Stop Buying Software, Start Buying Outcomes

00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now, let's get on with the show. Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Today, I'm joined by Dustin from Kansas City in the US. Dustin, welcome to the show.

00:00:30 Dustin Domerese
Hey Mark, so glad to be here today.

00:00:32 Mark Smith
Good to be talking to you. I love that you've just published a book and it's around a topic dead to my heart, CRM, ERP systems, interesting space. And I used to have a, and I'm going to be explicit here, I used to have a, in my first company, this was a company that I founded in CRM, Dynamics CRM back in the day. This is like 25 years ago. I had a, maybe not that long ago, maybe 20 years ago, I had a sign on the wall that said, when the big guys **** it up, feel free to give us a call. And that was because we were rescuing so many big CRM projects that millions have been sunk into, and then our little boutique agency would pick it up and solve it time and time and time again. And so your book kind of resonates. So with that in mind, food, family, and fun before we start, what do they mean to you?

00:01:26 Dustin Domerese
They're all connected, right? I mean, food and family, especially. Time with the family, especially mine. My kids are getting older now. So the only time that I can pin them down to actually spend time with mom and dad is when dad's buying dinner, I think. And so those two go hand in hand for sure. And just getting a chance to spend some time in their lives around the table is always a good thing. That's one thing that me and my family have always firmly believed in is like dinner time with the kids and with the family is one of those things that's non-negotiable. Like we try to do that as much as we can. And fun for me is all about traveling. I love getting the chance to see new places and see a lot of the stuff that we don't get to see in Missouri. And especially on the Kansas side, we like to make fun of them because it's all flat and corn. And fields and green, but it's fun to get out and visit new places.

00:02:27 Mark Smith
I love it. What have you been working on for the last 12 months? What's been your focus?

00:02:33 Dustin Domerese
Oh goodness. I mean, the last 12 months have been all about focused on the book. And as a part of that, reliving some of those old stories, Mark. Like I got my start at a Microsoft partner right out of a bootcamp program where I was a C#.NET developer. Very first job, this company was a Microsoft Great Plains back in the day, if you remember when it was called Great Plains.

00:03:00 Mark Smith
Yeah, exactly.

00:03:01 Dustin Domerese
Some of the old school folks out there will know exactly what we're talking about. And Microsoft was doing this new thing called CRM, and that was back when it came on the CDs, where you had to install it and do all the fun stuff.

00:03:15 Mark Smith
MSCRM, it was called back then.

00:03:17 Dustin Domerese
Yeah, MSCRM. And it was revolutionary, right, for Microsoft, especially, and they were finally going to start competing in that market. And They hired me. I don't know why, but they hired me right out of a boot camp program. They're like, well, it's got some C-sharp in there. Surely this guy can figure it out. And now 25 years later, here I am still doing Microsoft CRM. So I don't believe in accidents, but kind of fell into that part. And so with the book, it's been fun because I've been able to go back and relive some of the stories behind implementations that, quite frankly, did not turn out like I would have hoped. Like if I had it to do over again, how would I go back and do that implementation differently? But now we get a chance to do that for, like you said, some of the big firms that are out there that are still doing some of the same mistakes over and over, especially ERP, maybe not as much CRM these days, but a lot of ERP and CRM projects. And so just getting a chance to relive those stories was a pretty amazing journey and writing them all down and putting them in a book to share with some folks that I'm sure have lived through similar journeys is a fun time.

00:04:36 Mark Smith
You said that you had some C# and someone said there's some C# and CRM. So that's why, you know, do you know what? That is the reason we picked up so many projects, because what would happen is that a.NET team would come along, they would see CRM, they would see that, oh, we know how this is run, not a problem. And of course, one of the whole rules around the software development kit, as it was called back then, was you are not allowed to touch the code base. You have to go through the abstraction layer into it. And of course, what would these people do, the.NET and C# is, let's just jump in there. Let's just, and of course, we'd be called into project after project where the performance of the system was crazy slow. They would try and throw more hardware, because this is pre-cloud, right? Throw more hardware at it. That didn't solve it. Because they fundamentally didn't take the time to understand the software development kit and why there were specific constraints in place. And if you follow, you know, SQL injection was just the biggest crazy thing going on back then.

