Amanda Holmes became CEO of Chet Holmes International at the age of 24. The singer/songwriter stepped in after the death of her father, Chet Holmes, author of The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business With Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies. The firm's youngest employee by a 20-year margin, she took the business world by storm when she increased conversions 1,100%, increased leads generated 1,176%, and doubled the company's coaching clients two years in a row.

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One of her key initiatives when taking the reins was to experiment with marketing automation. I invited Amanda to Marketing Smarts to share how she used automation to increase webinar conversions and optimize every touch point in the customer journey.

Here are some highlights from my conversation with Amanda:

Automation can help you ensure a top-quality customer experience at key points along the buyer's journey (02:30): "At first, I did it as a quality control: 'I want to control every piece of this scenario so that my clients get the best possible experience.' We're known worldwide for what we do in the consulting and coaching and the 'core story,' and marketing and sales, so it's not like we were anything lower [quality], but I was obsessed with wanting to control it. That's what led me down the path of automation: 'If this is an automated email that I've written to a tee and this is the webinar that I can give to a tee, and these are the videos, then I know that they'll have a killer experience.' "

You can automate social posts, but have people ready to respond when followers reach out to you on social channels (10:35): "I automate emails. I automate videos. I even automate—on my company's social media channels—how many posts we do and when they're going to go out.... I generate more business from social than ever before because, they may go to my website, they may be getting my email campaigns, but then they're reaching out to me and my sales team on LinkedIn, on Instagram. And they want to know about the people behind the brands."

Automation becomes easier when you have a few "core stories" you can interpret for different channels (14:00): "If you can create one core story, and that becomes the thing that you disseminate to every single marketing medium, then you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You've already created the center of that wheel and it just gets repurposed. That one story gets put into your webinar. It gets put into your video funnel. It gets put into your social media posts. It gets put into your blogs. For us, it looks like a document of a lot of different stats, a lot of different stories, testimonials, case studies. All of that becomes this living, breathing document that Marketing and Sales interact with, and they all know that core story. So everybody's singing the same tune. That's a key part."

To learn more about Chet Holmes International, visit ChetHolmes.com, or follow the company on Twitter. You can follow Amanda on Twitter @AmandaHolmes.

Amanda and I talked about much more, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

This episode brought to you by GoToWebinar:

GoTo Webinar makes it easy to produce engaging online events. Whether you want to connect with your prospects, customers or employees, GoTo Webinar has the tools and analytics you need. Start creating interactive and educational webinars your audience will love.

Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on June 20, 2019