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The Agency Hour
Agency Automations
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If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, brought to you by Agency Mavericks.
SPEAKER_01What are you doing, brother? Now is it like it's Thanksgiving? It's Thanksgiving in the States tomorrow, is that right? Tomorrow. Thanksgiving Eve today. Yeah, this is the day everybody. Explain this to me like I'm six. What the hell is Thanksgiving? Where did it come from? How did it start? What are you doing? Is it just the beginning?
SPEAKER_02There are legends about how it started, and and some of them aren't too kind to the Native Americans. I'm not really sure what the true story of how it really started. I don't think anybody really truly knows how Thanksgiving started. Um, but it's been around forever. And it's just the third Thursday of Thanksgiving of uh November. We shut it down and we get together with family or friends, and we watch American football, which is the best football.
SPEAKER_01The third or the fourth? It's gotta be the fourth. It's the fourth Thursday. It must be the fourth, yeah. The fourth Thursday in November, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, last Thursday. Um and we it's all about family, uh traditional foods, you know, so a lot of food, and um football, and you know, some people get together with the friends instead of their family, and just being grateful. And the reason it's my favorite holiday is because it's about those things, and it's not about I don't have to buy anything for anybody, I don't have to be be um like remembering the vet the veterans or remembering these people, or remembering like it's not about anything like that, and it's certainly not religious or political, so it's just like a day to be grateful, and you know how I am about gratitude and thankfulness and all that stuff. So, like it's just a day to focus on that and be around your family and just chill and take the next day off too, because it's a Friday.
SPEAKER_01So uh uh so uh I'm gonna say here, I'm reading from Wikipedia, which is a trusted source of information, yeah, that it's been celebrated nationally on and off since 1789 with a proclamation by President George Washington after a request by Congress. What did Congress just needed a day off, did they? So they requested an annual holiday. Okay. Thomas Jefferson chose not to observe the holiday until uh, and so the celebration was intermittent, until Abe Lincoln in 1863 proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving and praise to our benefit benef beneficent father who dwelleth in the heavens, calling on the American people to also with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation.
SPEAKER_02There you go. So that's the kickstart. But now it's not now back then everything was about the Almighty in the heavens, and yeah, now not so much.
SPEAKER_01So it's not a religious thing these days.
SPEAKER_02Not for not for most people.
SPEAKER_01Right. So um, you know, in Australia, when we have a public holiday, it's usually around like a horse race or a football game, or there's some kind of betting or gambling going on. Um, but what you're telling me here is that this is just an excuse to have dinner with family and friends and be grateful.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and we do watch a lot of football. There's there's there'll be there'll be several football games on tomorrow. And then actually, it's also the kind of the unofficial start of the holiday season for for for Christmas, right? It's Black Friday and all the sales and all that. So our stores, our stores are nuts. You know, we you guys see all the internet Black Friday stuff, but you know, you try to go to a store around here, you know, you just you don't do it unless you're crazy.
SPEAKER_01So Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and then Cyber Monday.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_01And then at four weeks' time, Christmas, right? This is this is like a dress rehearsal for Christmas, right? Pretty much. Interesting. There we go. Um well, so it's uh it sounds uh it sounds I was hoping that there would be, you know, for I mean, truthfully, I was hoping that there would be more symbolism or more kind of, you know, more meaning around the holiday. Uh, but it doesn't, it sounds like it's just something that's kind of evolved over time and it's now a nationally observed day, but doesn't really have a hell of a lot of meaning. So it's not not like in it's not like an important part of the history of the nation, right? It's not like individual.
SPEAKER_02No, not like that. It's not a national, no, no, nothing like that.
SPEAKER_01Right. And uh in Canada, they do it uh at the start of the harvest in mid-October, yes, because Wikipedia did say it was originally a harvest festival. So is this like does this tie in with harvest season in the States?
SPEAKER_02No, it's a little late for that now, I think. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's always been November.
SPEAKER_01Jaden says food and murica and football. That's all the meaning you need.
SPEAKER_02Throw some family in there. Family in there too.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, family. Love it, love it. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us on the eve of Thanksgiving here for the agency hour live in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group. Today, we are going to talk about automations.
SPEAKER_02Ah, yes.
SPEAKER_01Yes, automations. And uh specifically, we're gonna talk about automations in agency life. And specifically, we're gonna talk about what you can automate, some of the things you can't automate, and then we're gonna talk about some of the things you shouldn't automate, even if you can automate them. Let's first of all talk about why, like how why is automation beneficial in the first place? What would what what's the benefit of having things automated? Well, I don't want to throw you under the bus right now.
SPEAKER_02No, it can it it uh it can standardize processes and how things get done. If you do you know automations are gonna do things the same way over and over and over again, and if it's a repeatable test like that, then it saves somebody the time and effort of doing it and the possibility of doing it wrong. Right. Um so you know it depends on what you're automating, but that's that's basically what it boils down to for me. Like if we can automate something that makes somebody's job easier, then we'll we'll try to do that.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01So so uh consistency, right? If you're doing the same thing over and over again and it needs to be done exactly the same way, and you can automate it, then then you know that's one advantage is that the robot will generally do it the same way every time because we program the robot to do it that way, right? Right.