00:05:38 Dustin Domerese
Stored procedures and triggers on the tables. Yeah, you're right.

00:05:43 Mark Smith
Yeah. And And that's where we would be called in to solve those projects. I remember this one government agency that we were called into that in New Zealand had offices all over the world in the main, it was a trading-based agency. And just the performance was just ridiculous. You could, you know, click and then go have a cup of tea, a cup of coffee, and come back and, okay, we're at the next step type thing.Just crazy times. And we'd get, you know, called in for those scenarios. So tell me, What's the lesson learned from writing this all down? What are your takeaways? What are your observations around why projects have failed and continue to fail, as you say? And what do you got to get right to prevent those failures?

00:06:29 Dustin Domerese
That's it. I mean, I think you've seen Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, all the big players, you've seen their market cap, right? They're really good at software. And Quite frankly, I mean, the stuff you can do in Salesforce and the stuff you can do in Dynamics, I mean, there's so much parity now and across all of these platforms that so many people are still buying software like it's a software decision rather than a business decision. And I think it's a, I just look at all the case studies and it's just mistake after mistake. And we see it today. I mean, I'm sure the audience has seen it so many times, either writing or reading RFPs and someone looking for a system. I would like a system that solves this problem and has a great user interface. That's it. That's all you've got to go on. And yet Salesforce and Microsoft and partners are now required to go bid for that work with that type of terrible requirement. It comes down to outcome-based stuff. So I like to think about it as you're always solving one of four problems. You're either solving a problem of surveillance. Do I have the data in the same place every time? Are you solving a performance problem? I need to be able to track the analytics, the KPIs, the metrics. I'm solving a problem of excellence. I need everybody in my company to do the same thing the same way every time. Or you're trying to go to automation and trying to automate a process that maybe is already excellent or has great performance. And so you're really only trying to solve one of four business problems, but most organizations aren't even thinking in terms of what is the root of what I'm trying to solve. Instead, they're shopping for the best vendor that can do the best demo. they can get in and they can talk about how they have an amazing product that works well for financial services. And so you should buy our platform because we're built for financial services. And then when you get in, like it's just a bunch, it's five or six screens and a handful of fields that are different about that solution versus a solution that's more vertical or horizontal. And so I think just in general, the way people are selecting and buying and implementing software way back before the project ever starts seems to be so flawed. And I wonder if everyone would take the time to really think through what are the outcomes? I want to increase customer satisfaction scores. I want to reduce churn. I want to have better visibility into my budgets and be able to track expenses more accurately and do approvals across different departments of budget items. those kind of outcome, if you start there, the technology really doesn't matter as much anymore because you can solve that problem in so many different ways, especially Microsoft Power Platform. I mean, there's so much you can do with it. If it's a Canvas app, model app, like Power BI report, whatever you want to do, and Copilot's changing that even more, right, where you can then take and literally do anything. So That's a good problem to have, but organizations seem to trip over themselves a lot because they're not focused on outcome-based software. Instead, they're picking software based on vendor or partner and not necessarily looking at what are the outcomes that I want to try to achieve.

00:10:03 Mark Smith
It's interesting you say that and like the whole RFP process and how flawed it is. And when I think about in my career, how many implementations I've been involved with in CRM. And then oftentimes you're dealing with a company and perhaps a committee that's been formed in that company, the procurement team, to acquire this piece of tech that they have no experience. They've never done a project like this before, never understood it. And yet they're going to tell you, the person that has untold experience with it, how they should be how the interface should be and how this should be and how that should be. And I just find the further along you get in consulting career, the better you become at going, hey, that's cool, but this is what I know and I've done hundreds of these and this is your first one. I've got a lot more other value that I can bring here that you could be tapping into rather than your shopping list of features that need to be included. Have you come across that same type of thing where you need to go into much more the driver's seat and tell them what they need? Not that they're saying that the customer's not right, but this is their first rodeo.

