Cross-Channel Marketing & Business Process Automation Insights for 2021 [Sam & Josh Ovett]

In our first episode of the year, we have invited Sam Ovett and his business partner and father, Josh Ovett, Founders of Mobile Pocket Office. Today’s episode includes subjects such as the changes that have happened in 2020 in terms of business processes, trends in sales & marketing automation for 2021, as well as designing a future-proof business infrastructure for this year and a touch on multi-channel attribution and how to implement this correctly in both sales & marketing.

 

Mobile Pocket Office helps new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity.

 

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Connect with Sam & Josh:

Website: https://mobilepocketoffice.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mobilepocketoffice/

Sam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samovett/

Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshovett/

 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro 

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

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Episode Transcript:

 

Andrei

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Sam Ovett, who is a Co-founder of Mobile Pocket Office, and is leading the way in helping new and established businesses augment the human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity. And today, as we are just kicking off 2021 New Year, we'll look at how to best automate business and marketing processes this year in order to have your business or your department bring better results and rockin’ basically for the year. So Sam, how are you? How's everything going? Very happy to have you on the show.

 

Sam

Doing good,  can't complain, thankfully. And you know, even though the pandemic is raging right now I am doing good. And everybody wants to get online still. So that is keeping us very busy.

 

Andrei

Nice. We also have the weather to go with it. I see the skis in the background. 

 

Sam

And the skis are right here, eight miles from the nearest ski area. So we keep very busy outside along the way. And so it's a nice way to break up being on the computer with going outside and playing. You know, so we're very we're like at 500 feet for what would that be in metres for the non-metric listeners? 

 

Andrei 

Oh,  I’m not good with these translations either.

 

Sam

But it is really hard to metres. I'm gonna google it real quick. It's 2590 metres. 

 

Andrei

Oh, that's cold.

 

Sam

It's cold and high, but it's beautiful. We're up here in the mountains in just about Boulder, Colorado, in the United States. 

 

Andrei 

Nice. Nice, nice. Super. So I think to you know, build the report and to get people to know you're reading. Let's Yeah. Tell us a bit about you. Tell us a bit about what you do with you know, with the company with your father with you know, the projects that run at this point in time. 

 

Sam

Yeah, so I think I'll share my background for a bit because I think it's interesting, it's a little different is I went to school for environmental sciences. And then after that started into the world of the outdoors, and ended up guiding and being a professional athlete in the outdoor world as a whitewater kayaker, and funnily enough, what I realised in that, as you're a professional athlete, that primary aspect of what you realise is, as a professional athlete, one of the primary things you are when you work for when you're sponsored by different companies, you're part of the marketing team. You may have physical talents, but really their physical talents that you're videoing or posting about or sharing what you're doing, and you really are a part of the marketing team. And so there's a couple of things that came out of that, that I pulled over into the business world when I made my transition a little while ago now. And I think that's a little bit unusual, but I think people can relate to that from the physical things they do. And if they also look at that, and then that brought me into the world of realising: wow, there's so much that can be automated from the marketing side. Because hard work and marketing are done, and getting people interested. Would you agree? 

 

Andrei

Yep. 

 

Sam  

Like that's the creative work. That's what the athletes are doing. That's the stuff that's, you know, you're thinking, what can I do to get people interested in my company, right, no matter what your company is, you got to get people interested in that largely can't be automated super well. And we talked a lot about automation in our company, Mobile Pocket Office, because our whole focus is to help people be human where it counts, and otherwise automate, right, free up time, for your resources, to scale. All those wonderful things that we talked about. We talked about automation. But somebody's got to do that marketing work to get the interest going. And then once you have that lead, it's a matter of what do you do with it? So that's the background, that's where I came from at it. And also, the other thing we found out that I think is interesting, because I was participating in these very high-risk activities, right? Where I could die, or get very seriously injured or drown. I was paddling off of large waterfalls and down steep riverbeds. And what's interesting about that is if you take that and people think about what are those things that I do, right? Do I do anything outdoors, it's kind of a higher risk activity, right? Take those lessons and apply them to business because you wouldn't go jump into something that was super scary or super big for you without stepping up incrementally. And the same thing we do when we think about business with people when people want to make changes in automation. Don't make massive change all at once. take it to step by step, do little pieces and then track the effectiveness so that you don't take your business along the way because a lot of people are going from a fully manual business almost entirely to automating pieces of it, but you got to be careful, right? You got to do it step by step. Because if you don't, and you automate everything, you may realise: Wow, those human touches that we just automated, had a significant impact on bringing new business or referral business.

 

Andrei

If you were to extend this, there was saying, which I don't remember exactly, but I'm just gonna say, the idea of it, which was to do with automating the right, or the wrong thing. So you have to be able to choose what you automate because you can automate and amplify the right thing or the wrong thing. And you don't want that. So definitely, okay, getting it into small steps. and choosing wisely, I think, is very, very important when you look at revamping.

Sam 

And look at the risk to right, what's the risk to your business if it goes wrong. And so if you assess it, and you go, what's the risk, if it goes wrong, if the risk is low, and you want to try it, go ahead, if the risk is high, try it in this smaller segment of your business with a certain segment of prospects and customers. And then if it goes, well apply it to the rest of the business. And so take that experience of judging risk that people do in the rest of their lives and apply it to business. I think it's a really good way to roll new, exciting process and automation out, especially when it comes to following up with all that hard work you've done on the marketing and getting those leads, and that interest in your business to happen. Now you got to get them into customers, right, and you got to fulfil the promise. And then hopefully, if you do, right, you'll get referrals. And we have a framework that people can use, that we work with, with folks that I can share. But that's a bit of the background, it's different. So I like to share it, because it also means that, you know, we work with businesses across all different industries, and to help them become very successful in what they do. And give them the ability to scale and track their effectiveness and their marketing. And what I think is really interesting here is that you know, you don't have to come from a traditional business background. You'll learn it along the way, if you're interested, you know, you'll pick it up, you got to do the work. You got to figure it out. But I just like to show that anybody can come from any background in this stuff. And really pick it up if you're motivated to figure it out. 

 

Andrei

Sounds good. So let's actually, before diving straight into it, how what's your take on 2020? Like, what do you think has really happened in terms of businesses, you know, using technology, automating stuff, you know, online things?

 