SPEAKER_02And and most, I mean, in my business, most most uh automations that we have are just interaction between from one tool to another. So, you know, just sending a message to some other tool to kick off some process or to notify me or to notify somebody else on the team that something needs to get done or somebody needs to be contacted, something along those lines.
SPEAKER_01And also automation uh frees up the human to uh do more human stuff, right? Like be creative, solve problems, you know, talk to customers, which the robots aren't particularly good at. Robots aren't particularly good at thinking for themselves or talking to customers, right? Right. Not yet. Not yet. So let's let's dive in and give me some examples of things that you can automate. Rather, let's not talk about whether you should. By the way, we're gonna we're gonna do a run through of uh an email follow-up sequence uh a little bit later in the show. We're gonna do a run through of an email uh follow-up sequence that we teach. And I'm we're gonna kind of do a bit of a deep dive as to which parts of this you should automate and which parts we think that you probably shouldn't, and why, and what to do instead of automating the emails, right? So stay with us for that. It's gonna be riveting, I'm sure. Uh what are some of the things that you can automate in the agency? Let's get let's give the people some examples of things that you can automate to save time or to make sure things happen in a consistent fashion.
SPEAKER_02Whether you can or whether you should or shouldn't.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, whether you can.
SPEAKER_02Um, I don't know. Like, so there's probably parts of the sales process that you could probably automate, maybe automate outreach with email nurturing systems and all those kinds of things. You can automate parts of your care plan, like how you communicate with your clients, how you communicate, how you assign tasks. Some of that can be automated. Uh, like you said, the email nurture sequence for pro project or for proposals and things like that. That's about all I've ever really tried to automate in my business.
SPEAKER_01So let's talk about outreach for a second. We I have an automated sequence that uh finds me a lead, and then I'm not gonna I won't do a deep dive in the actual tools that we use because this is a whole other conversation. I actually do have this plan to do this later on for the agency hour, a whole deep dive into how we do this. But what I have is I have uh an automation that finds me a lead, uh a list of leads predominantly from the LinkedIn database, right? So I get a list of uh 25 leads a day that uh I don't need to go find those leads. It's completely automated and it comes into a dashboard and I have a look at those 25 leads and I quickly scan them. And as long as I don't recognize any names as being our existing customers, which I don't because I have an exclusion list loaded into this platform. So if anyone's on the exclusion list, the software just ignores them, and so far that's working. So I get this list of 25 leads, I quickly scan through them and approve them. I manually approve the leads. Takes me like less than 20 seconds to scan the list and go, yep, bang, bang. So there's one software tool that finds me the leads, brings those leads into another platform that puts them on a dashboard. I look through them and go, yeah, bang, uh, all good. And then what happens is this other platform visits the LinkedIn profile of those 25 leads. So the person is like, oh, who's this Troy Dean that's visited my LinkedIn profile? Then a day later, I send them either a connection request or a message if we're already connected, right? And the message, the in the connection request and the message are basically uh, in fact, I'll read the the connection request says something like, Hey Pete, looks like we're both in the agency space. Would love to connect, smiley face. If we're already connected, it says, Hey Pete, looks like we're both in the agency space. Thought you might find our agency Facebook group interesting. We recently interviewed so and so about topic XYZ. Are you the right person to share this with? So I'm just looking for a response, right?
SPEAKER_02Now are these automated?
SPEAKER_01Automated.
SPEAKER_02These are all automated. Okay.
SPEAKER_01These are all automated. So I visit their LinkedIn profile, the robot visits their LinkedIn profile, then a day later, it either sends them a connection request or a message based on, you know, if I'm already connected with them, if if it it knows it looks at the LinkedIn API and goes, hey, Troy's already connected with this person, so send them this message. Troy's not connected, so invite them to connect. And the message is generic enough that it's going to appeal to anyone who is on that list of leads that I manually approve because they're all in the web design, SEO, digital agency space, right? They're they're all agency owners. My list of leads, the criteria is they need to be an agency owner or founder or CEO, right? Then a day later, I send them an email because I get double verified email addresses from my lead generator software, right? And the email, so imagine this, you you you I visit your profile, your LinkedIn profile, and I and then a day later I send you a message on LinkedIn. And then a day later, I send you an email and says, Hey Pete, I pinged you on LinkedIn the other day and thought I'd follow up here. Thought you might find our agency Facebook group interesting. Are you familiar with guest name? I interviewed him recently about topic XYZ. Are you the right person to share this with? It's exactly the same message that I just sent on LinkedIn yesterday. Yeah. And then I wait a couple of days and I ping them back on LinkedIn and say, hey, Pete, I emailed you the other day and thought I'd follow up here again. Are you the right person to share this with? Here's the link. Love you to contribute to the conversation. Come and join our Facebook group. And then a final email a couple of days after that saying, okay, you got me. Maybe you're not interested in our Facebook group. If there's a magic trick I could send you right now, what would it be? And again, just looking for a response.
