Episode 218: Top Reasons a Small Business Should Systemize Their Marketing

Ken

Hey, everybody, this is Ken Tucker with Changescape Web. I am your host for the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast today. And as usual, I'm joined by Ian Cantel, Jeff Steck, and Paul Barthel. Hey, guys.

Ian

Hey. Hey. I just noticed we all have facial hair right now.

Ken

Yeah, even Paul, even though you can't see him. So, you know, we all have been big believers in system, systematized marketing for a very long time. And I don't know that we've really ever actually talked about some of the big benefits of why a small business would want to have a systematized marketing program in place. So I thought it'd be a good topic today. Systemized marketing can help ensure consistency, scalability, measurable results. And we really just are going to go through today some of the top reasons why small businesses should systematize their marketing and maybe even some other related business systems as appropriate. So, Jeff, I'm going to start with you. How do you go about systematizing your marketing to ensure consistency?

Jeff

Sure. So how do you go about systematizing? Well, that's a big topic. We're going to get a lot into it. But I think at its core, systematizing is really about approaching a task with some discipline, right. And then kind of mapping out the steps that you're going to go through and how you're going to do it. What that does is it makes it easier to manage, it makes it more repeatable, and then that drives consistency out of it. So marketing consistency is important because it builds brand recognition and trust. When you look at branding for sure, as we did recently, you know, consistency is a big part of branding. Consistency is a big part of how you show up to your target audience, your target market, everywhere in marketing. And when you start systemizing tasks, you know, building standard ways of doing things, standardizing on, look and feel that that systematization in things like social media posting and your email campaigns, your ad schedules, basically how you approach your marketing, it lets you maintain a regular, predictable process. I was going to say a consistent process, but that's what we're trying to define is, right. What is the consistency in marketing. It also takes some of the workload off. And that goes back to the systematization of it is the automation, if you can, the standardization, the scheduling of your workload. It's a chicken right thing. You're looking for consistency. When you define the things that help make you more consistent, then it lets you be more consistent because you're building that system that approach the standard operating procedures and you're executing it reliably every time you go through lets you identify gaps and fill gaps and just basically show up to your audience better and make your brand seem, you know, more reliable. I mentioned earlier, it takes some discipline to do it. But when you do it, especially if you use automation, especially if you have calendars, it can start to remove some of those things that can feel burdensome, some of those things that can, you know, be the demotivating factors, if you will, to the workload. And again, whenever you start to take away the negatives, you're building the positives. You're building a consistency. A couple of quotes I'll end this answer on is one from Woody Allen. 80% of success is showing up and that's consistency. It's just going out and doing it right. And then Dan Kennedy, a little closer to the marketing world. A lot of us in the marketing world know Dan Kennedy. He's one of the old sages, especially when it gets into copywriting and building marketing systems. But quote from Dan Kennedy. All wealth is based on systems. So if you want to really be successful and you want to really drive the consistency through your business, you got to look at systematizing.

Ken

Yeah, I'll just add to that too. You know, I mean, systemization can actually add a lot of value to your business if you're looking to pass it on, you know, to your generations or somebody, you know, to take over from your company and, and buy you out or even just, you know, get your, your business position for acquisition, you know, and, and Jeff, you mentioned, I think it's Peter Drucker that talks about there are really only two things that businesses do, marketing and sales. I think that's you who always brings that up.

Jeff

I have in the past. Yeah, that's one of my favorites.

Ken

And you know, this is systematizing, one of the most essential to systems that you need to have.

Jeff

So, yeah, if you question the value of systematizing, the value of systems, just look at any franchise. At the core, franchises are about systems. That's really what you're buying when you buy into a franchise. And then the systems drive the consistency. McDonald's isn't the best, you know, cheeseburger in the world, but if you go into McDonald's in Florida and you go to McDonald's in Alaska, you're going to get the same cheeseburger. That's because they've systematized and they have that consistency.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. Ian, you or Paul have any questions or comments, follow on?

Ian

Yeah, I just, you know, systems are what makes things efficient. Right. Like you've said it all really well, Jeff. There's, there's a quote from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, that I thought was pretty good. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You, you fall to the level of your systems.

Jeff

I like that.

Ken

All right, Paul, how does systematizing marketing save time and probably therefore money? Right.

Paul

Yeah, I think there's a couple different parts of that. First of all, if you and Jeff talked about this, if you incorporate processes and you know, standard operating procedures, so everyone is doing things the same way, everyone's on the same page, that's, that's going to save a lot of time. And the other part of that is automation. We talked about this in the past. Redundant tasks can be automated. Right now we're working with voice, voice AI agents where you have small business owner, service area businesses, they're out in the field, they don't have someone to answer the phone. You can put in this AI voice system in place that answers the phone and, and ask questions so people get, they get their questions answered. And because again, we've talked about this in the past that people are less and less likely to leave a voicemail, they're just going to move on to your competitor. And a voice AI system can help with that. Right now I'm building some, some zaps for a client. Not going to go into what that is, but it basically we're creating a pipeline for their internal processes and someone goes to their website, they fill out a form and they choose a product and that the value of that product, the price of that product automatically populates into that pipeline and they can, they can track sales and revenue and it's all automated. Right now they're doing all this manually, so we're automating that process and so that's going to save them a lot of time.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

Cool.

