The great wave of automation is coming, whether you like it or not. Eventually, all of our jobs are going to be replaced by AIs and robots but in the meantime, you have an opportunity to leverage automation throughout your business and in your marketing. You have two options: ignore automation at your peril or embrace the opportunity and adapt quickly. My guest hasn’t just embraced marketing automation. He’s made it his business to help others use automation to their advantage. I’m talking about Brad Martineau, Cofounder and CEO of SixthDivision. In this episode, you’ll be getting some real insight into how to incorporate automation into your marketing strategy and even your overall business strategy. You’ll also be getting some power tips on using Infusionsoft and how to build an effective customer journey that gets results. If you’re serious about leveling up your business, stick around as Brad reveals the secrets to doing automation right.
Transcript
Brad, it’s great to have you on the show.
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
I am a customer of yours at SixthDivision. I’ve gone through the SixthDivision Academy. I’ve learned a lot about Infusionsoft and how to tag things in a way that makes sense. It’s strategic but I don’t get into the weeds of actually setting up tags and building campaigns in Infusionsoft. We will probably end up in the weeds at some point but we’re going to get pretty strategic throughout most of this. Why would somebody need such a high-powered and oftentimes confusing tool as Infusionsoft, when there’s so many very simple CRMs out there, simple shopping carts? Why Infusionsoft or one of its ilk like ONTRAPORT?
You alluded to the answer and how you approach it yourself, which is, “I know what those weeds are but I don’t get into them.” A lot of people come ask and say, “Should I get this tool?” A lot of people like to have conversations around tools. The very first thing that we’ve got to help people understand is that you don’t ever start the conversation around a tool. The answer is it depends on what you’re actually trying to pull off. You mentioned the academy, we talked about this a lot in the academy. Any clients we work with first, we’ve got to be clear. Strategy precedes implementation and implementation is where the tool comes into play. Tools don’t necessarily come into strategy. They come in afterward when I’m deciding how to go implement. The answer to that question is specific to each business. I want to be really clear, I’m going to give some examples of why you would go to a tool like Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign or ONTRAPORT or a tool like that. The key is you wouldn’t go there because of what I’m about to say. You would go there because you have created a design or a plan of what you want your client journey to look like. That tool is the tool that best facilitates the creation of that client. I would be the only reason why you would go to one of those tools. Are you familiar with Joe Polish’s Genius Network?
Yes, I’ll be at his annual event.
I was talking to one of the guys that joined the group as well. He said, “Why would I go with Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign? Why wouldn’t I just use MailChimp?” I said, “Those other tools, while they’re simpler, they don’t offer the same level of automation if you understand what automation is all about.” Most people when they get automation, the name of the category is marketing automation when you get a marketing automation tool. If we’re not careful, we’ll forget that words and language impact what we see as being possible. We say marketing automation and what it does is it limits our view down to only the things that involve marketing, which typically has to do with generating leads and then getting them onto a sales conversation or getting them to buy and then automation. Most people end up thinking it’s email autoresponders and then it’s like, “Why would I need an Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign that is “marketing automation” when I could do some email autoresponders with MailChimp?” The reality is automation is so much bigger than that.
Predictability only comes as a result of visibility over time. Share on XWhen I look at automation, there are four different forces of automation that I look at of how you’re going to use it. The first key to understand marketing automation is that’s not about marketing. It’s about creating a systematic and automatic client journey from beginning all the way to end. For me, marketing automation is as much about what I do after somebody buys, as it is what I do when somebody is moving through my sales process, as it is what I do when I’m capturing leads and I’m trying to convert them either to a purchase or to a sales process. I get into MailChimp and if I have to sell in my business especially service providers, coaches, consultants, anybody like that where you’re selling with people over the phone, MailChimp’s not going to help you with that. AWeber is not going to help you with that. All of the email marketing tools are not going to help you leverage what automation can do for the manual parts of your business. They have no ability to create any systems in the business.
For me, anybody who has committed to creating a predictable client journey, it’s systematic, it’s automatic, that thing runs like clockwork. Especially where you have a sales team or you’re delivering a service that involves some one-on-one work, that’s where you want to start looking at tools beyond MailChimp. That’s where they’re going to start to look at a more robust tool because it allows you to control the entire journey from within one core platform. If your business is you send some leads online, you capture them through a web form. You send some follow-up emails, they buy a product online, you drop them into a core. If it’s a totally online business, informational only, then you may not need an Infusionsoft. What I’ve found is most people start to get in, they start to build out their client journey. They don’t have a lot of pre-planning on what it’s going to look like. They end up creating this big old mess typically because they don’t have a plan. The tool that they’re using isn’t designed to run an entire client journey. It’s designed to do some lead capture and then convert leads to whatever’s next.
In summary, a couple of main reasons why I look at one of those other platforms is if I was sitting down with a business owner looking at it and say, “One, are you committed to creating a predictable, systematic and automatic business? Number two, do you have elements in your business where human beings have to come in and interact with your prospects and customers? Three, is your business more than a funnel?” That might actually summarize it at the best. This is actually one of the forces of automation. A lot of people launch a funnel and they think they have a business. Businesses require more than a funnel. It’s about building an entire client journey. Those would be some of the primary reasons why I would start to steer somebody to an Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign or potentially an ONTRAPORT or one of those platforms. Their business has opportunity and needs that will not be served by a simple email autoresponder combined with a simple eCommerce platform. There’s a more cohesive example. We’ve got to start sealing the cracks or they stopped losing leads because their systems aren’t connected very well. They don’t have the whole thing designed. That would be the longer and then try to concise it at the end answer to that question.
A common mistake that people make is they’re building stuff out to handle the marketing. Marketing isn’t the up until you sign them on as a client or as a customer. It has to continue because people have buyer’s remorse. Those first hundred days are critical. I had Joey Coleman on and we talked about the first hundred days in his whole methodology around retaining new customers and customers ongoing over many years. I signed up for the academy. It was a little touch, a little nuance that I hadn’t seen before. You sent, I forgot if it was a photo or a video but you or somebody else in the photo or video was holding up a white sheet of paper and it had my name on it.
That was a photo with the entire team. It says, “Welcome, Stephan.”
It’s super cool how you did that little automation and that’s after I signed up. You kept the automation and the high touch going through systems and you already got my money.
