WSW - Lightspeed Pt 3 - Sales
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[00:00:00] [00:00:30]
[00:00:39] Dan DeLong: Welcome back to another Workshop Wednesday brought to you by Schoolbookkeeping. com, where it's casual conversations for serious workflows. And we're joined again by KG from Lightspeed. How are you, KG?
[00:00:54] KG: Doing well, thanks, Dan. How are you?
[00:00:57] Dan DeLong: Very good. So we are continuing our [00:01:00] series with Lightspeed.
This is part three of of our series. And kgs been nice enough to join us through all of those. So you can always check those out on our YouTube channel or wherever you happen to be catching the workshop about those that have been migrating or needing to be migrating from a QuickBooks point of sale to another.
Service and in this case, we're focusing on lightspeed because especially the the clientele from from the QuickBooks point of sale world has been, [00:01:30] inundated with choices, I guess that's probably the most polite way to say it. Would you say,
[00:01:35] KG: yeah,
[00:01:36] Dan DeLong: exactly. And the main thing, and I was talking to my wife today about what a grudge purchases, nobody, especially a retail establishment, a retail brick and mortar store, they don't really go looking for a new point of sale system, right? They it's going to take an event to cause them to be able to look to that. Do you see that in, in the light speed world of people [00:02:00] just looking for a better way, or do you find them Coming to you just because they were, looking at something and then decided to check it out.
[00:02:10] KG: Yeah, I think it aligns with what you said. There's always an event. People typically buy out of something as opposed to into something. So something will happen with their current workflow, that'll be a huge detriment. So like the camel that broke the, or the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.
So then that's when they'll be like, all right, I need something else. And then once they put their [00:02:30] name into some sort of list, and that's where, of course, everyone starts to reach out and says, hey, we noticed there's a little bit of interest.
[00:02:37] Dan DeLong: Yeah, my yeah, my wife was like, what the heck is a grudge purchase?
And and the whole thing centers around an event, right? Like you, you don't go looking for a plumber until you've got a leaky sink. So you don't go looking for a heating air conditioning company until. Your air conditioner goes out in the middle of summer, which all that's always when it happens, right?
You never you never need those [00:03:00] things when there's when they're not broken so if it's not broke don't fix it and it's definitely the same thing for a point of sale system, right? As long as my, as long as I'm bringing up sales it's, yeah, it's working for me. And as long as something doesn't break with that, then I'm not in the market for looking for something else.
So obviously the latest trigger event, which has brought a lot of people to looking for something else is the discontinuation of QuickBooks point of sale. And as it's a program that we talked [00:03:30] about in our first first workshop that, the big differences between a QuickBooks point of sale and Lightspeed where it comes to environment and back office things, and then, like the tasks that you do in the back office, like setting up inventory and those types of things and comparing and contrasting, the things that you can do.
But now today we're going to be talking about the things of. Making sales, because that's that's what the name of of the software is point. It's the point of sale, right? It's to bring up. [00:04:00] Bring up sales now from KT from a light speed per se perspective. What is the ideal?
Type of business that really, you know finds itself using light speed and using it.
[00:04:14] KG: So the ideal customer for us internally is more anyone who's Looking to improve their practice or scale their business. At the end of the day, what we offer that makes us a lot of very different from anything else in the industry is being able to use things that are analytics to drive.
That [00:04:30] business further not just let things like stale or slow moving stock, sit there and collect dust give them reasons to put them on promotions. And then you are making all those tools that we have easily accessible. That's the big one is we want to make sure that it's not only easy for the owner to view and use it, but easy for their staff to use it as well.
And then going down even further to the consumer level, we're all consumers, we all go shopping and we want that transaction part. to be fast. I just want to go pay and get out of [00:05:00] there. I don't want to spend too much time doing this and that and everything else. All those abilities are there for the business if they decide to go any of those additional routes.
But the ideal customer for us, if you're looking for that next step, something to help scale your business and utilize the tools that we need, we have. That's where we step
[00:05:18] Dan DeLong: in. So the, so that's the type of, type of retailer, but what type of vertical would be a best fit for something like Lightspeed?
