Podcast Transcript:
In this episode we are exploring everything you need to know about automation.
Hey there. I’m Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I’m a Mama, a wife, an entrepreneur and best selling co-author. In each episode, you’ll get real-world, practical advice and strategies, and may be a parenting tip or two along the way if you’re ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle that you’re in the right place.
Hey there! I’m so excited that you’re here with me for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in listening. By the way, if you haven’t subscribed by now, go ahead and hit the plus button, the like button, subscribe button. Whatever button it is that you need to and make sure that you get the latest episode. There’s been some really, really good stuff in here. I’m super psyched about the content. I’ve gotten really good feedback back from a lot of listeners. So thank you so much for tuning in. And if you’re interested in learning how to get leads, if you wanna know how I get over six hundred leads a month, go ahead, jilliankendrick.com/webinar. That’s jilliankendrick.com/webinar. And you can watch my latest training on lead generation.
But for now, today, we are talking all things automation. This is the stuff that I love. This is my bread and butter of my business. This is what our agency has done for clients over the last twelve years. And I was so excited to be bringing this topic to you today. Automation. Let’s talk about three specific things. Number one: What is automation? Number two: What can I automate? And number three: How exactly do I go about doing it all? Great questions. I cannot wait to unpack this with you.
First up. What is automation? So automation is anything like a task, or an update, or a process, or an action, or thing that needs done that you don’t have to do. Think about it this way when you put a bunch of dishes into the dishwasher and push the button to turn on the dishwasher. That’s automating the process of washing dishes, right? You don’t have to stand there and scrub every single one, and then rinse it, and then put it on the drying rack. It does all of that for you. When you do a load of laundry. You put the wash in the washer. Put some soap in, click a button and it washes your clothes now. I understand that, being that, a lot of us now have grown up with these modern conveniences. We might not appreciate the fact that, yeah. People used to wash their clothes by hand and a lot of us. If you have lived in an apartment in a big city, like I have, you didn’t have a dishwasher because there was no room and you were the dishwasher. But even though we have these amazing modern conveniences. And yeah, sometimes especially as a busy working mom, I do laundry. It gets washed and dried pretty quickly, and then it gets folded about two weeks later. That is our life right now. And that’s okay, if I could figure out a way to automate my folding of my clothes. Ooh! Or I could buy one of those automated folding machines. Ah. That would be amazing. But I think you get the idea. Automation is allowing a machine, a computer, or a device or technology of some sort, to expedite a process or expedite an action or a task or thing. So that you don’t have to do it. Or if you’re like me and you have a team and you delegate stuff out so that another human being doesn’t have to take time to do it now. For instance, I work specifically in marketing automation. We do a lot of other automation. We do process automation, task delegation automation. We do email marketing and text message automation. We do a lot of different things when it comes to utilizing automation. But we kind of bundle it under the umbrella of marketing. Because let’s be honest. If we don’t have clients coming through the door, if we’re not getting that revenue, if we don’t have new blood coming through our funnel, or anybody for that matter, what’s the point of creating all of those processes.
