21: The one about streamlining your processes
Get ready to nerd the fuck out about business systems! Today it's part 1 and we're diving deep into the shit that'll save your sanity - CRMs and automation tools that'll stop you from losing your mind over repetitive tasks.
We're spilling all the tea about our love-hate relationships with tools like SuiteDash, ClickUp, and Asana (spoiler alert: they're actually pretty fucking awesome once you get your head around them). Plus, we're sharing the embarrassing stories of what our businesses looked like before we got our shit together with proper systems.
If you're drowning in manual tasks and feeling like a hamster on a wheel, this episode is for you. We're breaking down how to automate the boring stuff so you can focus on the parts of your business that actually light you up (and make you money).
Fair warning: We get pretty excited about this stuff, so prepare for some serious system-loving enthusiasm and maybe a few F-bombs along the way. Because let's face it - good systems are sexy as fuck!e
Part 2 will be in episode 23.
Number of fucks given in this episode: 14
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Christine: Welcome to the Fuck Around and Find Out podcast. We're your hosts, Rah, Emily and Christine. We're three women who have built and run our own businesses and are here to shoot the shit on everything about women in business and running your own business.
Rah: I've already lost my headphones. Hi, I'm coming back.
I'm coming back.
Emily: Afternoon, whenever we are.
Rah: Hi Rah, you're plugged in again? Yes, I'm plugged in. They fell off my head because I was trying to make my hair look pretty. It's all about the gram. Lordy, now I feel like I'm wearing a helmet. I know, it's a bit weird, isn't it? This is all the behind the scenes shit I never thought about when we said yes to starting a podcast.
Christine: No, and I still think we need to do a
Rah: podcast
Christine: episode on all the stuff
Rah: that
Christine: we've done wrong, but we've learned to live. You mean the three attempts
Rah: it took to record a recent episode? Oh, well, you know, maybe. Maybe
Christine: something like that. Maybe don't close the lid
Rah: when your laptop's recording. Well, you know,
Christine: there's that, but I'm not going
Rah: to criticise.
Also,
Christine: [00:01:00] you
Emily: know, it happened because we were so in depth with the conversation. Very true. That it didn't even notice we were recording. for being generous with my lost my marbles. It was very in depth.
Christine: It's like oh no, I want to focus on you and we should all go back to where we want to focus. It was great conversation.
It was brilliant. We can't wait to share that with you guys live. Must be rerecorded.
I'm all used up for this one. So what are we going to chat about today, ladies?
Rah: Look, um, I just do, I dunno. I was going to start talking and then I realised, you know, the words and I don't. So I was like, do you want me to say it or do you want me to just shut up and get stuck in my corner? I'm cutting my bit out.
Um, we were,
Emily: um, we were, we're going to talk about business structure. I just wrote it down real fancy. It's business structure. Streamlining your processes, I think is, is the way in which we want to go with this. [00:02:00] Yeah.
Christine: We're spitballing
Emily: about talking about automations, but we thought we'd figure out a better way of how that works.
Rah: And also automation scares people. So if people see this in their podcast app, they're going to go, yeah, I'm not listening.
Emily: Yeah, so it's about, um, your business functionality, your systems you have in place to help streamline the administration and onboarding, offboarding, client life cycle, all of that stuff.
All that repetitive shit, there are ways to improve it and not do
Christine: it yourself.
Emily: It is so important and it's also like, You know, I was talking to a girl today actually, and she was like, Oh, it's just so much work, isn't it? And I was like, I mean, it is, but it also doesn't feel like it to me because it's just part and parcel with what you get used to doing.
But it is so important when you are like, you know, Chris and I, in our situation, running a team as well as clients, and then Rah, for you, just running your clients and just having that process in place. I'm running myself. I need automation out the wazoo. Well, exactly. And we've already touched on it in a few different episodes about Um, bits and pieces, like, you know, structure and contracts and, um, you, you know, your backup [00:03:00] plan and that kind of stuff, it all kind of part and parcel plays into that wider conversation.
