Methodologies for Implementing the Right No-Code Tech Stack

Welcome, everybody, to my talk on methodologies for implementing the write no code tech stack. So just a little bit of an introduction from me, first of all, my name is Kelly Goss. I am the founder of an agency called Solver. We're also an automation academy, and we are smart suite certified consultants, pipe drive partners, Zapier certified experts, and Xero certified advisors. And although that we partner with all of these different tools, we are pretty tool agnostic in the sense of we help businesses from all over the world to do better in terms of their productivity with the right no code systems, better processes, and we help them implement automation and AI to help them to ultimately be more productive, save time, and work smarter.

We also have an academy, so we teach people again all over the world how to use tools like Zapier and no code automation platforms, as well as, you know, different things around how to use APIs and webhooks and different platforms as well. So that's just a little bit about me, and what are we going to talk about today? So we're going to cover how do you actually choose the right tools for your tech stack? We're also going to dive into some process improvement methodologies which are going to help you to select those tools, and then I want to give you some no code tool examples that are specifically for marketing teams but can be actually used for any process ultimately. But as audience today is marketing teams, that's what we're going to talk about.

So let's get started with how do you actually choose the tools that you use and implement within your tech stack. So some of the things that are super important here are, first of all, the user experience and tech savviness of the people who are going to be using these processes. So you always need to take this into consideration because one tool may be very complex for certain types of people, whereas it might actually be quite a simple tool to use for somebody else. So it's really important to make sure that whatever process you're building and whatever tool that you implement is really going to help the user to be more productive, and there's not going to be a hindrance.

Of course, if you are not the person who's deciding on the budget, you do need to get budget approval and get an idea of what really is the right budget that is going to take into consideration implementation as well as ongoing subscription costs. You'll also want to consider timelines for the build. So with no code tools, something that's off the shelf and something that's customizable. Of course, SaaS creators, so software as a service creators now, will create platforms for us that really are going to make it easy for development time. So you don't need to be a programmer or a coder to actually build solutions that would take two or three years to build. A lot of tools that are available on the market right now really mean that development time is very, very quick, but you do need to take that into consideration. You also need to consider the bigger picture. So what happens after you put your tool in place? How do you connect it to all the other tools that you might have within your tech stack? So you should be taking into consideration what it integrates with, what kind of automation you can have internally, as well as connecting it to third-party tools like Zapier or Make, for example. And does it have a lot of native integrations versus whether or not you have to build all of these integrations in a custom sense. And then I think very important is make sure that whatever tool you're going to select is really going to offer you a large amount of customer support. So hopefully, in this day and age, most SaaS products do have customer support teams available, but make sure that this is going to fit in with your time zone and availability, and whether or not it's paid support, Premier per support, or whether or not you get that free as part of the subscription that you're paying for. And then, of course, you do need to take into consideration all of your experience and knowledge, and whether or not that falls short. So if your knowledge and experience does fall short when you're trying to decide on a tool that is really going to be useful for you, whether or not you need to be bringing in help from external consultants to be able to help you with those processes and help you to understand what is going to be the right thing to put in place. And very important here, and this isn't specifically listed here, but very, very important is making sure that whoever is going to be part of the process going forward is part of the team that investigates the tools, implements the tools, and can be there as champions for other people within the process and the teams that they're working in so that everybody is on board. Because one of the biggest problems with implementing any kind of technology is user adoption. So I hope that helps initially.

So I just wanted to introduce you to a few process improvement methodologies that are really going to help you to start putting in place some of the things that I've just talked about. So you may have heard some of these phrases, but a lot of them come from lean management and other process improvement methodologies. But the main things to take into consideration here, and some of the words that we're going to be using, I'm going to focus later on on total quality management, but we've also got things like continuous improvement cycle, brainstorming, process mapping, 5W1H, so that's who, what, where, when, why, and how. Lean management, the Deming cycle, Jodoka and Kaizen, and all of those link into each other in one way or another. But ultimately, these are process improvement methodologies that we use internally at Solver to help all of our clients in the way that we then help them to implement tools within their businesses.

So let's now focus on total quality management. So what is total quality management? So actually, if we break it down into different things, total quality management is user focused, process centered, total employee involvement, promotes integrated systems, is strategic, and has a systematic approach, promotes continual improvement, is based on fact-based decision making, and includes effective communication. And we take all of those different methodologies, and we have our own Solver methodology, well it's a Solver automation methodology, a trademark process, which has four steps in it, and the first part is identifying, and this is pretty much process scoping, process auditing, putting together a plan as to what we should be putting in place, so what new tools, how we should be optimizing existing tools, what automations and different productivity processes we can put in place. Then we're going to be putting all of that and building it, so that's the execution part, and then we've also got the continuous improvement side of it, where you go back and do quality control and quality assessment to understand whether or not the process is fit for purpose, is working, and is continually being tweaked and adjusted to make sure that everything is working correctly.

