If you can accelerate your sales growth by tweaking some of your most redundant and mundane business tasks, do not hesitate to do it. In this episode, Adrienne Hill sits down with sales expert, tech geek, and podcaster Kevin Snow, who discusses how email automation can help skyrocket your sales. He explains how integrating digital technology into your sales processes can create a straight path toward business success as long as the human element is not completely lost. Kevin also explains the best ways to leverage text reminders and email marketing, as well as how to avoid making messages that sound too salesy or unnatural.

#impactfulentrepreneurshow #guestinterview #EmailAutomation

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I'm super excited about the massive value that we have for you in this interview. The co-host of the top 100 Apple podcasts, Growth Mode, and the CEO of Time on Target, Kevin Snow, is a sales expert and a serious technology geek who knows how to help his clients take their automation game to the next level and is changing the game of business development.

With a 20-year career working with brands like Frontier Communications, Nextel, Salesforce, and BNI, his knowledge, skills, and understanding of communication and technology are getting real results for the businesses he works with. Kevin knows how to integrate digital technology with your sales process in an authentic, professional way. He'll show you what you've been missing in terms of ensuring an effective system of outreach and trust-building. He is here to talk to us about automating your emails for sales growth. We are excited to dig in with you. Welcome, we're so excited to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for this. This is going to be a cool conversation.

Looking Back

I can't wait to dig in because I know there are tons of us out there who we're either discovering the world of automation for the first time, or we're waist deep and we're trying to pick the right options, the right tools, and the right strategies. Regardless of what boat our readers might be in, this is going to be hugely value-added. Now, before we geek out completely and jump in, for those in the readers who maybe have not met you yet. Can you tell us just a little bit about you and your story and what led you up to this point of being an expert in this space?

The funny thing is the last semester I was in college, I went home and I think it was probably Christmas break and I said, “Mom, Dad, I think I'm changing my major again. I think I want to go into Marketing.” They said, “No, you're graduating in May, go. You're done with school.”

Keyword being, again.

The key word is I'm going to change it again. They're like, “No, you're not. You're graduating.” I graduated, but I didn't go into my field. I got a job right out of college with a telecom firm doing hybrid sales. I was doing sales and account management with them and I was horrible. I got fired within my first year. I was completely horrible at the sales thing and prioritizing work and that whole thing but then my next job was at Nextel and corporate sales.

I remember the walkie-talkie phones and I loved them. They're so cool. It was where I figured out how to sell. I decided I knew how to do this and I could be good at it, and make some really good money. I stuck in the sales and the business world with them. I went through one of their business partners for a while, their indirect agents, sold for them, did some distribution channel management for them as well, built out a subprogram, and just did tech sales.

I was selling cell phones and I went in and sold managed services for a while. I sold salesforce.com and that was my exposure to the sales automation world with CRMs. This is back when it was still software and not just a portal on the website. I was doing that and around that time I got involved with another organization that was a networking business, a networking organization.

I got sucked heavily into their world and I became one of their area directors. I was managing 50 of their chapters and over 1500 members. I was helping grow the region by then I was also coaching all the members. I was figuring out how to help them grow their business through word-of-mouth marketing and networking. It was kind of cool.

At a certain point, one of the other executive directors from a different region said, “You're good at this launching chapters thing. Can we bring you in to teach our team how to do that?” I said, “Yes, sure.” I totally would love to visit Houston or Miami. There a multiple people asking me, and they said, “We'll pay for your airfare and we'll get your hotel room.”

I said, “Sweet bonus, this is awesome.” Then they said, “And we'll pay you.” “What? You're going to pay me too?” That's how Time on Target was born I needed a company where I could take payments. Most people start companies because they have this cool idea. It's like, no, people want to give me money. I needed a tax ID.

We started Time on Target because I was still doing the networking thing. I just started doing public speaking and training at companies about networking and sales and speaking at other business organizations is all cool. I was also in the army at the time, Minnesota National Guard, and then I deployed and came back and there I had no speaking gigs lined up. I had nothing in my pipeline. I'm like, “Crap.”

