JULI BARANIK:

[0:00] If you’ve ever wanted to get a behind the scenes look at business and see if people really practice what they preach today’s your lucky day. My name is Juli Baranik. I’m the founder of Seven Figure Builder where we help businesses and business owners work smarter, not harder with their businesses to grow and expand and have better results than they ever imagined. So today, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes look at how I run my podcasts, and specifically how I run the intake of my podcast and the automation that I built behind the scenes, which personally I think is pretty slick, and thought it was worth sharing with you today. So I’m going to share my screen for those that are on the podcast, you can get this on YouTube, and also get screenshots of what I’m showing you. But I will talk you through of course, and you can watch the video, the full video on YouTube, or my podcast, I have a page on my website, of course, and I have a form that people can fill out to be a guest on my podcast and it is blowing up at the moment I have my schedule is scheduled very far out in advance, but which I’m thrilled to say. But this is how people can become a guest on my podcast.

[1:09] So you click on this link here on the page, and it will take you to the guest interview page. And you can fill out this form to apply to be a guest on my podcast, when you hit submit, it will create a record in my system automatically. And will also let me know of course, but I run my automation pieces most of my automation I run through Active Campaign. And I’ve used all sorts of systems. And this is one that I love most and fits my needs for what I’m doing in my business. So I’m going to show you exactly how my automation is running behind the scenes as of today. And I think it will help you out a lot. So when people fill out this form on my website, it will create a record in my system. So I’m going to create a test record here and we’re going to watch it go through the system. So when I hit submit, it will now create a record in my Active Campaign system. And it will go to the thank you page so they can see the confirmation that I have received their submission.

[2:05] In my system, you can see my test record here, and it has the tag podcast guest. And I automatically see everything that was submitted within the swarm. So the cool part is I have automation built, which will take this record, create deals in my CRM, and automatically move people through the different pipelines of my CRM. So you can see these are the pipelines that I have set up for the podcast, that when people come in, they fill out the form, then they’re going to schedule their session to be able to record the podcast. And then I’ll have confirmed them as a guest, that everything checks out, they’re good to go. And then I do send them the list of questions ahead of time so people can see what it is that I’m asking and think about it ahead of time. And let me know if there’s anything they don’t want to talk about. And then I will send them the media kit afterwards. And then I’ll schedule my podcast, right.

[2:59] So these are the steps in my pipeline that I have people go through through the creation of my podcast. But I don’t want to have to keep up with this manually. And that’s part of what I love about automation is I can set this up to literally do things for me. And I call it my friend Jarvis. If you’re an Avengers fan, I’m an Avengers geek and love all the Avengers movies. So I refer to this as my friend Jarvis. So he helps me move things along and takes care of things that I don’t want to have to keep up with, but keeps me focused on streamlining my workflow. So what this actually looks like behind the scenes is this is the automation that I have built, people submit the form, there’ll be tagged with a tag podcast guests. So that’s how my automation knows to kick off, I’ll then create a deal for them within my pipelines that says they’re a guest for an interview, that will put them in right here into the stream. It will also put a note in my system, just letting me know that they requested to be a podcast guest and that their podcast lead. And then I will wait until I check it out and make sure that everything is you know, this is a person that I want to have on the podcast. And when I check off, yes, then they’ll move to the next step.

[4:07] So when I come into this record, and I click that I want this person to be a guest. And again, this is all customized for my needs. I hit Save Changes. All I did was simply click Yes. And then within a few minutes, it’s going to move it over to scheduling because what it does behind the scenes when I clicked yes, it will now add a note to their record saying that they’re approved to be a guest. It will move their deal to podcast scheduling, so I can know who exactly is still currently scheduling and I can follow up with them. And it will send them automatically an email with instructions on how to schedule their podcast now this is personalized to them and tells them exactly what they need to do with the links after the email is sent. I add a note in there as well. Just saying that I’ve sent them the request to book their time slot and then it will wait till they schedule their session in Calendly.

