Applying Manual Techniques in an Automated World with Dustin Mathews (Part 1)

Dustin is known for creating “marketplace frenzies” that drive people to buy millions in products and services online and offline, including a startup company that landed on the Inc. 500. He managed and marketed over 200 events, seminars and boot camps per month generating over $12 million dollars in the course of a year. Author of How to Get Rich Working For FREE and Secrets of the Real Estate Millionaires, Dustin also publishes the most widely read the offline newsletter for speakers and promoters.

 Here are a few of the key takeaways I took from my interview with Dustin.

 Systematic but not always Automatic

 Dustin reminded me of something that I think is kinda funny.

I’m pretty sure the human mind has a couple of glitches. And one of those glitches is that it is insanely ungrateful.  It doesn’t take more than about 13 seconds for us humans to forget our prior state of being and go right back to complaining about our current state. For example, many of our businesses prior to Infusionsoft were very manual.  Infusionsoft introduced automation and efficiency to most of our businesses.

So if you think back to when you first got Infusionsoft rolling, and the first time you hit a snag where something couldn’t be implemented EXACTLY the way you wanted it.  Admit it, you felt a little letdown, and maybe even doubted whether Infusionsoft was going to work.

I find it somewhat amusing that we so easily find ourselves lamenting the fact that we can only automate 80% of our business (that was previously not automated at all) or that if something can’t be totally automated, we abandon it.

Dustin takes an alternative approach.

If it can’t be automated, Dustin’s next question is whether it can be done manually and then tracked by Infusionsoft.  If so, and it’s a good idea, Dustin moves on it.

For example, it would be pretty cool if Infusionsoft could automatically take a contact record, look them up across all the social networks and try to make connections.  That’s not a feature of Infusionsoft, but a human can do that really easily and Infusionsoft can tell the human what needs to be done.

Additionally, Infusionsoft can follow up with the human to make sure the job gets done. I think there are probably places all over our business where we drop opportunities because we are limited by this ALL OR NOTHING mentality.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my interview with Dustin!