That's when I got into the sales consulting piece. We did a huge pivot with the company which then turned the speaking into a business development tool for me, as opposed to the actual product. Then we started going into businesses and helping them launch their programs. We helped them start figuring out, “How do you sell?” “What's the process look like?” “How do you train new salespeople to do the same thing?” “How do your clients make purchasing decisions?”

We kept niching down our focus until we were tightly engaged in just that business process piece. We got rid of all that. Here's how you hire salespeople and here's how you train them. Here's how you manage. We got rid of all that. It's like, “We're going to help you figure out how to sell.” We're going to help you to figure out how your buyers buy.

Then came the second huge aha or what I call my, “God, Kevin, you're an idiot.” moment, was when I realized that I was throwing away thousands of dollars because I was bringing in other people to do the automation for these processes. We discovered, “Here's where we need to automate things, or here's what we need to do to integrate your CRM better with everything.” I'd bring someone else in to do it. My realization was, “You’re dumb because you're doing that all for your business, you can do that for everyone else and get paid to do it.”

We niche down again to really into that automation area and helping people figure out, how to apply tech into your outside sales process. That's really where we've been since and focused on how you integrate your CRM. How do you integrate an email tool into an outside process where you have a salesperson so that the salesperson can manage more businesses in the pipeline and close that business faster?

Systematized Processes

That's a perfect topic here because this entire event is all about any smart strategy that you've systematized into your business so it's consistent because it's one thing to do it once. It's another thing if you do it and you're getting results and anyone who's had success knows, you systematize that thing as quickly as you possibly can. If it's working and you can systematize it and it keeps working, show it to some other people, because they're probably going to love it. They're probably looking for something like that. That's perfect.

The funny thing is with most small businesses, they don't understand the process that they use for selling, because I'll ask them, to walk me through what their sales process looks like, and they won't know. They can't describe it at all. I have to ask a bunch of different questions. I still ask the question, even knowing that they're going to say, “I don't know, we don't have a process.” Just because I want to hear them say it. I want them to have that realization that they had to just say that out loud to someone. “I don't know how we sell things.” That is a big thing for a business owner.

It helps them to recognize, “I have this process that has 52 holes in it.” “Let's start plugging those holes.”

Let’s say that they don't even understand they have a process and then we can have that conversation about, “Here's how you scale. You need to have a process that you can replicate and you can teach other people to do.” That's how salespeople learn to sell. We're taught a process. My first sales jobs, both at Nextel and at the telecom company that ended up firing me, put us through a month's worth of training before we even got to talk to a prospect.

You need to have a sales process that you can replicate and teach to your team so they can sell in an interesting and convincing way.

In the world of sales, it's like 50% having the people skills and knowing how to truly help someone and 50% plugging into a process and knowing exactly what you're doing each step of the way because for those of you who are reading and you're thinking, “Do I have a sales process and what is it?” If the answer is, “I don't know why wing it, it's different every time.” You need this interview.

The funny thing is, even when people say that and then I start questioning them, I say, “You have a process. Here's what it is.” You just didn't think about it that way. It's become an ingrained way that people do things. The other fun question I always ask business owners when we're trying to figure out how they sell is, “What is that one thing that you will say to a prospect that every time you say it, you can see the lights go on in their eyes because they get it and now they understand.”

They're like, “Wow, I never thought about that.” I reply, “If you think about it long enough, you're going to realize there is that one thing you always say and you're not going to realize that you say it, but there is.” That's the key because once you understand how you're selling, now you can start looking at how your buyer makes those decisions and make sure that they're lined up. As salespeople, whether you're the owner or just a W2 sales employee, our goal is always to get to that, “Yes.”

To get to that point where they're saying, “Yes, let me sign the contract.” Or, “Let me give you money.” We're trying to get there as quickly as possible. We're not always paying attention to where the buyers at in their process. If we push too hard, then we enter that world of being the pushy sales guy or sales gal, or that used car sales feel where people are saying, “I don't know if I want to work with them because he's pushy.”

