CRMs in Use
When we talk about digital marketing and how businesses can and should use it to expand into new markets, one part of digital marketing that should be utilized once all the other parts are put into place (SEO, eCommerce to process payments, good hosting, branded content creation and repackaging and distribution strategies, and so on) is having a way to realiably and consistently interact with customers.
Customers are the spine of business, any business, for obvious reasons. Using a Customer Relationship Management service assists in setting up a CRM, and lets you use it.
So what is a CRM?
From my own blog post on the topic:
A CRM system is a powerful tool that allows organizations and businesses to manage customer interactions and data, automate marketing and sales processes, and gain insights into customer behavior.
These steps of a much larger process, and following up on them with regularity, is a process (customer management) within a much larger, broader scope of processes that, if followed-up on, differentiates amateur business owners (what Mark Cuban accurately terms “wantrepreneurs” and a term I use often here) from those who scale for rapid growth.
In this episode of the Digital Marketing Solutions podcast, I talk with Samuel Cook, of CRM Sanity Desk.
You can scroll to the bottom of the page to watch our interview or listen to the audio version or find a little way down.
His Own CRM
Sam created his own CRM meant to streamline and automate Customer Relationship processes and procedures to make daily business easier and more efficient; thereby helping business owners regain their “sanity.”
Here are some of our discussion topics.
CRM Talking Points:
Some of the topics we discuss are:
- His military experience and how that informed his current business interests.
- His CRM startup, funding, specific offerings.
- Why businesses fail.
- The role of relationships in business.
- How intimate relationships can mirror business relationships.
- How and where technology trips up business owners so often.
- How logistics can destroy a relationship over larger shared objectives.
- Where story fits into marketing.
Transcript
Here’s the transcript for you to read. Please pardon any “uhms” and “ahs” or minor misspellings since most transcriptions are taken through automated programs in order to save time.
David Somerfleck:
Thank you for watching or listening another episode of Digital Marketing Solutions. I’m your host David Somerfleck, and my guest today is Samuel P.N. Cook.
Samuel graduated for West Point in 2000 went on to became a U S armored cavalry officer where he served at the regimental as the regimental at Jude int for HR McMaster in the battle of Tal afar and 2005 2006 that was cited by then president George W. Bush as a turning point in that war with a front row seat to history.
Samuel was responsible for the media messaging and writing the history of this campaign, which in and of itself is very interesting.
In 2007 Shango returned to Iraq as the commander of crazy horse troupe for a squadron, third arm armored cavalry regiment where he was cited in the Washington post and Tom Ricks bestselling book on Iraq for his novel counter-insurgency strategy that combined tribal negotiations and police trained parole system for a mass murder.
David Somerfleck:
And that’s about 10 podcasts right there. When he returned from Iraq in 2008 Sam went on to get a master’s in Russian and Ukrainian history in New York city university, New York universities, Jordan center for Slavic studies. He then went on to teach history at West point from 2010 2013 Sam founded James Cook media in 2013 after leaving the army.
The company is a storytelling marketing agency that focuses on growing then brands of authors and experts around the world. Here he created the story matters many cores with over a hundred thousand subscribers as well as the story matters podcast. In 2019 he founded sanity desk, which I love the name I’m sure you’ve heard that before.
A full stack software solution for experts at small service businesses to launch and manage their businesses online sanity. Dusk is funded by angel and vouchers. Oh. And is rapidly becoming an innovative solution for savvy marketing professionals who help small business owners grow their brand online.
David Somerfleck:
And like I always said, angel investors, I call them little devils because they like to sink their teeth in and take a little piece with them. As I’m sure you have found out. Well it depends on the, on the angel, but it depends on the angel. Yeah. Um, all girls are angels, right? Oh yeah. That’s what the angel for. Sure. That’s what mama told me.
