Making life easier one automation at a time...
Orange Country’s top rated mortgage broker and lender.
Thank you to everyone at WNC Insurance Services for allowing us to design and implement your marketing automation system. It will provide the basis for leveraging your new inside sales department as well as the foundation to scale the system to all Divisions. Following several design meetings we delivered a strategic project document as well as Data Dictionary that act as blueprints for growth.
Thanks to everyone at Fremon Scientific for allowing us to design and implement your system. Integration with QuickBooks will provide the order history you are looking for to manage End Users, Distributors and Sub-distributors in your Pipelines and distribute leads. The Reseller Application has been moved on-line to facilitate completion worldwide. Multiple automations will insure the input is processed correctly to move from lead to Distributor with the help of ActiveCampaign automations and the CRM.
Lead Progressions matches Franchise Brokers with Franchise Prospects
Thank you Kim for allowing us to work with you to plan and customize your automated system for lead distribution to Brokers for franchise opportunities. This involved custom programming of the WordPress database to enhance integration with Twillio (SMS messaging) and SendGrid (Emails). Using Basecamp as our project manager we are in position to extend the system by custom coding as well as provide representation of how everything is engineered for your company records.
The good folks at ActiveCampaign use their servers and sterling reputation to send out emails for your Campaigns and Automations. They are very clear that the email recipient has expressed willingness to receive the messages. So how do we reach the base of potential prospects lay in the cold water of no permission given yet?
This is where Woodpecker.co comes in. It is a very affordable way to send emails out that reach the inbox and can be part of intelligent (well fairly intelligent) Automations.
There are benefits to setting up Woodpecker to mirror and reach your ActiveCampaign database contacts;
Having a scheduling system that integrates with your marketing system can be a great benefit. Setting it up is inexpensive* and it is easy to learn how to use it quickly. You can leverage the power of ActiveCampaign automations and have a powerful and integrated system for peanuts (see bottom of this post for details).
The form used for scheduling is an easy way to capture imortant data into the ActiveCampaign system. The automations can then act on this data, as well as the scheduled day and time to fine tune the relationship details and keep in touch with the contact automatically.
The system can confirm the meeting (usually 24 hours ahead of time) via email and/or text message. If a contact cancels their appointment the system will let you know and attempt to reschedule the appointment with prompts going out via email as well as text.
The Contact will schedule in Calendly and complete the scheduling form in Calendly which is mapped into ActiveCampaign. The first step is to setup the Calendly event. It can be a phone call, a face-to-face appointment, a Zoom meeting, etcetera. Calendly is very flexible and the event we want to use will have a link that will go straight to the calendar.
As you can see, the form below has information we are gathering for a pension review meeting. The form is easy to complete and the fields are mapped to the marketing system. Fields can be moved around and made to be required before the system will allow a completion.
Here a Contact is inserted (or updated) into ActiveCampaign from Zapier;
The Contact is pulled from the Prospecting automation and passed to other automations. Here we have hit pay dirt and the system can determine if the contact has been in a prospecting automation and take them out and put them into an automation to nurture them to the meeting. We will also have our automation create a Deal with their name as the Deal Title (via personalization), Tag them and add them to a List. They will be assigned the correct Pipeline and Sales Stage as well. We can also tell our automation to notify us when the lead comes in (and up to three more people). Our automation can check their gender, what state they are in, etc.. and determine other actions from the If/Else conditions we can setup. Finally we can set one or more Goals that, if met, will be automatically included in reports.
So below we see an Automation creating the Deal and other intake steps and then on alert for a cancellation which will then trigger action. If it sees no cancellation then 24 hours ahead of the meeting a text reminder will go out to the contact confirming the appointment.
*Calendly for a single user is priced at $25/month. Zapier is another $25. ActiveCampaign is $49/month for 500 contacts on the Plus plan. 5,000 contacts is $139 a month. Only ‘Subscribed’ contacts are counted toward the total.
Click here for a Free Trial of ActiveCampaign (no credit card required). We will give you two hours of coaching free with your signup.
