Empower Your Business with Sales Operations Automation in Canada

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welcome to Vancouver Business Network where entrepreneurs learn Network and grow I am Roger killin the organizer our weekly workshop for entrepreneurs is brought to you by Telus business the fastest and most reliable pure fibre broadband network in Metro Vancouver our speaker is Stephen log ii-era Stephen is a tech wiz an automation expert and a seasoned Sales Professional his clients hire him to create an automated profitable sales process that save them time and energy and enable them to never miss enrollment opportunities ever again Stephen his own omission he wants to help small business owners to work less and make more through automation Vancouver Business Network members and most welcome guests I invite you now to put your hands together and give Stephen llegará a warm warm welcome everybody my name is Steve Allegra and you know it's interesting because I'm into tech but today's talk is really gonna be not about tech and as I develop my talk I'll tell you why so whether you've been in business for only a few months and I just starting to generate leads or you've been consistently generating leads along with your be in your business you're in the right place well let me see with a show of hands and I gotta want you guys to be honest this is you tell me this is you have a stack of business cards at home that you've never followed up with okay appreciate your honesty you feel frustrated because following up takes way too much time okay quite a few hands one out third of all you've lost sales because you don't always follow up when you know you should alright so if you identify with these things you're definitely in the right place so my promise to you is I'm going to show you exactly how to increase your sales how to automate your follow up and never leave money on the table again when you don't follow up that's what you're doing you're leaving money on the table so again my name is Stephen Luger and I am a certified geek I have a degree in Computer Engineering and a minor in business so I've always been into technology and business right out of college I got a job with IBM doing technical sales I've been in today I've been involved in technology and sales for a big part of my life for over 19 years and I've have I've had several businesses and I've always incorporated technology and most importantly creating systems and processes now when I talk about systems is really important that I'm not talking about technology when I talk about systems when I talk about systems I talk about processes step by step process how to do something once I figured out what the step by step processors are less step-sister step by step system that's when I bring in automation and so I've been I've been doing that for many years and and by doing that I've learned and I figured out ways to save time make things more efficient and as a result make more money so who wants to be more efficient and make more money all right so for the last eight years since I moved to Vancouver I've been in the digital marketing field and setting up automation systems for clients and I work with hundreds of clients helping them to get their back-end systems and their automation set up so a little bit about me and why processes and systems and automation is so important so I have the gift of a DD the non hyperactive kind okay so whenever so the gift of a DD is that I can hyper focus so I love to problem-solve and I love to learn so when I have a problem I need to solve or I need to learn something I can focus and stay completely engaged and focus for hours so customer has an issue I said they're hyper focus and I solve it the downside of EDD is when I have too many things too many irons on the fire I usually just get overwhelmed and I shut down so in my work life as a business owner you know we all we all have a lot of fires that we that we have to put on at the same time so if you don't have processes chances are that you're not going to get things done and I think most entrepreneurs sort of have an EDD streak to him once you agree so and I kind of misspelled the slide here notice that when I was working on this so for 12 years I worked in real estate and when the market crashed and this was done in the US and when the markets with the market actually crossed in 2005 most people talk about the 2007-2008 crash it actually crashed in 2005 people look at the East Coast and the West Coast when he's talking about the market in the u.s. at least I don't know about here in Canada but the trends actually start in the Midwest I used to live in Minnesota and that's where the the housing bubble burst in fourth quarter of 2005 in the Midwest and so I started figuring okay what what do i Anish and everybody says you know if you're gonna do something find a niche so I figured I would find the nation I found the niche when I saw the market taking a downturn and I started figuring out how to do what's called a short sale okay so in the real estate of short sale is when a homeowner owes more than what the house is worth so let's say you have a house that's worth that's got a mortgage of $500,000 and now they owe 250 I mean the the house is worth 250 sorry so there's $250,000 with a negative equity so what I had to do was I had to negotiate with the banks and ask them to take less so I had to build a case around them now the the files were I mean there was just a ton of paperwork there was a lot of things that I had to include I had to build a financial case I had to prove that the property was not worth what what what the bank thought it was worth so I had to build a case problem is that required a lot of paperwork and when I first started doing that men then my ATD kick in talk about really being overwhelmed having to put all this paperwork together all these things together right so when I first started I can maybe do two or three and two or three short sell cases and it would take him about four hours to put together one of these short sale packages to sign into the bank so what