Revolutionizing Fintech Sales Strategies With Wim Van Lerberghe

Wim Van Lerberghe is the Founder of Advintro, which provides outsourced fractional sales services for fintechs, helping them scale and grow their businesses. Before founding Advintro in 2019, he spent two decades in enterprise sales with prominent firms such as Penson and Pershing. Originally from Belgium, Wim's diverse career includes graduating from law school and working as a tour guide in the USA before venturing into day trading. In his current role, he emphasizes building trust and genuine relationships, focusing on curating innovative fintech solutions for large organizations.

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

• [2:07] Wim Van Lerberghe discusses how Advintro helps fintech companies expand successfully through tailored sales strategies

• [4:54] Employing industry-experienced salespeople for deeper engagement

• [5:12] The symbiotic relationship between fintech innovators and their institutional clients

• [8:05] Advintro’s approach to helping buyers navigate the fintech landscape

• [10:22] Wim talks about the crucial role of trust in the sales process

• [14:28] The importance of transparency and relationship-building in sales partnerships

• [19:45] Advintro’s Criteria for selecting clients that align with their business ethos

• [20:56] What makes a sales relationship work or falter?

• [25:32] The current trends and perceptions of AI within the fintech industry and its implications
  

In this episode…

Entering the competitive landscape of the financial technology market can be a daunting challenge for fintech companies. As they strive to establish a foothold, these firms often encounter significant obstacles, including the complexities of building a robust network, earning customer trust, and successfully introducing innovative products to potential buyers. So, how can these companies navigate these obstacles while ensuring a seamless customer experience?

Wim Van Lerberghe, an enterprise sales expert in fintech, delves into the innovative world of fractional sales, addressing these questions and outlining how his company transforms the fintech sales scene. Leveraging trust, expertise, and a unique vetting process, he explains how they connect innovative tech solutions with enterprises that benefit from them, creating win-win scenarios. Wim highlights the role of genuine relationships in business growth and how AI is reshaping the sales landscape without replacing the human element.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Wim Van Lerberghe, Founder of Advintro, about how fintech companies can effectively scale and enter new markets. Wim discusses how Advintro helps fintech companies expand successfully through tailored sales strategies, the symbiotic relationship between fintech innovators and their institutional clients, the crucial role of trust in the sales process, and what makes a sales relationship work or falter.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik! 

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn  

• Wim Van Lerberghe on LinkedIn  

• Advintro 

• Paul R. Renken on LinkedIn 

• "Maximizing Efficiency With CRM Optimization for RIAs With Kate Guillen" on The Customer Wins 

• "[AI Series] Tailoring Client Acquisition in Finance With AI With Farbod Nowzad" on The Customer Wins 

• "Revolutionizing Fee Billing Systems for Advisors With Lacey Shrum" on The Customer Wins 

• "Transforming Financial Services With a Customer-First Approach With David Crow" on The Customer Wins 
  

Quotable Moments:

• "People buy from people they like and trust, so we fractionalize the trust and experience in fintech sales."

• "Building relationships is not about being conniving, it's truly about seeking to help someone."

• "Soft skills, combined with a good understanding of AI, will be crucial in the near future."

• "Sales is not just a numbers game; it's about communicating value and building trust."

• "If you are not trustworthy and you treat somebody wrong, it's going to harm your reputation, and that's not good for sales."

Action Steps:

1. Prioritize responsiveness in all client communications: Being responsive builds trust and shows commitment to the client, directly influencing the possibility of success in sales encounters.

2. Adopt a curated approach to sales: Focusing on understanding client needs rather than pushing products fosters deeper relationships and can lead to more sales.

3. Embrace new technology, such as AI, but keep the human element central: Using tech to enhance efficiency while maintaining a personal touch can give companies a competitive edge.

4. Cultivate soft skills within your sales team: As AI advances, soft skills become ever more valuable, creating genuine connections that machines cannot replicate.

5. Ensure transparency with your potential and existing clients: When clients feel informed and safe, they're more likely to trust your judgment and commit to business.
   

