Making More Sales with Your CRM Software feat. Kronda Adair

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off 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 sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:31
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, the founder of automation bridge, and today’s guests could go without an introduction, but we won’t do that. So glad to have her back again. And what we’re going to be talking about today is something that you may have

Chris Davis 0:55
not known that you need. But after this podcast, I’m pretty sure you’ll be in full understanding and agreement that this may have been the missing piece for you, and your CRM software. But before I get ahead of myself and start jumping right into the podcast, let me give her her proper introduction. For those of you who do not know Karana Adair is the founder at Carville digital, where her mission is to help mission driven service based businesses use content to sell their services so they can scale without burning out in the process. And let me make Khurana tangible to you all. She went from making $500 websites 10 years ago, okay? Didn’t you just follow me $500 websites 10 years ago, I’m gonna let her when she comes on, tell you where she’s at now. But she provides tools to help you organize your content and through their marketing intensive VIP days, she will help you craft a strategy to deploy your content to the right people at the right time. So your prospects show up, ready to buy from you Kuranda thank you for jumping back on the podcast with us. How are your

Kronda Adair 2:15
time’s a charm I’m doing so well.

Chris Davis 2:19
You know what Third time’s a charm. And it still won’t be the last time.

Kronda Adair 2:24
Now I’ll just I’ll just keep coming back for as long as you have me. I’m doing so good. Today, I just finished a one of my CEO retreat weeks prepping for a launch that we’re going into. And I’m just I’m just really excited about this offer because I do think it is the missing link. And I feel sort of silly sometimes that it took me so long to get here. But we’re here now. So let’s talk about it.

Chris Davis 2:49
Now. So listen, everybody, I’m going to help you fast track and catch up. We’re posting the links to Caranas previous episode on the podcast episodes on the podcast. So you can listen to that and get caught up to speed with our background. And everything. Khurana for the new listeners, just give them the 32nd 10,000 foot view of who you are.

Kronda Adair 3:16
So, like you said, started with $500 WordPress websites, and thankfully figured out how to raise my prices, how to branch out how to create more effective websites and eventually realized the website. It’s important, but it’s really the front door. And so in 2018 at the end of 2018, I transitioned out of web development and into coaching full time.

Kronda Adair 3:42
And I started a content bootcamp. And for the past four years, our flagship program has been content bootcamp 12 weeks where I teach business owners how to to create content that sells or services in preparation for them to be able to automate it because you have to have content that works in order to be able to automate it and get the results that you’re looking for. So that’s kind of where we were. And then sure, we’ll talk in more detail about this, but throughout the year last year, gradually transitioned into realizing that what people need isn’t what they needed before. So we’ll talk about that pivot and get into the details. But that’s kind of where we find ourselves right now.

Chris Davis 4:22
Great, great. And I want to give a shameless plug Khurana has an amazing resource around content called the Pot o gold pot of gold everyone and let me tell you how hot this pot is.

Chris Davis 4:37
We have a community if you don’t know this automation community, you can join it anytime. But it’s it’s a community full of the sharpest and aspiring sharpest marketer automated marketers to be. And I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s somebody that has heard about it that didn’t just snatch it up. You Immediately, I mean, it can’t keep it on the digital shelves. So shameless, plug bear, get your hot pot of gold. While you can. And yeah,

Kronda Adair 5:11
and for those that are new, it’s an air table template. So you got to have air tail. A lot of people say, Do I have to pay for air table? No, you can use the free version. But it’s a template that will help you store all your content, like the valuable asset that it is. And yeah, people love it.

Chris Davis 5:27
Yeah, you are, if you’re new to the podcast, you will hear air table on pretty much every episode, they do not sponsor this, they have not sent me a t shirt. But I use their tool so much. And it just does so much. So so with that being said, Khurana you’ve been in the space for a while, decorated, I will I will say rightfully so decorated, because you’ve been in the trenches with the right client, and you’ve been in the trenches with the wrong client, you’ve made shifts and pivots in your business to stay afloat, you know, and to really continue to thrive. So right now, there is a need, we have talked about this, and I get to talk to you individually. But we’ve assessed the need in the market. And I don’t know if the market is aware of this need yet and thus we have this podcast. So kind of give us the lay of the land Kuranda at what has led you to this new approach to getting marketing automation implemented the right way.

Kronda Adair 6:36
So last year, you know, well, let me back up. So I started bootcamp, it only took about nine months into boot camp, which was no done for you, right? I’m just telling people what to do. Only took about nine months before people started coming back to me and saying, This is amazing. You know, it’s working. Can you help us with our tech because our tech is sad. And so it’s like, okay, now you care about your technology. So let me go back and figure out what’s the offer, I didn’t want to go back to selling websites. And so I created it in sourced. And so if you go back to the second time I was on here, we talked a lot about in sourced. And it was like an umbrella, right? Because there’s a lot of done for you things that we could do, we could do you know marketing automation, we do a little bit of LMS work, we were still doing websites at that time, we needed to redesign or an upgrade from Squarespace like all these things under this umbrella for just a very simple, like retainer based pricing, right. And what we would do is we would do the assessment, we would go through their, you know, their six systems, and we say, okay, based on where you are, here’s what you need to improve based on where you want to go, here’s the order of operations. And then we say, okay, give us you know, minimum four or five months to do this. So that’s where we were last summer. And then you know, I don’t know if it was the recession, you know, the price of eggs, I don’t know. But our retainers all just kind of came to a close. And we weren’t getting new ones. You know, bootcamp was going great. We were getting people into bootcamp. But we weren’t getting those retainers, which were the bulk of our revenue. And so, you know, I started looking at I think, as a community, we started to talk about, like, what is going on, in the space of automation. And because we meet every week, we were talking, and we were saying, like, we had this theory, that people were doing automation, were using automation in their business, but they could do it better. I think that was kind of our collective theory. And that theory needed to be questioned. And so what I did was I started going to my colleagues, and I started doing audits. And I would say, Hey, give me $500, give me $1,000, give and give me your Active Campaign login. And let’s see what’s going on in there. And so I did probably six or eight of these audits. And there were a few people who were doing pretty good. But there were many more people who were like, just missing out on so much opportunity. You know, I think to a large part of the business owner population who aren’t as technical, if they have a welcome sequence, they’re like, cool, I’m doing automation. And you and I know there’s just so much more to to it than that. There’s so much more opportunity than that to increase your revenue to save your time to save your team’s time to give your your subscribers and your clients a better experience. Like there’s just so much more out there. And so once I saw that happening, I was like, Okay, how I describe it is if the if there’s a scale from zero to 10, we thought people were maybe at four or five and we could get them to like eight 910. And really, what I found is people were like zero and one and two, and just trying to get a handle on it. And so That’s why we came up with CRM to sales. Because it is a full time job like someone has to be focused on your CRM, and making sure that your CRM is you know, as we say, marketing ready, right? Meaning, you don’t just have a mess of like a million lists in there and a bunch of tags that you created on the fly. And no segmenting or, you know, those segments in Active Campaign were to a segment of and then the date and then the name of the email, and then you don’t know when you come back to it, you’re like, I have no idea what that is. And I created a term for that called sudden segments syndrome.

