Lisa Catto: The Queen of Automation

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And today's conversation is with Lisa Caddo. She's the founder of the consulting firm The Business Catalyst and self-proclaimed queen of automation on LinkedIn. And she's been an entrepreneur since 1990, when entrepreneurship wasn't exactly as sexy as it is today. Now, Lisa and I have been introduced a few months ago, and she really piqued my interest with her position as queen of automation because I feel like automation has gone way too far and is ruining sales professionals who seem to be turning into robots.

In this episode, we talk about where automation fits in the sales process, but also where it doesn't. She talked through her approach of mapping out the ideal customer journey and where automation can have a really positive impact, but we also talked about where it can have a very negative impact, especially when we fake personalization and insult the intelligence of the receiver. We then dove into personal and professional branding and if there's even a difference anymore between the two these days. One of my favorite quotes of our conversation is when she said, you be you because everyone else is taken. We finished up with a discussion around the importance of core values and aligning yourself with people and customers who share them.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. What's happening, Make It Happen family? Big shout out to our partners today, Gong, Vidyard, and Chili Piper. Gong's data is more than valuable. It's cornerstone in any organization looking to collect the data that's going to tell them where they can improve and where they need to spend their time making changes. Vidyard makes it easy for people to use videos anywhere. No matter whether you're sending videos in email or on social media, posting them somewhere, or sending them in a DM, Vidyard has got you covered. Our friends at Chili Piper are so much fun to be around. They make it easy for people to get on your calendar.

And every sales rep has got to have this function locked in. It's one of the most important things we can do as a seller. How can I get you on my calendar easily? Chili Piper can make that happen for you. Be sure that you're checking out all these great tools. And now let's pass it over to John to find out who's joining him today. See you soon, everybody. Lisa Caddo, the queen of automation. How are you? Yeah, I am really good. August has hit. I'm ready for some downtime in some serious way there. I was going to say, where are you based out of again? I'm in London. I'm in North London in the UK. I'm always jealous of EMEA in August. It's like everybody takes the month off. And it's like, oh, I wish we had something like that here in the States where we could feel okay to take off, you know, basically a month's worth of work before we got back into it.

It's such a more healthy way of approaching things than we got things over here. So I envy you in a lot of ways. France and Spain, they literally... Oh, Spain is... Everything just stops for August. But it is, it's ridiculously hot. So that's where the siesta came from, right? Right. Well, and I think that's, I mean, the weather that London's had recently as far as the heat and how like 98% of people don't have air conditioning, like that's the downside of the, that's why almost you need to take the month off, right? Yeah, we should have air conditioning for the 48 hours a year that we have ridiculously hot weather, but we're not geared up for it. So the roads are melting, the railways are buckling, because they're not, you know, if you're in Arizona, then, you know, you're used to the heat and everything's geared up for the heat.

But we complain it gets too cold, it gets too hot. It's like the UK really doesn't know what's going on with the weather. But I think we're known for that. It's part of our charm. Yeah, we got, I think we got a little bit of that in here, Boston. It's, you know, we're never happy. It's either too hot, too cold, too muggy, whatever. It's never just great. So anyways, Lisa, let's talk about this automation, because, you know, we had talked briefly in the past, and I know I've been looking through what the work, the stuff you're working on, and you're on LinkedIn, you are the queen of automation. And I am extremely concerned about automation right now and how it's turning a lot of reps into robots or replacing a lot of reps.

So before we get into the kind of the meat of the topic, though, give everybody a little bit of background of kind of how you got to where you are right now, so we can have some context for the conversation and why you lean on the automation side. Okay, well, I've been an entrepreneur for 30 years. I had my first business in 1999, I think it was, somewhere around that. No, earlier than that. It was in 1990. Anyway, it was a long time ago, decades. The main part of my career was actually in making computer games, where we were the first people ever to place an advertiser as third-party product placement in a game. So we put the Adidas ball into FIFA soccer. We did all the branding, Sony Gran Turismo.

Then we started making promotional software, you know, the CDs that used to go on cereal boxes and millions of those. So we started doing promotional impact on pack. And then we went into Xbox and PlayStation games with our own proprietary technology, which was ragdoll kind of technology and motorbike stunt racing games before motion capture existed. So that was my history. We did so well at that, I kind of retired in my mid-30s. I lived in the south of France, pop country. And then about 10 years ago, from getting divorced, I came back and I fell into automation. I was actually at a traffic and conversion conference where Richard Lindner was talking about email marketing, which I'd been doing.

And he's like, yeah. And I spend two hours every night researching this. And I'm like, there's no way I can keep up to date with all the stuff that's going down on Twitter and new stuff coming in and all the algorithms and pander this and Google snap that. So I decided to niche into automation because I've got the marketing side of things, I've got the technology side of things, and the two just went really well together. And that's when I discovered Keep, which is formerly known as Infusionsoft, became a partner and have just gone from strength to strength. So I'm now known for designing and building and implementing the ideal customer journey, where we look at any business, whether it's in bricks and mortar, e-commerce, e-learning, courses, all the different types of businesses.

Sorry, my brain's got a bit fuddled there. And we build different journeys depending on the business. And we do all the implementation and we support them in that. Love it. And for you right now, who is the target audience that you mainly work with? Like, who's the clients that you tend to work with? We work with any business that's doing north of $200,000, $300,000. We have a niche in dentists and orthodontists, where we have something called the ideal patient journey. So that works for any appointment-based bricks and mortar business. And we have fantastic reporting, lifecycle reporting, which plugs into Google and tells anyone where, how many leads at any given time and where they're sitting in the funnel with all the analytics and stuff.

So just like really simple, effective data. So you can make intelligent, not dumb decisions and stop losing thousands of bucks, basically. People don't pay attention enough to the numbers, John. It's horrific. Oh, trust me. And look, I'm a huge offender myself, but I think it's evident these days that if you're not making data-based decisions, you're just hoping for the best. And you might hit something that works, but if you're not actually analyzing the data of what you're working on and learning from it and improving from it, I think you're missing the boat 100% with where we are right now with how fast things are moving. And for me, that isn't just marketing data, but that's financial literacy as well.