So let me give you a few examples. Our business phone number is set up as a Google voice number. Why did I do it that way? Because I’m cheap. And it was free through Google. And I mean, honestly, I pay for our Google email addresses. But using Google voice is a great way to receive text messages, send text messages. And it’s a really cheap, free way to do that. And if I’m honest for the most part, we utilize social and email. We don’t do a whole lot of back and forth texting. And even the back-and-forth, texting stuff that we do have we’ve automated like the majority of it. So Google voice is what we use for our business phone number. If you were to call the office line (321) 680-0199 you would actually get my Google voice number. But rather than paying a person to log into Google voice, every day or even every couple of hours, or even once a week for that matter. Rather than doing that, I’ve set up an automation that, any time we get a text message or voicemail inside of Google voice. We get a notification on our desktop saying, hey, somebody left a voicemail or hey, somebody sent a message. And it makes it really easy and convenient that if anything like that ever happens, we’re notified about it instantly. And then we can respond rather than asking someone to keep open a browser tab or pay somebody to be in there every hour of every day. Because we don’t want to miss out. If somebody’s trying to connect with us, we want to make sure that we’re following up with them in a timely manner. And absolutely the best way to do that is through automation. So we get that automation saying, hey, you have a voicemail or hey, you have a text message, and then we can go in and respond another way that we’ve automated our business is any time someone goes to jilliankendrick.com/webinar an option for the webinar that I just told you about. You will automatically be taken to the webinar replay. You’ll be able to access that training instantly. And all of that is done through automation. You’ll also get an email saying, hey, thanks so much for registering for the training. We’re so excited to have you. And by the way, here’s the replay link if you didn’t catch it. If you didn’t have time to watch it when you first stopped it in. And then it will continue to follow up with them based on the actions that they take. Another example of automation. We’ve not only in this for other clients for their lists or their clients. But we also do it for our team internally. Any time it’s someone’s birthday. We have a whole calendar and it list their birthdays, client anniversary stuff like that. We get a notification each and every one of my team members get a notification on our desktop saying, hey, happy birthday to this person or hey, happy anniversary to this client. That way we can all celebrate it. Anytime we get new team members in, we add them to the calendar. We add new clients anniversary dates to the calendar. Anytime somebody leaves, we delete that date. And it’s actually really, really easy to manage. And it’s a great way to continue to build community internally and externally. Another piece of automation. I’ve automated my calendar so I have a booking link if you don’t have a booking link if you want to learn and automate your calendar. Get a hold of me. Email me at hello@jilliankendrick.com and I will be happy to send you the training that I have. But I’ve automated my calendar to the point where I have several booking links depending on why they’re booking with me. Whether it’s a sales, call a potential new client, a one on one coaching call that somebody bought, a one on one meeting for a mastermind, a podcast interview, a webinar interview and multiple other things. So anytime somebody clicks on one of those links, it will display all of my availability. And it will omit any time that I’ve marked busy on my calendar. Then once someone books with me depending on the length that they use are the reason why they’re booking with me. It automatically adds them into my CRM, into my automation software. And then it automatically follows up and says, hey, thank you so much for booking. I’m really excited to talk with you can’t wait for Friday at two pm or whenever it is and then it will send them a Zoom link, or it will give them a phone number, or instructions on how to get a hold of me. It adds them to a series of reminder emails and text messages both following up with them, a couple of days before the event, or a couple of days before they booked, the morning that they booked. And then the time slot as well. So that they remember that they booked a call with me, and they’re much much more likely to actually show up on the call when I remind them. In fact, my automated calendar reminders increased the show up rate for sales calls in one on ones by over sixty percent. And if you want that again email me hello@jilliankendrick.com, And I’ll be happy to share what I’ve got. And another example of automation. And I know this one is a little bit obvious, but I really like to drive this home because I think in our whole world of technology, a lot of us, especially me sometimes have gotten away from understanding and really appreciating just how far we’ve come with technology and the things that we can automate so our ability. So automatically type up one email and then send it out to thousands, hundreds of thousands of, even millions of people at one time is absolutely incredible and astounding. Think of it like this. If you had a list of even just a thousand people, let’s say. And you had to individually email each one of those people. Even if you were to copy paste that email several times, that would take you a really, really long time. Even just to send it to a hundred people that would take a long time to copy and paste that single email to a hundred different people. But within our ability to use automation, we can create an email or a text message and then automatically send it out to up to millions of people at one time. And that is just absolutely miraculous. This is why I love technology. Another thing that we’ve automated inside of our company is any time we on-board or off-board a new client a new team member internally. I can go into my automation system. I can apply what we call a tag. Which is really just saying, hey, this person took this action or hey, start to do this thing. And then from there, it kicks off the automation to onboard them or off-board them. Depending on the situation, automation will connect within our project management software. That then applies an entire project template full of different tasks assigned to specific people and things that need to happen to on-board or off-board, this new team member client. It also will simultaneously email me as the business owner. It’ll email me updates so that I can keep track of the entire process and it will email that new client or that new team member to let them know the next step that they need to take and within those steps. If at some point they get busy or they don’t follow through on one of the steps or whatever that next step is, it will actually send them email reminders letting them know you haven’t taken the next action that needs to be done. Likewise it will let me know if something has fallen through the cracks so that I can follow up with that person and continue to get them on board. And then once the entire onboarding process is done for a client, we have an automation that kicks off that sends them a welcome card and a box of brownies automatically. I don’t have to do any of it. It’s great. There’s so many things we can automate from marketing. If you’re running Facebook ads, you can automate a lead ad that anytime a lead comes in through a Facebook form, it can automatically put it into our automation software. Which by the way is exactly how I do it. And then from there, the automation software can follow up with them. It can let you know that you have a new lead. It’s really an elegant, awesome process. And it can do everything from various parts of marketing. It can do internal task management. It can automate billing and failed payments. It can automate emails, voice messages, text messages.
