Infusionsoft Reviews | BrightIdeas.co

In 2013, Infusionsoft’s Ultimate Marketer contest had 3 finalists and Blue Chip Athletic was one of them. Since deploying Infusionsoft roughly two years ago, the company has seen revenue increase by 219% – after roughly 10 years of just 5 to 10% growth per year.

Suffice to say, Blue Chip is getting results that have been a real game changer for the company.

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, my guest is Andy Michaels – the marketing automation expert behind Blue Chip Athletic.

When you listen to this interview, you are going to discover:

The main features of Infusionsoft that led to the 219% increase in revenue
How Blue Chip has dramatically improved their follow up with existing customers using Infusionsoft’s campaign builder
How they have real time visibility into their sales and marketing funnels
How they used Infusionsoft to create a structured selling system that even average sales reps can excel with
How they create a WOW experience when their product is delivered and how that leads to more referrals
The two primary techniques they are using for lead generation
How they are using Fusedesk to turn customer support inquiries into additional sales
How they are automating routine tasks with custom forms

And so much more!

If you are really serious about growing your business with marketing automation, this is not an interview to be missed!

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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Transcript

Trent: Hey there, bright idea hunters. Welcome to the Bright Ideas

podcast. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast

for marketing agencies and other 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

Andy Michaels; he is the marketing automation expert behind a

company called Blue Chip Athletic, and I learned about Blue Chip

because they were named as one of the finalists for

Infusionsoft’s Ultimate Marketer of the Year Award.When I heard Andy describe how they were using Infusionsoft, I was

kind of blown away, and I really wanted to get him onto the show

to share with me and share with you the marketing tactics that

he’s using to get such incredible results at Blue Chip. By

incredible, I mean 50% growth in each of the last two years

after ten years of just 5% growth per year. It’s a really big

shift.Before we get to that, I have another technology tip for you; it’s a

WordPress plug-in called Speak Pipe. If you go to Bright Ideas,

you’ll see that you can leave me a voicemail message from almost

any of the pages on the site. That is a fantastic way of getting

feedback from your audience and hearing what’s on their mind.

Speak Pipe is how I’m doing that.The other thing that I want to make you aware of is a new webinar

that I’ve got coming up. Maybe by the time you listen to this,

it’s a webinar that I might have done once already. Regardless,

if you go to brightideas.co, you’re going to be able to hear

about notifications for this and any webinar that I’m doing.

This particular one is on life cycle marketing.You really need to understand this whole concept of life cycle

marketing because it can have a massive impact on your business.

There are seven steps: attracting traffic, capturing leads,

nurturing your prospects, converting the prospects into

customers, delivering your product, and satisfying your

customers, increasing revenue with upsells, and then generating

more referrals. This is all part of this concept called life

cycle marketing, and I look forward to seeing you on that

webinar.

With all of that said, let’s transition over to my interview with

Andy. Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy: Thanks very much. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Trent: So, my friend, I am so stoked to have you on the show. I have a

million questions I want to ask about how you absolutely rocket

business. Before we get to that, let’s quickly do a little intro

on you for the people who are listening to this who don’t know

who you are or what you do. Maybe you could just answer that

question very briefly.

Andy: Sure thing. I’m the CIO for Blue Chip Athletic; we are screen

printing and custom apparel company. My role is split; I do the

technology infrastructure and I’m also responsible for all the

outbound marketing campaigns. Putting together campaigns for

both our retail and custom customers and delivering them across

a variety of channels, the majority of which is done through

Infusionsoft.

Trent: Okay. For those of you who are listening and are going to

wonder what this interview is all about, we are going to go

really deep into marketing automation and in particular how Blue

Chip is using Infusionsoft. If that is your kind of stuff, which

I sure hope it is because it should be, you’re really going to

love this interview.

Your company was one of the finalists for the Infusionsoft Ultimate

Marketer of the Year Award. Very clearly, you guys are

leveraging the heck out of Infusionsoft. For the folks who don’t

know your company and are thinking what kind of results are

these guys getting? Do I want to listen to this interview? Can

you jump to the conclusion and tell me the kind of impact

Infusionsoft has had on your business? And then we’ll walk

through how you got there.

Andy: Sure. Absolutely. The most dramatic change has been on our retail

sales side. It’s about a third of our total business. We sell

wrestling gear, primarily singlets which are our own private

label singlets. We sell those as well as other equipment and

apparel online. That was where we first turned on the juice for

Infusionsoft; in the year after we started using Infusionsoft,

our retail sales were up 50% from the prior year. That wasn’t a

flash in the pan. That business had been around for about ten

years and had very slow and steady growth.

The first year when we tuned everything in and got everything going

with Infusionsoft, retail sales jumped 50% and the following

year, we almost repeated it; sales were up an additional 46% the

next year. That’s really just a function of engagement. We had

about 8,000 customers in a variety of contact management

systems. When we turned on Infusionsoft, everybody was in

AWeber, and it was a very generic, very sporadic follow up so we

turned on a few simple things which we can talk about in a few

minutes. The majority of the results were from making a few

changes on the retail side and getting those things automated.

There’s a few other highlights. The size of our list has grown

because we focus on referrals a lot and ask customers to help us

spread the word. After not quite 10 years of business, we had

about 8,000 customers in our marketing arsenal. Now we’re well

over 40,000 so we’ve had a big increase there.

Customer satisfaction is another one. I don’t really know how to

compare it. We went from having no idea what our customers

thought of us to having a very tightly integrated system that

captures customer satisfaction both on the custom retail side

and since we started asking about 18 months ago, we’ve had

customers give us an average of four and a half out of five

stars. We also ask them if they plan on ordering again; will

they order from us and 99.5 percent of everybody that we’ve

asked has said that they will. Knowing that information is

pretty powerful; it tells us we’re doing some of the right

things in terms of customer service.

That’s one of the other benefits is not just the sales numbers, but

it’s the visibility and knowing what’s going on inside the

business in real time rather than having to wait months and

months to analyze things. We can see at any minute how our leads

are converting, how happy people are. We can see where sales are

going.

Trent: That is awesome. Again, I have so many questions I want to get

We’re going to be talking for a while here. The first one I

want to jump into based on what you said is this real time

visibility; are you using Infusionsoft dashboards for that or

are you using a third-party tool to extract that information

from in Infusionsoft?