Sam

So I think a couple of things that popped out for me in 2013, obviously, it's been really challenging for businesses has been regulated out of business, right? Hey, you got to shut it down. That's tough, right? That's the challenge, where you can't open your storefront. There are alternatives, though. And for the businesses that are adapting quickly, that technology is more readily available than ever, to adapt, because I think the one thing we all realise is, wow, if we can't be in person, right? Like, let's just be like that, you know, there's a pandemic, it's real, it's affected the world and shut down a lot of businesses in the traditional way they operate it. However, there are a lot of opportunities to adapt, but you have to be quick about it. And you have to make that transition to stay with it. What we realised in 2020, is that many businesses that didn't think they could be online, are now online. They do they generate revenue, digitally. They do something or they've adapted their process to become digital. And so what I think is really exciting. From this, obviously, there's a lot of pain, but what's really exciting it's, it's brought so much to the world online, because they had to, and it's forced people to get online that otherwise weren't. So now the number of people who are familiar with using the internet and doing business digitally and are comfortable with that has gone up enormously, which also means your customer base has gone up enormously of the prospects and people who are comfortable working with you, people aren't afraid of it anymore. They don't have a choice, it's the new way of operating. So there's another piece there. And the other piece is that you can automate stuff, you can create revenue streams digitally, and even like a brick and mortar company, for example, restaurant, you know, think about the to-go order experiences and how much those have improved. If you just think about it. That single focus aspect of it. Right? It's way better now than it ever was, it's way easier. Because it's innovation was forced, you know, everybody had to adopt it. The other aspect of it that I think is really important to recognise is people still crave human interaction. And I think that's the biggest lesson of 2020 is that automation, digital stuff can totally change the way that you get revenue, right, it can secure your place in business, to make it so you're stable, no matter if you can open your doors or not physically, but people are still hungry for the human touch. Right. And we don't necessarily that touch doesn't have to be physical in person. But the more we can do to create a personalised, lovely, great human experience, where we are showing that we care about that customer that came to us, that human that came to us and chose to spend their money with us and use our services or buy our products, talking in general. That is where you can win over the competition because now everybody's online. I mean, not everybody, but like the majority of businesses are online. In businesses, we didn't think we'd be online. It's the experience that makes the difference. So if you can use technology, and automation, to create a better experience, not only for you internally to make business easier, but for the person doing business with you, and make it more human, and like, show sincerely that you care more about that customer, you're going to keep winning that business, and people are going to keep referring business to you. And that I think is what we learned in 2020 is that there was this massive push for automation, right? And it was like, we were getting humans out of the equation. But what we realised like we need to be around other people, we need to feel the energy that comes from people caring about other humans. If you can automate that into your process, man you and

 

Andrei

Yeah, I think it's, it's really about finding that sweet spot, isn't it? Okay, this is everything that we can automate. And this is why it's gonna be good for us. And then it's: Hold on a second, maybe 70% down the line, actually, we need to deliver that personalised that or that personal email or that nice follow-up in order to facilitate the next steps in the direction that we want to really?

 

Sam

Yeah. All right. I'll give you a really cool example, right? There's a company that we did a recent webinar with about this, called Ignite Post. The founder's name is Arne, you should interview him, his cool guy. And he started a service that allows you to send handwritten thank-you notes. I have one here at my desk because I was 

 

Andrei

Oh, yes, I heard about one of the last things you can do.

 

Sam

It looks like this. Yeah, there's a couple out there, for sure. It comes like this. It looks so totally handwritten my name on it. And then you can put your logo here, it's not a pitch for it. I just have to have it in my deck because my desk because we did that. And this is what the letter looks like. But here's the thing, right? Can does that look handwritten to you?

 

Andrei

Yep, it does.

 

Sam 

It's completely automated. So you're taking the value of the and people will have differing opinions on this. And it's controversial, which is fine. But you're taking the value of creating a handwritten letter, which shows that you care. And this doesn't mean you care any less, but it just allows you to do it at scale, and touch all of your customers consistently. So if you work that into the automation, to where it goes out at the right point in the customer journey. Imagine if every time someone bought you sent them a thank you note, and it was handwritten. And you had the option of typing in what you wanted to send. And it automatically sent like, you didn't have to write it, stamp it go to the mailbox, do all that work. It just went. And then you followed-up and said: How are you liking me? The thing that you just bought? Right? Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks later? Automated. So that's what we talked about. We say like, keep the human touch but automated.  That's a beautiful thing. Yeah. Yeah, that's a cool example.

 

Andrei

It is. Actually, I was trying to remember where I heard about this first, and he was a B2B Tech company, and they used to do this. They weren't doing this post-purchase. I think They were doing this just before closing the deal. 

 

Sam

Yeah, I can get a bunch of ways, right. Like you can insert it into the process.

 

Andrei

Yeah, I think it was something like sending these letters. And then the letters were containing also a code for free coffee from another partner. Do you know? 

 

Sam

Absolutely. 

 

Andrei

Yeah. I mean, he was phrased in a way that he was like:  Oh, yeah, I know, we're gonna be working together. So this is just a coffee that we'd have together right now signing the deal kind of thing. But yeah, it was cool. And I'm happy that you brought this up because I think, you know, mainly now since we don't meet that much anymore. Things like these are probably not very, not happening very often. 

 

Sam

No, I mean, think about like, when was the last time you got a handwritten thank you note, just like sad per second, where there was a birthday card or something? Not just from a company. But when was the last time you got a handwritten note from someone? Yeah. Do you remember it?

 

Andrei

Unless it was like a close person to me? I got one from a company that was a business partner at that time, and we are still in very good relations.

 

Sam

And how did it make you feel when you got that? 

 

Andrei

Well, he was cool. He was unexpected. He was a Christmas actually a note and it was last year. And it was from Bart who was on the podcast. In our first episodes together, so yeah, that was cool. 

 

Sam

And you remember it right? Now think to like, for example, not that you shouldn't send an email, write emails, very powerful marketing tool, like and conversion tool. It's awesome. But can you remember the last email you got from the same person? 

 

Andrei

Um, well, it was to do with work. I mean, yeah. He was certainly stomping around that. But yeah, you're there's a fair point here. So definitely, yeah.

 

Sam

So it's like the power or the experience is more impactful when we can do those things that are physical, inhuman, but if you can automate it, and they happen like they happen perfectly in the process every time. And that's the cool part.

 

Andrei

So let's try to look them because I'm excited to have a, you know, like a dialogue here. Because you have the sort of processes background, and I know that you guys have a lot of projects on helping businesses better their processes around automating sales and marketing, like this. We also have a lot of projects that focus mostly on marketing, but then when it's about, like, we don't work with sales teams directly, but I know that you guys do. So it'd be really interesting for the people tuning in today, as they are just going back into work, and maybe they are having that all-hands meeting, trying to try to improve the way that they work together as teams as well as you know, as colleagues for the year, what would be some common causes that you think are easy to optimise, and then maybe automating a certain, you know, percentage, Like, take a medium-sized business, let's say in, it can be Tech, it can be SAS, it can be serviced, and just go for some of the keys may be case studies or scenarios that you encounter on a more frequent basis., and let's see how we can inspire people that are listening to us right now to instigate some changes in their organisations as well.

 

