💸 Cash Flow On Autopilot: Build Your Automated Sales Machine 🔄
Create an automated sales machine with Brand Builder AI and see cash flow on autopilot. Success should be efficient, not overwhelming. For today’s episode, Shannon Lavenia, the founder and CEO of Brand Builder AI, shares how to simplify your business and create an automated sales system for steady cash flow. Discover the pitfalls of using too many tools and the impact it can have on your business. She discusses her personal experiences dealing with the overwhelming amount of technology and shares the key moment that inspired her to develop the automated sales machine. Shannon also walks us through the core features of Brand Builder AI. Discover the magic of this all-in-one solution that simplifies and revolutionizes lead generation, sales conversion, and customer satisfaction. Tune in now!
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💸 Cash Flow On Autopilot: Build Your Automated Sales Machine 🔄
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another power-packed training session. I am here with the lovely Shannon Lavenia. She is the CEO of BrandBuilderAi.com and the creator of the CEO Freedom Accelerator Coaching program. Her passion is helping business owners automate and accelerate their sales for freedom creating income. That's what we're all here for.
She's a contributing writer to Entrepreneur.com, co-author of Becoming an Unstoppable Woman in Finance, and has been featured in numerous industry magazines. We could not do this without Shannon. Welcome, Shannon. I'm so excited to dig in and geek out about building an automated sales machine.
I'm so excited to be here too. Thank you so much for including me in the summit. It is my favorite summit to be a part of and there is so much value for everybody here.
It's like we bring the best of the best and I love all the collaboration on the front end, on the back end, everyone is making friends, and we're connecting in the Facebook group, and it's awesome. Most of the audience probably knows you because if you know me, you know Shannon. In case there is someone who hasn't met you yet and they're meeting you for the first time, can you tell us a little bit about your story? How is it that you became the queen of automating correctly and a regular contributor for Entrepreneur.com? Can we dig into that? What is going on with this?
Long story short. I started my career as a science high school teacher. I was a biology teacher. I dig the systems and how things worked, but I did not dig the $26,000 a year salary and all the restrictions. We started our business way back twenty years ago selling other people's personal development products and conferences and we did so well. We crossed the million-dollar mark in our first sixteen months in business. Million dollars in personal profit, not sales. We had substantially more sales.
My husband and I have done over $100,000 in online sales, either in our own programs or selling for other big-ticket coaches. I am all about having lots and lots of time to go live life. Nowadays in 2022, there are so many tools and methods that you can Implement to automate a lot of the steps that we used to have to take on our own like picking up a phone and dialing a number. We used to have to do that. We used to go and meet with people face to face in coffee shops and stuff.
After COVID-19, the world adopted what we've been teaching for a long time anyway, which is you can operate your business pretty much virtually from anywhere. If you're smartly using automation and you're putting in systems, then you can create so much time freedom, and income for yourself that it does feel like a dream come true. We had this interview scheduled a couple of days ago, but I was in Mexico all week, and the internet was a little sketchy.
We could do the interview while I was there, but we landed on the ground here last night and that's the lifestyle that you can create for yourself. One other thing that I'll add to that is I got serious about automation and teaching other people how to automate when I went through breast cancer. In 2019, I was diagnosed, out of the blue, with stage-three breast cancer. At that moment, I had to get very serious about making my business work without me.
Not like doom and gloom, but I did a lot of treatments. There was a lot of time off and I got so good at making my business work without me that I decided I was going to coach others and teach others how to do it too because quite frankly, this hustle culture has people working way too hard for way too little. Putting in another hour in your business is not the solution. It is not because another hour of doing the wrong things is not going to make it go right.
This hustle culture has people working way too hard for way too little and putting in another hour in your business is not the solution.
I remember when I first started to take my business seriously, I was like, “I'm going to grow and scale this thing.” I started working with my first coach. The first thing she did was look at everything I was doing and she's like, “You need to do way less.”
That's right, “Why are you doing all these things?” It's so true.
I think people are realizing and people know deep down that I need to automate more. There are systems out there for this stuff. I should clean this up but I think tons of people are confused about how they even start that process. Where do I even start? I cannot tell you how often I talk to people. They're like, “I'm trying to put automation in place,” and they're talking about 22 systems that are duct-taped together with Zapie or Zaps connecting everything. They're spending an arm and a leg and they're in tech hell and they're over it.