Whereas if you can identify, Adrienne's at this point in her buyer decision, and I need to give her this type of stuff, you can accelerate how they make that decision and move them through the process faster. You have to be able to map that piece out too so that you can see, “We're at the same point or they're ahead of me or I'm ahead of them and I need to adjust my speed.”

Communication Automations

For those of you who maybe are realizing, I have a sales process, maybe hit or miss or maybe I've just never defined it before. Do I have all the right pieces? I'm not even sure. In your mind, when you look at setting up a systematized process around email automation, because that's part of the process, how you're communicating. How does the communication automation layer into the bigger picture? Are there a few key pieces that you always look for when people are setting up their sales process and linking it in with their automation?

Yes, there are two key things that you want to automate in a sales process. One of them is redundant tasks. The other one is redundant communications. For salespeople, there's always this idea that we have to reenter contact info into multiple systems. We have to put it in the CRM, then we might have to put it into another system.

Then we may have to type it in again into our proposal tool, whatever that is, as opposed to typing it in once and then it goes wherever I need it based on the system. You want to look at those tasks, whether it be data entry, reporting, all that administrative stuff that you can automate and take off your salespeople's plate or off your plate as the owner. Then the second piece is the communications part. You're always going to look for those redundant communications.

Email Automation: Identify the business tasks you do not enjoy doing that much. Start automating them so you can take them off your salespeople’s plate or off your plate as the owner.

For example, “Thanks for meeting with me this week. It was great to learn more about you and your company.” Email that not most salespeople will send out. It's usually the same thing for everyone. If you automate it, you don't have to worry about that salesperson putting in the wrong name or forgetting to change the name when they hit send.

There's that, but there's also the communication piece where you're feeding content to the buyer at key points of the process. It may be supporting content that will support a conversation that the salesperson just had with that decision maker, and you want to give them additional information to support what the salesperson's been saying, or there are specific questions that a person is asking as they're going through their buyer's journey to get to that next step, you're going to want to make sure that they can get those answers easily.

In front of the client, the salesperson is always going to be going with the flow and seeing how the meeting's running and throwing out information, asking questions, and having that conversation but then having that supporting email afterward allows you to make sure that we've gotten them all the right info, whether the salesperson said it or not. It's still there, they're getting it.

Then you can track their engagement because you're able to see if they click on it. Did they go to this site? What else did they do with it? Did they forward it? Did they share it? All that type of information, which then gives, if you have your program set up right, is going to give a ton more information back to the salesperson to be able to understand what's going on with their prospect.

How valuable to have a system with behavioral adaptive marketing that shows you that they clicked the link, they watched the video, they watched the whole video, and then they forwarded the email to someone.

It's funny because when I have this conversation and I bring in marketing and sales for some of my larger clients, the marketing will usually have all these drip campaigns already set up that they are sending to people. And then the salesperson, if they didn't get the sale the first time and they're following up or they said to call them back in six months. No, as salespeople, their go-to phrase is, “I'm just checking in.” “Just reaching out.” The client might say, “But I've gotten 10 emails from you. What do you mean you're just checking in? You've been emailing me all this stuff for the last three months.”

To them, it's not two separate people. It's one company and it's like, doesn't the right hand know what the left hand is doing?

Exactly. The salesperson doesn't know what to say but then the client is confused, “Because I'm getting stuff that has your name on it and you don't even know you're sending it?” It's like, it must be our automated tool but that's key information for the salesperson because it allows them to approach the prospect correctly.

My favorite one that I like to talk about is if a prospect is cooking on your pricing page, that's something I want to know as a salesperson because that is a buying signal. That means they are at the bottom of that sales cycle, the bottom of the funnel, and they're getting ready to make decisions. Now, you don't look at the pricing page at the beginning unless you're trying to determine some cost analysis, like do we even want to spend time fixing this?

Normally when people are at your pricing page, they're ready to make a decision. If I have a prospect that's hitting my pricing page multiple times, I need to know so that I can reach out coincidentally and have a conversation with them. “I'm so glad you called. I was just at your website the other day.” “Really? What were you doing there?” They were on our pricing page. That communication is key from your automation system to your salespeople to be able to send those notifications.