Chris Davis 10:38
Three G seven segments syndrome, get good yield,

Kronda Adair 10:43
and so on. So I just started, you know, offering this to folks and being like, you know, we’re going to take this over, and we’re going to start out, we were doing the audits. And then we’d say, Okay, this is the first project, that’s gonna get you to what we call the first victory, right, it’s going to give you the biggest lift the quickest wins. And most of the time, that is just setting up that basic marketing engine, that basic email engine. And, you know, we both we both love Robert Kennedy over email marketing heroes, like came up with that concept of having your email engine, so that every person who subscribes to your list, they get that welcome sequence, but a strategic right helps them get to know you. And then they get that sales sequence. And I think I think most people understand the contents of of like, Oh, I’m going to have the welcome email or the welcome sequence, they’re not always strategic about it, I think much fewer people have the concept of like, and then I’m going to have a sales sequence. And it’s not just going to be like one email going by my stuff. It’s like five or six emails, you know, talking about your offer from different angles, to really get people to buy because they joined your list, presumably, because they have the problem that you solve. So let’s tell them how you solve it, and why they should do it now instead of later. And that is going to increase your sales, and it’s going to shorten your sales cycle. Like just that one system.

Chris Davis 12:07
Yeah, I found, you know, as you’re you’re talking about this, I found that people often approach their CRM software, very similar to a new computer, or a new car, right? I don’t know how many people when they buy a car before they drive it, open up the owner’s manual. And like really read through it right, myself being guilty. Or when they buy a computer brand new MacBook Pro, or, you know, windows, whatever you want to say, Hold on, before we turn this on, let’s read. Let’s read his man. All right, nobody’s doing that. Nobody’s doing it. And so you add technology. And there is no person on planet earth that I have met. Even in the mirror, I have not met this person who before they dive into the software, they go through the documentation, they read, and they make sure that every they understand the platform to configure it the right way. So what happens is, you’re learning on the fly. And depending on your ability to learn, and your understanding of marketing and your familiarity of technology and comfort with it is going to determine just how big that learning curve is. Some of you who are listening, have an infinite learning curve, this is not a good thing, okay? This means you will be there all day or years, trying to figure out something that somebody like Kuranda certified automation service provider, by the way, has figured out for you. So once we understood that, it’s kind of like, no shame, right? Like no file for pretty poor previous performance, no file. But now that you know better, it’s time to do better. But what would it look like if we just said, Hey, you need to do better, you’re doing that wrong. So the CRM, the sales is from what I’m hearing, you jump in and make sure that the active campaign account is set up in a way for them to achieve success and the you help them maintain it.

Kronda Adair 14:12
That’s correct. Yeah. And the maintenance is a really important part of that, because I have a client, she was the first person actually, to, for me to dip my toe back into the done for you waters back in 2019. I was like bootcamp forever, not touching anybody shut, like forever. And she came to me and it was so clear that was like, well, you need an email marketing system. Like you’re not reaching out, you know, it was like, it’s a wellness facility. And, you know, you need those repeat those repeat customers. And it was so clear to me, like, oh, you need an email system. So I was like, Okay, let me let me set this up for you. And so I started up for her. We went our separate ways. And when she came back a couple years later, it had not been maintained. And then some things on the front end and change, she had gotten a website upgrade in the process of that website upgrade, really lost a lot of the gains that we had made in the marketing because the connections, the opt ins weren’t working properly, like, there was nobody there to say, Hey, okay, cool, great. You’re getting a new website, let’s make sure that we’re strategic about, you know, this new front door, we still want to welcome people in, we still want to segment them, we still want to make sure they get the right messaging. And so when she came back, it was like, Okay, well, now when there’s a setback, and now we gotta like clean everything up, before we can get you on the right path. So it is so much easier, much like cars, or any anything else that you value, it’s so much easier to maintain it than to say, you know, set it and forget it. And I had a conversation with her recently, where, you know, she came in, you know, she came into the conversation with with a little bit of like, what am I getting for this money every month? You know, that was kind of the energy that we started. And the energy at the end was, how can I give you a testimonial. So, um, you know, you really, you just there has to be somebody who has their eye on that ball. And our goal is for the business owner, to never have to log into Active Campaign if they don’t want to, in fact, it’s better. It’s better if they don’t like, we logged in. And we like we found a couple of those segments are like, Oh, what do you do it, let’s make sure you know, you can just send us those, we’ll create those for you. And it’s not to disempower people, but it’s just to make sure that things stay marketing ready, so that you can stay in your zone of genius, you know, people can do what it is they’re actually meant to be doing. So that is the goal is to just like, take it over, take it off your plate as a thing, you know, and she did give us a testimonial, by the way, and one of the things she said was, you know, yeah, I learned some active campaign, but it’s not a skill. I really want to keep up. Mm

Chris Davis 17:04
hmm. Listen, everyone, this is this is an intelligent business owner, which I believe all of you listening are, the only difference is in the awareness. Are you aware that you are the business owner? That let me give you some credit, you could learn Active Campaign? You could, but you really shouldn’t, you should leave this to the professionals. And here’s why. Here’s why. So I’m familiar with this, this offer. I’m familiar with the process and everything. And I want to give them a little bit of insight. And unless we’re going to flex on them collectively, here Khurana. So the regular active campaign consultant will tell you how to do stuff. And they may import some automations. And they may know how to do some stuff in automations, if else’s, maybe send a web hook, I don’t know achieve something. I’ll tell you what they can’t do. They can’t tell you historically, through your entire lifetime of owning that platform, how your emails and all of your automations have performed. And they can’t easily track that month by month. They also cannot look at the segments. Let’s just give people credit Khurana and say that they had organized segments of sending, they can’t tell you the performance of those segments relative to the email open rate and the click through rate. Okay, these are just two. I’m flexing a little bit but I haven’t really flex too much. What if we could do all of that with a click of a button? envision a dashboard, where any year, any month of the year, I can see open rate of campaigns open rate of emails sent in automations. I could see lists growth. What if I Karana? What if I wanted to see contact growth based on a tag? How many times was this tag apply? Now some of you, hey, there’s advanced

Chris Davis 19:03
analytics in Active Campaign. And if we go here, Listen, I’m not trying to demean Active Campaign in any way. What I’m telling you is the level of effort for you to figure out everything that I just listed should not be on you. Because it’s greater than your tolerance to figure it out. So if the level of effort required is greater than your tolerance, that’s just a nice way of me saying you will fail. Okay.

Chris Davis 19:36
Right. And we have to speak pointed like this, because it’s too many of you all with great businesses. And you’re just focused on the wrong thing. Khurana talk about No, you just gave us one one case where they were a little reluctant at first, but then they were so relieved afterwards. Just walk the listeners to through what that process entails from. Okay, I’ve signed up to some of the milestones where you started to see, okay, now they’re starting to get it. Oh, now they’re seeing the benefit, you know?

