Paul Sokol knows the world of business automation like the back of his hand. Since 2008, he’s been automating manual processes to save time and give his customers the best experience possible. Doing so transformed his life and business, so he set out to do the same for other entrepreneurs and their teams.
It goes without saying that Paul is an automation expert, and in this episode of Conquer the Chaos, he is giving you an inside look at some of his best automation secrets, including how you can use Keap’s new Solution Launchpad to get your business fully automated in less time than ever before or how you can use it to easily share (and sell) your own automations with the world.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Clate Mask: Hi, I'm Clate Mask, and on the Conquer the Chaos Podcast, I talk with inspiring business owners about what it takes to build a great business and a great life. That means more money, more time, more control, more impact, more freedom. So keep listening to hear the tough lessons they learned so you don't have to repeat them.
[00:00:23] Clate Mask: Welcome everyone to this episode of the podcast. I am Clate Mask, your host and co-founder and CEO of Keap. And I'm really excited because today we're going to get to go deep with a mad scientist. We're going to talk with someone who knows more about automation for small businesses than I think anybody else I know. He’s someone who has worked for Keap for many, many years back when we were called InfusionSoft. He's worked as a partner. He's worked with so many different influencers and folks who know how to apply automation in a small business, and so we're definitely going to talk about key number five, automation, in terms of the six keys to success. So without further ado, let me introduce our guest today, Paul Sokol. Paul, how are you?
[00:01:09] Paul Sokol: I'm doing great, Clate. Thanks so much for having me. This has been a long time coming. I'm very excited to be sitting here with you in these blue chairs.
[00:01:16] Clate Mask: I'm excited to have you here too. So tell everybody why, why are you the mad scientist?
[00:01:20] Paul Sokol: Man, so I'm the mad scientist because I've been using automation in my small business since 2008. I don't know if you remember my buddy Flywheel back in the day?
[00:01:29] Clate Mask: Yes!
[00:01:30] Paul Sokol: So we did a video email company in graduate school and that's where I first got exposed to CRMs and doing automation and we were part of the first CMAQ program back in 2009.
[00:01:40] Clate Mask: I totally forgot about Flywheel, that's right.
[00:01:41] Paul Sokol: Yeah, so that's where I cut my teeth on that. And then I ended up working for InfusionSoft as a coach directly. I started in 2011, and then helped about 200 people get started with the software. Then I got pulled into product. And then that's really where everything started ramping up as far as learning how to do automation and mastering automation at scale.
[00:02:03] Paul Sokol: That's where I wrote the InfusionSoft Cookbook, which did, you know, Michelle Bell, just released the Keap Cookbook?
[00:02:04] Clate Mask: Oh, did she really? That's awesome.
[00:02:18] Paul Sokol: Yeah. So the next generation of that's coming out and it's pretty cool. Yeah. I got to be a technical revere on that and so did Jade and Heather Wells, and I think a couple other people. So I just got my copy in the mail.
[00:02:21] Clate Mask: That's so great. The Keap Cookbook. That's got a good ring to it. That's really great. Okay. We're going to get into the cookbook stuff. We're going to get into how do you do … The audience is probably like, “Well, cookbook, what is this?”
[00:02:32] Clate Mask: What it is is really applying automation in very efficient ways. So you're doing the creation of automation in a very efficient way. You're doing prebuilt things, proven things that work. And this goes years back to what you were doing as an implementer of our software, as a coach to a couple of hundred customers over a period of time. You saw what worked over and over and over.
[00:02:56] Clate Mask: And then we said, “Hey, well, why don't you move into the product team and help us package up some of these things and make them available to customers?” And so you did that. That was the original InfusionSoft Cookbook.
[00:03:08] Paul Sokol: Yeah, that was a lot of fun. We did the campaign of the month where every month we were releasing. And the cool thing about it is it wasn't these wild, big campaigns. It was really kind of simple, but they solved the problem and they solved it efficiently. And they got you, well, over 80% of the way there. You could just use it right out of the box. And if you wanted to expand upon it, you had that framework that was there.
[00:03:32] Paul Sokol: And that was a lot of fun to research that, to develop it, and of course, to test it to make sure that when it launched, that support didn't hate me. There's a difference between building a campaign and then building a campaign that a thousand people are going to use all at once. It's a very subtle art to get that.
[00:03:49] Clate Mask: So we're going to get into this, but for a lot of people in the audience, you're probably like, “Okay, well, automation, what does that really mean? I don't know if talking to a mad scientist is going to help me a lot.” Let me tell you why we're going to have this conversation because some people are going to go deep in automation and they're going to be like, “Oh, I totally want to talk to the mad scientist,” and that's great. And we're going to draw out some of that, but it's also the years and the experience that you've had to make it very practical, very accessible for people. To be like,”Look, you don't have to be a mad scientist in order to get the benefits of automation.”
