Start Small, Think Big: Why CRMs Are Built for Your Bad Days with Aman Thakral

Aman Thakral appeared in the 31st episode of our second season of the Take the Leap podcast. In this episode, “Start Small, Think Big: Why CRMs Are Built for Your Bad Days with Aman Thakral” our guest shares perspectives on entrepreneurship being less about chasing perfection and more about evolving with the process, staying aligned with your values, and never being afraid to try things your way.

Some of our favorite takeaways include:

• Success isn’t about money: Aman emphasizes that enjoying the journey and having impact outweigh financial gain.
• Aman believes we should be taught how to accept “no” just as much as we chase “yes.” In sales and life, identifying a “no” early allows you to move on efficiently, freeing up time and energy for better-fit opportunities.
• CRMs aren’t just for big businesses—they’re a discipline that every entrepreneur should adopt from day one.

Guest Information:

• Guest, Aman Thakral, Business Head at Target Integration
• Find Aman on LinkedIn 
• Find Aman on X @TargetInt
• Find Aman on YouTube
• Visit the Target Integration website

Aman’s Bio: 

Aman Thakral, Business Head at Target Integration, a leading CRM and ERP consulting firm dedicated to helping businesses find and implement the right software solutions tailored to their unique needs. With over 16 years of experience, he’s partnered with some of the most renowned CRM and ERP platforms, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Monday.com, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics, and more.

Target Integration believes that the right technology can streamline operations, enhance productivity, and drive business growth. Their team specializes in implementation, customization, training, and ongoing support, ensuring that businesses make the most of their software investments. Whether you need to manage leads efficiently, organize business data, automate workflows, or monitor agent performance, they provide tailored solutions to help businesses achieve their goals.

Aman has successfully worked with startups, Small to Medium Enterprises, and large enterprises with thousands of employees across multiple industries, delivering scalable and efficient CRM and ERP solutions. Their goal is to empower businesses with the right tools and strategies to improve decision-making and operational efficiency.

If you are a business owner or decision-maker looking for a CRM or ERP that perfectly fits your business needs, reach out to connect! Aman is happy to discuss how they can help transform your business with the right technology.

Ashlan: All right. Welcome back everyone to the Take the Leap podcast. We are really excited to have Amman ral with us today. Amman is the business head at Target Integration, a leading CRM and ERP consulting firm dedicated to helping businesses find and implement the right software solutions tailored to their unique needs.

With over 16 years of experience, he’s partnered with some of the most renowned CRM and ERP platforms, including Salesforce, HubSpot, pipedrive monday.com, odu, Microsoft Dynamics, and many more. Target integration believes that the right technology can streamline operations, enhanced productivity, and drive.

Business growth. Their team specializes in implementation, customization, training, and ongoing support, ensuring that businesses make the most of their software investments. Whether you need to manage leads effectively, organize business data, automate workflows, or monitor agent performance, they provide tailored solutions to help businesses.

Achieve their goals. Amman has successfully worked with startups, small to medium enterprises and large enterprises with thousands of employees across multiple industries, delivering scalable and efficient CRM and ERP solutions. Their goal is to empower businesses with the right tools and strategies to improve decision making and operational efficiency.

If you’re a business owner or decision maker looking for a CRM or ea. RP that perfectly fits your business needs. Reach out to connect. Amman is happy to discuss how they can help transform your business with the right technology. And I have personally sent Amman things like, Hey, I have this client that wants this.

To be happening and he has given me some great insights into CRMs that could help with those problems. So thank you Aman, for being on the podcast with us today. Thank for being here. Yeah. Thank so much. We’re really, yeah. Excited to chat with you and wanted to dive into our first question. What is your, take the leap story, what drove you to become a business owner and entrepreneur?

Aman: Accidental. I never wanted to be. I think the life that I’m living right now is not the life that I ever imagined that I would live. I always wanted to be an employee who would start as they have a shopper driven car who would take him to a neighborhood, go to a different city, get sales done, come back home in the same shopper driven car.

Mostly a sedan a black sedan. I was so specific wearing a three piece suit come back home spend some time with family, sleep, and repeat. I never thought that I would get into an entrepreneur entrepreneurial journey where, it has a different, it’s a different drug altogether. It gives you a different hit when every day is a new day.

