[EO Austin] Transforming Lead Generation and Customer Engagement Through AI With Eric Evans

Eric Evans is the CEO of HyperTarget Marketing, a performance marketing agency specializing in generating leads for industry sectors such as legal, insurance, and financial services. He is also the Co-founder and CEO of Pipes.AI, an AI-powered sales engagement platform that automates and optimizes lead follow-up processes. With a background in performance marketing and technology development, Eric builds innovative solutions that transform how businesses connect with customers to drive conversions.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[04:14] Eric Evans talks about HyperTarget Marketing’s unique performance-driven business model
[08:33] How Pipes.AI was created and evolved into a sales engagement platform
[13:36] Challenges businesses face with timely lead follow-ups
[15:23] Key features of Pipes.AI that boost automation and conversions
[16:54] What the lead generation process looks like from the customer’s perspective
[22:52] How AI improves calls, voicemails, and follow-up processes
[31:18] Resources, tools, and mentors that shaped Eric’s entrepreneurial journey
[35:23] The importance of company culture and how Eric fosters integrity and collaboration within his teams
[38:41] Key hires that helped scale HyperTarget Marketing and Pipes.AI

In this episode…

Lead generation and customer engagement techniques are evolving faster than ever, with technology transforming how businesses connect with potential clients. In an age where speed and personalization are critical, how can companies ensure they’re reaching the right people at the right time — and converting them into loyal customers?

According to Eric Evans, customer acquisition and AI technology leader, the key lies in leveraging AI-driven systems that combine speed, precision, and automation. He highlights that businesses often lose valuable leads due to delayed follow-ups or inefficient processes. AI-powered platforms like Pipes.AI can solve this by streamlining lead nurturing through automated SMS, calls, and voicemails. By integrating smart technology into their workflows, companies can enhance lead conversion rates while creating a seamless and effective customer journey.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz meets with Eric Evans, CEO of HyperTarget Marketing and Co-founder and CEO of Pipes.AI, to discuss how AI is revolutionizing lead generation and customer engagement. They dive into the importance of “speed to lead,” the power of automation to simplify workflows, and how personalized follow-ups can turn prospects into long-term clients.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Related Episodes

Quotable Moments

“We always sell exclusive leads by nature; we’re collecting that person’s information and then finding the best match for them.”
“Attorneys are good at providing legal services, not necessarily experts at marketing or follow-up in a timely manner.”
“I always felt like I was working as a free product manager for other companies, constantly giving feedback and feature requests.”
“There’s so much horsepower put into just getting people on the phone to have good conversations.”
“We wanted to keep the marketing team involved through the whole journey and allow split testing of the follow-up process.”

Action Steps

Embrace “speed to lead” with automation: Implementing tools like Pipes.AI can ensure quick follow-ups with potential clients, increasing the chance of conversion by engaging leads when their interest is highest.
Integrate marketing and sales efforts: Use seamless integration between marketing campaigns and sales follow-up processes to ensure consistent communication and reduce lead losses.
Focus on high-integrity actions: Make integrity a core company value, ensuring transparency and trust in all business dealings. This enhances client relationships and the company’s reputation.
Harness the power of AI and SMS for engagement: Utilize AI-driven tools to handle initial customer inquiries and follow-up processes, reducing strain on human resources while maintaining high engagement.
Continuous optimization of customer touchpoints: Regularly test and refine communication sequences to enhance customer engagement and maximize conversion rates, much like optimizing web experiences.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:13