Samuel, thank you for taking the time to be on one of my podcast episodes. I appreciate, I salute your duty. Um, you know, as a, uh, a Navy kid who grew up on basis, you know, all around, I don’t even remember cause I was a kid. Um, let’s get started with who you are and your background as it relates to business and how that took you to where you are today.
Samuel Cook:
Okay.
David Somerfleck:
Just kind of open ended.
Samuel Cook:
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s great. Great to be here and thank you for, um, you know, organizing this chat with you and, and more importantly, your audience. And, uh, you know, sanity desk is, is really designed to solve one of the two core problems that, that, uh, we have found, um, in that, uh, business owners slash marketing agencies who help business owners encounter when, um, you know, they, they put their, they put their business online and businesses fail online for two reasons. If you think of a business success or failure, it’s a lot. Business is a relationship. You as a business are in a relationship with a set of customers, right? And if you think about our relationship in real life, let’s take it to the one that probably everyone’s most familiar with is an intimate relationship that you choose to get into and out of.
Samuel Cook:
Uh, when, when it’s, when it’s no longer serving you or both parties, uh, is, is the same way. And what happens when you, when you meet someone and you get into a relationship with them, it’s exciting. There’s romance, there’s attraction, there’s love there. I say there’s, there’s a passion, desire, all those different things. And that’s why we start a business, right? So we were in love with the idea, maybe in love with our customers, maybe both, maybe in love with our, our own brilliance or our own ego. But people do it out of passion, right? And you get into a relationship and what happens then? Life starts to happen in the beginning. You know, you, you, you start to learn each other’s peccadilloes and, and bad habits. And then you have kids and then logistics and there’s fights about money and there’s all kinds of stuff. So I view business the same way. It’s like, you know, you, you get passionate, you get an idea, you go after it, and then reality sets in. And the reality from my perspective is the technology. I’ve seen so many business owners create, have such passion for helping their audience create such a great story to connect with their audience. And the technology trips them up every time. So sanity desk is my attempt to solve that technological, logistical barrier that prevents, I believe, most people being successful digital entrepreneurs.
Relationships
David Somerfleck:
Now would you say that maybe when they’re tripping up in their use of technology, why do you think that’s happening? I mean from my perspective, I think they’re….fixating on tools and not objectives or that the objectives aren’t clearly defined.
What’s your take on that?
Samuel Cook:
Well, it goes back to, uh, let’s go back to the relationship analogy. You know, if you want to have the perfect relationship and you focus on the logistics that, Hey, I’m always, I’m always going to open the door. I’m always going to have date night on Friday, uh, and I’m going to be the most respectful, courteous, husband or spouse or partner or whatever.
That’s, that’s the logistics of a relationship and that can destroy a relationship. But, but at the same time, if you do not have the same values and goals in life and you’re not, you know, sharing the same vision for that relationship, uh, that relationship is not going to last. So the strategy, the love, the romance, the spark has to be there in the beginning.
Samuel Cook:
In business, you, you have to have, you know, and, and in a relationship, uh, do you both want the same thing in the future and you’re willing to support each other to get there? It’s a lot like a business. It’s do you both want the same thing? You the business owner, do you want the same thing that the customer wants? Do you both have the same philosophy and values about how they should get there? Whether they should violate certain values that they have is certainly not going to be congruent with them and vice versa. If your customer wants something that you don’t feel comfortable delivering for them, then you’re not going to be comfortable in that relationship either. So you have to have everything aligned at the beginning of the strategy, which is the story in business, you know you who your ideal customer is, what the better future is that they want and the product or service that they need to invest in to get that better future.
