The Power of Automation | The Better Than Rich Show Ep. 33

How to Save Time

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How to Save Time 〰️

The Power of Automation

As a business owner, you’ve probably heard the term “automation” thrown around in the marketplace and perhaps to some, the idea of automation can seem abstract or downright unsettling.

“You mean I need to give up the reins on all the processes that make my business run?”

Yep, we get it. It’s hard to let go when you’ve been running the show and all of its components. But have you stopped to evaluate if the show is actually running you?

In this episode we will lift the veil that surrounds the concept of automation and show you why you need to consider it as an essential tool to level up your business.

Put simply, automation removes the clutter and noise often caused by being in the trenches of your business. It unlocks doors and frees up your time.

And the true beauty of automation is that there are countless softwares available to help you increase efficiencies within your business. All it takes is some careful analysis on your part. And it’s worth it because you will soon realize that while there’s some learning to do and an investment upfront, the reward will be far greater than your upfront time and money.

We promise.

If you want to move past the 6 figure threshold but aren’t quite ready to hire staff, automating your processes will get you there.

You’ll earn back your time and get down to the real work to make your business grow.

It’s time to level up.

Mike Abramowitz 00:00
I was in the hospital for 254 days. And if, if I, if I wasn't, if I was in charge of doing it all, there's no way there's no way we would be able to produce $250,000 in revenue during that during that timeframe, and over six figures and profits. So the idea of automation is so critical in order to do that. Welcome to the better than rich show with your hosts Andrew Biggs and Mike Abramowitz. The better than rich show helps ambitious leaders who are on a mission to leave the world better than they found it changed their perspective and what's important, increase their income and impact and systemize their life and business. If you've ever struggled with finding your purpose have felt disconnected or distracted or found yourself going through the motions. This show will remind you that what you do matters and will re inspire you to chase your highest dreams. It's time for you to become better than rich.
Andrew Biggs 01:07
Hello, and welcome back, everybody to the better than rich Show. I'm your host, Andrew Biggs and I'm here with my co host, Mike Abramowitz. Mike, how are you doing this fine morning,
Mike Abramowitz 01:18
doing good. I'm excited for this topic. And the reason why is because I know this is going to be a part of our masterclass and some of the products that we're going to be offering. And this is gonna be a great introduction to individuals who may or may not know about the power of automation.
Andrew Biggs 01:33
That's right, yeah, and if you're not, if you're listening, and you're not familiar at all, with automation, or maybe you hear it, you know, thrown around in the marketplace, but don't really understand how to put it into practice with your business. You know, Mike, and his goal here this this morning is really to help you break down how to make this really easy, how to understand it, how, you know, to kind of like, you know, remove the mysticism around how to use automation in your business, because every single one of you if you're a business owner in any capacity, whether you know, you, you know, own and operate a 789 figure business or your, you know, a solopreneur out there, you know, just making ends meet for you and your family, this can really free up a lot of your time and make your life so easy. And it unlocked, it really is the key that unlocks a lot of doors for a lot of entrepreneurs that we work with. Because sometimes you don't you don't have the money to hire on a staff right to to handle things. And quite frankly, once you understand the power of automation, you might actually find that an automated tool, right that someone's created some sort of software is actually not only cheaper than hiring a staff, but it's actually more efficient and better for everybody involved. So you know, I'm really looking forward to breaking this down to help people understand how to harness the power of automation. And then, you know, hopefully, you can take at least one or two of these tips, or one of the two of the software tools that we mentioned, and run with them. So with that said, might, you know, big picture, walk me through automation from your perspective and how you use it in your business. And we'll kind of get you catch here today.