Knowing your numbers and the story they tell is you're never going to grow your business faster than if you have that dialed in. Yeah, absolutely. So where does automation fit, right? Because we can talk about it in a lot of different ways. I want to talk about it as it relates to sales. I think marketing automation is great, right? And marketing emails and that's been around forever, HubSpot and Inbound and all this other stuff. But as it relates to a sales professional, somebody who is now going to engage with the client at a certain point. And if we think through the sales process here of, you know, we got to find the business, we got to get those meetings, then we got to qualify, then we got to bring them through the sales process, then we have to close and then transition to a customer success or whoever that is.

Where in that journey does automation fit for a sales professional? And we'll talk about marketing and sales alignment here in a second, but I really want to hone in on this because I'm in the context for this question briefly is I see so many sales reps using the technology right now to automate what they're doing. And I fundamentally don't understand what the difference between that and marketing is. Like let's use the sales cadence tools, like sales loft and outreach and those type of things. Most companies take the marketing content, they put it into sales loft or outreach and they pretend it's like sales and then they start and reps are just pushing buttons. And I just wonder why in the world are we paying sales reps to do that from a commission standpoint when marketing can do it a hell of a lot better?

Okay. There was a lot there. So I'm just going to unpick that for a minute. Let's just loop back into marketing versus sales. Okay. So someone once said this to me and it just has it perfect. In a golfing terms, marketing tees up the ball, sales pops it into the hole, right? So it's the awareness, it's the branding, that's all marketing, the actual conversion process of getting someone to hand over their money. Now, the sales process for an e-commerce is very quick. You go to Amazon, you choose an item, you put it in the basket, you check out, you're gone. So depending on what type of business you're in and the value of the ticket that you're selling. So if you've got a high ticket item of north of 500 bucks, it's going to be very different from something that's south of 50 bucks, right?

So you've got to understand that a different sales process is required for different products, different services, even if they're within the same company. So that's number one, even if that's also leading up to ascending people from a lower value, low barrier to entry product into a higher value product because they're using it in terms of marketing to build light, know, and trust so people can get eyeballs on what they're buying later down the line. So as far as the sales process that you just described, so I'm going to take it step by step, step one in a higher ticket. So if we assume this is north of 500 bucks, where you need to have a face-to-face call with someone to close the deal, that's what I'm going to kind of go through now.

First step is you've got to get them on a call. So do we want to mess around going backwards? Are you free this time? Are you free that time? What time zone are you in? Does this work? Oh, no, I'm going to take my kid to tennis. Oh, no, do you know? So calendars, auto-schedulers, okay? Step number one, everybody is using them, including you and me at this point. So step one, that's where automation is. And we also need to differentiate between automation and automatic because being the queen of automation means making stuff automatic as far as a human being goes. And I'll come on to that in a minute. So we've got somebody scheduled in. Now, we want to make sure they show up. So we want to maybe automate an SMS and or an email to make sure that they have the details of where the call is, Google Hangouts, Zoom, whatever it is, the time it is.

And that they're reminded that that's the case and the opportunity to reschedule if necessary. Automation. Then we have pre-qualification. So depending on where you're at, like, no one can speak to me on a first call, discovery call, which is 15, 20 minutes, if they don't fill in my pre-qualification form. Because I want to go into that call winning. I want to go into that call knowing who you are, what your business is about, what your challenges are, and to make sure that on a financial level, we're not just both wasting our time. Because that's no good for anyone, no one likes that. Let me pause there for a second, because this is where I'm curious. There's the lead form, right? So there's, you know, on somebody's website.

And from what I understand, my background is marketing, but I haven't really been in marketing for a long time. So I don't know the real details here. But from what I understand, you want to make it almost as easy as possible with limited information for somebody to raise their hand and say, I'm interested. But then there's that, okay, I'm interested, I'll talk to you, but it's like your name, your number, and maybe your company website, something like that. And then there's the quote-unquote discovery call by the sales rep. There's a middle part that I do, which is, hey, thanks for your interest. Here's a link to schedule a meeting, so the calendar stuff. And here's a brief agenda of what I'd like to go through, what else you'd like to add.

Oh, and by the way, if you have a few extra moments, if you could fill out this brief little, I call it a meeting efficiency survey, where it's more detailed than that lead form. So please fill that out and then, right? Because, and I even say in there, look, this is information I have to gain anyways during our conversation. So we can either, you can either do it five minutes at your desk while you eat lunch, or we can spend 10 to 15 minutes talking about it during a call. But I'd much rather focus on, so how do we, is like that approach, and then it sets me up. But I only get about a 20, 25%. Should marketing on the front end be more, ask for more information so we don't have to do that middle piece there before we have a conversation?

Or do you think that's the right approach? I think what you've described is the right approach. To have a low barrier to entry, to grab their details, and then ask for more or establish more. So what you've just described, I put in there and I go, in order that we can have a really focused call, can you give me some basic information? So it's the same process. It's a pre-qualification to make sure that both people are getting the most out of it. And you should also be offering value. And by the way, because you've come in on this form, I think that you might find this article interesting, this podcast interesting, constantly offering value. And automation offers the opportunity to identify and segment what someone is interested in so that you can really start building your reputation as somebody who is an expert slash authority, whatever, on that subject matter.

It's like, oh, this guy speaks my language. This guy knows what the problem is that I need solved. This guy's going to solve it for me. So that, and I also think that in this day and age, there is a certain expectation around autoresponders. And if you don't get an autoresponder from something, then you're thinking something's missing, not that you're being over-communicated with. Do you know what I mean? It's like, where's my autoresponder? I need to get confirmation. It's interesting. You're right. I think there is something to be said about how we've been conditioned so far, as far as what we expect and how quickly we expect it. I think if it's something meaningful where we're looking for an answer on something, we're a little bit more tolerant to wait for actually a meaningful answer.