Andy: A little bit of both. I’m a huge fan of widgets. If I showed you my

homepage in Infusionsoft, you’d probably be amazed at the number

of widgets I have on there. I actually talked to Rebecca, the

product manager at Infusionsoft, about getting a tab set up so

you can get your dashboard to load more quickly if you have too

many widgets on there. I use those extensively and I’ve got all

of our custom sales reps set up with widgets to track their

pursuits for the custom orders.

We also do some external reporting. I’m kind of an API nerd and I

bought an HTML theme from Theme Forest; there’s one called The

Brain. We spent fifteen bucks on it and it’s got a bunch of

JQuery plug-ins set up and it’s got a bunch of Google graphs so

it’s really straightforward to create reports in Infusionsoft

and pull those out.

One of the things we do that for is to show activities to grade our

sales reps not only on their conversion which is the most

important thing, but if they’re struggling with conversion, we

look at their activities. Through the API, we pull out the

number of activities they do in a given day in pursuit of all

their opportunities. It’s an easy red to flag to spot if you’ve

got a guy who’s not pulling his weight on the custom sales side

and you look and he’s not logging any calls and he’s not making

any notes in Infusionsoft, chances are, he’s just not that

engaged and he’s not reaching out to customers as much as he

should. That’s just another way we can keep our finger on the

pulse.

We also track, we have a lot of different offers that go out both on

the retail side and the custom side. There’s a variety of

systems of involved. We have an ecommerce shopping cart through

Able Commerce that does our retail sales. Then, our screen

printing and promotional products side of the business where we

customize apparel, that process has its own software. There’s

some software we use called Shop Works. Between all those

systems and all the different moving pieces, that was really our

best option to pull out the highlights.

We have dashboards for different departments; we have one for

marketing that shows the effectiveness of the recent campaigns,

how much coupon codes are getting used and for how much. We also

track the traction for custom offers that go out via direct mail

or email or pay-per-click. We have the sales reps trained to log

the source of the offer. Whenever a customer calls them, they

say either use an offer code or how did you hear about us? We

can track our return on investment on those things in real time

because we can see how many invoices the sales reps have sent

out that are tied to a particular promotion that we’ve been

running.

I’d be happy to send you the information on that theme. It’s great if

you don’t want to hand code a bunch of reports and you’re not an

HTML guy. All you have to do is feed it the data and it spits

out some pretty graphs.

Trent: Yeah. Please do and I’ll make sure that I include it in the

show notes at the end of this episode. I will give you the link

to the show notes. The reason I don’t give it now is I don’t

know what it is until the postproduction process is complete. So

I can’t rattle off show notes link yet because like I said, I

don’t know what it is yet. All right. Let’s go back and try to

focus most of our conversation on Infusionsoft if we can. What

are some of the main features of Infusionsoft that you’re using?

Andy: The primary thing and the thing we started with is probably the

simplest thing, so it’s the automated follow up. When we first

started using Infusionsoft, it was before the days of the

campaign builder so we just had a variety of follow-up sequences

for the main tiers of customers. One example is someone places a

retail order in our shopping cart. Another example is a custom

order is shipped from our warehouse and our system indicates

that that happened.

The thing that had absolutely the most dramatic impact was like I

said, just following up with those customers that we had ignored

for so long and a principle that I am a big believer in. I took

some training from a guy named Mahan Khalsa who said intent

counts a lot more than technique and I try to keep that in mind

whenever I’m designing something. You can do a lot of really

fancy things and you can have one-to-one communication with

these customers, but just asking them what they thought and

following up with them to say, “Hey, did your package arrive and

is there anything else we should be doing that we didn’t do?”

Those are the kinds of things-maybe it’s just for our audience-

but, we’ve really been able to connect with people through the

use of those follow up sequences.

Additionally, being able to segment that based on what we know about

customers. Back in the days of AWeber, we were sending out

broadcasts. We sell a lot of NCAA apparel; that’s a good

example. We were sending out broadcasts that said, “Here are

three new shirts we got in for the Iowa Hawkeyes.” 95% of our

customers don’t care at all because they didn’t go to Iowa and

they’re not fans of that. That repository of information.

Inside Infusionsoft, we aggregate all of that information about what

products people have bought both on the retail side and the

custom side. In addition to the automation and follow up, the

ability to get laser focused, and say I’m only going to send

this broadcast to people that have either bought or clicked on

an Iowa product in the past, and not only that, I’m going to

segment them by zip code and send it only to people who live

within 150 miles of the University of Iowa. Being able to get to

that level, it really does feel to customers-at least, my hope

is that it feels to customers like you’re having a one-on-one

conversation with them and as little as possible you’re sending

them offers that are irrelevant to them. 90% of the time, you’re

talking about something that they’ve directly expressed interest

in and you’ve sort of started a conversation.

The way I think of my job is just continuing those conversations. We

can start conversations but we really need some feedback from

the customers about what they’re interested in and what kinds of

things they want to see from us.

Another way we do that is just with an Infusionsoft form that’s set

up as a survey that’s a little bit deeper than our initial

follow up for retail customers. They place an order in our

retail shopping cart and then we have a few messages back and

forth with them that establish trust.

Then we simply ask them what do you want us to talk to you about? We

ask them a little bit about their profile. In our case, it’s are

you a wrestler? Are you a parent? Are you a coach? We have some

different information that gets sent to them based on that. We

ask them do you want to know about retail offers? Do you want to

know about custom apparel?

There’s a lot of people on our list. Wrestling moms is one of our

sweet spots; one of their primary interests is just in education-

how can I help Johnny be a better wrestler? For those people,

we’ve put together programs. These are all self-serve. They tell

us what they’re interested in and we have weeks of information

that gets queued up.

We work together with some wrestling coaches in the Kansas City area

to put together a training series that gets dripped out to these

parents and their wrestlers over the course of the season to

teach them about different topics and what these elite coaches

think about training for peak performance at different times of

the season or weight management or how to understand how the

match looks from the perspective of an official.

Trent: So the people who maybe aren’t superfamiliar with Infusionsoft

understand, this is not a lot of hardcore code writing; this

isn’t actually any code writing to build the vast majority of

what we’ve just been talking about over the last few minutes,

right?

Andy: That’s absolutely right. The good thing is there was a little bit of

custom code that we wrote and it was just a hand off to create

the customer data in Infusionsoft from our respective systems;

from our e-commerce shopping cart and from our custom order

system. That was really the bulk of the heavy lifting; 90% of it

was done through follow up sequences.

