Episode 326: Automating Business Processes While Keeping Them Human

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:01:13 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. Or if you’re here for the first time, welcome to Making Sales Social. I have a really cool guest today. Pete Romano founded the company Segwik, which gives businesses that edge by bringing all the tools they need into one place while providing all the support necessary to learn and master those tools. Segwit believes in giving you the means to empower your vision.

0:01:41 – (Brynne Tillman): Their CRM technology is easy to adapt, easy to implement, and easy to grow upon. I love that. So you can run your entire business with clarity of mind, and the knowledge that your brand is running at its highest possible level. Pete loves to help companies turn leads, calendars, automated emails, and customer journeys into their vision and bring their business to the next level. Pete, this is so exciting. Welcome to the show.

0:02:13 – (Pete Romano): Brynne, this is amazing to be here. This is a long time in the making and I’m glad that we could finally do this. Yay.

0:02:20 – (Brynne Tillman): So excited for you to be here. And I’m so excited for the insights that our listeners are about to explore. So before we jump into your magic, we ask all of our guests, what does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:02:35 – (Pete Romano): Wow. I mean, there are so many ways that you could pull that apart. But just what comes to mind first is that for me, it’s all about Making Sales Social. If you think of social as meaning casting a wide net, then sometimes it’s hard for a small business owner or solopreneur or a three-person shop to be able to handle customers at scale. And so the process that we go through, I hope that we get into about the customer journey and merging technology is all about automating a business while keeping it human and creating that high-quality customer experience that we can multiply over and over again.

0:03:25 – (Pete Romano): That’s what social selling, selling means, is scalable, humanized businesses.

0:03:33 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that you’re bringing those two things together because this is the future. We talk with companies all the time that have very traditional relationship-building philosophies, and they’re like, well, I don’t think we want to do this digital world, this AI world, this automation world, because we’re so relationships built. As much as I understand, we have the other side that does all automation without the relationship, and neither one is really productive.

0:04:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. So, I love that you said we have to marry the two. So let’s, as we talk about that, and I love that to be kind of almost the common theme throughout this, talk to me a little bit about the customer journey, because this is something so many business leaders are talking about, but they don’t necessarily grasp the core of what that customer journey can look like. So talk to me a little bit about how you see that.

0:04:38 – (Pete Romano): Sure, sure. And yeah, well, I’ll try to keep it concise because I love talking about this, and it could be a whole college curriculum if you let me. But we don’t have that kind of time. So let’s just dive right into some insights that I had. Washington, I started this software company just from nowhere. I remember sitting around in Hoboken, New Jersey, in an office that we had, cleaning up my office, finding invoices on the floor, and unpacking project management notes and script notes. We were doing a lot of video production at the time, and I was finding contracts with customers and all these sorts of things. And it sort of dawned on me that everything about your business can be scienced in a certain way. There’s nothing in your business that is outside the realm of being scienced, and there’s nothing in your business that you ever really do once.

0:05:37 – (Pete Romano): If you’re going to do something, chances are you’re going to end up repeating that. Otherwise, it doesn’t really belong in your business. If there are outliers of some task that you do, then that’s improvisational. And you just sort of broke the system in a sort of way. And, that’s when it dawned on me that you can really look at your business completely as a piece of software, and you can have all of the steps laid out from the beginning of where you need to set up your company and the LLC or the entity documents and the operating agreement, which contracts are very much a piece of software in a way. If this does that if this does that.

0:06:23 – (Pete Romano): But then as it relates to the customer journey and you start to market to people, okay, well, how do you do that? Who do you go after? Okay, that’s a big conversation. But then where do you drive them to? Where are you driving them to? We call those customer journey entry points. And so are you driving them to an inbound phone call? Are you driving them to a calendar? Are you driving them to your LinkedIn?

