Automate sales content for banking

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did you know that you can automate your sales process using email marketing well you can in fact we used it to save our company now you're supposed to have a little catchy hook at the start of the video hopefully that will do in this video i'm going to show you how you can automate or at least mostly automate your sales process using email marketing that sounds pretty awesome right well it's entirely true enjoy all right so let's talk about automating your sales process using email marketing now the stuff we're going to be talking about today is mostly relevant to businesses that generate leads and have a sales team but if you're an e-commerce business or you sell without sales people then there's still plenty of relevant applicable information here as well and i'll give you some examples at the end this video also has pictures welcome to exposure ninja art class but before we get started today i wanted to give you a little bit of a behind the scenes on exposure ninja and also tell you a story about why we're so passionate about this topic you see back in 2014 when explosion ninja was still a little wee ninja we ran into a bit of difficulty financial difficulty in fact in october 2014 we lost money this was the first and last month that exposure ninja ever lost money but we'd seen it coming in fact we made a whole bunch of mistakes which led to a situation where we weren't generating enough sales to cover our expenses but we made some dramatic changes in the business and november 2014 was our best month ever then december 2014 was our best month ever again then the following year 2015 was our best year ever and we've continued to grow every single year ever since so what did we change from going from a place of losing money to making money and growing consistently well we changed a bunch of stuff including getting rid of our physical office and returning to being fully remote but one of the main things that we changed was actually doing exactly what we're talking about today automating some of our sales process now if you've got sales people you'll know that there are two types of sales people you have sales people that love doing follow-up and then you've got everyone else and everyone else group is a fairly large group like almost everyone and we were no different we had a very loose ad hoc sales process where the sales team would spend their time working on the leads that seemed to have the most potential whilst letting everything else kind of die on the vine this was far from ideal because we realized that actually the sales people couldn't always tell what was a good lead to be going after so really we wanted them to follow up with everyone but they just didn't have the time now this sort of ad hoc sales process with lucy goosey follow up isn't really ideal because it leads to ad-hoc sales results with loosey-goosey income which if there's one thing that you're running a sales team you don't want that so what we did is we automated the sales process this had a side benefit of allowing us to go from three sales people to one sales person whilst increasing the return that that sales person was able to generate so how does it work well what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to explain but i'm not going to use exposure ninja's model i'm going to use one of our clients who's legal lead generation so they have a five-step sales process and your business will have a x-step sales process as well so whilst i'm showing you how it works for them think about how this applies to you their sales process goes something like this they have a form on the website that someone fills in the second step in the process is that person then receives a letter through the post the third step in the process is the lead fills in the form that sends them by post sends it back to the business and they run through an analysis process the fourth step is they send a proposal and the fifth step is the deal is sold contracts are signed and so on so they have this five-step process now through our marketing work we helped to absolutely pummel them with leads to the point where sometimes they were getting more than 100 leads an hour they had a very very small team so how do you process this many leads through a five-step sales process automatically well you can use this exact process that we're talking about today so how does sales pipeline automation work well at each of these different sales points you can be communicating with the customer you can implement automatic follow-ups so for example as soon as they fill in the form on the website you might send them an email that means email by the way which says thank you for filling in the form here's what's going to happen next you're now going to receive your form after two days or whatever then fill it in and send us back then after another two days you might send them another email which says hey you've probably received your form by now fill it in send it back to us if you haven't received your form by now let's give it another couple of days and then you can reach out to us and let us know once the customer receives the letter through the post you might want to have some automatic follow-up which says hey you've probably received your form by now here's how to fill it in and here's where to send it back by the way if you've got any questions or if your form hasn't turned up yet do let us know and we can send out a replacement or assist you okay once the company then receives the letter back from the client from the potential client they can then send an automatic email out to that person saying hey thank you for submitting your letter our team are now going to start processing it now if the team hasn't processed it after say a couple of days you might want to send out another email that says something like thank you for your patience while we get through your form we've been inundated with responses at the moment we're doing our best to get back to you as quickly as possible now if you know that there are times when you get completely slammed and you're just unable to cope with the barrage of leads that you're getting you might also want to have another email that goes out maybe after five days that says thank you for being so patient we really do appreciate