Most people buy into marketing automation systems like Keap and ActiveCampaign before they have even considered what they actually want to automate in their marketing.
When you visually map out what you require then it becomes much easier to select the right marketing automation platform and to build an organised and integrated system from the start.
Check out my 12 minute video below which outlines how I work with clients to map out their Sales and Marketing system.
Transcript
Julian Mills 0:00
Hi, Hi there. My name is Julie Mills, I’m a small business marketing automation expert. I’m joined today by one of my clients said, Paul, Greg Smith, Paul’s a business coach, and runs a travel business as well.
What I wanted to show you guys today was how I work with my clients and prospective clients to first of all, work out which marketing automation platform they need, and how they would use it for their business. So we must have known each other for over four years now.
So we understand each other quite well. We have regular conversations. And I thought, having Paul on this conversation, he’d be able to interject with questions and bring the presentation to life. Fantastic. So I’ll start with, I’ll just share my screen.
Paul Greig Smith 0:53
So again, this is for anyone listening, this is this is for a kind of any business owner who wants to almost get a bird’s eye view of their entire marketing process. And what Julian did for me is, it’s wonderful because he is able to kind of take the information that you may have in your head, extrapolate it, put it on, you know, a lucid chart and show you just exactly what you’re doing with your with your marketing. And I found that so helpful. It identified areas where I needed to improve, and areas where I needed help.
Julian Mills 1:28
So the way I work is that prospective clients will approach me or find me online. And they’ll as can I help them automate a business with Infusionsoft or whatever system it is. And I’ll say, Well, before you buy anything or buy into any system, let’s see where you are, and see where you want to be, and then match the right solution for you. Okay, so this is how I do it, as Paul mentioned, using a tool called lucid chart it is a paid service, lucid chart, there is a free tool, which is very good as well called www.draw.io. And get that one, okay. So what are these tools, I like to compare them to a whiteboard, you might have in your office wall, where you can map things out, you can map the flow of things. This has a number of advantages over a whiteboard. Firstly, it doesn’t get rubbed out at the end of each meeting. Yeah, you can share it with others. So you start to work as a team on this, especially nowadays, ever working more remotely. And this chart This is just show you that when you systemize it this way, it grows with the business, you can update it, it’s not like the whiteboard where you might take a photograph of it this this evolve with you making it super powerful. I’ll show you how. So so might come up to approach me and we’ll start a conversation I said, Okay, tell me about your marketing. And this is just a very simple example, give you the concept here. But imagine, well, I’ve got a website. So I’ll say okay, so you’ve got your website there is what happens is people come onto my website from the internet, they have a look around, and we go to contact us thought fill that in. And then the website design he set up. So every term that forms filled in your phone, send me or my staff an email, I get an email in my inbox. And then it’s our job to remember it hopefully, remember, to follow up, we might use post it notes or calendar, Excel, whatever do from memory. And we close some sales from that. That’s great. I know this sounds familiar, Paul, if you’ve been there before.
Paul Greig Smith 3:37
Yeah, and this is, for many people. This is this is almost like the starting point of many kind of simple businesses. But yeah, it’s good to see it from a bird’s eye kind of point of view and actually say, Well, okay, let’s say for example, you know, are you generating traffic to that website, you know, maybe your contact us form is not very well designed. And it’s not optimised for conversions. And maybe there’s a delay in you know, that email to staff member and the staff member picking it up. So, almost being able to kind of look at the exact process and say, Okay, well, what can be improved? And what can we automate? What can we kind of remove? unburden the conscious mind as it were, and allow the sales and marketing professionals to do their job properly. So yeah, it’s a wonderful tool.