Ken

Jeff, Ian, you guys have anything else?

Ian

Yeah, I would add systems can be super simple or they can be very complex. Even systematizing your social media marketing can be as simple as a starting point of. I'm going to use a particular tool to regularly plan out and schedule my social posts. And I'm going to use these particular templates in order to create a consistent brand message. How those save time is if you're not recreating the wheel every single time you're trying to do a social post, which surprisingly an awful lot of businesses do, a lot of, awful lot of people do, that can save you a ton of time and the payoff is huge because it creates a consistent brand message. It saves your team time. The beauty of systems too, for marketing is that you, you can continue to improve them over time. Right. The, the system you start with today is not the system you're going to have probably in a year, because as your team uses that system for marketing, whichever part of marketing or marketing as a whole, because you can actually have a systematic approach to your overall marketing, you're going to improve that system. You're going to find areas of weakness. And, you know, especially I think it's Michael, a Michael Gerber quote on systems where he said systems run businesses. The people in the business run the systems. Right. So it's almost like, you know, when you get a good system going in your marketing, it's like you're an operator of that system, which saves you tons and tons of time. Just like running an excavator saves you tons of time and digging a large hole, Right?

Ken

Yeah.

Jeff

Going to that point and taking it back to something that Paul said, I think, you know, the, the running the systems also eliminates or reduces, let's just put it that way, reduces errors and omissions and things that then have to be, you know, backtracked and redone and done over. You know, that old saying, well, we're big on quotes today, aren't we? Old saying, you know, there's, there's never time to do it. Something to the effect that there's never time to do it.

Ken

Right.

Jeff

There's always time to do it over. Something like that.

Ken

Right.

Jeff

Eliminating the errors and omissions is going to make it more consistent, but it's also going to save time. And I think there may be a hesitation a lot of people have to systematizing things because, oh, it's going to take time to systematize it. Right. I've got to sit down, I got to think through, I've got to document it. You know, there's a lot of ways to do that, record what you do. Even AI tools can look at recordings and, you know, transcripts and can build, you know, SOPs from that. But I would say if you do something more than, let's say three times, slowing down on the first time or second time to build out an SOP and start thinking towards the system is going to save you time in the long run. You know, think of the, even if you're saving 10 seconds, if it's something that you do a hundred times a week, you know, 5,000 times a year, what does that add up to in, in terms of savings.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

You know, one thing I'd add is that if you're just getting started, you know, perfection is the enemy of progress. And we've run into this in all kinds of different ways that it's not going to be perfect for when you first start out and you're like, I think Ian said, you're gonna tweak it, it's gonna change, but if you wait till it's perfect to start, you're never gonna start because it's never going to be perfect.

Ken

Yeah. Ian Paul kind of talked about in his example of what, what he's working on with a client, you know, the lead management process and how systems can come in and benefit that. I'd love to hear your take on how, how to do that through systems.

Ian

Yeah, so. So let's look at the reverse. Let's look at generating leads without a system. So you put out flyers, you do word of mouth, you have a billboard. Lead management is picking up your phone basically, right? Like that, that's, that's pretty low level.

Jeff

Lead, lead management and remembering to follow up.

Ian

But even in there, right, you, you probably develop a system of answering the phone, how you answer the phone, how you offer people your services. So I, I just pull it back that far because once you get into, you know, digital lead management, you start to get into a whole bunch of systems actually that are kind of piled on top of each other, that lead into each other, right? You've got, you know, so imagine you create an ad on Google, Google Ads. That ad sends you to a landing page. But even before that you've got tracking mechanisms built in so that you can now see, okay, that lead came from Google Ads. You might even have lead tracking with a unique phone number, right? A tracking phone number. There's a whole bunch of things in there. And then they come to that page. There's probably a system in some way of how you communicate on that page in order to get people to act, in order to help them through their buyer's journey. Because, you know, We've talked about StoryBrand in the past. That's actually a system, right? That's a process, but it's a system, a systematic way to create communication that's going to have a desired effect. And then once that person comes to that page, they might watch a video, but you have a core call to action that you've systematically thought about in order to have them take that next step. And sometimes you have a primary call to action and then a secondary call to action which they might not Be ready to buy. But they might want to get a downloadable document, a PDF, a lead magnet that then gets them into your nurturing sequence, which is a whole other system. Right. So I think from a lead management side, all of this needs to eventually drip into or go into a CRM system, a rich marketing automation and CRM system, so that you can track those leads, you can communicate through that system, you can create opportunities, engage where they are in the process of buying from you, and you know, what, what answers or what questions they have, what pain points they have, and what your solutions are like. There's so much that goes into lead management, I think, you know, without having a system, it's like you're recreating it. You probably have something in your mind of how you approach this if you don't have a system. But having a system frees you to be far more effective to effectively connect with the people in, in that lead journey and then ultimately to close the deal. And, and one of the other quotes from Peter Drucker is if you don't measure it, you can't improve it. Right. And so, you know, that's inherent within systems in that without a system, you can't look at it objectively and say, hey, you know, that, that connection between those two things, that conversion rate between, you know, this part of the lead process and this part of the lead process isn't working very well. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. So I think that's, you know, I think it's really, really important from a, from a lead process, a lead generation, and a lead management standpoint, that you're able to create a system that's reproducible, because for most businesses, you don't have just one product or service. You have multiples. And you would need to create kind of these multiple streams in order for them to be most effective.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, one thing that blows me away is how few businesses I see out there, small businesses in particular, that don't have a system to even just capture and respond to every lead that comes in. Paul talked about AI voice assistance. You know, we've got AI chat bots, Missed call, text back, you know, but the core, the key thing is, you know, Jay Baer on our podcast a year ago, talked about how important speed of response is. And if you don't want to compete on price, then be the first to respond. That's the answer, folks. And so at a minimum, start. You know, I mean, as Ian talked about, there are multiple systems that you have in place, that all of that has to be set up based on if you're actually capturing and following up with those leads initially to get them to pique their interest, to say, okay, yeah, I, I am not just somebody who's, you know, reaching out to the business. I'm actually a legitimate interested potential buyer.