Kronda Adair 20:10
Yeah. So first of all, we launched this, as we’re recording this, it’s been about four years, it’s been about four and a half months since we launched this. And I literally Chris, I wrote, I wrote a sales sequence of the type that I spoke about earlier. And I hit send, and I got on a plane to go to an event. And traditionally, it so happens, I often make more money when I go on vacation, because I always read a sales. So as I’m in Cabo at this event, you know, I’m, I’m checking in, I’m opening up my phone, I can see like applications coming in. This is, I believe, the best product market fit that we’ve ever had in the company, because we we were booked out for the rest of the quarter for the rest of the year, within six weeks, I was like, oh, we can’t my goal was to get like 10 people’s first beta clients, you know, figure out what this thing needs to be. And we did that in a matter of weeks. And so that was the best launch that we’ve ever had. And so we’ve been taking clients through this process of getting them, you know, getting them. So it’s, it’s three phases, right? It’s the audit phase to see what is happening. So, and we used to sell the audit separately, just because I was trying to figure out what is happening. Right? Now we’ve just rolled that out. So we’re gonna audit and we’re gonna see what is happening. But a lot of times, we know it’s just the things aren’t happening that need to be happening. So I stopped doing the audit separately, because I’m like, what we what we really need to figure out is, of these three areas that we can automate marketing, or sales or onboarding, which one who’s going to give you the biggest, the biggest win. And so we pick one of those, and we do that project. So maybe that’s setting up your marketing engine, maybe that’s setting up some sales automation, so you can follow up consistently with leads, whatever that is, we’re going to do that. That’s about a 90 day project. And what’s typically happened, we had one client who was she started on MailChimp, and she was like, Okay, I’m gonna she heard me speak at this event that I was talking about. She’s like, Alright, I’m ready. I’m gonna upgrade to Epic, Active Campaign, she tweeted me this. I said, Okay, well, we’re here if you need us, she’s like, No, I got it. But two days later, she was like, I got this. So great. What let’s do this. And so we not only, you know, people think of migration is like, oh, I can move my list over I can, I can download a CSV and I can upload it to a new platform. No, we set up her, you know, you’ve often talked about like preparing the platform, right? So we we did a strategy session, and we figured out what is your strategy going to be? What are the segments that you need to have one of the lists that you need to have, like, what are our goals, and then we go, and we set up the entire platform. So we know how people are going to be tagged when they opt in, we’re going to know how they’re going to be segmented. And, you know, we know how we’re going to track sales. So there’s a whole thing that we did with the deals pipeline to track sales, because she’s a WordPress theme developer. So she has a theme shop. So there’s all these things that we did just to set her up before we even migrated anybody over and then we migrated her customers, but we also did an event to happen to be her five year anniversary in business. So it’s a great that’s a perfect event to structure this around, you know, do a sale and to get people to move themselves over to Active Campaign. Right? Because you want to you want to have, you don’t just want to move people over who are like unengaged. So we want people to take positive action and say, oh, yeah, I’m gonna sign up on the new system. So I can get the coupon for the sale, you know, that shows you like who your engage people are, that’s gonna help your deliverability right out the gate. And it’s gonna protect you legally, right? Because they’re, they’re opting in, they’re taking that positive action. So we did all of those things. Of course, we, you know, gave her templates to help her read or welcome sequence in our sales sequence. And almost immediately, she started getting replies. So, you know, someone who had was kind of doing the least had really kind of checked out of her list. And so we launched this thing, and now she’s done all the work beforehand, but now she’s getting these replies from engaged subscribers who are loving her emails, loving learning, about her philosophy, how she thinks about blogging and WordPress, and the importance of your theme and all these things, right. So she’s building relationships with these people, and she’s making sales. So that’s what our migration looks like. It’s, it’s building you an entire system. So I talked to a lot of people who, you know, they’re very trepidatious about, you know, letting go of like MailChimp or ConvertKit or any of those platforms that don’t have a CRM I am constantly I have been for probably six months out here trying to ask ConvertKit users, What are y’all using for a CRM because you need one. And like, they don’t know what a CRM is, they don’t have one, they’re trying to just tags for everything. And I’m like, you know, depending on what your business is, that’s okay for a while, but at some point, like, you got to level up. And so yeah, that’s, that’s an example of like, one case study that was, and she’s such a dream to work with. She’s, she’s one of my clients that, you know, get now that she has the structure. And she knows, oh, I don’t have to struggle with this technology, like clockwork, every month, she’s like, here are my emails for the month, you know, here’s the template I want to use. Like, she tells us everything that we need to know. And then we schedule it, and then we’re good to go.

Chris Davis 25:47
Yeah, and you know, in line with the the automobile, we’ve had a few references. It’s also this everyone, you can’t beat best practices. And you can’t learn best practices, just by reading something, right? Every platform will tell you, Hey, you should do this, you should do that. But until you get in it, and really start to use it because the truth be told, the creators of software are often not the marketers that are using the software. So it’s us that are finding those little easter eggs in the little Hey, do this do that you need to ensure that whoever is maintaining your CRM software for you that they have that skill set. So it’s like I recently missed my son recently bought a type of car, that is not an American car. So he did not realize he can’t take that to the regular automotive shops that he’s been taking it too, he can, but you’re going to risk that something is going to get broke, if they treat that car like all the other cars. So he has to take it to that specialist, that dealership. It’s the same with your CRM software, when it comes to Active Campaign. You need somebody that specializes in the best practices of that platform. Sure, you can go on Upwork Sure, you can go on Fiverr Sure, you can go into a Facebook group post help get 50 comments of people saying DM me, I can help you out and try to filter through all of that and be left with more than a mess than you started with. Or you can just take your CRM to the proper dealership with people who specialize in the best practice. And it’s we everybody, we’re saying this in a means to help you. If you think about your website, it is much easier to hand that off. Just let somebody handle your website for you. karandi and I are techy people. Give me somebody who’s going to maintain my website, and I’m taking them 10 times out of 10. And I know what to do on my website. Why everybody why why put that extra weight on you is the biggest question. And for the most part Kuranda. What we’ve seen is that people just don’t know that such a service is available. They’re familiar with, Hey, can you maintain my website? Hey, can you maintain my social media? Right? Hey, can you maintain my copy. But for whatever reason, maintain my CRM software just doesn’t tend to roll the same.

Kronda Adair 28:33
Now, what has not been a thing and I remember, you know, we went looking in the marketplace, right to see who’s doing this, and it’s not very many people. And here’s the thing, too, is the ones we did find, right, you could find a service and you could sign you can sign up right away, literally go to the website, sign up half an hour later, you can be sending them tasks, right? They have a million vas, they’ll automate anything. But it’s still on you, as the business owner to have a strategy to know what can be done. You know, I did a webinar back in December. And people were like, well, you can do that. I have a I have a mutual airtable friend of ours, who sent me a real excited DM and was like, Ooh, somebody mentioned you know, you could do this with conditional content and Active Campaign and now now she’s excited because she she doesn’t care about it for the the marketing, but she cares about it for her students. I want to be able to send really, really relevant information to my students. She’s like, do you know about this? Have you been talking about this? I literally have an entire YouTube video just about segmenting and conditional content. I was like, Here you go. So you have to understand what’s even possible. And if you just go and you sign up with one of these agencies that’s just like has, you know, a bunch of hands. Somebody still has to be the brain Somebody has to know what you can do. And it’s the same whether you go to an agency or whether like you have your tech da, and you’re trying to make him into a strategist, they’re just not, they’re not going to look at your email and say, like, I’m giving our clients, you know, some of them are like, Hey, can you look at my email before it goes out? Sure, of course, I can do that, you know, and say, like, Hey, where’s the section that was in the first draft? That’s the that’s the part that really impacted me. Like, let’s make sure this gets back in there. Or, Hey, have you thought about this? You know, and and they’re not going to do that for you. Those generic services?

Chris Davis 30:33
Yeah. Then they’ll they’ll provide the the building, right? It’s like you hiring somebody, Hey, I need I need a picture put up, hey, I need a new sink. I need this. But they won’t do the inspection. Right? Hey, wait a minute, this beam looks a little weak. They don’t care about this. So we’re not knocking the services. We’re just giving you all context on what you’re getting. And what you’re not. Keep going.

