bi-ultimate-marketing-automation-guide-feature

Infusionsoft Tutorial: How to Automate Birthday Reminders

One of the many ways that you can build relationships with your customers and prospects is to send them an email or a card to extend them a birthday wish.

bi-ultimate-marketing-automation-guideThe challenge with this is that, as your list of customers and prospects increases in size, sending out birthday cards or emails can become a significant resource drain – unless you have a means of automating it.

There are plenty of ways to do this, of course. However, unless you like adding complexity to your business, the most effective ways will not require you to add yet another “system” for you or your staff to maintain.

Infusionsoft: A Much More Efficient Solution

If you are an Infusionsoft user, there is there is a much more effective way to achieve greater results with less effort (and frustration).

In the video below, I’m going to show how exactly how this can be done.

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Digital Marketing Strategy: How Blue Cow Creative Doubled Revenue in 12 months with Marketing Automation

Do you run a small marketing agency and struggle to attract enough new clients to meet your growth goals?

Would you like to discover a way to put client attraction on autopilot?

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, my guest on the show is Shaun Whynacht, founder of Blue Cow Creative, a small marketing agency based in Nova Scotia, Canada. I learned of Shaun at the last Infusioncon and when I heard that he’d doubled his revenue in just a year, I asked him to come on the show to share his story.

When you listen to this fascinating and informative interview, you are going to hear Shaun and I talk about:

  • (02:13) Who he is and what his company is all about
  • (04:13) The results they’ve achieved (doubling their revenue!)
  • (04:58) What they did prior to what they’re doing now
  • (06:13) A big investment they made, and the cost of signing up
  • (08:13) How they capture leads
  • (10:53) Specific tactics they use for lead magnets
  • (11:53) Their focus on educating prospects
  • (13:13) How they segment their list
  • (15:49) The type of lead magnets they use
  • (18:43) Which social networks are working for them
  • (19:58) How they drive traffic
  • (21:13) A description of their lead nurture process
  • (22:58) How they are using the phone to follow up
  • (25:03) How they are converting prospects
  • (26:43) How they qualify leads
  • (31:13) How they are using testimonials
  • (33:53) How Infusionsoft has exponentially improved their nurturing
  • (38:13) How they are using Infusionsoft for operations
  • (39:46) Lightning round

Links

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

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Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent

Dyrsmid: Hey there, bright idea hunters. Welcome to the ‘Bright Ideas’

podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast for

marketing agencies and entrepreneurs who want to discover how to use

content marketing and marketing automation to massively boost their

business.On the show with me today is a fellow by the name of Shaun Whynacht,

who is the founder of a company called Blue Cow Creative, a small marketing

agency. I learned of Shaun by way of attending InfusionCon this past year.

Shaun started to use InfusionSoft, and in the year following his using it,

he was able to double the revenue of his firm. Being as he’s got a

relatively small firm, just two people, I wanted to get him on to tell his

story because that’ll be a great story of significant results with someone

who maybe doesn’t have a huge pile of resources to work with Shaun’s story

is exactly that.Before we get to the interview, I want to give you my tool tip for

this episode, and that is something called JobChangeAlerts.com. If you want

to know when someone who you are connected to on LinkedIn changes their job

description or profile, which might be an opportune time for you to get in

touch with them to sell them your services, JobChangeAlerts.com will do

that for you. Will actually send you an email, so it’s a super-cool little

tool and it’s totally free.The other announcement is, my next life cycle marketing webinar,

which you can register for at BrightIdeas.co/webinar. If you are not yet

getting as many leads as you would like, or you’re not doing a good enough

job converting those leads to customers, or you’re not getting enough

referrals from your existing customers, this webinar will definitely help

you to improve your results. So, BrightIdeas.co/webinar, to register.So, with that said, please join me in welcoming Shaun to the show.

Hey, Shaun, welcome to the show.Shaun

Whynacht: Thanks for having me.Trent: It’s a pleasure to have you on. I think you’re the first

Canadian that I’ve actually had on my show, which is significant for those

in the audience who don’t know, because I’m Canadian.Shaun: Excellent. It’s a pleasure to be on, and be the first.Trent: Go, Canada, go. [laughs] All right. For the folks who do not

know who you are or what you do, please take a moment and introduce

yourself and your company.Shaun: I consider myself an entrepreneur of life. I’ve had a business

since the age of 17, and a couple since; but most recently, what I’ve been

doing is a company called Blue Cow Creative Design and Productions, Ltd. We

do a lot of content creation for clients, including social media marketing

and lead capture, drip marketing, those kind of things.Trent: Okay. So, very much a marketing expert in the marketing agency

space, which is ideal because a lot of the people who are listening to this

show either run a firm like yours, aspire to run a firm like yours, or

could use the services of a firm like yours.You came to my attention because InfusionSoft profiled you for some

of the success that you’d been having since starting to use their

application. I want to talk a bit about that because obviously I’m a big

InfusionSoft fan. I use it myself and I think that there are people who are

considering using it, or could be using it, and I’d really love them to

hear from people who are having success with it.

With that said, you run a two-person agency?

Shaun: Yes.

Trent: Okay. Let’s jump to the conclusion first, So the people who are

wondering, ‘Why do I want to listen to this interview?’ Since starting to

use InfusionSoft, can you tell us a little bit about the results that

you’ve been able to achieve?

Shaun: We’ve been using it almost two years now. After the first year

of using it, we’ve noticed that our revenue has doubled from the previous

years. It wasn’t just a banner year just because of the economy, it was

actually what we have proven to be attributed to the benefit of using

InfusionSoft through educating our prospects before they actually decide to

work with us. And then the service after the sale, that it’s allowed us to

  1. That’s really what it has done for us and it’s almost like having two

other people working 24/7 for us when people are inquiring online.

Trent: Yeah. That’s pretty significant. Doubling your revenue and the

work of two other people.

Before InfusionSoft, how did you used to do what it is that you’re

doing now? Or did you even do it?

Shaun: If anybody listening is familiar with the old show MacGyver, I

say that we’ve MacGyvered a system together, where we had multiple

different systems out there running, one for invoicing, one for emailing,

one for contacts, and none of them really worked together. It wasn’t that

we looked at them as systems that didn’t work together. We just didn’t know

that there was a solution out there that would do it all in one.

When we heard about InfusionSoft and did the online demo, we were

hesitant that there was a claim that there was a service out there, that we

could subscribe to and use their software, and do all that. It took

probably six months for me to convince myself to take that leap and

actually try it, but it was the best decision we’ve done since then.

Trent: What you just said there is not uncommon. It’s a reasonably

good-sized investment up-front, a couple thousand dollars, and then it’s a

couple hundred dollars per month. I’ve had people email me who’ve listened

to the show, to ask about the pricing, and then right away, ‘Oh no, that’s

too much money.’ Did you think the same thing when you were looking at it

to begin with? Was that one of the things that was causing you to not pull

the trigger right away?

Shaun: Definitely. It wasn’t because I saw it as I didn’t have the

money to invest in it, it was just a big investment, especially for a small

business, a young entrepreneur who was just trying to make ends meet month-

to-month. Then, actually doing it, and looking at the other systems we used

where commonly they were considerably less per month, but you get what you

pay for. The time it saved us to not have to go between all those, it

actually works out cheaper if you figure out the time you’ve wasted with

the other services, by using their all-in-one solution.

Trent: Was there subcontractors that you used to use for various

manual processes, that now you’ve been able to automate and so you don’t

require those subcontractors, or even just your own time?

Shaun: It was my own time. It was replying to people’s inquiries about

common questions and those kind of things. For us, for what we do, because

a lot of the work is in creating a project and training our clients to use

it and be able to pedal on after the sale and use those solutions. To

educate them after, and have that resource there that they can come back

to, and currently drip information out to them after the fact to enhance

that service, was something that I would have had to spend a lot of time,

for one with a calendar and figure out, when do I send all this stuff, and

then actually physically have to do it. InfusionSoft just makes it all

simple for us.

Trent: Indeed it does. There’s three main pieces to InfusionSoft.

There’s the CRM component, there is the online shopping cart so you can

receive payments for whatever you would like, and then there’s the whole

marketing automation/email/autoresponder, however you would like to

describe that. I just call it the marketing automation piece. Are you using

all three pieces?

Shaun: I use all three. I use, more so, the campaign manager and the

campaign builder for a lot of the stuff. Probably about 80 percent of the

function we use it for, is for that. We have a lot of free resources on our

website where people can come in and request to download a free eBook or

free report, and then they get into a campaign where they’re getting drip

information about that, to convert them down the road, about when they want

to make that decision to move with a company like us, that they’re already

educated about what we do. We do that before the sale.

Then, after the sale, we use a lot of follow up through that, getting

people into education sequences, going out. We use the CRM, obviously, to

keep track of all the contact information, but also keep track of a lot of

the pertinent information regarding that client’s account, whether that’s

passwords, and things of that nature.

When it comes to the online payment and the eCommerce side, we don’t

use it as much. We don’t have an online store, but we do have certain

products. We do workshops where we get people to register and it processes

through that and puts them in the sequence for those workshops.

We wrote a book last year on marketing for small business and we sell

that through there, as well. There’s definitely a lot of power there on the

shopping side that we don’t use, but a lot of clients in different

industries could use it a lot more to their advantage than we do.

Trent: Yeah. Good segue into my next bit of questions. You started to

talk about free reports and capturing leads and so forth. I want to shift

to that because I think lead generation is a big problem for a lot of

people, especially when they are first starting out, or even when they’re

thinking about starting out. That’s probably the biggest fear I find in

people: How am I going to get my customers? In the next bit of the

interview, we’re going to talk specifically about what’s working for you

for lead generation, what you’re doing to nurture and educate those leads,

and then how you’re converting them to customers. Then, if we have time,

because I want to keep this under an hour, for sure, We’ll talk maybe a bit

about some of what you’re doing for up-sells and cross-sells and referrals.

Shaun: What we do for lead generation: when we started doing this kind

of thing, it was looking at people that were similar in our field and

seeing those mass numbers of contacts. Whether it was social media and

looking at their Facebook pages, to hearing about their email lists and

hearing about the thousands of people that they have, and being overwhelmed

by that and wondering how you can do it.

We’re looking to build quality connections as opposed to quantity. We

do it a lot through offering free webinars. We do a lot of them live, and

then we’re getting into more writing little white papers, two or three

pages, on things like permission marketing and Facebook advertising and

those kind of things.

In our industry here, most of the business community are owners over

45 years of age and up. So a lot of them haven’t grown up with the social

media side. They haven’t grown up with the technology. A big part of it

based around education. We don’t base it around, if you do this, you’re

going to make X amount of dollars, you’re going to bring X amount of

clients through your door. It’s education first. Then, they try it for a

bit, and then they want to take it to the next step. That’s usually the

point where they get in contact with us.

We do a really good job. We give them maximum information with

minimum commitment to begin, and that’s the key to lead generation. If you

want somebody to download something, if you want to email them something,

all you really need to give them, or for them to give you, is their email

address. You don’t need their address, you don’t need their phone number,

all that stuff. The more you ask for, the less you’re going to get. As you

get them through that whole sequence, and educating them, and building that

trust that you know what you’re talking about, then they’re going to be

more willing to give you that information down the road. That’s what we’ve

seen. It’s what we heard about first, and we tried it, and we see that it

works, so that’s what we’re doing.

Trent: Let me ask a follow-on question for that. You, like me and

probably everybody else, when you get that email address from an

individual, we really don’t know anything about them. In the case of Bright

Ideas, they could be a small business owner, they could be a marketing

consultant, they could be the CEO of a marketing agency, they could be

somebody thinking of starting a marketing agency. The way that I would want

to nurture and educate, because I have products across a couple of

different spectrums. Some products would be applicable to more than one of

those four categories, and other products wouldn’t. I don’t want to just

start sending out all my stuff to everybody, so I start to segment.

What is it that you do? You must segment somehow, because it’s not so

difficult to do. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing to make

sure that you get your list segmented in the right way?

Shaun: The information they’ve put out there for those lead generation

tools are very specific to that certain area. For example, we have one

where it’s a ten-video series on how to use Facebook, how to set it up, how

to do the very basics of it. We know that the people that are signing up

for that are very basic users. You’ll have the odd person that’ll sign up

because there’s something for free, but the majority of them are that way.

They’ll go through those ten videos, and then at the end we’ll make them an

offer to go to a more advanced phase, or they just sit there for a bit and

they just get periodic emails.

If they make the step up, then we know that they’re looking to go a

little further. The key is not, get an email and send them everything but

the dog’s lunch, it’s very segmented and making sure that you make them the

ones that control when they want the next bit of information. We find that

it works really well. Every webinar that we do, we do them for free, we get

a couple of really good leads that turn into clients, so it does pay back

itself multiple times after the fact. A lot of our clients that we try to

teach this to haven’t really grasped the concept of giving away something

for free. It’s like, ‘Why should I spend my time doing that if I’m not

getting paid for it?’ Well, you nurture them now, they’re going to pay you

back later if you do a good job at it.

Trent: Absolutely. It’s not as though you’re restricted to giving away

this information to one person at a time. The beauty, obviously, of a

webinar is that you can leverage your time by giving one bit of information

to many people at one time.

Shaun: The key that I’ve found with using InfusionSoft specifically

for this is that you’re not set to a start and end time. You spend the time

to create these products, create these sequences, and depending on when

people come into the funnel, whether it’s today or three weeks down the

road, they’re in the program. They’re getting the information based on the

time that they went in. It’s not like somebody’s going to miss some

information, and I think that’s what’s key to that. It allows us to

leverage the power of InfusionSoft above and beyond doing it manually, like

we had before.

Trent: Going back to what you were talking about with the lead

magnets. A lead magnet, by the way, in case people are unfamiliar with that

term, is what you are giving away to get the email address. It sounds like,

Shaun, that you have more than one lead magnet. How many different ones do

you have?

Shaun: We’ve done the webinars. We’ve recorded them, so those are now

available. People can go on there, sign up, then they get the link to the

videos. There’s probably two or three of those right now. We’ve got our

Facebook video series, we’ve got our book that we wrote, that’s now

available in eBook format and audiobook format for free as well. We’re

working on one right now, that’ll come out in probably the next couple of

weeks, on permission marketing.

Trent: Cool. Of those three, which one works the best for you?

Shaun: The videos. People like to be able to watch a video. The way

that we do them is solely with screencast for the trainings. People

actually get to see what we’re talking about, as opposed to giving them a

printed report. The printed report does all right, but not as well as

video, especially if you have some information to give out, just turning

the camera on and talking to the person will have a higher engagement, we

found.

Trent: I also think it goes a long way to build more trust, as well,

because they’re hearing your voice, and I think that we form a lot of our

opinions about how we feel about another person when we can either hear or

see them on our screen, versus just reading some text that they’ve written.

Shaun. Yes. You get to hear their voice, you get to see them. It’s all

those things that you would have if you were in front of that person. My

background is in video, so I’m a big fan of it. I think people are using

video more and I think they can use it even more as we move forward.

Trent: Speaking of video, I’m actually right in the process of

creating a new lead magnet myself, called The Conversion Tactics Toolkit.

If you’re listening to this on iTunes and you have not yet been to Bright

Ideas, go to BrightIdeas.co and you’ll be able to have an opportunity to

opt in to The Conversion Tactics Toolkit. It is an entirely video series.

All right. Is there anything that, in terms of capturing email

addresses, that’s working particularly well for you that I’ve not yet asked

you about, that you would tell somebody if you were sitting in a coffee

shop having this conversation?

Shaun: What I tell people is that if you’re doing this kind of thing,

and you’re on different platforms like social media, Twitter and Facebook,

is you need to have all your lead capturing/lead generation tools available

in all those different platforms. That’s worked really well for us. When we

create something new, we send it out to our existing email newsletter list

that we’ve gained over the years. We also put it on Facebook and do some

promotion there. We put it on Twitter and LinkedIn. The more relevant that

the information is to the networks that we’re doing, then we find we’re

getting some really good engagement that way.

Trent: Do you find that there is one social network that tends to work

better with the business audience than the others?

Shaun: Not really better, it depends on what we’re doing. Depending on

whether it’s a video series, or if it’s-, specifically let’s talk about the

Facebook one, because we had a higher engagement promoted out on Facebook

because they were in that medium when we were doing it. Whether it’s doing

that there, or sending it out by email, I think it’s relevant to what

you’re offering.

Trent: That makes a lot of sense. People hanging on Facebook would

obviously want to know how to use Facebook for marketing.

Shaun: Time of day, too, when you’re posting things. If you’re

targeting a business owner, which in most of the cases we are, we find a

higher engagement when it’s near the end of the day, as opposed to the

middle of the day because most people are engaged in their business. Even

on the weekends, surprisingly enough. At least here, we have a high

engagement of business owners that will subscribe to stuff on the weekends

because it’s low cost, in most cases free, for them to opt into it. That’s

when they’ve got some time to be online.

Trent: What are some things you’re doing to drive traffic to all these

offers? Are you getting traffic to your blog because you’re blogging, or

are you doing paid Facebook ads?

Shaun: We’ve done a little bit of paid Facebook ads, and they do

convert quite well for us. The majority of the stuff that we’re getting for

new leads is through our existing emails and through referrals. Most of our

new business, probably about 85% to 90% of it, is all referral-based. We

don’t do too much advertising. A lot of it comes through other people

sharing the content, being on our Facebook page, and those kinds of things.

Trent: Do you think there’s anything that you’re doing specifically

that’s stimulating those referrals, or is it just people who are genuinely

happy with the services you’re providing them?

Shaun: I think it’s the fact that we’re very real in the way we

present ourselves. We’re not making any false claims. We’re not giving them

the ‘This is the be-all solution to all your financial freedom.’ We make it

known that these are steps that you need to take to learn and know this

technology and we’re here if you want to take it to the next level. People

really appreciate that we’re not leading them in and making them sink or

swim.

Trent: Yeah. All right, let’s transition to nurturing now. You’ve

talked a bit about it. You’ve talked about the importance of educating

people, but I want to get a little bit more specific now, if we can. Let’s

use your video series, ‘Lead Capture,’ as the example of the guinea pig for

this part of the conversation.

Someone, they see your lead magnet, they give you their email

address, they hit the submit button, or the sign-me-up button, whatever

you’ve called it. What happens in that campaign builder? What have you

built, and what’s going to happen to that new subscriber? Walk us through

that.

Shaun: Once they sign up, they’ll initially get an email welcoming

them to the series, explaining what each of the videos are going to be

doing, and giving them the realistic expectation that they come out every

three days on a weekday and they spend whatever the length is there. In the

videos at the end, they’re then given a link to them. So that if for some

reason they can’t watch one, they’re going to get that in the end for that.

Throughout the process, then about a quarter of the way through,

we’re prompted to mail them out a letter just to introduce the company. No

sales or anything is in that letter. Just excited to have them going

through the series. Just introduce our website and those kind of things a

little bit more. Then, near the end, once they’ve finished, we’re prompted

to give them a call and see what they thought about it. See if they had any

further questions. They can talk to me personally about their journey

through Facebook.

We’re promoting it also as education, to use it on a personal level,

so we’re getting both sides of the fence there. Because I truly believe

that even though somebody might not be in a business and might not use it

for a business purpose, they know somebody that could. We’re not

eliminating educating those people that want to know how to use it for a

personal reason, too.

Trent: I’m very happy you mentioned that there was a call in your

sequence. I think that some people are needlessly scared of the telephone.

When you say call, they think cold call, and they think, ‘Ugh, I don’t ever

want to do that. That would be horrible.’ But, you’re not making a cold

call.

Shaun: No. That’s the key with putting the call near the end of the

sequence, as opposed to initially, at the beginning. If we put it right

when they signed up, we would technically be cold-calling them. Whereas at

the end, we’ve provided them ten videos, ten contact points of information

where we’re helping them every time. We’re never asking for the sale. Even

the call is not sales-oriented. It’s not, ‘Here we have a paid program’, or

anything like that. It’s ‘Just wanted to thank you for going through that.

Do you have any questions? If you ever want to take it to the next level,

this is who we are.’ We thank them for doing that. In most cases, we get

thank-yous back. Other times, we even get people saying that they’ve never

actually had a call that wasn’t pushy sales.

Trent: When you’re making these calls, do you find that people…

‘Hey, this is Shaun from Blue Cow,’ they’re like, ‘Oh hey, Shaun’. What’s

the response that you get, the vast majority of the time when they answer

the phone?

Shaun: They know who I am, even if I’ve never met them, because

they’ve heard me. Each of the videos are probably 15-20 minutes in length.

Some are shorter. They hear my voice throughout those videos. They know my

name. I introduce myself at the beginning, so it’s kind of like they

already know me when I call. It’s a familiar voice on the phone, as opposed

to getting somebody else to call.

Trent: Definitely it’s an easy phone call for you to make and it’s an

easy phone call for them to receive.

Shaun: That’s right.

Trent: How many times, even though you say it’s not a call to ‘be

pushy’ or ask for business, how, in your experience, are you finding that

some people are volunteering, ‘Hey, actually I would like to work with you

to do blah, blah,blah.’ or if that never happens, how are we starting to

convert some of these prospects to clients?

Shaun: Probably I have just over 50% of those people openly, as soon

as I thank them for that and I ask them if there’s anything else they might

need education on, they’ll openly tell me what it is. The rest of them, you

have to dig a little bit about that. I’ll ask, ‘How are you using

Facebook?’ first, if you have a business, and then I’ll ask, ‘How are you

using Facebook in your business?’ and they’re hoping to do some advertising

and that kind of stuff, so I lead them to one of our webinars on Facebook

advertising. Or, we have a report that goes with that and I tell them about

that. But probably more times than not, they want to schedule a time to

talk on the phone, and then, if we do a good job and convert them, then we

end up working with them.

We’re not scared to admit that the relationship is not a fit, if

that’s the case. A lot of people will not do that. They’ll just push and

push for the sale, whereas we want to work with a certain demographic of

business owners. If it doesn’t fit for us, and it doesn’t fit for them,

then we thank them and we both go our separate ways.

Trent: That’s a really, really important point, that you’ve brought

  1. Because a lot of small business owners, they get a few years in, and

then they realize they have this hodge-podge of customers, 20% of which are

generating 80% of the revenue. The other 80% are, kind of, a pain in their

butt because they took them maybe out of desperation in the early years. Or

they just took them for reasons that weren’t really solid reasons. Does

that sound familiar to you? Did you go through that experience, or were you

very choosy from the beginning?

Shaun: No, I was not very choosy. Starting out, any hook that came

into the water, I was biting at it. Using the InfusionSoft system, it’s has

allowed us to qualify those people and see, when they receive emails, what

are they clicking on? What are they doing? To see how interested they are,

so that when we talk to them, we can tell now if they’re really going to be

a key client. If we can’t help them, there’s no point in even going through

that process.

Even if the money’s there, we’d still do this work if we didn’t have

to get paid. We just enjoy doing it, especially if it’s helping people. But

also, that need to help people led us, in the early years, to jump at those

early leads because we feel that people were needing our help. We would

just do stuff. We’d discount some services just so they could use what

we’re doing. But in the end, like you said, that’s probably that 80 % that

just takes up more valuable time than you have, when really, they’re just a

one-off project whereas we’re trying to build long-term relationships.

Trent: You mentioned qualifying. I want to dig a little deeper into

that, if we can. In InfusionSoft, there’s something called lead scoring?

Shaun: Yes.

Trent: I apologize to the audience for all the frogs in my throat

today. I don’t really know why I’m having such a problem here, but I’m

doing my best. Are you using lead scoring, and if so, how are you using it

to help qualify the prospects that are in your funnel so that the people

who deserve the attention, be it the phone call and so forth, are getting

it?

Shaun: We currently don’t use lead scoring. I know the power of it. I

just don’t think that where I’m currently at with the business, that it

works for us the way we’d want it to. We do a lot of our qualifications by

the initial phone call and talking with people. We make it known that this

is what we hope to get out of this call and this initial consultation and

get them to commit to that first. Then we sit down. Just talking to people,

we find, is the best way to do it.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t go in and look at the back history to

see how many times they’ve been checking out our website, what they’ve been

looking at, before we sit down, so I can see how interested they are; or,

if they just decided to come to our website and call right away.

The lead scoring is a powerful tool, especially if you’re in a

business where you might even have a sales force or a sales team where it

can figure out if they’re a hot lead based on their interaction and those

kind of things.

Trent: When you are interviewing a prospective client, do you always

meet with them face-to-face before they become a client? Or, are you

sometimes getting clients who aren’t in your town?

Shaun: It depends on the situation. I prefer to meet face-to-face

whenever possible, but I realize sometimes that time restraints, distance,

and weather don’t allow that. We do a few phone calls for this kind of

thing, but in most cases we try to sit down. I think one of the key things

is to not come across as selling them something. But them identifying what

their needs are, what their goals are, and realizing that what we could

offer will be a solution to that. We find that’s really good.

One of the first things I ask somebody is, ‘What do you hope to get

out of working with us?’ They tell you right away. ‘This is what my problem

is and this is where I’d like to go with it.’ Now it gives us a target to

work towards. In some cases, that goal is something we can’t attain for

them, so it’s either try to get them to a realistic level, or just say,

‘Maybe there’s somebody else better suited for that.’

Trent: That’s a very powerful thing to be able to do. I know that when

I was running my last technology company, and this was in the early 2000s,

before any of this fancy-schmancy marketing automation stuff, that I was

aware of it maybe it existed. One of the first questions we would ask when

we would get a meeting with a new prospect is, ‘Why’d you take the

meeting?’ That was a really terrific way for someone to tell you their

agenda right at the beginning, so that you knew the points that you needed

to speak to so you’d have a chance of converting them into a good client.

Shaun: Yeah, for sure.

Trent: We’ve talked about how you’re capturing leads. We’ve talked

about how you’re nurturing leads. I think we’ve covered how you’re

converting your leads to customers as well, unless there’s anything else

there. Is there anything that’s major in your process on the conversion

part of it that we haven’t talked about?

Shaun: Because a lot of our new business and new leads comes from

referrals, it’s using the power of asking for testimonials. I’m a big fan

of testimonials and people telling their story of why they chose to work

with us. What they liked working with us, so we can use that on our

website, on our blog, on our social media, to promote that experience.

Because I think working with a company should be a positive experience as

opposed to just hiring somebody, and then not really understanding what it

is that we do. That talks back to what we do in the early stages with the

education. It’s not really a lot about educating them about what’s out

there. But educating them about the process we take with them, in the early

stages. So that they know they’re involved in that process and they don’t

feel left out.

