Interview With CRANKWHEEL.COM founder-JOI SIGURDSSON

Your host of the QuotersCast and licensed insurance agent Renee talks to Joi Sigurdsson who has had a lengthy and fruitful 25 year career as a software developer.

Joi spent 10 years at Google working on projects like the Chrome browser.

Since 2015, he and his business partner (who is an insurance agent) have been running CrankWheel.com.

It’s a screen sharing platform that allows salespeople to instantly demonstrate a project through their phone to a client – without the need for clunky, time wasting apps like Zoom or conference calling.

The prospect or client never has to use their camera or download anything.

They just click a link and voila! Find Joi at these internet spaces:

CRANKWHEEL – https://crankwheel.com

Joi’s Old School Homepage – https://joisig.com/

Crankwheel’s YT channel: / @crankwheel

TRANSCRIPT OF My Interview With Former Google Developer & Founder of ScreenSharing Platform

CRANKWHEEL.COM – JOI SIGURDSSON

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

Alright, so welcome to the quarters cast, and my guest today is Joi Sigurdsson and he is the founder of crank wheel, which is a software program for screen sharing for sales professional professionals.

You’ve been in the business for almost 25 years as a software developer and pen in those years was spent at Google. You’ve been part of multiple startups as a co-founder and executive, and so it’s almost like your entire career has been building towards this project, which I’m really excited about…

And I’ve been going over for most of the morning now. And so I’d like to concentrate more on the usage aspect of the software instead of the technical part.

So many of our audience are insurance people and finance people, and so is your partner.

Who maybe you can tell us a little bit about, is an insurance agent. So can you give us some background on how you came together and created this…

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Absolutely, thank you, and I am really glad to be on the podcast with you. Thank you and thanks.

Yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity of spreading the word about Crankwheel.

I’ll also be really happy to talk about things that we’ve learned through interacting with a lot of insurance agents. Such as how they’re able to sell better by using screen sharing tools on their phone and things like that, so yeah.

Yes, yeah, absolutely. I definitely have some tips around that…

Yeah, so the origin story, so my co-founder of kills. We started the company back in 2015, and killed had been selling insurance among other things. That was the latest thing he’d been selling, but related products like Real estate, banking products, those kind of things.

Mostly sold over the phone, sometimes in person. Sometimes a phone call and then driving to a person’s house to actually sign the papers, you know, that kind of thing.

And as you mentioned, my background had been at Google. I’ve been working on some technology in the kind of online meeting space there. And you’ll see, we were looking for a startup, do build together something in the sales space.

And I think we’ve kind of re-imagined every sale till there is out there. We discovered, of course, they all existed until I asked him quite innocently… When you’re on a phone call and you need to show your prospects on thing real quick, what do you use if you need to show them some documentation, or give them a presentation or anything like that.

And he says, You know what, on a kind of a cold outreach call, you’re never gonna do that.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Because the tools are too complicated. And that’s really where CrankWheel comes from.

Renee of QC:

Okay, well, this is a great entry point because I had not heard of this. I’m fairly new to the insurance base myself, but it sounds like a fantastic tool. But I wanna understand how you use it, ’cause I’m still a little fuzzy on that, so can you sort of, walk us through that.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Absolutely, absolutely. The fundamental thing to understand before we talk about some of the use cases is that you can be in a phone call with a prospect, and it can be. Your client could be very non-text-a, it could be.

Let’s just say a Baby Boomer got the first mobile or five years ago and he hardly knows what to do, it doesn’t matter. You can be in that phone call and then say something like, Hey, I just sent you a text message. Can you click the link?

And now I wanna show you something, you never have to explain what you’re doing. You just go straight to a screen share where you can show them live whatever you need. And if we talk about some common use cases in insurance…

The number one thing we recommend to agents that are using cranial is as soon as you’re talking with a client, open up your license for that particular states. Have that open on screen ready to go.

And then as soon as the call has progressed a little bit, just show them your license by sending them a text message or having them type in to send the link. That builds a little bit of trust.

If you want, you can put your webcam feed on top of the license so that you also get that kind of personal connection. Without having to request the webcam from your prospect, they might be in their pajamas.

But you present yourself a little bit better by showing yourself in the webcam. So that can build trust and definitely showing your license and build trust.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

That’s kind of maybe the first step, other steps would be doing a side-by-side comparison visually of different plan options, that kind of thing, you could have a quote to already to go while you’re in the phone call, and instead of confusing your prospect with all the different options that are available.

If you have a quote to somewhere, are you using like the government-provided ones, it’s your job to simplify their decision for them is You could be screen sharing to them, showing them the quote tool.