Sam 

So I think that I love that, that way of looking at it. And I'll give you actually, we'll do some case studies. And I give you a framework that people can go and do right now, with their companies to actually do this. Because the main thing we look for is where are the disconnects? Right? So if marketing is doing all this work, I would put it in context them and apply the framework of marketing is doing all this work to go out and attract interest. And hopefully, they're getting they're also like capturing those leads and send then at that point, that's usually where it starts to break down, right? There's a focus on going out if you have mortgage department getting interested, but then when the lead comes in your database, whatever you're using, right, you could be using HubSpot, Infusionsoft, like, whatever it MailChimp like whatever you're using to get that person's information on your website, right digitally, somehow. It's what do you do at that point? Does it just sit in your database, does it go through a process and then get scored and hand it off to the sales team at the right time with information that's valuable to them that they can act on? And so it's looking for where those disconnects happen, and then it's kind of doing that all the way through. So If we take a step back, I'm going to give people a framework to do this. And I'll give some examples of where, how we've done it before people. So people can start to think, Okay, this is how I would do for myself, the first thing you have to do in every business five pieces, no matter what industry you're in, it's applicable everywhere. If the attract business, you have to convert that business to leads and sales, then you get to fulfil whatever you promised with the sale, otherwise, it's a quick way to go out of business. And then you've got a fish after you've fulfilled it, that's where most people stop. The next is you delight a customer, this is what good companies do. Right? And they give you upsells that can get more out of a product or service, or they give you some training, or they share complimentary things. Or they ask you, you know, creative ways that you're using their product or service they share with other people that are using it. So you got to delight the customer. And then most people this happens, if their cost if their product or service is good, it just happens. But it could be better, and at that rate that it happens, that could be higher referrals. To attract, convert, fulfilled the light, refer - those are the five pillars, if you will, you got to optimise. So that's your big picture systems that run a business, then you've got to go in and look at those and go: What are the processes within this? What do we do to make this happen? And this is where you can start to identify the disconnects or the opportunities. So the first thing that you do is, and this is a really easy thing to do, but it's also kind of hard because you have to have everybody do. You give everybody just a spreadsheet? And you say okay, for the next two or three days, write down everything you do every about every 15 minutes, check-in, have you done something different, have you done an action? So if you're marketing, what are you doing? Right? Are you publishing ads with running ads? Are you setting something up? I make a UTM. If you're converting what are the different pieces that you're doing to convert, even if it's some of its automated, usually we have some kind of thank you email, and they're welcome. When somebody opts in, automate, automatically. If you don't have that, then you're you know, starting base level. But a lot of people have that at a minimum, and then to fulfil, what are all the processes that go into fulfilling? Do you delight your customers? If you do, what do you do? Right? Even if it's not, even if you just have to write down the things you're doing, you'll start to see you have patterns of process. And then refer when you do ask for referrals or get referrals, what do you do? What's the process? So once you have those over two or three days is a good starting point. Now you have an idea of the different busy work the tasks that make up your business.

 

Andrei

Okay, guys, so we just had a little tech glitch, but actually, you don't have to. So you remember Sam here, who was with me just a minute ago. And now he made us all a surprise. And he brought on his business partner, not only business partner, but father as well, because Sam and Josh were together, they run the company together, and they are father and son. So Josh, Hello, nice to meet you!

 

Sam

You know, it's like, it's like that whole idea of like, bring your child to the workday. But it's the reverse is like bring your parents to the workday. And so, you know, Josh is a ball of energy and super fun. And he tells stories like nobody out there that's kind of, you know, wired right around because he can relate these case studies of what we've done for people better than anybody I know. So I think that'll provide a lot of context for how people can dive in and like grab onto this and do it themselves and start down the process themselves.

 

Andrei

Sweet, let's kick it then. So basically, a few minutes ago, Josh, where we left me to go Sorry, I was looking at the daily activity of you, your team etc, like of a person and then mapping of trying to work out the processes so some pass it back over to you and then we can expand from this and Josh, feel free to interrupt us.

 

Josh

Don't worry, we're not afraid. We're not afraid to talk and contribute.

 

Sam

You know, to pick up where we left off is the idea that basically that you know, you have these five areas of your business so you focusing on you attract, convert, fulfil, delight and refer, and you have to look at those, how they work together, and then independently the systems that are involved inside of each one of those and then the processes that make up the systems. And then from there, you figure out. Based on what I've learned, and remember, we talked about that personal activity log, going in and making note of what you actually do to run the business, the busy work of business. That brings you to the step of what can I actually automate, which is where I'd like to actually Josh to pick up and talk about some of the examples of where we've done this with people because here's the deal. That is all well, and good to discuss it in that way. But it's pretty high level. And it doesn't feel like Josh's dogs are too - it's like, extra special. And, and so I'm sure my dog will come in at some point. And so, you know, we live in a world where everybody's word of mouth, and you got all these beautiful animals, and it's wonderful. And so that said, one of the things that I think is important is that understand in context, how this can work for you and what you actually do with it. So Josh, why don't you pick up? I think one of the most recent examples, that  I feel like it's really applicable to a lot of businesses is the case with consulting, an educational firm that does consulting like they help children with their education. So it's kind of like tutoring, but they have a process. And they have a lot of volumes, and they were limited in their ability to scale. So, let you take it from there. And that's the key.

 

Josh

So just to kind of give you a little background with it. I got a call and said, Hey, we heard you're an expert at this. And I said, Thank you, and how can I help? So I need a little thing. Okay, what's the thing? I get all these inquiries that come in, right marketing. And those her advertising and promotion are working. And now it's working too well. So she was getting 20 to 30 emails a day from her, you know, lead magnet, through an email comes in with all the details No, like, not 20 different questions that people filled out because it was that part of the funnel? You know, she's doing it, you know, advertising tool or webinar to a pretty standard consulting world and somebody who's doing services or as opposed to products. And it's going gangbusters. She teaches children, guesses what, in this time of that we're in, children need lots of help. So they are yeah, they do. So there's this really cool culture coaching. service as well, you don't have this problem, I want the data to go into my database, my CRM system, so I don't have to copy and paste all these, imagine copying and pasting 20 to 30 bits of data into one by one every time a leak came is in your database, so that when you actually then had the call with the person, you know, all that's right in front of you. It's pretty straightforward and simple. But you know, there was a copy and paste. And then it was like, then I need to send them a contract, and then I need to enrol them in all these different pieces of my process, you know, different systems, like, you know. So, let's just sum that up in real one quick thing is, she had to take the lead the system, then take that, but then have the appointment. And then once they bought, you know, take money, do contracts, and get them all inserted only stuff. Well, she was shy about 90 hours a week of being able to get all that little girl literally. So our first step was okay, let's make your league go from when they go and get an appointment that you ask them these questions. That's straight in the database. And that sounds pretty straightforward. But that wasn't happening. So now I eliminated all that copy and paste, that was gone. And then we set up the processes to automatically enrol them and everything else after they paid money. And she was taking money in one system and then putting the information in another. So I said why don't we take it? Why don't we do this? Get the information, have the appointment, you know, take money online while you're on the phone with them. And then check off the box that says enrol. And that sends him a contract which gets a sign and it comes back and merges all information out, signs them up into four different systems assigns all the work to the primary person who's responsible for that, who she's assigning that account and sets up everything in less than 30 seconds. That little process I just described, took 40 hours of work every week off her plate.

 

Andrei

That's a very good tie, literally.

 

Sam

And Josh, let's talk about the alternative, right? Let's say she didn't do this if she didn't figure out automation, what was her alternative to scale, to grow actually to grow the business?

 

Josh

Throw more people at it, which means throwing more money at it, throw more training at it. You know, management is not wrong with anything with the people part. But all of these tasks and they were literally tasks were something that was: A or B or done or not, it wasn't anything that you have to interact as a human with, somebody just had to do with, it would just know it to onboard a new client and all these steps was roughly 30-45 minutes after a sales call. And you're doing six of those a day, you know, your day is shot.

 

Andrei

So just to get into the details of how or what you guys use to implement this process because I think it's you know, it's an optimization that can be done for many companies in general, like the sales element of you know, like getting the inbound lead and getting it into the CRM, and then onboarding it and follow up etc. It's a process that usually for everybody takes some time and is automated, maybe more or less. So in this case, he wasn't automated at all. What were the exact steps or maybe if you can share some tools that he used in order to implement this automation? Maybe some people on the show can actually look at them, and see if they're fit for the businesses or try to get inspired by how they could work around their internal processes.