[00:05:27] KG: Yeah, so there, we do have [00:05:30] specific verticals that we do shine very well in to nail off a few. So things like bike, sporting goods, jewelry, apparel, electronics vape stores, pet stores. Health and beauty or supplements, things like that. And then home decor are some of our biggest verticals, mainly because we cover a lot of those features that they need natively without workarounds or integrations.
But in this case, a
[00:05:52] Dan DeLong: lot of the time, it's like the out of the box. Yeah, there is no box with nothing to unbox with with light speed, unless [00:06:00] you have hardware, but but you just log in and you're, and you get it up and running and start. Start working on it.
So without those, when you're thinking of other types of verticals, like one thing that, that QuickBooks point of sale was really helpful and in with is like the comp, the type of company that Not only sells hard goods, I buy stuff, I sell stuff on the shelf. . But they also maybe have a service component of that, something like a pool company.
, that would have, they would've a brick and mortar [00:06:30] front, for parts and those types of things. But then also, have the a service side of things or if they're even, creating pools that are building pools. That's the word I was looking for.
[00:06:41] Dan DeLong: If they're actually, they have customers come in and design their own pool and that sort of thing. What, where does that kind of vertical fit in with light speed?
[00:06:51] KG: Yes, the. If there are service based then we do have solutions for that. At the end of the day, we want to be able to cover as many features because sometimes you'll have [00:07:00] a business that falls into our, let's say apparel vertical, and they do that very well.
We strive with verticals like apparel, but then sometimes an apparel store will offer things like services, hemming. Adjusting whatever it is that they offer. So we need to be able to cover those bases for that type of business. And the good thing with that is that typically ties to other verticals that do services or that are predominantly services like tailoring or bike shops, for example.
Yeah, we do cover a lot of that. And of course, we're always [00:07:30] trying to make improvements to it as we use it with the customers.
[00:07:33] Dan DeLong: Now, is that something that Lightspeed will do right out of the box with regards to services? Or is it more of as soon as you mention service work orders, those types of things in a retail shop you're, Best bet is looking at, a third party integration that, that integrates with Lightspeed.
[00:07:56] KG: So services is, I believe, something that comes natively. [00:08:00] But it is a module that is unlocked. So it is very situational. Not every business is going to need or use services. So yeah, it is a module that can be added on to the business if needed.
[00:08:14] Dan DeLong: Yeah that's one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, like what's what's an ideal fit, retail fit, those that might be looking and going, okay I might need something, but my company does X, so that, that would fit in and it's always good to, to check [00:08:30] out. Check it out and have a demo and just to see if it is a good fit for your business. But if it if it doesn't or I'm sorry, if it once you see it then you can make that determination, but there's just because it doesn't do it right out of the box doesn't mean that there isn't a good, that light speed isn't a good fit because of your API and partner partners that you work with as well,
[00:08:53] KG: right?
Absolutely. The way we like to position it is we cannot be everything for everyone. So we're really good at what [00:09:00] we do natively. But then we rely on things like our partners to build out and provide them advanced features for things that they want to take it to the next level. So things like loyalty, they want to take our native loyalty and make it better.
There's Marcello. So anything else on side of that? So things like age verification or Whatever it may be there, chances are we have an integration with it. We have an open API, like you mentioned. Developers and softwares like to build on it. It's open, it's free. So people will [00:09:30] typically build an integration that sometimes we may not know about that they'll support.
But then sometimes we'll work together to build an integration that we will support internally. So the pool is very large
[00:09:39] Dan DeLong: right now. Lightspeed is is one of those companies that, that likes to acquire and then in, and then build in the integration. You are an example of that because you came from Ven and then Lightspeed use using that as it, as its flagship product.
Are there. Is that for other workflows as well, is that they're always [00:10:00] on the lookout for, things to bring in natively, even if it's not something they build, but they could, bring it into the full type of thing, right? Yeah,
[00:10:08] KG: exactly. And it does typically come from the partner that will say, Hey, I have this customer who uses our platform but needs to integrate to a point of sale.
And we noticed you have an open API. Can we make this work? And it normally starts off with one customer. And if it's valuable to them, we'll most likely make it work. But yeah, of course, we'll, we're always open to new [00:10:30] integrations. If anyone has a software that they're using that doesn't integrate to any point of sale that they know of, send it through.