So let's talk about some really cool adaptable no-code tools that can be used by marketing teams, and just to bear in mind that a lot of these tools that I'm going to talk about now are tools that can be used by any department in a company, and can be adapted for those uses, but we're going to focus more on the marketing side.

So these three tools that I want to talk about are SmartSuite, ClickUp, and Zapier, and we're just going to start with SmartSuite first of all. So SmartSuite is a relational database. What that basically means is that you can have different entities, or different tables that can link together to cross-reference different data, and what's so cool about it is you can use different formats that look different for different people, so you see things in different views, because some people might like to see things in a table, some people might like to see things in a Gantt chart, some people might like to see things in a Kanban view, and it's quite adaptable in that sense, but you can also have data in one place linked together, and you can also use it as a project management tool, which is quite cool.

So the first thing I want to show you here is just how easy it is to use in terms of using templates. So there are lots of different marketing templates available, so it means that you don't have to start from scratch, you're ultimately just using the opportunity to use something that's pre-built for you, and you're not reinventing the wheel. So it's quite cool in that sense that you can use a different template for different things, and you can very quickly start using it for your particular needs. And then in terms of how everything is going to look, we've got different tables that you can see here. So there are three different tables, campaign tracker and status, campaigning, requests and ideas and class. And this is just using a template that has been created for you, but you can adapt it to your needs, and you ultimately have different fields available to do different things, and then you can capture different entities. So you might want to have a date field, statuses, and different images, and then you could also take into consideration that you can see things in different views. So you might want to see things at a table, you might want to see things in a Kanban view, and you can adapt it to the way that you want to see it. But then we've also got dashboards that you can set up so that you can analyze your data and see reporting information on different things that you might want to observe. So it's actually really cool.

And then we've also got Smart Docs. So Smart Docs is a feature that allows you to write, create documentation within the tool. And the Smart Doc feature really is quite nice, because you have AI integrated into it as well. And yes, you could use chat GPT and copy and paste information from one place to another. But you can use this for writing press releases. So in this example that I'm showing you here, we can write a press release for something that we might want to do at Solver. And the whole document gets created based on the prompt that you're actually creating. And it means that everybody can collaborate in one place, and it makes it nice and streamlined.

Next, I would like to talk about ClickUp. So ClickUp is a tool that we actually use internally for all of our project management with clients, but also for our marketing efforts. So we have a blog, we have social media that we post, we have a YouTube channel, and we manage all of that within ClickUp, which is a little bit different to SmartSuite. So it's not a relational database. But you do have different entities for different things. And I'll just show you an example here where this is our blog section within ClickUp. So we have different lists for different things. And we're able to plan all of our blog content here in ClickUp.

So you can see different statuses, planned, approved, for blog upload, published. We've got lots of different statuses. And we can tag the blogs, we can create documents, so you can see a draft link there. We can create documents for all the blog writing. We can have all of our dates there, we can see who the person is who's responsible for writing the blog, but also we can have approvers in here as well. So it makes it really very, very organized. We, on top of that, can have automations that link to that. So we have different automations set up in each list that we have for our different marketing efforts. And each automation does a different thing. But a lot of them are based on status changes and creating tasks in the database when something actually happens. So you'll see the first one here, when a status is changed from to review blog image, we want to then create tasks that will review those images and reassign them to particular people. So it makes things really streamlined and more productive by having automations in place. We can do more with this by having tools like Zapier connect into ClickUp as well, which I'm going to talk about a little bit later.

So the next thing that I want to talk about is just ClickUp AI. So very similar to what we have with SmartSuite, where we've got smart docs, you also have AI functionality that allows you to do a lot of different things. And in this particular example, this video that I'm showing you right now, ClickUp AI really allows you to do very similar things to what we showed in the smart docs within SmartSuite, where you can create documents based on different prompts that are built into ClickUp already using AI. And again, we could use chat GPT or something else, another content writing tool, but this is all in one place. And if you're using a tool for a lot of different things, you're embracing all of its functionality. And it really makes sense to be able to use a lot of the functionality that you have available to you. And obviously, take into consideration whatever you might be paying as part of your subscription, really wise to use whatever you have available to you. So ClickUp AI is another productivity booster that allows you to do different things. So in this case, we're showing around documentation, but there are lots of different things that you can use ClickUp AI for such as organizing your tasks and creating summaries of different things. So that's all included as part of ClickUp AI.