[00:04:22] Clate Mask: And so to me, the expertise that you have, And the day-to-day product usage converge with these proven automations that you've created over the years, which we're now doing more and more of … And for those who are not aware, we've created the capability now at Keap to where our partners can package all of that up in a special edition for their clients.
[00:04:47] Clate Mask: And so now with what we call Solution Launchpad, you as a customer don't have to know nearly as much about how to create the automation and all that stuff. You can just get something that our partners created and use it in a way that's very specific and natural to you. So that's something I'm really excited about.
[00:05:04] Clate Mask: And it takes what you did years ago to a whole new level. It enables people who have great expertise, like you, to package it up for others.
[00:05:11] Paul Sokol: Yeah, the work with the Solution Launchpad has been fantastic because not only can we package up all of the automations, we can package up almost any asset of the system, so it's not just an automation model.
[00:05:24] Paul Sokol: If you just want to push a couple of custom data fieldS or a particular tagging nomenclature or pipelines, that was something that was really hard to do before with the previous campaign publishing. But what most excites me about the Solution Launchpad is the plays and the playbook because there's a difference between giving somebody a campaign and then getting them to actually publish it and to use it.
[00:05:48] Paul Sokol: And with the plays, that's exactly what we give them, which that was a huge missing component. And that was part of what I did many years ago. There would always be a help center article that paired with the campaign that walked you through here's the steps to do it. And now that's just built into it.
[00:06:03] Clate Mask: And you could be built into it. You can actually put your plays into it. You can put your video into it. You can give the coaching, the guidance. It's all of you. You can package all of that up and serve it up to the customer. So when they log in, it just guides them right there.
[00:06:15] Paul Sokol: I like to use the analogy of a video game where it's like the stuff you're pushing is like the cartridge and then the plays or the instruction manual. And before, we never really had the instruction manual or it had to happen externally or something like that. But now we can, like you said, we can upload videos as part of the plays.
[00:06:32] Paul Sokol: The specific checklists are awesome. And there are even content plays to help you write the copy, which copywriting is hard. There's just no way around it. Even if you're really good at it, it still takes time. So having content plays is a big win. So …
[00:06:46] Clate Mask: Yeah, totally. I love both the Solution Launchpad generally and how you can package it up, but then the coaching portal, the playbook, the way you can guide customers. And it's really fun watching people who have expertise like you apply that and then serve it up to customers. So that, you know … Let's take kind of a big step back when we think about the six keys to success and key number five is automation.
[00:07:09] Clate Mask: As we say all the time, it's the great game changer for small business because it gets you out of the world of trading hours for dollars. It enables you to replicate yourself to actually get stuff done while you're sleeping, while you're on vacation, while you're taking care of another customer, while you're doing whatever else because automation is working for you in the background.
[00:07:28] Clate Mask: I'd love to hear how you have discovered more and more over time, how to actually make that come alive for customers — the automation — because it's such a technical thing that people sometimes don't like. They think it's out of their reach. They think somebody else does that. They have a hard time maybe even believing the benefits of growth and profit and freedom that come from applying automation.
[00:07:52] Clate Mask: So what lessons have you learned as you've worked with clients or as you've practiced it yourself to see the growth, the profit and freedom that comes from automation?
[00:08:00] Paul Sokol: So I believe that automation at its core is relationships at scale. And so when you …
[00:08:06] Clate Mask: Relationships at scale. It’s a great way to say it.
[00:08:16] Paul Sokol: Yeah. If I'm going to go ahead and book a call with you and I'm going to … Instead of going back and forth, I can say “Here's a calendar link.” And now I can book calls with five Clates instead of the individual one-on-one things, or if we're doing follow up on a sales proposal, I can send you the proposal and then I can touch base with you periodically if I haven't heard from you through automation. And so getting to the relationships at scale part, it's … What I've discovered is it's all about the milestones and taking people from like the main things that need to happen, and that's what you automate around. Sometimes the things that you're automating around are still manual. It's still something that has to happen. You sometimes still have to produce a proposal but you can use automation and enable yourself to do all the stuff around the proposal.
[00:09:01] Paul Sokol: Yeah, that's what gets streamlined and dialed in. So maybe we're producing 10 proposals and following up with all these people. Whereas before, maybe you could only handle maybe two or so at once.
