Mastering Marketing Automation with AI: Insights from Khadirah Muhammad

Overview:

In this episode of Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders, Kerry Guard sits down with marketing automation expert Khadirah Muhammad to discuss how AI and automation can revolutionize marketing operations. Khadirah shares her journey into the field, the importance of a well-structured tech stack, and practical strategies to eliminate redundancies and improve data accuracy. Tune in to discover actionable insights on how to make marketing operations more efficient and scalable.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:05

Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. Trevor Van Woerden in the house. So great to see you, sir I appreciate you and to all of our other listeners out there. Thank you for being here at our new time of 11am Eastern it's cool coming to you in the morning as you grab your coffee and settle in. We have a great show for you today. I will be monitoring the comments, so jump on in. We are here for it. We want to make sure you can leave with action steps and get after it. Because today, y'all today, I got the automation lady with me, and she is going to spill all the tea on how to make our lives better, faster and get time back in our lives. I call the mops people, the marketing operations team, my time turners, because they have given so much back to me over the years in terms of my energy. I mean, pulling raw reports y'all, it's a thing of the past when you have the right time turners in place. And Khadirah Muhammad is going to take us through it all before she jumps on with me. A little bit about her. I totally stole her write-up because it's so good. Khadirah Muhammad, the automation lady in today's fast paced digital landscape, levering leveraging AI for marketing automation isn't just a savvy move, it's an essential strategy. As a seasoned corporate speaker and trainer, KhadirahMuhammad dedicated her career to unraveling the complexities of AI, empowering businesses to supercharge their marketing automation and systems. With a rich history of guiding businesses, she's revolutionized their operational trajectories by imparting cutting-edge strategies that seamlessly integrate AI. This not only boosts efficiency but also amplifies marketing endeavors across the board. Her mantra is clear, AI and human ingenuity should work in harmony, amplifying each other's strengths by weaving AI into marketing automation. She arms businesses with the prowess to enhance their outreach, automate intricate tasks, and, most importantly, curate a bespoke customer experience. Kadira, welcome to the show.

Khadirah Muhammad 2:20

Thank you so much, Kerry. I appreciate it. I've been looking forward to this over the past month. I admire everybody's reminding me of it. I'm like, I know I'm ready to talk about it.

Kerry Guard 2:36

I am stoked too, because I've actually, I've this is perfect timing, because I've actually been requested by the marketing tech weekly team to come to London and host a live show for their martech forum, their world their martech World Forum. So they are in terms of martech. I am so ingrained in it right now. And this is absolutely perfect, perfect timing. I know that they're all listening as well, because as we grew up and people start to see what this could be like, live in person, pretty exciting. So thank you. Yes, should be fun. Should be fun, and London, London, I'm so excited for this conversation. I gave a wonderful overview there, and I call it wonderful because you wrote it, and it's great. And this is all the things that you do, but really it's about your journey and how you got there. So tell us your story. Kadira, what do you do now, and how did you get there?

Khadirah Muhammad 3:42

Absolutely So right now, I'm a marketing automation and systems engineer. So what that means is, when it comes to your marketing and operations world, I make your life easier. That's effectively what I do. And how I make your life easier is I bring efficiency back into your business, or back into your organization. And I absolutely love what I do, because also, most people are not a fan of it, you know, they don't want to touch it when it's going to put full and that's okay, and that's perfectly fine, but that's why I come in. You want to say something?

Kerry Guard 4:18

No, I'm just totally agreeing with you, because it is the I don't like to touch it because it's so meticulous. And I am not a details person, and so it's so easy to overlook the littlest of details. And, you know, break it, yeah? So yes, we don't like to touch it, and we need to bring in experts like yourself, 100%

Khadirah Muhammad 4:39

Yeah, probably bringing the people who like puzzles and like sedoku or something like that, like kind of nerd stuff like that, that, that is all me. Yeah. But I got started in this probably around, really, about 10 years ago. It was way back when I actually started college. I originally school to be. Be a web developer. I taught myself how to code before I started college, did all the classes. Was really, really into it. Then started to go more into the marketing world. I used to work at New Balance for a couple of summers while I was in college. We used to work for local marketing agencies. I'm originally from Toyota, Ohio, so I used to do that as well. And while I was working for those agencies, I started to want to be a consultant, just a regular digital marketing consultant. I say regular, as if it's not an entire there's so much involved into it. I carry notes. There's so much involved there. I started with website design, SEO, advertising, but everything always came back to the tech side with the business owners I would work with, meaning we can do all the marketing stuff, but then the technology would just trip them up. And I ended up going deeper into that. My father, growing up, used to fix computers that's literally from hand, without YouTube, without anything at all, and he used to do that a lot, and so that's where my tech side comes in. And I just, I fell in love with the Kerry-like i It is one of those areas that really made it easy for me. I liked it. It made sense for me. It didn't make sense for others, and therefore we have the business aspect that comes into play. And doing all that, it led me to work with corporations. It led me to work with local business owners and just helping them be able to save their time and the headache of having to figure out the tech side, which, as you know, is expanding every second. It's probably expanded 1000 more feet, as we've been talking right now. But you know, I That's how I've gotten here, and I love it. Is absolutely amazing. And like as you are working in the marketing field and as a business owner, I know it's a headache for most other people, um, but it's, it's where I can really shine and help them in those details that they don't want to touch. Absolutely,