Sponsor for this episode...

This is brought to you by Quik!

At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.

Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.

Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.

Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.

Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.

Episode Transcript:

Intro 0:02 

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.

Richard Walker 0:16 

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win, and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of our past guests have included Kate Guillen of Simplicity Ops, Farbod Nowzad of Cashmere AI, Lacey Shrum of Smart Kx and David Crow of Axos Clearing. Today, I'm excited to speak with one of my business partners, actually, Wim Van Lerberghe, founder of Advintro. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms, instead, get Quik!. Using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started.

All right, I'm excited to talk to Wim. Wim grew up in Belgium and went to law school there, graduated in 1989 and decided to become a tour guide in the USA. After sitting on a bus for seven years, he decided to pursue a career in day trading and lost all his money. Of course, he was offered a job to help with the online expansion in Europe, and spent the next two decades in enterprise sales with Penson and Pershing. In 2019 he founded Advintro in order to help fintech companies scale and grow their businesses. Wim, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Wim Van Lerberghe 1:46 

Thanks, Rich. How are you?

Richard Walker 1:48 

I'm doing so great. I'm excited to talk to you. And for those who haven't heard this show before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. Wim, let's understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?

Wim Van Lerberghe 2:07 

So thanks for having me, Rich. Advintro stands for advice and introductions. We are basically an outsourced fractional sales organization for fintech. So we help companies like Quik! and about another 16 fintech with their enterprise sales. So the core thesis that we have is that people buy from people they like and trust. And we thought, why don't we fractionalize the trust and experience that we've gained in this industry over the past three decades, and instead of working for just one fintech, why don't we work for a few fintech? So I like to think that we're helping three groups of people. One is the actual fintech, because it's hard. I mean, you're a little bit of an exception as far as our clients are concerned, Rich, because you already have been doing this for 20 years. You know a lot of people, but there's a lot of firms that are either originating overseas.

We have clients from Wales, from the UK, Belgium, and they want to come into the US market. So they don't know anybody, and so we help them with making introductions, and help them also with sales discipline, structuring, working through deals. So that's the number one thing that we do. And the second group that we help is actually the buyers. Because if you work for a large organization, whether it's the top RIAs or the top custodians or the top banks, and you are in business development, every two guys with a PowerPoint think that they can sell into your organization, and that's just not the case. So we were able to become sort of slowly, more being seen as a curated provider of fintech goodies, rather than annoying salespeople. And then the third people that we help, and I feel strongly about this, are our employees, the salespeople, and the 1099, people that we're working with, because if you are just selling one product, it is hard to do true relationship-based sales.

You're pushing that product. Like, my last job, I sold the robo, and if I would have called you up and say, Rich, you want to buy a robo, and you go like, Nope, there's nothing for us to talk about for the next few years as long as you're employed there. As well with us, the people that work with us, they have a product palette of about 16, 17, solutions, and so they can have a meaningful conversation and try to be truly solution providers rather than salespeople.

Richard Walker 4:54 

Yeah, and I'm gonna make another point about these salespeople, most of the people I've met, maybe all people I've met on the team are from industry. They've had storied careers. I mean, they just have all this experience, and they want to use that to their best abilities right now, and you're empowering them to do that, right?

Wim Van Lerberghe 5:12 

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's the people that work with us. I mean, I joke or diversity is we have old guys that use a CPAP and guys that don't use a CPAP. Unfortunately, we're all, 30-year veterans and all around that 60-year age bracket. But yeah, we're people that have done corporate America, know how it works, know that it's not that easy to close an enterprise deal, certain steps that that you need to go through. And we help fintech. And some fintech think, the moment you close a deal with the business, that then the business, the deal is done. They've never heard of procurement, and the role of procurement, right? And so these are all things where our people and our team can help. And then the other thing that I really, really like is that there's a team approach, right?

So you work primarily with Tom on our team, but Brendan has also brought your leads. And so every day with our team, we're completely virtual. We have lunch together. And so every day we get together, and everybody talks about their experience and who they're working with. And hey, I just closed the deal with so and so. And then other people are like, oh my gosh, can you make an introduction? So that's another thing that I really like, is this team approach that we're having.

