Automating Marketing, Sales, and Operations feat. Marquis Murray

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast where we invite founders and digital marketers alike to discuss software and strategies to help scale your business. And today, those of you watching on YouTube, you see I’m saying this smiling while I say it. But we have a guest that special any special because I say so how about that everybody? Especially because I say so. But Marquis Murray is the CEO and founder of ditto, where he creates clarity within the work done inside of organizations. And he and his team accomplished this by implementing SOPs. These are standard operating procedures, watch this systems and processes. Okay, last one, and automation make work easier. So you see how I’m a little probably too excited right now promise I’ll calm down. But this is, I can’t wait to jump into this. He’s a serial entrepreneur, Mark, He is no stranger to growing and leading successful teams he’s had, he has at least 15 years of experience in the industry. He and his team at ditto are on a mission to eliminate burnout for good. So teams can focus on the work without the issue of not knowing where or how the work is happening. We’re going to discuss

Chris Davis 1:57
automation at scale, automating your marketing and sales processes at scale. And then we’re going to be honest on how this is an ever growing ongoing process, I should say, event of process improvement. I’ve said enough already. Marki welcome to the podcast, man. Great to have you on

Unknown Speaker 2:17
Chris. What an intro. Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. I’m blushing. I’m a longtime listener, longtime fan. So it’s nice to be here on the other side. And thank you for that introduction.

Chris Davis 2:31
Yeah, I want to give our listeners a little insight into some of our green room talk. And I was listeners. First off, thank you for listening. But I had to shout out Marquis and tell him you know, when I find somebody that is holding their own holding their own in the space, where there’s so much irresponsibility going on at marquee, right, so many people with empty promises, hey, we can do this, we can do that. And you find someone who’s operating in an Integris way, operating in a way that scales you’re not a one man band, doing it all yourself, calling yourself an agency, you’re the way that you show up online, I’m connected on LinkedIn, and I see your posts the most, you add so much value to connect with somebody like that. It’s always refreshing. And we were talking about how refreshing that is. And my intention, everybody for this podcast, is to really take a seat back and give Marquis the floor in the mic. Listen, I have my pen. So I’ll be taking notes as he’s talking. But again, thank you just listeners want to give you some insight, I am a student always as well. And Marquis, he is going to bless us today. With all of the Get Ready is all I’m gonna say Get ready. And I want to give you the floor Marquis and really talk about these sales and marketing processes. Right. And we can start with how do you differentiate between what’s a marketing process? And what’s a sales process? Because that tends to come up a lot. People are just like, Oh, fun, oh, customer journey. And it’s like, when you double click down in those words, it’s stuff starts to compartmentalize. So let’s start there. Well, how do you in your approach, and in your words, kind of draw that differentiation between a marketing process and a sales process?

Marquis Murray 4:34
Yeah, great question to kick us off. When it comes to marketing and sales, obviously, like they do run hand in hand. I don’t believe like you can have one without the other. I think in your sales process. It’s so important to have an element of marketing, right? And within your marketing, you’re having an element of sales so they definitely work hand in hand. I’ll start on the marketing side because that’s often you know, the First place that people are seeing you, you’re on social media. I know for me, I have my own podcast, like you said, you’re seeing posts on LinkedIn, I have a YouTube channel, right? Where we’re getting a lot of inbound leads that are coming from that. So if you’re very visible, and you are active in that marketing, you know, process, then you know, that’s where a lot people are going to be seeing you. So that’s really the first chance that they have to learn about your company, learn about your your process, learn about your services, and just get a real feel and, you know, do a gut check to see, is this a good fit for me? Can this company helped me? Is there enough, you know, helpful information there have? Have you done enough in your marketing to even build a trust with the person on the other side? Or is it pushy, and salesy? So before I even talk about funnels, like just the approach to marketing? What does it look like? What do you want to be known for, like branding goes hand in hand with that and being visible as well. But I think when it comes to marketing, you have to think, what channels are we are we going after? Where are we going to be spending our time? And what is the impact of the results that we expect to get from investing time on that channel? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 6:12
I think one of the big mistakes that a lot of companies a lot of founders will get into is they feel like they have to be present everywhere. And we have so many options. There is the LinkedIn, there’s the groups within that there’s the company channels, there’s the core, as of the world, there’s, you know, Reddit, and there’s Facebook, and there’s Instagram, and there’s Twitter, and there’s so much and there’s tick tock. And now, the word on the street is that if you’re not on tick tock, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity, which I don’t totally buy into, right, I think, where you plant your feet and where you invest your time is I think, where you’re going to grow. And so I think that’s the first thing you have to understand what channels are we using? What is the expectation of the hope we get, you know, what we’re expecting to get out of using these channels, and then we go from there. So I know with my podcast that’s strictly about visibility, and awareness, right? So you put yourself out there, you create these video snippets. Chris, I know you do the exact same thing, right? You put them on social media, we create promo packs for our guests, right, where they get their own four to six video snippets, they get images, and then we’re asking them to also share those on social media. They’re getting it from the perspective of this guest marquis who’s now being introduced to their audience, as a process person, and then they’re aligning themselves with ditto, and vice versa. So that’s one channel, we expect that we’re going to get inbound leads through that we’re getting new listeners through that. And ultimately, they are being redirected to ditto at one point or another. on YouTube. If I look at the numbers, right now, I don’t have that percentage, but we get a high, high volume of new leads from our YouTube channel. We talk about Asana, the work management tool, we talk about, you know, advanced features, how to use it in your business, we talk about process improvement on that channel, right, and people, they leave their comments, and then they’re booking calls, they’re going right to the website, they’re booking calls, we’re bringing them through that formula. So that was a really quick transition from marketing to sales. But in our case, it’s really fluid. And it has to be right there’s trust, there is authority area. Never once on any of my channels have I said, buy from me on sale now. discounts, book a call reach out to us, that does not happen. Because if you’ve spent enough time building authority and trust with your audience, they will find you they will seek you out. And so fortunately, I’m in a position where that is our reality. Right? I spent that time built it there. And so shifting into, you know, the sales process, what becomes important next is to qualify these leads, what does that look like? Because you can have an influx of these people that are just coming in and booking calls and there are some really bad fits. And there’s some really good fits. Yeah. Right. And so having them come in, you know, they’ve seen all your information, they’ve seen the testimonials, they’re now you know, they booked a call with you, you know, they’re in that in that nurture funnel, you know, thanks for booking a call. I can’t wait to see you. This is what you can expect. I jump on camera, because I’m the I’m the Lead salesperson for Dell right now. We just hired another salesperson, but you know, they jump on, and it’s really nice sometimes. And I know we talked about this in the greenroom. Chris, you know, you know, sometimes people will come on and they’ll say to you, oh, so nice to meet you, whatever. You know, and like that happens from time to time, I must say and even still I just think to myself. That’s great. Thanks for watching. You know, it’s still weird for me for them to come on. And you’ll say like I’m a huge fan I’ve been watching you for so all along. And I think I just created a YouTube like a year and a half ago because I didn’t know what else to do. No, that’s not that’s not completely true. I created the YouTube because I was looking for videos on Asana, and how to, you know, advance my knowledge in it. And there weren’t any, you know, they weren’t popular. So that’s why I created that channel. But they’re coming into this. Now they’ve seen my face, they understand, you know, I’m an expert in this space, whether it’s Asana or systems improvement, and there’s trust there. We ask questions, like you just did with me. I hope we’re not talking too long here, Chris. But I give them the floor. Yeah, I give them the floor. I want to know, what’s going on. What’s the background? Right, I let them talk. And then I take my 10 minutes at the end, to show them our process. I show them our different options. And they’re pointing at the screen. They’re like, yeah, I want that. That looks good. I want that. Because they already know that I can deliver. Yeah, and so thankfully, I’m now in a position where I’ve built the systems that can trust the systems and they’re ever evolving. We, like you said, we never arrive, right? Like it’s always gonna get better and improve. But that’s where we’re at right now. And that’s a little bit the probably the shortest version I can give you of how we incorporate, you know, marketing and sales and what the different processes look like.