I did is I put my you know my engineer head on my tech hat and I first of all I said that I figured okay what's the process and then I looked at every single bank and about 95 percent 95 percent of the process was the same for every single bank and there was this other 5% that was unique to him so I was able to create a process write checklists mind you I haven't talked about technology yet all I did was just create a process this is step one this is step two this is that three and so on as a result I was able to cut it down from four hours to less than one and I was able to scale my business alright because typically in that business you're looking at close to actually close about twenty to thirty percent of the deals you're working on so you got to be working with volume so working from two to three cases a month to concurrently twenty sometimes twenty five all because I created a process I automated it and I went from four hours to less than one hour to submit the short sale package so that I learned a very valuable lesson there about putting together processing systems that automating so when the the real estate market started to sort of bounce back I had to figure out what am I going to do next am I going to continue doing real estate what am I going to do and while I was in Minnesota I met my beautiful wife what she's sitting in the back and she's from Venezuela she was she was in Minnesota getting her MBA and she had applied to her permanent residency here in Canada so she got it and then I was first for the decision what's gonna happen it was really hard for her to green because it did get her green card in the u.s. my business was sort of in that what am I going to do next stage so I said okay let's move to Vancouver now here's the thing as an American thinking hey I'm just going up north right there's no problem here right it's not like I'm going down you know for us down south as Mexico for you guys down south is in the US so I moved up here thinking our to be easy you know saved up some money and moved up here and then realize that if I don't have a PR card a permanent resident card which is equivalent to a green card I can't work so I had to get creative and so there back then there was this website called Elance right I mean this was Elance was good because I could find work and actually paid well eventually Elance got I've got bought out by up work and then all of a sudden it just became very hard to make a living because if people were expecting websites for 40 bucks right back when you Nene lands she could find jobs for two or three thousand dollars so at least I can make a living and I started building websites taught myself how to you know build the website of WordPress then learning how to build membership sites for to deliver online courses then got into digital marketing so and even after I got my PR card it was hard for me to still find a job it's where the the the IT the the technical world here in Vancouver is very it's very competitive so I was forced again to just go back in and figure out how to do this all right and make a business out of it so fast forward a few years while while going to networking events just really building my business I admitted anyone by the name of Dan Locke anybody heard of him yeah calls himself the king of top high ticket sales so before the the high ticket sales there was just a day lock in a circle was just a mastermind and he would teach us marketing and sales and Wow we were in that mastermind he decided it was actually over a dinner conversation that the whole idea if I take a closer was born and we put a team together I build all the marketing funnels there was a guy who did the Facebook ads it was a copywriter so it was a team effort and we launched a high-ticket closer and as a result because I had been learning how to close from Dan actually my business took off even more so I was happy for that because I learned really some closing techniques that I learned from him but most importantly I was able to see I'm the type of person that I don't believe in like you know knowledge is power that's not true applied knowledge is power right so I said you know what let me go - let me go learn how to do this so I actually got a coat I got a job for a coach selling a 5,000 coaching program okay now earlier you know we talked about the ways that you are managing your leads right and the way that they wanted me to Mena's leads was and probably some of you can identify with this it was a spreadsheet and post-it notes and a notebook the challenge was that we were we were getting twenty to twenty-five leads a week so that's a hundred leads a month in a spreadsheet and then trying to figure out who I needed to followup with putting notes color coding setting you know having like 10 million columns to figure out okay I'm gonna follow up with this person and I was in talking about my ad dieter like really kicking up because think about this the first half of my day I work on my digital marketing business second half of the day I took calls I took sales calls so I was doing about four to five and then afterwards I was spending about an hour sometimes two hours just writing notes putting color codes figuring out how am I gonna follow up who do I follow up with who I don't follow up with and I knew I was losing money and also I was losing my sanity in the process so I thought to myself well I did it in real estate I was able to get from four hours to one hour that has to be a better way so I started researching and I wanted to find something that was simple right I didn't want to use so so I started looking for a CRM solution that wasn't like a Salesforce that it's like you know so huge and really complicated so I needed a simple solution that would allow me to follow up properly keep track of my notes and really have a good system but the first thing I did before I found the tech before I found the CRM that I wanted to use I first sat down and I wrote what is my sales process from when the lead comes in so either to when I close a deal and roll the client and then beyond that or to when they say no