That's right and it's so confusing. Nowadays it's even harder for the newer entrepreneur because their Facebook feeds, their Instagram, everything is loaded with ads of the next hot tool or you get on training with a coach and they talk about using this system for social media posting, and this system for their calendar, and this system for blah blah. Before you know it, you have a ton of subscriptions. For some people, their goal is to save money. They're like, “This is $37, this is $47, this is $19,” and before you know it, they have $500 a month of recurring subscriptions coming out of all these systems that they do not know how to operate.
If you do not have a pen and paper out, I want you to grab one right now. Grab the VIP workbook. I'm going to give you the keys to the automation kingdom right here and what your business is all about. This is what nobody tells you. No one told me when I first started and it made all the difference once I figured it out, but the core of your business is your database. That's it. What most people have with all these systems is scattered information all over the place about lots of different people, but it's not in one place where you can just move people through a pipeline. I want you to think about this. If you were building a house, there is a very specific process that you go through.
You find the land. You find an architect. The architect makes the plans. You find the general contractor. Then the contractor pours the foundation, then you put up the walls, the studs, the framing, and then you put the roof on to protect everything in the house that you're about to start putting in. They do not even put walls on before they put the roof on and there is a very systematic process. When people start their online business, they do not follow a process. They do not follow a strategy. We see this all the time.
They will start posting on social media and then they have a bunch of followers, but those followers are not walking through a process. They're not walking from, “New lead. Now, we give them something for free or freebies. Now, we make the contact.” They're not walking through a process. You have people on social media that are out there, they might be interested but you do not know because you're not taking them through a process.
You have some people on your email list in this system over here, but there is no data on them. There are no notes. There are no appointments. You might have tags because most systems have that but you do not know how to use the tags to take them through the system. One of the worst mistakes I’ve seen with people is they get on Instagram or TikTok and they get a Link Tree and that Link Tree has fifteen links to it. Now your prospect is like, “Too much going on. I do not even know what to click on here.” No process.
All they need is one link, one good working funnel that takes people through a sales pipeline that is strategic, that is working towards targets, that is automated so you're not they're looking at each person like, “I got to email this person. I should probably text message this person,” or “I should do this.” You're seeing money come in and you're like, “I was sleeping and there is money coming into my inbox.” That's creating time freedom.
Because you set up a system a process ahead of time, you know exactly where your lead flow is going. A lot of it is happening on automation. The point where you need to get involved, the system lets you know that now is the point for human interaction.
What we saw in our coaching program was this unbelievable pain that our coaching students were feeling because there was so much confusion over their process and where people were in the process. Sometimes people look at our testimonials and they're like, “How does that person make $15,000 two weeks starting in or something like that.” It's not that hard. It's that they have all the followers. They have people here and people there. They're not taking them through a sales pipeline and once we put that in place, it's easy to see cashflow. It's easy to have sales when you have a sales process in place.
I was talking to my clients about the same thing. Everyone knows you send traffic to the top of the funnel. That oops out at the bottom, but for most people, what happens in the middle, they have no idea. They are like, “I do not know that magic happens,” and then money comes out the bottom. No, magic does not happen. Systems, processes, and funnels happen.
Someone is like, “I should take out my credit card and send this chick some money.” Now. It doesn't work that way. As much as I would love it, it does not work that way. Occasionally, you'll get a sale where you're like, “Where does this even come from?” That is great but most of the time, you look at the sales and you can see the steps that you've taken that indoctrinate them into who you are, handle their objections, and speak to the different customer archetypes because there are different archetypes of customers.
People make decisions based in different ways. Some people are emotional. Some people are analytical. Some people need tons of bonuses. There are different archetypes for how you sell people but you can do that automatically through email, through SMS, through Messenger, and the cool thing is you do not need 95 systems to do it. You do not need a lot of different tools. In fact, if you have too many tools, I guarantee you, and I would bet money on this, you're hemorrhaging potential sales out of your business because you're not tracking people properly and they're not going through a flow.
Automated Sales Machine: If you have too many tools, you're hemorrhaging potential sales out of your business because you're not tracking people properly, and they're not going through a flow.
I see this all the time. I've lived through this pain before of starting to set up my own systems. How many of you guys out there are not super techy? I'm not techy. I’m old to know that I’m not. Suddenly, I had all these systems built up where I was trying to get this one to talk to this one, and how do I get that one to recognize that inside of this one, this thing happened because that has to trigger something inside of that one or that one. I was like, “Oh my God, I can't live this way.” I know you have found a wicked smart strategy for streamlining all this.