Kerry Guard 7:14

I'm definitely like I said, I'm definitely one of those people who don't touch it, but I love your background and the intricacy of how all these different pieces sort of came together for you and brought you back to the technical side as I'm not, I'm not an engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but I dabble on the web dev side of things. I can write a little bit of JavaScript to be dangerous so, but I appreciate like it. The beauty of Mar attack is that it's not just one thing which we're going to get into, because it's a lot of things, but it can get very overwhelming very quickly because I think we have a natural tendency to pile on before we get there. Before we get there, it's gonna be a lot to unpack, folks, hang on to your hats. It's gonna be good a challenge you're currently facing. What's hard right now? We're all human. We're in the marketing world. It's September, which might as well be q4 pretty much. So what's what's hard for you right now?

Khadirah Muhammad 8:16

Right now, the hardest thing for me, as much as I keep up with all the different technology. It's right now in the summer, in this kind of early part of q4 I focus on where I can simplify, even in my own business, let alone for my clients, that is a bit of a headache when you have so much that's there and everything is working together in some type of capacity, but it's a bit done in areas. You're getting duplicates. You're getting areas that actually aren't getting touched on at all, because you think everything is working. It's not working the way should be, per what you need. And I mean data, I mean reports. I mean also making sure that leads are being followed up with, you know, strictly on the marketing side, it's clean up for me. That's what summer is. It's usually kind of the slow season. You know, a lot of new contracts. People are on vacation, and that's great. This is clean up time for me to figure out where we can stop redundancies and make everything as simple as possible for my own business as well as for my clients as well.

Kerry Guard 9:28

Well, let's get right into it, because that was a lovely segue in terms of redundancies. I mean, I'm sure if we all signed into our CRMs, I looked at the data hard to cry a little bit in terms of the, you know, the data not being having too much of it and not the right kind of data. I feel like the always the first step for me with a new client is going in and seeing where I can, to your point, clean up and hone into the right folks. So. Is that, where you start, in terms of the cleanup process, you know, walk us through that a little bit of of how you because I feel like, before you can do really anything else, you have to have a good foundation. And we talk about that in SEO, right? We can't start really building out a lot of content. If you're architecture and your foundational text, technical side of your website's broken, right? So I imagine it's similar on the martech side, 100%

Khadirah Muhammad 10:31

I have my own, what I call the 4C method, and the first C is clarify. Let's figure out what's there right now. Let's figure out what's happening in your organization for this particular, you know, part of your organization right now, most of the time, people come to me and they're very excited. We have all these things we're trying to, we want to build this new thing. We're doing this for q1 2025, we want to spend all q4 building it out. And I'm like, I'm excited. I love building, you know, I like all that type of stuff. Let's look at what's happening right here first, before we do anything more. You know, most of people, I'm sure you use this word, it's an audit, but looking at, you know, not in a financial service, not where we're at, but we do a marketing audit. We look at Tech. That is the absolute first place that I look at, because if I don't know what's already there, then we can easily be building on sand versus a solid foundation. And more often than not, when it comes to time efficiency, you can easily save a lot of time by just looking at where you're at right now and seeing where duplicates, redundancies, reports not really reporting the right information, or you don't even know where to get this data, because you have all the things, you have, all the apps. We have, all the software, but we're not actually using it for what we needed versus what the app says it's supposed to be able to do and so that is 100% the first place that we go to. I don't do any work until I see what's going on right there. And it's not as sexy. I guess some people, you know, they're like, I want to, I want the new and the shiny, and I totally understand that. But I need to see where we're at, because I can't build on Sam. And I know you know what I mean by that, hearing

Kerry Guard 12:25

there is nothing worse than uncovering automation behind the scenes that you didn't know about. This actually just happened to me. I knew about all the tools they had, and I was like, wow, there's a lot like my client was talking about how he would export all the data from here, all the contacts from their where they track their customers, and then he would import it into their CRM. And I was like, but you could just, you could just connect those, and it would magically just do for you. He's like, that sounds amazing. Lo and behold, they had a whole Zapier system that did everything but that. But I also didn't know about all the Zapier stuff that they were doing, and so these tags were just showing up on all the I was like, we just imported this person. They're brand new, and then all of a sudden they have a tag. Where did that come from? A web to, like, figure out where, how it's all connect like the connective tissue alone, of understanding what people have tried to do without having a plan,

Khadirah Muhammad 13:31

it's unraveling this web, you know, and in the you know, the shareholder you're speaking with, your key contact person may only know so much about what's there, you know and like, you show them, hey, actually, you have all of this going on, and we could just fix this. Let's we need to start fixing that here. I run into that so many times.

Kerry Guard 13:58

Yeah, yeah. It's really tough. So in terms of the data, because it's, you know, so it sounds like first, what systems do you have, and how are they connected? And sure enough, you will find another system with another connection point down the road, even though you thought you did the audit, that's just inevitable. Let's accept, accept that lovely fact. It sounds like the second step is the data piece. Do you actually look at? You know, you talked about leads and the importance of those and the contacts and redundancies. How are you looking at the data to make sure, you know, I feel like a martech person's dream, a mops person's dream is clean data. What does that? What does that mean to you when you're walking into a new scenario?