in sales no is actually a good thing why because it doesn't eat up your mental energy the ones that meet up you run you eat up your mental energy the maybes let me think about it I need to talk to my wife to my husband to God I need to pray I need to meditate right those are the ones that really drive you crazy and if you don't have a good follow-up system to do that that is really going to trip you up so as a result once I put the system together I tweaked it I was able to do to reduce the admin time from 30 minutes per lead to 5 and I tripled my sales the fortune is in follow-up so today really what I'm going to talk about is first of all when I talked to many people I've done some market research and one of the biggest things that I got is some people say well sales automation right so there was this negative connotation around sales and automation and these are the three things I discovered that are not true then I'm actually going to teach you some things and we're going to talk about three steps to never miss an enrollment opportunity again we'd like to learn that and then I'm going to then we're going to talk about how to create your own sales process so that you can 10x your own sales so the 3 minutes about sales automation that are absolutely not true first one following up and keeping track of leads as an administrative nightmare can be but that's actually actually not true if you have a good you if you have a good solid sales process if you know exactly what to do at every step of the sales process and you have simple automation to follow-up actually becomes really easy myth number two you have to be a tech wizard to to be able to set it all up that's actually also not true there is simple technologies out there that makes automation easy and you can also outsource you know the initial configuration then just have them show you how to use it so you don't have to be a tech ones number three and this was the biggest one automating your sales process sounds robotic and you will lose the personal touch when I talk about automating your sales process I'm not I'm not talking about put everything on autopilot right there's ways that you can that you cannot you can you can use automation to save time and optimize the sales process and so that you never lose the personal touch so for example the serum that I use allows me to send emails it also allows me to create templates so whenever I let's say I and I'm actually going to share with you my process for when you're out networking so you guys are going to take home my actual system that you can put into practice right away so I can send out a customized email I just click I just go I open up the email template I hit enter email and I just literally changed the word in there and I hit Send prior to that I had to oh and by the way when I get a business card I can actually take a picture of it and it goes into my CRM alright so there's no data entry right so there are ways that you can use you don't have to lose a personal touch right I'm not a big fan of using autoresponders and can things to move the sales process forward there has to be that personal touch but the whole product the whole point of automation is to say two minutes here three minutes there five minutes there when you add that up at the end of the week you saved a few hours so really I'm never gonna marry the doctor three steps never miss an enrollment opportunity again and its really first up is create a step by step sales process then automate it then outsource it so creating a sales process is really about looking thinking of it as stages right stage one and then there's certain steps that go on that stage and it's gonna be different for for each and every one of you right I can give you sort of a big picture but you have to you have to figure out what what's what it is for you what's every step inside of that sales process so why create a sales process right so you're doing your marketing and if you look at if you look at all of these all of these different modalities everything that I have up here this is actually all marketing all right because when you're networking you're marketing yourself right you're not here just to hear a talk you're also here to meet people to maybe enroll people into your business or find someone that can help you with some challenge that you might have inside your business right that's why you're all here you can begin you can be given talks go to events marketing funnels digital marketing social media referrals joint ventures are huge and I'll tell you why I love joint ventures in just a minute so the simplistic thing with marketing and sales is like a lot of people collapse those together and you really got to keep them separate so the really easy definition of marketing is how you get elite in sales is what you do with I lead until you enroll them into your business or they say no and if you don't have a step-by-step process for what you do with that lead you will miss opportunities and missed opportunities is equal to lost revenue and lost revenue equates the business failure knowing what to do it every step of the way every step of the process is the key not only in business but in life like so for example I love to play softball and I play third base when I'm in third base and the batters hitting if I don't know what's my plan a plan B Plan C I'm going to commit an error probably most likely I'm going to commit an error right so I have a man on first I have a man on second third base here ball comes to me what do I do first step is touch third base if I'm far away from third base my second is try to tag the other person to try to tag the person learning from second to third my point is is that I know exactly what I'm gonna do before the ball comes to me and if you know exactly what to do with throughout your sales process you're gonna know what to do every single step of the way you're not going to be sitting there wasting mental energy right because you have this thing hanging out there what was this person that I wanted to followup with I met her at that now where he let me go to my box