Kronda Adair 31:00
Yeah. Okay, so here’s the here’s the revelation that I had, probably in the last few weeks. So we on boarded our first, you know, eight or nine clients. And we’ve been working with them for a few months. And, you know, I try to take all of the obstacles and remove as many of them as possible, right? So we’re doing all the tech, I’m also giving them the email templates, right? Don’t start with a blank page. You know, I’m talking to them about the strategy. And month ago, Spy six weeks, two months goes by and I’m like, we’re still waiting on these emails from some of y’all for welcome emails, Chris, that I gave them templates for. I’m like, What is going on? So I just emailed everybody. And I said, if you don’t have these emails done, book a call right now when I get on my calendar, so I start having these one on ones. And lo and behold, there’s still all these mental blocks that are keeping people from finishing their you know, these aren’t these are business owners, or them or not. of all, I left your self doubt, perfectionism. 10 minutes, maybe to let identify these and coach people through, you know, one example is like, well, the template talks about having a community and I don’t have a community. And I said, Well, if someone joins join means they can do that. That’s right. Yeah, that’s okay. Reframe No, oh, my, well, she was like, Oh, I just, I don’t want to bother people. I said, you really in it. And you asked me how my back is doing well for me, check in on your people. You know, just that amount of time. She’s like, Oh, okay, now I can send out these messages. I have a professional copywriter. She does copywriting and copy strategy for SaaS companies. But when it comes to writing her own emails, all of a sudden, Roblox, you know, and so I realized, Oh, I’ve been doing this thing where I’ve been bouncing back and forth, right. And I’m like, oh, people don’t understand marketing. Let me stop doing websites and do content bootcamp. People in content bootcamp need help with their tech, let me let me set that aside and make a done for you. There’s no such thing you can’t separate. You know, if you want done for you, if you want somebody to come and build you a fence, great. You don’t need mindset work for that. But if you as the business owner, you still have to produce this content for us to be able to deploy it. And that means they need that support. They need that coaching. You know, they need that community, they need that accountability. And so I realized I had to retire content bootcamp, and I had to make it all one thing. So we brought everything, you know, all that support from content bootcamp, and we rolled it in so and I sent I sent out a survey said, What do you like, what do y’all need? And they were like, We need one on one. We, you know, some people want community. So we’re finding a way to put all of that support into this so that you get the benefits. Because if you’re paying, you know, whatever it is, whatever monthly fee, but you’re not actually giving us the content and getting the benefits, then that’s a waste of money. And that’s not why we’re here. I’m not here to just be like, Oh, recurring revenue, and I don’t care if they if we actually do anything. No, I want you sending the emails.

Chris Davis 34:42
Yes. I want you to actually mark it, because this will work. Right? And I hope what you all are hearing is a passion to meet you where you’re at, and provide a solution that will move move you forward, we’re not we’re you know, I, I’m very careful with who I bring on and what we talk about. Because the last thing that I want anybody to feel as a listener to this podcast is older just pushing products or they this there that we have for years for years, truly assessed where the market is. And what we want you to do is not beat yourself up for not getting the most out of the platform. I was the Director of Education at Active Campaign for nearly three years. And I can’t count how many customers I used to see talking to support, and really admitting in saying, I know I should be doing more, but they did it in a like a guilt way. Like, I know, I’m not using as much as I should, and this doesn’t. And, you know, one side of it is use as much as you need to get the results that you need to get no harm, no foul if you’re not using features XY and Z, but A, B, C, D and E get you to where you need to be to. So that’s one thing, but two is actually being effective with what you need. Because you don’t know you don’t this these platforms are so robust. Listen, Khurana and I we get easily overwhelmed sometimes this is this is not a specific to you, because you don’t know what you’re doing. We know this journey. So this may be the first time that you’ve heard of such an offering. I would imagine after this because I know marketers are listening and their wheels are turning. This will most definitely not be the last time you will start seeing this type of service offered. And remember we soften that we soften your heart to such a thing. And and because of that, I believe that some of you are ready right now, at the point of listening to this podcast. So Khurana I want to give you the floor real quick and just let people know. Where can they go to find out more about you in this service offering.

Kronda Adair 37:09
Really, really easy you can go to Carvel digital.com That’s our homepage. I took my own advice. I knew we needed to, you know, my website’s been out of date because we did this massive pivot so I hired a copywriter. Like, I know I can write some decent copy, but it isn’t what I should be doing. Probably not. So we just got our copy back. It is absolute fire. I can’t wait to get up there. So just go to Carvel digital.com And you can start your journey, you know, learning whatever it is you need to learn before we get on a call. You know, I? We’ve been talking about content this whole time, right? So I encourage people when people are new, maybe this is the first time people are hearing of me, right? And they hop in and they’re like, Okay, I want to get on a sales call. And before we actually get on the phone, I will send them you know, based on what they share with me, I’ll be like, hey, go listen to this podcast, go watch this YouTube video, I don’t want you showing up to a sales call, like blind, I want you to go digitally stalk me, you know, because you can learn just about everything you need to know about our philosophy, how we work, how we think about things so that when we get on the call, we talk about you, right? We talk about what you’re going through and what you need to move forward. And I want to just let people know because I have kind of a reputation that I have been working on my poker face. So that when people tell me what it is that I feel like I gave a really great Oscar worthy performance. You know, recently, one of our clients, they were just I said, Tell me tell me the process. I didn’t fool her. But that’s the point is I’m trying y’all so truly no shade. You know, there’s there’s things that Chris and I are not good at. And if someone were to come in and audit, they’d be like, you’re doing what? And we all have those things. So, so come on in the water’s fine. I’m actually much nicer than I sometimes am in my content. A lot of my clients say especially who came through boot camp, they’re like, oh, Khurana is so supportive. She’s not mean at all. I truly just want people to win. I just want people to win. And so yeah, all

Chris Davis 39:27
right. Well, listen, we’re gonna have that link that you mentioned below, you’ll be able to connect with Kuranda. I have to say this. I can’t remember if I said it on the last podcast, but it’s worth repeating. Kuranda is one of the most resourceful people that I’ve ever met. I truly admire that. She will go to unlimited lengths to figure something out that she doesn’t know about or to find a resource to give you to get Are you ready for something? I’m when she went through the ASP program and got certified in everything, her resourcefulness is just, it’s just unmatched. And I think that speaks to your heart to really help and serve. So that’s who Kuranda is everybody. And I hope that in listening to this, you get a better understanding of not just what where the market is because you’re there you are the market. No longer do we have time to waste as the visionaries of our businesses. You don’t have time to waste figuring out the tech. The hard part is finding trusted tech folks. You have some now, okay, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve had a roster of people in the previous podcast in a variety of different areas. But this one is the closest to me, Karen is certified. She’s gone through my framework. She’s part of our community. And if you ever thought what kind of people are in that community, oh, I’m, I’m, I’m good. I got clients. I know how to do this automation stuff. This landscape changes daily, especially with artificial intelligence now, oh, my God. We can’t even touch on it.

Kronda Adair 41:16
We can’t even get into it now.

Chris Davis 41:17
So you need a place where there are like minds, one brain is never better than the many. Even if it’s just one other mind. It’s always better. You need a place where you can bounce those ideas off of the community. Is that automation bridge.com forward slash community if you want to join us Kuranda I can’t thank you enough for joining me on the podcast. I don’t even have to say See you online because I know I’ll see you soon this week. Community. But thank you so much for coming on. It’s greatly appreciated.

Kronda Adair 41:51
Always one of my favorite places to be.

