Automating Your Customer’s Journey With Paul Sokol

Episode 119: Automating Your Customer’s Journey With Paul Sokol

Paul Sokol started selling dime store candy for 25 cents in middle school. After a gauntlet of college combined with direct sales founding his first company, he dove headfirst into entrepreneurial business automation with Keap. This was in the summer of 2008. Since then, he has helped thousands of business owners and people leaders, written an authoritative book on sales marketing automation, and personally sold nearly half a million dollars in services.

 

What You Will Learn:

• What are some of the easiest and most common areas that business owners can automate
• How to nurture your customer relationships through email
• In what ways can you automate your internal business processes and systems
• How to determine where you should begin implementing automation in your business
• Why is automation a good filter for growing your team
• In what ways can you use automation to manage your sales team

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Listen to the podcast here

 

As you know, most of the time, I bring a guest to interview. Sometimes, I do what I refer to as a solo cast. I share some insights myself but in this episode, we have a great guest. Sometimes, I bring in 7- or 8-figure business owners or beyond business owners who are going to talk about their history as a 7-figure business owner. Other times, I bring in experts who know a thing or two that helped us along the way in the seven-figure growth journey. Now that’s the type of guest I have.

I have an absolute expert with us and I’ll get into what he’s an expert on here in a minute. My guess is Paul Sokol. Paul is a Cofounder of Be Pro, an expert when it comes to automating the customer journey. They also do some advertising for their clients. I know Paul from working together for a number of years at a fast-growing software company. You guys have heard me reference that company in the past. It was called InfusionSoft before. Now it’s called Keap and Paul still works in and around that ecosystem. He and his partner serve that community and others. Let me quit talking about him and welcome him. Paul, thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me, Brett. I’m super excited. This is going to be a fun conversation.

Absolutely. Please tell us a little bit more about Be Pro. Your partner, Brina, and you have built this thing and helped businesses. I gave an overview, but whatever you want to add to that. Please tell us what you’re doing.

Be Pro is our entire brand message. What we believe is if you’re going to do anything, you might as well be Pro about it. We help people plan and build automated customer journeys as well as internal journeys, which we’re going to talk about on the show. We’ll also do the front-end advertising if the client needs it. As you said, I’ve been in the Keap ecosystem. I’m not sure if you knew this, Brett, but maybe you did. I’ve been a customer since 2008.

I remember that.

The drive system is one that doubles your sales club. We were one of the people in 2009 that be able to say sales. We got this shirt and all that jazz. As you referenced, I worked directly for Keap when it was InfusionSoft from 2011 to 2016. Most of that was in the product. That’s where I was in the product team, which is where I build all the campaign models and stuff like that. In 2015, I started to get advertising and developing that skill because you can have a bunch of great automation. It’s like opening a restaurant. If no one is coming in the door, there’s no point. That was a muscle that I never developed when we were working at InfusionSoft because we didn’t deal with traffic. Now I have a lot of fun building business Legos effectively and I get paid to do it, which is even cooler.

Our audience is much broader than the Keap ecosystem. For those of you who aren’t familiar with that term, Keap is an automated sales and marketing platform for small businesses, specifically entrepreneurial small businesses that want to grow. Coming from that world where all we did was eat, drink, sleep, and breathe, small business growth automation. That’s the world that Paul comes from. That’s his expertise and he serves a lot of businesses in that regard.

Enough of who you are and what you do. Let’s talk about something that I think is relevant to any business owner, including and maybe especially, this group of seven-figure business owners that we served with this show. Businesses get started. They get their product or service off the ground. They got blood, sweat, and tears, that whole thing grounded out, and get that thing off the ground. If they’re able to figure out enough of the sales and marketing puzzle, they start to get customers. They then had to deal with the challenges of a growing number of customers or clients, and how do we fulfill our brand promise or what we sold to that growing number of people. If you figure out enough about the ongoing customer acquisition and fulfillment, now we’ve got a thing.

There’s this business with a steady operation. Some of those businesses crack that million-dollar mark and the business owners are still heavily involved in many cases to make the whole thing work. It doesn’t mean they haven’t thought about automation at all to this point. Hopefully, they have in their sales and their marketing but there’s a full customer journey that you help people automate. There’s an important aspect as we get bigger. There’s a growing number of team members.