Over the past three or four months, I’ve really gotten into the

campaign builder, and I’ve been going through the process of

retiring a lot of things where I had a little API script that

was on a timer to go out and see if a customer order has

shipped. There are a lot of pretty slick ways that you can do

that in the campaign builder to create a campaign that runs in a

loop and is not satisfied until some external condition is met.

That’s something that’s been really exciting for me. Custom code is

great, but it’s hard to maintain and it’s prone to break. We’ve

been going through a process over the past couple of months of

retiring some of those things that were built out of necessity.

As the capabilities inside Infusionsoft continue to grow with

the campaign builder, it’s been great for us to simplify things.

Then it’s easier for different folks in our team to go in and do

some maintenance or do changes on things without having to call

me or without having to hire a developer to go in and spend a

couple of days working behind the curtain.

Trent: Let’s say for example that someone is listening to this

interview and they’re the leader of their organization, maybe

they’re a solo printer or maybe they’re just the one that thinks

up the strategy of what should happen to a customer after they

buy or what should happen to a lead once they give us their

email address. They get on the white board or however they map

out their thoughts of what they want to happen, to take that and

translate it into actually being deployed and live and in

Infusionsoft, it’s really not very hard, is it? Do you want to

just walk us through how that happens in the campaign builder?

Andy: Yeah. That’s actually what we do. We do most of our mock ups in

Balsamic and the only reason I use that is because I saw Brad

Martineau using it a couple of years ago at InfusionCon. It

looked like an easy way to do it, so that’s our white board.

I’m personally virtual; I work from home, 90-plus percent of the

time. I’m in the office a couple of times a month, so that’s

part of the reason for that. But we’ll mock up different ideas

in Balsamic; anything from how do we want to talk to these

retail customers after the sale to how do we solicit new coaches

to write content for our Coach’s Corner series?

We also have one in the works now for a club for wrestling moms.

Wrestling moms can get in here and join an exclusive club where

they get gifts and membership benefits and stuff like that.

We draw it out in Balsamic or on a white board if I’m there and the

tools in the campaign builder let you pretty much have a one to

one relationship between what you drew on the board and what you

see on your screen in the campaign builder. Then it’s a question

of dotting the Is and crossing the Ts; you create tags to

indicate when a goal is met and things like that, but I’ve been

really impressed in the past few months as I’ve gotten into the

campaign builder how quickly you can go from that concept to

implementation, which in the former version of Infusionsoft, you

could definitely do it, but it was a lot more heavy lifting so

you’d have to draw up your ideas and you’d have to hand it off

to some guy who works in a dark room to assemble everything and

there was no real way to visualize how it was set up.

One of the things, frankly, it’s simple, but I’ve been most impressed

with the ability to look at a campaign now and see how many

people are in each step. That gives you a sense especially if

you’ve got a bottleneck in a process. A lot of times, I’ll set

up sequences one after the other. The first sequence will run

for some period of time until the customer takes an action and

that’s one of the measures. If you see too many people queued up

in that initial stage, that means they haven’t taken the action.

To me, that’s a signal that we need to do some diagnostics. We need

to fine tune our messaging or we have to make a stronger offer

or have some more compelling reason for them to move through

that gate to get to the next stage which is getting the

increased order size and getting additional orders and things

like that. Just being able to look at that at a glance, I love

that. It’s fantastic.

Trent: Yeah. The fact that it’s visual makes it so much easier. All

right. So, the main feature-and again, for those of you who are

listening, Infusionsoft does have its own shopping cart system

that works with everything else. It’s part of the system. I’m

guessing, Andy, that you guys are using a non-Infusionsoft

shopping cart because you probably set that up before you got

onto Infusionsoft. Or is there a different reason?

Andy: It’s both. It’s primarily because we had our shopping cart set up for

a couple of years before we were introduced to Infusionsoft. The

other reason is just the number of SKUs. We have probably 5,000

different products that we sell on the retail side and

Infusionsoft is great if you’re selling a smaller number. If you

want to have order forms for informational products or for

services or things like that or if you have fewer than 50

products, you would be great to use the Infusionsoft shopping

cart.

There’s some huge benefits to doing that. For example, just the

automation you can set up for successful or failed payments. If

somebody’s on a continuity program and their card is charged

every 30 days, and for whatever reason the card expires and they

get a failure notice, you can immediately jump on that guns

blazing and send them an email right away while they’re still

thinking about it and assign a task to a rep to follow up with

them and make sure you get that card information updated so you

don’t lose people due to attrition. You do everything you can to

keep them in there and you have those canaries in the coal mine

to let you know about it right away.

There are some things like that that I wish we could take advantage

of more. The one-click upsells are really strong too. It’s just

that our catalog is a little bit too big and unwieldy to do that

effectively.

Trent: Okay. That makes perfect sense. Aside from the campaign builder

to automate the follow up and to ask customers what they think

about your customer service, are there other features within

Infusionsoft which are having a really big impact on your

business?

Andy: There are. This is another one. This is kind of a plain vanilla

feature; it’s nothing terribly sexy, but the opportunities

module has been perfect for us. We have a sales force of five

people, and there are varying levels of experience. The two

owners started off as being the sole sales force, and they

learned the trade by necessity. They had to be able to sell if

they wanted to be able to pay the bills. They got really sharp

at it.

One of the things that’s been critical for us, especially in the past

couple of years, as the growth has ramped up, we’ve had to be

able to be a little more nimble and bring people in as demand

increases. We can’t be terribly picky and hire the best of the

best sales force. The margins in our product are not that great.

If you’re talking about custom apparel, a lot of people think of

it as a commodity. We try to treat it a lot differently than

that. What I’m saying is you don’t have the Cadillac sales guy.

You don’t have the old silver fox out there.

In order to compensate for that, we use pipeline automation and

opportunities so we did that mind meld of Gonz [SP] and Jason,

the two owners of the company. We crafted out the ideal

lifecycle of a custom order and we automated most of it. We have

our stages set up and the opportunities, and as the reps move

from stage to stage, the communication is automated to tell the

customers the right things at the right time.

We also use a lot of follow-up tasks because especially we have a

fairly seasonal business. Most of our custom apparel is still

wrestling; so during wrestling season, the reps have a lot of

irons in the fire at any one time. In the past, before we used

Infusionsoft for this, everybody was managing their pursuit in

Outlook or, even worse, on paper. It was easy for an opportunity

to get lost. I was supposed to call this guy two weeks ago, and

now his order is late and he’s super pissed off at me.