00:11:23 Dustin Domerese
And there's two sides to that coin. I think the first side is like the RFP process that you mentioned and we were talking about earlier. Most of the time it's done by a procurement team. Yes, they've got stakeholders across various departments that are involved. But if you look at what they're actually asking for, many times it's a boilerplate set of requirements that they've copied from some vendor website or that they've written down based on something that an LLM has generated for them more than likely.

00:11:58 Mark Smith
That's it. It's getting worse now, right, with AI.

00:12:01 Dustin Domerese
It is. It really is. And no one's vetted those real requirements to try to determine if it's something that the business actually needs.

00:12:10 Mark Smith
Yeah. So Crystal, two weeks ago, sat down with a potential customer, went through their requirements, wrote a response to it, and they came back and said, oh, plus we want all that and that price. And I'm like, hang on a second, what you've prescribed there, I can tell you've just had AI go, how can we max it? and put all these features in. I said, but your budget was this, what you're asking for is, and I can tell you Tuesday, I had to write this and I bet you have no idea what you're asking for. And it's just getting nuts in that respect.

00:12:45 Dustin Domerese
It is. I mean, we won't even do those kind of projects anymore. Like we don't even bid on them. Like it's just, it's not worth it. And so what you have is you have the partners that have been through it the most. the ones that are most qualified to actually get results and see success happen are the ones bowing out of responding to the RFPs and the projects. So your highest qualified people are not even in the game because you've already excluded the highest quality. And if we think about it just in terms of like government RFPs, that's certainly not the best use of government funds, right? I mean, We want this project. We want a new ERP system. We see it all the time with counties and states here in the US where they submit an ERP RFP.And it's like, here's all the things that we want. Well, all of your partners that are actually qualified to do that bow out. And now you're left with the bottom feeders who are just trying to get a lowest rate and they'll promise you anything. And best of luck. Most of the time we pick up those projects two years later after they've never launched.

00:13:52 Mark Smith
They've gone through so many CRs, right?

00:13:54 Dustin Domerese
Yeah.

00:13:55 Mark Smith
Change requests, and the project started off, let's say a million, and they're now at 3, 4 million, and they're like, no end insight. I was involved in a project two years ago, and it had reached $30 million and nothing was deployed.

00:14:08 Dustin Domerese
Wow.

00:14:09 Mark Smith
Was it a government agency? Yes, it was. Just nuts, nuts. I think the company working for them was billing 1/4 of a million a week to them.

00:14:21 Dustin Domerese
And here's the little part that most people don't know is there's generally about four layers involved there, right? You've got your prime contractor that comes in and wins the deal because they've got their name on the paper, even though they have no experience doing the technology. F&O or finance and operations is the world's worst as far as you'll get a big firm that goes out there and puts their name on paper and says, yes, we're submitting for this RFP. Here's what this F&O implementation is going to cost you. They've never done an F&O implementation in their life, but they have partners that have, and it's a network, and they'll bring in smart people, and they're just confident they're going to figure it out. Well, three layers deep, the end client is paying for all of those markups along the way in order to get to the actual qualified individual who's going to go do the project. And you're paying three or four times what you should have been paying if you would have just selected a qualified firm. out of the gate. But what's the old saying that no one ever gets fired for picking IBM or something like that?

00:15:30 Mark Smith
So I'm ex-IBM, as you are.

00:15:32 Dustin Domerese
Okay, there you go. Yeah.