of cards so like something you've done before yeah so lost revenues gonna it's you know there's a saying out there that says that a lot of small businesses fail within the first five years I'm number one reason they don't have processes in place right when you're solopreneur you kind of all over the place what about when you hire someone if they're doing their thing and you're doing your thing do you think your business is gonna grow let's say now you have us a team of five if you're all doing your own thing you're gonna fail right so processes is important and this is something that the corporate world knows right they call them SOP standard operating procedures and they have manuals and exactly what what to do right small business owners we really don't think about that but if you want to grow and scale your business you have to have these processes in place and scaling your business is impossible without that so we're going to talk about sales when we talk about processes we're going to talk about the sales process specifically so this is what I've deemed as a seven steps to create a sales process step number almost prospecting prospecting is knowing who your ideal client is and where they hang out right so for example when I'm prospecting and looking for networking events I'm looking for business owners small business owners so I come to Vancouver Business Network or I go to BNI or anything business-related I'm not going to go to a cooking meetup to get clients I got a prospect in the right places then I got to prepare so one of the things I do before I go to networking meeting I actually meet up is kind of nice because you can get a list of who's gonna be there and you can actually research is going to be there and maybe find someone that you want to talk to right so prepare for that is key and then your approach how are you how are you going to approach actually getting together with this person right are you going to meet for coffee are you going to send them a link to your calendar what's your approach to actually connect with this person to go to the next level which is your presentation right presentation could be you're giving a talk presentation can be hey is you're actually talking on the phone with someone and you're talking about your solution you're asking questions right last week was about that the kind of questions that you ask and how to solve without being salesy well that's all part of your presentation at some point so that presentation could be one phone call or it could be a series of phone calls depending on how you run your business right you might have to send proposals you might have to get every you know you know fine get a request for a proposal if you're dealing with a bigger company RFQ they call them right rfqs req request for quote that's what I was thinking up so it might take a few presentations for you to get to finally to the actual sales conversation so you know yes no maybe right and that's when you're handling objections then you get to the closing and it's really important to know when you actually bring a client on board how are you gonna on bore them right are you gonna give them access to your to your online courses do you have contracts as their homework in other words what needs to happen so that your your relationship with your client starts off in a good way and you actually get what you need from them and they get what they need from you so it's also important to think beyond just closing well this is my process for networking so first of all I find a networking event then I prepare for that networking venue I research who's there and then I do I do one or two things either I get a business card then I wait then I want to get home I take a picture of the business card with my app and that goes into my CRM or I might take out my phone bring up my app and actually make an appointment right at the meet up in the case of the business card then what I do is I send them an intro email and this is where this is where I try to keep it personal so the first email I send out these I actually say hey Taryn we met at Vancouver business at work and you said you were interested in the sales process I would like to set up a time for us to talk then I wait for your response so now we're having a conversation rather than your scent of a link right and then he'll probably say yeah I love to me you know my my my schedules available here and here and this is where I don't get into the back-and-forth of hey can you meet Tuesday at 3:00 no I can do Wednesday at far they actually studied this you know what's a back and forth how many times people back and forth people before they can actually agree in a meeting nine times nine times so to avoid that in the second meeting I say hey here's a link to my calendar by the time that works for you and let's connect and I'm really looking forward to connecting with you the next thing I do is there's a terminal marketing calling indoctrination indoctrination basically means in the marketing and marketing speak it's basically creating a low like and trust factor so typically what I what I advise my clients is you know put together some videos a little bit about you and your company so by the time they're on the phone with you they're you're more excited they know more about what you do what your process is and what you offer so I definitely do that give them some homework to do and then I have the sales conversation with them so that could be one conversation two conversations and from a sales conversation is really going to be three outcomes yes no maybe if it's yes do you have an onboarding process that you can fully automate I mean I've worked with so many people coaches specifically that you know I ended up getting ten different emails over three or four days just to onboard I'm exaggerating a little bit at least three four or five emails over an X you know over a five or six day period rather than getting one email with everything I need and typically they're actually writing these emails and sin and touching stuff and sending it out right well this is where you can have