The key too is going to be careful when we have conversations about how businesses can run because in my opinion, there are three types of businesses. The reality is there are only two and then the third is a hybrid of the first two. There are only two types of businesses. There’s a business that is truly, genuinely and 100% automatable. Those are going to be your online course, digital course type companies. I’m selling physical products where I can spend money advertising, I can get people to a landing page or to a sales page. They buy something, it gets shipped out or delivered automatically. Other than when the customer has a question, there’s no human interaction throughout the process. You’ve got those businesses and then the other businesses that require a human to actually move your leads, prospects, and clients to the client journey. Those are typically your service writers, your coaches, your consultants, those types of businesses.
You’ve got the hybrid where you’ve got service writers, coaches, consultants start to add a digital aspect or they create some physical products or whatever. It’s valuable I believe and I found it to be valuable in my work in marketing automation to help people first recognize what business are you in. That fundamentally changes the dialogue. If you’re listening to a guru or to a coach or somebody speaking at an event and they’re starting to spit strategy, you want to be paying attention to what kind of business they’re talking about. The strategies that they’re going to talk about and tell you to go implement will vary based on the business. What I’ve found is you can do some cool automation stuff in the fully online automated business. They tend to be more of the automation in the front end of the marketing side. You can still add some cool things on the backend side like what we did with the videos. You can create some automated experiences. I’m not in love with the category name of marketing automation because it doesn’t help people understand the possibilities here. You flip to the other side and you go to service providers, coaches, consultants, you’re running events. Your ability to leverage automation to automate what sometimes I’ll refer to as the un-automatable. You’re automating where a human being has to be involved. There’s a tremendous amount of power in that.
We’ve been doing a lot of work lately with agencies and helping them realize what they do in the first 72 hours after they sign up a client and how they automate it. When I say in the first 72 hours, I don’t mean what they do personally. I mean what they do to automate the onboarding of the client can literally shave half of the time that they have to spend delivering for that client right off the top because of how their training, how they’re educating a person before they ever have to get onto a call to actually go do any work for the client. Automation is not about, “I’ve got to plug this thing online and I set it and forget it.” It includes that but there’s this whole other piece that people start to recognize. Let’s take your example. You bought our online course, you bought the part of our business, the online fully automated piece. Let’s pretend that you bought one of our services though. You buy one of our services and let’s say we would run you through the exact same training program before we ever get on a phone call with you to do any work.
Look at what that does for me. When I get on a phone call with you and you’ve already been through my training program, you already understand our methodology. I’ve already trained you how to be a client. I’ve already trained you how we think, how we operate and I didn’t have to do it live and in person. I did it automatically. Two things happen, the amount of value that I can create for you is magnified and multiplied and the amount of time that I have to spend to create the increased value is decreased exponentially. I’m decreasing my time but delivering more value in creating a happier client. I’m using automation to do it even though I have to go deliver the service manually. For me, as I look at that, that is the framework that we’re trying to spread in the world. This is what automation actually is and there’s a methodical process to go analyze it, decide what to do in your business and it is way more than generally what people think when they get market automation.
I need to implement that myself because I have these two separate silos in my business. I’m an SEO expert and consultant, and I also have some online courses. It’s like they are separate silos though because if you sign up with that type one business of fully automated, you’re not going to have much interaction with me. You’re going to sign up perhaps for my do-it-yourself SEO auditing course. You’ll get 30 days free trial of my membership site and you’ll have access to a whole bunch of other cool things. You won’t have much interaction with me at all.
The consulting side of my business is very high touch and I’m working with clients like Volvo and so forth. Those two sides of the business never meet. I only can think of one client who bought my course and then they signed up for my consulting. None of my consulting clients end up going through my courses or probably even know that I have a membership site. I should probably implement your model and have courses that people can go through depending on where they are in the organization, if they’re the marketing manager or they’re an IT person in the company, “Here’s what you need to know about SEO that will help.”
Build your credibility by delivering more value. Share on XIf you’re mixing too, you start with the course and then you go through your consulting engagement. By the way, when we’re done, I’ll give you 30 days and my membership for free and then you got people that when they end their consulting, you’re still feeding your consulting into your membership. You use that as a sandwich.
What was the tool that you use to create my name inside the picture?
It’s called PicSnippets.
Let’s talk more about this client journey and how to make it predictable. I don’t think that a lot of people even map out what the client journey looks like, let alone make it a predictable client journey. Can we walk through the steps of that process of mapping it out and then making it predictable?
Let’s just look at the evolution that happens here. We want to get predictable. What does predictable mean? Predictable does not mean guaranteed, let’s snuff out some of the issues that come up when we use the word predictable. It does not mean guaranteed. It means that I can predict it. I’ve got a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. That might mean I can predict that we’re going to make no money or I’m going to predict that I’m going to make money. I want to be able to see it coming. Predictability only comes as a result of visibility over time. I can only predict something if I’ve seen results before so that I start to have an idea of what it is that I’m going to expect in the future. You can only get reporting over time if you’re doing things consistently.
We’ve got predictability, which is made possible by visibility. Visibility over time has made possible because I’m doing similar things consistently over time. Automation happens to be a phenomenal tool to help you be consistent because if not, then you’re relying on yourself as a human. Humans aren’t exactly what I would call consistently reliable. At the beginning of that, in order to have anything that’s running consistently, it has to be built. In order for it to be built, it has to be designed. What a lot of people do, they like to engage in activity that we’ve coined a term called blimplementing, which is where they blueprint and they implement at the same time. The easiest way to create a visual of how that would not work very well is to pretend you’re going to build your dream house and show up on the lot and start to draw while you’re building. You’re probably not going to end up with a house that you like very well.
The entire chain is important but the first key in the entire chain is you have to be able to step back and create a high-level playbook. A high-level playbook that says, “Here’s how I’m moving people through this client journey so that I create visibility at a high level.” When I say high level, I’m not talking like every single email. I mean, “My traffic sources are SEO, Facebook, Instagram, Google AdWords. I go to events, I have partners. Those are my traffic sources, I’m sending them to whatever my entry point is.” Everybody’s got entry points, we get clear on what that is. That entry point has one job and it’s to move them to the next step in the process, which could be to buy, engage with a sales team, register for a webinar or something. That’s another play in our playbook. It will be like Facebook to a free PDF template and then that PDF template goes to a webinar or to a sales conversation that goes to them buying. Once they buy it, you’ve got to go deliver. You’ve got to have clarity at that level of what it is that you’re doing to move people from one point to the other.