Chris Davis 11:12
Yeah, I love it. I love the fact that you said there’s an element of both in both, right? And I think that that’s where a lot of people, they miss it. Because you’re not just marketing. You’re not just selling, the big part of marketing is relationship building, so that you can prepare for the next step. So they need to see what what are you building a relationship for? Where can this relationship go? Right, like your foreshadowing what’s going to take place in the sales process? On a sales process? I can’t sell to who I don’t know. So I have to keep getting to know you, which is a huge part of marketing as we go through the sales process. So when you talk about, there’s elements of both in both men, I absolutely love that. And you did mention Asana, and I know I gave an intro of Ditto. But I think now’s a good time to clarify, if I don’t, I never want to assume intelligence. Asana is a project management tool. Everyone on this podcast, you’ve probably heard me mentioned clickup. More so because that’s what I use. Listen. It’s whatever you can, whatever gets the job done at this point. And I think it’s safe to say though, Marquis, I think it’s safe to say that Asana clickup I maybe missing one are probably the biggest figures in the space of small business project management right now. You know? Absolutely. So you’re listening. Listen to me, everyone. You’re listening to an Asana bona fide expert. Don’t believe me? Go watch his YouTube videos. Okay, go watch the YouTube videos. And how about this, just follow him on LinkedIn. You’ll see you’ll see what I see in it approve out true. So we’ve got the marketing and sales processes. When people when a new company comes to you marquee this, you’re going to chuckle probably. But when they come to you, what do you see as some of the most common trends and what I would call threats to add them to their thought of what automation looks like, right?

Marquis Murray 13:23
Yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you’re thinking. Yeah, I mean, as far as like processes, and like what I see, you know, definitely the biggest areas where they need help are their internal systems, right? It’s communication. And then it’s like onboarding their team training their team and just working on how they work internally. Oftentimes, they’re they’re experts. They’re fantastic. At, you know, what it looks like on the client deliverable side. Yeah. Right. And so they can deliver really well. But internally, things are a mess. And they often will turn to automation to try and fix their internal problems. And, you know, well, I actually wrote a blog about this not not that long ago, and I’m writing a course about it as well, like the importance of automation. And when they use it, it’s like you said, whether it’s the project management tool, whether it’s clickup, or Asana or Monday, right, it doesn’t matter what you’re using. You just all agree you’re going to be using one tool and this is how you’re going to be using said tool. The biggest issues that I see with you know, business owners is they think and these companies, they do a fantastic job of marketing. Right? They think that just throwing Zapier at it or make add it or you know, so like we use HubSpot internally, I used Active Campaign years ago, right for marketing automation. They think that just throwing a tool at it will fix their issues and make it easier, right and I put up this meme on my Instagram, where it’s like, you know, why spend three minutes doing a manual task when you can and spend six hours failing at automating it. Right? Because the reason

Chris Davis 15:06
why that is painful you input the gut knowing that

Marquis Murray 15:11
everyone listening. Yeah, everyone listening has been there, right? They spent hours, you know, trying to automate something and trying to think through all the different triggers and actions and variables. And the problem is that we don’t spend enough time thinking about it. Automation is so powerful if you’ve taken the time to set it up properly. And so I always recommend when it comes to process improvement, you start simple, you write it down. What is the process? Write it down on paper, write it on Google Docs, it doesn’t matter where you write it down, just write it down somewhere, you need to think through. How do we do this? Now? What is our current state are as is who’s involved in this process? What tools are we currently using? In this process to complete it? Are there any approvals needed? And if so how many approvals? Who is approving these things? What is the timeline to complete this process as well? There are so many variables that we don’t consider. And we just go and we plug in something in Zapier and we think why isn’t it working? Or what happened to that that task? Where did it go, that person didn’t get notified. And we’re assuming that it works, just because we turned it on, when you haven’t thought through all the steps. And when I say things fall through the cracks, those cracks are usually your internal team becoming frustrated, right, and they’re there, they’re in the dark, they don’t know what’s happening, their morale goes down, you’re losing team members, because you haven’t taken the time to think through your process and think to actually improve it. Your clients feel that on the other end, we’ve all been stuck in a really bad automation loop, where like, you’ve been a customer for, you know, a few months, and you get an email that says thanks for being a customer, or whatever it is, or thanks for joining our team, or, Hey, sorry to see you go, you know, any, like what is happening right now. And so they haven’t thought through all the potential pitfalls, and all the variables that are involved along the way, right. And so it’s so important to not skip this crucial step of writing it down, documenting it, visualizing what the future could look like, right, visualizing what the future could look like sandboxing potential outcomes, then, you know, working slowly to build in automation to that, so you can make work easier. So, yeah, it might sound like a lot of work. But if you do it, right, you do it once. And then you move on from there and just continue iterating.

Chris Davis 17:40
That’s it, man. And, Mark, I’m so glad you talk about it. Listen, I full disclosure, I did not in any way feed, Marquis, any of that, anything that he just said, that was all on his own knowledge and his strength. But the beauty of it is you see the parallels, it doesn’t matter where you apply automation. I don’t care if it’s the marketing, the sales, onboarding, the back end team execution. It’s the same process. Everyone, you have to get clear, you have to get clear on what the heck is it that we’re doing? You have to get that documentation, because that then becomes the specification for your automation. All right. I want to I want to say something. I’m not I’m not outing her. My wife, we were walking and talking. And she was talking about automation, man. So you already know that’s my language. It doesn’t matter what time of the day. And, uh, you want to talk to me about automation. I’m wide open, right? And this, she made the statements. She made the statement. She says, I know what I want to do. I get that. And she was like, but the hardest part is he’s like, I want to talk about automation. I know what I want to do. The hardest part is like getting the tools to do it. Right. I kind of chuckled, I was like, well, that’s automation, literally, software to do. Like you’re talking about automation that will be like, I know that I want to shoot the ball. The hard part is actually getting it in the hoop. That would be basketball, right? So yeah, we had a chuckle about it. And I stepped back and I said, Let me affirm you. You knowing what you want to do is half the battle. Like you have processes. I said, the reason why you’re getting hung up is because you’re trying to jump right into the tool. So you got to step back. Let’s map it out. That’s why I have a whiteboard in my office. That’s why you always see me writing on paper. And she was like, oh, so everybody, everybody has this reckoning mark key when it when you say I want to automate, you’re also saying I want to get clear on what I’m doing. I want to document right I want to be impatient. I want to stick with some manual processes till I prove them out. All of that is inside To automate all of it, it’s just one word. But all of that is packaged, you know, in there. So, man, I so enjoyed listening to this. So now we talk about scale, and I’ve witnessed this many times mark, you can get the marketing onpoint, you can get the sales point, you can get your onboarding, you know, the the point, the failure point then becomes how do we manage this internally? What do those systems look like? So for somebody like yourself, this is your, this is your sweet spot, right? Like, let’s, let’s get these, this, this thing firing on all cylinders. And I want to say it like this, everybody so that you start to see that automation can be applied to different areas of your business, in every area is critical. This you could argue is the most critical, right? Making sure though, back end processes are flowing. So when you when you think about scaling, what is it that people listening? First off, what are some symptoms that that oh, wait a minute, things aren’t what they should be before scaling? And then what are those, like telltale signs that show you like, you’re ready? Let’s go Wow, great job on the back end, we’re ready to go like it. When you assess it. What do you what are you looking for? What are you seeing?