But then you might wanna pause the screen share while you do something a little bit more complicated, before you bring up all the different available options. You might pause the screen share and just talk them through the options, the one you recommend and so on, chose that for the US screen share.

Keep going. Building up that form together…

Renee of QC:

Okay, so hang on a second, there’s a few… This is starting to sound in that software that you can… Hantesa or screen casemate for desktop and laptop, and it sounds like your software does something similar through the mobile phone, is that correct?

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Yeah, it does something similar, but life, while you were talking to your prospect on the phone, you can show them whatever is on your screen, you can show them your webcam feed if you want.

It’ll open up on their mobile phone without any software download or anything like that as I mentioned. You can even just send them a text message, they click on a link there and immediately they’re seeing your screen, and if you compare that to trying to use something like Zoom, which we’re using right now… Some is great, right?

But if you try to use it on a cold call, you’re very likely to lose your client, they’ll be… What is to more or they’ll be, Oh, I don’t have the zoom software on my phone. Do I need to install that?

And you might change a call that is going great into a call where all that client remembers is the frustration of you try to have them use some complicated tool. You know what I mean?

Okay, so what you can do is you can choose something like crankwheel instead. Where it’s just a text message link, they click the link from, your screen is up on their screen. And it’s similarly easy if they’re on their computer instead of a mobile.

Renee of QC: Okay, so why does… Nobody thought of this before.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Well, we thought If I wait back in 2015, but it’s been a slow burn, we have a really great business, and over the last few years, it’s been really picking up with insurance agents, particularly Health, and we’re seeing life…

We were seeing lots of growth also in life right now, that actually brings me to another tip. In terms of use cases, sometimes you have to enter the social security number into a form. And you might be using screen sharing to help your client fill in that form. But it gives them what we’ve found, or what we covered from a life insurance agents in particular.

It’ll give your client a great deal of comfort if you turn control of the form over to them just for that last little bit when they’re filling in their social security number. So that’s a really great capability to have. You say, Oh, I’m gonna give you control now. You type in your social security number and they can do that from their phone or from their desktop. All without interrupting the phone call or stopping the session or anything like that.

Renee of QC:

Oh, that’s outstanding. Now, so it puzzles me now why you don’t seem to have any competition, and so I didn’t hear about this through insurance, I heard about it through a podcast, not interesting.

So yeah, and so it seems to be still a little bit mysterious or quite mysterious here.

And also, if you can maybe segue into talking about compliance, ’cause I think approaching a lot of these insurance companies. That would be a big deal collecting all that information through an app on the phone, so… Can you address that?

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Absolutely, we do have some larger insurance customers in the insurance vertical, by number, it’s by far are independent agents, and then after that, it’s smaller teams, maybe 100 to 2030 people. But we do have some considerably larger insurance customers, devotes one.

And in terms of compliance for the larger customers, we are able to sign a business associate agreement. So they need to be HIPAA compliant, we can fit right in with that. And we have done that in terms of compliance for the smaller players that I can show it like let’s say, independent agents.

Now that you have to save all recordings for 70 years, things like that. We don’t interfere with that because we don’t actually take over the phone call. So you use whatever system you’re already using for the phone call, you’re using crankwheel only for the visuals. Typically, you can use Frankie for audio, but usually you’re…

So we know that a lot of up-lines will make a requirement you use this or this voice, a variety system. Because we know that they aren’t gonna be compliant with the recording requirements of storing and all that, and…

We don’t interfere with that.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

We think of that. It’s the best practice. Oh.

Renee of QC:

Okay, well, now that makes sense because your app is available in 11 languages. And I thought, Well, that’s overwhelming in terms of trying to meet all the different compliance issues with different countries, so… Yes, yes. Okay, so it’s just integrated into their system and all of that is taken care of on their end…

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Yeah, so if you already use a vitality system that does the call recordings for you and for a long term for you, then you’re covered and crank… Doesn’t interfere with that.

Renee of QC:

Okay. You also integrate with Zapier and Salesforce, is that correct?

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

That’s correct, yeah. And for our larger customers that are coming on board, we also tend to build, not necessarily custom integrations.

For example, there’s a customer that we are to in negotiations with right now. And they use Zoho CRM and they use a VOIP system that we don’t have an existing integration with. But we can turn those out pretty quickly for larger customers.

So that’s what we tend to do.

Renee of QC:

Okay, okay, great. So since your partner is an insurance agent, can you take us through some real specifics on how he uses this to gain more clients?

