When two CEOs of automation businesses get together, it’s a can’t-miss conversation.
Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, joined Clate Mask on this episode of Conquer the Chaos to discuss how to know what to automate in your business, what’s holding people back from taking full advantage of automation software, and how to incorporate AI and automation without losing the human touch your audience loves. Listen to learn all this and much more so you can boost revenue and save time in your own business.
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Transcript
[00:00:22] Clate Mask: Welcome everyone to this episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. I’m Clate Mask co-founder and CEO of Keap and your host of the Conquer the Cast podcast. And today I'm really excited because we're going to talk about one of the things that's near and dear to my heart, and talk about it as one of the keys to success for entrepreneurs. It's automation, and who better to talk about automation for small businesses than Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, longtime partner of Keap, longtime friend of the company?
[00:00:54] Clate Mask: Wade, great to have you with us.
[00:00:56] Wade Foster: Yeah, I am stoked to be here, Clate. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:59] Clate Mask: You bet. Um, for those who have been under a rock or don't know what Zapier is … They are zaps. That's the way you connect it. Tell us a little bit more about Zapier so that everybody listening knows what Zapier does.
[00:01:16] Wade Foster: Yeah. Zapier is an automation platform that helps you automate big chunks of your work. You can use it across any part of your line of business. A lot of folks use it for marketing sales automation, but there's a lot of back office automation that people are doing for project management and things like that.
[00:01:34] Wade Foster: You know, we started as a big integration library where you could connect tools and then we quickly realized, “Hey, it's not just integration that folks are really after.” The integration is sort of like a toehold to this bigger problem, which is people are just doing a lot of like manual dirty work inside these businesses.
[00:01:56] Wade Foster: And if they had software that really helped them streamline the work and it was easy to do, they'd automate a lot more. And so, we've been investing just a ton in automation over the course of the last five, six years to really make it easier for folks to get rid of big chunks of labor inside the organization and allow folks to focus on the more creative endeavors at work.
[00:02:20] Clate Mask: We love what you guys do at Zapier. So many of our customers use Zapier to advance their automation. And you know, if two automation company CEOs got together and didn't talk about automation as one of the six keys to success, I think everybody would wonder, “Hey, what the heck is going on?”, so we will definitely talk about automation and talk about the use cases and how automation changes the world.
[00:02:42] Clate Mask: The lives of entrepreneurs … I say all the time that automation is the great game changer for small businesses. It's the thing that puts hours back in the day for small businesses. It's the thing that enables small businesses to get out of the business of trading hours for dollars. It's the thing that enables small businesses to get the freedom they want and not be so beholden to the business.
[00:03:02] Clate Mask: And yet. Even here we are today, years down the road from when we started our automation companies and many small businesses still think it's a pipe dream. They still think that automation is very impersonal and that it's a technical thing that’s out of reach for them. And so today folks, we're going to talk about the use cases of automation.
[00:03:24] Clate Mask: We're going to talk about how to make it more accessible, more friendly, more desirable for people to use it because it will put hours back in your day. It will enable you to achieve the freedom that you want. So let's talk about that. I'm going to share one little fun fact as we start here.
[00:03:40] Clate Mask: Some people may not know that years ago when we were Infusionsoft, we kicked off at one of our conferences, a battle of the apps contest. And this was like all these different apps that were in the ecosystem and the winner of that first year of the Battle of the Apps was Zapier. You guys were the winners and it was the beginning of a partnership for us that we've been working together on for many years. So thank you for the years. I don't know what that year was. Do you remember? It's probably like 12 years ago.
[00:04:11] Wade Foster: Something like that. I want to say it was 2012. I want to say, and I remember it too, because we had I think five full-time employees at the time. And the gentleman who built the then Infusionsoft integration was actually a part-time contractor and so when you shared, “Hey y'all are going to win this award I was like, “Well, I need to invite him out to come because he built it. He did all the work.”
[00:04:37] Wade Foster: And he was like, “Well, I got this full-time day job. It's kind of weird for me to take off and we'd been meticulous with our money. We didn't like to spend a lot, et cetera. But we're kind of getting that point where we're like, “Yeah, I think we could probably hire another person.”
[00:04:51] Wade Foster: So when he said that, I said, “Well, would it help if you just worked for us full time?”. And he was like, “I think it would.” So that's how that guy got a job offer.