0:06:44 – (Pete Romano): Are you driving them to a webinar? Okay, and then if you drive them to your phone, then what happens? Or if you drive them to your calendar, then what happens? And then you could just keep asking that question, and before you know it, you have all of these branches and you have this wireframe of a really elegant, beautiful model. If you really just take the time to consciously build that, not unconsciously, and think, well, the customers usually put me through this and then they put me through that, that’s got to stop. You are the composer of your own business processes. You are Beethoven with a little scribe pen with a little feather, and you’re writing out the steps of how everything should operate. And that’s the real job of any entrepreneur, is to be. That’s what being an entrepreneur really is. You’re building the system that delivers the products.

0:07:36 – (Pete Romano): You’re not building the products, you’re building the system that delivers the products. And to our world, that’s what we call the customer journey. And everything is informed by that. Everything that you do internally is informed by the steps that the customer has experienced from just learning about the problem that they have to choose you, to being a passionate advocate all the way to the end of the process.

0:08:00 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. I know when we first launched our LMS, my entire wall was posted notes, if this, then that, if this, then that. Right. And I remember just kind of moving them around and trying to visualize that customer journey. But what are some of the things that you do to help your clients kind of map out that customer journey?

0:08:26 – (Pete Romano): Yeah. So the great thing is that for our company, we are the implementers and the consultants and the problem solvers, the brains that help to map out problems. But then we also have our own technology to implement these challenges. And our technology will replace other technologies and then also work well with technologies that they want to keep. So we help them kind of sort out what their technology stack is going to be.

0:08:57 – (Pete Romano): And we meet with the clients, we hear what they’re trying to do. And, we mainly work with complex service providers, people that have long sales cycles, people that have complex proposals that they need to go through and that go through many rounds. And then those go out to a group of stakeholders where the politics of your client’s organization all take over and have to figure that part out. And so you have to follow up with them and maybe they’re ready to go, or maybe they’re not.

0:09:29 – (Pete Romano): And then when they are ready to go, what does that look like? And so we work with the clients, to our clients to really figure out all of these steps. And it’s not just about figuring out all of these mechanical steps, because that’s what a fully technical-minded person would do. They could map it all out like software. But then what you said in the intro, then the humanizing part comes in and everybody listening to this, we’re five or six minutes into this podcast.

0:09:59 – (Pete Romano): Everybody listening to this has probably gotten two or three Google calendar invites in their inbox just while they were listening to this podcast. And what’s the point of that? It’s a boring email that just clutters up your inbox. Doesn’t do anything for anybody. You know, what time you’ve agreed to? Like why do you need to confirm? So even something as mundane as an email confirming an appointment from booking a calendar time can be what we call a high-value touch point where let’s say it was an email confirming a discovery session, the first really important call that a service provider has with a person who needs a service. Right. This discovery session should be a momentous celebration that somebody’s willing to set aside 45 minutes or 90 minutes to hear about you. So that email should reflect the high value that you put on that customer’s time and the high value that you put on your time to have a very productive session. So let that person know what they’re getting into, give them an agenda, give them a video preview, give them a downloadable item, some things to think about, some potential questions to have. And so we’ll design these really intricate emails that just help to move this customer through these beautiful stages of the business.

0:11:24 – (Brynne Tillman): That is really brilliant. So I’m just going to restate what I heard so our listeners get how absolutely impactful that is. Every touch point needs to be meaningful to the person you’re touching.

0:11:42 – (Pete Romano): Yes.

0:11:43 – (Brynne Tillman): Like that’s it, right? Like, this is not just a reminder, this is a touch point. Take advantage of their eyeballs. Take advantage of that real estate that you got them to look at. You know what? That alone is just like kind of the mic drop of the month for me.

0:12:04 – (Pete Romano): I’ll give you another example. Here’s one thing that we’ve done for clients, is using that example again. Maybe it’s the kickoff of a project. Maybe it’s the, hey, we knew this was coming. We started the, just like you order a dominos pizza, we got your order. It’s in the oven. That’s how I think about delivering services is we all agreed were moving forward. You’re getting an email that this project is kicking off. Okay, that’s great.