 

Josh

So the most important thing, okay, the tool, there are plenty of tools, we'll talk about the various tools. So we pulled tools that we need, anywhere to create, whatever is needed to do. But let's, let's talk about the bigger picture, okay? I come from a manufacturing background and this thing called lean manufacturing, there's a process called Kaizen, it's a Japanese process, it's very well known in manufacturing, we apply that the software, okay? Kaizen means continuous improvement, you're always looking for a way to make things better. Because software always changes things get faster, easier, better, whatever your processes change, they get bigger, you know, more complex, but you always have to load your continuous improvement. And then the second thing, the terminology in Japanese is called Poka Yoke, okay? And that's important. This one's very important. Figure out where it breaks, so it doesn't break anymore. Okay. So the idea here is, and I'll use this comment is, if I hand you a bag of chocolates, right, let's say M&Ms, and you put it in your pocket, and we never seal the chocolates, and you know, you sit down the chocolates rolled out, whatever, that's a hot day, now you get that pocket, right? The way that you prevent that, say: Okay, how do I fix that? A ziplock bag, you know, at least the chocolates will stay in the bag, they melt, they don't get in your, you know, on your clothes, in your keys and all that stuff. So, thinking about what happens in the process, that can muck it up. Because then if your process gets mucked up, you have rework, you know, but you know, people don't like the experience they had, it wasn't good. You know, and then if you can't do it right the first time, we need to find time to do it again, it's just so busy. So the idea here is, you know, always be looking at your processes, right? And now, there's a couple of tools, these are tools to think about. One is if you hire somebody new, is the greatest opportunity to figure out what screwed up in your organisation. Why? Because you got to teach that person exactly what to do step by step. And most of them, please and go. After you tell them everything you do. They sometimes go, Well, why did you do that? When you could just why do you walk around that table and go over there and do this when you just walk straight that way. And the usual statement is because that's the way we've always done it. They don't take the time, you're so busy, you don't take the time to look at each little study, you got to break down the section, you can do this as a big monster, you can't eat the more elephant all at one time. One piece of that. So you look at a piece of that process and you improve it. Okay, make sure that you and sometimes you might not know what you could improve with. That's why you hire people like us sometimes to say, Okay, what couldn't be done? Or what are you doing now? what's available? So you need some sometimes some outside input if otherwise, you're kind of breathing your own exhaust. You know, you don't know what you don't know. So you kind of do it the same way. So some of the simple tools that we use, okay, one is called diagrams - Dotnet. Okay, it's a diagram. Is free. So you can run an experiment with it. But you actually make a diagram and you know, this is gonna be on video when we do this, this is going to be, I'm just saying is, we can show you when it's published. Yeah, when it's published. Is it gonna be a video was published?

 

Andrei

It's also going to be a video. So we have Spotify, iTunes, Apple.

 

Josh

So if you happen to be looking at this as a video sample. Right now. Yeah, so you can see what it is and what one looks like. So in the grand scheme of things, right. Some of our customers, when they describe when I say, you know, describe your process to me, and write it down and maybe, you know, on a piece of paper or whatever. And sometimes I get something that looks more like a flea, flicker, football. Play, you know, why is it arrows and all that stuff, and I'm going, Okay, walk me through it. And this is an example of is this happens to be an online university accredited university. And this is all the processes that they run people through to enrol and go through courses in the university. This all used to be manual, step by step, they had a team. Now it all happens automatically. Another team, about five people were freed up to do a lot of other things.

 

Sam 

And this is just the enrollment aspect of the process. These are different pieces of it. And for those who are watching this, we're just looking at diagrams online of the actual process that we built for people. So that to represent very clearly what this is, what is the outcome of this stuff actually looks like? How do you do it, and it's really, you think about like a pinball machine, you know, this happens, then this happens, and this happens, and this happens, and this happens. And you and you document all of it. So that you know really clearly what's going on.

 

Josh

But there's one problem with a pinball machine. happens the same way twice. Okay. And in business, you want consistent processes that happen the same way every time because you have a consistent outcome, like plumbing, right? And I use this phrase, some people cringe, when you press the lever, you expect it to flush. If that process doesn't happen, you know, nobody's happy, right? Um, when we talk about a process is making sure that when you fix one part of the process, okay, you also then think about, okay, this parts working really good now, look downstream because now you've caused a problem for the person who now has to catch what you've done. So, you know, I, in this case, we increase the process by almost tenfold. Now, we didn't I knew what the next part was, because the comment people say is, well, you're already two steps ahead of me says: Yeah, I know, when we fix this one, where that's going, now who's responsible for it? Because that's my neck, you know, that's the next person to say: I got too much now, what do I do? Okay, how do we automate that? So there's a cause and effect when you improve things, okay. It's like, you have a big diameter pipe going into smaller, if you increase the pressure, it may not be good, or if it's not good, it's gonna leak, and things go. And all the good work you did here is gonna fall on the floor over here. So you know, the idea that those tools are, and one simple tool that we use, it's really crazy simple. Through the Kaizen process, and we send people this on Amazon, is literally a roll of brown paper, okay, that you can tape on your wall so you don't mess up your wall. And then a bunch of multicoloured sticky notes. And each of these sticky notes has a different colour for because they mean something different, like the beginning of a process, the end of a process, you know, a transition from a process or this is an action. So we actually have a document and a link to buy it on Amazon and resell it. But you know, you buy a box of sticky notes, certain colours, and then you have these and then you can actually then line them up and work as a team that's in it. Each one has a different meaning. So everybody's on the same page. No. And that way you can really stick them up and then make a process that people can follow. And you know, because the sticky notes you can move around. And then you just writing on them or, you know, then drawing a line says, Okay, this does this, the second,

 

Sam

Let me jump in for Josh, what happens is, in manufacturing, when people do this process, where is where it originated from, you can see it's such a visual process, right? You can see the steps in manufacturing, it's physical, it's real. And you can tell and you have to physically move something. A lot of times, when you get into the digital world, there's a lot that happens that we forget about, we don't think about, right? Oh, yeah, just we get some leads? Well, there's actually a lot that goes on in getting some leads, right? And we follow up with them. Okay, well, manually do you have to export some data out of one system that you use to capture them? And then put them in another to follow up? Is it done all the time? And then when they buy, is there more manual work that has to be done? Right? If that was in the manufacturing, we had to, you know, lead you to pick up the person that you just attracted and move them into the next bucket? And then you know, okay, now you're going to sit in front of this other salesperson, and they're going to talk to you about this thing, they there's videos, you know, okay, now we're going to put you in front of the product people, and they're going to talk to you about a video, right? That would be very real, it would be very visual. But what happens is it's not it's an email that shows up on your computer, right? It's sent out of a system that's triggered by automation that was connected to hopefully a form that you didn't have to export and import it into somewhere else. And along the way, you have to know where these people are coming from. Right. And where the leads are. So that's the idea. Go on. with that. I just want to put it in context, because like, why do you do this, in this way is because you're trying to make a digital thing physical, so you can really get a handle on what's going on.