Samuel Cook:
That is something they can in good conscience invest in and they believe you’re the best person to deliver it and something that you are best positioned to create and deliver for that client. That’s the alignment. So no amount of technological wizardry, no amount of tools can compensate for poor strategy, poor alignment, poor value, aligned, poor relationship. But once you have that alignment, the hard part is anyone who’s been in a longterm relationship can tell you is making it work every day. And, and then keeping that spark alive, you know, by making the logistics smooth and you know, attracting the client on the web to your site, seamlessly gathering their details, giving them the right content, they need to believe that you can help them get a better future and then serving them the right offer at the right time. And that is logistics. That’s technology. That is, uh, the hard part. I have to say two points that, um, I noticed that your expressions change when you talk about relationships quite into quite interesting. And the other thing is I have to interject, you sound just like my wife as far as the relate to relationships metaphor obviously. Uh,
David Somerfleck:
which I think is a very, very salient, uh, metaphor obviously, but she uses that metaphor quite a lot with having that collaborative relationship. The relationship metaphor in general. I agree. 110%.
Samuel Cook:
Well, I’m lucky, one of my dear friends on our board of advisors, and I think probably the favorite one of the favorite people I’ve ever worked with is a man named Roy Martin. Uh, who, uh, founded the invitation of love, uh, which is an amazing masterclass in relationships. I helped him film and put together and market and then balance a power which is, uh, from his company, relational power dynamics. So relationships to me are the foundation of pretty much everything that happens in life. You have a relationship as you’re growing up with your parents, you have a relationship with your siblings, you have a relationship with uh, your peers in school. You have relationship with your boss at work, you have relationship with, with everyone, whether it’s a stranger you meet for five minutes, you’re interacting and, and it’s unavoidable and some people wish they could avoid it.
Samuel Cook:
But ultimately, if you’re a business owner, uh, I think the number one philosophy you have to adopt is I am in a relationship with a set of people that I am passionate about helping them reach their objective. And obviously they’re going to reward me for open and reach our objective by giving me the chance to earn a decent living, you know, support myself, support my family and achieve my goals. That’s gotta be mutually beneficial, supportive and ultimately productive. And, and, and I, I give this example because I had a business, I was in love with the subject and my customers at the beginning I ran it, ran a triathlon, a marketing agency and then the triathlon camps business. And at the end I fell out of love with that. I was no longer doing triathlon, I was no longer interested in solving that problem for people.
Samuel Cook:
And I did a lot of self destructive things. I believe looking back to intentionally in that relationship, rather than being honest with myself, Hey, I’m no longer happy in this, let’s stop it in a controlled, productive way. I just kinda pushed things too far cause I wanted to go fast and make a lot of money so I could do what I really wanted to do. So I think that’s what I mean about in business. Are you in the right relationship? Are you still in love with your customer? Would you help your customer for free? Cause a lot of times in business, especially right now, a lot of business owners are paying to work for their customers and are you going to resent that or regret that?
David Somerfleck:
Yeah. And I’m not even going to get into volunteering.
Samuel Cook:
Um, well a lot of business owners end up volunteering without volunteering, you know?
David Somerfleck:
Yeah. Yes, I do know. Um, as far as marketing is very broad, would you say that in terms of marketing your area, your wheelhouse, so to speak as digital marketing? Or would you say it’s more messaging and building the brand?
Samuel Cook:
Well, definitely that the tools that I’ve built are for the digital world. Um, I am not going to design a magazine cover or even a book cover for someone. I have a designer. I’m sure I could do a more than respectable job, but when it comes to the digital world, that’s where I’ve designed the tools and the technology and the toolkit. And I like to think of the digital world as, as, as a mirror of the physical world that works. So, uh, we have built our technology to allow a business owner who may not be able to operate offline right now. Like a lot of people, as of may of 2020, uh, most businesses are locked down and, and can only operate digitally. And I like to think of a business owner, uh, in, in the digital world should be doing what works in the physical world.
Samuel Cook:
So a quick example of that is if you own a store, so let’s take the Apple store. We’ve all been to an Apple store. It’s a, it’s a very wonderful, uh, uh, uh, retail experience. I think something we should all aspire to. And you were walking in the mall and you see this big beautiful silver Apple symbol there and that immediately draws your eye. That’s your website, right? That is drawing you, that’s your storefront, that’s drawing people over. It’s the sign outside of your store. It’s the golden arches. You walk into the store and immediately you’re in a a, a layout. It’s a marketing layout. It’s like your email marketing campaigns, your text message campaigns where you’re reminding people that, Hey, you’ve showed interest. Let me remind you that we have things that can help you free or paid. And that is what that’s like.