We'll make it work.
[00:10:37] Dan DeLong: Yeah. Cause the sweet spot for Oh, I want to ask you this question. Cause I was looking at your list of, ideal micro verticals, and then you're you're risky. Your risky verticals and obviously the risky ones are, like the CBD guns.
firearms, ammunition, those types of things that are like a little sketchy when it comes to, payments, [00:11:00] but the last one on the list was high end furniture. Was that specifically about the payment side of things or that? That's not a really great fit for Lightspeed itself.
[00:11:12] KG: That's a great question. It is in regards to payments. Across the payment industry and even the furniture stores will probably understand this as well. That a lot of the times it's because of the high volume of transaction. So it's not very often that someone will come in and drop. 15, 000 on the credit card.
50, 000. Yeah, [00:11:30] exactly. So when that does happen it raises eyebrows at the payment processor at the bank levels. In most cases, it's not that we can't handle the functionality of the business. That's a great fit for us. One of our biggest ones is home decor and furniture that we work with. But in most cases, or in some cases, the high end verticals or high end furniture stores, they may just have a harder time getting our processing.
But we do have high risk processors that we work
[00:11:53] Dan DeLong: with as well. Yeah, I just wanted to point that out because when I was looking at, okay, a good [00:12:00] fit is home decor says to me for furniture and then to say. A high end furniture is not a good fit. I thought it was maybe because they do a lot of special orders and those types of things and that's not a great Workflow fit for lightspeed, but you can solve those needs for those types of stories, it's just when it comes to the integrated payment solution and you still do have payment solutions that will work for those types of industries, right?
Absolutely. And
[00:12:28] KG: again, that's where our partners come [00:12:30] in. So for things like CBD that need high risk processing, we just can't do it with like speed payments, for example, but we have partners that will do it, that we have full integrations with, and those ones are typically exempt of any additional processing fees because we cannot do it.
Work with them on the payment
[00:12:47] Dan DeLong: side. Cause normally if you if you're not using Lightspeed payments, there's a good call out. So if you're not using, again, one of the great advantages of Lightspeed is this all in one solution. You've got you've got your point of [00:13:00] sale for your brick and mortar.
You've got your e commerce option for your website. So you can, within one application, you can basically sell online and in store. And then you've also got. Payments between those, both of those workflows, which can allow you to accept credit card payments for for either of those two things.
So you've got this all in one solution type of thing for that. And that's one of the great advantages of Of light speed, even, comparing that to QuickBooks point of sale, because you've [00:13:30] got applications that you have to bolt on in order to do to do those things.
So if you have an e commerce website, yes, you can bring those transactions into QuickBooks point of sale, but you need a bridge or a connector to do that, right? So yours is all all in. In the box, right? Yeah,
[00:13:50] KG: I could manage the loyalty, e commerce, multiple locations, all from one link.
And what makes it easier is the bills as well, right? I always like to compare it to when I [00:14:00] combined my cell plan with my home internet and being able to just be with one company, one bill makes it significantly easier. So compare that to something in your business. If you could just consolidate all of
[00:14:11] Dan DeLong: that.
So when they're in that vertical that it doesn't really fit for lightspeed payments, you have a third party or if they say Hey I prefer my own payment processor or something like that. I'm, or I'm in a, I'm in a, I'm in a long term contract and it doesn't make sense to [00:14:30] switch.
You can use other payment processors with lightspeed payments. But typically there is a per transaction fee. Yes,
[00:14:40] KG: it does cost us to train and support multiple integrations. In this case, there is an additional processing fee that we would charge if not taking Lightspeed payments. But when it comes to the volume there really should be no financial reason not to switch.
We cover a lot of bases. With what we offer with the integration, but on top of that, the savings that we offer just by [00:15:00] offering a flat rate alone, we're doing better than 70 percent of the cases that we're seeing. And that's hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars per month. Financially, there should be no reason.
And we do offer contract buyouts as well. Yeah, the sale team they'll help you
[00:15:11] Dan DeLong: out. But, when you think of all of the, like you were saying about bundling all your. Bundling your home in auto if we're talking about Patrick Mahomes and the the, but with those types of things, when you bundle, you've got you've got, you, you actually have, a shopping cart website.
So [00:15:30] people can think of okay the money that I'm spending or have spent on my website, I could feasibly roll into my Lightspeed subscription. My, my point of sale, my payment processing, all of that under one roof, so to speak. It does add to the value of that bundle when they look at all of the other things that they don't have to have when they're doing it with Lightspeed, right?
Exactly.
[00:15:53] KG: Making it that much easier.
[00:15:55] Dan DeLong: And then there's only, like you said, one person to complain to. Exactly. [00:16:00] If one thing goes wrong. And that is specifically trained on all of them, right? So they're not like, it's not like a lot of finger pointing goes on when a When it comes to that Intuit is famous for finger pointing, right?
That's not our, that's not our domain. That is the payment processor. That's your website or that Shopify, or that's, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that out loud,
but so let's talk a little bit about the [00:16:30] sales workflows. And I know you have a hard stop at in 10 minutes. So we want to make sure we're concise. What kind of sales workflows? Work work best in inside of because this is all the point of sale is to bring up sales. What's the scope of of sales out of the box, right?
And obviously, there's that caveat of if there are. Yeah, but my company, yeah, but with my company does it this way. There, there is the potential of third party application or third party integration that will fulfill that need.[00:17:00] In, inside of a point of light speed.
There we go. Couldn't say it right. Yeah. There it is.
[00:17:06] KG: Natively within the platform, what you get at the point of sale transaction is right away, you get things like advanced promotions to be able to sell things like buy one, get one, for example. So those ones are right out of the box, a simple, basic transaction, like scanning the product.
Paying for it and then sending out an email, for example, instead of printing out a receipt all of those things come natively within the platform, being able to collect customer data if you wanted to, if you wanted [00:17:30] to cleanse, continue that flow, but the purpose of the, of course, the sales screen is just to be as fast as possible.
And you want to make those as quick and easy as possible again, not only for the owner, but for the staff member using it, the cashiers, the part timers that may not be there for a long time, and it's a learn this quickly, the user interface is extremely simple and easy to understand. Natively. Almost all the features are locked at that point.
Unless, of course, you need things like loyalty. Maybe you need things like services that may be dependent on the business or the vertical that you're in. So [00:18:00] I would always recommend, bring your use case to the team and we will always point you in that direction. And if we can't solve it, like I said, we can't do everything for everyone.
We have solutions in the form of integration. There's almost no situation we cannot cover on a retail basis. With our integrations and native workarounds already.
[00:18:18] Dan DeLong: The most common things of, I don't track customers and I just want to ring up sales, something that is very like cash register focused of I just need to collect money and then, [00:18:30] have a report of that, about that that, that will certainly be.
be done. But then when you start adding on, a little bit more complexity of hey, I want to track this customer's buying habits, maybe have a loyalty or send out emails. Can you do that in in Lightspeed does it have an email marketing built into it that you can do rather than having to, again, purchase another MailChimp or something like that?
[00:18:55] KG: So the good thing is that similar to we do have an integration with MailChimp, I should note. Yeah, [00:19:00] I'm sure you do. But that being said, we do have a white label with Marcello. So it is billed by Lightspeed, for example, no third party. So it's direct integration with them. If they wanted things like advanced loyalty.
We do have our own based loyalty that we offer within Lightspeed, but it is a little bit more basic, only focused on in store. But if your business is more focused on Omni, for example, selling online, in store, anywhere else, this connects it all. So that way the customer has the power to use their points anywhere they shop.
And again, I went to
[00:19:28] Dan DeLong: I went to a store [00:19:30] Lightspeed because of course I see, I'm always very curious of what are they using? And and I noticed they had a little tablet. And then they were ringing up other people and they're like, do you want to join our loyalty program? They were talking about it.
And I was like, wait a minute. I don't think I didn't think light speeds loyalty did that. And that's why I understood that. Oh, there's a, there's another. Yeah, loyalty program that's out there and they were saying all the things that it could do and oh, this is pretty phenomenal when it comes to that.
And it's under [00:20:00] one for people. Yeah. And they can refer people to that. But without that loyalty integration is there a. Like with customer collection of just, their email, phone numbers, that sort of thing can lightspeed send marketing to them or does it
[00:20:17] KG: Not natively.