[00:09:13] Clate Mask: Yeah. So the relationships at scale concept combined with automating at certain milestones, clearing those things that really resonates with me. I remember, years ago, as I was doing sales work and working a pipeline, there were very specific things, specific milestones through the funnel that I knew we had to clear. You get past a certain set of questions and then they go back and they come back and then they go back and ask questions internally and they come back and they've got this new thing. You hit these certain milestones. It was like, “Oh, okay. We got past that objection and now we're ready to have the conversation about them back then, you know, buying our software.”
[00:09:53] Clate Mask: And so you see these milestones and the natural tendency is we put a lot of human work and effort, time and effort around those milestones. There are phone calls that go into that. There are emails, there are follow-ups, and unfortunately, there are a lot of breakdowns in that process that don't happen.
[00:10:14] Clate Mask: So I've always described it to people as it's fixing your follow-up breakdowns, fixing the follow-up failures, but I really like the relationships at scale because I think about conversations I've had with customers over the years, and they've said different lines that are like that.
[00:10:31] Clate Mask: They've said, ”Oh, this enables me to have relationships with hundreds of customers instead of dozens of customers,” or “Hey, this relates, this enables me to go deep in my understanding of a particular client because of the way that I'm able to engage with them with custom fields and doing things like that.”
[00:10:47] Clate Mask: So it resonates with me, relationships at scale. And I really like your point about the milestones and how you automate through those milestones.
[00:10:56] Paul Sokol: Yeah. So like you were talking about proven automations, right? So one of the most common proven marketing automations is the idea of a lead magnet, where you give away something of value for free and that builds your list.
[00:11:07] Paul Sokol: And then that can feed the sales conversation. So that's really like a two-milestone kind of thing. The first milestone is people request the thing, so they fill out a landing page or maybe they text in a number. They're at an event and they talk to you at a booth. And then the next milestone is actually downloading the thing.
[00:11:25] Paul Sokol: Okay. And that's where I see a difference between amateurs and the professionals is they skip that. They'll have somebody request a lead magnet and then immediately just go into the sales pitch. And all they've done is deliver one email that says, “Hey, here's your thing,” and then they just start drilling you.
[00:11:41] Paul Sokol: But that's not how that would work in real life. If I were to send you a book, for example, I would want to make sure, “Hey, did you get the book yet? Have you seen it? Oh, it hasn't shown up in the mail yet. Okay, cool. Hey, I'll talk to you again in a couple of days.” And then once you get the book, “What do you think about it? Did you like it? Cool. Now let's go ahead and talk about building this out for you,” or whatever that is. And that's the relationships at scale. The difference between good automation and bad automation, in my opinion, is people use automation to try and sidestep or abdicate the relationship when really it should be the exact opposite.
[00:12:19] Paul Sokol: If you're automating, if you wouldn't do it in real life, you shouldn't automate it …
[00:12:24] Clate Mask: Yeah, that's a great way to say it.
[00:12:25] Paul Sokol: Because then you just get weirdness at scale.
[00:12:27] Clate Mask: Right. If you wouldn't do it in real life, then you shouldn't automate it because then you just get weirdness at scale. Yeah, and it's the relationship, it's building that relationship, slowing it down, noticing what normally would happen through a series of emails, phone calls, conversations, and then putting that into the automation so that you're nurturing the relationship and bringing it along in a natural course. But you're not doing it. It's happening for you because you've thought about it beforehand, and now you can do that for each person that comes into your funnel and do relationships at scale.
[00:13:01] Paul Sokol: Yeah, absolutely. And this is where things like timing are really handy. So a real human isn't always going to email every single day at 8 a.m. That's just not how it works. If I was inviting you to a party, let's say — actually it is Monday right now when recording this.
[00:13:16] Paul Sokol: So, “Hey, Clate, come out to my party on Sunday.” And if I don't hear from you by Thursday, then you know, maybe as a human, I'll just remember, “Oh yeah, I haven't heard back from Clate. Let me, let me go ahead and text him.” And I do that in the afternoon and then it's Saturday and I'm getting ready for my party and “Oh, I have, I still haven't heard from Clate yet.”
[00:13:33] Paul Sokol: So maybe it's noon when I'm doing this and I hit you at noon. That's the kind of automation that you would want to build. So for the lead magnet, of course you can immediately deliver that. But then if they still haven't downloaded it three days after the fact in the morning, then you can go send a reminder, “Hey. I noticed that you requested this database structure planning tool or whatever, go ahead and check it out.” And then if they still haven't downloaded it in four days, maybe you hit them in the afternoon, “Hey, good afternoon. This is my last reminder to go ahead and get this thing.” Right. That's another thing too.