Richard Walker 6:41 

Yeah, it's really incredible. So let's go into some of the experience aspects of this, because you are creating a better customer experience, I think for a couple of different parties here, like for me, for example, as a customer of Advintro. And I really don't think of myself as a customer. I think of you guys as partners for us, you are creating a better experience for me, because maybe I get to offset some of my time to your team to do follow-up and outreach and business development, etc, or for anybody else on my team, you're also helping us build a much more mature process, more accountability in our sales cycle, more clarity of what we're doing. But you're also helping bring more value expertise and experience to the client conversations that we're having, so therefore, you're creating a better experience for your customer.

But that goes to the second part, which is the customer of your customer, right? The ones you're actually bringing so your buyer, as you said. And one of the things I found fascinating, like you guys gave us an introduction to Bank of America, a company I never thought we would talk to. They're huge. They're proprietary. They're the king of the hill in a way. And it's true, we're not gonna do business with them because of the way they work. They wanna do everything themselves. They have their own tech their own teams. But what was fascinating is they have somebody on their team who's just looking at products all the time. So you guys can walk in the door say, hey, we've got 15 products you can look at, and don't you meet with them quarterly? And other companies like quarterly to do that kind of exposure?

Wim Van Lerberghe 8:05 

We do have quarterly meetings with some of the largest financial institutions. I don't know that. It's probably not a secret, but Bank of America has an invite-only event October eighth and ninth in San Francisco, Paul and I, Paul, my business partner, are invited because they really appreciate the fact that we bring in cool ideas. Same thing with Morningstar. We publicly announced, I have to be careful where we're under in the game. Yeah, right. So we did publicly announce two deals that we signed with Morningstar, and one of the heads of the fintech relationships at Morningstar is like, oh my gosh, I should pay you guys, because you bring me such cool companies. So most of my day is spent talking to new potential fintech.

And then we decide, and the fintech obviously decides to is if there is a match. So we're pretty well plugged in as to what's going on, what's cool, what's exciting. And the buyers are valuing that. They're almost seeing as a little bit as a fintech scout. But it is curated, yes, but it's not soccer-certified, or they just don't have the right policies and procedures in place to talk to a very large organization. We're not going to make that intro because then we would be wasting everybody's time. And so that's where I think the buyers know that, if it's coming from us, there's a little bit of curation going on.

Richard Walker 9:36 

Yeah. So I want to make this point a little bit more like articulate, you are helping the buyer go through a better experience. Because you're effectively not selling. You're not pushing. You are guiding. You are like you say, curating. It's almost like saying, look, I know we're at the restaurant. You're probably going to drink wine, the salmon, a comes over and just shows you all the different experiences you can have, and you figure out what's right for you. And in my world, I struggled with sales because I'm a product person, I'm an engineer, and sales has been a challenge over my career. And I always thought of sales as the used car sales guy, like, I got to convince you, I got to manipulate you. I've got to do tricks. And I don't do those because I don't like them. The exact opposite. It's the exact opposite. Yeah.

Wim Van Lerberghe 10:22 

Trust is the single most important. It's like Billy Joel says in that one song, it's a matter of trust. If you are not trustworthy, it's such a small industry that we're having there's like 1000 people working on Wall Street, and they all flip around a couple of firms. And if you are not trustworthy and you treat somebody wrong, it's going to harm your reputation, and that's not going to be good for your sales. And by the way, you're a very good sales guy, Rich, I mean, because precisely you don't think that you are. You're just very honest and open in the way you communicate. You're a brilliant sales guy.

Richard Walker 11:06 

I will still rebut that, because I don't want to label myself the sales guy, but what I do appreciate you guys have validated that some of the things, or many of the things I do are effective, are appropriate. And like, there's a thing that founders go through Wim, and I think everybody goes through it in their own way, but it's a imposter syndrome type of thing, which is everybody will tell you, be who you are. You are the only person in this world to ever exist out of billions and billions of people through time, you're the only version of this. So, be it, do it.