Um, and it's something Chris and I are currently quite deep into at the moment with our business. Yeah, we're really into the weeds. Sorry, I sounded
Rah: like Beetlejuice then. Appropriate timing. Musicals coming out to Sydney next year. Is it really? Eddie Vee's feature's playing Beetlejuice, the guy who pre edited it.
Might edit that out, I'll check, let me make a note.
Christine: Might be an edit point there. And you might need to remove my thing, I said Halloween's next week and of course this is the rug up to
Emily: Halloween. This is what happens when we're organised. I know right. Um, yeah, but it's, you know, it's, Chris and I are deep into the moment of, Of, you know, the nature of what all three of us do means that we unfortunately are across multiple systems all the time and it becomes quite over complicated and then you, it's messy because like we can't figure out where the hell to save things.
We can't figure out what to use. You know, Chris and I've talked a lot about wanting to dive [00:04:00] deep into the Google and be really Google people, but we have clients that are Microsoft based, so we can't, we have to straddle that line between the two. Exactly. It's tricky.
Christine: It is, but it's like, where are you going to make the home of your one?
Where's your, yeah, yeah.
Emily: And that's where we've kind of been working on at the moment. And we've got a CRM, which I bought over a year ago and haven't done anything weird because it was such a big project.
Christine: Look, as you know, I like to say, everything has its time and we weren't ready when you got it, um, beautiful lifetime, um, special hashtag absolutely.
Absolutely. Um, wasn't ready. Would I say at this moment in this week that feels like it's been two weeks long, and it's only a Wednesday. Um, would I say, yeah, um, would I, I would probably say, damn, why didn't we get it sorted sooner? But again, I come back to that. Everything has its time. the
Emily: [00:05:00] same token, right?
Like there's never the right time. I'll go recent,
Christine: but I fuck, do we need it now? Yeah, we do. And yesterday, you know, we're lucky enough
Emily: to also have had some support in our team to help us set this up. Um, as well as some very long weekend nights for me lately. Yes.
Christine: I know. So, um, so in, um, Chris like messages, messages me and um, says, Oh, you know, I'm setting up the sweet dash stuff and, and everything.
And all I said was, no, hang on, hang on. I said, I said
Emily: that I just set up our own personalized, completely branded J. R. portal.
Rah: And I was so fucking
Emily: proud of this thing. And Chris was like, cool.
Rah: Yeah. Because she doesn't understand. I was like, what? How magical it will be. Like, what was that reaction? Okay, so that's me with a really fucking great spreadsheet.
Yeah. Yeah. And then I show it to people, God love them, who don't, who can't understand all the data I've just punched into the spreadsheet for them and put filters and data validation. Look, and I appreciate all the work, but you know what? At that
Christine: [00:06:00] moment I should have shut the fuck up because I was like.
When in doubt, fawn. Fawn. Well, you know, I think it, but you know, I, I am not, you know, I'm a juggler of things. I'm a woman after all, we juggle, but you know, there's the myth around multitasking. You can't focus what you need to focus on one thing fully. Right. So I don't focus. So in that moment. I had my, my mind in some other space.
I was probably having a pity party. I'm a bit tired. Oh fuck. You know, blah, blah, blah. It was also the weekend, so technically I shouldn't have messaged, was the weekend, uh, no, no. You're allowed to message me. Hashtag shaped boundaries. Yeah. Yes, yes. There was a real anti-climax. But it's fine. Cause I,
Emily: my dad happened to bop by later and he's a massive techie guy.
Like all my
Rah: flashbacks, Chris, to when people saw your reaction to your surprise birthday party. It's probably exactly what that was. Like, Oh God. Hashtag triggered. I think [00:07:00] so. I, that's fine. We just know you don't, you can't fake arresting bitch face. No. Well, I can't. And
Emily: you know, and like I said, I had my dad come around and every tech ability I have is definitely from dad.
