EPISODE 230 WITH JEFF MENDELSON: THE POWER OF AUTOMATION IN DIGITAL MARKETING

Ready Yet?! Podcast Episode 230 with Jeff Mendelson: The Power of Automation in Digital Marketing

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: All right, hello, hello, and welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet podcast. My guest, Jeff Mendelsohn, here’s the thing. I see, you know how the universe gives you what you need? If you’re real clear on what you need, the universe puts it in front of you. And I will tell you, that you are my third podcast in a row who specializes in the exact thing I’m working on.

Erin Marcus: So I’m just gonna do this episode for me. Ask you, right? I mean, it’s so crazy. It’s literally three people in a row who specialize in things I’m exactly working on. So I’m, I’m excited to share your story but also a lot of your subject matter expertise with the audience. I think as you try to grow a business, scale a business, this is, this is the key to so much of it.

Erin Marcus: So, so, so much of it. So, before we get into all the details, how about a little origin story, who you are and what you do?

Jeff Mendelson: Ooh, my superhero origin story. , thank you so much. I had

Erin Marcus: to use, right? I had to use the nomenclature.

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah. Right. . So my name is Jeff Mendelson. I have been a digital marketer for over 20 years now.

Jeff Mendelson: And fun fact, 16 years ago, I got fired from my last job making me certified unemployable at this point. Hoo. Yeah, right, right. Totally get it. And, and what’s interesting about, you know, about all this is that at first I was like. Who’s going to support my Starbucks habit? And how am I going to pay for these diapers?

Jeff Mendelson: Right. Cause it was like, yeah, those were, those were real concerns. And what happened was I was like, you know, something like I can do that, you know, when it started out with just one client, you know, with just one, where I was doing some, where I was doing some great work for her, she was getting, she was getting hammered by her prior developer.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. And I came around and I’m like, I’m like, look, you have these, you have these, 30 sites. Like, let me do this for one, one low price for you every month. And then you won’t be nickel and diming. She jumped on that. And I was like, yes, you know, there’s something here, right?

Erin Marcus: Accidental entrepreneur. It’s amazing what happens when you know how to do something and then you go help someone else by doing it.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. And you know, and you know, something, this all started because. I, way back when I wanted to be a real estate agent and a mortgage broker, right? Like everyone else in Florida, right?

Erin Marcus: It’s part of the rules.

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah. It’s part of the rules. One out of every eight citizens in the state of Florida has a real estate license.

Jeff Mendelson: So only 5 percent of those are actually active in it. But. But the

Erin Marcus: state loves collecting those annual fees. So

Jeff Mendelson: the state loves those fees. Yeah. We live off of those fees. So what happened was, you know, like I thought I was going to do great doing that, right. Cause you know, I was in sales. I knew, I knew a thing or two about a thing or two, and I just realized I had zero aptitude for this whatsoever.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. Where it’s like, I couldn’t sell a mortgage to my, right. And that was like the, like the, you know, here, give it to me. Here’s the paperwork. Take my license, please. Right. And I just couldn’t do it. And that’s what I have. I

Erin Marcus: have a new associate with a similar story who was very excited about what was going to be his amazing real estate career until he realized he hated houses.

Erin Marcus: He hated sellers and he hated buyers.

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah. And I just think of myself as, you know, we just bought this house two years ago. I was just thinking to myself as a buyer and I’m like, I wouldn’t deal with that. She’s on the weekends and all that, you know, yeah, pass, but anyways, I made a great website. Right. So, you know, then everyone’s like, yeah, you know, you really suck at real estate, but Hey, can you do that website for

Erin Marcus: me?

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah, this is really pretty. And that’s really how it started, you know, when at first, you know, at first I was like, Let’s just talk about you know, like a website and a website when you’re building it for somebody, when you’re building a web presence for somebody, it’s a big check, right? You know, five, 10, 15, 000, whatever it is, right.

Jeff Mendelson: It’s one big check and then you walk away. Right. And I didn’t want that for myself. I was just like, listen, the, the real money is in the recurring revenue. Right. So I started doing website hosting. I started creating content. I started You know running the ads for them and then I could charge a monthly fee.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. And that monthly fee was like, yeah, that’s what I got hooked on. Right. Because it, and you know, depending on how you model that you could even, you know, give, you know, now we have great templates, we have great We have great programs that allow us to create a web presence very, very quickly. You can almost give that away for free and then sell the services on top of it.