Mike Abramowitz 03:04
And I will say what inspired this topic is yesterday, I was on a prospect call. I don't know if you knew this, Andrew, I was on a prospect call. And I said how she's starting her coaching business. And you know, she's a nurse. But once you get into this coaching world, and she was I said if a client wants to get on your calendar, how did they do that? And she said, Well, they fill out a contact form on my website, and they'll send me an email. And then once I get the email, I'll respond to them. And find a time that works for both of us, for us to get on the call. And I was like OMG like, this is very archaic way of going about getting a process or getting a potential client on your schedule. So that is where the inspiration came from. Because obviously what I told her is what I'm about to tell you, dear listener, is you should never have to do any work that is easy to automate. So the easy way of what I explained to her and will explain to you is if you want someone to get on your calendar, there should be no communication, you send them a link, I use Calendly I love Calendly there's also acuity there's other, you know, other forms of what you could use, but you put the link on your website, just like we have them better than rich. If someone wants to set up a call with us, they click the little button that says, find a time to talk. Then our availabilities are there, so she I told her you put your availabilities on there, your availabilities pop up, and the user goes ahead and clicks and finds the time. And then it sends an automation sequence, which is, here's the link to join me on zoom at this time, it will automatically sync with their calendars, they get a reminder. And then you're done. You don't have to like respond to an email then off to fill out like a contact form that's all inside of Calendly which in my opinion is one of the most user friendly tools to set up appointments and I think it's a great tool for automation. So that's that's the no Number One immediate one that pops up is avoiding back and forth conversations to arrange an appointment. And realistically, live calls. Like if someone wants a live call with me, I don't, I very rarely pick up the cell phone. If someone wants to get a call, I sent him my link, it's a here, just pick a time on my calendar, because these are the times I'm available. And then just pick a time. And it just says, from a simple level, if you only get that listener from this show, please, from this episode, go get go create a Calendly account and start using that to protect your time. Yeah, and
Andrew Biggs 05:34
just just to, you know, help people understand how much do we pay for Calendly every month.
Mike Abramowitz 05:40
I mean, there's a free version that my sales reps use the they use the free version, but we do the $8 one or the $12. One, maybe 15 at most.
Andrew Biggs 05:50
So it's like cheaper than a trip to Chipotle, right? A month in you get, you know, a powerful tool that saves you hours and hours of your time. And you got to ask yourself, how much time is my time worth? Right? You know, is it worth more than 12 hours? Like even if it saves you one hour? Right? Is your time worth more than $12? an hour? If you're listening to this podcast, I would certainly hope so. Right? And so, you know, if you don't believe your time's worth more than $12 an hour, we have bigger problems, you gotta go back and listen to some mindset episodes. Because, you know, nobody should be thinking, Oh, I'm worth $12 an hour, even if you're making $12 An hour right now. So understand, like, you need to be thinking, okay, my time is worth 50 hours an hour. $100 An hour 150 200 500 $1,000 An hour. Okay. And so if I'm sitting there sending emails back and forth trying to find a time and then was like, Oh, we found a time but actually it's not. It turns out, they're in a different timezone. Yeah, that email back, it's like, how many times have these things happen, where it's just a complete waste of your time, it's a negative user experience. You know, a lot of times that that doesn't end up formulating or at the very least what's happening is you're kind of onboarding them in this sloppy way. And that signals like that the rest of your experience working with you is going to be sloppy. So when we when we use the power of automation, all these things go away. And Mike give a very concrete example, right? And I want to kind of take a step back and also look at the the macro level perspective of like, the mindset of automation and thinking with like, the perspective of Canada automate this almost as an almost as a reflex. In your business, that should almost be one of the first questions you ask, right. You know, one of my one of my mentors, as I was getting into the personal growth space was Rory Vaden. And he has a great company brand builders group, you can check them out if you're interested in like personal branding and stuff. But the you know, what he talks about in his TED talk, I think it's got three or 4 million views at this point. It's called multiply your time. What he talks about is kind of this this model, where you know, first off, you should ask, you know, is this task even worth doing? Right? So that's the first question, is this task worth doing? Is it worth building, you know, something like this out? Or is it is this task that necessary in the business? And if not, we can eliminate it, right? Because