Khadirah Muhammad 14:41

Yeah, when I walk into a client's scenario, first, I want to see if they're even looking at any type of data and how they're looking at and again, that probably gets uncovered in the audit side of things as well. How do we know where leads are at in the process? Where do they go? What stages? Where do we. Know where they're at in terms of your sales journey, where how do we find that data? Are you using a CRM? Are you not? Are using something that's not really a CRM, but you're kind of making it be one, which is kind of often. How do you know? So this is a lot of conversation I have with the key person. Sometimes it's the owner, sometimes it's there. It's the director or their own internal operations manager, but it's we need to know, kind of how are you looking at this right now? And then that'll let me know, along with what systems you already have, how we can clear that up, because I like to start from a plan before again, we start doing any of the grind work, the real work, the building of the things, and that goes into kind of our next team, which is the clarifying it. And now we need to craft the workflow. And the workflow is not just one, you know, because there's a lot of different ways to do a lot of different things, but I want to see, okay, if we're focusing on, let's say we're focused on lead nurturing, and that's why the client hired us to kind of help them automate that process before we can do any of that. How do we know where leads are at? Are you using a pipeline system? How are you looking at the numbers in terms of how many people, how many lead to bring in on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, how many of them are booking calls? Because a lot of our clients are service based business owners, so therefore they're likely selling over the phone in some type of capacity. How do we know what's happening after that? So I like to start thereafter not start there, but that's the next part, after we do that audit, I need to see where you're getting that data, and then we figure out how we make that cleaner, and if you're using a CRM. Now, let's look at what the CRM is capable of being able to report that, because a lot of CRMs are this is where the fun part is, like building out the dashboard so you can see all of that information that's easy as possible. Love it, love it, love it, love it. But yeah, the next part definitely is how we're looking at that data, and then we can start to use it.

Kerry Guard 17:11

My favorite thing to do, this sounds so funny. This is such a nerd. This is, this is high nerd alert, right here. My favorite thing to do into a new CRM is look at bounces and unsubscribes and immediately deleting, like, just unnecessary contacts in here, overfilling your CRM. Let's just because you have to pay, you know by how many people you have in your system, right? So, like, let's keep those costs down, shall we? It always amazes me at the Bloat there. And it's just so it's like, such a quick win, like, boom, just and then all of a sudden you're like, your rates. You know, as soon as you clean up your CRM and you're looking at people who aren't engaged, you're all your rates start going up. Such a good feeling.

Khadirah Muhammad 18:03

Clean it up. I might have to take that. I'm not gonna lie. I might have to take that, because I never do that in the beginning. So I love that, because it is unsubscribes

Kerry Guard 18:14

are a little trickier. Yeah, unsubscribes are a little trickier, because if they are, they might unsubscribe from the This is always a fun thing that I find, too, is that when people are sending out newsletters, or they put their they don't have a newsletter list, they just have the master list. And so they're sending out the newsletter to just everyone. And so when people unsubscribe, they're unsubscribing from the master list. And so then it's like, do you? Do you how engaged are? Like, how important is this lead? Are they in a sales flow? Are they not and now, like, they're just on the we gotta need some some flow. To your point, need some flow here to make sure that we're not deleting, um, people who are important that just don't want the newsletter.

Khadirah Muhammad 18:57

Yeah, I went into that quite a bit. I went to that quite a bit, because once you combine everybody and that, you know, to your point, if they unsubscribe from there, they're not going to get your sales related information that they actually wanted. Um, yeah, especially if they opted in to that part. So learning that segmentation, oh, my goodness. Oh my goodness, I might be, I might be jumping. I'm sorry. I don't know what she knows.

Kerry Guard 19:23

No, I like it. I do think there's a piece in there of cleaning up the data and then segmenting it a really thoughtful way so that for everything we're talking about you, you got to have it. But maybe I'm going to let you drive the flow here. I do want to just touch on Trevor. We're talking about cleaning up data and the importance of the right data. To Trevor's point, what are your thoughts Khadirah on from a B to B perspective, we're generally talking to a B to B audience. I know for B to C, it's obviously different, but for B to B in particular, what's your point of view on gathering personal email addresses instead of business email addresses? I.

Khadirah Muhammad 20:02

So I, if we're going straight B to B to me, just makes more sense to gather the business email addresses. If we're directing certain information to another person who works at an organization. It just makes more sense. Now you may want to keep the personal on hand, however, available somewhere in your CRM. Most CRMs allow for additional emails, secondary emails and whatnot. I just want to make it the primary. And if you're in a sales negotiation with that organization, and that is a contact that you know is important as a shareholder in that process, you still want to have the email for the personal email, just in case you need to contact them. And then, for whatever reason, they're not responding in their business email and they're looking for what you have to sell. But for the most part, we want to only be contacting them on their business email addresses as much as possible. But if they give you their personal they clearly may want you to use that person. So again, maybe just relegate it to a secondary or an additional email contact for them.

