Focused On The Road episode 6 focuses on automation. Bo discusses the importance and applications of this concept, as well as some examples of it that he has encountered. Watch this video and contact us to learn more about how automation can help your business succeed. For more Focused On The Road, subscribe to our YouTube channel!
Focused On The Road episode 6 transcript:
This is Bo with Focused Engagement. It is Tuesday, July the… hmm. You notice in 2020 that all days just sort of blend together? I think I’m just going to start saying today is 2020. Driving into work and doing another Focused On The Road. First, I want to point out to my wife. I have yet to end up in Vegas or Idaho or at the airport or anywhere else that I didn’t plan on going. So I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job of this.
I had new carpet installed this weekend. And the process really got me thinking about automation, why? Well, cause that’s what I do and I have ADD. So, you know, my brain goes to a thousand different things. So, but automation specifically because I had a couple of different phone calls from the people installing my carpet. I got thinking how much of what they were sending me could be automated. And that’s the beauty of automation; it takes data a lot of day to day tasks that you do and if it makes him more or less automated, obviously that’s the name of automation.
I’ll give you an example. If you are a service business, if you install roofs or install carpet or do anything that’s based on a date, right? You got an installation date of some sort. With automation, you can set a series of emails that are going to go out based on that date. So let’s just say let’s take this whole carpet.
So you set the date for the installation. Let’s just say two weeks out. You want an email to be sent out to give information about what you should do to get ready for your carpet installation?
You send out this email saying: you got your carpet being installed in two weeks, make sure that you have all your doors removed or if your installers remove doors for the customer. Maybe you want to just say make sure your doors are marked so that when they get put back on, you know, what order they went on.
If they’re going to tear up their own carpet, maybe it’s a video that shows best practices for tearing out carpet three days before, Your installers are coming in on, you know, three days. If you have any last minute changes you want to make, do it now because otherwise you’re locked in.
On the day of, maybe you want us to have an email sent out confirming the time so that you’re ready for it. You can actually do text automation as well. So you can have these send out as SMS messages instead. The only thing you really can’t do is have the call, but you can create a task that says, remember to call this person if you always do a phone call the day before, which is what I got. And I actually got a call an hour before as well. But maybe you want to set a task to say, you got to call this. The beauty of the automation is that it takes it off your mind. You don’t have to think, “okay I got to remember to do this, this or this”. Even if you already have the emails created and ready to go, you can send them out that. So you can automate that process. It frees up your time and allows you to focus more on building your business.
There’s an adage that I’m sure mostly business owners are familiar with. It’s one that I am intimately familiar with because I struggle with it. You can either be working in your business or on your business. It’s very hard to do both. So in your business or on your business, it’s very hard to do both. Automation helps you take away some of the day to day tasks that you have to do in your business that will allow you to work more on your business.
So that’s the beauty of automation. It is way more than just email. Some of the cool things we can do with automation, and we’re actually going to do a full Focused Friday on it this coming Friday. So I’m won’t go into all the detail cause I can put it up on the whiteboard when I do it.
But with automation, in the sales side, you can automate a lot of those tasks. If somebody, for instance, you create a nice email. And if somebody that is already in your lead database visits the particular page. You can actually have it shoot off an email automatically. So, so in my, in my business, marketing, I have my leads.
If a lead was to go to the automation page page that talks about my automation services, I fire off an email that talks about how much time automation could save them in their day to day business. And it just happens. You can also be notified when they go to that page to be notified when they open that email.
So they go to the page, they opened the email, you get notified. You give maybe half an hour or something, you give them a call. I did this once. That’s the exact scenario that happened that wasn’t on automation. I don’t remember what it was a couple of years ago, but they visited the page.
They got the email. I got notified that they opened the email half an hour later. I called them up and said “Hey, thinking about you and sent you an email a bit ago. And they said “Yeah, that is so weird because I was just on your website when I got that email”. And I said “Oh man, this is fate. We have to work together”.
So, I later told him that it was automation, but he was pretty impressed and your clients can be impressed too. You can seem like magic. So, anyway, that is automation. It is a fantastic tool. There’s lots of different automation platforms and we work with two, primarily SharpSpring. We love SharpSpring. We also use HubSpot. They both work very, very well.
But if you want to know more about automation, call, text, email me, however you want to get a hold of me. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.