so if we can eliminate a task, because it's just, it's redundant, or it doesn't make any sense to be spending time for for anybody to be spending time building this out, then great, we're going to be able to do step one, and that's eliminate some tasks, right? But ideally, then, you know, you're left with the tasks that are essential to your business, operating and operating at a high level. So the next question would ask if you can't eliminate it is, can I automate it, so eliminate, then automate. And the reason we want to go to automate first is because it's the like, it's the least amount of effort. Sometimes there's like an initial setup cost, quote, unquote, and then usually that cost is mostly your time to set up the automation. But once it's set up, it runs, it runs forever, it never breaks. There's never a problem. No one ever accidentally clicks the wrong link, because everything is completely run, you know, through software and automation. And, and you're, you're harnessing the power of the world that we live in, which is mostly the power of software's. And so that's something like if you if you don't have like a suite of software's, you know, and you're a small business owner, even if it's like a handful, you know, if you don't have at least five to 10 software's you're using on a daily basis, in your business, you're probably doing it wrong, you probably are living in this archaic world that Mike referenced at the start of this episode. So that's the next question is, can I automate it? And then the last question is, you know, can I delegate if I can't automate it, there may be some tasks that ultimately you can't automate or you find that, you know, maybe it is better to delegate, but I'm always looking and what I find more and more often, Mike and I'll take it back to you here is I find that if I simplify things enough, almost everything can be automated. And that's a that's getting to some really powerful places right now. Um, because you can make it look as if you know, all of these things are being done by human beings. And that's a really powerful, you know, resource. Right? So Mike, what's coming up for you?
Mike Abramowitz 10:10
And so that last point is potentially efficiencies might go down? Yes, because everything is like automated. However, if profitability goes up? Well, it's it's something to explore. Because if you're paying for us a personal example, if we pay someone to run interviews, like a human person to run the interview, to recruit, and to recruit students, I pay that individual 350 week plus bonuses, I end up paying her close to two grand a month. Now, what is that efficiency on the two grand a month? Well, let's think about it. And let's, you know, we map out the efficiency now, if I remove the $2,000 expense, and instead, it was like a webinar type of setup, where individuals just pop in at any point in time, they go through and watch videos, and then we have we have a human just interview them afterwards, and not the initial interview. Maybe that would save me 1500 a month. So I would, you know, I would be a net positive of 1500 there, but the maybe the efficiencies go down a little bit, because it's not like a human, it's actually a video, maybe people can easily hop off. But then we can compare and see, well, maybe it's still a net profit. Now, granted, it takes away a job from someone, but that means I could put that person into a different place that produces more revenue for the business. So it's this idea of automation, almost automating being able to automate almost anything, is the way I think, because I want time back, I want time back. And I also want profitability. And I want to, I want to put humans into the most profitable places. So if we can automate something for 10, or 12, or 15, or $20 an hour, and I could put someone who I'm paying 2530 35 $40 an hour, I want to put that person into work that's going to produce more results for the business and automate the things that are more of a lower wage and delegate what I can to virtual assistants and you could go back to that episode. I one thing that you mentioned about the eliminate that resonated with me, there's a great book called The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and Tim Ferriss talks about in the book, how he was able to eliminate certain things from his life, specifically incoming calls and emails, which I alluded to. And the way he was able to eliminate those is because he eliminated incoming calls because of how he set up his calendar and how he set up his schedule, saying, These are the only blocks of times I'm doing an income and I'm doing live phone calls. And he almost set up like an office hours, like a professor where it's like this is the only time available and communicated that to people. And then as far as his emails, he, he started having his VA, check his email for him, and having auto responders on his email letting people know that like, Hey, I might not get back to you right away. So it directed them to not email him as much. So he didn't have to respond to that many emails. So he set up his life in a way where he didn't have to respond to these things. So essentially, he eliminated him by creating a different infrastructure and a model of communication for people in his life. I thought it was a really profound way of eliminating things with intentionality. So that was just one thing that should have happened. Yeah, go ahead.