 

Josh

And I'll give you the kind of follow-through. So the coma, we freed up the time to do for her to do more stuff. Right? And so a call that we had just a week ago was okay, I ramped up my marketing, I'm getting more leads. And I have too many leads to talk to. I think that's a good problem. Right? Yeah. Okay. Well, now what? I said, Well, tell me about why they're, you know, tell me about them as well. They're not all qualified. Is it? Okay, so you're advertising and marketing, and the whole process is driving you now, twice as many leads as you had before, which is awesome. But, you know, the complaint was I spent my whole Saturday following up with people, and none of them was qualified. Okay. And, you know, she was thinking of how we do this, and, you know, okay, we won't take as many we'll have less, I mean, her schedule is full. I said: Why don't we do this? Why don't we filter out those who and do some, do some more qualification than you already do? And, you know, sometimes you want to, sometimes you want to tell somebody, in this case, is, you know, are you a good prospect? Tell me, so we have these crazy questions. So we designed a set of questions says, you know, what, do you feel, you know, 1 to 10? What do you feel about this, this and this, and depending on the logic, it's either you get to make an appointment, or I appreciate your opportunity, but I don't think we'd be a good match. Right, and, you know, cut down the flow, so that you're talking about talking to the right people, we had this problem happening with another customer who's a tech business. They were getting 500 leads a week. It was amazing. But they only have three people in the department. You know, so, and they and the funny part is, we're doing no advertising, this was word of mouth, and just, you know, marketplaces that people were inquiring. So, you know, the counter was is, you know, the people that couldn't keep up with it. A lot fell through really tough on people. I said, Why don't we ask them a few questions before they make an appointment? Well, the 500, those 500 leads went down to like 300 we write and the 300 because we qualify them, some people can write to doubt, you don't hear just don't get some demo. Some people like: okay, you need to talk to us. And some people's like: No, we need to make an appointment to read those larger accounts. So we're really qualified. But over a period of 90 days, they had more sales than they had ever had in the compared to the last two years combined. Because now they were talking to the right people. Because they said: you know, if you just if we layer advertising on top of this, your problems not going to get better. All right, and then, you know, you take the next step as well. They're their support. People weren't salespeople, they're a good implementation and not if somebody wanted to buy it was good. And so, you know, the missing piece was they didn't have a sales team. They didn't need one, they've been business 10 years and have 10,000 plus customers. And haven't had a salesperson this far. Why don't you know, right? So I said, you know, you address the questions that these people have, well, why don't we do a webinar, an automated webinar? So that way, you know, people can watch, have a sales presentation, answer all the questions, and have one on every single different product, they had 44 different products. So you know, is complex, depending on they were a connector type thing. So they connected A to B and depending on what she was on each side, there were a different methodology and different reasons to use it. So we created a webinar, which then had, you know, all the commonly asked questions that were done through there. And then they either got bought the product right away or if they were qualified, they made an appointment. You know, the call was, this was a January of this year, they doubled what they did in the last 90 days in a month. And we found out that they were getting 40 hours of people a week watching webinars. That's a full-time salesperson. You didn't have to, but you only had eight, we have built it once, and it plays many. And guess what, you know, it's still running. So now I have, you know, they got smart, because instead of having their support team, and having more employees and more, you know, there's nothing wrong with having employees, but be human work counts. Otherwise, automate their case. 

 

Sam

Let's actually bring that up after this story. Yeah, at the end of this, because I'm going to talk about that.

 

Josh

Sure. But the idea here is, we took the, we identified the problem, using that Kaizen and Poka-Yoke type thing is, where's the problem? And then we had to think about how would we go about fixing it? You know, their comment was originally a webinar, what kind of the webinar was I, you don't have a salesperson, you know, you tried doing a group meeting and you get 50 people to sign up, and 10 people show up, and then we're disappointed that I said, people are interested now, let them decide, it'll help them qualify, it takes it off your back. So you know, that success caused other problems. So you know, that pipe keeps going, Okay, now, we've got too many of these. Now, when we do them, it also means we had to go back into their processes and get them to fix. So there was a lot we did, but you know, we look at how do we generate more revenue? You know, how do you get more leads and more prospects in? And then you got it? 

 

Sam

How do you do it with less human resources to make it happen, and use technology to handle the busywork of it?

 

Josh

Here's the philosophy, the best business model, there is the one that doesn't need you. Okay, in the business, world, you own the business as well. And the other. The other process is you also own the business, you know, can you take a six-week vacation with no phone and not worry about it, you know, there's automation involved and proper processes to follow. It makes it easier. I did it this year, I took a six-week vacation, I disappeared. Deep last night. I went on vacation, I said I'm not I'm taking a digital holiday.

 

Andrei

So before going into the subject that you wanna, you want to dive in, I want to go back a bit into because I want people to be able to touch on some actionable bits for their teams or their processes or their businesses. So for example, from our discussion so far, we know that one of the places where we can automate more things are in this lead capturing and then following up or filtering or scoring, so things that we discussed until now, and this goes into aligning marketing with sales as well. So it's a very good point, it’s, you know, it's somewhere where everybody or almost everybody can do a better job at you know, filtering these automatically. Now, what are some tools that you found useful apart from the diagram? No, sorry, I have it written down here. So yeah, Dotnet diagrams.

 

Sam

I tell you what we intentionally stay out of talking about tools we, and here's why. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna flip the script on what you just asked for a reason. People get caught up in their tools, and they don't think about their process. tools are great. The main thing you need to do is figure out what do you need the tool to do? Not what tool should you get, figure out what you need the tool to do. And then reach out to whatever the software is that you're using, and find out if it does what you need, specifically, very clearly understand the specs that you need that to do to pull off the function of automation. But don't get caught up in the tools because tools are tools. It's like if I were building a house, and we're pretty, pretty adamant about this. And you're like, what tool do you use to build that house and I got a toolbox, you know, and it's like, I got a bunch of different types of drills, and like they all drill, the main thing is that the battery stays charged long enough and that it works to go in. If it accomplishes that function, then I can put the screws in the wood and build start, you know, do that function to building the house. So the thing is, does the drill work? Does the tool that you're getting work? Does it work reliably? Does it have a good support team if it goes wrong, that's how we look at tools outside of that. Josh, you can add to it your thoughts, but we're pretty like very much, it's just tools. People go about the tool, this tool, that too. And it's like: Look, there's a lot of cool tools out there. But if and the other thing is, people get in, I'm giving you a little bit of monologue on my, you know, is my tool rant. This is people get all caught up in their tools. And then they have way too many tools and half the tools they have overlapping the other. And now their data is in all these other tools because they're buying tools like it's going out of style. And I don't try it, so I'm trying this. An nd then before you know it, you've got this mess of tools, and you still don't have your process fixed or dialled or automated. That's my take on tools, you know.

 

Josh

When you start a project analogy, what do you got?

 

Sam 

And they should do, everybody should write down everything that you use, okay, you know.

 

Josh

We make a Google Sheet or Excel sheet, whatever you use a piece of paper. We had one client that had 96 different software, online tools they were using to run their business. 

 

Sam

That's actually not uncommon, when you actually look at all the tools, not just one core tool, but all the tools you use to run a business. Literally, if you took one away, you would lose a function of what you do.