Marquis Murray 21:27
Yeah, I’d say that, you know, first symptoms, let me just write that down. So when to go. So yeah, as far as symptoms go, it’s having disalignment with your team, you have your team members. And as you’re growing, right, like it’s a simple problem of the right hand, not knowing what the left hand is doing. Right, I often will use the analogy of making toast on my Instagram bio, it says maker of toast, and some people get it and some people don’t. Right? Like, if I asked you how you make your toast, what are you going to say you’re gonna say go to the I go to the bread box, maybe open up my toaster, and I put it in and I put it on number four, and I put it down. But for me, right, I don’t have a breadbox, I go to the cupboard and open it, you know, and then I put it in there. And I set it to to, you know, to get out. And then like, well, what are you putting on your toaster versus what I’m putting on my toast? Right, like, and where does the bread come from? How is it made? You know, where is it stored? All of those things are variables. And if you ask people on your team, let’s take you know, a web design shop, for example. Because we work with a lot of marketing and E commerce shops. Right? When it comes to a an ad campaign, let’s say or we’re building a website, you ask, you know, three different designers. You know, what’s the first step when a client signs that dotted line, we have the brief going, what do you do next? Right, you’re gonna get three different answers. And so that can cause confusion, that can cause double work. That’s another symptom, right? Double work or duplicate work, right. You know, budgets, you know, going above, you know, what estimations were. So you’re running into places where your products aren’t profitable anymore. And you’re thinking, How is this happening? We’ve estimated, you know, we have this many people on the product, we got our project manager, we got to two designers, we got our, our UX person, you know, whatever it may be, and your your budgets are going over and you’re not profiting and you’re thinking what’s happening. So that’s another symptom. And that’s probably the biggest one is not being able to predict, you know, and this is another one, like, who’s working on what, how long? Is it taking them? And hey, we have another client that wants to build a website. When can we get them started? Who’s available to do it? And you as the leader, as the owner, as the founder, you have no idea. And you’re guessing, right? You’re guessing. And you’re thinking that going through it, you’re just gonna like magically figure it out somehow. And then here’s where it starts to change. Like, you know, we talked about like being good to go. This is hard for a lot of founders, because especially in the agency space, these founders are people that were once freelancers, right, they came in, and they were wearing all the hats, they know how to build a website, like the back of their hand. But they’ve had to learn over the years, how to also build a business and how to be an HR, you know, manager and how to be an IT person, and how to be an accountant. And slowly, they’ve started passing off some of those hats if they’re scaling properly, right, but there’s still these things that they feel like they are the best at when the reality is that they’re not. So when these founders wake up and see that, you know, in order for me to grow and scale effectively, the symptoms that I’m having, I cannot ignore them. I need to take the time out of my day to day, I need to go away somewhere I need to spend that time and block it out and write down what’s going on. And it’s at that point when you read it Lies, that you’re not the best, smartest, most efficient person and your processes are broken. That’s when you know, you’re good to go. And you take a look and you sit back. And you see what’s going on. And I was watching one of your Instagrams the other day, and you were talking about a topic and you’re like, This is not a plug to hire me. Right? Not at all. But like, if you have the resources internally to do this work, and you understand process improvement, and automation, go for it. If you can afford to take time away from client projects to work on your internal stuff, go for it, right, just do it. But that’s where you can hire a consultant, you can bring on a process improvement specialist, you can bring on an automation specialist, you can look to the tools you’re using to see if they have a partner program and bring them in to help you build on this and iterate and grow because you’re seeing problems, hire a fractional CFO, look at your your books and see where are you spending your money, implement a time tracking tool that, you know, your team needs to now use for the next three months, so you can understand where their time is going. Right? If you don’t have that information in that data, and you’re experiencing those symptoms, it’s too late. Sorry, I wouldn’t say it’s too late. But you’re you’re digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole. And it’s time to start correcting it so that you can get out of that hole. So

Chris Davis 26:25
Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. And I wanted you to mention the symptoms so that the listeners can say ouch. Okay, so by the way, if you’re listening to this podcast right now, it’s okay to say after that I wrote a lack of profitable projects, and projection. Okay, which means I don’t know what’s coming in, when is going right? Double work? Do you realize you realize you’re paying these people, so you’re paying twice for the same job and probably three times because you pay one person to do it their way another person to do it their way, you got the wrong way that you got to pay somebody to do it the right way. Right, like you’re paying triple for the outcome. And then another one is who’s doing what sync? You have to be in sync? Listen, everybody, let me let me break this down. We’ve got marketing automation, you have sales automation, you can claim there’s customer fulfillment, automation, right? What what I hear when you’re talking marquee is we’re really talking about administration automation. This is the back end, how do I administer the task and operate my business? For the term that I use internally with my team is operational excellence. Right? Like, I want to operate in excellence on the back end? So yes, what does automation look like on this back end that Mark Mark is talking about, you need to have ways that your marketing is talking to Asana, that’s your project management on the back end, you need a sauna to talk back to whatever other platforms. So that’s where I see a person like yourself, marquee, and by the way, you are so supplementary to what I do. Right? Because although I can turn that that switch on, just like you can you can turn the switch on and go on the marketing and sales side, right? I can turn the switch on and go to the back end. But I would rather not. You know, I would rather hand that off. Hey, look, we got our front end systems. Here you go. Ditto recommendation, you get what I’m saying. So it’s it’s hugely important for people to start to understand the compartments of automation, so that you know who to go to. For what for you. Now I’m interested I get to be so hey, it’s my podcast. I could be selfish, everybody. I’m just I’m personally curious. What are some of the I either say fun, most proud of our most commonly used integrations that you find yourself doing with Asana and other tools? What is kind of like that bread and butter. Listen, what we do is we hook up Asana, and we always connect it to this or we always make sure, yeah, what’s that for you?

Marquis Murray 29:21
I have two, but one of them. That’s my absolute favorites. And like what you’ll understand about me are hoping I’m you know, putting out is that I’m an operations guy, but I love sales and marketing. I love that. But like when it comes to operations, like the two tools that we use day in and day out that I constantly have open our Asana, and that’s talking to harvest which is our time tracking app. And then that’s talking to four that’s talking to forecast, which is our scheduling and capacity management app. So everyone’s time on projects is in there. We know exactly what’s profitable, what’s not who’s working on what when their capacity when they’re under capacity, we get reports on that weekly. So that whole process is automated. And then HubSpot is our CRM is our website is our knowledge base is our customer feedback module is our ticketing system is our blog is everything right? That’s our marketing engine. That’s our sales engine. Everything is on HubSpot. And so to have that talk to the sales aspect, we’ll talk we’ll connect HubSpot to Asana because you know, all my sales tasks are managed in HubSpot, and then on project related tasks are managed in Asana. And so when it’s time for someone in Asana, who’s not in sales, who’s maybe an operations like a project manager, to give me their thoughts on a new proposal, or a call recording that I had with the prospect, right, that’s getting shuttled over to Asana to go on their task list. Right. So that’s one way that we use those tools and then harvest. Like, I track my time I track every single second of my day, I know exactly where my time goes. I’m not a founder, that’s just you know, stuck in email all day, I know what’s happening. I’m time blocked and so harvests allows me to do that. It allows me to not track and micromanage my team to know where their time is going. But by them tracking the time for projects. It gives us real time, actionable data and insights on our internal work. On our customer work, we know exactly how long it takes to go through our deep dive process, which is our discovery, we know exactly how long it takes on average to go through our customer onboarding. We know how long it takes us to deliver 50 or 100 SOPs, we know exactly how long it takes us. We know exactly how long it takes us to implement a new Asana, exactly how long it takes us to build out their learning commons, which is the internal knowledge base role, the SOPs are housed, we have all that data. And so some people think I don’t want my my team to track time or they’re not going to track time or they don’t want to feel like I’m, you know, micromanaging them. But it’s not about that there’s so much information that you can gather from this data to help you the leader, better project, better estimate in your sales give more accurate pricing. When someone says How long is that going to take? How much is that going to cost? Right. And so it all ties together. And then the last tool that I’ll say that we use all the time for our proposals and sales is panna doc. And that connects to HubSpot in real time, as well as a signer aware, but there’s a nice ecosystem there.