Ian

So Ken, let me add one more thing because you brought up the voice AI part, but it, this particular anecdote I think fits really well here. So we have a, an accounting client. They're, they're a CPA and we've been doing a lot of lead generation for them over the years. And one of the things that we have in place is call tracking. And so we can determine and attribute the source of where those calls are coming from. But the beauty of it also is that the calls are recorded so you can actually audit what is the quality of these calls from say filter out just Google Ads, which is the lead funnel, part of the lead funnel. And what we found was anything after hours. He had a call center set up and, and it was disastrous. Like the call center was very, very low quality. They were losing opportunities for him. They were saying things that just put a stop to the conversation. And he wouldn't have known about that in general, but very specifically with regard to something he's paying us to do, which is to generate these leads. So he's, he's, it's not just a loss, you know, in these opportunities, it's a loss because you're also investing in these lead opportunities. And so, you know, voice AI agents is a fantastic thing that I'm so excited about because not only can you again track and attribute and record these calls, but because it can be integrated within the CRM and marketing automation system. That whole process of getting a call, having the AI be able to respond and answer to people's questions and, and then send them an appointment link and then track all that within the system and ping you as the business owner and even escalate emergency calls if you're an electrician or a plumber. So powerful. And I think it's something that takes it whole next step. But I think it's so valuable in the lead generation process.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. I think you're going to be doing leading an episode on that very topic here shortly too. So yeah, so we'll get more, much more into that for sure. So stay tuned. Maybe even as early as next week or the following week or well after the holidays. Anyway, I'm going to stop babbling now, Jeff. I'VE got another question for you. So, Ian kind of hit upon this a little bit, but, you know, measuring return on investment is often really a struggle for a lot of businesses. And you know, so talk about how systematized marketing helps to solve that problem because that's, you know, a lot of people don't want to continue to invest in something that, where they can't really feel like or quantify the, the results that they're getting.

Jeff

Yeah. Another way, everyone always wants to talk about roi. And it's very important. If you don't have your, your, you know, finger on the pulse of the financials in your business, then you don't have a serious business. But ROI is, you know, it can be approached a couple of different ways.

Ken

Right.

Jeff

And, but one of the big ones is make sure your money is spent wisely and as efficiently as possible. So there's that efficiency word. Now we're back to systematizing things and making sure that they're done in a predictable, repeatable way. And one that lets you gather as we're just talking about information analytics so you can experiment or make changes and make improvements because that's how you, you get to where you want to be as you make a lot of incremental improvements. And going back to the last question, the lead generation one, you know, if you've got a lead generation funnel, everyone always wants to focus on how do I get more leads, you know, more leads in the top of the funnel, but at every level, leads are falling out of the funnel. And if you can improve incrementally, a little improvement in your close rate, a little improved rate in each level, working up the funnel, the, the, it's multiplicative, right? The, the roi, therefore, can be huge. What's that? Ian?

Ian

That's an awesome word.

Jeff

Multiplicative.

Ian

Is it real?

Jeff

I think so, yeah. I don't know.

Paul

Cool.