No. So our tool is more focused on the in store customer and inventory. We do have a loyalty program, but it is not a marketing tool. The main reason why is because once you get into things like marketing, you really want to [00:20:30] track your ROI. And we just don't have the capability to do that. So that's where things like Marcello come in.
The loyalty plan is great. If you're just looking to support, let's say your local community, right? In that case, it's, it works perfectly fine for what you're looking for. But if you want to branch out more online, things like that, then we have tools to facilitate.
[00:20:47] Dan DeLong: Yeah. And QuickBooks point of sales loyalty, it does have a loyalty, but it's very rudimentary, right?
It's must. very similar to turning their purchases into some kind of currency.[00:21:00] And that could be, points that turn into dollars off or something like that. And then they'll have an integration with something like constant contact or something like that for the marketing side of.
Of those types of things, but you can still collect customer information in light speed without those things, but what you do with them then becomes up to you and you're taking the mindset or the stand the mindset that, Hey, use that's where we.
Where we [00:21:30] end, right? We'll collect the information, but not necessarily give you all the great tools to do something with that, because there are other players in the field that do that better than we do, and that's very overarching. I think that's very a good a good way to, to think about.
[00:21:45] KG: Yeah, just to give you a little bit more. An idea of which direction you want to take it. Cause a lot of new businesses will start off and of course they just want to at least have a customer base because once they have that base, let's say first hundred, first couple hundred customers, then they can start discussing, all right, I [00:22:00] want to start bringing these customers back.
How do I do that? With X tool, go ahead and use a tool, dump your customers in there, and then you'll start putting them in things like automated marketing, who clicks the emails, who refers their friends, who collects points, then you can start again, even tailoring those marketing campaigns even more specifically.
It really does take it to the next level.
[00:22:19] Dan DeLong: Yeah. And then one of the last things I wanted to talk about is, and this kind of flows into, because, MailChimp is an Intuit product, right? They're now, they spend a lot of money [00:22:30] acquiring MailChimp. And then of course there's that whole marketing side of things where, okay, I can do some of these things inside of my QuickBooks because I can track their customer purchases and that sort of thing.
Just want to forewarn people the way that those things were sent over from, QuickBooks point of sale to QuickBooks was typically in a summary fashion, right? So you weren't necessarily you weren't necessarily tracking every customer purchase over into your QuickBooks and Lightspeed functions much [00:23:00] the same way where at the end of the day the QuickBooks integration with QuickBooks online is going to be.
The end of the day type of thing, you're not going to be tracking your individual customer sales in your QuickBooks because one, that would just make the file huge and in QuickBooks online, it would make things slow and then that would be horrible, right? Yeah. A
[00:23:22] KG: lot of manual work, a lot of
[00:23:23] Dan DeLong: man hours, right?
So same thing for Lightspeed as far as the integration into QuickBooks when it comes to the end of the [00:23:30] day.
[00:23:31] KG: So are you talking about the actual integration itself with QBO? Yes. Yeah. So the integration, what we push is what's needed from our end. Like we don't push everything that needs to be sent over, over there just because QuickBooks just needs things like, for example, the sales ledger payment processing that was accepted invoices, things like that.
We don't necessarily need to send over how well did this one product sell. That's the kind of stuff maybe we'll keep
[00:23:59] Dan DeLong: internal. You're not going to [00:24:00] be doing your inventory tracking inside of your QuickBooks Online. You're going to be doing that inside of your Point of sale and your lights. So you'll get more, more usable data out of your light speed over your QuickBooks.
So what sends over to QuickBooks is more of the end of day, daily sales types of things. And then you'll be able to take it from there. Like it's a relay race. It's sends a baton over to pass it on
[00:24:25] KG: to QuickBooks. Use the tools for what they're good for.
[00:24:29] Dan DeLong: Exactly. [00:24:30] So I know you got a hard stop and I appreciate you joining us here today, but we'll wrap this up next week with with our last part four of migrating from QuickBooks point of sale to Lightspeed with our.
With our special guest KG and we appreciate you joining us today on the workshop and we'll see you next time.
[00:24:49] KG: Take care. Bye.