Chris Davis 41:53
Yes, yes. Yes. All right. 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 podcasts, Google podcasts, 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. Automate responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off 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 sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:31
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, the founder of automation bridge, and today’s guests could go without an introduction, but we won’t do that. So glad to have her back again. And what we’re going to be talking about today is something that you may have

Chris Davis 0:55
not known that you need. But after this podcast, I’m pretty sure you’ll be in full understanding and agreement that this may have been the missing piece for you, and your CRM software. But before I get ahead of myself and start jumping right into the podcast, let me give her her proper introduction. For those of you who do not know Karana Adair is the founder at Carville digital, where her mission is to help mission driven service based businesses use content to sell their services so they can scale without burning out in the process. And let me make Khurana tangible to you all. She went from making $500 websites 10 years ago, okay? Didn’t you just follow me $500 websites 10 years ago, I’m gonna let her when she comes on, tell you where she’s at now. But she provides tools to help you organize your content and through their marketing intensive VIP days, she will help you craft a strategy to deploy your content to the right people at the right time. So your prospects show up, ready to buy from you Kuranda thank you for jumping back on the podcast with us. How are your

Kronda Adair 2:15
time’s a charm I’m doing so well.

Chris Davis 2:19
You know what Third time’s a charm. And it still won’t be the last time.

Kronda Adair 2:24
Now I’ll just I’ll just keep coming back for as long as you have me. I’m doing so good. Today, I just finished a one of my CEO retreat weeks prepping for a launch that we’re going into. And I’m just I’m just really excited about this offer because I do think it is the missing link. And I feel sort of silly sometimes that it took me so long to get here. But we’re here now. So let’s talk about it.

Chris Davis 2:49
Now. So listen, everybody, I’m going to help you fast track and catch up. We’re posting the links to Caranas previous episode on the podcast episodes on the podcast. So you can listen to that and get caught up to speed with our background. And everything. Khurana for the new listeners, just give them the 32nd 10,000 foot view of who you are.

Kronda Adair 3:16
So, like you said, started with $500 WordPress websites, and thankfully figured out how to raise my prices, how to branch out how to create more effective websites and eventually realized the website. It’s important, but it’s really the front door. And so in 2018 at the end of 2018, I transitioned out of web development and into coaching full time.

Kronda Adair 3:42
And I started a content bootcamp. And for the past four years, our flagship program has been content bootcamp 12 weeks where I teach business owners how to to create content that sells or services in preparation for them to be able to automate it because you have to have content that works in order to be able to automate it and get the results that you’re looking for. So that’s kind of where we were. And then sure, we’ll talk in more detail about this, but throughout the year last year, gradually transitioned into realizing that what people need isn’t what they needed before. So we’ll talk about that pivot and get into the details. But that’s kind of where we find ourselves right now.

Chris Davis 4:22
Great, great. And I want to give a shameless plug Khurana has an amazing resource around content called the Pot o gold pot of gold everyone and let me tell you how hot this pot is.

Chris Davis 4:37
We have a community if you don’t know this automation community, you can join it anytime. But it’s it’s a community full of the sharpest and aspiring sharpest marketer automated marketers to be. And I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s somebody that has heard about it that didn’t just snatch it up. You Immediately, I mean, it can’t keep it on the digital shelves. So shameless, plug bear, get your hot pot of gold. While you can. And yeah,

Kronda Adair 5:11
and for those that are new, it’s an air table template. So you got to have air tail. A lot of people say, Do I have to pay for air table? No, you can use the free version. But it’s a template that will help you store all your content, like the valuable asset that it is. And yeah, people love it.

Chris Davis 5:27
Yeah, you are, if you’re new to the podcast, you will hear air table on pretty much every episode, they do not sponsor this, they have not sent me a t shirt. But I use their tool so much. And it just does so much. So so with that being said, Khurana you’ve been in the space for a while, decorated, I will I will say rightfully so decorated, because you’ve been in the trenches with the right client, and you’ve been in the trenches with the wrong client, you’ve made shifts and pivots in your business to stay afloat, you know, and to really continue to thrive. So right now, there is a need, we have talked about this, and I get to talk to you individually. But we’ve assessed the need in the market. And I don’t know if the market is aware of this need yet and thus we have this podcast. So kind of give us the lay of the land Kuranda at what has led you to this new approach to getting marketing automation implemented the right way.

Kronda Adair 6:36
So last year, you know, well, let me back up. So I started bootcamp, it only took about nine months into boot camp, which was no done for you, right? I’m just telling people what to do. Only took about nine months before people started coming back to me and saying, This is amazing. You know, it’s working. Can you help us with our tech because our tech is sad. And so it’s like, okay, now you care about your technology. So let me go back and figure out what’s the offer, I didn’t want to go back to selling websites. And so I created it in sourced. And so if you go back to the second time I was on here, we talked a lot about in sourced. And it was like an umbrella, right? Because there’s a lot of done for you things that we could do, we could do you know marketing automation, we do a little bit of LMS work, we were still doing websites at that time, we needed to redesign or an upgrade from Squarespace like all these things under this umbrella for just a very simple, like retainer based pricing, right. And what we would do is we would do the assessment, we would go through their, you know, their six systems, and we say, okay, based on where you are, here’s what you need to improve based on where you want to go, here’s the order of operations. And then we say, okay, give us you know, minimum four or five months to do this. So that’s where we were last summer. And then you know, I don’t know if it was the recession, you know, the price of eggs, I don’t know. But our retainers all just kind of came to a close. And we weren’t getting new ones. You know, bootcamp was going great. We were getting people into bootcamp. But we weren’t getting those retainers, which were the bulk of our revenue. And so, you know, I started looking at I think, as a community, we started to talk about, like, what is going on, in the space of automation. And because we meet every week, we were talking, and we were saying, like, we had this theory, that people were doing automation, were using automation in their business, but they could do it better. I think that was kind of our collective theory. And that theory needed to be questioned. And so what I did was I started going to my colleagues, and I started doing audits. And I would say, Hey, give me $500, give me $1,000, give and give me your Active Campaign login. And let’s see what’s going on in there. And so I did probably six or eight of these audits. And there were a few people who were doing pretty good. But there were many more people who were like, just missing out on so much opportunity. You know, I think to a large part of the business owner population who aren’t as technical, if they have a welcome sequence, they’re like, cool, I’m doing automation. And you and I know there’s just so much more to to it than that. There’s so much more opportunity than that to increase your revenue to save your time to save your team’s time to give your your subscribers and your clients a better experience. Like there’s just so much more out there. And so once I saw that happening, I was like, Okay, how I describe it is if the if there’s a scale from zero to 10, we thought people were maybe at four or five and we could get them to like eight 910. And really, what I found is people were like zero and one and two, and just trying to get a handle on it. And so That’s why we came up with CRM to sales. Because it is a full time job like someone has to be focused on your CRM, and making sure that your CRM is you know, as we say, marketing ready, right? Meaning, you don’t just have a mess of like a million lists in there and a bunch of tags that you created on the fly. And no segmenting or, you know, those segments in Active Campaign were to a segment of and then the date and then the name of the email, and then you don’t know when you come back to it, you’re like, I have no idea what that is. And I created a term for that called sudden segments syndrome.