Jeff

I was a math major, so at one point, before I was a computer science major, but yeah. So when your marketing is systematized, you can track the performance, you get greater accuracy, you have numbers to work with, and those incremental improvements become possible, those experiments become possible. So tools like CRMs, analytics platforms, they make it easy to monitor these metrics and get the data that before may have just been thumb in the wind. Guess so when you're looking at cost per leads, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, these are all things that you can look at. And then you've got a lot of dials and knobs you can start tuning and playing around with to increase the performance of the business, decrease waste, you know, and therefore overall improve your roi. Systematizing can reduce the number of variables in a system. You know, if you do things different ways at different times, it's hard to tell, you know, what's working, what's not working, what, what's cause and effect of doing something when it's not the same every time, or if you want to change one thing and see what the effect is, you got to make sure that you're holding all the other variables constant so that they're not, you know, potential contributors to the new, the new results. So when you reduce a number of variables, again, we're back to that consistency. We're back to the ability to look at data and improve things and therefore increase the roi. Controlled experimentation I just talked about that I think is a big benefit from systematizing. You know, the different points in the process of the system that you built and therefore you can focus on one at a time and try different experiments. But also from an HR perspective, I think this is one especially for a little bit larger businesses that gets overlooked. From an HR perspective. If you can increase your job satisfaction, therefore increase your retention or give people, you know, clear expectations of what they need to do and when they, what they need to do to move up, that's going to reduce your turnover, it's going to improve your productivity and that goes into ROI as well. So again, I go back to the, don't be hesitant. Oh, people don't want to be told, you know, how to do things step by step list. Yeah, a lot of times they do. A lot of times people not having clear goals and expectations or clear direction is a contributor to low morale and them causing to start looking around. So it can affect the ROI directly or indirectly through the, through the people in the turnover and all the second order effects that come in when you have to deal with those other things. Things. So yeah, systematizing, Huge, huge driver for roi. Yeah.

Paul

Cool.

Ken

Paul, can you talk about the systematizing marketing to support scalability?

Paul

Yeah, you know, again I think it goes back to processes and automation. You know, we had a, well, we have a mobile inspection client out in California and when someone schedule an appointment or wanted to schedule an appointment, the person in the office, they, they were doing everything manually. They were sending out the emails that the here's your appointment time and here's what to expect and here's how you prepare. And then after the mold inspection they were sending out another email about when they could expect their results and if they had Any questions to contact the inspector about the results. And they were doing all this manually. And you know, there is a finite amount of time in a day to do that. So we automated that entire process. So now it's once the appointment is booked, it's that whole process is automated. So that can happen 24 hours a day. And so that right there goes to scalability. Because a person isn't going to work 24 hours a day, but an automated system can. And so it, I mean, she told me that that freed up after we got everything in place, she said that freed up about four hours a day for her. So that's, that's scalability.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, I've talked about, you know, even something as simple as creating videos for answering frequently asked questions that don't tie up your staff's time. You know, again, it's developing a system and just doing it, identifying those questions that maybe, you know, generate a service call that's not profitable for your business. Like, you know, the programming thermostat, you know, when you go do that service call, by the time the, the tech gets there, performs the job and gets it done, it's cost you money where you can't deploy that service tech to maybe a much more lucrative income generating opportunity. And at the same time, you know, you may have a frustrated customer because they just had to spend an unnecessary, what they expect, you know, hundred to a couple hundred bucks to get that fixed. If you systematized your marketing and realized those questions and those responses and gave people an opportunity to watch videos where you're solving those problems again, that's a system that's in place and it keeps your texts from going out on service calls that are less than your ideal profitability rate.

Paul

Yeah. One thing I'd like to add here is that we're talking about automation and AI. And AI is not a magic bullet. It is a tool. It's just another tool. And if implemented wrong, it can cause more problems than it solves it. I often say that the more Google tries to help me, the less efficient I am. And you, you would think the big companies would have this figured out. And even they don't. So it's just AI is not a magic answer for all of your problems. It's just another tool in your, this whole systemization process.

Ken

Yeah, and, and you know, it's not set it and forget it either. There are a lot of marketing consultants and companies out there right now that are selling set it and forget it stuff. And anybody who tells you that I think you should run personally. AI does help with scalability in a tremendous way, but only if it's under the guidance and, and review of human experts.

Jeff

I think there's another aspect of scalability that we maybe haven't hit on as much. I think Paul kind of got into it a little bit. But the when I think of scalability, I think of two things. I think of how can we do more with the resources we have? Because that's growth, that's business growth. But as Paul mentioned, there's a cap on that. Right. People aren't going to be working 24 hours a day. And if there was the demand of 30 hours a day worth of work, one person isn't going to do it. So there's the how do you enable everyone to do a little more of the productivity aspect of it, but then there's also just the overall business volume that you can handle and the growth that comes with being easily able to add capacity, to add staff. You know, how many businesses have you heard, they're like, I can't afford to hire anyone, not because they don't have the money, the business is good, but because they can't train them, they don't have the time. It would take away from too many other things. And when you have things systemized, it makes that ramp up time a lot quicker and a lot easier. And therefore if your business volume doubles, you add another person. If it doubles again, you add two more people. Right. That's the big scalability. So there's little scalability is productivity growth, but then there's the big scalability of how easily can you go from 0 to 100 and really have the capacity and the volume to be able to service the customers as well or better than you could when you were smaller.