Jeff Mendelson: So many different ways, many different ways to slice this. I personally just went around you know, creating a digital marketing agency, even though we didn’t really call it then, right. You know, Oh, I do SEO. I do paid ads. I do social media, things like that. And what happened was it turned out to be something really interesting.

Jeff Mendelson: I’d say about I’d say about three years ago, three, maybe four years ago, I was really got into the, how do I automate this stuff? Like, how do I automate you know, newsletters? How do I send out, you know, client appreciation emails or surveys or things like that. And then that was yet another rabbit hole, right?

Jeff Mendelson: Cause then you go into the active campaign, you go into HubSpot, you go into, you go into Salesforce and which one’s the best, which one can I, can I afford things like that. And yeah, there’s one now that’s smoking them all and that’s high level.

Erin Marcus: It’s interesting. So it’s in, and I have a white label version of high level.

Erin Marcus: But I have a question because I, you know, you and I, when we met, we had, I think, 20 minutes on the calendar and about 90 minutes later, we’re, we’re both like, you know, I’m hungry, right?

Jeff Mendelson: And we weren’t even done.

Erin Marcus: We weren’t even, we just had to cut it off. So, I know that you’re highly personable and interactive and relationship based and you like people and talking to people, you know, how do, how does a, a business owner who identifies themselves, because that’s one of the things that I really believe, like, how you see yourself drives everything, right, because your brain is not going to let you go do something that’s the antithesis of how you see yourself, for better or for worse.

Erin Marcus: So how does a. I’m not talking about the fear based reason for stopping. That’s a whole different problem. But how does someone such as myself, who’s so relationship based and so interpersonal in my natural behavior, learn how to transfer that into what you do? Because it’s such a part of what makes me successful.

Erin Marcus: And I say me because, like I said, I’m working on some of this right now, but I know I’m not alone in that. And I think one of the things that prevents. people from doing what they need to do with the type of work you do is a story in our heads that I can’t do what I do in that way.

Jeff Mendelson: If that makes sense.

Jeff Mendelson: So first of all, I respectfully and wholeheartedly disagree with you.

Erin Marcus: That’s what I want you to disagree because I know I need, right. I, I, I agree with you. I just don’t know how to get over the bridge.

Jeff Mendelson: How did you get it? So so first of all, automation is not a dirty word. Okay. And you know, how do you prove it?

Jeff Mendelson: You know, like you go to your Facebook feed and there is a high degree of personalization. Do you think there’s a little Facebook gremlin in there thinking, Oh, how am I going to get it today? No, it’s all, it’s all algorithm, right? It’s all, it’s all stuff. You know, if you’re, here’s a fun thing to do, go to YouTube, look up three flat earth videos.

Jeff Mendelson: Okay. Thanks. Right? Then all of a sudden you’ll get like every letter. I

Erin Marcus: mean, and it’s so weird. Like, so personal version of this, I am five feet tall. And for most of my life, until I got older, I was a hundred pounds soaking wet. And one of my best friends is plus size and five 11. And she was sending me pictures of dresses.

Erin Marcus: She was going to buy to wear to a wedding. And it just. It made my ad pop up ads hysterical for a while because Amazon lost track of exactly who it is that I am and didn’t know what to show me for a while.

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah. So, I mean, that kind of stuff happens now, you know, to directly answer your question. I’m sure that you put a lot, a lot of love and care into the emails that you send out.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. There’s no, there’s no shame and there’s no harm in, you know, writing like you talk.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. And I learned, I had to learn to do that. That, that was a curve,

Jeff Mendelson: right? So that’s a curve, right? And then, you know, so first of all, you know, like you should be batching your content, right? You shouldn’t be writing your emails.

Jeff Mendelson: Let’s just take newsletters. Newsletters is just an email blast out to your thousand clients, whatever it is. Right. Right. So when you do something like that, it’s like, okay, you know, you’re, you know, you have the personalization high and squiggly quotes, first name, you know, things like that. And, and you just go in and put in the content that you created.

Jeff Mendelson: What happened when you start taking that one step further, the automation happens when you can set up different types of triggers and events. After what somebody did with that, right? So you can say, Hey guys, I got a question for you. You know, are you using do you prefer Facebook reviews or Google reviews?

Jeff Mendelson: Right. And you can have two buttons there, right? So on high level, it’s really easy. Now you’ve got triggered links,

Erin Marcus: right?