Samuel Cook:
Your marketing automation, your email auto responder, your text followup, your Facebook messages, right? And then at the beginning when you go in the good stores, we’ll always have someone who’ll come up to you and they’ll ask you right as you enter the store, Hey sir, can I help you with anything? And that’s like a survey that you may have on your website, which says, Hey, where do you need to go? And they’ll point you directly to it so that you don’t waste time. You’re going straight to where you want to go. And then someone comes up to you while you’re browsing in the Apple store. They’re really good at it. And a lot of retail stores do this. They say, can you buy some, you know, can I help you find something? Well, yes, actually I’m looking for an iPhone. Oh, it’s right over here.
Samuel Cook:
Would you like the 11 or the 11 max or whatever that is. And in the Apple store they have a place where they can swipe your card, right? They have a checkout process right there and if you think about that online, this is where you’re getting into the territory. A lot of business owners don’t have this set up is okay, you’ve set up some automated followup. Where’s your personal deal board to track deals as they go through and that’s a sales pipeline or CRM to on any successful sales person knows that that’s essential to successful selling. Right. And let’s just declare
David Somerfleck:
I CRM, customer relationship management, which most of the time is not what they would immediately see the small business owner or the or the customer and they’re not going to see the CRM, but it’s inherently just as valuable, not more valuable than what you would actually see on the phone.
Samuel Cook:
You never see. The only thing the client sees is your webpages. But um, having a website with no marketing automation, no sales CRM is like having a, an Apple store with nothing inside to say. Exactly.
David Somerfleck:
Exactly. I agree a hundred percent I just wanted to clarify for anyone listening who’s not familiar with that
Samuel Cook:
term. Yeah. You know, if you’re, if you’re not familiar with that term, you shouldn’t be things set up. Now is the perfect time to do it because if you don’t have that set up in your business, I guarantee you selling this stuff, I know a lot of your competition is looking for it and setting it up so it’s a perfect time to put some pedal to the metal and, and just to continue the analogy at the end, when you buy something in an Apple store, you leave and then it stops working. They have a warranty program. You come back in and what do you see at the back? This entire wall, which is called the genius bar. You walk back there and they’re asking you, Hey, can I fix anything that’s broken? Oh, do you want to leave it here for repair? Oh, let me just go to the back office, which is a whole nother part of your business.
Samuel Cook:
Every, every physical business has a back office where you organize work orders and requests and repairs and things like that which the customer definitely never sees and um, those are the five components of any successful business, offline or online. And if you’re listening to this and you don’t have a back office task management tool, deal board, Trello, whatever, to manage tasks that have been submitted, a sales CRM to manage prospects who haven’t bought that you need to follow up with so that they can buy a support desk, which is not your email inbox. Your email inbox is not a quality support desk that is built for purpose to be able to take communication from any channel, turn it into a support ticket, kick it over to your team seamlessly. You do not have your business fully digitally optimized online. I looked for tools like this, I would stitch them all together for years of my agency and that’s why we built it. We built everything in one place with the micro digital entrepreneur in mind. The person’s all the way up from solo operators, solopreneurs, up to 2030 people is who we’re focusing on when we build this product. Now it may be useful for people up to 120 or more. Uh, but we’re always thinking about the problem set that the individual business owner needs, how much do they need and how much it was going to be overwhelming and building it for them.
David Somerfleck:
Hmm. I’m thinking of a hundred other questions right now. Um, and I’m trying not to, because I’m thinking about base camp. I’m thinking about e-commerce. At what, at what point do you say that sanity desk offers enough in terms of being robust CRM and at what point would you want to roll more into it?
