Last time for Recap

If you missed the last two blog posts Intro and Marketing + Automation or have completely forgotten since last week, here’s a quick recap of automation:

Automation is a piece of software or technology that does certain tasks repeatedly so your staff can be freed up to do other things. These tasks are normally repetitive ones that tie up unnecessary time and ones that your staff doesn’t necessarily need to be doing.

Delivering Massive Impact

As we talked about in the last post, email marketing automation can deliver massive results to companies. So can connecting sales operations to automation. We all know that the hallmark of good sales is persistence. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Energy and persistence conquers all things.” Being persistent in sales means staying on top of that momentum that you are building with a lead. At the very least, a good Sales Automation system has continual reminders to keep you on track and on top of leads but can take that a step further if built correctly.

Let’s look at an example:

Going back to the example in the first post, a potential customer calls up Sales staff to inquire about products. Sales and Lead have a conversation. In this version of the scenario, a sale isn’t immediately made but, instead, Sales sends them some information and enters the in his Leads spreadsheet that they keep. However, Sales gets really busy over the next couple of weeks and Lead never calls back so… no sale.

So, what can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen? As we did in the original example, we built some automation that was triggered by entering a row into a spreadsheet. In this case, the automation system reminds Sales every couple of days about the Lead and to check-in. It also does the same to the Lead, launching them into an Email Marketing journey that checks on them, and sees if they are ready or have any questions. Now, a very low-level system of checks and balances has been created to make sure that customers don’t fall through the cracks.

Now, for the sake of clarity, I wouldn’t suggest having all your sales contacts live on a Google Spreadsheet. I would recommend that a company explore a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system at the very least. Through that CRM, we would launch the automation reminders and email marketing system.

Serving Both Parts

If you think about it, your Sales Funnel has two parts: BC (Before Contact) and AC (after Contact). The example before is looking at how you might apply automation to your Sales Funnel AC. This is a place where Automation really should be part of your process even if, at the very least, you’re just using a CRM and having it automatically create follow-up tasks.

For example, when I meet a lead, I put them into my CRM. I then email them through my CRM with any information that I am providing them with. From that email, I can see if they go to my website and look at anything online. I have an automation system that sends me a notification when they look at specific pages. This way I can gauge if a customer is hot or not. Now, if I wanted to, I could fire off an automated email that asks them if they would like to speak soon or not. Or I could drop them a personal email checking in. I, as a rule, try not to do that right away because it can get creepy and I’m not trying to give someone an active reason not to do business with me.

But how would you use Automation in your Sales Funnel BC (Before Contact)? That would really depend on how you get customers. Are your customers mostly word of mouth or do you advertise a lot to get customers? If you’re advertising online, there are different tools that you can use to log leads as they click on different links and your website. You could use chat programs that would allow you to chat with leads while they are on your website. Automation could be set up to connect all these pieces and send you a message when someone who has a high lead score lands on your website. Or you could fire them a message through Facebook messenger or Instagram. There’s a lot more you can do in this place to build out the effectiveness of how your leads become customers.

More to Come and What’s up Next

As I’ve been writing these last couple of posts, I’ve been discovering that there’s more to write than just these posts. I’ve started working on a PDF that has some of this information and more in it. I’ll post a way for folks to get it for free when I finish.

In the meantime, next, we’re going to dig into the ways that you connect your website and automation. We’ve hit on a few ways that you can do that in the past couple of posts but I want to dig into it a little deeper. After that, I want to get into some software that I’ve used for CRMs, Project Management, and Automation.

As I’ve said before, if any of this intrigues you and you want to hear more about how this connects to your business, you can drop me a line through my contact form or you can set up a time to talk to me: https://cwtwebsites.zohobookings.com/#/customer/4321453000000026017