Now, we have reminders set up that we’ve trained the reps to work

from their dashboard. It’s pretty hard to lose sight of an

opportunity. If you haven’t contacted somebody for ten days,

it’s right there staring you in the face. We’ve had a lot better

success at keeping fewer drops and fewer misses and keeping in

front of customers.

The other thing about it is it’s a better experience for the customer

because it’s a lot higher touch without having to overload the

reps with thinking of a million things to do every day. The

customers are still getting a lot of follow up during and

especially after the order. We have messages that go out to them

that say, first of all, your package should have arrived. Let me

know if the quality is okay, and if anything is missing or you

have any questions or concerns. That’s a big one right there

because you can spot a lot of problems right off the bat before

the customer has a chance to stew about it or tell other people.

Then, we like to do follow-ups after the goods are delivered on a

scheduled basis. It’s not like we’re going to sell to you once

and forget about you; we’re going to be in touch at 30 days out

and 60 days out and six months out and several points along the

way just to say hi. We’re looking for more business, but we’re

really just looking to make sure everything is okay with their

order, that they didn’t have any problems with the quality, or

anything like that.

Trent: I want to interrupt you there because what you’re explaining

sounds common sense and simple, but it’s so incredibly

important. Without Infusionsoft, all this follow-up you’d have

to remember to do up and that tends to be where it falls apart

for most people. What you guys have done with Infusionsoft is

created processes for this that just fire off automatically upon

the purchase of one of your products so no human being has to

remember to send an email at 30 days and 60 days and 6 months,

correct?

Andy: That’s exactly right. I’m a big believer in the good nature of man

and everybody has good intentions. Even those A sales people,

they’re not going to hit it 100% of the time. They’re going to

have bad days and they’re going to get behind.

What we’ve essentially done with that is raise everybody up to the

level of top performing sales rep. Not necessarily in terms of

ability to sell on the phone or sell in person or anything like

that, but in terms of the follow up, we’re going to blanket

these customers with the right information at the right point.

We know what the common objections are and we’re able to address

those presale objections without the rep having to get on the

phone and go through their laundry list. It’s done for them.

By the time the customer gets ready to buy, in most cases, we’ve

answered most of their questions, we’ve inundated them with

testimonials and things like that so they feel good about the

company and they feel good about what their friends think about

the product.

Our intent is to make that, we’re not trying to create a selling

experience for the customer; we’re just trying to create a

buying opportunity. That’s really what our model is more geared

towards. You can’t go out and sell somebody 48 t-shirts. If I

called you and said I’m not going to get off the phone until you

buy 48 t-shirts, most people don’t have that need right now.

What we can do is make sure we’re in front of that person and they’re

thinking about us and we’re top in line when that opportunity

does come up, and they say, “My son’s got a bachelor party or my

kid’s soccer team needs new uniforms,” or something like that.

We’re establishing relationships with these people.

Again, it sounds simple, but we do that for lost opportunities as

well. Whenever somebody gives us an opportunity to bid on a job

and we don’t win it, we have a very long tail follow up sequence

and we don’t give up on those folks. We say thanks for the

opportunity to bid. In some cases, we send them a card depending

on the size of the opportunity.

Again, at 30 days we check in and say we remember that they were

going with somebody else; we just wanted to see if you had any

feedback on their process or anything I could have done

differently. Then again, a couple months later, we’re checking

in to see if they have any other orders that we can bid on and

again, most of these are seasonal so at the 10 to 11 month mark

is where we ramp that up a little bit because most of these

people are coaches and they’re ordering for their upcoming

season. We put more pressure on at that point and say we’d love

to be able to sharpen our pencil and have another opportunity to

bid on your project.

Again, that’s completely taking the habits or the experience or the

skill of the sales rep out of the process. All they have to do

is answer the phone when that guy gets that note, and he’s in

the right mood and he says you’ve been emailing me for a year,

I’m going to give you another chance. All he has to do is answer

questions and smile and nod and give that customer good service

when he is ready to buy.

Trent: Your sales reps, are they predominantly answering? How much

outbound prospecting are they doing versus answering the phone

and taking the order because you’ve created a system that

communicates and nurtures and stays in touch and persuades to

make the customer call you and place the order?

Andy: If I said 15% outbound, that would probably be aggressive. The vast

majority of all their orders are they’re answering the phone or

answering an email when somebody calls in. We get a lot of that

from our outbound marketing and all the constant messages that

are going out.

We also get a lot from referrals. Customer service is huge for us;

I’m sure it’s important for a lot of businesses, but we put a

lot of effort into making sure that the entire experience is as

good as possible.

One of the ways we’ve really grown the business is we’ll establish a

relationship with a coach. A lot of these are primary and

secondary schools, so it’ll be a high school coach and we’ll

make sure we knock his socks off with great design and great

service and a great product. He’s going to be sitting in the

teacher’s lounge with three other coaches opening the box when

he gets his t-shirts or his shorts or his warm ups or whatever

it is.

That’s really been the bread and butter for us; that particular

soccer coach opens the box and the track coach is standing there

and the basketball coach is standing there and they’re saying,

“What the heck is going on? I deal with a local guy and he works

out of his truck and he’s always late. The t-shirts are printed

crooked and all that stuff.” That’s really been our Trojan

horse.

We’re rolling out some new systems where we’re formalizing that: a

little more instead of just relying on the product to speak for

itself, we’re creating advocates out of those people and giving

them some incentive to spread the word and tell the other

coaches and to tell the other parents about our service.

Trent: Very interesting. Let’s run up to the top of the sales funnel

with lead generation. You mentioned that your sales reps are

spending less than 15% of their activity outbound which means

you’re doing a lot of something to get people to come and

somehow get into your marketing funnel. Can you tell me what

you’re doing and what happens? Tell me about that.

Andy: Sure thing. The majority for the custom side is a lot of repeat

customers. We’re staying on top of those customers who have

already-to use a hackneyed phrase-they already know, like and

trust us. We’re staying after those people with the add-ons. If

we have a special on beanies or backpacks or something like that

to go along with their seasonal orders. That’s a big aspect of

We stay in front of those people a lot through email and

direct mail.

The custom apparel market is pretty tough to compete wide open. If

you looked at the cost per click on Google Ad words for a phrase

like “custom t-shirts,” it’s running into a chainsaw. It’s

impossible to compete.

