Sales & Marketing Playbook: Unleashed

What Happens When You Automate the Entire Client Journey Without Losing the Personal Touch

• Evan Polin & Craig Andrews

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Buyers don’t wake up searching for your brand—they wake up searching for answers. We dive into how to meet them there and guide them all the way to loyal, long-term customers using automation that still feels human. With Dr. Denise Dennis of Action Accelerated, we map a complete journey from awareness and consideration to decision, onboarding, retention, and optimization—and show where automation saves hours without stripping out your voice or values.

We start with solution-first awareness: what turns casual scrollers into qualified leads, why lead magnets work, and how to deliver instant value with clean capture and clear next steps. Then we unpack nurturing that builds trust—evergreen sequences in your tone, timely broadcasts that prove you’re present, and behavior-triggered follow-ups that keep relevance high and pressure low. Dr. Denise explains the tech stack in plain English: pixels, UTM tracking, Google Analytics, and CRM workflows that surface what’s working across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and email.

Decision becomes effortless when logistics are automated. Smart scheduling links, thoughtful reminders, and pre-call assets (testimonials, a 90-second intro, one-question intake) set the stage. Post-call paths route yes, no, and maybe into the right journeys—agreements and payment links for buyers, concise recaps for fence-sitters, long-term nurture for later fits. Lead scoring helps sales focus on the right conversations by weighting downloads, clicks, and visit depth.

Retention is where revenue compounds. We cover onboarding that calms buyer anxiety with welcome videos, clear instructions, and quick wins. Automated summaries after sessions, periodic check-ins, and satisfaction surveys keep clients engaged and heard. When progress is visible, expansion feels natural—course two after course one, VIP days after group programs, strategic packages after pilots—raising lifetime value without awkward pitches.

Finally, we show how to optimize the full funnel with data: view-to-opt-in, opt-in-to-show, show-to-close, and beyond. Test headlines, proof, and CTAs; follow the demand your data reveals; and treat automation as a reliable system that delivers the right message at the right time. If you’re ready to work smarter, reclaim time, and scale trust, hit play, subscribe for more growth playbooks, and leave a review with the one step you’ll automate this week.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the sales and marketing playbook Unleashed, the premier podcast for innovative growth strategies, hosted by two seasoned experts. Meet Evan Poland, the president of Poland Performance Group, a master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience. Evan is not just a consultant, he's a force in sales, focusing on mindset, planning, and skill development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services The Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency, an expert in growth marketing. With 20 years under his belt, Craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, Evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices, and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed.

SPEAKER_02:

And again, welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. I'm Craig Andrews and my partner in crime, Evan Poland. How do today, sir? Great to see you. How are you doing? Not too bad. Now I had a thought. Just one thought. Not many thoughts in my head today. Okay. But I just want I just want to give you a thought. I realized that one of the reasons that people confuse sales and marketing is primarily because they see the customer journey in different parts of it, right? They see some parts and not the other parts. And I think today's episode, what we're going to try to do is that we're going to try to find out how we can make all these pieces come together in a very easy and fun-filled way, if you will, uh, to make our jobs easy. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01:

I think that's great. I think the other thing that today's um podcast may do for folks is sometimes I can be kind of lazy. And if there's ways to work smart, yeah, rather than work hard and not have to physically have your hands and everything, but to have things continue to work, that's a good thing as well. And I think that some of the things our guest is going to talk about today may help some of our listeners with some of those things.

SPEAKER_02:

I I completely agree. So let's bring her to the stage. Dr. Denise Dennis. That's a tongue twister if you say it fast enough.

SPEAKER_03:

That's what I hear.

SPEAKER_02:

How are you doing today, Doctor?

SPEAKER_03:

I'm doing great. How are you both doing today?

SPEAKER_02:

Doing well. Thank you. Doing fantastic. So before we really get into the weeds here, why don't you tell everybody about who you are and what you do?

SPEAKER_03:

Certainly. So uh Dr. Denise Dennis, founder and CEO at Action Accelerated. We are an automation agency. Uh, but more importantly, what we are doing is helping coaches and consultants reclaim their time. So a lot of coaches and consultants went into that field because they want to coach, they want to consult. They don't want to spend their time writing out a bunch of follow-up emails, chasing clients down for payments and so forth. So, what we do is we come in and we automate every step of their client journey so that all they need to do is show up and coach, but their client in the meantime feels cared for every single step of the way.

SPEAKER_02:

Awesome. Awesome. So the the thing I want to kind of touch upon here is I'm going to try and list each stage of the journey from a sales and a marketing perspective, and then you kind of give us some feedback in terms of what we could do because we're about the we're the playbook. We're about giving people actionable steps to improve their business. Sound fair?