Julian Mills 4:26
Okay, exactly. So this is the starting point. And Paul very few yesterday so that then other conversation with my marketing hat, another technical stuff of the automation of the platform, whatever. So what what marketing Do we need do just like Paul was saying, so that’s the phase two comes in. Love the conversation, and then you can start to map out now what’s the ideal for you so for instance, now, yeah, someone fills in the Contact Us form, and two things is gonna happen. The first thing I do is, job I have a central database, a CRM, system a database. Yep, be it. Whatever system Infusionsoft keep Active Campaign MailChimp. Now we’ve got a store for our data, where we can start to do things in the future, maybe send a regular newsletter, send out an email broadcast selling a product or service. In the future, set up whole new marketing campaigns, we’ve got the data stored somewhere, not so spreadsheet or post it notes. So click back here. So it takes us all safe. The contact us form will send straightaway thank you for inquiry email, getting pushing straightaway, yep. Then going to create an opportunity record, so that either you or your sales team can manage that opportunity to sell something proactively rather just in post it notes, as I mentioned, we’ll go through a sales process with you. And ultimately come to a decision. Yep. Either the sale is one, which is great. Yep, we can move them into an automated campaign to followup with your customers. Yeah, a sale is lost. Now. For me. These tend to be the tire kickers. So before we fills in your form, I want something free, or salesperson trying to sell you something you never sell them and move them to last. But everyone else goes into the maybe in the future. And this is where you find the gold is and it’s often neglected. People are interested, but not ready to buy today. So I’ll typically set up a campaign and this campaign could run for something like four years. And maybe every six months, we drop a very casual, informal email. Hey, how we look in on whatever you sell. Are you interested at the moment? And people come back to me 234 years later, say, Hey, I’m ready to buy now. That’s my thought exactly, where they say, How do I buy
Paul Greig Smith 6:44
Just to add the longest I’ve had, I’ve had someone on my list for 10 years. And literally when they when they finally purchased, they said Paul have been on your list for years, I’ve always loved the look of your wildlife tours and trips, I’ve always wanted to go but I’ve never had the money, then they had a bereavement in the family, they got the money, but it was something like 8000 pounds sales. So just goes to show the power of keeping these lists going.
Julian Mills 7:14
Yep. So now it’s time to get a framework and prospective client or the client, we start to get a feel for how we’re working this and it becomes a joint sort of process, evolving the marketing. They’ve got phase three here. You see here now now it’s really starting to take shape the plan. So I’ve also added in now to say you got you have a lead magnet on your website, okay? Now you might be offered a free guide or free book or whatever, it might be a free consultation. So it fills in that form. Again, straightaway, the data goes into our CRM our database, so that we can follow up with them. Yeah, and what I’m doing here, as soon as they fill in the form to go into CRM database, their prospect equally as ease of prospects straightaway and putting them into an evergreen campaign. Okay, this campaign never ends. Yeah, the only way to escape from this campaign is either unsubscribed or they’ve come through here, they become a client. In that case, automatically, the system feeds back and stops the prospect campaign, because now they’re a customer, there’s no point sending them prospect emails anymore. That’s all happening on autopilot, you the salesperson don’t need to worry about that sort of stuff in the lead magnet office, we’ve got a little campaign to deliver the lead magnet, maybe reminders are all built in man, etc. At some point, they might put the hand up and say please give me a call the filler for me, please give me a call, I’m ready to be taught. As soon as they put the hand up. We can drag them into here create sales opportunity and feed them into the sales teams to follow up. So make sense, Paul yet.
Paul Greig Smith 8:54
I love it. I never cease to be amazed whenever I look at your lucid chart.
Julian Mills 9:00
Okay, so that’s giving us the 30,000 foot view of your sales and marketing system. But let’s get down to the granularity, the nitty gritty. How does it work? in practice? How do we build out the campaigns in the futures of key Active Campaign or whatever. So here now, we will focus here on this part of the campaign. I’ve called it campaign one that would match the campaign that you would build in your automation platform. You see here, Polo stars on here, which actually say live in them. So what are we doing with clients is as we’re building out the whole system, I’ll be completing each section, I put a little star on here to show it live, and a little bit of gamification. And over time, it builds out and we build the whole system. If campaign one and they’ll be mapping out here. Watch is going to happen in campaign one. Before we before I even bought a system to do this. You can map it all out and have a clear idea as to exactly what you require your system to do. Here’s the Contact Us webform built in the system and build out a system. First Name, Email typically takes your thank you page. Yep, there’s no delay. And immediately I’m going to start assigning to a wreck might be on the same to a rep. Yep. There’s no delay then. And straightaway, I’m going to create a sales opportunity in that sales pipeline. And it’ll be in specifically, and this pipeline for him to follow up, he will start working that lead. And they’re gonna wait three minutes. Listen, the thank you email, thank you for your inquiry. And guess what, by email is going to call for Monday. So straightaway, we’ve started to build relationships, so that when the calls the respective call, this start to build build relationship, really, rather than just will call you shortly. Yeah, that’s all part of this, I’m coding everything up. So that when you go to your ad campaign or your key campaign, you can exactly go straight to that campaign, straight to that partner campaign and edited or updated or whatever, in the future in the future. You can manage the whole system. It cooks it as a building out the emails here, since we’ll be making notes to the copywriter. What’s the purpose of that email, what’s the call to action, etc, etc. So the time all that’s ready, and everything’s complete, me as a campaign builder, in the automation platform, as ever, this is a this is a blueprint for building, we just go in and build a campaign, dropping the copy of the email, the job’s done. Often you find with these platform if people say or they wonder, the stole the sizzle, but then when it comes to the actual implementation, they’re left with a blank canvas. And they go, Why don’t I like Star? Because the first two problems First of all, they’ve done what they want. Why is this solves it. And secondly is the technicalities. To sort of bridges to cross captures a lot of people out on it. But this was you know what you want, you can ask the right questions and build out what you
Paul Greig Smith 11:58
want. I love that. And certainly as a business owner, being able to tailor make the copywriting content to the specific client as well as is super powerful.
