Those that know me, will know that I love to reflect on the best use of my time and have many ways of maximising the use of every valuable minute.
Last year I saw the impact that Artificial Intelligence and Automation was having on so many businesses. Initially, it was with much larger businesses than mine, but matters seem to have accelerated in 2023 and it is now impacting all our businesses. ChatGPT made it feel much closer for many businesses, depsite having this technology for many years. From conversations, I felt that if we were not embracing the technology then the impact will be negative for us as others embrace the change as earlier adopters.
In Q4 2023 I worked with MetaCog.ai, an Ai Automation Agency, to review my systemised processes and lead generation tools to establish how Ai and Automation could help me or save even more time!
In this article, I share an overview of the journey so far:
Centralising My Systems
Firstly, I set myself the challenge of centralising and automating my tech stacks for relationship management and onboarding. I wanted to avoid adding the same data in more than one system manually. I also wanted to contain the rising amount of SaaS subscriptions I had. I’d reviewed many available CRMs but I couldn’t find one to fully adapt to my unique end to end requirements, leaving me with solutions that were only partially effective and still felt disjointed.
Solution:
MetaCog.ai crafted a custom no-code CRM utilising Airtable with a lot of the processes and workflows being automated using Make.com. This centralised all my critical information in one place. It also gave me the standard CRM benefits of customer interaction records. This development granted me total visibility of my contacts, their origins, and their journey as a observer to prospect to customer from awareness to consideration to purchase and onboarding.
With simple clicks or automated activities, my leads now smoothly progress through the pipeline, activating relevant actions such as sending quotes or dispatching proposals, sending my agreements, and invoicing. The CRM’s seamless integration with Outlook (my email), my finance (Xero), with eSignatures.io and email automation system (MailerLite) ensures no duplication in key systems.
Benefits:
The result? A 360-degree view that boosts sales conversions in a more timely manner. This integrated CRM converts stagnant leads into sales by enhancing visibility and focus.
I also automated the entire customer journey – from quotes to signed proposal to the completed invoice sent – using no-code tools. When a client agrees to engage my support, simply ticking a box instantly triggers distribution of my agreement and kickstart questionnaire, linking to calendar events, and accounting integrations to accelerate my time-to-revenue.
Tedious manual data entry in kanban boards, excel and repetitive tasks, such as duplicating an agreement in word and saving as a pdf, have significantly reduced. My focus has shifted to value-adding activities, more time for my client work, uplifting both revenue and business goals.
We’ve utilised Ai to level up the automation of my email communication sequence to be more relevant, personalised and timely. We’ve used the automation tools to prompt me for more personal interactions, such as a phone call, at the right time.
Further Automation of time consuming manual processes
I offer my audience access to content that I hope they find thought provoking and time consuming. For example, I offer a personalised report in reply to 24 questions that will help the business owner to improve their entrepreneurial success. I’ve always received grateful feedback, however at times I’ve reduced the promotion of this offer, as I simply didn’t have the time to pull together the individual reports in the timescale offered!
The Solution
MetaCog worked with me to review the process and establish what I didn’t have to create myself. What could be replicated for each report, such as the structure, and how could the resulting report be send more easily to the recipient, whilst at the same time capturing the contact in my CRM and avoiding the further manual addition.
The Benefit
This has saved me so much time! In addition, I was providing about 4 reports per month but have now been more proactive in offering the report and in the last 60 days have provided so many more reports for free.
24/7 Lead Generation Through Conversational AI
Consistent lead generation and prospect qualification is a crucial part of my business but this can be a very time consuming task. I considered hiring to support this part of my business to avoid the ‘feast and famine’ experience but that was neither cost-effective or guaranteed to match my style and experience, as much of my sales process is about meetings, conversations and personalisation using my knowledge and experience.
Solution
MetaCog.ai developed a Conversational AI chatbot, trained with over 500KB of my custom content. It sits on my website and has been trained to mimic my conversational tone and brand voice, to effectively engage prospects.
Benefits
Prospects can interact with this AI assistant anytime via my website, receiving business advice, my contact details, and access to useful information – even whilst I sleep. This AI not only qualifies leads but also provides tailored advice before they choose to share personal information for my contact with them. In the month of November alone, this autonomously generated four leads on autopilot.