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here Founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Eric Evans. You can check out his companies at I and hypertargetmarketing.com. Eric, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. This is kind of like a combination, right? It’s top. I have a top agency series, which Eric is. I have a top SaaS series, which Eric is, and I have an EO series, which Eric is. So, you know, when you have these serial entrepreneurs, they fit into multiple categories. So a couple top agency episodes people can check out. I did one with Jason Swenk. Jason Swenk built up his agency to eight figures and sold it. Then he started an agency group and helping agency owners. It’s kind of the group he wish he had when he first started. And he also has been buying up agencies, which was interesting to hear. The space agency space. That’s a good one in that realm. And the EO profile one I had Rich Walker on. Rich Walker of EO Austin, amazing guys. You know he’s got a great software. He really focused on customer support and service his podcast so you can check him out. And Rusty Shelton was another one from EO Austin. And he’s got a great story. Zilker Media. And then Mat Zalk of EO Tulsa was also a great story from the SaaS side. I had one of the Co-founders of Zapier on. That was a really interesting episode, how they built that up. And one of the Co-founders of Pipedrive, you know, Eric, when I first had him on, I think they had 10,000 customers. Now they have they have over 100,000 customers. They’ve grown, you know, quite a bit. So check out more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. And we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. And Eric, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, most importantly, focus on running their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how to give to my best relationships, and I have really found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and the companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com. I am super excited to introduce Eric Evans. He’s the Founder of both HyperTarget Marketing and Pipes.AI. HyperTarget Marketing is a performance marketing agency focused on legal. They’ve helped many different companies in legal, insurance, financial, all over the place. And we’re going to dig into that because I think, Eric, you have a really interesting business model from an agency perspective. Also, Pipes.AI is a cutting edge sales engagement platform that automates the process of connecting with customers and prospects as well. So before starting his own companies, he actually worked in Hollywood. He did special effects for blockbuster movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean. So Eric, thanks for joining me.

Eric Evans 03:42

Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s good to be here.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:44

You have a very interesting journey. And even early on, you know, I’ve watched you’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve watched videos of you from, like, 12 years ago, and even early on, you were building these sites that were producing like a couple thousand dollars a month, which is pretty amazing at the time. Just we’re going to get into that. But talk about HyperTarget Marketing first and what you do there.

Eric Evans 04:14

Yeah, absolutely. HyperTarget is an agency we’ve been around since 2009 as performance marketers. Started off in the paper call space as a mobile media buyers back. You know, when iPhones were brand new and, you know, learned how to drive phone calls for companies. And it’s since evolved and grown and changed with the times. And now we own and operate a number of web brands. We buy our own media and work with a number of different partners to generate leads for companies. And we then take those leads into our own internal call center to further qualify them, get them on the phone, warm them up and then deliver a prospect who’s, you know, very deep into their buying journey to our customers.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 05:00

With that and we’ll talk about HyperTarget Marketing for a second. Are you working specifically with a company per niche? Because I know there’s lead generation companies that will serve up leads to like, here’s three potential. You know, companies that you can work with. Are you working more just with a specific company because this is you know, you’re putting your money on the line here for them.

Eric Evans 05:31

Right. So. Yep. Yeah. No, it’s it’s risky. I mean, we we are proficient at what we do. And, you know, we know we’re capable of of doing a great job. And and you know, and making it work from, from a profit perspective obviously in order to take that risk. And so we work with a number of different companies. You know, we try not to overlap too much by geography. But, you know, different customers are looking for different things. And so we do work with a number of different companies and a few different spaces. But yeah, as you mentioned, legal and personal injury attorneys is one of our largest categories now. And we’ve got a lot of great customers there.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 06:07

Yeah, I want to dig into that because I know you work with them all over the country. But let’s take for example, like a PA attorney in California, would you when you you’ll walk through kind of how it works. I’m curious if you get a lead someone who’s like a good, good prospect for the company, will you deliver that to three local companies or you’re like, listen, we’re working this one company in this geographic area and everything we get in that geographic area, we refer to this firm.

Eric Evans 06:39

Yeah, we always sell exclusive leads, right. By by nature. Right. We’re we’re collecting that person’s information. They’re requesting a follow up from us. We then follow up with that person, qualify them and find the best match for that person and, you know, introduce that company warm, transfer them to to the end person who’s going to service them. And and those attorneys then have the opportunity to retain them as clients.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 07:05

I’m curious. You know, it seems like a no brainer scenario, right? Like you’re basically putting in the money and the time and you’re qualifying them. What objections do you get from a firm with this scenario? Or maybe you’re just like, you could just choose who you want to work with and just go to them. Hey, do you want leads? And like literally you only pay for the leads that we give you?

Eric Evans 07:28

Yeah. It’s a I mean, it’s a really easy pitch, right? It’s definitely not it’s not a hard sell by any means. If someone says no, it’s you know, it’s really no big deal to us, right? It’s it’s it’s very low risk on their part. And we’re providing a lot of value, putting a lot of work in to get those people there. I mean, the only objections we typically get are from people who just aren’t familiar with buying leads from third parties, and might have an internal marketing team that, you know, feels like, rather than us coming in to supplement what they’re doing and help them grow, that we’re somehow competing with their internal marketing departments, that they can sometimes have some pushback to us. But at the end of the day, I mean, we’re not competing with those teams. We’re just providing additional value on top of whatever they’re doing for their own brand.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:14

Yeah, I want to get into the process and services because that’s kind of how Pipes.AI was born. So talk about let’s talk about the like a pie attorney in California, for example, and what you did with them. And then we can get into Pipes a little bit more.