For each one of those places, from the Facebook advertising to this free PDF, from this free PDF to the sales team, from the sales team to the purchase, from the purchase to their consumer and they’re happy. Then you’ve got to go create an executable blueprint, which is where you actually get clear on the details of what you want to happen at each one of those steps. Once you have designed it, then and only then have you earned the right to go implement it. If you design it right, people always say like, “Implementation takes forever. That’s where we stumble.” I say, “No, it doesn’t. Blimplementing takes forever.” Implementing doesn’t take any time at all. It’s actually insanely easy when you have a blueprint because the blueprint tells you exactly what it is that you need to go implement. You get it implemented live. The key is that you can’t change 800 things all at once all the time. The key is that you get it live and when you plan it the right way, you’ll have visibility and reporting that’s over the top of this where you can see the numbers that matter. It’s about making micro adjustments and it’s about sticking the course. There’s no earth-shattering secret here.
Predictability comes from consistency. You’ve got to consistently be working the same system, making micro tweaks and adjustments so that you have data to be able to go back and look at that says, “I want to sell X of these historically.” If I want to sell X of product Y or product one, then I know that I sell those through my sales team. If I want to sell ten, I tell my sales team to close it at 50%. That means I need to get my sales team twenty opportunities to sell in order for me to sell ten of these. If I want to get my sales team twenty conversations, I know that from this PDF, 10% of the people get to my sales team. I need to go get 200 people to come in and actually request this PDF and then I can go look at my traffic sources to say, “What do I need to do to get 200 people to opt-in?” The predictability comes when I can say, “If I know what my numbers are based on my target, let me go look at what I’ve done the last six to nine to twelve months. Let me see what’s actually been working so that I can go put my time and energy in a place that will most predictably get me to the result that I want.”
It’s about having a systematic process of laying out what your plan is and a playbook. Getting clear on the details on your game plan, having the reporting over the top of it and then being able to look back at that reporting historically because that’s the only thing that actually gets you predictability. What you’re optimizing is the message, you’re optimizing the sources that are coming in to make sure you get the right people and you’re delivering the right message. We’re back to basic marketing, basic businesses, right audience, right message, right offer. The key though is in your ability to visualize it. Automation makes the thing run the same way every single time. You’re reporting side is not good if you’ve got a sales rep who is an artist and he makes stuff up every single time, there’s no consistency to it or if every marketing thing is different. That’s the formula to follow if you want to get to predictability in a client journey.
Let’s use you as the example because you guys clearly eat your own dog food. You apply your methodologies, tools, and systems to your own marketing and your own clients’ journeys. Let’s say that you get a lead from the Traffic & Conversion Summit. You have a booth and people come up. They give you business cards or you scan their badge. What does the client journey look like for them after the first couple of phases and what is the playbook? What does the playbook look like that you’ve developed to make sure that these people don’t fall through the cracks, that they get lead nurtured until they start seriously considering hiring you guys for a build out or even for the academy?
I’m going to back up a little bit because our strategy starts even before somebody shows up at our booth. When we go to events, we rarely go to an event and have a booth, without having an opportunity to speak. It’s part of our strategy when we go to events is that I’ll speak at the event and we’ll have a booth. Our entire strategy is architected around how do we start to pre-frame for people even before the event that I’m going to be there speaking? When people are at the event, we’ll do some geo-targeted Facebook advertising as well to target people that are most likely at the event, they’re there locally as well to get them into the session. We’re using the session to drive people to our booth. We don’t drive people to our booth and say, “Come give us a business card or whatever.” We plan and deliver on strategy sessions while we’re at the event.
Businesses require more than a funnel. It's about building an entire client journey. Share on XOur call to action at the booth itself is, “Here’s what we do. If this seems like it would be something that would work for you, let’s schedule a strategy session while you’re here. Let’s talk about what this could look like for you.” We’re actually trying to bring our sales conversation into the event rather than get a whole bunch of business cards and then let time and distance, how people’s enthusiasm wane over the next couple of days after they leave. The first attempt is I’m going to speak and at the end of my presentation I’m telling them, “We’re here. I brought my team with me, let’s sit down and actually do a strategy session with you.” We have a system that we put up to help people schedule while they’re there. From there, we got people to buy and then the people that don’t buy are in our sales pipeline and our sales reps are following up over time to move them forward.
The other thing that I do when I speak is I have a text opt-in in the middle of my presentation. I’ll do a text opt-in for a valuable resource that has to do with whatever topic I’m talking about and I’ll capture. The goal is to capture as many leads in the room. In the middle of my presentation before I get to the end and say, “Come talk to us directly.” I’ll get way more people to text in for the resource than people who will actually go to the back of the room or go to our booth and schedule a time to talk. That’s natural conversion. For all of those people that we’ve captured those leads but didn’t come to the booth, we have a series of follow-up emails and text messages that run for the duration of the event itself, to drive them to come to schedule a conversation while we’re there. We walk them through a series of communications. First is a series of communications at the event. Post-event, we’ve got a series of communications that follow up.
From there, they fall into our general house list where we’re nurturing. We have three degrees of follow-up. The first one is, “We’re here. You saw Brad speak, you requested this resource, you should come talk to us right now.” The follow-up is, “The event’s over. Hopefully, it was great.” We’re taking a slightly different approach in some of our messaging to try and get them to come schedule a call with us, even though we’re not at the event anymore. Beyond that, we release them as far as our follow-up around the event specifically, put them into our general reengagement nurture. We’ve got some automation that runs depending on which bucket they go into, anywhere from 30 to 90 to 180 days. We’re walking them through a series of topics. At some point, they’ll end up on our house list and our regular communications until they bubble up. At that point for us, it’s being intentional about delivering quality content so that we are welcome in their inbox. The more we can deliver valuable content, whether it has to do with what we do or not, the further they get away from their initial point of contact with us, the more we’re going to keep delivering content to stay valuable then at some point to be like, “I’m ready now.”
What technology are you using to capture their phone number when they’re texting and then deliver the lead magnet or whatever that you had promised in the session? Are you using Leaddigits from Leadpages, using TPNI Engage or what system for that?
We use PlusThis to do our text and capture. PlusThis is a marketing automation tool kit that has a whole bunch of tools to help you enhance what you can do with your marketing automation platform if you’re using Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, ONTRAPORT, HubSpot or Drip, and texting is one of those tools. As a disclaimer, that’s another company that I own that we created when we realized there are a whole bunch of people that want to do this automation thing. The marketing automation tools themselves didn’t offer all the features like, “I want to do this.” “You can if you go hire a developer.” When you tell an entrepreneur, “Go hire a developer,” they get about as excited as when they’ve got to get a root canal. We’re like, “We’ll build it.” We built the tool but that’s the one that we use to do our lead capture and then they dropped the people into in our case Infusionsoft and then the follow-up and the delivery of the lead magnet run out of Infusionsoft.