Kerry Guard 21:13

I find that a work email gives you a lot more information that you can actually validate the lead to be legit. So you know, being able to go to the LinkedIn page, knowing the company's name, looking up the website, then going to the LinkedIn page, seeing all the people involved, having some sense of their name, to then match it to them being part of that company, is just a little bit easier to validate that they're real, versus their personal email address. I also find that personal email addresses rarely go get activated if you have like a double opt in system. For some reason, it seems that it's harder to get those to double opt than a business one for for whatever reason, I guess because they're more serious if they're giving you your business email address. But I find that our CRM gets so bogged down in non active email addresses, and then I'm like trying to re-follow up with those folks to activate so that I can send the newsletter, because I can't send the newsletter for not activated something you signed up for and you said you wanted, but now you're not getting Yeah. Yeah. So that's my experience with personal versus but I hear what Trevor saying in terms of reliability and when you're talking about list building and those sort of things potentially, but not, not unfortunately, in my experience from B to B perspective, yeah,

Khadirah Muhammad 22:39

I had a similar experience with that, also with your personal emails, especially if it's a Gmail, them being regulated into the other folders automatically that gets set up, which is not the same usually, if it's a business email address, those kind of different folders and whatnot in Gmail don't always work the same way, or not as intense as it is on the personal email address. So it's really easy for them to just miss it, because you're getting, you know, 1000 emails. Also, the email ads in Gmail will take up space where a regular email will be in those kind of update or social or promotional filters that Gmail does on personal email accounts. So again, they can give you that email, and they may actually be interested in what you are, what you're presenting to them, or whatever the offer was, but that double confirm can be varied. I've seen mine in my own just to test it. My own personal email Gmail address is just to see and like that stuff is so very, very quickly.

Kerry Guard 23:43

Yeah, that's true. Interesting. I Trevor saying that this could be a reflection. He's a he's a salesperson. So he's coming out from a sales perspective, it sounds like Trevor that you're saying from a selling standpoint, you actually have better luck contacting their personal email than their business email. So that is definitely something I'm going to follow up with you on, because that's very interesting. And not our, yeah, not our mops experience, for sure. Kadir, what's the next step? So we've cleaned up the we've we got a handle on other systems. We hope we've cleaned up their data in terms of making sure that there isn't any duplicates and that, you know, no unbounces and those sort of things. What's the next? Oh, so the the flow, so we're creating, we're looking at, we're creating a plan to figure out what the customer journey is, essentially, is, yeah,

Khadirah Muhammad 24:40

that is the next part. That's our next step, and that's where we involve anybody else in the organization that's a part of that journey, in any respect that can include any salespeople, any sales associates or sales managers, that can include anybody who's also in charge of follow up. So maybe that's. In a system, or somebody more in the customer service related field as well, but this is where we need to figure out the new plan of how we are following following up with people. And I mean that specifically, if we're working for our client in Lean nurturing, because it also looks different. Sometimes we work with clients on their onboarding process, but we still want to create this new flow. So that's when we're visualizing, and I really get to map it out for them. And we go down a step by step, you know. And for for a tool recommendation, I use whimsical love it will swear by it. Yeah, I know, right. It's very it's very visible. And if anything, I should definitely, if you want, I can actually show examples or something, just to give people a feel, but it's a visual mapping tool, and I love it, and I bring that out, and I show the clients, okay, this is the initial setup. Let's talk this through, and then from there, after, we build out that flow. Now we have a plan, and now the client specifically knows what this looks like, and I found that mapping it out visually helps them understand it without having to go too deep into the details quite yet, because I always come back to that details, but I just need them to understand what we're doing on a high level.

Kerry Guard 26:19

Mops has so many details you cannot skip a step. I think it's one thing you mentioned that I want to touch on, because it's so important. And what I think gets lost in the sauce when it comes to marketing Ops is that it's, while it's called Marketing ops, it's so much bigger, like you just talked about how you could streamline an onboarding process. I did something similar for my company ages ago, and being able to put those flows in place for things like that. I know people who do it for payment systems, right? Like, if you know you're trying to get paid online, right? What's those steps that it's not technically marketing anymore, right? But it's the operations within an organization that you're streamlining, and man, is that powerful. So you mentioned onboarding. What other examples can you give so folks, just give folks a taste of like, how you go above, you know, beyond mark, not above, but beyond. Marketing operations.

Khadirah Muhammad 27:17

This is where we go into service automation, or service workflow automation, and whatever words you can put there, which is a part of what I do as well. I know I get to get a chance to talk as much, so I love this, but the Client Onboarding and how you actually deliver your skills, that's where we can come into play. And that's, it's so I'm getting excited. It's, it's under it's what's the word, not underestimated. It's just not talking about as much. But at that point, you're looking at, okay, how do we actually deliver this service at the highest level for our clients, clients, and what can we do to streamline that so all the people involved are where they know what's going on. It's moving forward, and there's also contingencies on let's say we're a little bit behind on the project, a little bit behind on the past. It's less of a project management role that we kind of come into play, but it's more about the automation in the systems and making sure that everybody involved kind of knows what's going on and key data is being transferred. That's where that data transfer is even more important, right there, because once we have a new client in, we're excited. You gotta actually fulfill it, and we actually have to do the things, and you also have to get the information from your new client. You have to get access. You have to get certain documents and whatnot. I do this a lot with our financial service side clients, all that documentation, all that information that you need before you can even start doing what you have to do. How do we get that in more seamless. So I love service side as well.