No matter how well you follow different strategies, but you sometime be a firefighter, sometime be a cheerleader for the team. Sometime you have your own anxieties and depressions and everything else. In one whole day. You live so many emotions being an entrepreneur and gosh, that’s

so true.

Aman: Yeah. One email saying, Hey, I’m gonna work with you. Let’s go, makes your whole day happy. One resignation, one customer saying, ah, let me delay the project, make you feel sad. It’s even more sadder than a girlfriend saying, sorry, we are done. So I.

Victoria: That’s so true. Those client rejections hurt. I know

Aman: money to.

Not today. Yeah. Oh, back

Ashlan: pec. Yeah. Especially with your field, right? Technology implementations and CRMs, because I feel like you could do everything right and they’re like, oh, this. This has happened to me frequently where they’re like, oh, I found a cheaper solution over here, so we’re just gonna go do that because all of this over, over here isn’t doing it.

And then, you’ve had some of those folks who like come back and they’re like, yeah, I was wrong. Which, but then you also being the person that you are, you cannot gloat and be like, I knew,

yeah, I

Ashlan: knew that you were

you.

Victoria: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And I love what you said about being an entrepreneur. Every day is different. It’s so true. It doesn’t matter how well you plan your day. Like things just come up that you can’t predict. There’s so many outside factors that you can control. Oh, yeah.

Aman: And I think the bigger the team you have, the bigger vulnerability, bigger surprises that you would get because now you’re not just thinking about yourself, you’re thinking about your team, you are thinking about your customers everything that’s happening in their life.

So you need to be very cautious, very sensitive. And then that’s probably the. The most interesting part about entrepreneurship is that it makes you a different person and probably that’s why I like it. Yeah.

Victoria: Yeah. I was gonna follow up and ask you, I know this isn’t what you had predicted for your life, and it’s a little bit different than what you were thinking it would look like, but are you still, even with all those things, are you glad that you went down this path?

A

Aman: hundred percent.

Victoria: Okay.

Aman: I, yeah. I think it’s a great journey. I think if I would have not done what I’m doing right now, I might be a different person, more grumpy than what I’m, I think the journey always makes you a better person regardless what you earn financially. It’s a different conversation altogether, but a journey teaches you a lot of.

Different aspects about yourself, about life, about being gratitude to having a gratitude towards the way that you get things. So I think I would repeatedly do whatever I’ve been doing now. It’s a great experience where we started from a, not so garage, but a yeah, almost like a garage to a point where we have a team spread across different countries.

Yeah, good days, bad days. All are mine. I love all of them.

Victoria: That’s great. How’s that? That’s wonderful. So cool. That perfectly tease up my next question, which is, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your younger self when you were first starting out?

Aman: I would say I think, I.

And this could be a little and this could be a little controversial, but I feel entrepreneurship or business is like a canvas. Go and express yourself as much as you want to. Go out, whatever challenges, whatever new things, whatever difficult things, whatever feeling that you in your gut feel is right, go behind them.

There’s no success mantra. No matter how intellect and intelligence that I try to sound and anybody else tries to sound, nobody knows the success mantra of life. So if whatever gives you happiness, whatever makes you feel is the right approach, follow it. The God lies within heen, and if it gives you the light to follow, you are right in following it.

Victoria: That was really powerful. That’s, I don’t think that’s controversial. I think that’s something that we should all learn from for sure.

Yeah.

Victoria: That’s amazing. I love that. Thank you. Thank you.

Ashlan: Yeah. When I feel like we always, we want to be able to do that, right? To follow our gut and do what we think is right.

And we get told by a lot of people that like, this is the one way, this is the right way. You are not gonna be successful if you do it that way. And then I think one of the things that I’ve always loved as an entrepreneur and. One of the things that I think in my head, but don’t actually go back to those people is just like you told me I couldn’t do it this way.

You know what I fucking did? I did it. I figured it out. I made it happen. But absolutely, we also don’t often get to gloat in the face of other people.

Aman: Honestly I’m a big time God believer. I always feel, and this is I’m a Hindu, so it comes from a relation to where it says The karma is in my hand, but the results, which are the byproduct of my karmas are not in my hand.

So I do not know, and I don’t think so. Anybody knows if I follow certain footsteps, I would still reach the success or not. So if nobody knows what’s the right step, why don’t I follow my own step? At least it’ll give me happiness that I did what I felt like doing.