00:15:34 Mark Smith
And I did three years in IBM. And I saw this at a scale that just, you know, mounted my face type thing. Is that how you could take the cost to do something, to implement an outcome. And I remember with one customer, I was like, hey, we could do this really agilely. We could, maybe two people, we can deliver this. And they were like, what? Oh, no, Minimum, we have scope that minimum A-team always needs nine people in it. It needs nine people, and it needs to be a minimum of six weeks for this type of feature release. And you're just like, the cost to value ratio is just off the Richter scale negative. And then in IBM, you would have A consultant charges X, their manager would put the tax on because they need to be utilized. So they're going to utilize by leveraging consultant one and two to overlap hours. Then the office director needs to put their cut on. Then the state director needs to put their cut on. Then the region director puts. And then what you get is this much value, but with this much overhead that has no value to the customer apart from If you buy IBM, if you go blue, you won't get fired. And it's just like, I think that's well gone, as in that construct, as in believing that IBM, if you hire them, because it's just, there's been so many failures that have come out of them. But isn't that nuts, as in from a cost to value ratio on something and how the consulting industry has just become this tax on tax on tax on tax of headcount that has nothing to do with the project?

00:17:18 Dustin Domerese
Consulting's all about the people, right? I mean, you get the right people with the right experience in the room that have the right methodology. You don't have to pay for those layers. And it's amazing to me. But so my first company that I started, I left the Microsoft partner that originally hired me. And when I started my own thing, we were a partner to partner consulting firm. staff aug and white label partners, and we still do, we still have those relationships with some of those partners that we had for decades. But what I found is every one of those partners, and we've worked for hundreds of them in some form or fashion, they all have their secret sauce, and it's never a secret sauce. It's always about getting the right talent in the right room to solve the right problem. And Like the methodology is great. We have our methodology. I could go on and on about how it makes it so much better than everyone else's. But the truth of the matter is like having people that have been there before, done it, know where all of the gotchas are in the tech and in the business process. Yes, It's the most important thing.

00:18:37 Mark Smith
So interesting talking to you, being that our careers have so many overlaps. Let's talk about AI and what you're seeing in the consulting landscape. What are you seeing? How are you seeing AI changing the role of a consultant, the role of your dev resource as part of your consulting team, the role of functional consultant, the role of architecture? Is it changing or is it staying the same or is it too soon to tell?

00:19:11 Dustin Domerese
It's changing for sure. And I think to take those layers and think about what it takes to make up a good project team, I mean, AI in my mind is now to the developer what the introduction of a tool like Visual Studio was to the developer in the 90s. I don't know off the top of my head when it was released, but it felt like it was sometime in the 90s. Maybe it wasn't. But I mean, I remember hearing the old school developers going, Yeah, this is never going to work. Like you got to compile it manually and you've got to write the code. What do you mean you can see that the button, what the button's going to look like before compile? Like what do you mean an IDE? That's not a thing. Like that's not real development. But what it did was it accelerated the time to value, like we were talking about earlier, for software and systems. And yeah, the old school guys and gals that were writing code, like they were resistant for tools like that could make their lives easier. But eventually they came along and it accelerated things. It made the good developers really good and it made the bad developers a lot faster. And I think we're seeing the exact same thing. A client can see through a consultant that has experience who is using AI tools versus one that has no experience using AI tools right off the bat. I mean, they're going to make ridiculous suggestions that clearly are AI. Like, we all know when an e-mail is being written by AI. Like, you can just read it and know, like, especially if you know the human, they didn't write that. I know them. Like, that's not the way we would truly interact if we were having a a conversation. And I think the systems are no different. And the technology and consulting especially is really no different. It's amazing tools though, right? I mean, we've never had tools like this at our disposal in all of our careers. But it's going to end up creating a gap. My fear is it's going to create a divide that's even bigger than there is today. And you know, your great consultants are going to become really great. and your consultants that are not so good and they're a little lazy and they don't really put in the effort or the time and don't really have the experience to be in the position that they're in, they're just going to be able to hide it longer and that could be a problem. So I love the changes. In fact, I mean, just the way that you can use the tools to do the mundane tasks. I mean, think about how long we used to spend building a PowerPoint pitch deck in order for a demo or a client presentation. And now you can actually just put your thoughts out there on Notebook LM or something else, and you've got a great slide deck overnight. And that part to me is really where consulting is going to shine. Because we can take the things that are in our heads and all the years of experience, and we can articulate it and tell the story a whole lot cleaner now with a lot less manual effort than I think we used to have to put into it. And that's the biggest thing for me.