Eric Evans 08:33

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the attorney space, attorneys are good at providing legal services, right? They’re not necessarily experts at marketing. And even if they are good at marketing, they’re not necessarily Early experts at following up with people in a timely manner, or they get busy and don’t have the staffing or resources to follow up on those leads. And so what we found, you know, was happening is we were, you know, we were driving inbound calls for companies or we were selling just just leads. Like if someone had filled out a form and requested to be contacted by somebody, you know, we would then sell that lead to somebody. And, you know, oftentimes we would get the feedback that they weren’t able to get those people on the phone. And so, you know, they would they would come back to us and say, hey, you know, these leads aren’t quite working at the level that we were hoping. We’re not able to get these people on the phone. So we finally started digging in deeper and deeper over the years into why they weren’t getting these people on the phone. And there’s a number of different challenges that go into that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 09:34

Maybe they weren’t answering the phone.

Eric Evans 09:37

They weren’t answering the phone, or they weren’t following up in a timely manner. Right. And so the the, you know, it’s it’s a direct downward graph from the time someone actually expresses interest and says, hey, I need to talk to somebody. I’d like to get a call from someone. If you don’t follow up with that person in five minutes, the odds of that person answering the phone keep going down. And we found that, you know, people would get busy and they might not call until the next day, at which point that person’s probably already found another competitor to work with, or made some other phone calls, filled out some other forms. And so that’s where we we started putting more effort into doing that follow up ourselves, not just selling the leads, but saying, hey, we’re going to generate this lead. And not only are we going to, you know, get this person information for you, we’re actually going to get them on the phone, make sure their information is correct, make sure they meet all the criteria that we know you would ask once we get them on the phone and kind of serve them up on a silver platter, and so they just need to make sure that they’re ready to answer the phone. And so we solve those challenges in a, you know, both a cost effective and efficient way, right? You know, it can be expensive to hire. Resources to make outbound phone calls to follow up on these leads. And so that’s where Pipes kind of came into the picture. Years later of finding ways to automate that through SMS and AI, to make sure that we’re meeting those people right when they’re interested. Getting them on the phone, qualifying them and getting them over in a way that’s that’s super efficient.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:09

I think, you know, Eric, this is instructive, I think, for any business. So I want to go through the process a little bit because it seems like the first step is obviously you became masters at paid search. It sounds like there’s some SEO as well. So do you build like custom pages for the company from like an SEO perspective as well, from a traffic perspective or like, what are all the ways that you, first of all, attract the person, the lead just to even sign up?

Eric Evans 11:39

Yeah. So we we own and operate our own web brands in a number of different verticals and industries and, you know, drive traffic to our own websites that we can then optimize those consumer journeys. And, you know, get people through our own marketing funnels. And so we’re we’re handling all of that in-house through our own web properties.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:00

And then those those ways you do it are are they combination? I’m looking here at your page if people are watching the video but it could be paid. Search local listing, SEO, blogging, social media, radio, all these all these channels display email, TV and web video. All these channels kind of to drive traffic.

Eric Evans 12:19

Yeah. So we’re yeah, we’re buying traffic and media from a number of different channels and funneling them all through our own call center and websites.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:27

Yeah. And so the next step is they fill out a form like you’ve create these optimized websites. Obviously you’ve been doing this back in the day in the early days. Once they do that they go to a call center.

Eric Evans 12:42

Correct. Yeah. So they’ll they’ll go through both a combination of our live agents and pipes to get them on the phone and make sure that, you know, we call it speed to lead, right. That that we’re following up with those people immediately. And if we don’t get them on the phone right away, we’re automating a lead nurture sequence that’s going to send them text messages and make follow up phone calls to make sure that we do get them on the phone when they’re ready to talk.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:07

I’m curious. So we’re here in like kind of in this process, in stage where you’re talking to someone, you’re in the call center. You could have just used pipes as your superpower and never released it to anyone else to use it. Right. Because you’re using this internally, right. Speed to lead. Yeah. Why did you decide to release it so that other people could use it too? It’s kind of like a little bit of a secret sauce.