Chris Davis 32:31
Yeah, I need you all to hear that. You may need to rewind that part. Because and I asked that intentionally, I knew you were going to, I knew you’re gonna drop it on us like that marquee. So we’re witnessing alley oops, and slam dunks right now. Okay, this is what this is how it looks in the in the nerds around, right. It’s so good, right? This is what if I can just get you all to dream with me? What if all of your systems were working like that? Do you see? How can you imagine how valuable it would be? If you could if you were track you had your systems in place, tracking your time tracking, you’ve got your task auto populating, right. He mentioned, our kid mentioned, you’ve got stuff in HubSpot, and then at the appropriate time, it gets shuttled over to Asana. He said that and best believe when that happens, he’s got templates that are creating the to dues that I know I can see it. All I want you to do is imagine just for a minute, we do a lot of marketing and sales talking here. Well, Mark key is talking about his operations. Could you imagine if you could know, to the minute how long it takes per client, and then start to project that when you’re creating your proposal based on what you’re what you’re putting in that proposal. Like we talk about projection of sales and predictions of sales and sales all the time. But have you thought about that being able to accurately assess what is going to be required to fulfill on this client? Because that’s usually reactive marquee, right? Like you don’t know you’re at overload until you’re overloaded. And it’s like, what if we could use automation in our operations to tell us that proactively warning you can take this on, but look at the capacity load. Look at how much time it takes for something like this. And my thing just in general is educated Yes. Always. If it’s not an educated yes by No, it’s no. It’s like a very simple flowchart. Is it an educated? Yes, yes. Yes. No, stop. Right, right. Is that simple? You would at least be able to give that educated yes and say okay, I know this is going to take me over capacity. And I know it’s more hours than I allotted for. But because of that, I know I need to hire somebody else or XYZ. It just prevents you from being reactive in your business. You know, let last thing man last last ally appear. We know, you and I, when I say we we know that you are never done. Right. It’s it’s a fallacy, it’s a false finish line to think that you will be done. How? How do you set the expectation? Because I know you have the understanding? How do you set the expectation to your clients, to the marketplace? For them to understand this is a iterable process, and we’re always improving. What what does that look like? How do you ensure that they know we’re done for now? Things will change. And that’s a good thing you want them to change, you want to adjust and optimize and all of that?

Marquis Murray 36:07
That’s a really good question. Because yeah, it’s absolutely true. Let me see if I can slam dunk this one will often talk about it, right? Like we we preach process improvement. As we are going through the process, we have our deep dive, which depending on the subject matter, and everything we’re diving into, it can take anywhere from four to six weeks, right? Maybe maybe even longer up to eight weeks. And what we often see, and it’s a nice realization when it does happen. So nice moment when it does happen. Because the customers realize, oh, we can never be finished this, right? Because we get to a certain point in the discovery, we’re asking all these questions. And for the first time, they say to themselves, wow, or we’ve had customers say I should say, you know, like, this is like therapy, right? Because I’m talking about all these things. And I can see my business from a different place that I’ve never considered before. Right. And so they see it. And then we get to the end of the six or eight weeks, whatever it is, we have our report. And we’re like, alright, this is what we’ve seen. And these are our recommendations. This is where we are headed. Right? We give them the timeline to implement that. But it’s like, they start to understand that this is going to give us you know, improvements for a certain time. And we’re going to have to keep going with this, right? Because by the time we get to implementation, they’re already coming back to us saying, hey, what if we do this? What if we try this, Hey, we change this internally. And so we do our best to put like a freeze, we want to put like blinders on the client. But like, No, we’re focused, we got to get to our finish line. Like they’ve already started to think about the future, right. And so did always focused on education more than anything, we want to educate them on how to improve their processes, we want to educate them on how to document and update their standard operating procedures. Because we can be there, we will be there to help you do it. But if we can get you in that mindset, we’re actually helping to transform the minds of the people that are actually doing the work, it becomes almost second nature, where it’s like, they get excited and want to improve, right. And so sometimes we have to say it and spell it out. And we have packages for that where we provide ongoing support. But like when we’re really working with them, we’re training them on how to do it. And they’re seeing the opportunities on the other side for what improvement looks like, right? That’s what it’s really about. So it’s like, yeah, you could keep using us. But we want to create a culture and educate your team so that you can see the opportunities and get excited about improvements. And now you’re the foundation and understand what steps to take to get there. So I don’t know if that’s the exact answer you’re looking for. But that’s what it looks like in our space. And it works really really well.

Chris Davis 38:52
Yeah, it’s beautiful because they see it again, you know it you know it you know, this is going to be a process and look, we’re here, we’re here for you. I just need you to see it needs you to see and understand and be excited about it. Oh man, I’ve got a couple more alliums to be honest. I thought I was done but I got a couple more but I know we’ve got to bring this to it in this has been out standing marquee I am so glad I’m so glad that we got to sit down and have this talk. We need to talk this needs to be talked about more in the space of digital marketing okay, because once the marketing is working in the sales are flowing in Guess what? You Your ops better be in place and in place I mean well documented and well automated art or else your profit margins just there’s there’s a plethora of things. So thank you so much for for dropping those gems for us and just being transparent and open and willing to share man I never take that lightly. If it goes without saying but just in case people were like, wait a minute, that’s Oh, I can actually go there. So, you’ve mentioned it many times, if somebody wants to reach out to you get connected, explore more of what you’re saying, you can do and apply it to their business what’s what’s the best place that they can go?

Marquis Murray 40:14
They can go to think ditto.com. That’s our website, there are resources there, you can check out our knowledge base, you can read our blog, you can go to YouTube, if you are an Asana, you know, shop, you can go and you know, watch stuff there. But think dito.com, or you can catch me on LinkedIn, Marquis Marie. And I’m like Chris said, I’m posting content all the time. I love having conversations with people in the comments. So those are two really great places for you to go.

Chris Davis 40:41
Yes, absolutely. If you’re on YouTube, it’s on the it’s on the screen. As of now, if you’re not think ditto all one word.com, Marquis Murray, on LinkedIn. And again, we’re connected on LinkedIn, huge value there. Thank you. Thank you so much, Marquis, for coming on to the podcast. This has been tremendously enjoyable for me. I know it will be the same for the audience as well. So thank you, man.

Marquis Murray 41:11
And I appreciate this. You block into time and you know, asking great questions. So thanks for this opportunity today.

Chris Davis 41:16
It was fun. Yes, absolutely. I’ll see you online. Yes, sir.

Marquis Murray 41:21
All right.