Victoria: Exactly. And just reiterating what you said about we don’t know what success or we don’t know what success looks like for everyone and it’s gonna be different. And we can’t predict these things. We say Ashlyn and I say this all the time, like success just isn’t a straight line. It’s not, yeah. It, we can’t predict it. It’s, you’re gonna have one month that’s great. One month.

That’s not, and I feel like as soon as we can get rid of this old way of thinking and the old way of doing things, and when you start to be more creative and in tune with yourself and things like, that’s kind where the magic is. A hundred

Aman: percent. A hundred percent. That’s the magic line.

Ashlan: And doing what you’re happy with is the point of entrepreneurship sometimes, right? You, like you, you get to have. A little bit of that it’s control in a different way, right? You can gauge what is and isn’t going to bring about that

Aman: happiness for you. Yes, for sure.

It’s the feeling.

It’s the feeling of something that you built is the feeling of what Victoria was saying, something that you felt you should do, no matter how many people were not supporting it and you. Felt it and followed it. It might take some people less days. It might take some people more days. But we have a, we have life.

We have to live it. No matter we reach to success early or we reach to success, late life, we all have to live. So it’s a journey and I think we all need to learn and respect each other’s journey. And very lately, I’ve realized, each time when I go out, even on dates, I start asking people about their journey.

I think that’s what made people what we are today. That shows the exposure that you got. That so shows the kind of respect and gratitude that you have towards one another, and the more journey that you have covered, the more experience, the more humble humbleness that you would carry, and you will value everything that you have around you.

Ashlan: I love that. That was a great perspective. Yeah. Incredible.

Aman: I know, right? Friday night

down, so I’m just kidding.

Victoria: You get.

Ashlan: I have our last question before we jump into our hot seat questions. And that is, what is your why? We have lots of different things and different paths that we can choose, but why do you continue to choose entrepreneurship?

Aman: My why kept on changing. When I started the why was to, because my brother wanted me to join his business and he’s like a father figure.

When I got in, my wife was to make money. I was like, this is a great approach. And I was back in India. My brother was in Ireland. Do you guys believe in the sibling ly, the all the siblings? Oh

Ashlan: yeah. So we both have siblings and that is Yep. You absolutely.

Aman: Back when I was in India, it was, I found entrepreneurship is as a route for me to make more money than my siblings.

Being in India because I was like, Hey, it gives me a great exposure to make as much money I wanna make later on. It became a vibe where I wanted to prove that all these strategies that I have in my mind, they really work and I can make them, I can build them, and I can make them successfully executed.

And now. After having a team, my why became or not now, it’s a previous why is to help all the employees. I feel very happy when a team member of mine end up buying a house buying a car. That you are able to fulfill somebody’s dream. It’s not something that I’m doing, but God has given me an opportunity to be a medium, to fulfill somebody’s dreams.

And now I feel my why needs to be bigger and better where I feel I’ve enjoy helping communities. I enjoy helping people. I really wanna spend some time in educating kids. So if my bigger why would be to go back with whatever money that I earned, with whatever knowledge that I have, with whatever ways that I could give back to the community because money doesn’t excite me anymore.

I feel it’s it’s a byproduct. It happens. It happens. It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. I should not look at myself or anybody from a glasses of money. It’s all about how much you enjoy this journey, and then whatever money that you make, you give back to the community and make others enjoy it.

Ashlan: I really love that. That is so awesome. And I love the evolution of your why over time. Yes. Because one of the things that you did say I resonated so much with because when I started my business that the wanting to implement strategies that you already had ideas about and like never really got to test them out.

1. Felt like I was like majorly, like gaslight. Yes. At my old jobs when like I would go work with these clients and they’d be like, where did you come up with this strategy? I was like, I’ve like legit wanted to do this for five years and nobody ever let me do it. I’m like, you’re letting me do it and it’s working so.

Aman: One fine day while taking a shower. You think of a strategy which is very crazy and people may not agree to it, and you just. Try it because your gut says it and you want to give it a shot, and this becomes a million dollar strategy, and you’re like, damn, this is what I wanna try.

Victoria: Yeah. And if nobody else is gonna take a chance on you, why not take a chance on yourself?