SPEAKER_02Yes, just a response. Yep.
SPEAKER_01Just a just a pulse. Exactly. Correct. They are messages that I would send anyway.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Right. And in fact, these are messages that I have I've been doing this sequence manually before I automated it.
SPEAKER_02Which is something I would suggest anyway. Yeah. And anything you're going to automate.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. I just got, I just, it was like, fuck, I could just can't keep doing this every day. It's like it's boring and it's drive me crazy. And I do like five of them, and I'm because I have ADD, I'm like, I'm bored, I want to go hassle Pete. I get into Slack and start abusing people. And um, so I just automate it now. And the robot does the work for me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Another uh automation that is often used in sales processes are chatbots. Yep. And that whether it's messenger or on your on your website, like that's an automation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um pre-qualifying someone before we connect them with a unit.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02And then of course the one that we all use, or you should be using probably, is some sort of calendar booking. I mean, that's an automation too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_02So booking and that saves a lot of time. I'm available at two. Well, I'm not, I'm not available till three. You're like, it's like crazy.
SPEAKER_01So there was this this this thing called Amy.ai.
SPEAKER_02Um I remember hearing about that when it came out.
SPEAKER_01And uh the whole point of Amy.ai was to handle that, like to have that conversation with for you in your in yeah. Yeah. That's right.
SPEAKER_02I don't know if it still exists, but supposedly we even work with multiple with multiple people booking a meeting. So that because that's that's always a big headache.
SPEAKER_01That's right. And uh I I I'm like, I don't know, like it just felt like um x dotai. There we go. X dotai it was. Yeah. X.ai. And um, I don't know, it still feels really plunky. It's like I still have to read emails, right? Do you know what I mean? Like exactly, yeah. Like, yeah, so uh x.ai doesn't exist anymore. It now redirects to Bizabo.com. So they pivoted. Here's a good example of what you can automate and what I think you shouldn't. You can automate people booking in your calendar because you give them your calendarly link and they book in and then they get the reminders. They get the email reminders, you can send them text reminders. You know, we normally send a text reminder 10 minutes before someone's booked into a call to say, hey, remember you we've got this call coming up in 10 minutes. Please make sure you turn up, you know, because we're busy and you know, otherwise we're going to make the calendar spot available for someone else, which is a true story, right? And we send an email a day before and you know, we just nurture that lead to make sure they turn up. However, what we do is we typically now it's it's it's it's rare that we send the calendar link to people. What we typically do is we chat with them over chat and we give them some options. We say, hey, we can do Thursday, 2 p.m., Thursday, 4 p.m., or Friday, 11 a.m. Eastern time, what which one works for you? And they tell us, and then we book them in using our calendar link. Yeah. So all the reminders and the nurture sequence of emails and text messages is still uh automated, right? But what the actual booking them in is not automated. We do that, we we call it the concierge experience. And that's purely because we found that, and I think this happened, and we'll talk about the pandemic and how that's impacted automations, but we found that people just weren't booking in, people just stopped booking in. Whereas if we reach out to them and we book them in, there's a we we get way more. I mean, we just wouldn't get we just wouldn't get bookings if we don't yeah, for and for sales.
SPEAKER_02But but but if you're working on a project and the client, you know wants to have a meeting with you, I would just send them the link. You don't have to do it that way, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's for sale. You you're talking about for a sales process, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. I'll give you another example. We I signed up with a company recently called startpack.io, and they have gone through the process of uh what they do is they register you as an LLC in the States. So we are now a we are now a registered LLC in Wyoming.
SPEAKER_02And um it's the good of place as any.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. There you go. And uh and um they we went through a a whole process with them. They set up our Stripe account, they set up our bank account, they set up, they do all the paperwork, right? But what happened is as soon as I paid and filled in their onboarding form and landed on the thank you page, within 30 seconds I received an email saying that they had shared a Google Drive folder with me. And that is automated, right? So now we have a shared Google Drive folder and all my stuff just gets put into Google Drive. Like manually logging into Google Drive and creating a folder and naming it Agency Mavericks LLC is something that they could do manually, but why when you just automate it? Because it's something that needs to happen repetitively. It's you know, the robot's gonna do it consistently. Yep. And so that was uh I was like, oh, that's a nice automation.
SPEAKER_02That's that's that's what robots are part of the onboarding process.