Jeff Mendelson: So somebody who selects Google, right. We’ll be recorded. You’ll have an automation there that will tag them as they selected Google links. You can also have you know, automations where you send someone an email, they didn’t open it.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. So resend it again, you know, Hey, did you see this? You know, things like that. These are all things we should be doing anyways. You should be following up and you shouldn’t be afraid of like, Oh my God, this robot’s doing it you know, doing it against my will. I mean, obviously you need to, you need to think this through.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. You should have a whiteboard map it out or a good sheet of paper, you know, whatever it is. And also you don’t really need to have all these crazy if then statements going on, right. It should just be linear. It should just be that if somebody clicks on this, then go, you know, tag them as that, move them to this column, read another another, another opportunity for them and just.

Jeff Mendelson: And then send them another email three days later, right? It should just be like that. Just something linear. Don’t go off. Don’t go wide, right? Cause wide means that you have this trigger, that trigger, this story, that story, and they all funnel into the same thing. And then they disperse again. Don’t do that.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. Have a specific trigger for, you know, a specific case. Right. And then, and then create another automation that handles the second case, the second case, meaning, you know, the Facebook button.

Erin Marcus: And as I’m listening to you talk, I think one of the challenges that people have in doing this is the part that I work with them on.

Erin Marcus: And I say, and I, and I say this because I have this conversation so many times, they don’t know who they’re trying to reach. I did.

Jeff Mendelson: Well, then you have an identity problem.

Erin Marcus: Right. And I did a live show a couple weeks ago, months ago, I don’t know. And it, the way it came out of my mouth, it was like, yeah, that’s the problem.

Erin Marcus: Have you ever noticed that you’ve never talked to a highly, highly successful business owner who doesn’t have an ideal client avatar?

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah, that happens. I, it happens not often, but

Erin Marcus: right. Like that’s how you get successful is knowing who you’re trying to talk to. And I think one of the things that stops people from being effective at the type of thing you’re talking about is they’re not real sure they don’t know enough about their clients to do what you’re talking about

Jeff Mendelson: or the flip side of that is that they think they know so much about their client that they couldn’t possibly automate it.

Jeff Mendelson: And then it’s like okay. Yeah. So No. So I love that one. I love that one when it comes out. And I’ll tell you why, because then I asked them like, okay, you know, like, what does your admin do for you? The one that’s physically typing out these emails feel like, well, they’re responding to every DM. They’re responding to every email that comes in.

Jeff Mendelson: All right. So would you say that, that, that this one person types out the same five or 10 things every day? Yeah. Like, yeah, of course. And I’m like, okay, well, why couldn’t some of that be automated either as a snippet, either as a you know, as a full blown, you know automated reply, why are you paying that person?

Jeff Mendelson: I don’t care how cheap they are, right. You know, get someone for 4, get someone for 14, get someone for 24. That’s that’s not the point, right? You want them to work efficiently. Yeah. Don’t get me started on the on the virtual assistant route, because that’s, That’s another rabbit hole unto itself.

Erin Marcus: Right.

Erin Marcus: Well, my whole, the way that I sum up that problem is people make the mistake of hiring what I call task rabbits instead of hiring for horsepower. And you’re just right. You’re replacing doing the work with managing the work. And I only want people in my business who are driving the, you know, everybody’s driving, I, you know, pushing forward together.

Erin Marcus: I don’t need. Somebody don’t need a

Jeff Mendelson: robot.

Erin Marcus: I don’t need a robot. And I, I am the worst babysitter of adults known to man. So I just won’t do it. Like I won’t do it. So people hire because they’re worried about spending and end up with this horrible expense when it could have been an amazing investment.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. You know, that’s why one of the things that, you know, someone told me this a couple of years ago and I’m really sticking to it. Don’t hire a virtual assistant, hire a virtual specialist. Right. Find someone who knows social media so much better than I do that it was

Erin Marcus: right,

Jeff Mendelson: you know, or someone that knows writing so much better than I do, please do that.

Jeff Mendelson: Someone who knows audio editing so much better. I can do all these things on my own. I have an MBA, right? I think I’m, I think I’m a little bit educated here. I can do it, but is that the best use of my time

Erin Marcus: or I say don’t spend a lot of time to do a bad job. It’s something that someone else can spend a short amount of time doing a great job at.

Jeff Mendelson: Oh my God, that’s so true because you know what happens is that I will spend four hours obsessing over trying to get the audio right when I’m editing a podcast, things like that. And then I just go in and I really got clopped in the head with this because once I gave up. All of that audio editing, I was four or five hours into the project.