I love that you're bringing this topic to us. I know you call it the Automated Sales Machine. For the people who are watching this who either do not have any automation yet and they're like, “I do not ever want to duct tape things together. Please help me,” or for the people who are currently trying to get nineteen systems to talk to each other and they want to crawl under a table in the fetal position. Where do people start with ending that insanity and stepping forward with a smart system?
What we did was we launched our own system. We built a system based on what we know works. It's called Brand Builder AI. It's amazing. We use it in our own business and because we've had so much success with it in our own business, we launched it to all of our coaching clients and now out into the bigger realm of the coaching and direct selling world. Here's why we did that.
Because in our coaching business, we give, and I know you do this too Adrienne and all good coaches do this, we give people our tech stack. We give them our tech stack, which is our funnel pages, our automation, our emails, our tagging strategy, how we work our calendars, and how we work our sales pipelines. We give that to people. Initially, when we started our coaching program, we were telling them to use multiple different tools. It was much too complicated for people and it took too long to get to the money.
That is ultimately what we're focused on like speed to ROI. How do you get to the money the fastest, money is what creates time freedom along with automation. The more automated and simplified you can get the more time freedom you have. We launched one system that did it all. Here's in essence how it works. First of all, you need to have a funnel. A funnel is a couple of web pages that take people through, getting to know you, you're helping them solve an initial problem a pain point, and then it brings them into your offer. We always start with a low ticket offer something that's $17, $27, or $47. We do that on the back end of our free offer because then it sorts our buyers from people who are not as quick to take out their credit cards.
Right there, you're creating a hierarchy of effort. If your hierarchy is, what's going to take the most effort what's going to take the least effort? Talking to buyers is going to take less effort than if you're talking to non-buyers. That's a sales logic that you can apply to your business. Sometimes people do it in reverse and they put help on it and they'll go after the people they think need the most help when you're top buyers are the people who need the least help.
When someone is in buying mode, they’re in buying mode. Why not talk to those people and help them get with their looking to buy versus spending all your time on the freebie stickers and they're not ready yet?
You need a way of identifying those buyers from nonbuyers. You then put them into a sales pipeline. A sales pipeline kind of looks like a Trello board. It's stages that you're taking people through. In our business, we're looking to get people on the phone to book appointments so that we can deep dive into their business, give them an initial strategy, and then introduce our program.
We always leave people with the strategy whether they join our program or not. We give them a framework of what they should be doing and it's easy for us to identify things that they should not be doing and things they should be doing. We always leave them with that so that there is real value on the call, but you need that process. You need email automation that speaks to the buyers versus the non-buyers. Those are two very different conversations.
If you're not separating them out in the beginning, then you're having the wrong conversation with the wrong people. We make sure that that's there. We have an integrated calendar system so that on the contact record when you look at the contacts in your system, you can see every email they've opened, every link they've clicked on, and every conversation they've had. All of our messages, all of our text messages, all of the emails, all of our Facebook messages or Instagram DMS are all right there on the contact record, which is very different than other systems where you have to be like, “Who was that person I was chatting with on Instagram?” You're scrolling down trying to find the person.
Not only will it show you the web pages they looked at or the emails they opened, it will show you your Instagram conversation or something that happened on LinkedIn.
What we call this is the bulletproof sales method. This is a bulletproof sales method because when you're a salesperson you want to be armed with as much data as you can about that person when you’re talking to them. This is true in any business whether you're in direct selling or your coach or you're a plumber. You want to know as much about that person while you're on the phone with them as possible so you can truly offer them something that they're ready to buy that they need. They want and need it. They're excited about it and they're like, “Let's do that.”
All of it is in one kub. Even our social media poster is in one hub. It's in one place and it's all scalable. You can have a gazillion funnels. You can have fifteen funnels. You can sell products. Membership courses are in there. Automations are in there. The appointment setting is in there. Sales pipelines are in there. It's all in one hub. It's based on that core or the secret that I told you in the beginning, which is your database.
That database is the core of your business and if you think a little bit higher level of your business when you're thinking about businesses that are built to sell, the core valuation in a selling business is the size of your database and how much revenue each one of those names generates. They take your profit like your revenue. Let's say you made $1 million in a year and you had a million people on your list. Each one of those names is worth a dollar.
If you have 100 people on your list and you've made $1 million, each one of those names is worth a lot more. That's what you start to think with and that's a database. No matter what you offer, no matter what you decide to do in the future, you have that database to go with you, which is why you can start things and you can sell courses. We identified in our database something people want is an email writing course. We're putting that together and we'll launch that. We know that there are hundreds of people in our database ready to buy instantly. We were able to identify that because it's all in one place, all the data together.