How does this look as far as the playbook? Is it like a visual map of some sort? Is it like a list of things, a bullet list? Are you using tools to create this?
We’ve created a set of worksheets and we’re toying it around and turning it into an actual software tool to do the mapping. It’s visual. My background and my history actually are in usability and product design. When I worked at Infusionsoft for eight years, that’s what I did. I did a bunch of studying and a bunch of research into it. What I’ve learned is nuances matter a ton. One of them is creating a visual of how people move through your client journey and then also doing it at different levels. What it looks like is there are two layers of detail that you create. Probably one of the biggest places where people stumble I’ve seen is that they try and design things with one level of detail. They’re trying to have this big strategic conversation about they’re going to move people through their business. Simultaneously what’s popping up is that they’re going to have seven emails here and they’re going to have nine emails here. That works fine if you’re just doing a funnel.
When you start to build a client journey and you’ve got people coming in from multiple sources with multiple lead magnets, some might go to a webinar or some might go directly to a sales page, some might go direct to a sales team. Then it starts to get overwhelming fast. It violates one of my principles, which is the Lego Principle. It looks like a high-level flowchart that monitors a visual flow and displays what you’re doing from an advertising standpoint and how that’s feeding into place that you’re going to capture leads, move those leads into a sales environment, which is now a sales play. Then the sales play moves them into becoming a client, then you have your client play, what you’re going to do with that person once they bought so that you can track literally where the client’s going to go.
It’s almost like a pinball machine or like choose your own adventure like, “Here’s where they could go and here’s where I’m trying to get them to go,” but you’re not getting in the middle and there’s a landing page and there are ups and downs. It’s a set of boxes that say, “Here are the big strategic plays that we have in our client journey to get people to move.” Then for each one of those plays that’s on that visual flowchart, then you have what’s called an Executable Blueprint which is the details within that. That’s where we start talking about landing pages and emails and phone calls and we’re going to mail something out or we’re going to send a text message or whatever. That’s where we get into the detail. You have the two different layers that make it really easy. For anyone to grasp what’s going on as they want to get more detail, they can get more detail and they can dive into that detail, but that detail is in the way up front to confuse what the process actually looks like.
Before we get too far down the track of building a software solution for your visual flowcharting, you might want to take a look at GERU, which is John Reese’s platform for creating a visual flowchart for funnels. Then you can do some what-ifs like, “What if the conversion rate increases by these amounts and how does that affect all the numbers through the rest of the funnel and so forth?” It’s a cool software. He just updated a complete rewrite. That’s now version two that just came out. Let’s talk a bit about PlusThis and some use cases for the audience who maybe are using Infusionsoft or considering Infusionsoft as a CRM/shopping cart/affiliate system. What are some of the other things that you can do with it besides the text messaging to get the people who have an interest in getting that lead magnet when you’re talking about it on stage?
I’ll go through some of the highlights or the bigger ones. We’ll start with some of the basics, but one is GoToWebinar integration. Infusionsoft is one of the major players. ActiveCampaign’s coming on the scene. PlusThis will integrate with those two, ONTRAPORT, Drip, then also HubSpot and there will be more. We have a GoToWebinar integration. You can have people go to the regular landing pages that you would use out of those platforms and when they fill it out, you can then automatically go register that person for a webinar and go to a webinar. Then when the webinar is over, PlusThis will go figure out who attended and how long. Based on different intervals, you can then have that go back into Infusionsoft and tag people accordingly. You can keep track of who’s showing up on your webinars and that works with GoToWebinar, WebinarJam, Zoom Webinar, Zoom Meeting. It’s a bunch of different webinar-type integrations. The other nice use case around the webinars is not even just when people are registering, but if you’ve got people that have bought into your membership for example.
If you run a weekly or a monthly call and you want to register them for that call, I can go to the webinar. Rather than sending a link to them and says, “Click here to go fill this out to register for the webinar,” you can just pull up a list of people and say, “Go register these people for this webinar.” You can make it store there their unique join link on to their contact record in whatever platform you’re using, and then just send an email out of Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign or whatever that says, “Our call this month is going to be on Wednesday, the 27th. Here’s your link to join.” It has you not have to jump back and forth between those tools to try and mix and match who’s registered and who’s not and what’s the data? That’s one use case that a lot of people use that really just simplifies the process of being able to know who came and who didn’t come and who should I follow up with and, and how should I follow up with them?
Predictable does not mean guaranteed. It means you’ve got a pretty good idea what's going to happen. Share on XIn fact, that’s the way that I started becoming a customer was I had that situation. GoToWebinar needing to integrate with Infusionsoft and not have them go through multiple hoops and refill out forms and things like that. Then I discovered all the other cool use cases after becoming a customer.
We talked about SMS, which is both the inbound I can capture people’s information and then also you can do outbound SMS messaging as a part of it. When I get up on stage, I’ll just say, “Text,” whatever is the name of the event, “to this code.” They’ll text it in and it does a little dialogue back and forth. It will text you back and say, “I’d love to send this thing to you. What’s your email address so I know where to send it?” They’ll just reply with your email address and then it will reply one last time to book. What we do is we reply, “What’s your first name so I know what to call you?” We’ll do that back and forth. At the end of that, it will move it to an email conversation if that’s what I want to do or I could keep it at a text conversation if I want it to, but that’s the SMS world. You get over into some Facebook stuff and you’ve got the ability to move people through custom audiences and sequence with how they’re moving through your funnel or through your journey.
For example, I could create custom audiences where I have a set of ads that I want to run to the audience and I want to run it based on where they are. If I’ve got a PDF that goes to a webinar that goes to a sales conversation that goes to a new client. Theoretically what I could do is I could have ads that are being served up to them once I’ve captured them as a lead because I just add them to the custom audience. Once they register for the webinar, I could have that set of ads changed and put them into a new custom audience where now I’m delivering ads that are going to supplement the webinar or whatever emails I’m sending. Once they get engaged with my sales team, I can stop the ads. You take your Facebook advertising and you can match it to whatever marketing you’re doing once you’ve captured them into your system. PlusThis allows you to keep that synced up, which is pretty cool. It can be powerful. You can monitor how long people have watched videos. You have somebody that opts in and you’ve got the follow-up video, maybe you’re doing like a product launch style launch or something like that. You can keep track of how long people have watched videos so you know what people are engaging.