He is, I also giggled cause I messaged her as well, being like, my dad sat down. He's like, so I'm thinking about a side hustle. It's like, where the fuck you been in the last few years, man? Like, what do you think I'm doing? This You know, he wants to make apps. He's a coder. He's a, he's a techie. So everything I can do, I learned from dad.
So I was like, look what I've made. And then I was giggling. Cause he's like, and what's the CRM? And where did you get it from? And how much did it cost? And I was like, have you heard of AppSumo? No, looking it up and he's fine. I'm like, look at this. I'm teaching the old dogs some tricks now. The roles have reversed.
Um, I've learnt things and now I'm teaching them back. Um, Hashtag look out for our new app coming soon for the to be, what it's going to have, I'm
Rah: not f ing sure. But we're getting one. But we're recording this so that we have a record on the ideation. Yeah, [00:08:00] but is that the right word? I'll use AI to put in the right word.
Yeah.
Emily: Um, but you know, the CRM for us is a really big game changer right now and it's, it's got It's one of those things that I think every company should potentially look at in some way, shape, or form. We were just advising some clients on this yesterday, and it's, you know, it's your one source of truth, as Chris said.
And it's the ability to then, you know, if anyone, again, we go there by the hit by bus theory, right? If one of us gets killed, or dead, whatever, um, We have the CRM, which has a track record of all of our clients, of all the notes, even potential clients, everything, it's all there. Well, exactly.
Christine: So for any of our listeners, um, today who aren't actually on top of what a CRM is, it's a Customer Relationship Management System, so hence CRM.
It's seriously essential for small businesses. to efficiently manage customer interactions. You can track your sales, foster growth without it. You've
Rah: got
Christine: no idea.
Rah: [00:09:00] There's no lights on. No. Can't see shit.
Christine: No, no. You know, you know, it's seriously at the moment we, you know, any business can start with the Excel spreadsheet and you know, for tracking, for finances, for invoicing.
There's ways to do it manually. Absolutely. Absolutely. But there is a point in your business where you. Need to grow and you might not have the funds for it But without growth without taking on staff or team, you can't grow further to get those funds and the CRM It's the same thing. There is a moment in time in business where it's like shit needed.
We've got to have it
Emily: Yeah and the system we've picked we got after a bit of research on my part and also The fact that we like it does Everything, right? It's got a client facing portal that we can completely white label branding, you know, learning. It is pretty cool. We've got the ability to invoice through there.
We've got the ability to run our documents and our quotes and our, um, contracts. It does [00:10:00] a signature through there, which is a big one that why we liked it. Cause it means we don't then need to pay for like a docu sign or anything else. Yep. Um, it's got the ability to schedule and has calendar built in and stuff like that.
It does have its own app as well, built into this. So we can actually get everyone that we need or want or who wants it to have a Juniper Road app on their, on their phones. It has, it's got everything we need and then some, and it can be a bit intimidating, which is where I'm struggling right now is trying to go through all of the things that I need to know.
Um, thankfully we do have a very fabulous person on our team who's going to be right in the weeds with me setting this shit up. As of next week, thank God, so I don't have to do it on my own, but to get that flowing properly, because then it means when we have a new client or a new team member come on, we can just instantly trigger workflows that go, and this is what the automations is for those that don't understand what an automation is.
It is something that you don't have to do because it's automatically done for you. So you do need to build them in and that's where I'm getting, you know, I'm getting some help in [00:11:00] my techie abilities, which is definitely above average for human being need some help with this. And I'm getting some help for that, but it's literally like, okay, well you've signed this person up and then you can little things like add a tag of, you know, for us to retain a client, project client, whatever it might be, then that triggers X, Y, and Z to happen.
And we don't have to manually go and do it all. And you can do things like send out a form so you can gather all of their information. Yep. You know, trigger contracts to pre, that are pre built into our system to then.
Rah: And autofills with their details. Exactly. For those who to send it to.
