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CEO at American Truck Training | Chairman at Commercial Vehicle Training Association | BOD at State Chamber of Oklahoma
Ready to take your business to new heights? One of the biggest roadblocks to growth can be outdated tools that can’t keep up with your ambition.
This is especially true for mission-critical systems like your CRM.
You need a solution that scales alongside you, not hold you back.
In this episode of Closing Time, Jerome Redmond, CEO of American Truck Training (ATT), shares his inspiring story of how Insightly’s scalable CRM helped him haul his business from “zero to multi-millions.”
ATT, a commercial driver’s license (CDL) training school in Oklahoma City, was founded to address the growing need for skilled truck drivers.
Jerome, an Insightly customer since 2012, dives deep into the value that Insightly CRM + AppConnect has brought to his business. He’ll reveal the top reasons why Insightly has become the engine driving his success and how it can help your company shift into high gear, too!
American Truck Training, a commercial driver’s license training group, has been working with Insightly since 2012. Over a decade ago, CEO Jerome Redmond discovered Insightly through online research and felt it was the perfect fit for his needs.
Jerome’s story is particularly remarkable because he started his business with no formal education in entrepreneurship. Insightly’s user-friendly platform made it possible for him to build his company from the ground up. “Insightly allowed me to start a business. I want to make that clear. It was simple enough to where I can start a company, not know what I’m doing,” Jerome emphasizes.
Today, American Truck Training has trained thousands of truck drivers and manages tens of thousands of leads, all thanks to the tools and support provided by Insightly.
The simplicity and ease of use of Insightly were crucial for Jerome, especially as a first-time business owner. He highlights that anyone can start and grow a business with Insightly, regardless of their background or experience. Insightly’s resources, including video tutorials and Insightly University, offer comprehensive guidance, making it easy for self-starters to learn and implement business strategies quickly.
Jerome’s success with American Truck Training has also opened doors to leadership opportunities beyond his company. He serves on the board of directors for the Commercial Vehicle Training Association, an influential group representing trucking schools nationwide. His success and recognition in the industry, partly due to Insightly’s support, led to him speaking before Congress. Jerome discussed important legislative matters, including a bill to help fund truck driver training, showcasing his influence and leadership.
Additionally, Jerome is on the board of the state chamber of Oklahoma, alongside leaders of major corporations. Despite the modest size of his company compared to multibillion-dollar enterprises, his presence on the board reflects the significant impact and respect he has earned in the business community. Jerome credits much of his success to the robust tools and support from Insightly, saying, “Your company, in my personal opinion, is only as good as the tools used to help it grow. And in my case, it was Insightly that helped me grow my company to, like I said, a multimillion-dollar corporation.” Jerome’s story demonstrates that a business can elevate to new heights with the right resources.
CRMs like Insightly are built to integrate seamlessly with other critical tools that run your business. What sets Insightly apart from others is how these integrations are built, tested, and managed.
Most CRM integrations require extensive coding, developer help, and long development cycles. On the other hand, Insightly AppConnect is a powerful, drag-and-drop integration platform that empowers anyone on your team to build, test, and run integrations without complex code.
Jerome explains that many businesses resort to layoffs when looking to cut costs. Instead, he leveraged AppConnect to streamline operations. “I was able to utilize AppConnect and some of the other components to help my workflow to where it’s made us more efficient,” Jerome says. By using these tools, he didn’t need to replace employees who left, as the apps filled in the gaps, saving on expenses and creating a more efficient workflow.
A standout example of this is the integration with RingCentral, their voice-over-IP phone service. Jerome discovered that RingCentral’s direct connection with Insightly could enhance their communication processes. “Being able to take my phone calls in and out from Insightly through RingCentral was great,” he explains. This integration not only streamlined phone calls but also ensured that calls and text messages were automatically recorded and added into Insightly.
Jerome credits Insightly’s team for helping to set up these integrations seamlessly, allowing them to maximize the platform’s potential. These advancements have enabled American Truck Training to operate more smoothly and cost-effectively, ultimately driving better experiences for their customers.