One of the things we’ve heard a lot is that they’ve worked with other

companies and they don’t hear from them for a few days and they don’t

really know what it is that they’re doing. Then, they get a bill in the end

and hopefully the project is good, or not. That’s key to what we do.

Trent: How do you ask for testimonials? Do you just call them up and

ask them? Or do you have a process, campaign, something?

Shaun: Yeah, we just have a little note campaign that we add to that

contact at the end. Just thanking them that the project has completed and

we’ve successfully launched, depending on what it is. And just ask them to

go to our Facebook page and write their testimonial, as opposed to just

emailing it to us.

Trent: Wow, that’s cool.

Shaun: In most cases, but if they’re not on Facebook, then obviously

we take it by email, but we want it to come authentic from them and not

seem like we’ve reformatted it and pushed it out after the fact.

Trent: Then, you can take a screen shot of it on Facebook and reuse

that particular image wherever you like.

Shaun: That’s right. Plus, immediately, all their friends see that

they’ve posted something on our wall, and it helps that way.

Trent: Golden nugget, there it is. I’ve got to write that down –

testimonials on Facebook.

Shaun: You can always copy and paste it and use it in other things

after, but at least the original source is authentic.

Trent: Yeah. Okay. This nurturing process that we’ve been talking

about obviously is working very, very well for you. And you’d mentioned,

before InfusionSoft that this was not so easy. Did you nurture, in any way,

shape, or form, like you do now, only you did it manually and it took a lot

of work? Or, were you like maybe a lot of people out there who would get a

prospect, call them three or four times, ‘Nah, they don’t want to take the

meeting’, and then just give up?

Shaun: Yeah, the last one there, that was pretty much me. A lot of the

process of using InfusionSoft was learning the keys to nurturing and that

that was actually a key point to doing business. The benefit with

InfusionSoft is not just that they’re a software, but there’s a whole team

of people there that are invested in your growth and the well-being of your

company.

So if you have any questions about, ‘How could I use this element?’

It’s not just the p’s and q’s, and click here and do this. It’s ‘Here’s how

you take it offline, here’s how you use it.’ So I think that they’re really

great that way.

I’ve also been down to both InfusionCons in the last two years.

That’s a huge event that really helped me focus my business, learn what I

needed to do, and realize that I didn’t have all the answers, but I could

learn them down the road.

Trent: That is such an incredibly good point. I’m wondering if you do

this: back when I was running my technology company, I participated in a

couple of mastermind groups where, in one case, one of them was called True

Profit, and another one was called Vistage. We would meet, I think one of

them was four times a year, and the other one, I can’t remember. I think

also four times a year. You’d sit down in a room with other people who are

running companies exactly like what you’re running, just in a different

marketplace. And we would openly share a huge amount of detail in every

area, from marketing to operations, so that we could all learn from each

other.

I can’t emphasize how valuable that was, because you’re learning from

people who are doing exactly what you’re doing, and they’re running their

own businesses. Do you participate in anything like that?

Shaun: I currently don’t. I’m currently looking for something like

that. I do see the extreme value in a mastermind group, but just in the

area that we’re in, we haven’t found that kind of thing. We do a lot of

networking and talking to businesses in other areas that cover a lot of the

key basics of bookkeeping and all that other kind of things that we need to

talk about. But when it comes to specifics, we currently haven’t done

anything like that.

Trent: Okay. Well, I’m going to introduce you to something like that.

Bright Ideas does have a mastermind group. If you go to

BrightIdeas.co/mastermind, you can learn more about it. It is specifically

targeted to people who are marketing consultants and marketing agencies.

However, with that said, because that’s what, when you read the page,

actually by the time this is published, there will be a full page

explaining everything, Shaun. If you go there right now, it’s just what I

call the pre-launch page, where you can register for updates and so forth.

Even though, on the full page, which, people when they’re listening

to this will see it, I want them to understand that the principles and the

things that we talk about, and it starts off with a two day workshop, two

day online workshop. The principles that we talk about are going to be

highly applicable to whatever industry you’re in, but most of the people in

the group probably will be running marketing agencies. With that said, one

of my facilitators, and you probably know him, his name is Dustin Burleson.

That name ring a bell with you?

Shaun: No, it doesn’t.

Trent: Oh, okay. He was one of the Ultimate Marketer finalists at

InfusionCon this year. He’s the guy that has the orthodontics clinic

that…

Shaun: Okay, yes, now I know.

Trent: Four clinics now, because he’s using, it just blew up once he

started using InfusionSoft. He’s going to be inviting a number of the

people who attend, other orthodontists who attend his seminars. This first

one that we’re going to do, I’m not exactly sure of the mix of the people.

Regardless, if you’re looking for a mastermind group, just head over to

BrightIdeas.co/mastermind and there will be information there for you to

check out.

All right. Sorry, again, for all the frogs in my throat. I don’t know

why. What do I want to ask you about next? We were going to make a

transition, how are we doing for time? We’ve still got a bit of time.

Are you still – got a few minutes left?

Shaun: Yes, certainly.

Trent: I know. I know what it was. This wasn’t on my list of

questions, but you talked about this early on. We’ve talked a lot about how

InfusionSoft and the campaign builder is helping you with marketing, but I

want to talk about how it’s helping you with operations, and stuff that

happens after people become a client.

Can you speak to, because the campaign builder, I mean, campaigns

don’t have to be marketing-oriented. Because all a campaign is, is a

sequence of communication and activity, which is more or less any, and

almost every, business process. Can you talk about anything that you’re

doing in that regard?

Shaun: Well use a lot of the CRM side of InfusionSoft, with the custom

fields and and the custom tabs, to tailor it towards the information that

we need to keep about each client’s project. When we’re dealing with people

that we’re building websites for, or setting up online accounts, we keep a

lot of their account details in there; attach their records, so that if I

need to go in, or somebody else needs to go in later to send them that

information, it is there for them.

The other side is, also, using a lot of the tracking of the emails

that we send out. We can send them out through that so we can see when

they’ve opened them and any links that they clicked on. As for using any of

the sequences internally for the actual project building, usually once we

take on the project, when we finish it, a lot of that communication is just

done one-on-one with the client by our team, or any subcontractors that we

use. Then, after the sale, we go back and give them some resources about

using that service or that product that we’ve created for them.

Trent: Okay. All right, Shaun. Well, I want to thank you very much.

Oh, before I go, my lightning round. Can’t forget the lightning round.

Three questions.

Shaun: Okay.

Trent: Question number one: what are you most excited about for 2013?

Shaun: For 2013, what we’re more excited about it we’re launching a

new area to our business called the Seniors Learning Academy. Because here

in Nova Scotia, we have a large contingency of seniors who are using iPads

and a lot of them don’t know how to use them. This whole project is, first,

teaching them how to use these new pieces of technology for their

lifestyle. We’ll be rolling that out in a DVD learning series for them.

That’s what we’re really excited about, coming up.

Trent: Now is that a product you’re going to sell?

Shaun: Yes.

Trent: Okay. I was going to say, because how does that fit in with

lead gen? But now I get it. That’s just a revenue producer in its own

right.

All right. What is your favorite business book?

Shaun: Ooh, well, I’m currently reading, and I’m really liking, Seth

Godin’s ‘Permission Marketing.’ I really like the mindset of that. Anything

that he writes has been stellar, right from ‘The Purple Cow,’ to ‘Meatball

Sundae,’ I think is the latest one that I read before this. Anything Seth

Godin puts out, I think, is golden.

Trent: Finally, for the folks who have been listening to you now and

think, ‘Hey, I might like to do business with Shaun’, what’s the number one

easiest way for them to get in touch with you?

Shaun: The best way is to go to www.BlueCowCreative.ca.

Trent: Terrific. Shaun, thank you so much for making some time to be

on the show. It’s been a pleasure to have you on.

Shaun: It’s been a pleasure being here.

Trent: All right. To get to this show notes from today’s episode, go

to BrightIdeas.co/66. When you’re there, you’ll see all the links that

we’ve talked about today, plus some other valuable information that you can

use to ignite more growth in your business.

If you’re listening to this on your mobile phone, just text TRENT to

585858 and I’ll give you access to the ‘Massive Traffic Toolbox,’ which is

a compilation of all of the very best traffic generation strategies shared

with me by the many proven experts that have been guests here on the show.

As well, you’ll also be able to get a list of, what I feel, are the very

best interviews, thus far, that I have recorded. I can promise you will

discover many bright ideas as a result of those interviews.

Finally, if you really enjoyed this episode, please head over to

BrightIdeas.co/love, where you will find a link to leave us a rating in the

iTunes store.

That’s it for this episode. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and I look

forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care and have a wonderful

day.

Recording: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas podcast.

Check us out on the web at BrightIdeas.co.

About Shaun Whynacht

ShaunWhynacht-PromoShot-SmallAs a leader in social media consulting, Blue Cow is on the leading edge of technology application, combining an up-to-the minute understanding of current tools and trends with proven skills in creative design and video production to offer clients the latest, hippest approach to their business needs. But Blue Cow’s approach dictates that superior customer service and a personalized approach is the hallmark of their operation; here high tech meets down home.

It’s a business acumen that has made converts of business operators who have experienced the philosophy; developed by company President Shaun Whynacht; of educate, engage and accelerate in which clients learn about the options available, buy-in to those concepts, and then, through applying those tools and trends, meet their goals. But it’s a process that is preambled by Blue Cow’s astute understanding of the technologies and deep interest in the needs of the client. There’s no love-‘em and leave-‘em in these relationships – Blue Cow and their clients stay committed to each other for the long haul!

And with that track record, it’s no wonder that the youthful Mr. Whynacht (he’s, amazingly, just 32) has earned the attention of regional business leaders who have featured him and his firm in High Flyers, a showcase of the region’s most promising up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

How to Capture More Leads, Target Them More Effectively, and Sell More Products

Do you ever feel like there is just not enough time in the day to get everything done?

Do you feel like you have a crystal clear picture of exactly what success looks like for your business?

Would you like to hear from another small business owner who is successfully making the transition from owner/operator to just owner?

If you are looking for actionable tactics and strategies that you can use to spend more time working “on” your business, as opposed to “in” it, you are going to love listening in on the discussion that we have in this interview.

My guest on the show today is Brad Martineau, founder of Sixth Division – a leading source of coaching, training, and done for you services for Infusionsoft users.

When you listen to this interview, you are going to hear Brad and I talk about:

  • (9:35) Brad’s biggest challenge
  • (12:52) How to transition from Solopreneur to Entrepreneur
  • (18:05) The story of Pardot & what anyone building a business can learn from their strategies
  • (20:05) How to define what success means to you
  • (23:35) How plusthis helps capture more leads, target them more effectively, and sell more products
  • (27:15) How Iron Tribe (a past brightideas guest) uses plusthis with great success
  • (30:05) How to customize thank you pages
  • (30:10) How Laura Roeder (another past BrightIdeas guest) uses plusthis
  • (35:05) What transactional text messaging is and how you can use it to offer a speedy response to your customers
  • (40:05) How to use expiring promotions to offer time-limited discounts
  • (48:05) How to use a Cycler Tool to determine the order in which you deliver content
  • (55:00) Lightning Round

I learned a great deal in this interview, and strongly encourage that you go check it out now.

Links Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent

Dyrsmid: Hey there, Bright Idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas

podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast for marketing

agencies and entrepreneurs who want to discover how to use content

marketing and marketing automation to massively boost their business. My

guest on the show today is Brad Martineau, founder of Sixth Division, a

leading source of coaching, training and done-for-you services for

Infusionsoft users. They’re also the founder of a company called PlusThis

which we’re going to talk about in some detail in the interview.I met Brad while attending Infusion Con 13 and I learned of his new

venture which I just mentioned, PlusThis. They were a battle of the apps

finalist. They do some really cool stuff that integrates with Infusionsoft

and that’s why I wanted to give Brad an opportunity and talk about it.Before we get to that we’re going to talk about my technology tool

tip of the week. That is something called ‘Buffer App’. I use Buffer App to

very easily schedule up a bunch of social sharing. whether I want to put it

on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. When I’m reading my RSS feed each morning

and I see stuff that I want to share with my particular audience if you

just hit the tweet button it’s all going to go out automatically right away

and I don’t necessarily want stuff to go that quickly. I like to stagger it

out. Buffer App, which is a free tool to use, you can get it at

BufferApp.com is a super easy way to stagger your distribution and choose

which of your social networks you want to share that traffic on.Lastly I want to make mention of an upcoming webinar that I have.

It’s called the Seven Secrets of Success for Small Businesses. If you want

to attend that webinar you’re going to learn all about something called

‘life cycle marketing’ which is a seven step process that I absolutely

promise you will have a massive impact on your business once you understand

and then embrace these seven steps in the business. If you are not yet a

subscriber and you want to get notified of that webinar just go to

BrightIdeas dot C-O, enter your details and you’ll definitely get emails

from me making you aware of the next webinar date.With all of that said please join me in welcoming Brad to the show.Hey, Brad. Welcome to the show.Brad

Martineau: Thanks. Glad to be here.

Trent: You recently have come out with this new tool, I’ve just

started to use it really early on and that’s why I wanted to have you on

the episode to have you talk a little bit about the tool and how you’re

using it to build your business and how your clients are using it to build

their business. It’s called PlusThis, it was a battle of the apps finalist

at Infusion Con 2013. That’s how I learned about it and I want to talk

about that but before we dive into that for people who don’t know who Brad

Martineau is or what you’re doing maybe just take a quick moment and

introduce yourself.

Brad: Yeah sure. Obviously, my name is Brad Martineau. Funny how I feel

compelled to say that even though you’ve said that several times. But

that’s my name in case anyone missed it the first time around. I’m a co-

founder at Sixth Division which is a company that provides marketing

services and coaching primarily right now our target market is people who

use Infusionsoft but we see ourselves at some point expanding to work with

the small business population at large.

My background very quickly. I was the sixth employee at Infusionsoft.

I believe it was back in 2004 was when I started so I was the entire

support team and then we hired a support team and I moved into

implementation. I was specifically just helping people implement the

software and I ended up in product management which is a fancy way of

saying that for about five and a half to six years I got to work on the

front lines with customers to figure out how they were using Infusionsoft

and quite frankly other tools in their business to run their business,

being able to see what worked, what doesn’t work. My job was to work with

our developers and our executive team to create a product development

pipeline and build features that were powerful and also made sense to

people.

I believe I had the best job that you can possibly have. Being able

to work with end users and customers and then being able to work hand in

hand with the developers. I had my fingerprints over pretty much every

feature that was developed the time that I was there. It was really fun to

see what technology could do and understand, at a level deeper than

probably any business owner ever cares to know and I don’t know that I

really care to still know that, but it was really good to get that deep

dive of, ‘This is what’s possible with technology,’ and have that blended

with, ‘Here’s what people are doing in the real world to build their

businesses.’

I did that for five and half to six years and I got to a point where

the stars aligned, planets aligned got to a point where it made sense for

me to branch off. I was going to solve all the problems in the world and

then reality hit, there was a learning curve like I think everybody goes

through of building and running and growing a business is a little bit

different in theory than it is in practice so there’s a little bit of a

learning curve but after a while I connected with Dave Lee who’s my

business partner. He also worked at Infusionsoft. We worked together for

about six years. He had subsequently left as well. We decided there’s a

need for a practical, down-to-earth yet elite team and service provider to

really help people grasp this concept of marketing automation and really,

as opposed to the tail wagging the dog, put the business owner and make

them be the dog that actually wags the tail. A lot of people get in and

jump on this train ride that is Infusionsoft and they’re holding on for

dear life. We want to put them back in control and really help them

leverage the power that Infusionsoft can bring their business.

That’s the short summary. I was at Infusionsoft and now we’ve got a

company over here where we help people unleash the full power of

Infusionsoft on their business. We’re having a blast, having a good time.

PlusThis was spun off…I don’t know if you follow 37 Signals but they

wrote a book early on and talked about by product and how some of their

products were created because it was just something they needed when they

were initially being a consulting company or building and designing

websites. PlusThis is the exact same thing. It was a, we were working with

clients… and maybe you’re going to ask where PlusThis came from so it’s

going to dovetail into that but we worked with a lot of clients and we

realised very, very quickly that there were almost zero implementations

that we could do, and do the way that we wanted to to really unlock

Infusionsoft without requiring a little bit of custom development. That’s

not to say you can’t make it work. It’s just to say that the way we wanted

to build it we needed some additional tools that weren’t available. We

started contracting a developer to build these little scripts that we

wrote, and we would install it on our customer’s web server and they could

do really cool things. We realized we were building the same things over

and over again.

I had had this idea when I left Infusionsoft to build a library of

scripts so we could put everything in one spot and once we realized we were

actually building the same scripts over and over again and the fact that

business owners don’t want to think about FTP or API or web servers or any

of that, most of them, so we wanted to build something so easy… we like

to joke around the office it had to be so easy that even Clate Mask could

use it, who’s the CEO of Infusionsoft. We set out to build this library of

features, that’s what PlusThis is and we ended up becoming a finalist in

Battle of the Apps. It’s debatable as to who should have won that contest

but we’ll let it go. That’s where we are now. We provide services and then

we have this software tool that we’re continuing to develop and add on to

and again, everything we focus on right now is helping the small business

get more out of Infusionsoft and really leverage the power that’s there

whether it be through services or through software.

Drysmid: For some of the folks who haven’t heard of Sixth Division where

are you located and how many people are coming to work there every day?

Brad: We’re in Chandler, Arizona so we’re ten minutes door to door from

Infusionsoft. Straight down the freeway from Infusionsoft. We have some

employees who are remote and who travel in to do services. We’ve got one in

Ohio, one in San Diego and then there are seven of us that work in the

office. So nine total plus a couple of contractors that do some pretty

regular work for us.

Drysmid: You’ve built a very nice small business. The reason I ask that

question is there are a lot of people listening to this who are a

solopreneur or maybe even a two person or a three person shop. I remember

when I was a solopreneur and I got to two and then I got to three. When I

was at three I was thinking, ‘Man, how do I get to six?’ When I was at six

I was thinking, ‘How do I get to ten? How do I get to twelve?’ I want to

make sure people understand that you’re a small business owner just like

they are and you have the same challenges in attracting new clients and

making sure profits arrive and systematizing and so forth to grow your

business just like they do.

Brad: Just one point on that. Our biggest challenge…and I don’t say

challenge like ‘we don’t know what to do’. It’s the next obstacle. But our

obstacle right now is creating systems and getting everything in place to

where my business partner and I can spend our time building the business

and not doing the work. There’s an interesting gap that you have to get

across, if you had asked me even nine months ago I don’t know that I would

have told you that within the next six to nine months that I would

literally be in a position where I would be building the business and not

doing the work. And quite frankly I don’t know that I would have told you

that I wanted to. I think that probably six months or so ago I wanted to

build a team because we needed more people to provide services but I was

excited about being involved in the work because it was my baby.

The thought process of how we go about doing what we do, a lot of

that was coming from me. My business partner’s more the marketing and the

sales side. The only reason I bring this up is because for the person who’s

sitting at three or even at six, depending on the type of business and

there’s variations, and all different types of business, but there’s a very

strong pull to want to hold tightly to the thing that you do, whether it be

providing a service or you’re building something. Whatever the case may be

there’s a very tight pull, almost magnetic, that you want to keep a grasp

on what it is that your company does. Really for the company to grow I’ve

had to come to realize and to learn that I have to get people that can do

that and empower them to do that because there is so much work that needs

to be done to establish a systematized business and then to create a

marketing plan to continue to bring in the leads. There’s a full time job,

if not multiple full time jobs, just to build a business and it’s what the

business owner should be doing. If there’s anybody listening that’s

struggling with that that’s something I definitely struggled with. There’s

definitely a mental shift that has to take place to go from ‘I’m going to

be doing this work, I’m going to be doing it,’ to get to the point where,

‘I could actually go hire people. If I could find the right people, I could

put the right people in place to be able to get myself to where I’m

building the business and not doing the work.’ But it takes a bit of a

shift of a mind set.

Drysmid: I’m glad you brought that up and I’m going to go down that

rabbit hole for a little bit before we shift and talk about PlusThis

because I think it’s a really importantly rabbit hole. The first thing is,

you talked about something and as you were saying I thought about this. You

can have growth or you can have control. I think that’s part of that big

mind shift. I’m interested in your opinion. Did you feel you had to give up

control to get to growth?

Brad: Absolutely. Infusionsoft offers this thing called ‘Elite Forum’. It’s

Clate and Scott teaching their methodology. Dave, my business partner, and

I were involved in that when we were at Infusionsoft. He made a really

interesting comment the last time I was there which was just a different

way – I’d never thought about it this way. He said, ‘Entrepreneurship is an

exercise in learning to let go.’ If that’s not the truest statement in the

world I’m not sure what is.

I believe 100% that in order for you to be able to grow, and not just

grow revenues, but to grow the business however it needs to grow you’ve got

to have the mentality of finding good people that you can empower to go do

the job. I’ll frame that and this is a critical point. You have to know

what you want out of your business first. There are a lot of people that

want a solopreneur shop and that’s what they want. They want the lifestyle,

they want to run everything and that’s great. What I would say is, know

what you want and then create a plan to get there. If you want the

solopreneur bit then don’t let other people convince you that you should be

hiring to grow. Because if you just want the solopreneur gig then make that

work and completely control your schedule.

What you do is, this is my formula. You start by saying, ‘What do I

want out of my business?’ Whether it’s solopreneur or build the business,

whatever it is create a plan that says, ‘This is what my life will look

like as a result of me building this business.’ For some people it’s going

to be solopreneur. For us, we know how big we want to get. We don’t want

100 coaches in our services business. That’s not what we’re trying to do.

That’s not what we want to build. Infusionsoft on the other hand, they want

the whole built-to-last approach.

I’m not going to sit here and even pretend to try and judge and say

which one is right because it depends on the business owner but the key is

to know what you’re trying to build and then once you know that, then the

next step is to create a business plan that allows you to get there. Once

you define your ideal lifestyle you should end up with a dollar amount and

‘This is what the profit needs to be so I can live this way and this is

what my schedule’s going to be.’ Once you have that defined now you can

create a business plan that says, ‘These are the products and or services

I’m going to offer and this is their price point and I need to be able to

sell X number of each one.’

I don’t want to take this too far down the rabbit hole but for anyone

that is chewing on that create-the-menu business plan I would read a book

by Michael Masterson called ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ where he talks about your

first job is to sell your first product profitably. If you’re not at the

point where you’re into profitability and cranking with the product and

you’ve got five I’d cut four of them out and I’d focus on one. And I would

focus on your most expensive one because it gives you the most profit.

There’s a whole conversation there but first, identify your ideal lifestyle

and how many hours you want to be working and how much money do you want to

be making. Then you want to create a business plan. A business plan is

literally as simple as ‘These are my products and services. This is what I

charge for them. This is my margin. Here are my fixed expenses.’ You just

come up with an equation that will tell you exactly how many units you need

to sell. Once you decide on that you move to the next step which is go

create your marketing plan of how you’re going to get those clients.

I see a lot of people that every time they run into a roadblock they

go back and assume they have to change their business plan, their products,

their services or their pricing. I say, ‘No. Decide on that and move onto

your marketing and get better at marketing. Don’t blow up your business

every month because you don’t hit the numbers you want. Figure out how to

market the right product.’ That’s the formula that works for me. And that’s

what I’ve learned. Identify what you want your ideal lifestyle to look

like, come up with a business plan. What are you going to sell, how many

and at what price point and then go create a marketing plan to make that

happen. Then your energies and effort should be in the marketing plan and

making sure you’re driving that forward.

That forces you to have to let go of everything else because your job

is to then get those units to build the business to match whatever it is

you want your lifestyle to look like but you’ve got to let go of everything

else. You can’t be answering the phone when somebody calls in. You’re never

going to build the business to where you want it to be. Somebody else needs

to do that and you need to find someone you trust to do that. You may not

be able to take all the sales calls. I don’t do any sales calls and I

hardly do any implementation anymore on the services side and it’s a little

bit difficult for me at times. It’s hard to let go of that. But yes, I

agree 100% with your statement. we can either grow or I can have complete

control over everything. I’d rather grow and get to the point where we want

to build our business to because it makes everybody’s life better.

Drysmid: It does. Plus if you’re the solopreneur there’s never anything

that you can sell, you’re never building any equity. Nobody wants to buy a

business that is 100% dependent upon you. If you’re trying to build some

lasting value for yourself and your family and have the opportunity to

transition to retirement or real estate investments or whatever it is you

want to do when you don’t want to do this anymore you cannot be a

soloprenuer and make that happen.

Brad: Yeah, I’ll take thirty seconds. A really quick story to illustrate

that. I met a guy about six or seven years ago at a [inaudible 00:18:01]

Association conference named David Cummings. He’s the guy that founded

ParDot, the email marketing solution for bigger businesses. I don’t know

how many businesses he has but, very interesting, his model as the business

owner is he starts a business and the first thing he does is go out and

finds a president or a CEO to run the business. He builds everything around

systems so literally, he just sold ParDot to, I don’t remember who it was.

Exact Target or Vertical Response or somebody. He sold it. Because none of

the businesses depended on him…normally when you sell it’s going to be

cash less stock and then you’ve got to stay around for a year. He signed,

it was a 95% cash deal, he signed and and then he walked out, literally,

walked out the door the next day, in fact it was that day, and never went

back. Never had to do anything with it. There’s a lot of power and leverage

in having a business that can just run and crank and just go, all by itself

and you’re driving the business so that if somebody else wanted to buy it

they could just drive the business but the systems are already in place.

Trent: Just for my show notes, what was his name again?

Brad: David Cummings. For anyone who wants to follow he’s got an excellent

blog. He blogs everyday and it literally takes you two minutes to read it

and they’re amazing insights, short, bullet pointed stuff, but really,

really good insights. He’s a really good entrepreneur, great mind to

follow.

Trent: What’s his blog?

Brad: That’s a great question. I think it’s 10,000 Hours of

Entrepreneurship. If you just search for David Cummings it’ll come up.

Trent: I’ll make sure I include it the show notes. At the end of the

episode I’ll announce the link for how to get to show notes. Before we move

off this topic I wanted to offer up a book as well that I just finished

reading. In Canada there’s a company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK. They’re not in

Canada, they’re worldwide now. They’re one of the more phenomenal growth

stories of at least my hometown. Their COO for years, who has left them

now, I don’t remember his name, but his book is called Double Double.