Chris Davis 41:23
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out. And while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. automated responses responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast where we invite founders and digital marketers alike to discuss software and strategies to help scale your business. And today, those of you watching on YouTube, you see I’m saying this smiling while I say it. But we have a guest that special any special because I say so how about that everybody? Especially because I say so. But Marquis Murray is the CEO and founder of ditto, where he creates clarity within the work done inside of organizations. And he and his team accomplished this by implementing SOPs. These are standard operating procedures, watch this systems and processes. Okay, last one, and automation make work easier. So you see how I’m a little probably too excited right now promise I’ll calm down. But this is, I can’t wait to jump into this. He’s a serial entrepreneur, Mark, He is no stranger to growing and leading successful teams he’s had, he has at least 15 years of experience in the industry. He and his team at ditto are on a mission to eliminate burnout for good. So teams can focus on the work without the issue of not knowing where or how the work is happening. We’re going to discuss

Chris Davis 1:57
automation at scale, automating your marketing and sales processes at scale. And then we’re going to be honest on how this is an ever growing ongoing process, I should say, event of process improvement. I’ve said enough already. Marki welcome to the podcast, man. Great to have you on

Unknown Speaker 2:17
Chris. What an intro. Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. I’m blushing. I’m a longtime listener, longtime fan. So it’s nice to be here on the other side. And thank you for that introduction.

Chris Davis 2:31
Yeah, I want to give our listeners a little insight into some of our green room talk. And I was listeners. First off, thank you for listening. But I had to shout out Marquis and tell him you know, when I find somebody that is holding their own holding their own in the space, where there’s so much irresponsibility going on at marquee, right, so many people with empty promises, hey, we can do this, we can do that. And you find someone who’s operating in an Integris way, operating in a way that scales you’re not a one man band, doing it all yourself, calling yourself an agency, you’re the way that you show up online, I’m connected on LinkedIn, and I see your posts the most, you add so much value to connect with somebody like that. It’s always refreshing. And we were talking about how refreshing that is. And my intention, everybody for this podcast, is to really take a seat back and give Marquis the floor in the mic. Listen, I have my pen. So I’ll be taking notes as he’s talking. But again, thank you just listeners want to give you some insight, I am a student always as well. And Marquis, he is going to bless us today. With all of the Get Ready is all I’m gonna say Get ready. And I want to give you the floor Marquis and really talk about these sales and marketing processes. Right. And we can start with how do you differentiate between what’s a marketing process? And what’s a sales process? Because that tends to come up a lot. People are just like, Oh, fun, oh, customer journey. And it’s like, when you double click down in those words, it’s stuff starts to compartmentalize. So let’s start there. Well, how do you in your approach, and in your words, kind of draw that differentiation between a marketing process and a sales process?

Marquis Murray 4:34
Yeah, great question to kick us off. When it comes to marketing and sales, obviously, like they do run hand in hand. I don’t believe like you can have one without the other. I think in your sales process. It’s so important to have an element of marketing, right? And within your marketing, you’re having an element of sales so they definitely work hand in hand. I’ll start on the marketing side because that’s often you know, the First place that people are seeing you, you’re on social media. I know for me, I have my own podcast, like you said, you’re seeing posts on LinkedIn, I have a YouTube channel, right? Where we’re getting a lot of inbound leads that are coming from that. So if you’re very visible, and you are active in that marketing, you know, process, then you know, that’s where a lot people are going to be seeing you. So that’s really the first chance that they have to learn about your company, learn about your your process, learn about your services, and just get a real feel and, you know, do a gut check to see, is this a good fit for me? Can this company helped me? Is there enough, you know, helpful information there have? Have you done enough in your marketing to even build a trust with the person on the other side? Or is it pushy, and salesy? So before I even talk about funnels, like just the approach to marketing? What does it look like? What do you want to be known for, like branding goes hand in hand with that and being visible as well. But I think when it comes to marketing, you have to think, what channels are we are we going after? Where are we going to be spending our time? And what is the impact of the results that we expect to get from investing time on that channel? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 6:12
I think one of the big mistakes that a lot of companies a lot of founders will get into is they feel like they have to be present everywhere. And we have so many options. There is the LinkedIn, there’s the groups within that there’s the company channels, there’s the core, as of the world, there’s, you know, Reddit, and there’s Facebook, and there’s Instagram, and there’s Twitter, and there’s so much and there’s tick tock. And now, the word on the street is that if you’re not on tick tock, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity, which I don’t totally buy into, right, I think, where you plant your feet and where you invest your time is I think, where you’re going to grow. And so I think that’s the first thing you have to understand what channels are we using? What is the expectation of the hope we get, you know, what we’re expecting to get out of using these channels, and then we go from there. So I know with my podcast that’s strictly about visibility, and awareness, right? So you put yourself out there, you create these video snippets. Chris, I know you do the exact same thing, right? You put them on social media, we create promo packs for our guests, right, where they get their own four to six video snippets, they get images, and then we’re asking them to also share those on social media. They’re getting it from the perspective of this guest marquis who’s now being introduced to their audience, as a process person, and then they’re aligning themselves with ditto, and vice versa. So that’s one channel, we expect that we’re going to get inbound leads through that we’re getting new listeners through that. And ultimately, they are being redirected to ditto at one point or another. on YouTube. If I look at the numbers, right now, I don’t have that percentage, but we get a high, high volume of new leads from our YouTube channel. We talk about Asana, the work management tool, we talk about, you know, advanced features, how to use it in your business, we talk about process improvement on that channel, right, and people, they leave their comments, and then they’re booking calls, they’re going right to the website, they’re booking calls, we’re bringing them through that formula. So that was a really quick transition from marketing to sales. But in our case, it’s really fluid. And it has to be right there’s trust, there is authority area. Never once on any of my channels have I said, buy from me on sale now. discounts, book a call reach out to us, that does not happen. Because if you’ve spent enough time building authority and trust with your audience, they will find you they will seek you out. And so fortunately, I’m in a position where that is our reality. Right? I spent that time built it there. And so shifting into, you know, the sales process, what becomes important next is to qualify these leads, what does that look like? Because you can have an influx of these people that are just coming in and booking calls and there are some really bad fits. And there’s some really good fits. Yeah. Right. And so having them come in, you know, they’ve seen all your information, they’ve seen the testimonials, they’re now you know, they booked a call with you, you know, they’re in that in that nurture funnel, you know, thanks for booking a call. I can’t wait to see you. This is what you can expect. I jump on camera, because I’m the I’m the Lead salesperson for Dell right now. We just hired another salesperson, but you know, they jump on, and it’s really nice sometimes. And I know we talked about this in the greenroom. Chris, you know, you know, sometimes people will come on and they’ll say to you, oh, so nice to meet you, whatever. You know, and like that happens from time to time, I must say and even still I just think to myself. That’s great. Thanks for watching. You know, it’s still weird for me for them to come on. And you’ll say like I’m a huge fan I’ve been watching you for so all along. And I think I just created a YouTube like a year and a half ago because I didn’t know what else to do. No, that’s not that’s not completely true. I created the YouTube because I was looking for videos on Asana, and how to, you know, advance my knowledge in it. And there weren’t any, you know, they weren’t popular. So that’s why I created that channel. But they’re coming into this. Now they’ve seen my face, they understand, you know, I’m an expert in this space, whether it’s Asana or systems improvement, and there’s trust there. We ask questions, like you just did with me. I hope we’re not talking too long here, Chris. But I give them the floor. Yeah, I give them the floor. I want to know, what’s going on. What’s the background? Right, I let them talk. And then I take my 10 minutes at the end, to show them our process. I show them our different options. And they’re pointing at the screen. They’re like, yeah, I want that. That looks good. I want that. Because they already know that I can deliver. Yeah, and so thankfully, I’m now in a position where I’ve built the systems that can trust the systems and they’re ever evolving. We, like you said, we never arrive, right? Like it’s always gonna get better and improve. But that’s where we’re at right now. And that’s a little bit the probably the shortest version I can give you of how we incorporate, you know, marketing and sales and what the different processes look like.