Emily: Exactly. It's all there and it's all done within the system.
It's all housed within the system. We've got file sharing ability with this platform too. So they can share any files with us through the CRM. So we don't need a Dropbox, we don't need a Google Drive, we don't need any of it. It's all done through the system and it's housed in one place. And
Christine: by being housed in the one place, your entire customer journey life cycle is held in that capsule.
Absolutely. You don't need to be uploading, oh, download it out of DocuSign to upload [00:12:00] it over here. Save my email as a PDF and then import it and all of that. It's just there. So the productivity from a time perspective, Save. It's awesome.
Emily: And as, um, Rah did a beautiful thing for us yesterday and I didn't even realise, but there was Did I?
The Zapier. I didn't realise I could connect some of my sites through it. Yeah. Through Zapier as well. Fuckin Zapier, man. Those who don't know what Zapier is, it's a little bit of a tool that connects things together.
Rah: I call it the translator droid. So what it does is it takes When something happens on one thing, it can make something happen somewhere else.
So for instance, it's like the equivalent of someone submits a form, it can email you. Yeah. Exactly. That's the very simple term, which is actually by default provided by form systems, but it can add a row to a spreadsheet for you. It can save shit. You can get it to save your Instagram posts and save the image to your Google Drive and add the add the actual post details into a spreadsheet.
There's so much magic. Hashtag. I think we need a webinar [00:13:00] on this.
Emily: Yes. Well, I've actually got one. I want someone to teach me this stuff because Zapier is a bit like, I've dabbled it. It is magical.
Christine: Yeah, we had a client and um, using a particular um, project, so basically a CR, a split CRM, but um, it didn't integrate with Outlook and we couldn't email.
In the CRM, but so we emailed, um, in Outlook and it was just, you know, the Zaps and was set up. So just had to blind CC Yeah, great. And an email address and that then went in and said it, it added it to the record. Send it to the record. Um, oh,
Rah: that's just given me an idea for something. I'm helping a client try and work out a solution for Love it.
Yeah. Yeah. Because the magic of it is you set it up once and unless something. Bucks up.
Christine: Yeah. You don't have to touch
Rah: again. And it will fuck up because things just fall apart a bit. Like when you've got social media schedulers, you have to reconnect your Instagram [00:14:00] and your Facebook because it's the same concept of having that connector translator droid, that handshake wears thin and gets sweaty and your hands can't.
It just needs a bit of a boost. It just needs to be reacquainted digitally through the ones and zeros. Um, but even things like with, um, places that do forms. So I think Google Forms does it, but also SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Gravity Forms if you've got that plugged into your WordPress website. you can have conditional results.
So if someone hits, no, they weren't happy with your service, then they get taken to something else, which is like, Holy shit, we need to fix you. Like we've got something that we need to help resolve. Um, versus, Oh, they loved us. Great. Do you want to leave us a review on Google? Yeah. That's one of the smartest things I've seen someone put into a survey.
It's
Emily: very freaking smart. Very freaking smart.
Rah: Um, [00:15:00] But I will caveat that very quickly. It's not a bad thing if you get a bad review on your Google business listing, because you can turn that, you can work that in. Yes, you can, you can, you can definitely
Emily: respond to it in a way as
Rah: well. How you respond to it is what will actually help, because people don't believe when there's 100% five star.
No, it's, it's not legitimate. Yeah.
Emily: And anyway, I'm, what I'm hearing is where I was going to be running a Zapier.
Rah: Absolutely. Cause that's
Emily: stuff I really want to learn. And side
Rah: note, there is another version, which is a little bit cheaper called make. com make, make. Yes. It used to be called Integro mat. And I have, um, a friend who is an absolute gun at it.
And I'm learning how to use that as well, because I like the idea of saving money. It's a little bit harder to learn, I think. So Sapien, while fantastic, they can charge you more because it's so much simpler to use. But just having all of those, um, bits and pieces [00:16:00] that can talk to each other, it's just one less thing for you to have to worry about.