Jeff Mendelson: Finally, I went to Fiverr and I found this, found this sound engineer guy in England who was unemployed at the time. And he was just like, yeah, I’ll set it up for you. 50 bucks. And the thing is, is that then I asked him a very critical question. I’m like, well, what tools do you use to do that? Right. So he lists it off.

Jeff Mendelson: He’s like, well, I got logic pro pro and I got one, two, three, four, five plugins, and that’s how I did it. So then I went back and researched all those plugins, those plugins would have cost me a thousand dollars to get on my own, right? Right. And he only charged me 50 to edit the, to edit the. And

Erin Marcus: I, right, and I will tell you, like, there’s certain things where it doesn’t matter as much, but I will tell you, when I watch people DIY things that matter, because they think they’re good enough at it, and then you put their thing next to someone who’s actually good at it, you can tell.

Erin Marcus: It’s, you can tell.

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah, it’ll either, it’ll either get over engineered or it’ll get This isn’t good enough. Yeah. So there’s, there’s several different ways that, you know, to do it. Right. I, you know, I agree. If you have superhero syndrome, go for it, you know, like, yeah. Knock yourself out. Cause like I can figure out just about anything, right.

Jeff Mendelson: Is that the best use of my time? Probably not.

Erin Marcus: You know, most of my listeners, most of my clients, they’re, they’ve got the newsletter. Like they’ve, they’re doing some things. What are, I’d love to hear your opinion on what are some less obvious or less commonly, commonly understood opportunities for automation and marketing? Like, what are you seeing?

Erin Marcus: That’s actually kind of interesting.

Jeff Mendelson: You know, first of all text messaging. Right. So, so being, so emails get, I don’t know, you, you know, 7% open and reply rate, you know, 15, 20, if you’re, if you’re amazing at it. Did you know that text messages get a 97 percent open rate?

Erin Marcus: You know what you’re, you’re probably, yeah, I’m thinking about who texts me from a business perspective versus, but you open

Jeff Mendelson: them all. Yeah.

Erin Marcus: I might not click on the thing, but I definitely see them.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. So that is now you need to have a good list for that, right? You know, you’re not just going to go buy a bunch of cell phone numbers.

Jeff Mendelson: Like that’ll get you, that’ll get you banned. But if you’re already in the practice of collecting this information, right. Right. And so how do some companies use this? Well I happen to live very close to a to an outlet mall. I got on the polo list. Right. And, you know, they send me just enough to keep it to keep it interesting.

Jeff Mendelson: There’s a restaurant that I like that, you know, every once every two weeks they’ll send some kind of special, Hey, come on back. You know, things like that. It’s a, it’s a short and sweet way to keep in touch with people. Right now, if they were to be sending me three, four times a week, you’d cancel it. Right.

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah. But then that’s easy. You just type stop and that’s it. Right. So You have this information, you have this you know, you have an idea of what it is that you want to say, you just, you just have to think about, you know, whether it’s appropriate to reach out for them or not. You know, how would this work for like a kitchen, kitchen installer, right?

Jeff Mendelson: Kitchen installer. Well, first of all, they’re probably working on a kitchen when you call them. Right. So you can, you can set up high level to do what’s called miss call text back. Right. So that if somebody calls in the number and you don’t answer. Right. Then automatically it sends them a text back that says, Hey, I’m kind of busy.

Jeff Mendelson: You know, can you press one to set up an appointment or press two to schedule something?

Erin Marcus: I think that is absolutely huge because it removes, you know, we all tell ourselves stories that have, you know, completely not based on any fact except our own opinion. And if someone doesn’t answer the phone or if someone’s busy or if someone doesn’t get back to us right away, and especially in the home services business.

Erin Marcus: Any technician business to stop what you’re doing in order to answer the phone, you just become massively inefficient. Right? But to do that one step further instead of just leaving a voicemail, but have that text because 90 percent of people now are calling you from a cell phone, not a home, not a landline.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. Exactly. And you know, what’s cool is that first of all, you can almost be rest assured that it is in fact a cell phone. So you can text them back. You, you’re collecting more information, like when they, like when they reply and interact with you. Right. And also it just creates a much better, much better service delivery.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. And now all of this stuff you could manually do, like if you’re hammering away, installing, you know, you could just, you know, cut and paste something into your phone, you know, Hey, I’m busy. I’ll call you back later. You know, but then, you know, there’s some serious FOMO going on, right. Because, you know, you got five calls stacked up.

