Chlo?'s 3 Things: Irony & CRM / AI & Team / Meta Ads

Hello,

Hope you've had a great week.

First off HUGE thanks to the team at Dark Matter Commerce for including me AGAIN this year in their "Top 25 eCommerce Voices" list.

Would be fair to say the competition to make the grade has REALLY gone up this year (see the full list here).

I also need to give some thanks to Pete Robertshaw for making me giggle and feeding my ego far more than is good for any of us with this comment:

OK let's get on with the newsletter... here’s what I’ve been thinking about this week:

• Thing 1: Irony & CRM ?? My ongoing sales failures
• Thing 2: AI & Team ???? how do you make it work?
• Thing 3: Meta Ads ?? how do you make them work?

Here we go:

Thing 1: Irony & CRM ?? My ongoing sales failures

Regular readers will know that I'm spending Q1 building business systems to create a great platform for future success.

This week my attention turned to our CRM and sales activity.

Let's get the Irony out of the way

It would be fair to say I did not make as much progress as I wanted.

The irony in that?

The distraction of the week was... sales ??

A lovely lovely distraction, it's always exciting putting together promotional packages for SaaS brands and agencies who want to get in front of our audiences. BUT still frustrating when you're supposed to be building the systems to make it easier to do just that.

Ah well!

My Ongoing Sales Failures

Sales has always been the worst-performing area of my businesses.

2007 was when I first started to realise this, so "being bad at sales" may now actually have become a habit...

Since 2007 I've been working out ways to get by on the sales front, and more recently building those up into systems and layers of activity that work for us.

This year's development to make up for my lack of natural ability... is funnel optimisation.

At the heart of which is... a workable database and automated contact system.

The CRM data-where? conundrum

I started the week with a clear CRM Step 1 plan...

?? Collect data with Airtable

?? Move it to Swipe One with Zapier

?? Move the automated emails from Airtable to my inbox (using Swipe One)

?? Add automated follow up emails (hallelujah! the dream!!!)

?? Migrate the old data from my dodgy spreadsheet into Swipe One

I got half way through the Zapier bit... and with the further testing that enabled... realised what I was planning wasn't possible, and also wouldn't have been fit for purpose anyway.

More irony?

Well yes! Hello Irony!

Since Tuesday all my subconscious brain, and half my conscious brain has been rebuilding, tearing down, and rebuilding email flows, data structures, fields, triggers, what's manual vs automated and on and on and on.

Getting in quite a pickle.

The irony... I've been interviewing the best in the business at this stuff this month - we've got an interview with Jim Herbert from Patchworks going live on eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast on Monday, and this week I interviewed Nicky Lomax about CRM for a future Keep Optimising Marketing Podcast episode.

So now I'm taking a step back from "CRM Step 1 Plan A", as clearly I need to do a lot more testing and research before building further.

My "Fix CRM in Week 5" plan has now gone out the window.

But for all the right reasons.

?? Got any CRM set up tips? I'm all ears!

Thing 2: AI & Team ???? how do you make it work?

Inspirations for this thought:

1. This post by Amanda (Elam) Cole - see the post if there's anyone running a marketing team in SaaS or eCommerce who isn't now following Amanda for her next update... what are you doing?!
2. The Meta Ads episode we put live with Janis Thomas recently (hear it here) all about building an in-house creative team
3. Reflecting on how we're starting to use AI in my own business for copy and for videos

You have to surrender control

My go to "new tools / systems" process is:

• Chloe tests it
• Chloe builds it
• Chloe trains the team on it
• Success follows

That's a very silly way to embrace AI tools.

There are two many options in the implementation.

When you're setting up a Google Ad Campaign that box should either be ticked, or not ticked.

If you're building a weekly newsletter the graphic that goes in space A is always the same sort of graphic.

When working with AI tools nothing is copy and paste if you want to get the most out of it. It's all about prompt tweaking, and sharing the success tweak ideas with the rest of team so everyone improves together.

A better AI exploration & optimisation process

As the 'manager' I:

• Provide the budget
• Provide guidance on what we need the output to be
• Provide a forum for the team to share what they're learning
• Help everyone to keep progressing along this journey - remove tools, check they're happy etc etc

In my case my team are freelancers so I'm also deciding which tools we're going to test - but then handing them over to the team to test.

If I had a fully employed team I'd be getting them to find the tools they believe we need.

Where have we got to?

At the moment, we're mainly on copy - using a tool called "Team GPT" to enable easier sharing of templates around the team.

And on Video snippets - we've done SO MUCH testing of these tools in the last few months. We're now on extended tests of 4 different tools... and I don't know how to use any of them properly ?? which I see as a massive success.

During these extended test periods, my focus is switching from "what tech" to "how do I best help the team to get the most out of these tools".

Watch this space!

?? How are you enabling your team to embrace AI?

Thing 3: Meta Ads ?? how do you make them work?

This one relates to our current series of Meta Ads updates on Keep Optimising Marketing Podcast AND the post I put live yesterday summarising where I think we now are in the Meta Ads evolution - read post ??

I'm actually going to make you click and read the post! Because I think you need to go to the source for this one - and a lot of comments there are must-read written by those with far more connection to the world of Meta Ads and how it's evolving than I have.

That's it for this week,

I'd love to engage with your comments, so please do add your thoughts below.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Who am I and what do I do?

I've been in eCommerce for 20 years, worked brand side, ran a marketing agency for 10 years, and now I run a media business.

We create content to help brands make better decisions on their path to success, and sell advertising and sponsorship to SaaS and agencies looking to get in front of our audience.

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