But if it's something like, I just need a quick, I need to know this, or I just wanted to fill out this form and then figure out when I want to schedule this meeting, that's the type of stuff. You're right. If I fill out a form and I don't get some type of response within 30 minutes or so, I might completely forget about what I did in that. Three hours from now, I might not even remember with all the other stuff that's happening. So I do agree with you. I think there is that expectation that's something. And now it doesn't have to be personalized. Like, okay, cool. There's how I can schedule my meeting. Let's go. It's a transaction. Is that the same? Have you seen the same with chatbots, by the way?

The loop of doom with chatbots. It's like, oh, I just want to speak to a human. And that's so, you know, Drift. I remember Drift first came out with the chatbots and everybody else was doing it too. And the funny thing that I noticed is that when they first started coming out, they were pretending like they were human. So, and you kind of got through like two or three questions being like, oh man, look at how responsive this company is. But then usually around the third or fourth piece of the thread, you were like, okay, wait a minute. This isn't a human. And then it actually ruined the experience. And Drift changed the game a little bit by they raised their hand and they say, no, I'm a robot.

Okay. Like, I just want to let you know I'm a robot, but I could probably help you get pretty close to where you need. And then you can raise your hand for a person. So have you seen the negative impact on automation at that level? There's two things I'm going to raise there. One is don't insult the intelligence of your prospects and your clients by trying to pretend that you make it personalized and make it relevant. But don't try and make out that this is a customized email just for them. But it is really important that you are serving your prospects and your clients in a valuable way and that you're not pretending to be doing something you're not. I'd also invite you to think about the fact that on a sales in-person level is those sales agents that are reading from a script and then you take them off script and they don't know what to do.

They're scrambling for the right paragraph. So it's kind of the same thing, but once in-person. So it doesn't matter what's going on in the world of sales and marketing, in my opinion. Having been doing this for over 30 years is it's the same strategy. The channel might change. The format might change. But ultimately, the strategy, the rules of play, the human behavior, the way human beings react to stuff is consistent. Our attention span is getting shorter. Sure. We need, you know, seven upwards of seven touch points to, you know, for something to become relevant to us now. So there's those things, but the ultimate strategy of treating people so that they think and feel it's relevant, not making them burn too many brain calories because they get bored and they're going to move on.

All of that stuff remains the same ultimately. And that's what I think the danger I see is that, to your point, that fake personalization, the fake personalization bugs the crap out of me, which is why I personally can't stand the phrase personalization at scale. Like, I think that is such a bullshit thing because just be, and what most people are talking about when they say personalization at scale, they change the name, the number, you know, the title in the industry of the person on an email and send it out to 500 people. And they call that personalized. To your point, I think that's insulting a lot of people's intelligence or for instance, the video tools out there where somebody superimposes your name on the, on the whiteboard here.

And it's like, and it says Lisa, and then you open it up and I'm like, Hey, you, thank you so much for opening up my email. I really appreciate it. But you could tell that, and like that to me is actually worse than a point of obvious automated email. You're a savvy marketeer, right? So, but there are, depending on who the consumer is, the ultimate client, some people are going, ah, that's so cool. That's so clever. They know it's automated. They know it's canned, but they're just impressed that someone's gone to that effort to make that happen. And then there's only one thing worse than being talked about, right? Is not being talked about. So if they're going, Oh my God, check that, you know, it's, that's what marketing is, is grabbing people's attention, getting them to talk about it.

Um, I mean, look at all the rubbish on Tik TOK. I'm not a Tik TOK fan. Just hands up there. I think I'm on it right now and I'm getting my ass handed to me. It's no, I also saw a YouTube the other day about Tik TOK privacy terms and conditions, uh, to get the bejesus out of me. Do you see that one? Yeah. Oh, I'm deep in it. Like, and it is, I mean, a little sidebar, but there's no question in my mind that Tik TOK is a Trojan horse from China trying to rip apart democracy from the inside. There's no question in my mind about that. Third world war is going to be all around intelligence and data. There's not going to be a bomb or a gun in sight. Right. And they, they also speak to you. I couldn't agree more, but let's not get onto that topic.

Let's look back. So yeah. Chat bots chat. As long as, as long as you're not pretending that it's, you know, I'm here to serve you with the immediate information that you don't need a human being for the FAQs. So really understood part of the sales process is overcoming objections is understanding what the problem is that you're solving and being able to pre answer those queries. And that's all about knowing your ideal client. You can't have an ideal customer journey without knowing your ideal client and knowing what the solution is that they're looking for. So those tools, in my opinion, are there to serve with that information. Is that if I just need to know your directions, I just need to know what hours you're open.

I just need to know how to be able to get in touch with you. They serve a purpose. You want to speak to a human being? Fill in this form. We'll get back to you. You know, but we do live in a world of immediate gratification. Yes. So let's go, let's go to the front end real quick on the, on the prospecting side about to tee it up. Right. And that, that scenario that I'm scared most about first, because I personally think right now in the kind of SAS world, right. The technology, the whole model of SDR, BDR, AE, right. Sales development rep, business development rep. And those roles are meant to go get me all their job is to get meetings. Right. And then they flip them over to the account executive and the account executive takes that meeting and runs full sales process.

So on that front end, I get calendaring, I get agenda, I get follow-up, like as far as a contact strategy. So if I'm coming after you, Lisa, and I have, you know, however many thousands of people in my database, where should, and again, assuming it's a higher ticket item that needs a conversation that isn't a low ACV, right. I need to reach out to you, whatever the number is, 15 times, whatever the number is these days, where is automation and where is the sales rep need to be put into that as far as gathering the information on you and coming up with the contact strategy and then executing that contact strategy and where I fit in. So can we, can we start with like information, like information about Lisa, so I can figure out where you are.