Jeff Mendelson: Now you’re going to call them back at 7 PM. Listen, buddy, it’s now, you know, three in the afternoon and I look for kitchen installers and I picked the first four people off of that list. So the first one I’m going to talk to is, is, is going to have pole position for getting my business. It’s as simple as that.

Erin Marcus: So in addition to not doing it, we’re going to call that the obvious error. But in addition to the error people make of not embracing automation, what’s a pitfall to avoid? Like if you were going to lessen someone’s learning curve right now, what is a pitfall for them to avoid?

Jeff Mendelson: First I would just say overthinking it, right?

Jeff Mendelson: You know, don’t overthink this. What is a missed call text back? I missed a call. I mean, your initial message should just be, Hey, sorry. I missed your call. Can I call you back? Right now, if you want to get into automating with AI, a proper conversation that you know, someone can ask, what are your hours?

Jeff Mendelson: And it’ll reply back. Okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s a rabbit hole, right? But really what you, what you want to take here are baby steps and build it out after that. Right. You just want to, you know, you just want something to happen to make a little efficiency in your business. Right. And you, you, you will probably think like, well, it only takes me 30 seconds to reply to that.

Jeff Mendelson: You know, how many, you know, but how long did it take you to get back into yours? Right.

Erin Marcus: It’s that context switching problem, right? When we try to do two things at once, we lose 20 percent of our capacity to do anything. And now you’re taking the 80 percent left, dividing among two things. And you realize you’re not doing well at any of it.

Erin Marcus: That’s how a lot of mistakes are made. And,

Jeff Mendelson: you know, and really, and really, who are we talking about here? We’re talking about solopreneurs. We’re talking about superhumans anyways. Right. You know, people that can, you know, we can do everything right. We can, you know, we can make it happen. We’re not even talking about, you know, 25 person business, 50 person business, you know, things like that, you know, we’re really talking about individuals here and how they can make a difference in their, you know, in their lives.

Jeff Mendelson: And how do you scale, right? How do you replicate, like, why, why can I go to a Best Buy in Fort Lauderdale and a Best Buy in Denver and see the exact same products in the exact same. The exact same service delivery. It’s because someone scaled it.

Erin Marcus: And, and that predictability is a big deal. Being able to predict the experience someone’s going to have, but also for the individual business owner, this is about how do you leverage your resources?

Erin Marcus: And that’s like the number one reason I see that people can’t scale is they’re so busy doing all the things. And so they can’t get to the, they have to move from doer to owner, which is all about thinking, not doing figuring. So,

Jeff Mendelson: so there is a recovery group for people like that, right? You know let’s just be honest.

Jeff Mendelson: You know, we can make fun of these people all day long, right. But But the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, like once you see the light, like once you automate that one thing.

Erin Marcus: Oh yeah.

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah. You know, that is like, like, wait a second. Now that just happens automatically. I don’t need to think about that anymore.

Erin Marcus: I mean, here’s, I’ll give you a real life example that I’m in the middle of creating that I’m very excited about getting out of my own way. Over automate, you know, you got to get out of your own way on a few things. Number 1, that it can be automated and still be very personal and very highly effective and very highly curated.

Erin Marcus: And also a lot of us do a better job when we’re not there to stop ourselves.

Jeff Mendelson: Imagine

Erin Marcus: that. You know, like, if I, I, the example I use for that is always when, when the new website went out with all the, with all my much more bold colors and, and harsh, more direct language, thank God I was too busy to notice someone pressed the publish sign because I was very busy being worried about it and someone else published it and, and the response was fantastic.

Erin Marcus: I would have, you know, hemmed and hawed for days. So right now think of the difference, you know, LinkedIn is a perfect example with sales navigator and then all the tools you can attach to that. Do you want to spend four hours? Cyphering through and connecting. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I can’t do anything for four hours except sleep, right?

Erin Marcus: And, or do you want to create a system that can do all this for you, and then that way the only people that Who you interact one on one with are the people who’ve showed interest in doing so.

Jeff Mendelson: You know, that’s really the, that’s really the secret sauce, right? Is getting people to raise their hand and identify themselves as, yes, I need help.

Erin Marcus: And it’s not about, here’s the other piece. It’s not about pitch, pitch, pitch. I am not advocating in any way that you connect with somebody and then DM them your sales page. Like that is not a great way to do this, but there are really great ways to do this.

