EP016: Mastering The Balance Between Automation and Personalization with Sachin Patel

Welcome to the Perfect Practice podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel is a functional medicine success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Perfect Practice. Today I'm going to be discussing a topic that is very relevant, especially in the digital world, and that is the incorporation of automation and systems into your practice while still maintaining personalization in your practice. I encounter this more and more. You know, a lot of practitioners want to automate things. They want things to be, you know, you know, done for them. They don't, they want to set it and forget it. And the problem with that is that you're going to miss very important opportunities where personalization is the only solution. So when we look at the travel and the journey that a client goes through, I created kind of a organizational timeline, if you will, to help you understand how far somebody is from becoming a new patient and what processes can be automated. So, you know, one of the things, if you're using social media that you want to do, and I'll use Facebook as an example, but this can really apply to Instagram and YouTube and all kinds of things. So the first thing in the timeline is a Facebook post. And that's gonna be very general, it's gonna be very vague, it's gonna be specific to your, if you've got your message dialed in, but it's not personal to the person. So this is something that I would consider an automation. You can use something like Syndowit in conjunction with authentic posts. So don't just set it and forget it because that's not gonna communicate directly to that person. So I would use something like Syndewit, for example, and then I would incorporate personal posts with you. If you're living in congruency with your message, it should be very easy for, for you to create social content. It doesn't have to be pictures of you, it doesn't have to be selfies, it doesn't have to be glamorous. Take a picture of what you're eating, take a picture of your favorite pen that you're writing in your Favorite journal with and sharing a message of gratitude. I mean, there's so many millions of things that you're already doing. If you're living in congruence that you could be sharing, there's really no excuse for you not to be doing it, except for some sort of irrational fear that it's not gonna serve you or serve your community in some way. So Facebook posts are very general now. They can get personal if you start responding to commentary. So if you're gonna be sharing Facebook posts, make sure you're giving people an opportunity to feel communicated to, to the point where they feel like they can be responded to. So keep that in mind. Is very, very important to do that. Engage in the conversation that people are having, ask a question that you want responses to, and turn something that's relatively automated into something that's more personal. The next level or layer on the person's journey is going to be Facebook lives. Now, these are going to be not automated because they're live, but you can put them into your calendar on a weekly basis. Think of it as a patient appointment, right? You wouldn't miss a patient appointment, so why would you miss a Facebook Live? And consistency is very important. People ask me all the time, when's the best time to do this? The best time is when you feel best, when you feel most energetic, when you feel most authentic, when you feel like you're in your element and a time where you know is very unlikely to be disrupted by other things. Set it in your calendar, commit to it, and do it. And when you're on a Facebook Live, the cool thing is, is you can have a conversation with people that are on the call with you or on the presentation with you. So this is a combination of automation being in your schedule, putting it in there, committing to it, and automatically turning to it, and personalization more personal than a Facebook post is going to be. The next level or layer is getting people from your posts and from your lives into a group, because groups have much higher engagement than sharing something on a fan page or sharing something on your personal page. And people can get even more personal with their questions. The nice thing about groups and pages is you can actually have content creating, delivered on specific times and dates. And you can plan this in advance so you can kind of automate it. But groups, you're gonna find people are gonna ask more personal questions. So again, the fine line between automation and personalization, you have to have both. You can't just post things out there and not have any interaction with people. Then from your Groups, you might wanna get people into your autoresponders. And this is somewhat fully automated, unless you're asking for responses from individuals. So this is where kind of your long term nurturing sequence, your background nurturing sequence, if you will, is continuing to be sent to people. But you still do the Facebook posts, you still do the Facebook lives, you still do commentary and add value into the Facebook groups. And then from your autoresponder, once people are on your email list, then it doesn't really cost you anything to get them. But you know, keep in mind that, you know, if you're not sending compelling email, or email's boring, or it's not interactive, then people might stop opening it. So give people a reason to open up your emails that way that autoresponder, that automation is doing some work for you. And then once you have people's email addresses, then I would invite them from your Facebook group and from your autoresponder CRM software to a webinar. A webinar is where you're going to get a commitment from people to show up. Now you can do two ways. You can do a live webinar or you can do an automated webinar. I prefer that you have live webinars so that you have higher personalization, higher interaction with people in addition to doing automated webinars. If you had to pick one, start with the lives, get better at those, and then you can pluck out the one that you felt you did best in and turn it into an automated webinar. So, you know, we can make things personalized at first and we can then also automate them as well. A webinar moves somebody further along if they're committing to that period of time. They're probably pretty invested in what you have to share. These people are superfans. These people are, are committed. They might not buy something right away, and