Chris Davis 10:38
Three G seven segments syndrome, get good yield,

Kronda Adair 10:43
and so on. So I just started, you know, offering this to folks and being like, you know, we’re going to take this over, and we’re going to start out, we were doing the audits. And then we’d say, Okay, this is the first project, that’s gonna get you to what we call the first victory, right, it’s going to give you the biggest lift the quickest wins. And most of the time, that is just setting up that basic marketing engine, that basic email engine. And, you know, we both we both love Robert Kennedy over email marketing heroes, like came up with that concept of having your email engine, so that every person who subscribes to your list, they get that welcome sequence, but a strategic right helps them get to know you. And then they get that sales sequence. And I think I think most people understand the contents of of like, Oh, I’m going to have the welcome email or the welcome sequence, they’re not always strategic about it, I think much fewer people have the concept of like, and then I’m going to have a sales sequence. And it’s not just going to be like one email going by my stuff. It’s like five or six emails, you know, talking about your offer from different angles, to really get people to buy because they joined your list, presumably, because they have the problem that you solve. So let’s tell them how you solve it, and why they should do it now instead of later. And that is going to increase your sales, and it’s going to shorten your sales cycle. Like just that one system.

Chris Davis 12:07
Yeah, I found, you know, as you’re you’re talking about this, I found that people often approach their CRM software, very similar to a new computer, or a new car, right? I don’t know how many people when they buy a car before they drive it, open up the owner’s manual. And like really read through it right, myself being guilty. Or when they buy a computer brand new MacBook Pro, or, you know, windows, whatever you want to say, Hold on, before we turn this on, let’s read. Let’s read his man. All right, nobody’s doing that. Nobody’s doing it. And so you add technology. And there is no person on planet earth that I have met. Even in the mirror, I have not met this person who before they dive into the software, they go through the documentation, they read, and they make sure that every they understand the platform to configure it the right way. So what happens is, you’re learning on the fly. And depending on your ability to learn, and your understanding of marketing and your familiarity of technology and comfort with it is going to determine just how big that learning curve is. Some of you who are listening, have an infinite learning curve, this is not a good thing, okay? This means you will be there all day or years, trying to figure out something that somebody like Kuranda certified automation service provider, by the way, has figured out for you. So once we understood that, it’s kind of like, no shame, right? Like no file for pretty poor previous performance, no file. But now that you know better, it’s time to do better. But what would it look like if we just said, Hey, you need to do better, you’re doing that wrong. So the CRM, the sales is from what I’m hearing, you jump in and make sure that the active campaign account is set up in a way for them to achieve success and the you help them maintain it.

Kronda Adair 14:12
That’s correct. Yeah. And the maintenance is a really important part of that, because I have a client, she was the first person actually, to, for me to dip my toe back into the done for you waters back in 2019. I was like bootcamp forever, not touching anybody shut, like forever. And she came to me and it was so clear that was like, well, you need an email marketing system. Like you’re not reaching out, you know, it was like, it’s a wellness facility. And, you know, you need those repeat those repeat customers. And it was so clear to me, like, oh, you need an email system. So I was like, Okay, let me let me set this up for you. And so I started up for her. We went our separate ways. And when she came back a couple years later, it had not been maintained. And then some things on the front end and change, she had gotten a website upgrade in the process of that website upgrade, really lost a lot of the gains that we had made in the marketing because the connections, the opt ins weren’t working properly, like, there was nobody there to say, Hey, okay, cool, great. You’re getting a new website, let’s make sure that we’re strategic about, you know, this new front door, we still want to welcome people in, we still want to segment them, we still want to make sure they get the right messaging. And so when she came back, it was like, Okay, well, now when there’s a setback, and now we gotta like clean everything up, before we can get you on the right path. So it is so much easier, much like cars, or any anything else that you value, it’s so much easier to maintain it than to say, you know, set it and forget it. And I had a conversation with her recently, where, you know, she came in, you know, she came into the conversation with with a little bit of like, what am I getting for this money every month? You know, that was kind of the energy that we started. And the energy at the end was, how can I give you a testimonial. So, um, you know, you really, you just there has to be somebody who has their eye on that ball. And our goal is for the business owner, to never have to log into Active Campaign if they don’t want to, in fact, it’s better. It’s better if they don’t like, we logged in. And we like we found a couple of those segments are like, Oh, what do you do it, let’s make sure you know, you can just send us those, we’ll create those for you. And it’s not to disempower people, but it’s just to make sure that things stay marketing ready, so that you can stay in your zone of genius, you know, people can do what it is they’re actually meant to be doing. So that is the goal is to just like, take it over, take it off your plate as a thing, you know, and she did give us a testimonial, by the way, and one of the things she said was, you know, yeah, I learned some active campaign, but it’s not a skill. I really want to keep up. Mm

Chris Davis 17:04
hmm. Listen, everyone, this is this is an intelligent business owner, which I believe all of you listening are, the only difference is in the awareness. Are you aware that you are the business owner? That let me give you some credit, you could learn Active Campaign? You could, but you really shouldn’t, you should leave this to the professionals. And here’s why. Here’s why. So I’m familiar with this, this offer. I’m familiar with the process and everything. And I want to give them a little bit of insight. And unless we’re going to flex on them collectively, here Khurana. So the regular active campaign consultant will tell you how to do stuff. And they may import some automations. And they may know how to do some stuff in automations, if else’s, maybe send a web hook, I don’t know achieve something. I’ll tell you what they can’t do. They can’t tell you historically, through your entire lifetime of owning that platform, how your emails and all of your automations have performed. And they can’t easily track that month by month. They also cannot look at the segments. Let’s just give people credit Khurana and say that they had organized segments of sending, they can’t tell you the performance of those segments relative to the email open rate and the click through rate. Okay, these are just two. I’m flexing a little bit but I haven’t really flex too much. What if we could do all of that with a click of a button? envision a dashboard, where any year, any month of the year, I can see open rate of campaigns open rate of emails sent in automations. I could see lists growth. What if I Karana? What if I wanted to see contact growth based on a tag? How many times was this tag apply? Now some of you, hey, there’s advanced

Chris Davis 19:03
analytics in Active Campaign. And if we go here, Listen, I’m not trying to demean Active Campaign in any way. What I’m telling you is the level of effort for you to figure out everything that I just listed should not be on you. Because it’s greater than your tolerance to figure it out. So if the level of effort required is greater than your tolerance, that’s just a nice way of me saying you will fail. Okay.

Chris Davis 19:36
Right. And we have to speak pointed like this, because it’s too many of you all with great businesses. And you’re just focused on the wrong thing. Khurana talk about No, you just gave us one one case where they were a little reluctant at first, but then they were so relieved afterwards. Just walk the listeners to through what that process entails from. Okay, I’ve signed up to some of the milestones where you started to see, okay, now they’re starting to get it. Oh, now they’re seeing the benefit, you know?