SPEAKER_01James Mugatroid says onboarding email sequence with intake forms for passwords and stakeholder names and info.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01Uh onboarding process and sending client prep work, says Chetsoni Brooks. Yep. Client onboarding is a great example of things that you can automate. I will say this though, this is an example of where things can go a little bit funky, right? We I hired an agency once, a content agency, who I've been chatting with a guy over Messenger, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna pull the trigger. And I and he said, All right, here's the link, just go sign up. And so I went and signed up and paid. And it was five o'clock p.m. my time. I was about to knock off for the day and go and have dinner with the kids, and you know, five o'clock in a house with a four-year-old and an 18-month-old is freaking mayhem, right? And on the thank you page, there was an intake form that I had to fill in that and he and and there was a video saying, Hey, thanks for signing up, blah, blah, blah. Here's the intake form. We need some information from you to get started. Don't close this page because if you do, you won't see it again. Like this, the this form only exists on this page. So please fill in the intake form. I'm like, okay, cool, no worries. I'm listening. He he then says it should take about 45 minutes to fill in the intake form. I'm like, fuck what? Dude, why didn't you tell me that in Messenger before I signed up? I would have signed up tomorrow morning. I haven't got 45 minutes to sit here now. And that means I have to go and have dinner with the kids, put the kids to bed, and then come back and do this tonight. Because if I close this page, I'm never going to see it again.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01Now, this is a really bad customer experience.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like you should have told me that before I signed up, and I would have done it tomorrow morning in the office when I have 45 minutes to fill in your intake form, right? I have a better idea. Let's get on a call and do the intake on a call. I'm not a big fan of 45-minute intake forms. No. I would rather talk to a human being, answer your questions, and you fill in the intake form for me because I just hired you.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Right? Two or three questions is one thing.
SPEAKER_02There's a 45-minute no.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I'm even like I even look at client onboarding, which is a whole different conversation because it depends on what you're onboarding them for. But I look at client onboarding. We had an onboarding, we had a great onboarding experience with Hirsch Marketing. It was a call with their team. It was a call with the strategist, it was a call with the media buyer, and it was a call with the creative team. There were four people on the call, plus myself and Emily. And it was a call that they recorded. And I just talked and they made a bunch of notes afterwards and sent it back to us. That's a great onboarding experience. I don't like filling in big long forms. I would suggest that you ditch the massive client onboarding form, have a checklist for an onboarding client onboarding session, and actually have a call.
SPEAKER_02It builds relationships on top of everything. On top of all the other things, it's going to start building the relationships and correct. And setting tone, like setting tone for how the thing's going to go. And right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Emily says they did have an intake form too form. Well, I know they they might have, but I certainly don't remember spending 45 minutes filling in their intake form, right? I love the idea of completing intake form for the client on the call. Yeah. So, you know, when you're on a call with someone, you can go, hey, we need all your assets. We need your your current, do you have a current style guide? No. Okay. Do you have logos? Oh, yeah, we've got a logo on the website. Okay, do you have that file anywhere else? No. Well then guess what? You go get the file off their website and save it into your Google Drive folder for them. That's called customer experience. That's called customer service, right? Emily spent the 45 minutes doing the intake form. Excellent. I'm glad someone did. So I, you know, the other the other one is the website worksheet, which is something we teach in the blueprint. The website worksheet is essentially an automated pre qualifying process as part of the sales process, right? I had a um I had a an Epiphany a few years ago when my brother, who is a general manager of a large nonprofit in Adelaide, he reached out to me and he said, Hey man, we're running these little workshops for corporates to help them identify early signs of mental health issues with their staff, right? And we're pitching this to large corporates and we think we need a little like a basic kind of five-page website to explain the program so that when we go and do a sales presentation, we can say, Hey, check out the website, and then people can inquire and say, Yeah, we want you to come run a workshop for us. And I said, No worries. Well, before you do anything, go to uh, you know, troledane.com.au slash get started or whatever it was and fill in the website worksheet and just tell me a little bit more about it. He said, Yeah, no worries. So anyway, he he and the guy that was running the program, his colleague who was running the program, they sat down and they did the website worksheet together. He said it took them about an hour to answer the questions, right? Because they really thought about it and they really put a lot of because this was a new project for them. They're like, oh, we're really gonna think about this. He rang me afterwards and he said, dude, you should charge people to walk them through filling in that form. He said, that was the most valuable exercise we've done. He said, we hadn't just taken the time to sit down and work out what the success criteria is for this project. He said, that was incredibly valuable. And that was that moment I was like, right, I'm just gonna turn this into a discovery workshop and sell it as a discovery workshop. It's the same thing.
SPEAKER_02Well, and and the benefit there is you'll be there with them and able to add value at the same time.
SPEAKER_01Correct.