Christine: And look, it's seriously important because, I mean, there isn't, there isn't a unicorn anything, right? No, you can get a system, whether we're talking a CRM or a platform or whatever, it's going to, you know, the good ones are going to maybe have 95 percent of what you're looking for. If that, I don't know. I'm just pulling the numbers out, but not everything.
So it's about, well, what's the best one and what can you do? Can you 5 percent or can you get the bang for your buck? Exactly. Yep. Exactly.
Rah: Because the money that you may spend. So I think the cheapest plan for Zapier might be 35 us a month. I'm pulling that out of my ass. I will have to correct this at some point, but it sounds like a lot of money.
But when you think about the value of your time doing the manual handling of, I'm going to manually send an email and copy and paste the text or update a spreadsheet. The tricky part with the
Emily: Zapier though is that you're going to need someone to [00:17:00] help you set it up. If you don't have, you know, Yeah, the generalised techie sense tier.
So if
Christine: you're a Christine, you're going to outsource it to M. But even for me though,
Emily: like I'd be sitting there and I would deep dive into it and I'd probably blow like two day. Like I'd be something I'd be sitting there over the weekend and I still wouldn't come out of it feeling like I know enough about it.
Oh yeah. So even for someone like me, I'd need some, I'd need some help on that to try and get it. YouTube. Yeah. It was fantastic. And that's what I like about just to go back to the CRM is that, you know, cause we are with sweet dash, they have an LMS system built into the, um, the system. So they've actually run their own training.
In their own platform. Through their own platform. I know. Which is so clever. And there's YouTube galore. There is so much stuff about how to use it. So it's like, it's almost to the point where it's a tad overwhelming, but there's so much out there. A tad. It's always overwhelming. Yeah. You have to
Rah: decide
Emily: what you're going to focus
Rah: on and actually get it done.
But
Emily: what we were advising our clients yesterday, and this is the key for everyone, I think, is [00:18:00] don't let the fact that it can do so much, put you off. Exactly. You can use it in the most basic form. Start with where you're
Rah: at. Yeah. Yeah. Improve something bit by bit. Just
Emily: get you, just get a bunch of people on there.
Just get clients on there. Just get, you know, little bit by little bit. And then you can, as you said, you flex as you get used to the system, as you get used to that change. And it was really interesting watching, um, our clients actually go through that decision making process yesterday. That was quite interesting.
Yeah. And especially because one of our clients is very techie. She's techie as well. I was kind of giggling because I made a stunned silence, which is like a solid win on my part. Always fun. Yeah. But
Christine: you know, there's that. Yeah. She's got a great interest in tech. And a real need to be more productive and know that they need to move forward.
But you could also see the struggle and it's an and I think it's so where you are placed in the history of technology. Whether you were born before the internet or you were in your mid 30s before you actually had a little computer anywhere near your desk at work kind of thing. [00:19:00] So, When you are of that, um, Jen.
Jen, thank you. Yep. You sometimes the, the overwhelm is even more overwhelming. Yeah. Yeah. 'cause you know, you need it, you know it's gonna save you time, but you've also got that. It's just, I could just, I could, I'm so fast with how I do it now, you know, I'm gonna be 10 times slower until you've gotta got to, you know, practice makes progress.
I don't run fucking fast if I. Yeah. Worked at it, I would get better. Well that's right. Or an
Emily: alligator was chasing me. And you've got to start somewhere. Oh no, I'd be dead. Like you
Rah: have to start somewhere. Well this is exactly right. And that's the thing, you know, We didn't learn how to do everything on the internet immediately.
No, we
Emily: literally just fucked around and found out, this is how it works, you know.
Rah: Kind of how we came up with the name.
Emily: Pretty much. And you know, the other thing we've got, and it's okay to You don't have to have one system, like we still have another system that we use for our project management tool.