Okay. So lead gen activities. So in a, the high ticket item, you're going to have a longer sales cycle. It's going to take longer for someone, unless they are completely problem aware, solution aware, and know that you are a solution provider and that you have built enough awareness around yourself, you can have a little bit of a longer sales cycle. I actually, I was on another podcast a couple of years ago. Someone came to me and went, yo, the solution to the problem I didn't know I had, right. And that's about branding and that sits in marketing. So as far as prospecting from cold goes, there's, there's different numbers of ways. So you've got Facebook adverts, for example, or LinkedIn adverts or adverts, whatever, where you are delivering a targeted message to people that have been identified as a group of prospects with valuable content, whether it's a download, whether it's a, an audio, whatever it is.

And then they get to start engaging with your content and raise their hand and go, I'm interested. And that's the point at which you want to capture it and then start the nurture process to pre-qualify them. As far as cold prospects, there are farming tools that you can, you know, going farming and you've got to be careful, really careful about using automation tools on LinkedIn and Facebook because you will get your account banned. So use them wisely and carefully. There's nothing worse than getting a message on LinkedIn of, hi, you came up in my network, let's connect. And then the next message is, let's get on a call. I want to sell you something. No one likes to be sold to. It is about building relationships.

And it's how you and I started our conversation this afternoon was we have lost the art of building rapport and conversation. And that's on both sides. That is on the sales to consumer and the consumer to salesperson, that building of rapport, because everyone is expecting to be sold to. So it's really tricky. So being valuable, not being creepy as far as trying to hit them up with a sale first, but genuinely find out if you've got a solution to a problem that they have and building that rapport. And it's a long old process of prospecting properly and researching somebody to see if they're the right kind of person. So, yeah, that whole prospecting stage needs to there's a certain amount of automation of finding the audience and using tools like that.

But human interaction, you need the automation creates the space and the time to be able to build those relationships and have that rapport. And that's the automatic side of things. Does that give you clarity? Yeah. And because I think you're right. I think we need to get to a point where we're being served up like through intent data and all these other things. Like people who are more, have a higher propensity to buy than others, right? So that we know where to focus our time. And to your point of the teeing it up, I think marketing's job is to aggregate all this information based on ideal customer profiles to then tell us, hey, instead of just a laundry list of people from Zoom info or whatever, no, no, no, no.

These are the ones that are in our space and that really most likely have a need because of what they've done. Now the sales rep has to reach out to them. And what I'm seeing a lot right now, and there's a couple of those that are scaring me, I saw back in 2017, there was this email that I got from a group that I had trained Salesforce, okay? And one of the kids left Salesforce and said, hey, John, we created this artificial intelligence bot that creates super highly personalized emails at a fraction of the time as sales reps. And it's based off of your email. We want to show it to you. And at first I was like, whatever. Like, okay, fine. Show me what this... And the email they sent me blew me away.

I mean, it was almost better than any email I could have ever written. And so I hit him back and I was like, whoa. And I asked, like, there was no human involvement in writing this? And he goes, nope, other than picking the article to use from our app. And by the way, it only took 70 seconds for this thing to do. So I was in a panic back in 2017 because I figured if automation does that, we're sales reps, there's almost no space for us at that front end at this point. But I met with Gary Vaynerchuk, went to his thing, and I had this, like, Gary, what are we going to do here? And he's like, don't worry about it. Let technology do all the work. But right before it hits the client, you put the flavor on top.

Because until computers start buying from computers, like once that happens, we're kind of screwed. But as long as there's a human on the other end of that phone, there's always going to be that human element. And so automate as much as you possibly can, but make sure that the part that matters is the part that you engage with. So how do you put that in context of like, okay, we found some opportunity to use some people that kind of fit the mold here through automation. Now, I've identified Lisa as somebody I want to go after. And I do some research, and there's some tools to automate some research here. But say I got a 10-touch sequence to you, right? Say we follow the math, and it's like a 15-16-touch sequence.

In your opinion, how much of that needs to be truly personalized, like really about you, versus maybe some relevant stuff? And to your point, adding value and sharing content and those type of things. So how much of it should be personalized in that scenario? Well, there's personalized and there's relevant. So if, for example, someone's done a quiz or a scorecard, you want to be delivering that sequence of emails specifically on the problem that has been surfaced as a result of that quiz, scorecard, or survey. If you are a health coach, there is no point delivering recipes to somebody who needs mindset or that's somebody that needs to understand about keto, right? So it's about having it relevant to the problem that they need solved.

And you need to establish that through whatever, whether that is because of you tracking, using your automation, what content they are engaging in, or it's the results of a survey, or it's a result of looking at their posts on social media, whatever it is. You have to, marketing is understanding the problem and marketing the solution. So that's what people are looking to have. So if you keep it relevant to that, and you're going to resonate with people with your voice and how you go about things, they are going to go, this guy is going to be able to help me solve a problem, and they will pay for that. And it's about keeping relevant. And if they don't, it's fine. Go back fishing in the sea. There's more there.

So what you're saying is it doesn't necessarily have to be personalized as long as it's relevant to either the person based on their situation. So let's take the scenario of we've identified a tier one account, right? Like this one is exactly the type of customer you want to work with. There's intent data, all of, and that lead now hits your inbox, Lisa. Like Lisa, XYZ company, you got to go after them. They fit our profile. What would your approach be to, and I'm the VP of sales, for instance, that you want to get a meeting with. You are now the sales rep. We have some automation. We have some tools like the sales lofts and the outreaches. What would your approach be to me to get me on a, to get a meeting with me from a sales standpoint?

Forget about from marketing, because marketing did their job. We've identified them. We've maybe set the stage here. Now you're a sales rep. What's your approach to me? Well, my approach is going to be to go and find out about you and what you're interested in. You've got kids. What age are the kids? Which football team are you supporting? Am I going to send you tickets? Am I going to send you flowers? Am I going to send you a box of Dunkin' Donuts? How am I going to get your attention? How am I going to stand apart? And how are you going to know that I care about the service that we want to deliver for you, and I'm not just here to take your money? Is that we are here, and this comes back to core values in the company and being representative and the branding thing about that.