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Absolutely, I think the number one thing is, if you think about the difference between being able to finish the business on the phone. Being able to get someone on the phone, get them interested, show them your license, and then walk them through the documents.

You may have a legal obligation to show them some particular documents and then you can do that over the screen share without meeting them in person.

If you think about that case, you can imagine you could get through maybe even 10 clients a day, an impact, or maybe more…

In fact, some of them are the most active insurance agents. They will have 100 plus meetings with granted every month. And if you had to go in person after the call to show them documentation, that kind of thing.

Or if you had to chase them, sending the documentation through email, and then get a confirmation that they read them or whatever. If that actually is compliant, not depends on your location in the world, I guess, if you had to do that, you wouldn’t get through anywhere near that number in a day.

So it’s about volume in particular, we enable you to lose the deal on the first call. If you get the client interested, you’re able to do everything you have to do with them.

And at the end of the day, you can have them sign up essentially during the call. It’s health insurance or life insurance or weight, it might be damaged, casualty, whatever.

But it’s mostly a personal decision. So it’s usually either just them or maybe them and the spouse that are going to decide whether to buy, so why not try to not try to close on the first call.

Renee of QC:

You know I agree with you 100%.

Yeah, so yeah, we’re trained as insurance engines, whether you’re captive or independent on the call is to get a meeting. Then they probably won’t buy in that first meeting and you wanna get a second meeting and then some time down the road, weeks or months.

And times they’ll eventually buy from you, so it sounds to me like you’ve created something that really…

You really can have a one call close with insurance is like revolutionary woolly. Okay, so uses also looking for a video that could really. So I wanna be able to visualize it and see how it was used. I know you have a demo button on your website, is that the best way or do you have YouTube videos available for people to see.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

We do have YouTube videos that show you how to use the system and walk through a number of use cases, we have a channel on YouTube that’s simply called Crankwheels. You’ll find it there pretty quickly, there is a completely free version of crank wheel that people can… Try out and use for as long as they want.

In fact, Crankwheel is free for life if you’re doing 15 meetings or last per month.

So you can do that forever without paying a sense, so that’s pretty easy to set up. Just go to Crankwheel and you can sign up there.

Okay. Yeah, but yeah, for sure, the YouTube channel has a ton of material times of up through some features and things like that.

Renee of QC: Okay, alright, you also mentioned that you…

Joi Sigdursson of CrankWheel:

In terms of the door…

Renee of QC:

No, I was just wondering, you mentioned that it’s good for the Alps. So that you can call it, somebody from the Alps can call up the client and show what their advertisement would look like. How would you use it for that?

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

The funny thing is, way back in 2015, when we started the company, Gilead been working as an insurance agent. As we’ve talked about, and we’d be intended to product for insurance agents, that was like number one call.

Number one thing we designed for that was the person that we were thinking of or had in mind when we designed the product. But then our hirth actually came from other industries, and it’s more like the last four or five years that we’ve been seeing really strong growth and insurance.

Although we’ve actually had people selling insurance all the way since 2017, were still using the system today.

But yeah, yellow pages was one of those first industries where we saw growth, and they are essentially selling digital marketing services to small business.

So it’s like you said, show you what your ad is looking like or something like that. What they will actually do, and this is something that I think really echoes what’s done in the insurance space, is they will do a consultative selling approach.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

So instead of calling you and just blatantly trying to sell you to subscription to run a website for you or something like that, or an ad campaign with the most common use case that I hear about within his websites, they would call and say, Hey, Mr.Plumber or some small business owner, I noticed that you don’t have a website yet, and it just so happens that I’ve used a really quick one for you, and they have a semi-automated systems for that.

And they’ll say, Would you like to see it? And if the small business owner says, yes, then it’s like a corneal session and get them connected in 510 seconds, show them what you’ve built, and then it’s a consultative sale where it’s like, How do you like this? How do you like that? Do you wanna change the color here… What about the wording here, they might even give them control.

As I mentioned, so that the small business owner themselves can type in a title or change something, but mostly they’re showing them the website as it’s being built.

And so at the end of a 15 or 30-minute call, you have the small business owner who is now emotionally invested in the website that they’ve sort of helped to build for the duration of the call, and you ask them, Well, oh, by the way, if you like, we could make this life, the site live today, and the cost is only whatever, 20, and I don’t know what they charge, but the reasonable cost, and it’s a small business owners, so they can probably make that decision right there in the first call, so it’s a very interesting way to sell, and I think it ACES…

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

A lot of the ways you wanna sell in insurance, you want to become their trusted advisor, and I think you want to do that before you sober, you go asking for their business, you want to make sure that they feel that you…

Over the person that can help them with their insurance, regardless of whether they decide to purchase from you or not…

Right, so start building up that trust.