Eric Evans 13:36

It is. Yeah. No, it’s that was, you know, something I wrestled with when we had built it that, you know, should we just keep this for ourselves and continue to grow the agency side? But I always had a dream of, you know, getting into the SaaS business and creating my own technology. You know, we were working with a lot of different systems to accomplish what we were doing at HyperTarget, and I always felt like I was working as a free product manager for these other companies. Right. And I was constantly giving feedback and giving feature requests. And, you know, I a lot of them got built. Some of them didn’t. But, you know, in the back of my mind, I always felt like, you know, I have a knack for, you know, designing these these marketing systems. And man, I’d really love to build my own right and bring that to market someday. So it was just something that was in the back of my head. And when we finally had pipes to a state or, you know, pre pipes before, before it had its own name where it was really working. Well, you know, I decided to take the, the leap of faith and start a second company here. And you know, both to just diversify my own revenue streams and, and also, you know, be be part of that journey of growing a tech company. It was always something I wanted to do. And I’m, you know, I kind of I kind of follow my heart. I mean, that’s that’s my story, you know, from the movie industry to this to to the next thing. So I, you know, it felt like the next adventure and something I wanted to tackle.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:01

Yeah. And you knew what you wanted to and maybe, you know, you wanted certain features. So at that stage, at what point? So they could talk to someone or Pipes. What were some of the key features you discovered you needed, you know, within Pipes to serve HyperTarget Marketing, which obviously helps the other companies on the platform?

Eric Evans 15:23

Yeah, definitely. It’s been a you know, it’s been an evolution where Pipes initially was designed just for my own purposes. Right. For the things we needed at HyperTarget. And as time has gone on, you know, we’ve we’ve built features and and it’s taken a life of its own to, to where there’s, there’s new features now that that are, that are much broader than, than just the needs of HyperTarget. But, you know, some of the things that that set us apart initially was not not just a sales engagement platform that we really needed to make sure that that the leads we were following up on were good leads, right. So we built a whole function on the front end of pipes for data validation to make sure that we’ve got good working email addresses, good working phone numbers. You know, we’re managing our duplicates properly. You know, we’re segmenting people into campaigns properly. We’re making sure that people aren’t on any kind of known spam list or litigator lists and things like that. And so, you know, to make sure that anybody that we’re going to follow up with that, we’ve got the right information from the form they filled out.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:37

So someone calls in. How does it work? Like what’s happening on. So they call in and they, you know, get routed into pipes. They don’t realize that. But what’s what happens from the customer’s perspective?

Eric Evans 16:54

Yeah. So whether they, they call inbound or or were so they’re filling out a web form initially typically is they’re, they’re they’re filling out a form. That data gets sent into pipes. Sometimes they are making an inbound phone call off a phone number on a website. But then that data is is running through our validation process. If we find that it’s a bad email address, it’s going to get kicked back. But if it passes all our validation checks, it’s then going to get assigned to what we call a pipe flow, right? And that’s a nurture sequence that our customers can design themselves. It’s a combination of SMS, follow up, I phone calls and voicemails that we leave. And so, you know, you can test out a lot of different cadences to follow up. And that was one of the things that I really wanted to focus on with pipes as well, is that we were, you know, we were doing all these follow up sequences and trying to figure out the best way to get a hold of these people, but none of the platforms we were using really allowed us to do the kind of split testing that a marketer would do, let’s say, on their website. Right? Like testing out different landing page combinations the way that, you know, different, you know, layouts of buttons and colors and, you know, there’s so much effort that goes into optimizing a website or optimizing an ad campaign. But then we found that a lot of times someone would fill out that web form and they would just kind of hand that lead over to the sales team. And there was this break between these marketers that are optimizing and what the sales team was doing. And so we wanted to try and bridge that gap and say, hey, we want to keep the marketing team involved through the whole journey here and allow them to split test that follow up process and say, hey, you know, when someone fills out that form. Should we follow up with the text message initially, or should we? Call them immediately. And if they don’t answer the phone, should we? Send them a text message afterward. And you know, we were designing all. These different sequence to find out the best combination of of ways to. Follow up with these people. And when you boil it down to it like. You know, we’ve had some customers say that, you know, for every percentage point. That we can increase their contact rate. That’s an extra million. Dollars in revenue for them a month. Right. And it seems like a, you know. A small increase. But when you think of, you know, how far it boils down to. You know, initially you look at, you know, your click through rate on your. AD and your conversion rate on your landing page. And you know. You’re looking at your your win rate on the sales side. But just. That small increase in getting someone on the phone makes a huge difference. And all this, this media spend that went into getting that person to fill out the form.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 19:24

So when they fill out the form, does the person determine what gets initiated. So for instance, they could immediately set an email. They can immediately send a text and they could immediately call dual pipes, do all three at once. Or will someone say, well, I really want them texting them first? I don’t know what’s like what’s your advice around how they should use it?

