Streamline your sales process with automation in sales for small businesses

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[Music] the first business i ran um for about five years was was installing and servicing draft beer dispense systems and the business grew um which made me think that i was doing things right but what i didn't know then and i do know now is that the business was entirely manual and the reason i say i didn't know it then was because i didn't realize there was an alternative um when i wanted the business to grow i had to work more hours i had to go out and get more clients and then i had to service those clients and like that was the only path that i saw uh was like four more hours into this the business grows and and that was you know the route that i was on and the result of that was that um i burnt out and i took a business that i was passionate about and that i loved and eventually i just i i felt like i i didn't like any of the paths forward and it hadn't occurred to me at the time that the answer to the problem i was facing would be automation was that i could automate receivables it was that i could automate lead nurture was that i could automate um you know so many different components of that business which would have allowed me to spend my manual time doing the things that i loved and doing the things that i was best at but instead what i found was that i was wearing all the hats it's which just wasn't a scalable recipe and i think the reason i share this with you is because many small business owners are still in that same place where they may love the industry they're in they may love the clients that they serve but there are elements of their business that they have to do that they don't love doing that are going to result in them burning out because they don't know they can solve them through other means and that was certainly the case for me my name is greg from the keep academy team and if you fast forward to today i am an auto automation advocate an automation proponent um and a a small business owner once again with a completely different perspective on the role uh automation can play for for growing a business the transformation for me took place because i happened to move to arizona and i happened to find a job with keep which at the time was called infusionsoft and during my stint there i was indoctrinated into the world of automation and i saw time and time again firsthand how automation could shape a business and the role and the impact that it could have but i also recognized in some of the people that we worked with something that i would have felt previously because if you went back to that first business where i was installing draft beer dispense systems and you had said to me greg the answer to your problem is marketing automation or sales and marketing automation or just automation in general if you had said that to me grabbed me by the lapels i think i would have laughed i don't think i would have embraced it because i didn't believe that automation could do what i was doing i didn't believe that automation could create the experience for my customers that i a human was creating and i was too proud of my business to entertain that i might be doing things that weren't necessarily the best use of my time so the soil so to speak had not been tilled and i see that i recognized that in so many other small businesses as well and so in this video i want to sort of challenge that i want to ask you to consider automation differently to think about it in ways that maybe you haven't been willing to because it can be uncomfortable as a small business owner you're likely proud of your business you're likely and you should be and you might you might feel like automation is a compromise like it takes away some of the control some of the um some of the parts of your business that you could be most proud of and i guess the message that i want to offer is that it doesn't have to there's a quote i like from a friend of mine and a keep certified partner gareth everson who says automation is you being you on your very best day every day and there's something comforting in that you know the greg that ran his first business entirely manually would have been proud and wouldn't necessarily have been willing to embrace automation but there's something empowering about recognizing that the automation isn't arbitrary it isn't an outside influence imposing itself on your business the automation is an instrument that you that i that we get to employ we get to apply it to our business in the areas that it will serve us and our customers and that's the piece of the puzzle that i was missing is that i forgot or didn't know to ask that automation isn't an entity unto itself until we tell it to be it does the things we ask it to do you know this isn't an ai that is thinking for itself although that's a different conversation but automation is the extension of the things that we would do anyway and if you think about it like that it goes from feeling like you're losing control to like you're gaining influence like you're gaining impact like you're expanding the can the other what otherwise would be boundaries for what your business can do and to me that's what automation makes possible is it helps us do more of what we would do anyway it helps us multiply the impact we can create yeah like for our customers and on the world and it helps us amplify the message that we have the work that we're up to anyway i don't i think maybe a resistance that i hear is that you know automation feels like this dramatic shift like if you're proud of your business then the idea of a dramatic shift feels counter-intuitive but automation doesn't have to be all that different yeah it can mean repairing something that isn't working well or rebuilding a process that you know is outdated but it also can just mean accelerating the journey your customers are already on it can mean scaling the number of people that you're able to serve and it can mean doing more of the things that you're proudest of sometimes that happens by simply you know layering and automation to make things possible that weren't there previously but sometimes it happens by automating things that you are doing presently that you shouldn't be or that your team members are doing that aren't the best use of their times or that might be you know driving them towards burnout and so i wanted to just encourage you to take a step back and to examine or at least recognize you know bias you may have or resistance you may have that could be artificially limiting what your business could be doing or the impact it could be having or the the number of of people it could be serving so hopefully this was valuable for you i'd love to hear your thoughts comments reactions in the comments below the video take care [Music] you