For example, we ran an event on our sixth birthday at SixthDivision, so we did a birthday party at our event and we had 50 seats. We ran our first couple of emails and we’ve filled 35 of the seats. We’re like, “What do we want to do now to get the next ten filled?” What we did is we just went in and we checked and said, “Who watched at least a part of all three of the videos?” There were nineteen people. This is an example of where I can leverage automation to do some non-automated things. We literally sent them personalized videos like, “We’re doing this party and I know you’re interested because you watched all three of the videos. Let’s make this happen.” We sent out nineteen of those videos and we filled the fifteen seats. You can track how long people are watching videos, you can have it adjust your automated follow-up so they get to a certain point in the video. You can actually flip them into a different follow-up track then if they haven’t watched any of the videos.
Does this work if you’re on Wistia or you’re on Vimeo or you’re using YouTube?
Yes, any of those. There are a bunch of features or tools that as a business owner, you might not necessarily get geeked out about the tool itself, but your implementer will. It’s like, “Here’s what I want to know. I want to know this or I want to get this reporting.” A lot of the automation tools aren’t designed to just give that. There are a lot of tools. Infusionsoft for example, if you’re tagging people as they take certain steps in your journey, there’s a feature that will allow you to go take two tags and calculate the amount of time in between those tags being applied on contacts and then you can do a roll-up report that shows you what’s the average amount of time it takes me to have somebody go from here to here. They’re more like a back-office hack for the person where the business was like, “I want to know this.” Other than me going through each individual contact record and writing down the date or the time, I can build it ahead of time where I just have the report at my fingertips. There’s stuff like that.
A lot of people will create with PlusThis these expiring offers. There’s a feature where you can say, “If somebody opts in today, I want to give them 72 hours to take advantage of this offer.” It will calculate what’s three days from now and store it into a field? I can schedule all my follow-up emails based on the fact that that’s going to expire on that date. It’s unique to each contact records. If somebody comes in today, their expiration date is three days from today, somebody comes in tomorrow, their expiration date is three days from tomorrow. You can then insert a countdown timer and emails. I’m listing off several features that you string together to pull this off, but a countdown timer that counts down based on that custom field. Computers store dates not the way that humans think about them. We’ll store the date like in a computer date format. There’s a feature to take that date and convert it into a human format so that when I send it in an email, it looks pretty like the way that I would want it to.
You can go through and use it to do some more analytics. You can go through and say, “Tell me what my average customer value is.” For each contact, it will go summarize all of their purchases, stick that into a field so that you can do some analysis on what’s the average customer value. I could go on. There’s a bunch of other tools like that. A lot of them are going to be really valuable and helpful for the implementer or the person who’s responsible for the technology so that they can deliver what the business owner wants. There’s a whole other set that the business will be like, “That’s cool,” because they can understand right off the top of the head. I get webinars, I get the text message, I get Facebook, I get tracking videos. They’ve got some that’s called scarcity triggers where you can say, “There are only ten of these left,” and you can do things based on that. There’s a whole bunch of different tools that just allow you to be a little bit savvier and a little bit more advanced or a lot more advanced depending on where you are, and how you’re leveraging automation to get people to convert. Then also to just create a better, more personalized, more customized experience.
Some of these features inside of PlusThis would update Infusionsoft tags, put in, for example, a date or time when the offer is no longer valid. Maybe it would then go in and change the tag or add a new tag that says, “This person no longer gets the offer or they no longer get the ability to check out and go through the process and buy the thing that had a limited shelf life for them.”
One of those features in there is you can do smart links. What the link will do is I’ll have a link in an email because once you send an email to somebody links out there and so you’ve got to have some way to be able to have that link redirect to a different page once an offer is expired. You create these links that say, “When they click on this link, I want to go look at the person that clicked. I want to make some decisions about where I want to send them.” This also actually worked for on a Thank You page of a webpage where somebody fills out the form. The next page you might be selling them a product. If they’re a past client of yours and they’ve already bought that product, you may not want to show them the offer for that product. You can build in some logic that says, “Based on who the person is, I want to send them to different pages. If it’s a scarcity funnel where it’s expired, then I want to take them to a page that says, “Sorry, you’re too slow, slacker,” or whatever the message is that you want to deliver.”
What would be some best practices for Thank You pages since you brought up that topic?
The first thing that I always start with everybody looking for Thank You pages is to recognize that the Thank You page’s purpose is not to say thank you. We have a rule that we called No Dead Thank You Pages. It’s one of the most violated rules that I see when I’m working with people. It’s the result of the funnel existence a little bit where people are just focusing on funnels. The whole purpose of capturing a lead, whether it’s a new lead or you’re trying to get your email list to reengage or something. The whole purpose of getting it a funnel form is to get a person to fill out the form that’s going to take the next step. It’s not just to get them to fill out the form.
The fastest way to kill getting people to convert to the next step is to not make it insanely obvious what the next step is. Share on XWhen I look at Thank You pages, I want to beat my head against the wall. Anytime I go to a page and that’s what it says, “Thank you. We’ll send you this thing or whatever.” It’s like, “No, the person’s there.” The psychology behind it is people will never be more excited about working with you than the split second between the time that they either fill out a form or they bought something. That next page it shows up is the most valuable in prime real estate that you have in your entire client journey because you’re capturing them literally at the peak of their excitement. Unfortunately, it’s only downhill after that. The whole idea of automation journey is to continue to keep it up.
There are a couple of things that I would look at as far as best practices on Thank You pages. Number one is if it’s part of your ascension, you should already be talking about the next step. You’re familiar with Joe Polish or Dean Jackson. He’s got another concept. I don’t know if it’s a concept necessarily, but it’s a thing that he talked about. When he said it, I was like, “Yes, that.” When people opt-in for your lead magnet or whatever, the conversation about the lead magnet is now over. That’s how you want to think about it. It’s not whatever the next step is. The follow-up series and the Thank You pages that are all about, “Here’s the content. Let me tell you why you want to consume the content.” I’m not saying you don’t deliver the content. The point is on the Thank You page, they ought to know.
It will almost be like annoyingly obvious on the Thank You page what they ought to be doing next. What a lot of people do is they go, “Thank you. Here’s the content, go consume it and then I’m going to gradually start to introduce you to the next step.” What I would be doing is if there is a next step for them to take right away on the Thank You page, I would be going right to that step. It’s, “You just request this thing. I’ll send it to you. It will be in your inbox in three minutes. In the meantime, if you really want to solve problem X, Y and Z, let me tell you about a thing that could really help you do that,” and I’m going to go to the next step right away.