Jeff Mendelson: There are some great automations out there if you know who you’re talking to and what their motivations are.

Jeff Mendelson: Mm-Hmm. , it makes the conversation so much easier. And lemme tell you, I, you know, it took me a while to really grasp that, right? Because as a digital marketing agency, you know, I joke, I have, I have 50 ways to take your money, right? There are 50 things that I can do to, you know, to, you know, to increase that retainer.

Jeff Mendelson: And what I started do, you know, I started playing with a, you know, with a, with a group of entrepreneurs that are real estate photographers, right. And what did I like about them? First of all, is that, you know, these are people who are mostly working solo. Maybe they’ll have like a, like an admin, but like really that’s about it.

Jeff Mendelson: There are virtually no national players. Not even regional players, you know, in the space and their target market real estate agents. Right. They are the easiest contacts to get. Oh yeah. They’re the easiest.

Erin Marcus: It’s very easy to find them. .

Jeff Mendelson: Very easy to find them. Right. Very easy. And they, and they’re, they’re not hiding.

Erin Marcus: They’re not hiding. They’re not hiding.

Jeff Mendelson: And they want those phone calls. Right. They may not want your message, but they want those phone calls. Right. So they will pick up, they will li, they will listen to you. And if you have an offer that makes sense to them, they will call you back. Right. And if you can take, you know, like that, you know, synthesize that down to listen, I’m just going to get you leads for your real estate photography business.

Jeff Mendelson: That’s it. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re the one that has to deliver. You’re the one that has to you know, have the great portfolio. You’re the one that has to, you know, figure out what extras to throw in, in order to close the business. Right. But do you really have time to go and email every.

Jeff Mendelson: Every real estate agent with you know, with your offer and follow up with them. Most do not. Right.

Erin Marcus: And I did. I went through that as a speaker. And years ago when I was, because real estate agents, that’s in my background, so it was one of the groups that I was speaking to a lot. And there are 200 chapters of, at least, of the Women’s Council of Realtors in the United States.

Erin Marcus: And I’ve spoken at probably 25 to 30 percent of them, which is a lot. And every year I would have to get on the, you know, watch a movie and get on the computer and look up who was the new vice president coming in and how do you get, you know, get their information. And now, you know, we would reach out to talk about speakers, they would reply, we’d have calendar, we’d have tasks in our calendar to remind us when to send the next one.

Erin Marcus: And it’s amazing how much easier it is now. Using AI to gather the information and that way we’re only having, we’re only spending our time. With the people who are responding.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. So you know something? Let’s go to a convention. What do I do now? I create a new home screen on my phone that has a big QR code.

Jeff Mendelson: Really huge. You want my contact information? You want to keep in touch here? You know, scan this QR code on their phone. Right? It’ll bring them to a page where, you know, just tell them here’s a blue button, click download my contact file. Or fill out this form to give me yours. Right. And then I know exactly where they came from.

Jeff Mendelson: I know exactly what time I know exactly how to follow up with them. Like if I’m at a podcast convention, like my,

Jeff Mendelson: I’m not, I’m sitting here going out.

Erin Marcus: I’m not either, but yeah. Well, what I love about what you’re saying though, is the information you’re gathering, because the way I see people do that wrong is with a LinkedIn code. Because I have, well, I have 5, 000 contacts in LinkedIn though. So if you show me a QR code that just sends me to your LinkedIn page and I click connect with you, do you think there is any, you’re gone.

Erin Marcus: You’re in a list of 5, 000 people. I don’t, I’m not going to remember that. And you’re not going to remember it either. So all we’ve done is increased a vanity metric. Of how many people do you know,

Jeff Mendelson: you know, there’s so there are so many cool ways to do it. Right. So instead of sending them basically what’s basically what you’re talking about is sending them off site, sending them off message, right?

Jeff Mendelson: Cause the second you send them to Facebook, to YouTube, to you know, to LinkedIn, you didn’t capture anything. Right. You didn’t capture any love there. Now, if you would have presented a form, you know, that says, Hey, put in your name, email, phone number, and how we met. That’ll go into a special table right in your right in your CRM.

Jeff Mendelson: When you come home, you will see, you’ll see the 35 people that you showed your phone to, and you’re able to then have a great conversation. I mean, how did people do this five years ago? Right. Take a selfie together. Remember that, right. Or, or, you know, just try to, you know, fast and furious, you know, type it into your Crackberry, they

Erin Marcus: have these services while you put it in the card and the card uploads it to your CRM.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. But again, if you’re just doing nothing more, you know, when you talk about automation, not done well, if you’re doing nothing more than adding a name to the bottom of a list of names with no context and no way to remind. You’re not. Really? You’re, you’re falling short of your opportunity.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. How are you going to follow up with them?