SPEAKER_03:

Yes, love it.

SPEAKER_02:

All right, Evan, you ready for this?

SPEAKER_01:

I am ready for it. I I am a sponge for free consulting, and I can't wait to hear some of these great ideas that I hope to be able to implement into my own practice.

SPEAKER_02:

And I just need you to tie on the end of that to the marketing is better than the sales, and then we'll be all set. How about that? No, okay, well, he's not going for that one, Doc. Okay. So the first stage of the journey is the awareness stage, which is the purpose to attract and educate potential customers. Uh near and dear to my heart, but why don't you tell us from an automation perspective, what could somebody do to improve that part of the journey?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, so I think first, let me just talk about I think one of the one of the misconceptions that people have is that people are out there looking for you. They don't know you from Adam. Yeah, although it hurts our heart that people aren't looking specifically for us, but the reality is they're not. They're looking for an answer to their problem, a solution to what ails them. So uh one of the things we can do at this stage is to provide those answers through three uh free uh snapshots into our genius. And so we typically refer to those as lead magnets, which just means giving away some of our genius for free, whether that's a free download, a free quiz, a free video series, whatever it is, the automation piece is putting that out there on social media, for example, maybe running ads. And then when people sign up by giving us their name and email address, we're automatically delivering that solution, which is letting that person see, oh, here's somebody who understands what I'm going through and who could potentially solve my problem.

SPEAKER_02:

That sounds very familiar, Evan. That sounds very familiar.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm still gonna getting over the fact that people aren't specifically looking for me. That that still is hurting a little bit. Um, but but but I'm gonna try to move past that to identify ways that people who aren't you know specifically searching for me might still be able to find me.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. Absolutely. So the next stage we're gonna talk about is the consideration stage. Um, and in that part, it's the nurturing of the leads and building trust. Uh, I would say from a marketing perspective, that's very important. Uh, because Evan and I have talked on many occasions in other episodes about how sales and marketing kind of fight each other. But the key part here is nurturing every lead that comes through because they found you to your point. They finally got to the process that they found you. Um, and so we don't want to just throw that away like it didn't exist from a perspective. What can we do there?

SPEAKER_03:

So now at the consideration stage, when they are trying to figure out, okay, was this a one-off? Yes, this was a great little quiz, or yes, this video or this PDF download was wonderful, but do they really understand me? And so in the consideration stage, you're going to continue to grow that nation or that relationship, grow that trust in you as the potential solution by sending that person emails, potentially sending that person text messages, uh, so that they are continuing to get information that is increasing their trust in you, which means you're not immediately going in for a sale. Instead, you are establishing that relationship. Hey, let me share more about other solutions to your problem. Let me share how I helped Sally or John solve the exact same problem. Let me tell you a little bit about me so you get to understand how I'm different from the coach down the street who may say they have the same solution. So it's really building that relationship. Uh, but again, the the uh what saves people is the fact that this is all happening automatically. So it's not you manually typing typing out emails to each of these people all the time.

SPEAKER_01:

So you know, along those lines from your perspective, because I think I I know some people who, you know, I need to customize everything and I need to do it all, and it needs to be personal, it needs to be me. I know other people on the other extreme where I don't want to touch anything, I'm automating 100%. What do you think is kind of the right mix or the right balance is as they're going through that consideration stage? And how should people optimally be kind of mixing and blending the automation with maybe some personal outreach?

SPEAKER_03:

So it should be a blend of those automated emails that are what we call evergreen, meaning whether I sign up today or sign up in six months from now, I start with email number one, then email number two, and so forth. That can be uh automated, but automated doesn't mean cold. So it's still infusing you and who you are, which is why we're not just copying and pasting from Chat GPT. You're still right, you're still writing emails that reflect you and who you are. Those are going out automatically. And then if you want to speak more to what is happening to you today, this week, this month, that's when a weekly or monthly newsletter, which is a uh one time this email goes out to everybody, kind of email blast, might go out on a regular basis where you can do more uh personalization. But in either case, there's still so much of that that can be automated. And automate again, automation does not mean that it's not personalized, it's still personalized, it's still reflecting you. It's just not you sitting there typing it out every single time.

