231 Leveraging Automation and AI for Growth - Jason Benedict Aug 21 2024

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us today, Jason Benedict. Jason is the co-founder of Automation Agency. Welcome, Jason. Thanks for joining us.

Jason Benedict: Yeah. Thanks guys. Thanks for having me on.

Greg Bray: Well, let's start off, Jason, just get that quick background and introduction. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jason Benedict: Sure. So, my name is Jason Benedict. I'm one of the co-founders of the Automation Agency. We're a full-service digital marketing [00:01:00] agency, but we kind of call ourselves more of a growth agency. We specialize in working with custom home builders to create more growth, more profit, and more freedom by leveraging automation and AI.

Kevin Weitzel: Automation and AI. You said some magical words. Boy, as soon as Greg hears anything digital, he's like, Oh, and then he gets all shaky and gets all happy, like a kid looking for candy in a candy store.

Anyway, hey, before we get into all that, Jason, do me a favor, let our listeners know something personal about you that has nothing to do with work or the home building industry.

Jason Benedict: Yeah. So, one of the things I think that is most interesting is I was born in Saudi Arabia.

Kevin Weitzel: That's a first, another first there Greg.

Greg Bray: Yeah. Have not had one of those on the podcast before.

Jason Benedict: So, I only lived there for two years. Typically, the first question I get asked is you don't look Saudi Arabian. And I said, well, what gave it away? The blonde hair or the blue eyes?

Kevin Weitzel: Absolutely. What was the purpose? Were your parents just there for work for the military? What was it?

Jason Benedict: Yeah, my grandfather was a chemical engineer, and my dad was an accountant. They both worked for Ramco. [00:02:00]

Kevin Weitzel: There you go.

Greg Bray: Have you been back since?

Jason Benedict: I haven't, but it's definitely on the list.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, Jason, tell us a little bit more about the background of the Automation Agency. You mentioned working with custom builders, but just a little bit more about exactly what you guys are trying to do for them and the services you're offering.

Jason Benedict: Yeah. So, the agency started about 10 years ago. My wife and I co-founded it together. I've always had a background in marketing and a passion for helping small businesses. I kind of got into the automation side of things about 12, 13 years ago. When I started understanding and learning about automation, I'm very process-driven and automation is very process-driven.

So, one of the key things that we help businesses to do is to build and understand the right systems processes. And when they have those things in place, then they can leverage automation and AI. But it's when business owners don't take the time to extract that information out of their brains and put it into a documented process, that's usually where they have challenges [00:03:00] with growth or understanding why they're so frustrated over the things that they're going through.

Greg Bray: So, what got you with all of that focused in the home building industry specifically? How did you decide to kind of become a specialist there?

Jason Benedict: Yes. So, started out kind of working within real estate. First started working with real estate agents, helping them to do lead generation. That then expanded into working with loan officers, and that then expanded into working with custom home builders. So, it's kind of a unique triangle there, right? It's like, all of them kind of are looking to do similar things, collecting leads, converting clients, and basically creating repeat customers.

And so, that's kind of the backbone of leveraging automation. And we have kind of created our own process. We call it the C3 Growth Framework. Basically, the premise behind that is that every business needs to do three things consistently. You need to be able to collect leads. You gotta be able to convert those leads into clients and then convert those clients into repeat fans.

Greg Bray: So, you keep [00:04:00] using the word automation. I have a definition in my head of what that is, but just to make sure that everybody listening is kind of thinking of the same thing, how do you define automation and what it is you're trying to do with that?

Jason Benedict: Yeah. So, I think I'll tie that into two words, right? Process automation, or even three words, business process automation. So, from a custom home builder standpoint, they're doing things consistently every single day. A lot of those things are done manually, and a lot of those things are done repetitively. So, when I think about automation, I think about what is the process that a custom home builder is going through consistently each day, and how do we replace the repetitive manual steps with automation. Right?

So, think about this from a lead coming into their website. Typically, when that lead comes in, they have to pick up the phone, they call, they get a voicemail, then they write up a manual email. They send that email off. Then they write a sticky note down and a note to call and follow up. So, those are kind of like the manual processes.