 

Josh 

So in this case, when we were setting, then there was so much overlap, we were able to eliminate down to 36 tools. Okay, and there was one tool I use as an example. They told me, you know, we get, in this case, there are 500 new leads every month, this is an awesome tool. Like really, I want to know about that, you know, somebody else that we work with, it might be a good tool. And I said: let's look at that. I'm curious guy, I don't want to generate leads, you know, especially when a lead is worth 1500 bucks apiece to them, as you know, that's cool. Um, we went to the tool. And then we looked at this month and notice that we look, we went four months back. And then there was a 500. And I said: so what happened from last quarter? Says: I don't know. Said: you pay for a credit card. Right? Why don't we check there, see if it's not expired? And he looked at it, and when you're right, it's not working. But they didn't tell me or I didn't see the email, you know, I said, Let's see 500 leads your conversion rate is just $1,000. Right, your conversion rate is 30% of those. So you know, that's 15,045 grand over the last 90 days, you're missing. It's not in your cash register, so to speak. I said: How much is it all? This is 100 bucks a month. I said I pay for it annually and make sure it's on your calendar in the future. That $12.100 just cost you 45,000 because you missed the renewal, or somehow it stopped and nobody called up and said: Hey, dude, you know, you want to keep this going. So I would blame so to speak the Software per company that selling it that says they don't have a process since it, you know, they lost their customer pain, you know, in that case, but the customer lost a really big benefit. So that's when processes break when you get too many and or, in some cases, when you have all these tools. I look at it this way, if you want to dig a hole in your backyard, you can use a spoon, a shovel, a backhoe just depends on how big the hole needs to be. And how quick you want it done. Right? A backhoe, dig that hole in one scoop? No, it might take you two days to dig the vein with a shovel with rocks and everything else. And a stone it might take you six months. So it depends on how quickly you need to move that.  Oh, what's the urgency? People come to come to us and say: I have an opportunity. And I need something to do this. Yesterday, one of our customers came to us and I did a big presentation in front of 5000 people. And everybody wanted me to everybody wanted to buy, were willing to pay for me to put it up there so that I want to put up there for 30 days and have it disappear. And they can pay access. I can't figure out how to do that. I said okay: how much is access? Just curious, 185 bucks to see this series of videos that are all that she presents. I said: okay, give me 30 minutes. Is it just how much is gonna cost me? Nothing. No one, she sent me a tip she sent me she said I'm sending you a holiday tip. She said $500. Like: Thank you. You know, we'll celebrate, you know, we'll go out to dinner or whatever, we'll have a fun time. But because we knew what needs to be done, and I didn't buy any tools, I use the tools we already had and just kind of figured it. When the email that for me was I tried doing this for a couple of hours, couldn't figure it out. Can you? Can you look at this one? Yeah, here it is. Because we knew what to do. And we knew which tools and how to configure them. So knowing what the capabilities of your tools are as equally as important rather than going let me go on in it. I need another thing. And you know, you gotta say: Oh, this solves that problem. You know, and you've now just added more complexity when it breaks doesn't get paid for? Or who knows. I mean, if your audience is business owners and marketing people, you know, if somebody leaves or takes a vacation, and nobody knows how to fix that tool, or, you know, how did that tool work, and it stops, then sometimes you don't even know why is stopping. Anyhow. So there are many tools, and there are tools that we use, we'll be happy to have a list of them at the end or whatever. But I think that the biggest challenge that we see when we're working with clients, is this take a step back and say: Okay, let's look at the process. What needs that actually happened? And what can where can we remove errors, rework, okay, and speed up the process.

 

Sam

And you have a saying that kind of encapsulates that whole idea. Where you take the focus away from tools and put it on the business,

 

Josh

Oh, be human word counts. Otherwise?

 

Sam

Well, there's that one, there's the other one that you've used for, for even longer, you know, that you actually taught me is to say, look, we're business people, first technology, people second, in that in that order versus technology people than business people. Because if you try and solve, if you try and just find technology to solve business problems, that's different than solving your business problem and then applying the technology to the problem to make it work.

 

Josh

So you know, you need to find out and figure out why before you do your house.

 

Sam

Yeah, yeah. And if you try to solve the problem around revenue or something like that, you got to figure out what is it that you have to do, or that you want to try and then apply the tool to get to your endpoint, the tool is just a means to an end. It happens that tools are amazing. Now, they're incredible. And there are lots of different nuances to talk about. And I think that's a wonderful thing. And I don't mean to shut that conversation down. But I think for the marketer, and the business person, and the salesperson and the people who are involved in this kind of automation work, you shouldn't have a hard time going on G three, and looking up tools to solve your problem in that space. I would say we'd encourage people to do is make sure you don't lose track of your data. Keep your data in one spot and be able to track the effectiveness of what you're doing very, very clearly, because the lack of effective tracking is an enormous problem in the automation, rather, to say I made a change globally, there's a difference. I don't know what actually caused that. So I don't know what to work on what to improve. Whereas my process, could it be made better? Right? I ran a bunch of ads and made more money, I spent money and I made more money they match. Well, guess what? We had a gentleman that we worked with, spent 100 grand a year on advertising, Google ads, Search ads. He came out ahead every year as profitable. That's cool, right? We all would like everybody who runs ads would love to do that. But, you know, in the dirty secret is that's not the case. And that, and that, the deal is that once we actually put tracking in place, in addition, automation for that project, but once we put tracking in place to find out what ads were doing the work, right, because what, when we talk about marketing, you got to find out what's doing the work. And when you ask yourself, what's doing the work. The work is sales, closing new business. So what ad originated, the business that actually gave you money, not just leads are great, clicks are great, they can make you broke. And so you need to be tracking that stuff. And know which one you're driving says. And we found that $20,000 of his 100,000 drove all his revenue.

 

Andrei

As it happens, the 8020 rule, right?

 

Sam

Yeah. And so this was like a, you know, and I'm not kidding about that, though, that isn't just like a blanket, you know, it wasn't exactly 20, right? It was like 20, whatever was the number, but on average, $20,000 of the revenue he did wasn't a very creative advertiser, he just was a consistent advertiser. And he found something that worked, and it worked for him. It was a national movie company, across the United States. And then, so when we found that out, he was able to save $80,000 a year. And put that, you know, at that point, you can do whatever you want with it. The smart person, if they had an assistance to scale the business, they say, well, the $20,000 that's actually bringing customers and not just leads, why don't we take that other $80,000 and put it towards that. Now your business is growing, you're tracking it, you see the effectiveness, and you can see if that as you invest that, you know, if you tap out the market potential or whatever, but the key is: know what's happening, because very few people, citizen, they're good, but people I got the data. And when I ask people, can you make a decision? Like, can you make an actionable decision to improve your business, meaning generate more revenue, or get whatever action you want, you know, get more conversions from leads? And if you can't, then you're you don't have good data, or you or your data is not organised in a way that you can use it. The key is that any of these systems you put together for automation, make sure you can look at it and go, what does this mean? And what action do I take with the data?

 

Josh

So there's two and two are going all over the place. 

 

Sam

In that case, you know, the original problem was, you know, I asked: do you know what makes a sound? So you can we so you can track what we're spending on? And the answer was, he couldn't tell me. So is it alright, let's look at the data. The data doesn't lie. So he took 10 years worth of data, right and stuff that we had some tools. They said: Oh, hey, Stu, did what can you do with a million dollars? Could you buy a small island off the coast? But that? He says: yeah, I said: well, over the last 1012 years, you spent a million dollars and you've just kind of throwing it out the window? No, I said: Would you like to know how to take that and you know, if you knew you could only have to spend 200,000 7 million to get the same result. Would you be interested? He's like: Yeah, what am I dumb? I'm like, No, okay. Let's look at the numbers. When conversely, we have another scenario where people are advertising, okay, let's just go down this pipe of technology, right? multichannel attribution. Okay. In other words, you're advertising on Google, sending emails, Instagram, Facebook, you know, people are seeing you all over the place. But the common is how do you know what started the sale and what closed the deal? The whole customer journey. Are you tracking all those pieces? An interesting scenario is one of our customers, they spend a couple  $1,000, six months earlier. And they said, you know, that campaign suck, we didn't get much out of it. Literally, it was not even returned or clicks. And then we'll put some tools in, they said: Hey, that campaign was interesting. Look at all those $200,000 of revenue that came in from that, that came in that had no attribution on it. But we tracked it back to that original campaign. That campaign started out with an ad then I went to a couple of emails. But I said: you know, what, why don't you try running that again, but the difference is that if you put money in and you know, you'll get it out in six months because that's how the processes. And we saw that what we saw the seventh email, after the retargeting etc, actually close the deal. But in the tool, it said: You made a sale, and there was no cost to it. How'd that happen? Let's look at the customer journey, and say: Look, you know, you tried something, but there was a delayed reaction. And that just proves the fact that customers take time to buy sometimes.