[00:05:03] Clate Mask: That's awesome. I never heard that. That's so great. I love it. Well, let's talk about automation. Let's talk about … Why don't you take just a second and share why you believe small businesses … And I know you guys do automation for more than just small businesses, but I think that we share a pretty common overlap in that we do it for small businesses. Why do you believe that small businesses don't use automation like they ought to?
[00:05:28] Wade Foster: I think it's probably a couple of things. I think a lot of small business owners didn't start their business out of some deep-seated love of technology. They started it because they love gardening and they want to start a gardening business or they loved making tacos so they started a taco truck or they loved, I don't know, selling insurance or whatever. And so that was the thing that they are obsessed about and the technology side of it felt almost like a necessary evil.
[00:06:14] Wade Foster: And so, I think there's a passion challenge for a lot of these folks. And then I think there's probably an imposter syndrome that comes with that as well for a lot of folks where they're like, “Hey, this stuff is pretty technical. I don't really know. I'm not sure.” And that creates an activation energy hurdle where … Look maybe, 10, 15 years ago when you and I were starting, the technical hurdles were pretty real where it was like, “Yeah. This does require somebody who's willing to roll their sleeves up and learn it. But candidly, like 15 years later, you have to learn a few things, but the tooling is really stinking good now. I mean, you put like what's capable with AI too.
[00:06:55] Wade Foster: A lot of times you can just ask the AI, like, “Hey, I run a gardening business. What are 10 ways I can add automation to my business?”. And the AI will give you 10. They're not going to be like the most creative ideas, but they're going to give you 10 really good starter ideas and you're probably going to look at 10 of them and go like, “Well, you know what, these three, I think I could probably do that. That actually feels right in my wheelhouse. And I find the best way for folks to get started is to just break it down to the simple stuff and say, “I end up doing this every single day. Is there a way that I can just simplify this little bit?”. You don't have to start with being like, “Oh, I'm running these complicated machine learning algorithms.”
[00:07:33] Wade Foster: That's not where most people start. Most people say, “Hey, I'm collecting leads on my website over here. Sure would be nice if like those landed in my CRM or it sure would be nice if I got a text message whenever somebody important came in.” So you can start with this pretty basic stuff.
[00:07:52] Clate Mask: Yep, totally. And that's what we see, too. We see that people are driven to it more by the pain that they're experiencing, the frustration, the menial nature of the work they're doing, or the pain of the waste. They see dollars wasted and hours wasted.
[00:08:11] Clate Mask: And what I find is that small businesses they're doing their thing. Like you said, they've got their passion. They're doing what they do. And they don't even realize that this time and money that they're wasting could be addressed. They don't even really … And then it gets to a point where it gets acute. The pain gets acute and they're like, “Okay, hold on. We just spent this much money on this marketing campaign, and we're realizing that a lot of the leads are slipping through the cracks. So, man, if we could just improve the conversion,” or they're hiring people, and they're putting a lot of dollars and hours behind tasks that need to be done.
[00:08:51] Clate Mask: And so what we find is it's the pain that usually gets them to finally go, “Oh, okay, what can I automate?,” And most of the time, our experience has been that people will do that in the marketing arena first because it's where it gets the most acute. You spend money on leads. You're trying to generate new customers and you realize “Oh, there's a lot of loss there,” but I really appreciate your point that there's so much that can be automated and and really just it's a matter of asking, if not the AI, asking yourself.
[00:09:20] Clate Mask: Well, what am I doing over and over again? Why do I just keep doing it again and again? And it seems like if I'm doing this over and over each week multiple times a day multiple times a week, then that's a pretty good indicator that it could be automated. So let's go to what do you see as being the most common things?
[00:09:41] Clate Mask: And I definitely see on the marketing side and maybe you see something similar, but where do you see people start to dip their toe in and then go, “Oh, wow, this is amazing.”? I'm sure you guys have said something similar to what Scott and I've said forever — that once, once entrepreneurs get addicted and they get a taste of automation, it becomes addictive. They start to look at what else they can automate and how they can automate across their business. What are some of the areas that you see where people jump in and start to … you know, the use cases that cause the lightbulbs to go on? They're just like, “Oh my gosh, I got to start doing more of this.”
[00:10:14] Wade Foster: Yeah. I think marketing automation is probably the one that is the earliest recognized. And I think a lot of times the tooling is more often the area that has the fewest engineers attached to this stuff.