The way we get around that is we do sports specific campaigns. It’s

all the same. It’s all the same t-shirts and the same shorts but

in order to compete better in that market-and we seem to do

better by design or not in the smaller tier sports. Basketball,

football and baseball, there is a lot of competition there from

some of the really big players, so we have better luck with

things like volley ball and lacrosse and cross country and

swimming and diving.

We’ll do campaigns on AdWords that are specific to those smaller

market sports. You have an ad that runs and drives to a landing

page that is tailored to that specific sport that shows we have

a design library with thousands of designs for custom apparel,

and we’ll hand pick the ones that are the best for that

particular sport.

To that person, it doesn’t feel like they’re buying “custom t-

shirts;” it feels like they’re buying custom track and field

uniforms or custom track and field apparel. That’s one of the

ways we’re able to slice that down into smaller segments and do

a better job of competing.

We do some direct mail. We really haven’t gone outside of our

customer list. We have a variety of different offers and some of

them are highly focused on repeat orders. If a customer ordered

from us last year, we’ll send them a special to reorder the

same, exact apparel with the same, exact design. We do a fair

amount of that.

To our broader list, we have a lot of attempts at conversion from

people who bought from us on the retail side, which is bigger in

terms of customer volume. We try to convert those people into

custom customers and that’s an exercise in generating awareness.

It makes perfect sense to me that we do both, but probably well over

half of the customers who shop with us on the retail side have

no idea that we do custom apparel. Throughout our customer

service exchanges and throughout our retail follow up sequences,

we’re constantly showing examples of the custom apparel we can

do and we’re planting seeds in the customers mind to let them

know this isn’t only for sports teams.

We do corporate apparel. We do event specific apparel; bachelor

parties and summer camps and church camps and family reunions

and stuff like that. That’s a decent part of our business. It’s

really an exercise of planting that seed in the customer’s mind

to let them know that we do offer that service. It’s one person

in a hundred that’s going to be ready to buy custom apparel, but

getting in front of those people and converting them, that’s

been a huge benefit for the custom side of our business-making

sure the retail funnel directs people that way.

Trent: How does Infusionsoft play a role in that? Is that the campaign

builder and just campaigns that you have mapped out as you

explained before?

Andy: It is, and it’s really being able to sit down and map out that ideal

conversation. Going back to my Gonz and Jason example, they knew

how to work a conversation and how to slowly warm somebody up to

that idea.

What we’ve been able to do is sit down over the course of two years

now since we’ve had this in place. We set it up and we

constantly go back and fine tune that to figure out how we can

sharpen the message here or improve the number of clicks on this

particular email, things like that.

That’s one of my big beliefs in the marketing role; I don’t really

know anything. I have some hypotheses that I test, but I

realized quite a while ago that if I sit down and think I know

the answer to unlocking the customer riddle of how they’re going

to behave in a certain situation, I’m wrong 100% of the time.

My model now is I set up a bunch of different hypotheses, and then I

test them. That’s what we’ve been able to do with these

sequences. We put something in place, and we see how it performs

and that becomes the control group. Then we try to beat it by

sending more offers or sending fewer offers or more information

or less information, more pictures or more text. Things like

that just to see what’s going to push customer buttons at

different stages.

I think that’s critical for anybody out there who is thinking about

marketing. That’s a fundamental shift in mindset at least for me

is going from thinking that I’ve got all the answers and I can

set up a campaign and jam it down somebody’s throat to all I can

do is put a bunch of different lines in the water and see which

ones get nibbles and focus more attention on those.

Trent: Help me to understand that. Let’s dive into an example of that.

Can you think of an example we can talk our way through?

Andy: Sure. One example that is non-Infusionsoft related-we do that a lot

with landing pages, just AB testing landing pages and offers. So

that would be which one is going to get more people into the

funnel? And secondarily, what we really care about is which one

is going to generate more orders. If one particular landing page

or one particular sequence of events gets a ton of people in the

funnel but they’re not purchasers, we don’t really care about

those. It’s really a resource strain for us, so we want to get

the most productive customers in the funnel.

The best example is with our FuseDesk customer support. I think we

have fifteen or twenty different templates in there that are

optimized for different customer questions. My shipment never

arrived; I lost it. We have a template, a three or four message

sequence that kind of works somebody through that. The people

that respond to the, “Did your package arrive?” It’s a pretty

huge volume. In those reply messages, I’m constantly trying to

embed different things related to custom apparel.

Asking people if you’re interested in custom apparel and you want a

rep to give you a call, then click here and go to this landing

page and fill out this form. I’ll put that in place and let it

run for a while, then I’ll change up the verbiage or move it to

the top or make it more pronounced or less pronounced or maybe

put it in a different message later in the sequence and then

compare to see which one makes more hay.

We’re always doing small changes like that. Not to say that we’re not

satisfied with our results, but we’re never convinced that we

can’t improve just by wordsmithing or changing the color of a

button or changing the subject line of an email and the

important thing there is just to measure which ones are more

productive and keep track of everything, so you know when we use

the ambiguous subject, we get more opens but fewer clicks versus

when we use a very direct subject that’s very transparent and

clear. We don’t get as many opens but the people who do open it

are more likely to actually respond and start a conversation

with a sales rep and fill out a form or something like that.

Trent: Let me make sure that I understand what you just explained. In

your customer support system which you’re using FuseDesk for,

people are submitting support questions or what have you and you

are embedding marketing messages into the replies that you’re

sending to their support queries? Is that correct or did I

misunderstand?

Andy: That’s absolutely right. A great example is the follow-up sequence

has an automated message that goes out that says did your

package arrive. I don’t know the exact statistic, but a lot of

people will reply to that and say, “Yes I did,” or “Thanks,” or

“No, I haven’t gotten it yet,” or whatever. Those all go to a

catch all email address, FuseDesk, and the reason we do that is

by design. I’ve seen a lot of people who will put a link in the

email that says click this link to tell me your package arrived.

At this point in the game, most of our customers since our growth

curve is still fairly steep; most of the customers are dealing

with us for the first time so as much as possible, we want them

to feel like they’re dealing with a real person. If I send Trent

an email and I say, “Trent, tell me if you’re feeling okay

today,” that’s a lot less personal than sending you an email

saying, “How are you doing? Hit reply and let me know how you’re

feeling today.”