Eric Evans 19:50

Yeah. So there it’s not a one size fits all thing right. So we’ve got customers now in a number of different industries. And so what works best in, you know for example for HyperTarget, following up with people looking for attorneys might be a different process from someone who’s looking to remodel their home or someone who, you know, needs a pest control company to come out to their house immediately. Right. Like, what’s going to work best is different across those industries and also the media channels they came from. Right? Like the the way to follow up with somebody from a search ad is going to be a little different than how you’d follow up from someone who saw like a banner ad on Facebook or something like that. And so our customers can they can do as much or as little as they want, right? Our team will help them design these sequences and set up the split tests. But a lot of people, once they they get their hands on it, you know, they want to start tinkering and doing it themselves as well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 20:38

Well, let’s talk about the pie example. Will, will someone or when you’re setting it up for someone because you’re running them on the you’re running Pipes on the back end for them. I’m curious do you, you know, automatically initiate the email sequence and the text sequence and call or how do you how do you like to do it?

Eric Evans 20:59

Yeah. So our our software will, will automatically initiate the sequence. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s a trigger based system right. So we’re we’re integrating very deeply with people’s CRMs or whatever system they’re using. And you know, whatever trigger points, they want us to follow up that they don’t necessarily have the staffing or the resources or the time to to do on their end. You know, we’re going to automate those follow up processes and, and not just on the sales and lead gen side too. And so that’s where things have evolved to, to be more on the customer success side as well. And you know, it’s it’s everything we designed initially was was for customer acquisition. But what we found that even after people acquire their customers, they still have challenges following up on the customer success side, like doing customer satisfaction surveys, like in the home improvement space, you know, when a job is completed. A lot of times they weren’t following up those customers just to make sure that, you know, everything was great before all their subcontractors get paid. And almost like an NPS score, right? You can use pipes to to do that to to keep these people engaged. And additionally with renewals. Right. Like if it’s a subscription based model, you know, there’s there’s so much reactive work that needs to be done by customer success reps that a lot of times they don’t have time to do that proactive work. That’s arguably more important of scheduling those follow up meetings and just seeing how people were doing, doing those check ins, and so they can use pipes to automate those follow up processes that maybe they they get distracted or they get busy and they just don’t have time to do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 22:34

Yeah, I could see how it’s super valuable because it sends an email, but it also sends text and like, I don’t know, at least for me, I check 100% of my text messages. So I don’t like neglect the text message. Will it also call like how does it work as far as the calling piece goes?

Eric Evans 22:52

Yeah. So it’s really focused on everything with your phone. Right. So we integrate with email systems. We don’t natively send emails. We’re really focused on those phone engagements through sending text messages and making phone calls. And so yeah, it’ll it’ll make a phone call. We’ve got an AI voicemail detection that we’ve built. That’s one of those like under the hood, really cool features that, you know, isn’t necessarily something that people think about a whole lot. But, you know, we’ve got some really great technology just to determine if, if a human answers a phone or not, and what action we’re going to take with their voicemail, what action we’re going to take when they answer the phone. But yeah, when you answer the phone call, it’s a, you know, very realistic sounding voice that has a great personality and can handle objections and, and function just like.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 23:37

Really crazy.

Eric Evans 23:38

Call center rep would do. Yeah. So they’re having a.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 23:41

Conversation with the with the AI voice.