[00:14:07] Paul Sokol: The devil's in the details with good automation. It's very subtle. So if you send an email at 5 p.m., open it with “good afternoon.” If you're sending it in the morning, “hey, good morning.” And that sells the relationship, not because we're trying to mislead, but because that's what you would actually do.
[00:14:25] Paul Sokol: When I'm writing an email in the morning, I'm like, “Hey, good morning, Susie.” That's what you want to inject into your automation.
[00:14:32] Clate Mask: I think that point of what you would actually do is something I want to press on for a second. Because it is what you do. You're doing it. You're anticipating and expecting. You know your customers so well. You know what the relationship is. And I remember going through this when I was doing sales years ago, I was like, “I know exactly what has to happen,” but it takes time. It takes energy to do that.
[00:15:00] Clate Mask: And so you can only do so much of it, but if you stop and slow it down and say, “Well, look, here's what needs to happen. Now, let me automate that” … I think some people feel like you're taking out the personal touch. No, the personal touch is there. You know them so well because you know what they're going through.
[00:15:14] Clate Mask: And there's something that's really gratifying about when you build out automation and the customer's like, “Man, it's like, you're reading my mind. You know exactly what's going on.” Yes, exactly because we've been through this over and over and over. But I think some people sometimes have a little bit of a hang up on doing the automation because they think it's not authentic when actually, I look at it and say, no, it's totally authentic.
[00:15:35] Clate Mask: You know your customer so well that you can actually anticipate what the process is that they're going to go through and you leave just enough flexibility in there that you can have that live conversation when it's time and you can have the step in there that is purely personal.
[00:15:52] Clate Mask: But when you do that purely personal step, that's actually a fully manual step. It actually augments and enhances all the rest of the automation because the customer now is like, “Oh, you know, I'm sorry that I didn't reply to your texts. I'm sorry that I missed your email. It's been on my mind. I've just been busy doing this stuff.” And it creates grounds for a more authentic conversation, a real conversation that you can have because we shouldn't hold it against them that they didn't reply to us the times that we followed up before. They're busy. They're busy doing a bunch of stuff.
[00:16:24] Clate Mask: That's why companies that do proper follow-up will double or triple their sales because people are too busy to respond when we have the time to follow up with them. So what does automation do? It stacks the deck in our favor. It puts two or three, four or five times more follow-ups in place so that when we actually do make that connection, it's a much more effective conversation.
[00:16:48] Paul Sokol: It is. And I like what you said about what they're going to do and you know who you're talking to. So I recently built a pipeline for a lady who does executive coaching and then they do it in cohorts. So they'll take like 10 VPs, 10 C-level people, and they'll all have one monthly coaching meeting, and then she does the individual one-on-one with them throughout the course of the month.
[00:17:07] Paul Sokol: And that's the fulfillment part of the journey. So in the sales journey, she's obviously sending an agreement that they have to sign and make it all official. And so from an automation standpoint, we built a sales pipeline, of course, because anything that's a high ticket, that you're manually following up with people and investing that human labor, you need a pipeline, period. That's nonnegotiable for me. So what we did for an automation is when the agreement was delivered, or I think it was when the proposal was delivered, there is an immediate … And she does the proposal delivery manually because it's a very high-touch thing.
[00:17:44] Paul Sokol: They're working with the execs and CEOs of big companies. So there are only two automation points in the “proposal sent" stage. When she moved it into “proposal sent,” there was an immediate email that said, “Hey, great, I'm glad we were able to sit down and deliver the proposal. Let me know if you have any questions.”
[00:17:59] Paul Sokol: The second automation didn't happen until 30 days from there. That basically says, “Hey, are you still thinking about it?”. And of course, if they moved out of ProposalSent within 30 days, that wouldn't go. But the reason we did that is she's working with these CEO types. They're super busy. It's longer sales cycles, and in some cases, they don't even have the budgets to do this stuff right away.
[00:18:22] Paul Sokol: And so rather than risk upsetting these people, the best that we could do from an automation standpoint was say, “Listen, if they're in proposal sent for a whole month, go ahead and send a feeler out there, ‘Hey, what are you thinking?’” And even the email itself was like one or two sentences — Just “Hey, how are you doing? I was looking at my notes. Looks like we did the proposal about a month ago. Where are you at on that?”. That's it. That's the whole point of the automation and that's because that's what she would be doing anyway,
[00:18:49] Clate Mask: Right! Well the way you said it was then the second automation follows up 30 days later. And you said just real quickly, unless of course, they've moved out of that.
[00:19:00] Clate Mask: Well, that's one of the beautiful things about automation is it'll go take you out of that. And so you have this backstop of automation, automated follow-up that's happening unless it's not needed. And then it's automatically pulled out of that communication sequence. That's part of the beauty of what automation can do.