00:22:45 Mark Smith
With the consultants, and I've always define my consulting teams in three categories, even though there might be many different nuances. And I put project management to one side because that's its own specialty, and even the design thinking process, that's its own thing, and change management. Let's put those three over there. But I've always had architects, functional consultants, and developers are kind of the three things. And if I design functional, I can take business requirements and translate it into the technology low-code. right? MSCRM was the original low-code platform long before, 10, 12, 13 years before the Power Platform became what it was. Then you've got your developers that do everything where the edges finish in the platform, right? The extensibility story, data orchestration, triage, et cetera. And then your architects that should have end-to-end understanding of why all this tech is tying into business processes. And so I'd keep it simple to those three things. But when I look now, I am under the fundamental belief that low-code, the reason low-code was developed was that we couldn't get enough technical developers to build a solution. And also, I will also say this, that it provide the plumbing, the infrastructure, the... underpinning of any software development, like your security model, like your integration layer, like your UI, you didn't have to rethink that every time you built a new solution. That was great. But I'm now feeling that the speed to do something with a WYSIWYG experience, a drag and drop, you know, decorative design out, is now slowing down the speed you can go at if you just want to create software that still has all that plumbing because it's so standardized now that you can just bring in those components as you need. But to deploy a piece of software is way quicker now, I feel, from the command line than mucking around with, let's type the name of that field in and drag that box and create that table and put these field type on the table. AI can handle all that. It can tell this is the type of field you're doing. So therefore, I'm going to choose the correct database entry for that. Like, how is that? Like, I just feel like for me personally, low-code is dead. Because I agree. Pro-code, developer-assisted pro-code is far faster, cleaner. The software runs at a high efficiency rate because it doesn't have the let's create a software layer that suits any type of scenario. Now I can just strip that away and just say, no, what is my business scenario? And I don't need 50,000 different redundant features that I'm never going to use, but I'm paying for.

00:25:42 Dustin Domerese
Think about this thing. It's an incredible debate that I had with a client actually the other day. It was all in good fun and we were kind of brainstorming back and forth, but they were in a very specific energy space that required contract management and pricing that was very unique. to their business. And their comment was, we have evaluated every ERP system out there and nothing does this thing. But we don't, we have two choices, right?We can either implement core ERP, we can then build, get an add-on that would add in and handle that and probably have to change it a little bit. Or we could go buy some off-the-shelf product that says that they work for our industry and probably pay the vendor. a little bit of money to make it work for us. And my argument was, well, there's a third option now, and that is use a tool like a Business Central and literally vibe code your own add-on. So you've got the foundational layer done. Like, guess what? We've been calculating debits and credits the exact same way for decades now. We don't need to reinvent how we're doing core accounting. But the way you price, the way you quote, some of those very unique things, instead of going trying to buy an off-the-shelf product, you can now vibe code add-ons to core products. And thinking about the ISV community and how this is going to change the way clients view the ISV community, I think is

is going to be the biggest fundamental change. I mean, Microsoft Business Central and Finance and Operations, they're always going to be there because no one, even if they could vibe code their own ERP system, there's no CFO in the world that's going to say, yeah, let's put our company on that.

00:27:33 Mark Smith
Yeah, but the last ISV I looked closely at was out of Europe and it was for a bank in Australia and they had, they've got this They had built it under Dynamics, a full banking overlay for, let's say, business banking and personal banking. When I looked at it, I was like, did I just go back 10 years? Like the interface was like, I can't remember, I remember CRM3 and four looking like this. And I find that now the amount of technical debt you get with an ISV, And then they're going, but we can make those changes you want, but we own it. Like it's going to roll into our code base. It's going to be ours. And it's going to take us four months to get our ISV solution now on parity to where we need to be technologies. And I'm just like, why would we need to go through you owning all that technical debt by charging us for it? The ability for me to build the software from scratch now, I'll own the technical debt or the code-based maintainability, but man, I've got some cool tools now that I can maintain that in a 24-hour, always on, always validating, always testing, always improving type scenario. I don't want the ISV solution anymore.

