How To Qualify A Prospect Using Automation To Save You 100s Of Hours This Year

Using Video To Qualify Clients Before You Do An Intake Call

My business has changed drastically over the past several years, but we do done-for-you marketing funnels and sales support for entrepreneurs who sell digital content and training.

In order to run our business, we need to be successful at executing on the service we offer to customers.

Some of these customers are able to leverage our solution into many more times the revenue our own company is making and we’re happy to be a part of that.

You can do a lot with automation, but most people’s minds go right to email. I think you can be leveraging automation all over your business to save time and money. The ability to connect multiple systems and processes is the crux of all marketing automation.

It’s easier to automate an existing process versus creating new processes. A lot of people dream up cool stuff they can automate, but these systems don’t even exist in the first place.

Things like reports, customer communications, and onboarding are easier to handle because you’re already doing them.

All prospects are not a good fit

We have people who reach out to me requesting consultations to see if we’d be a good fit for a larger engagement. We provide an intake form and when they fill it out it prompts an email response that sends them to our scheduler.

After having multiple sales calls I realized I was spending a ton of time repeating the same information over and over again on every call.

I didn’t want to keep doing this, so I devised an automation where I created a 3-day block on the scheduler before I listed any available slots. (This was based upon when they filled out the intake form.) After a prospect books their appointment they will be sent an email with an attached video where I begin talking about our approach.

Each day they will get a follow-up video with another piece of that repetitive part of the sales conversation. This has streamlined our sales process dramatically.

Once we hop on our call together, my first question is, “did they watch the video?” If they didn’t I tell them to go watch the video and reschedule.

The odds are that if they didn’t watch all my videos then they aren’t a good fit to work with me. We’re not cheap and we do give our clients homework.
This strategy has saved me hundreds of hours a year.

 

The Forward Follow Up Tactic Lewis Howes Modeled For Me

The best automation technique I’ve applied recently is called the “Forward follow up tactic.” The first time I saw this tactic being used I was amazed.

I had registered for one of Lewis Howes’ webinars and I knew it was an automated webinar but it wasn’t being promoted heavily. I registered and I missed the webinar time.  
I (like most people) expected to be sent the replay. Instead, what I got was an email later that day which was actually a forward. It had the “Fwd” in the subject line.  
The subject read, “Why didn’t Greg attend?” It had my name in the merge field and everything. The email came from Lewis’s assistant reaching out to me with a link to re-register for the next email.

In the body of the email, there was a message from Lewis to his assistant asking about what happened on the webinar. It read so naturally, but I knew it was all automated. It caught my attention and broke through the clutter in my inbox.

I loved it and I have since used a similar strategy in my funnel.

 

Action Steps

1. Create a triggered sequence for participants who miss their scheduled webinars.
2. Have the email populate with their first name and “Why didn’t [name] attend?”
3. In the body of the email show an internal forward being sent from you asking about what happened to that participant.
4. Allow them to reschedule on a future webinar.

 

Result You Will Achieve

More webinar attendees with an automated webinar follow-up message that reads naturally like an email forward.

 
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.