Because it does a bunch of other stuff for us that I haven't yet discovered whether SweetDash can do it or not. So that will be something down the path, whether that might turn into [00:20:00] that or not. But it works for us at the moment, but we have compressed to two things, which is a big win on our part too.
And also helps the organisation and trying to run the team and that kind of stuff too. It's, they're our processes that are helping streamline our ability to
Rah: do,
Emily: do the job. And it's also
Rah: financially streamlining. Yes. Like apart from the, the inadvertent, or what's the word? I can't think of the intangible improvements in terms of you are spending less time Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Doing, doing busy work.
Emily: Exactly. Right. And that's why like, you know, so we use Clickup as our project management tool. Take Asana over here. Mm-Hmm. . Um, and we've, I've always known that Clickup can time track. But I never really thought to do it in in ClickUp, but then we kind of went the other day. Hang on.
Yep. We're paying for a time tracking tool that we have to set up the team on that we get paid per, we get charged per seat for. That we're like, okay, but if I just paid for it, like an unlimited, whatever the plan is on ClickUp, it's actually cheaper than what we're paying for the other tool. [00:21:00] And it does more, including what that already was doing.
Rah: Yeah. And my equivalent for that in the last few months was when I realized that Zoom has new features that I hadn't been utilizing. So one of my favorite tools that I've been using for like four years is called loom. com. So you use that for recording videos and you record yourself and your screen. And it.
It syncs to the cloud while you're recording it, like it's mint, so good. Um, but Zoom has brought out their own version called Clips. Have they? Well,
Emily: that's good to know.
Rah: Yes, I can give you a demo once we finish recording. And I was telling it to my friend who's a guru with make. com and she works with a, um, really big business.
Um, and she was like, holy shit, I'm putting that to the board.
Emily: Yeah. Because it's just,
Rah: it's all, they already have Zoom. So they're already paying for Zoom. and it works in the exact same way. It will send you an email when someone views that video for the first time. Interesting. Fantastic. And so that's only [00:22:00] 150 a year.
Um, And it's just those things that if you, I guess we're lucky that we go looking for solutions. Yeah, we do. When you're stuck in doing all of this stuff, you're just like, oh, fuck, where's the answer? Yeah.
Emily: And you can also see why people get so stuck in their ways and don't want to change. Yeah. Because the change is hard.
I get it. And it's also, if you're not technically inclined. And you're really like, my beautiful friend is um, so not a tech girl. And like, I love her to death, but she just doesn't even want to learn. Does not want to know. It's all too hard, is all I ever get. She doesn't have the attitude of, I want to know how to better this.
She's not interested. And it just, and so half the time if I'm like, you know, I've built a website and a few things, and if I'm doing stuff like that, I have to do it all, and just show her how to use it. Yep. And then it's like, that's, that's where we're at. Yeah. I'm desperately trying to get her onto an online booking system, and it's a, she's literally writing shit in a book still.
And I'm like, this hurts my brain and my soul [00:23:00] just watching you write stuff in a book. But that's how she knows. Mm. Yeah. And it's also because she was taught old school from day one. Yeah. And it's, uh, It's just kind of like, mate, let me just fix this up for you. But not interested. But even if you're not techie, as long as you've got the attitude that you want to learn.
Rah: And that's key. And the thing that I always try to explain to people when they're having a little freak out about having to learn new systems or work out what they're going to do differently. I said, you're never going to be fully proficient in Word, Excel, Outlook, Google, whatever. No, you're always having to learn.
how to be agile with this stuff. And you just have to accept it. It's never going to be set in stone. That's just not the way it works anymore.
Emily: It's not. No. Cause the digital world is such a different thing. Like you have to be on the night. My Google maps
Rah: in my car has changed its layout in the last three days.
Every day. You know, it just caught
Emily: me this morning. I went to check when my doctor's appointment is next week. The entire fucking app has changed. I had to relog back in.
Rah: I was at AMS direct. Yeah.
