#10: Where SMBs Should Start Their AI Journey
Welcome back to The Junction Today we are
going to be diving into AI and Automation
for small and medium sized businesses.
We work with a lot of SMBs and we
we are a small business, mid sized business, right.
We're, I think the last time we
checked, we're at 26 team members.
We've hired an additional two that will put us at 28.
We're creeping up on that 30.
Yeah, hit us up if you want to work here.
We are hiring.
So talking about SMBs, where they
should start their automation AI journey.
We are an automation company, so we can
speak from a lot of experience in house
about how we are using automation.
But not every company knows.
So we should probably actually unpack some
best practices, things to be thinking about
and then actual steps they can follow.
What are your initial thoughts?
I'm going to paraphrase our favorite colleague
who is all about taking it slow,
bradley Delon, our director of Operations.
Dude is very smart and ultimately he leads us
in a good direction when he cautions us.
And this is a good caution.
He says, before you automate it, perfect it.
Right, take your time, figure out what that looks like.
Because if you go straight to automation, you're going to
spend a lot of time and money reworking it, doing
it over again because your process will change.
And for some of our folks that we work
with, they don't know what they want, right?
So you can't just automate something.
You don't even know how it should work to begin with
and we're going to beat the circles in a dead horse.
Like people process technology, right?
You can't have people and
technology without the process.
And I think there's some level of balance here, right.
If you're spending an inordinate amount of time
trying to knock out manual tasks, that's probably
something you want to look at first.
If you've got this really hot, cool idea, but
you spend like, I don't know, ten minutes a
week and you're a one man shop.
You're a five man shop or woman shop. Right.
That probably doesn't make sense to try
to automate or stick AI on it.
So kind of like an ROI priority list.
If this is taking me a ton of time
and it's something that I should automate, if it's
a repetitive task, I probably should automate it.
If it takes a ton of creativity or a lot
of thought and discernment, I think on the marketing front,
you can't just throw out a campaign and have automation
and AI go and just do it for you.
It takes a lot of forethought, a lot of expertise
to hit those numbers that you're looking to hit.
So that's where I would start. Yeah.
So I'm a big fan of opening it
up, opening up the dialogue to the organization.
Would you do the same? Right.
When you say repetitive tasks?
Feasibly everyone could come together and collaboratively
put together a list of things that
take me the most time.
And I also think it gives it a
little more skin in the game, right.
People are more bought in to the change.
You do have to poke and prod, right.
It's really easy for people to get lost
in the day to day status quo.
I always send the TPS reports and
it takes me 1 hour a day.
Well, I'm not going to talk about boring stuff.
I'm going to talk about the
things that are really painful.
And it's really easy as business leaders to let the folks
around us just dig in and get their stuff done.
And we don't stop and ask hey Mel, what is something
that's taken up an hour of your day every day?
Maybe aside from lunch.
But hey, I'm doing the same thing every day.
And those are just things that we don't like.
It's not sexy, right?
We do them quarterly in the form of hackathon.
Oh, for sure, right.
Which until I came to Venn wasn't something that
any other organization I've been a part of did.
But it goes back to our founder.
Scott always has this analogy about the shoemaker
and the shoemaker's kids never had shoes, right?
So busy making shoes for everybody else.
So if we're so busy automating everybody else's business
but we're not doing taking the time to automate
our know that's eventually going to catch up to
have this is Bjorn's motto, right?
Always be coding.
And that's kind of a mantra we had from the beginning.
It was always be automating.
Mainly because we were taking on a ton of work
and we were doing some of the same things over
and over again and was just natural for us to
try to find ways to do those faster.
And if you have a team of people they are
probably trying to find ways to do those things faster.
And here at Ven we do have an ethos of
look for something that already exists that accomplishes that same
use case before you try to go do it manually.
Because inevitably those folks, those organizations are
going to be spending more time maintaining,
implementing additional features, things like that.
So mel. I'm making this up. We're starting out a new
marketing department at my SMB.
What are some things I should be
thinking about on the marketing front?