Andrew Biggs 13:27
Cool. Yeah. I mean, if you haven't read The Four Hour Workweek, like you gotta you gotta pick that up, right? Because, you know, this, this, the mindset, and I remember listening to an old manager mind be like, I can't believe you know, that this is what the next generation wants, they want a four hour work week, like, Who do they think they are? And I remember hearing some of these thinking, you know, I think the way that you want to look at that is not necessarily that you're only working four hours, right? But it's like, you're putting your time where it's most valuable is really the lesson there. It's almost like, if I wanted to work four hours this week, I could that's really what it is, right? Because, you know, you're a better the rich, we, we believe you have a mission and a purpose. And, you know, if you're only spending four hours a week, every single week working on your purpose, yeah, it's probably not, you know, your purpose, you're not using it as like this north star to guide you, in orient you in life the way you probably should. But also, there's some weeks where I want to work for hours, and, and we should be able to take advantage of that. So that's really what I recommend in terms of, you know, your, your interpretation of that book. And once you read it, it'll make a ton of sense. So the, this concept around around automation, it's like, well, what the way we want to think about this, and we've talked about this in the systemization episode, Episode Seven, but you want to be thinking about what's the process, right of how something goes through. And you always want to you know, reverse engineer this, this really cool design and you know, this is kind of our specialty is like reverse engineering the user experience. So once you do Think about, you know, where do I want to take this person? What's the journey want to take them on? Then we can kind of step by step by step say, Okay, well, this is what they need at this stage, this is what they need here, this what they need in the in the transition between once they booked the call to showing up to the call and once they, you know, after they have the call, this is what I want to send them and, you know, we can build that out. Right, using the power of software's, you know, whether it's, you know, just risk list off some of the ones I have listed here, but it's like, you know, Calendly acuity Zapier, monday.com Trello, Asana, you know, you can look at CRMs, right, where you can be sending messaging like HubSpot, Active Campaign, Infusionsoft, Salesforce, you know, I'm using close close.com for salespeople, there's so many different, you know, automations, we can put people through, you know, if you're in sales, and you want to use playbooks, or you want to use outreach.com, like, these are different things that that are available. And what's cool is, it's all If then, right? So again, thinking logically, because part of this might be like, Wow, it's just listed a bunch of software's like, Where do I even start? Well, the first place to start is, you know, where would you want to take someone in an ideal world, right. And then, if this happened, then I want to do that. So in Mike's example, let's say someone comes up for the interview with him and his team. And there's, there's almost two tracks that will split, right. So they're scheduled for the interview, but then there's two checks, they might show to that interview, and they might not show the interview, if they don't show the interview, they're gonna get a certain sequence, right? To maybe reengage them, right. Or if they, if they're, you know, a super big pain in the ass to say, Hey, you're no longer, you know, qualified for to interview with us. And here's why. Because, you know, even you haven't even responded to these emails. And you didn't show up for your interview time. So if they didn't show the interview, then there's also multiple tracks, right, where they accepted for the interview, where they're not where they qualified for the interview or not. And all of these are basically creating what's called a flowchart, right? And you can, you know, map out different flowcharts, I really like using like a Canva, or, you know, a tool like figma, or something like that, where you can kind of visualize what this flowchart looks like. You know, I also, you know, whenever Mike and I are do our gym sessions, we usually have a big whiteboard. And we're just like, you know, scribbling all over, and it doesn't make sense to anyone else. But us. But the, what it's doing is it's walking you through that journey from from A to Z. And there's probably 15 different steps, right to take someone from never having heard of you to, you know, a raving fan. Maybe there's even 25 steps, who knows, but you need to know, what are those steps, and let's automate as many as possible, Michael is coming
Mike Abramowitz 17:42
in, this is what we did, in my, in my direct sales business for that reason, you know, because I was in the hospital for 254 days. And if, if I, if I wasn't, if I was in charge of doing it all, there's no way there's no way we wouldn't be able to produce $250,000 in revenue during that, during that timeframe. And over six figures in profit. So the idea of automation is so critical in order to do that. So I'll walk through real quick, just just what what what I did and put into place, you know, my version of that flowchart of just walking through the user experience. So you listener, I'd like for you to think about, okay, how do you apply this to your business? So applicant is interested, they go to the website, they click, they felt a very short form, its name, phone number, email address. And who sent you to this website, like how'd you hear about this website, they click a button, and that takes them to a Calendly. The Calendly then gives them a time here, pick a time to arrange a meeting to meet with the manager so you can get all your questions answered, and we could get our questions answered. So you can get all your information, we could get our information, right, they find a time, click the button, arrange a time, there's a couple of questions that they answer there. Those are qualifiers, so that way, you know, we know who's who could potentially be a good candidate who might not. So there's the qualifiers on Calendly a range of the time, boom, they click that button. Once they click that button, that triggers on Zapier, so Zapier now knows this person has an appointment. Now that they have an appointment that triggers a couple of sequences. Number one, it triggers an email
Andrew Biggs 19:21
and like what Zapier like, I know we mentioned it but what is that? What is it?