[00:19:15] 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.
[00:19:37] 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.
[00:20:17] 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/letsgrowsummit. That's https://keap.com/letsgrowsummit. And you can take advantage of our early bird registration pricing, which expires at the end of July.
[00:20:38] 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/letsgrowsummit, November 20-22 in Phoenix. I look forward to seeing you there. Alright, now back to our chat.
[00:20:59] Clate Mask: Let me ask you this … I know you, you hear me say all the time “the fortune’s in the follow-up,” and I say unabashedly any small business that does proper follow-up can double or triple their sales. And most of the time, when I say that people are like, “Oh, come on, how can you double or triple your sales? I'm already doing all that …” and I say, “No, you practice proper follow-up and you will double or triple your sales.” So I'd love to just hear … you've been practicing automation and specifically automated follow-up for years. What would you say to the skeptic that says, “Oh, well, I don't think I could double or triple my sales if I properly followed up.”? What would your response be?
[00:21:44] Paul Sokol: Well, depending on the context of the conversation and how well we are, I may just directly be like, “Okay, let's go ahead. Look at your numbers. How many people are in your pipeline? Right? When's the last time you followed up with them?” Because I build pipelines all the time, and to this day, I've still never met anybody that's completely, totally on all of their people. Because again, we're human too, right? We'll slip through the cracks, right? But unless you can have a system that says, “Here's my pipeline stages. I've got six new opportunities, four people here, six people in ‘proposal sent’ whatever. And this is when I need to talk to them next,” you're losing money. Period. People are slipping through the cracks. And that takes a lot of discipline. And that habit … You have to be in that rhythm of regularly keeping up on your pipeline and knowing when you're going to talk to somebody and why.
[00:22:40] Clate Mask: Right. Well, and if you take … if you go from a brand new lead through to a lifelong client … So a lead to an initial sale to a long-time client, what happens is between the lead and the initial sale, there are a number of places where follow-up breaks down. Then once they become a client, until they become a raving fan, there are a number of places where the follow-up breaks down.
[00:23:05] Clate Mask: And I was provocatively making this statement to a group of people just before I wrote the book. And I got a … Frankly, I got a bunch of crap for it. You know, they're like, “Oh no, I don't believe this.” And I said, “No, no, you do this the right way. You properly follow-up.” Well, what's the proper follow-up?
[00:23:23] Clate Mask: Well, it's a combination of the number of times you're communicating with the media that you're using to communicate. Because if you're just sending email, email, email, email, email, that's not proper follow-up. So you got to mix in text, email, voice, maybe even mail — a piece of mail — but at least three messages, three modes of communication, media of communication, with multiple touch points with a little personality and a little realness, a little like … Hey, this should be not just dry, boring, but, but hey, I'm interested in actually seeing what this is with some education, some variety, a little spice of life in there. When you do that properly and you start to apply it, from the point of the first lead, even just taking it first lead through to the initial sale, there is so much gold that is left out there.
[00:24:16] Clate Mask: And it's because people don't have the money. They don't have the time. They don't have the know-how and they say … The money can really be solved with a system. They don't have a system. They don't have the time. They don't have the know-how. So I took the challenge in the book to say, “Look, I'm going to show you what this looks like.”
[00:24:29] Clate Mask: And in the book, I laid it out. I said, “Look, here's what proper lead follow-up looks like. And I lay out about a 15-point follow up over the course of 45 days or so. That's a combination of emails, texts, and calls, and maybe even a postcard or letter that's dropped in there. And depending on your business, you might adjust which media you use and how frequently you're going to do it.
[00:24:54] Clate Mask: You use an example where it might be plenty to have three touch points, but as long as they're very carefully crafted and they follow some of the other concepts I laid out there, it can be considered proper follow-up. But I know you've seen it, I've seen it, and people fall so far short of automating their follow-up in a way that will create the fortune. When I say the fortune’s in the follow-up, they fall so far short of it because they think of doing it manually.
[00:25:26] Clate Mask: They don't have a system to do it. And they think, “Well, I don't know how to do this.” So, any thoughts? I know you've experienced this a bunch, but any thoughts that come to your mind as I share what proper follow-up looks like and how people can actually do it?
[00:25:38] Paul Sokol: Yeah. So you make a really good point about mixing up the channel and the mode.
[00:25:43] Paul Sokol: I can't tell you how many times I've been emailing with a lead and then they just stop responding. And then I'll send them a text. And they'll respond right away. “Oh, Hey, sorry about that. I've been getting your emails, let's go ahead and chat,” or something like that, or I will go ahead and mix up social media engagement with people.