it we know it's taking us longer to get to your form than we would have liked but rest assured we will get back to you so we're keeping the customer informed without the sales person without your sales team having to do anything and i know what you might be thinking well we don't want to send that to them if we've already processed their form we're going to come back to that in a minute now once you send the proposal to someone you'll obviously email that to them and you can then contact them another couple of days later saying hey you've probably had the proposal and you've had some time to look through it just wanted to ask if you had any questions now you can automate that as well then you might want to ask them a few days later hey have you got any more questions about your proposal or are you ready to get started so you might want to add another email there all of these emails are completely automated when they send out the contract they might want to add a follow-up that happens the next day if the contract hasn't been signed they might want to add a follow-up another couple of days after that if the contract still hasn't been signed just answering some of the common objections or questions that people have or just prompting them to give you any feedback about why they haven't yet signed their contract now i know what you're probably thinking how do we stop people getting barraged by emails if they've already moved to the next step of the process for example if we've already sent out their proposal what we don't want to be doing is hammering them saying hey sorry we haven't sent over your proposal yet well all of these steps are going to be automated as you move people through the different stages in your sales pipeline in your crm system these email sequences will stop so let's say that we send the proposal to someone on the first day well they would no longer receive these emails they would move straight into your proposal sequence so what are the benefits of taking this approach well firstly you're ensuring a consistent experience for all of your customers because you have each of these steps scripted out written out automated and timed to perfection you can very accurately measure the performance of your sales funnel over time this allows you to make minor tweaks and observe the differences this makes to your conversion rate on the conversion rate of each step in your process one of the problems that we faced in the early days of exposure ninja was our sales team all took a pretty different and pretty loose approach to follow-up so we didn't really know the impact of that change and whether it was worth rolling out to everyone in the team or whether it would actually suppress response we didn't know but by standardizing our approach we could measure very scientifically the impact of each stage in the sales process and the follow-up that we were doing there's another benefit to this as well though if let's say for example in this case we identify that the proposal has a relatively low conversion rate let's say that only 20 of the proposals that we send out turn into customers well what we can do is we can actually use email automation to fact find and work out why that stage is breaking down and one of the things that you can do is you can add another email after let's say seven days coming from someone else in the business that just says hey i noticed you had a proposal and you decided not to go ahead just wanted to find out if there was any feedback that you had for us this is a very simple casual email but you will get responses from people who say yeah do you know what i was going to but then i did something else or i forgot about it or i didn't think the proposal was compelling enough or or whatever the thing might be but that then allows you to diagnose the process and go through and fix it okay so you might have two questions at this stage firstly how do we actually build this secondly what sorts of things do we need to send in the emails at each stage okay we'll go through both of them so the first question is how do we actually build this well the simplest way to build something like this is through using a crm system which has email automation built in so for example we use infusionsoft which has both the sales pipeline management piece and the email automation other things like salesforce with its various connected offerings can do the similar sort of thing if you're using a separate crm to your email marketing system then you might have to do some linking up through something like zapier and what you'll be doing with zapier is you'll be setting triggers so that when a lead moves through each of these different stages a zap is fired which goes and triggers something in your email marketing system now it's obviously important to set a trigger when someone moves into a pipeline stage as well as when they move out of it because when they move out of it we want to stop the sequence that they're in okay inside infusionsoft this is relatively simple to do you'll set a trigger which happens when an opportunity is moved and then you can build an automated sequence that happens as a result of that okay so the next question is what sort of things should we be sending well this is where it gets really interesting because you can actually design the perfect follow-up or what we call mini indoctrination sequences for the stage that somebody is at well just to give you a real life story to illustrate i'm about to move house and one of the things that we're looking at is getting a garden room built in the garden so we can build a gym there so i reached out to some local garden rooms companies to see what the deal was now it turns out that this is a business type where the sales route is fairly clearly mapped out everyone's pretty much following the same sort of thing so the first step is you fill in a form on their website so that's exactly what i did someone then gives me a ring and they book the second stage of the process which is an in-person consultation so we've got these two steps and then presumably some sort of proposal will happen probably by email and then i expect there will be some form of follow-up or some sort of thing that happens follow-up consultation followed by being asked to sign a contract so i'm expecting this is the process that we're going to go