Kerry Guard 29:05

I think it's so underrated, it's definitely not talked enough about, because you could fill the pipeline all day long and bring leads in and nurture them, but if that customer experience does not deliver in the same seamlessness that you just gave them from a marketing standpoint, ouch. So yeah, I love that. That's something you do. And when it's a good experience, like there's so many tools out there, right, that we all work with on a regular basis, and you just know that the it just makes that renewal so much easier. When it's a great customer experience, even if it's automated, it's those touches that just make a world. Yeah, you got to bring it all the way through customer success. Yes, I'm here for it. Let's talk about the next so one of the things we really wanted to pull apart is the. So let's just assume now we have the tech stack that we know the clients are currently using. We have clean data, we have the workflows. Let's talk a little bit about the technology piece of this because, to your point, you don't want to build on sand, and I find a lot of times clients their initial reaction to fix something is to add another tool.

Khadirah Muhammad 30:21

Please You're not, please.

Kerry Guard 30:25

That's our talk today. I want to get you started. Let's go Kadir and give it to us, what let's, let's

Khadirah Muhammad 30:30

definitely what's best practices here. Best practices is, before you add on anything, you have to look at what you have right now. And I know we've said that before, but it's so important whether you're hiring a professional or not, and you're just trying to clean up what's going on in your own business before you get that new tech. We gotta know where we're at right now. Once you have that, then we need to really, in my opinion, I think you should look at technology like you look at hiring an individual. You kind of have to interview them. You have to look at what is qualifications. How is it going to help you? And not just today, but five years from now? You want to think as long term as possible, which I think may feel like a contradiction in considering how fast technology moves and how quickly everything can kind of change on this heel, you know, AI specifically open. Ai changed a lot over the past couple years, even though AI has been out prior to to chat, GPT and everything. But now let's change however. You should still be thinking ahead anyway, because as your organization grows, or if you're a small business owner, as your business grows, you it's going to be harder to transfer out of tech. One, one of the most key places you should be looking at and carry, I think you agree, is your CRM. You want to see if you can live there, essentially, because that is pretty much your house in terms of if we're, if I'm using this analysis right, it's the hub. It's where everything is stemming from. It's where all your data is going to be integrated in. It's where all your leads are going to be in. Your whole team is going to be using that. So we don't want to play lightly when it comes to choosing a CRM then we're going to stay at, we don't want to have two CRMs. We don't want to have I've seen that like, I've seen people use act, you know, something like Active Campaign, and maybe they're still in entrepreneur or something or or even like, keep, like you. I don't know why we're using two different ones. I don't know why we're using two different ones, but we need to choose the one that's going to work for us, because if not, not only is this just cost that's just going to go up, but it's more confusion, and you're just in terms of the marketing world, you're going to lose out on leads. You're going to lose out on new sales opportunities, because everything is everywhere, and if you're maybe a smaller business, and maybe it's just you, the CEO, the owner, plus, you know, either assistants or you might have some directors, that might seem okay, but it doesn't work. It just doesn't look

Kerry Guard 33:23

yeah, there's nothing worse than having different teams using different tools. Yeah, yeah, run into that, for sure, definitely a conundrum there. I got us, I gotta say, you gotta I love what you're saying about the five year mark, because there are so many times where we get stuck in a tool that isn't actually working. We actually had this with our with a data tool we were using where the data connections were always breaking, and the work my team was doing was so overly manual, and it took us six months to just figure out how we would even move tools. And by then, we didn't have another solution lined up, and we were locked into another year with this tool that was broken. And so I basically gave my team a year, but I was like, I am not renewing this again. Figure out something else, because you get, you get sort of in that stuck, like, is it better to go with what you know, even if it's got these kinks, than to do somewhere new that's unknown, right? But you if you don't, if you don't spot it soon enough and start the process of migration fast enough you're going to get stuck. It just happened to me with LastPass as well. I couldn't migrate the team quick enough to one password, and we were just afraid of losing access to the things that are so important that we had to renew again with this tool that keeps getting worse and worse with every update. So I love what you're saying about doing the due diligence. Because switching, even when you know you have to, can take a year to two years to do it.

Khadirah Muhammad 35:13

Yeah, and, and to your point, it's like it's the devil that you know versus the devil that you don't. Right. We know this tool. Even if we don't like it, we know it. And then the thought process is a lot of times as human psychology thing, we fear the loss more than we desire the game sometimes, yeah, so you know the loss in what I have right now, the loss in, you know, money, depending if you have to pay more for this new tool, even if it's going to be better versus the gain of actually using the tool for what it's for getting the results that you need to get, which is likely have an understanding of your data and your leads, moving on a clear path in your customer journey, which I think would probably make up for whatever the money is you have to spend on the nudes, but I'm gonna nightcress Right there. But it's a real thing. It's a real thing. And and really, if we don't think long term head, at least at a five year mark, then once you, and you just said this, once you get to, like, the one to two years and you're in your life that a contract situation with the tool, you have to be with them, or else you either lose out, or you have to pay more for breaking the contract, whatever those terms are. Yeah, it just costs you actually more to stay and dealing with the lack

Kerry Guard 36:42

of which is, it's so painful. I'm just agreeing with you all over the place, yes,

Khadirah Muhammad 36:48

yeah, it's, I mean, it's, you're losing out so much. That's why, especially if you're in a business right now, you're not, don't have, like, a satellite foundation. Really have to look at, specifically, I'm talking about CRMs like you're hiring another person. Can you see yourself with this app for five years? Are you testing it? Are you thinking of as many scenarios as possible and knowing where your business is going as well? That's so, so important when it comes to picking tech.