[00:10:37] Wade Foster: And so, it's prone for just a smart, savvy person to sit down and go, “Hmm, what else could I do here?”. And then to your point, there are actual real dollars lost if you do this poorly. Your conversion rates are going to be bad. You're going to let money slip through the cracks.
[00:10:51] Wade Foster: And so there's this drive to make it work better. Specifically within marketing, the place that seems the most obvious starting spot is like right around lead generation, lead management, and lead follow-up. That whole pipeline there's a whole bunch of touch-points that are really useful. So on Zapier, a lot of folks will have a forum on their website or maybe they're using Facebook lead ads or Google lead ads or LinkedIn lead ads. You're spending money on those platforms to drive leads their way.
[00:11:27] Wade Foster: And then the first question is like, “Well, you've got somebody, now what are you going to do with them?”. The basic one can be like, “Hey, just text me when I have it and I can call them, right?”. So that can be a simple one if you have low amounts of lead volume coming through. As you start to get more leads coming through, you're like “Well maybe I need to actually store some of those somewhere, so I should probably put that in a CRM to manage it and keep up to date with it.” That might be like hey, you're getting a little bigger.
[00:11:54] Wade Foster: Then maybe you're like “You know what? Now that I'm storing them, I sure would like to know a little bit more about these people. All I have is their first name, their last name and their email address. That's not that great. So maybe I can do some lead enrichment. So I'm going to run it through a service like Clearbit, and now I'm going to know their title, the company they work at, and all this other stuff. And so now I have a whole bunch of other things inside of my CRM that I can do. And then you start to go like, “Well, if I can enrich these things, maybe I can actually run a whole campaign off of this.” So, we had a customer, uh, Siqi Chen, who's at Runway, who set up a really cool one where his website started to go viral. And he went from barely getting any leads to getting dozens every minute. And he was like, “Hmm, I know what I can do. I'm going to run this through Clearbit to enrich the lead. Then I'm going to have it go send a note to ChatGPT and tell me if it's a free email address or not a free email address. Then based on all the lead enrichment and if it's a business email address, I'm going to have ChatGPT write the email that I want to send to the customer and so I'm going to feed it all this information. I'm gonna tell ChatGPT, ‘Hey, you're an expert sales rep and you're trying to sell this and I want you to be direct and follow these brand guidelines. I don't want you to get cute or clever or cringe.’” He just gave it all the guidance and instructions and then he said, “I don't want you to actually send the email right away, but I do want you to drop it as a draft inside of Gmail because I'm not ready to have people send every bit of this automated, I want it to go there first.” And so then, he and the two sales reps on his team, they'd wake up and they'd see a whole bunch of Gmail drafts ready to go. They’d quickly review and they'd send them out and get off to the races.
[00:13:33] Wade Foster: And I bet what's going to happen is over time, he's going to start to realize, “Most of the time I'm just not making any edits.” I'm just going to press send on these things and then now all of a sudden you start to realize, “You know what? This whole automation, not only is it now as good as a human, but you know it's way faster too, like I can have I can follow up with my customers way way quicker, which I could never do that with a human.”
[00:14:02] Wade Foster: I was blown away. I was like, “I only have so many hours in a day and so automation is actually the only way that they could scale or they could throw more bodies at the problem, but they throw more bodies, the costs go up. They have to raise their prices. If they raise their prices, are the same customers going to be interested in it?”
[00:14:17] Wade Foster: And so you realize that automation, it does become a strategic advantage to sell and it all can start with that like basic idea of, if I get a lead, maybe I should text myself, and you can sort of see the like stages of that funnel getting more sophisticated as the company grows.
[00:14:35] Clate Mask: Okay. We're going to keep this going, but first a quick message for you. Conquer the Chaos listeners, let me talk to you straight for just a minute. You're running your business, and it dominates your mind. It can be very difficult to take a step back and see what's needed to create balance in your business and your personal life, and to create great growth and development and progress in your business and personal life.
[00:14:57] Clate Mask: One of the most powerful ways to gain the perspective that you need is to get away from things and immerse yourself in an environment where you're going to be inspired, where you can see possibilities, where you can create connections, and where you can learn and grow and develop. And I know of no better place for entrepreneurs than Keap’s Let's Grow Summit. For years. We ran this conference as just an amazing mecca for entrepreneurship. And then, truth be told, for a few years, we didn't run it. We got back to it last year, and this year, we're putting it on and it is going to be awesome. I am so excited about this.