[4:58] Now that’s one that I enjoy. And a lot of you do as well. But the Calendly system is fantastic and has a great integration with Active Campaign, what I do is I send them an email that goes out to them with a link in it that they click on and they go to Calendly. And based off of my calendar availability, they can book their session. So after they’ve done that, again, it comes back into my CRM, it will give it a specific tag, so that automatically their deal will move from scheduling to confirmed guest and that they’ve already scheduled their session, and that they’re confirmed at my system. So if I refresh this, you can now see automatically this moved over to scheduling.

[5:39] After I’ve confirmed them that yes, I want this person to be a guest on my podcast, they’ve now automatically received an email, and it’s automatically moved over in my CRM, I don’t have to touch a thing, which I absolutely love, I can come in at a glance noticed and see where people are, and where I need to follow up with people. So now my test person is scheduling, I can come in here and choose a slot, and I can choose what’s available. And within a few minutes, this will automatically moved over to confirm guests, because I know now they’ve scheduled their session with me. I then will create a custom list of questions that I will send directly to them. But I will also add into their record so that I know what questions I’ve sent them. As soon as I add questions in there, my system knows that.

[6:26] Now, I’m going to take a step back. So looking back at the beginning, they come in, they fill out the form, they get a tag added, they have a deal created, a node is added, it waits until I say yes, this is a person I want on my podcast. And we’ll automatically move them to the next phase of scheduling, we’ll send them out an email automatically with directions on how to schedule their session, we’ll add a note in the system for me saying that they’ve been sent the email and that they would be scheduling their session. And then it will wait until they’ve scheduled their session. And I received that time back. As soon as they get the time back. It’ll add another contact note saying that they’ve already been scheduled. It moves the deal automatically to confirm guest which is where we are right now. And then it waits until the podcast questions are not blank. So as soon as I fill in that field, it’ll then add an out a note saying that questions have been sent, and automatically move their deal to the next stage saying that I sent the questions.

[7:26] And then it’ll look to see if they have purchased a media kit. If they have great, it moves them to the stage media kit. So I noticed send that to them. If not no problem, it puts them in the scheduled stage so that I wait until I have the podcast scheduled. And I know within my system again at a quick glance who is where where I need to follow up. And I didn’t have to manually move anybody anywhere within my CRM. And I know exactly who I need to speak to about what at every moment’s notice. So I think this is pretty slick. I like to geek out with this stuff.

[7:59] Luckily for you, I know there’s a lot of details I went through in here. And it can get a little technical, you don’t have to know any of it. But if you want help, if you need help with something like this, reach out to me and I’d be happy to help you come up with a concept that is custom made for your business. Again, this is custom made for mine. I know what my needs are, I know what my flow is, I know my systems. But I’m happy to help dig into yours, figure out exactly where your needs are. And what will help you the most to be able to free yourself up not have to keep up with all these individual points, make sure your data is going exactly where it needs to go. And so you don’t have to manually take things in you don’t have to copy and paste from one system to another, everything just flows seamlessly. And it makes your life a lot easier because then you know things are accurate, and you didn’t have to do it all and you’re not buried in paperwork, quite frankly, you can focus on your business and the things that are important.

[8:52] So that’s really how I like to use automation is to be able to pinpoint my attention to the points that I really need to focus on, which is that one to one connection, right. Automation is not about impersonal connection, it’s truly about freeing up your time of the tedious, repetitive steps that you do over and over again, so that you can focus on that one to one connection with your customer, which really takes your personality and your attention and your focus. So I hope this is helpful. It’s again, just a little snapshot behind the scenes. I’ve got lots of these and I’ll go into more another day. There’s lots of really cool stuff that we can do as far as keeping your data clean and lots of things that I like to geek out on that I will have in subsequent episodes.

[9:34] So if you need help reach out to me, I’d be happy to help you out. You can hit me up at SevenFigureBuilder.com I have a link below. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode!