How to Demo Software Without Turning It Into a Product Tour | Seth Haake

Carter (00:01.27)
Hey Seth, give the people a quick intro. Who are you and what do you do?

Seth Haake (00:06.124)
Yeah, Seth Haake, I'm a sales engineer at Total Expert. Been there for about nine years. We work primarily with enterprise lenders, primarily IMBs, but also banks and credit unions. you know, really trying to help them think through how to drive growth through better customer engagement, retention strategies, loan officer productivity. Really.

Like how can they turn their database into a growth engine and operationalize like what their best LOs are doing.

Carter (00:43.906)
Like you said, you've been at Total Expert almost nine years now. How is selling the product today different from when you first started there?

Seth Haake (00:51.886)
Well, yeah, Total Experts changed a lot in the nine years I've been there. When I first started, were primarily a compliance marketing tool. How can we help lenders compliantly co-brand with their co-marketing partners, their referral partners, like real estate agents and others? And the platforms, it's changed a lot. you know, in the beginning, we probably were selling more of like tools and capabilities.

Now, because we have a real suite of sales and marketing tools, like we are really selling to outcomes. So like it's completely shifted. We go in to executives and we're kind of thinking like, don't look at us as a tool. Look at us as a partner that can help you, you know, with growth, retention, you know, all of these things that they wake up worrying about every day.

You know, we do our best to really, you know, have them come back to the conversation thinking like, how do you, how do you capture more leads? How do we give your marketing team and your loan officers superpowers so they can do more with less? And like, we really focus now on, on true outcomes. Cause like our system actually can drive these outcomes and prove these outcomes where, you know, when you're a startup and you've just got a couple of good

cool capabilities, you're really pushing the tool itself.

Carter (02:18.531)
Mm.

Carter (02:22.37)
That makes sense. That's actually crazy. I don't want to go too off topic, but I see every almost every person I interview. Well, when I'm looking at everybody's LinkedIn, they're here for a year here for a couple years. I never really see anybody that's been at a company for nine years. Why did you stay? Why have you been there? So long? That is it. That is quite a bit of change over nine years.

Seth Haake (02:39.5)
Yeah, for sure. mean, I came from a technology company prior that was in like retail supply chain. And I started there when it was still semi-small, so it was exciting. And it just grew to a point where, you you kind of get into a role that you're kind of doing the same thing every day. It doesn't feel like you have that much impact, but, you know, with Total Expert, I joined and we were like a true startup, you know.

you had to come in and wear multiple hats. And, I feel like it, you know, the ability to have an impact here has continued for me, especially since the product has, has changed so much. And we've got all sorts of different types of customers now. Like my role is sales engineer, but I'm involved with marketing, product marketing, product. I'm, you know, probably the most tenured sales individual on our team.

Carter (03:09.828)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Haake (03:37.031)
so I just come with a lot of experience and expertise. So I get, I get brought into a lot of different conversations a lot of times, and I love that. So I think that's what's kept me here. And, know, I mean, at any, at any job, it's, it's always too about the people. have great people here that are passionate and, fun to work with. You know, some have gone, some have left, but like, we do a great job of bringing in awesome people. So, yeah, I've just, I've had a great, great ride here so far.

Carter (04:06.5)
That makes sense. When you're in front of an executive buyer, what makes a product demo land instead of turning into just going over a bunch of different features, know, and turning into a feature tour?

Seth Haake (04:16.14)
Yeah, for sure. mean, it's kind of what I mentioned before. It's like, it's all about impact. and you gotta be able to tell a story and tell a story that they can see themselves in because you don't want to get down into the minutia of like how you press this button and what this button does or all of the kind of really fine details of the solution. want to be telling a story of the outcome that you're driving and how that impacts your organization.

You know, we always kind of talk to the ability of like, if we can deliver this, like if we can improve your retention by 20%, if we can improve your lead to app or lead to loan conversion by 20%, like what does that mean for your business? And what does that mean for you in your role? Like these product demos, you have to give them an idea of how the partnership looks and what the future looks like for them and what's the future of.

Possibility right like so it's it's always about keeping and maintaining a story rather than like this is how this thing works It's this is what this thing can do for you your company you in your

Carter (05:22.349)
Yeah.

Carter (05:28.034)
So this is maybe answered my next question, but really when it gets to, it starts getting really crazy technical, you're always trying to pull them back to the problem and what it can do for them essentially. Like you're not trying to get so crazy into the weeds generally.

Seth Haake (05:40.239)
For sure. Like even like when you build out an agenda, you want the agenda to be outcome focused because if you build out a demo flow or agenda that's based on here are the capabilities of the system, it becomes a checklist. And like, I'm sure most people in sales, they're familiar with these RFPs that are just like these ridiculously long checklists of can you do this and can you do that? And you know, I, there's always probably a place for those types of things, but like,

People want to know what they're going to actually get in terms of impact. They don't really, like, maybe if you're the person that has to click all the buttons, yeah, you want to see how all the buttons are clicked. But when you're talking to executive level, they're not thinking about a tool as a tool. They're thinking, how does this help the organization with, you know, XYZ?

Carter (06:33.728)
lenders are getting hit with AI pitches nonstop. Right now, when you're showing something like Total Experts AI Sales Assistant, how do you get buyers to see it as a real operational advantage that is gonna get those outcomes instead of just another random AI demo or like a nice to have type of thing?

Seth Haake (06:49.82)
yeah, I mean, I think everyone's saying AI, but in reality, there's a lot of people that still don't understand what AI actually is. It's a buzzword. But again, when you align it to a actual problem, our AI sales assistant is built to solve the problem of

a loan officer needing to always be like a salesperson. Like a lot of times these retail loan officers, they want to be a financial advisor. They don't want to have to run a sales, like front of the funnel type of business. And we know from data, like if you actually have a, an opportunity or a lead in front of you, whether it came from a referral partner, a website, however you're getting those.

Maybe it's from our customer intelligence, like monitoring your database. Like to actually get someone on the phone, like you have to call that person five, seven, 10 times before you actually get them on the phone. And like a lot of CRMs, it's like, hey, the task is call this person. And a loan officer, one doesn't want to have to live in a system all day and just complete tasks. So our AI sales assistant is like this superpower that just goes out.

Carter (07:48.6)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Haake (08:13.652)
on their behalf, it's intelligent enough to have conversations with people, collect all this information and then now bring these opportunities on a platter to these loan officers so that they can be the advisor and they don't have to be the sales guy as part of the business. So like, again, it all comes down to like, what is this thing actually doing for me and how does it impact my company, my people, my teams? And I think a lot of times,

A lot of people just like to demo this new cool thing where it's generating text or it's filtering through data, but at the end of the day, how does that equate to some type of business out?

Carter (08:56.748)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was a mortgage banker before, so I could totally see that. You were having to hit up, a lot of deals would be, I guess maybe that's just sales in general, but a lot of deals would be you're hitting up the people, yeah, five, six, seven times before they do anything, which is crazy. So that makes a lot of sense. The mortgage lending world is very small. A lot of people know each other. How much does reputation carry from one deal to the next in your world?

Seth Haake (09:11.381)
yeah. Yeah.

Seth Haake (09:22.638)
Probably more than people want to admit. I mean, yeah, like to your point, it's a small industry. You know, we have people at Total Expert that are just really well connected in the industry, but then we also have, you know, people that are from outside mortgage. And, you know, one of our best ways of selling is having someone that went from one company to another.

that use Total Expert and now this new company doesn't and they can see the difference and you know, they've had a great experience with us and they want to, you know, bring that to their next gig. So the reputation matters a lot. think especially in mortgage lending, there's just been a lack of maybe a level of partnership with technology that, you know, people have been burned by. Hey, whether it's...

people have promised they're going to build something or they buy something and they don't get the support that they need. Like there's a lot that goes into technology outside of just the technology. I think that's why we've had so much success. have awesome team here that has worked with a lot of lenders and can see what works, what doesn't, how, you know, an enterprise size lender should be operationalizing all these best practices and

The partnership is almost more important than just, you know, setting up the tech.

Carter (10:53.91)
Are all these people pretty open to these types of technologies or is there a lot of lenders that are very antiquated? They've been doing the same thing for, you know, 10 plus years and they're pretty skeptical about these types of, or is now everybody kind of on the AI train and the, types of different technologies.