Ken

Yeah. Well, another thought too is, you know, with, with restaurants and using an AI voice agent that, that AI voice agent can actually take orders and do it very well. And think about, you know, it's hard for a lot of restaurants right now to find staff and if you have to have certain number of staff available to answer your phone to take orders instead of being able to make delivery runs, if you're, you know, selling pizza or cooking the food or, you know, just providing in person customer support, you know, for those patrons who come to your restaurant, you know, it's really liberating and it gives you the opportunity to do a lot more with the, with the staff that you have. So there's, there are a lot of different nuances to that, for sure. Ian, let's talk about, you know, how systematization helps enhance the customer journey, both from the customer perspective, but also from the business perspective.

Jeff

Right?

Ian

Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, this is really a where the rubber meets the road kind of place for a lot of how system systems can enhance the success of your business. Because if you can enhance, systematize and enhance the whole buyer's journey process, then you will enhance your profitability. And just to, you know, describe again what a buyer's journey is, in case some people don't know, you know, everybody who is buying or considering buying a product or a service is on a journey. And in that journey, there's different steps we take, but it's pretty consistent in that. And sometimes you can skip these steps or fast track them a little bit. But basically, you have to know about a business. You have to like the business, trust the business, try the business, buy from the business, of course, which is where we all ding the bells and think. That's where the, you know, the little drop of gold comes out of the funnel. But then there's also repeat and referral. And in there you get the full life cycle of the buyer's journey. And I think it's really important for the listeners to understand that in this, because you have a relationship, your business has a relationship with the person looking for your service or your product, that there's two sides to this equation. All of those steps of the buyer's journey that I talked about, the buyer has particular needs that they're looking for, particular answers or answers, questions that need to be answered on both the emotional side and the logic side. And they're going to be looking for the answers to those things in different places as well. So as a business, you need to create a system. You need to systematically approach this and say, okay, you know, who is my ideal customer? Let's just start going through each of these stages of the buyer's journey. Where are, you know, what are they looking for in the no stage? How are they looking for my product or service? Where are they looking for my product and service? How can I get in front of them? Right. And then the like stage. Okay, so once they find me, what are they looking for in order to, like a business like mine? What. What am I going to produce in order to move them from the no stage to the like stage, which will then take them to the trust stage? Right, right. And there's different things you can share, you know, reviews, you know, just to give an example of how this works in real Life. Think about, you know, how, how the lead funnel works for a service based business like a marketing agency or an accountant or consultant, anything like that. Where you're offering a service, you know, you get a somebody, somebody has to find you, right? So they probably find you on Google. I'm just going to use that as an example. They might find you other places, but they find you on Google. So you have to be findable on Google. When somebody's searching for that service, they come to your website. Your website has to be compelling enough, it's got to walk them through their journey enough in order to, you know, help them understand that you understand and feel their pain points and that you offer a solution, right? And then you have to have a call to action. Say that call to action. The primary call to action is to fill in a form or to call so they fill in a form. Ideally you'd want a nurture sequence to go out after they fill in a form. And the whole purpose of that isn't just to, you know, fill up their inbox, it's actually to help them along that journey some more. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to predispose them to actually choosing you over the competition. And how you do that is you position your, your unique aspects of your business, your core difference and then you're trying to get them to schedule an appointment. So you're consistently talking about that, providing them an appointment link. They schedule an appointment, have another nurture sequence, right? What, what should they expect in your, your initial consultation? You know, common questions that people ask in these consultations. But again it's all to position your business as the primary choice and walk them through that and then you can have additional, you know, then you, you move in. So you have your initial consultation, then they schedule with you in that meeting, a strategy session or a follow up appointment, right? Then you have another nurture sequence because the ant, the questions they're asking are different at those stages than they were before. And then you, you want to deliver a proposal to them. So then you have another nurture sequence. And again it's to reinforce and reinforce and reinforce and help them make the most informed decision possible. And then you either win or lose that opportunity. And then you have an onboarding sequence. Say you win the opportunity, then you need to onboard these people. There's common things that every single new client that you have needs to hear in order to understand the process, to reduce buyer's remorse and help them through that process and to help you help Them, Right. And then you might have a monthly newsletter and then you might have pre renewal sequences. Right. There's all these things you want to ask them for reviews, you want to ask them for referrals. All of these things can be part of your overall mapped out buyer's journey. And if you don't think about this stuff, some of this stuff might be happening naturally. Happening naturally. But if it's not, then your, your, your bucket is very leaky. The more leads you're filling up, the more leads that are falling out the bottom.

Jeff

You know, Ian, as you're talking through all that, the flashing neon sign in front of my eyes was customer experience, Customer experience, customer experience. Those are all elements of providing a better customer experience. And why do you do that? You do that for longer term retention. You do that so people be more receptive for upsells. You do that so people will talk about it and will refer their friends and neighbors. And like you said, reinforcing, eliminating buyers remorse. That's all, all important. But overall, the customer experience is one way that you can differentiate a business, your business from anyone else's. And, and yeah, so that's, we talked about that before. That's important. You got to do it and the systemization is going to make sure you do it again. We're back to consistently and in a well thought out, well engineered way that people will appreciate and that then we'll accomplish the goals that I just, you know, threw out there. That you threw out.