Those marketing efforts, internal and external processes. The way that I like to think of automation is this: if we can sum up the exact steps and list of the things that are necessary to complete a certain task or to get a certain project done. Then the secondary level of that list becomes okay. What are the things that a human being absolutely has to do that? A computer or a piece of technology just cannot do. And there are certain things. Right. So yes, I can automate like I just said the sending out of a card in a box of brownies. But let’s say, for instance, if you had a subscription box or if you had a subscription model, or if you had printed stack of books, and you had to go mail that book to somebody rather than automating it through a fulfillment center. You or some human being would have to print a packaging label, would have to put that thing in a box, would have to tape up the box. And then would have to go and drive it to the post office, right. See what I mean? So that is something that a computer cannot do. Now if you had a fulfillment center in the fulfillment center could do all of that for you. That’s a different story. If you had a whole team, maybe you don’t have to be the one doing it. Maybe that box of books lives at somebody else’s house, or in somebody else’s office. And then whenever that task would come through, you would assign it to that person. But you can still use automation to do it. So that really leads us to next. How do you automate well? There’s lots of different softwares out there there. Lots of different pieces to the puzzle. And like, I have always said, and like I’ve said, in this podcast episode as well if you have specific questions, email me hello@jilliankendrick.com, and I will be so happy to answer those for you. And because there are so many different softwares, so many different things, so many different ways you can automate. If you don’t have a specific tool in mind once you start to go down that rabbit hole. Trust me, it’s gonna get really, really confusing. But I can show you exactly what we do and give you the formulas to automate this stuff really quickly. And you know that it’s going to be done and be done correctly because we’re already using all of those things.
But let’s say you already have a piece of automation software that you’re working with. And you want to know what is the thought process this behind creating an automation? So first you need to decide a start and an end. There really, when it comes to automation, nothing is going to happen that you don’t tell the computer or the technology or the software to do now. Yes. There can be hiccups with software, or something can go awry. Sure. That happens, but you as the intelligent human being need to be the one that programs and tells that software what it needs to do. So there has to be a beginning point. And there has to be some sort of an ending point between all of the stuff that you do. So decide what that’s going to be. I’m going to use the onboarding a new team member example. Just for the sake of this recording. So that I can give you really clear examples. So in our automation, what we do is when we say, okay, we’re going to onboard a new team member, that’s the start. And then once they’re fully onboarded. And a certain thing happens at the end. Then that’s the end. That’s how we decide our start, and our end. I can’t stress this enough, especially as someone who is an automation expert and has worked in the automation space for over twelve years. The best thing that you can do to set yourself up for success is to write out all the steps first on paper, on notecards, on a Miro board, in a Google Doc. And then once you have your plan setup, then go and put it into the automation software. Then go mess with Zapier and mess with Slack and mess with your project management, software and mess with all the other things. Because if you’re in the weeds of the software, trying to also simultaneously make decisions, it just becomes that much more difficult. And that much more work you have to do for yourself. You might hit a snag, right where the software can’t quite do what you needed to do. And you need to regroup and make a new decision that happens to me now and again? But I’m telling you as an expert in this field, do your due diligence to create your plan on paper ahead of time. Write it all out with the steps in place, and then go into your automation, or going to your software, and and tell it what to do. So to onboard a new team member, there are several steps ahead of time, right? We have to create a job description. We have to post it out there. We have to get candidates. We have to interview them and make offers. But once we have a candidate, we’ve made them an offer. They’ve accepted the offer and we’re going to now onboard them as a new hire into the company. This is how we do it. So I go into my automation software. I create them as a contact record or as a person in our software, not as a user who can log in, but as a contact that I’m allowed to email and make connections with. From there I do what we call applying a tag. And I talked about this earlier, but I’ll just describe again applying a tag just means, hey, automation go do this thing or it means drop this person in this bucket. Or it means, hey, this person took this action or did this thing or should be part of this category of people. That’s really all tags are. When it comes to tagging inside of the automation software that I specialize in, tagging really just says historical data or this person did this thing. Or this is the action that they took. It really gives you kind of a broad overview of who that person is, what they have access to, what they’ve done in the past, what they’ve opted in to like that. But when you apply to tag in the automation software we work in that can then kick off all sorts of automation and actions. And because this is the start right. Because this is the beginning of that relationship in the beginning of these automation. This is a step that in my opinion, only a human being can do. And we’ll get to that part next.