Jeff Mendelson: How are you going to remember to do it? I know I get frazzled at these at these conventions. You meet so many people, you know, you’re on such a high, you think that oh yeah, I got all this great information. Let me, you know, I can’t wait to implement it. And then boom, you get home and it’s like, who the hell was that person?

Erin Marcus: Right. And you’re exhausted, right? And, and you’ve got four days of regular work waiting for you.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. Exactly. You know, you go through these, you go through these business cards and, you know, like you try to be diligent about writing on the back who they were, but, you know, not everyone you did that and, you know, then you got to go, that’s a, that’s a lot of work.

Jeff Mendelson: That’s a lot of work to go back in and reprocess all that. So yeah, you don’t start small, you know, and start with something that you can, you know, that you can actually record the metric of like, you know, how many, how many people did I capture just walking around this convention?

Erin Marcus: I did that for event. I was having online events.

Erin Marcus: And when I was at speaking, when I was out speaking, I would, You know, there’d be like 150 people in the room and I would just say, look, if you want to come to the event, you could go here or I’m around, come scan my QR code. And I would have that QR code on my phone. And literally as I’m talking to one person, there’d be people, I would just hold my phone out.

Erin Marcus: And so I’m still able to have a conversation and it’s not really interrupting anything. And other people were just coming and scanning. And it was amazing how well that worked.

Jeff Mendelson: I was very proud of it. Yeah. And you know something, if you’re manning a booth, right, make sure that QR code is on the desk or is on the thing, you know, I’ve been to a chocolate shop now that just had, you know, scan here to write us a Google review, right.

Jeff Mendelson: At the cash register. Right. So make it easy,

Erin Marcus: right. That’s my big thing. Make it easy to be with you to make it easy to do work with you. Make it easy to. The easier you make it for other people, the more likely they are to engage in anything.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. And think about what you can do with this, right? Is that if I bring it, if they scan a code and you know, not, everyone’s going to rate you five stars.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. Let’s be honest. Right. Some people are going to be, Oh, they don’t do that.

Erin Marcus: Right. Some people just don’t do that. Right.

Jeff Mendelson: So, you know, some of the things that I’m implementing for my clients is you know, how many stars would you like? I ask on my webpage that I control not on Google or Facebook. I don’t send them there.

Jeff Mendelson: And if they, if they, if they tap on five stars, then it’s, then it gives them a link saying, Hey, please post this on Google. If they tapped four, three, two, or one stars. It doesn’t even show that like, then it shows a form, tell us how we can do better.

Erin Marcus: Right. I mean, how amazing is that?

Jeff Mendelson: So simple. So simple.

Jeff Mendelson: And you know something people are gonna, you know, most people will tell you, you know, like, you know, like where you went wrong. I’ll, I’ll tell you what happened this weekend. I was in Denver. The hotel you know, it was a night, it was a nice ish hotel. It was a courtyard by Marriott, right? You know, and, and, you know, that’s kind of a big deal, kind of a big deal.

Jeff Mendelson: Like, it’s like 10 30 at night, you know, the thing is, so, you know, of course we tried to work with management. They gave us another room, you know, the whole nine yards, two days later, guess what? Somebody broke into my car. It didn’t break in. I didn’t exactly lock it. So they went into my car, I should say.

Jeff Mendelson: And they took my wife’s earmuffs and her jacket. Right. And it’s like, all right, so now, you know, we go back to the hotel. It’s like, guys, do you even have security here? Like it was a nice ish, nice ish hotel. It wasn’t a motel six in the somewhere rule, whatever. Right. And you know, of course, you know, you can make a big deal about it.

Jeff Mendelson: Oh, these guys suck. Or, you know, it can be, first of all, it’s a teaching moment for the hotel. And it’s, you know, it’s an opportunity for them to make things right. Right. They ended up refunding us all of our points back. Plus. Right. And so that helped, you know, they ended up, you know, we got free breakfast and things like that.

Jeff Mendelson: You know, it wasn’t exactly trying to get, you know, scams, not

Erin Marcus: about most people. Contrary to what Tic Tac would have you believe. Most people don’t lose their minds when something’s wrong there. So giving people that opportunity to tell you how you could do better does not necessarily open the door to an assault.