Ian

And, and it like, as I was explaining it, I'm like, wow, this is really going on a long time, right? Maybe you guys were feeling that, maybe the listeners are feeling that. But that's the point. This like, you know, when the buyer's journey is not a short process unless, you know, maybe when you're talking a quick transaction like food or gas or something. Right. But for a lot of businesses, transactions are actually a lengthy process or a somewhat lengthy process. And so you have to think through the stuff because you can't improve it, you can't tweak it. You don't know whether, you know, when we land a new client, we want a package to go out to them to celebrate this new relationship we have with them. Like we do that. And it's somewhat systematized. Could it be more systematized? Absolutely. But we wouldn't know that unless we had it as part of our system.

Ken

I think the key point too, Ian, is, you know, you, you just rattled off probably a dozen systems that are subsystems that somebody might need to have in place. As Paul mentioned earlier, you don't have to have all these perfect, you don't even have to do all of the systems that Ian, you just rattled off. Just start somewhere, focus on the ones that have the highest impact on, on your revenue. And, and Jeff, as you may expect, expressed, you know, customer experience, get started there and just continue to build out to it, you know, and a good, a good marketing partner is going to help guide you through and maybe even have, you know, some good solid basic starting point services and systems in place to help you speed up the whole process.

Ian

Yeah. So, you know, I'm glad you brought that up, Ken. One of the systems or processes with systems built into it that we use is part of the duct tape marketing system for some of us in this group. Right. And part of that is the marketing hourglass framework which I basically listed out. But it's an exercise that few businesses will ever do. Like even how I explained it today, very few businesses will do that on their own. It really does help to have a consultant come in and help you walk this journey because the consultant can ask you questions. Questions like what is the buyer current, you know, looking for at this stage? But there's also, you know, some documents that help people through this process. And it's not a hard process. It, it, the hard part is the thinking. The, the, you know, you just need to, to give it a try.

Paul

The implementation. The implementation can be somewhat technical and difficult if you don't have the knowledge and expertise to do that. Like talking earlier about building the zaps between taking data from here and piping it over to, to the CRM. That, that's not a five minute boom, it's done thing.

Ian

Yeah, I would just reinforce that like they, they shouldn't even be thinking about, nobody should be thinking about implementation until they've mapped it out. Right, right. Otherwise you're getting into the weeds of. And that's not a rebuff at all, Paul, because I know that the implementation to making all of this work is really key.

Paul

I'm wounded.

Ian

It's that thinking thing that I think is the most challenging.

Jeff

That's actually a good point, Ian. And I think I've seen this in CRMs, especially a lot of CRMs come with a default pipeline built in. The business process shouldn't be changed to match the CRM. CRM should implement the business process. Now there may be some back and forth of things that, well, if we did it this way it would be better for, you know, implementation, whatever, but it's Thinking through the business, the process, the steps, the stages, what's needed first before diving in, trying to implement strategy, before tactics. Right, yeah.

Ken

Jeff, you had kind of started to talk a little bit about, you know, how systems help reduce errors and, you know, can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

Jeff

Yeah, I kind of hit it from the HR point of view, but again, absolutely. When you have things that are documented, that are put into templates in workflow managers, project managers, we talk a lot about CRMs, but the internal delivery side of it may be a project management tool where you can build the fulfillment system, if you will, and that it probably interacts with the CRM, and it may be the CRM, but the point is you're focusing on how you do things internally as well, and that can avoid mistakes because things are well laid out of, excuse me, what you do and when, and also deadlines. The systems can keep you on track and make sure you're moving along and things are progressing at the right pace. And also looking downstream for dependencies. If your work output goes to somebody else and you're behind, they can see it, you know, in the systems. So it's, it's documented, it's. It's well defined, how long everything should take, when it should get done, when it needs to get done, and that again, back to that consistency word. But it avoids mistakes, it improves workflow to deadlines from an externally visible point of view. It makes sure your messaging's on brand, your branding is living up to its promise. And that's all good for both internal and external reasons, for ROI reasons, for customer experience and business growth reasons. One of the things I think that reducing human error, systematizing is. I kind of hit on it earlier when Ian was talking. I tapped my head. It reduces reliance on memory. If you're systematized and you're following a flow, even if it's written down on notebook paper about what you do next and what the steps are, and you're filling in a template on paper. I don't necessarily advocate that, but it's one way to do it. It means you don't have to remember, oh, I've gotta catch up with, you know that guy? I talked to him two days ago. That means I need to talk to him again tomorrow. Right. If you're juggling 10, 15 different sales opportunities in your head or work tasks or whatever it is, keeping them all straight and what has to happen when can be a challenge. And that takes time and effort. So systemization can reduce the reliance on personal memory. In that, and in that kind of same vein, it can also increase what I call institutional memory. You're not relying on, oh, go talk to Joe down the hall. He knows how to do it. Right. You're not relying on that. You build institutional memory into the system and then it gives you the flexibility of how to reassign or adapt. If somebody gets sick, if somebody goes on vacation, if, you know there's a flood in the, the town you're in, your office is out of commission. It gives you the ability to adapt to other problems that can occur. Not necessarily human error, but it's in that same vein of eliminating weak links in the, in the system and making sure things get done and get done properly and on brand.