through so how can we use email marketing to enhance this experience well the first thing that we could do is recognize that the in-person consultation is booked for two weeks from the date i filled in the form on the website well that leaves me sitting here for two weeks wondering what's going to happen and giving myself time to back out of the decision this is really far from ideal if they had an automated sequence which was designed to work with the date that the in-person consultation happened so let's call this date day zero and it would be ideal if they had a sequence which worked in the run-up to this so let's say that straight away after booking the in-person consultation i get an automated email that says thanks for booking your in-person consultation here's how they tend to work here are some testimonials from people who've had the initial consultation and here's what they said about how easy the process was great that immediately like gets me a bit warmer and it stops me from looking for other sources because i'm like great this thing seems pretty locked in but let's say that a couple of days later i get another email and uh that email might be here are some examples of the garden rooms that we've built and the different uses well that might be pretty cool that might show me some ideas for mine and it might get me to start visualizing having a garden room then let's say another two days after that i get an email that's here's some of the objections or here's some of the questions or concerns that people have about garden range for example do you need planning permission well that might be pretty cool because that might be a question that i might have then as the day approaches i might get a bit more information i might get a bit more information about the person who's going to be coming around and their expertise and some of the projects that they've worked on i might get some testimonials about that person's work i might get some information about pricing here's the sort of prices to expect and you can see how by building this automated process they could get to a situation where when the in-person consultation happens i'm pretty much ready to go i've had my objections handled i've been sold the dream i know all of the things that are going to happen i know all about the company i believe that they're a great company to work with so i've seen case studies and testimonials and all of that is done whereas instead what's going to happen is someone's going to turn up at the door they're essentially going to be cold because i can't even remember the name of the business so they then got to resell me on the business it's been two weeks since i went on their website so i've got no idea so you can see how by automating this type of thing they could really make this a lot easier so let's say that the salesperson has visited what might they do after that well they might send an email that says thanks it was really great to meet you we're just going to start putting together your custom proposal for your garden room this usually takes two to three days if it's gonna take any longer we'll let you know if i still haven't received my proposal after three days i get another email that says hey we did say two or three days it looks like it's taking us a little bit longer so please hang in there we promise it's gonna be worthwhile right so they're automatically kind of keeping me warm if i'm starting to get a bit antsy and remember there's no human intervention required here because i'm gonna get this sequence automatically unless i'm moved out by the fact that i've been moved into the proposal sent opportunity status okay so we send out the proposal what happens then well if i decide to go for it and i decide to book a follow-up call then great i might not get anything else but if i don't decide to book a follow-up call well maybe i'll get some more stuff hey you've had your proposal just wanted to find out if you had any questions about it hey looks like you still haven't made a decision here are some of the top questions that people have before they consider buying a garden room and here are some of the answers that we find to be most helpful to people at that point or whatever so you can see it's all about tailoring the follow-up to the position in the sales process where your lead is going to be all automatic no manual intervention required now of course you don't have to build all of this out from the word go this is the sort of thing that you can build up over time so you might start with one or two emails at each stage and over time based on the feedback that you get from people you might add more and more emails in you might also want to send them testimonials and case studies throughout here you might want to send them stuff that isn't related to the sales process you might want to send them tip guides you might want to send them some of your content from your website you might want to send them videos whatever throughout the sales process just to keep them in the loop with you and to keep them thinking of you now email marketing is something that we do for our clients here at exposure ninja and we can help you build this sort of automated pipeline for your business we have an awesome email marketing team here who are ready to help so if this looks like the sort of thing that you think your business could really benefit from then all you need to do is go to exposureninja.com and request a free digital marketing review we'll ask you a few questions about your business and your digital marketing and will then put together a review and a plan showing how we think we'd be able to help in different areas including email marketing this service is completely free of charge so if you're interested in working with exposure ninja on this type of thing then just request your free review today you'll also get to see our automated sales process in action as well because that is the first step in our process so i hope you found this video useful don't forget to subscribe to our channel and click the little bell icon because we release a new video every week as well as having our youtube live sessions every friday did you know you can also check out the explosion engine podcast on whatever podcast platform you listen to your shows on just search exposure ninja until next week keep automating