Especially being a COO, he’s a real numbers guy and he talked a lot in

Double Double about pretty much, Brad, what you said.

Figure out what the outcome is that you want and then reverse engineer. His

name is Cameron Herold. Reverse everything you need to do to get there and

then figure out what your key performance indicators are and your job is to

watch those very closely on a weekly, daily, monthly basis to make sure

you’re hitting them. In his book he chapter by chapter breaks down how to

do all this. If it’s growth you want this is probably a book you’re going

to enjoy.

Brad: I don’t think it can be overstated, the importance of ‘decide what

you want and reverse engineer how to get there’. I think there are way too

many people who wake up every day and they go into an office and they feel

comfortable they spent eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve hours in an office

and they go home but they have absolutely zero bearing on whether or not

they are closer or further away from their goal. Usually I see the problem

is people haven’t started by defining what their goal is. They have no idea

what success looks like. And if I can throw out one last little bit on this

and then we can be done with it. It’s not easy to figure that out. I think

some people get into it and they try and write it down and they feel dumb

because they feel it should be easy to figure out. It’s not. It is a pain

in the freaking butt to figure out and really identify what you want.

It takes a lot of thought because you have to balance everything in

your life. If you’ve got kids you’ve got to balance out how it’s going to

work with your family, how much time do you want to spend versus how much

time do you want to spend in the business? I Ultimately it just comes down

to making a decision. It’s not easy. It’s a simple process but it does take

time and it is hard because you’ve got a lot of stuff to balance and

because you’ve never thought about it before.

If you’re an entrepreneur or a business owner and you don’t have a

clear number, meaning dollar amount/time amount, that you’re working

towards, then there’s a certain part of you that is just wasting time every

day when you wake up and go to work. You’ve got to know. If you’re trying

to lose weight it’s easy. You know exactly how much weight you’re trying to

lose and then you work towards that every single day. Same thing in

business. what are you trying to make happen in the business and what are

you working towards? You’ve got to decide that. It pains my soul every time

I talk to someone that doesn’t know. ‘What are you doing then? How do you

know if you’re being successful or not if you have no idea what your goal

is?’

Trent: It’s like going for a drive and not knowing where you

destination is. Or just driving around. At the beginning of Cameron’s book,

that’s what he devotes his first three chapters to. In fact, chapter one is

called Vision/Painted Picture and it’s preparing for fast growth. Very

good. I’m sure you would love it.

That was a cool rabbit hole, I’m glad we went down it and I’m quite

sure we served the audience by doing so.

Now I want to talk about PlusThis. Infusionsoft as you know and I

know and anyone who’s listening to this already knows is an amazingly

powerful tool so much so that people who don’t use it really don’t even

get. They don’t comprehend. I get emails from people every week saying,

‘Could you spend a little bit of time with me showing me why you’re so

excited about Infusionsoft?’ I do a little Skype and screen share and show

them how much of my stuff I’ve automated and usually their jaw is just

hanging open. ‘I had no idea. I thought it was an email program.’ Which

couldn’t be further from the truth.

You build this thing called ‘PlusThis’ which integrates very smoothly

with Infusionsoft because there are all these little problems that you want

to solve that are not necessarily super easy to solve with Infusionsoft.

We’re going to give some specific examples of that in about ten seconds and

how solutions to those problems can benefit the business. Let’s talk about

a couple of the features that you guys have developed early on in PlusThis.

Let’s start off with Stealth Video Tracking. What is it and why should

someone use it?

Brad: Perfect, let me just start. All of these we go through, our approach

to PlusThis. Let me just give the backdrop for that, all those will make

more sense. The end result of using Infusionsoft in our business is we want

to make more money. We can make more money by converting more people. We

can convert more people by getting the right message to the right person.

That requires us to know a couple of things. One, we need to know a heck of

a lot of information about the prospects and customers in our database so

we know if they’re the right person to send a particular message to.

We want to provide tools in PlusThis that allow us to capture and

store more information about our prospects and customers. What are they

doing, who are they? Then we want to build tools that allow us to send more

relevant and more targeted messaging that will lead to increased

conversion. The big picture backdrop is, capture more information so we

can be more targeting and convert more sales and make more money. That’s

the idea.

Stealth Video Tracking. The generic use of this is if you’re using

YouTube, Wistia is a video provider, or Vimeo, anyone of those three, we

can help you track how long people watch any of the videos you use in your

marketing. Probably the two most famous examples of this are Jermaine

Griggs. I’ve got a whole interview with him but but Jermaine Griggs. His

entire model is set up, he’s got four videos that he gives to his new leads

to start his opt in piece. And what he does is, he uses his videos to build

relationships with his customers. Also, on each video, next to each video

he’s got a little mini survey that allows him to capture additional

information. So what he does is, he sends people to go watch his videos. If

they don’t watch them I believe he sends them up to three or four

reminders to try and get them to go back and watch the video. If they watch

the video a couple of things happen. One, he knows they’re engaged in the

content so he knows they’re better likely to get an offer and actually buy

something. Two, he’s able to make jokes in his videos and start to build a

relationship with these people and three, he’s got a higher likelihood that

people will fill out the survey and give him even more information about

who they are and what they’re interested in.

So with the video tracking feature what you are able to do is track

of whether people have watched your videos or not and then you can adjust

your marketing based on that. So, for him, if somebody watches his first

video right away then the next video gets ‘unlocked’ the next day. If they

don’t watch it, then what happens is they get a reminder the next day to

watch video one and they’ll continue to get reminders up to three

reminders. At the end of three he’s like, ‘Fine, if you don’t watch video

one I’m going to try to get you to watch video two’. But because he knows

whether they’ve watched the video or not he’s able to then adjust his

marketing to make sure he’s preparing all his prospects the right way. On

the front end marketing side that’s one way you can use it. If he had a

sales team that was picking up the phone and calling, he doesn’t, but if he

did then they would be able to, when they opened up a contact record, would

be able to look at the contact record and as they’re talking to someone

they would know what that person has watched and what they haven’t watched.

Another example is Iron Track Fitness, they were the Ultimate

Marketer winners in 2012. Jermaine won in 2011. They’re selling franchises

now. They’re a gym out in Alabama but they’ve started franchising and

they’re at like 40 locations or something. Now what they do is, on the

franchise side of it, when they’re selling new franchises, they have their

entire education and basically franchise, onboarding process built into a

membership center and that’s all video based. They have a ton of training

that’s all video based and they take people through classes. What they do

is they use the video tracking feature to track whether or not somebody has

completed a course or not, whether they’re watching the videos. The people

that manage how their new franchisees are moving through the process can go

in and they have a simple little dashboard that tells them whether the

person is watching the videos or not. If they’re not they can pick up the

phone and be like, ‘Hey, look. You really need to watch this video because

it’s going to affect your franchise in this way, this way, and this way.’

It allows them to have better customer service for their franchises.

Whether it’s on the marketing side or whether you have an info

product and you want to be aware of whether people are watching or not. If

you’ve got an info product or a course and somebody’s not watching, that

person is going to be at risk to cancel or request a refund so it’ll let

you highlight who those people are. You can pick up the phone and call

them. On the flip side if it’s any of your marketing content, people that

are watching all your videos are at a higher likelihood that they are going

to be willing to buy. They are more interested. Those are the people you

want to call first or engage with first.

Again, it’s about giving you more information so you can either

change your conversation you’re having in person or automatically adjust

the conversation you’re having through emails or whatever other follow up

you’re doing.

Trent: For the folks who are maybe are not yet using Infusionsoft I

want to make sure there’s no details that are missed here. All of this

stuff happens on auto-pilot. When someone watches a video to a certain

point, which you define, you can then apply a tag within Infusionsoft and

when a tag gets applied you can trigger in the campaign builder all sorts

of actions whether they be phone calls or additional emails or what have

you. When Brad says ‘Germaine adjusts what he does’ it’s not as though he’s

sitting at his desk doing different stuff.

Brad: Quite the opposite actually. I think he literally works an hour a

week on that business that’s cranking out. Because he has it dialled in.

It’s totally 100% automated. All you do is build it once and then it runs

every time like clockwork.

Trent: If you’re interested in hearing more about Forrest Walden I did

interview him. You can get to that interview by going to BrightIdeas dot C-

O slash 3. It was a fascinating interview. Jermaine is actually going to be

on the show soon so if you want to catch that interview make sure you

become a subscriber and you’ll get a notification.

Let’s talk about customized thank-you pages. What’s the big deal

about those?

Brad: Stealth Video Tracking is more about capturing more data so that we

can start to tailor our message. customized thank-you Pages is a tool that

allows you to actually display customized messaging. When you get into

Infusionsoft it’s relatively easy, like you just described, to have

Infusionsoft automatically branch your messaging where if they watch the

video send them this series of emails and if they haven’t continue to send

them this series of emails. You can do all that inside Infusionsoft with

your emails or your voice broadcast or letters. You can have it branch in

terms of what you send out of Infusionsoft to your prospects or customers.

What Infusionsoft doesn’t have the capability to do is let you control the

message that you display immediately after somebody buys a product or fills

out a web form and opts into your website. Or fills out a survey that you

sent them if they opted in previously.

A really good example of this is: Laura Roder is a client of ours.

She teaches people about social media, she talks about Facebook and she

talks about Twitter and she talks about LinkedIn and Google Plus and

there’s a whole bunch of different social media tools. When somebody comes

to her website and they opt in, she’s going to want to ask them ‘What are

you most interested in?’ or ‘What are you having the most problems with?’

It only makes sense that if somebody checks off the box and says, ‘Hey,

Facebook is my biggest challenge right now,’ then it only makes sense that

the next page that shows up would be a page that talks about Facebook as

opposed to having one page. Imagine 100 people filling out this form and

let’s just say they were spread evenly across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

and Google Plus. You have two options. option number one is on the thank

you page you give a generic message that talks about all four of those. Or

you get tailored and based on their biggest problem you take Facebook

people to Facebook, you take Twitter people to Twitter, you take LinkedIn

people to LinkedIn and then you take Google Plus people to Google Plus. The

more you can keep your message 100% on target the higher your conversions

will be.

She’s excited because she’s able to use it increase her profit per

lead because as people are coming in, based on what she knows about them,

she’s able to deliver a very targeted thank you page after somebody fills

out the form. Now, the email messages will most definitely be targeted

because that’s handled inside Infusionsoft but the follow up marketing

starts on the thank you page of a web form. Most people don’t think of

that. I’ll see a lot of people that put up a web form to capture a lead and

all they’ll put on the thank you page is ‘thank you’. Really? They’re at

the peak of their interest. They’re most interested right when they opt in

or right when they fill out the form and the very first message they see is

the thank you page and a lot of people just throw up a generic ‘thank you’.

It’s like ‘No.’ That’s where you either continue to conversation or that’s

where you start selling something.

Another thing Laura will do and several of our other clients is let’s

just say somebody fills out a form to request a new report Seven, whatever.

Seven Secrets of whatever it is. On the thank you page they want to up sell

a particular product, say Product A. If somebody’s already bought Product A

you don’t want to offer them an up sell at a discounted price especially if

they bought at full price. customized thank-you pages also let you

comfortably and confidently put pages out there and allows you to take

anyone that’s already bought that particular product you basically branch

them to a page that is about something else. Maybe it’s an additional piece

of content or Product B. Try to sell them that product. So, customized

thank-you pages let you start creating a completely tailored message not in

your first email but actually on the thank you page when they’re looking

at it right there. You have 100% open rate on that page. Everybody sees it.

Trent: For anyone who would like to hear the interview with Laura

Roder I’ve done that, it’s at BrightIdeas.co/44. She has done a phenomenal

job of transitioning from what used to be just a web design, solopreneur

business, so this kind of dovetails into what Brad and I were talking about

earlier, into a team and a seven figure business with a very healthy profit

margin that she runs from her laptop on the road. Again, BrightIdeas.co/44

if you’d like to hear more about Laura’s story.

Brad: So much so that when we worked with her, which was last year she was

about ten minutes late. She was like, ‘Sorry I’m late. On Monday we decided

to move.’ She was engaged and they are moving to London in the span of a

week and a half. This was inspiring to me that she had her business set up

this way. In the span of a week and a half she decided to move to London,

sold everything in her house, moved to London and it didn’t disrupt

anything in her business. It was really impressive. Anyway, really

interesting story.

Trent: That’s one of the reasons why so many of us are enamoured with

online businesses because it does give you that flexibility. Where are we

time wise? Okay, we’re still good.

Let’s talk about transactional text messaging. Again, what’s the big

deal? Why should I care about this stuff?

Brad: Text messaging. We have a ton of clients that use it for reminders

for webinars, to get people onto webinars. We have a lot of clients that

set up appointments. The way that they sell and the way that we sell set up

appointments to meet with someone and it’s a consultation and then we sell

out of the consultation.

We’ve got a guy, I forget where he is, anyway, Clint Barr. He runs a

fitness business and his whole model is people opt in for free information

and then he drives them to come into the office, sit down and have a

consultation. When you get into the gym world and into the MMA world and

all those they have insanely high close rates, 85% to 90% of the people who

get to an appointment will close. And it’s because, before you walk into a

gym you usually have a pretty good idea whether you’re going to buy or not

so their thing is getting people to come in for the appointments. We set up

a follow up sequence where we would do some email remainders and also a

text message reminder to get the person to come in because text message has

a much higher read rate than email. He was saying that before we

implemented that he would usually have six or seven no shows a month and he

got it down to one no show a month.

If you look at that and it’s like, ‘Well, those numbers aren’t

massive,’ but when you consider he’s setting maybe 20 to 25 appointments a

month. That’s 20% to 25% of the people that are coming in, that are

scheduling appointments don’t show up, and then he gets five more people

to show up, well five more people to show up at an 80% close rate means

he’s adding four new clients. You factor that over the life of the client

because they’re signing up for a three, six or twelve month contract then

all of a sudden it’s a little bit bigger deal. When you multiply those

numbers across any other business with larger margins or higher ticket

items it’s definitely worth it. Small hinges swing big doors. This is a

small hinge that could potentially swing a very large door.

The other potentially slightly different and, I think, maybe more

interesting use of text messaging that he has just recently implemented, in

his business, and I think this is true in a lot of businesses, he’s found

that speed of response is huge. When somebody opts in or somebody requests

an appointment the amount of time that passes between the time they’ve

filled out a form and he gets them on the phone to have a conversation has

a lot to do with whether or not that person’s going to convert. What he did

was he set up his system to where the transactional text message, he gets

one sent to him every time somebody opts in or requests an appointment.

There are some points where the clock starts ticking and whenever that

happens he has a text message go to him. I think he actually has changed it

to go to the assistant that actually makes the calls so the text message

comes in, ‘Heads up. Brad Martineau just filled out the form requesting an

appointment. Here’s the phone number.’ He clicks on the phone number and

can call it right then and literally be connected to the person within a

minute if they pick up. It allows him to cut down on his time of response.

Another interesting idea or use case for text messaging is not to

send it to prospects or customers but to send it to myself as the business

owner or a key employee or potentially even partners. There are a lot of

different ways you can use that once you start to realize, ‘Wait a minute.

I don’t have to send this to the prospect. I can send it to anybody I want

if I have their information.’

Trent: Excuse me, I have a frog in my throat today. I actually built

that feature into my…I have a plug in that generates leads for marketing

consultants and marketing agencies. If you want to check it out go to Mobi,

M-O-B-I, LeadMagnet dot com. I have that feature that built into the plug

in where when someone fills out the form on the landing page if I’m the

vendor, the guy who wants to get the customer, it lights up my phone and

says, ‘Bob just filled out the form two seconds ago.’ On my Smartphone I

just tap the phone number that came in and you can instantly be on the

phone with Bob and say, ‘Bob, I notice you just filled out my form.’ That’s

the moment you want to talk to somebody because they emotionally have made

a purchase decision and you don’t want to lose out on that opportunity.

Brad: Exactly, exactly.

Trent: All right. I’ll try my best to keep the frog out of my throat.

I guess I talked too much over the Memorial Day weekend so apologies to

everybody for me coughing. In Robert Cialdini’s book, I think I pronounced

that properly, on… gosh now I’ve forgotten the title. But it was,

scarcely, where I’m going with this, feebly I might add…

Brad: ‘Influence’ right?

Trent: Yes, ‘Influence’ is the importance of scarcity in marketing.

It’s hardwired into us to be more inclined to act when there’s the

possibility of losing out on something. That transitions us into this thing

called ‘expiring promotions’. What are they, why should I care about them

and how does PlusThis help me make them go?

Brad: Yeah, absolutely. Anytime you’re creating an offer of any kind, one,

your offer needs to be irresistible and amazing in and of itself. In

addition to that, any time I’m creating an offer, and this is whether it’s

an offer on a landing page, an offer for somebody to buy something or

whether I’m presenting something from stage, it doesn’t even matter in

which medium I’m delivering the offer, I’m always considering how do I…

the way s that I make the offer really great are, one, you’ve got to have a

good offer to start. Two, some type of a discount that’s available for a

limited amount of time. I’ll usually throw in bonuses for the first certain

number of people, because the idea of scarcity is so real you’ve got to

make sure you include some element of ‘I need to act now so I can get

this, this, this and this.’ The idea of creating an environment where when

somebody comes into buy…when I was at Infusionsoft the VP of Sales used a

term I’d never heard before and I really liked it. He called it a ‘forcing

function’. He said, ‘You’ve got to have a forcing function. You have to

have something that pushes the person to buy. They can’t just sit around

and say ‘Oh, that’s a cool offer but I know it’ll be there forever. I’ll

buy later.’ It needs to be something that causes the person to sit up in

their chair and say, ‘Wait a minute. I need to consider this right now

because if I don’t right now I’m going to miss out on something.’ That’s

the idea behind expiring promotions. With PlusThis it’s not a single

feature, you use a couple of features together to pull off expiring

promotions but the idea is that when somebody comes and they opt in, they

get you some free piece of information and at some point in the cycle

what’s going to happen is, you need to say, ‘By the way, I have this

product you can buy, product A and I’m going to give you a discount if you

buy it within the next seven days or within the next fourteen days.’ You

get to choose what your cycle is.

One of our clients, Sean Greely runs Net Profit Explosion, he helps

fitness businesses build their businesses up. He uses this concept where

when people opt in he’s trying to get them onto a consultation. Normally

they charge for their consultations. So his offer is that within the first

30 days you can get a free consultation instead of having to pay for it if

you jump. The key elements of creating an expiring promotion are you have

to know when the promotion ends and with it expiring you want it to be

evergreen which means it can work for anybody. We’ll take Sean’s example.

You’re doing a 30 day promotional window. If Jim comes and opts in today

then in 30 days from now his offer needs to expire and I need to be able to

talk to him about his offer expiring in 30 days from today. What’s today?

May, whatever. Anyway, today.

If John comes and opts in next week I need his promotion to expire in

a week and 30 days. It’s got to be built where no matter when somebody

comes into my system I can create this promotion that expires based on when

they’re coming in and on their timetable. What you do is, we have a feature

that allows you to calculate a date, it’s called What’s the Date, but

calculate a date in the future.

So what you would do is you would say, ‘The first thing I want to do

when somebody comes into my system is I need to calculate when does their

promotion expire.’ If it’s a 30 days window we have a feature where you

say, take today’s date, add 30 days and it will create that date and store

it for you inside Infusionsoft. Then we use another feature that’s called

Humanize the Dates, because they’re storing it as a funky computer date. We

want to convert it so it’s readable like a human would read it so that we

can merge it into emails. As soon as somebody opts in PlusThis says, ‘I

know today is May 1 and this guy’s offer needs to expire on June 1.’ So

what it will do is, it will calculate June 1 and then convert it into a

human date so I can put it in an email and say, ‘Thanks for coming and

opting in. I’ve got an offer for you. You can buy this product at half off

plus I’ll throw in this bonus, this bonus and this bonus and you’ve got to

buy before June 1.’

Then I can schedule all of my follow up emails leading up to that

expiration date but it’s specific to each contact so, again, if somebody

comes in on May 1 their expiration date is June 1. If somebody comes in on

May 15 their expiration date is June 15. For every single person that comes

in there is an automatic built in sense of urgency and scarcity because

they’ve only got a certain amount of time to take advantage of that

particular offer. So what it does is, it allows you to create that scarcity

and increase sales and you don’t have to do anything with it. Just like we

talked about with Jermaine’s system before, it’s autopilot. The thing just

runs. Every time they come in you’re cranking out your expiring promotion.

That’s the idea. We have a lot of clients that have used that all over the

board with a lot of great success.

Trent: I want to jump into that one a little deeper because I’m

thinking how I could implement that with my own. I have my info products

which are products within Infusionsoft and then I use an order form. I’m

very familiar with promotional codes and so forth that you could give a

discount. How does your expiring promotions tie into that? How does it

actually work? Would I have to create more than one order form? Do I have

more than one promotional code? Within that 30 day window let’s say, I

wanted, just hypothetically speaking, If you buy in the first week I’m

going to give you 50% off, if you buy before week two the discount goes

down to 25% off and if you wait till the very end it’s only 10% off.

Brad: The most sure-fire way to do this is with either the new order form

or the shopping cart where you can pass promo codes through the link into

the order form or into the shopping cart. And then what you do, here’s the

deal. This is where it gets tricky, right? You’re going to send an email

in week one that says, ‘If you buy within the first week you’re going to

get 50% off,’ they still have that email even when they get into week two.

They can click on the link from that email so it can’t be embedded in that

link that they get a 50% discount because they can go back to it and click

later. The third feature that you use is actually the customized thank-you

page feature. So what you do is you go in and you create a customized thank-

you page that will route to, let’s say you have three different offers.

50%, 25% and full price. You’ll create a customized thank-you page that

says if they have a tag that says I should give them 50% off I’m going to

send them to the 50% off link which adds the same product into the cart but

it includes a 50% off promo code.

If they have a tag that says they should get 25% off we’ll forward

them on to a link that says add the same product but give them a 25% off.

If they have a tag that says no discount then just add to product to the

cart like normal. And then what happens out of PlusThis, is PlusThis gives

you a URL and you plug that into all of your links across any one of the

emails. It doesn’t matter which email it goes in and then throughout your

sequence you’re going to apply and remove tags that control which promotion

they get.

As soon as they opt in this person gets a 50% off promo. That runs

for a week and at the end of that week we take that tag off and we put on

the ‘this person gets a 25% promo’. End of the next week we take off 25%

and put they don’t get any discount. What happens is no matter what email

they get throughout that calendar time frame, those emails will all point

to the PlusThis customized thank-you page URL so when they click on it,

whether they click on it during the first, second or third week, they’ll go

to PlusThis. PlusThis is going to check which promotion or discount they

should get and it will then pass them along to the appropriate URL and

because you’re passing the promo code through the URL when they get to the

shopping cart all they’ll see is your generic shopping cart URL at the top

and they’ll have no idea that a promo code was entered so they have no way

to spoof it unless somehow they figure out what that promo code is.

Trent: Slick. Excuse me, the frogs are back. That is a fantastic tool.

The last one is the ‘Cycler Tool’. I don’t even know what that is

because I haven’t used it yet. Why do I care about that?

Brad: You can do this without PlusThis if you’re really bored and like to

build a bunch of stuff out of Infusionsoft, which I’ve found most people

would rather make money. I think the first time I built this was for Laura

Roder, again she talks about social media concepts. When I opt in I might

say, ‘Facebook is my biggest problem but I’m also interested in learning

about Twitter and LinkedIn. I don’t care about Google Plus.’ Any time you

are marketing to prospects that have a wide variety of interests across

different topics you immediately come across this dilemma of ‘Okay, how am

I going to keep track of what people want and then how am I going to choose

what to send them and in what order?’ So you can get into Infusionsoft.

With her we built something called a ‘Cycler’. Think of it as a wheel

basically. When somebody opts in the first thing we want to try and pitch

them on is Facebook. If I know they’re interested in Facebook and Twitter I

want to try to pitch them on Facebook first.

If I know they’re interested in Twitter and LinkedIn I’m going to try

Twitter first. She’s got four kinds of messages in her library of content.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. When she goes to decide what

she needs to send to somebody first she needs to know what the person is

interested and then second, know if she’s already sent something. Once she

knows those two things, then she needs to have a priority of how she would

normally send things, if somebody was interested in everything what order

would she send all of her content in. So what this tool does, is it allows

you to go into PlusThis and say, ‘My library of content is broken up across

these four topics.’ And I’ll stick with Laura as a specific example.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. ‘If somebody’s interested in

all four I want to market to them, first I want to talk to them about

Facebook. If that doesn’t work I’ll talk about Twitter, if that doesn’t

work or even if it does, then I’ll talk about LinkedIn and then I’ll talk

about Google Plus.’ You go into PlusThis and you set those four up as

pieces of content that you have that you want to send out. You create a tag

for whether the person is interested in each one of those and then you have

a tag that says ‘start this content’, meaning either send this email or

start this entire sequence.

We also set this up for Casey Graham and the Rocket Company. They

were the 2013 Ultimate Marketers. They just came out and we built a similar

thing for them. Where, when somebody opts in, lets say somebody comes in

and says, ‘I’m interested in Facebook and I’m interested in LinkedIn,’

instead of choosing a sequence to start we just run an ACTP post to

PlusThis. PlusThis, say Okay, let me go check and see what this person,

it’ll basically say ‘Number one is Facebook. Let me go see if this person

has a Facebook tag that says they’re interested. If they do then I’m going

to go check and see if I’ve already sent them the Facebook content. If I

haven’t I’m going to start the Facebook content and I’m going to stop.

PlusThis doesn’t do anything else, it starts the Facebook sequence. Once

the Facebook sequence is done, then what I can do is I can run that same

ACTP post again and it will come back to PlusThis. Are they interested in

Facebook? Yes. Have I already sent the content to them? Yes. Okay, let me

move to the next one. Are they interested in Twitter? No, I don’t have a

tag for that. Okay I’m going to move to the next one. Are they interested

in LinkedIn? Yes. Have I sent it before? No. Okay, let me send the LinkedIn

content. It allows you to take this library of content and it allows you to

organize it any way that you want and you plug it into PlusThis and you can

prioritize.

For example, this may be a more specific example. you have a whole

bunch of interviews to talk about whole bunch of different stuff. Let’s say

you went through all your interviews, you’ve got at least 44. Because I’m

counting your numbers as you go up. As you look at all the interviews you

could categorize them and say, ‘This is a marketing interview. This is a

business building interview. This is a leadership interview. This is a

technology interview.’ You could label them all that way. Then what you do

is you say, I’m going to have people opt in and I want to know what they’re

interested in. I’m going to give them options. ‘I’m interested in marketing

and I’m interested in technology. I don’t really care about leadership and

business building.’