We’re trying to establish rapport with customers. Once that comes

back into FuseDesk, that reply that says, “Yes, I got my

package,” that creates a support case. Then we have a template

that replies to that that says, “Thanks very much, I’m glad to

hear it. Your satisfaction means a lot to me; by the way, did

you know we also do custom apparel?” Or “By the way, we’re

running a special on custom apparel.”

Again, most of our customers on that sequence are going to be parents

and we’ll say things like, “We’re running a special this month

on wrestling cleaners. Do you think your son’s team would be

interested in getting this offer? If so, click here and give us

their name. Hit reply and give us their name.”

Those are Trojan horses; we’re embedding those things into the

natural course of the conversation where we want the customer to

feel like it’s an exchange of pleasantries of just making sure

your package arrived. But again, I’m planting little seeds in

there to make sure they know we do custom apparel or to make

sure they know of different special offers that we have going on

at any particular point.

Trent: When the reply goes to FuseDesk: you send an email asking if

they got their package. They type in yes, or yes I did or you

betcha or any number of ways of a positive response. How does

FuseDesk know that they got their package? Is it keyword based?

Andy: Yeah. That part is not automated. We have one customer service rep

who monitors that queue and there’s no natural language parsing

or anything like that. She looks at the responses and if they

yes or yep or you betcha or whatever, then she can quickly

within two clicks choose the template that says reply to the,

“Yes I got my package,” and her template already has all the

offers embedded in it. That way, we can change them out without

involving her or having to train her to do anything different.

She just chooses the same template.

You still do have to look at and read every message, but the fact

that you can reply within three or four seconds to each one.

During our busy season between November and January, we have one

customer service rep who is handling all of our support cases

that come in, so we use our support@; support@bluechipwrestling

and support@bluechipathletics. All of those create cases in

FuseDesk. We had one person working on those part time and she

was able to patch all the customer support cases during our

busiest time in addition to doing some other responsibilities.

That’s been extremely powerful both in terms of providing that high

touch experience and also providing a very consistent

experience. I don’t have to worry about them with grammar

mistakes or spelling mistakes or saying anything off color.

We encourage them to personalize messages. If somebody says thanks

for sending out my singlet, Johnny won his tournament, then

they’ll type in a quick one or two sentences at the top that

says, “Congratulations to Johnny. If you have a picture of him

in the singlet, please send it into us, and we’ll post it on

Facebook.”

For the most part, it’s boiler plate responses. 90% of the time, the

conversation goes exactly the same way, so we just anticipate

that. If we do have one of those that’s in the 7% that’s

completely off the map, then somebody just has to sit down and

type an email which is what most people are doing 100% of the

time. It’s been a dramatic time savings for us.

Trent: Absolutely. There are a lot of ticketing services available. I

looked at FuseDesk and it’s not the cheapest in the world; I

think it’s about a hundred dollars a month. But it integrates

into Infusionsoft. What is the benefit of that integration for

you at your organization?

Andy: The main thing is maintaining that complete view of the customer.

Whenever you have a conversation via FuseDesk, all of that is

appended to the customer record just as if you were sending an

email through Infusionsoft. If a customer calls in and has a

question, the CSR can quickly pull up their record and see at a

glance if this is somebody who has had chronic problems and we

screwed up their order 20 times in the last 20 days. You have a

slightly different approach and a higher level of service with

those people to make sure you can save the play there versus

somebody who is calling in for the first time.

The visibility is one, the fact that there is literally no

integration. The only thing you have to do to tie the systems

together is plug in your API key. Then you can pull over. We

have a category of templates that’s just called FuseDesk

templates and that’s what our customer service rep looks for.

That’s where we have the respond to the customer about the lost

shipment or respond to the customer that says thanks I got my

package or respond to the customer that wants to change an order

at the last minute. All those templates are stored in there.

Trent: In Infusionsoft?

Andy: Yeah. They’re written in Infusionsoft and they appear in FuseDesk.

FuseDesk is a web interface, you long in, and any template that

you set up in Infusionsoft is just pulled over via the API and

appears in a drop down within FuseDesk so somebody can grab it

and send it out that way. That’s one benefit.

The other thing is, what we did in the past was everybody had their

own mailbox. The girl who handled the support cases would get an

email and if she was out sick or if she was on vacation, unless

somebody went and logged into her email . . .

Trent: No one would know.

Andy: Chances are the connection would get lost. Now we can seamlessly

transfer those cases to somebody else and make sure that queue

is getting worked and that nothing’s getting dropped.

The reporting is also nice; you can see how quickly cases are being

closed, what your average close time is and things like that. It

lets us keep an eye on how we’re doing. As we get into the busy

season, if our close time is going down, or we have a bunch of

cases open, we can appoint somebody else and say, “Okay, go

start answering cases,” and you don’t have to worry about

stepping on one another’s toes.

You can assign a case to yourself and work it and any replies to that

case come back to you. It’s been great and the best thing about

it is that it maintains that comprehensive view so you don’t

have to worry about going out and looking in some other system

to see what kind of service we’re giving to this guy.

Trent: Could you have some kind of activity happen in FuseDesk which

would cause a tag to be applied which would then trigger a

campaign to be fired?

Andy: Yeah. Absolutely. They’ve done a lot in the past year. There are a

number of things you can do: you can run a note template, you

can run an action set, things like that from the FuseDesk

interface. We’ve done a few things like that.

One good example is we provide credit to our retail CSR if they get a

referral. A lot of times, they’re on the phone with the

customer, and they can in a very conversational way find out if

this guy is a coach, and if so, would he be interested in

talking to somebody? We’ve got some custom apparel offers. Can I

interest you in that? She is compensated based on the number of

leads she hands over the fence to the custom sales team and she

just runs a note template.

Inside FuseDesk, she’s answering the case, she runs a note template

that applies a tag to the customer that says it was a retail

referral, it creates an opportunity for the sales rep to call

that person, and it sends an email to the sales rep to get on

the phone and call this guy right away, he’s a hot lead.

It’s really think of anything that you can do; within Infusionsoft,

you can now integrate into your customer support experience.

That’s pretty powerful.

We use internal forms as well. There’s no internal forms in FuseDesk,

but it’s a pretty great shortcut to be able to kick off any kind

of a campaign. Again, it’s for those situations that come up

every day. You have 100 people in a day who say a particular

thing. If you want to start them in a different sequence, all

you have to do is pick an item from the drop down menu and hit

The person running it doesn’t have to have any knowledge of

Infusionsoft, they don’t have to know what’s going on behind the

scenes. All they have to know is I get a point for every time I

do this, and if I get 100 points this month, I get a gift

certificate to go have dinner somewhere. That’s all and

everything else happens on its own.