Aman: Absolutely. And that’s the fun. That’s the fun of entrepreneurship, that the ship is in your control. You are okay to take a risk. You are okay if you end up hitting a rock. But you don’t mind taking a risk otherwise.

We are. What’s the fun of being an entrepreneur when you cannot take risk? Yeah.

Ashlan: Yeah. Oh, that is a good point. ’cause I do feel like every other job I ever, I. Worked. I was very risk averse, whereas like now I’m like, cool, let’s do that thing. If it works. We’ll make the million dollar strategy.

If it doesn’t, we’re gonna get to try something new.

I love.

Victoria: I love that you, yeah, you have a really good perspective. And then, yeah, just to also point this out too, I love how you said that your why evolved over time. I think that’s something that we don’t talk about a lot ’cause we asked that question to a lot of people, but our whys changed. When I first started my business.

It was so that I could start controlling the narrative around some of the things that I could do and starting to make those decisions. And in the middle of being an entrepreneur, I had my first kid and my why has evolved since then. Now, and so it’s and it’s going to continue as I go along.

’cause we evolve as humans. Absolutely. And. Life circumstances happen, we change. And so our why is always gonna change. And I think that’s, yeah, that’s something that, for asking that question to almost all of our guests we haven’t really gone down that path. So I really like that you pointed that out.

Aman: Yeah. That’s Gods swell.

Victoria: I love that. We’re gonna move into a section we like to call the hot seat questions. They’re, they’re hot, but there’s no rules. There’s no rules. So the first question I always ask, just to kick this section off, is, what is the best and or worst advice that you’ve received in your career?

Aman: Oh, worst.

I’ll go with the best one. Okay. The best advice that I ever got. That’s one of the advice that I got very early in my career when I was serving customers. And I realized I. No matter what I do, customers were still not happy about it. And I was like, what am I doing wrong? I’m working seven days a week, I’m making sure I’m always available on the call.

I’m doing the best of things that I could, but still things are not working out. Then I met a gentleman called Osh Patak. I don’t know if he would be listening this or not. And he’s a coach and he said, you are doing the best. But do they know that you’re doing the best?

Wow. And that kind of changed my perspective. So now or since then, even if I’m supporting a customer on a Sunday, I will let them know that I’m not supposed to do it, but I’m doing it because I wanna make you feel happy. Does that change? Kinda let people know that I’m doing, I’m going an extra mile for them.

It made me change things and it made me be a better person in my relationships as well because now I let my. Friends, my family know that I don’t like what I’m doing right now, but I’m doing it for you. This kind of clearly communicate that I’m going beyond my comfort zone to be around you.

And I think it’s a fabulous it. Piece of advice. I don’t know whether he meant it this way or not, but that’s how I understood. And it worked well for me.

Victoria: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I have found myself in a similar boat of I’m working really hard behind the scenes and then I, you just show them the end product, but, yeah, that’s a really good point. I don’t always say, and here I did this because, and I did this as an extra thing because I thought it would really help you out. I don’t really communicate it that way. I just say, this is what I do.

And give

Victoria: the whole product. So that’s a really good point just to yes it’s all about the language that you use and there are small ways that you can do that and just show them that yeah, that that’s really good advice. I like that.

Aman: And the worst one, I don’t remember honestly, I. And I do not want.

That’s good. You just retain it then. Yeah. Yeah.

I,

Aman: 2025. 2024. I have promised myself to only look at the positive things, so I’ll ignore this part. Hope you guys okay with it, but honestly, I don’t remember. Yes. Trust me, I do not remember because even if places where I fell on my face, I. They gave me a great learnings of my life. They made me a stronger person.

All the girlfriends who have dumped me, all the clients who did not pay me on time, all the people who decided not to work with me, taught me something and made me a stronger person, make me a better person. I think very early in life, parents should teach their kids how to accept nos instead of yes.

Ashlan: Yes,

Aman: so it’s

Ashlan: accepting rejection. Rejection is important because if you lose your shit every time something happens.

Victoria: Yeah. Not even in a regular job or just life in general? Life

Ashlan: entrepreneurship. Yeah. Yeah. I just talked to somebody a new client prospect today who is just I’m really picky. I hope you don’t mind. And I was like, I have no hard feelings about rejection. My goal is to give you something.