Instead of you building out this really intricate fancy campaign

inside Infusionsoft you go into PlusThis and you say, ‘Hey look. I’ve got

interviews for every interview you create a new entry in this cycler tool.

For all the interviews that are marked ‘marketing’ you’ll set it and say,

‘Hey if they’ve got the marketing tag I want to send this interview. Then

you have a tag that will kick off that interview and actually send it. Then

when you’re building out your ongoing [inaudible 00:52:44] you’re deciding

what email or what interview you want to release this week, instead of

putting an email in you put in an ACTP post that goes to PlusThis and says,

‘Hey, go grab the next interview that this person’s interested in that I

haven’t yet sent.’ It will automatically kick if off. It allows you to, you

basically put this library of content up and let PlusThis decide, based on

how you build it, PlusThis decides what to send and who it should be sent

to based on what they’e told you they’re interested in.

So as you add new interviews you might have a really hot interview on

marketing and you want to be sure that’s the next interview anybody gets

who’s interested in marketing. You go into PlusThis and add it to the top

of the Cycler and next time that ACTP post runs to PlusThis, no matter how

far down the list of interviews somebody is the next time it comes back

it’ll take that one first and say ‘Hey, are they interested? Yes, because

they said they were interested in marketing’. Second, ‘have I sent it? No.

It’s a brand new interview.’ And that will go out next to everybody who’s

interested in marketing.

Trent: That is very cool.

Brad: So anyway, what you get to do is, you build the logic of what kind of

content you’re going to produce and then all you have to do is just fill

the library. PlusThis will keep track of who should get what based on what

they’re already received and based on what they’re interested in. It

greatly reduces the complexity of, have I already sent this to somebody? It

allows you to leverage your content better too because you can just create

a library and you don’t have to think through who I should send what to.

PlusThis does it automatically.

Trent: Yeah that’s very cool.

Brad: That one’s a little harder to visualize so I apologize to everybody

on the call, once you see it it’s a little bit easier. It’s extremely

powerful in being able to cycle through different offers and promotions and

stuff like that.

Trent: Okay. Regarding the number of interviews it’s actually much

more than 44. If you want to listen to Casey Graham you can go to

BrightIdeas.co/63. I think we’re up around 70 or so, they’re not all up.

Two a week. I’m cranking them out. All right, so that pretty much sums up

all I wanted to cover.

We just dumped a ton of marketing automation madness on the audience

and I took feverish notes and I will mention like I say at the very end of

this episode what the URL will be to get to these show notes. Actually I

can tell you now. It’s going to be BrightIdeas.co/65. So there you go Brad

you’re number 65.

Brad: Sweet.

Trent: We’ll wrap up with the lightning round. Brad, what are you most

excited about for 2013.

Brad: I am most excited because 2013 is the year I’m going to go from being

an owner-operator to an owner and it will be two businesses. We’re starting

to treat PlusThis as a totally separate business from our services. We’ve

got some other software ideas that are bubbling but I’m excited because

this will be the year where we get our systems in place, we’ve got a killer

team in place that’s cranking and it will allow me to leverage my strengths

in way better ways than I ever could realize before. I’m stoked because I’m

starting to feel the freedom. It’s not the I went through the ‘Oh I’m

excited because I’ve freedom I can go do whatever I want. And then I

realized you know what, it’s not like-, I’m 33, I’m not at the point where

I’m trying to not work for a year. What I want to do is I want to have is a

manageable schedule and make cool stuff happen and starting to get to the

point of tasting the way that we’re going to be able to make really cool

stuff happen is by me not being involved in delivering all of the work, but

actually having the freedom to be able to apply a strategic vision to our

business. And we’ve got two really good product offerings that I think

we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do on both sides. I’m

excited because I’m right at that threshold of being able to get over the

humps, so to speak. And I feel like over the next couple of years we’re

going to be able to explode both PlusThis and the services side and I’ve

got a couple of other software things that that will hopefully be coming

out relatively soon.

Trent: Very cool. Make sure you let me know and if they fit with the

audience that I’ve got, which I’m sure they will, I’ll be happy to have you

back.

Brad: Perfect.

Trent: What is your favorite business book?

Brad: That is a tough question. I saw this when you sent the question over

before when you at least you were nice enough to warn me that you were

going to ask that. It depends, is my answer. It depends on what area of

business, like, business is not like simple things. So there’s a bunch of

different aspects to it.

Trent: Absolutely.

Brad: So I’ll just rattle off a couple that I really, really, really like.

One of them is ‘Ready, Fire Aim’ by Michael Masterson. I jokingly refer to

that as one of my bibles for building my business. It is such a practical

down to earth and logical approach to growing a business and so, there’s a

quick summary and he gives four phases that every business goes through. I

have read the overview of all four and I actually have only read the first

section and a half because that’s all that applies to my business and I had

enough stuff to go run and work with. So, love that one.

I love Verne Harnish, ‘Mastering The Rockefeller Habits’ it’s a great

read. Pretty simple read too but a great read to start to wrap your brain

around metrics and how to track them. The only caution that I would throw

out is depending on where your business is that book may… read it as a

student, not as a follower. Meaning read it to take ideas and then realize

that all the stuff he talks about may not be critical depending on where

your business is, but it’s a great frame of reference. Like, ‘Yes, I need

to be doing metrics. I need to be having reporting in place.’ So that’s a

great book.

Let me think what other like.

Trent: Well lets stop with two.

Brad: Okay, we’ll stop with two.

Trent: Two is good.

Brad: Oh, I got one more. Sorry, one more. This one I think is

awesome. For pricing and sales. It’s ‘No BS Pricing Strategy’ by Dan

Kennedy. Amazing, amazing book to help you understand how to price and how

to sell. Great book. So those three, money.

Trent: Okay. And for people that want to get hold of you, what is the

one easiest way for them to do that?

Brad: Go to sixthdivision.com We do a similar interview approach. We’ve

done a bunch of video interviews with marketers, Jermaine Griggs is one of

them. You can go there, and opt in for the interviews and get access to a

bunch of content there and then.

If you are an Infusionsoft user and are interested in anything else

we have to offer you’ll be prompted to schedule a consultation but as you

go through that process… so sixthdivision.com on the services side,

that’s the best place to find out anything about what we’re doing and then

PlusThis.com on the software side. But that’s pretty much where we are.

That’s where all of our stuff is at.

Trent: All right my friend. Thank you so much for making some time to

come on the show. I really enjoyed this interview and I’m sure the audience

did as well.

Brad: Thanks for having me.

Trent: You’re welcome to come back any time you like.

Brad: All right. Awesome.

Trent: All right. To get to the show notes from today’s episode go to

BrightIdeas.co/65. When you’re there you’ll see all the links that we’ve

talked about today plus some other valuable information you can use to

ignite more growth in your business.

If you’re listening to this on you mobile phone while you’re driving

or doing whatever, just send a text – rather, just text TRENT to 585858 and

I’m going to give you access to the massive traffic toolbox, which is a

compilation of all the very best traffic generation strategies that have

been shared with me by my many proven experts that have been guests here on

the show.

As well, you’ll also be able to get a list of all my favorite

episodes that I’ve published thus far on the blog.

And finally, if you really enjoyed this episode, please head over to

BrightIdeas.co/love where you’ll be able to give or rather find the link to

leave us a rating in the iTunes store and I would really appreciate it if

you would take a moment to do that, because it helps the show to build its

audience and the more audience members we have, of course the more people

we can help to massively boost their business.

So that’s it for this episode. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid and I

look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Take care and have a wonderful day.

Recording: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas podcast.

Check us out on the web at BrightIdeas.co.

About Brad Martineau

bradmug2-copyBrad Martineau, Co-Founder of Sixth Division, serves the small business community as the leading provider of coaching and software tools that help entrepreneurs tap into the power of marketing automation.  He’s consulted thousands of successful entrepreneurs, business owners, and top marketers around the world.  He loves teaching and helping people understand difficult concepts.  Nothing drives him nuts more than seeing someone NOT do something because they don’t know how.

Back in the day, he was the sixth employee at Infusionsoft, and spent over six years leading the product development efforts as a key member of the Infusionsoft leadership team.  He had a blast and learned a ton doing this, all while getting to rub shoulders with many very highly successful entrepreneurs.

Brad is married with five kids, loves playing basketball, is addicted to fitted hats, and is pretty into the whole entrepreneur thing.

Digital Marketing Strategy: The Story of How Digital Relevance Grew by 3,596% in 3 Years

If you heard about a marketing agency that had increased revenue by 3,596.8% over a 3 year period, do you think that would be a firm you’d want to learn from?

Are you looking for ways to get more attention for your firm (or your clients) from the media?

If you answered yes to either of these questions, you are in luck!

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, my guest is Aaron Aders, co-founder and Market Research Director of Digital Relevance (formerly Slingshot SEO) which was named the fastest growing private company in Central Indiana with a 3 year growth rate of 3596.8%!

When you listen to this fascinating and informative interview, you are going to hear Aaron and I talk about:

  • (00:00) the service that his firm offers that is in such huge demand
  • (3:00) how they launched their company without any outside funding
  • (4:00) a very ingenious referral strategy that played a pivotal role in their very early days
  • (5:50) how they produced an industry report that literally catapulted them into the spotlight and brought them to the attention of their target market
  • (11:00) how they got their next report, a blog optimization guide, covered by Inc magazine
  • (16:00) an overview of their Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 content production plans that is used to underpin all the media attention they receive
  • (20:00) how they produce their own blog content, how Google authorship plays a role, and how to get credit (from Google) to their writing team
  • (24:00) how they nurture their leads to become qualified prospects that the sales team should talk to
  • (28:00) an explanation of the specific process that a lead goes through in their funnels to become qualified

I learned a great deal in this interview, and strongly encourage that you go check it out now.

Links

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Trent: Hey there bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas

Broadcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the

broadcast for marketing agencies and entrepreneurs who want to

discover how to use content marketing and marketing automation

to massively boost their business.On the show with me today is Aaron Aders, co-founder and Market

Research Director of Digital Relevance formerly known as

Slingshot SEO, which was named one of the fastest growing

private companies in central Indiana with a three year growth

rate of, check this, 3596.8%. You are absolutely going to love

this interview with Aaron. Before we get to that I want to go

over my tool tip and I’ve got a special announcement webinar

coming up.So the tool tip for this episode is something called the Fancier

Author Box by ThematoSoup and it’s a free WordPress plug in that

you can download and in this interview you are going to learn

why this is so important. But to basically to boil it down to a

nutshell this allows you to make sure that the author of each

blog post is properly credited in the eyes of Google for the

purposes of Google Authorship, which is an increasingly

important component to SEO, so it allows you to insure that each

writer is properly credited and that will help your SEO efforts.

So you can just Google it Fancier Author Box of course it there

will be a link in and show notes as well.And so the webinar coming up is the webinar on lifecycle marketing

and if this topic you’re not going familiar with I strongly

encourage you to become a subscriber to Bright Ideas just go to

brightideas.co and you will receive notifications of the next

webinar coming up as this has been proven to be a very popular

webinar for folks who to want better learn how to use this

concept called lifecycle marketing to make customer traction oh,

so much easier.So with all of that said, please join me in welcoming Aaron to the

show. Aaron, welcome to the show.Aaron: Hey, thanks for having me here, I really appreciate the

opportunity.Trent: No problem at all. I appreciate you making the time to come and

share with the Bright Ideas audience what’s working for your

firm. So for the folks who don’t yet know who you are or much

really about your business can you just briefly introduce

yourself and your company in your own words?

Aaron: Yeah, no problem, Trent. My name is Aaron Aders and I’m co-

founder of Digital Relevance Inc. and what we do is mostly earn

media online so usually what that means is we work with

companies to create valuable content that target marketing will

find value in and do a visual PR effort to get that out to the

industry influential websites and things of that nature. So the

result from that is a mix of leads and search engines traffic

and the results of those links and the content and a email list

growth, a lot of digital marketing return that really have the

biggest ROI and SEO and such a media and such, so that is

Digital Relevance and I’m one of the co-founders.

Trent: Cool. So we might dive into that a little bit more in a few

minutes, but before we do I just want to kind of give our

readers our listeners as of why I invited you on the show. I was

traveling around the Internet as I always do and I don’t even

remember where off the top of my head now that we discovered you

but what stood out was your growth rate over the past three

years. You grew at 3596.8% over three years. That is a

whopping amount of growth.

You want to know kind of…where were you three years ago in terms of

how big the company was and where are you now and what in the

heck did you do to cause so much growth to happen?

Aaron: Well it was an interesting ride for sure along our growth

there. We took an interesting position beginning that we wanted

to bootstrap this thing and grow organically because I think

that is just a real natural way to grow through. I guess client

referrals and on the back of your work rather some fundraising

effort that just goes out and hires a lot of sales people; not

that that’s bad. It can get a lot of traction from new ideas but

it just wasn’t the idea that we wanted to go by because I

believe being in services is a little bit different then if you

had a product or something like that, it makes sense to a

fundraising for.

So as a service writer . . . well first of all, when we started this

company, I was 26 years old and we didn’t really have a whole

lot of funding between us or anything else, but we did have a

list of people that were interested in our services. So kind of

as when we were starting off a bit of our strategy was, “Okay,

let’s get these clients on board, let’s do great by them,” and

we took some of the first contracts to kind of, not quite a loss

but just about. I mean we were eating beans at the time to give

you an idea there.

When we took this contract we said we’re going to do this for you at

somewhat of a discounted rate and basically all we ask is that

when we make you successful, not if, but when, you tell three

other people about us and we’ll make that pitch at the contract

of signing and hold it back. We never really had anyone turn

that down but it was very effective in growing us. Because we

did hold people to telling other business owners about our

company so that kind of word of mouth marketing was really how

we grew our business in the beginning. The 3,000% growth rate,

that was past. I think you were referring to the Inc. 500

number.

Trent: Probably.

Aaron: I think you have to . . . you can’t say anything to them until

they make over a $100,000 but still, at that point we really had

a pretty small market, inbound marketing team but it was mostly

by word of mouth. We didn’t stop taking projects at losses was

obviously, and grew that way but it was really through clients’

success and really being adamant that when we make you

successful we expect that. When you do right by people and do a

good job for them and especially in marketing, I think that’s

something people like to brag about.

We got our start in SEO and having rankings being number one or

number two or whatever for a certain keywords that people like

to brag about that as well, so I think that also helped us.

Trent: Yeah. No question. So let’s go back then to, because it seems

to me that the growth has really been the byproduct of this,

what you said at the very beginning of the interview, you create

valuable content, combine it with PR campaigns and that ends up

helping the SEO or helping the ranking of your clients for a

given keyword set of keywords.

So if I’m to understand what you’ve explained so far it’s the result

of your work, combined with that referral strategy that caused

all the growth as opposed to doing a lot of webinars or doing a

lot of lead magnets or doing other things, am I correct or is

growth coming from two places?

Aaron: Well, as we scaled when we got larger we had beef up our

marketing department and our marketing efforts just to keep up

that growth rate because doubling every year gets twice as hard

every year as we scale. So we did have to pick up, but again

all of the marketing that we do–I should say the marketing that

we do for our clients–which is webinars, white papers and

research guides.

In fact, probably the most successful marketing campaign that we ever

did was a click through rate study that we released in 2011 and

so that was really significant because unless you are a search

engine or a digital marketing company doing the SEO campaign for

a ton of clients, you really don’t have the data to show real in-

depth and informative click through rates on certain keywords.

So that’s essentially was what it was. The PR study was looking

at top ten results, how much percentage of clicks the number one

position get versus the number two through ten.

So since we had such a large client base of SEO customers, we had the

data to have a very significant sample set and now there was

something in that we put together pretty quickly. We were

already tracking the data, we already had it in there, but we

created this what we call a contribution. A contribution is

something that . . . our target market finds valuable and our

target market is essentially marketing directors, VPs of

marketing. This was something that was very important to them–

understanding click through rates so they can plan their

campaigns.

So when we developed that and we went to market with it, that was

talking to, in our case, Search Engine Land and Search Engine

Journal. Websites like that, these industry, influential, what

Google refers to at hilltops, so these authority basis

essentially. So we went there, they loved it, and they were

in fact fighting over the first rights to release it and we

ended up releasing it on Search Engine Land and then released on

guest articles on a lot of other places that were still willing

to take that even though they didn’t get the first release.

But if you have a contribution that valuable, then you’re going to

see those links and the placements come very naturally but you

have to combine the contribution which is obviously putting

upfront effort to create something quality, very targeted, and

then combine that with an earned media strategy and that is the

effective, again, also targeted outreach. So all of that has to

be in sync and speaking to the same audience.

And if you can put all those pieces together then that’s essentially

what we do at Digital Relevance and that’s what I do. I’m kind

of the digital relevance at Digital Relevance here on a day to

day basis so it’s a really fun job and a great way to grow your

business.

Trent: So this report that you’re speaking of is this called the Tale

of Two Studies: Establishing Google and Bing Click Through

rates?

Aaron: Yeah, you were able to find that pretty quickly. I mean that

study was so effective and driving leads to us, driving links.

We instantly started ranking for everything around click through

rates, but it kind of raised the ship on all fronts because we

suddenly became the center of authority and kind of helped out

on our own right because of so many links from other hilltops in

our industry. That was so powerful and it really kicked off the

discovery of . . . well, earned media and contribution that is

just a way that you have to of SEO and optimizing for search

going forward.

Trent: It’s interesting that you mentioned so much success with this

and I want to make a shout out to a past guest of mine in a past

episode because what you’re describing is what Mike Stelzner of

Social Media Examiner calls Nuclear Fuel in his book, “Launch”.

And I did an interview with Mike. It’s brightideas.co/7. If any

of the audience would like to go and check it out and we go into

a lot of detail on producing what is called or what Mike calls

Nuclear Fuel and your report absolutely falls into that

category.

It’s something that attracts a ton of attention to your firm or your

brand and gets a lot of coverage and ends up on a whole bunch of

links that’s coming into you and that’s exactly what you’ve been

describing.

So now, I see on your site you’ve done a couple of other reports.

There’s an enterprise blog post optimization guide and a

Facebook graph search cheat sheet. Did either of those reports

have the impact for you that the click through rate report did?

Aaron: Yeah. Like I said, the click through rate report was definitely

the biggest but those were also very impactful. For example the

blog optimization guide; that was huge. I released in on

Inc.com’s website and that just trickled down to so many

different . . . but that’s what you get out of a big media

placement.

So if you create something of value for a target audience and you

market it effectively to these outlets and you get these

placements, then you just get this trickle down effect of all

these links coming across from people that just syndicate that

content just straight up. That happens from public libraries,

public institutions, private companies all in your industry and

you get requests get a placement in even magazines and print

publication. This guy has been in both and we’ve gotten

requests for both.

And you can just look . . . one of the easiest way to check that is

select maybe a paragraph of text there and throw in a Google

search and you can see how many people straight syndicate that

and you’re looking at hundreds if not thousands of links

everything time you do that. So yeah, the impact of these things

is really big and that’s what we’re seeing in most of the

releases that we’ve done.

Trent: So a couple questions come to mind, first you said you released

it to Inc. Magazine. Can you describe specifically what you mean

by that?

Aaron: Yes, a digital PR effort, the earned media part is probably the

biggest piece in terms of guarantying that you that you get a

lot of links out of that. It’s pitching to an outlet that is an

authoritative industry hilltop that has a lot of your target

audience members reading that publication so whenever this is

placed there, not only get the search engine rankings, you also

get a ton of leads coming in that download that piece; that

value added piece.

That PR digital effort is pitching to them and trying to first get

that first release to somebody and also marketing articles to

the other ones that might not have gotten first release. But if

the piece is valuable enough, then you’re not going to get . . .

it makes the outreach effort a lot easier, let’s say that. Again

those two strategies, the contribution and the earned media, you

really got to be firing on both sides and they’re going to make

each other most successful.

Trent: Okay, so when you reached out to Inc., it’s not like you paid

them. This wasn’t a media buy. You just said, hey, we’ve

produced what we think is a phenomenally valuable piece of

content and we’re going to give you first dips on putting it in

your magazine, mentioning it, linking it, whatever if you deem

it as valuable as we believe it to be. Do I understand this

correctly?

Aaron: Exactly and in doing so we call that climbing the hilltop. And

when climbing hilltops, it’s kind of a future proof way to build

links because it’s done natural. Now we also tell people that

you can’t buy a ticket to the hilltop. If purchasing the links,

first of all, Inc. and any serious publishing wouldn’t even

consider it but some websites do and that’s a practice some,

well, quite a few, people take in trying to get a guest article

posted. They’ll say, hey, I’ll give you $50 to post this on your

blog. It might be middle of the pack domain, authority website

and Google’s attacking that.

[Mad cats] came out last week and said they’re looking specifically

at in shutting down these networks and so as a result whenever

these companies get penalized using that are using tactic they

have to go in an disavow that link. Being from Indiana, I always

have basketball references so pardon me here. It’s kind of like

using a strategy as like taking the ball down the court and

every shot clock ends in a violation. It’s not worth doing at

all. You’ve got to take the other route. Just create something

of value and then you don’t have to pay for it.

I mean consider the effort of those hundreds and sometimes thousands

of links an Inc. article will place out. How long would it take

you to make that manually, to pitch that many companies and what

would you have to pay them? I mean you can’t pitch. It’s really

the best way to scale, link building. It’s a good contribution

and their immediate combination.

Trent: No kidding. So how often are you producing, and Mike Stelzner

is calling this primary fuel, blog posts versus these bigger

reports because obviously it’s a lot more work to produce the

report, the click through rate report, or the blog post

optimization report. So in addition to those reports, actually,

before I move off, how many per year of six months, or how often

are you trying to produce a new report?

Aaron: So we have tier one, two, and three levels of content, so tier

one would be like an e-book, something of that nature, that blog

put out an optimization guide, would probably be considered tier

one. Maybe tier two [good] as a guide. Tier two would be like

cheat sheets, guides, things of that nature, and then tier three

would be just really great guest articles that say you have an

awesome idea to pitch to an industry public publication in just

a really nice well thought, well researched article.

And so we try and do one tier per quarter and then multiple tier two

and tier threes depending on our cycle of editing schedule and

things like that so that’s kind of a good thing to shoot for.

But it’s really not, especially for enterprise clients, it’s not

like it takes a ton of work to create these in some cases

because even in tier one content pieces.

Because there are so many enterprises in the back of their desk

somewhere or maybe sometimes behind a payroll or maybe somewhere

buried on my website they’ve got these false leading pieces and

guides already and sometimes you can just take that and put it

through a more consumable downloadable format, in an e-book or

something like that and then we dress it a little bit.

But a lot of times these companies have tier one content but they

just don’t know it or don’t know how to promote it so that’s a

really great situation coming into. We get a client takes

thought leadership seriously and is creating this somewhere and

we get our PM on it and fast track it. Like I did with the

[CPR] study, I think we spent maybe two guys and less than two

weeks. I know that because we already had the data and we just

crunched the data and wrote maybe a couple thousand words around

it and that was it.

Trent: For the folks that are listening to his if you’re wondering,

I’m browsing Aaron’s site as I’m going the interview and you can

get free reports from him on all this stuff. How to be the

Topic of Your Industry with Earned Media and there’s a download

for that. How to Write Insanely Popular Blog Posts, there’s a

download for that. So I would really encourage you to go to . .

. it looks like it’s Relevance.com. Is that correct, Aaron?

Aaron: Yeah, our website is Relevance.com. You can check the Resources

section and we’ve got . . . it’s all over the map. How to Pass

the Google Analytics IQ Test. That’ll teach you there,

Beginner’s Guide of Google Analytics. Yes, so many ways that we

try to help our target market. Again it’s VP marketing,

directors of marketing do their jobs better and then whenever it

comes around to making decision around digital PR and SEO and

things like that we’re top of mind.

Trent: You know what’s really doing horrible interviews like this for

me is I realize how much more homework I have to do as a result

of talking to you.

Aaron: Well, it’s all there for free.

Trent: All right, so my question that I never got to was, how often do

you blog? And I didn’t mean like you described tier one, two,

three which looks like it’s all content that’s going on other

people’s properties, and then you have your own blog and it

looks like it’s pretty darn active. Two posts in the 20th, one

in the 17th, one in the 16th, two in the 16th. How many people .

. . I mean are you taking guest posts from other people or do

you just have enough people on your team that you guys are able

to crank out this much content?

Aaron: Yes, we have staff of about 80 people here in Indianapolis and

so a lot of these blog contributors, they are all staff. I know

that we have maybe one or two guest posts here and there from

people outside of our company and we do accept guest posts of

their own topic and valuable, just like any other publisher.

But we try to foster blogging for our company within our organization

and I think that’s an important point I’d like to make,

especially with Google Authorship coming. Or it is here and

it’s coming, it’s probably going to be a big part of ranking out

algorithm here soon, but it’s kind of going to . . . [employees

able to] promote themselves, right. So these employees that are

blogging on our website that’s more coverage for their name and

gives them more credit under their Google Authorship profiles.

We want to promote that because it will help us in the end, and even

if they do move on in some point to another organization and

keep doing the same thing, then their [confidence] our website

just only becomes more valuable, so really it’s in the best

interest of the employee and the employer to encourage this

thought leadership and again it helps them and probably even

more than it helps us.

Trent: And how are you ensuring that for example in the case of Rachel

Brown, I see she has two posts. How are you ensuring that the

content that she has authored that is published on your blog is

in Google’s eyes through the authorship of whatever word you’d

like to use is “credited” to Rachel? Is there a plug in or how

does that happen?

Aaron: Yeah, great question, so if you click on that post and you

scroll down to the bottom there is a plug in and it links to

their biography on the site that links to their Twitter account,

Google+. You can see their latest posts so that plug in, I

don’t remember the name of it. I know we run WordPress. I think

it was called Fanciest Author Box. So it will connect your

Google+. Anything that connects your Google+ [inaudible 24:47]

there’s ways of doing it by hand but pay the $5 or $10, maybe

it’s even free. It’s just one click if you’re using WordPress

and you’ve got a connection.

Trent: Okay, Fanciest, and if you’re listening to this I will be at

the end of this interview I’ll describe a link on how you can

get to the show notes for this episode and anything we’ve talked

about like this will be in the show notes. And you’ll be able

to follow those links to get to it.