Leveraging Email And Texts

When it comes to the world of email marketing and text message marketing, what are some of the key ways that you like to leverage those to feed the sales process? When is the right time to automate versus not? It is because I know tons of people are worried about being salesy. They're worried about automating too much and then looking like a robot. There's a fine line. how do you leverage email and text in your automation?

Let's talk about when is the right time to automate and not sound salesy because that is one of the key things I like to talk about with people. The key to not sounding salesy is to write like you normally talk. This freaks my marketing people that I work with all the time because I always tell them to stop talking like a marketer, stop writing like a marketer, write like a salesperson, and write like how we talk to the client. You may come up with all these cool value proposition statements. We understand them. We don't use them.

If you want to not sound salesy, write your marketing messages just like how you normally talk. Stop writing like a marketer or a salesperson.

That is not like natural language. You're saying just be human.

We will take those value prop statements and we'll reward them so that they fit our personalities and that the client will understand them. They talk like they talk. If you're selling to construction companies, construction people talk a certain way. They don't talk like financial planners. They don't talk like an IT guy. You have to understand who you're selling to, how they communicate, and then how your salespeople who are interacting with them are communicating as well.

It needs to sound like it's coming from me, not like I just cut and paste some marketing content. That's the key. It always made my marketing people's heads spin by telling them to stop talking like a marketer. It's the key because you want it to sound human. One of my clients, and now we're business partners for a new venture, the first thing we automated for him was a welcome series for his Facebook group.

Super simple campaign. We automated when they put someone in the Facebook group, it added them to a Google sheet, which then pushed it into the automation tool. Then they got this six-email series over two weeks of welcome to the group and here are all the things to do. The first email was, “Welcome to the group. Here's all the rules. Don't break them. We'll kick you out. Now, go post something and introduce yourself.”

The second email. We made it sound hyper like Donnie, my business partner. The subject was, “My God, I'm so sorry. I'm an ass.” It's still our number one email for opens and the copy was, “I'm so sorry. I was so excited to have you in our group that I told you all the cool stuff, but I forgot to introduce myself. Can we start over? My name's Donnie and here are three things most people don't know about me. I'd love to have you reply to this and tell me these things. If you ask me a question, I'll reply with the answer to the number one question we get next time.”

At least once a week, we get a reply back from people who had replied and they type in, “My God, Donnie, I don't think you're an ass. I wasn't offended at all.” I'm like, “There is a big unsubscribe block at the bottom of this email because it's automated. It has to have that. Did you all not see this?” It's because it sounds like Donnie and it feels like Donnie is talking to them that they're like, “No, I didn't think this at all.”

Do you know what I love about that? Not only is that email just more human and more real, but it gets opened a ton and it gets responses. I know if people are replying to your emails, all the email deliverability systems are more likely to put it right in the inbox and not in the spam.

They look at the opens, clicks, and replies. Open is hard now because of the thing Apple did where they just open everything automatically and mark it as “Opened.” On iPhones now in the Apple email system, whenever you get an email on your phone, it just automatically marks it as opened and reports are open to the email providers.

That's an odd thing to do.

It's good for them when they're trying to stop the marketing tracking and having that type of info, but it sucks for us as sales and marketing people because opens were hard to track before, now they're almost impossible and it's just a wasted metric anymore. The click-throughs and the replies are key for it to tell email systems that this is a really good email.

What's your favorite and how often do you like to use email versus text?

It's very situational. If there is a ton of content I need to put out, I will usually do it all in email because then you can send longer messages. No one wants to get that text message that's been split into five. That's just a pain. I'm like, “Really? Stop blowing up my phone.” You also have to understand who your audience is. Certain age demographics are more apt to want text messages than others. The Gen X, that's me. We're in the middle, we will take it, but we are okay without getting text messages about stuff as well.

The generation before us is much, my parents don't want text messages. They're like, “No. If you're texting me, you better know me. Otherwise, why are you sending me a text message?” Then the younger generations, want it more, or they now want it on WhatsApp or another messaging service. You have to understand who your target is and how they want to be communicated with.