There are some internal processes that we could also leverage the power of automation to fulfill or to have happened. Why don’t we talk about some of the most common things that you run a cross in businesses that you’ve served that are low-hanging fruit to get the power of leverage through automation? What are some of the candidates for processes that businesses in the space might think about automating?

This is a great question because when we think about automating a part of the customer journey or if we think of it like we’re watching a play on stage, we usually think about what’s going on and what the audience is seeing. You and I both know that there are people in the wings, lights and sound, makeup, and all that jazz in the background to make that experience. When you start looking at how to automate those things behind the scenes, it not only introduces more reliability and stability in the processes but introduces a place for governance because there’s data.

Now you can see things getting done or not getting done. As you mentioned early, with teams scaling, you do need to be able to look at the team as a whole and then also the individual performances of each contributor on that in the pod or whatever they’re at. You said low-hanging fruit. I don’t know why this came to mind but I guess it’s because automation is, at the end of the day, no matter what you’re automating, about the relationship. Automating is the relationship at scale. Good automation helps build relationships and bad automation deals like a robot and nobody cares about you.

Good automation helps build relationships and scale bad automation. Click To Tweet

Low-hanging fruit is simple and you can do this in most systems. It doesn’t have to be Keap. I’m going to shame tactics that are agnostic on the platform. You can do these in pretty much any modern system. An email hard bounce recovery, and if that all sounded like Greek, a hard bounce is basically like a return to sender. He shoots the letter and it comes back. The email was bad and there are a number of reasons for that. However, this is a perfect opportunity to nurture the relationship. I have a thing in my system where when an email comes back as bad, it spits out a task to follow up with the person and says, “I try to send an email. It came back. Is there are better email for you than whatever?”

If there’s a phone number, I’ll usually call or text. Sometimes, I know these people. I’ll find them on Facebook or LinkedIn and send them a message. For the people that respond, it’s almost 100% take rate. There’s only been a couple of people that are like, “I’m not in the business anymore.” I’ve never had anybody get upset because again, relationships at scale. If you think about sending an email to one of your friends. You send it, it comes back. You might text him, “Is your email still this?” That’s a normal relationship thing, but of course, it’s all timely as well. When an email comes back as I delivered, that would be the point where somebody would reach out or something to that effect. You could even put them in some campaigns depending on scale.

We’re talking about businesses that are larger. If these are paying customers, maybe their email went bad. You send out a batch of postcards once a week that says, “We care about you, and this email that we printed on your postcard came back as bad. What’s up? Here’s how to get it fixed or something like that. Any number of ways where you can do it.” That’s a low-hanging fruit. If someone’s email goes bad, that doesn’t mean the relationship is over. Try and see if you can recover it. The silver lining is it’s perfect out of the blue, “I care about you,” and in the end, people want to be cared about.

 

Let me highlight something that I didn’t anticipate. I’ve known you for a long time. You were a customer back at that business we talked about in 2008. That’s when I started working at that business. It shouldn’t have been surprising to me, but it did surprise me. We’re here to talk about automating to help these businesses and almost the first word out of your mouth was relationship. That’s so powerful. I love that you did that, Paul. The way to start scaling some of these businesses that get off the ground is to use the power of automation to do things at scale that you do now very personally one-to-one.

You can’t maintain that same level of one-to-one touch at scale unless you hire more people or you figure out how to do some automating of some things that don’t replace relationships. It enables it at a larger scale. I love that you started with relationship. It’s fantastic. I love that you use the simplest of examples where you’re like, “We all send emails in this day and age,” whether they’re to prospects or current customers. If we get a hard balance, someone comes back and says undeliverable, message not received, or whatever, you have an automated task that brings it up for you.

You don’t have to go looking for that information. It shows up for you, and then you have a way that you deal with it every time. There’s a process around it. That helps you be consistent. It’s not about governance. You mentioned governance as well. I’ll add the word visibility to that. I love your analogy of the play. What’s behind the curtains? What’s behind the set? What’s in the orchestra pit? We don’t see all of that but there’s a lot of activity happening and visibility is important as you build the business.

I love where we started and go on so much about what you said, but I was like, “Okay. More of that.” What other things do you see are fairly low investment, low effort, and fairly high yield in terms of automating processes, whether it’s customer journey or internal operations that you can automate? What do you see out there that are common things or maybe ones that you thought, “That was a cool one that we did, maybe a case study almost?”