Kerry Guard 37:18

So let's talk about the CRM for a sudden, because it is, to your point, the most, one of the most important tools that you'll have in your it's probably most consistent tool you'll have in your stack, right? There's probably two or three that you'll that are like, you can't function really without them, the CRM being the hub. So what do you look for when you're trying to choose the right tool for either yourself or the client. Yeah,

Khadirah Muhammad 37:43

for clients, what I'm looking at is what's their actual trajectory, and what is their actual business? Because we work with clients in different industries, it's not always financial services, but it's always a professional service. So I need to see what are is your business actually doing, and what do you intend to do at least over the next five years, but I did longer, and how big your team is going to get. So there are some industry related you know, CRMs are specific for those industries. That doesn't always mean that you should use those, but it's an option that probably makes more sense than others. But I also need to know, how do you sell? How do you market? Does this make sense for you? For example, I'm actually really big fan of a CRM called go high level. I love it. It's a very big fan of it, but I'm not always recommending it for different clients who I know. You don't need that level of power, and it's just too it's going to be too much for you, and it's just not going to be a good fit for you. You need something that had that's been more seasoned, that's been around, that also has the support that you're going to need. Because especially if you're only hiring me on a consultancy basis, versus maybe you want us to manage your software, which is different, then you your team is going to be handling this, and I know that CRM something different, because it's just too much. It's just too much. So you need something like an Active Campaign. You need something that has more support available for you, and it's just easier to navigate inside the actual platform to find what you need to find without having to necessarily build it from scratch, which is what you know high level does love it, but that's what it does, and that's what makes it a headache for a lot of

Kerry Guard 39:29

people. I think that's a really important distinction between the tools you recommend based off of the resources you have available. I also feel like listening to you talk. The other aspect of it is when you're looking at the five year mark growing into something too so being able to not like a MailChimp, you're going to grow out of really quickly. Because all it does is capture addresses and news and newsletters. It tries to do automation. Yeah, moving on, moving on. So having something you can grow into, I would also say, from a sales team perspective, or customer success team perspective, looking at the tools for how they interact with it, I'd love your take. I have many opinions, but in terms of the right data, having your sales team be able to provide helpful insights into the CRM, or into a Salesforce that connects into a CRM, I think is crucial in really understanding the deal flow and and the right leads coming into the system. So what's your when you're so active? Campaign has a sales system, which is great. Now, not all systems do, and I also imagine it really depends on how big your company is, right? So let's just take each size for a second and give them some examples. So if you're a small business, maybe more in the startup space, you're going to scale right? Not a mom and pop shop, but like, you're a small business, you're a startup, you're going to scale at some point. But for where you are right now, you got a few people in your team. You maybe got one salesperson. You're dabbling with the concept of marketing, and you're probably haven't done anything. Where do you start? What system would you recommend for them? I

Khadirah Muhammad 41:25

think I still actually would recommend Active Campaign for them as a CRM because if you're scaling, you're growing, you're going to hire on young people. Doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have a large sales force, but I don't think you need a large sales force to still benefit from active camping, even just ignore the pricing structure for a second their actual features, because that that is a and they just had another price increase. So you know, just ignore that for me, just know that for right now, their actual feature set and what they can do works very well if you are in startup mode and you know the goal is to have a larger sales team, a larger marketing department as a whole as well, you're going to need a solid tool like that. I would still recommend that if you are not, and maybe you don't have intentions on having a larger sales force or a larger company as whole. And maybe you're not looking at millions and millions, but then you're just looking at hundreds of 1000s. You may benefit from something like a dubsado if you're more of a creative, especially like a HoneyBook, if you're more of a creative, because I don't think they're good tools for larger teams, or if you have a more complex ish sales team. And when I say not complex sales team, but more complex sales system, maybe it's not as straightforward. Also, if you're not as data heavy, those might be a better fit. Okay, if you're a sales team that is very obsessed with the data side of things, you're going to need a tool that can provide that and give you that in an easy way.

Kerry Guard 43:19

I hope sales, the sales team started data centric, as we all should be. Let's talk about, I feel like we've talked a lot about the small startup scale up. Let's talk about when you get more complex, when you get bigger, when you get more like in not quite enterprise, but leading up into that and then into enterprise. Of those, what's your ideal because, like we said, it's very easy to try and solve problems by just adding more tools, which we don't which we've been very clear that we don't recommend. What's your ideal tech stack when you do have a bigger sales team, a bigger marketing team, and maybe even a customer success team,