0:12:32 – (Pete Romano): You could make that high quality. We’ve done great things where very interesting things where you have the important calls to action at the top of an email and at the bottom of the email are like a simple link to your latest article or a simple link to your latest podcast where you have the business at the top, the relevant, timely business, and then at the bottom of the email is sort of timeless type of content, evergreen content. We’ve done that. But then one more point on this is that I had a really good friend who would say, Pete, stop sending me. Got a minute? Meeting requests. Pete, got a minute? Meeting. You’ve got a minute? Hey, you got a minute?

0:13:10 – (Pete Romano): That’s what a typical person does as they go through their customer life cycles I need this question. I have this thing and they go to their Google calendar and they send off the invite to the customer and you go, everybody knows Google Calendar. You just put in whatever subject line you want in there and that does not give you any barriers to your process. What’s that meeting about? Like, what’s it like? It just lets you put in anything.

0:13:35 – (Pete Romano): And so we work with people to put barriers on the process because we’re all human, we all make mistakes, we all want to stray and improvise day to day. And if you could put proper barriers that allow the right amount of control at the right moments, you’re building your scalable business.

0:13:53 – (Brynne Tillman): Wow. How much of that is driven by AI, your prompts? Or is it just kind of click button for follow-up on this process? Click the button to follow up on that process. Like how are you delivering those scalable, productive calendar invites or emails at the right time?

0:14:18 – (Pete Romano): Great question. That’s a great question. An AIH can play a role in this, and I’ll share. But as you’re building out your exact business processes for us right now, most of it is, well, pretty rigidly laid out where AI isn’t really playing a role in the structure of your journeys. Maybe AI can help inform you if you ask questions about ideas about how you could make elegant customer journeys. I can give you some brainstorming ideas, but the actual carrying out of them, they’re rigidly timed. But I’m going to give you an example right now that’s going to blow your audience’s mind about where AI is going for us.

0:15:00 – (Pete Romano): Let’s say that I have a contact in my database where I say to my virtual assistant, hey, get some discovery sessions with this person and that person. Okay, well, person a, you might have a very high rapport and you’ve known them a long time. Person B, you just met at a networking event last week. The outcome that you want from your VA is that you want them to help compose an email that is going to get them both to a discovery session.

0:15:30 – (Pete Romano): If you want that to be personalized, chances are you haven’t really put in any information that your virtual assistant might be overseas, that has no context. They don’t know who these people are. They don’t know what to say. So we’re really focused on making sure that every interaction that you’re having with people is easily loggable. And so if I have a person that’s been in my universe for ten years and I have a person that I just met, the system will know that.

0:16:01 – (Pete Romano): And if you want to get a personalized email to them, that’s where AI can really start to help, where it can analyze everything that you know or everything the system knows about that customer and compose an email, regardless of having a common goal. Each of those two examples would get an email that is in my tone, and that’s appropriate for the relationship that’s already been established.

0:16:30 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s awesome. I mean, we’re developing AI around building content, but this is the fact that this is in real time. Click a button. Here’s what I’m looking to accomplish is amazing. So I love that businesses and business processes have been, I guess business processes have been around for a very long time, whether it’s originally your CRM that you put in processes or you have your timeline from when you roll out a new project.

0:17:09 – (Brynne Tillman): But scaling that has always been a challenge. So talk to me a little bit about how you are helping your clients refine that process and then actually scale it through technology.

0:17:26 – (Pete Romano): Yeah, sure. So I would say to clients that if you could map how just, I’ll say it like this. At the current moment any business, if the business was to just stand still and freeze a moment in time, there are customers that are at one point of their lifecycle. There’s customers that are further down, they’re at the end of their life cycle. There’s people that are just getting into their life cycle. And so you, as the business, you’re seeing all of these people in different stages of their customer lifecycle, and you probably have no, very limited best practices to begin with. And so you’re having to juggle all of these people, and this guy has, we have to say this to them, and we need to do this for that person, and it becomes a very improvised process.