that's okay. You just continue to nurture them, you tag them and identify the interests that they have. Then another layer of automation and personalization can be direct mail. If you have an individual's mailing address, then direct mail can be very powerful, moving somebody along. And this can be automated through processes, or it can be personalized. You know, as you're moving into this more higher level of individualization and customization, it's okay to get personal with people. There's a tipping point where all of your communication should be personal. And I'll share that with you in just a second. So direct mail is mailing somebody to something. It could be a book that you wrote. It could be a guide, it could be something of value that can help and inspire people. The next layer from direct mail that moves people closer into your fold, you know, and you're in their homes now, they need to come into your space, which would be a live event. Now, if you're doing a live event, that's very personal, okay, extremely personal, but there could be several steps of automation built into that. It could be the reminder emails, it could be the follow up emails, it could be the indoctrination sequence that goes out to people. Again, maintaining automation, but also personalization at the same time. Now, if somebody comes to a live event, that person is your hottest, hottest lead. Because that person has probably seen your posts, they've seen your lives, they've seen, they've been in your group, they've responded to your emails or at least read a few. They've attended, perhaps a webinar, if they're local, they're going to attend a live workshop. They may have received some direct mail from you. These people, they don't have to become patients to become referral sources for you. Okay, somebody might not patron your services, but they might be fully in belief of what you offer. And one thing you want to leave these individuals with is can you think of somebody that this information can help? Are you willing to share this information with somebody, somebody who you think it can help? And are you willing to get this person moving in the right direction and come to a future workshop just like you have? Give somebody a very simple challenge and get them to follow through on it, and these people can become your biggest advocates. Now, that personal touch leads to automated referrals that are coming into you. It leads to automated contacts that are coming into your fold. So keep that in mind. Very, very valuable resource for you are these people that come to your workshops, your super fans, your raving fans. Again, they don't have to buy something from you to be a fan of yours. You don't have to buy a Louis Vuitton purse or you don't have to buy a Ferrari or own a Ferrari to know that that's a nice car or it's a nice item, right? You can appreciate things. And if you know somebody who's looking for a really nice car, then you know exactly where they need to go or if they're looking for a really good practitioner. So you leverage those personal touches all along the way to create this automation of referrals to your practice. Now, if somebody doesn't sign up for whatever reason, then they can Always be invited to a discovery call, which now we're getting even more personal. So you could have an autoresponder that goes out to people after they've attended your workshops and invite them to a call with you, which an automation leads to highly personalized, moving this person closer down the stream, if you will. And then these discovery calls, once you've had personal contact with an individual, then it is my high, highest recommendation that pretty much all of your content starts to become personal at that point. Because now you have information about this person, you can provide them with specific helpful tips based on the history and information that you know about this person. And what I do is I have my practitioners do something called Follow Up Fridays, where every Friday we follow up with people, make sure that everyone's moving in the right direction. Some people are gonna need more touch points than others. In the beginning especially, people are changing their entire life. They're going to need support with that. So once somebody gets on a call with you, my recommendation is to get them into a consultation where things get even more personal. But after that, extremely personal, one on one conversation, on the phone or in a discovery consultation, everything should be personalized after that. So if you're going to write them a letter, write them a handwritten letter, okay? If you're going to send them an email, make sure it's a personalized email, not something generic, not something that you wrote for everybody. Now you can still have your autoresponder going in the background because you're continuing to deliver value through your messaging. That's going to stay there forever. That's not going to change. That's operational and automational in autopilot, if you will. But any email contact, mail contact, you know, any form of reaching out to that person is going to be personal after that point. And I know it sounds very daunting and cumbersome, but you're in the business of helping people. And if you can't, if you're not willing to write somebody a personal letter or a card or a personal email, then you do not have the right to help that person with their health. Okay? Because that is a much bigger responsibility that you have for people. So I hope this helps. I hope you get value out of this and I hope you can start to see a little bit more clearly how to use automation and integrate it with personalization and this will be a very powerful transformation in your practice. Yes, it's work, okay, But I'd rather be busy working than busy worrying about where my next patient is going to be coming from. Okay, this is very powerful stuff. So use it, utilize it. If you're enjoying these podcasts, please share them. Invite your friends. You know, we all need to cooperate together and collaborate together to elevate functional medicine and natural healthcare into the limelight. And together we can do this together with the right information and all of us collaborating and coordinating, you know, we'll be eventually celebrating the fruits of our success. So go out there, help people, automate the things that can be automated, personalize the things that need to be personalized. And when in doubt, personalization always wins. With love, with gratitude. This is Satchin. Have an amazing rest of your day.