Mike Abramowitz 19:25
It's like the if then that's that's essentially what it is. It's the tool that says if this happens, then trigger something else to happen. So if someone arranges a time on Catlin Lee, then send them an email and send them a text message. So that's essentially what Zapier does. Zapier communicates with these all these different technologies. So it's so so instead of a human having to let me send them an email now and let me send them a text, Zapier just acts as the human that says, Alright, boom. Since this happened, I'll send them email, I'll send them a text so that's My My way of interpreting what Zapier does, it's a communication amongst the other technologies.
Andrew Biggs 20:04
Right? So, so just to like, consolidate that for you, listeners. So basically what Zapier does is it connects all these different software's together, right? So Calendly, can talk to your Gmail can talk to your texting base can talk to your CRM, and they can basically just do actions inside each one of those tools, based upon whatever is coming in that what's called the trigger, right. So we have a trigger. And then we have, you know, the steps that follow the trigger. And quite frankly, depending on how many zaps you want to build, and how much you want to spend on it, you know, typically, you know,
Mike Abramowitz 20:40
I spent 160 a month, I spent 160 a month, we spend 160 a month on that, as a CFO, you know,
Andrew Biggs 20:46
and that's like 1000? Like, how many how many 1000s of actions is that? It's like, it's
Mike Abramowitz 20:51
like 20? Yeah, it's like 20,000 or 30,000? Or more like, it's a lot. Yeah. Maybe up to 100,000. Now, there's
Andrew Biggs 20:59
yeah, there's, there's been some months where it's pretty wild. And so like, each one of those steps is in action, right. And so but what they do is they kind of bill you, but there's like, you know, you get massive discounts if you go up. But you know, you can get started for free. I think they even have a free trial. And then you know, it's like 20 bucks a month to start, right? If you really just need this for a handful of things. So we really do recommend that that's one of the software's you zoom in on. And we're even going to be putting out a masterclass on how to walk people through this because sometimes people get confused, just just you know how to learn this. But once you learn it, it really does open up a lot of doors, sorry to cut you off there, my God. So we can actually kind of just help people gain more scaffolding and context around this. But so you're saying once they zap once they accept the invite on Calendly Zapier connects them, and then they get the email now
Mike Abramowitz 21:52
they're gonna get into a sequence of an email and a text message. So because our CRM that our company uses is very archaic, it's not one of the companies that are on Zapier, and that's something you don't have a choice of is that it's not in my control. So so a lot of a lot of you that are listening, your CRM might be one of those. So ideally, it would create a profile. So it would take the information from Calendly. And Zapier can then create a profile on to your CRM platform. So when a client picks up a call with me on Calendly creates a profile for them on Active Campaign, if a client hooks up with Andrew, it creates a profile for him on Active Campaign. So ideally, it creates a profile in your CRM. And then it also triggers a confirmation email, a reminder, email sequence, a confirmation text, and a reminder, text sequence. Now all of those funnel towards zoom towards our meeting. So now once they get on to zoom, that's like the end of that first part of the flowchart. So the whole model of what I just said is the flow of interested applicant to meeting then now there's the next point of contact, the next point of contact is meeting. So the next question is what happens from meeting until next point of contact, if qualified and good candidate, then if non qualified, not good candidate, then and that triggers the next section of that flowchart. So then you can take go through the exact same steps, I just went through what is next, what can be automated, what can be delegated? And, frankly, what could be eliminated from that process? And you do by doing that, for every step of the user journey of their points of contact, it will dramatically absolutely dramatically show you and reveal how much can be automated without you having to click a button. And it being done with technology.