So I create them. I apply this tag and then they go into the automation. And the automation then sends them a few emails, gives them a few tasks that they need to do, and it’s all listed by numbers. And in the specific order that I want them to do those things. So they have to sign a contract and they have to fill out, you know, W-9 tax form. There are a few tasks specific to our company that they then have to do. And I have to actually create them as a user inside of our project management software, because if they’re not created in there, then the software doesn’t know who to assign those tests to because there’s no user. So I again, the human being. A computer cannot do this. I have to then go in and create them as a user inside of our project management tool. Which really is no time righ? This at most, at this point, it’s taken me, maybe five minutes, tops. So this is not a huge task in terms of the overall, like, benefit and time back that I get because I’ve automated the rest of it. So then it assigns them specific tasks in the order that we want them to do them in. I also have it setup where they have to sign something. And then the system waits for them to then be tagged again that they’ve done the signing, or that they’ve signed their tax document before it moves them onto the next step and assigns the next thing. So I don’t want to onboard a new team member. And let’s say, I don’t know off the top of my head. Exactly how many things we have to do to onboard them. But let’s say it’s like ten for the sake of arguing. Didn’t we have to assign them ten things. I don’t want to send them an entire email, asking them to do ten things at once. Instead I’m going to send them an email, letting them know the tasks are coming in order to get them fully through the entire onboarding process. And then I’m going to assign them one at a time. That’s how I like to do it. I think that the human brain is really only capable of effectively doing one thing at a time. So I don’t want to overwhelm or bombard somebody by giving them ten things that they have to get done. And then, of course, if they’re left to their own devices, they’re going to pick the ones that are easier or that they enjoy or that they want to do rather than the ones that have to get done. So I as the business owner have made the decision that here’s the order in which those ten things need to get done that I’ve decided. And that’s how they’re going to be assigned. So then what happens within those ten tasks is they get the assignment whether it’s through email or through our project management system. And then our automation system way waits to see until they get that thing done, whatever that process looks like whether it’s signing a contract signing a tax document going and watching an onboarding video reading through certain documents that we have whatever it is familiarizing themselves with Slack because we utilize that for internal messaging stuff like that. So then once they’ve gotten to the end and I don’t remember off the top of my head. Which task is the last one? But there is a very specific time, specific task that they need to get done. I send them a survey like a new team member Onboarding survey. And it asks various things like, who is your emergency contact person. And what’s your favorite flavor of candy? And what’s your T-shirt size? I actually bought hoodies for our entire team two years ago, and I was able to grab their T-shirt size and do that really quickly and easily. So it’s just like an onboarding thing. And it walks them through kind of a questionnaire. So then once they complete that document, that is the very last step. And then Google integrated with our automation platform. Google then let’s our automation system know, hey, they’ve completed this survey or this Google form go ahead and apply the tag that they’re onboarding is finished. And then that’s the endpoint. So you have to have a starting point. You have to decide what the chronology. What the chronological order of the different steps being done has to be. Think about it in terms of the shipping a book example that I just gave a couple of minutes ago. If somebody were to order a copy of your book, and you weren’t fulfilling it through a fulfillment house, you weren’t fulfilling it through Amazon. You actually are, a team member of yours, had to go and do it. What would you tell them? Well you can’t take an empty box to the post office? Right. You have to put the book in the box first. And you can’t put the book in the box until maybe it has some bubble wrap or some package in peanuts or foam or something around it. And maybe even a packaging slip. So then step one is print the packaging slip. Step two is grab the book. Step three is put the box together if your boxes are folded and flat. Grab some bubble wrap. Put the bubble wrap. Then the book, then more bubble wrap, then the packaging slip on top. Then close the lids of the box. Then tape it up. And that’s the specific chronological order that you have to do things in. Right? If you told them to tape the box before they put the book in the box. Well then you’d be shipping an empty box. And that’s no good. And maybe after all, those things are done, then print the packing slip. Then get in the car and take it to the post office. Or maybe call U.P.S or Fedex for a pickup. Something like that. So there has to be a start. There has to be a chronological order that the things that are necessary for that task or for those steps to get done in. And then there has to be some sort of ending. You have to define. Okay. This is the last step, or this is the thing that denotes this task, this action, this thing. This process is complete.