Because if somebody is reaching out to me, well, you, what's the very first thing that we do? We're tapping it into Google. What are they going to find? Are they going to find pictures of me necking bottles of wine down in the pub, or are they going to find stuff that's congruent with the product or service that I want to sell? And it is important. It is the catalog. It's the brochure of the company, and we have to be aware of that. So there's no automation in that. That's where the relationship building comes in. There's other automation that is in play in the sales process that makes stuff automatic, which would be adding to a pipeline, automatically moving pipeline stages, notifying the sales agent when it's time to follow up.

If you send out a proposal, when we send out a proposal, the minute that we move the pipeline stage from had a sales call to followed up from the sales call, there's automation that will trigger an SMS that goes, hey, John, was great chatting just to let you know there's an email in your inbox waiting for you. Because the way the email boxes are put now, and especially if you're working with corporate, chances are it's going to go in the spam or the jump folder. And that's down to a whole other conversation around email deliverability that we'll have another time. So automation has its bit, yeah, don't get me started on email deliverability because we will be here until next Thursday. So ensuring that the process is being followed, the automation underpins and supports that.

If, for example, we built a pipeline up for a sales team of 115 people, and it was across four different sales teams. So they had outbound, they had if people didn't show up. And, you know, making sure that the automation is supporting the process so that if it's a wrong number or somebody didn't show up, that they get pinged out a task or a Slack message goes out or an SMS goes out in order to get them back in, and that you're making the most of the leads that you've already done, all the hard work to bring in. And that's where automation can support the sales process. Because I think that your misgivings, from what I understand, is where it becomes robotic in the face, where it should be face-to-face stuff.

And I'm saying, no, there's a space for report. Automation creates that space, creates the information and intelligence you need to be able to have the conversation. In an intelligent way. And make sure that you're having them at the right time, with the right person, on the right subject. What's up, everybody? I know you're enjoying this conversation. John does a great job with genuine curiosity on these episodes, and our guests consistently bring the heat. We want to take a moment here and let you know that you've got an opportunity. An opportunity to become better than you were yesterday. And you can do so by gaining access to all of JBSales' content. All of their training, tips, techniques, tactics, and takeaways can be yours for $1 a day.

$365 for the year gets you annual access to everything, including our private Slack channel for members only, which you get access to all of us directly, 100% of the time, 24 hours a day. And then at the same time, you're going to get access to our bi-weekly Ask Me Anything sessions, where you can bring real deals to the table and get the help that you need where you need it. This is very, very important. Sales reps that invest in themselves are often found at the tops of their leaderboards. Join us today and get the help you need to become the seller that you deserve to be. That URL, one more time, is joinjbsales.com. Let's get back to the show with JB and our guest for this week. That's what scares me is the automation turning into laziness as opposed to leverage, right?

Whereas it, you know, and I also, I don't know whether it's because I grew up without automation and sales that I just don't trust it. So for instance, there's all these, not, I trust automation to a certain degree, but let's, let's talk about like now the back half of the sales process. I, you know, there's all these AI tools that plug into CRM and tell me when I should be reaching out to my client after I send them a proposal and scheduling activities for me. And for me, I'm like, don't tell me what to do. I've been in sales for 26 years. I know exactly when I should be following, but I personally, and, and I'm a little bit of an anomaly. I think at least what I, what I've been told by other people, because I'm actually a very detail oriented salesperson.

Like I, I scheduled tasks. I have a zero inbox. So for me, don't you dare tell me what to do because I know what I need to be doing. So, but, so, but is there value in maybe using automation for that type of thing based on optimization for people who might not be as experienced as I am? Is that kind of the balance there? It's like, it's like, if you don't really know, then we're going to give it to you. It's not even if you don't really know you're, you, you are an anomaly in many ways, the experience and legacy that you have in sales. If you look at the sales people that are coming up through the ranks now who are, you know, my son is one, he's 22. So you know what I mean? And he's working on Zendesk and he needs the task.

He needs to be delivered the lead, told where the lead came from, what it is that they're interested in, plus his manager. So this is, this is a lot of what we're doing with the ideal patient journey with dentists. They are relying on their front of house staff and their care coordinators to follow up on leads that they are paying for. So they want, so we have what we call a zero dashboard, which is like these numbers should all be zero. This is all the new leads that have come in. This number should be zero at the end of every day. And then they're being delivered their task and they know it came in from a Google app. They're interested in teeth whitening. You've left, you know, you've had three points of contact with them.

This is what they said. This is their message from the website, giving them all the information they need to take them to the next step. Now you as a sales professional, as a standalone, yeah, I would expect you to be that organized. But if you're running a sales team, the accountability needs to be there and the sales team need to know that that accountability is there and they are going to be held account to those numbers. You need to know how many calls they've made. It's like call recordings and secret shoppers and all the rest of it because not everybody is just the sales guy for their own business. They're looking to possibly pass that task onto a colleague or a member of staff. Absolutely.

And it comes back to the numbers, John, too, of how many calls. It's like when you're creating a dashboard for a business, you have to have a dashboard of numbers that you can impact. There's no point just having numbers for the sake of numbers. And it's like, well, how many calls and what were the results of those calls? And if it's below this percentage, then how do we get it above that? Is it training? Is it our marketing material? Is it the state of our proposals? It's like without the data that the automation is delivering off the back of the things like tasks and the stuff in the back end is how do you have that data and know what to pinpoint to get an increase in your ROI? Yeah, and it gets back to that insights from data that you need to make better decisions with.

You had mentioned something about when somebody looks at you, right? So say I was going after you and I sent you a couple of emails or whatever, and then you're going to go look at me, right? So you're going to go look at my social profile. You're going to look at my brand. Question for you on this. Is there any difference these days between a personal and professional brand? And the reason I ask is because I think it used to be in, well, I'll give my history. Facebook used to be for me, my personal side of the house. That's where I would rip off about politics and, you know, say some dumb stuff and take stupid pictures and kind of be a little crazy. But LinkedIn obviously was the professional side of me.