SPEAKER_02:

And so before I stick to your stage here, Evan, and in the decision stage, uh the thing I want to kind of reiterate uh what Dr. brought up is AI is not always automation, right? That's that's a big determining factor. People tend to confuse those, right? The point of the automation is to save you time, effort, and energy and make your workflow easier, but it's not to replace in an AI space that people are talking about. We've talked about that on on other occasions, where it's not a replacement, it's a tool, and making sure you use the tool appropriately. I wouldn't use a hammer to cook my dinner. Exactly. That's not that's not the point. You like that analogy, Edwin? It depends what you're eating. Right, right. Why don't you talk about the discovery stage or just I'm sorry, the decision stage?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So so so a couple questions uh as things get nurtured along. Um, first, is there a way of somebody's running multiple campaigns or you know, going through multiple different channels to kind of track what's working, what's not working, what's getting them better engagement. Um, how do folks do that if they're utilizing you know LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and multiple channels?

SPEAKER_03:

So depending on how sophisticated your system is, and I don't want to be overwhelming because you don't have to use the most sophisticated system, but for some systems, you can track the source of that lead. So if the if the person, if the lead is coming in through LinkedIn, that can be recorded inside your CRM, inside your automation tool. So do you know this person came in from LinkedIn or this person came in from a Facebook ad. So we can track the lead source. And then if we are looking at our numbers, which we should be, so the answer to your question is know your numbers. If we're looking at our numbers, we can see, oh, the majority of people who are coming in are coming in through LinkedIn. So let me focus more of my attention on LinkedIn. Uh, or I need to improve how I'm showing up on Facebook because I'm not getting as many leads from Facebook as I would like. Uh, so I think that's that's part one. You asked a second part, which I've totally forgotten what the second part of the question was.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, yeah, and are there any specific tools that you recommend that folks use, or you know, what what what's the best way to kind of track some of those things?

SPEAKER_03:

Okay, so you are going to, if you're running ads, for example, you are going to, if you're running them through Facebook, you're going to use um the Facebook Pixel, which is just a little bit of code that's being placed on the various pages so that you know the source of the information. Um you can also use Google Analytics to track where inform where people are coming from. But beyond that, once they're in your system, once they're in your automation tool, you're also going to track what are people doing. So much of automation is based on what are the behaviors people are doing. Which emails um are people opening, which email, which links and emails are people clicking on? Which of your free things are people signing up for? So if you if you um are a if you're a pet store and you have lead magnets on how to choose the right dog collar and lead magnets on how to choose the right kitty litter, and people are only signing up for the dog collar ones, then maybe that means you need to shift your focus and focus more on dog owners rather than cat owners. So the data is always gonna tell you what people want, what they're interested in, and likely what they're gonna want to buy.

SPEAKER_02:

You heard that, right, Evan? You heard that. I know you heard it. Yeah, you heard my line, right? Data data data. It's brilliant. I love it. It made me very happy. I got early. You know, and I think that ties directly into what your opening statement really was when you're sitting back talking about people aren't really searching for you, but they're searching for the problem. I know Evan preaches that in his sales trainings all day long. That's what differentiates you from everyone else. And I think the beautiful thing about data, the beautiful thing about technology, the beautiful thing about us as small businesses is that we're very nimble and we can we can kind of move and shake a lot easier and faster than maybe some of the bigger corporations. And technology is kind of level the game that way compared to what it was years ago. Um, so I love everything about that. This next phase, I'm sorry, go ahead, Evan.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, actually, uh one other question, kind of in the decision stage, and we start to as we start to get engaged, uh, back to something I said a little bit earlier. I'm a big believer in working smart rather than just working hard. Is there any way to kind of automate the scheduling of the meetings? Or if somebody schedules a meeting and no shows, um yeah, as they kind of get into that funnel, are there ways to make things a little bit easier in terms of getting that engagement, getting that connection? Um, and even the the connection from marketing together.

SPEAKER_03:

And if we look at it from yeah, if we look at it from the prospect connect uh perspective as well as our own perspective, from the prospect's connection uh perspective, we can automate the process of giving them a link to book, which again could be part of an email, that that's the next logical step of hey, let's set up a time to talk. And there's a link in the email. So they're getting the link to book the appointment, they're getting automated reminders of hey, our call's coming up tomorrow, hey, our calls in an hour, hey, it's time for our call. And so they're getting those reminders. And then after the appointment, if they were a no-show, we can automatically send them an email saying, Hey, sorry we missed you. Here's the link to rebook. If they were a yes, we can send them whatever our next steps are in the onboarding. If they were a maybe or a no, maybe we then add them to our long-term nurture so they they still get information from us so that maybe when they are ready, it's a yes. So all of that can happen on their side, and we can we can make it more robust by not just sending reminders but sending information that's like, hey, before we meet, here's some more testimonials from people who people who love me. So here's some more videos, or here's some more, you know, here's an article I wrote that might be interesting to you. But so that by the time you're talking with them, they're already almost a yes, because they've had all this experience with you. So all of that can be happening. Uh, and then on our side, in terms of when to reach out, if perhaps that prospect hasn't reached out yet, again, the data can tell us, we call this lead scoring. The data can tell us, okay, well, this person has requested these two lead magnets. They've clicked on these three links, and so that's gonna give them a score of five, or however we want to rate it. And maybe we have our system set up so that anytime somebody reaches a score of five, create a task for me to reach out to them directly. Maybe I'm gonna pick up the phone and call them. So, not just not cold calling anybody, but specifically reaching out to the people who through their actions have demonstrated, okay, they are really interested, and they're probably at the point where they're ready to at least have the conversation and more likely to say yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Craig, is this a setup? I'm hearing more about data and tracking and using metrics to determine who I should reach out to, how strong a lead is. Does this stuff actually work?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, you know, I'll say very clearly marketing's better than sales. What can I tell you? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