As a manager, having visibility into your sales team’s activities and tasks is crucial for maintaining productivity and ensuring that goals are met. This oversight allows you to monitor progress, provide timely support, and identify areas for improvement, ultimately driving better performance and success for the team.
Jerome highlights how Insightly’s tasks and calendars play an essential role in keeping his team organized and efficient. He explains that task management is a critical feature for his sales team–after a call or text with a client, they can immediately set a task for the next follow-up action. This task then serves as a reminder, ensuring no prospect or client interaction is forgotten.
Jerome finds this particularly useful for staying informed about ongoing deals. “If I want to check in on a deal, all I have to do is select where I can follow that task,” he explains. Changes or updates to tasks trigger email notifications, keeping Jerome in the loop without constant check-ins. “As a business owner, we’re religious about our emails. So, I’m getting constant updates from Insightly saying, ‘Hey Jerome, look what Joe over here is doing with this lead.'”
In addition to task management, managing calendars through Insightly has proven invaluable for Jerome and his team. Jerome, a visual person, appreciates the ability to see his team’s schedules at a glance. “We utilize colors and other spreadsheets that represent each salesperson,” he says. This color-coding helps him quickly assess activity levels. “If there’s a bunch of yellow for Joe, the salesperson, I know he’s busy. If not, he might need to step it up.”
Events and appointments are also tracked through Insightly’s calendar, allowing Jerome to see who is scheduled and when. This visibility helps him ensure the team stays on track and busy. “If the calendar is a little light, I can say something to our team and maybe offer a bonus to motivate them,” Jerome adds. The combination of tasks and calendars in Insightly provides a robust system for maintaining productivity and oversight.
Every business is unique, and the right CRM should adapt to meet your specific business needs (not the other way around).
Jerome’s business generates revenue from three main sources: cash customers, B2B transactions, and grants or agency funding. To manage these diverse streams effectively, Jerome has customized Insightly with specific dropdown menus for each category. This setup allows his sales team to easily select and categorize each transaction, making data management seamless.
This customization means Jerome can quickly generate reports and understand the financial health of his business. “I can see exactly what’s going on with finance, B2B, and agency funds,” Jerome says. By breaking down the data into these specific buckets, he can identify which areas are performing well and which need more attention. “If 20% of my business is coming from one source and only 5% from another, I know where to focus my efforts.”
Insightly’s flexibility doesn’t stop there. Jerome notes that there are still many more features and customizations to explore. “We’re not done yet. There’s still plenty more to add into Insightly to make things even better for our company and give us more visibility,” he adds. This ongoing ability to adapt and enhance the system ensures that American Truck Training can continue to grow and optimize its operations.
We have the CEO of American Truck training here today. And I really think this story is so fantastic because this customer has been with Insightly and grown with Insightly almost since Insightly became a company. So let’s explore more during this episode of Closing Time. Thanks so much for tuning in to Closing time today. I’m Melinda Prescher, Insightly’s director of Product and Customer Marketing. And today I have the pleasure of hosting a special customer. Spotlight edition of Closing Time. Whether you’re a weekly listener, an Insightly customer or both, you’ll find useful takeaways on how to get the most from Insightly. All right, Now, without further ado,. I want to welcome our guest, Mr. Jerome Redmond,. CEO of American Truck Training. Thanks so much for joining me today, Jerome. I’m glad to be here. We’re really so excited to have you and to kick things off. Let’s have you talk a little bit about American truck training and how you got started with Insightly. Sure. So basically, American truck training is a commercial driver’s license group. So we train the big truck drivers. We got started with Insightly back in about 2012 when you guys were fairly new,. I think, to the industry of CRM as well. And, you know, I researched the Internet and found what I felt was the best fit. And we’ve been with you ever since. And it’s just been a joy because to watch not only you guys grow, but I was able to grow alongside you and build our company to to having, you know, tens and tens of thousands of leads that we work and thousands of folks we’ve trained. And it started from zero with you. I mean, Jerome, your story is really good because it shows how in partnership with Insightly, you’ve really been able to do some great things with your company. I’d love to have you dive a little deeper into how Insightly has helped you grow. Well, here’s the big thing I want people to understand is that I this was also my