What we can do and what we've done successfully with [00:05:00] many businesses and custom home builders is help to automate that process by leveraging automation and AI to automatically collect the lead, send the lead notification, assign ownership of the lead to a sales rep or to the owner. Then automate the welcome email that comes out. Maybe even include a nice welcome video from the custom home builder that showcases how you're unique and different from your local competitors, right?

But then you have the automated follow-up processes, which lead them to the next step. So once that lead comes in, your first typical step is you want to try and make a connection with them. That's usually either over the telephone or by booking a consultation. So, there's a lot of steps that we can automate throughout that process. That's kind of the first step that I would say to create an analogy for custom home builders, how to leverage automation.

Greg Bray: Kevin, did you hear that he mentioned the Post-It Note CRM?

Kevin Weitzel: I was just going to say, he mentioned the Post-It Note. Number one, my girlfriend, she's been an office manager for about 20-plus years in the power sports industry. [00:06:00] She literally throws people out of her office if they even open up a Post-It Note packet in her office. There's no reason for Post-It Notes anymore in this day and age, other than to say, you know, that this is Tony's sandwich, your sandwich you put in the refrigerator. That's the only excusable use for a Post-It Note anymore.

Jason Benedict: Agreed. Yeah, we can't use Post-It Notes and sticky notes anymore. It's not happening. It's not working.

Kevin Weitzel: Okay. So, let me follow this up with just something then, because I know a lot of custom home builders. I'm not saying that custom home builders are the major offenders of this because I know some production builders that do this as well. And they're typically smaller production builders that they're building spec homes, but they only do 10 homes a year. They don't justify the expense or the cost of setting up a CRM. What do you say to companies in those conditions where they can say, Oh, well, we're only doing 10 homes a year, we're only doing 20 homes a year. We don't need to have that system.

Jason Benedict: My first step is, do you care about your customer and client journey? That's the first question I have. If the answer is yes, then you need a CRM because if you're not using [00:07:00] automation, your processes, your follow-up is inconsistent. If you want to create consistency and you want to scale, or you want to grow, or you want to create an amazing customer journey, you need automation and you need those systems and processes to find out.

And your team and your vendors and everybody who's a part of your business needs to understand what that client journey looks like so that they know where and how a customer should be greeted, should be spoken to, what steps are going to happen next, like all those key things. So, that's my response to someone who says they're not willing to invest in CRM.

I understand that cause a lot of custom home builders are still not doing a lot of advertising. I think statistics show that about only 38 percent of builders are actually advertising, and a lot of them are still doing things the hard manual way. You know, not to say they haven't had success in what they've been doing, but it's about enhancing and innovating. If you want to be the most innovative builder out there and you want to create the best experience possible for your customers and your high end clientele, then you should [00:08:00] probably be investing in a CRM system and automation.

Greg Bray: Now, if we stay on this lead response process for a second, don't we sometimes have the issue that I'd love the idea of making it better and faster and easier if I'm the builder? But I can't find a tool that will move the sticky note for me from this side of the desk to the other side of the desk, so I don't know how to automate that, right? There's this point where you have to actually step back and re-look at the whole process before you can even begin to automate it. Because I can't automate moving the sticky note around into a different pile the same way that I can use software to do some of these things.

And so, I'm being a little facetious here folks, just in case people think, Greg, of course, there's a way to move sticky notes. What are you talking about? There has to be some process definition work before the automation work, otherwise, we just make a bad process faster and so things go bad faster. So, how do you get into that piece when you're talking to folks of let's step back, let's look at this [00:09:00] process completely differently? Maybe you'd never even thought about it that way before.

Jason Benedict: Yeah. Great question. So, the first thing that I want builders to think about is would you build any building without an architectural drawing. Would you build something without a blueprint? A lot of custom home builders wouldn't.

Greg Bray: Just a lot of them?

Kevin Weitzel: I know firsthand, there's some builders in West Virginia and South Carolina for sure, that literally could just take a black and white floor plan and go, yeah, I can build that.

Greg Bray: Sorry to interrupt.

Jason Benedict: No, no. I love the discussion because, you know, we have to get into that, right? Because, yes, there are builders that will do it. And that's why I say that a little facetiously too, because, yes, you could do it, but should you do it? No, you probably shouldn't. If you want to do things the most efficiently, effective, and the most productive, you need to have a blueprint and an architectural drawing for building a custom home, right?

