40. Rushing Into Automation

Saturday, September 09, 2023

Smooth Operator/Podcast/40. Rushing Into Automation

40. Rushing Into Automation

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Transcript

Just been thinking a lot about a couple of topics. And I want to dive into one here today. Before I do that, though, if you're new podcast subscriber, seeing the numbers there is rocketing upward. So thank you to all the new subscribers, definitely good to have you on board. If you can just go give us a review, we definitely appreciate it. This is already episode I believe 40. So crazy, that we're up to 40 episodes already. And I'm looking forward to where the podcast is going. So one of my inspirations when creating this was to make it a daily show. And this was from directly from Russell Brunson, who was told, you know, I think Steven Larson told him Yeah, for the first like 40 or 45 episodes, you kind of sucked, then it got better and better, because it's partially about finding our own voice, our own identity. So that's been part of the reason I've been doing these daily. It's finding my identity. And so I hope that came through and speaking to fellow entrepreneurs, CEOs, I'm sure you can understand that. And I genuinely appreciate if you can give me any feedback, anything that you're seeing anything you like, or don't like about the show.

Great. So today, I want to get into automation. Because we were just at I was at a conference, and we heard from Perry Belcher, there's a great talk about the added value of including premiums with our promotions. So you see these all the time, where if you buy this certain product, you get this other physical thing free premiums, the numbers are clear that premiums when the right premium is matched with the right offer premiums to increase your your cart value your conversion value, exponentially. So that's one thing I wish I should give a more further in depth conversation on premiums later. But that's kind of the genesis of this, of this discussion. Because there was a lot of chatter in about premiums inside of a private group on belong to and one dude, like, I don't blame him, but I just gonna, it just made my spider senses tingle. When he said, Yeah, we're gonna include these premium products to our membership. And I want to automate right away. I was like, dude, dude, you're missing the boat, man. You're just missing it. Automation is fantastic. I love automation, I try to automate as much as possible. But automation is the last step. It's not the first. And that's in almost anything that we're doing.

We do want to make things automated, it takes things off her desk and make things think things easier to manage. Make makes things more automatic from even the customer's perspective. So automation is great. But it has to come at the right time, at the right place. And with the right amount of expertise and knowledge of your customers, before you can move into automation. So some examples of things that we would want to automate any any swag, you do one, automate that, including the order ordering process. Any premium bonus physical products, like I mentioned, we often see automation with webinars. And with testimonials and case studies, and everyone, you know, certainly automates their email sequences, all those things are great things automate. I will never take automation away from any of those. But at this point, you don't know what you don't know. And that's kind of the key. When you do things manually, when you're in the trenches actually, pushing send on that email, hand jamming the order form. You see things, you see opportunities, you see shortcomings, you see places where things can work better, you might even see an opportunity that you didn't know existed yet. Because you're going through things manually, you're you're actually getting your hands dirty, you know, and working through the process of what it actually takes to offer that physical product or that extra service. And when you do that is always gonna be the little thing that you see.

I know for me when we were doing we did sweatshirt, so if you purchase this tear of our membership, you got a free sweatshirt. Okay, great. Fantastic. And it was kind of a late term idea. We're like, oh, we should do this. Okay, awesome. By going through that whole process, what I noticed was that many of the students weren't necessarily getting in receipt and opening the email that collected their, their stats. So I needed to know their size, I needed to know if their shipping address was different from their billing address, we had an email that was manually triggered. But there was no additional email that was ever triggered from that, there was no automation to pull them out of that sequence. If they had properly filled in their information, all this stuff can be done. So it's a matter of just knowing your different automation rules, what you can do in your CRM. I'm an Infusionsoft guy. So I can talk for days and days and days about what you can do in Infusionsoft, I haven't really used many of the other ones, so I know less about those. But by manually doing that, when I went to go place the orders, and I made that big CSV sheet with all the data, it was then that I noticed we had a number of students and qualified for that premium bonus, but it never get gotten us the information in order to allow us to fulfill. All right, so that's a good thing to notice. Where is that communication breakdown Coming? Coming? Maybe it's too early after the order that you're asking for. Their stats, maybe, you know, sometimes people just miss things. And they miss the message. You know, our customers, our clients are humans. And most people aren't nearly as wedded to their, to their laptops, and desktops and mobiles like we are. And you know, this is what we do. So we, we mistakenly believe, Oh, of course, I saw that email, I sent it, not necessarily.