[00:15:34] Clate Mask: And I want you as our listeners to not miss out on this event. It's going to be November 20-22 in downtown Phoenix with the main days being the 21 and the 22. You can register for it by going to keap.com/lets-grow-summit. That's keap.com/lets-grow-summit. And you can take advantage of our early bird registration pricing, which expires at the end of July.
[00:15:58] Clate Mask: So if you are needing a reflection time, an opportunity to take a step back, gain greater perspective, inspiration, and most of all, see what automation — the fifth key to success — can do for your business, then make sure that you attend the Let's Grow Summit. keap.com/lets-grow-summit, November 20-22 in Phoenix. I look forward to seeing you there. Alright, now back to our chat.
[00:16:23] Clate Mask: Right? Well, I love the example you gave because it highlights how the automation and the human being are interacting. It starts with just the individual getting notified that he has a lead and now, what do you do with that? And I think what I find a lot of times is people, when they're applying automation, they need a little guidance on how to elegantly intervene the technology with the human connection. And then, over time, as they get more comfortable with it, they realize that they can have the technology to do even more and more of it.
[00:16:59] Clate Mask: But in the first place, you called that initial connection of the technology and the human intervention of just being, “Hey, just notify me that I've got a lead. Just text me that I've got that.” And what I see is, particularly in a sales process, it's the elegant integration of technology and human intervention that creates the really personal connections that enable conversions to go up and the business owner to get the yield that they're looking for on their marketing dollars.
[00:17:30] Clate Mask: Is there anything that you've seen, in that dance between technology and human interaction, where you bring those together in a way that's really powerful and very personal, because, a lot of times people, they don't want to adopt the automation because they feel like they're going to lose the personal touch.
[00:17:53] Clate Mask: So anything that you've seen or any guidance you could give our customers that you've seen where they've very successfully maintained that personal touch by bringing together the technology and the human intervention?
[00:18:04] Wade Foster: Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you an example that we use internally, which is You know in the last couple of years we've started to sell. For the longest time zapier didn't have a sales team.
[00:18:14] Wade Foster: The last two years, we started to have a sales team we're starting to sell to larger organizations and so we have a sales reps who are talking to our prospects, and they're educating them, and they're coaching them these are folks that would never buy from us. We tried to fully automate that end to end. That human touch is pretty valuable.
[00:18:32] Clate Mask: Right.
[00:18:33] Wade Foster: But we had a problem, which is that, in the lead funnel, there's a lot of handoffs going on. Now, when we have this going on and a lead comes in, they have a conversation with someone in marketing, something over here, some notes get logged in the CRM. And they get handed off to the sales rep. Now sales has a whole conversation over there. Maybe, in some cases, legal gets involved and has some comments on the terms of service over here. Maybe we're lucky enough to close the deal. The deal gets handed now over to a customer success person whose job it is to help get them up and running.
[00:19:08] Wade Foster: Every step of the way, we are learning something about the customer and what they need and what they want out of that experience. But every time they're moving between departments or teams, that's a place where we have the opportunity to show up as a disjointed, fragmented, big out of touch organization, right?
[00:19:27] Clate Mask: Handoff causes Disconnect
[00:19:30] Wade Foster: Exactly. And so, you know on one hand, we want to show up as humans, but on the other hand, these handoffs are making us actually look kind of like dunces. So one of the things we thought was we still want to have that human own that personal touch, but we have to do a much better job of equipping the person who's just talking to the customer with all this historical context.
[00:19:54] Wade Foster: And so now, what we've orchestrated in our stack is that every time before one of those meetings, we'll look at the daily calendar and it will go collect information out of the CRM, out of the customer management tool, out of like the historical context. And it'll create a brief for the person to say like, “Hey, they've talked to this person.They talked about this topic. They talked to this person.” So now when that sales rep or that customer success person gets on a phone or gets on a Zoom with them, they're still having that one-to-one conversation, but now they're equipped with a bunch of information to say, “Hey, by the way, I saw you talk to Lisa last week about this and she mentioned you wanted to follow up with me, on this particular incident. Did I get that right? Is that what you were wanting?”. And now all of a sudden, it actually feels like a continuation and a fulfillment of a promise, rather than the sales rep going like, “So, tell me why we're talking today.”