SPEAKER_02Instead of them just randomly answering they they can be guided by you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Some of the things I some of the things you can automate that I like automating is what you were saying before, Pete, is the movement of information between tools.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So if you know, if for example, if we kick off a new project in a in a sauna, automatically create the Google Drive folders for the client, right? That's something that can be automated. Notifications in Slack. You know, if this happens, then notify a Slack channel so that everyone knows. Oh, hey, look, we just got a new client. Woo, ring the bell, right? We have a ring the bell channel. E-commerce, any e-commerce sales, notifications in Slack, internal communications and internal distribution of information. I'm a big fan of automating that stuff. Client-facing stuff, I have been, I have been unscrambling the egg and and removing automations a lot. I'll let me give you an example. This happened the other day, right? In Mavericks Club, there's you you get a one-on-one call with a coach every 90 days to sit down and work out your 90-day flight plan. And last year I built this automation, which meant every about every 75 days. Well, what would happen is we would look at your date on your record and go, right, your last flight planning call was this date. Wait 75 days and then send you a reminder and go, hey, it's about time for your flight planning call. Here's the link to your coach's calendar, book in. Right. The other day, a maverick turns up in my calendar and she pings me about an hour before and says, Hey, we're supposed to have this flight planning call. Uh, I haven't revisited my flight plan. I think it would be a good idea if I revisit my flight plan before we have this call. And I said, Yes, that would be an excellent idea. She goes, Great, let's reschedule. I'll do the flight plan. I'll reach out to you next week and we'll reschedule. I said, No problem. So I dug in the automations and I'm like, the automation's broken. The automation doesn't work. I mean, it works, but the messaging's all wrong. The message, first of all, the message should be this is your quarterly flight planning call. Make sure you revisit the flight plan before you jump on a call with your coach. By the way, here's a video that reminds you how to walk through the flight plan, and here's some coaching to help you get through the flight plan and come up with your next 90-day plan, right? I said to Emily, let's turn that off. Let's just have the client success team, Michelle and Charmaine, let's just have those guys reach out to a Maverick. Let's put a date in their calendar. We manage our members in Asana. So let's just put a date in Asana, go, you know, hey, here's their last flight planning call. In 75 days, let's reach out to them and remind them. Let's just do it manually, right? Even if we're dealing with, you know, even if we end up with 500 people in Mavericks Club, we can do that manually with the client success team. We don't need to automate that. The automation prov I think the automation provided a less than awesome experience for our customer. So I'm like, let's kill it. Let's just have a human conversation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I didn't know we were doing that. That's good to know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think we just we're gonna turn that automation off and we're just gonna have people talk to people. So I know, imagine. He so now this flies in the face of what we taught back in the blueprint, which is to automate the crap out of everything, right? What what so what's changed? Why are we now saying that maybe you shouldn't automate as much?
SPEAKER_02I think people get sick. You can tell when a message is automated. You know, you know when it's an automated message, especially when you already got that message once before and you know you're getting it again. Um so I think people got sick of that. We we want to be we want to feel a little bit more special than an automated message.
SPEAKER_01I yeah, I agree. I I agree. I think there's two things. I think automation has you know gone a little bit too far, and particularly software companies and you know, the the little in-app messages that pop up when you're in a software thing that says, Oh, congratulations that you set up your first pipeline in pipe drive. Yay, confetti, and now it's time to blah blah blah. We used to do a lot of that stuff as well. And it's like, oh, piss off, just get out of the way, right? Yeah, and it's I it's a bit patronizing, and I think it's gone, I think it's gone far enough that people do feel like it's not personal.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01I got an I got an email this morning from Summer at Bon Joro. Summer is a customer delight representative at Bon Joro. And the email said, Hey Troy, I wanted to send you a personal message to tell you about Bon Joro's new done for you video service. Check it out. I made a video for you. And I'm like, all right, I know Bon Juro make personalized video. So I clicked on the link and there's Summer, and she's holding her iPhone and she goes, Hey Troy, hope you're having a great week, blah, blah, blah. And she tells me that they've got this new done for you video service. And I'm like, that's great. Now her getting the task to make a video for me was probably automated. She's probably got a list that's just coming up. Make a video for Troy, make a video for Pete, make a video for Charmaine, make a video for Christina, right? She's making the same video over and over again, but it's personalized. It took her less than 30 seconds. She says the same script and she just inserts name, right? That's not automated, but the task list is automated. And then all she does is she finishes the video and goes bang, send, and it sends to my email address. All that's automated, right? The creation of the landing page, all that's automated, right? But her making the video is not automated. And what I like about this is that Bon Juro have automated everything except what the human should do, which is communicate and talk to another human. Everything else is automated. I love Bon Joro because you literally click a button, you say, Hey Pete, just wanted to say welcome to Team Accelerator. Super excited to have you here. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you've got any questions, do this, blah, blah, blah. Uh, check it out. And uh, you know, CSR. Bye. Bang. And then everything else is automated, right? Dave Foy did that and it blew me away. Yeah. Dave and I did a fair bit of that with high-ticket sales funnels, actually. We got overwhelmed when we launched that. We'd log in and just have like dozens of people to send videos to. And we we split it up, we shared it. So I so they've automated everything except what the human should do, which I like. Yeah. I think the other thing that's happened is the pandemic, right? Is Oh, maybe, yeah. I had a call yesterday with someone and uh with one of our mavericks, and I said, Hey man, I hope you don't mind, but I'm gonna turn my video off because I'm gonna go for a walk while I have this call on the phone because I am sick of looking at the internet. I am just I'm just sick of looking at screens, and I don't think very well when I'm looking at a screen. Right? They say your best ideas come to you in the shower because you're not on the keyboard looking at the screen.