Fancy, yeah, something called Fancier Author Box by ThematoSoup. So

we’ll check that out and make sure that’s the right one and if

not, I’ll trade some emails with you here and we’ll make sure we

get the right one.

All right, so I now you have to keep this just a half hour so I think

we have about seven minutes left. So obviously you guys are

doing a killer job in terms of getting attention which is a

first phase of lifecycle marketing of course attracting

interest. Phrase two is capturing leads so lots of people are

coming to your site because of all the exposure and these links

and this is helping your ranking and they’re entering their

contact info to get whatever free report which you have many

that they are interested in.

But the next phase is nurturing because just because they download

from a report doesn’t mean that they are ready to become a

customer. So what are some of the things that you do with

you’re a HubSpot partner, yes?

Aaron: Yeah, we use HubSpot. We are a HubSpot [founder].

Trent: So it doesn’t matter for what we’re going to talk about next,

whether you use HubSpot or Infusionsoft or whatever marketing

optimization tool. It wouldn’t matter because you can accomplish

this in all of them. But what are some of the things that you

do to segment and nurture your list of prospects so that your

sales team focuses on the people they should be focusing on?

Aaron: Well, I think, like you said, a lot of marketing automation

software out there could handle quite a bit. I do think HubSpot

does offer definitely some functionalities that others don’t.

But essentially what you want to do is from the very first

gathering their information on a questionnaire form, you want to

understand what questions, and you can get this data from your

service sales people is get prospect questions basically that

can give them an idea if this is someone we want to target and

as a prospect. So it might be a company size, it might be

revenue levels, or numbers of employees, or things of that

nature. Maybe it’s a more in-depth question, but working these

questions into your form that people have to download, fill out

the download your content can help.

Now lengthening that form too long is going to have diminishing

returns with people getting annoyed filling out giant survey but

if you can keep it to a few questions that’s pretty good

practice, and then probably even better information comes

through the software as you start to funnel users through your

marketing automation workflows. So that’ll gives you an idea,

when you send them more resources and more messaging: are they

opening, are they downloading, are they coming back to your

site, what are they looking at when they come back to your site?

Are they filling out the content form?

A good marketing automation software will have all this information

within the portal and ad leads scores as different interactions

happens so you don’t really have to . . . you can set up these

workflows and say they come in through, in our case a blog

optimization guide. We have a specific workflow just for that

because these people are interested in the writing and

authorship and things like that. So people who work through that

funnel and say you have a prospect and say we’re interested in

and they’ve opened up every analysis and downloaded everything

we sent them and they’ve kind of upped their lead score so now

they know more about our company.

At that point, depending on the content that they read, it might be a

time for outreach someone from business development. Now it’s

not that you can send them ten things about your company and

okay once they’ve read ten, then their qualified. You have to be

very tactical with the content that you send them. You’re

starting off at the very top of the funnel when they first find

you and then you work your way down the funnel. So top of the

funnel stuff might be educating them, then about some market or

industry techniques things like that. And the middle of the

funnel might be educating them about those specifics techniques

that your company provides, and maybe it talks about some

comparisons and things like that.

At the bottom of the funnel directly here’s what we do, here’s some

more data, and if you have somebody, a prospect that works

through all that content and downloads it all, then they’re

clearly interested in you, they have been educated on your

company and then outreaching them at that point is not only a

waste of your sale’s guys time but it’s going to be high

prospect, high percentage they are going to close in the end.

Trent: Absolutely, which makes the sales person job easier, lowers

your cost to your customer acquisition, eliminates the need to

waste tons of cold calling and there’s all sorts of benefits. I

think that it’s reasonably likely that lots of people listening

to this don’t necessarily know what auto marketing automation

  1. So I want to feedback on what you just described so I can

make sure folks who aren’t terribly familiar with it really get

a handle on what it is because it’s extremely powerful concept

to embrace and then implement in your business.

So what’s of folks have websites and you can go put in your email

address and you get whatever it is they are offering. But it

sounds to me, Aaron, like what you’re doing of course is you

have not just one lead magnet, but you have many lead magnets

and the follow-up campaigns, which are these sequence of emails

that path down the funnel as it were is going to tailored

obviously to each one of those lead magnets. Am I understanding

this correctly?

Aaron: Exactly.

Trent: Okay. And then at some point down each . . . let’s say if you

have ten lead magnets. Ten different reports, for example, you

would have ten different early stage educational and nurturing

funnels, and then at some point you’re probably have what I call

a catch all product and company specific thick funnel that these

people would eventually make their way into that says “this is

what we do and you can kind of buy our stuff.” Is that correct?

Because I’m thinking of a scale of about how many, of how

manageable that you can make this.

Aaron: Yeah, we have a workflows for every piece that we send out and

all of them in and learning a lot more about our company and

that specific offering that they might have been interested in

more than maybe a different offering we have or different

offering, or different perspective on our offering. Our goal is

to get them to, as what we call, go through the bottom of the

funnel so really what that means is someone again has gone from

leaning about your expertise in the market, to learning about

your company and your offering.

So it doesn’t matter. Like when you sent it to a salesperson and if

you’re like a giant company and you have all these products that

you sell, you obviously want to send people from certain

workflows to the sales guys that handle those. We essentially

sell one thing and that’s the contributions in earned media, so

it’s pretty easy for us because we can export our [inaudible

32:54] through leads and see which workload they are in and get

an idea of what interest drove them to our company and in just

use those as conversation starters and to see if there’s any

interest there. So they all lead to the same thing which is a

high lead score on the bottom of the funnel [website].

Trent: Okay. There’s so much more I could ask you and that I want to

ask you. Excuse me, let make that stop ringing, but you told me

a half hour is all you have, so sadly I’m going to have to cut

this episode off here. I do really want to thank you, Aaron,

for coming and being on the show. Like I say, I’m kind of mad at

your now because I need to read a lot of lead magnets and see

how much better I can do at some of this stuff. For the folks

that are listening who want to get a hold of you, what would be

the easiest way for them to do that?

Aaron: Well, pretty easy: Aaron@revelance.com. That’s my email address

and you can go to relevance.com and see a lot of the guides and

research reports and things of that nature. I think it’s very

helpful for anyone that’s interested in learning more and even

implementing some of these strategies on their team, or their

marketing tam in their company, trying to earn more natural

search engine traffic and leads and social media mentions and

all the great things that earn media contribution provided.

Trent: Absolutely and that’s by the way that’s Aaron with two A’s,

aaron@relevance.com.

Aaron: Yeah. A-A-R-O-N at relevance.com.

Trent: Okay, Aaron, again, thanks you so very much for making the time

to be on the show. It’s been a pleasure to have you on and look

forward to having you back.

Aaron: Yeah, thanks a lot, Trent. It was great fun and I’ll be back

any time.

Trent: Okay, take care.

Aaron: Take care, bye-bye.

Trent: All right, to get to the show notes for today’s episode go to

brightideas.co/64. When you’re there you’ll see all the links

that we’ve talked about today, plus some other valuable

information that you can use to ignite more growth in your

business. If you’re listening to this on your mobile while

you’re driving or doing whatever, just sent a text to, rather

just text Trent to 585858 and I’m going to give you access to

Massive Traffic Toolbox, which is compilation of all the very

best traffic generation strategies that have been shared with me

by my many proven experts and guests here on the show. As well

you’ll be able to get a list of all my favorite episodes that

I’ve published thus far on the blog.

And finally, if you really enjoyed this episode please head over to

brightideas.co/love where we’ll you’ll be able to find a link to

leave us a rating in the iTunes store and I would really

appreciate it if you’d take a moment to do that because it helps

the show to build its audience. And the more audience members

we have, of course, the more people that we can help to

massively boost their business.

So that’s it for this episode. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and I look

forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care and have a

wonderful day.

Announcer: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas Broadcast.

Check us out on the Web at brightideas.co.

About Aaron Aders

AaronAdersAaron is co-founder of digitalrelevance™, a national leader in inbound marketing, planning and execution. Building on more than a decade of Internet marketing experience, Aaron steers the strategic vision behind digitalrelevance™ marketing strategy, research and collateral. Aaron also maintains a weekly tech column at Inc.com and has contributed content to various national publications including Time.com, Businessweek, Money Magazine, and SmartData Collective – where he also serves on the board of advisors.

Digital Marketing Strategy: How Casey Graham Reached 5,000 customers and $2 Million in Sales in Just 3 Years

3 years ago, Casey Graham was at rock bottom. He was $80,000 in debt, he’d just missed out on a major family event (because he was on the road making sales calls), and things at home weren’t exactly firing on all cylinders.

For many early-stage entrepreneurs, this is an all too familiar story.

Fast forward 3 years, and Casey’s company has become extremely successful, all thanks to a major realization he made on a trip home from overseas (when we was missing out on that important family event).

While on the plane, Casey realize that the way he was delivering his product was wrong, he sales strategy was wrong, and if he was going to ever realize his dreams of owning a successful business, he was doing to need to do a number of things differently.

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Casey Graham, founder of The Rocket Company, and also the winner of Infusionsoft’s 2013 Ultimate Marketer award. Having made some pretty big changes to his business 3 years ago, Casey now generates over $2 million a year (with very high profit margins), is completely debt free, and is having more fun than ever!

When you listen to this interview, here are some of the things that you are going to hear Casey and I talk about:

  • How entering his company in the Infusionsoft Ultimate Marketing Finals really helped his team to get ultra focused
  • (10:52) The story of how Casey fired himself from his last job to start his own business (and how awful it turned out)
  • (19:12) How his very first email broadcast from Infusionsoft earned him a few thousand dollars (something that he’d NEVER done before)
  • (20:12) Casey’s traffic generation strategy, and specifically, how Twitter played a pivotal role in growing his list from 832 to over 47,000 in just 3 years
  • (25:12) How Casey sets up automated nurturing campaigns in Infusionsoft
  • (28:16) How Casey warms up his new leads in a very special warm up sequence, which is then followed by a webinar sequence that results in the vast majority of their product sales
  • (32:42) How webinars play a crucial role in Casey’s sales funnel and how he structures them to produce maximum conversions
  • (34:00) How he presents an offer in his webinar so that more sales result
  • (37:30) How Casey generates substantial additional revenue via up-sells and cross-sells
  • (38:30) The 3 types of up-sells that Casey uses and how to replicate what he’s doing in your own business
  • (47:12) How Casey is building “relationship capital” with his customers with specific examples
  • (52:00) How the success of all of this has massively changed Casey’s life
  • (55:10) What he is most excited about for 2013, his favorite business book, and how to reach him
..And so much more!

Links

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Trent: Hey there bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas

Podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast

for marketing agencies and entrepreneurs who want to discover

how to use content marketing and marketing automation to

massively boost their business.On the show today is Casey Graham, founder of The Rocket Company. I

first learned of Casey when I was at Infusionsoft’s annual

conference. His company one the annual 2013 Infusionsoft

Ultimate Marketer of the Year award. To do that, he had to beat

out some pretty impressive competition. You’re in for a real

treat with this interview.In the interview, we’re going to talk about how Casey, a couple years

ago, was essentially broke, driving around in a little red

pickup truck, and really trying to make his business a success.

Fast forward three years later – He’s got a mailing list of

47,000 people, he’s doing over $2 million a year, he and his

family are completely debt free, he’s got a wonderful team of

people helping the company continue to grow. He’s actually now

removing himself from all operational roles so he can focus more

on strategy. Like I said, this is going to be a very fantastic

interview.Before we get to that, a couple of special announcements – My tool

tip of the week is a brand new tool called PlusThis. You can

get there, if you’d like to use our affiliate link, by going to

brightideas.co/plusthis. PlusThis is essentially a library of

add on tools for Infusionsoft users. One of the tools there,

for example, is the integration with GoToMeeting. One of the

things, if you’re doing webinars with GoToMeeting, wouldn’t it

be valuable for you to know who attended and who didn’t attend?

You can get that information from GoToMeeting, but you have to

manually export it from GoToMeeting and then import it to

Infusionsoft, and that creates duplicates, labor, and

inefficiencies. That is one of the many things PlusThis can

help you automate.The other announcement I wanted to make is that our next webinar on

life cycle marketing – If you haven’t yet seen one of these

webinars, they’re a huge hit because it really goes into detail.

I show what I do, and what guests on my show have done to

increase the pace at which they are attracting new customers,

which obviously makes our companies more profitable, which

allows us to invest in further growth. If you want to get

registered for one of those, just go to brightideas.co, join up

on the mailing list, and you’ll receive a notification of the

next time I’ve got that webinar running.Please join me in welcoming Casey to the show.Hey Casey, welcome to the show.Casey: Thanks for having me on, I appreciate it.Trent: No problem at all. First off, congratulations on your

recognition as one of the Ultimate Marketer finalists this year

for Infusionsoft, that’s quite an accomplishment to say the

least.Casey: Thank you. I’d never heard about it until a year ago, and then

we went to InfusionCon a year ago, and we saw them on stage and

decided to apply for it this year. Somehow we were able to make

it through the rigorous interview process and the cuts and all

that and be a part of all that. It was awesome. We learned a

bunch from the other guys that were finalists as well, and are

actually continuing to learn from them. I would highly

recommend being a part of the Infusionsoft Ultimate Marketer

process, just from the relationships that you build.Trent: Yeah, no kidding. Both Dustin and Andy have been on the show

as well.Casey: That’s awesome, you’re getting it done.Trent: I try to make it my effort to get all of the Ultimate Marketers

on the show now. I think you’re being a little too humble here,

you didn’t just make the grade, if I remember correctly, you

won.Casey: Our team won. Me and Michael, and The Rocket Company won the

award. It was awesome to win, and to be a part of that. I

don’t know we won, the other guys were so awesome. Dustin and

the other guys, BlueChip, they were doing so much. It was cool.

Like I said, the process – I don’t know if everybody who

listens to this in an Infusionsoft user or not, but people that

Infusionsoft should be a part of the Ultimate Marketer process,

because it helps you think through your processes, since you

have to present them to people. What it did internally for us

was great. The award was awesome, but what it did internally

was solidify a lot things that needed solidifying. I really

appreciate you giving us a shout out for that.Trent: For the folks who don’t know who you are, and I normally start

my interviews with this, but I kind of skipped it, a little bit

on purpose because I wanted to send you that congratulations.

People don’t necessarily know who you are or what The Rocket

Company is. I want you to introduce yourself in just a moment.

For the folks that are listening, the big why on why you want to

listen to interview, and I think Casey is probably going to get

into it, is he was driving around in his little red truck trying

to find customers, and was not having a real good time at it,

and I’m going to let him tell that story, and then here he is,

some amount of time later, I don’t remember if it’s a year or

two later, he’s the Infusionsoft Ultimate Marketer of the Year,

and his business has absolutely blown up, in a good way, as a

result of that. We want to get all of those things out in this

interview, and I think we’re going to do a real good job with

that.

With that said, Casey, thanks for being on the show. Please take a

moment and tell us just a little bit about what your company is

and does, and who you are.

Casey: The Rocket Company is an online learning for pastors and church

leaders. Church leaders get caught a bunch of things in college

or seminary – It’s kind of like us, even as entrepreneurs, you

can go to business school, but then there’s all of this stuff.

People that are actually listening to podcasts now, they’re

going, “That’s great, I learned that in business school, but

what is it really?”

That’s what The Rocket Company for churches, go, “That’s great, you

learned all that stuff, and you learned some theology, you

learned something in school. There is real stuff you have to do

as a pastor, like preach better sermons, and raise money, and

deal with volunteers. The Rocket Company provides online

training, learning and coaching for pastors in that way. It’s a

totally online model, except for some live events that we do.

It’s all digital, it’s all online, and it reaches all across the

world now. We have about 5,000 customers that are connected to

The Rocket Company, and that’s the niche which Rocket Company

serves.

Very simply, why we do it is that we believe in the church and we are

trying to help the church be successful. We’re tired of pastors

preaching boring sermons, we’re tired of cheesy TV pastors

trying to raise money on TV and doing it the wrong way and

turning people off, and we’re tired of volunteers burning out in

churches because there aren’t enough. We’re creating solutions

and coaching in those areas, that’s what we currently do.

Trent: If I was to really shorten that into a super simple

explanation, you help churches become more effective at the

business side of being a church.

Casey: Yes, and no. Yes, I think that’s right in a lot of ways, but

there’s a heavy relational slant on it. It’s not just business

as usual, we help them develop the interpersonal skills to be

able to pull off raising money, volunteering, preaching, and all

that stuff. Yes, you’re right. It’s where the rubber meets the

road. Simply, when people ask us what we do – We help the

church succeed. That’s what we do, and we feel like these are

the areas that make the most impact right now.

Trent: The reason I said that is that I think that probably few, if

any of the listeners right now, are involved in the church

business. I don’t want them to click the stop button, thinking,

“Oh, this is for churches, it wouldn’t be for me,” because that

couldn’t be further from the truth as they’ll learn, as they

keep on listening to this.

Casey: Well, we’re a business that serves churches, so you should

listen because we’re [inaudible 08:55]. 86% of churches are

broke or behind budget this year. The clientele we’re serving

do not have a lot of money, and the other reason, the clientele

we’re serving don’t get a financial benefit from using our

services. If they’re giving [inaudible 09:14] to the church,

they don’t get a percentage of it, they’re not a salesperson,

their salary stays the same.

It’s all on goodwill, so it’s much harder to sell to somebody. If

somebody is buying a product and you’re increasing their income

or business revenue, they’ll keep buying from you because they

get a personal benefit. For us, it’s the complete opposite.

We’ve still been able to find success even with having niche and

as 86% of them are broke or behind budget.

Trent: How much success are you guys having? How much revenue are you

guys doing a year?

Casey: We are over two million last year, for 2012. In 2013, we’re

projected to be 2.4, 2.5.

Trent: That’s a pretty nice growth rate.

Casey: Actually, this year will probably be the slowest one on

purpose. We grew about 832% over the last three years. We went

from about $212,000 in revenue to over two million in three

years. We need to catch our breath, hire the right people, get

the right people, get the systems in place, that kind of thing,

because we just grew [inaudible 10:18] and we’re trying to

organize now.

Trent: I’m so glad you mentioned that, because that’s the story I

really wanted to dig into. Let’s go back to the red truck,

let’s go back to pre-Infusionsoft. Tell us a little about what

your life and your business was like, and how you got into this,

because you had a real struggle. I want people to understand

that anybody can go from a real struggle to where you’re at now.

Casey: Here’s the deal – I was on staff at a church. At 27 years old,

I fired myself from being the CFO of a church, and I hired

myself as the CEO of a startup company, that I was going to go

out and help churches. I had no plan, no strategy, I’d never

started a business before. Here’s what I had – A wife that

wanted to stay home with a one year old baby, that is the

hardest work you can do, but unfortunately, she doesn’t get a

paycheck for staying home. That was that, and then we have

$36,000 saved up in the bank. I said, “We’re going to go after

this, I’ve got $36,000, and I think churches need to have money

for ministry. They need to learn how to raise money better.

I’m going to go out and do it.”

We started, and we did the good old fashioned Casey driving around,

in my 1998 Red Ranger Ford pickup truck that I got as a junior

in high school, and literally going into churches and walking up

to secretaries or assistants, and say, “Hey, I want to talk to

your pastor about our services.” Just doing the old fashioned

cold calling.

Also, cold calling anybody. In fact, I would drive by churches and

see the phone number on the side, and call it. It was cold

calling, driving around doing that. I did that for about two

years, and the strategy was so amazing that second year in,

here’s what the results were – I missed dad’s night at my

daughter’s school. People listening to this may or may not have

kids, or are maybe single or whatever, but the point is this.

I started a business, not only to help people but to create autonomy

where I could be at dad’s nights, and I was missing them. I was

missing family dinners, I was traveling around the southeast to

try to get deals. We ended up being $80,000 in debt in the

business. I had a business partnership I got into. I ended up

the worst, the bottom of the barrel when it comes business is, I

had to lay off three people at one time – Not because of

anything that they did, but I just thought business was all

about sales and growth, and I wasn’t managing the back end of

the business, and it just got away from me honestly. I had to

tell the ladies – I set them down and said, “Hey, in two weeks

we’re not going to have enough money to pay you, so I’m going to

have to let you go.”

Being at the rock bottom, at that point, I literally went around the

world. I went to the Philippines. Only a dumb entrepreneur

would do this, and I said I was going to go to the Philippines

to outsource, we did some outsourcing for churches, and decided

to outsource the outsourcing to try to save money. While I was

there, literally, I can’t get all the story, but a guy climbed

through my window, it was a totally random act of violence, he

came in literally with a knife, bloody, trying to kill me,

randomly. I ended up running down 13 flights of stairs with an

armed guard in the middle of the Philippines with a machine gun,

looking up at this guy hanging off the side of a building on the

13th floor getting in there to kill me. I know this is the

craziest story you’ve ever heard.

Trent: It is a little unusual.

Casey: Here’s the point – I got so low that I was traveling around the

world trying to save a business $80,000 in debt, with a bad

business partnership, and I was rock bottom. I said, “You know

what, something’s got to change.”

In that moment, at being at the bottom, and literally being around

the world and flying back is when I started the process of

realizing the problem’s not the market, the problem’s not the

economy, the problem is not anything – The problem is me. The

way were doing it wasn’t working, and we needed some changes.

That’s what happened in the first two years of our business.

That was probably too many details, but that’s the real story of

where this thing came from.

Trent: I wish we could have got those last two sentences out to the

entire planet, because you said something there that was so

incredibly profound, that entrepreneurs say, but that few others

do – The problem wasn’t the economy or the world, or this or

that or the other thing, the problem was you. That is something

I find is unanimous in entrepreneurs, we are never the victim.

Our success and failures are always our own. As soon as you can

adopt that mindset, in my opinion, you set yourself free,

because then you’re in control and you can choose to change the

outcome, which you did, and we’re going to tell that story.

I do want to offer up one other idea. You mentioned at the beginning

of this, that you were doing it the good old fashioned way, and

then you went on to tell how you were prospecting. It may have

been old fashioned my friend, but I don’t think it was good.

Casey: That’s funny. That’s true, it was terrible.

Trent: There was nothing good about making about making cold calls,

missing your daughter’s event, and being around the world, there

was nothing good about that.

Casey: [inaudible 16:03] everybody I met said this was how to do it –

You go to leads groups, and you pass business cards out, and

this how you do it, it was the old fashioned way to try to do

this deal, and we live in a different time. I just had to learn

the hard way. That’s what the story was.

Trent: You and me both. I have often said to people in conversations,

and maybe even on my show here, that I never get it right the

first time. I always duff it the first time, and then I get it

figured out the second time around.

Let’s get into your discovery of Infusionsoft, when was that?

Casey: That was at that point, right after that trip around the world,

about three years ago, middle of 2010 – I was searching online

and I saw a donate redirect on a website I was on, and it said

Infusionsoft, and I was curious what it was, so I Googled it and

went to their website. I was low with no money, no team, I was

worn out and they’re making these promises on their website like

– Infusionsoft is like having 25 people sell for you while you

sleep. It’s automated, and all this stuff.

I thought, yeah, whatever, but it was worth me putting in my e-mail

address for the demo. I got an e-mail back late at night, and I

thought man, these people are on top of it, they work all hours

of the night. I’d never heard of an auto responder before. They

sent me e-mails, and finally got me on the phone and sold me on

Infusionsoft, and I put money where my mouth was and did things

differently. That’s how we found it.

A big transition happened though – When I used what was called the

Infusionsoft Success Coach, there was Brandon Steinwig, he got

on the phone with me, and said, “Thanks for getting in on the

call today. When are you going to send your first broadcast?”

I said, “What’s a broadcast?”

He said, “Well, that’s why you bought Infusionsoft, right?”

I said, “Well, I bought it because of all these promises.”

He said, “Let me tell you what Infusionsoft actually does. Do you

have an e-mail address?”

I said, “We have 832 e-mail address.”

“Do you have anything you can sell online?”

“I’ve got $80,000 and a red truck if someone wants it.”

He helped me understand that you can sell something online, and that

people would buy stuff that we had done, it was just sitting

around my office. I was like, “I’ve got this old seminar I did,

we just recorded it because there was a machine there, so I

recorded the three hour seminar I did for church leaders.”

He said, “All right, let’s put this on a website, let’s send an e-

mail out to them. I’ll help you write the e-mail and get things

started.”

Within a couple of days, we put it up there and I sent the e-mail out

to the 832 people I’ve never e-mailed before. I said, “Hey, I

just want you to know, I’ve been driving around doing all this

high-end consulting, here’s a $99 product you can buy right

now.”

Within the first couple of days, we sold a few thousand dollars

worth. I was like, “You have got to be kidding me. I have been

doing all this stuff, driving around, missing dad’s nights,

trying to make money, and I just sent out one e-mail and made a

few thousand dollars?”

That was the point when everything started to change, it was an aha

moment for me.

Trent: In three years you go from guy in the truck, no money, to guy

with a $2 million plus business which has a very healthy profit

margin. I hope people who are listening to this get inspired

and fired up, and think man, if this guy can go from broke,

selling to churches that have no money to this wonderfully

successful business, maybe there’s something about this whole

marketing automation stuff that I could use in my own business.

The answer of course is “Yes there is.”

Let’s try to dive into more details, and let’s talk. It all starts

with lead generation, can you tell us about the process that

you’re using for attracting and capturing leads for your

business?

Casey: Yep. Our attraction strategy is very simple. After going

through hell and back, we said, “We can’t do everything, but we

can do something.”

When we learned about attracting traffic to our website, we said,

“Here’s what we’re going to do – Number one, we’re going to have

blog.” Everybody on this call can have a blog, and everybody

can write three times a week. If you say you don’t have enough

time to write a blog three times a week, that isn’t true, unless

you’re incapacitated and almost dying in a hospital.

Every single person can do that and add value to people who could be

their potential customers. That’s the outpost through which all

of our stuff happens. We put stuff on the blog.

Our strategy to attracting traffic is that we know where pastors are,

unlike business people, because a bunch of business people

aren’t on Twitter. Most pastors, when you speak at a

conference, say how many guys are on Twitter, 80%–I don’t know

the exact number–but it would be 8 out of 10 people would raise

their hand. That’s where pastors are, so what we said is we’re

going to dominate one thing. I know there’s Google+, I know

there’s pay per click, I know there’s SEO, I know there’s

Facebook, I know there’s all these other things, but we’re going

to dominate one thing and what we know how to dominate is

Twitter.