 

Andrei

I'm very much with you on this one. And it's also something that we discussed with, like every occasion with our clients as well. And everybody has been very positive about, you know, validating this. But indeed, and we can also like Google Analytics is the simplest way where you can look and see, you know, the challenge, and see how many sessions average word happening per hour.

 

Sam

Yeah, I'll tell you there's one little problem. It's good. But it misses one key thing. The recurring sale?

 

Andrei

Yes, no, I'm talking about tracking.

 

Sam

The attribution back to the recurring sale, which, if you're a smart business, and most businesses can do this, there is an opportunity to create some kind of subscription or recurring sale in your business. And if that sale, you got to obviously know a couple of things, how long do they stick around on average? Once you get it going? Right? What's churn? What's it cost you to get that in the door? And then how long does it take for you to make that money back and make it profitable relative to that advertising? Basic stuff, hard to track, largely, you know, like, we all talk about it like it's just so everybody knows their tack and their, you know, lifetime value in the churn rate. They don't, is the reality? A lot of people don't, they're missing that data. They have a sense of it roughly, anecdotally, but they're large can't point to numbers on a screen and go, and being able to track back there, tie back the recurring revenue, to where you can look at a dashboard and go, that ad brought someone in four months ago, we've made this much money from that ad spend. That's a big deal.

 

Andrei  

It is. I mean, it's very different from services, or B2B to B2C. So I think the platforms are a bit different when you can go to.

 

Sam

Unless. I mean, how many services do you know that have retainers? Yeah, would that be a recurring sale?

 

Andrei

Um, depends on how you put it. 

 

Sam

Well, look, did you have to pay to get that money again, through another advertisement? Or a new need? That's recurring? So? The track that backs to the original source. I'm not beating up on you. But I'm saying there's recurring revenue in this as a company, you know, where did that come from? What did I do to get it? If you don't know? Then you're blind.

Andrei

Basically. So to finish off, the idea was for services, you can link back to your CRM, and then you can track their the customer lifetime value. And you know how long they have been lucky. 

 

Sam

You know exactly which ad that came from? 

 

Andrei

Yes.

 

Sam

And you help people do that, right. Instead of like, if people don't, though, in their business, it does not attack you. But if people aren't doing that in their business, they need to talk to you. It's up to you know, where they need to go figure it out themselves on the internet, how they do that? Because if you don't know exactly what advertisement or content is driving these new sales, even if it's a combination, but there's something that people started on, and then there's something that closes the business, and there's the in-between, what's the mix, what's the cocktail, you don't know what did it then you're blind to where your business comes from.

 

Josh

There's one thing to do is one thing that I've seen, and I had this happen, we worked with one of our customers. Yeah, they did a television ad across multi markets across the United States. And that went into, you know, a, you know, automated phone system that would take your money or send you to a live operator. And they had internet advertising driving leaves, they had average or they had, what was happening was is we had people doing Facebook, people doing a search, people doing TV ads, people doing radio ads. And the interesting thing was, we put together some tracks and we talk about technology, what's the pipeline? And say: okay, you were the sales for the week. Every one of the different advertisers claimed that they made the sale. I said: How is that possible? Well, because when it is because it was a touch to every one of those attributions along the way. It all claimed close the sale. But in some of the type of technology that we use, we can see which one started which one followed up with it. And the funny part is, I said: Guys, Monday through Wednesday, I can tell you who started the sale, which and from which source they came in first from. It's a bit I can tell you that on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, what closed the deal was the follow-up emails, and some of the retargeting, so you may have started the interest you that's the marketing part. But your spend, the biggest spend was hundreds of 1000s of dollars in TV advertising. And then we're just trying to push, you know, a couple $100,000 a week. Yeah, it's good. It said: most of your ads are not close. I said: the cheapy Facebook ads, and the Instagram ads are doing gangbusters. You know, but you know, the markets that you're working with, you know, I said, you know, they thought they would they took an ad out on the football channel. And I was like: You spent a lot of money, but we got no sales from that, you know, home shopping network and home, you know, the Home and Garden TV, it made more sales in the football show. But it took three weeks for those sales to close. So you know. But if you have data and you know that in the marketing game, if you have data, then you say this is what happened, and you can then repeat it. But the idea here was all those sales, you know, when they add ran and all that stuff, the automation drove all the systems, no humans needed. In most of the case. 20% were had to go to an operator, the other 80% of the sales happened automatically went into the sale system, then you send over, it was like: Okay, we got all these sales. Now, how do we ship them? I said: Well, what do you use the shipping system? Let's connect the pipes, or the sale when it's done goes into shipping. And then the next comment I got was that it was obvious, I knew it was coming and they just weren't interested in listening at front. Firstly, they said the accounting processes: how do I extract the data from the sale system and can account for it? It's like, well, why don't we just put it in the accounting system, sales, shipping accounting, so simple. And this is an old wine company been around for 30 years. And, you know, their idea of integration was download, upload. You know, I mean, they had factories, manufacturing product, but technology-wise on the internet, they were it was really just an email, you got an order, you know, type scenario.

 

Andrei

I think also very important for you guys tuning in probably many of you, I'm sure you do this already. But when you look at, for example, this case study, and some of you I know are running TV ads, radio ads, to get a read online, or maybe even magazine ads and stuff like that in print, or outdoor, I think this is the best time where you can look back at your marketing mix and your campaigns and everything that you have done for the quarter or for the half-year, and try to map everything, again, to the customer journey and how or what you want that ad to do. We've just done this with our clients. And it was very, very useful so that they can track the right KPIs together with us together, with the agencies that they work with. And then, you know, if you run a TV ad, certainly that's not going to be converting the same as remarketing ads on Facebook, but that might trigger a surge in Google that you want to be ranking for, whether it's online or like organically through SEO and then you have to make sure that the keywords that you are on that you want to rank for. You do If not, then run Google ads so that you can still be in the first results for that category of product or service or services, and then you know, try to map everything according to the customer journey and see where like, you basically work a process around the lead generation element of marketing. And then, as you guys were saying, to try to automate as much as possible across the board, so that you can scale that up when you have the recipe and is working.

 

Josh

So when you take that type of recipe that you're talking about is, you know, let's talk about that. I'm talking about three types of touchpoints, if somebody comes to your website because it drove that, right, you can retarget them with a message to come back, right? Regardless, depending on what source you're targeting another one platform. And then the next thing is they give up their email address and you've got a lead magnet, you know, stop sending that same return, you change the message of, you know, come take a taste, I can try to get

 

Sam

Move them to the next step in the process in the customer journey. But it was something we really talked about the idea of a customer journey, relative to the rest of it. 