Marketing Automation for the SMB HVAC Business
A revolution is underway in how businesses treat customers. Competitive companies work with customers on an equal footing as coaches, co-creators, nurturers and trusted advisors. This implies a consistency of communication, couched around a message that their satisfaction is first priority. Content management and SEO efforts are widely accepted methods now. CRM and marketing automation exist at relatively few HVAC businesses. Having everything in one affordable, accessible system that is matched with the business methods has a wealth of immediate and long term benefits for a relatively small investment. TO READ THE FULL WHITE PAPER CLICK HERE.
If you play tennis or golf you will quickly learn how great the sweet spot can be. The ball comes off the racket or club and sails away almost effortlessly. The professionals make it look easy. Having been in Fortune 500 sales for 15 years selling mainframes, CAD/CAM and workstations, I can recall times when I breezed by annual sales goals in the first quarter. I can also recall literally having seizures early on while giving my first corporate overviews to prospects. I was self-conscious and had only a shred of product knowledge despite the corporate training.
As time went on, my sales skills improved as did my product knowledge. Those two elements, combined with qualified prospects spelled the sweet spot. How we get these elements to coalesce in a marketing automation system is the challenge. The development of this model relies on replacing the sales person and imbuing the system with their sales skills and product knowledge. Eric Keiles and Mike Lieberman authored ‘Fire Your Sales Team Today: Then Rehire Them As Sales Guides In Your New Revenue Department’ and is a definitive tome for this approach whereby a new order of reality is created and traditional sales people become ‘sales advisors’ engaging with contacts that have been pre-warmed or jump started by engaging with the system prior to personal attention.
Businesses that are service oriented and have recurring revenue opportunities such as maintenance agreements to support warranties can especially benefit from this approach. Automation can be used to facilitate reminders and easy renewals with e-commerce links for payments. This can be taken a step further and on site visit protocol can include equipment audits that ascertain the manufacturing dates. End of life predictions based on the make and model can be easily done and legacy automations can be setup to remind customers when end of life is near to harvest replacements. Service oriented companies such as HVAC dealers can also leverage the system for requests for reviews (review automation).
Email marketing is by far the most cost effective way to acquire a new customer. Importantly, marketing automation systems now have sophisticated methods for extending the life cycle of the customer and generating incremental revenue through automation. Define your business tactic and create the automation.
A few examples automation is perfect for;
• Interest in a specific product (gleaned from site tracking or form).
• Engagement tagging (Engaged or Disengaged)
• Abandoned cart reminder
• Upgrade incentive
• Service reminders and payment processing.
• Customer Win Back Sequence.
• Blog Posts.
• Failed Bill Reminder
When approaching or analyzing your project it is worthwhile to divide the components into sections. If we think of it as a four legged stool that your company will rest on, each ‘leg’ of the project has to be equally structurally sound.
When you discuss or attend to the project, whatever you do can be assigned into one of the four legs or silos of development. These are;
Technology is the enabler but should not be the sole focus. Instead, the less obtrusive the technology is the better. I think back to circa early 2000 and can recall what seemed to be endless hours installing application software on desktops and laptops. The CRM solutions being installed would need to be integrated with other local applications such as MS Word and also setup to synchronize with the central database if it were a laptop computer.
Those localized days are gone and Software As A Service (SAAS) has replaced applications running locally. Simply assign a login and user rights and away you go. Features, functions and benefits are what you are after and not the constant worry about system problems or upgrades.
The all-in-one marketing platform we prefer is Active Campaign and it is very easy to see why when you look at comparisons such as the one at Smart Business Trends.
The digital world seems abundant these days with marketing expertise, opinion and examples. From one glorious cold email campaign to a raft of split tested messages from a high reputation sender and the consequent dashboard selection of reports and drill down in exotic bar graph charts. If you are a geek, or propeller head as we used to call them, this is a self-perpetuating field of dreams. If you are a small business owner who has thoughts about adopting Internet marketing for your business it can be a field of screams.
So, how best to approach discernment of the context? Let’s forget the means and first look at the ends. Fast forward three years and you are asked by someone you know and admire ‘what’s new with the your business?’. Obviously, you immediately think, you are going to be pleased with any reply that involves more money. That juices your ego and temporarily makes you forget the fear that you may be missing a better path. By virtue of your will and intention however, you had adopted a marketing system that practically ran itself and consistently lowered your sales costs, delivered better prospects, and allowed you to focus your time. Basically, the system made your life easier and that is what you relay to your friend. And that is the goal; to make your life easier.