Trent: Something I always wondered with the internal forms: let’s say

you have a guy in your database. His name is Bob Williams and

his email address is bobwilliams@gmail.com. Let’s say Bob’s

already in the database and somebody on your team pulls up a

custom form for he’s going to order-I don’t know. Give me an

example of when you would use a custom form.

Andy: We do it for completing their profile. When the retail CSR is on the

phone with somebody, she quickly types in their first and last

name to find their record. The internal form says things like-

it’s actually got a script on it-it says things like did you

know we have a discount club that provides 10% off? The customer

either says yes or no and if they say no, then she says would

you be interested? Should I sign you up for the discount club?

It doesn’t cost anything and you’ll get a coupon and special

offers in the mail. They say sure, absolutely, so she checks a

check box that says sign up for the Take Down Club.

Another one that’s one there is Coach’s Corner; that educational

series. You don’t say these every time to every customer; she

just tries to work them into the conversation if it’s a natural

bit.

Then she’ll say would you be interested in getting this education

sequence written by elite wrestling coaches? And they’ll say

absolutely so she checks the box for that and the big one that

we try to get her to work in is the custom apparel. She says,

“I’d be happy to help you with this singlet; did you know you

can order custom team singlets for your son’s wrestling team?”

They’ll say I didn’t know that. “Would you like me to have a

sales rep get in touch with you?”

She checks a box and when she submits that form, there are three

different campaigns that are getting fired off. One is to sign

them up for the Coach’s Corner so they get their first message

within a couple hours. Secondly, they get their discount welcome

to the club email for the Take Down Club and then thirdly, we

create an opportunity for that custom sales rep to give this guy

a call.

That’s that retail referral where she gets credit for it and the

custom guy gets the lead and gets on the phone with the

customer. That’s the primary use.

The other thing is just rounding out their profile. If she can happen

to get their birthday, if she can happen to find out if they’re

a parent, we have different messaging. If we know someone is a

parent versus a coach, we speak to them slightly differently.

She’s just checking off boxes on the form as she goes and when

she hangs up the phone, she hits submit and all those things

that she queued up during their conversation get fired off.

Trent: Where I was going with my question: if Bob Williams already had

an instance in your database; there was already a record, using

this custom form and filling in his name and his email again

doesn’t create a duplicate entry. It just updates the current

one because the unique identifier is the email address. Is that

correct?

Andy: Right. Actually, one clarification: it’s something that I’m not crazy

about. You cannot use an internal form unless the person is

already in your system. If they’re not, you’d have to add

contact, create that person, and then once you hit save on that

secondary page where you’re looking at the profile for the

customer, about halfway down the page there’s an internal form.

The way it’s designed is that you’re only filling it out for

people who are already on your list and anything that’s on their

profile.

For instance, the top section has their name, email and phone and the

second section has their billing address and the third section

is the offers. If you were talking to a customer or if Ashley in

this case is talking to a customer who has been shopping with us

for five years, most of that stuff is already going to be

complete. When she pulls up that internal form, their name,

phone, their email is all going to be there, their address is

going to be there.

What we ask her to do is just confirm those things. “Are you still on

123 Wistia Lane or is the best phone number to reach you still

1234?” She’s confirming that more than filling it out. The heart

of it is she’s asking them about those different offers trying

to get them interested in custom apparel or trying to get their

birthday or another one we ask for is their shirt size.

Since we’re an apparel printer, a lot of the promotions we do

involves sending people a free custom t-shirt or a free custom

polo or something like that to plant the seed to get them

interested in custom apparel. If we know their shirt size, we

can set up tiers of customers. All the customers who have

shopped with us if they’ve placed more than three orders in the

past six months and their total spend is over $7,500, we’ll put

together that short list of customers and if we’ve already got

their shirt size, we can go ahead and send them a wow package or

a thank you package just to get that feel good vibe going.

Trent: I see what you’re talking about now. I just got my first golden

nugget here for myself. You pull up the record and it’s under

the tasks tab and then you scroll down a little and there are

internal forms submissions. You can pick a form and click the

fill out button. That’s what you were referring to, correct?

Andy: Yeah. It’s a bit of a specific application. When I first heard about

it, I was thinking about it the same way you were: she’s going

to get a phone call from a lead that’s not in our system and

she’s going to be typing all this stuff to add them. That’s not

really what we use it for.

Frankly, I wouldn’t want to slow down the conversation that much so

if somebody calls in, I wouldn’t want to force them to sit there

and wait as she typed out the form. Unless it’s of value to

them, we don’t want to collect information that’s just an

annoyance to the customer. It’s making sure that she can quickly

kick off those campaigns is what it comes down to. With one

check box, she can start off a whole sequence of events just

based on us finding out that they’re a parent or what other

sports they’re interested in or things like that.

Trent: Just so the folks who are listening to this-because I know this

is a rather technical discussion-it’ll probably mean more to

people who are already using Infusionsoft. But in the event that

you’re not and you’re still listening, I want to give you

context to understand this.

Think about in your business when you talk to a prospective customer

or an existing customer and they say they want fries and they

want ketchup and they want a burger and a shake or whatever it

is that they want and you hang up the phone and then you have to

go do all that stuff so you don’t forget to follow up and send

all those emails and do, do, do.

What we’re talking about here is a way that you can simply put a

checkmark in a check box that on submission will fire off a

campaign that was built by you in the campaign builder, which is

a drag and drop environment. For every person you put that check

box in, that campaign will fire in exactly the same way every

time so the sales rep that’s talking doesn’t have to remember

that when they hang up the phone because heir phone might ring

again and they get distracted that they have to do this and that

and the other thing so that nothing falls through the cracks.

Andy: Yeah. That’s exactly right. And the way I like to think about it: I

think it’s ideal. That approach is perfect for businesses when

you’re going to have multiple touches with the customer over a

period of time.

Sorry, I got some feedback there. I thought I lost you, Trent. If

you’re having multiple touches with a customer, you’re not going

for the kill on call one. You’re going to talk to this person

three or four times over the span of a couple months and it’s a

very slow, iterative process.

