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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 a video, hopefully that will do. In this video, I'm gonna 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. (logo whooshes) So let's talk about automating your sales process using email marketing. Now, the stuff we're gonna 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 Exposure Ninja was still a little, wee Ninja, we ran into a bit of difficulty, financial difficulty. In fact, in October, 2014, we lost money and 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 salespeople you'll know that there are two types of salespeople. You have salespeople that love doing follow-up and then you've got everyone else. And that 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 seem to have the most potential whilst letting everything else kind of die on the vine. This was far from ideal because we realised that actually the salespeople 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 loosey-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 salespeople to one salesperson whilst increasing the return that that sales person was able to generate. So how does it work? Well, what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna explain but I'm not gonna use Exposure Ninja's model, I'm gonna 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's sent to 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 help to absolutely pummelled them with leads to the point where sometimes they were getting more than a hundred leads an hour. And 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-up. 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 gonna 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 wanna 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." 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 and I are gonna 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 salesperson, without your sales team having to do anything. And I know what you might be thinking. Well, we don't wanna send that to them if we've already processed that form. We're gonna 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 that you can automate that as well." Then you might wanna 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 contracts, 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 is 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 wanna be doing is hammering them saying, "Hey, sorry, we haven't sent over your proposal yet." Well, all of these steps are gonna 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 standardising our approach we can 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 want 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 whatever the thing might be. But that then allows you to diagnose the process and go through and fix it. 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 sorts 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. 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. So the next question is, what sorts 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 routes 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 sorts of proposal will happen probably by email. And then I expect there will be some form of follow-up or some sorts of thing that happens. follow-up consultation followed by being asked to sign a contract. So I'm expecting this as the process that we're going to go through. So how could we use email marketing to enhance this experience? Well, the first thing that we could do is recognise 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 gonna 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 happens. 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 straightaway 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's 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 cause 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 that email might be, "Here are some examples of the garden rooms that we've built and the different uses." That might be pretty cool. That might show me some ideas from mine. And it might get me to start visualising 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 rooms. For example, do you need planning permission?" Well, that might be pretty cool 'cause 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 gonna be coming round 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 sorts 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 gonna 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 gonna turn up at the door, they're essentially gonna be cold 'cause 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 gonna start putting together your custom proposal for your garden room. This usually takes two to three days. If it's going to 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." 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 the sequence automatically unless I moved out by the fact that I've been moved into the proposal sent opportunity status. 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, it looks like you still haven't made a decision. Here's some of the top questions that people have before they consider buying a garden room. And here's 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. And you might want to send them stuff that isn't related to the sales process. You might wanna send them tip guides. You might wanna send them some of your content from your website. You might wanna 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 we'll 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 Exposure Ninja podcast on whatever podcast platform you listen to your shows on. Just search, Exposure Ninja. Until next week, keep automating. (laughing)