For people tuning in, I’m assuming they probably have sales teams or at least sales people that are more than one person, which means there’s a sales manager who needs to be checking in with people. Years ago, I coined the term invisible sales manager. This is assuming you’re using a pipeline to track your sales leads but you should be using the pipeline at your size. If it’s an assisted sales process, you should be using the pipeline. The invisible sales manager is following up with the rep with respect to the sales stage of the leads. I’ll give you an example.

The invisible sales manager is following up concerning the sales stage of the leads. Click To Tweet

If someone fills out a contact form on your website and then it fits a lead into your deal pipeline. If they don’t move out of the new lead to something else within 36 hours, which means the sales rep hasn’t even attempted to call them. They didn’t even move to contact or whatever. The system can automatically send an email and they’re from the sales manager that says, “Sales rep, what’s the status with first name and last name? I saw they came in recently.” If it’s done with respect to when the deal is moved, then those emails are not going to be bashed up.

If I’m a sales rep and I move somebody at 1:00 PM and then I move them at 2:00 PM and 4:30 PM, in theory, I might get three emails bugging me in two weeks if I hadn’t moved those people. It’s going to come at 1:00 for the sales manager and then 2:00 and then 4:30. It’s what the sales manager should be doing too. You talked about enablement and using automation for marketing enablement, sales enablement, and fulfillment enablement. It is a huge one. This is a good example of it. We’re enhancing what they should be doing anyway.

It’s like you would do with traditional sales pipeline automation. You move someone into the contacting stage, it spits an email out that says, “I tried to call you and I missed you. What’s up? Here’s my calendar link.” It’s the exact same idea except the customer never sees it. It’s behind the curtain. It’s the stage manager running into the dressing room and saying, “Tony, you’re on five. Make sure your makeup is glued on tight from rehearsal or whatever.” I feel like I ranted a little bit.

It’s a great example of a very practical application for an internal process. The invisible sales manager is always watching. Are you moving people through the pipeline in a timely manner? If there are exceptions to what we set up as expectations, we’re going to get a little reminder. An automated reminder that says, “How’s it going?” I’ll get better at asking better questions and you’ll do better as a guest. I see that you want to say something.

I want to pen something onto that as well. This isn’t necessarily because the sales rep wasn’t doing their job. Sometimes I will leave a note on the deals record or the contact record that says, “This is a stalled lead.” That way, we can pull reporting easier in the future. Let’s say somebody is supposed to be in the qualified stage for fourteen days. Meaning, within two weeks, we should be getting them booked for an appointment or marking them as lost.

 

Maybe at day 10, the system adds a note that says, “This is a stalled lead,” or maybe wait until day 14 and says, “This is a stalled lead.” You can pull reports on those notes, and if you do it right, give them good meaningful titles and data inside them. You can get very rich data. You can see trends of, “Sales rep A is consistently stalling leads and sales rep B is great. This lead source has a bunch of crummy leads because look at all these stalls but they all come from this one place.” Visibility transparency, that’s what reminded me of that whole note thing.

I love that. That’s good insight. There are so many ways that you can use the power of automation to be more efficient and give more visibility like you said. There are lots of things we could talk about. It caused me to think, but let’s step back. If I’m a business owner and I’ve got a blank canvas, which isn’t blank but full of my business. Here’s everything that happens in my business. How would I know where to start?

I’ve heard some people talk about automation and they’ll say things like, “If you do a task more than one time, you should automate that thing or as much of that task as you can.” Maybe that is the answer, but do you have a set of rules or almost like a wizard, like, “Step through this process. Here’s a series of questions about where to start,” even thinking about automation and how to get going?

I don’t know if you remember the business’s research on the small business assessment, but we discovered something called The Priority Path. This was the order of the conversation and operations that we would talk and the user to see where should they start looking at their business. The simplest way we distilled it down to is this idea of closest to cash. If you imagine the cash register right here. There’s something that’s going to happen right before the sale and something right after.

The idea is you start closest to cash on either side and say, “Is there something broken right before the sale that we could automate or something right after that we could automate?” Once you handle one of those, you spiral around. You keep going further back into the customer journey until you eventually build out everything from the top of your marketing to your sales process and deep fulfillment with referrals to testimonials and upsells or cross-sells.