Ken

Yeah, Jeff, that's a great point. I mean, I know you came from, came from a, you know, computer engineering perspective. Paul's got some experience in that realm. I came from a software development exper, you know, expertise. And in the software realm, there's this thing called the capability maturity model, you know, and level one is called chaos, because what happens is organizations rely on the excellence of a single individual or two to do some heroic, amazing things. But if that person leaves, if that person gets sick or is out for a period of time, the organization is in a world of hurt. The same thing is actually very much true in the world of sales and marketing and, you know, so putting, you know, maturity through systems in place so that you do get that institutional knowledge, you become less reliant on the superstars. They're always going to be important in your organization. But the more that you can get that institutionalized, you can level up so many more people and, and, and, and get more repeatable, effective results with fewer errors.

Paul

Football.

Ken

Football, yeah.

Paul

Every team has that, that one player that, whether it's receiver, running back, guard, or attack, that they are better than anyone else on the team at that, maybe one of the best in the league. And when they get injured, the team just can't do what they normally do. They can't score, they can't defend. And that's exactly what you're talking about, Ken, is it? That one superstar goes out, the whole team suffers.

Ken

Yeah, and that was, you know, I'm not a huge football fan, but one thing that I immediately think of is, you know, there was a paradigm shift back in the, I think it was even 2000 with the, at the time, St. Louis Rams. And yeah, they are still the St. Louis Rams, by the way, folks. You know, they implemented a system that was radically different, but it was A system and the entire team was trained on it so they could swap personnel but still perform at a very high level because they had that system and it was a system that nobody else had. And so they had massive differentiation. And of course, you know, they went on to win the super bowl and, and had a pretty good run there for a couple of years largely because, you know, I mean, they swapped out quarterbacks due to injuries, as you said, Paul. They, you know, they were able to swap out some key, you know, receivers and running backs and things like that. So that's actually a great analogy which kind of leads me to your next question. Paul, for you is, you know, improving team collaboration. You know, Jeff mentioned the project management tools that are out there and how that comes into play. But what else do you see or do you even have examples of like some of those tools?

Paul

Well, you know, there's teamwork, Asana Trello, but you know, there's a joke in corporate America that you have to have a meeting to see if you need to have a meeting. And it's. But the purpose of that is to keep everyone on the same page, so to speak. It's not about the project management software you may or may not use. It's, it's about the system and everyone using the system and making sure that everyone knows what needs to be done, when and where. And everyone, like I said, is basically on the same page. And that's, that's how it improves team collaboration. Because if, if you don't know what someone else is doing, it's like, okay, I know this thing needs to be done, but I don't know who's doing that or when there's doing that or if they're doing that, then there's, there's. That creates a huge disconnect.

Ken

Yeah. So Ian, you want to kind of take that and elaborate that on how.

Paul

To jump in there.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. How, how that actually helps, you know, with businesses who want to stay competitive.

Ian

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think the first step in having assist how systems can help you be more competitive in marketing is first of all, competitive analysis. Right. If, if in your system of marketing you build in regular competitive analysis, I think that's one of the biggest eye opening opportunities for business because no business, I say this so often, but no business exists in a bubble. Right. You may think you are, you may think you are entirely unique in the marketplace or that you don't, you know, you don't need to do anything. But the fact is that the people looking for your product or service are looking out in the world, they're searching online, they're looking on social media, they're asking their friends, they're asking on Facebook groups, you name it, they're looking, right? And if you have no idea how you show up compared to your competitors in those areas, you are at a severe disadvantage. What's fantastic and what is a huge opportunity for practically any business that's listening to us today is of all of the businesses I've ever interacted with who have hired us for an opportunity audit, a competitive analysis, even just a prospecting call where I do some initial competitive analysis, because I want to really accentuate the point, the pain point with them, right? I want them to understand this is where you are today and this is how I can help you with your marketing. And the competitive analysis for me is a really easy way to show people that opportunity. But the fact is that most businesses do not do this, especially small businesses. So that's, that's where I would start for sure, from a competitive marketing system analysis or starting with analysis. But how it can really help you is first of all, it helps you laser target. Like this is what we should be doing to out compete our competition. And some of the areas where you can systematize it or where systems help with being competitive are just what I think it was you, Jeff, that talked about consistency, right? Like brand consistency, consistency in execution as well is key because I'm sure you guys have experienced this when you've done audits for prospects or clients. And one of the things you do is you see, you know, here's, here's how you guys have, have used or engaged social media over the last five to 10 years. And usually the chart, especially with COVID during the COVID period, right, where a lot of businesses were shocked, shut down, and they were like, well, I guess I'll do some digital marketing. I guess I'll get active on social media. So it's kind of like, you know, boom. And then it falls right off. And the, the companies that win are the ones that are consistent, right? If you consistently have an SEO strategy and you execute that SEO strategy, you're always going to win against. Assuming you do it right, you're going to always win against your competitors who are either small, sporadic, or not, not doing it at all. We see this with blog posts too, where almost any business I talk with understands that creating content on a consistent basis is really important. But when you look back at, well, what blog posts have they posted, usually there's like a little burst where Maybe they went to a course for a weekend or maybe they were at a conference and somebody said they should do it or they saw a YouTube video. So they do like five and then there's no more since that, you know, since five years ago. And so that's not going to help them compared to a company that is consistently executing in a systematic way on their marketing. Some other ways that systems really help are with efficiency. If you're more efficient than your competition, you're spending less money, less time on doing what's working and then making data driven decisions. I think it goes back to that competitive analysis. But also how are our metrics being tracked for all of the marketing we're doing? Because that can help drive making informed, data driven decisions, which is far better than gut feeling decisions because usually our guts, you know, relate to what we last ate. So it can save you money, it can improve your return on investment, it can improve your lifetime value of a customer and ultimately the profitability and valuation of your business if you want to sell it.