[00:26:00] Paul Sokol: So I'll connect with somebody either on Facebook or LinkedIn and I'll send them a message on Facebook, “Hey, how's it going?” or sometimes that's where the sales conversation starts and that's where I house it. Somebody will bubble up on LinkedIn, “Hey, I need help with this.” Cool, and I'm chatting with them there.
[00:26:14] Paul Sokol: And so I use opportunities in my own business. I can't imagine not. I have no idea what my sales would look like. It wouldn't be any good. I've got a custom field for the social chat, so I'm always one click away from picking that conversation up. So the CRM — in this case, Keap — is controlling the relationship. And then it's telling me, what do I need to do? Where do I need to go?
[00:26:40] Clate Mask: Yeah.
[00:26:40] Paul Sokol: And so, ”oh, cool. I’ve got to follow up with this person today. And it looks like the last time we wrapped was on Facebook.” Cool. One click away. I'm back into Facebook Messenger. “Hey, how's it going, buddy? Or how's your project coming?”.
[00:26:52] Clate Mask: Yeah.
[00:26:52] Paul Sokol: And then falling short, that's something that I also want to highlight. Relationships aren't one-and-done.
[00:26:59] Paul Sokol: That's a very transactional thing and that's just not how humans are. We've known each other for almost two decades at this point, and we're going to continue to know each other for a very long time. And that's how businesses work. I can't tell you how many people I've courted in my sales process for literal years before they're ready to pull the trigger and go because life happens — funding falls through or somebody gets sick or just, “Hey, that project got put on ice for now,” “Okay, cool. I'll follow up with you in six months.” Next action date is six months out, and then I just kind of forget about it, and then I do have some automation that's rolling in the background. I’ve got a long-term nurture now … This is a cool one. You want an automation strategy you can use for any business pretty much? Check this out.
[00:27:47] Paul Sokol: I have an annual … I call it a classic long-term nurture because it's classic, like how the old school salesman used to be where they would just drive around their territories and stop in and say hello, right? So I'm doing this with automation. So I've got nine internationally recognized holidays.
[00:28:06] Paul Sokol: Because I have clients all over the world and it's nine emails that go throughout the course of the year. And then it repeats itself every single year and I have an annual habit to, in January, go and rewrite those emails and just twist them and spin them a little bit. But the whole idea is still the same.
[00:28:26] Paul Sokol: I'm showing up every once in a while, “Hey, how's the wife and kids?”. But even then, you’ve got to be careful what you're saying. So like on Father's Day, I can't address that they're a father or that they're a parent or anything like that. So I'll usually say something like, “Hey, it's Father's Day. It got me thinking about people that are important in my life. You're one of those people. How are you doing?”. And then it just repeats. And as long as somebody is in my long-term nurture stage of my pipeline, they're getting that. And there's people that'll be in there for a couple of years, but they would never know because unless they're paying attention to when the emails come in, it's always a slightly different subject line and the messaging is always slightly different. It's a classic long-term follow-up. It's a classic long-term nurture.
[00:29:07] Clate Mask: It’s classic long-term follow-up
[00:29:09] Paul Sokol: It's a classic long-term nurture. Yeah.
[00:29:10] Clate Mask: I love it. It's really great. And it's using that analogy of the rep that's driving around their area and just checking in. It's a really great way to describe it. And you can … There are all kinds of things you can do with video and stuff to make it more personal and make it feel like people are just seeing you and hearing from you.
[00:29:30] Clate Mask: So I love that. So let's shift gears just a little bit and talk about how we … We've talked about mixing up the automation, the follow-up, the nurture with different media. We've talked about some of the nuances and copywriting and how to really grab people's attention, injecting personality, variety, and education.
[00:29:53] Clate Mask: But for most business owners, they're like, “Wow, that's a lot for me to figure out.” And if there's a place they could just go buy it and get it, they would much prefer to do that. So let's talk about pre-built solutions. Let's talk for a moment about the kinds of experiences you've had over the years of where you can just serve something up for, in this case, a Keap customer.
[00:30:19] Clate Mask: They've got an app and we can just get that automation into their app. Yet now using Solution Launchpad, we can push a whole bundle of automations in there. What experiences have you had around that? And how would you … How could you kind of simplify it for the pragmatic, practical customer that just wants to get a hold of it and start playing with it, start applying in their business?
[00:30:38] Paul Sokol: Well, for the person that just wants to start applying it, I would say, go find somebody that's already doing it.
[00:30:43] Clate Mask: Yeah.