Same thing. When you're building automation into your business, you need a flow chart and a funnel [00:10:00] diagram. You need to understand: Where are the entry points? What are your lead sources? How are those lead sources getting tracked? How are those lead sources getting communicated differently to? How are you segmenting your leads differently for those people that are interested in renovation versus new build versus others?

You need to be able to communicate effectively based on what your customers' needs and wants are. Automation can do that at scale. If you want to build a system properly, you should start by designing a flow chart very much like you would have one of your consumers go to an architect to get a blueprint before they actually start building their home.

Greg Bray: [00:11:00] Hey, everybody. This is Greg from Blue Tangerine. And I just wanted to personally invite you to join Kevin and me at the upcoming Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit. It's going to be October 23rd and 24th in Raleigh, North Carolina. You do not want to miss this. We're going to have marketing education. We're going to have online sales counselor education. We're going to have networking, round table discussions, and of course, a whole lot of fun. So, make sure you get registered today and join us. You can get all the details at buildermarketingsummit.com. Can't wait to see you there.

So, you've talked a bit about leads specifically. Are there other typical processes that builders should be thinking about beyond just leads? I mean, of course, we want to stay focused on the marketing ones if we can, but what are processes that are good candidates for automation?

Jason Benedict: So, I think it really depends on what the business is trying to accomplish, right? So, if a builder says, Hey, I need more leads. Then you should be focused on top-of-funnel marketing automation, right? Identifying lead sources, identifying your target audience, and then identifying how you're going to capture and convert those leads.

But if a builder comes to me and says, Jason, I've got plenty of leads, but I'm not converting at the percentage that I'd like. Well, then we would focus on education better and making sure that we're communicating and helping them to understand what their processes are.

Or if another builder says, Jason, [00:12:00] I've got leads and I'm converting them, but I'm not doing a great job of getting referrals and reviews and getting more repeat type of renovation projects. Well, then I would focus on creating a better customer experience on the back end that has systems and processes and communicates effectively based on those things. So, we treat it very differently based on what the need is of the custom home builder.

Kevin Weitzel: Can I ask one question? And I'm going to say a profane word, so Greg you might want to plug yours. Templated email. That's a bad two-word cuss word that we say around here. I get offended as a consumer by templated emails. How do builders automate their email processes without being overly obvious that it's just an autoresponder that is just ridiculous?

Jason Benedict: So, the simple answer is you need to build in your personality. Video is a great way to do that. You can add video into it that shows your personality, feels like it's coming across custom. The other thing that I will [00:13:00] mention too is capturing customer data, and the way that you capture customer data and you segment your audience is also a great way to make it feel like it's not so templated.

Let's say, you know, you have a conversation with them. They tell you that their daughter's recital is coming up and you document that and you store that information in your CRM. Well, you can automate a follow-up message that has that information saying something like, Hey, how was your daughter's recital last week? There's things that you can do with automation and AI to build in a more unique customer experience. So, that's the great thing of where technology is heading.

But I would say the first thing you need to do with any email and any automation is you need to build your personality. It should amplify your personality. We're not trying to replace humans with robots, right? That's not our goal and our objective. We're trying to enhance productivity while also getting more exposure for the custom home builder.

Greg Bray: I'm just picturing a Kevin Weitzel personality amplified.

Kevin Weitzel: We've gone into Claude and created a persona based [00:14:00] off of a spattering of my emails. It came back with a pretty accurate recalling of who Kevin is and, you know, what writing style needs to be when an email is written.

Jason Benedict: It's incredible.

Greg Bray: Well, Jason, let's peel back the AI piece of that comment, right? The automation plus the AI, where does AI fit into this? Is it built into some of these tools? Is it a separate piece you use to kind of create the inputs you put into the automation? What are your thoughts there?

Jason Benedict: Yeah. So, AI can literally sit at any point in the sales process. Let's just say, for the sake of this conversation with a CRM system, right? AI is now being built into every aspect of CRMs to where it can understand and interpret the information that you're putting into it. So, think about that sticky note, right? We talked about that earlier. That sticky note is now being digitized and it's also being collected, so AI can analyze what's being documented on there. Or if you're putting notes about that recital on the daughter's recital, you can actually use AI to now pull that information in and create that [00:15:00] unique content and customer experience. So, that's one piece of it.