Ken

Yeah, real quick, guys, we're coming up on the hour. Just, let's just kind of go through and hit, you know, just real quick hits. How do you guys see systematized marketing helping in regard to specifically customer retention?

Paul

Well, it helps you personalize things. You know, let's go back to the mold inspection company where she was doing everything manually and trying to keep track of things in a spreadsheet. And if she missed something, she had people calling, say, hey, I just want to make sure we're still on schedule for this. Well, once that was automated and she got a lot of feedback, people loved it. And the one thing they really liked is that. And this goes back now, mold inspection may not be a regular thing, but they got referrals because of this. That when we set this whole process up, the email she sent out, that was sent out before the inspection had a picture of the inspector. So they knew who was going to show up. And customers look, because you're letting someone into your house, you know, and, and they got a lot of feedback on that, that they loved it and they actually got referrals because of that one little simple thing.

Ken

Cool. Jeff, how about you?

Jeff

Yeah, I think, you know, I go back to the relationship, right? It, the systematization gives you a framework, or as I think, Ian, you talked about the customer experience, right? Customer journey, but it gives you a framework for operating that customer experience. Those touch points, those touch points that go beyond the sale that are important for not only retaining customers, but for Getting referrals. You know, I owned and operated a house painting franchise for a number of years. Yeah, I can't keep a job. I've gone from the semiconductors to house painting to marketing. But when we sent out follow up emails and it was systematized, it was done through a CRM, we got referrals and we got customers that would say even after a year after doing some work, they would say, oh yeah, I've been meaning to call you back about some more work I want to have done. So it's that relationship, you know, it's having a system that provides the framework to operate out of that lets you maintain, build and maintain and strengthen relationships with your, your customers and that's key for retention and referrals.

Ken

Yeah, glad you brought that up, Jeff. So important. Ian, how about you?

Ian

Yeah, yeah, I think some key points that systems can help with retaining clients is being aware of their pain points and questions. So even if they're an existing client, they may have some pain points with your processes. So surveys asking, you know, even having your team ask them systematically throughout the process. Especially as you consider with most, if it's a service based businesses, business, you know, a lot of times there's a renewal. If it's an ongoing service, man, as the renewals are coming up, you should have a process whereby you're, you're heading that off very early to reinforce the value that they're getting from you. You should be doing that through the whole time that they're with you. But again, reinforce value, reinforce value. Otherwise you leave people in a question bubble or they're confused. Right?

Ken

Yeah, yeah. I mean if you don't control the narrative, something else will and chances are that's going to be something that's not necessarily desirable for your business. That's why email marketing consistently is so important because if you're not staying top of mind and controlling the communication and helping to facilitate the ongoing relationship with past clients when they do have those needs, as Jeff mentioned, you know, they may make a connection to say, okay, painting, I need painting. But if you also do light carpentry services or you know, window treatments or something like that, they may not have any idea that you do that. And so you're missing out on opportunities. If you're not systematizing your, you know, your marketing, in this case email marketing, which I think is really one of the best friends of any business that's out there if you know how to do it and do a. Well, so with that let's, let's wrap it up. I think it was a great discussion. This is super, super important topic. In case you don't know or didn't notice throughout this podcast. I think we're all really huge advocates of systems. So your name, you know, I can't stress how important it is. And with that, Ian, you want to take us out?

Ian

Yeah. Be sure to like this podcast. Be sure to share this podcast. We'd love to get more exposure with more businesses and so we can help more businesses. We love sharing this information with you. Reach out to us if you have a specific question or a burning issue that you'd like answered and in. Folks, keep calm and mark it on.