Instagram started to kind of get in between for me. And at a certain point, I was just like, I can't have two separate lives because it's getting too – like one, I remember Doug Land is my good friend who I was business friends with him, but we became very good friends. He was the first person I led into my Facebook network that was associated with work, and it opened up the floodgates. And all of a sudden, all these people that Doug was connected to wanted to connect with me on Facebook. And I'm like, oh, crap, now I can't say what I usually say on Facebook because – so I blended the two together. So what are your thoughts on someone's personal brand and their professional brands and how those two are associated with themselves today?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind from what you were just relaying to me was be you because everybody else is taken. Stop trying to pretend to – because otherwise someone's buying a product and you're misleading them, right? They think they're buying this version of John, and actually you sell them and they get this version of John. It's like, hey, I've just been missold. So be congruent. In my company, we've done several rounds over the years of our core values. And the core values start with me as the business owner. And when we hire people, we pressure test against those core values. It's like, how can you know if somebody's going to be a good fit if you don't know what it is they're fitting into?

So you have to be congruent with the values of your service, of your product, of your team, of your company, and you as a human being. So even though my Facebook profile and my personal Instagram has got pictures of my dogs and pictures of my kids, the messaging of who I am as a human being and the values that you can expect for me and my team and my company are congruent across all of it. Although, you know, my business page is much more motivational memes and our reporting products or whatever it might be. But if you look at the example of Richard Branson and Virgin or Steve Jobs and Apple, you've got a personal brand and you've got a professional brand. But you know that if you're dealing with a virgin company, Virgin Atlantic or Virgin Telecoms, whatever it is, is that it's steeped in the values that Richard Branson believes in because it has stemmed from him.

And it's the same with Apple and Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was all about innovation. It was all about being cutting edge. It was all about the experience. That's Steve Jobs. So you know that every Apple product is going to be steeped in those same values. So, yes, you can have them as standalone, but they have to be congruent, in my opinion. So let's talk to the sales reps here who are on this personal brand journey, but need to walk a line for their organization, right, to say. And I actually want to ask another question as that comes up is the question of companies allowing sales professionals to build their own personal brand. So let's put a pin on that. But what if somebody is like social justice, for instance, say they're really, really strong.

Some of their core values are about social justice issues, okay? Where's the line with that in business? So here in America, obviously, we've had quite a few issues, right? We've got the Roe v. Wade. We've got Black Lives Matter. We've got all these things that, you know, I want to scream from the mountaintops about because I personally believe in these things. And they are core to my values as far as diversity and that type of stuff. But I know by doing that and having a very loud voice in that area, it ostracizes or it causes conflict that I may or may not want to deal with. And it's probably cutting my audience in half. Not that I care about the people that don't share my values. I do, but I obviously want to work with people that share my values.

So where's that line for you as far as your social values versus what you're putting out there from a business standpoint? Well, there's values and there's irresponsible behavior. So many, I would always recommend that any company has a social media policy for any of their staff because you don't want them in uniforms or branding that represents you whilst they are, you know, getting so drunk they're falling over and putting those videos up on TikTok. So I'd always recommend that you, number one, protect yourself from that. Number two is that you hire people that are in alignment with your values and are not going to be way out there. Now, to your point about social values, I'm going to cite again the ideal client.

Now, you can't please all of the people all of the time. And I've actually written a blog recently on this, on the value of not working with everybody. There is a massive mistake of working with everybody because you end up just battering each other because you're not aligned. Go let someone else serve them. Of course, your product can serve a much wider audience than you'd like. But as Jay Abraham reminded me in a talk that I was at recently, the pie is this big. You need this much of the pie to be massively successful. So stop trying to serve everybody. Stop trying to please everybody. Stop trying to be something that you're actually not because you'll get found out and that will negatively impact your reputation.

Focus on the people that do line up with you and do resonate with you and speak to them. And if you don't with other people, well, hey, that's life and it's okay. There's the people pleaser in us, right? We're in service industry. We want people to know, like me, like me. You know what I love from a marketing standpoint? I love it when I go to a company's website and it's very rare, but I love it when I go to a company's website and they talk about who they're for. But they also talk about who they're not for. Like, if you're this, yes, click here. But if you're this, please don't click here. We're not for you. There's a podcast company. Right? Well, I think Sweetfish Media, the podcast company, and I'm friends with their leadership over there and everything.

They have this great video on their front, right on their front page. They explain, here's our philosophy around podcasting. This is who we're for. But if you're somebody looking for a podcast to do X, Y, Z, we're not your company. Go find these other people. But this is who we are. And it's the same thing with the qualification process here, which is I'm actually, once you kind of fit that mold you've gone through, and yes, you are somebody that I think we could add some value to. Once that box is checked, I then flip over to disqualifying you or finding ways that we shouldn't, like, what are all the reasons we shouldn't be doing business here? Because you're going to figure them out eventually anyways.

And that's going to help me select those real clients that I can make a real difference for versus the ones that don't share my values that I don't think we can hit a home run for. So do you like the disqualification as much as the qualification, even in the marketing process? I mean, how many times in your experience, in your business history, have you seen the red flags, recognized the red flags, worked with them anyway, had an awful experience that's taken up your time, your headspace, your money, made you frustrated, and not ended up in any testimonials or referrals at the end? Whereas, if you were just to go, look, this isn't working, please go see my colleague in this company over here, who I think is going to serve you much better, which is the, what was the, the Zappos, right?

So if you've ever read Delivering Happiness, the Zappos book, which is the first company that I know of that ever put in company culture, they were like, they were all over it. It's like, we haven't got those shoes for you, but this company over here does, and they send them off. So they're creating a wonderful experience. So even if that person is never going to be a client, they're telling their friends they had a wonderful experience with Zappos, and they're creating referrals, because it's better to be talked about than not be talked about. So it's you serve yourself and you serve them better by not serving them in the first place with your product or your service, because it's just going to come to blows in the end.

