Statistics.

Somehow, simultaneously excessively boring, and frightening. It depends on your perspective.

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Why is this the case? Is the economy bad? Or are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the accessibility of technology? As online services become more robust, and user-friendly, the need for micro-managing how that technology runs on a day-to-day basis falls to fewer and fewer people. The one thing computers excel at, is repetition. And, math really doesn't lie, and computers don't make mistakes. So, once a process is coded in, in only really relies on what you input. As you likely remember from school: garbage in, garbage out. Code is law. Etc, etc.

The team at thanks.io have been in this game a long time. We have developed many complex systems since the early 2000's and also figured out over time how to remove as much of the tedium from these processes from your average user. This is absolutely necessary as your every day human really isn't that interested in computers that much. Only, in the content they provide.

Now we're at a point in time where the next phase in technological advancement will be built upon the shoulders of those who built before. When complex systems have been compartmentalized into packages that anyone can plug and play like Legos, the entire game changes. Anyone can make anything like that. Especially small business owners and team leaders who understand the 30,000ft goal they need to reach.

OK, great. How does can this affect MY business, specifically?

I'm so glad you read that question and agreed to ask it.

Business owners and Agency Brokers are painfully aware of the minefield that must be navigated when entrusting money making and retention processes to employees. This problem with humanity is sadly part of the territory. That being said, we still need people. But, where people can fall short mostly lies within the halls of tedium. This is especially true of salespeople. If you need to train someone to use a technical interface to line up every duck, you're mostly doomed.

Re-focusing Positive Energy

Where people are most valuable in business comes from their face-to-face interactions. We want their time and energy spent on closing the deal, not putting it together. We need to remove them from those repetitive processes that are always resulting the same. Your "maintenance" of your customer relationships and influence should be automated so as to be a reliable source of revenue and insulating you bottom line. This is the original promise of the CRM system. A way of organizing your relationships and managing them to that end. Your sphere of influence, your upsells, your referrals, your periodic touches, your lost carts, your new leads, your happy holidays, your birthdays, your thank you's.

All of these things are necessary.

Choosing a Path

As a general rule of thumb, which I think is still not very well known to most people, is that the best system, is the one you use. I have a personal addendum to that rule, which is, it is also the one you can use without friction. This is a little trickier to analyze, as it depends on your business and the many rules around certain things. For example, some systems must be HIPAA compliant and you are kind of limited as to how much connectivity it can really have. But, the buck always stops with you. You can remain compliant by limiting what data goes in and out.

To cut straight to the point, we're going to look at Go High Level, a core platform upon which many great independent CRM's are based. What makes it so incredible, is the open-ness of it. It's like a convertible. You can choose to be open to the sky if you want to. This is kind of a classic challenge to most CRM builders, actually. It can be quite dangerous to give too much power to some people. But, I feel that this article which is dedicated to business owners and agency leaders are especially capable of navigating, even if they are not technically inclined.

This is accomplished with their workflow automation capabilities which feature an incredible set of tools that allow you to design your own intricate flows with only a little bit of effort and learning.

The Role of Direct Mail

Thanks.io is a utility, like electricity. You gotta get it setup, you need to make an account, you have to register your home, whatever. It's all the same it needs to be done once and then you basically need it every single month in order to enjoy industrialized society.

But, mail...? Yes. You see, unlike email, everyone reads what's in their mailbox. And, you have a couple of choices. One, is that your mail is super clean and professional looking with absolutely minimal content that poses a question or call to action that someone can decide in 2 seconds or less standing at their mailbox. OR, something that is so terrible that looks like it was done in middle school but as such, is definitely interpreted as local, honest, home-grown, sincere, etc. Both approaches work. This is kind of the same as doing digital marketing and emails. You know, you need to design a banner ad. You need to choose how your email newsletter looks, that sort of thing. But, it is a physical version of that which can be seen in the flesh, not blocked by an ad blocker or shunted into the black box known as 'Spam.'

This makes it incredibly valuable when executed correctly. That is it is also sent at the right time.

Direct Mail Is Not Dead.

How do you leverage this? Well, if you close a deal, you probably want to send a thank you card. Also, if it's your client you probably want to send them a birthday card. May as well at least throw in your preferred holiday cards as well. Now, the 30,000ft view as it pertains to thanks.io is, add someone to a mailing list, and the right time, and have all of these things scheduled in advance and sent, physically at the right time. Without any people. Of course, if they no longer are a client, we remove them from that list.

This all needs to happen without people.

GoHighLevel + thanks.io

A specific combination of these two systems allow you to book any sequence or required touch in advance. Whether it's a birthday, a renewal, or if it needs to be X number of days before X date, all of these rules can be setup. Of course, you may need guidance on how to do so, but there are people here who can help you with that. You may need to learn some syntax, but you don't need to be a programmer to learn syntax. The custom webhook actions available in GoHighLevel allow you to execute the processes that you would normally need to train employees on, autoamtically. So, it's kind of like, instead of training your employee on how to do something at a certain time, and then also provide and entrust resources to them, you just teach the robot how to do it instead. Now, your employee is free to focus their energy where it needs to be, in fostering your customer relationships where it's most beneficial in the game of retention. More efficiency is less stress, and happy people are a good thing.

This is worth writing about in particular concerning Go High Level because the execution of your automations with a custom webhook is actually fairly unique in this space. By and large people need to use a third party platform such as Zapier to make these kinds of automations happen, whereas in GoHighLevel, you are met halfway.

Here's an example:

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The eff is this? Well, actually it's pretty easy to understand. This is information that's coming from Go High Level and being sent to thanks.io. All you need to know, are a few basic rules.

First, you don't touch the curly braces.

Secondly, you'll see that each row of stuff is a key:value pair. A key is the slot into which the data needs to go, and the value is, the customer info. So, starting at the top, it says "mailing_list" followed by a "1." So, this data is going into mailing list number 1.

Thirdly, each key and value are surrounded by "double quotes."

Fourth: There is a Colon : between each key and value.

Finally: each row ends in a comma, except the last row.

Once you know that these are the rules and to not violate them, you know how to send info from your CRM to your mailing system automatically. It's simple. Literally, just type it in once correctly and it works every time.

You can add people to mailing lists to get a sequence of scheduled mailers. You can send something from within this process instead if it needs to follow certain timing rules that are managed on the Go High Level side. You can splice into your workflows the removal of people from lists as well. I'm sure you can start to understand now how your workflows are very simple task masters to are consistently reliable. Your actual employee is just marking the new client as "sold" or "closed" and the sytem is doing all of the repetitive heavy lifting.

How-To

Want more info? Check out our help article on how to do this, in way more detail here: https://thanksio.frontkb.com/en/articles/1093505