[00:30:43] Paul Sokol: So for some reason, Robin Robbins, she comes to mind for managed service providers. So for IT folks, if you're doing managed services, cool. She knows how to use automation.
[00:30:56] Clate Mask: That's right. She’s packaged it all up. It's all pre-done. You don't have to worry about, “When do I send the follow-up? And do I do this? And what about the reminder? Do I do this now? Do I do it by text? What about my email?”. Like all those kinds of questions, she's removed all of that.
[00:31:08] Paul Sokol: Yeah. So go find somebody that's already doing it, even if they're not necessarily using the exact software that you use, there are people out there who are teaching how they do it.
[00:31:17] Paul Sokol: And that'll at least give you a leg up on where to start instead of just having it that blank canvas or that blank sheet of paper where you're like, “I don't know where to start,” they'll say, “Hey, if you're in this kind of business, then we know these specific things about it and you can get started with that.”
[00:31:32] Paul Sokol: So I think about a vertical that I'd love to get into because I'm a musician. I love arts and things like that. I would love to get into doing automation for studios, like recording studios because they have a high ticket thing that they offer, they have a longer sales cycle, and the sale is always pretty much the same — you talk with the engineer and say, “Here's what we need.” And then you schedule time to come into the studio, you record, and then they'll, depending on the kind of studio they are, they'll just give you the raw recordings or they'll also do the mixing and the mastering of it as part of their services.
[00:32:07] Paul Sokol: And all those are milestones. So you can start building automation around those. So go find somebody that's done it because there's almost nothing new here these days. There's just been so many kinds of businesses and so many people doing it. Somebody out there somewhere has tried it and likely found success, especially the more niche it is if somebody's figured it out, they're nailing it.
[00:32:32] Clate Mask: Yeah. Well, I think that’s the best advice — find someone who's already doing it. This is what we've been enabling with Solution Launchpad to get more and more customers to be able to just go, “Oh, okay. Let me grab that package. Let me grab that bundle. Let me get those automations.” And whether they're a brand new customer and going and finding it in a vertical like you described — you're a managed service provider, you're a coach and working with Donald Miller's Coach Builder — or whether, it's a new partner or new customer getting the solution or a Keap customer who might be watching this saying, “Hey, well. I'd like to take advantage of some of these other things,” you'll start to see more and more partners that are bundling up their solutions and making those available. It's one of the reasons why we love our annual conference because it's where people come together and get those things and shortcut the process and start to get automation accelerated in their business..
[00:33:23] Clate Mask: So I would love to see you do something with studios by the way. That'd be awesome. It'd be more and more … We've got more and more partners and savvy users who are consuming Solution Launchpad and creating these solutions for customers.
[00:33:38] Clate Mask: But I think you said it exactly right: Start with someone who's already done it, knows it, and get that plugged into your product that way.
[00:33:43] Paul Sokol: Yeah. Because I can't recall anybody using Keap specifically for things like recording studios or anything like that. I haven't seen it. The closest I've ever seen is there's one single band, I know a lot of bands, there's one single band that uses another CRM and they're not even doing anything crazy, right? They'll go on tour and they'll send a couple of emails, “Hey, we're going to tour. We're coming to your city.” But you know what they do at the end of every single tour, like clockwork?
[00:34:14] Paul Sokol: They come back and they do an email promotion and say, “Hey, we still have tour merch left over that we didn't sell. Go buy it off of our store.” I've not seen any bands ever do that. And it's such a low-hanging fruit. You put all this investment into coming up with the art and getting all the merch printed and t-shirts and hats and all the stuff.
[00:34:34] Paul Sokol: And then you go on tour and you don't sell all of it. What are you supposed to do with all this stuff just sitting in a box in your studio? Well, send an email to your list.
[00:34:43] Clate Mask: Follow up!
[00:34:49] Paul Sokol: Follow up with them. And packaging the stuff up we're going to start to see a lot more of that. I'm working with Partiv on that. He's doing that for dentists. So if you're a dentist and you want to know how to do this stuff, he's been doing it for years. It's probably well over a decade at this point. And pretty soon he's going to have a thing that you can just … “Oh, you're a dentist? Do you want to use Keap? Cool! Use the Parthiv Shah system. And because I'm involved in that project, I'm going to make it as plug and play as possible because that's kind of the cool thing about standing on the shoulders of giants, right? Most of these people, most industries aren't tech savvy, and that's not a slight against them, but they're really good at what they do.
[00:35:26] Paul Sokol: They're the best dang dentist in the world, but they're not necessarily super tech savvy. And so by having something like Solution Launchpad and being able to receive not only the automations, but the instruction manual on how to use it, that'll help you get to value pretty much almost immediately.