Andrew Biggs 23:49
Yeah. Awesome. And again, if you're listening, and you're thinking, Well, I don't recruit that many people, you know, I recruit people here and there, but my team is like three people. We've been going at this for three years, we're a small team, you know, we'll just apply what Mike said to your customer. Right? So it's like, you know, what, what do you know, from the customer's point of view, if someone wants to engage with you, what does it take to apply, you know, for your phone to get on your calendar to learn about your services, right? What does it look like for them to, you know, to have some sort of like, lead gen capture, right, you know, at least kind of have like a lead magnet, that then triggers a sequence of emails that maybe tries to encourage them to get on your calendar to learn more. That way. They don't just have the free version, but they have the actual real deal. That's the real solution to their problem, which is what you do for people. So understanding, you know, the power of automation in a in a modern world is, is really, you know, it's almost like an essential skill set. For a modern entrepreneur, to get beyond, you know, kind of a six figure point and start flirting Hang with, you know, what does it look like to be multi six figures to be seven figures? And I'm guessing if you're listening, that's part of the journey that you're on, that you're excited about learning about. Yeah, I
Mike Abramowitz 25:10
think about if you're in financial services or in real estate as an example, you're going to onboard, maybe you're not mass recruiting, but you onboard a qualified agent, that sounds are qualified advisor. Well, what do you do with that person, mom, from my friends in the industry, you take, you're like, alright, you gotta learn how to do everything. So just follow me field train with me just learn from me
Andrew Biggs 25:33
and me for you know, for three weeks and watching this one of my appointments and pick up on something.
Mike Abramowitz 25:40
Exactly. And it's just such an archaic model of training versus, well imagine if there was you just take all of the things that you do, you put it into, like a tutorial, think if IK is what we use for better than rich, you put into torture, or you break it down into a, like a modified course. And what happens is, as soon as this qualified agent or advisor, in order to get on the calendar, or once they set up a meeting to meet with you to go on your field training, it also gives them access to a course for them to go through some modules to learn and how to prep them on how to go field training with you or how to, you know, shadow you. And then after they do their first shadow, then it's like, check what's next, it access, it gives them access to the next section of the course, now that you watched your first shadow, these are the next things that you want to learn on how to do this position. So instead of you repeating yourself. So what's the saying if you find yourself repeating yourself, either record yourself, replace yourself, or there's another art that I can't think of right now. But you get the point that we got to move, we got to think better, we got to move past what we've always done, because there's another way of doing the same thing. And it could save you a tremendous amount of time we do that with vas. When we onboard our new VA clients, Biggs and I were getting a little bottleneck. We're like, shoot, we're the bottleneck of our business where the VA where we teach this stuff. So what do we do? Now when someone clicks submit on their payment, they pay for it, boom, it triggers an email. And in that email, it gives them access to their private discord, it gives them access to the Thinkific course it gives them it shows them how to join WhatsApp, we get a trigger on our and they fill out a Google form. Once they felt that Google form, we get pings them, Hannah, or you know, our lead VA, she creates the groups for them. And we have that a lot of that delegated that way. It's all it's all automated from the time they submit payment to the time they could start working with their VA, because we were the bottleneck, we had to like do a lot of that originally, I was like, Wait, we got to redesign redesign this thing. And it's now it's very much plug and play. That's what we want for you as well, anytime you're the bottleneck, get out of the way and use automation and delegation.