Do I just pull up chat GPT
and say build me out a campaign?
Or where do I start my automation journey?
You're the HubSpot.
Whiz like where do we go?
Well let's take the technology out of it for a moment.
Anytime I'm looking at kind of that
early stage of a marketing plan.
You're asking how do we do business?
You need to understand the business.
How do we make money, how do we sell?
Who do we sell to?
And then you want to kind of document those
processes further because if they don't exist, right?
Like back in the day when it was
you and Scott, did you have personas?
Did you draft out or map out? No.
Target personas?
No, we were too laid back for that.
I think that's not a knock.
I think that that's just natural.
The evolution of the business.
You get to a certain size or a point where
especially as you start hiring on more salespeople or teams,
and you're looking like one of the business objectives when
I was brought in was we've nailed referrals, right?
Tons of business comes from referrals, but let's
go get the ones that are out there.
Let's go get more organic leads
and convert that into business.
And so I had to understand, well, who is that?
Is that the same decision maker as
who's coming through the referral channel?
Those are mostly partners.
How do I get to the CFO?
Because in part, I mean, you guys
knew we're selling to CFOs and CIOs.
So you could go ask a tool like Chat GPT,
who uses Sage intact, who uses Stripe, how are they?
You could ask it basic questions
like that to get a profile. Right.
And I'm a CFO today for a small business in healthcare.
And what are my primary responsibilities?
I think you could start there from an ideation and
you could kind of do like a check balance sort
of thing, like, yeah, that sounds like my customer.
That sounds like my buyer.
I'd also just look at your existing customer data and if you
can pipe it in and say, who signs our Sows CFOs?
I did that analysis when I first came in, but it
was a salesforce report and I went line by line.
You know, else I did?
I went out and found every single
person who signed an Sow on LinkedIn. Oh, wow.
And I did a demographic like a profile, and I
learned things like, wow, these CFOs are really educated.
A lot of them had MBAs, a
lot of them had they were CPAs.
They had ongoing certification for that.
I went and manually found that information.
So if I'm starting out now, I'd start to
ask those questions of Chat GPT of CFOs, like,
what are characteristics of the CFO over a small
business in these kind of verticals?
And then I'd ask questions about
the tools that we're using.
And maybe, like I said, that's
kind of your research phase.
And then as far as putting together a
campaign, maybe you're outlining based on what you
know to be their challenges or their objectives,
business objectives, from your persona analysis, maybe then
you are putting together like, blog topics. Yeah.
And then maybe you're going and writing them.
I wouldn't suggest just like, putting that into Chat
GBT and calling it call it a day. Gold star.
Put it out there.
Let's keep going down that route.
I don't know what I don't know.
I'm starting up this new business.
I think I can do anything.
What shouldn't.
Where do I need to steer away from if
I'm spinning up a sales and marketing team?
What are some of the things like don't do that well?
You kind of talk about you don't know what you
don't know if you haven't defined your key differentiators and
what makes you unique in the marketplace and what makes
your product and service unique in the marketplace.
Yeah, you need to get that story.
And maybe you do hire people to help
you craft the story or the narrative. Right.
As far as gosh, you really put me on spot here.
Well, should I just start going build
out sequences and just let them ride?
Or do I build out we have all these
automated workflows that you've built out in HubSpot.
Do I just start winging it?
No, start small. Okay.
What is your business objective?
What is it?
What is it for the year?
Do you want to make $100,000 in revenue?
What's your average deal size then? Do you know?
Hopefully you've sold a deal. Yeah, maybe.
I know with Scott, I've got a point of reference.
His goal, I think the first year
was like, go book this much business.
And then every year it was a revenue goal.
And so if you now know that every time you sign
a deal, you have kind of a profile of that customer
and they fall within this revenue in this industry and they're
this decision, this goes back to the persona.
You can now go target them. And if you want to go build
out sequences, you do that in HubSpot.
But you start small.
Don't just go buy a list and
then mean, this is basic marketing.