Tell the same thing to people who are redoing their website. You need to give them options. You're going to have people who want to do the Contact Us form and type in stuff and then get emailed back. You also have people who want to do live chat. When I now buy software systems for Time on Target and success champions that we're going to subscribe to, if there's not a live chat support feature, I am grumpy because when I'm working on something and I want to figure out why it doesn't work, I want to be able to figure out why it doesn't work, not have to put it on pause and come back later.

24 or 48 hours later, who else has time for that?

Even three hours later is annoying because I started, and I'm in the right mindset to be building, creating, and doing things. Then I have to stop because I can't figure it out or I spent the entire three hours trying to figure it out and now I'm just really frustrated. I like having the chat piece. I won't chat just on a website to ask questions. I'm completely fine with emails. If you can’t get back to me, I don't care but people get to decide their urgency and that's the key thing.

You want to give them options. We'll usually do text as reminders for things as a pretty common feature. Our recording today, calendar events, “Don't forget, we're going to be meeting in an hour. I can't wait to see you. Here's the link in case you're on the road.” All that type of stuff. I set up stuff for a Legion last week and we're doing text marketing for them.

People are going to be able to scan a QR code, opt into their text SMS program and they're going to get discounts. Buy one, get one free this night if you have this code, that type of stuff. We have this event coming up. It's the Summer Veterans Dance, you can get your tickets here and they're going to get people access to early events and try and drive patronage of the Legion using text. It's going to be super easy because no one wants emails from their Legion, but send me a text with a buy one, get one free for a mixed drink. Sure. Let's head through Legion Friday night. It's situational-based for us.

Audience Touchpoints

You've talked a lot about this has been peppered throughout. I want to mention this. You talk about how the prospects, the leads that you're talking to, they're at some point in that customer journey and that what you give them has to match how far they are into that journey. How do you identify those touch points and how do you identify what they need at each point and then use automation to help you get more sales there?

This is going to be shocking to some of our readers, but the best way to identify that is to ask them. Just literally talk to people who have said yes and bought from you and then talk to people who said no and didn't buy it from you. The ones who said yes, if they like your service and you're doing great things for them, they're going to be happy to give you feedback because they want you to stay in business and be successful because it's a pain to change vendors.

Email Automation: If people like your service, they will be happy to give you feedback. They would genuinely want you to stay in business and be successful.

If someone has a good experience with you, chances are they want to continue having that good experience.

They want you to get better so they can keep working with you and not have to switch because that's a pain. The bigger your company is, the harder it is to switch and the bigger the pain it is. That's what we always do when we're working with a client for we're doing a buyer journey map for, “I need a list of these types of clients, good clients, bad clients, people who said yes and then left, people who never came on board.” I usually get the business owner, the face normally just goes white and they’ll ask, “You're going to talk to our clients?” “Yes. Better yet, I'm going to talk to them without you in the room.”

It is because then they'll give the real answers. There's the person who found you, who was checking out your stuff and they, for whatever reason, didn't move forward with it at all. The person that maybe you had a conversation with them, maybe even a sales call, but they decided not to move forward. Then there's the person who had the sales call, they move forward, they're partway through the process, and then there's the person who completed the full process. They're onto the next day.

I usually won't talk to people who are in the midst of the sales process because I don't want to screw up the salesperson's mojo.

Yes, that's true. They might get mad at you.

I don't want to screw that up because I don't know what's going on and what type of conversations. It's more of a bigger variable for me. I don't want to add this, “Who's a strange person now asking me about stuff?” It is because then it also freaks out the salesperson, “Is management checking up on me? What's going on here?” It's always people who said yes and our current clients, people who said yes and were clients, but left. Then people that said no, and then become clients.

That group is a little harder and they're not always willing to talk, but usually the other ones are. Then it's just getting them in and I'll usually do it on video. A lot of times I'll do it on Zoom. Then I can just record it so that the company has the entire conversation and they can watch it later if they want. Then it's we ask them a ton of questions and walk through and get ideas about what's important for them.