[00:20:47] Wade Foster: And they're like, “Well, shouldn't you know? Your own team handed me off to you.” So avoid some of those challenges. And so, where am I going with this? I think the reality is for folks who are maybe nervous about, “do I want to just fully automate this or not?”, You don't have to fully automate it.
[00:21:06] Wade Foster: You can design the experience you think your customers want and you can put humans in the loop and the places that you think humans are going to do the best job. And then in the places where you think automation is actually going to help augment the humans, use automation to support them.
[00:21:23] Wade Foster: So, that to me is like the way in which you should be thinking about it. It's like, what's the best tool for the job here? Because in some places humans are still going to be … I mean, we're unmatched at a lot of things. We're really freaking, freaking incredible creatures. So there's probably places we want to put ourselves in the loop.
[00:21:37] Wade Foster: And then there's places humans work, we're kind of dummies. And like, it would be nice to get like a super machine to sort of augment our skill sets in these other areas.
[00:21:46] Clate Mask: Right. I love that. I appreciate the case study that you just mentioned, because it's a common problem that happens through a sales process and through the onboarding process.
[00:21:56] Clate Mask: And what we find is when, when customers adopt automation, like you said, it's not that they're adopting it for anything and everything. They adopt it for pieces that are very manual. And so, you know, for example, a customer that uses our pipeline tools to manage the workflow of moving a lead from somebody who’s interested in having a conversation all the way through the buying process.
[00:22:24] Clate Mask: If you're just selling something online, you can do that through automation with a funnel. But when you have sales conversations, like you just described in your business like we have in our business and in pretty much any business that has a high dollar item that they're selling, there's human capital that goes into this.
[00:22:42] Clate Mask: There's these conversations that are happening and yet if it's totally driven by human conversations, it can become very inefficient. So setting up a pipeline where with the click of a button, the sales rep can move the prospect from one one step in the pipeline to the next step in the pipeline, and then that can fire off a sequence of communications to the prospect.
[00:23:10] Clate Mask: It can fire off tasks to other team members. It keeps track of all of that. It makes notes in the CRM. All of those little steps that get done with a click of a button are time savings through automation. But it's not independent of the human interaction. And so I draw that example for people because, a lot of times, when people might be hearing two automation company CEOs talking, thinking it's “you automate everything.”
[00:23:40] Clate Mask: No. you start with the manual tasks, the redundant things that have to be done repeatedly, and you package those up in automations, and then you start to automate more and more — like in the first example you gave, where you could actually have emails being written for you, and then you can go in and tee them up and send them off.
[00:23:59] Clate Mask: So thanks for going through that. I appreciate that. Are there other examples of automation that you would call out for people who are listening and thinking … We're going to get to AI in a little bit more detail in just a second. But before we get to AI, is there anything else that you see that you're like, “Hey, here's just low hanging fruit that people need to be taking advantage of that all too often they’re not?”
[00:24:22] Wade Foster: Well, I think the other exercise that can be really helpful for a small business, whether it's an individual or team in that business, is just taking a bit to really document your day. For small businesses where you're waking up and it's just like task after task, go go go go go, this can sometimes feel like I don't have time for that.
[00:24:45] Wade Foster: But It is a really healthy exercise to just sit down and say, "Where are the consistent pain points? Where are the activities I'm just doing over and over again? … Like actually surface those somewhere that you can sit and think about, like, “What could I do about that?”. And the job is not to look at that list and say, “Okay, great I'm going to, in one fell swoop, automate all of this,” right? The job, at least, is just to get you thinking about where this is and then pick one and say, “Hey, there's one thing. Maybe I'm not automating even the whole thing. Maybe I'm just finding a way for an automation to just be a little more assistive here and make it a little bit easier for me.”
[00:25:23] Wade Foster: And then what we find is that folks who go through that exercise and then finally find one thing to automate There's almost like a light bulb moment that goes off where they're like, “Oh I get how I can think about this now. I get how I can use this in my business and it goes from a one-off small thing that maybe doesn't do much for the business to now starting to see the opportunities much more clearly in the organization and it can become an intentional craft of the organization and say, “We're going to think about the ways in which we can reduce waste, improve conversion rates, and make our lives more like … just increased job satisfaction.
