Interview with the “Dr. Frankenstein” of marketing
Published: Thu, 11/05/20
Troy is an “Email Players” subscriber, my business parter in Learnistic, and also what I like to call a “fringe” marketing automation scientist — like a cross between Steve Jobs & Dr. Frankenstein. Especially with Zapier. And until seeing him in his “lab” I had no idea what kind of marketing powers Zapier can give even a caveman like Yours Knuckle-Dragger.
Anyway, each part is long.
So if you are one to whine & shriek about emails that are “too long!”, you’ve been warned. This is for grownups with an attention span greater than a guppy.
All right, here goes with part 1:
BEN SETTLE: Who are you, and why should anybody care what you have to say about marketing, automation, Zapier, or anything else we're going to talk about.
TROY BROUSSARD: Software has been in my blood since I was 12 years old and I was also a nuclear engineer, so I take a scientific approach to it, using the scientific method, which none of these guys running around about their so-called tests and tracking actually do. I mean, there's nothing like overseeing a nuclear power plant to think that maybe you need to pay attention to what you're looking at. Because you don't need a Three Mile Island scene hundreds of feet under the water in the middle of the ocean somewhere.
So with that nuclear engineering background, you absolutely have to have it, and I had a great deal of training with that. I noticed this in my daughter, my 10 year old daughter, just the other day, I gave her a task to upload a bunch of videos into Learnistic for us. I taught her the attention to detail, trust, but verify. I taught her to go back and verify everything and make sure, try to break it, try to find a fault. And lo and behold, my 10 year old daughter just blew me away as she went through my audio book that has 41 laws and every one of them starts out on the audio with "Law number 41. Law number 22." That's like the intro to every single one of them. And she's like, "Dad, on these two, you didn't say the word number. You just said law 17. You didn't say law number 17, in all the others, the other 41 you said that.”
That is an example of the scientific method trying to break something, trying to find what doesn't belong here approach to analyzing any kind of data. In Zapier, that's really critical. It's critical to have that mindset of trying to break things because with Zapier there's a lot of detail. And you must learn that mindset of attention to detail if you want to have success with Zapier. Otherwise, you can create a spiderweb of automation insanity. And so attention to detail is something that is very critical in that process. If someone doesn’t think that makes me the guy qualified to talk about automation then they should probably move on from this interview.
Besides that, software and programming has been a thread in my entire life going back to every crazy different niche and business type you can think of I used software and programming. So even when I was doing land development, I did software in CAD and drafting stuff. When I was in a cabinet shop, I created custom software for our management, I've always done custom software and automation.
And when I got into entrepreneurialism, and after being fired from corporate and starting all over again, I really went deep down the path of marketing and growing my business. It started out as an SEO company. And then I went down that path with marketing. And there's this unique synergy between being really effective with marketing, with marketing automation. And when I, I would say in the mid 2000s, like 2005, 2006, 2007 in that range is when marketing automation really kind of grew its wings. It's when Infusionsoft came into the scene and started really challenging the way marketing was done by saying, "Hey, there's a better way some of this stuff can be automated, some of this stuff can be segmented." And so I went down that automation path with marketing automation very, very deeply with Infusionsoft, became one of the top two or three in the world in terms of leading consultants and advisors and strategy guys with Infusionsoft.
And went down that path.
I worked with a lot of seven, eight and even nine figure level marketing guys teaching them automation, how to use segmentation automation more in their business. But Zapier is really the extension of marketing automation. Zapier is the tool that allows you to connect different platforms, different tools together, and make them all work as if it was your own product. It's kind of like the Walter Bishop from fringe of marketing. You get to just experiment around and create these crazy combinations of things that are really unique and specific to your business that nobody's ever going to build a specific tool for. And yet, with the power of Zapier, you can extend and kind of unify the tool set that you have to create something that rivals one of Walter's creations.
So that's kind of what it's about to me. That's who I am. That's where I come from. And that's what Zapier and how it fits into this picture. It's really that tool that allows you to create personalized experience in your own marketing.
BEN SETTLE: Why do you call Zapier the digital duct tape for businesses?