That makes you happy, that meets the needs of you. And then she had asked me to, to share other website, like past websites that I’ve worked on, and I was like, I’m going to share them with you. I want you to remember as they look, as you look at them, this is not what your website is gonna look like.

This was something that was approved by those humans to pass muster for what they wanted, and also caveating certain websites have limitations. If you build your website on GoDaddy. Their limitations. Yeah. So yeah. And she said, I respect that you said that because people will judge, you know that is quote unquote your work.

But I’m like, ultimately you are the customer. Yes. You are the one who gets to choose what is right and what is not. And I will be relying on your discernment to give you something that you want so as well,

Victoria: being able to handle those and. It makes you more creative too on like problem solving as well.

Yeah.

Aman: Yeah. Hundred percent.

Victoria: Yeah. So as someone as a, with a 2-year-old who says no a lot, and I’m now saying no a lot, I I feel like that is my goal, is to make sure he can handle, this is what I, right now,

Aman: and this is what I teach my sales team, I tell my sales team, there’ll be a hundred nos in one.

Yes. Your job is to find nos early. Then later. Yeah. 

Yeah. Help your customer. The difficult thing in the life of people, no matter how badly they wanna say it is, no. So help them say no. If they’re not answering your phone, call them. Say, I understand you are probably not answering call because you are occupied, or This project is going for delayed period.

Tell me, and I would call you after 10 months, I’m fine. I want you to make a better decision. So the earlier you find no, the more you can focus on. Yes.

Yeah.

Ashlan: And

Aman: that’s what I feel.

Ashlan: Yeah. That is such good sales training too, because overcoming those objections like to get to land the Yes. Or like you said, get to the no faster because not everything is a good fit for everyone.

Exactly. And you wanna be able to move on to the next thing you know that is gonna be the right one. That’s really a great life lesson.

Yeah, for sure.

Ashlan: All right, I’ve got our next question which is why do you think it is important for an organization to leverage A CRM and then what are the key benefits to a business that is maybe just getting started to, to.

Land in a CRM system.

Aman: Alright, so this is, I love it. This is what I do for a living. If you think your brain is not super computer, if you think you would remember everything and you don’t, you never forget anything, you don’t need a CRM. You are good. But if you need notepads, if you re if you need.

You know all the business cards around you. You have notes on your phone or a notepad at place, or you use any other tool you need CRM and a requirement of CRM happens as early as you start your business. It’s a discipline. You meet somebody, I and you do not remember their kids’ name you do not remember what kind of work they do.

It’s pretty bad when you meet them next time business, and I’m sure each one of us who’s an entrepreneur would agree. It’s all about networking. And for you to, as a business owner, you’re the best salesperson. And as a best salesperson, you would end up meeting 10 to 15 people every day.

And how would you remember them? How would you remember what kind of business they run? How would you remember what kind of relationship they had? It’s pretty important,

For you to have the whole conversation, maintain somewhere. But the interesting part, we speak to people on WhatsApp, phone calls, emails, text messages in one-to-one meetings or in-person meetings.

Now, if you keep notes for every different section, like my emails have a different set of notes, my phone has a different set of notes. They’ll never be accumulated. So a CRM system is something which will accumulate all of this. It has our on the go in your mobile devices and you can track it.

Plus the moment you start growing and now you have team member all the time that your team spend in generating leads, follow up reminders, they all go away the moment they leave the job. But this is the data that you collected or they collected for you. So if they go away, they not only go away with the work they have done, they also go away with the data.

So that’s where you have data in CRM for you. Even if they go away, you still have that intact. And CRMs, and I always say this to people, CRMs are not for good days, for bad days because.

Imagine

Aman: you, your business is running fabulously. You’ve been collecting data, but you’ve never been going back to it.

But one fine day when the market crashes and some, for some reason, you do not have any way to generate business opportunities for you, you will always go back to this data that you collected.

And they’ll be like, Hey, you know what? I met you three months back, four months back. And interestingly, if you meet somebody today, they will never give you business straightaway.

They need to be networked. They need to start trusting you, and that’s where the old data relationships all comes handy. So CRMs a great tool because, and I’m not referring towards a singular CRM. Every CRM is great, just every dress is great. It is just that who, which suits what. Likewise, it’s CRM.