It never ends well. Never. And I think you gain so much credibility when you talk about not only what, where, you know, who you're not a fit for, but actually not what, what you're not good at. You know what I mean? I, I, I can't tell you how many, almost every sales conversation I have with a client, we've honed in on what they really need and those types of things. And when they bring up stuff that I know I'm average at, I'm not saying that, you know, there's very few things I would say we're terrible at, right? But there's certain things that we're just not great at, right? And, you know, we can check the box, but there's other people that do it much better. I'll tell the client, I'll be like, look, this is where we're great.

Here's where we're not. So if that's what you're looking for, let me introduce you to somebody else. And I use this all the time with me is like, so we do qualification, right? So we do prospecting, qualification, meeting, execution, all that stuff. Our qualification stuff is good. It's good. But it's part of the package. I have some colleagues like Jim Keenan with Gap Selling and those like where the qualification stuff that he has is off the chart. So if somebody's like, oh, qualification, we really are really, I'm like, you know what? I'd love to be working with you here, but I don't think I'm going to be hit a home run with that. You should go talk to Keenan. And it's almost this weird reverse psychology because when that happens, they now want to work with you more than they're like, wait a minute, you don't want my business?

I'm like, no, I want your business. I just don't, I don't want it just because. I want to make sure that we can actually really do a great job here. So that psychology is an interesting one. No, the creating the FOMO is massively, it's quite funny. It's like, we are experts in automation. We don't do traffic. We don't do creative. We have copywriters. We have graphic people that we will push you over to, go work with them. We go hand in glove. It all works really nicely. But yeah, 100%, you create the FOMO. They want to work with you more. You build reputation by going, yeah, we're not the people to serve you. And they go, oh, but I want to work with you slightly, but I want to make sure that you're served.

And all you're doing is improving and increasing your reputation by not trying to please all the people all of the time. Just not trying to get the sale for the sake of it. Because then you just appear like a hungry hyena. And that's not pleasant for anybody. How do you balance that with an empty pipeline? So let me explain. Most startups that I've worked with in the past, okay. And myself included, by the way. The two startups, this happened to me. Actually, only one of them. I smartened up on the second one. But my first one, we didn't have any money. We had no funding. And we were looking for clients. We did outsourced IT services. So we were looking for clients that did kind of recurring maintenance, right?

$1,000, $2,000, $5,000 a month. That's what we were looking for. That was our ideal customer scenario. But we needed money. So if somebody needed a project, you know what I mean? And it would give us 50 hours worth of time to do that project. We would take it. But it would suck us away from the clients that we really wanted to develop long-term relationships with. So how do you balance that? Even as a rep, let's talk about their pipeline is empty. So they'll pretty much take meetings with anybody just because... And usually those meetings might not be with the right fits. But they're going to try to cram it in because they got to get that revenue. So how do you balance the... We don't have anything and we need money with...

I know I need to be focusing on the right clients here, but I just... None of them are buying right now. And that's a longer-term play. There are... I don't believe that scenario. And I'll tell you why. It's like, fine, the ones that are in your pipeline are not buying right now. And they might buy later. And you need to make sure that automation is serving you so that when they are ready to buy, you're ready to serve. There are joint venture opportunities. So go and find a business partner that you can joint venture with that has the same audience that you're looking for that is not in competition with you. And find a partnership. Go for the one-to-many. Stop going for the one-to-one. Having an empty pipeline is not a sales problem.

That is a marketing problem. So go and build some relationships. Go and extend your network. Go and stand on the shoulders of client. Go and surround yourself with the right people. Be in the right place. Be visible. Be congruent. And be loud and proud about the value that you offer. But be clear. One of the big turning points for us is that we're automation experts. And that we used to do per hour. We used to do per project. And it was only when we started focusing on a monthly recurring revenue, an MRR model, and put together what the value of that offer looked like. And we're crystal clear on it. And crystal clear on the ideal customer journey of framing up all the stuff that we do in automation so that it was really easy.

You didn't have to burn any brain calories to understand what the service was, what the offer was, what the commitment was. Suddenly, we became a magnet. Everyone got the solutions that we were providing. And they started flocking to us. It's like being on this podcast with you. How can you be visible? How can you serve and give value, not expecting anything back, not being that hungry hyena? And then people will see you. They will like you or they won't like you. And if they do like you and they feel you're congruent, you've got a solution, they will come to you. So just trying to serve the wrong people for what would appear as the right reasons is not going to serve you long term. And your model is broken.

See, I agree. Again, I learned that my first startup. We chased so much bad revenue early on that it actually slowed our growth. We thought in the beginning it was going to help our growth because we were bringing money in the door and we were getting projects done. But it actually slowed our growth at the end of the day. But it's a scary chasm to go through when your pipeline isn't there and really focusing on. But I do the same thing. I encourage almost any entrepreneur to stay the course, right? Stay the course. Find those great clients early on that you can have as testimonials, that you can have as references. And then the world will open up to you versus starting off with mediocre clients doing bad work and potentially getting bad reviews out there on social.

And then your life is going to be exponentially more difficult trying to find the right type of client once you start getting your traction. On a human being level, there's also looking at who you're being in that. So I'm very big in the world of kind of self-development. If I go into a conversation feeling desperate, feeling panicky, even though I'm in the UK and you're in the States, you're going to feel that. You're going to sense it. Whereas if I'm being someone that is truly believing in my product, truly believing that I want to serve you with a solution that's going to enhance or improve your life or your business, and I'm passionate about it, that is going to come across. And that is people buy people.

They're not buying the product. They're not buying the service. They're buying you. So you need to be that person and really at your core be aligned with that. And if you're not, then I can recommend books. Go read the Ultimate Coach book, you know, if you need to have the book of being. Do you know what I mean? There's nothing that beats it. And that comes back to being in alignment with values. But if you don't know what the values are, then nobody else does. If you don't know what your offer is, trust me, nobody else does. Get clear. Get clear on your branding. Get clear on your messaging. Get clear on your values. And trust me, everything will just kind of align on its own. It just does.

