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Follow The Yellow Brick Road
Automation Butterfly Effect: How One CRM Error Crashed a Million-Dollar Launch
00:07:41
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- [00:00]
A
The thing about automation is it is prone to the butterfly effect. There's tiny little change that shouldn't be affecting anything. This can have catastrophic effects. You can't predict for it.
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B
How often do you suggest checking systems.
- [00:11]
C
That are working, being realistic? Twice a year. You do once you're already almost good enough.
- [00:17]
B
Every six months is fine. But if there's a dollar amount attached to that automation, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars do you think that that cost their clients? And how many millions of dollars in the future did it cost them? Thank you for joining us for another episode of Special Ops podcast. I'm Emma Rainville, your host here. We give actionable insights to direct response marketers and e commerce sellers. Today we have with us Thiago and Richard from Shockwaves team. And we're going to be talking about how and when to check on working systems. Guys. Far too often we find that our clients will have something automated, that it works. So they left it alone, they never touched it, they never looked at it, and it turns out there's some disaster laying behind it. Richard, I'll let you open up and start that.
- [01:02]
A
Yeah. So the thing about legacy systems is that you don't look for the problems. If you're not actively doing that, you will not see what is going wrong. 5% of the people who purchased your product, maybe they are previous members, so they're being tagged wrongly and the delivery is not going as it should for them. That's something that can happen very easily with any kind of automated system. Just something that wasn't considered at the time because it didn't exist at the time. Since then has become a issue and if you don't actually investigate, you will not find this. So when we come in for new clients, the first thing we do is this kind of deep dive for their systems. And we see this with pretty much every area we come in with. I mean, it's not always a disaster, it's not always costing them money, but it may be costing them some level of.
- [01:45]
B
We found enough that costs a disaster of money that we need to talk about it on a podcast. Absolutely. Tiago, how often do you suggest checking systems that are working, being realistic?
- [01:57]
C
I think if you do it twice, and we may disagree, twice a year, you're going to be better than 95% of small businesses. You do once, you're already almost good enough. Once a year is already pretty decent unless you're going through too many changes.
- [02:16]
B
You're right, I disagree.
- [02:18]
A
I definitely agree with the twice a year, every six Months.
- [02:20]
B
The I think that if it's, if, if the automation brings in any kind of money, it should be every three months. If the back end of the automation is dollars, it's every three months. When I say brings in dollars, email sequences bring in dollars. If your backend automation has a credit card captured or a wireless money, anything like that, it should be looked at every quarter. Otherwise I'm totally with the every automation, every sop, every six months and everything should have a date on it from when it happened. Every six months is fine. But if there's a do amount attached.
- [02:53]
A
To that automation and the slight difference is for like launches, like if you're building something new using the new system, you absolutely need to be going through.
- [03:00]
B
Apps or if you're doing a split test and updating one little thing, you need to go through the whole thing.
- [03:06]
A
I mean the thing about automation is it really is prone to the butterfly effect, like this tiny little change that shouldn't be affecting anything. Like a tag that hasn't been properly updated. This can have catastrophic effects and you can't predict for it, so it needs to be checked. You can't realistically predict for it because if you could then you wouldn't have had the problem in the first place.
- [03:25]
B
Yo, we interrupt this pod to tell you like and subscribe. What are you doing? Why haven't you liked, why haven't you subscribed? Just subscribe. What's the problem? In all seriousness, subscribe so that you get notifications every time we drop new content. Additionally, if you have not signed up for our visionary vault, what the hell. Www.specialopspodcast.com Go sign up.
- [03:44]
A
It's free.
- [03:45]
B
Free. We never try and sell you and we're putting all kinds of stuff in there to help you with the operations of your business because we're passionate about it and we want to share operational excellence with our direct response, e commerce and online selling family. Do you remember the CRM that set up automations around their gateway? And they put. So there was a CRM and they did all kinds of automations to the gateway portion of their business. And when they did that, the automation was set for December 31, 2023 I think it was, was the year they'd.
- [04:21]
A
Had it set up for like five, 10 years.
- [04:23]
B
It was five or 10 years into the future. But nobody checked it, nobody looked at it. And so here's what happened. New Year's Eve comes the biggest day in direct response of the year is arguably New Year's Eve, New Year, new you you can sell almost anything on New Year, new you. I can spin anything to that. Midnight happened at 12:01, thank God. It was an off year for me drinking because I go through like I don't drink for a year, then I drink heavily for a year, then I don't drink for a year, then I drink even more heavily for a year to make up for it. It was an off drinking year, thank God, because I was completely sober and I got a phone call at 12. It was literally 12:01, 12:02. Hey Emma. We just went to check our links. We're on links 7 to 22 and they're all down. Customer service team. We used to have our customer service team check our links every 15 minutes. They would run through and check all of our links. We had a automated system that did it. Pingdom I think it was, and it missed it like three or four times and we were just like over it. So we just had it started having them test it and so sure enough we woke up. I'll never forget this. I called Profitable Media, great tech company. They were working with several of our clients at the time. And so I called Zach, who's like the owner of Profitable Media and I was like, I think that X CRM is completely down. I can't get any money to process for any one of our clients. He went and investigated. I called Travis Gomez and I said, hey, I think the CRM is down. He was like, yeah, okay, I'll check it. And I knew he didn't get out of bed. So I waited five minutes and I called him back and sure enough, he did not get out of bed. I made him get out of bed and then he went and checked it. And at the same time all three of us, Zach, Travis and myself got on a phone call and we were like, oh my God, they're down. Travis called the CEO of the CRM. No one knew and everybody that worked for the company was out, smashed. It took them two and a half hours to report that it was down and six hours to get it back up. All automations that were left and I believe it was a five years. They just cast it five years into the future and no one touched it. We're going to wrap up here. We wanted to just really get into this. It's a quick topic but it's an important one. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars do you think that that cost their clients and how many millions of dollars in the future did it cost them? Because the clients did leave in droves. So we do have for you guys something special. Richard wrote you an SOP on this how that you can just implement right into your company. Take our logo out, put yours in, and it's ready to go. It's that good of an sop. That's gonna be over at our Visionary Vault. Visit us at www.specialopspodcast.com and if you haven't already, sign up for our Visionary Vault. We have tons of things in there, from courses, split testing, to checklists on how to onboard new hires. You name it, we've got something in there. And if it's not in there, throw it in the comments and maybe we'll do a podcast on it for you. So thanks guys so much and we'll see you next time.