first real business, too. So I’m a guy with no formal education as it relates to owning and starting a business. Insightly allowed me to start a business. I want to make that clear. It was simple enough to where I can start a company, not know what I’m doing. Yeah, and. And build it into what it is today, you know? And now we’re expanding into the markets like Houston, and we’re also expanding into a markets like Tulsa here, just literally found the property the other day. And so this is all built from Insightly so you don’t have to know anything about business. You don’t even have to know anything about, Insightly will help guide you and give you a reference points through video, through Insightly University, all these things that all these extra things that you can learn from your success manager or from Insightly support, or you can just, if you’re like me, a self-starter, you can just grab some videos online on YouTube and listen to it and know how to do it within minutes. You know, it’s really great to hear that Insightly has helped support your success as a small business owner and help you grow. I think for you specifically, you’ve also mentioned that you’ve had some really great leadership opportunities, even beyond your company, that have really helped you expand the profile of what you all do. And I’d love to hear you talk about that. Sure. So if I were famous for something, you know, it would be I utilize my resources, any resource I have. So I leverage Insightly to give me back, to buy me back some of my time, obviously. Right. And with that time, I was able to serve on the board of directors for, and I still serve on that board, for the Commercial Vehicle. Training Association. And what that is, is the association for all trucking schools throughout our nation. And because of our success, you know, with the help of Insightly, I was deemed as a leader in the industry, didn’t think of myself as a leader in the industry, maybe a leader in my block or in my in my city, but in the nation. And that opened the door for me getting to speak to Congress through the Ways and Means Committee, literally on the same day they voted in the last Speaker of the House, which was a lot of turmoil above that. I won’t go into all of that detail, but it was great to sit there in the halls of Congress, give a speech and spend literally 6 hours going back and forward. And now they’re looking at very highly likely passing this bill that will allow folks to get more, you know, help folks get paid for training. And it’s just been great. And then also the other board. I chair of, the chair of I’m sorry, but I’m on this board for the state chamber of Oklahoma, which is another similar political type deal. Where it’s the biggest and the best companies in the state of Oklahoma sit on this board. I mean, multibillion dollar corporations. Then there’s me, which makes me laugh because I’m like, they know my company doesn’t do billions, right? But I’m still on this board. And some would say, hey, you know, well, Jerome is maybe because of this, maybe it’s because of that. Well, honestly, your company, in my personal opinion, is only as good as the tools used to help it grow. And if in my case, it was Insightly that helped me grow my company to like I said, a multimillion dollar corporation. Jerome, you bring up such an important point about how important it is to have the right technology in your tech stack to help you do the things you need to do to run your business. And so I’d like you to talk maybe do a double click. On how Insightly has really helped you and what are you actually using within Insightly to to help drive great experiences for your customers? Sure. Well, some of the newer technologies, like AppConnect, I suspect that a lot of other business owners are looking for ways to save money and cut down on their expenses. So in a lot of companies, what they do and I just I won’t mention a company, but I heard of a major company laying off 346 people today, whereas what I did in my case, instead of doing, you know, some massive layoff or something like that,. I was able to utilize AppConnect and some of the other components to help my workflow to where it’s made us more efficient, so I don’t need, so as a, say for us if someone did leave our company, I didn’t have to replace them with someone. I allowed the apps that I utilize with AppConnect to fill in the gap. If that makes sense. I just want to make sure that the folks around can understand that it’s not so much just adding AppConnect it’s what AppConnect can do to kind of help save on expenses. And help create a better workflow and more efficiencies within your company. For instance, RingCentral. RingCentral is our voice over IP phone service that we utilize. I had no idea that by just looking at AppConnect and as I was researching RingCentral, part of my decision for going to RingCentral because it was a direct connection. So being able to take my phone calls in and out from Insightly through RingCentral was great. And then so now my calls are recorded and added into Insightly. And now with the help your team was able to code it right to make sure that even my text messages go into Insightly. So that’s just one thing that we utilize to make Insightly work even better for us. You know, Jerome, one of the things that we talked