And then from there, then second step. You can go back and say, okay. Which pieces of these is something that a human being absolutely no argument asked to do. And which pieces of these is something that a computer could do, or a piece of software could do, or a piece of technology could do. But step two really is: Okay. What are the things that a human being has to do? And it can be you or somebody else. And then what are the things that you could abdicate to your technology and automation software? So then once you’ve made those decisions. And look, if you’re not sure which is which, then talk to an automation expert. Find me or somebody like me. You can always email me hello@jilliankendrick.com and I’d be happy to answer any questions that you have. Or find a Facebook group, ask colleagues, ask these questions to help make your life so much easier. Than once you’ve decided what’s automobile, if that’s even a word, and what is a human function that has to get done by a human being?
The third step is to then. You decide. Okay. Which human beings have to do those things? Is it you the business owner? Is it another member of your team? Is it a contractor that you have currently you like have a relationship with? Is it a contractor that you then need to hire and go to Upwork or Fiverr somewhere else to get that done? Then you can make those decisions in that third step, the fourth step, but really kind of coupled with the first is, then writing it out. Use Google Docs. Use a Miro board. Use pen and paper. Use three by five blank notecards. You guys, I do that all the time. I have an entire stack of blank three by five notecards that I buy regularly and I will write out all my stuff on three by five blank notecards. That way. I can move them around. I can sit at my desk or my kitchen table and I can move them around like chess pieces that way. I have the physical process of writing them out. Which I really enjoy doing. And also make them movable. And I can switch things around and move stuff into different places. I love doing it that way. I highly recommend it. So then once it’s written out once, you know that a human being or a piece of technology is going to be doing it once, you know who those people are, then the sort of fifth step, I guess is: which pieces of technology need to follow these processors. Are these functions? My project management system is different than the system that we use to sign contracts, which is different than the system that we used to send text messages, which is different than the system that we use to build landing pages and other things. So then once you begin to look at each step of the automation process through the lens of your tech stack. And your tech stack, if you’re not familiar, is really just list all of the technology that you need to run your business. That’s a tech stack. When you can look at your automation through the lens of your tech stack, you begin to see things more clearly, you can. See where there’s holes and gaps and then you can see, okay, well automation platform does this? And the integration platform does that. And then this thing talks to this and this one talks back to that one. And then you can put all those pieces together. And then once you have all of those steps ready and done, that’s when you actually put it into practice. And I would hire, we recommend this is what we do. This is an absolute rule within my agency. Is any time we build something. If we build a piece of automation for a client, we take it through a lengthy testing process where we have to test every single step of the process to make sure that it’s right. Even if we know that it’s right, even if it’s a simple apply tags and email. I’m still gonna test that because I want to know that I as a human being and as the responsible party for doing this thing that I’ve sat. And have watched it get done correctly. I want that peace of mind. And I want to bring that peace of mind to the client when I meet with them, if there’s ever an issue. So that’s why every time my team builds anything, we always test it. If we fix it, we retest it. If we tweak it, we tested again. Period.
So there you have it. My big tips for running automation inside of your business. Now you know what automation is. You know what you can automate. And you even know a little bit on how to do it. Like I’ve said before, if you have questions about automation, what system, what platform to use, how to do it. Is there a way to expedite the process? Please email hello@jilliankendrick.com. And I will make sure somebody gets back with you so that we can get your questions answered. And if need be, I’d be happy to have a conversation about it as well. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast have listening to this has brought you value improved your life or giving you any insight to help you build momentum in your own business and please share this with a friend and I’ll see you on the next episode.
The Momentum Marketing Podcast
By Jillian Kendrick
Episode: # 19
Topic: Business Automation Basics
Contact: hello@jilliankendrick.com
Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama
jilliankendrick.com/webinar