Some would like to buy an expensive CRM. Some would like to buy less expensive. CRM, they are CRMs, which starts with $4 a month, so you should not look at CRMs from a standpoint. It’s an expensive tool. Look at this as a tool which can help you organize your whole operations. But then leave it on us. We can help you find out CRM, which matches your budgets, the features that you want, technology you want.

And the best part, we do not charge for selecting A CRM. We would only charge when we customize things. So selecting A CRM or running a discovery call with us is for free. And that’s our way to give back to the community saying, we helped you choose HubSpot. Now you go buy them directly. I’m okay. I would not complain about it.

So yeah, CRM is for all.

Victoria: Yeah, that’s great. And I love how you. I love that what you said. Sorry. No, you’re good. You said it’s for your bad days, not your good days.

Aman: Absolutely. I love that. And I felt personally, honestly there was a period in my business where I was making ton of money and I was like, great, I don’t have to worry about things.

It’s going great. But the moment I went through a bumpy road, I realized I have to generate more business. And then after to went back to my CRM data where I had, so I had a hundred and thousand people, a hundred thousand people data with me and I was like, damn, this will make me living for next three, four years and this is how I’ve been using it.

Firsthand experiences.

Ashlan: Yeah. That’s a really good point. Some of the clients I have today was from strategic follow up. They didn’t say yes or no the previous year. Yeah. They, and if you don’t have that follow up, and then I just filled the pipeline with other stuff and then when I went back to it, I’m like.

Oh, okay. We should be making sure to follow up with people, especially people who didn’t say yes or no.

Absolutely.

Ashlan: Because they got busy and there’s different ways that you can go about it. ’cause there are those pushy salespeople that you’re just like, go away. Go away. I did tell you no.

Or I did push, like I did tell you bother me at this date. And then you’re, the, I’m dealing with it with one of my clients who we asked him to bother us. I think in the middle of April, and he’s been following up this month and I was just like, shall we just crush his dreams and just say no, like that?

We don’t enjoy this tactic at all. But it’s just, it is a good reminder that implementing SCRM system is part of. Sound business operations. Yeah. And information. And I know many business owners that, they don’t have email lists, they don’t have websites.

They’re relying on social media. How do you get in touch with those people? Like

exactly.

Ashlan: That person, it doesn’t even have their real name attached to it half the time. So you. You should, if you want a real business, you should be implementing these tools and

Aman: For sure. And then anything, like I said, if you are, if you’re starting up new you do not have a lot of budgets.

They’re cheaper CRNs spend with them.

Okay. You can always export out the data the moment you have more money. Go to a bigger CRM if you want to. It’s easy to export out and export import in. Yeah, don’t shy away. We all improve. We all initially start with less money. I, something that I do not enjoy in entrepreneurs is they have shyness saying, oh, I have less budget.

Don’t worry. Best of the best companies have less budgets. They have the least budgets, so it’s okay. We all go through the same struggle. We all understand. Even I understand at least that. The days are not ro rosy all the time. You have to go through small period lean period. Then you make money. It’s a cycle.

It happens.

Victoria: Yeah. Absolutely. I love that. Pivoting to a completely different question. I love the stories behind people’s business names, so I just wanted to ask you about your business name and how you came up with it.

Aman: Alright, so the story behind that. Okay. There are two answers to this.

The answer that world already always knows, and the answer, which is truthful here. So when Rohith, who’s my elder brother, decided to start this business and he floated different names in the family group I did not like this name Target integration. It never really, it first is a bigger name. It never really resonated the way I wanted it to be, but.

Somehow, even today, I feel it’s all about marketing and branding, how you wanna do it. And I am always of a believer there’s nothing in the name. If my name would have been John instead of Aman, I’d still be the same person. So I was like, sure, yeah, keep it whatever you wanna keep. But then over a period of time, probably.

This is how it was destined. I realized that this name is quite appropriate with the way what we do. Target integration defines targeting integrations, and as a company I. We integrate multiple tools for a business. So when you come into us, we will integrate your CRM with your website, social media, your email service provider, your bookkeeping tool like QuickBooks, and then we will integrate with your biometric devices and so much more.

So now I really resonate with this name. Not in the beginning probably that it’s that we come with an aim of integrating different technologies for you.

Victoria: I love that. That was a great answer. I love that

Ashlan: you grew into the name, you grew into the name. I love it. You’re

Victoria: like, I don’t like this.

