult. To your point, Salesforce,
I've yet to use an instance that doesn't feel
really chopped up because it's not easy. to create
elegant interfaces. It's not easy to create intelligent
forms that are asking data in the right time
at the right way. Salesforce is built to scale,
but essentially it's a fancy database. I mean,
it really is. And again, it's fabulous, but you
could screw it up with the best of them. Totally.
Well, so there's got to be it. So aside from
being embarrassed and getting egg on your face,
just like getting catfished. discovering that
you're dating a middle -aged man that you've
been flirting with online. What's the impact
of, you know, there's a reason why SAS fishing
is not good for the gullible. What's the impact?
I think some of it just comes down to the wasting
time. Yeah, yeah. Like the grass is always greener,
spending a lot of time in just, you know. instead
of fertilizing your own yard with manure, which
is a great fertilizer, you're looking across
to like, oh man, they've got such nice green
grass over there. Like it's just that waste of
time. And then just the stress of trying to get
anybody to adopt anything is so hard. Change
is hard. Yeah. I've yet to encounter an organization
that doesn't have two or three seismic things
going on at once. Good economy, bad economy,
flat economy. We have people that are coming
and going. We're losing key actors. We're being
forced to change out software products or change
our pricing or work with new customers. We undervalue
how painful change can be. So yeah, I think that
that's like the next thing, you know, the next
two when it's like the cost of doing it is just
the cost of the team. Yeah. Because you're taking
them down to run a parallel, right? You know,
you're you're you're if you do it right and you
have buy in and you have authority to actually
implement something new, you can tear down a
bunch of process that and it doesn't matter what
you switch to. Yeah. You could switch from PowerPoint
to Excel, and not that you would, although maybe
PowerPoint to Word. You could switch from PowerPoint
to Word, and just in doing that one thing, you
could unstrip some of these legacy things that
just aren't a thing anymore. Chris, I think that
that's a really good, and we talk a lot about
this process that works. Oftentimes, it's hard
to argue for a budget. to process. It's not going
to be sexy. Even your example earlier, use the
tool we have, invest some cycles to really remove
all of the fat and unused tissue. Give us a new
name. I think, truthfully, I think that's why
sometimes people name their systems not by the
branded provider. But they call it something
else internally because it does give them a little
bit more flexibility, you know. So. All right.
So how do we prevent it? Yeah. Talk to me about
thoughts on prevention because we all get a sandbox.
Oh, good. Get a demo. Get a PST. Don't show me
your happy path. Perfectly curated landscape.
No. Let me get messy. Some of it's insurance.
Spend a little upfront to get a PST. Especially
especially if you're gonna drop hundreds of thousands
200 ,000 a year. Yeah, like spend some money
Yeah, give it a go right put a team on it find
someone's finding her find some early adopters.
Yeah, you know get real users That are that are
really different that weren't on the ski trip
or weren't at the gulp Okay, miss the golf outing
but get people that are different that have different
opinions that are both early adopters, because
you're going to find really good solutions when
you find one that works for both of them. It's
a good call. And then, you know, you and I talk
about this a lot, but it's people, process, and
tools, and really manage it in that way. Yeah.
And then when they, you know, this one's actually
really good, but just watch out for integrations.
Yeah. because everybody wants automation and
they don't understand how difficult they are.
I remember when APIs and integrations first showed
up and Zapier sounded like this really magical,
you know, Lego like click a block. And what was
never explained was that that was just the basic
handshake to say, yes, the front door is here
and the other front door is there. It doesn't
move anything. You know, it's a shallow experience.
And I think we In the last 10 to 15 years, we've
really come to understand that integrations are
deep and, uh, and take time to invest in. Yeah.
And you're also, you're also beholden beholden
to whatever those applications are. Yeah. You're
like, Hey, yeah. You, you were limited to what
the system will allow you to do. Yeah. Even worse
you're you're limited to what your people are
actually going to do and that's actually where
I think they break down the most better Yeah,
the human factor is variable, right? Oh 100 %
No, Chris. This is a good. I love I love the
how to defend yourself That's a great list Well,
I think we did it again. We made it through another
one just a smidge over five minutes, but I think
it's worth it Yeah, careful sass fishing out
there on the dating site. No. Yeah if you're
gonna If you're gonna go status fishing, get
a good lure. That's right. That's right. Take
some preventative measures. Hey, as always, I
appreciate our conversation. Catch you next week.
See ya. Bye.