Cover of Connecting the Systems Behind the Sales Process with Andy Janaitis

Connecting the Systems Behind the Sales Process with Andy Janaitis

Connecting the Systems Behind the Sales Process with Andy Janaitis

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EPISODE SUMMARYAsk a small manufacturer what his win rate on quotes is and most will guess at a number. Ask how they know, and the room goes quiet. The company already bought the ERP, the CRM and the subscriptions, but nobody ever connected them, so the same question gets three different answers.In this episode, Justin Goethe sits down with Andy Janaitis, founder of Janaitis Business Systems and PPC Pitbulls, to talk about bringing an industrial engineering mindset to the commercial side of the business. Andy explains why SOPs rarely stick until the underlying systems make it impossible to break the process, why most AI pilots fail because nobody feeds them real context, and why Claude is best thought of as a strong junior developer that still needs a systems architect checking its work. They also dig into who actually owns systems integration in a $2M to $20M shop, how to think about the org chart in terms of jobs and skills, and why a founder-dependent sales process shows up as a discount at the time of sale.ABOUT THE GUESTAndy Janaitis is the founder of Janaitis Business Systems in Baltimore, Maryland, and has run the paid media agency PPC Pitbulls since 2020. He is an industrial engineer by training, with an undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s from UMBC, and he came up on the data and software side at Booz Allen, Elder Research and MindGrub.Andy works with $2M to $20M manufacturers to fill the systems and numbers role they cannot yet afford to hire full time. His approach is to fix where data gets captured, connect the systems so nobody retypes a record, and then go after the biggest bottleneck those numbers reveal. He works with what a company already runs and guarantees the build at 90 days, or he keeps working for free until it ships.KEY TAKEAWAYSThree answers to one question is a systems problem. In founder-driven shops, sales data lives in the founder’s head or with one key salesperson. Until the CRM is configured properly and connected to everything else, close rate and win rate will mean something different to everyone who reports them.Build the system so the process cannot be broken. Andy’s own team wrote SOP after SOP in Google Docs and none of them stuck. What worked was building the standard into the tools, such as requiring certain fields and emails before a deal can move forward in the pipeline. Justin shared a parallel from an RFID project where compliance only came once material could not be pulled without scanning the tag.Take KPIs down to leading indicators. Revenue and margin are the end result. A real-time scorecard (Andy’s team runs EOS) or a KPI tree that starts at net profitability and breaks down into revenue, material, labor and overhead lets you find the leading indicators that actually move those numbers.Founders run on gut feel because the reports take too long to build. Most owners understand how their numbers roll up. They just cannot pull something like scrap rate without a months-long study, so connecting systems and automating the reporting is what moves a business from rule of thumb to data.AI pilots fail when they lack context. Long, carefully built prompts work, but nobody will write them every day. Andy’s team connects AI directly to their email so it drafts each message, the person rewrites it, and the tool compares the draft to what was sent to learn the writer’s voice. Repeated over time, that loop gets an inbox done in minutes instead of hours.Keep a human in the loop, and make sure that human knows the work. Andy’s internal operating system cuts his team’s workload roughly in half, yet he still catches something flat wrong every day. His rule for the team is to do a task manually once before automating it, and his view is that anyone building complex apps without coding experience is setting up to fail.Systems architecture is the role nobody owns. Integration work tends to fall to the founder, an operations director, an admin or the IT person who installed the software and has no idea how it is supposed to be used. Each tool works on its own, but the real value comes when time tracking, quoting, invoicing, financials and planning talk to each other.Plan the org chart around jobs and skills. Small manufacturers tend to grow headcount one supervisor at a time. Andy suggests listing every job that has to get done first, since one person may wear five or six hats, and Justin adds an honest look at the skills on the team so you know where to supplement with outside help.A founder-dependent sales process lowers your valuation. As a buyer, the question is whether someone else could step in and run the business tomorrow. If every sale closes on the founder’s relationships and nothing ever hits a system, there is little business left without that person, and that shows up in the price.QUOTABLE MOMENTS“It wasn’t an SOP problem. It was that the systems that underlie all these problems weren’t connected.” – ...
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