Ashlan: You’ve told us a lot about, the importance of CRMs. For businesses, but I’m just curious, like what are some of the common mistakes that you see people making when they first start working with you?

Aman: I think the biggest mistake that I look at people, one, they don’t start early. They always come pretty late.

CRMs are disciplined, like I said, and if you already have a team, then you buy a CRM. And they are top to bottom. So employees never want a CRM. Nobody likes to fill in the data, right? So you buy A CRM, you spend money with people like us, you spend money on a software, but you still end up not using a CRM and that mostly because the discipline of using CRM was not there.

So if you. If you yourself use the CRM, if you have the CRM, before the employees were there in the business, the probability of accepting A CRM is higher compared to they are employees. And after that, you bring in CRM. That’s the biggest flaw that I see people follow second to which is the moment people have budget, they straight away feel I should go and implement everything all together.

Please never do that. I would love to, I would make more money, but that’s that’s not really a right approach. Any change happens has to happen slowly, gradually. So even if you have money, even if you can afford the best of the best tool in the market, please go with a phase manner or baby step approach.

Don’t start running straight away. Please start collecting small information, small automations together. Make this as a longer, approaching two years of plan, where initially I’ll track customer data, then I’ll track my project management, then I’ll track my customer service, then I’ll integrate with my payments, bookkeeping.

Then I’ll have my marketing coming in. You can choose the sequence the way you want. There’s no right sequence, but at least take tiny steps. There’s no point bringing all the chips on the table on the day one. So if people do with these two things, at least the the raw, the rate of falling is lesser, quite lesser.

Victoria: I love that so much and I. I have examples of both of those things because before I became an entrepreneur, I was on the marketing teams of a few different companies. One was a nonprofit, one was a corporate company, and both of them. For some reason, I, as the marketing person, was the one in charge of implementing all of the CRM stuff and I was very low, so on the totem pole, so I, I was the intern, so I had to learn the software and implement it for the company and.

They should. They were at a point by the time I got there where they should have already been using something and they weren’t using anything. It was just like you said, there was no discipline. Some people had notes in their emails, some people had Excel spreadsheets, some pe like some people didn’t track anything at all.

So then. All the work I put into that project of learning and then coming up with systems so that people would remember to start and they wanted to do it all at once. They wanted, they took like an all or nothing approach. I know, and before I left the company, they basically had. Stopped using it. So all the work I had put into it was nothing.

And then same with the nonprofit that I was at. Like it was an all or nothing approach. They had been operating for 20 years before I even got there. And they were doing nothing. And it was the same thing, the same results. And I remember just feeling like. So defeated that, like I put so much work into trying to improve the way that they did things and it, but it was the same thing.

Yeah. And I wasn’t really, I couldn’t make decisions like, my bosses could, they’re like, okay, if we’re gonna pay for this is how we have to do it. And, it didn’t work. And as an

Aman: entrepreneur, I do make money. I, no question. But you feel bad about this money because somebody paid for it.

But they could not use it. You are sad because you of course cannot refund the money. You spend money implement. You spend effort implementing it, but you feel bad because they could have. Probably listen to us and implement it in a right way. And this way they could have saved this money.

If there’s one piece of advice that I want to give to everyone is look at us as doctors, and if doctors says, you need a surgery, let us do the surgery, please don’t be a doctor.

Ashlan: That is a good point. You hire experts for a reason, right? Yeah. Like that. We’re no strangers to that. As marketing people, we’ll have people who say, oh, I just completely designed this thing. I was like, oh, the thing that looks nothing like the rest of your brand and won’t match anything that I post,

have the forethought. To send it to me first,

Aman: I’ll always make money. That’s the reason I’m working.

But now when you have hired me, hear me, let me do it.

Okay.

Aman: And trust me, my in, if you would use this thing more, I will make more money. The lesser money for my intentions and my objectives are now intact and collected with your objectives.

Let me do it. If I’m saying do baby steps, because I know I have done this multiple times. People run fast and fall on their face and then blame the field for it. It’s not the field. You never knew how to walk. How can you run?

Ashlan: Oh, that makes a lot of sense. That’d be like, being like, oh, there’s something wrong with my toilet. I’m totally not gonna hire a plumber. I’m just gonna YouTube it and figure it out. And then you like make it way worse. Be like, now you know what would’ve been like a $200 problem is now a $2,000 problem.