That’s a really important point because the kind of best practice that I’ve heard is you don’t want to waste the opportunity on the Thank You page to just say, “Go check your email,” where you have a very little likelihood of getting people’s attention because there’s so much stuff in there from their bosses and their colleagues and so forth. Put something there that’s going to add some additional value to explain further the lead magnet or the thing that you promised like, “Here’s some information about what you’re going to get in about ten minutes in your email and how to get the most value out of it.” You’re saying just jump right to the next thing like, “This is the next step for you.” Any attention that you have with that person should be directed to the next thing and just move on.
Which is critical if we go back to what we talked about at the very beginning when you want to get to predictability, we’ve got to start with this design but you’ve got to know what the next thing is. A lot of people don’t. They’re like, “I’ve got leads.” I was talking with a lady who runs a chiropractic office and she’s got to get people in for visits. We’re looking at her entire journey and I mentioned early on there are these four forces of automation that we focused on. One of them is making sure that we’ll look at an entire journey and we’re really sealing the cracks. Her primary lead generator was this free resource that she was giving away. We went and looked it out and I fill it on the Thank You page. The Thank You page didn’t even say thank you. I had to scroll down to find the thank you, but it didn’t do anything to mention like, “You should get your butt in my office.”
There’s a total disconnect here between you’re sending people to this resource that people love it and they’re consuming it, but you’re actually not doing them or yourselves a service because you’re not moving them to the next step. We’ve got to be really clear. If we align those two together as part of a journey, you’ve got to come really clear like, “I’m going to give you these five exercises you can do to reduce lower back pain and then on the next page.” That’s on its way and you could even deliver right there if you want you. You don’t have to necessarily hold it off. The point is once they’ve requested that, what that’s done is it’s indicated they have an interest in solving a problem. Your lead magnet is not going to solve the problem. It’s going to help them make some progress to work that’s going to provide some value. That typically is going to walk them then to, “What’s the next step?” For me, anytime I look at the second page like, “Thank you. By the way, here’s what I have for you that’s going to help you even more.” I don’t actually care if you download and read the PDF, the reality is most people won’t. I’m trying to ascend you to the next step as quickly as possible. I want it to be insanely obvious.
There are times where that might not be the case like more when you’re already delivering for a client or they’ve already bought and they bought like an event and it’s going to be late or whatever. There are three things generally speaking that I go through as far as options on the Thank You page. First one is as soon as they opt-in, move into the next step, like the headline out of habit. For me, I like to put three or four calls to action on the next page that all say, “Here’s the next thing. Let’s schedule a time to chat or register for this webinar. Or I’ve got this offer for you that expires in a couple of days.” That’s aligned with what they asked for initially and there are no tactics here. I’m not trying to withhold or be weird about the next step or the resource that they opted in for, so I’m not being sleazy. I’m just recognizing that I’ve got a lead because I wanted to move into the next step in the process. Now, I’m going to start moving them there. The fastest way to kill getting people to convert to the next step is to not make it insanely obvious what the next step is.
We’ve got to get into the decision-making process, but that doesn’t start until I’ve actually offered them to go to the next step. The first thing is you go look at any of your Thank You pages throughout your entire journey. Pull it up and then ask yourself the question, “Is it insanely obvious what I’m trying to get the person to do next?” Then go look at your follow-up emails as well and say, “Is it insanely obvious what it is that I’m trying to do next?” A lot of times it’s really helpful if you just have somebody else do it for you because you might think that what you put on there is really obvious. This is what we do. A lot of people would do our automation audits like, “Let’s just go look at it.” I’m not in the middle of your business. I can look at and be like, “This isn’t nearly as clear as you think it is.” The first thing is, “How can I make sure I’m moving them to the next step in the process?”
You have to know what the next step is by mapping that out ahead of time.
That presupposes that you have thought that out ahead of time to know what the next step actually is and that it aligns and all of that. I don’t actually have anything yet, maybe I’m just getting started or for whatever reason, there’s a bunch of them. Maybe I don’t know where I want to send them next to or maybe they bought a ticket to come to an event or something that’s in the future. I’m going to send them the follow-up and perhaps I don’t actually have anything to give them right now that makes sense. Here’s what I’ve done in the past. We send people to a Thank You page and I said, “We’re super excited, we’ll see you at the event. By the way, here’s a video of a ten-minute talk that I gave the talk about X, Y, and Z that you’ll find really valuable. In the meantime, go watch this.” It’s short, it’s five to ten minutes, which is something they can consume.
Because I don’t have a direct next step to take them to that, my intent with that is to start to build credibility and build that relationship. I’m going to put it in front of them as a, “Here’s me speaking on stage in front of a bunch of other people.” When I introduced it, it would be like, “Here’s a ten-minute talk that I gave on stage. I had a chance to share the stage with Brian Tracy and a couple of big-name people and this is what I talked about. It’s a three-question form to stay on track for success. You’ll like it. Here you go.” If I’m not sending them somewhere, at least what I want to do is I want to start to build my credibility in their eyes and also deliver more value. I’ve even gotten this far on somewhere. I’m like, “A lot of these people have already seen those videos.” I’m thinking of one in particular, which was at the end of when somebody bought our service. We took them through a business profile survey, so we knew more about them.
Automation happens to be a phenomenal tool to help you be consistent because if not, then you're relying on yourself as a human. Share on XAt the end of that, they’re in the middle of a one-on-one service. I don’t really have something else to try and sell them. They’re already scheduled and I don’t have anything else for them to go do. I get to the end of the survey like, “What do I do here?” What we did is we took two videos that were YouTube videos. One of them was from Eric Thomas, the hip-hop preacher, one of my favorite videos about motivation. Then the other one is from Brian Regan, who’s a comedian and they’re both maybe five to ten minutes long like, “Thank you so much for giving this information. We’ll be in touch but in the meantime, I thought I’d share a couple of videos with you. One of them is one of my favorite videos around motivation and another one is just funny. Enjoy.” People might hear that and be like, “That doesn’t make any sense why I do that.” Here’s why. It starts to expose a little bit more about me and about the things that drive and motivate me and the inspirational video can be really inspirational and the other one would be really funny.
It creates things that we can talk about when we get into the call like, “I watched that comedian video, then I went off. I watched the other ones and it was awesome and it was funny.” Now we’ve got something to talk about. The point is I still have this valuable real estate and I want to put something in front of them, whether it’s, “Here’s the next step and the offer, here’s some more valuable stuff for me that will boost my credibility,” to “Here are some things that are valuable that are not even related, but you may find valuable as well, where you’ll start to get a better insight into who I am, how I operate, how I think, so that we can build and develop a relationship faster.” It’s all happening automatically on a Thank You page. I’m actually there doing it. That’s the other end of the spectrum of what I would be looking at Thank You pages if I don’t have a specific spot to send them next.