Chris Davis 11:12
Yeah, I love it. I love the fact that you said there’s an element of both in both, right? And I think that that’s where a lot of people, they miss it. Because you’re not just marketing. You’re not just selling, the big part of marketing is relationship building, so that you can prepare for the next step. So they need to see what what are you building a relationship for? Where can this relationship go? Right, like your foreshadowing what’s going to take place in the sales process? On a sales process? I can’t sell to who I don’t know. So I have to keep getting to know you, which is a huge part of marketing as we go through the sales process. So when you talk about, there’s elements of both in both men, I absolutely love that. And you did mention Asana, and I know I gave an intro of Ditto. But I think now’s a good time to clarify, if I don’t, I never want to assume intelligence. Asana is a project management tool. Everyone on this podcast, you’ve probably heard me mentioned clickup. More so because that’s what I use. Listen. It’s whatever you can, whatever gets the job done at this point. And I think it’s safe to say though, Marquis, I think it’s safe to say that Asana clickup I maybe missing one are probably the biggest figures in the space of small business project management right now. You know? Absolutely. So you’re listening. Listen to me, everyone. You’re listening to an Asana bona fide expert. Don’t believe me? Go watch his YouTube videos. Okay, go watch the YouTube videos. And how about this, just follow him on LinkedIn. You’ll see you’ll see what I see in it approve out true. So we’ve got the marketing and sales processes. When people when a new company comes to you marquee this, you’re going to chuckle probably. But when they come to you, what do you see as some of the most common trends and what I would call threats to add them to their thought of what automation looks like, right?

Marquis Murray 13:23
Yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you’re thinking. Yeah, I mean, as far as like processes, and like what I see, you know, definitely the biggest areas where they need help are their internal systems, right? It’s communication. And then it’s like onboarding their team training their team and just working on how they work internally. Oftentimes, they’re they’re experts. They’re fantastic. At, you know, what it looks like on the client deliverable side. Yeah. Right. And so they can deliver really well. But internally, things are a mess. And they often will turn to automation to try and fix their internal problems. And, you know, well, I actually wrote a blog about this not not that long ago, and I’m writing a course about it as well, like the importance of automation. And when they use it, it’s like you said, whether it’s the project management tool, whether it’s clickup, or Asana or Monday, right, it doesn’t matter what you’re using. You just all agree you’re going to be using one tool and this is how you’re going to be using said tool. The biggest issues that I see with you know, business owners is they think and these companies, they do a fantastic job of marketing. Right? They think that just throwing Zapier at it or make add it or you know, so like we use HubSpot internally, I used Active Campaign years ago, right for marketing automation. They think that just throwing a tool at it will fix their issues and make it easier, right and I put up this meme on my Instagram, where it’s like, you know, why spend three minutes doing a manual task when you can and spend six hours failing at automating it. Right? Because the reason

Chris Davis 15:06
why that is painful you input the gut knowing that

Marquis Murray 15:11
everyone listening. Yeah, everyone listening has been there, right? They spent hours, you know, trying to automate something and trying to think through all the different triggers and actions and variables. And the problem is that we don’t spend enough time thinking about it. Automation is so powerful if you’ve taken the time to set it up properly. And so I always recommend when it comes to process improvement, you start simple, you write it down. What is the process? Write it down on paper, write it on Google Docs, it doesn’t matter where you write it down, just write it down somewhere, you need to think through. How do we do this? Now? What is our current state are as is who’s involved in this process? What tools are we currently using? In this process to complete it? Are there any approvals needed? And if so how many approvals? Who is approving these things? What is the timeline to complete this process as well? There are so many variables that we don’t consider. And we just go and we plug in something in Zapier and we think why isn’t it working? Or what happened to that that task? Where did it go, that person didn’t get notified. And we’re assuming that it works, just because we turned it on, when you haven’t thought through all the steps. And when I say things fall through the cracks, those cracks are usually your internal team becoming frustrated, right, and they’re there, they’re in the dark, they don’t know what’s happening, their morale goes down, you’re losing team members, because you haven’t taken the time to think through your process and think to actually improve it. Your clients feel that on the other end, we’ve all been stuck in a really bad automation loop, where like, you’ve been a customer for, you know, a few months, and you get an email that says thanks for being a customer, or whatever it is, or thanks for joining our team, or, Hey, sorry to see you go, you know, any, like what is happening right now. And so they haven’t thought through all the potential pitfalls, and all the variables that are involved along the way, right. And so it’s so important to not skip this crucial step of writing it down, documenting it, visualizing what the future could look like, right, visualizing what the future could look like sandboxing potential outcomes, then, you know, working slowly to build in automation to that, so you can make work easier. So, yeah, it might sound like a lot of work. But if you do it, right, you do it once. And then you move on from there and just continue iterating.

Chris Davis 17:40
That’s it, man. And, Mark, I’m so glad you talk about it. Listen, I full disclosure, I did not in any way feed, Marquis, any of that, anything that he just said, that was all on his own knowledge and his strength. But the beauty of it is you see the parallels, it doesn’t matter where you apply automation. I don’t care if it’s the marketing, the sales, onboarding, the back end team execution. It’s the same process. Everyone, you have to get clear, you have to get clear on what the heck is it that we’re doing? You have to get that documentation, because that then becomes the specification for your automation. All right. I want to I want to say something. I’m not I’m not outing her. My wife, we were walking and talking. And she was talking about automation, man. So you already know that’s my language. It doesn’t matter what time of the day. And, uh, you want to talk to me about automation. I’m wide open, right? And this, she made the statements. She made the statement. She says, I know what I want to do. I get that. And she was like, but the hardest part is he’s like, I want to talk about automation. I know what I want to do. The hardest part is like getting the tools to do it. Right. I kind of chuckled, I was like, well, that’s automation, literally, software to do. Like you’re talking about automation that will be like, I know that I want to shoot the ball. The hard part is actually getting it in the hoop. That would be basketball, right? So yeah, we had a chuckle about it. And I stepped back and I said, Let me affirm you. You knowing what you want to do is half the battle. Like you have processes. I said, the reason why you’re getting hung up is because you’re trying to jump right into the tool. So you got to step back. Let’s map it out. That’s why I have a whiteboard in my office. That’s why you always see me writing on paper. And she was like, oh, so everybody, everybody has this reckoning mark key when it when you say I want to automate, you’re also saying I want to get clear on what I’m doing. I want to document right I want to be impatient. I want to stick with some manual processes till I prove them out. All of that is inside To automate all of it, it’s just one word. But all of that is packaged, you know, in there. So, man, I so enjoyed listening to this. So now we talk about scale, and I’ve witnessed this many times mark, you can get the marketing onpoint, you can get the sales point, you can get your onboarding, you know, the the point, the failure point then becomes how do we manage this internally? What do those systems look like? So for somebody like yourself, this is your, this is your sweet spot, right? Like, let’s, let’s get these, this, this thing firing on all cylinders. And I want to say it like this, everybody so that you start to see that automation can be applied to different areas of your business, in every area is critical. This you could argue is the most critical, right? Making sure though, back end processes are flowing. So when you when you think about scaling, what is it that people listening? First off, what are some symptoms that that oh, wait a minute, things aren’t what they should be before scaling? And then what are those, like telltale signs that show you like, you’re ready? Let’s go Wow, great job on the back end, we’re ready to go like it. When you assess it. What do you what are you looking for? What are you seeing?