Julian Mills 12:09
Okay, so just to finish off, I’ll give you a couple of examples to show you how we can start to look at tags if these as a measure of the star, these plans are these systems built up over time, and you’re constantly tweaking, constant refining. You got to keep them up to date, because the only way you know how everything is fitting together. Here’s a simple automation planet clients. Here you see here. Have job drill down to too far. Yeah. Traffic Sources, where are you advertising? What are you doing to attract people onto your website here, in this case, I’ve got a lead magnet, landing pages Contact Us form, even a third party online store, you can integrate with third party, third party tools. You see here, when you fill in lead magnet to get a campaign to go into an evergreen campaign. The whole point of the campaign is to get people to come back onto the website and not forget about those. Hey hates your sales pipeline we got going. So you know, when you have a new member of staff starting say as a salesperson. He said the sales person on the first day. But here’s where every morning you only see new opportunities you deal with those opportunities to look at the close them. Yeah, but they can see straightaway. Well, these are all the things that are feeding those opportunities to me. And part of the big picture here. Now you see how everything fits together like a jigsaw. Yeah, the sales person might close the sale. But then maybe there’s an account management team that handle the client onboarding that can all be automated and managed. And all Hey, see, here’s where he started to see here, the campaign detail started to map out what each part of the system needs to do in a logical manner. So as you can understand it, and for whoever is building the campaign for you, they’ve got clear idea for the start, what they’re doing, and how it all fits together as a complete system. Awesome. Making sense for you. And then finally, show you what this is, this is what mine looks like you know you’ve you’ve run this webinar, you follow this video rather, you’ve probably coming up here when you’re feeling down my my funnel here which is what it is is a sales funnel. Though the automation or the third party tools is support that with my my goal here is to make my job as easy as possible. Without without using my time to do manual mundane stuff.
Paul Greig Smith 14:36
Yes. And that’s such a valuable point you you’ve touched on that it’s saving yourself that time energy and attention. Now Julian is obviously he’s an expert at it and he makes this look easy. For someone like me, this looks really hard. And but it’s like you know from someone who and along business owners sometimes their marketing and sales process can sometimes be ad hoc and reactive. This is very much proactive, but building out the correct systems over time to ultimately save yourself that time, energy and attention but also ultimately improve your productivity and profitability over time as well.
Julian Mills 15:19
That’s all I’ve got to say today. Really, Paul, that’s just how I, how I work with clients to map out the marketing, before we even look at implementing in until
Paul Greig Smith 15:31
Julian’s been really helpful in my businesses. And you know, I highly recommend for anyone who has has, you know, seen the value that the Julian’s able to create through these kind of funnels and so on, you know, give him give him a shout on what’s the next step for people to get in contact with you, Julian?
Julian Mills 15:50
Yeah, well, I’ll typically do is organise a discovery call. And when we start to map out these processes and happy to give you study insights, and get you started your even if you want to do it yourself, do it yourself. We’re happy to help. Just go to our website, Julian mills.co. UK and schedule a discovery call. He says it’s all automated. So just check the discovery call. And we’ll be talking soon. That’s it. Thank you for your time today political freedom, Julian. Thanks, bye bye.
The phone app – Pic Scanner is the key here and it was the best photo scanner app that I have found. You basically take a photo of the photo, its AI then works out the borders etc and auto crops the image (you can even scan multiple images at once and it auto creates separate images, but you will lose a bit on the resolution).
Love him or loathe him there is no disputing the fact that Piers Morgan has been highly successful.
For the past 12 years I have been helping clients to automate their marketing and to sell stuff.
If you are responsible for accountancy marketing then I hope you will find these 5 top tips valuable, so please read on.
TOP TIP 3
But how do you go about it?
Back when I started email marketing in the 1990’s having a large email list and blasting out emails made perfect sense. But times have changed.