I mean, I really think it comes back to
you have to understand business needs and goals and
the objectives before you just start spinning up product
teams and marketing teams and sales teams.
And then if we're talking about going and
adding layers of automation to that, I would
just always, like I would take Bradley's side
on yeah, perfect it and then automate it. Right.
So start small.
Start with one drip campaign.
And maybe you do leverage a tool like Chat JPT to
help you craft the narrative or craft those four email, you
know, use that and test it, measure it, do it again.
Can you talking about the workflows
right there's a connector into Slack.
You've built out a ton of quick Slack
automations that are just posting when things happen.
Those are incredibly helpful.
Can you talk about just a couple
of those and why those are beneficial?
What are we doing there that provides a ton of benefit?
Yeah, I think no matter the size of your team.
So if we're talking about, again, back to a
small business early stage, giving them you might be
rubbing elbows with them at one point, Brent and
I brent runs our sales team here.
We were in the same office, like, literally.
And then our director of delivery.
Also the three of us office together.
So when a lead came in,
it's like we're high fiving, right?
Like across the desk.
We've gotten bigger now with separate offices, but
not to mention that's just not scalable. Right.
So with HubSpot and there's lots of tools
out there I'm sure that can do this.
But big fan of HubSpot within a workflow, you can pull
in a module or a widget to say now when this
happens, send a message to individual people, to channels.
So we get a lead from the website, for example.
We're telling it if it's a
marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead,
we're doing some sort of qualification.
We're sending out an email from one of our reps,
we're assigning it, doing some lead routing and we're using
personalization tokens so that it's an automated message, but it
kind of looks like it's from a human.
Yeah, we're sending them a scheduling page and
then we're also notifying the rep, we're saying,
hey, we just got a new stripe lead.
And then it says a new message says they've
been sent an email to book time with Mike.
And then when they book with Mike,
the stripe lead booked with Mike.
So now Mike knows. Right.
And this wasn't always perfect.
We've had some, many, many iterations of this to realize
that just saying we got a lead wasn't enough.
We needed to know did they book? Right?
Because we also want to know that's
like a big piece of conversion. Yeah.
So bringing visibility so especially for small teams though,
I think in your early days, bringing that kind
of stuff into your shared environment, into slack, all
that stuff is out of the box.
HubSpot, you're not paying to go integrate.
I mean, these types of automations we're talking about,
it's not like I'm looking to you to build,
they exist and you should be leveraging them.
Give your teams visibility to when
leads come in the door.
But also we do this for recruiting.
We're doing some really awesome stuff to
give people visibility to applications coming in
the door, what stage things are at.
We're doing deal alerts, like win a deal, close
a deal, everybody can celebrate around the office.
It's not just leads.
My question though is to you, what's the
risk of not doing these things right?
If this is my side gig and it's just kind of taken off
a little bit, I don't know how to do these things yet.
Is there a risk of not what's the risk of
not doing anything as it relates to automation and AI?
As you start to build out teams,
everybody's dependent on you, the knowledge exists
within you in your head, right?
So the sooner you can send and share that
information into a place like, let's just say slack,
I mean, if it's just you, who are you?
Slacking yourself? I don't know.
That may not be a great example, but let's
say small teams in general, as you continue to
take on more work, sell more product, you're tapping
into new ecosystems, you're working with partners.
The more that you can surface this information, the easier
it will be for teams to act on that information.
But then also just the customer experience. Right.
Like if you're not leveraging tools for sending if someone
buys something from you, even if you are one team.
I've seen, I've actually been on the kind of
the receiving end of this with different apps.
I've used services.
A gym is a good example.
There's an app that I use to book classes. Right.
I know that there's automated features within the
app that allows them to send me an
email on my one year anniversary. Right.
There's a lot of things they could
be doing above and beyond that. Oh, 100%. Right.
They haven't checked into a class for two weeks. Yeah.
That enrolls you into some sort of thing
where they a cadence, where they reach out.
And I'm not saying that again, these are
basic concepts, but most of these apps that
people are using today, this functionality exists. Yeah.