Kronda Adair 20:10
Yeah. So first of all, we launched this, as we’re recording this, it’s been about four years, it’s been about four and a half months since we launched this. And I literally Chris, I wrote, I wrote a sales sequence of the type that I spoke about earlier. And I hit send, and I got on a plane to go to an event. And traditionally, it so happens, I often make more money when I go on vacation, because I always read a sales. So as I’m in Cabo at this event, you know, I’m, I’m checking in, I’m opening up my phone, I can see like applications coming in. This is, I believe, the best product market fit that we’ve ever had in the company, because we we were booked out for the rest of the quarter for the rest of the year, within six weeks, I was like, oh, we can’t my goal was to get like 10 people’s first beta clients, you know, figure out what this thing needs to be. And we did that in a matter of weeks. And so that was the best launch that we’ve ever had. And so we’ve been taking clients through this process of getting them, you know, getting them. So it’s, it’s three phases, right? It’s the audit phase to see what is happening. So, and we used to sell the audit separately, just because I was trying to figure out what is happening. Right? Now we’ve just rolled that out. So we’re gonna audit and we’re gonna see what is happening. But a lot of times, we know it’s just the things aren’t happening that need to be happening. So I stopped doing the audit separately, because I’m like, what we what we really need to figure out is, of these three areas that we can automate marketing, or sales or onboarding, which one who’s going to give you the biggest, the biggest win. And so we pick one of those, and we do that project. So maybe that’s setting up your marketing engine, maybe that’s setting up some sales automation, so you can follow up consistently with leads, whatever that is, we’re going to do that. That’s about a 90 day project. And what’s typically happened, we had one client who was she started on MailChimp, and she was like, Okay, I’m gonna she heard me speak at this event that I was talking about. She’s like, Alright, I’m ready. I’m gonna upgrade to Epic, Active Campaign, she tweeted me this. I said, Okay, well, we’re here if you need us, she’s like, No, I got it. But two days later, she was like, I got this. So great. What let’s do this. And so we not only, you know, people think of migration is like, oh, I can move my list over I can, I can download a CSV and I can upload it to a new platform. No, we set up her, you know, you’ve often talked about like preparing the platform, right? So we we did a strategy session, and we figured out what is your strategy going to be? What are the segments that you need to have one of the lists that you need to have, like, what are our goals, and then we go, and we set up the entire platform. So we know how people are going to be tagged when they opt in, we’re going to know how they’re going to be segmented. And, you know, we know how we’re going to track sales. So there’s a whole thing that we did with the deals pipeline to track sales, because she’s a WordPress theme developer. So she has a theme shop. So there’s all these things that we did just to set her up before we even migrated anybody over and then we migrated her customers, but we also did an event to happen to be her five year anniversary in business. So it’s a great that’s a perfect event to structure this around, you know, do a sale and to get people to move themselves over to Active Campaign. Right? Because you want to you want to have, you don’t just want to move people over who are like unengaged. So we want people to take positive action and say, oh, yeah, I’m gonna sign up on the new system. So I can get the coupon for the sale, you know, that shows you like who your engage people are, that’s gonna help your deliverability right out the gate. And it’s gonna protect you legally, right? Because they’re, they’re opting in, they’re taking that positive action. So we did all of those things. Of course, we, you know, gave her templates to help her read or welcome sequence in our sales sequence. And almost immediately, she started getting replies. So, you know, someone who had was kind of doing the least had really kind of checked out of her list. And so we launched this thing, and now she’s done all the work beforehand, but now she’s getting these replies from engaged subscribers who are loving her emails, loving learning, about her philosophy, how she thinks about blogging and WordPress, and the importance of your theme and all these things, right. So she’s building relationships with these people, and she’s making sales. So that’s what our migration looks like. It’s, it’s building you an entire system. So I talked to a lot of people who, you know, they’re very trepidatious about, you know, letting go of like MailChimp or ConvertKit or any of those platforms that don’t have a CRM I am constantly I have been for probably six months out here trying to ask ConvertKit users, What are y’all using for a CRM because you need one. And like, they don’t know what a CRM is, they don’t have one, they’re trying to just tags for everything. And I’m like, you know, depending on what your business is, that’s okay for a while, but at some point, like, you got to level up. And so yeah, that’s, that’s an example of like, one case study that was, and she’s such a dream to work with. She’s, she’s one of my clients that, you know, get now that she has the structure. And she knows, oh, I don’t have to struggle with this technology, like clockwork, every month, she’s like, here are my emails for the month, you know, here’s the template I want to use. Like, she tells us everything that we need to know. And then we schedule it, and then we’re good to go.

Chris Davis 25:47
Yeah, and you know, in line with the the automobile, we’ve had a few references. It’s also this everyone, you can’t beat best practices. And you can’t learn best practices, just by reading something, right? Every platform will tell you, Hey, you should do this, you should do that. But until you get in it, and really start to use it because the truth be told, the creators of software are often not the marketers that are using the software. So it’s us that are finding those little easter eggs in the little Hey, do this do that you need to ensure that whoever is maintaining your CRM software for you that they have that skill set. So it’s like I recently missed my son recently bought a type of car, that is not an American car. So he did not realize he can’t take that to the regular automotive shops that he’s been taking it too, he can, but you’re going to risk that something is going to get broke, if they treat that car like all the other cars. So he has to take it to that specialist, that dealership. It’s the same with your CRM software, when it comes to Active Campaign. You need somebody that specializes in the best practices of that platform. Sure, you can go on Upwork Sure, you can go on Fiverr Sure, you can go into a Facebook group post help get 50 comments of people saying DM me, I can help you out and try to filter through all of that and be left with more than a mess than you started with. Or you can just take your CRM to the proper dealership with people who specialize in the best practice. And it’s we everybody, we’re saying this in a means to help you. If you think about your website, it is much easier to hand that off. Just let somebody handle your website for you. karandi and I are techy people. Give me somebody who’s going to maintain my website, and I’m taking them 10 times out of 10. And I know what to do on my website. Why everybody why why put that extra weight on you is the biggest question. And for the most part Kuranda. What we’ve seen is that people just don’t know that such a service is available. They’re familiar with, Hey, can you maintain my website? Hey, can you maintain my social media? Right? Hey, can you maintain my copy. But for whatever reason, maintain my CRM software just doesn’t tend to roll the same.

Kronda Adair 28:33
Now, what has not been a thing and I remember, you know, we went looking in the marketplace, right to see who’s doing this, and it’s not very many people. And here’s the thing, too, is the ones we did find, right, you could find a service and you could sign you can sign up right away, literally go to the website, sign up half an hour later, you can be sending them tasks, right? They have a million vas, they’ll automate anything. But it’s still on you, as the business owner to have a strategy to know what can be done. You know, I did a webinar back in December. And people were like, well, you can do that. I have a I have a mutual airtable friend of ours, who sent me a real excited DM and was like, Ooh, somebody mentioned you know, you could do this with conditional content and Active Campaign and now now she’s excited because she she doesn’t care about it for the the marketing, but she cares about it for her students. I want to be able to send really, really relevant information to my students. She’s like, do you know about this? Have you been talking about this? I literally have an entire YouTube video just about segmenting and conditional content. I was like, Here you go. So you have to understand what’s even possible. And if you just go and you sign up with one of these agencies that’s just like has, you know, a bunch of hands. Somebody still has to be the brain Somebody has to know what you can do. And it’s the same whether you go to an agency or whether like you have your tech da, and you’re trying to make him into a strategist, they’re just not, they’re not going to look at your email and say, like, I’m giving our clients, you know, some of them are like, Hey, can you look at my email before it goes out? Sure, of course, I can do that, you know, and say, like, Hey, where’s the section that was in the first draft? That’s the that’s the part that really impacted me. Like, let’s make sure this gets back in there. Or, Hey, have you thought about this? You know, and and they’re not going to do that for you. Those generic services?

Chris Davis 30:33
Yeah. Then they’ll they’ll provide the the building, right? It’s like you hiring somebody, Hey, I need I need a picture put up, hey, I need a new sink. I need this. But they won’t do the inspection. Right? Hey, wait a minute, this beam looks a little weak. They don’t care about this. So we’re not knocking the services. We’re just giving you all context on what you’re getting. And what you’re not. Keep going.