Samuel Cook:
Well, look, right now we are in a closed phase. We have what I believe are from, from experience building dozens and dozens of campaigns for clients and coaching hundreds more and, and training thousands more with our video education.
We have the core elements that people need. Uh, if you run a service business or digital product business, uh, or, or something online, uh, you know, maybe you run a physical business, but you want to set up your digital business to mirror it, we have the right solution. Now, if you are a physical product business and you’re selling multiple physical products and skews and different colors and sizes, we’re probably not the platform, the first platform I would even recommend, I would say, let’s look at, uh, Shopify. I mean a lot of people like our landing page tool because we have a survey where you can create customized results and then they could send them from there over to Shopify.
Samuel Cook:
We also have an email autoresponder system, uh, that does email followup. So, so it could be, you know, you may have a favorite tool that you have, like a Shopify checkout cart, or maybe you just really, really love this CRM or this support tool we have Zapier to integrate into anything else that you want to use. But I’m thinking of the digital entrepreneur who can barely wrap their head around one tool. Uh, let alone trying to evaluate and stitch together a bunch of tools. We just want to be the place where you can put it all in one place. You can open it up, it works, it’s integrated.
There’s no thinking required about architecture. We’ve built the house, the prefab house for you. Just customize it, modify it with our tech support team, make it fit your business and have one login, one landlord, digital landlord versus eight or nine pieces of software where you run your business and you forget to update the credit card and you go out of business over the weekend cause you forgot to pay the bill or your expiration date went out of business or you know, just random stuff can trip you up online and break your entire system.
Samuel Cook:
And it’s frustrating.
David Somerfleck:
Right? Well ultimately the purpose of, of a robust CRM is consolidation of overhead and reducing redundancy. So I, that’s exactly why, what it should be doing. Um, what are their levels of offerings or levels of packaging? If I were to go to sanity desk. Now are there multiple levels for different sizes? Cause I know you have SMB small businesses, then you’ve got the enterprise level, which uh, last time I checked was 50 or more employees. Are there different levels of offerings or different levels that would be applicable for different types of businesses? Whether you’re a digital marketing person like me or the small business owner, the local mom and pop?
Samuel Cook:
Yes, there are, there are different offerings and um, it depends on your objective. So if you want your website to be a respectable storefront where you have a beautiful pages, you’re able ask him a few short questions so you can segment and then do some basic followup by email or text or Facebook messenger. That’s our basic plan. It’s what I would call the, I use my site as a storefront to be respectable for people looking for me. But, uh, I do not invest a lot of money in, in client acquisition through digital, which I think in the current crisis, uh, probably that, that model of, you know, using your site as just a, uh, a big digital brochure where people can research you may be less and less appealing to other business owners. And that moves us over to the pro package so that the basic package is $49 a month.
Samuel Cook:
The pro package is where you can basically, if you’re a small business owner, do everything in one place from building your website, building landing pages for ads, campaigns that you may be creating, whether it’s Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, LinkedIn, whatever the case may be. Uh, collect people’s email addresses, uh, their phone numbers and follow up with them with our workflow tool where you can design that kind of layout of the Apple store where everything is, is laid out. And no matter what people tell you or, or do on your site, you can design a custom path for them through the workflows. And that’s the basic plan or sorry, the pro plan. And then the enterprise plan and you actually made it real and that’s the pro plans, $99 the enterprise plan is $299 a month and the only difference between the enterprise and the pro plan is the enterprise allows you to create a hundreds, thousands, and even tens and hundreds of thousands of combinations of emails and pages that you send to people.
Samuel Cook:
And, and if you’re curious how this would work conceptually, I’ll explain it, but you can go to the sanity desk.com website and look at the product demos and watch it. But imagine that someone comes to your site, they want to work with you, they answer a short survey before they submit their contact details. You have three or four questions on our site. There’s four questions in the four answers in the first question, three on the second, two on the third, and that creates 24 different combinations just by answering three simple questions. Who are you? I’m an author. Expert is our first answer, business owners. The second, third is marketing manager. Fourth is marketing agency owner as four combinations. What is your greatest challenge that we can help you with? Or what is your challenge really to digital marketing? I have no funnel. I have a funnel that’s not working.