0:18:15 – (Pete Romano): So one of our insights very early on was this idea of putting all of that out of your head. We have to put that out. And let’s just focus on how one customer moves through our processes perfectly. Let’s just. Oh, but Pete, we have customers that are high-end, and we have customers that are very low-end, low value, and we have customers that are very high ticket. Okay, well, if you service those differently, let’s create two different Personas.

0:18:44 – (Pete Romano): Okay? You have your high ticket Persona and you have your low ticket Persona. You just said that they move through your processes differently. Okay, let’s take one at a time. This person moves through these steps and the other Persona goes through a different set of steps. And so not every customer in your database is created equally. And so it’s up to you, the business owner. Again, it’s about being proactive and not reactive. So we will work with customers to really shape that.

0:19:13 – (Pete Romano): But then it comes down to, and this is where I mentioned earlier that I had a music background, that none of this came to me because I was good at this. I was a musician, I was an improviser. I would play guitar solos. And you’re just coming up with stuff. And that is good for a certain kind of environment, but it’s not very good for making analogies to business processes. Business processes. I needed to learn to be more like a football team or more like a basketball team, or more like the New York Yankees, where you’re running plays and you’re practicing the play. And so we’ll work with businesses to say, okay, we’ll build wireframes, we’ll build videos of saying, okay, well, when you do this, then this happens. And then this happens. And this happens. And so study, what’s going on and learn how the system is working now that we’ve configured it. And so we act as that kind of manager, that coach that says, run the play again, run the play again.

0:20:11 – (Pete Romano): And it’s going to get better every single time.

0:20:16 – (Brynne Tillman): I love this. And, you know, it’s amazing how people are just randomly out there in the world. Running their business and don’t really have this structured process in place, which I think makes it really difficult to scale. So I love what you’re doing. So two more questions. Second to last question. What question did I not ask you that I should have?

0:20:44 – (Pete Romano): Oh, wow. What question did you not ask me that you should have? Well, I guess a lot of people, leave our sessions with more questions than they have answers. And so you’ll start to get questions like, okay, Pete, well, do you work on other technology or do you only work on your type of technology? And so we have our own platform. We have our own, you can call it a CRM. We call it a customer journey automation system.

0:21:16 – (Pete Romano): It’s industry agnostic. It really can take on the challenges of any kind of business. But we’re not necessarily exclusive to that because you can’t just tip over a business’s Applecart just willy-nilly. It’s not your decision to make. There’s ongoing stuff. And so I like to say that if you’re in the New York area, you remember when they knocked down the old Yankee Stadium and they built the new Yankee Stadium?

0:21:42 – (Pete Romano): Yeah, it is. So we’re building, for our clients, we’re building the new Yankee Stadium while the old Yankee Stadium is still having games. And so you don’t want to tip over the apple cart in that way. So we’ll work with any kind of industry on any kind of technology just to make their businesses run better. That’s our passion, it shouldn’t be so hard to run your business and we should all be spending more time with our kids and dogs and family.

0:22:10 – (Brynne Tillman): I love work-life balance, that’s for sure. So last question. If you’ve had peak to the interest of an entrepreneur or business leader, how can they get in touch with you?

0:22:23 – (Pete Romano): Sure. Segwick.com is segwik.com or just find me on LinkedIn.

0:22:31 – (Brynne Tillman): Also, Pete Romano from Segwick. Thank you so much. Lots of mic-drop moments. Absolutely brilliant. I will say, although I had a lot of takeaways, I’m going to repeat the one that really is just, like, going to be part of the fabric of my being, which is to make every one of those touch points meaningful to the receiver of that touchpoint. And just, it’s such a simple thing, but it’s mind-blowing that I haven’t done that.

0:23:03 – (Brynne Tillman): So thank you so much for your insights and for everyone else that’s out there listening and learning, I’m sure you got some amazing takeaways. And make sure when you’re out and about. You’re making your sales social. Thanks, Pete.

0:23:18 – (Pete Romano): Thanks, guys.

0:23:19 – (Bob Woods): Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast and leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us. Next. Register for free [email protected] dot. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.

Outro:

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