an email autoresponder that sends out one email with everything I need in order to start the coaching relationship in the case of a no and this is this is this is something I learned from a gentleman by the name of JFS I know I can still make money off of a null right I can either depending on what that noise I can put them back into the marketing or I have a network of people because I can't solve everybody's problem right I wish I could I'd be you know I I be doing really really really well but I know I can't but here's what I do with a No maybe I don't have a solution but maybe Patti does and then Patti and I make an agreement hey if I send you leads you give me a commission and vice versa right and then you look like a rock star in front of your client because your client went to you to get a problem solved even if you didn't solve the problem you found somebody you found a resource for that client so you're a rock star right and then on the maybe once I had the sales conversation and I and I deem that it's a real maybe because sometimes people say well let me think about it well maybe they're just trying to be polite and trying to get you off the phone or send me something right so part of the sales conversations and when it's a real maybe let's say for example somebody says hey I need to I need to close a deal and I'm waiting for some money to come in I'll be ready to go in a week great so what I do is I make an appointment with them right there and then right I don't send a link or anything I said okay great so you say you're getting by one all by Friday great I'll give you a couple extra days I set up an appointment for Monday right and this is where I use the technology to do all this if it's something a little bit more long-term I do i do what i called my 7 by 24 follow-up and that's basically 7 touches in 24 days and it could be a mixture of phone calls or emails a little bit of both right and sometimes somebody might be a few months down the road and I'll give you a perfect example of something that happen again I have another softball story right I play a little softball in the summer last summer I was in a league and one of the girls that that was one of my teammates she sold insurance right and she says hey do you need insurance and I said well this was maybe June and my insurance doesn't reset till October so I have no need but I said you know what my insurance recess in October I know you I like you why not give you my business out of a problem with that get back in touch me in October that was a for-sure sale 100% she was gonna get my business on top of that she said she'd actually should actually come to my house with all the paperwork bring the stickers and everything so I don't even have to leave my house I was like sign me up October came around never heard from her that was a sale she just lost I'm not gonna chase her it's her job to come and say hey Steven we talked about this in October I'm ready let's hit up the time for you to talk right and I'm just basically walk down the street got my insurance done that person got the Commission so it's really important to have that follow-up and and have a system right and this is where this is where the automation does come in have a way to set you to do list your appointments right I was talking to a mortgage professional the other day actually and one of his problems was that here in Canada the mortgage resets every whatever every five years and as a mortgage broker it's your job to get in touch with a client otherwise the lender will just go ahead and redo the paperwork and completely cut you out right so another very important weight and very important thing to have that follow-up system in five years if it needs to be right so remember I talked about the importance of first like sitting down and thinking about what's my process of what step 1 what step 2 what's step 3 you know or stage 1 and then step 1 2 3 4 right first write it down figure out what that is then automate right a lot of people tell me what software to use what platform should I get I say forget it don't worry about the platform don't worry about the tack first figure out what you want the tech to do then go find the tack that'll do that thing that you need to do how many people have been here at an event and you've bought this piece of technology that you've come home and you've never used because it was a great deal and it was gonna do everything for you including laundry right and then thousand two thousand five thousand dollars later it's basically doing nothing for you right that's because he didn't have a process that would take advantage of that piece of technology so text second right and then you use it to automate and I mean for me it's very simple my my follow up is an online scheduler a sales forecast CRM and an email autoresponder I don't want to make a difference between a CRM and a Neiman an email autoresponder a lot of people tend to collapse those two together a CRM is a customer relationship management system it's how I interact rack of my contacts of my database and it allows me to maintain my calendar allows me to have a to-do list it allows me to send and receive emails right so again when I was looking for that CRM solution I already knew what my process was that I knew what I was looking for and then I can start off with a simple system and then expand it so I wanted something that was also expandable right so the middle part is basically a scheduler the CRM and then the email autoresponder right then there's an app that I can take a picture of a business card when I'm in a networking meeting that data goes into my CRM write document signing right nowadays you don't have to have you don't have to send a document a summit and then they have to print it fill it out email it back to you you can do e sign right that integrates into the CRM system it's also really important to have all your documents in the cloud right somewhere where you can access them all the time so integrate with Google Docs also integrate with my accounting software I want to be able to make phone calls from my