And that's really hard to do as a founder. When you've got to build the business and encourage the team and come up with product ideas, etc, you think, oh, I have to be the cheerleader sales guy. I've got to be whatever. And I've gone through all those situations. But what I've realized is this is who I am, and I really think of my job as CEOs to help people make a high-quality decision to empower them to do their best work, to solve problems. I don't really care about making the sale. I care about, can I solve the problem for my customer and be partnered with them to do that? And then you guys say, well, that's a brilliant salesperson.

Wim Van Lerberghe 12:15 

I mean, people buy from people they like. So there's a word in their people. If you go to sales, there's nothing more fun than going to sales training with a bunch of people that are not natural salespeople. Natural salespeople are pleased. I mean, that's just they want to make people happy. They want to please people. It's just this is not about being conniving and trying to convince somebody truly is trying to help somebody. And I think it can be trained, but it's also something that some people have and that they're born with. And like I once went to a sales training, gosh, a long time ago, and there was a couple of engineers there who were not natural salespeople, and so they said, hey, the first five minutes of the conversation, you have some building rapport.

If you see a fish hanging behind the guy's office, talk about fishing. And so literally, every one of those five salespeople, of those five engineers, started a conversation. Oh, I see you like fishing. And then after five minutes, they were like, transitioning into the actual push. It's about building relationships, and it has to, you truly have to believe that you can build a good relationship with people, and then you add value to what they're doing by providing a profit solution, which is why I like very much what we have, because we have so many solutions that are cool and people like I tell people, when I try to convince them to go on a quarterly call with us, I want when you see my or thing pop up on the calendar or meeting, I want there to be a smile. I wonder what the hell he found this time, as opposed to what he's going to try to push me now.

Like, you know this, this guy at Bank of America, he's got a team of 12 people looking for a cool fintech. He's like, I don't know where you guys find them. And it's fun. We're having a good time my partner, it's awesome.

Richard Walker 14:28 

When you talk about relationship, I mean diagnose the word. It means to relate with somebody, right? And it's a simple we all do this, like, how's your weather, where you're located, or how was your weekend, or what are you going to do this big, this holiday, etc. I suffered with that for the first 10 years in my business, as I had a business partner who was helping with sales, and he'd spend the first 10 minutes talking about cigars and sailboats and end the meeting with cigars and sailboats or whatever. And I was always like, let's just get to the stuff. Let's get into the tech. Like, that's why I'm here. I'll tell you a funny story Wim.

I was at Bear Stearns back in the day, and had a conversation with what their CTO and I he said, I said something like, and this was in person, by the way, like 12 people around the table. It was myself and my partner, who was in sales at the moment, and I said, I'm not here to sell you anything. And honestly, it was funny from a political standpoint. Went from him laughing to the next guy, to the next guy, to the next guy, all of them laughing. And then when he stopped, everybody stopped. And then my partner looked at him and said, no, Rich is sincere. He's not here to sell you anything. I am.

Wim Van Lerberghe 15:42 

By not trying hard to sell and genuinely helping people, people gonna trust you and they're gonna buy for you, because even in a large organization, there's one guy or one girl that takes the responsibility and saying, I'm putting my name on the line. We need to work with these people. And so the larger the organization, the harder it is to convince them, because the buying motivation changes, right? So if you are a small organization, the buying decision, maybe, will this make me more profitable? Will this make me save some money? Middle organizations are kind of ideal. Large organizations, the number one buying decision is like, is this going to get me in trouble? Like, if I'm the person that actually have to write, convince my senior manager to sign the agreement. If it goes great, the upside is still limited. In an organization that generates billions of dollars, the upside is not huge.

The downside, however, if some PII gets leaked or something bad happens, the downside is enormous. So the buying decision is different with a larger organization. And so you have to feel and play, you know, not play to that solve that solution for that person, saying, look, we know you work for a very large organization. We know privacy is a huge concern. These are the steps that our client has taken, and this is how we're trying to address everything preventing them from looking foolish within their organization by threatening their career by signing a deal.