So now let's talk about another one of my favorite tools, which is Zapier. Zapier is a no-code automation workflow builder, which allows you to connect with over 7,000 different cloud-based tools. So say for example, Slack, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, I don't know, you name it, there are so many thousands of different tools that Zapier connects with. And ultimately, what it really does is helps you to build connections between different tools that you might have within your tech stack to help them to communicate with each other and for you to automate tasks that you might be doing manually. So I just want to show you some of the things that we actually do with Zapier, which is pretty cool. So we use Zapier very extensively within our business, as well as with our clients. So we do a lot of automation building for our clients.

But just to give you an example of what we do internally, so we use ActiveCampaign for email automations. We use HubSpot for our CRM. We use Slack for some communications. And we have lots of different other tools that we use. So this is just an example of some of the automations that we have that are set up to connect ActiveCampaign with some of the other tools that we use within our tech stack. And you can see here some of these examples are things like when somebody opts in to a list within ActiveCampaign, we might want to send an email notification. We might want to send a Slack message. We might want to add that person or those details into a Google Sheet. There are lots of things that we might want to do. So for manual and repetitive tasks when trying to connect to different tools that you might be using within your tech stack.

So here are some more examples of things that we do internally. So this is actually the Zap that you would have. So where you have a trigger, which is your first step within the automation, and then you have lots of different action steps. So you can have one or more action steps to do different things. So in this particular example, we have a YouTube channel. And whenever a new video is posted in that channel, I want an email to be sent to me notifying me that there's a new video posted. I also want to find the task that we have within ClickUp. As you heard me saying earlier on, we use ClickUp for our project management and also for managing other things like marketing tasks. So we would have been building out the process within ClickUp. We then want to find the task that's specific to this particular video being released, and then update that task status within ClickUp. We also have some processes around ChatGPT. So we have every month at the end of the month, we have a scheduled run of an automation that will prompt a conversation within ChatGPT to ask ChatGPT for 10 social media ideas that we can use that is all specifically around automation and AI. What this automation will then do is it will run and split all of those ideas into separate lines and loop through to create 10 different tasks within ClickUp, so that once we have those ideas, we can then start acting on creating the social media entities that we are then going to put together social media assets, such as images and text and that kind of thing.

Now, another thing that I think you're going to find really super useful is Zapier's app marketplace. So Zapier has a directory of over 7000 apps that it integrates with. And as you can see here, we've got things like Google Sheets, Gmail, Slack, all the things that I mentioned earlier on. But you can also see that there are app categories and lots of different things where Zapier is categorizing all the tools that it connects with. Why this is really useful is because if you're looking for specific tools to use within the business or within your team or for yourself, you know, solely to use by yourself, you can actually come to this directory, which is found at zapier.com forward slash apps A-P-P-S, and you can go to the marketing section. And in that marketing section, you will find thousands or hundreds of different marketing apps that you'll be able to potentially use. And one of the things I mentioned earlier on is thinking about the bigger picture.

So the bigger picture ultimately here is when you're looking for a tool, you really want to be looking for something that has other possibilities, integrates with other things, can automate different tasks that you might want to do. And by going to Zapier's app directory, you'll not only be able to find a tool that might help for a specific purpose, but you'll know that it has Zapier integration, and you can check out what kind of triggers and actions you can use within a workflow to be built into your processes, which is really, really useful, of course.

And then, before we wrap up, just a couple of things that I wanted to mention. So I've just mentioned how much I love Zapier. Zapier is such a cool tool. What I'm going to be doing is holding a workshop as part of the conference on the 10th of December, and it's going to be about utilizing Zapier's built-in AI capabilities and AI tool integrations. I am going to be giving you an overview of how to use Zapier from scratch. So if you don't know how to use Zapier, don't feel like this is too advanced, you know, you can come and I will teach you some stuff about how to use Zapier as well. And I'm really going to dive into some of Zapier's built-in tools that have AI capabilities, and we're also going to talk about some AI tools that Zapier integrates with. So some of the things that I've already mentioned in the Zapier app directory, but there are going to be a lot more tools that we will talk about as part of that workshop on the day.

So come and join me for that session, so that you'll learn lots of stuff about how to use Zapier and make yourself more productive with some of Zapier's AI built-in tools and integrations. And then lastly, please go to my website solver.co.uk, there are lots of free resources there as part of my blog. I've also got some different resources that you can get access to, and you'll be able to connect with me on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Vimeo, so please come and get in contact with me. I would love to hear from you and your journey with all of these different tools that you might be putting in place. And with that being said, thank you very much for joining me today, and I look forward to seeing you during the workshop. Thanks. Bye.