I’m on Twitter, our teen is on Twitter, we know Twitter, we know

pastors on Twitter, so that’s what we decided to do. We put all

our eggs in the Twitter basket, and so here’s what we’ve done –

We went out and found celebrity pastors that we can either buy

their time, you can rent anybody’s time, and we get them on an

online event, and we have them tweet out the links to our

landing pages. Part of them being a part of it is that they’ll

promote it, and that drives a tremendous amount of traffic to

our website.

In the last three years, with the Twitter strategy of getting famous

people to tweet to us, and for us using Twitter to generate blog

content, we’ve grown our list from 832 contacts to about 47,000

contacts in a three-year time period. That’s what we did.

That’s it, and that’s all we did. We know there’s other things

we should do, and we’re going to do those in the future, but to

start out and be simple and dominate, that’s where we started.

Trent: Man, that is impressive. 832 to 47,000, wow. I think anybody

could do this in a business, they could find out who the

celebrities are in their space or niche, contact those folks,

because they’re all looking – Did you have to pay them, or did

they come on because they wanted the exposure?

Casey: Most wanted to just help people. Most wanted that, but we paid

them anyway. What I found is that you had to pay some, it’s

just the way it is. The point was, people hear that and go,

“Oh, I don’t have anybody. I’m in the salon business, there

aren’t any salon celebrities.” Yes, there are. There are

absolutely places you can go where there are salon people that

other salon people learning from and listening to.

People say, “I’m in a retail location, what is there to do in a

retail location?”

Well, that’s why smart companies have Justin Bieber as a celebrity

that drives people to their retail locations, because they’re

renting a celebrity at the top end of their of funnel. It

associates them with that person, and that is a lead driver, a

lead attraction, a lead magnet that they can pull people in.

Every single niche has people that people listen to. If you can

align yourself and go as hard as you can to reach those people,

don’t quit because the first one tell you no, you can get

aligned with those people and they’ll help you significantly.

Trent: That’s a very good idea. I want to give a quick shout out to a

resource on this topic of defining your nice, if you got to

brightideas.co and on the navigation bar, you’ll see the life

cycle marketing guide, scroll down through the links, and that

links to a whole bunch of articles, but in the attract interest

category or section, you’ll find an article on how and why to

define your target market. There’s a whole bunch of details

there for you.

Let’s move on. Your strategy worked exceedingly well, your list grew

like mad. Here’s the thing – Just because they’re on your list

doesn’t mean they’re whipping their credit card out and willing

to buy your stuff, right?

Casey: Totally different.

Trent: Correct. So, what happens between getting them on the list,

and getting them buying stuff. There’s something that happens

between those two things, what is that?

Casey: What we found is that–I hate to say this, I probably shouldn’t

say this but I’ll say it anyway. It’s a great way to [inaudible

24:55]. Most people try to treat this like sex on a first date.

They get somebody on their list, and then they try to close to

the deal. It’s like, come on. People do that to me all the

time. I get on a list and they’re trying to close the deal with

  1. If that’s how you do real life, I’m sorry, but if you

understand that a healthy relationship is built over time and

built on trust.

Between attracting traffic and converting the sale there’s a whole

thing we call building relationships on the list so what we try

to do is build the relationship. Here’s a couple things that

have worked. I’m giving everybody practical things that you can

  1. I like everybody to know that I’ve had a red truck. The

reason why, is that the only thing you remember from my

introduction speech is that I had a red truck. It’s a red

truck.

I like people to know I have a family when they come onto our list.

When we’re e-mailing our list, and we’re sending stuff out, I’m

not only introducing them to stuff that can help them, I’m also

introducing them to my family. The reason why, is that we’ve

found people trust people and have an affinity for them if

they’ve seen their family, and they see they have kids, and what

they look like. Do they look like weirdos? Are they normal

looking? Can I relate with these people? That kind of thing.

The red truck story, like a story of struggle, here’s where

we’ve been, here’s how long we’ve been doing this, that sort of

thing.

The third thing we like to send is connecting us with famous people

in our niche so that we gain credibility. If we’re sending out

e-mails or doing videos and people see you and they associate

you with the leaders. That builds credibility. Inside of that,

we’re building a healthy, what we call like a dating

relationship via e-mail, via video, and warming people up. We

don’t send people directly into a sale unless they ask for it,

if they ask for it or click on a link to buy something, they can

go buy something. For most people, we do what’s called a warm-

up sequence. We are warming them for the point in which we feel

like we can move in to take action and create a purchase, so

that’s what we do.

Trent: Let’s dive into that a little bit. Let’s say I come to your

site, and I get one of your lead magnets, I fill out the form

and give you my name and e-mail address, hit the submit button,

the first e-mail, is it going to give me just what I asked for,

“Here’s the free report,” or whatever it was? Is there going to

be anything else in that first e-mail?

Casey: The first e-mail, we’re just giving them what they ask for, but

we’re also tell them there’s more coming.

Trent: What comes next? When do you introduce the truck, the family,

and the celebrities?

Casey: That’s a great question, and it depends on where they came

from. We have a very complex business now. I’m going to start

where it was really simple. We used to do 10 emails over 30

days as our warm-up sequence. The point of those e-mails was

those different things: likeability, trust and credibility. If

say something about the red truck, it’s, “Hey, I used to drive

around the Southeast in a red truck, and here’s what I learned

about that and learned from pastors.” Then we do something very

helpful.

Again, the whole thing’s not about the red truck, it’s just a mention

in a what we call a by the way moment. We’re mixing those in

throughout the 10 over 30 days, and that’s how, when we first

started, when we were selling just one program and it was a very

simple operation, that’s how we did it and we mixed a little bit

of personality in with a lot a bit of helpful content. It was

about 20% personality, 80% helpful content.

Trent: Okay, excellent. Yep, go ahead.

Brian: Key in that, we would put in the PS, “Oh, by the way, we know

you downloaded this report on church giving, we have a cool

coaching program called Giving Rocket, and you can click here

and you can go check out all of that kind of stuff.” Again, it

was there. If somebody wanted to go get it, they could. During

that first 30 days, we’re building the relationship and

nurturing them and getting them to know us and us to know them.

I’ll tell you a trick – One of the best e-mails we ever do,

especially when you’re small, and you’re trying to get off the

ground or try to grow in Internet business, just do an e-mail

that says, “Would you please reply and let me know?” [inaudible

29:36].

Just ask them a question and the question and the question of what we

found out is a question about either their personal life. I

would send one with a picture of my family in it, and say, hey,

tell me about their family. I’d love to get to know you and who

you have in your family. Again, I ask them to divulge some

information to me, and I divulge some to them, when it’s a two

way street and a conversation starts, those people end up being

low hanging fruit that will buy just about anything from you.

Trent: I do something almost like that now, and you’ve given me an

idea how to improve. Anyone who’s on my list will know that in

one of my first e-mails, I say what they’re struggling with the

most, and I ask them to reply because I want to get a

conversation going with these people, and it does work. Not

everyone replies of course, but the ones that do become your . .

.

Casey: No, but the people that are opening and reading and engaging

do, and those people, man, those are some of the best people.

Some of them are weirdos, but a lot of them are great people.

Trent: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. If you don’t have an e-mail

in your warm-up sequence that says reply, you might want to

consider doing that.

I’d love to dive deeper into what you’re doing with your advanced

strategy, but I’m going to keep on keeping on here, because

we’re going to run out of time, and there’s still some other

categories of life cycle marketing I want to talk about.

Before I move on, you’ve got the 30 day warm-up sequence. What

happens the end of those 30 days?

Casey: We transition them to a webinar sequence after that. A webinar

is where we sell the most, and so after 30 days we put them into

our webinar sequence. It’s built for over a two-week period to

get them on a webinar, and to get them to hear helpful content.

About 80% help, and there’s 20% sales. Sales is woven

throughout the webinar, and that’s where we get the most sales.

What we found is that when we consistently did webinars like that,

every single month per niche topic we have, that’s where the

huge growth came from, was consistently doing new content

webinars. They got everybody on the nurture list, after they go

warmed up to us, then we got them on the nurture sequence, which

is where we’d move people to listen, buy, and hopefully become a

customer.

If they don’t become a customer, they still get helpful content, but

they’ll be invited to the webinar that happens next month. If

they come to that one, we’ll come to different topics to reach

different types of people, so that’s how that works.

Trent: In you webinars, you mentioned you weave in 20% sales

opportunities. Do you make an offer at the end of the webinar

that says, “Hey, if you want more you can go this page and you

can click this buy button and get this thing.”

Casey: Our webinars are very simple in structure. Most of them around

about 45 minutes long, and the beginning of the webinar we

always do success stories. After I introduce myself and success

stories, we tell them that’s why we have Giving Rocket. You’re

going to see a button below as I talk throughout the rest of the

webinar, and you can just click that button, and by the way, you

can click it if you want to right now and see everything that’s

listed for this webinar offer, and my voice will keep playing

because it’ll open in another tab. That’s right within the

first five minutes.

We come back as we’re doing helpful content, so we’ll say that when

it comes to fundraising, here’s something they could do. And

that’s why we did it with Giving Rocket. With Giving Rocket, not

only do we tell you what to do, we’re going to do it for you.

It’s done for you, fundraising resources. If you click the

button below, you’ll see all the stuff you get da-da-da. That’s

what’s called a by the way pitch.

Then, at about the 70% mark of the way through, we turn it and we do

about a ten minute full on explanation of what Giving Rocket is,

why we have this Rocket, how it can help them, special offers

and bonuses if they do it within the next 48 hours, click the

button below, that kind of thing. Then go back to helpful

content at the end. We found that putting it about 3/4 of the

way thorough, with pitching the by the way moment as you lead up

has worked very well for us.

We have a page, and on the page it has one button, and the button is

always below they video, and they can click it, and there’s a

special offer per webinar. That’s how we sell.

Trent: Are these webinars live, or live simulation?

Casey: No. We got away from live webinars a long time ago. I am not

a fan of live webinars. If you want to do a live webinar,

that’s great for you. I don’t like doing them for many reasons.

Ours are prerecorded and pre-done in advance, and that’s how we

do all of them. [inaudible 35:00]

Trent: I would imagine, in you particular niche, these folks have

probably never even heard of a webinar simulation, and I know

that you’re not saying these things are live, but do you say

they’re recorded, or do you just not say?

Casey: We don’t say either. We say we’re going to have a webinar at

this time, and that you can sign up and show up. Here’s what we

do: On the webinar, I’ll say, “Guys, tweet us right now at the

Rocket Co., we’ve got our teams, they’re waiting right now.”

They’re interacting with The Rocket Company on the webinar, not Casey

Graham who’s doing the webinar, or Michael Lukaszewski, my

partner who’s doing the webinar. They’re interacting with the

company, not us as a right to interaction. We still get

interaction, but it’s with the company. We always have somebody

scheduled to be available during those times do all of our

social media interaction during the webinar.

Trent: Brilliant. What software tool are you using for the recorded

webinar?

Casey: I have no idea. I know that the video is on Vimeo, but I don’t

know what the technology piece is. I’m not the technology guy,

so I have no idea for that. I just record the things and send

them to our team, and they do all the technology. I’m sorry, I

hate it that I don’t know that.

Trent: That’s okay. One of the ones that is very popular, it’s by a

guy named Geoff Ronning, it’s called Stealth Seminar. It’s been

around a long time, a lot of people use it, I’ve used it in the

past. There’s another one I’m not as much of a fan of us,

because I tried it and it sucked initially, but apparently it

works quite well now, it’s called Evergreen Business Solutions,

I think what its name is.

There’s more and more of these webinar recording software platforms

that are available, so if you just Google around you’ll find all

sorts. If you type the word review after whatever name, then

you’re looking for, you’ll find people reviewing those products.

Be mindful, when you’re reading those reviews, most people are

an affiliate with that particular software platform, so read

between the lines and make sure it’s as objective as a review as

possible.

Casey: That’s good, good words.

Trent: Now we’ve got some conversions happening, we’ve captured leads

in this discussion so far, we’ve nurtured them, we have

converted them with recorded webinars – Which is brilliant by

the way, because you can put it all on autopilot. Once they buy

something, they probably might by some other stuff. In other

words, would you like fries with that?

Could you talk about what you’re doing to upsell, cross sell, and

generate repeat business?

Casey: Yes. The upsell that we’re working very hard on, which has

worked very well, is something we’re really excited about is, we

sell on CustomerHub. CustomerHub was bought by Infusionsoft.

We use it deliver all of our content.

Let me tell you why we use it deliver all of our content – It’s that,

and I didn’t know this until recently, that’s why we implemented

all of this, this is what we’re currently doing. You can one

click upsells inside of CustomerHub. People that are in there

consuming content of module one of your program, how to be a

better real estate agent or whatever, you can have a little

video on the side or inside CustomerHub, that says click this

button and you can get this da-da-da for free, because you’re

watching module one and we’re going to give you a special offer.

They go to a secondary page in CustomerHub, and it’s a one click

purchase. It says, add this to my account or I agree with this,

or whatever. It’s just one click, and it goes on their credit

card, which is on file. That has been huge, because we’ve taken

all the go get your credit card back out to customers, and we

can just create banners on the side.

Does that make sense? I know I’m beating inside the weeds here, but

one click purchase inside of CustomerHub, and if it’s not

CustomerHub, you need a solution that creates a one click

solution for repeat buyers. It’s the PayPal effect.

What I mean is that people ask me to give money all the time, but

they’re little project fundraiser things they’re going to do.

Anytime there is a PayPal button, I will click the PayPal, and I

can just enter the amount and be done with it. I don’t have to

get my credit out and all that kind of stuff. That’s how your

customers feel.

Don’t make them get their credit card out again, that works really

well. That’s number one of selling inside, it’s where your

customers are consuming content. If you’re not giving them

places to consume content, I would rethink that. I would give

them a portal or a place to consume content that also has

natural upsell opportunity in the same area. That’s just my two

cents, that’s not how we started, that’s where we are now.

That’s number one.

Number two is what we’ve done as well is the good old fashioned build

the sequence out in advance. If somebody buys core coaching

project – Let’s just keep using Giving Rocket, to help increase

church giving – We just go ahead a write a three day sale into

that sequence that happens automated whenever they get to day

78, 79, and 80, whatever those days are, and those e-mails just

go.

It’s a three day sale for everybody in that sequence, and it’s on a

product that is related to the core coaching program of Giving

Rocket. That is the fries that come with it. It can come two

months in, we have some six months in, some 12 months in, that

kind of thing. That works really well. That’s just scheduling

e-mails in advance for people who have currently bought

something.

The third thing we do is we upsell [them the] store. At the point of

purchase, if you’re buying this, we’ll give you 50% off this

systems bundle or whatever, because you’re buying this product.

Hit add this now, and they can just click inside the

Infusionsoft checkout and add it, and we have a lot of people

who do that. It surprises me. A lot of people, and I don’t

know the percentage, click on that and take that offer. Those

are three ways we upsell.

Trent: All right. So I want to dive in those a little bit. Let’s start

at the back, and then we’ll go backwards. The way you just

described on the Infusionsoft order form, you can very easily

put an upsell on there, is that what you’re talking about?

Casey: Not the order form, but in the store. You can’t upsell on the

order form unless there’s something we don’t know about.

Trent: You can.

Casey: You can?

Trent: You can. I do.

Casey: I need a blog post or something, I would love to do that.

Trent: I’ll just send you an example on one of my order forms, and

you’ll see. I put a little video in. My videos are hosted with

Wistia, which is a sponsor of Infusionsoft, a shout out to them,

thank you for that. It says, “Hey, here’s another thing that’s

complementary with what you just bought, if you want to add it

to your order, click the button right below.” They click the

button, it adjusts the total, and they check out.

Casey: That’s great. We want to learn from that. Ours is done in the

store, if they buy a store product, the e-commerce thing

Infusionsoft provides.

Trent: I haven’t messed with the store yet, I’ll make sure I do that.

Maybe your way is better than mine, but I’ll make sure to share

a link with you.

Casey: That’s awesome.

Trent: I’ll also put it in the show notes, this episode, so if you’re

listening to this and you want to see what the heck I’m talking

about, there will be a link in the show notes. I’ll give it to

you at the end of the show, in the post production there will be

a link to that.

One other question I wanted to ask on point number two was – You said

you built the sequence out in advance. Are you, for Giving

Rocket, dripping the content over time?

Casey: Yes.

Trent: Can you talk about little bit?

Casey: It’s 12 module program. They get one module per month. They

can unlock all the modules by paying an upfront fee with a

discount, but we still drip the content out over time. The

reason we do that is that… This is where we’re different from

a lot of Internet marketers that just want the payment and all

that stuff. We found that there is a significant amount of

customers, that if they get all the content at once, they never

do anything with it.

Trent: Yeah, it’s too much.

Casey: What we’re trying to do is to continue to market them to watch

a video, not all the videos. Even if they buy up front, we

still drip out, “Hey, did you know in module two, you can watch

all this.”

We give them benefits to pull out and that kind of thing. They’re

busy, just like us – How many times have we bought a book or a

seminar, or something. With great intentions, you listen to the

first thing and then you don’t ever do anything else with it.

It’s because they didn’t continue to sell to you after the

purchase. We keep continually selling. Go to the content now.

There’s another reason we do this as well. Guess when they go

to the CustomerHub, and they watch a video inside CustomerHub,

guess what they’re seeing on the side?

Trent: An upsell.

Casey: Getting them to consume the content again and again we found

works well for us in all the programs we sell.

Trent: Do you have an e-mail sequence that is reminding them to go

back, saying that there’s more and more content?

Casey: Yes. It drips out. There’s two e-mails a month. One says,

there’s module one, it’s available. Here’s what’s you’re going

to learn, blah, blah, blah. In the second one, we do some kind

of piece that’s helpful. For example, something like a written

version of something helpful. We also do two other e-mails a

month to our customers that we can put in our sequence that are

sales e-mails that are upsells, “Hey, you’re in Giving Rocket

month 2, but did you know that we have something called

Volunteer Rocket, and if you click this link you can just add it

on with one click, and it’s only another $49 per month, and it’s

50% for the next… whatever.” I’m making that up, 90 hours,

whatever the deal is.

You can build that stuff in, build the upselling into your e-mail

sequencing of delivering your content. Most Internet marketers,

actually none I’ve bought stuff from do that.

Trent: Brilliant. Giving Rocket is a monthly pay for 12 months,

correct?

Casey: Yup. $99 a month for 12 months.

Trent: If they want to unlock it, get it all now, what is the discount

they?

Casey: $997. They save about $200, basically two months for free.

Trent: Very good stuff man. You’re giving me lots of what I call

golden nuggets, so love getting those.

How are we doing for time? We’re at 44 minutes. I’ve a got a few

more questions in what I call the lightning round, and I want to

ask you how you’ve changed your life from the red truck to

today. Before I get to that, is there anything I haven’t asked

you, Casey, that you think has been a huge aha for you that you

want to share?

Casey: Here’s the number one I think would say creates the

competitive advantage. If somebody comes to your McDonald’s and

plops down a Burger King, what’s the difference? If somebody

comes and does your exact business, what’s the difference?

Here’s the number one difference is that we spend an inordinate

amount of time and money building relational capital with our

customers. We don’t Infusionsoft the whole customer life cycle

marketing, to me, it’s 50% of it. The other 50% is that it’s a

care software, it’s building – We are caring for our customers

in unique ways using Infusionsoft. We are reaching out to them

and deeply caring about what’s going into their lives, who they

are, who their family is, that stuff isn’t tactics, it’s core to

us.

For anybody in the info business, or anybody that’s trying to sell

something online, or whatever you’re doing, whoever is listening

to this, I would say that your differentiator is not your

marketing, it’s not your product, but it’s the relational

capital you have with your customers. I would build in as much

capital as possible to love, care for, take care of them and

deliver a tremendous – you can sell an average product with

great customer care, and people will love you. A good enough

product.

Everybody tries to have the best product, but they suck at taking

care of people. Take care of people, period. We have great

customer care, great response times, great service, all that

stuff, and that’s where we put our eggs for long term. It’s not

in being a better marketer. We love being the better marketer,

but what we believe is the best is taking care of people and

treating them right.

I know everybody will agree with that, but here’s my question: If I

looked at your business budget, how much are you spending in

customer care? How much are you spending in proactive customer

care? How much are you sending direct mail to them that’s not

asking for a sell, but thanking them? How much time and money

do you spend on referral partners, thanking them for referring,

not just asking for more referrals, and really building that

side of it out? That’s where the gold is.

You see I get real passionate when I talk about that, because most

Internet market people you learn from are just about getting

paid, and getting some money out of people, and selling. Or I

live on the beach, or I’m a guy that’s just on the mountain

somewhere and I just live in my mansion and I have all these

customers that pay me millions of dollars. Well, that’s great,

but we care more about our customers than anything else so

that’s what we spend time doing. Sorry for the long answer, but

that’s my heart.

Trent: That’s okay. Can you give us an example of exactly what you’re

just explained?

Casey: Every customer that buys from us, we send a personal,

handwritten thank you note every time they buy something. When

was the last time you or anybody listening to this has bought

something off an Internet marketing website and gotten a

handwritten thank you note from somebody on the team, that’s

personalized to you and what you bought? It’s rare.

Trent: Let’s go with… never.

Casey: That’s one that everybody listening can do. What people do is

they send that crap on Twitter. They’ll go “I got a thank you

note for The Rocket Company, I just bought a $79 product, and

they sent this.” Here’s the other thing – we ship a box.

In the box, we’re The Rocket Company, so we send a bunch of finger

rockets. They’re things you shoot across the room, and they’re

awesome. We send a coffee mug and a Rocket Company t-shirt

that’s actually a cool, nice looking t-shirt that’s not a piece

of crap. We send that out and tweet that stuff, they put it on

their Facebook pages, and they say, “The Rocket Company is over

the top when it comes to customer service, I just bought this

$99 product, and they sent all this stuff to me.” That’s

practical stuff we do.

The other thing I’d say we do is, we hired Call Ruby. Have you ever

heard of Call Ruby?

Trent: No.

Casey: It’s an outsourcing company that we use that answers our

telephones for us all the time. Nobody knows it’s Call Ruby,

it’s just an answering service. When anybody calls our phone

number, we always have somebody who picks up and answers the

phone, they get routed – They may go to voicemail ultimately, or

they may go to whatever, but when they call, somebody answers.

That’s a $250 a month investment we make, and it is a huge

investment because nobody ever says that they can’t get in

touch with The Rocket Company – They won’t e-mail me back, or

answer the phones, that sort of thing. Those are practical

things we do.

Trent: These finger rockets, the coffee mug and the t-shirt, you don’t

tell them in advance they’re going to get that stuff, do you?

It’s not on the sales page, you didn’t like say hey, if you buy

this, you’re going to get a t-shirt? No.

Casey: No. It’s surprise and delight.

Trent: How has all this good stuff changed your life from the days

back of the red truck?

Casey: We went from $80,000 in debt and then I had about $200,000 in

personal debt from a mortgage. About $300,000 in total, to now

our family is debt free and business is debt free. From a

personal standpoint, we’re all out of debt. That’s huge for us,

and the reason is not so people can go, oh great, you’re out of

debt, because nobody cares if I’m out of debt.

What is cool is now that we can make better decisions, because I’m

not making business decisions on I wish I could get out of debt.

It’s allowed us to then go we can invest more money here, we

can put more money there because we’re really caring about the

business not just about trying to make a rich owner. That’s

huge.

The second thing is from a time off perspective. Obviously, driving

around in a red truck doesn’t promote much time off. You know

what, if I’m your listener – People hate when people talk about

how good their life is, but honestly, selling online and selling

recurring income online – I took four weeks off last week and

went to Belize and went on a Disney cruise, and went to the

mountains with my family for some rest and relaxation. I wasn’t

worried one bit about what was happening because I know that we

have automated processes that work. We have a great team of

people of that are helping people step off. From a time off

perspective, it’s been huge.

The other thing is that we’ve been able to help so many more people

by Casey waking up and realizing that I was the problem, and

that I couldn’t do it one at a time, this is not working, and

being willing to say that I’m going to struggle as a business

owner and I’m the problem. There’s two problems and I’m the

problem and I’m the issue. From that point of saying that it

wasn’t anyone else’s fault but mine, and saying that we’re going

to create this has allowed us to reach so many more people.

Now we have 5000 people we’re serving. I couldn’t serve five

effectively when I was driving around doing it the old way.

We’re able to accomplish our mission, and that’s where the

personal satisfaction comes. It’s not that we created an upsell

opportunity, that doesn’t make me satisfied. What makes me

satisfied is when we get the success stories back in from some

guy in Australia who says “I’ve bought you product, and here’s

what’s happening in my church,” and we get a success story

unsolicited that comes back.

We get, I think the last count was 109 success stories in the last

100 days of people, unsolicited who just come in and say, “This

is working, thank you for what you do.” That’s really the pay

off and the reward, so that’s how my life has changed.

Trent: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. All right, lightning round – Three

questions and then we’re done. What are you most excited about

Casey for what remains of 2013?

Casey: I’m most excited about getting out of all the operational roles

from Rocket Company, and I’m focusing on creating the exact same

thing we did in the church space, I’m doing in the business

space. We’re creating a place for people listening to this, for

you, for anybody who wants to create content for the life cycle

marketing thing, for any piece of it, for attracting traffic,

for building relationship, to converting the sales in webinars,

and we’re creating a high end opportunity for them to come in,

and for me and my team to be content creators and do it for them

in two days by the time they walk out of the room.

We’re excited about doing that content creation machine which is

awesome. We found that that’s a huge thing. I can create a

webinar in fours hours and have people on it in 24, some people

think that’s hard to do. It’s so easy, so we’re just going to do

it for people who need to create content that will be part of

life cycle marketing. I’m super excited about that. That’s

probably the thing I’m most excited about right now.

Trent: What’s your favorite business book?

Casey: My favorite business book is “The Advantage” by Patrick

Lencioni.

Trent: “The Advantage”, okay. Lastly, for anyone who wants to get in

touch with you Casey, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Casey: It’s Casey C-A-S-E-Y@ultimatemarketers.com.

Trent: Okay. All right, man. Thank you so much for being on the show.

It’s been a fantastic interview. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I

learned some things and I hope the audience has as well. In

just a few moments, when Casey and I sign off, I will announce

on how you can get the show notes. If you have questions for me

or Casey, just go to the bottom of the post where this will all

be help, and just leave your comments there and we’ll be sure to

leave you an answer.

Thanks very much, Casey.