SPEAKER_01:

So I, you know, I I I I it's nice to see that somebody can be wrong and still have that self-confidence and you know, still still still have that strong identity to feel good even when they're wrong. So I I I I I I'm happy for you, Craig.

SPEAKER_02:

Anyway, moving on, this part of the stage is where a lot of people, at least from the marketing perspective, fall short, right? The the part of making sure after you have the sale, which Evan can speak to, you have to do further work, right? The job's not really done, even after the sale. Because the biggest thing, and I know Evan, you and I have talked about it in the sales training that we've had, is it's really good about keeping those clients on a recurring rep rep uh process to keep them on, right? You went through all this marketing, all this automation, all this sales training to get them in the door and you got them. It didn't just go away after that point. You still have to nurture them. So, here in this stage is the retention and loyalty stage. Uh, just to define it, it keeps customers engaged and increase their lifetime value. Real quick, Evan, could you define lifetime value? Because I know that's a huge one for you.

SPEAKER_01:

So I I love lifetime value, especially when it's big, and that's how how much that client is worth to you over the entire life of the relationship from the first time they purchased a product or started engaging in a service throughout their entire time with you. Um, I'll also say um the the but before we have you know everybody else chime in, that as you're doing this, one of the things that I would strongly recommend from a sales perspective is at least once or twice a year you look at all of your clients and do some account planning. Which ones do you think because they're growing or because they're only using a small number of your products or your services, which ones can expand? Which ones can give you regular big business and is it gonna be consistent? Did you lose any customers and do you want to start a campaign to recapture some of those customers? So if you are strategic, I'm sure that some of the automation that's being suggested is gonna be that much more effective.

SPEAKER_03:

Um so I love that that was a lot. So I agree with everything that you just said. Um, so how do we do all of that? First of all, it starts from the moment that person hits submit on that order and has paid their that initial money. Because that's the point where they're gonna be like, oh my gosh, what the heck did I just do? I could have used that money to go to the movies, uh, put a down payment on something, whatever else. And so there's that that's the point where they have the most anxiety about this potential purchase that they just made. And so, right from the beginning, we want to make sure that they feel like this was a smart decision. And we do that through our onboarding. We do that through immediately sending them a welcome email, uh, maybe sending them a welcome video. And so here's where we have that blend of the automation and the personalization. We could either have a standard video welcome that you as the as the business owner is like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad that you're that you're here. Here's what you have to look forward to, or we could automate creating a task for me to send an actual video specifically to this person where it's like, hey John, I'm so glad that you're here. Yeah, we could also get into how we could have the AI version of me greet them automatically. That could be set up uh automatically. Uh, but that's just part one. We're also automating uh the welcome sequence. So making sure just at that beginning, when they're first on part of our community, they are getting regular emails from us, making sure they understand, hey, here's how to log on to the course platform, here's where to join the Facebook group, um, here's how to reach out if you have any questions. So again, they feel like this was a wise choice, particularly with my population, which is primary, I primarily work with coaches and consultants, and a lot of their clients have experience getting um having very bad relationships with prior coaches and consultants who took their money and disappeared. And so it's so important for people to realize no, this was actually a good choice. So you want to establish that early on. And then throughout the process, throughout your time working with that client, you're going to send regular check-in emails, maybe have an automated email series that only goes out to clients. Uh, maybe after each coaching appointment, you automatically send out a coaching summary of your conversation. So they're again seeing their progress. Um, and then periodically, you're also sending them customer satisfaction surveys so that you're getting feedback from them on things you can do to improve your services, which increases the likelihood that they're going to stick around. And then finally, throughout this process, you're also going to give them opportunities to take the next step. So if they signed up for course number one, you're going to let them know, hey, you're doing a great job with this. You're going to want to improve these skills by taking course number two. Hey, you signed up for my group coaching program. Let's take it deeper by having a VIP day. And so it's just a natural next step, which is also going to help increase that lifetime value.

