Open the Magic Black Box

Show Notes

• Infusionsoft and other automation programs seem like a magic black box as you can’t see into it and know what is going on.
• In order to Inspire confidence and utilize programs like Infusionsoft better you will need to open up this black box.
• Slack allows Ryan’s team to collaborate on different teams and channels. It is easy to communicate and share documents.
• In an effort to be even more effective, the Fix Your Funnel team created the Slack bot for their Funnel bots.
• They pushed key activities from Infusionsoft into Slack, such as sales related activities or monitoring how far someone progressed in key campaigns. This helped Ryan’s team know when things were working or not.
• You can make team assignments in Slack and set up alarms. Then rather than search through Infusionsoft or your email to follow the assignment, you can have those programs message into the program you are already using to communicate as a team, such as Slack.
• If you are using Infusionsoft, Funnel bots for Slack are free.

Using Slack with Infusionsoft via free Funnel bots from Fix Your Funnel will produce a big change in the way you run your business.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Infusionsoft is a magic black box. I think it's a pretty accurate description of what it is. And the reason that I'm bringing that up is because it's a black box, which you can't really easily see into what's doing, you can go into the user interface by logging into Infusionsoft and you can kind of comb through different reports, which are mostly just text, and then also you can try and look at individual contacts and see what's going on with them.

But really, that's very investigative and that's part of the problem I think a lot of people have for trusting automation in general. Automation in general is a black box. You can't really see what's going on, but you know things are happening. If you want to inspire confidence and end up utilizing the things like Infusionsoft better, then what you have to do is you have to open up that black box.

When we first started to become a [00:01:00] distributed team a few years back, meaning we have people in three different states working for us and we needed to communicate. We used iMessage and we used Google Chat initially, but honestly, you couldn't search it very well. You could search Google Chat, but it also pulled up all your emails and I'm sure there's a way you could isolate chats, but I couldn't figure it out initially. iMessage was a mess. We were all on Macs, so that worked, but it still was a mess.

The other problem was that chats are difficult to organize with iMessage and chat because both of those are really meant for 1 to 1 communication, and then finally, there was limited functionality. Then we discovered a software called Slack.

Slack is great because Slack allowed us to be able to collaborate as teams on different topics and in different channels, is what the term is in Slack, and it really opened up our communication. Plus, it gave us really good searching and the ability to share documents and stuff internally. It became a [00:02:00] central hub and we immediately fell in love with Slack for internal business communication.

Then we created the Slack bot for a funnel bots and we started pushing key activities into a channel so the team could see them. Meaning, we took that black box of Infusionsoft that had all this automation and instead of us having to proactively go into it to find out what was going on, we started having Infusionsoft tell us what was happening.

Not by sending us emails, which I already get too many and if you know me, you know, I hate email personally. In fact, I have a reputation outside of business as well as being someone who just hates email and it always mystifies people since I'm in software. Instead of having to go in and dig and find information or having it clog up your email with even more garbage, we started saying, let's have key activities pushed into our Slack. It started having a channel and we'd have certain activities coming in, so we could have sales related activities.

That was kind of [00:03:00] neat because people could see, oh, we're getting results. Then we started having other things that would tell us like how far someone progressed in key campaigns and this information became pretty valuable to help people to see when things are working and also let us know if something wasn't working right.

We could go, hey, how come there's no activity in this channel, and then we could immediately jump over and see what the cause was. We could have had something else that it created a problem for a web form or something like that, or an order form, and we can address those quickly because we saw the stream of information coming from Infusionsoft into our Slack.

The next thing that we started to do is we started to make assignments to team members from Slack. I know there's tasks, and those have some great functionality built into them, but there's a lot of things where we just need somebody to do something and if it doesn't get done, we can be able to track that inside of a campaign builder with what we call an alert or an alarm.

If it doesn't happen in the time frame that we need to, then we can have an [00:04:00] alarm then notify someone else that's responsible for making sure that that person who is assigned that process does it in Slack again. Instead of having to go hunt and peck through Infusionsoft's UI or try to get through our email and see all the things that are being told to us, we could just have it messaged into the place where we're already communicating as a team.

Slack has become a central part of our approach to using Infusionsoft. I would highly recommend it, and what's great news for you, if you're using Infusionsoft, is funnel bots are free. At least, the ones that include the Slack bot are free, and you to start using it today without having to spend any money whatsoever. That's kind of a service that we offer to help people with their Infusionsoft business.

If you aren't already using Slack, I recommend you do it. The cost if you want to have a the deep history, which I think is worth it is minimal per user and with the free slack bot, you'll be able to start sending data into Slack that is going on in Infusionsoft and help you to [00:05:00] gain even more confidence in using it.

That's my little spiel on why I think you should be using Slack with Infusionsoft via the free funnel bots from Fix Your Funnel. Now, if you already have our SMS or dialer or even the SendOutCards integration or the Zen Direct integration then you already have funnel bots included with all those accounts. If you have any paid account with Fix Your Funnel, basically you also get funnel bots including the one-click up sell service.

Hope you enjoyed that, start using Slack, start letting Infusionsoft tell you instead of you having to go find out what's going on, and you'll see a big change in the way that you run your business.