Andrew Biggs 27:49
Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, I just want to maybe address maybe one objection that I hear sometimes around automation. And I'd say like, you know, maybe the most common one might be well, does it feel impersonal? Does it feel that? You know, maybe we are people can tell? Right, that something's automated? And you know, I have some thoughts on that, that I think it's a you might, but it's like, first off, you know, if you look at your email inbox, how many of those you know, emails that you receive today? Do you really think were handwritten directly to you? And of course, you can kind of tell right? And, you know, is there a little bit of, of loss efficiency in that? Because, well, if someone's more more likely to pay attention to something that's handwritten to them? Sure. Right. And maybe in a special case, right, because someone's really qualified or you've been pursuing them for a while, and you have a relationship built up. And maybe they got a call with them two weeks ago, they said they wanted to think about it, and you're following up, yeah, probably don't automate that, you know, like, probably write it an email, sit down, take the 15 minutes that it takes to make that a great email, and really win them over with a white glove sort of experience. But most people aren't like that, right? Most people aren't at that white, they haven't earned that white club sort of experience yet. And they're kind of in this like lead stage, or they're very early on in this in this process. And the fact of the matter is, when you're very early on in the process, you kind of just need volume, right? Most of the time, unless you're in a very specialized sort of sale, where it's like, Hey, I close, like one deal once a quarter, and like I have to stalk my prey on LinkedIn, and like really hone in on who they are. And, you know, send them gifts and do up to a very sort of sophisticated, you know, sale for this one client that I'm targeting. If you're more in a mass market, where, you know, there's a lot of different potential, you know, people that you're reaching, you really need volume early on. And so to Mike's point earlier on it decreased efficiency. That might mean some of your percentages at each of the stages go down. But what you lose in efficiency to gain and in like your overall efficiency, and in your overall effectiveness, because there's just no way for you to scale, sending handwritten emails to every single one of your prospects, Mike, what comes up for you,
Mike Abramowitz 30:20
and especially if you're in so if you're in direct sales, you're in network marketing, you're in real estate, you're in financial services, you're in one of these industries where you have, you essentially have two different funnels, you have your internal operations, and then you also have your external clients. So if you're in direct sales, you have your internal sales team. And then you have those salespeople sell a product, if you're in real estate, you have your internal team of agents, but then you also have the clients who are buying and selling those houses. So you have to think about there's the internal and then there's the external. So what you're saying big, some of them like on the external, you might not have as many clients or in the internal, you might not have that many agents. But either way, having consistent messaging sent to them keeps you top of mind. So if you're selling houses, as an example, if you want to make sure you're top of mind, you want to have a proper follow up, how are you enjoying your home, you might want to have a proper referral, ask, Hey, you know, here's ever, you know, I'd love for you to generate refer, give me some referrals or give me some leads, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to give you a lead or a referral. How do you do that? Well, you probably have an automated, create an intake form, click this, click this link, enter your friends, or your referrals right into this, this database, and then that automatically uploads to your CRM. And that's an easy way for you to generate referrals with a some sort of automation tool for as a follow up as a referral tool. But being top of mind, so if you want, like if you make a sale, then I want to put a customer through some sort of sequencing that gives them messaging. So I could stay in touch stay top of mind every, you know, we'll do 33 times in a 90 day period. And then it's like three times over the next 120 days. So it's like spread out over the course of whatever how you however you want to set it up. And that's, that's an example of how you can use automation, messaging. It's not impersonal, it's intelligent. from that vantage point, but you've already established the rapport, you already established the sale, you already established the connection. So there's lots of ways for you to use this.