Richard Walker 17:28 

You just described, why the saying was, nobody got fired for hiring IBM. It was a safe choice, because the people are worried about the safety of their career, their jobs and their company. Like you said, especially in today's day of privacy data, Wim, when I met you, I had this, and maybe this is your persona, but I had this feeling like, wow, could we be good enough to work with Wim? Is my company good enough? And I love that feeling, because I think a true partnership is equals, and I want to bring as much to the table as you're bringing to the table. So I'm kind of curious if you could talk about, how do you select this specially curated Group of Companies? Because everybody, especially in startups, everybody, has a challenge selling. How do you choose somebody?

Wim Van Lerberghe 18:18 

It really is. There's no hard and fast. So first, do we like the people? Like we liked you, Paul and I, we're like, oh, we like this guy, Richard. And that's just an intangible, and it's the most important one. Quite frankly, because we're old, we don't want to deal with people. Two, do we feel deep in our heart that we can sell this? Do we feel that this solves a problem and that we can sell a fair amount of it? And then, three, is it cool? Is it interesting? And so, if we think we may not be able to sell this yet, because the product is not mature, but it's really cool, and it has a lot of potential. We may take you on as a client, but the nice thing is, look, Paul and I, we don't have any outside investors.

We run stuff by Brendan, who's also one of our partners, and the three of us together will decide if we want to work with somebody, and then obviously the client has to decide if they want to work with us. So there is no scientific we don't go through metrics. We don't have a spreadsheet. It really is like the Germans call it finger Spitz and gefiel. You feel it in your fingertips whether you want to work with somebody, but the most important person thing is, do we like the people?

Richard Walker 19:45 

Yeah, I think that's a very important metric. I've often said Life's too short to work with people you don't like, and that goes for customers and partners and vendors all across the board. So I'm glad to hear that. It's funny, when I met you, I was at a conference, and you told me that Brendan was one of your guys. He was working for another customer, so I went and vetted him without you knowing it, just to test him and see how that was going. And it was really, really fun to see how he was interacting with this particular company. I forget what the company was, but the founders, I don't know that English was their first language. I think definitely geek was their first language.

So having somebody there who could help them translate to customer needs and values is a huge benefit that you're providing to a technically driven company. Let's talk about some of these customers. I mean, I've had your stake on my podcast, which is one of your customers, I believe, and I think about a couple others. Well, let's talk about it from two perspectives. One is what makes for a bad relationship? Like, what are some of the expectations or behaviors of a customer that makes for a bad partnership? If there's anything that you could point out, maybe you like them, maybe you start working with them. But what makes it not work?

Wim Van Lerberghe 20:56 

A lack of transparency, and also territorialism. I mean, we have in our agreement, that people can send us a no fly list, but you don't do that. You know, here's my HubSpot. It's right open, let's close everything Kumbaya. Let's all work together. But it has to be in order for us to put our reputation on the line, which is what we're doing, we have to know what's good about your product, and potentially what's not so good, and so we can anticipate potential flaws and then make an informed decision whether we're going to introduce somebody or not, right? Yeah, it's our reputation that we're having. But we think we do a good amount of vetting, and then there's also timing. So we change. We used to work with people for a minimum of three months. We changed that to six months. It's hard.

Richard Walker 22:01 

Yeah, sales are hard. That cycle is not that short.

Wim Van Lerberghe 22:03 

It's not, it's not, it's between getting to know and understand the product, owning in a sales strategy, finding the target audience, get the target audience ready to engage. It takes a little bit of time. We're not miracle workers. I mean, I think we're decent at what we're doing and what we're doing, but we can't work miracles, right?

Richard Walker 22:28 

Yeah, no, it is very much like a snowball. You start building it and growing it and growing it, and then you get a few introductions, and then you get a few leads, and then you get a few conversations, and then you get a proposal out, and months go by, and then finally somebody signs, and it's like, now we got momentum. We got excitement. Yeah, you have to allow for that, and it would be no different if you're hiring an internal sales team or person.