I read a book that was pretty profound for me. It was called “Hug

Your Customer.” It was about this apparel retailer in New Jersey

and they had this system in place where each customer had this

huge profile of information and the sales reps would get

familiar with what we know about this guy and what are his kids’

names and when’s his birthday? What’s his favorite bottle of

wine and all that stuff?

That’s the way I like to think of it. As you have multiple touches

over the course of time, and in addition to that, multiple

touches from people in the organization, we’re all plugging in.

We’ve decided what are the things that are most important for us

to know about this customer and we’re all working together to

round out that profile, so that over the course of a couple of

years-and that’s really the lifespan of our customer. We do much

better with somebody who has been with us for several years

versus somebody who is just going to come and place one order.

We’re trying to round out a profile and learn as much as we can

about them through all those different touches so we can turn

around and provide exactly the right service they need based on

what they told us about themselves.

Trent: How do you get the people who are on the phone with them to

remember to look at the internal forms that are available, to

pick one, and to click the fill-out button?

Andy: We incent them. That’s the main way. The primary incentive for the

retail CSR is they get credit for the number of custom leads

they pass over the fence. It’s not perfect. They’re not going to

do it every time, and I wouldn’t really want them to do it every

time. If they’re in a hurry and somebody just has one quick

question, it wouldn’t necessarily make sense for them to say,

“Hold on a second while I log into Infusionsoft. My password

expired; I have to change my password, hold on another minute.”

That’s just a bad customer experience.

It’s not going to be perfect, but we try to make sure they know

there’s something in it for them. We don’t have a formal program

in place; they get credit for those leads in terms of the

commission that’s driven from those sales. They get some upside

from that.

We also do little promotions. If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant,

whoever sells the most appetizers today gets whatever. We do put

tags on people so we can tell who are all the people who had the

internal form filled out for them. You can do some metrics on

that and provide some one-off incentives to give them a little

boost.

Trent: We are closing in on the hour. There is one last thing I want

to ask you before I go into the lightning round which is a

couple of real quick questions. You talked a lot about measuring

customer satisfaction. Are you using a net promoter score to do

that?

Andy: No, we’re not right now. It’s on my list of things to get

implemented. Right now, it’s purely based on their rating on a

scale of one to five. We’re in the process of rolling out a

program that’s going to make it easier for people to refer

friends. We don’t really track right now. If Trent sent Bob to

me and Bob placed a big order, then I give Trent some sort of a

high five for that. We’re not doing that right now, but probably

in the next month or so we’ll have a formal system in place to

do that.

Trent: Yeah. Okay. Let’s wrap this up. Lightning round. Three

questions: what are you most excited about, Andy, for 2013?

Andy: For 2013, I think I’m most excited about the growth on our custom

sales side. We’ve dialed in so many things on the retail side

and seen such incredible results there. We haven’t applied all

those things to the custom side; we’re in the process of doing

that now. I think between the growth and our sales team and the

things that we’ve learned and the capabilities that we’re

getting in place, that business which is actually two thirds of

our total size of the company, if we can see the same results in

our custom apparel sales as we have seen in our retail sales, I

think that’s going to be outstanding.

Trent: Yeah. Huge. Okay. How about a business book? Do you have a

favorite business book? You mentioned “Hug Your Customer.” Would

that be it?

Andy: One that is more for more complex, consultative sales; I mentioned

Mahan Khalsa before. There’s a book called “Let’s Get Real or

Let’s Not Play” and that was really a fundamental shift in my

thinking about sales. I was talking about how you’re not

selling; you’re creating a buying opportunity. It gives you some

direct, clear ways for thinking about how you interact with

customers and how you’re actually trying to do.

The thing I try to keep in mind every day is it’s really about what’s

best for our customer. We’re trying to be a trusted advisor and

I want every customer to make a decision that’s in their own

best interest.

A lot of times, that means we’re not the best fit. If we can’t meet

their timeline or we can’t provide good service based on their

specific requirements, we have no qualms at all with saying,

“We’d love to have your business but we’re not going to give you

the best experience and we want you to have the best

experience.” Just that shift in mindset from I’m going to do

whatever is good for me regardless of what it means for the

customer to doing the best thing for the customer regardless of

what it means for me personally.

In the long run, there’s no question that’s a better way to operate.

And in that book, “Let’s Get Real and Let’s Not Play,” that was

pretty profound for me.

Trent: Okay. Cool. Thank you for sharing that; I hadn’t heard of that

one. For anyone who is listening to this, if they want to be

able to reach out to you, is there a way that they can do that?

Andy: Sure. I’m on Twitter; my twitter handle is theandymichaels. I also

check my email a lot. My email address is

amichaels@bluechipathletic.com.

Trent: Okay. That was very generous of you. Thank you for sharing

that. Andy, thank you so much for making the time to come on the

show. I hope that the listeners who are already using

Infusionsoft have picked up some really terrific new ideas, and

for those of you who aren’t yet using Infusionsoft, hopefully

this interview has given you some insight into what is possible

with Infusionsoft.

If you have additional questions about it, please feel free to email

me directly. I’m also an Infusionsoft user and obviously a

raving fan. You can send that to trent@brightideas.co. Andy,

thank you so much for making time to be on the show.

Andy: Thanks, Trent. It was my pleasure.

Trent: To get the show notes for today’s episode, head on over to

brightideas.co/55. When you’re there, you’ll see all the links

to any sites or books that we talked about as well as 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, you’re in your car

or wherever, and you want to be able to get access to some other

really cool stuff, go ahead and send a text. You want to text

the word Trent to 585858. When you do, you’ll get access to the

Massive Traffic toolbox, which is a compilation of all the best

traffic-generations strategies shared with me by my guests on

the show. As well, you’ll also get a list of my personal

favorite picks of all the interviews I’ve ever done. With 55

interviews in the can so far, there are a lot of interviews to

choose from.

And 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’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 Podcasts.

Check us out on the Web at brightideas.co.

About Andy Michaels

Andy worked for the global consulting firm Accenture for over eight years, traveling the country helping Fortune 500 companies achieve positive results through smart implementation of process and technology. After getting sidelined by Hodgkin’s Lymphoma for nearly two years, Andy went back to the drawing board to rethink his approach to life and his definition of success.

He now serves as the CIO for Blue Chip Athletic, where he introduced Infusionsoft to catapult their sales of retail and custom apparel. In two years he turned Blue Chip from a customer-ignoring wallflower into the belle of the athletic apparel ball, culminating in their nomination as an Infusionsoft Ultimate Marketer in 2013.