Andrew Biggs 32:32
Right? You almost need to ask yourself, well, what's better than getting automated, an automated message, right, that's pre written, or not getting any message at all, because the vast majority of your people who are prospects were somehow in your funnel or, you know, disengaged leads, or, you know, people in the nurture stage, and quite frankly, even your clients sometimes, right, you know, having something get get to them that that touches their heart, right, who's ever signed up for like those text message, you know, things and it's just like, it sends you something like a thought of the day or something, it's like, you know, that's obviously going out to, you know, 10s of 1000s, or hundreds of 1000s of people, but you don't care like it's an uplifting text. So, you know, would you rather have not gotten it. And so that's really what you need to be thinking is like, am I top of mind for people, if by the way, if you're not top of mind for people, then someone else is going to be top of mind for that. So if you know, this is a way to stay ahead of the competition, you know, if you are a financial advisor, you know, someone else is a financial advisors that they know too. And if you're not in their ear, there, someone else is saying, are you really getting this quality of service that you really think this person should be giving you and they're gonna start sweating, you know, swaying you towards their direction. So no matter what, you know, it's a competitive landscape business is a game, if you want to win, let's learn the power of automation, and harness it so that we can take you from where you are to where you want to go. And we really believe that this is one of the tools that you need in your toolbox in your tool belt, my closing thoughts from you, and then we can send everyone off to have an amazing day.
Mike Abramowitz 34:11
Using that as an example, I think about the financial services, how sick would it be, hypothetically, if you had a message where you were able to see your clients average gains, or their their net gains for the year, every month, like this is how they're pacing. And then once once a month or once a quarter, you have an automatically sending them Hey, just want to let you know, this is how many this is what your average gain is for the year so far. Thanks for doing business with us and it was just automatically sent to every one of your clients. Now you might say Well, Mike, what if what if they're down? Well, you probably need to do better job. No, but you probably want to communicate that to you probably want to have that cue. It's like if it's in the red, this is the message that sent Hey, don't worry, here's a resource, give them value. If they're if they're in the black if they're doing well. It's like hey, celebration tax. This is where you're Add this while you're doing thanks for doing business with us. But either way, I think it's a great, great way to provide great service and you don't have to think about it, all you have to do is think about it once, set it and forget it. And then, you know, we you could, you could put it in a sequence that stays top of mind to add value to your clients add value to your staff. There's endless possibilities with automation. And that's why I'm really pumped for what we're going to be offering a better than rich to teach this to help with our masterclass and our mini course, and we're going to be helping anyone in the in these in these types of businesses that can help you level up from where you are and where you could go. And frankly, I mean, the unspoken, right now, the economy is fairly unpredictable. So because of that, we probably want to make sure that you're prepared to over deliver for your customers and over deliver for your staff, as we go into some uncertain times that we're gearing up for during the next as we go to the mid elections. And then we have two years until the primaries, I mean, there's always there's typically uncertainty around this timeframe. And you want to make sure that you are equipped with your systems with your automation. And we would love to support you with that, if possible. So that's my closing
Andrew Biggs 36:13
thoughts. Absolutely. I mean, if you were like, I would say, I mean, it's been great because I have not been worried about the economy at all. Because I know that my business is in my control, right? And so if you're nervous about the, you know, the economy and you feel like the economy can hurt you, you know, you got to change that mindset reach out to us, we'll help you out. Because your business should not be reliant on who's in the White House or, you know, what the Fed decided to do today. Or the tax rate changing like you need to have a business that you know, maybe that's marginally improves it or marginally hurts it a little bit, but it shouldn't be like on you know, shaky ground just because of some sort of policy from Washington, DC. So anyways, that's my closing thought. Thank you, Mike. For yours. This has been fun. If you got value from today, be sure to share this with somebody and let them know that you care about them. And because it's one of the biggest best gifts you can give to us. It's one of the best gifts you can give to them. We've truly do appreciate you taking the time to enjoy and engage with us. If you need anything. Don't hesitate to reach out. And until next week. Remember to leave today. better than you found it we'll see you there bye
Mike Abramowitz 37:40
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the show, please share it with others post about it on social media or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest from us. You can follow us on Instagram at better than underscore rich and join our Facebook group at the better than rich show. Thanks again for listening. We look forward to seeing you next time and remember, leave today better than you found it
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