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01So I said, I'm just gonna go for a walk. And he said, Yeah, no worries, man. So we had a great call yesterday. We had a fantastic conversation about job scorecards and outcomes and KPIs and responsibilities. And I wasn't looking at him on the screen, I was talking on the phone. So the pandemic, I think, has people have been stuck looking at Zoom, right? Or and they've been bombarded with messages. Everyone's come online, business have come online, gyms have come online, yoga classes have come online, everything's come online, and we're more overwhelmed with automated messages now more than ever. So we're getting tired of automation, then the pandemic happens, right? And so I think now what people in in our experience, what people want more than anything is they just want to talk to someone.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. We've we we're seeing that in our when we do our sales process, right? For for agency Mavericks and for my own agency. Like the more I talk, the sooner I can get somebody on the phone, the better chances I have because they do want to talk to people. They're tired of getting emails. Nobody, everybody hates email. We always have, yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's right. Here's an example of how to use automation and human activity in a in a that sales process, for example. We're gonna do a deep dive on this. I don't know exactly when it is. I'm not gonna say too much about who's coming up in terms of our guests, but it might be next week. I'm not sure. It's either next week or I think it's next week, actually. We've got a we're doing a deep dive into our sales process and some automation. We've got some really cool shit we're gonna show you. But one of the things that we do is we have a request a callback button on our website that people, you know, if they click that button, you leave your name, phone number, and email address. One of the things that we do is we text you, we automate this. If you request a callback on our website, we text you immediately saying, hey Pete, saw that you requested a call on our website. Have you got five minutes for a quick chat? Now, the word Pete is a placeholder. It's a merge field, right? Hey, contact first name because they've opted in. Hey Pete, saw that you requested a callback on our website. Have you got five minutes now for a quick chat? We we wrote that message once. Someone opts in, they come into our CRM, it kicks off that sequence, we send that text message, and then we wait. And if they reply, we then check their reply for a positive keyword. So sure thing, yes, absolutely. It uses uh a natural language AI to go and have a look at what they've said. And if they are positive and say yes, they're free for a call, then we ping that to a salesperson straight away and go, hey, call Pete. And then someone picks up the phone and calls them, right? So we don't have to sit there and watch 24 hours a day to see people coming in, right? We just get a notification, hey, someone's up for a call, and then Dioza or Robert or Pete or whatever will call them. Now, sometimes this can go wrong, right? Yes. Like the other day, the other day comes in and Pete calls them and then they get an automation.
SPEAKER_02I literally, I literally saw it come up that so-and-so requested a callback. So I said, Well, shit, okay, I'm available. So I texted them, we had a text conversation, then we had a phone conversation, and then he got an automated text.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And the reason he got the automated text is because the automation, what we realized is that the automation didn't have a condition in it to say, if somebody responds to a message, cancel the automation because Pete beat the automation. Pete basically texted the guy, the guy responded, and then the automated text happened. Right. So again, we just got to fix that condition, that trigger. So that text message, the reason we automate the first text message is because we don't want to sit there and watch it 24 hours a day to make sure that we're jumping on people, right? And that we're that we're connecting with people if they request the callback. And if someone requests a callback on our website, they are the hottest lead that you've got. So we want to contact them within five minutes. There's a whole thing I won't bore you, but there's a whole study that MIT did uh basically that you know, if you contact a prospect within five minutes of them expressing interest, that with that five minutes is the metric. If you contact them within five minutes, there's like a 8,000% chance more likely that they're going to become a client. So I don't know, some fucking thing. It's ridiculous. 42% of all statistics are made up, so it doesn't matter. But you basically massively increase your chance of them becoming a client if you communicate with them within five minutes. What we don't do is like as soon as they respond, then we don't automate anything else. We just get on the call and we don't ask them a bunch of questions. Well, where are you? And how big is your team and how much revenue are we doing? We don't automate any of that shit. We just want to have a conversation with them. So, one thing I do want to show, one thing I do want to, I want to give you an example here. Let me just uh share my screen. This is the anti-follow-up sequence that we taught way back in the blueprint. And this is a slightly updated version that we teach in sales accelerator, right? But I want to run through this and give you, show you some of the emails that we put in our anti-follow-up sequence and that we teach, and then show you some of them that maybe shouldn't be automated and why and talk about what to do instead. Basically, what happens is after we do a sales call with someone, if they don't pull the trigger straight away, then what we want to do is we want to nurture them. And this is specifically for this example sequence here, is specifically for uh pitching a website project to someone, right? So I don't pull the trigger on the call and they're like, oh, well, we're gonna need to think about this and talk to the board and get some funding and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then we want to nurture that prospect without being annoying. So what we do is we give you this sequence and we'll talk about some of the things that you can automate and some of the things that you maybe shouldn't. So send this email the day after the strategy call. And the email basically is our process. Hey, Pete, I thought you might uh like to see the process we use to launch websites. And then we just put a PDF to an infographic here. It's a great resource that we use here to make sure everything is considered and nothing is missed. Hope you find it helpful, right? Hope you find it useful. You could totally automate that, no problem. Right? It's a day after the strategy call. It looks personal. You could totally automate it. Again, this is placeholder content. You would take this and you would put your own content in here. We're not actually talking about the content of emails, we're talking about whether or not you should automate them. This is two days after the strategy call. So this is like the this is like you've had the strategy call the day after we send that email that we just talked about. The next day we send this, right? And again, the content doesn't matter, but the subject line is landing pages. Hey Pete, I found this the other day and just had to share it with you. That messaging I'd probably fix. Um, it sums up everything that makes the perfect landing page on a website and presents it in a beautiful way, and then a link to an infographic. I hope you find it useful. Right again, we're just we're just being helpful here. We're not asking for anything, we're just being helpful. I would probably rewrite the content on this email and make it a bit more personal and a bit more authentic, but I would totally automate this email, no problem.