[00:26:02] Wade Foster: We can use automation to just make this business more effective as we grow through automation. Just that simple act of observation I find is like the step that a lot of folks just skip over.
[00:26:15] Clate Mask: Yep, totally. We talk about mapping your business understanding from when the lead comes in all the way through to a lifelong client that you know or somebody who leaves your business.
[00:26:26] Clate Mask: There's a whole process there … And identifying the pain points and identifying the breakdowns and where the leaks in the bucket are where that time and money are dripping out of business. So that's a great suggestion. And then like you said, just picking one to start with and kind of realizing, “Oh, okay. We can now automate the next thing, the next thing, and the next thing. So let's talk about AI for a second here. As we come to kind of the tail end of our discussion, you and I have seen automation in the early stages. We've seen it starting to mature. We've seen it … I still believe we're in the early stages of small businesses really adopting automation, but now there's this hyper wave of activity around AI that combines with automation. What are your thoughts on where this is going for small businesses and how they use automation and AI together to create even greater efficiency in their business?
[00:27:23] Wade Foster: Yeah, I think there are probably two pretty common ways that we see customers using it and how we use AI ourselves. The first I already talked about, which is this idea of asking it questions around like, “Hey, what could I automate? Give me 10 ideas” or “Hey, I got this contract that showed up on my desk. Can you help me reason about what this phrase means?” So you kind of have this like sidekick that's there helping you with a whole bunch of problems. Is it perfect? No, but I think it really quickly helps you go from zero to competent at a whole bunch of disciplines really, really quick because you can just go have conversations with it, learn, etc.
[00:28:11] Clate Mask: About 25 years ago, when I first started to really get the power of Google. It's like that to a whole other level. So if you just use ChatGPT as an assistant and don't use AI in any other way, you will get benefits of knowledge, acceleration and progress that a lot of people probably are not yet availing themselves of. I think most people are starting to get there, but maybe not. I like your way of describing that. Just think of it as an assistant.
[00:28:41] Wade Foster: So that's use case one. And then use case two is, what if I actually want the AI to do tasks for me? I want it to actually go do work on my behalf, and there are certain types of work that AI is really good at.
[00:28:57] Wade Foster: It's opened up a whole new set of use cases that was really hard to automate. Or you could automate it, but it would do it kind of clumsily. And AI is particularly good at working with unstructured data. And so what do I mean by that? Well, it could be a document, like a big PDF or something like that, or a big block of text and you go, “Okay, I want you to go analyze the document. I want you to go extract contact information out of the document. I want you to go categorize a whole bunch of comments as positive or negative about my business,” or “I want you to go read all these reviews that I've collected, and I want you to summarize the common themes. What do they like about my business? What do they not like about my business?”
[00:29:35] Wade Foster: So it works really well with unstructured data. The second thing it does is it’s also really good at generating text. So, you can feed it a whole bunch of information and then you can say, “Hey, I want you to go write something about this. Maybe I want you to write a draft of an email, or maybe I want you to go generate a blog post or a social media post or maybe I want you to write a memo of this.” So those can be like really powerful tasks and the thing we found is that you can combine that with more traditional automation to get really high reliability around certain things like that. So coming back to the Siqi Chen of Runway example, he had these deterministic traditional workflows like, “Hey, I'm going to take a lead from my website. I'm going to go enrich it through Clearbit, but then I'm going to go have it generate an email based on all this stuff I found.” And so like, hey, come up with that, whereas in the past, the old way of doing that automation would be kind of a mail merge where it's like, “Hi, blank. Thank you for visiting. I saw you worked at blank company,” you know, and you got that sort of thing.
[00:30:42] Wade Foster: We've all been on the receiving end of those emails. And they're not very good. It just doesn't work very good. Whereas you find the AI version of it and you look at it sometimes and I'm like, “I don't know if I would have written anything better than that. That's pretty darn good.” So, when it's working with unstructured data, that's just where it really, really thrives.
[00:31:04] Wade Foster: I think you can combine that with these traditional workflow software and get AI to literally just go do work for you on your behalf in certain tasks. And so those are probably the two most common ways we're seeing people interact with AI in small business today.