If you're not kind of tinkering with it, then
I think you're missing out on providing a really
great customer experience on the front end.
Well, you're speaking to essentially like you're paying
a specific amount of money and you're only
using like 10% of the functionality.
There's a lot of underutilized
capability that's being left behind.
And it kind of goes to this idea of,
well, don't get stuck in the status quo. Right.
Use every facet of this functionality.
Because they didn't just build it out for fun. Right.
Right.
Workflows aren't there just to sit and do nothing.
They help you.
They're there to automate your business. Right.
They're there to automate some of those things that
you do on a day in and day out.
We are demanding these experiences too. Right.
That's why these features exist.
So think about when you it drives me
neurotic if I place an order for something
and I don't get an email immediately, right.
Like, I want that automated email.
It's not necessarily a personal touch from someone saying
like, hey, so these things should just be part
of how people operate within these apps.
And the apps are suggestive. Right.
They're saying, like, even in HubSpot, they've got
these pre built Drips campaigns and sequences and
workflows that you can get started with today.
So maybe we started this episode off with
how small businesses can be leveraging AI.
But I think really what we're realizing is
that if you're not utilizing not that if
you're not utilizing the automation that exists today
within your own systems, start there. Right?
Totally.
Because we keep coming back to this idea of automate
and then layer the AI on top of it.
I think you can't well, you see a lot of
this, at least in the past, recent months, where people
are using Chat GBT to just chat something in prompt.
It real fast and copy and paste stuff.
I think there is some of that you can do,
but that's what you're calling like a one shot.
Yeah, the one shot, right.
Like, let me one shot write this email for me.
Get a little more context in your prompt.
But as you were talking about businesses, we're
not talking about just writing one email, we're
talking about writing 100 emails, right.
We're talking about how do you scale your
small business into a medium sized business.
And a lot of that we keep going back to automate.
Write down your process, right.
Figure that out, then automate it, then layer in the
AI if you want to get to something that scales.
If you just need to write an email, pull
up Chat GPT and hammer it out real fast.
Yeah, there's no harm in mean, I don't want to
discourage again, this is kind of an area, maybe a
blind spot for me as you ask, hey, if I'm
starting a business, can I do marketing?
Using these mean?
HubSpot is an expensive tool for sure.
So I don't want to say that
it can't help you add value immediately. Right.
Could you replicate these email touches yourself?
Sure.
And then utilize Chat JPT to get there faster. Fine.
I don't want to underscore or
undermine I guess that point.
Well, one thing that we've kind of danced around is
that the functionality is there for you to use.
They didn't build it out we said this.
They didn't build it out for fun.
It also means that everybody else is using it, right?
Right.
So if all of your competitors are on HubSpot,
they have access to this functionality and you don't
want to spend the time to figure it out.
Well, now you're already kind of at a disadvantage because
all of your competitors are going to be using that.
You know, I think this comes back to we've talked about
the people who are going to use it in such a
way that the content that is authentic, original is elevated and
all this other stuff is kind of like varied.
So never lose sight of that's.
Why I said what makes you unique
if you don't know your differentiators?
It's one thing from a business perspective, but
I can speak to Venn Technology Marketing.
We have a lot of things that set us apart
from other companies doing similar things or just in general.
If we just started shiny object Syndrome, went over
to chat GPT and just started trying to run
campaigns out of Chat GPT without giving it that
context for, like we said, how we talk, how
we present ourselves, we're out there, I call it
our freak flag and we fly it like Bjorn.
We lean into that yeti.
And that is not something that that is authentic, that
is not like, sure, you can go have something, generate
an image and then be like, this is my mascot.
Okay, you want to go have it pick you
a mascot and go create your mascot, fine.
But you still got to give it personality.
You got to go I don't know.
That's just my two sit parked. Right?
You got to hit the gas. Yeah.
Let me ask you this.
Let's move into our next segment, the hot take, right?
We know that we would be in a very different
place, right, if we didn't have Mel her expertise.