One of the innovative things that we've been working on is more of a generative AI telephone agent. So, this is where it gets really interesting for custom home builders where you can literally have something that sounds like a human, but it's highly intelligent, and it could be trained in a matter of minutes.

If you're a builder, and you're thinking about hiring a salesperson right now, typically that process is like three to six months for you to recruit, to hire, to train, spend time training, and then more training. Well, with a generative AI telephone agent, you can actually deploy this thing within a matter of days, and it can literally read your website and know all of the information about your business within a matter of minutes, and it can speak intelligently about that to automatically book appointments on your calendar, to do customer service questions. Like it's incredible.

Greg Bray: It's going to be incredible for the builders who have the right information on their websites. I think there's some builders that would [00:16:00] find that if all they did was feed their website into a tool like that, it wouldn't have very much to say.

Jason Benedict: Our generative AI solution also allows us to upload and create its own knowledge base. So, essentially we could take a PDF, we could take a document, we could take a full book and it would know it in a matter of minutes and be able to speak to it intelligently. So, it could be a lot of different things other than just a website, but that was kind of the first reference of, Hey, if you have a website and it's updated, it could speak intelligently and help you to capture those inbound leads.

Or let's say you're doing Google ads or Facebook ads and, you know, rather than having that lead sit in your database for a few days without getting a response or a call, the lead could come in and the AI agent could immediately call the lead the moment that the lead came in from Facebook or Google ads, and then automatically set the appointment for the builder. That's some of the incredible stuff that we're doing.

Greg Bray: It's fascinating how quickly these tools have evolved over the last couple of years and the kinds of things that people are being able to do with them to experiment with and play with. It's a [00:17:00] little scary too, to think that someone can just be talking to the computer and may not even know it before long to take care of some of these things.

To your point about educating the software or the AI, I think we also need to recognize that it's not just our own internal tools that we need to be able to educate. There's going to be tools on the other side. Like at some point, the buyer's going to have their little tool that they're going to say, go review these builders and tell me which one's the best fit for me, you know, or, or things like that, and help me narrow down my search.

And if we don't have our content out there to feed these types of tools that are doing it, we may not get included in some of those types of searches in the future. Any thoughts on that, Jason, since you've been kind of working on educating these tools and these bots and kind of what they need to know to be useful?

Jason Benedict: Yeah, I think that's a very valuable point that you mentioned, Greg. Like, you've got to be online. You've got to be getting reviews and getting [00:18:00] referrals and getting content created. You need to be updating your website and writing blog posts and showcasing the before and after photos. You should be creating case studies for every project that you're working on and posting that and distributing that across social. That's how AI is learning and growing is from what we're feeding it on the World Wide Web. So, if you're not doing those things, you very well could not be in the mix. If a consumer is high-tech and they use AI to do a comparative search, you might not be on that list if you're not doing those things. So, that's a very valid point.

Greg Bray: So, are there specific tools, Jason, that you're using that you like to recommend? I mean, it's fine to name-drop here if we need to, kind of the ones that you think are worth taking a look at.

Jason Benedict: Yeah. So, there's some proprietary software that we've designed and built, but one of the ones that I'll recommend for, let's just say CRM that has automation and AI built into it is Keap. So, that's K E A P. This is the CRM solution that we have been [00:19:00] certified in for the past 10 years, and we've serviced more than 5, 000 small businesses with this software with great success, helping them to implement automation and AI.

Greg Bray: If builders are looking for help with some of that content creation that you were just talking about, are there some other AI tools that they should be looking at? Is ChatGPT the one, or are there other things that are emerging that are helpful?

Jason Benedict: I would say if they're just getting started, ChatGPT is a great place to get started. You could literally create an account in a matter of minutes and even ask ChatGPT, Hey, I'm a custom home builder. How should I be using you? And then ChatGPT will tell you exactly how you should use ChatGPT to grow your business. So, it's pretty incredible. But then I think the next thing that you have to think about is, yes, it gives you the information, but as the builder, you need to know what to do with it next, right? If you're not implementing what's being given to you, then it's not really helpful for you. It's what you do next with AI and how you implement it into your systems and processes that's going to make it the most [00:20:00] beneficial for you.

Kevin Weitzel: You just described a corporate employee questionnaire, when they send out an employee questionnaire and they get back, you know, 150 entries, and then nothing changes comparatively speaking to what it was before the questionnaire.