system and record those by the way here's a really great tip for you in sales always try to record your calls let your client know I am recording the call because that's how you're going to know how well your conversation is and where you need to go back and maybe change it a little bit so I highly recommend at least when you're first starting even though you're not a salesperson you still have any sales calls record those right having a system that can record right into the contact again it's about having everything in one place so when I was working with the coaches I had the spreadsheet open over here I had my Outlook open over here I had my calendar over here I had my I had a text I had a text file open right so when I wanted to follow up with somebody I had to go go to the spreadsheet oh here's here's a yellow one then go and read the note all now I have to cut paste it into the email then go to my text file take a little bit of copy and I had already put in there that was like five minutes of going all over the place and again my ATD is going ah alright I was able to consolidate everything into one place so I knew exactly what I needed to do I knew what stays in the sales process I'm in right am i in the follow-up stage am I just in the first contact stage where am I in that process I want to think of it as like a like a column and then you can move one person from here to here from here to here from here to here but I needed to know what stage that was in and exactly what happened in that stage so process and again I can't stress enough come up with your sales process first right know exactly what to do so what happens when I'm at a networking event what's step one I'm giving a talk let's step one I'm doing a marketing funnel what's step one how does my lead come in and when that leak comes in what do I do with it what's the first thing I do you're gonna find that they're all gonna be a little similar but there's gonna be some differences and if you know exactly what to do next especially when you start hiring people because now if you're doing all the sales you can have your assistant follow this doesn't those steps with you and do some of the things that you need to do so for example one client that I work here on sales teams right I'm actually gonna be setting this up for him very soon and we're gonna start selling this to his clients so whenever he gets off the phone he uses this app called boxer and sends it to his list was assistant and the assistant goes in she puts the note she puts everything and right now they're using a spreadsheet and doing this convoluted thing that I was that I used to do when I approached him with this he was like oh my god Steven I need to hire you like yesterday so we're actually working on this and first thing is we're creating a sales process then we're gonna automate it so process first automation second third step is outsourcing this is this is really important guys especially you if you if you're what I call technically challenged all right why waste a mental energy first of all trying to figure out how to set this thing up to work for your business and then figure out how to use it on a daily basis right and if you're you're what I call technically courageous and you like to fit over the things they need to put stuff in there then my question to you is what is the highest and best use of your time is it to figure out how to use the damn software and set it up and do all these things and then connect this connect with that right I mean it took me it took and I'm super technical it took me six months to come up with this thing and tweak it and find the right software all this stuff right why don't you hire somebody who's already done the research and figured out how to use it and can just teach you how to use it you know think about a car right what do you need to know to drive a car you gonna turn it on you need to help put it in gear you need to know how to steer you need to know y'all know how to use the accelerator and the brake and usually somebody teaches you how to drive this car family member or friends maybe you go to driving school right so somebody actually kind of unless you did a button you did it yourself and actually crash the car I just said this on the Internet sorry Antonia you have somebody teach you how to do this right so and if it breaks that's what the mechanics for I don't care what happens under the hood and all the systems and stuff I just I just care that when I turn that on it turns on they want to hit the accelerator it goes and when I brake hopefully it stops right so definitely think about outsourcing right away so we've covered that we've covered and we busted the three myths around sales automation that are not true you know the following keeping track of your leads is not it doesn't have to be an administrative nightmare that you have to be a tech wizard to be was set it all up outsource it and number three automating your sales process sounds robotic and it's not it can actually be very personal and then three steps that never miss an enrollment opportunity again humming how many you guys learned something today about your sales process do you have something that you can actually go home and implement right away because I would that was I gave you my system for networking I figure we're in a networking event why not give back to you guys you feel that you can take that home and and put it to use awesome so again create the step by step process automate that process and then outsource and make sure that it's sequential so who wants to take things to the next level all right so my gift to you to the people online is to book a complimentary sales process automation discovery session with me and you can go to automate my sales process comm forward slash supply and you can book a call with me and we can talk about your sales process then how we can automate that sales process thank you thank you very much you've just made something really complicated really simple appeals to my simple mind tell us thank you very much for making this production possible thank you tell us