It does. Like magic. So let's finish up with this. What are some, like, what are two or three, like, super tactical things that, like, your favorite tips for people out there right now, whether it's related to automation or whatever it is. What are some of your favorite tactical things that somebody could, listening to this, go out and do and see if they could, you know, have an impact on their results? The top, number one, follow up. At every stage, follow up. Know your ideal client and serve them and serve them well and be congruent with who you are, your product, your service. And don't give up. And let's face it, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Yeah. I think that's the, it's, it's one of those things where, you know, everybody sees the results on, you know, on social, on Instagram and all these different, like, oh, look at how great that looks.

But they don't see the journey of what it took to get there. And that's why I'm such a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk because he's like, you know, people think I'm an overnight success. Yeah, I'm a 30-year overnight success here that worked my ass off to get to this point. And that's why he's so passionate about sharing the journey, not the result, the journey, right? Because that's where the, that's where the meat happens. And, you know, the most truly successful people I've ever found are the ones who are, you know, just resilient as all get up. You know, they, they keep going, they're consistent with it. They do the fundamentals consistently and they consistently well. And, and they're, they're just in it for the long haul.

And I'm, I'm sure you, you probably are. I'm a huge Simon Sinek fan and that, that whole infinite game, right? The infinite game versus the mind, the, right? That's what I play. I play the infinite. I don't care about my competition because I'm not trying to beat my competition. I'm not trying to win against them. I'm trying to stay in the game. I'm trying to win this overall game of life here. Which puts a different perspective on day-to-day, you know, all that stuff. A hundred and ten percent. I mean, the, the, the 30 year overnight success is, is absolutely the story. Consistency is the story and how you show up. You have to show up every single moment as the person that believes in the product.

And if you're not showing up, then nobody else is going to believe in you. And that means that you're going to have failures and you need to get back up. I always remind you of the, the kid, you know, when a kid is learning how to walk and they fall down 500 times, they don't stop getting up because it's just too damn difficult to walk, right? They keep on trying and they keep on going. We're incredibly resilient. But if you're not enjoying it and you're not having fun and you are not passionate about what you are doing, then stop. Because if you're not, nobody else is going to, is going to believe in it. So just whatever you're doing, be somebody that shows up a hundred percent in whatever action.

If you're being with the kids, show up with the kids. If you're in a sales school, be in a sales school. Just show up a hundred percent in whatever you're doing and be authentic and congruent. And you can't go wrong in life because all this, we, we take it all a bit too seriously. And it's like, have fun, take a break, take some time out, get some thinking time, go read The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham if you need to learn about thinking time. And, but taking time out as well to get a holistic, you know, some objectivity away from it and surround yourself with people that frankly are going to call bullshit as well, that you can share with, that are going to give you that objectivity that you haven't got an emotional attachment to.

And listen, be open, be coachable and surround yourself with people that care and know more than you. Do not be the smartest person in the room. There's quite a lot of advice in there, sorry. Yeah, no, I love it. Thankfully for me, I always know I'm not the smartest person in the room. So, so Lisa, it's been an absolute pleasure. Where can people learn more about you and what you're doing and connect with you? So Lisa Catter, that's 2-T-E-C-A-T-T-O. And my website is thebusinesscatalyst.co.uk. So come find me on social or on my website. Let's have a call and see if we can revolutionize your life with automation. I love it. So I wanted just to ask you, we went into this conversation with you not believing that automation had its place in the sales process.

And I just want to know the debate that we had, where you've ended up on. I think it has, yes, it has its place. I think your version of automation of putting a sales rep in a position to have the conversation, but also then, you know, putting them into a position to personalize is the right way to think of automation versus what I fear is what's happening right now is the over automation of the process. And that's the line that I think, especially with Gary Vaynerchuk, he said, like, I guess, you know, he said, look, don't worry about it. Don't try to fight the robots. Don't try to fight artificial intelligence. They're going to win. Don't leverage it. And the image that I always bring to the sales organizations that I work with is you have to be Iron Man slash Iron Woman in today's world.

Because if you think about it, Tony Stark, as a human being, he, you know, he's great. He's rich. He's good looking. He's really smart. Right. But if he were to go out and fight this fight against all these aliens, he'd get killed. Right. It wouldn't even be a contest. So what does he have to do? He has to create the suit. And the suit is great. But the suit, i.e. software, the suit is great. But without Jarvis, the artificial intelligence, the suit's just a big hunk of metal. So you'd put the artificial intelligence with the suit, with the person, and now you can go out and fight this fight and still be a human and still have that human connection. But it's that last mile. It's like, I keep trying to tell people, think of it as you are the last mile as a sales professional.

Let automation do almost everything. But before it goes to the client, before you have that conversation, before you send that email, take it, look at it, humanize it, and then send it, and then do it. And that's where automation works. Automation does not work when it comes to just pushing buttons and hoping for the best and thinking that automation is a silver bullet to solve all your problems. We are aligned, I believe. We both won the conversation, which pleases me very much. There we go. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Lisa. So, look, and everybody, like I always say at the end of all these, look, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because if you had a bad day or if you think you're having a bad day, you go out there and make somebody smile.

I promise you, you had a good day, and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all for listening, and I will see you on the other side. Thank you so much for your time today and listening to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts in the industry with over a million downloads, and I can't thank you enough. To keep the momentum going, if you could go to your favorite podcast platform and leave us a five-star review, I would greatly appreciate it. In return, I will answer any question that you have on Instagram. Hit me up there at John, Emma's, and Michael Barrows with a video question or a DM, and I will get right back to you, I promise.

And last but not least, if you're looking for training, I'm adjusting my training approach this year, and I'm actually going to be delivering training to the masses. I'll be delivering live training the first and second week of every single month with our two marquee courses, filling the funnel and driving a close to anybody who wants to join, and it includes membership in our on-demand platform with weekly AMAs. So you can go to jbarrows.com slash open to check out the details. Thanks again, and have a great day.