Samuel Cook:
I have a successful funnel. And that that takes you up to uh, another, um, you know, 12 combinations and then do you have time or money? What do you want to invest, uh, to, to solve this problem? You’re going to invest one or the other. Both. And people say, I’ve got time or money and this is, this is from my agency site. James Cook, media.com says 24 different combinations. And then we map out, okay, well what are four steps you have to become a customer? And people can either be a lead where they’ve given us their email, they can have watched a video, we call it a marketing qualified lead where they’ve watched a six minute video. They are a phone lead where they’ve given us their phone number. And then finally they are, they’ve scheduled a call, they’ve booked a call. So that is the levels of progression that people go through to become a client of our agency. So those are four different steps times 24 different types of avatars, 96 people,
David Somerfleck:
right? Yeah. And I think in asking those questions, it lets you segment or, or get into segmentation however you want to say it. Um, so that you can segment, uh, who’s coming in through your, uh, onboarding process. And, uh, from the perspective of the digital marketer just as a consultant, those are very, very important, uh, salient questions to ask potential clients just in general terms. Um,
Samuel Cook:
yeah, I mean I think those three are foundational in terms of it’s hard to change who you are. I mean, some people can change their business model. What is your challenge? How aware of the challenge are you? Are you just starting, are you struggling?
Are you succeeding and need to go to the next level? And then finally, what’s your budget? What are you willing to invest in solving that problem? And I think those three foundational questions, and I have some quizzes where we ask a lot more questions than that. Um, but that creates a foundation from which you can speak personally to everyone in every email and on every page. And then you, you add that up with all the other things they could do.
And you know, our funnel, James Cook media has 1.9 6 million combinations of journeys that people could be, uh, on through that entire funnel based on what they’ve done, what they’ve watched, what they’ve told us about themselves.
David Somerfleck:
Well, I think it’s extremely interesting and I think you’ve answered multiple questions at the same time. Um, because basically I had several more questions that I was going to ask you and you already mowed right through them. And for any web developer, digital marketer listening, you have just learned indirectly how to screen clients more effectively.
So you stop being led around by your nose, by people who don’t know what they want. You don’t want to talk to someone who doesn’t, who may have a problem but doesn’t think they have a problem or has an unrealistic budget to match expectations that don’t intersect with that. But, um, I appreciate your time. Is there any part parting thought or anything you’d like to add? Because like I said, you mowed through everything that I had written out.
Samuel Cook:
Well, I would just say that if you are right now, we are in a moment, uh, everyone is in a moment too that together collectively, globally where there is a sea change in people’s opinions, preconceived notions, and opinions about expectations from the digital world.
And if you’re a marketing professional, digital marketing professional, which I’m assuming that’s most of your audience right now, uh, you are in a unique period to, uh, help business owners, uh, reimagine, reinvent, uh, reconstruct what’s possible for their business and the future is going to belong to those who can help business owners as marketing professionals or business owners who can adjust to this period. So, uh, I know how it feels. I own both an agency and an a software company is, uh, businesses are frantic. They’re in a panic. Uh, they’re very scarce with their investments right now, but the only investment that businesses can and will make and the SBA loans in America is starting to funnel cash in a small businesses.
Samuel Cook:
Where do you think they’re going to put their money? They’re going to put their money into the one thing right now that they know will probably produce a positive return, which is digital infrastructure. So, um, now’s the time whether you’re a business owner to self-educate and or hire someone to help you with this or do it yourself or as a practitioner. Um, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and step out there. And I know a lot of people who’ve said to me, I don’t feel like selling during this period. It feels like you’re taking advantage of the situation. But frankly, that’s malpractice to me. If you have a problem or sorry, if you have a solution to a legitimate problem, not some scam or not some MLM pyramid scheme, but a solution to a legitimate problem that someone has right now and you do not put that in front of them, you do not make that offer. I think that is a dereliction really of, of a moral imperative, which is I have something that can help you potentially stay in business, get back into business, grow your business right now during this period, uh, and you have a duty to offer that to people. Don’t be shy about sharing your expertise in this field or gaining that expertise and offering that to people. And that’s what we’re passionate about. Helping people do, especially marketing professions.