Marquis Murray 21:27
Yeah, I’d say that, you know, first symptoms, let me just write that down. So when to go. So yeah, as far as symptoms go, it’s having disalignment with your team, you have your team members. And as you’re growing, right, like it’s a simple problem of the right hand, not knowing what the left hand is doing. Right, I often will use the analogy of making toast on my Instagram bio, it says maker of toast, and some people get it and some people don’t. Right? Like, if I asked you how you make your toast, what are you going to say you’re gonna say go to the I go to the bread box, maybe open up my toaster, and I put it in and I put it on number four, and I put it down. But for me, right, I don’t have a breadbox, I go to the cupboard and open it, you know, and then I put it in there. And I set it to to, you know, to get out. And then like, well, what are you putting on your toaster versus what I’m putting on my toast? Right, like, and where does the bread come from? How is it made? You know, where is it stored? All of those things are variables. And if you ask people on your team, let’s take you know, a web design shop, for example. Because we work with a lot of marketing and E commerce shops. Right? When it comes to a an ad campaign, let’s say or we’re building a website, you ask, you know, three different designers. You know, what’s the first step when a client signs that dotted line, we have the brief going, what do you do next? Right, you’re gonna get three different answers. And so that can cause confusion, that can cause double work. That’s another symptom, right? Double work or duplicate work, right. You know, budgets, you know, going above, you know, what estimations were. So you’re running into places where your products aren’t profitable anymore. And you’re thinking, How is this happening? We’ve estimated, you know, we have this many people on the product, we got our project manager, we got to two designers, we got our, our UX person, you know, whatever it may be, and your your budgets are going over and you’re not profiting and you’re thinking what’s happening. So that’s another symptom. And that’s probably the biggest one is not being able to predict, you know, and this is another one, like, who’s working on what, how long? Is it taking them? And hey, we have another client that wants to build a website. When can we get them started? Who’s available to do it? And you as the leader, as the owner, as the founder, you have no idea. And you’re guessing, right? You’re guessing. And you’re thinking that going through it, you’re just gonna like magically figure it out somehow. And then here’s where it starts to change. Like, you know, we talked about like being good to go. This is hard for a lot of founders, because especially in the agency space, these founders are people that were once freelancers, right, they came in, and they were wearing all the hats, they know how to build a website, like the back of their hand. But they’ve had to learn over the years, how to also build a business and how to be an HR, you know, manager and how to be an IT person, and how to be an accountant. And slowly, they’ve started passing off some of those hats if they’re scaling properly, right, but there’s still these things that they feel like they are the best at when the reality is that they’re not. So when these founders wake up and see that, you know, in order for me to grow and scale effectively, the symptoms that I’m having, I cannot ignore them. I need to take the time out of my day to day, I need to go away somewhere I need to spend that time and block it out and write down what’s going on. And it’s at that point when you read it Lies, that you’re not the best, smartest, most efficient person and your processes are broken. That’s when you know, you’re good to go. And you take a look and you sit back. And you see what’s going on. And I was watching one of your Instagrams the other day, and you were talking about a topic and you’re like, This is not a plug to hire me. Right? Not at all. But like, if you have the resources internally to do this work, and you understand process improvement, and automation, go for it. If you can afford to take time away from client projects to work on your internal stuff, go for it, right, just do it. But that’s where you can hire a consultant, you can bring on a process improvement specialist, you can bring on an automation specialist, you can look to the tools you’re using to see if they have a partner program and bring them in to help you build on this and iterate and grow because you’re seeing problems, hire a fractional CFO, look at your your books and see where are you spending your money, implement a time tracking tool that, you know, your team needs to now use for the next three months, so you can understand where their time is going. Right? If you don’t have that information in that data, and you’re experiencing those symptoms, it’s too late. Sorry, I wouldn’t say it’s too late. But you’re you’re digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole. And it’s time to start correcting it so that you can get out of that hole. So

Chris Davis 26:25
Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. And I wanted you to mention the symptoms so that the listeners can say ouch. Okay, so by the way, if you’re listening to this podcast right now, it’s okay to say after that I wrote a lack of profitable projects, and projection. Okay, which means I don’t know what’s coming in, when is going right? Double work? Do you realize you realize you’re paying these people, so you’re paying twice for the same job and probably three times because you pay one person to do it their way another person to do it their way, you got the wrong way that you got to pay somebody to do it the right way. Right, like you’re paying triple for the outcome. And then another one is who’s doing what sync? You have to be in sync? Listen, everybody, let me let me break this down. We’ve got marketing automation, you have sales automation, you can claim there’s customer fulfillment, automation, right? What what I hear when you’re talking marquee is we’re really talking about administration automation. This is the back end, how do I administer the task and operate my business? For the term that I use internally with my team is operational excellence. Right? Like, I want to operate in excellence on the back end? So yes, what does automation look like on this back end that Mark Mark is talking about, you need to have ways that your marketing is talking to Asana, that’s your project management on the back end, you need a sauna to talk back to whatever other platforms. So that’s where I see a person like yourself, marquee, and by the way, you are so supplementary to what I do. Right? Because although I can turn that that switch on, just like you can you can turn the switch on and go on the marketing and sales side, right? I can turn the switch on and go to the back end. But I would rather not. You know, I would rather hand that off. Hey, look, we got our front end systems. Here you go. Ditto recommendation, you get what I’m saying. So it’s it’s hugely important for people to start to understand the compartments of automation, so that you know who to go to. For what for you. Now I’m interested I get to be so hey, it’s my podcast. I could be selfish, everybody. I’m just I’m personally curious. What are some of the I either say fun, most proud of our most commonly used integrations that you find yourself doing with Asana and other tools? What is kind of like that bread and butter. Listen, what we do is we hook up Asana, and we always connect it to this or we always make sure, yeah, what’s that for you?

Marquis Murray 29:21
I have two, but one of them. That’s my absolute favorites. And like what you’ll understand about me are hoping I’m you know, putting out is that I’m an operations guy, but I love sales and marketing. I love that. But like when it comes to operations, like the two tools that we use day in and day out that I constantly have open our Asana, and that’s talking to harvest which is our time tracking app. And then that’s talking to four that’s talking to forecast, which is our scheduling and capacity management app. So everyone’s time on projects is in there. We know exactly what’s profitable, what’s not who’s working on what when their capacity when they’re under capacity, we get reports on that weekly. So that whole process is automated. And then HubSpot is our CRM is our website is our knowledge base is our customer feedback module is our ticketing system is our blog is everything right? That’s our marketing engine. That’s our sales engine. Everything is on HubSpot. And so to have that talk to the sales aspect, we’ll talk we’ll connect HubSpot to Asana because you know, all my sales tasks are managed in HubSpot, and then on project related tasks are managed in Asana. And so when it’s time for someone in Asana, who’s not in sales, who’s maybe an operations like a project manager, to give me their thoughts on a new proposal, or a call recording that I had with the prospect, right, that’s getting shuttled over to Asana to go on their task list. Right. So that’s one way that we use those tools and then harvest. Like, I track my time I track every single second of my day, I know exactly where my time goes. I’m not a founder, that’s just you know, stuck in email all day, I know what’s happening. I’m time blocked and so harvests allows me to do that. It allows me to not track and micromanage my team to know where their time is going. But by them tracking the time for projects. It gives us real time, actionable data and insights on our internal work. On our customer work, we know exactly how long it takes to go through our deep dive process, which is our discovery, we know exactly how long it takes on average to go through our customer onboarding. We know how long it takes us to deliver 50 or 100 SOPs, we know exactly how long it takes us. We know exactly how long it takes us to implement a new Asana, exactly how long it takes us to build out their learning commons, which is the internal knowledge base role, the SOPs are housed, we have all that data. And so some people think I don’t want my my team to track time or they’re not going to track time or they don’t want to feel like I’m, you know, micromanaging them. But it’s not about that there’s so much information that you can gather from this data to help you the leader, better project, better estimate in your sales give more accurate pricing. When someone says How long is that going to take? How much is that going to cost? Right. And so it all ties together. And then the last tool that I’ll say that we use all the time for our proposals and sales is panna doc. And that connects to HubSpot in real time, as well as a signer aware, but there’s a nice ecosystem there.