Khadirah Muhammad 43:59

at that point, if customer success, you definitely need to hope you're already using some type of customer specific type of software, help desk, ticket system, that can streamline that process, as well as be able to field what type of questions that you're getting, what type of issues that are coming up for clients that you're working with, our customers, just depending on what your basis, you also need to have, you have the CRM side, and you likely need a data visualization type of tool that's able to take all the information that you're bringing in. Because as much as I would like for you to have a super tech stack, you probably don't, and you just may not be able to fix that. I'm just being very quite honest, because you're too big and you're too much inside of it, and that's where migration actually might be a headache more even if you try to do it in stages, it just may not make sense for for that business to do that at all. So at that point, I hope you're. And some type of data visualization tool that's outside of what your CRM or what tech you're using right now that can take all that information and be able to give you levels of support for that which had a recommendation. Is

Kerry Guard 45:12

that, like a is that like a Tableau or a business insights, Microsoft's Business Insights tools sort of thing. When you're dealing with a lot of data from multiple systems, you can pipe it into one place, right? Yeah,

Khadirah Muhammad 45:28

that's correct. Yeah. At that point you need to account for the size of your organization and the fact that, again, multiple departments, departments are using different systems and tools, you need some type of big data visualization that can make it make sense, because you all the Zapier. You know, automations in the world is probably not going to give you what you need. You need something more than that at that point.

Kerry Guard 45:59

Yeah, that makes sense in terms of sales systems on the flip side, right? So you have your CRM for your marketing hub, and then you have the customer success tools you just mentioned, which is great in the the analytics piece that's pulling it together. What would you recommend, like, can they just work in something like an Active Campaign, or if you've got, like, the enterprise hub spot, or do you think it is important for a sales team to have their own system, like a sales force, that then you connect what's sort of like your ideal world scenario. In

Khadirah Muhammad 46:27

my ideal world, they would actually would be using Salesforce. They will be using something specific for sales only because CRMs focus more on the marketing side. They just do. They focus more on the marketing, the lead management, but when it comes to the actual sales process, when you're big enough, and you're at that enterprise level, and you're just kind of hitting there, your sales process and everything is too complex, I think, for a CRM to do just and that's not just on the data side, necessarily. It's just also the management of everything. At that point, you have a clear distinction between marketing and sales, and your sales process deserves its own home. At that point, you just need to be able to connect the two together and be able to see the you know, the data, make sure everything's flowing. But at that point you need your own home. We need a second house. You know? We need a second house. That's a vacation. Yes, we need to take vacation. And that's where all you know, because it's going to make sense for your sales provision. It's big enough you have people, and if you're you know, your sales process again, just maybe more complex. It needs more a sales force is going to be that for you. Yeah, it's

Kerry Guard 47:49

kind of you're talking about, like with a with customer success, you need a it's a totally different system. You need, like a Zendesk. It's going to operate completely different. So let's talk about the pitfalls of having multiple tools, because as much as these come, as much as these teams need their own homes, there's challenges that come with that, in terms of migration, data connectivity, data flow. So help us talk. Let's talk about the pitfalls, and then what, how you would approach those to try and either mitigate them or try and at least reduce it.

Khadirah Muhammad 48:24

Yeah, one of the biggest pitfalls is either leads, not if we're speaking specifically, like maybe you already have your systems and you trying to create that flow between leads, context, dropping off duplications, redundancies, leads, not actually, or contacts not actually being transferred correctly across the board, and therefore you don't know where that contact is in their customer journey at any point, some of the biggest issues leads getting information that they either don't need, or they're getting it twice, three times, because we don't really know where they belong in this process, which I've seen, and that's probably one of the biggest headaches. And at that point, most CRMs, if we're speaking specifically in the marketing world, they're able to differentiate. You know, if a contact fills out a form, but it fills it out again, but uses the same email, but maybe a different phone number, it's able to pretty much match that person and adds on that phone number as a secondary phone. Once we have these different systems and they're acting into different marketing or sales material, their ability to use vastly different, you know, communication, um, methods. Now we don't know that this person is actually the same person. They just got three different emails in two different phone numbers.

Kerry Guard 49:54

Well, yeah, I mean, that's it's kind of like what Trevor was talking about earlier, right? So if they opt into marketing with a business. This email address, but they're connecting and hanging out with sales on a personal email address. Now they're showing up as two different contacts right in the CRM, and now we're hitting them

Khadirah Muhammad 50:11

twice, and now they're getting all the things, which means they may be seeing promotions that they didn't qualify for when they initially took them on, or we don't want them to see that, because, you know, they're already inside of the sales process, whatever that looks like. That's one of the biggest headaches, because it also means the data isn't as accurate either, right? Because you might have more people in one side of Lean nurturing versus the sales side, more people. You're thinking, we're getting in more leads, and they're not converting as much, but they could be, but that just may be skewed. So that's probably one of the two biggest issues the data side, and where contexts are at you're gonna have, they're gonna be dropped off, or they're gonna have issues. It's near large enough, it's going to happen is, there is no perfection with it. How I try to mitigate that is, this is where you really look at your Zapier, your makes, how is the data being transferred, and seeing if there's ways that we can simplify that more there to make sure it's actually happening. This is also where it does require, I think, a manual review of, not necessarily all the context and everything, but you need more eyeballs on it. This is where it's less. Let's automate 100% we probably have to, not necessarily reduce automation, but you need to add in a human element of somebody who can look at this data to the best of your ability, depending on where your organization is at, you might have a whole department that's just in charge of that department. Might be a couple people, but it's somebody who's looking,

Kerry Guard 51:54

yeah, human i the human touch, I think is under rated when it comes we think that automation can just solve all of our problems. Where else do you think my last question for you, because I know we're at time. Don't blow the horn on me yet. Peter, last question, where else do you feel like the human element when it comes to automation in our tech could really benefit in helping with things like that?