Seth Haake (11:07.983)
yeah, mean, there's definitely your forward thinking organizations that hear of something and they want to start using it right away. And then, you know, it's kind of your classic like banks and credit unions, banks, especially move the slowest. and usually there's a lot of guardrails that get in the way. So there's, there's a wide variety of different, but I would, I would say most people at this point understand.

the importance of having some of these sales and marketing tools in place. And if they don't, they're going to get left behind. So a lot of people now understand, Hey, maybe I don't want to be the first person to use a tool, but like, I know all my competitors are doing these things. Like, you know, there's like these rocket mortgage of the world. Like they've got a ton of not only technology, but they throw a ton of people at all these things and to retain your, past customers.

Carter (11:49.646)
Yeah.

Seth Haake (12:06.423)
You have to have tools in place to help you do that because it's impossible to rely on just your people to do that. I mean, you know, we go around to all these conferences and shows and talk about as an industry, the mortgage industry has a pretty horrible retention rate when you look across other industries. And there's probably a lot of different reasons for that, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way. There are ways to.

Keep your customers and be the service and financial advisor for these people long term rather than just thinking of a mortgage as a one-time transaction.

Carter (12:46.998)
Yeah. What kills a deal at month six that looked great at month three and how would you avoid that from happening?

Seth Haake (12:56.441)
Yeah, for us, mean, like everybody says, time kills deals. And usually what the time means for us is sometimes we get initially talking to a marketing team or we're talking to the chief lender or sales leader. And a lot of times to get a deal done, you've got to include multiple people, multiple teams. You have to include the executive. So what happens is

Carter (13:12.931)
Hmm.

Seth Haake (13:22.575)
We sell one segment of the business and now we got to go back and sell all these other segments. The other thing that gets in the way is just like executive alignment and kind of building. We use what we call like a mutual action plan, which is just like, what are the steps that we, as a tandem, us and our prospects need to go through to get this deal done? Like help us understand your buying process. It's amazing too. Like a lot of times people don't really.

fully understand their own buying process. So sometimes we can even help there. Like, hey, we know typically, you know, this is what a vendor process looks like. You're going to want to get sales and, marketing leadership aligned here. You're going to need an executive sponsor to push this thing through. How do we get all these people together, get an alignment that this makes sense and then drive through. like for us.

Carter (14:00.078)
Mm.

Seth Haake (14:16.685)
Like I have a really great job. Like we have an amazing product and a lot of times people realize that very soon. And like you said, reputation, we've got a good reputation. the hard part about deals is just how do you actually navigate your organization and get something approved and aligned and like, you know, there's so many different types of work, like lenders out there. Some have huge marketing teams, some have tiny marketing teams. So it's like,

How do we also help you understand what this project looks like and how we can help you build this out successfully? Sometimes we have, you know, our teams internally help you build it out. And sometimes they've got their own teams that can do it themselves. So there's a lot of moving parts and building an action plan together to understand that and having alignment across the org. That's how you get deals done. And that's usually when you don't have those things. Month three, month six, that it keeps rolling along because.

We're just not getting that alignment.

Carter (15:14.498)
You're saying because there are so many different layers and so many people that have to check off on things.

Seth Haake (15:18.735)
For sure. Yup. And, and not only check off on things, but also they it's like, it's like marketing has their process of evaluating something. Sales has their process. And then at an executive and organization level, there's also these kind of guardrails that you have to go through to understand and get approval. So it's like, how do you just understand that path right away and just keep moving on it before you hit a roadblock and all of a sudden month six, you're like, well,

Now we're not ready to do this.

Carter (15:50.306)
You know, just some final thoughts. Do you have any advice for people on trying to get those groups aligned? Like on ways they should approach that?

Seth Haake (15:58.403)
Yeah, I again, like I think the most impactful way to get alignment is talking through these business objectives and strategies. And if those three people are aligned on, hey, we need a way to, let's just say retention is their biggest opportunity across the organization. Like if you can explain what the issue is and how there's a solve and it can result in

this type of business outcome, like maybe a 20 % increase in retention or that leads to this much in terms of total loan production, you can use that to sell internally to get those people involved, to get their eyeballs on a solution like Total Expert. And now that's how we get all of these people aligned and we can build an action plan as a group.

Carter (16:51.97)
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I think we got some good stuff here. I will end it here.

Seth Haake (16:56.816)
Awesome.