David Somerfleck:
That’s key. That’s a key point right now. Uh, businesses are going under faster than anybody can even keep track of. The unemployment rate is, I think if it goes up another 10%, I think if I’m, I’m not sure, but it should rival the peak of the great depression. And right now if you’re a digital marketer, if you are competent and informed and experienced, you have tools that can help business owners scale for accelerated growth and now’s the time to be helping them. And it could not possibly be more true. The need is greater now than it ever was before in history. I think, um, you know, it’s like the old quote Louie pastor said that chance favors the prepared mind.
Samuel Cook:
Yeah. Well, fortune favors the bold preparation is what happens. Or luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, right? I mean, this is the moment for this audience. Thank goodness there’s so many people who are not as fortunate as where you are. So if you think you have a tough right now and you’re in the digital, uh, marketing industry, men, you are one of the lucky ones. And, and, and uh, it’s, it’s time to think that way, behave that way and, and spread that, uh, skill set out to other people that need it.
David Somerfleck:
I agree. Totally. Samuel, thank you for being on my podcast. I appreciate your time. And, um, can you please list your different domain names so people can get in touch with you.
Samuel Cook:
The first one is Sanity Desk the domain is um, just that and then for, for our storytelling agency that, that, uh, I founded a long time ago was where I started my marketing career, which built sanity desk internally as a, as an internal tool that we used to use for our clients. And then now as an investor in sending to desk that is JamesCookMedia.com and that is uh, our agency and we have a free online training, a two and a half hour, three hour master class on storytelling. So one agency handles the romance, the spark, the passion side of building your business online, which I believe is essential without that nothing will succeed. And then the other one that handles the tough, uh, logistical slog of getting the tech working to deliver that story and strategy online so your business can connect with your customer and help them and thrive.
David Somerfleck:
Well. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and um, hang around for another minute or two and thank you, uh, out there. Uh, anyone who’s watching, please hit that subscribe button. Give it a thumbs up if this has been helpful to you. If you’re listening to this as a podcast, please subscribe, give it a positive review and take care of everybody and stay safe.
About
Samuel P.N. Cook graduated from West Point in 2000. He went on to become a U.S. Armored Cavalry Officer where he served as the Regimental Adjutant for Colonel H.R. McMaster in the Battle of Tal Afar in 2005-2006 that was cited by President Bush as a turning point in the war. With a front row seat to history, Sam was responsible for the media messaging and writing the history of this campaign.
In 2007, Sam returned to Iraq as the commander of Crazyhorse Troop, 1st Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment where he was cited in the Washington Post and Tom Rick’s best-selling book on Iraq for his novel counterinsurgency strategy that combined tribal negotiations and police trained parole system for a mass surrender.
Samuel Cook of CRM Sanity Desk
When he returned from Iraq in 2008, Sam went on to get a Masters in Russian and Ukrainian history at New York University’s Jordan Center for Slavic Studies. He then went on to teach history at West Point from 2010-2013.
Sam founded James Cook Media in 2013 after leaving the army.
The company is a storytelling marketing agency that focuses on growing then brands of authors and experts around the world. Here he created the StoryMatters mini-course with over 100,000 subscribers as well as the StoryMatters Podcast.
In 2019, he founded SanityDesk, a full-stack software solution for experts and small service businesses to launch and manage their business online. SanityDesk is funded by Angel investors and is rapidly becoming an innovative solution for savvy marketing professionals who help small business owners grow their brand online.