[00:31:20] Clate Mask: Yeah. I appreciate the point of the assistant and then as we see AI get more and more integrated into workflow automation software, it's fun to see customers and partners who grab onto this. I think we're still in the very early stages of people trusting it because it's like, “Okay, well, this can create a campaign for me with multiple emails with landing pages, and it creates it for me and it pulls in notes and data and information from the CRM and it's going to send out this communication.” And sometimes people are not very trusting of it. They're kind of like, “Whoa, I have to see this first and really experience it.”
[00:32:04] Clate Mask: It's not too different than a couple of decades ago, people experiencing autoresponder email sequences for the first time. And it was like, “Whoa, this is kind of a new thing. I'm not sure I wanted to say that three days later or in two weeks or whatever else.” So it does take a little bit of getting used to, but I think as people work with it more and they start to have that eye opening moment where they're like, “Oh my gosh, like that really is better than what I would have said,” then they start to lean into it and realize, “My gosh, for the time savings, if only to take advantage of the 80-20 rule … If I can get 80% there in 20% of the time,” when usually you can actually get even more than that, close to 100%.
[00:32:48] Clate Mask: So yeah, but I do appreciate that learning curve that people need to go through to play with it for a little bit and get comfortable and then be like, “Oh, okay, let's take the next step…” Go ahead.
[00:33:04] Wade Foster: I was going to say, I think this is like a pretty normal thing. The way to solve that is to have a human in the loop and search yourself and say, “Hey, you know, I'm going to have you do all these tasks. And then right before we sort of make it official, I'm going to review your work.” This is just what you would do when you hire an employee.
[00:33:20] Wade Foster: You don't take an employee off the street and just say, “Hey, go do sales calls.” You're like, “No, I want you to sit down next to me and I'm going to do the sales call first. And then I'm going to run the whole thing. And then the next time I'm like, “Hey, why don't you prep for the call? I'm still going to do the sales call, but you're going to do all the prep work.” “Okay. Next time, I'm going to sit next to you. You're going to do the call, but I'm going to watch you the whole time.” And then finally you're like, “Okay, I'm going to let you go do your thing, and maybe I go listen to every 30 calls you do or every 50 calls to just check in and see if it’s still going good? Or any tips and tricks I have for you?”. And with AI, I think you're going to follow sort of a similar progression where you're going to increasingly delegate more to it and you're going to trust it more and more over time as you had a chance to see how it's working and see that it's getting better at these things as you’re able to tune the system work the way you want it.
[00:34:12] Clate Mask: That's right. I mean, there's a reason why we call it training the AI because you're training it and you trust it. You train it. You trust it. It's very much like hiring an employee, but it's been fun to talk with you, Wade. I I love what you guys do to push the envelope of automation. It's fun for me just like it is for you to see small businesses adopt automation and have the light bulbs go on and be like, “Oh my gosh, there's so much I can be doing to save time to grow the business in a more efficient way.”
[00:34:39] Clate Mask: Where can people learn more about you and more about Zapier to take advantage of the ways that you guys are making automation more available to small businesses?
[00:34:49] Wade Foster: Yeah, check out Zapier.com. Uh, we have an amazing blog that talks all about this stuff. If you sign up for the product, we have a Zap guesser. So if you want to describe what you want to build, it will try and go build it for you. I’m active on linkedin.
[00:35:05] Wade Foster: You can find me on X. I'm easy to get in touch with by email, and I love hearing from folks and hearing how they're using automation or hearing their ideas for how we can make the product better, any of that stuff. So if you have ideas for us, reach out.
[00:35:19] Clate Mask: Well, thanks for sharing, Wade.
[00:35:21] Clate Mask: You know, so many of our customers, many of them use Zapier in conjunction with Keap and are using all kinds of different apps to tie things together. I think your greatest strength is your automation. Your integration is really powerful. It's one of the cool things that people are able to use your integration in order to automate things from all different systems.
[00:35:47] Clate Mask: So we appreciate what you guys do here in the Keap world. Thanks for taking a little bit of time and sharing your insights, your passion and thoughts about automation. For anybody who's not yet practicing automation, if you're not using Keap, if you're not using Zapier, you should use them. They can make a huge difference in your business.
[00:36:05] Clate Mask: And if you're feeling like, “Hey, I just need a little guidance on that.” Well, that's what we do. Obviously here at Keap, we're very hands on in helping you to use automation in ways that will benefit your business. So, until our next episode, get out there, push the envelope a little bit on automation and use it to keep growing.