SPEAKER_02:

I love every bit of that.

SPEAKER_01:

And so it's not over after the first sale.

SPEAKER_03:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02:

No, not even close. Not even close. And I I love it because what you did is you basically set us up beautifully to talk about the final stage here, which is the uh optimization. Um, the optimization is important because we know need to in sales training, we need to learn how to improve ourselves from a sales perspective. How did it go? Could it have gone smoother from a marketing perspective? How much more efficient can I be in terms of getting more of the same like clients who were the exact ones that I want, right? So, from an optimization perspective, how does that work from an automation perspective?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. So you're optimizing in a couple of ways. You're optimizing by trying to duplicate the same wonderful clients that you have. So, in that customer satisfaction survey, as a result of that, for the people that loved us, which of course is going to be majority of people, for the people that loved us, we're going to ask them to provide reviews, provide testimonials, provide referrals, which isn't going to increase the likelihood. We're going to get more people like them. Um, so that's what they can do to help in that process. But then behind the scenes, we're also looking at well, how many people looked at our webinar registration page versus how many people signed up for the webinar versus how many people showed up for the webinar versus how many people bought on the webinar versus how many people bought after the webinar? We're looking at all those numbers and we're tweaking uh little elements of that, changing the headline, changing the offer, changing the pitch to see if we can improve those numbers. We're looking at our uh the emails that we sent out. Were the ones, you know, going back to my example before, were the ones about dog toys clicked on more often than the ones about uh caring for your gerbil? And if so, then maybe that means we need to just focus more on the dog care. So that all of that's going to give you information, and that's how we're optimizing by making sure we're doing more of what's working. But we can't do that if we're not tracking to figure out what is working.

SPEAKER_02:

Love it. Love it. Evan, do you have anything to add to that?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I think that's fantastic, and it gets back and wraps up wraps up a lot of the things that we've talked about over time. The importance of having a process, the importance of tracking, the importance of knowing what's working, knowing what's not working, pressing on those things that are working, and being able to tweak along the way. And again, the automation is a great tool to help you do that times 10, times 100 of what you're doing if you're just doing it manually.

SPEAKER_02:

And so, Doc, if people wanted to reach out to you, if they had concerns or questions, because I can already hear the bells ringing now, like that's a lot of work. I got to think about all this whole thing. How am I gonna possibly do that? How can they reach out to you?

SPEAKER_03:

Uh, the easiest way is to follow me anywhere on social media at automate with Denise. That is me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. Uh, I also would encourage people to go to reclaim. I mean, um go to 15hoursback 1515hoursback.com and sign up for my free training where I show you how you can use automation to reclaim at least 15 hours every single week. And or you can just send me an email at denise at actionaccelerated.com.

SPEAKER_02:

Awesome. Awesome. So as you guys know, Evan and I um we do this podcast because we really want you guys to have information that's going to help your businesses grow. Uh, we want you to win. We want you to win in sales, we want you to win in marketing, and now we want you to win in automation so that we can all as small businesses grow and succeed. Uh, Evan, before I close out, do you have anything that you want to add?

SPEAKER_01:

So I just think that it's important that you look at your business as a business, you look at what processes you can put in place so that none of us went into this to do our own accounting, to do our own bookkeeping, to do our own manual work. So the more that we can look at ways to automate, to one, free up time so that you can do more valuable, more higher-level thing, and two, to get you better the better results, um, you're missing the boat if you're not looking at how to do this.

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. So, if any of this information from Dr. Denise, Evan, and myself has any value to you, by all means, like, subscribe, send us a comment, all of that stuff above. We're on all the major podcast platforms. And if you want to see our beautiful faces on YouTube, um, you're by all means, you can go to YouTube and find all of our episodes there. Uh, for Evan, Craig, and Dr. Denise. Uh, we enjoyed you guys, and uh keep winning. Keep winning. Bye-bye now.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for joining us on this exhilarating journey through the world of sales and marketing. Remember, the playbook is in your hands and the possibilities are limitless. Keep exploring, experimenting, and innovating, and watch as your business reaches unprecedented levels of success. Don't forget to subscribe to the sales and marketing playbook unleashed on all major podcast platforms and follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn for even more exclusive content. Until next time, keep hustling and keep winning.

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Craig Andrews

Host
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Evan Polin

Host