SPEAKER_02So we are being helpful, but we're also trying to stay front of mind without being desperate.
SPEAKER_01Correct. Yeah, that's I would automate this unless they'd responded to the email I sent the day before. If they'd responded to the email I sent the day before, I might take them out of the automation and then just have a conversation with them in my inbox on email, right? So what I then might do is I might take this and I might take them out of the automation and go, oh, hey, Pete, I'm glad you found that useful. By the way, um, I know we talked about landing pages the other day on our call. I found this as well. Uh, this is something we use on a regular basis to make sure that we're building landing pages, you know, based on best practices. Check it out. And then I would just send this a link to a landing page blog post, right? So if they'd responded, then I would take them out of the automation because then what you want to do is you want to, you don't want them to get the same, you don't want to get them an email the same time every day because they know it's automated. So I would respond to them organically. This is just another, it's just the same kind of email. It just helps them educate them about SEO. If you've taught if you've spoken to them about SEO, right? This is four days after the strategy call. So now we're kind of waiting a couple of days. And again, if they've responded to any of the previous emails, I'd take them out of the automation. I'd just have a conversation in the inbox. Otherwise, this would be weird. If they're in fact, I just spoke to you yesterday, dude, about landing pages. And now you're this feels like an automated message, right? So I I would have that condition in the automation. Here, I would not automate sending this email.
SPEAKER_03Never.
SPEAKER_01In fact, we have a note here that says if you use a CRM, we recommend not automating this email. Oftentimes you will have had a communication from the prospect, and if so, this email will seem untimely and out of place. Instead, automate a reminder to yourself that this email should be sent manually.
SPEAKER_02That's exactly right. Yeah, you may have already booked in another call with the person to collect their money or to finalize details on the pro on the statement of work or proposal or something. Who knows? So, how stupid would it be to then get this message?
SPEAKER_01So the purpose of this email, by the way, is just to say, hey, we've been doing some, you know, the team and I have been doing some more research on your project, and we can't wait to share our findings with you. That's intrigue, right? It's like, hey, we've been doing some work in our some of our systems, and we found some awesome keywords that we should totally go after. Can't wait to share them with you. I'm not gonna tell you what they are. I just want you to be intrigued, right? So when the doctor calls you and says, Pete, uh, we've got the results back from your ECG. Can you please call me? Well, that's kind of going to go to the top of my priority list, right? I want to make sure I'm not having a heart attack. They never give you the results over the phone. I've also been chatting with some of my colleagues who are very excited about this project. We've got a great team of designers, developers, and SEO, blah, blah, blah, social media experts. Here's the thing our schedule is filling fast, and I want to make sure we get the opportunity to work together. I wouldn't say that. I I would say something authentic, like, hey man, it's like November. If you want us to start work on this before Christmas, you've got to let us know now. Otherwise, we're going to fill the spot with someone else. We work on a first come, first serve basis. Are you ready to, you know, like are you ready to go? I wouldn't say you're ready to create something amazing together. Sounds a bit kumbayar. Um, are you are you ready to go? You know, Pete. So what you would do is instead of automating this email, you would automate a task reminder to send this email, and then you would have this saved as a canned response in in Gmail, or you have this saved as a snippet in your notebook or wherever you save your snippets.
SPEAKER_02Actually, I have it automated so that that gets sent to me as my reminder too. And I'm not looking for it, it's right there.
SPEAKER_01There you go. There you go. Martin, is there gonna be an undated PDF? No, no, I'm not sure what you mean, undated or updated PDF. I'm not sure. Um, but no, no, probably not.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's all because this is all about using the concept, not our words.