about before is just how Insightly makes it really easy to stay on top of all of the activities that your team has going on. You’re really busy.. Your team is really busy. Talk a little bit about task management. Sure. Sure. So one of the things that is really great for my sales team and as far as me as well is that we use tasks. And tasks, how it works is that you, whenever you get off the phone call with a person or you finished up text messages, you can set a task for your next thing that you need to do with that particular client or prospect. So you set a task and the task can remind you when to work with that person again, or have another conversation about what we’re selling. And if I want to check in on a deal, all I have to do is select where I can follow that task. And so any time that task has some type of change or adjustment, let’s say, for instance, the salesperson says, Hey, I’m going to call that person or they’re going to pay for school or whatever this situation or whatever the thing is that they have to remember, it also emails me and keeps me apprised of what’s going on. So it’s kind of nice. I don’t keep asking that person. Oh, how is this deal going?. What’s going on here? What’s going on? Well, it just sends me an email, just sends me an email. And as a business owner, you know, we’re religious about our emails, right? So I’m getting constant emails from my team. That’s not actually from them, it’s from Insightly saying, Hey, Jerome, look what Joe over here is doing with this with this lead. I just want to keep you in the loop, okay? And I’m like, Thanks Insightly. Jerome. I think the other thing, in addition to tasks that is really helpful is everybody is just so busy today. We have things coming at us from all over the place. You mentioned trying to make sure not only you’re staying on top of the business, but that, you know, making sure you know what’s going on with your team. What about other things like managing calendars and so on? Is there anything you’d add there? Sure. Well, managing calendars for us has been a really good thing because I’m a very visual person. So when I see, like my team’s calendar, it obviously lets me know that they’re busy. And so we utilize colors and other spreadsheets and other things that we’ve had for that represents each salesperson. So like one salesperson is green, one salesperson’s yellow, one person. So in Insightly,. I can customize the color of the person. So whenever, whenever I go to look at the calendar and say, Joe, the salesperson is in yellow, I can just see if there’s a bunch of yellow. I know he’s okay, right? If there’s not a bunch of yellow that I know, he might need to step it up a little bit. So we use events as our calendar for our appointments. So when they set an appointment, person comes in, I can tell on the calendar who’s where and who’s coming. And so if the calendar is a little light coming up in the next day or so, I can actually say something about it to our team and say, Hey, come on guys, let’s get some more on the calendar and or maybe possibly sometimes write a SPIFF or some type of bonus to kind of get them to move a little bit. That was great. So, Jerome, we hear so often that customers really love the flexibility of Insightly and just how easy it is to customize Insightly to the unique needs of their business. I’d love to have you talk about how you’ve customized Insightly and make it work for you. Really good question. We have been able to do a lot of customization. The one that really strikes out is, the way my business is built is you can kind of summarize it into three different main revenue sources, cash customers your B2B business-to-business, you have your financing, and then you have your like grants and things of that nature, agencies that help pay for school. And so with that, you know, you have those buckets. Then for me, I like to get a little technical, but I won’t go too technical now for this. But I have so many dropdowns from each one of those to be able to, so my sales team can select, you know, a specific either company specific way to go, specific way of financing. And now it’s all easy for me to just click a button and see a report on everything that’s happening within my company so I know exactly what’s going on with finance. I know exactly what’s going on with B2B,. I know exactly what’s going on with my agency folks because I can say, oh 20% of my business is coming from this bucket. Oh, only 5% is coming from this one. You know, maybe I should figure out what to do and get that 5% up. So it’s just, and the crazy thing about it is we’re not done yet. There’s still plenty more to to add into Insightly to make things even better for our company and give us more visibility. That’s great. Jerome, thank you so much for these insights and for joining the show. If our audience wants to learn more about American truck training, how can they do so? Well, Easily. You can go to AmericaLovestrucking.com. That’s Americanlovestrucking.com Learn more about how to get your commercial driver’s license and how we put people to work and serve our community. And thanks so much to all of you for tuning in. Again, remember to like this video. Subscribe to the channel and ring the bell for notifications so don’t miss an episode. We’ll see you next time on Closing Time.