Automated Sales Machine: No matter what you offer, no matter what you decide to do in the future, you have that database to go with you.
You're looking at all this data and you're saying, “We're seeing a lot of information about people needing help with emails. They do not know what to write. You know the minute you make a course. You can email them about it and be like, “I'm emailing you to tell you I can help you write your emails.” You know there is going to be a certain percentage who buy it immediately.
We know from the numbers that we saw, the number of people who downloaded our freebie, which is email prompts. We have about 2,000 people who recently downloaded that. We have messaged a whole bunch of them through our automation and we got the date back that they are struggling with writing the emails. We know as a guesstimate that will probably make about $20,000 to $30,000 off the initial launch of that email writing course. All those people will then come into appointments for us to critique their follow-up, which then will bring in multiple six figures into our coaching program.
This is amazing. You found yourself at a point in time where you were living in that tech hell where you had all these systems up that you put together. You said, “We do not see a solution out there so we're going to build one.” As a smart marketer and as a smart business owner, you know all the pieces that would need. You built them in there.
We put them in there and we even put in training. We put in courses. We have courses on how to launch our micro course. We have a bootcamp in there, five days to your irresistible offer launch. We have the training in there as well. The other thing that we saw was that people struggled with systems out there. I'm not going to name any names but one of the big ones has awful tech support like the worst. We used to pull our hair out over it because we would launch and things would break and we would be spending thousands of dollars on ads and we couldn't get anybody to help us.
We put seven-day live chat support from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM Pacific. There is always somebody there to help, to train, to give tips, to support our members to make sure that they're getting everything there. We have daily office hours for people who want higher-level tips. We made it so that the entrepreneur like a lot of these pain points these struggles these challenges that they're having of trying to sell online and automating because automating is using tech, but there are different gradients of tech. We went for the lowest gradients like, “Here's our entire stack if you want to launch a course. Here's our entire automation if you want to do book-to-call coaching funnels.” We've gave it to everybody.
As you shifted from using tons of tools to building this one smart tool. What kind of a shift did you see in your business? Did you have fewer hours of you and your support team putting in? Did you see a boost in revenue? What happened to you personally when you made this shift?
1) We started making a lot more sales on autopilot. 2) Our Facebook ads blew up like amazing conversions that we started to get because Facebook ad tracking is also in the system. We're able to monitor that in a very easy way without looking at the ads manager.
Let me pause there. Because of all the Facebook ad changes, the iOS updates, and all the things, tons of people struggling right now with getting good data out of their ads because like on the Facebook side, things are breaking down because of what happened with Apple and a whole thing. Because of how was that integrated, you guys are getting smart data minute by minute.
One of our pages, and this is probably the craziest thing, I would say I'm very well known for getting high conversions on opt-in pages but a high conversion typically is like 55% or 60% and you're like, “I'm a master of this.” We have a funnel right now that's getting 95% opt-in from Facebook ads. Our ROI on our Facebook ads is crazy high. Even my Facebook ads manager is like, “I've never seen anything like this.”We're getting a 5% click-through rate on our ads. It's so awesome how it's working and it's also because we have the analytics.
The speed of our pages is good. We're on the Google server system. Our speed is high. Everything works smoothly. The email deliverability in our system is over 99%. It's like 99.1% and 99.3% deliverability on emails. We put a lot into making sure that everybody had what they needed because it's what our business is based on too.
It’s not like you're using one system and selling someone else. That’s what you run your own business on. I'm sharing the wealth here.
I do not want crappy email deliverability. I do not want other people to have crappy email deliverability. We've put it all in one place and I think it makes it so easy for entrepreneurs to come in, automate, have what they need, not more than what they need, and operate a very seen, streamlined, and smooth profitable business.
That's so smart. As you've started showing it to clients, have you started sharing it?
Yeah. They're giddy. We have such a diverse range of businesses as our clientele. We have coaches. We have people who sell training on dental billing. We have barbecue pits. Everybody is gaga over it because it's based on the fundamentals. Here’s how you generate leads. Here's how you get that lead to buy something. Here's how you get that lead to now rave about how amazing you are. Those three factors are what everybody needs in their business.
Here's how you generate leads. Here's how you get that lead to buy something. Here's how you get that lead to now rave about how amazing you are. And those three factors are really what everybody needs in their business.