Chris Davis 32:31
Yeah, I need you all to hear that. You may need to rewind that part. Because and I asked that intentionally, I knew you were going to, I knew you’re gonna drop it on us like that marquee. So we’re witnessing alley oops, and slam dunks right now. Okay, this is what this is how it looks in the in the nerds around, right. It’s so good, right? This is what if I can just get you all to dream with me? What if all of your systems were working like that? Do you see? How can you imagine how valuable it would be? If you could if you were track you had your systems in place, tracking your time tracking, you’ve got your task auto populating, right. He mentioned, our kid mentioned, you’ve got stuff in HubSpot, and then at the appropriate time, it gets shuttled over to Asana. He said that and best believe when that happens, he’s got templates that are creating the to dues that I know I can see it. All I want you to do is imagine just for a minute, we do a lot of marketing and sales talking here. Well, Mark key is talking about his operations. Could you imagine if you could know, to the minute how long it takes per client, and then start to project that when you’re creating your proposal based on what you’re what you’re putting in that proposal. Like we talk about projection of sales and predictions of sales and sales all the time. But have you thought about that being able to accurately assess what is going to be required to fulfill on this client? Because that’s usually reactive marquee, right? Like you don’t know you’re at overload until you’re overloaded. And it’s like, what if we could use automation in our operations to tell us that proactively warning you can take this on, but look at the capacity load. Look at how much time it takes for something like this. And my thing just in general is educated Yes. Always. If it’s not an educated yes by No, it’s no. It’s like a very simple flowchart. Is it an educated? Yes, yes. Yes. No, stop. Right, right. Is that simple? You would at least be able to give that educated yes and say okay, I know this is going to take me over capacity. And I know it’s more hours than I allotted for. But because of that, I know I need to hire somebody else or XYZ. It just prevents you from being reactive in your business. You know, let last thing man last last ally appear. We know, you and I, when I say we we know that you are never done. Right. It’s it’s a fallacy, it’s a false finish line to think that you will be done. How? How do you set the expectation? Because I know you have the understanding? How do you set the expectation to your clients, to the marketplace? For them to understand this is a iterable process, and we’re always improving. What what does that look like? How do you ensure that they know we’re done for now? Things will change. And that’s a good thing you want them to change, you want to adjust and optimize and all of that?

Marquis Murray 36:07
That’s a really good question. Because yeah, it’s absolutely true. Let me see if I can slam dunk this one will often talk about it, right? Like we we preach process improvement. As we are going through the process, we have our deep dive, which depending on the subject matter, and everything we’re diving into, it can take anywhere from four to six weeks, right? Maybe maybe even longer up to eight weeks. And what we often see, and it’s a nice realization when it does happen. So nice moment when it does happen. Because the customers realize, oh, we can never be finished this, right? Because we get to a certain point in the discovery, we’re asking all these questions. And for the first time, they say to themselves, wow, or we’ve had customers say I should say, you know, like, this is like therapy, right? Because I’m talking about all these things. And I can see my business from a different place that I’ve never considered before. Right. And so they see it. And then we get to the end of the six or eight weeks, whatever it is, we have our report. And we’re like, alright, this is what we’ve seen. And these are our recommendations. This is where we are headed. Right? We give them the timeline to implement that. But it’s like, they start to understand that this is going to give us you know, improvements for a certain time. And we’re going to have to keep going with this, right? Because by the time we get to implementation, they’re already coming back to us saying, hey, what if we do this? What if we try this, Hey, we change this internally. And so we do our best to put like a freeze, we want to put like blinders on the client. But like, No, we’re focused, we got to get to our finish line. Like they’ve already started to think about the future, right. And so did always focused on education more than anything, we want to educate them on how to improve their processes, we want to educate them on how to document and update their standard operating procedures. Because we can be there, we will be there to help you do it. But if we can get you in that mindset, we’re actually helping to transform the minds of the people that are actually doing the work, it becomes almost second nature, where it’s like, they get excited and want to improve, right. And so sometimes we have to say it and spell it out. And we have packages for that where we provide ongoing support. But like when we’re really working with them, we’re training them on how to do it. And they’re seeing the opportunities on the other side for what improvement looks like, right? That’s what it’s really about. So it’s like, yeah, you could keep using us. But we want to create a culture and educate your team so that you can see the opportunities and get excited about improvements. And now you’re the foundation and understand what steps to take to get there. So I don’t know if that’s the exact answer you’re looking for. But that’s what it looks like in our space. And it works really really well.

Chris Davis 38:52
Yeah, it’s beautiful because they see it again, you know it you know it you know, this is going to be a process and look, we’re here, we’re here for you. I just need you to see it needs you to see and understand and be excited about it. Oh man, I’ve got a couple more alliums to be honest. I thought I was done but I got a couple more but I know we’ve got to bring this to it in this has been out standing marquee I am so glad I’m so glad that we got to sit down and have this talk. We need to talk this needs to be talked about more in the space of digital marketing okay, because once the marketing is working in the sales are flowing in Guess what? You Your ops better be in place and in place I mean well documented and well automated art or else your profit margins just there’s there’s a plethora of things. So thank you so much for for dropping those gems for us and just being transparent and open and willing to share man I never take that lightly. If it goes without saying but just in case people were like, wait a minute, that’s Oh, I can actually go there. So, you’ve mentioned it many times, if somebody wants to reach out to you get connected, explore more of what you’re saying, you can do and apply it to their business what’s what’s the best place that they can go?

Marquis Murray 40:14
They can go to think ditto.com. That’s our website, there are resources there, you can check out our knowledge base, you can read our blog, you can go to YouTube, if you are an Asana, you know, shop, you can go and you know, watch stuff there. But think dito.com, or you can catch me on LinkedIn, Marquis Marie. And I’m like Chris said, I’m posting content all the time. I love having conversations with people in the comments. So those are two really great places for you to go.

Chris Davis 40:41
Yes, absolutely. If you’re on YouTube, it’s on the it’s on the screen. As of now, if you’re not think ditto all one word.com, Marquis Murray, on LinkedIn. And again, we’re connected on LinkedIn, huge value there. Thank you. Thank you so much, Marquis, for coming on to the podcast. This has been tremendously enjoyable for me. I know it will be the same for the audience as well. So thank you, man.

Marquis Murray 41:11
And I appreciate this. You block into time and you know, asking great questions. So thanks for this opportunity today.

Chris Davis 41:16
It was fun. Yes, absolutely. I’ll see you online. Yes, sir.

Marquis Murray 41:21
All right.

Chris Davis 41:23
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out. And while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. automated responses responsibly, my friends