Eric Evans 23:46

They are. Yeah. I mean, so typically our scripting on those calls will sound something like, you know, hey, this is, you know, Jeremy, I’m the AI assistant for Rise25, and I’m just looking to get some information from you. And that can that can go a lot a few different directions. Right. If you’re trying to qualify that person for an appointment, you might eventually want to transfer them to a live person. Or if it’s just kind of a follow up survey, there might not be a transfer at the end. It’s more of a data collection tool to say, hey, you know, how was your experience with our podcast? You know, can you give us a rating on 1 to 10? We can then collect all that information and post it off to off to your CRM.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 24:26

That’s really cool. I want to hear the different use cases with it because there’s so many different use cases I could think of. Because it saves a lot of time and energy. And we were talking at one of the conferences we were at, and I had taken my car in or trying to make an appointment for service for my car, and it started off with like one of these kind of AI voice things, and it wasn’t really executing that good. And so, you know, I’m like, they should probably use pipes actually, but use case wise so I could see it for my attorneys. Like someone fills out a form, they can immediately call and gather information. They can text. The person feels like, wow, I mean, I’d be impressed, right? Like they emailed, they texted, and then they immediately called me. And then they can obviously transfer to a live person or just I mean, they already know the questions there. A live person’s going to ask at this point. So I could see what attorneys you’re mentioning Vivint when we were talking before. What talk talk about them and what how do they use it.

Eric Evans 25:37

Yeah. So they they’ve been using our software for a long time, one of our great customers. And they they have their internal marketing teams that are running advertising all over the internet and driving traffic to their websites. And they use us to handle that initial follow up process to make sure that they get those people on the phone in a timely manner. And basically change the experience for their their own call center. Right. To go from an outbound call center to an inbound call center where, you know, one of the the kind of things that’s hard to quantify is like the morale boosting effect that pipes has for call centers, where they spend a lot of time chasing people oftentimes and hitting voicemails or getting wrong numbers, or they finally get someone on the phone and they say they’re not interested. And so there’s there’s so much horsepower that’s put into just getting people on the phone to have good conversations. And pipes kind of flips the scripts for those companies where it’s it’s pipes is doing that hard work on the front end, and they’re just taking these inbound phone calls now that pipes is able to send to them.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 26:41

Interesting. Yeah. And then you were mentioning moving companies as well.

Eric Evans 26:47

Yeah. That’s been a huge success story for us is, you know, really all home services. But the moving and storage space has been great. We’ve got some some awesome customers like Ken Cohen from JK moving that have been with us for a long time and have really taken pipes to to new heights and done things with it that I never even envisioned. Right. It’s it’s it’s awesome to to build something like this and have customers engaged and seeing success with it and start utilizing it in ways that you never even thought of.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 27:17

From the SAS perspective. Eric, I’d love to hear, you know, obviously as people start to use it more and more in different industries, use it, you probably get a lot of feature requests. Some of them you can actually do. Some of them are like, well, let’s put it on the roadmap. It’s it’s only for you. Not everyone wants this. What are some maybe 1 or 2 feature requests that you were like, that’s a really good idea. And they helped you kind of expand the the product.

Eric Evans 27:46

Yeah, that’s I mean, that’s a challenge of every SaaS business is figuring out what lane you want to be in and where you want to stay. Right? If you try to be everything to everyone, all of a sudden you’re just mediocre at everything, right? And trying to to really hone in on what, you know, we’re, we’re going to be great at and what we want to provide, you know, the most value for. So yeah, we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from customers. A lot of times, you know, some of the best feedback we’ve gotten for customers has been, you know, improving the way we integrate with with other systems, right. Where for initially we were kind of a you know, we would we would say we were like a point solution that that was really easy to set up and kind of lived outside of what they were doing. But we really found that the biggest success for us is when we’re really deeply integrated with their systems, and we’ve got a really great webhook solution that we’ve built that’s come out of that to make it so that really non-technical people can hook up pipes to work back and forth with what they’re doing to make sure, you know, for example, if if someone tells our AI that they don’t want to be contacted anymore, that we connect with their system so that they’re not following up and vice versa, right? And getting getting these synchronous loops back and forth so that we work seamlessly with their, their own efforts.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:04

Yeah, I could see that the different integrations people want and then the communication between all the systems to make sure it works seamlessly. What are some challenges, you know, going in that you’ve discovered that if someone’s like, you know, the Holy Grail, I want a holy grail of a SaaS company. Obviously, there’s a lot of sometimes I’ve heard people talk about the grass is greener there, and there’s there’s still a lot of challenges, even though they accomplish the holy grail of having a SaaS company. What are some of the challenges that you wish you would have known before starting?