All of the work that you put in
every I'm the I'm the SMB guy, right?
I've got two people, we're knocking stuff out and
I need like I need somebody to come in
and kickstart, push the gas, build out my yeti. Right?
Can AI do that?
Can they give me like temporary somebody?
Can I type in all these prompts to have it do
the same types of work, the same level of work?
Can that person give me some time or
some ability to do marketing without firing?
I was going to say hiring.
Hiring like staff augmentation. Exactly. Yeah.
I mean you showed me that you could build a
whole website with some pretty I don't want to say
rudimentary, but like prompts on one hand you could say,
yeah, but it's like so there's no personality or whatever.
I don't know.
Again, I go back to are you using it to
create and inform that brand and then you're leveraging that
say, yeah, that's in line with what I'm about and
what I want to go do now.
Go build me a website off that. Sure.
I mean there's tools out there like these wix.com and
Square and there's all these even WordPress to an like
you can go very quickly spin up a website shopify.
You can go quickly spin up an e commerce store.
And while that may not be AI, I think
that small teams should utilize those tools to get
their message out to the market faster.
But you have to make sure that you have enough to say.
Yeah, so I don't want to discourage the use of it.
At one point in time, Vent Technology
did not have any director of utilized.
I think Scott is a marketing genius.
Let's just go on the record to say
that naturally, yeah, we actually have a channel
in Slack called Scott's Marketing Gold.
So don't want to sleep on that.
He's definitely built an incredible foundation
for which we're just here amplifying.
But you definitely as a small team maybe don't need
the level of a team that we have now.
So use the tools that are out there.
Helps you get your message out
faster on a staff augmentation.
I just want to warn you, if you're
just getting into automation and AI, it's not
something that you can just have the automation.
Just give it here's a job description.
You have to maintain it.
Oh, for sure.
You have to continually prompt it.
You can't just do like, well, write me one email. Right.
It's not going to write all of your emails,
and it's not going to continually do that, or
it's not going to fulfill a role.
It's better to think of it
more of an augmentation, right.
Not the traditional staff aug, but more of like, hey,
it's giving me new capabilities, and I can spend less
time doing this one thing that I was before.
But I don't see this from a dystopia nightmare
type deal where I'm like, all right, OpenAI.
Hire me a director of marketing, and boom, my
new model, my new mel bell model one pops
up, and she's off to the races.
24/7 knocking stuff out. Yeah.
I mean, again, you got to go back
to the story, especially if you're a founder.
What's your story?
What makes you unique?
Why did you get into business?
And if you can't tell that story well, I don't
think a bot will tell it well enough for you. Right.
But it can help you craft.
Yeah, naturally.
Well, it's more for the folks out
there that are just getting started. Right.
They don't know what they don't know.
And if you go and follow with some of
the things that we're doing internally and follow some
of the tips and tricks, then you're going to
be headed in the right direction.
Don't just do nothing, though.
You got to do something,
because everybody else already is.
And I will say, raise your hand, get on LinkedIn,
start following people who are doing the same thing.
Like, if you're a founder, go
follow founders, connect with founders. Right.
That's something that and then share your story,
share your message, those types of things.
That's marketing I'm all about.
Dave Gerhardt, founder brand, got to plug that.
He has been so successful in helping early stage
startups and founders get their the marketing strategy has
been around the mean, and that's created tons of
content, and it makes it really easy for your
marketing team to come in.
Scott has been consistent since day one
in telling his story, and what ven's
about the business has evolved a lot. Right.
Like, we started as a salesforce firm
that did a little integration work.
Now we're an integration firm
that does some salesforce work. Maybe. I don't know.
That's kind of how he tells the story. Right. Yeah.
So it makes it easy to then
go proliferate that message throughout the market.
Absolutely.
Well, if you're a founder out there and you
have ideas or you've been doing this or you
don't know where to start and you have questions,
you should send them into us.
Send us an email at
thejunction@thentechnology.com otherwise, keep it automated.
Y'all.