00:28:52 Dustin Domerese
I think it's going to really create some upheaval. in the ISV community. I think we're going to see that over the next few years. I think we're going to see more change in that field than we do to the big software players. You know, Microsoft, Salesforce, they're all going to have their own tools.

00:29:11 Mark Smith
They're going to need to pivot, but because, you know.

00:29:15 Dustin Domerese
Yeah, they are.

00:29:16 Mark Smith
I think that what small and medium businesses can do now with let's use the term vibe code, they can produce. Now, you got to know, like, I've produced a lot of stuff in the last three months, but I have a history in the space. I know the tech. I know what good looks like. I know what I want to do. I want to, you know, I want to run a zero trust architecture. I know how to talk about stuff like that. And so therefore build it into my solution, put that robustness, you know, securing my APIs, all this type of thing. The thing is, I think we're less than 18 months away from you being able to take an enterprise-built application. I'm not necessarily saying SAP or F&O or something like that, but we're getting very close. I saw a company recently that decided to take on COBOL, refactoring COBOL to modern language with AI. And they're already being valued at over a billion dollars because they're doing it. right? There's no COBOL developers left alive, right? It's all part, they've either retired or they're pushing up, you know, daisies. But now you can have AI fully understand COBOL and go, hey, let's refactor that entire code base into a modern language. We've got forward grade ability. We now have APIs because we never had them there before. All these kind of great things. I feel that it's going to come after the enterprise SaaS space as well.

00:30:49 Dustin Domerese
It will. And if we think about the legal ramifications of some of this, I mean, we've been around a while. I'm pretty sure both of us could pop open a piece of software, grab some screenshots, throw that in to, you know, clawed code, And we could have an app that looks just like the other app and functions pretty darn close to it.

00:31:15 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:31:16 Dustin Domerese
So what is to stop a client from doing that? I mean, obviously you've got add-ons like tax and things like that have a lot of guts behind the scenes. You're not going to replace that overnight. But there's a lot of them that are just tables and fields specific for an industry. And you can replace that stuff so easily.

00:31:35 Mark Smith
So I bought a full CRM last week.

00:31:38 Dustin Domerese
Nice.

00:31:38 Mark Smith
Right. taken all my experience. I defined, part of my parameters was I didn't want to give it any historic stuff because I said CRMs are fundamentally based on 25-year-old thinking. The world doesn't operate like that. CRMs didn't know social media, didn't even have e-mail at that point back then. And I said, if we were looking at doing, and this is the conversation, I'm in planner mode with Opus 4.6, and I'm going through this. And I created a full headless, deployed in Azure system that is fast, zero cost to me now. I've built it. I don't want to sell it to anybody. This is for me, right? My business. And that's what I'm saying. I'm a small business, but I think that is going to be available to large businesses within 18 months. And to take really complex things, because I don't go, oh, listen, understand. For my crimes in my past, I built a payroll system inside Dynamics CRM for a company. And this was pre-2008, the global financial crisis. Now, it hurt me. In fact, I had to bring in investors into my company that I had a Dynamics practice at the time because the company they built it for couldn't pay their bills because the GFC hit and that they lay off so many staff and stuff. So And that was enough to screw me over. But I'd built this payroll system inside Dynamics, which was just stupidity back then. But now I can go and say to an LLM, ingest the entire tax code that I sit under. And in New Zealand, we're a country that's not 200 years old, right? As in our legal Our legal books were in the UK would be a library on a subject. Ours is one book or a pamphlet. It's way lighter. And so I couldn't just say, listen, go to our revenue agency, read everything, understand it. And now this is the type of business I'm in. Optimize, make sure I'm never at legal risk. Go for it. And it's not going to have that legacy baggage of, we've always done it this way. This was written because the tax code was like this 15 years ago, even though it's been superseded, we've still got that feature in there. You know, the amount of features in Dynamic CRM or sales, you know, customer service, whatever, that are from 25 years ago that are never used, but part of the data model because someone might use it. It's just, I think it's, we're in a fast changing space.