Once you’ve done that for your core offer or you’ve got it all planned out, then you can start looking behind the scenes. Depending on the size of your team and what you’re doing, you may want to implement an automated weekly check-in, and the member of the big three, of course, you and I have an automated management bot. As a result, the two of us were doing a boutique agency. Every Friday at 8:00 AM, I get an email that says, “It’s time to tell the business what you did on your big three for the week.” If we don’t submit it by 4:00 PM, there’s a reminder, “Before the end of the day, go ahead and check in.”

 

On Monday morning, we get a report of, “Here’s who reported and here’s who didn’t report,” and then rinse and repeat. Whether someone reports or not, they’re queued up for the next Friday’s email. That’s something that you could build in and implement with your existing employees, but then also, that’s something you bolt into your onboarding. When you have the conversation around your roles and responsibilities and here’s what your KPIs are, I’m going to go and set your weekly check-in. Here are the three things we’re going to be asking for the next quarter or whatever your cadence is and then you hit go. You can do it for things that are beyond a weekly check.

You could use it, in theory, to check quarterly reviews. It’s like, “It’s time for your quarterly review. Go ahead and schedule some time on my calendar.” Since you’re the manager, you have the calendar link. People should show up for their own reviews. It should show the rate on those. You, as the manager, crop up on your calendar and then there can be similar automation to say, “This person didn’t schedule their call.” Maybe that’s when it spits out a task, “I got four tasks to follow up with Johnny, Susie, Jim, and Blake.”

What I love about all these examples is that we were bouncing from an invisible sales manager on the front end of the journey with customer acquisition to a concept of closest to cash when you’re trying to decide where I invest in automation efforts to now all the way out here. This is more an employee or internal team process, whether it’s checking in on big threes every week, which we talked about a lot in our Elite Community. For our audience, that’s the three key responsibilities for every role in the company. The measurable how-to lines to our company goals and expectations of each role for self-reporting every week and then cumulative or roll-up reporting once a quarter and a quarterly review.

There are things that you could automate throughout the business. Many of us don’t even think about that. Let’s come back to the closest to cash. We want to automate that for obvious reasons. We’re getting money as a result of this automation from somebody who recently bought and we are fulfilling that expectation so that they’re happy customers. We want them to keep doing business with us later and refer. Closest to cash was a great criterion for where I might start thinking about my automation endeavors. What else should I be thinking about when deciding? Are there any other criteria that you might run us through about where I should do automating?

It’s important to make sure you’re starting at the high-level strategy in the why and then click down into it because automation is a joy. As I said, it’s about relationships at scale. Whenever I think about automating or I’m playing something with the client, the very first thing to figure out is, “What part of the customer journey? Is this a marketing journey we’re working on? Is it sales? Is it a fulfillment journey? Is it an operational journey? Maybe it’s a list-free engagement like the hard bounce would be an operational thing. Is it a money journey? Is this the process when a payment fails and the journey they go through that for us to recover it?”

Once we’re clear on what part of the journey it is, then we get clear on two high-level things. We are clear on the strategy, what it is that we’re doing, and then tactically, how are we going to do that? Let’s say we want to generate leads as a strategy. How we’re going to do that is we’re going to offer an assessment. We’ve gone from this real high level in the journey to what part of the journey. If you think of it like a movie, it’s act 1, act 2, act 3. Which scene specifically are we going to work on? They should then all flow.

It’s all one conversation as Greg Jenkins of Monkeypod Marketing teaches. It should all be one continuous conversation. When you’re looking at the priority path and where to start or you’re going to go right before the cash, that would be a sales journey. If you’re going to go right after the sale, that’s the fulfillment. Of course, it’s a transition and it should be a smooth transformation. Once you have that, the next thing to do is to storyboard the customer journey. What do they experience from moment to moment along the way?

This also has a 10,000-foot in ground-level process. You want to think of it almost like a ball-and-stick model. Let’s do a non-technology one. I get a business card at a networking event. That is the event and when that happens, there’s some pathway that takes me to the next major moment, which is I have scheduled a call. I don’t have three arms, otherwise, it may make a little bit of sense. We call it a ball-and-stick model. You basically create a ball-and-stick model of the key moments in the journey.