Casey: Thank you.

Trent: To get the show notes for today’s episode, go to

brightideas.co/62. When you’re there, you’ll see all the links

we’ve talking about today, plus some valuable information you

can use to ignite more growth in your business.

If you’re listening to this on your mobile phone while you’re driving

or doing whatever, just send text “Trent” to 585858 and I’m

going to give you access to the Massive Traffic Toolbox, which

is a compilation of all the very best traffic generation

strategies that have been shared with me by my many proven

experts that have been guests here on the show. As well, you’ll

also be able to get a list of all my favorite episodes that I’ve

published thus far on the blog.

And finally, if you really enjoyed this episode, please go over to

brightideas.co/love, where you’ll be able to find a link to

leave us a rating in the iTunes store. I’d really appreciate it

if you’d take a moment to do that, because it helps the show

build its audience, and of course the more audience members we

have, the more we can help to massively boost their business.

That’s it for this episode, I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid, and I look

forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care, and have

a wonderful day.

Announcer: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas

podcast. Check us out on the Web at brightideas.co.

About Casey Graham

caseygrahamIn 2008, Casey Graham started The Rocket Company out of a passion to reach church leaders worldwide – to train, speak, coach, consult – all to help the church. With barely any money in the bank, a stay-at-home wife and a one year old daughter, he set out on a dream which almost failed a few times. Five years later, The Rocket Company is reaching thousands of church leaders and expanding its service offerings. In 2013, they won Infusionsoft’s Ultimate Marketer of the Year award and are now helping other business leaders grow their businesses. Casey lives in Atlanta with his wife and kids.

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email-hygiene

How to Maximize Email Deliverability

Email remains one of the most effective tools in the marketers toolbox…unless of course it’s not getting delivered.

What is the worst possible thing that could happen to your email? It gets marked as spam.

How do you know if you’re sending email that is likely to be marked as spam? That might be an unanswered question on your small business’ mind, so Infusionsoft has created an infographic to help you clean up your act and apply proper techniques to your email sending practices.

Keeping your list updated and not letting contacts grow cold is very important in marketing to the right audience, as well as avoiding silent killers like spam traps and becoming black listed. Form healthy habits that can be followed each and every time you email market to your list of customers and prospects and grow your customer base.

Email Marketing Best Practices Infographic Infusionsoft 570px Email Deliverability Health & Hygiene [INFOGRAPHIC]
Email Deliverability Health & Hygiene Infographic by Infusionsoft

Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Maximize Conversions with Content Marketing

Building a successful marketing blog is no easy task because there is a LOT of competition. Building a software company that sells software for a monthly fee is even harder.

Have success with on or both of these endeavors and you are on your way to one heck of an exciting entrepreneurial adventure!

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Dan Norris, founder of Inform.ly. Informly provides actionable data to help content marketers engage their audience and create content that grows their business.

When you listen to this interview, you are going to hear Dan and I talk about the following:

  • Why he started Inform.ly and where traditional analytics apps fall short for content marketers
  • How he hired coders to build his app (5:30)
  • A sidebar plugin he’s building that will display your best converting posts (7:30)
  • How he’s attracting customers (9:00)
  • His top 4 tips for building a highly successful blog (15:00)
  • Why conversions are more important than traffic (17:30)
  • How to maximize conversions from your blog (18:10)
  • His biggest screw up and what you should do to avoid repeating this huge mistake (26:05)
  • Why surveys aren’t a good tool for validating your product (31:05)
..And so much more!

Links

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Dan Norris

current_bio_pic_DanNDan Norris is the founder of Informly and helps bloggers and content marketers create content that engages their target audience and drives leads. You can download his free ebook with his top 12 tips here.

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How to Measure Customer Engagement with Infusionsoft

When it comes to nurturing your prospects, by far the the most important thing you can to is to provide them with valuable educational content and then devote your energy to following up with those that are most engaged.

bi-ultimate-marketing-automation-guideThe challenge is to know which of your prospects are most engaged without having to actually call each and every one of them!

With traditional outbound prospecting techniques, most of our efforts are focused on following up with every prospect to ask some version of “would you like to buy now?”.

As you might guess, the effectiveness of this ‘old-school’ style of prospecting is rapidly deteriorating, because neither sales reps nor customers enjoy this type of phone call.

Worse yet, due to the manual nature of making so many calls to unqualified leads, it’s an extremely inefficient use of time!

A Much More Efficient Solution

If you are an Infusionsoft user, there is there is a much more effective way to achieve greater results with less effort (and frustration).

In the video below, I’m going to show how exactly how this can be done.

As you can see, this is an extremely efficient way to ensure that you are reaching out to your very best prospects for any topic or product that you have for sale.

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Digital Marketing Strategy: The Story of How Infusionsoft Became One of The Fastest Growing Companies in America with Scott Martineau

Would you like to put customer acquisition on auto-pilot? Just imagine how it would feel to have a steady stream of qualified leads that were all happily buying your products on a regular basis.

Now imagine that they were also telling all their friends to do the same.

Sound too good to be true? Well…you might be surprised to learn that if you embrace something called Lifecycle Marketing in your business, that one day in the not too distant future, the scenario I’ve just described will become the reality of your business.

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Scott Martineau Co-founder of Infusionsoft, ranked by Inc Magazine as one of the fastest growing software companies in America. Infusionsoft is absolutely amazing software and I can’t imagine running my business without it. If I did, I’d have to work far longer hours and my business wouldn’t be nearly as easy to run as it is now.

I recently attended ICON, Infusionsoft’s annual business conference, and while there, I had a chance to meet Scott and ask him to come share his story here on the show.

When you listen to this interview, you are going to hear Scott and I talk about the following:

  • How they first started Infusionsoft back in 2001
  • Why their first idea wasn’t working and the one thing they changed that has allowed them to create a 400+ person company today.
  • Why Goldman Sachs invested $54 million in Infusionsoft and what this means for the future of small business in general
  • The consulting business model vs the product business model and what you need to understand about the massive benefit of one versus the other
  • The importance of picking a target market and how to do it correctly (20:15)
  • An example of some early challenges and how Scott and his partners turned this challenge into a huge opportunity (26:15)
  • Why it is so important for an entrepreneur to have a strong mind and 3 thing you can do to make yours even stronger (33:15)
  • An overview of Lifecycle Marketing and why to embrace it in your business (39:45)
  • What’s next for small business owners (55:15)

Links Mentioned

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

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Transcript

Trent: Hey there, bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas

Podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast for

marketing agencies and entrepreneurs who want to discover how to

use content marketing and marketing automation to massively

boost their business. On the show with me today is Scott

Martineau, Co-founder of Infusionsoft, ranked by Inc Magazine as

one of the top ten fastest growing software companies in

America. Infusionsoft is absolutely amazing software and I

cannot imagine running my business without it. If I did, I’d

have to work far longer hours and my business wouldn’t be nearly

as easy to run as it is now.

I recently attended iCon, which is Infusionsoft’s annual business

conference and while I was there I had a chance to meet Scott

and I asked him to come, I asked him, rather, to come share his

story on the show. Coming up in this episode, you’re going to

hear Scott and I talk about how he started Infusionsoft, some of

the early challenges that they had to deal with and how they

overcame them. We’re also going to talk about why so many small

business owners aren’t realizing their potential in terms of

profitability and revenue growth and what, some of the things

they can do about.

We’re also going to have an overview of something called lifecycle

marketing and how you can put it to use in your business to help

you solve those problems. If we have time, we’re also going to

get into some success stories and I will also link to those in

the show notes.

Before we get into the interview, I’ve got a couple of special

announcements. My tool tip of the week is something called

Optimizely. If you’re not yet running split tests, you

absolutely are leaving money on the table. A couple of months

ago I interviewed a guy and he told me, he scolded me because I

wasn’t yet running split tests on my main opt-in page. I went

over to Optimizely. I got myself a free account, not a free

account, a $20 a month account and I very quickly set up a split

test. You don’t need to know how to write any HTML at all to do

this and within three days I had doubled my opt-in rate. Just to

put that in, the gravity of that into perspective, I would have

had to of doubled my traffic had I not figured out how to double

my opt-in rate. Definitely go check out Optimizely.com.

The other announcement is I’ve got a webinar coming up on lifecycle

marketing and that is going to be a totally free webinar and

we’re going to be talking about the seven stages of lifecycle

marketing and those stages are how to attract traffic, capture

leads, nurture prospects, convert those prospects to sales, then

deliver and satisfy, increase revenue with upsells and generate

referrals. If you could use more customers in your business,

this is a webinar you definitely would like, or you should want

to attend. With that said, please join me in welcome Scott to

the show. Hey Scott. Welcome to the show.

Scott: Thanks, Trent. It’s good to be here.

Trent: It’s a real privilege to have you on my friend. I’m a big fan

of Infusionsoft. I use it to run my business. Love it. Was

actually just showing a guy this morning, earlier on, and he was

using another company and he said, “I don’t really get it,” and

I screen shared with him for about 15 minutes and at the end he

was like, “Can you get them to call me.”

Scott: That’s good.

Trent: I think there’s a lot of that going around but for the folks

who are listening to this podcast, who don’t have a clue what

I’m talking about, don’t know what Infusionsoft is and don’t

know who you are, let’s kind of set the table for where this

discussion’s going to go by first of all, just please introduce

yourself and a little bit about the company that you co-founded.

Scott: Great. My name is Scott Martineau and I started a company by

the name of Infusionsoft, we started this company about 2001, so

12 years ago or so and Infusionsoft really has one purpose, we

exist to help small businesses succeed and I think we’ll talk

more about how that came about but we’re an all-in-one sales and

marketing software provider that specifically focuses on small

businesses and we’re over in Arizona. We’re down in Chandler,

Arizona. We’ve got about 400 employees at the time of this

recording and we’re just, feel like we’re just barely getting

started with what we want to accomplish in the world but that’s

the little bit about us.

Trent: Thank you for that. Audience members, if you’re listening to

this and you are anything from a solo entrepreneur with a

business that’s generating revenue all the way up to somebody

with maybe 20 or 25 employees doing a few million dollars a year

and you feel like you’re struggling with working too much and

not getting enough of the results that you want to get in terms

of revenue, growth, customer acquisition and profits, I think

that you are going to get a ton of value out of this interview

and we’re going to do our very best to deliver on that.

Scott, you had a really big win recently and I think that this is a

wonderful vote of confidence from some very smart folks on the

future of this whole lifecycle marketing idea and your company

in general and it was a $54 million investment from Goldman

Sachs, so congratulations on that.

Scott: Thank you.

Trent: What I want to talk about is the story of how you got there

because not everybody gets a $54 million investment from Goldman

Sachs so you’ve got to be doing something right. Then, so we’ll

spend a bit of time talking about that and then I really want to

talk about, for the people in the audience who are running that

small business and working really hard, what’s this lifecycle

marketing thing all about and how can I automate all this stuff

and so we’re going to do as much as an hour will allow us to do.

Scott: Great.

Trent: Let’s go right back to the very beginning because I think a lot

of people really love the stories at how super successful

companies get created and it usually starts with a why. People

have a problem, you had a problem that you were trying to solve,

if my research is correct. You want to talk a little bit about

that?

Scott: You bet. We didn’t actually have a very clear why when we

started the company. I’ll kind of give you the evolution, but at

the very core of our founder story was that my brother and I

were working for my dad in the family business that he had

started and it’s kind of a funny business. It was a company that

sent balloon twisters, these are like the clown, people that

make clown balloons, that type of stuff. Not necessarily clowns.

They would send these twisters into restaurants and they’d go

make balloon animals for all the kids while they’re waiting for

their food.

Our dad had built this company up to, in about 15 or 16 different

states in the U.S. here and he had this whole thing going but he

had some really weird things that he, not weird, but some time

consuming things that he had to do to make this business run.

One of those things was that every night he’d have to log in to

this voicemail system and he would literally download and delete

200 or 300 voicemails from these balloon twisters that were

checking into their restaurants and Eric and I, my brother were

like, “Dad, this is so old school. Come on. Let’s get with the

times.”

We ended up building for him a website, basically, that allowed

people to come in and check in. It was a web application, which

these things were just starting to become acceptable at that

time and it was awesome for us because we watched what happened

to, finally dad could not have to go make all those voicemail,

call to voicemail, listen to every one, delete every single one.

Check it off in this little database system. All the people

could just do all these things online.

That was kind of the first glimpse for us that we could finally see

how technology would enable a business owner to do something

that needed to get done without having to spend an hour of their

time or two hours of their time to do it. Around that time we

started having this idea, “Why don’t we go start a company

building technology solutions for people that could help save

them time.” We started this company and we didn’t have a vision

of anything. We just knew we wanted to do our own thing. We

didn’t want to go work for a company. We wanted to be our own

boss and all of the possibility for risk or sorry, for reward,

and that meant we had to take the risk and so we started this

company doing custom software development.

That was kind of where everything started right there in the

beginning was a custom software development shop. It was hard.

It was, that’s a difficult business to be in because here we

were starting and we’re trying to go sell custom development to

people, which usually was made up of an estimate. They’d call up

or we’d spend a bunch of time figuring out what they needed.

We’d go give them an estimate, they’d walk us down on the

estimate and we’d cave in and give it to them for less than we

should and we’d spend twice the amount of time.

It was a difficult business to be in but it really, at the very

beginning of our company, it gave us a couple of things. Number

one, our passion for using technology to solve problems was very

real and it was really kind of the thing that got us into the

business but I think most importantly, from the very beginning,

we knew what it felt like to be a small business ourselves. It

was difficult.

We had two different periods of time where we went for months on end,

one time it was between four and five months that we went with

literally no income and as you can imagine, Trent, that’s hard

to go home and talk to your spouse and say, “Come on, honey.

Just hang in there. We’re going to get this thing figure out.” I

think that that time period for us was critical because it kind

of baked into the DNA of our company and appreciation for the

challenges that small businesses go through.

Trent: So very true. Now I know I have a lot of people in my audience

who are not yet a small business owner or are very early in

their small business career so I want to take a very quick

little sidebar here. Let’s talk about business models for just a

quick second. When you started off your consulting business

model and now you’re a product business model and veteran

entrepreneurs, most of us will agree that the product one is

significantly better as a business model. Can you just very

quickly speak to why that is?

Scott: Well, I remember the very first time we got a stack of orders

when we started to sell software like a product and we actually

sold it with recurring revenue attached as well. I remember the

time when Clay and I walked out in the parking lot with a stack

of new customers who had just bought our product and we looked

at each other and said, ‘”Holy cow. This is nirvana. We got new

customers. We don’t have to go build custom software for them

and they’re just coming on. We don’t have to build from the

ground up. We’ve got what they need out of the gate and it was

just a beautiful thing.”

I think it’s a great point, Trent, that business owners need to

really consider the validity of their model. There’s product

versus custom, which is kind of what you’re talking about and

there’s some clear advantages there obviously with the amount of

time you have to spend to create the product to deliver to the

customer, as well as all the estimating. I think there’s also

just some general profitability things that people should be

aware. Does the unit economic of your, do the unit economics of

what you’re offering actually work?

In other words, if we could deliver to you a sales and marketing

system that would, and I’m not talking about software just if

you could double your sales, is that a good thing or a bad

thing? Frankly, some business owners have a business model that

isn’t worth doubling because the economics just don’t work out.

You’ll end up just working yourself silly and really not having

any profit at the end of the day to think about.

The time to have those considerations and to think about that is

really early on and sometimes it takes a little bit of risk. I

remember when we decided to move from custom development to a

product, we had to take one of our employees specifically,

[Shawn], and said, “Shawn, you own all of our custom development

and we can’t be around having a lot of lose ends here. We’re

going to go 100 percent and focus on this product business.”

That was a really risky thing for us because that was our bread and

butter. It was a pretty measly bread and butter but that was it

and luckily he owned in a great way and we were able to go focus

and convert, in our case, convert our service business, custom

development shop into a product business and I’m really glad

that we did. We wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we are today

without that.

Trent: No, you wouldn’t have and I wish somebody would have told me

that back in 2001 when I started my glass tech company because

I, like many new entrepreneurs, I just thought, “Well if I could

go out and do X hundreds of thousands or X millions of dollars a

year in sales, surely there’d be profits leftover,” because I

was very naive. It’s, in a consulting model it’s not that easy.

That’s why I asked you to go down that rabbit hole. I’m hoping

that we’ve provoked some thought in somebody who’s listening to

this who’s maybe in the early stage of their business figuring

out, “Maybe I should be thinking about this business model

thing.”

Scott: A lot of it has to do with intent too because a lot of times

I’ve noticed people are, the first phase of their

entrepreneurial venture is actually just replacing their income,

their salary. If that’s really the only goal, there are some

fairly simple ways to do it but I think if you really want to

build a business that has profit, that can operate without you

being right in the middle of everything, you’ve got to really

think hard about the business model and be clear from the get

go.

Trent: Absolutely. However, if you don’t have the cash to do that

there’s nothing wrong with starting this trading time for money

business model and figuring out how you can add some people to

your team like you did so that you can make that transition

without having to maybe bury yourself in debt or give away three

quarters of your company because it’s so hard to raise money in

the beginning when you don’t really have anything that’s worth

much. People, if they’re going to invest at all they want

everything and you get deluded and you don’t necessarily want to

do that.

I am taking us off on tangents. I’m going to bring us back on course.

Why small business? You hear all these companies and they’re

going to go out and they want to sell to the enterprise, they

want to go for the big guns. Why did you decide that small

business was where the opportunity and the gold lied?

Scott: I think part of it was just that that’s where our history was.

We had a passion for what the entrepreneur had to go through and

so we’re just connected emotionally, I think, to the plight of

the entrepreneur. Interestingly, you mentioned it but it is the

natural magnetic force in our space, at least, in the software

space, that people will, companies will come in and they say

that they serve small businesses but in reality, all they’re

doing is using the small business owners as a stepping stool to

get into bigger accounts and to grow up and serve mid-market

companies.

For us, there’s a very big difference between the S in SMB and the M

in SMB and we like to say we’re for the S in SMB because what

mid-size businesses need and what small businesses need are so

very different.

I think if I had to wrap all that together I’d say the

reason is because small businesses are the life blood of most

economies. We feel like it gives people the ability to go out

and to just own and create which is a beautiful process to be in

the middle of and frankly, it’s a lot funner, I think, to serve

small businesses. When we can go and help a small business owner

grow their business and they go from X to doubling or tripling

that business, the amount of satisfaction and joy that they have

is so much, for some reason, I shouldn’t say for some reason. I

know why, but it is way higher than taking, for example, a

manager in a mid-market company and providing them with software

that helps make their life a little bit easier.

We’re connected to the whole livelihood of the business owners and

for a lot of people that’s scary. They want to run away from

that but I think that’s where all the excitement is. We’ll talk

more later but I think more and more people are starting to

recognize how critical small businesses are to our economy and

are recognizing the tool sets that they need. Small businesses

need a very specific set of tools, not just a watered down

version of what a larger company needs. In a lot of ways, they

need a more powerful solution because they don’t have time to

think about, they’re already wearing five hats. They need

solutions that work for them not cause them to have to go

outside of what they’re already struggling with to go create

success.

Trent: I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been a small business owner myself

for 14 years now and that’s really why I started Bright Ideas

because I learned so much in my first couple of years online,

about online marketing, something I knew really nothing about

when I ran Dyrand, my old company. I thought, “Man, there’s so

many people that need to know about this stuff.” It’s been just

an absolute thrill to have the privilege of being able to have

people like you and all the other smart guests on the show

because I get wonderful emails from business owners all the

time, almost daily, saying, “Thank you.” That puts a big smile

on my face.

Scott: I think it’s funny because most business owners, actually none

are required to have any degrees, per se, to start their company

and I like to say they don’t come out, entrepreneurs don’t come

out of the womb in their business really understanding all of

the concepts. There’s a lot of stuff to figure out. How do I

have enough capital to do what I need to do? How do I hire the

right people? How do I build the sales and marketing plan? What

tools do I need to be able to accomplish this? There’s just a

lot of stuff that you have to figure out.

I love that you’re out educating the small businesses because I think

that’s a critical component. I think, as much as I’d like to

think that software’s the only solution and that solves all the

problems, I don’t think it does. I think it’s actually the

education teaching small business owners that really solves a

need that they have.

Trent: That is a wonderful segue for my next question. One of the

things that I think I did a poor job of back when I started my

old business that I got really focused on when I started Bright

Ideas was defining a target market. Really getting specific

about, “Who am I creating this stuff for?” Because if you’re

just going to try and create for everybody you won’t resonate

enough with anybody and it’s very difficult to get traction. Can

you talk, did you guys in the early days of Infusionsoft, at

some point you must have said, “We really need to define who

we’re going after, at least initially.” Can you talk a little

bit about the importance of that and how you did that?

Scott: You bet. For us this has been one of the most challenging

things to solve. There’s a lot of things going on when you’re

trying to identify your target market. One of those is you’re

fighting your natural tendency to expand what you do to meet

everybody’s needs, which I think you said it accurately, when

you do that you really can’t solve anybody’s needs well. There’s

that going on.

We had some interesting challenges because we’re providing all-in-one

sales and marketing software which, in most business owners’

minds there actually are four or five different software

products that exist out there that we’re trying to combine into

one. Our message, we’ve struggled to keep our message simple and

to keep it accurate for people.

We started and we were kind of, we positioned ourselves as small

business CRM software. A lot of the business owners didn’t even

really know what CRM software was even though that was kind of a

big movement. We’ve toyed around with what are we? Are we

marketing automation software, so there’s, when it comes to

positioning, half of it is trying to be able to describe

yourself to your market and the other half is being clear on who

it is that you’re actually going after.

I think, I just can’t emphasize or add my support to what you’re

saying enough, that as the business owner, you’ve got to be

really clear and the approach that works the best is to get

extremely specific first and I have found that when people get

extremely specifically then their ability to grow their target

market increases over time. When you nail it for one, you’ll

create natural segues for other specific target customers but

when you try to just go for everybody, you sound like everybody

else. You’re a watered down nothing and you’ve got to stay

focused. You’ve got to be very clear.

A good exercise, Trent, that I found is that you need to be really

clear as a business owner about who are these people you’re

targeting and what questions do those people have? What are the

things that keep them up at night?

You’ve taught a lot about lifecycle marketing and it’s a helpful

exercise to ask yourself what questions are going through the

mind of my prospect through each phase of my customer lifecycle?

For example, in my case, I might ask myself the question, “Let’s

think about what are small business owners thinking about as it

relates to software before they ever enter our customer

lifecycle? What are the questions that they have?” That might be

things like, “How can I build a sales and marketing plan that’s

going to work? How do I know when I spend marketing dollars,

that it’s going to be on a marketing program that’s going to

actually deliver customers to me?”

Then once they engage with us in our sales process, there’s a whole

new set of questions that come about. “Can I actually use

software? Maybe I’m not very technical and so,” can you hear me

right now, Trent?

Trent: Yes. I can hear you just fine.

Scott: My machine just said there might be a connection problem.

Anyway, if you can become an expert at the questions that your

target market is asking, you will be able to create really

powerful marketing that just is there when they reach for

questions, you can be there to answer them and to establish

yourself in a position where you’re going to win the business.

Trent: For the folks who maybe are newer to Bright Ideas, I want to

mention another interview that I did that we really go into

depth on this topic and that is an interview with a fellow by

the name of Marcus Sheridan. If you go to BrightIdeas.co/27,

it’ll take you directly to that interview. Marcus has a company

called River Pools and Spas and got really good at figuring out

what questions people were asking and then blogging about the

answers to those. Go check out that interview to learn more on

that.

The other thing I wanted to mention, there’s also an article, if you

go to BrightIdeas.co and on the navigation bar, if you go to the

Lifecycle Marketing Guide, there is, it’s divided into seven

sections, if memory serves me correctly. There is an article in

one of those sections that really goes deep into, again, how to

pick your target, How and Why to Pick Your Audience, is actually

the title of the article. It just makes such a huge difference.

My experience with Bright Ideas, I decided that I wanted to get

really focused on marketing agencies and it took me a little

while to do that but if I didn’t do it, I definitely would not

be experiencing the speed of the traction that I’m experiencing

as a result of that. If you haven’t done that yet in your

business, cannot emphasize enough how important that is for you

to do.

Let me go back to my list of questions here and find out where we

want to go to next. A lot of times early on in a business, not a

lot of times, all the time early on in a business we, the

entrepreneur, experience setbacks. Setbacks can be horrible at

the time but in hindsight they can also turn out to be some of

your most wonderful opportunities for discovery. I’m sure,

Scott, that you have many examples of setbacks. I’m interested,

would you bring one up, speak about it and then I want to ask a

couple of follow up questions.

Scott: You bet. Let me just enter a little point here too. Clayton and

I, Clayt, by the way is one of the other co-founders of the

company. We brought him on shortly after Eric and I started this

software company and he and I wrote a book called “Conquer the

Chaos” and this is, we hit really heavily on the mindset that

entrepreneurs need to have when they start their company.

We talk about emotional capital, which is kind of the emotional bank

account that you have and the need for entrepreneurs to be

always adding to that bank account and be very aware of what’s

going on inside your head and we also talk about the concept of

disciplined optimism which is that you are looking at, you’re

willing to look at the facts that surround your current reality

as ugly as they might be but you’re combing that with a

determination that you’re going to succeed and a lot of people

look at that and they feel like you’re just naive to think that

you can be staring that nasty situation in the face but moving

forward. We found that that is one of the keys to

entrepreneurship.

I’ll go back maybe to one of the early dark days. I’ll start there. I

remember when Clayt, my business partner, his wife, who happens

to be my sister, so we recruited my brother-in-law Clayt to come

be in the company and I guess we weren’t fooling [Cherise] and

one day she said to Clayt, “Clayt, this is it, man. Go out today

and find a real job. We’re done with this whole small business

thing.” Clayt came into work with his tail between his legs and

he said, “I’m so screwed because I’m not going to go out looking

for something but I know that Cherise is expecting that of me.”

The reason is because we had just, this was in one of these really

difficult times where we just weren’t bringing in the income and

it was a really difficult thing. Luckily, when Clayt walked in

that afternoon ready to have a little talking to, Cherise met

him at the door and said, “Clayt, I’ve really spent some time

thinking and praying about this and I feel like everything is

going to be okay.” He said, “Good because I haven’t found a job

and I didn’t even go looking.” I’m really glad that he didn’t

but in that case it was flat out a sales and marketing

challenge. We just weren’t bringing in enough business to

accomplish what we needed to.