[00:35:43] Paul Sokol: And if you do it right, talking about the customer experience and the relationships at scale, if you design that onboarding with that in mind, not only can you sell this solution, you can bring a bunch of people on quickly and they all have an amazing experience.
[00:35:58] Clate Mask: That's right. And then they can consume other automations. They can create them, but it gets them started in a way where they can get to value and get a lot of value out of automation. I'm just so glad we had a chance to talk because as we see partners using Solution Launchpad to create value for customers who don't want to get in and figure out all the nitty gritty details. It's really fun to see what you guys are creating.
[00:36:22] Clate Mask: And it'd be fun to see you do something with studios or something like that. It'd be awesome. So, we had talked about potentially going into a couple of other things, but went deep into automation and started talking about Solution Launchpad and helping people to get the real understanding of automation and what it is and how they can maybe shortcut the whole thing by going and by getting a solution that's already built for them. So thanks for going through that. I know there are probably people who are like, “Hey, I'd love to dig into more of the mad scientist mind here and see what else I could, I could apply in my business.”
[00:36:52] Clate Mask: How can they learn more about you, if people want to know more about Paul Sokol?
[00:36:56] Paul Sokol: Yeah. So if you want to learn more about me, Paul Sokol, I am all over the internet and social media. Just search for me, Paul, S O K O L. I actually just released, for the first time, my own mini-course, which were you there at PartnerCon when I was in the hot seat?
[00:37:10] Paul Sokol: And I was challenged to do that?
[00:37:11] Clate Mask: Oh, yeah!
[00:37:12] Paul Sokol: Yeah. So it was Melody Moore and Sarah Laws and Micah. They all challenged me. They're like, “Hey man, we know that you know what you're talking about. You need to release the free mini-course.” And so that's exactly what we did. We released a … It's about two and a half hours that explains exactly how we think about the milestones, the pathways to get people from milestone to milestone, and it even comes with functional working Google Doc copies of the tools we use internally anytime we're building stuff out. So, that's a really good place to get started. Like you said, for people that ask, “Oh, where do I begin?”. It actually doesn't start in the software. In fact, that's probably one of the worst places to start.
[00:37:48] Paul Sokol: You want to just start with the customer journey. The strategy. What are you trying to do in the first place? And then the tools or at least like two or three layers abstracted from what the actual journey is.
[00:37:58] Clate Mask: Well, and that's why in the six keys to success on the business side, I start with strategy and then go to automation and leadership because when you get the customer strategy right, then the automation starts to follow very, very naturally.
[00:38:09] Clate Mask: But when people jump straight into the software and they don't get the strategy part right, it can cause all kinds of challenges for them. So I love that you called that out and reinforced that point I make all the time — software plus strategy plus services equals success.
[00:38:21] Paul Sokol: It's like trying to build a house. You wouldn't just start breaking ground and building a house unless you had a plan, like an architect, because there are so many things that you can be missing. And unfortunately, a lot of people do that with their automation. They'll just get in there and they'll just start building stuff out and forget that high-level, 10,000-foot view of why am I even doing this in the first place? And should I even do it? That's another thing too. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. Getting back to what we spoke about at the very beginning, if you wouldn't do it in real life, don't automate it because you're just going to get weirdness at scale.
[00:38:51] Clate Mask: It's just weirdness at scale. I love it. Well, the relationship at scale makes so much sense. I love that you shared that. It was fun to go deep on automation and talk with Paul Sokol about some of the things that he's done over the years, but in particular, the things he's doing now to make automation packaged up and accessible for people that just want to get a solution, which I think is most pragmatic users.
[00:39:13] Clate Mask: They don't want to have to go build all this stuff. They just want to go get it and start applying it so they can get the benefits of growth and profit and freedom. And that's one thing I want to just … As we wrap up, all of this is about growing. The whole point of the six keys to success is balanced growth in your business and personal life. Growth, like we want to grow. And that's what automation does. It makes it possible. So thank you for going deep with us on this. It's been a super fun episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. And I appreciate all the years of work that you've done in automation in and around our community, what we call Keap Nation.
[00:39:47] Clate Mask: I appreciate what you continue to do. I know I'm looking forward to our event in November, bringing together a whole bunch of people working on growing their businesses with automation. And I look forward to seeing you there. So thanks for being here today, Paul.
[00:38:21] Paul Sokol: Thanks for having me, Clate. It's been a blast.
[00:40:01] Clate Mask: You bet. Thanks everybody for joining us on this episode of The Conquer the Chaos Podcast. Until the next episode, keep growing.