Jason Benedict: That's right.

Greg Bray: Jason, this all sounds great, right? I'm just going to grab these tools. I'm going to set up this process. It's going to do all my work for me. I'll get better leads and then the computer's going to call them back and schedule appointments and all kinds of great things, but what gets in the way of actually achieving that dream? What are some of the roadblocks that a builder who goes, all right, I want it, I want it all, and I want it all now, what stops them from getting there sometimes?

Jason Benedict: Fear. Their fear and themselves kind of get themselves in the way of moving forward and testing. And so, you know, one of the things that I would say is, if you're one of those old-school custom home builders, that's been reluctant to implement these types of tools and technologies, start small. Try one thing and then implement it.

I think the biggest component of this is you need to be able to know what you're [00:21:00] reporting on. If you're not tracking and measuring what you're trying to accomplish, then it's really kind of irrelevant, and you won't see a goal or an end game in mind because you didn't set a goal and an expectation to begin with. So, know what you're trying to accomplish and then reverse engineer that backward to leverage and identify how to implement AI to achieve that specific goal.

So, if you're doing 10 builds a year and you want to get to 20, well, then great. We now know what 20 is. We need to understand what were the metrics that helped you to get to 10. And there's a formula there that can help us to unpick and leverage AI to tell us what are some of the things that we need to improve upon knowing my, you know, lead conversion is at maybe 5 percent and I need to get it to 10 percent.

Or I'm converting 50 percent of clients. Well, what's happening with the other 50%? Are you following up with them? Do you have some sort of nurture process in place? There's a lot of variables that, you know, need to be documented. And again, that goes back to having that blueprint for your business, having that architectural design and [00:22:00] strategy of what are you building, why are you building it, and what's the type of experience you want your customers to have.

Greg Bray: Do you have any resources that you recommend for folks who want to learn just more about what AI tools are out there and maybe some tips on how to use them? Any thoughts on where to go to learn?

Jason Benedict: Yeah, well, we actually host a daily webinar where we train people on automation and talk about AI. So, they can go to automation.agency, and they can click on our attend a webinar. That will essentially get them into learning about automation and learning about marketing and how to implement these types of things.

Greg Bray: Daily webinar. That's a lot of work, Jason. I'm impressed. That's a lot of work.

Jason Benedict: Do you think there might be some automation behind that?

Greg Bray: I'm not gonna pull back the curtain and expose anything. So, there you go. Well, Jason has been a great conversation, definitely touched on a lot of different points. Any last thoughts or words of advice that you'd want to leave with our audience today?

Jason Benedict: You know, one [00:23:00] thing that we didn't talk much about was, what are most builders doing, and where is there opportunity for growth? And I think a lot of builders who are advertising are doing, you know, Facebook and Instagram and Google, but there's one area that they're completely overlooking, which is LinkedIn. And a lot of builders that I've been working with, they haven't really focused on developing and designing partnerships as a strategy for growth. They've been doing referrals primarily most of their lives and built their businesses off of referrals.

So, what we've done is we've created a LinkedIn automation solution that can actually help them to automate the process of outreach to say, architects or interior designers and help them to design and develop partnerships that way. That way they have an army of referral partners around them. So, that's one strategy for them to think about if they're looking to, you know, drive in more business growth and they haven't really been focused on partnerships. I'd say LinkedIn is kind of an untapped resource that a lot of builders are not using right now.

Greg Bray: No, it's definitely a different focus [00:24:00] and it requires a little different strategy, and it's a great reminder. Thank you. Well, Jason, if somebody wants to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Jason Benedict: Yeah. They can visit our website at automation.agency, or they can text us at 602 900 9345, or give us a call.

Kevin Weitzel: Whoa, wait a second, Greg. I just thought of something. Maybe I'm paranoid, but how do we know that this is actually Jason on this call and not some automated chatbot that he's just deployed in his place?

You're going to have to call and find out.

Jason Benedict: You'll have to meet for sushi next week, Kevin.

Kevin Weitzel: You had me at sushi. That's not a robot. No chance that that's a robot. Robots don't eat sushi.

Jason Benedict: That's right.

Greg Bray: Well, thanks again, Jason, for sharing with us today, and thank you everybody for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with Outhouse. Thank you.

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