What are your some of your favorite books? If you could recommend one, two or three books to our audience that would be life-changing or business-changing, what would they be?
One of my favorite books that I started off with is Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. He breaks down the five phases that businesses go through as they scale and what the challenges are on each phase and what to do about each phase. I remember it’s like zero to a million or a million to maybe three million, three million to ten million, ten million to 100 million, 100 million-plus. When I read it, I read the first section like, “I’m not at a million yet, so we’ll go there.” I’ve since graduated to the second section and moved on to what I should be focusing on right now based on where my business is. I found that one to be extremely valuable from an overall business structure, what to focus on, I really like that one.
How about favorite conferences?
Traffic & Conversion Summit is really good. This is a little bit tougher and the reason why is because when I go to conferences, I typically speak. I have not been to many conferences purely as an attendee. It’s a little bit different experience. Traffic & Conversion Summit. I’ve been to Funnel Hacking Live with Russell Brunson at ClickFunnels. I like that one as well. I love his energy and the way he teaches.
I have not been to that one. That one is one you’d recommend?
Yeah. I like that one. I went to Archangel Summit in Toronto. That one has been really good as well.
Have you been to LaunchCon?
I have not. Our team went to Product Launch Formula Live. I have not been there though. I’ve heard really good things about it. I have not been personally, so I can’t really give an assessment on that one but I’ve heard really good things about it.
Dean Jackson’s famous nine-word email, which is a very clever concept. If you could just off the cuff, come up with a nine-word email that you would send to cold leads that have gone stale that you want to reactivate and shake the tree and see if you can get them to sign up for whether it’s your academy or it’s services. What would be an example of a nine-word email you’d send out without any of the graphics and any of the typical stuff that goes with an email campaign?
A couple of thoughts come to mind. It would be something like, “Are you still interested in getting rid of the headache around marketing automation?” I might even blend a DigitalMarketer, “Have you yet?” like, “Have you gotten your hands wrapped around your marketing automation yet?” If I knew they were using Infusionsoft, I would be more specific and be like, “Are you still ready to get more of Infusionsoft? Let’s have a chat.” Something along those lines. When I sit down and write them, I’d come up with something better but it would be something along those lines.
I learned in reading the book, Never Split the Difference, which is an amazing book by Chris Voss. He talks about an email getting the reader, the recipient to say no. If you say instead of, “Are you still interested in marketing automation services?” You might say, “Did you give up on overhauling your marketing automation?” Then they get on the defense saying, “No, I didn’t. I’ve been busy.” Infusionsoft tagging can be a real hornet’s nest, just a nightmare. There’s no consistency and just a free for all. What makes your system for tagging so special and awesome? I know you teach that in the academy. What would be a quick answer to that?
The first thing is it’s a system that’s been proven through really any type of business that you’re running through Infusionsoft. We came up with it after having worked with a whole bunch of people. One is the system. Two, they’re structured to the categories of how the tabs are set up so you don’t end up with 100 categories, which is what a lot of people do. All tags will fit into five categories and then the tags themselves are broken down. There are three or four elements to each tag name so that when you go look at tags, the tags themselves combined with the category tell you a story. Literally, you don’t have to go talk to somebody else to figure out the tag name means. You can just look at it and it tells you a story.
Predictability comes from consistency. Share on XThey’re intentionally named so that when they show up in a list, when you’re going to do a search or when they show up on an individual contact record, everything is named so that it shows up naturally the way that you would read it and in the order of how you would want to read it. The biggest difference in the way that we’ve set it up is it’s intentionally designed so that at a macro level it makes sense when you’re looking across all the tags and the application. When you’re looking at an individual contact record, it also makes sense. All of that went into how we created the system and how we designed it so that you don’t want to beat your head against the wall once you start digging and to clean up the mess that you made for yourself.
How do you hire an Infusionsoft person or agency and not end up beating your head against the wall and feeling like, “I just took the money and I lit it on fire?” I’ve had so many cases where either I hired an Infusionsoft person or agency and they miss important details. Things went out with mistakes or went out to the wrong people or at the wrong time and so forth. It made it look like amateur hour. It’s very frustrating. They don’t deliver anything other than exactly what I asked for. There’s no creativity or thought process. There’s no strategy. It’s just, “Give me exactly what you want and I will build it,” as if I should know all the things. If I don’t specify, “Put the steering wheel in the front driver’s side,” they will build me a car and put the steering wheel in the back seat.
If you’re going to hire any agency resources, whatever your marketing automation platform is, because I want to be really clear, my answer is not specific to Infusionsoft, but we’re talking about Infusionsoft. It can be any platform. My experience has been if you go hire a vendor to go handle something and you don’t know anything about it, you are asking for a problem. Here’s what you do. You get our academy because our academy gives you the system of how you want your business to be run. When you bring your vendor in, they use your system, not you being beholden to whatever their system is. You do not want to be beholding their system because if you have to go from one vendor to another to another, they’re going to create a mess for you because none of them are going to use the same system.
What I would do is I would get into our academy that you would go through yourself, “I went through the academy. I understand how all this ought to be organized. I don’t do it.” That’s exactly the way it ought to be. You ought to have the strategic person that knows how it needs to be done right but it’s not actually doing it themselves. That’s what I would do to make sure that you’ve got some consistency and I don’t want you to beat your head against the wall. That’s the first half of the question. The second half of the question is how do I avoid getting someone that I had to tell them exactly what to do every single time? There are three critical roles that exist if you want to build a predictable client journey and you want to use marketing automation to do it. You have to have the strategic visionary. That’s probably you if you’re an audience to this podcast most likely. It’s probably you as the business owner or as the marketing manager or whatever. You’re the one that’s got the vision of what needs to happen. You’re the one that is taking the responsibility for the results.
At the other end of this team is the implementer. The implementer is like a digital drywaller. They’re going to do exactly what they’re told. I’m thinking of role and I’m thinking of people necessarily. There’s the strategy and then there’s the implementation and then in the middle, and this is the role that is most frequently missed and really we’re on a mission to create, this is an actual role and actual function and really enhanced the skill set here is the architect. The architect is the most missed function in all of these. You’ve got a strategic person who goes through an event, gets really excited, comes home, draw some boxes up on a dry erase board with no real rhyme or reason to it. It turns around to the person that they hired to be the admin assistant who then they hand it off to Infusionsoft who’s got a little bit of technical prowess and they say, “Go make that thing become a reality.” There’s no clarity between the two of them whatsoever.