It is the fundamental foundation and then your systems should empower those three things. Here's how you get great leads. Here's how you get those leads to buy because if you're generating leads that are not buying anything, then you know you've got a breakdown in your business. Here's how you get those people to become raving fans because all those testimonials cycle back and they make it even easier for you to generate leads and make sales.
What I’m interested in and it sounds unique about this system that you've built. You create the pages, the emails, the tags, the lists, and all those things, but this one integrates into social media.
It integrates social media. It integrates with Instagram DMS. It also integrates with Google My Business, Google Ads, and Zapier for people who want a lot of other things. We have about 20,000 different connections that you could possibly do. We do not recommend it but you can do it. With Google My Business, you can send automatic text messages or emails out to get reviews for your business and it goes automatically on to Google for your business.
It connects to Google and Google ads, Facebook and Facebook ads, and Instagram. Does it connect to other social platforms or just those ones right now?
It connects to LinkedIn in our social planner and Twitter and we're working on the integration with TikTok to get that in there as well. There are endless amounts of features that you can do. We do try to keep it very simplified to be an on-ramp for people in they're onboarding so that they're up and running very quickly and there is the ability to import pages from some of the other systems as well. That makes it a little bit easier. It's amazing.
People come in and even though there is all this functionality, you help them take a few smart bites to get things set up and get money coming in and then slowly a few more bites.
That's right because we're building an empire. You're building an empire and if you start with the fundamental basics and then scale from there, it makes it a lot easier. The other thing that makes it way easier is when we build something out, one of the things we wanted to know was how can we automate our calls to our customers, to our potential customers or leads and we figured out the whole automation so that people do not need an external system. We have an internal dialer. We can leave the voicemails. We can use the text messages. We can make automatic notes based on it. We can assign it to different salespeople. All of that is built into the system.
For example, if someone is DM-ing you on Instagram and they're asking questions, you have an integrated dialer but you can call them up and be like, “I wanted to give you a call. I thought this might be easier. Let's talk it through.”
That's right. You click a little green phone button and it automatically dials it. We do that too. We have it where if somebody messages at night, we say, “We're not available right now.” It automatically replies, “We're not available right now. Everybody is sleeping. Is it okay if we call you tomorrow?” People respond yes or no and our system can determine if it's a positive response or a negative response to then reply and say, “We'll just continue the chat.” If they say yes, we'll say, “We'll call you tomorrow.”
It pops up in someone's cue the following morning like, “Someone needs a phone call.”
Because we build these things out in our own business, we can pop it into everyone else's account. They do not have to rebuild it. We do not have to teach them how to build it.
We do not know the structure. It just appears.
We're handing over the fish. It's like, “Here's the fish. This fishing thing is way too complicated. Here's the fish eat it, run with it, profit with it, and be well.”
I'm sure people are realizing, “This is everything I ever needed that I didn't know that I needed.” For those who are hungry and curious and realizing that this is the missing puzzle piece, you have a nice free gift that can help them get started on this pathway. Do you want to tell us about that?
I have an Automate Your Business guide which is going to take you through some of the fundamentals of automating your business. I'm going to talk about your database because that is so important in that freebie, and I do reveal a couple of incredible secrets that I used. Many of my other seven-figure friends have used it as well. Adrienne, I know you use these. Secrets that a lot of times people never reveal. It's the things that we keep close to our chest for our clients.
The insider secrets.
I'm going to give you some insider secrets in this guide. Adrienne is including a link down below to Brand Builder AI. You can go there and check it out. I'll tell you it is the most amazing system but if you're not quite sure what to do, book a demo. Click the link and book a demo. Let us show you how it'll work for your business. We'll compare it to the systems you're already using and honestly, if we think the system you're using is right for you, we will tell you that but we have not encountered that yet. You might be the challenge case. I do not know. We're so excited to share with you.
I will let you know that we have a special bonus now for all of our premium members since we were talking about Facebook ads. All of our premium members are getting our Facebook advertising course for free in the system. This course is unique because we hired a woman who teaches Facebook ads managers how to run Facebook ads to make the course for us. Not coming from the consumer standpoint, but learning how to optimize ads in an incredible way. That course alone is worth $1,000 and that is a bonus.
Is it that amazing? I'm super excited. I cannot wait to dig in myself.
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About Shannon Lavenia
Shannon Lavenia is the CEO of BrandBuiderAI.com and creator of the CEO Freedom Accelerator coaching program. Her passion is helping business owners automate and accelerate their sales for freedom creating income.
She's a contributing writer to Entrepreneur.com, co-author of Becoming an Unstoppable Woman in Finance, and has been featured in numerous industry magazines.