Eric Evans 29:43

Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, there’s a lot that happens under the hood that I didn’t know about. And so, you know, learning about DevOps, right. And all the things that go into scaling a software company. Right. It’s it’s not easy. But once you’ve got a working solution to the, the what needs to happen to go from, you know, just a couple beta customers and a couple small customers to saying, hey, we’re going to bring on some larger enterprise clients that are going to be doing this at a much different scale, and everything that goes into the architecture around that was a huge undertaking and a big learning curve for me, along with all the the security that goes into it. Right. Making sure that we’re compliant and, you know, up to date with all the everything we need to do for for larger companies to be compliant and integrate with their systems. So it’s it’s a lot and that’s a whole other part of it that that isn’t quite as it’s not really something you see. Right? It’s not the customer facing part of it. But it was a big undertaking and it’s still part of our growth journey, is making sure that the infrastructure is is rock solid.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 30:55

I’d love to hear Eric, some of your some resources, some of your favorite resources. The resources could be software, it could be tools. It could be books. You know, what are some favorite resources that have helped you on your journey?

Eric Evans 31:18

Yeah, I mean, I’m a huge fan of HubSpot these days. We use it ourselves, and we’re building some really cool integrations for pipes. You know, one of the things that’s going to be coming out soon is, is a native integration on the HubSpot marketplace to use pipes for your own data there. It’s not quite ready yet, but it’s something we’re working on. So, yeah, they’ve been a great ally and resource for us as far as books go. I mean, you know, I’m really a big believer in, you know, growing teams and building culture properly. And so yeah, there’s a there’s a handful of books that that stand out in my mind. I mean, probably my favorite book is one called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. You know, there’s a lot of concepts in there that stuck with me, and it’s just a great kind of story book. You know, a similar vein is another one called Built to Sell. And I really like books that are that are kind of these simple stories to follow along with as opposed to, you know, very detailed, kind of academic type type books. Right? Like there’s there’s a few books out there that just just tell a great story and it’s easy to read.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 32:27

So yeah, those are really good ones. I also like the Patrick Lencioni one because it’s I think if I remember, it’s much shorter. So it’s quick, quick to get through and and yeah, Built to Sell is fantastic. I did have John Warrillow on the podcast so people can check that episode out with John who wrote that, which is fantastic as well. What about mentors wise? It could be colleagues too, like colleagues you learn from in in EO. But who are some of your mentors? And we could talk about maybe some of the best advice or experience shares we should say that they gave you?

Eric Evans 33:08

Yeah, I mean, EO has been an amazing resource for me since I joined about, I mean, close to four years now. And just getting access to people who have have been through it. You realize that a lot of your challenges are not unique, right? And so many businesses, despite industry size, you know, segment whatever you want to call it. Like there’s there’s so many of the same challenges that people face. And so yeah, it’s been great. There’s a gentleman named Nate Little, one of the advisors to our company, who’s been a huge help for me and learning, you know, how to how to operate our company better. What does he do. Yeah. So he, he yeah, he he actually had an exit a couple of years ago and is now, you know, consulting with some businesses and starting his own new ventures. But you know, he he’s someone who did it right. Started a company, built up a SaaS business, you know, found his niche and, you know, was was able to have a successful exit. So it’s great to learn from people who have done it right. And that’s one of the concepts of of EO is experience sharing, right? Not just not just giving advice, but but actually telling your story and just sharing your own experience.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 34:20

Nate Little is a good one. Who are some other maybe EO Austin people we could see. Here’s Rich Walker here quick forms and he’s got the Customer Wins podcast. Who are some of the other EO Austin people you’ve learned from.

Eric Evans 34:36

Oh man there’s a lot another another gentleman named Jeff Carpenter has been a huge help for me and a lot of guys in my in my forum, you know, I’ve had a great experience learning from them. You know, Forrest Higdon and Donald Addington, a number, a number of guys that, you know, we all have such different companies. But just seeing the the struggles that they’ve gone through and the things that they’ve learned have, you know, helped me grow both as a person and in my businesses as well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 35:06

You know, Eric, I Eric, I want to talk about team. You mentioned culture and team is really important to you. What are some of the things you do in Pipes and HyperTarget Marketing to help maintain and foster great culture?