Khadirah Muhammad 52:21

That's a great question. I think it actually comes into list segmentation, and being able to see your customer base and edit your segmentation. Automation can handle quite a bit of that, but this is where you need to know your customers and know why they're opting in. What are they looking for? And you may look at that data and see, okay, maybe we need to ask them more questions. Actually, I've had that happen with clients as well, but they have a big enough list, and it's somewhat, you know, segmented. You have certain sections, you have certain lists, but I just think there's more that's there. And if you ask them the questions, see if they segment themselves to certain degree. But you need to look at what's there. What have they actually bought? What have they opted in for? What if they tried to download? What have they what emails have they responded to? Which can get real meticulous, I know, but that's where, if you have somebody looking at that who also understands your company and your organization, what its mission is, let alone what it sells, it allows you to, I think, get more use, use that data, data, and get more feedback than you think. That's actually there, but your AI system doesn't know you to as deep as a degree as maybe it too. You know, I understand that, but you know your business and your your employees know your organization. Those who are in charge of that should be looking at that, because they're going to be able to gain more from that data than you know, an AI system or even a big data tool is going to be able to tell you, you have to tell it what to do. Quite honestly, this is the other way around.

Kerry Guard 54:13

AI is not coming for our jobs. Y'all. The other thing I would really love, I would love to add to that from a human element. And speaking, like, doing some due diligence, talking to your sales team, right? Like, talk about a human element of trying to really understand where their pain is and what the leads look like for them, and are they, why don't they think they're good leads and so that, okay, what's making them not ready yet, so that we can do a better job of scoring and nurturing and getting you the best possible leads we can so we're not wasting your time. Is just not something AI can do out of the gate. I mean, there's they can send them back and we can say, Okay, well, but we don't know why they're sending them back or what made them a bad lead. Right? There needs to be some conversation there to continuously Hone and get them the good, the good leads that they can follow up with, who are ready to buy, who are ready to buy, and just because somebody downloads a white paper, y'all, that doesn't make them ready to buy? No, it

Khadirah Muhammad 55:13

doesn't this. I love that part too, because most of your leads are not going to be ready to buy right then and there. It's only a percentage of your leads that are ready to become clients or to purchase whatever you have. Most of them are not exactly ready. The more we can know why they aren't and what they're really looking for versus what they say they're looking for, and that's the benefit of a real salesperson, because they ask the questions. They get into it, they have the conversation they can if they're not, you know, on Zoom, if they're at least on the phone, you can hear how the person speaking inflections. You know what they're saying, and then what they really mean. And that salesperson, I love your answer, because they gain so much more even from the non verbal contact, because most communications non verbal anyway, so I love

Kerry Guard 56:10

that. It's true. Make friends with your sales team. Folks. Make friends. Yeah, both of knowledge. Kadira, I could talk to you all day, all day. I am so grateful for this conversation. If you want to learn more about Khadirah and to she can help you elevate your marketing automation with AI driving unparalleled growth. She can equip your team with groundbreaking techniques that set your Leap, set you leaks ahead of the competition. And she can harness technology to refine your customer journey, bolstering loyalty, your LTV and expansion. If you want to get to know more about kadira, hit her up on LinkedIn. We'll also have her website in the notes for you, kadira, I'm so, so grateful. Before we close out, you're more than a marketer, you're more than an ops person, you're you're our time savers and all of the things, and we're so grateful. But you're more than that. So in your personal time in you got four months here left in the year 2024, before 2025, is upon us. What are you most looking forward to in the months to come? I

Khadirah Muhammad 57:16

will say definitely my birthday. My birthday is October 30, so I'm 100% looking forward to that birthday. Thank you. Thank you. Happy birthday. But yeah, I'm looking forward to that. I love to dance and run when I'm not on a computer. So continuing that, and also, if I'm traveling, I might be going somewhere. It might be mixed up, but it might be somewhere else in Latin America, and I danced the chatter, uh, bachata, salsa and kazumba. I'm a big fan of land dances. I might be able to put that to the test in those countries. So I'm looking forward to,

Kerry Guard 57:52

oh my gosh, exciting. Well, I'm going to follow up with you. I want to hear how it's going. Yeah,

Khadirah Muhammad 57:57

thank you. Thank you.

Kerry Guard 57:59

Thank you again. Katero, so grateful if you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share this episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps complex brands get found via SEO and digital ads. Toasted by me. Kerry Guard and co founder of MKG Marketing, Music Mix and mastering done my company called Snappy. And if you'd like to be a guest, please hit me up real quick. Little FYI, as I mentioned, the Martech World Forum is happening in London at the end of October, just around Kadir as birthday. And if you would like to come hang out in London with me, I'm going to drop a link in the notes, and you can get a 20% discount. And they're also doing early bird specials right now, so the tickets are red hot, and you should jump, jump on that and come hang out with me. I would love, love, love to see y'all Yes, thank you again for hanging out with this episode. Happy Thursday. Bye.