Create a ball-and-stick model of the key moments in the journey. Click To Tweet

You’re talking about one step at a time, right?

Not almost. It’s the 10,000-foot steps. Think of it like a theme park map or you’ve got splash mountain here and then a haunted mansion over here. Those are the main things and then there are the pathways to get someone from one moment to the next. I get a business card, then I enter that into my system. I build some kind of a form for me and my sales team to put it in. We know the next step is to get them to schedule a call. This is now where a storyboard of the ground-level stuff. Once we know that that’s generally right, we made the right move so here’s the walkways.

I want them to first get an email that says, “It’s so nice to meet you. Here’s my contact info and my calendar link. Please book it.” Hopefully, they book it, but if they don’t, this is where automation comes in because this is what humans are going to be doing anyway. You can say, “I want them to make another email or reminder. Let’s wait three days.” If they haven’t booked, we’ll send a reminder email. That’s what the sales rep would be doing anyway or whoever. You storyboard it out and then you can go from each main moment to the next.

Once they schedule, how do you get them to show up? I want to send an email that confirms their appointment. I want to send an email the day before that says, “I’m looking forward to it.” In the morning, I want to send a text message and another reminder email as a heads-up. You want to do the storyboarding first then you can start having conversations around the specific ground-level messaging in each asset. What is each email going to say and then even further what specific tools are we going to use? We send our emails to Maropost. This is an Maropost email and then we use Calendly for our scheduling. We’re all going to need to use Zapier to connect Calendly to our database when somebody books.

You get into the people who are not only using Maropost email but who have the creative skill to write the email and the technical skill to load it. It may not always be the same person. For accountability, there’s always an owner for each asset. You storyboard this out and then you flesh out the pieces until you get down to the ground level of what tools are we using, who’s using it, and who’s accountable for getting this thing done. That’s our planning process entirely. That’s what people pay us for and we give them a document of the plan. We can then turn around and say, “Here’s what it’ll cost to build or give this to your team because they can build it.” It’s like building a house. You have to make a blueprint first and then you go turn around and build it.

You have to make a blueprint first, then go and build it. Click To Tweet

If somebody wants to automate more of their processes, they need to have some automation engine. We were familiar with CRM.

They need a tool. They need some bells and whistles and know at least the capabilities. They don’t need to be the technician who understands how to set it up. For example, if we contract that somebody has clicked on a link in an email and we want to respond to that, I need to know that my tool can do that. If I know that’s something I want to do, I’ll be like, “CTO or ops people, this is one of the criteria we need for a tool we’re looking at investing in.”

Once we want to start automating processes, we need to have some tools. Most CRMs that are worth considering would have all the capabilities that you would need.

They’re all pretty much a parody.

You mentioned there are tools out there like Zapier that are connectors that go on these Calendly and an email tool. There are ways and the technology is out there.

It’s a lot easier than it was years ago. That’s for sure.

Also, nobody has to know as much as you do about the tech.

I wouldn’t recommend it.

That’s a lot of Monster drinks served, coffee or whatever, to keep that energy going but they do need to understand some basic ideas. They’ve got to have a process that probably has to be used more than occasionally. You want something that’s going to be worth spending the time and energy investing in making this happen. They could get help from somebody like you. Maybe they have a technical person on staff but they might need to get some help.

Once that’s built, what we’ve done now is created consistent, reliable, and more visible. We get a lot of benefits out of having that thing built and the things in service for a long time. That’s the idea. The more of that we get built, the more we’re getting done with fewer people and less one-time effort. We had a one-time effort and that gets leveraged over time over many instances. That’s the power of automation that allows a lot of businesses to scale.

Can I talk about one more automation tactic?

Yes.

I want to talk about growth specifically. I’m talking about the growth of your people. To grow your team, you need to interview people. If they’re fit, onboard them and get them ramped up for success. This is where automation can be a huge time saver as well as a good filtering mechanism for potential candidates. Even something as simple as, “Are you interested in applying? Give us your name and email and we’ll send you a link to apply.” The first thing someone has to do is confirm their email address. If they confirm their email, here’s the link to our application or whatever. That idea was a campaign we pushed into the marketplace for the users.