How do they decide which vendors to work with? How do they set up criteria? Who's involved in decisions? Is it just the owner who has the final say in everything, or do they delegate to people? How do they decide who to bring in to give advice and consult? We ask lots of details and we get them to just really share the secret sauce for how they make decisions as a business owner. We take it all and just put it together and try and figure out what are all the similarities. What are all the things that they're all asking?

I would imagine even the solo entrepreneur, who maybe they're a coach or a course creator or someone in the network or affiliate marketing, has an offer, but they don't have a big team. They're not a big company but I would imagine even if they understood those three distinct people and what's going on in their heads at different points in the process, you could create an FAQ section that addresses all those objections. You could create bonus content that addresses some of the objections or things standing in their way. It would give you a clue of what your marketing materials need to be, and what to send in those follow-up emails.

It gives them a clue of what order all that information should show up in. If you are a course creator and you are doing a webinar or a workshop that's going to feed into your sales funnel or get people to just purchase your course outright, there's a certain way you need to present all the information to help them move through that buying process with a big chunk of that workshop being a solution that you're giving them where they're like, “My God, this is awesome.” All the other stuff has to be done in a certain order. If they're not ready for the information, but you're giving it to them anyway, they're not going to pay attention because that's not what they're thinking about.

Free Gift

I'm sure at this point, the readers are realizing, “I want to understand my client's buying process.” “I want to understand what step of the journey they're on.” “I want to understand what questions to ask in what order and therefore what information to share and in what order.” I know you have a gift that could help them get started with mapping that out. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

We do have a gift for everyone. What we have is a four or five-page PDF but the first half of it is just the questions that you need to ask your clients to be able to figure out what their buying process is. When you're going to do that client interview, these aren't questions that you would ask during a sales process. These are the questions you ask after. When you're trying to figure out what happened.

Why did they buy it? Why didn't they buy it? How did they make the decision? This is what you should do in that interview that we talked about. There's a whole list of questions you can go through that help you to determine specific things that are going on with the buyer's decision process as they move through their journey.

The second half of the PDF is a list of content that you can utilize in the sales cycle as bonus information or as lead magnets. It's all mapped out to the generic step in the buyer's cycle. For example, case studies are a big one for people who are at the beginning of the sales process, they're at the top of the funnel, if you want to use that term, and they're trying to figure out, do we even have a problem? Is this something we need to expend time and energy to try and fix or is it not so bad and we can survive it and just keep the status quo?

Vice versa, as we talked about on the pricing page. That's a piece of information that is on the bottom of the funnel, where people are getting ready to make that buyer's decision. Checklists are another one that people will usually consume when they're getting ready to decide because they want reinforcement that I'm making the right decision. Those are both good things. We have 50 different types of content all mapped out where they normally correspond in the sales cycle.

That's fantastic. I love that because there are probably tons of people who are reading this and haven't started this process at all. This will be their one-stop shop or they've started systematizing that sales process, but they're realizing, “I think I might have a gap.” Or, “Maybe I'm sharing all the right information, but in the wrong order.” “I'm not sure.” Just to have your years of experience and have that easy button is so helpful. Thank you for sharing that with our readers.

The other cool thing that it allows you to do is understand timing and who's doing what within your pipeline. We do lead scoring. You may have a prospect that's going through your sales process prior. They said no, and they've gone through some drip campaigns, but they’re not engaged, but all of a sudden you see them clicking on certain things. If you have it mapped out, you can set up your automation and say, “Adrienne started clicking on these things again. She's here.”

Now she's clicking on here. Now we want to have her engage with an actual salesperson. In that mapping piece, you can understand the content that they're consuming, and you can understand when is the key time that a real person needs to talk to them. When they are ready to have Kevin reach out and say, “Hi, I'm Kevin, I'm with Time on Target and we saw you had been checking out some of our information on how to automate. I'd love to know if you have any questions, how can I help?”