Wim Van Lerberghe 22:49 

Exactly. And so we're also not very good with metrics. So we've a night working with a couple of clients where they're like, okay, so how many calls are you going to make a day and how many leads is that going to produce. We're going to work for you, give or take, 50 hours per month that we're going to document that in the CRM that you can see live and we'll fly to meetings for you. But it's hard to quantify, especially these bigger relationships, a call into an LPL or a Pershing or Vanguard or fidelity is not the same as a call into an RAA with 100 million they're both B2B sales. So, it's hard to quantify that.

Richard Walker 23:36 

Yeah, well, and I think what you're pointing to is something that I believe very deeply, that if I'm going to empower you to do your best work, it means that I allow you to go do what you do, and I don't necessarily try to tell you how to do it or change how you do it. You're the expert. In fact, I want to learn from you because you're the expert. And let it run, let it do what it's going to do, time will tell if it's going to work. But I also really agree with that transparency thing. And I think you need transparency with clients. I have found more value in telling clients that we can't do something than in saying we can do something. I mean, our product does a lot of things, but when I tell them it doesn't do this, it gives them facts they can deal with, and gives them clarity so they can make better decisions for them.

Wim Van Lerberghe 24:19 

Yeah, yeah. And that will lead to an honest answer, right? If you're honest in what you can and cannot do, you will get an honest answer. And there's nothing worse for a startup or a scale-up and a disingenuous yes, because you're going to waste a ton of time and resources hoping that that big deal is going to materialize. So that's one of the things I think, that we bring, we have a good relationship with some of the buyers, and if it's not for them, they're going to say, Look, we're not going to do this, because this and this reason, and that's very valuable Intel for the startup, right? Obviously we want the other answer, but it's just sometimes clarifies things a lot.

Richard Walker 25:05 

It does. It does. So the second perspective I wanted to ask you about in this is you talk about things need to be cool, exciting, innovative, the people are going to have their interests peaked. I mean, come on, forms is pretty boring. So is it all about AI, is it the trends? What makes it cool in your mind that is worthy of bringing to a customer?

Wim Van Lerberghe 25:26 

Well, you make forms less boring, right? That they are boring.

Richard Walker 25:31 

I like to think so.

Wim Van Lerberghe 25:32 

You are doing it. It's obviously less boring. And look, everybody has forms and it's a pain to deal with. And so you can make that a lot more efficient. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's fun, but it is cool what you're doing. Any AI, look right now, AI pops up in every conversation. It's a little bit different from last year. So last year, people were talking about AI, but they were scared about it. And we would actually advise our clients not to mention the word AI too much, because compliance would, nine times out of 10 say, no, we're not ready for this. Yeah, it seems like AI has matured, and use cases have shown up that are relevant. And I'm very intrigued with the whole agent infrastructure that we have a couple of clients that play in that space, and I think that's generally going to change the way people are performing tasks, because at the end of the day, that's what an agent is doing.

It's performing a task for you as where an LLM wrapper is basically providing you with an answer, where it's a true answer or a wrong answer. That's their job is to find the answer, and so hallucinations will potentially come. The task approach is, this is my job. I'm doing this task. And then they coordinate with another agent, then another agent, than another agent, and then when everything is done, there comes another agent that checks all the work. And so that approach seems a lot less threatening for buyers, because last year, if you bought an AI solution three weeks later, you looked like a fool because it was outdated. If you buy an AI, if you are an agent, infrastructure, there is a good chance that you can just add more databases, add more agents, and therefore you will remain current. And I've seen a change in the buyers, that they're actually willing to write checks and for this AI this year.