Kronda Adair 31:00
Yeah. Okay, so here’s the here’s the revelation that I had, probably in the last few weeks. So we on boarded our first, you know, eight or nine clients. And we’ve been working with them for a few months. And, you know, I try to take all of the obstacles and remove as many of them as possible, right? So we’re doing all the tech, I’m also giving them the email templates, right? Don’t start with a blank page. You know, I’m talking to them about the strategy. And month ago, Spy six weeks, two months goes by and I’m like, we’re still waiting on these emails from some of y’all for welcome emails, Chris, that I gave them templates for. I’m like, What is going on? So I just emailed everybody. And I said, if you don’t have these emails done, book a call right now when I get on my calendar, so I start having these one on ones. And lo and behold, there’s still all these mental blocks that are keeping people from finishing their you know, these aren’t these are business owners, or them or not. of all, I left your self doubt, perfectionism. 10 minutes, maybe to let identify these and coach people through, you know, one example is like, well, the template talks about having a community and I don’t have a community. And I said, Well, if someone joins join means they can do that. That’s right. Yeah, that’s okay. Reframe No, oh, my, well, she was like, Oh, I just, I don’t want to bother people. I said, you really in it. And you asked me how my back is doing well for me, check in on your people. You know, just that amount of time. She’s like, Oh, okay, now I can send out these messages. I have a professional copywriter. She does copywriting and copy strategy for SaaS companies. But when it comes to writing her own emails, all of a sudden, Roblox, you know, and so I realized, Oh, I’ve been doing this thing where I’ve been bouncing back and forth, right. And I’m like, oh, people don’t understand marketing. Let me stop doing websites and do content bootcamp. People in content bootcamp need help with their tech, let me let me set that aside and make a done for you. There’s no such thing you can’t separate. You know, if you want done for you, if you want somebody to come and build you a fence, great. You don’t need mindset work for that. But if you as the business owner, you still have to produce this content for us to be able to deploy it. And that means they need that support. They need that coaching. You know, they need that community, they need that accountability. And so I realized I had to retire content bootcamp, and I had to make it all one thing. So we brought everything, you know, all that support from content bootcamp, and we rolled it in so and I sent I sent out a survey said, What do you like, what do y’all need? And they were like, We need one on one. We, you know, some people want community. So we’re finding a way to put all of that support into this so that you get the benefits. Because if you’re paying, you know, whatever it is, whatever monthly fee, but you’re not actually giving us the content and getting the benefits, then that’s a waste of money. And that’s not why we’re here. I’m not here to just be like, Oh, recurring revenue, and I don’t care if they if we actually do anything. No, I want you sending the emails.

Chris Davis 34:42
Yes. I want you to actually mark it, because this will work. Right? And I hope what you all are hearing is a passion to meet you where you’re at, and provide a solution that will move move you forward, we’re not we’re you know, I, I’m very careful with who I bring on and what we talk about. Because the last thing that I want anybody to feel as a listener to this podcast is older just pushing products or they this there that we have for years for years, truly assessed where the market is. And what we want you to do is not beat yourself up for not getting the most out of the platform. I was the Director of Education at Active Campaign for nearly three years. And I can’t count how many customers I used to see talking to support, and really admitting in saying, I know I should be doing more, but they did it in a like a guilt way. Like, I know, I’m not using as much as I should, and this doesn’t. And, you know, one side of it is use as much as you need to get the results that you need to get no harm, no foul if you’re not using features XY and Z, but A, B, C, D and E get you to where you need to be to. So that’s one thing, but two is actually being effective with what you need. Because you don’t know you don’t this these platforms are so robust. Listen, Khurana and I we get easily overwhelmed sometimes this is this is not a specific to you, because you don’t know what you’re doing. We know this journey. So this may be the first time that you’ve heard of such an offering. I would imagine after this because I know marketers are listening and their wheels are turning. This will most definitely not be the last time you will start seeing this type of service offered. And remember we soften that we soften your heart to such a thing. And and because of that, I believe that some of you are ready right now, at the point of listening to this podcast. So Khurana I want to give you the floor real quick and just let people know. Where can they go to find out more about you in this service offering.

Kronda Adair 37:09
Really, really easy you can go to Carvel digital.com That’s our homepage. I took my own advice. I knew we needed to, you know, my website’s been out of date because we did this massive pivot so I hired a copywriter. Like, I know I can write some decent copy, but it isn’t what I should be doing. Probably not. So we just got our copy back. It is absolute fire. I can’t wait to get up there. So just go to Carvel digital.com And you can start your journey, you know, learning whatever it is you need to learn before we get on a call. You know, I? We’ve been talking about content this whole time, right? So I encourage people when people are new, maybe this is the first time people are hearing of me, right? And they hop in and they’re like, Okay, I want to get on a sales call. And before we actually get on the phone, I will send them you know, based on what they share with me, I’ll be like, hey, go listen to this podcast, go watch this YouTube video, I don’t want you showing up to a sales call, like blind, I want you to go digitally stalk me, you know, because you can learn just about everything you need to know about our philosophy, how we work, how we think about things so that when we get on the call, we talk about you, right? We talk about what you’re going through and what you need to move forward. And I want to just let people know because I have kind of a reputation that I have been working on my poker face. So that when people tell me what it is that I feel like I gave a really great Oscar worthy performance. You know, recently, one of our clients, they were just I said, Tell me tell me the process. I didn’t fool her. But that’s the point is I’m trying y’all so truly no shade. You know, there’s there’s things that Chris and I are not good at. And if someone were to come in and audit, they’d be like, you’re doing what? And we all have those things. So, so come on in the water’s fine. I’m actually much nicer than I sometimes am in my content. A lot of my clients say especially who came through boot camp, they’re like, oh, Khurana is so supportive. She’s not mean at all. I truly just want people to win. I just want people to win. And so yeah, all

Chris Davis 39:27
right. Well, listen, we’re gonna have that link that you mentioned below, you’ll be able to connect with Kuranda. I have to say this. I can’t remember if I said it on the last podcast, but it’s worth repeating. Kuranda is one of the most resourceful people that I’ve ever met. I truly admire that. She will go to unlimited lengths to figure something out that she doesn’t know about or to find a resource to give you to get Are you ready for something? I’m when she went through the ASP program and got certified in everything, her resourcefulness is just, it’s just unmatched. And I think that speaks to your heart to really help and serve. So that’s who Kuranda is everybody. And I hope that in listening to this, you get a better understanding of not just what where the market is because you’re there you are the market. No longer do we have time to waste as the visionaries of our businesses. You don’t have time to waste figuring out the tech. The hard part is finding trusted tech folks. You have some now, okay, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve had a roster of people in the previous podcast in a variety of different areas. But this one is the closest to me, Karen is certified. She’s gone through my framework. She’s part of our community. And if you ever thought what kind of people are in that community, oh, I’m, I’m, I’m good. I got clients. I know how to do this automation stuff. This landscape changes daily, especially with artificial intelligence now, oh, my God. We can’t even touch on it.

Kronda Adair 41:16
We can’t even get into it now.

Chris Davis 41:17
So you need a place where there are like minds, one brain is never better than the many. Even if it’s just one other mind. It’s always better. You need a place where you can bounce those ideas off of the community. Is that automation bridge.com forward slash community if you want to join us Kuranda I can’t thank you enough for joining me on the podcast. I don’t even have to say See you online because I know I’ll see you soon this week. Community. But thank you so much for coming on. It’s greatly appreciated.

Kronda Adair 41:51
Always one of my favorite places to be.

Chris Davis 41:53
Yes, yes. Yes. All right. 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 podcasts, Google podcasts, 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. Automate responsibly, my friends