Emily: And I had to do that before I could toggle [00:24:00] between like my husband and the kids. Can't do that now. Or I don't know where it's gone now.
But like things that I was just like, Oh, come on, you got to get on on board with it. This is just how the world works now. And when it comes to business functionality and running your business, you need to be spending time either doing business development or doing the job. Yeah. And you can't spend it as that, like, Buckets and buckets of time with your back end admin.
Yeah, you just can't like, it's just not, you know, at least Chris and I got two of us. We divide and conquer the load and that makes it a bit easier, but there's still, we don't have time to sit around doing all this stuff. So you need to get the best, most efficient ways possible and also factor in what is for your time and setting up a CRM and getting that running, you know, like we said, start small.
It is gonna take you a minute to set it up. Yeah. You gotta persevere. But it's, the long term benefit of that is definitely outweighs the short term pain.
Rah: And you can even just do baby steps. Mm-Hmm.
Emily: Yeah. Like I literally bought it and sat on it for you, . Yeah, exactly.
Christine: Yeah. But you know, like, you know, but that's right.
And now it's [00:25:00] about, you know, okay, well let's work out getting four and you know what's great? Yeah.
Rah: You weren't paying per month for it. No. 'cause I bought a yearly lifetime. Lifetime. Yeah. Yeah. It was sitting there ready to go when you, you weren't suddenly going, fuck, we really need this system and then shopping for it.
Exactly. Yeah. It was ready. We'd made the decision. And how much money have you saved? Cause we looked at the monthly cost now. Oh yeah. Yeah. Now that it's rolled out. I'm pretty sure we paid something like we paid. Cause you were, you guys basically AppSumo exists to get early adopters to help fund. ongoing development of apps.
And
Emily: I'm pretty sure we, what, what their yearly fee was. We paid for the lifetime. Yeah. So like, it wasn't. Yeah. It was worth its weight in gold. Yeah. You've saved so much money with that. I mean, the price for SweetDash is great. Um, anyway, as I was looking at the other day. Yeah, it's still good value for what you get out of it.
They don't charge per seat. Yeah, which is gold. Yeah. And I thought that was very clever. Um, look, we know we're talking hard about SweetDash. There are so many other CRMs out there [00:26:00] available and that can do multiple things at once. And that have different functionalities
Rah: purposes. Yeah. Like the CRMs for photographers.
There's, you know, all sorts of things. Yeah, salons have a different one. Yeah, exactly. Um, and I'm certified. Um, hang on, I need to change my phrasing. I am a KEEP certified partner and I have to tip my hat because I feel like, always feel like a cowboy when I say partner. Um, and KEEP is a CRM that used to be known as Infusionsoft.
And so I've gone through the training and the assessment processes, including customer, cycles, lifetime, blah, blah, blah. Um, as well as the technical aspects of automation and making all the shit talk to each other, because it's just so powerful, like it's, you know, there's so much that you can do with it.
And after like, I had been using it for eight years beforehand, got the certification and like, Oh yeah, it's fine. Like you've created an automation. Um, what did I put? I did. One of my assessments was for. a monthly competition that was being run for [00:27:00] a business and the automations that I set up, set it up for the entire year and it would save, I think it was something like 130 hours.
That's hectic. See that is phenomenal. And that's just
Christine: one automation. Yeah, exactly. And that's the power of automation. So it's the
Emily: power of having streamlined processes in place. Yep. You know, like it's whether it's just something that you've written on paper when you got, okay, new client comes in the door, these are my steps, or it is having a fully functioning built in CRM automation that triggers a whole bunch of stuff.
And you look at the major companies too, like the Woolworths groups or, you know, anything that's more than like is a large company, they have automations in place as well. The automations in place for setting up new users. When you have a new hiring, it triggers a whole bunch of automations when you're recruiting and when you're hiring people.
There's different things. So there's no reason we shouldn't be having all this stuff in a much smaller capacity.