Be able to have that real person. If it's too soon, they'll say, “Get away, it's creepy. I'm just looking.” One of the technology pieces that we will use from time to time with clients is good at that. Literally, I will download or I'll visit a blog and they will message me immediately 10 minutes after I leave the page. “We saw you were checking out this blog post. Here's some other content that you might be interested in.” That's creepy and then 10 minutes later, I get a phone call from my rep. I'm like, “Dude, that's too much. Little clingy.” I need some space. If you're a Friends fan, “We were on a break.”

Yes, I love it. There's a fine line between being helpful and being approached with a heart of service versus being salesy. What I love about your process is that it maps out the process itself and it shows you when and where to have certain touch points so that you're helpful and you're serving, but you're not creepy and salesy.

You can set up your automation so that if someone clicks to say, “I want this lead magnet.” Awesome. You send them the automated email that says, “Here's your lead magnet.” Then you can watch and see if they download it. If they click through and download, “Awesome. Cool, here's some more content that you might be interested in or more content that builds on what was in that lead magnet and takes it to that next level.” If they don't click on it, you could say, “No, see I haven't had a chance to download the content yet.” “Everyone gets busy, totally got it. Here's the link again for you so that you can make sure that you don't miss out on this thing that you wanted from us.”

Smart. I love that. If you have not yet scooped up the gift, definitely check that out, and thank you so much, Kevin, for breaking down how to be more human, yet systematize, automate, and maximize sales at the same time. Super helpful. Of all the strategies and things to systematize, I think this is the number one thing that any business owner can systematize, honestly.

It's really funny because when I meet with new businesses that want to do automation, they're all excited, we're going to automate sales, it's going to be awesome. They come in with these really big grandiose ideas of all the things they want to automate and how data is going to be flying everywhere. I normally will take them 10 steps back. I'm like, “Let's find the one thing that we can automate that's going to have some immediate impact on your quality of life, Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner so that you can spend more time building your business.”

What is that one thing? Are we automating the thank you email? One little thing that's going to be easy for us to build for you and get you using it and it's going to make you happy when it works because you can always add to it. If you get too complex right away, now there's too much opportunity for things to break and not to work correctly.

If you're not an experienced Automator, this is what I do every day, build stuff. If something breaks, I know what I did. I forgot to do this thing. Most people think, “Now it's going to take me days to figure out what I did wrong.” They just get frustrated and they stop. They'll say, “This doesn't work.”No, you tried to go too big. You tried to build a Titanic instead of a sailboat.

Correct, start small and add and add. It also helps that you have the perfect level of geekiness for this.

I have a nice balance between geekiness and being able to talk to people.

Closing Words

I love that. Thank you so much, Kevin. This is super valuable. You should scoop up his gift if you have not yet. If this is hitting you in just the right place and you're realizing, “This is the thing I need to take action on.” Be sure to grab that VIP ticket because you might want to circle back, reread this, take notes on it and break that apart, have that guide next to you, and do a deep dive on it. If you haven't grabbed the VIP ticket yet, grab it now. With that, we will see you inside the Facebook group. We'll do a debrief. We'll have some Q&A opportunities.

Important Links 

• Growth Mode

• Time on Target

• Time on Target Facebook

• Time on Target Contact

• Freebie Audience Explosion

• https://www.facebook.com/groups/6.figure.strategy

About Kevin Snow

Getting into the mind of your ideal client or customer is hard to do…unless you’ve got Kevin in your back pocket! Ask the right questions and watch the results roll in using Kevin’s strategies.

Guest 1 Bio: The co-host of the top-100 Apple Podcast, Growth Mode, and CEO of Time On Target, Kevin Snow is a sales expert and a serious technology geek who knows how to help his clients take their automation game to the next level and is changing the game of business development.

With a 20-year career working with brands like Frontier Communications, Nextel, Salesforce, and BNI, his knowledge, skills and understanding of communication and technology are getting real results for the businesses he works with. Kevin knows how to integrate digital technology with your sales process in an authentic, professional way.

He’ll show you what you’ve been missing in terms of ensuring an effective system of outreach, and trust-building. Part entrepreneur, part salesperson, part networker, part technology master and part Star Wars fan…how can you afford not to have Kevin on your team this year?