When they build it, it’s not what the strategic visionary wanted. That is the exact same as if I took some pictures from a house account or a Pinterest account. I went and I hired a drywaller and pick them up on the street corner and said, “Come build my house.” Pretty sure I’m going to get something that’s sub-par. The key is knowing that those are two different types of functions and skill sets. When you go to interview and work with people, there are two different types of functions you’re looking for and you want to be asking questions and you want them to be able to demonstrate to you which one they are, so at least you know what you’re getting. If you decide, “I’m the strategic visionary and I’ll play the architect role,” then all you need is someone who will do exactly what you say. You can get them really affordably. If you don’t want to play the architect role, then you’re going to be investing more money and you want to make sure that you get that person and as you go to interview them and vet them, I would be having them do some mini-projects. We have a little mini-course we put together about how to hire contractors and resources, virtual assistance and different resources we put together that walks through the specific process. Maybe that’s something we could offer to people if that would be valuable.
I was thinking I’d love to get a job description or job advert example of the architect position because that’s such an important and unusual role. I wouldn’t know how to go about writing a job description or a job ad for someone like that.
You can just email me, [email protected]. Just say, “I listened in on the podcast with Stephan, you mentioned the hiring thing about how to get resources, contractors. I love to get my hands on that.” I’ll put something together, we can kick that back in and let people get ahold of that. The summary is it’s the combination of two things. I want to pull this back together. One is to recognize that there’s that middle function that has to be handled. You either have to assume responsibility for it or know that you need to go hire it, but don’t go hire the drywall installer, so to speak, expecting them to be an architect, when they’re not going to be.
The second, to tie it back to the first answer I said, your business will be miles ahead if you own the process that that architect is going to use. If you ever need to let the architect go, if you ever need to upgrade them to another role, you want to have a process where what they’re doing is a system in your business, not just a system that they came up with. We already created the system. The combination would be like, “You get into our academy, we’ll give you the system, you have access to it forever.” When somebody else comes into like, “Here’s how we operate here. We’re going to use this system.” Go figure it out. It’s very simple training. We’ve cut out all the fat and then you decide, “Am I going to be the architect that uses that system or am I going to go hire an architect?” You put those two things together and you follow the basic principles of how to hire contractors and you can get really good people and then you own the process. It doesn’t matter who you’re working with, everybody was doing everything the exact same way so everything stays clean and pristine.
I do have one last thing on the books. I have three other books that are hot for me. First one is Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. It’s a phenomenal book. He’s on a mission to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty and he’s got the simplest practical, financial approach of how to run your finances in your business. It’s just awesome. These two are more on the personal side. One is 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. That’s a phenomenal book as well. One that I read that I really liked is Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s written for creatives specifically who are wanting to write books, but any entrepreneur for me is creative. There are a lot of really interesting insights. There may be some things you’re like, “That doesn’t really apply to me,” but I went through it. It’s not a long read and there were a lot of really good insights about how to break through resistance here, how your mind will play tricks on you here as you’re going to create something. She talks about it in the context of books mostly. When you look at business and leadership, it’s all the same thing. I really like that one as well.
How do people work with you if they wanted to build out or revamp or overhaul their marketing automation, their ad systems or overhaul their existing systems so that they work much better? You have an agency as well as the PlusThis technology platform as well as the academy that people can learn from. If they just want to have done for them.
That’s the SixthDivision side. There are a couple of things you can do. You can go to SixthDivision.com. There are some resources down there and there are links all over where you can click to chat with us. What we’ll do with anybody and everybody is we start with an audit of, “Let’s figure out what the possibilities are here.” You might be listening like, “I don’t know if I need to do something,” let’s just hop on a call and spend 30, 45 minutes, let’s go through it and see where there are opportunities. If there are some then it’ll be like, “You could go do this,” and you might say, “I’ll go handle it or I want to hire you to do it.” Then for some of you, you’ll be like, “I like all this stuff that he talked about and I don’t really want to deal with any of it,” great, we handle that as well.
You can email me, go to SixthDivision.com. It might also be that you have somebody on your team that you want to build into this architect role. We help people with that a lot of great bring them out. We will train them on our system and also help you get things implemented so they can actually see it come to fruition. What you’re left with is not only things that have been built correctly but also resource that saw them get built correctly and it has a system that you own as a business that they’re just plugged into. It really shows up how you’re going to implement ideas down the road as well. Drop me an email, head over to SixthDivision.com. We’ll create a time to chat and we’ll see what’s possible and go from there.
Thank you so much, Brad. This was amazing, thought-provoking, informative and strategic. I love it. To the audience, it’s time to take action. You’ve learned some great stuff. I hope you’re not working out at the gym and thinking, “Another great episode. Thank you, Stephan.” You actually need to apply some of this in your business to take your business to the next level. This is Stephan Spencer signing off. We’ll catch you on the next episode of Marketing Speak.
Important Links:
Your Checklist of Actions to Take
☑ Analyze and evaluate my business strategies first before I decide on which tools I need. These tools will play a huge role when it comes to implementation and it would be good to make the right decision before purchasing them.
☑ Recognize that marketing automation isn’t just about capturing and converting leads but about creating a systematic and automatic client journey from beginning all the way to end.
☑ Familiarize myself with Infusionsoft and learn about the ways it can help my business in automating most of my CRM. Hire an Infusionsoft expert to help me kickstart the automation.
☑ Be open to strategies given by the experts but pay attention to the kind of business they’re talking about. Is it for a business that’s fully automatable or for ones that require human interaction?
☑ Get creative with my marketing. Use PicSnippets. It’s a tool that allows me to personalize images for my sales funnel.
☑ Don’t go blimplementing. Brad says it’s where you blueprint and implement at the same time. Instead, create an executable blueprint where I can clearly see the predictability, visibility, and consistency of each process.
☑ Utilize PlusThis. It’s a campaign toolkit for marketing automation users that does text and capture.
☑ Get involved and attend conferences like Traffic & Conversion Summit, Funnel Hacking Live, Archangel Summit, and Product Launch Formula Live.
☑ Understand how integration works on each platform so I can better execute it for my marketing automation. Some examples are GoToWebinar integration, Infusionsoft, PlusThis, ONTRAPORT, Drip, and HubSpot.
☑ Visit SixthDivision.com and work with Brad and his team to uplevel my marketing automation by creating and implementing a system that runs best for my business.
About Brad Martineau
Brad Martineau is the CEO of SixthDivision and Co-Founder of PlusThis. Brad started SixthDivision almost 7 years ago to help entrepreneurs make sense of how to automate their businesses without having to rip their hair out. They did seven figures their first year in business, and have been growing ever since.
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