Richard Walker 27:45 

So I want to go back to this perspective. I think what's cool is what solves problems and potentially does it in innovative ways, and does it in ways that maybe nobody else can do it, which is something I always look at. How do we do things differently than anybody else in the world? How can we make it better, faster, cheaper, etc? But also going back then to talk about the AI, you're right that the agent mindset is a really interesting one, because you can take portions of jobs, not necessarily whole people. Maybe it is whole people, but they get to do portions of jobs, go do the research and bring that back. Now the next agent's going to take that research and turn it into content. The next agent's gonna take that content, put it into an email campaign, right? So you have these kinds of like micro jobs or workflow elements where an agent can be involved, or 100% driven by agents, and that starts to create scalability and streamline workflows for people. So then we go to the question of, will AI replace jobs? And I still don't think it will. But what do you think?

Wim Van Lerberghe 28:52 

I mean, it's going to replace jobs, and they're going to create jobs, just like every other invention, right? So, I mean, there's jobs, like, if I was to be in college right now, I'd be convinced that the job that I'm eventually going to have is not invented yet, right and now that is a real job. So the one thing that's interesting with AI versus different innovations is the speed of change. And where the internet, 1996 started, and then it got crazy in 1999, 2000, we had a bubble burst in 2001 and it took around to 2015 like on the stock market, if you bought Microsoft in 2001 you didn't get your money back until 2016. So it took about 15 years this AI thing seems to move so much faster. I like to say for what we're doing, I think AI is not going to replace us. It will actually magnify the importance of soft skills, because soft skills, you know, are true. I mean, you know AI, there's going to be a lot of fake stuff going on, and there's going to be hard to know what's real, what's not real. And so I think soft skills, with a good understanding of AI that's going to be very important in the, not a distant future.

Richard Walker 30:27 

Yeah, I don't want a relationship with an AI. Yeah, you just can't have one, right? They're not human. So people still buy from people, and I think, like, I'm already seeing this HubSpot put out a bot of AI within their system. So now, if I need to prepare for a meeting, I can type in somebody's name and it gives me a summary. It shows me their contact, their deals, the opportunities, whatever. So it's very fast. It's saving me time, and I can be more well-prepared. That's what I love about AI; it facilitates and enables me to do my work faster and better, but you're right. It's not going to replace relationships. Wim, we're going to run out of time here, so I'll have to wrap this up. But before I do that, and I have another question for you, what's the best way for people to find and connect with you?

Wim Van Lerberghe 31:14 

It is Wim, so that's Wim@advintro.com, stands for advice and introduction. It's not the best name in the world, but we're keeping it.

Richard Walker 31:28 

It's sometimes a little hard to say Advintro, and people's like, What? What? Say that again, Advintro.

Wim Van Lerberghe 31:33 

Like Advintro. They think in a Form ADV. So I didn't 100%.

Richard Walker 31:39 

That's okay. That's okay. You can build a brand on great work and great reputation, no matter what the brand's called. So here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Wim Van Lerberghe 31:55 

Frank was a very senior executive at Pershing, and he once told me that he got back to people every single day, at the same day, with a response. So even if it was to say, I don't have time to get back to you, he got back with. And I like that attitude. If somebody sends you an email, if somebody reaches out to you, get back to them and respond, even if it's to say you don't have time to respond. So I really liked it. And then also, I think my co-founder, Paul, working with somebody together as a co-founder is incredibly challenging, and our company is five years old, and Paul and I have never argued in five years. It's magical, and we didn't know each other that well before we started the company, and we work together every day. He does a lot of the stuff that I'm really bad at, and so we're incredibly complimentary, and I'm very grateful for Paul and Brandon and Tom and John, the team. I'm just happy to be working with the people I'm working with. And it's really very satisfying to work with people every day that you like.

Richard Walker 33:12 

It is. Truly is, it's magical when you get it. And a business partnership can be worse than a marriage when it's not working. Yeah, I like Paul so much, and I'm glad to know you guys didn't fight over who got to be on the show.

Wim Van Lerberghe 33:27 

Well, you can ask him next time.

Richard Walker 33:29 

Yeah, right. All right. I want to give a big thank you to Wim Van Lerberghe, founder of Advintro, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Wim's website at advintro.com, and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion, click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Thank you so much for joining me today, Wim.

Wim Van Lerberghe 34:00 

Thanks, Rich.

Outro 34:02 

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