Rah: And to give an example for people who are freaked out by the idea of coming up with, like, how much time it would take to develop an [00:28:00] automation that would save 130 hours a year, autoresponders on your email.
That's an automation. Yes, it is. It's literally in the name. So having, um, an autoresponder, so like Ellie, who we've had on the podcast before, um, Send Ellie an email and depending on when, when you're sending it, she might have an autoresponder that says, I'm out in meetings all day. I'm at a conference. I'm taking the day off because my kids are sick.
Like she gives you those. She
Christine: does that really good. She's
Rah: very clever with that. And by doing that. It's using, utilizing and
Emily: automation. And you're also setting expectations, which is also the key to that too. But, you know, Facebook has even bought, like I've talked a few times and run some training sessions on how to utilize Facebook groups.
Facebook groups have automations built into them. That saves so much time for me. You can schedule posts. You can schedule it. Welcome. To new members, you can, there's quite a bit you can do within that as well. And that's, that's another version of an automation. It's all, it's all built into that.
Scheduling tools are essentially automation.
Rah: And even with Facebook and [00:29:00] Instagram in MetaBusiness where you can automate that when someone sends you a message for the first time, it will automatically send a specific reply and you can personalize it with their
Emily: name. And you can set out of office times on those messages as well.
So it sends them out of business hours.
Rah: Ask the common questions. So they just tap a button and it will say, here you go. Here's what you need to know. Go to this page, call this number, fuck off. So if you're, if you're not, mostly
Emily: fuck off. Cause I don't like those messages, but if you're, if you're using a page for a big company or something that there's not.
You cannot have someone manning those kind of inboxes on your social channels especially. That stuff's perfect because you can just flick them off and respond without responding because it is too hard to sit there and try and click through everything and all of that stuff. And
Christine: again it comes back to that, you know, that time.
Yeah, it's time saving. And imagine what you can do, like, if it gets, if you save 130 hours on just one automation, imagine what you can do with that 130 hours back [00:30:00] in one day. I know, it's gobsmacking, absolutely gobsmacking.
Emily: Yeah. Which is why, you know, we think it's so important to have a look at your processes for your systems.
Have a look at your systems and processes. Have a really big look at how you've structured your business so that when you do bring in a new client, whether or it's a new customer that's buying a product, what does that then trigger? You've got e commerce has a whole set of automations built into any of those platforms.
If you're a bricks and mortar store. What is your process when people walk into your store? What's that customer journey that these automations and these systems efficiencies can actually create for you? Because that's what it ultimately does. It creates a really, really good customer lifecycle journey.
Yep. Which ironically is the next part of this conversation. But that's, it leads into that and you think about the experiences you've had with somewhere that you've really, really enjoyed. Yep. Either it's a service, it's a shopping experience. And how fast it is. Yeah, the efficiency, the level of personalisation, all of that stuff.
Can be attributed to proper systems and [00:31:00] processes and, you know, often training, making sure your team are trained to help SOPs people. So, so, so, so important operating procedures. Yeah. For those that don't know, um, But we highly recommend it. We'll put a list in, um, our podcast page and show notes and on the website all the things of a couple different CRMs We recommend for those who are in different sized of businesses with different price ranges We'll chuck some project management tools in there that we use.
We'll, you know, Rahh and I use different different tools Different things that are basically same, same, but different.
Christine: Yeah, absolutely. And if you've got a good CRM you use, tell us, industry, go and share it so we can share that love.
Emily: There will be people out there that don't know and would love to benefit from that kind of, um, behavior.
Honestly, Chris Rye and I sit around here talking about this stuff and we're constantly coming up with ideas, just talking to each other. So it's worth looking at how you, how you run your systems and how you run your backend. And your website and your digital presence all ties into this as well. It's not just one element.
It's a whole bucket of [00:32:00] bucket of goodness under the rainbow kind of thing. So, um, really, really have a look at it. It's definitely worth it.
Rah: Yeah.