 

Josh

The next part would be is if they have taken that next step, and given up though some information, they've taken an action. Alright, so now they did a demo, maybe they finished the demo. You're doing retargeting, so you know how to do cold ads, that same person, you should now be helping them to say you should be buying, you know, this is a great thing. I know that as an example, I use this as an example. If you buy something from Zendesk, they may have changed your policies from a year ago, but I noticed this, you buy something from Zendesk, alright. And you're gonna get retargeted for you know, months, he buying Zendesk, and they don't upsell you and say: Hey, you should try another service or shoot for somebody I already bought, why do I see your advertisement? You should know that I purchased already.

 

Andrei

That's the data integration issue like you know, just the way that they manage everything through by the way are you guys using any CDP at the moment or oil helping your clients integrate CDP is. Do you have any recommendations or thoughts on these for our listeners?

 

Sam

When do you say CDP? There's a lot of acronyms in this world. Oh, yeah, by CDP, that acronym, maybe I don't live under a rock.

 

Andrei

I'm sure you know what I mean. So is the customer data platform, so where we can run omnichannel marketing from. So basically, the single thought, they are very useful in order to get the single customer view, and to be able to integrate your multiple data touchpoints, from from from all channels, and to basically know which customer went through? Or saw which types of advertising from you? What was their journey with you etc? So you can remove that?

 

Sam

For sure. Okay. Yeah, I'm familiar with what you're talking about. Good. Josh.

 

Josh

One of the tools we use that can attach to any of those front end systems is a tool called Wicked Reports. Alright, and we're going to we're talking about, yeah, that that is a multi-channel attribution tool that allows you to see your customer journey, and also see the cost of you know, every metric that you want to see along multiple channels, and it can feed it also straight into multiple CRM systems. Okay, it's integrated. Now, yeah, it's simple. Once you learn how to use it, green is good. Yellow is not so good. And red is terrible. That's, you know when you set up your dashboard and say: Okay, this is working, and you can actually see your ROI and over what timeframe and where it's coming from. And you know, what actually started the deal, what close the deal, and how they went through the journey. So that is one of the tools were certified partners, and that we actually came upon that kind of the backwards version, and we help people understand their data. But the idea is that data comes out of your CRM system for names and sales. And it can be connected to e-commerce stores and webinars and everything. I can track the fact you mentioned billboards and stuff like that. If you're getting clicking billboards, and a code is going into a system, we can send that information back to those reports and say, you know, it started from a billboard and it wound up on a retargeting ad, and then it wound up from an email and then it went up for sale. What was the journey and you and you see these cockamamie journeys that people take to get there? And so the idea is if you can figure out where they start, and what actually helps close the deal and what timeframe it is, you feel better about: Oh, happened. Integrate all kinds, you can track everything with a script that you put on there. And it's like: boom, it just, you see more information coming into your system. You know, the challenges and you think, you know, that is evil that no need to learn how to drive that dashboard? What's the data there? So those people who are experienced with it, I go: aha, those people never done or forgot where I start.

 

Andrei

So now going back, like a beat back, but we might have already discussed what Sam wanted to say. But you, Sam, you want to say something and I interrupted you. So this discussion? 

 

Sam

I think I want to talk about is the idea of being human where it counts and otherwise automating, obviously, that's our tagline here at Mobile Pocket Office. But that's not why I'm bringing, you know, we have it for a reason. And it's the same reason why I bring it up, is because I think one thing, and we talked about this very early on, when we were in the podcast here was that I think the thing that we learned through the pandemic, is that, you know, it's still happening, but that we really learned is that, yeah, you can do most of your stuff online, but people are still hungry for human interaction, they want that they appreciate that. And now people are getting it less and less. And so the idea is that if you can integrate into your automation, and design into your automation opportunities to remind you at the right time when to be human or automated, so it feels very human, and it gets literally the same effect. That's a really good thing. And so there are examples of that. That is really exciting about what you can do. Right? Did I already mentioned the thank-you card? 

 

Andrei

Yeah, we spoke about in the beginning.

 

Sam

Yeah. So we spoke about that. It's one example. The other example is, you know if it is not free to send a thank you card that costs money, right. And it's a cost, you have to factor into your, your total cost of acquisition. But one thing that doesn't cost that much money other than just having them a platform to do it on is sending a video, a personal video to people, thanking them, welcoming them, whatever you want to do at different stages of the process. Josh, you've probably got it up on your phone there I do. We use a particular tool to do it. And again, the tool is not important, an important tool is called Bunge, they happened to be cool people, we like him. But we can give you that link. People buy differently. show people how it works, Josh, real quick, because I think this is cool. This is human. And not only is it cool and human, but it’s also helped people generate a heck of a lot more revenue. Okay, and I'll give you some numbers, while Josh is showing you how to do that like it's incredible.

 

Josh

So it's an app, every time a certain type of lead comes in, or a certain type of thing comes into our systems increase revenue versus: Hey, you have a new lead. And I know on this where they came from, where they came from, all the data is collected is putting in here. So I think and push that person's name, it says record now. I say: hey, Sam, I'm so glad you replied to our website information about doing automation, and specifically X, Y and Z. I look forward to talking to you and I know you made an appointment, and then we're going to talk on Monday. See you there. Actually, I didn't record it. I had a little hit the little record button. Hey, Sam glad you made appointment. I'll see you on Tuesday. Look forward to helping with the automation. Boom, I hit stop.

 

Sam

Let me give you an example.

 

Josh

And now Sam is gonna get an alert that he's got a message Yeah. didn't reply to me too.

 

Sam

So let me give you an example. Right. Let's say you have a product that's a consumable like coffee, right? You have an e-commerce store. Not a crazy idea, right? I think people can relate to that. There is a company out there called Ojo coffee. They used Bonura 14 weeks they went from $35,000 a month in revenue from subscriptions to 75,000 a month, revenue from subscriptions. And they found that in their case, their subscription customers averaged 20% more revenue than non-subscription customers, so that as strong incentive to, you know, improve the number of subscriptions, that's meant to mention that it helps stabilise, you know, what you can expect each month in their case for the business. And the owner of the business took people into where they were roasting coffee. He's already there. And he just recorded a video of him doing it, saying: thank you, you know, wanted to show you around, and thank you for your business. And it was literally that simple, in addition to educating them that they could actually do a subscription that was an option. People didn't know it, he just explained, hey, if you want to do subscription, that's an option. So that helped people move from non-subscription customers to subscription customers. And those numbers are again, $35,000 a month to $75,000 a month in subscription customers. I mean, if that doesn't sell a tool like this and the little bit of time it takes to be human and investing in this. I gave up on you, right?  

 

Josh

You know, another tool that we're experimenting with... 

 

Sam

But let me just add one more thing in there, Josh, like the key piece, is that, well, how do you know, right, you've got to send that at the right time somebody purchases, they didn't get a subscription, you want to convert them to a subscription. As soon as they make that purchase, you want to thank them and educate them on the subscription and make sure that it's easy for them to take that action. So you need automation to tell you when to do that. And that's the key, then you are human it sends it’s automated, they get it. And they can go take care of setting up a subscription. So that's what we talked about when we say to be human where it counts, otherwise automates things like that. Because they are not just for fun, but because they grow your revenue, and they make for better customers.

 

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