SPEAKER_01That's right. This is this is the theory. This is the so take this, tweak it, and make it your own. Um, you know, and so then again, like if they've responded to anything, I wouldn't have them in an automation. These again, these next three emails are just positioning. Hey, if you'd like to learn about keyword research, check out this training at LinkedIn, social media, you know, whatever. Suggested reading. Here's a great book I read, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Now, again, if they've already, if you've already talked about this book in the and they're like, oh man, I love Simon Seneca, it's amazing, blah, blah, then you wouldn't send this email, would you? Because you look like a schmuck. Like, dude, what are you talking about? I told you about that book, and now you're telling me about that book. That's weird. Uh, and again, the magic email is something that you wouldn't automate, you would set yourself a task reminder to send this.
SPEAKER_02Ideally, you'd have some some way to automate that if they responded to any email in the chain, it just shuts it down and tells you that it shut it down.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And if your CRM doesn't do that, then get a new CRM. No, if your CRM doesn't do that, then you just what you can do, like in most CRMs, you can just go into a client customer record and go remove from workflow or remove from automation and just take them out. It takes like five seconds. So it basically the too long didn't read version is this automate whatever the robots can do internally to speed up your process and your workflow and keep the sharing of information within the organization consistent. And don't try and automate too much that's client-facing. Like just I'm just a big fan of getting on the phone and talking to people these days as much as humanly possible.
SPEAKER_02Just in fact, my my care plan has one automated message. As soon as they send something to the to the ticketing system, it replies and says, Hey, yes, this is an automated message. I know I hate them too, but you'll be we just wanted you to know that we received it and you'll be receiving a human response very shortly.
SPEAKER_01And that's it. Exactly. Love it. And it's transparent. And it's like, yeah, you know, I so we if I text, if I see something. Someone come into our system and they're not going to get an automated text because they've come in from a different channel, which is a whole other conversation. I'll send them a text and I'll say, This is not an automated message, by the way. I'm really here. And people respond back and go, I remember when Kath Hughes uh joined the Blueprint a long time ago, back in 2014 or whatever it was. I would send her emails and she would send back, dear automated Troy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I would send her emails back going, Hey Cass, blah, blah, blah by the way, uh, this is not automated, this is really me. And eventually I got we connected on Skype. And eventually I called her on Skype and she's like, I can't believe you're talking about it. I'm like, I did none of that was automated. That was actually me talking to you.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01And she was blown away because she just expected that everything was automated.
SPEAKER_02Right. One thing, one automate, it's not really an automation, but uh it's a pet peeve. I hate when you sign up for a webinar and the webinar has been pre-recorded, but they act like oh yeah, it's live. Like, don't do that. People don't do that. Mavericks don't do that.
SPEAKER_01That's awful. I tried that once and it was a bit like folk dancing. I didn't like it, so I never did it again. In fact, you know, he he like here's another thing. I got I get emails. I don't sign up for webinars anymore because I don't have time and I realize webinars are bullshit. Um, I'd rather get on the phone and just talk to someone. Uh, but the last time I signed up for a webinar, I got an email the following day from so let's say there was the influencer, right? Let's call him Mac. Troy. And then he had his then he had his minion, right, who was Steve. I got an email from Steve the day after the webinar that said, hey Troy, Mac just sent me a note saying that he saw you signed up for the webinar but didn't watch it all. And he wanted me to make sure that you got it, right? And below that email was an email forwarded from Mac to Steve saying, Hey, Steve, uh Troy signed up for the webinar, but something went wrong and he didn't watch it all. Can you make sure that he gets access to it, please? Right. That is a tactic that is taught in a particular course uh by I think Sam Ovens teaches that tactic, right? That it looks like Mac forwarded the email to Steve and had Steve reach out. It's complete bullshit. That the copy and paste email below is copied and paste with my name in a merge field, right? It's complete bullshit. I emailed the guy back and went, dude, don't do that to me. You look like a schmuck. And and like treat me with a bit more respect, please. You know, like don't I didn't come down on the last shower, man. So, you know, I hate that shit. Uh fake countdown timers and fake bloody scarcity stuff. I don't like it at all. So, what are you guys gonna un-automate now as a result of literally turning off? Yeah. This is the this is the unautomation agency hour. What are you guys gonna turn off now? Let us know in the comments or if there's something else that you're automating uh that you're that is really working for you, let us know in the chat. I'm just gonna look some something up here. And uh next week we are going to be doing uh a deep dive on our sales process.
SPEAKER_02And Anthony says, there's goes there goes my Zapier account.
SPEAKER_01Excellent. This has been fun, and uh yeah, next week we got something really cool coming. We're gonna show you our sales process, we're gonna show you what what we automate, what we don't, we're gonna give you some numbers to look at, and we're gonna give you an amazing deal on uh on a sales CRM that we are using and that we recommend that you use as well. So stay tuned for that. It's gonna be a lot of fun. All right, crispy butter, have a great week. Enjoy Thanksgiving, my friend. Well, thank you, and we'll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye now.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcast, Audible, and wherever you'd like to listen. You can catch all of the Agency Hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash agencymaverics. Or you can get involved. Check that out Free Digital Mavericks Facebook, where we broadcast these episodes live throughout community every week, along with a ton of free trick. We'll see you today.