LinkedIn is my primary platform for me. One area that excites me is the Ai assistants interaction with my prospects LinkedIn data. Metacog.ai have built a tool that reviews their profile and suggests key points to focus on or to include within my communications such as my connection requests.
Additionally, as a copywriter, my Ai assistant has reviewed all the copy on my website for improvement, but whilst also retaining the consistency of my voice and style.
Content Creation and Useful Downloads
For over 3 years I have been generating weekly blogs and videos, plus daily social posting. This has given me a wealth of content on my website. However, these were underutilised, as I was committed to creating even more content. My aim was the repurposing of this content without redundancy.
The Solution
MetaCog.ai built a custom GPT Virtual Assistant that is trained on my blogs and knowledge base content. The VA supports my content creation and daily operations. Metacog.ai also devised a ‘content creation machine’ that transformed my YouTube content into suggested posts for LinkedIn and Twitter.
The Benefit
This Ai assistant offers content themes and ideas, that then translates to my social posting and email campaigns. It repurposes my timeless knowledge across various channels, maximising audience reach and engagement. One key benefit I have found is that the suggestions encourage me to say some things that I perhaps avoided stating in the past, because I felt they were perhaps boastful. In fact, according to my data my audience have found them engaging!
Sending more regular emails has made a big difference on the traffic to my blogs. Each Thursday morning a new blog is released on my website. Soon after my CRM identifies the new post and the Ai Assistant suggests repurposed content that I could use as an email. I review the content, make some amendments and then ‘sync’ the CRM table with MailerLite that then sends the email. So easy! It’s such a huge time saving that the desired outcome of sending the email is now done, whereas before I couldn’t find time to complete the numerous steps to make this happen!
Whats in the Pipeline for Q1 2024?
I am delighted to have been introduced to MetaCog.ai as this will be a key area for businesses in 2024 and I again want to be ahead of the curve.
For me, the future looks bright as we continue to innovate and grow ways of working, engaging with my audience and supporting my clients.
Early this year we will be looking at:
LinkedIn Analytics and analysis to identify top-performing posts, patterns, themes, focusing on content that resonates with my audience.
Airtable (CRM) Analytics: Data driven analytics/ reports that will provide insights into my CRM contacts – categorising prospects, referrals, past clients, and understanding their sources. This will guide engagement strategies with different contact groups.
Paid Ad’s Integration with the CRM. To consider performance monitoring of clicks, conversions and impressions plus the automation of triggers such as updating ad sets and pausing campaigns depending on performance metrics to spend.
AI automation has enabled me to streamline operations, enhancing lead generation, and optimising my content strategy.
I estimate that I am now keying one third less of the content into my CRM, office suite and social platforms, that all helps considering the pain in my fingers!
Metacog.ai have also shared their knowledge and experience to improve other areas of my business in addition to my efficiency. As a business they have their ears and eyes open to software and market improvements. Their recommendations and signposting have resulted in me now building my lead lists in a much more targeted manner with better data sets, having better conversations on LinkedIn and the creation of my new email based Empowerment programme.
Another outcome is that I have a new .com website that is now offering many more downloads and tools to help business owners improve their business or the way they work.
I’d recommend a conversation with Metacog.ai about how your business may embrace Ai and Automation. If you’d like an introduction, then just reach out.
Metacog.ai
MetaCog AI empowers resourceful solopreneurs to get ahead of the competition with AI-driven automation that 10x’s their time and abilities.
Leveraging intuitive drag-and-drop platforms requiring no technical skills, Metacog.AI rapidly builds customised workflows to eliminate repetitive tasks.
Free up hours every week to focus on more meaningful work by automatically capturing leads, onboarding clients, optimising service delivery, creating and scheduling content, and more with MetaCog’s done-for-you automation solutions.
Our tailored enterprise-grade AI tools work 24/7 alongside your current operations so you can accomplish 3x the impact without losing the flexibility or customization you need as a small yet mighty team of one.
Find out more that: https://metacogai.io/
Free report on ‘Seeing in the Mind of your Ideal Customer’: https://airtable.com/appdd0Mu7ggn8NRcW/shr2k8FmsSrTrZkHq