Adobe webcam functionality that we have, just being able to show your webcam without going into a full-blown or compressing to some more go-to meeting or teams, which just fails too much of the time if it’s been…

Especially if it’s a non-tax abuser, but still build that trust, make them feel comfortable with you before you go asking for their business.

Renee of QC:

Wow, that’s excellent. So it makes me think that there’s other applications in terms of expansion, like maybe like healthcare, a lot of doctors and patients now are doing things like this, I think it’s a little more secure than zoom, but it sounds like your comes for that or maybe life coaching. And have you started to branch out in that way…

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

We have a few other verticals that are doing really well, wealth wealth management, this one, ’cause then the person doing your wealth management for you, like a financial advisor, can easily be showing you visuals as they talk to you, so it could either be a new sale or it could be an ongoing sort of consultation.

So I use quite a lot for that, and solar is another one, so residential solar where they’re selling you Denning a four solar panels for your roof that’s gonna lower your energy bill and you rate a return on investment type of calculator live while you’re in the call. It just totally makes sense. You can show all the benefits of visually…

And again, it’s the kind of decision maker where it’s a home owner, so they can probably either make up their minds by themselves or with their spouse, so it’s not like you don’t have to duplicate a heavy enterprise kind of or a business to-business sales process where…

It might be multiple steps and multiple stakeholders and stuff like that. When it’s just one or two people who can decide together, just why not try to close on the first call if they’re interested enough, you can show them I…

Renee of QC:

Alright, that’s great. But that half hour went very quickly. So this is fascinating, and I’m looking forward to… To using it, I also wanted to ask you about the use of yellow and your branding, it’s just so rare that it’s usually the main color that a brand uses.

So why would you choose that?

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Yeah, the yellow or orange. It’s an action-oriented color, and it’s associated with innovation action, that kind of thing.

I will tell you the secret reason why the company is called Crank wheel, it’s because I enjoy cycling and a grand wheel is a lesser used term for the changing the part of your bike that you turn with your pedals, so that’s where the word came from initially, but the thing is, we wanted sort of… We wanted to invite…

Sorry, we wanted to evoke that it is a simple tool that…

It’s a simple, powerful tool, just like the caning on a bike is, it’s very simple, but it really helps give you power, and you can actually see the other side of the logo and it looks like a changing or something that could interact with the chain or a year, but yeah, the color, it’s so chosen because it’s sort of this action-oriented color, and that’s what we think sales people are and should be as action-oriented.

Renee of QC:

Okay, so one last question. I know you’re over in Iceland, correct. I’ve heard how beautiful the country is, and I just think there’s a lot of people here in the US who have not visited and don’t know much about the culture, so I’m just wondering… Can you give us a little insight into Icleandic culture, if you don’t mind?

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Sure, no problem. So I’ll tell you the truth, and then I’ll tell you the romanticized version. So we are Scandinavian essentially, but here on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, and because of some historical events around the Second World War where we were occupied by first the predation and then the Americans.

And also just because of our fascination with American culture, we are actually quite Americanized in terms of culture, food, a lot of different things, but our roots are Scandinavian, so we share a lot of values and things like that with the other Scandinavian countries, like Denmark, within Norway, Finland, and our neighbors.

Frogs and green lenders.

So that’s sort of how I see it. And I’ve lived a big part of my life abroad in Scotland and in Canada, and a little bit in California, so that’s how I see it sort of as an inside or quit one with maybe some perspective from living abroad.

The romanticized version is that we all believe in Elves, which we do.

So this actually happens, so it actually happens that they’ll be putting down the road somewhere and there is some giant rock in the way of the road, and somebody will point out that it’s believed that Elves hid the rock, and they will actually tethered around that.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

So I think that’s part of our apolitical attitude or culture, because we used to be at highly dependent on the climate, which is horrible, fishing, which was very dangerous back in the day, so we tend to be sort of fatalistic.

So we believe in some mythical creatures and we believe in things just sort of tending to go away most of the time. We have a saying called the faith is a very famous Islamic saying that, and I’d be translated, but it just means things will be sort of… Okay.

Renee of QC:

That’s great. That’s excellent, I love it. Well, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed our talk. And so, I wish you much success. And so have a great day and maybe we’ll talk again soon.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel: Thank you very much for now, I’ve greatly enjoyed it. Have a great day and pass the success with everything, and I hope the podcast grows like crazy.