Erin Marcus: It’s most of the time, it’s actually good information.

Jeff Mendelson: So, and some of the

Erin Marcus: time is stuff that you can’t do anything about and you don’t worry about it. Some people are just unhappy and that’s it.

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. So, you know, I deal with that also with some clients, you know, they got just this week they got some they got some one star reviews.

Jeff Mendelson: One was from a completely unhinged former employee, right? And another one just. That is where they usually come

Erin Marcus: from.

Jeff Mendelson: Yeah. And you know what? And you know, the way I explain it is this, you know, like you have, you know, you have a clinic out somewhere, right. And it’s got, it’s got 80 reviews. You have a 4. 6, a 4.

Jeff Mendelson: 8, 4. 9 thing. And then someone comes around and says, no, this clinic sucks. Do you really think people are going to look at that? Yeah. No, one’s going to believe them. So it’s like, you know, just keep on, just, just keep on moving forward. Like you still need these, right. Because you’re competing with everyone else who’s trying to.

Jeff Mendelson: who’s trying to get these reviews. Right. But think about it. How are you going to automate it? Like, are you going to ask everyone before they leave, please review, please review, please review. Well, what if they sign up for your loyalty program? Then you can, then you can hound them afterwards. So there are so many different ways to do it and it’s, and it’s not even, it’s not even intrusive.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. This isn’t something I think

Erin Marcus: that’s a big piece. I think, you know, here in the Midwest where we’re all very worried about not being nice to each other. One of the things people worry about is that this is going to feel intrusive. And I don’t, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to, I tell people all the time, you’re worried about being a sales, a pushy salesperson.

Erin Marcus: Well then just don’t be a pushy salesperson. That’s real easy. It’s the same thing. You’re worried about this being intrusive. Well then don’t be intrusive. They’re problem solved. Right? Like do it the right way. This is, you’re worried about something that’s not going to happen because you’re not going to do it.

Erin Marcus: And I see people let them let that stuff. You

Jeff Mendelson: know, so, so going back to that outlet store analogy, right? So I still received the text messages from Polo. Basically, because, well, I like their clothes and every text message, you’re always giving me 20 to 40%. Right. They’re

Erin Marcus: giving you coupons.

Jeff Mendelson: They’re giving me coupons.

Jeff Mendelson: So that’s good.

Erin Marcus: Right. Right.

Jeff Mendelson: And you know, I signed up for the same thing with Nautica, Nautica is another brand, but Oh my God, four times a week, you know, and it was just like, Hey, come back and buy something. How

Erin Marcus: many shirts do you think I need in a month?

Jeff Mendelson: Exactly. So, so that one, I stopped. I stopped.

Jeff Mendelson: Right. The, you know, the pizza place that we like once every two weeks on and off, you know, things like that. Yeah, it’s not intrusive. Yeah. Right. And you know, and they’re, and they’re just building, you know, and if I move out of the country and I don’t want their text messages anymore, you just

Erin Marcus: stop. Well, and here’s the thing.

Erin Marcus: When you do what you do, you’re going to get data in the form of the response. Are people staying? Are they canceling? Use that information to do a better job. It’s really just that simple.

Jeff Mendelson: It really is just that simple because you know, if you’re sending out, you know, you can then measure this, you know, send out a 15 percent coupon for that pizza place.

Jeff Mendelson: But only to the people that are on your loyalty program and then count how many people came in. You said in the past week, hello, it’s like, that’s why you’re paying for this. Exactly.

Erin Marcus: So if, if people want to learn more about how you can help them, if they want to connect with you and continue this conversation, because we can keep talking about this, but at some point we have to stop.

Erin Marcus: I saw your dog get up and walk around. She gave up on you, but you never know. What is the best way for them to reach out and get ahold of you?

Jeff Mendelson: Sure. It’s my name, Jeff at Jeff Mendelsohn. com. The website is Jeff Mendelsohn. com M E N D E L S O N. And really that’s an overview of everything that I do.

Jeff Mendelson: You know, it’s got you know, it’s got some information about the podcast, about setting up email campaigns. lead generation, things like that. And also a podcast that I managed for a while.

Erin Marcus: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for spending time with me and going into detail about some ideas on what else is possible out there. So I’m excited to do some myself and, and make my life easier, right? That’s what the point is. So thank you for your time and all of your insight.

Jeff Mendelson: Thank you for having me.

Jeff Mendelson: It’s been a lot of fun.