TROY BROUSSARD: It's like the MacGyver thing — he fixed with duct tape was one of the components in his MacGyverized solutions. With Zapier it's kind of the same thing with your business. You're trying to fix something and it's broken and the two pieces just aren't really meant to work. And you've got to get that window covered up because it's raining and the car just shattered the window as you're going down the road because you hit some rock and it crashed a side window and you don't want to get the car wet. You duct tape it. It's something that it works. It may not be perfect. Ideally, you would have stopped and replaced the window but you know what, you can get some thick plastic and duct tape it around there and it's going to hold, it's going to get you by until you get to the next town and or you get home and get it fixed right.
So it fixes things and joins things that aren't meant to be joined. And Zapier does the same thing. It takes two different programming systems.
Maybe your Email Marketing System and maybe your appointment setting system. And it connects the two in ways that people had not even envisioned. And this is the example I like to give, Ben, if you think of the operating system on an iPhone, okay, the iOS operating system. This was developed after Steve Jobs... Now, obviously iOS he developed. But this feature I'm talking about, this app I'm talking about was developed before... It was developed after he died.
And I think that he would just be really touched in knowing it. But somebody took his operating system that had the ability to do incredible things. And they engineered a phone that would sit on its end, stand up on the edge of the phone and use the vibration of the phone, applied differently on left and right sides to turn the phone and make it vibrate into a complete circle so that it could film a 360 degree interior view of a home. It would sit on a table in the middle of the room, set the iPhone up vertically. And this app was so intelligent that it would use iOS to turn and pivot the phone just through the vibration of the phone.
And that's something that Steve Jobs could have never imagined, being created when he created the operating system. It was just he created this tool set. And it was up to app developers to create incredible products from it. Well, it's really the same thing with Zapier. With Zapier, you've got this massive, incredible tool set. And nobody can really even think up the ways that you can possibly want to or need to use it to glue together, duct tape together disparate systems in your business.
BEN SETTLE: Do you need to be a tech guy or have a team or an assistant or someone to use it? Or can you be a one man band caveman like myself to use it?
TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah, you can absolutely just do this yourself. Zapier connects thousands and thousands of different platforms together. And that can seem overwhelming and daunting. And something that would say let me just hire this out. But the reality is that every one of us in business uses just a small subset of tools. So Ben you've got your AWeber. ou don't do appointment stuff, so you don't have any of that drama, but you have AWeber, and you have 1ShoppingCart. And so the reality is you don't need all of the complexity. And you don't need to be overwhelmed with Zapier and you can start really, really thin.
The analogy that I would say is it's like peeling an onion. You can peel back a layer and get a basic level of automation in place with Zapier with just real simple stuff. And then as you start using it, you can go deeper and deeper and deeper in the tools. Which is exactly what I teach, I don't teach someone to try to go in and just become a master at it. I teach him to go in and just do some basic stuff with it, with the tool set that they use. The same tools that they're using all the time, and just over time, go deeper and deeper and deeper with it. And when you do that you develop a real core understanding and knowledge of the few areas that you really need to and nothing else.
So yeah, I think that it's absolutely appropriate for anybody, even a caveman like elBenbo.
That ends part 1.
Tomorrow in part 2 Troy’ll talk about how info publishers specifically can use Zapier to make lots more sales using a cheap Zapier account.
In the meantime:
Troy and his long-suffering business partner Moshe are selling a live Zapier training along with the recordings, if this sort of thing interests you.
Plus, if you buy from my link below by the deadline, you also get:
“elBenbo’s Copy-Soaked Brain”
This was an unadvertised bonus I did for our $399/month coaching program in Learnistic.
The tl;dr of it is this:
Part of my copywriting process is, I read my sales letters out loud 10x's before running it. This audio is the 4th of 10 readings of the elBenbo Press sales letter — with all the edits, bumps, and ideas being worked out and arranged at that stage, and with all the psychology & insights going through my brain as I think about, work on, and write/edit my own sales copy.
The deadline to get all this is tight.
You got til Sunday, 11/8 at midnight EST.
Details at this link:
https://www.EmailPlayers.com/zapier
Ben Settle