This episode, B Squared Media’s Founder and CEO, Brooke Sellas, talks about different scheduling and automation tools, how these can be used to improve productivity, and the different ways you can streamline the hiring and onboarding process.
Brooke Sellas is an entrepreneur, digital customer experience consultant, and CEO and Founder of B Squared Media, where she spends most of her time working on sales and marketing. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:
- Tools that help with scheduling and automation.
- How smart automation tools can save time and increase productivity.
- The danger of scope creeps and how to avoid it.
- Hot to build trust with customers using social media content.
- Why behind-the-scenes content is always the top-performing content, no matter the industry.
- The type of person that makes a good guest.
Resources:
Connecting with Brooke Sellas:
Connecting with the Josh Hoffman:
Quotables:
- 06:34 – “I don’t want to do automation to the point where personalization goes away, but I do use a lot of automation to help get my message out as people want to connect with me or want to buy the book or want to download something that we offer or sign up for our newsletter. So I always say in my emails that are automated, Hey, this really is me and I read and respond to every comment. So if you want to reply and ask a question, book a call, whatever it is, I will read it and I will reply. And so I think that kind of helps soften the fact that yes, everybody’s getting this automated email, but it truly is me and I truly do respond.”
- 11:18 – “As a business owner, what I’ve learned, one of the biggest and best pieces of advice I could give is in your agreements, make sure that your scope of work is crystal clear about what you will and what you will not do. And that way if somebody tries to do something that’s outside of the scope or presents you with scope creep, you can say, Hey Josh, thank you so much for the opportunity to do this new project with you. It is outside of our scope of work. If you look at the agreement, however, I can put together a proposal for this project or an hourly rate or whatever it is to get this done for you. Like we’d love to do this for you, but it’s not in your scope, so you’re going to have to pay more”
- 18:52 – “We were the opposite of what the thing says, which is hire slow, fire fast. We were the opposite. We weren’t hire slow, no, we would hire fast and fire slow. So we were not the best and we got lucky. We’ve had some like incredibly amazing people who have worked with us and still work with us, but we’ve also made some real doozies hiring. And so about two or three years ago we totally revamped our hiring process, and we stuck the job of hiring with a few key people on our team so that that process is followed. It’s always the same people, and that has drastically changed the way we hire and onboard new people.”
- 29:57 – “We actually score people with a scorecard on how they answer questions. So if they don’t make it to a certain score, we don’t hire them. So, some people can have a good interview, but their personality seems amazing, but they don’t answer the questions quite the way you’d want them to. Well, they don’t get hired. I’m sorry, it’s not about how great your personality is, it’s how well can you do the job? So we have those and then our onboarding process got totally revamped, and now we make them shadow with people. So for the first 90 days, they’re almost in training so that we’re not just cutting them loose on doing something before they’re ready.”
- 24:41 – “I think the biggest thing that marketers have issues with are putting things in a box, right? So like a lot of times you’ll see the social tools post something, the best time to post is Wednesday at 11 or whatever. And then marketers take that blanket statement and apply it to their brand, when really every brand is different. You have to set your own standards for each brand or client that you work with. And I think teaching marketers that critical thinking part of creating what those standards are and then implementing that into some of the, the processes, the standard operating procedures that are specific to that client, right? So we have the SOPs, but then you have the brand SOPs or statements or whatever.”