Eric Evans 35:23

Yeah. You know, it’s it’s evolved over the years. You know, years ago we had an office. And so it’s the the way you interact with people when you’re all coming into the office every day is, you know, it’s a little easier to have those, like those water cooler conversations. But, you know, since the pandemic hit, we’ve we’ve gone fully remote and the team is spread out all over the country and, you know, all over the world now. And so being able to maintain, you know, good working relationships while everyone’s spread out on different time zones, different schedules, different, you know, life experiences and places like that, that’s the biggest challenge is being able to main maintain a unified culture, you know, distributed. And one of the things that that didn’t mean a lot to me years ago and has become a much bigger part of, you know, how I maintain that culture. And it might sound simple, but it’s establishing core values that you really believe in and core values that you as an executive can, can actually demonstrate, right. Where I think those things tend to fall apart and culture can fall apart is when, you know, you tell your, you know, employees about these core values that are important to your company. But if you don’t demonstrate them right, it’s if you’re if your actions don’t demonstrate them, then then your words fall flat. And so that that’s been a really big part of it is that, you know, we think hard and believe in those core values and live them.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 36:54

What’s one important core value that was a must on on that on that list for you.

Eric Evans 37:03

Yeah. So High integrity actions is is probably my most important thing. And that’s, you know, something I say kind of sets us apart. You know, it’s I’d say especially in the lead generation industry where unfortunately, it doesn’t have the best reputation all the time, is that, you know, we’re we’re always going to behave with integrity, right? That’s one thing we stand behind and not just talking about it but but actually doing it right.And that goes to how we behave with each other, how we behave with our clients, with our vendors, just treating people with respect and high integrity and doing what you say you’re going to do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:38

Yeah. I’d love to hear some of the key hires you put in place from from the agency perspective. What? You know, because I know it started with just you. You created some websites. You made a couple thousand I love we won’t get into it now, but your thought process on really it speaks to your core value of high integrity and the way you chose the niche. And maybe at the time you didn’t identify it as that. But you’re like, at the time I’ve heard you talk about, okay, there’s these acai green tea, like kind of pills and supplements or we can help like a, you know, an actual large company get leads for the financial services or law firm. And, and I’m sure you maybe could have made some quick and easy money on some of these pills and potions, and you chose against that from a probably just a long term view. But at that time, it was just you, right? Talk about your key hires. Some of the key hires you put in place.

Eric Evans 38:41

Yeah. You know, I think initially most entrepreneurs have a tough time delegating. And when you’re first starting off, you you want to try and do everything yourself. And, you know, eventually you’ve got to start trusting people, right. And and offloading work that’s that, that they can do can do independently and not just, you know, like these, these initial lower level tasks. But how do you start offloading some of these higher level tasks that if they don’t go right, you know, could could have a negative effect on you and your business? And so, yeah, you know, a couple, you know, key hires I made were just, you know, account managers. I realized that I, I, I’m a builder. I’m not really a maintainer. And so, you know, maintaining those relationships with customers, you know, sometimes I would, you know, I’ll admit, like, even for what pipes does on the customer success side, I was I was struggling to, you know, to to keep those relationships and follow up with people in a, in a regular basis. And so hiring, you know, account managers that that were more relationship focused that that really liked doing that, you know, was a was a big step for us to, to growing and taking these not just bringing on these key accounts, but growing them as well. And then on the the operations.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 40:03

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. On the operations.

Eric Evans 40:05

Yeah, I mean I, you know, I’m, I’m a creative person at heart. You know, I came from, like you said, the movie industry. And, you know, I like building and tinkering. And so that doesn’t always mean I’m great at, you know, writing down all of these processes and establishing SOPs. And so I didn’t really see the value in doing that for for too long. So if I could go back in time, I would hire people who were who are, you know, much more aligned with documenting processes and streamlining things and making things more repeatable that can kind of kind of hone in on all these crazy ideas I have and create processes out of them. So those were that’s probably the biggest, you know, I would say if I could go back in time, I would I would hire ops people earlier before I realized I really needed it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 40:53

Yeah, I love it. There’s an episode I did with the founder of SweetProcess which there. So there’s a set there, a software that helps document SOPs. So if people want to check that episode out with Owen, it was a really fun one talking about just, you know, documenting process and how we use we process ourselves. And so we love it. It’s just an easy way for the team to find and create SOPs. So I love that. Eric. I wanted to be the first one to thank you. Everyone should check out Pipes.AI and you can check out hypertargetmarketing.com to learn more. And just I really appreciate you sharing your journey with everyone and we’ll see everyone next time. And Eric, thanks so much.

Eric Evans 41:42

All right. Thanks, Jeremy. Glad to be here.

Outro 41:43

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