 

When we looked at the global statistics, it filtered out about 33% of all applicants. Think about that. 1 out of every 3 people that say I want this job couldn’t even go to their email and confirm it. I don’t know if I went into these folks. That’s a simple example because we were talking about processes here. You need to make sure you’re interviewing is a process and making sure it’s standardized too. Not to create a consistent experience but also for compliance too. You can get in trouble if you don’t have standardized interview questions and stuff like that, but make it a process.

If somebody wants to apply, here’s how you do it. Here’s how you would go submit a resume. If you have a sales pipeline, you can have a hiring pipeline. If you’ve got a new applicant, review their resume. If they’re qualified, book the first interview. If the first interview is done, then offer a letter. Offer received and that kind of stuff. It doesn’t matter if you have 2 or 2,000 people you’re considering hiring. For each individual person, you know exactly where they’re in the relationship and because you have automation, you can do things like if you’re reviewing someone’s resume and it’s not good, move them to loss.

That can automatically send an email that says, “Thanks for applying. We look at your stuff. It doesn’t look like it’s a good fit.” You don’t have to worry about that. Most importantly, you’re closing a loop. I get frustrated reading all this stuff on LinkedIn about companies not even telling people, “We’re not even looking at your resume.” To me, it’s rude. It says, “I don’t care about the relationship.” Also, make sure you’re using automation for the onboarding. Even before that, once somebody gets hired, pop in their hire date to who the manager is, and then have the systems spit out tasks for somebody, the hiring manager or whatever, the day before, “Go ahead and print out Susie’s work agreement.”

These are computer tasks that get assigned to the IT guy. These print tasks get assigned to me as the person running training. Since I’ve designed the employee experience, who’s ever talked about the EX? That is starting to come up but you don’t hear anyone talk about EX these days much less automating the experience. You can, though. This is where automated onboarding is so helpful. Right before day one, “We’re excited. Here’s what you need to consider.” Even if you’re doing something or you’re buying them lunch, it’s like, “We’re going to buy a lunch tomorrow. Click here and tell us what you want.”

Start building your employee dossier there. If they have any food allergies or something, that’s where you can collect it. If there’s information you need to collect for an employee profile, do that beforehand. Send them reminders, “Bring your Social Security and passport so we can do your I-9. Make sure you are legal to work here.” You can all have processes around that and screening processes too. Get their I-9 task completed. If this fits out another task that says cool, file it in their whatever.

I do talk about this with our people. I’m not a marketing expert. I know your team and culture expert, and this is what we talk about. I love that you came right back around to the relationship. If you’re trying to get establish and maintain a great relationship with prospects and customers, you can use automation to do that at scale. If you’re trying to improve the experience and the relationship of your team members, you can use automation to make sure that is a very consistent process for people as they come in.

It doesn’t eliminate our role as leaders, our voice in copy, or the relationship. It enables us to maintain more of them. I want to end on that note, Paul. Thank you so much for bringing your expertise to this conversation. There’s a lot that is automatable. Sometimes, as business owners, we get flooded and inundated and we’re like, “I can’t take on anymore.” Automation might be the path forward. Hiring somebody to take something off your plate or setting up a process that you can automate to take some of that for you.

It doesn’t have to be the whole test. Sometimes it can be part of it but it’ll give you more leverage to spend your time on things that you need to be doing personally. I commend automation and the idea of automation to all of you. I want you to take some of the examples that Paul shared. Think about how they apply to your business and find ways to get more leverage through the power of automation. Paul, thank you so much for being with us. How can people get ahold of you? How can they learn more about Be Pro or connect with you on social?

We’re most active on Facebook. Go to Facebook.com/BeProNow. I’m all over LinkedIn personally. Look me up, Paul Sokol. I do have a book coming out. That’s generally about business. If you go to Book.PaulSokol.me, you can get on the waitlist. That should be out in early 2023 because the publishing cycle takes time.

Paul, thanks again. For the audience, please like, share, and review. Do all those things so we can get this episode and all the other ones in front of as many seven-figure business owners as possible. We exist to help. Elite Entrepreneurs like you to build meaningful businesses and we’re going to keep bringing great episodes on this show. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next episode.

 

Important Links

• Be Pro
• Keap
• Monkeypod Marketing
• Maropost
• Calendly
• Zapier
• Paul Sokol – LinkedIn
• Facebook.com/BeProNow
• Book.PaulSokol.me

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