Bryan Franklin

3 Incredible Automated Systems that Will Transform Your Business

10 years ago

You’re leading your business. Your job is literally to work yourself out of a job such that leadership is the only thing that is left. Such that you’re only doing the steering.

When you first start, it’s okay if you’re doing the steering while wearing three or four or five other hats. This is natural for start-ups, but it’s a limiter when you want to grow.

When the time comes to grow, you want to start taking off those hats and giving them to other people. Because when you’re steering—and steering only—that’s where your genius really comes in.

I have three incredible systems that I’ve put into place, and automated within my own business, that are relevant for you if you’re an entrepreneur or business owner. These systems have really helped me to scale, and I’ve shared them again and again in my coaching as the top systems for clients to create within their businesses.

Automated System #1: Sales and Fulfillment

When visitors come my website and they are not on my list, they get a big flashing sign that says, “You should take this assessment, learn about my seven-figure-formula, and I’ll send you a customized growth plan for your business in the next 19 minutes.”

They frequently choose to take the assessment, which consists of a bunch of questions. The answers tell both them and me where they are in the whole grand scheme of growing their business, as well as what they need to do next.

If they start the assessment and don’t finish it, they get a bunch of friendly emails (automated emails) that say, “Hey we noticed that you started, but you haven’t finished yet.”

We walk through all the reasons why people might not have finished and the first one is like, “Listen, if you didn’t have time that’s okay. It only takes about twenty minutes. If you’re thinking too hard about each question, don’t worry about it just go with your first instinct.”

The next email comes back and says, “Well maybe you were intimidated by some of the questions. That’s okay. Just answer ‘no’. All the questions are not for everyone.”

At the end of the email, they are invited (via an automated time-trade link) to schedule a phone call with someone who can talk them through their results. The person they speak to is one of our salespeople, who sells them on coaching.

After that point, one of the coaches on our team fulfills the service end of the process by coaching them. The whole idea is to produce a set of coaches that can coach the business owner on scaling and growing their business using our automated assessment and reply technique.

It’s cool because the whole process from beginning to end is out of my hands now. I spend a lot of time on the assessment and the methodology of how to address each stage of the business once we know where the client is at. The coaches are able to take the scaling model that I’ve used and implement it really effectively.

Automated System #2: Content Marketing

I noticed a lot of entrepreneurs have started to realize that they need to generate more leads. One of the most common questions people have is, “How do I get more people to hear about who I am and what I offer?”

One of the many answers to that question is to really put your content out there, to utilize social media, and to engage the people who already know you.

There is this notion that you need to not only run your business, but also run a social media company within your business. You have to send out tweets, send out Facebook posts, create blogs, and record YouTube videos…

When you’re first starting out, on top of selling and fulfilling, marketing your products through content and social media feels like a really heavy burden. It feels like a whole other skill set that could very well require an entire team of people.

So I decided to create a done-for-you content company that automates blogs, videos, and social media for everyone. This company, called PlumeSocial (like nom de plume) provides an automated content process via a simple five-minute interview.

Automated System #3: Engagement

A lot of people only think about automating their internal systems. For example, having emailing systems that deal with customer service or streamlining employee processes.

But I decided to figure out a system that could automate the engagement side, directly with the customer.

The complexity of most people’s systems is just an email sequence that you’re either on or not on. For most businesses, the email recipient signs up and then gets the sequence.

Business owners always measure how many emails they’re sending out. But, what many of them are not measuring is what people are doing with those messages. How are readers behaving once they receive the email? How can you automate and systemize your interactions with them based on their behavior—instead of just sending out, sending out, sending out?

What about a sequence that actually knows what you have done and what you haven’t done? A system that branches off based on what the customer has done so that it feels like you are actually having a conversation. With such a system, the audience feels like they’re getting a personal touch.

This is something that a program like Office Autopilot can do, and it’s a great example of what awesome things technology makes possible these days.

For example, with Mind Money Meaning, we could track exactly where people were in our program, and based on what they were doing or weren’t doing, we would send them really personal emails saying something like, “Hey, I noticed you’re kind of stuck. Here are some thoughts for you about what happens when people get stuck at this point.”

We’d follow up with another encouragement email five or seven days later. Then two or three weeks later, if they still didn’t respond, we would reach out to them again with, “Hey, are you on vacation? If you’re out of town just let us know so we know to stop bugging you.” They were really great emails—they were personal and totally based on the behavior of the client.

People would write us back these wonderful messages saying, “Wow thank you. This totally got me to engage in your program.”

The online marketing world tends to have a lack of engagement because many businesses don’t optimize their marketing for human interaction.

This is often due to the expense in both time and money—if you had a staff of five or ten customer service agents personally engaging your clients or potential clients, it would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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