And

Aman: people think buying a right CRM as an expensive CRM will fix it. Sorry. It’s not the CRM, it’s the implementation of CRM. What matters. You may have the bus best gun in the planet, but until you do not know how to use it, you cannot be a good shooter.

Ashlan: Totally. Yeah. It’s like cars, right?

Yeah. All cars can get, as long as they’re running properly can get you to point A to point B. You can have a really expensive Lamborghini, or you can still have a Honda Civic, and it’s, they do the same thing. Yeah. And that one’s just gonna be when it breaks or it has, I think a lot of the more expensive CRMs, they still need human input.

Yeah.

Ashlan: Like you don’t just get to, you just don’t get to talk to it and it auto or it pulls out of your brain. The information. Yeah. The human error is the problem. Absolutely. So spending more money is not gonna fix the issue.

Aman: For sure. Not.

Victoria: No, that’s, yeah, that’s really good point. So taking a total left turn with this last question here, completely random.

We’re asking all of our guests the same question so that we can turn it into a, something fun. What is a song or an album that has been on repeat in your life lately?

Aman: Interesting. There are a couple of ones. We will, we’ll rock. You always remain in mind.

Oh, nice. Yeah.

Aman: It’s a song which motivates me.

It’s a song which always makes me feel that whatever I have in my mind as a strategy, this will work. This keeps on motivating me. And there’s one more song. I don’t remember the the Singer, but it says I wanna be a Oh.

Ashlan: Oh yeah. That is Bruno Mars, right?

Aman: Yeah. So

Ashlan: yeah, that’s

Aman: something which is probably at the time when my why was to make money.

That I wanted to be like, Hey, I wanna be a billionaire, which is not true, but I still, it’s a pretty pappy song. I enjoy it. It

Victoria: get stuck in your head. Yeah,

Aman: it does. And unfortunately, fortunately today, which I hope one day get changed, people look at success proportional to the money that you have made.

Yeah.

Aman: I hope one day this gets changed. I hope one day people start appreciating the journey that people have done, or effort that people have done to achieve something, whether they have achieved it or not. Separate conversation. 

But unfortunately, today’s era a good entrepreneur and a bad entrepreneur, the only difference is how much money he or she made.

That’s that.

Victoria: Yeah. And I think having conversations like this is the only way we’re gonna change that. I hope making that more, more natural. And I think that’s like the reason behind this podcast is we were sick of all the podcasts out there for business right now because they’re all saying the same things.

Or even like the business books, it’s all the same person basically. That followed the same formula who came from the same. They might have started in a garage, that garage was in their very wealthy parents’ house, or, you know what I mean? It’s just, it’s all the same.

Like they all have the same background, the same access to opportunities, the same privilege, and. So their advice, while it’s great that they, got to where they were and they did become successful, their advice isn’t necessarily applicable to a lot of us who are trying to be, become entrepreneurs and make a difference in our yeah.

Ashlan: Yeah. Yeah. That’s like running a marathon and being like, yay, I’m so proud of myself. But you started two miles in and the rest of us had to do.

That’s awesome. I love that.

Ashlan: We’ve come to the end of our questions. Is there anything else that you wanna share with our audience today, Aman? And thank you again for being on with us. I feel like this has been such a great conversation and so many insights for our listeners, thank you. No,

Aman: I honestly wanna take this opportunity to say thanks to both of you.

I think it’s one of those podcasts where I enjoy the most. I love the questions. They make me think, I honestly love podcasts and I’ve been doing podcasts since very long. But I always love when people ask me abstract questions, different questions that make me think, that even makes me learn new things about myself.

So thank you so much. Thank you so much for being such a great host. Thank you so much for asking these questions. Thank you so much for arranging all of this. You guys are kind great. I know how much effort you would do post-production, so this game is not over yet for you.

Victoria: Thank you. Thank you. We really appreciate it. We’ve, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you and yeah, we’ve had a really great conversation. So I think this is gonna be great episode and I’m excited for our audience.

Ashlan: Yes. Awesome. Thank you again to our listeners for today’s episode. We will have all of the links to target integration in the show notes. And if you have any recommendations of guests you wanna hear from or even topics you wanna hear on please send us DM or email us at aloha at take the leap today, do com and we will see you next time.

Bye now.