Since 2009 as a Marketing Automation Architect I have worked with hundreds of small business clients.
In just about every case I find that over time the business has accumulated a whole group of unconnected systems, often “free” tools which made perfect sense when the business was starting out. And this has brought success. But now the business is hog tied by these systems as they are not sophisticated enough and most importantly they often cannot be “fitted” together to form an integrated sales and marketing machine. We call this “Multi System Chaos”.
Let me give you a typical example. A business may have these pieces of the jigsaw…
- A website. The business has a website with a Contact Us form. When someone fills in the form it sends a staff member a message and hopefully, the enquirer gets called back at least once. After that, the contact gets forgotten about.
- Google Adwords. The business spends money on keyword clicks and gets a stream of enquiries coming in and then someone in the office calls them back. But there is no organised and planned way to follow up over the long term with those leads that have cost money and there is no idea how cost effective it is.
- Press Advertising. Money is spent on advertising but there is no idea how effective it is. It’s impossible to get a list of previous press ad enquiries and send them a targeted offer by email or direct mail in the future.
- Email Marketing. Staff use a tool like Mailchimp to send out monthly newsletters, when someone in the office remembers to do it. But often clients want to do so much more – send out not just emails but direct mail, texts and even make outbound phone calls as part of an integrated marketing campaign.
- Social Media. A social media expert posts out good news and gets the client noticed all over social media land and then hope people will visit the profile page or website and call in. But there is no planned and systematic way to capture leads and follow up with the enquiries.
- Sales Team. The sales team receive leads as an Excel spreadsheet (or even worse as scribbled Post-It notes), then use the spreadsheet to try and manage the sales follow up process. The sales team quickly convert the “easy win sales” but fail to follow up over the long term on the prospects who are not ready to buy right now, but would eventually buy in the future IF ONLY we can stay in touch. There is no planned,systemised and measurable way to enable the sales team to efficiently follow up over the long term.
- Customer Service. The customer service department just uses Outlook to try and follow up with customer service enquiries, which is not only time consuming but frustrating for staff as Outlook is not designed as a customer support/ helpdesk tool. So it’s all ad hoc meaning potential customer dissatisfaction and poor reviews on social media. So customer service issues hamper future sales and growth.
The above points are just a few general examples. But imagine how your business could be transformed by integrating points 1 to 7 above into a centralised sales and marketing machine? So you start to see there are many systems in your business.
Often as a Marketing Automation Architect, I find that many of these existing “systems” are not documented in any way. They are safely stored in your head or your employees heads and this means that should you want to exit your business then it is difficult to sell as you are the key component of the business. Or when your employees are on holiday, sick or leave then the “system” just breaks and causes you and other staff headaches. If you have ever tried to document systems in writing you will know how sole destroying work that can be, but I show clients methods on how to easily capture, store and update system documentation.
This is what I do for clients as a Marketing Automation Architect. I solve the puzzle and re-engineer existing systems and integrate new ones to build the complete sales and marketing machine for the business which instills organisation and scalability in your business. More often than not, a central piece of the jigsaw of the sales and marketing machine I build will be a powerful piece of software called – Keap / Infusionsoft which is the leading sales and marketing CRM and automation platform for small businesses.
Here are a couple of my clients speaking about what I deliver.
So are you interested in learning more?
If all this resonates with you then let’s schedule a free Discovery call. During this call, I can learn about your business and I can visually map out during the call how your systems currently look when documented – most clients find this an eye-opening session. The purpose of this call is to firstly add value for you and you will start to see how I think and operate in order to transform my clients businesses – and then maybe after you know more about me and the value I can add then you will decide to become a client.
So let’s now please go to this page I have set up for you www.julianmills.co.uk/discovery. Then on the page just complete the form to schedule a free 1-hour Discovery Call at a mutually convenient time.
I look forward to speaking soon.