00:34:23 Dustin Domerese 
I think 18 months is the right timeframe. I mean, we see the iterations of these things moving so fast that there's no way it slows down.I mean, energy consumption is the biggest fear, right? Can we keep up with compute power and energy across all of these new data centers coming up all over the world? The fact that we're talking about that now, 25 years ago, that certainly would not even have been close to a conversation that we would have had of our biggest limitation being the amount of data center and energy available.It's a wild time. I love it though. It's fun. This is the most fun I've had in my career in the last 10 years. It's been boring the last 10 years.  This is amazing.

00:35:13 Mark Smith 
Tell you my 2 takeaways from building the CRM. was I distilled everything down to really two, let's use old terms like entities or table types, but it's not that. It's much more than that. Is everything comes down to a person and a signal?

00:35:30 Dustin Domerese
I like it.

00:35:31 Mark Smith
And it's that simple. And that was the riff I'd got off it. Sure, I have dashboards. Sure, I have automation. Sure, I have... But it really comes down to being that simple. And even things like... I've used LinkedIn Sales Navigator tools like this for years, and when my subscription runs out on Sales Navigator next month, I'll never use it again. Because I can, if I'm using a Gemini model, I can get more data-rich, real-time understanding of an individual than what their LinkedIn profile will give me.

00:36:05 Dustin Domerese
It's true. And I mean, you can do then crazy things like, create a FBI profile of this individual and tell me the right way to sell to them. And I mean, it's getting wild.

00:36:18 Mark Smith
Using psychology in the mix, I have definitely used that in my prompts.

00:36:21 Dustin Domerese
Of course.

00:36:23 Mark Smith
Take a psychological approach to actually addressing this or how should I engage or what are their points? Do they prefer more technical engagement?Do they want it more high level? Like the analysis you can have at your fingertips just based on their digital exhaust that exists out there is crazy.

00:36:40 Dustin Domerese
I mean, think about this. 20 years ago, the biggest requirement that I remember seeing from a CRM system was, can you tell me who my competitors are? And then it would be like, yes, I can.Look, here's this little competitor subgrid on the form. You can click and add them in. And they were like, this is amazing.

00:36:58 Mark Smith
And you can add the SWOT analysis, the one-off static SWOT analysis.

00:37:02 Dustin Domerese
Yeah, And now it's like, I can not only tell you who your competitors are, but I'm telling you who they should be. And probably what their pricing is based on reading all of the data that I can find in public RFP responses. and everything else, I can tell you where they're going to come in at price, and it's just mind-blowing. I couldn't even imagine being a sales manager.

00:37:25 Mark Smith
No. You can often tell what their problems are, too.

00:37:29 Dustin Domerese
Yeah.

00:37:30 Mark Smith
Like, you can go in there, I bet you're struggling with this, and this, and they're like, how did you know? Yeah, isn't that incredible? Just in what you can do with industry analysis. Dustin, it's been great talking to you. If people want to grab your book, where can they find it? We'll make sure we get it in the show notes.

00:37:46 Dustin Domerese
Yeah, thanks, Mark. It's on Amazon right now. It's called Last Chance to Launch. I've got a picture right here. Maybe it'll zoom in.

00:37:53 Mark Smith
You can see it.

00:37:55 Dustin Domerese
Nice, But yeah, it's available on Amazon. I'm excited that you get a chance for everybody to let me know what you think about it. It's a lot of fun.

00:38:03 Mark Smith
Awesome. And if people want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

00:38:05 Dustin Domerese
DynamicConsultantsGroup.com or you can hit me up on LinkedIn. Either way, Dustin Domorice on LinkedIn.

00:38:12 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffee.com forward slash nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the starts.