One of the things that we did in our company was actually, we had the

really great privilege of, kind of toward the end of our custom

software days we found a marketing coach who became a custom

software client. His name is [Reid Hoisington] and Reid taught

mortgage professionals how to be better marketers. Through the

process of serving him as a custom client, he was actually the

key to helping us transition to a product based business instead

of custom software. Part of it was because he was sick of paying

us custom software fees but he took us to these, he said, “Come

to my marketing seminar and I’ll let you get up on stage, you

can sell your software to all of my customers who need it

because I’m trying to teach them these marketing principles, how

to capture leads and how to follow up and nobody’s doing

anything because they don’t have the right tools.”

We said, “Great. We’ll come.” We went to there and we sold the

software. Well as we started going to these marketing seminars,

Reid ended up suggesting that we go to some other folks

marketing seminars, some other marketing coaches. We would go to

these places. We’d help the marketing coach get their business

in line and then we’d go sell at their events. While were doing

that we’re sitting out in the audience taking notes. We’re just

kind of like dumb software developers and we’re like, “Man, that

is a great idea.” We’re hearing all these speakers at these

marketing seminars stand up and talk about a lot of the stuff we

teach in lifecycle marketing. Here’s how you capture leads. Here

are some examples of how you could follow up with those people.

Here’s how you create a compelling offer. Here’s how you could

close the deal.

We had this bright idea one day that maybe we could actually use some

of these marketing principles on our own business. It was just

like the big duh moment of the century. We started to actually

implement this stuff. I’m giving you the solution to the really

difficult challenge that we had and so what we did is we created

our very first educational lead magnet and it was called Six

Secrets to Your Mortgage Marketing Success, or something like

that. Then there was just this thing we would offer that would

teach people. We taught them about the fundamentals of marketing

in a mortgage business.

It was amazing. I remember the day when Clayt walked into the room

where Eric and I were in there doing programming or taking

customer calls or something and he’s like, Clayt was our sales

person at the time, he’s like, “Guys, we are onto something.

This stuff actually works.” What had happened was he got a

string of calls back from people who we had put on to this

automatic drip nurture sequence. We send out this educational

information. We started following up. “Just following up. Did

you get the free report that we sent you? What did you think? Do

you have any questions I can answer?” Then a few follow-ups.

Clayt would get people calling back and saying, “Thank you so much

for following up. I think I’m ready to go.” These are people he

hadn’t talked to before. These were people that had requested

the information, received the education, and by the way, this

education was answering the questions that were going on in the

heads of these mortgage professionals and he was just on fire.

We call that our Infusionsoft moment and a lot of our customers,

they go through that exact same process where they start sending

out these follow-up things, based on some formulas that we

provide them and stuff happens.

I would say that the key when you have setbacks is number one, that

you’ve got to be emotionally strong and you’ve got to be really

clear and aware about what’s going on inside your head. If you

can’t control your thoughts as an entrepreneur, you are screwed.

If you’re the type of person who comes in and is tossed about by

every little thing that happens and you can’t go to that place

where you ground yourself, you’re going to have a really

difficult time. There is always going to be pressure on you as

the business owner that you have to learn how to accept. You

can’t go and blow up your employees because you’re having a bad

day. You can’t get depressed and get down. The job of the leader

of a small business is to help create the vision and maintain

that vision and that takes stability of mind.

Then, I think you’ve got to just learn. Learn the principles and the

practices that are going to create success. In our case we had a

sales and marketing problem and we learned and then implemented

something and sometimes that implementation can be challenging

because you have so many hats to wear but I would say strong

emotional stability combined with learning and executing the

stuff that you’re learning, that’s one example. Maybe I blabbed

on too much with that example but that’s what came to mind.

Trent: Give us two ways that you think that, two tactics, strategies

for emotional strength. Call it your mind workout. You go to the

gym, you pick up the dumb bells and you work out your muscles.

Your mind is another muscle. You’ve got to keep it strong.

[inaudible 33:04]

Scott: Fantastic. One thing I’ve noticed is that reading, reading is a

phenomenal tool to create raw material in your mind that just

keeps your mind active and alert. I didn’t really read a lot

before I met Clayt and Clayt and Eric and I, we started to read

books at the same time and we would talk about them. I just

think, that gives you the ability both to have the education

coming to you as well as providing you with new insights and

you’re able to hear successes of other people. I would encourage

that. That’s a really important part of mental make up and

develop some opinions. You don’t have to love everything you

read but be aware of what’s out there.

The second thing is I actually find that master mind groups is a

really powerful concept that helped us. When we started to find

like minded people that we could be accountable to, it really

helped. Most business owners, it makes sense. They’re out on

their own, so to speak. Sometimes family members don’t

understand them. The people around them don’t. Their employees

may not understand them and it takes connecting with another

entrepreneur that sometimes can just shake you, grab your

shoulders and look you in the eye and say, “Dude, wake up.

You’re thinking about this the wrong way. You’re acting like a

victim.”

I think those two things are just really critical and I’ll give you a

little third one, just because I think it’s important. That is

as hard as it is, you have to spend time in what I would call

meditating and planning, which is you just, you stop the madness

and you get away and it might start out as a couple of hours but

I think it should grow into maybe a day a quarter where you just

let things, just let the busyness go on. Pretend like you’re

sick. For some reason we’re always okay doing this when we’re

deathly sick but we don’t ever create the time proactively.

I’m suggesting that we intentionally create a space were we can just

stop and think and we’ve developed a strategic planning

methodology here that allows us to, we have seven exercises

where we go through, “What are the accomplishments we’ve made in

the recent period? What are our lessons learned? What are our

strengths? What are we really good at? Or our weaknesses, what

are the opportunities, what are the threats?” We go through

exercises like this just to evaluate what’s going on but do it

from a place where I’m not hurried and I’m not rushed and I can

sit down and create a plan for moving forward that I feel

confidence in.

A lot of times that those emotional challenges come because you just

feel the chaos looming or just crushing in on us and you just

need to just ease that up and go spend some time thinking and

you’ll be amazed at how much insight will come to you when you

think about that in an intentional way.

Trent: That was great. You guys are starting to share what you’re

doing with that strategic planning, are you not? I think you

have a name for that and maybe if you do, maybe you could give a

URL if people want more info.

Scott: That’s great. We have, actually it was something that Clayt and

I talked about wanting to do for a long time. We had kind of the

best practices we had used to build our company and we realize

that most business owners want to have those same, they want to

understand how we do our strategy planning and how we do, how we

build our culture and so we created what we call the Elite Forum

and it’s that exact, it’s with that exact purpose is to help

business owners understand what they need to do. Let’s see, I

should know where that is right off the top of my head. I think

if . . .

Trent: You can get it to me after.

Scott: I think it’s actually just Infusionsoft.com/eliteforum, but let

me, yes. That’s exactly what it is. Infusionsoft.com/eliteforum.

Trent: For those of you who are listening in your cars, don’t worry.

At the end of this episode I’m going to give you a way that you

can just send a text and you’ll get all the information. You’ll

get linked to the show notes for this episode and so forth, so

just stay tuned because everything that we mentioned, books,

links and all that will be in the show notes.

I want to mention a couple of things. There’s a book called “Double,

Double,” which is written by the guy who is COO of a company

called 1-800 Got Junk, which is a very impressive growth story

in itself. It’s a book that I’m going through right now and he

talks a lot about creating this painted picture. If this is

something that, what Scott and I’ve just talked about that

resonates with you, either check out the Elite Forum and/or

check out this book called “Double, Double.”

Bright Ideas actually has a master mind group for marketing agency

consultants and marketing agency owners. If you want more

details on that just email me directly, trent@brightideas.co and

I will get you a link to the page. I just can’t remember it off

the top of my head and if I go searching for it I will get

distracted from leading [sounds like], this interview so I don’t

want to do that.

Those are a couple of very good strategies. One more that I wanted to

add and this is why I’m a podcast producer, listen to podcasts.

I, when I’m having those challenging times, I want to listen to

inspirational stories from other entrepreneurs who have overcome

adversity because it makes me feel like, “The challenge that I’m

dealing with maybe isn’t quite so bad after all,” especially if

I’m able to hear the story of somebody who overcame something

more challenging than I did. The beauty of that is you can

listen while you’re walking, running, exercising, driving, what

have you, which is hard to do with a book.

I want to shift gears now, if we can, Scott because I know we only

have 20 minutes left. Business owners, I think, as a whole, I

don’t think there’s anybody out there who would disagree that

they could always use more customers, more leads and more

customers. You mentioned early in our conversation that you guys

had a sales and marketing problem. I think that that’s probably

the number one problem in almost every small business on the

planet. How does lifecycle marketing, and Infusionsoft is built

to support lifecycle marketing, so let’s talk about lifecycle

marketing. What are some of the things that people should be

doing to overcome that, “I don’t have enough new customers on a

regular enough basis,” problem?

Scott: Well first I’ll totally agree with you. I think sales and

marketing is, it’s interesting how connected it is to, I think,

the core challenge that everybody recognizes and that is, think

about one of the key problems small business owner’s face is

they wear so many hats. You go to start a company, you have

visions of more freedom, more time freedom, more financial

freedom, etc. and what ends up happening is you get into this

business and it feels like the business is owning you. You feel

like you’ve got a job and the job is hard, and I think a lot of

that comes because the business owners don’t have the revenue

that they need to hire the people to do what needs to be done.

It’s always, there’s always a battle.

If I’m going to spend my, some of my profits to go hire an employee,

that’s literally taking away from my take home pay and so I

have found that in most cases the answer is that the sales and

marketing part of the business needs to be amplified. Think

about it this way, is there any problem that a small business

owner has that cant’ be solved with more revenue and more

customers? When you have the revenue and you have the capital

and you have the customers and stability there, you can solve

all the other problems. The one that seems to be most

intimidating is getting the customers. I’m totally with you on

that.

Lifecycle marketing is a concept that I think represents a new

approach for small businesses. Most small businesses, when they

think about their sales, they think about it more like a hunter

where they wake up in the morning and realize, “I’m hungry. I’m

going to go out and I’m going to perform some kind of low

hanging fruit activities that allow me to get a customer.” In

our analogy that might represent the person waking up and going

out and finding the next deer and shooting it and pulling it

back and eating for awhile. Then it all, the cycle just repeats

itself and there’s always the next hunt that you have to go on

and you have to always be out chasing and chasing.

Lifecycle marketing kind of flips that on its head and it celebrates

one of the best inventions that’s known to mankind which is the

fence. It’s this idea that the hunter can go from having to be

out there at the mercy of the herd following that person around

to bringing livestock and plants and so forth into their fence

where they have control over that. They now go into a harvest

mode and yes, it takes planning and it takes work and it takes

foresight but it flips everything around. It creates a stability

of life for a farmer, for example, that just doesn’t exist when

you’re living the hunter lifestyle.

The way that we do that with lifecycle marketing is we take our

business and instead of just thinking about it very

monolithically and just saying, “We either don’t have enough

sales or we do,” we actually break the entire experience that

our customers have with us up into seven distinct phases and

that’s why we call it the lifecycle. Just like a plant or a crop

has a lifecycle, customers in our businesses have a lifecycle,

so our seven phases of customer lifecycle, and I know that you

teach this, Trent, but just for the sake of those who aren’t as

exposed to it, we start out by attracting traffic. When we’ve

got somebody’s attention, maybe they’re on our website or maybe

they’re in our store or at our booth, then we want to make sure

we capture the lead. We’ve got to get the people’s information

in exchange for something that we’re offering to them so that we

have the ability to follow up if we want to.

A lot of people have websites or telephone lines or trade show booths

where you have a lot of people coming up to it, visiting your

site, calling on the phone and if they’re not ready to buy

today, they walk away and they’re gone. Again, it’s more like

we’re at the mercy of, if they come back that would be great but

in reality, most of them won’t come back. We teach people to

capture leads.

Then we have some very systematic ways that people can follow up and

nurture prospects. That’s the third phase where the businesses

reach out and provide valuable information to nurture the

relationship so when that person who wasn’t ready to buy before

is ready to buy, we’re the people that are at the top of mind

for them.

Then we actually go and we have different strategies for converting

the sale, so when people indicate that their interest is high

and that they’re a hot lead, so to speak, then we have the

process in place to convert those leads into customers, whether

you’re doing that online or with sales people or just through,

kind of, promotions that you run in your business, there’s

systematic ways. I won’t go through all the details but after

that we make sure we are delivering and satisfying and really

wowing every single customer that comes through the door so that

we can get upsells and so that we can get referrals from our

customers.

I found that when business owners, when the light clicks on and they

realize how much opportunity is sitting there in the business,

it’s awesome to see. For some people, it can feel a little bit

overwhelming. They’re like, “I have a hard time thinking about

my business as it is. You want me to think about all seven

phases?” Well, the goal is not that you go focus on fixing

every single place of opportunity in your business. I think

lifecycle marketing provides a framework where you can go and

identify the next most important thing. For some people, they

already have traffic coming to their website, they need to focus

on capturing more leads. In other cases, people already have a

decent customer base, they need to focus on upselling their

existing customers, not necessarily going out and trying to get

a bunch more leads to the top of the funnel.

Lifecycle marketing provides this new framework for the business

owner to think about building a harvest based business where the

sales and customers are flowing to them and really it comes down

to them being in control. Infusionsoft, our software solution

exists, it really is the only software solution built for small

businesses to manage the entire lifecycle marketing process all

the way from attracting the interest. We just acquired a company

called Grow Social that lets companies create really cool social

media attraction campaigns. Then we have tools that allow the

business owner to capture leads and put all those leads right

into a database that allows them to be really well organized.

Then from there we can, you can initiate automatic drip follow-

up systems using some of our different formulas and that drip

follow-up gets people to bubble up and we have methods that help

you to convert those sales.

We’ve basically taken all of the different phases of customer

lifecycle, all the way from the very first time you hear about

somebody to the time they become a customer, until after they

become a customer, all the follow-up and nurturing we do there

and the collection of referrals and we’ve, I guess to further

the analogy, we kind of created the John Deere tractor that

allows somebody who wants to go to this new harvest based sales

and marketing to do it without having to spend their energy out

on their hands and knees. We allow it to happen automatically.

Trent: That it does for folks who maybe aren’t terribly familiar with

Bright Ideas just yet, if this is your first exposure, make

sure that you go to BrightIdeas.co and you have a look at the

lifecycle marketing guide because in that guide, and you can see

it right up on the Nav bar, you will see an extensive library of

content for each of those seven phases that Scott just talked

about. I have interviewed almost all, and soon it will be all,

of the Infusionsoft ultimate marketers and these are folks who

run businesses, everything from selling collectible trains to

music training to athletic wear to a bed and breakfast in

Champagne, France and they are all sharing on these interviews

how they embraced lifecycle marketing to achieve unbelievable

results in their businesses.

An interview that was just published with a guy by the name of Dustin

Burleson has built an unbelievably successful orthodontics

clinic as a result of his embracing lifecycle marketing and

Infusionsoft. Make sure, it’s all free. You can download it on

your phone, listen to it in the car. There’s just so many golden

nuggets in all of those interviews that you’re absolutely going

to love it.

I want to, we’re running out of time, so we’ve got a couple of things

here, Scott, that we’re going to talk about before we close out.

Is there, for anyone who hasn’t yet heard any of those success

stories, is there one that stands out in your mind that you

briefly would like to talk about? Maybe three, four minutes,

five minutes.

Scott: That’s a really tough question because we have so many

different, I’m going to actually, I’ll give you a little micro

versions of three of them and I’ll do it, probably in three

minutes [inaudible 49:06]

Trent: Perfect.

Scott: I really have, you mentioned our Ultimate Marketer Contest.

That’s something that we do every year at our annual user

conference which is to celebrate a business that’s kind of gone

above and beyond with their marketing. What I love about

watching that is seeing example after example of people who have

created their own version of success.

One of the gentlemen that won the Ultimate Marketer Award very early

on, Jermaine Griggs with Hear and Play Music, he cared a lot

about creating a business that was just turnkey without him

being in the business. He teaches people how to basically hear

music and play it and so I loved hearing his story where he

talked about all the different elements of places where he was

having to spend time that he could just completely automate and

he kind of built this whole turnkey business model to the point

where now he kind of has to figure out what to do with his time

because the system is on auto pilot, and that was really

important for him.

Another one of the contestants, Jeanette Gleason her story was

awesome for me because she and her husband were spending a lot

of money in these marketing programs that they just didn’t feel

like were producing results. I’m sure some of your listeners

have felt that experience before. In their case they were doing

really expensive dinners to try to woo clients and realized,

“This is stupid. Nobody’s really buying. They’re just coming for

free dinners.” She found out about lifecycle marketing, started

to gradually implement different components of it, and for her

it was really about kind of saving her husband’s business.

She was a stay at home mom and finally he said, “You’ve got to come

in and help me figure this stuff out.” She came in feeling

pretty nervous. Not technical at all and really grasped onto

lifecycle marketing and they put some really cool stuff in place

in their business. For them it was really just about re-

establishing the confidence in their business and in their

business model. Today, Jeanette is actually teaching other

financial planners, that’s the business they’re in, about how to

have successful marketing campaigns.

Trent: Let me, I’m sorry. Let me interrupt real quickly. You can hear

an interview with Jeanette if you go to BrightIdeas.co/#11 and

you’ll see how they cut their spend by 90 percent while they

tripled their revenue.

Scott: Who wouldn’t want to do that. That’s awesome. I love hearing

those stories. Then The Rocket Company, they were one of our

presenters this year and they shared their story about how they

took their business from, I think it was just over a couple

hundred thousand in revenue all the way up to two million in

revenue. For them, that was just, they’re really passionate

about their product. These guys are in the business of helping,

it’s kind of funny, they say, “We help preachers to stop giving

boring sermons.” They’re out servicing the market of churches

and they just shared their passion for the work that they do and

how implementing lifecycle marketing and automation for them is

now enabling them to reach more of their target customers, more

of these churches and just to really change their world.

The cool thing is, regardless of what your version or definition of

success is, whether it’s time you want to reclaim or revenue you

want to create or impact or confidence, when you follow the

principles of lifecycle marketing and specifically, I think,

when you can use Infusionsoft, I think for some of your

listeners Infusionsoft would be a great solution, I feel like

you can create your version of success. That’s what’s exciting

for me is that that vision people have for success can be

realized.

Trent: That’s exactly what I’m trying to do in my own business as well

and I’m using Infusionsoft to help me do that. By the way, in

the Lifecycle Marketing Guide on BrightIdeas.co, I am creating

an every increasing library of videos that show how I’m actually

using Infusionsoft in my business.

Scott: Very cool.

Trent: If you haven’t seen any of that stuff, like the guy that I

talked to this morning that I mentioned very briefly at the

beginning of our interview, he’d never actually, he’d heard

about Infusionsoft but he’d never actually seen it and I said,

“Do you want me to do a screen share with you?” He’s like, “Yes.

If you don’t mind.” I did about ten minutes and I showed him

lead scoring. I showed him my engagement campaign, my sales

funnel, my long term nurture, the automated how I register free

people for webinars and then how people get on my show as a

guest and how that’s all automated and he just, I could see him

just going, “Holy cow.” He says, “I had no idea that you could

do this much stuff.” He says, “I thought it was like an email

program.” I think that that is not entirely uncommon for when

people see it. It’s hard to grasp something, the power of

something until you’ve really seen it. Come and check out those

free videos and hopefully you’ll get as excited as this

individual did.

Scott: I love that you’re doing that and I would just encourage the

listeners, when you’re watching that, the temptation is to say,

“That person’s business, Trent’s business is a little different

than mines. Maybe that doesn’t apply.” If you fight that urge,

you will find application and ask yourself the question, “How

can I apply this to my business? What area of my business can I

use a strategy like this?” I think you’ll find that to be a much

more successful line of thinking.

Trent: I don’t think there’s most any, I mean, I think about this

stuff a lot. If somebody came to me and said, “I have a dry

cleaner, could you make me run better with Infusionsoft?” I’d be

willing to bet I probably could. I’m not even an Infusionsoft

consultant so please don’t email me to, but I can refer you to

one if you’re listening to this and you want one. I don’t think

that there is a business around that could not be improved

through marketing automation and Infusionsoft is a great tool

for that.

Let’s wrap up with a little view into the future. What do you see

coming next for small businesses and then we’ll go into, that’s

my last question before we go into the Lightning Round, which is

just a couple of quick ones that I always like to ask.

Scott: Well I think, the Goldman Sachs investment to me was kind of a

symbol and yes, I think it was significant for us to have

confirmation from a really well established company, but I think

even more importantly is that Goldman Sachs and others are, they

realize that the small business market is massive and that

excites me because we’ve been here with our feet cemented hard

into this small business space, helping small businesses succeed

but a lot of people don’t see the vision. I think they’re just

not willing to really understand small businesses.

You can imagine, a lot of businesses, large companies, who have

executives and so forth that have never been through what it

takes to be a small business, it’s hard for them to really catch

the vision but I think people are starting to catch the vision

for small business and that’s exciting to me. That means there’s

going to be more companies being, more companies who serve small

businesses being funded. More people who care and are willing to

go and create solutions for the small businesses. I think it’s a

really exciting time and I think that the technology

advancements that we can provide small businesses give them an

outsized advantage where they can start to look like a big

company and do the things that in the past were limited to only

big companies with massive budgets. I think it’s a really

exciting time to be a small business owner.

Trent: I couldn’t agree more. A couple of episodes from now I’m going

to be interviewing a guy by the name of Dan Norris, he runs a

site or a company called Inform.ly. He’s put, as you’ll hear in

the interview, only about $10,000 into building his software

application and his results, they’re modest at this point and

time. He only started actually selling this stuff a couple of

months ago and he’s up around $700 a month in recurring revenue

and it’s growing every month. He’s adding customers regularly.

The really cool thing is that business model has so much scale.

My old roommate years ago, I watched him do a similar thing and now

his business generates $100,000 a month and there’s two guys.

Two guys. There’s not even an office. Imagine the profit margins

of that much revenue coming in. It’s so incredibly cheap to

start a business now, 2001 when I started my other company, not

so much. It took a lot more. A lot more. I was many hundreds of

thousands of dollars in debt and that was not a lot of fun. If

you’re thinking about it, there has never been a better time to

go out and create a business and change your life.

Here we are in the lightning round, Scott. What are you most excited

about for 2013?

Scott: I feel like this is a game show. Just kidding. 2013, well one

of the things that we announced at our last user conference was

that we are, we’ve created a marketplace for campaign templates,

so it’s interesting that you brought this up but just as you are

working with the gentleman on the call or your friend, and

helping him to see a really specific concrete example of a

marketing campaign.

I’m excited because we’re unleashing a new round of, kind of a new

era where we provide business owners campaign templates which is

just something that’s already a proven strategy and all they

have to do is install that campaign template, go change it so

that it matches their branding and their company and make sure

that the wording works well and all that, but I’m real excited

about that. I think anything we can do to make life easier for

the small business owners, to me is the way of the future. It’s

really where all of our focus is. Totally pumped about that.

Trent: On that note, if you run, if you’re a marketing consultant or

you run a marketing agency and you’re thinking that you would

like to become an Infusionsoft user, if you use my affiliate

link, and they’re all over, there’s ads on the site, I have

built a specific nurturing funnel, webinar, the whole thing, a

year’s worth of content for your business and you get a copy of

all of those campaigns and all of those emails and everything

for free if you decide to use my Infusion link to become, sorry,

my affiliate link to become an Infusionsoft partner. It will

save you a ton of time and then you can go in and customize it

and tweak it and do whatever you do but there’s a year’s worth

of content there for you. Last question then, what is your

favorite business book?

Scott: That’s not a very fair question. A lot of books out there. I

think, I don’t know if [inaudible 01:00:04] is a business book

but one of my multiple reads that I really love is called “Made

to Stick” and it’s essentially a book about how to create ideas

that can be easily transferred from one person to another. The

reason I bring that up in this context is I think that every

business owner, they’re in the business of persuasion and

whether it’s creating ideas that need to work with your

employees or your vendors or partners or customers, I just think

that’s a really critical element to life and I like the way that

those guys talk about creating ideas that are sticky.

Another one I really like is “Banker to the Poor,” that was one that

Michael Gerber turned me on to. It tells the story of Muhammad

Yunus who created micro-financing and I love just, I love

watching him just intentionally go after his vision and not stop

at anything and just pound and pound until he figured out the

system that would work. Really inspiring.

Trent: Terrific. Thank you for sharing that and Scott, thank you so

much for making the time to be a guest on the show. I have

thoroughly enjoyed the interview and I hope the audience feels

the same. If you have questions for me or for Scott, when you

see the post, there’s comments at the bottom. Go ahead and leave

your comments and questions there and I’ll make sure that both

of us are notified of that.

Scott: Trent, thanks for having me, man. That was fun. I love talking

about this stuff and I appreciate you taking the time to have

the conversation.

Trent: No problem at all. You’re welcome to come back at any time.

Take care.

Scott: Have a good one.

Trent: To get to the show notes from today’s episode, head over to

BrightIdeas.co/60 and when you’re there you’ll see all the links

that we’ve talked about today plus some other valuable goodies

that you can use to ignite more growth in your business. If

you’re listening to this on your mobile phone, just text Trent

to 585858 and I’ll give you access to the massive traffic

toolbox which is a compilation of all of the very best traffic

generation strategies shared with my by my many proven experts

that have been guests here on the show.

As well, you’re going to get a list of what I feel are the very best

interviews that I’ve ever recorded and you’ll also get an invite

to my upcoming webinar on lifecycle marketing that I mentioned.

Finally, if you really enjoyed this episode, please head over to

BrightIdeas.co/love where you’ll find a link to leave us a

rating in iTunes and I would really appreciate it if you would

do that. It helps the show to increase its audience the more

feedback that we get. There’s also a pre-populated tweet there

so all you have to do is click the tweet button if you like what

I’ve written and if you don’t like it you can just click the

tweet button and type something else, if you’d like.

That’s it for this episode. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid. I look

forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care and have a

wonderful day.

Recording: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas Podcast.

Check us out on the web at BrightIdeas.co.

About Scott Martineau

scott-martineau-onScott’s mission is to solve the challenges small businesses face in marketing their products and services. He leads the Demand Generation team and oversees marketing activities that drive new prospects and customers for Infusionsoft. His own entrepreneurial experiences and his understanding of what small businesses need enable him to continually evolve our software in innovative and successful ways.

Scott holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from Arizona State University.

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