So that was just one small example of something that I noticed. Another small example is that we had a vendor, you know, we were getting things ordered from them, they were shipping. But when I was doing it manually, I noticed how big of a distinction there was in shipping prices to certain parts of the world. It was stuff that we'd hadn't noticed during the initial vendor research, but we were able to notice it when we were manually fulfilling them. So that gave me an opportunity to find another vendor, find a vendor that had regionalised production facilities, you know, save a lot at the company a lot of money in the long run, you know, because we're able to find a company that allowed not only for the automation, but had things all worked out on their end, to route the order to it's appropriate for fulfillment facility. So we could really save on shipping, especially if you consider worldwide customers. I mean, we're based out of London, that particular company was, and we get orders from Australia, India, New Zealand, you're talking about shipping costs, and some of those countries it starts get pretty pricey up to I mean, it was more expensive to ship half the products than it was for the by the product itself. So it's kind of crazy like that. That's one thing that we saw from the from just doing things manually. I was able to get real time feedback from our students see if they were even interested in the premium offer. There's a whole lot of Yeah, I really didn't want that anyway, you can keep it. Well shoot, man, if you got to us big enough percentage of your customers telling you that? What does that say about your premium product, you might want to test something out. And there's the other aspect of it. Doing things manually allows you to test things faster. You can test different premiums, because you're not spending all of your time setting up the automation. We talked about automation, like it's a panacea it is once it's working. But that's the key. Once it's working. It's everything breaks.

I mean, it just does. And I've had very few instances where I nailed things the exact right way the first time and knew my automation worked. There was always a little thing here a little thing there, you know, something that wasn't going the way we intended it to do until we had manually put a couple people through it made sure. And then we're able to trust the systems that we created on the back end. All right, so yeah, and I mean, there's there's a big victory right there. Just seeing if there are any reactions to your premium product, any reactions to whatever messaging you're putting out there. So you can refine them. So you can optimize them add reduce the number of contact points between you, I mean, and the customer really kind of depends on what you're doing. You're not going to be able to see that at the root level if you're relying on automation from day one. So it's just some physical order examples. Just some things that do come through when you're doing it manually.

It allows you to go through the process. You see how well it works. You The how much you have to be involved where things could fall apart. You know, you, you also get a feeling for what the fulfillment vendors are doing. You see the lead times, you see the lag times, you know how, how quick do they need the order to start production? How long after the order is started? Is production actually received? You might know that from your market research, but there's a difference in between knowing what some vendor told you on a sheet, or in a conversation versus what actually happens when things are in motion. When things are moving forward and automated. We're actually going, like I said, going through the ordering process, get a feel for the customer experience, what are they getting out of this? Are they getting notifications, that things are coming? Are they giving you any feedback, all these things are very valuable touch points.

Another particular thing I love to automate now, but I had to do a whole lot of work to get there is case studies. Case studies are great, you know, we need that social proof for our audience, we need to build that out needs to be part of our value proposition. Me personally, though, I did over 51, to one face to face interviews, before I was comfortable enough to automate well over 50 is probably closer to 100 120. It's now automated. And there were ways I could do that even ways of putting me on a video camera where it was like you were having a conversation with me, but just done in an automated can fortune porch format. And everyone knows it's automated, you only have to tell them they get it. But the questions I asked the way I would steer the prospect or the student, when gathering social proof from them was very well refined. Because I've done so many interviews, I kind of knew the questions that would elicit emotional responses, I knew the questions that would not necessarily be clear. And I was able to reward them. So that we had something very clear. Because sorry, when it's automated, they have no ability to ask a question of you. If something isn't clear, you're only going to get that by having that face to face interaction, then you're going to know if you're wordings correctly. So one thing we were able to gather from that as well as we doubled our testimonial case study interviews, as an avatar interviewer allowed us to really optimize our messaging, see what it was about that offer that made it a no brainer for our prospect. My favorite was when they talked about I really didn't I know it seems kind of fuzzy here. But now that I went through it, it's great. If you haven't noticed, I'm in the information products industry. So we're able to refine our messaging, get some of those lagging objections, find ways to answer it in our messaging.

That all came from a whole lot of time on the ground. Giving those interviews facilitating that and you know, being that person the other thing it did is it made superfans I had people that I'd show up on a group coaching call the back, Adam, so good to see you made super fans because they had felt really appreciated by the personal time that I took with them. And when some of the superfan that is waiting to open up their wallet to you again. You really can't discount how valuable it is to create superfans. Okay, so there's just two examples, physical products and case studies on you know, some added benefits to not doing things automated from the beginning. Like I said, I'm not ragging on automation at all, I think it's something you should look for in every aspect of your business. But again, that's the last step. Do things manually do things the hard way, because you're going to see opportunities, you're going to see different ways that you can make things better for your prospects. And when you do move to automation, you're going to do it with a whole lot more confidence and a whole lot more data than you did going into it.


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