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

• Conquer the Chaos
• Marcus Sheridan Interview
• Infusionsoft’s Elite forum
• BrightIdeas’ Lifecycle Marketing Guide
• Made to Stick
• Janette Gleason Interview
• BrightIdeas.co Agency Mastermind Group

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

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’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.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”InfusionsoftCTA”]

How would you like to triple your company’s revenue in just 18 months? Sound too good to be true?

It can be done. In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Dustin Burleson, a practicing Orthodontist and an extremely talented marketer. By focusing on marketing excellence, Dr. Burleson has been able to build a practice that has 4 locations, 35 employees, 7,500 patients, and annual revenue of just over $4 million.

Best of all, Dr. Burleson has increased his vacation days from just 5 to over 40 per year!

In this exclusive interview Dr. Burleson will go into detail explaining how he:

• Increased revenue by over 600% since deciding to focus on improving his clinic’s marketing
• Attracts new patients
• Retains existing patients
• Reduced his patient acquisition cost by 56%
• Increased revenue from referrals from just 20% of total revenue to over 60%
• Managed to go from 50 new patients per month to over 170 without overwhelming his staff
• Makes use of high quality free information reports to capture the interest of prospective patients, and then, how he’s automated the entire follow up sequence that last for 11 months after the initial inquiry which has resulted in 30% more calls from these prospective patients
• Advertises in specific locations to drive more traffic to the portions of his website that offer these valuable free information reports
• Configured his systems to alert his staff to which patients and prospective patients require a personal touch, and when that touch is needed so that no one falls through the cracks
• Created an irresistable offer that gets bundle in with routine treatments so that he is able to protect his pricing

…And so much more!

Links Mentioned

• Contest Domination
• Dentma.com
• Think and Grow Rich
• BurlesonSeminars.com

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

Transcript

Trent: Hey there. 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 Dustin Burleson of Burleson

Orthodontics. Burleson was started in 2006 with just one

employee and no customers.Today Burleson is doing over $4 million a year with 35 employees,

four locations and over 7,500 active patients. In 2013 Burleson

was named as one of Infusionsoft’s Ultimate Marketer of the Year

finalists, and after hearing its story of how using Infusions

software tripled the size of this company, I knew that I really

wanted to have Dustin on the show.But before we get to that I have a couple of special announcements,

including my technology tip. So this one is, if you use Chrome

and you frequently need to access the same kind of set of

webpages in multiple tabs, there is a free chrome extension

called FreshStart Cross Session Browser Manager. So if you just

Google Chrome extensions, it’ll take you to chrome extension

store where you can get this. So if there’s like five or six

tabs. For example, for me, I have like this social, so it will

open up Facebook, it will open LinkedIn, it’ll open YouTube and

it’ll open up Twitter. So I don’t have to open those manually, I

just click this button and all of them just pop up. That’s

exactly what Fresh Start will do for you.The next thing I want you make you aware of is my upcoming webinar on

Lifecycle Marketing. Now, this a topic if you aren’t familiar

with lifecycle marketing, you really need to be because it’s

what separates the profitable businesses from the ones that are

struggling. Lifecycle marketing comes down to seven steps:

attracting traffic, capturing leads, nurturing those prospects,

converting those prospects to customers, delivering your product

or service, and satisfying the customers with, not even just

satisfying wowing your customers, increasing revenue with

upsells and cross-sells and then motivating your customers to

generate referrals.And as you are going to hear in this episode, my guest used to get

15% to 20% of his new clients from referral now he gets 60% of

his business from referrals from existing clients. So lots of

good stuff to come in this interview, to sign up for that

webinar just go to brightideas.co and you’ll be able to be on

the list and you’ll receive a notification every time that I do

that webinar.So that said, let’s transition over to my interview with Dustin. Hey

Dustin. Welcome to the show.Dustin: Hi Trent, thank you so much for having me.Trent: No, it’s my pleasure to have you on the show. So for the folks

who have just heard the introduction that I read off for you,

but don’t really know who you are, maybe just in your own words

give us a little short brief introduction of who you are and

what you do.

Dustin: Sure. I’d love to. So by trade I’m an orthodontist, so I work

on teeth and help mostly kids and some adults straighten their

smiles and improve their bites. We also work with cleft lip and

palate kids. So by professional, I’m a trained orthodontist, but

over the years of growing into coaching and consulting other

doctors, dentists and certainly orthodontists on how to improve

the business life, how to improve their practices and actually

create a lifestyle that’s not so much about working in the mouth

24/7.

So that’s a little bit about me, I’m from Kansas City, Missouri. Have

a wife and three beautiful children and we have four locations

throughout the Metro area and about 35 employees and we’ve grown

from zero patients and zero employees. Actually, I was the first

employee back in 2006. So it’s been a rapidly growing ride and

we’ve been enjoying it quite a bit.

Trent: And no kidding, that is a phenomenal accomplishment and so for

the folks who are listening how I met Dustin was at InfusionCon,

which is Infusionsoft’s Annual Conference, and he was nominated

as one of the three finalists for Ultimate Marketer of the Year.

So this is going to be a conversation that has a lot to do with

Infusionsoft because, and I’m going to let Dustin explain it to

you, it had a pretty big impact on his business.

Do you want talk before we get into the how you did what you did? Can

you just tell us a little bit about the results that you

achieved Dustin? So the folks who are listening can figure out

hey should I keep listening to this interview or should I skip

on and do something else today.

Dustin: Yeah, so for those who are result-driven much like I am, I will

fast-forward to the end result and say that since we started

with Infusionsoft our company grew 600% and that was beyond our

a pretty good-sized company. So we started getting seriously

involved with using Infusionsoft on a day-to-day basis to run

our operations. We purchased the software probably in 2009 and

like a lot of users kind of dabbled with it and once we got

really serious with it in 18 months it grew our business over

600%.

So it’s been a tremendous result for us and I would encourage anyone

who’s not using it to at least look it up and can consider that

because we’re going to talk about, today’s trend is the nuts and

bolts of how that’s happened and it’s as Trent knows a very,

very powerful piece of software and it’s completely changed not

just our business but my personal life as well. If you are

entrepreneur looking to get some free time back, enough to spend

some more time with your family and to not be involved in the

doing day-to-day routine, repetitive tasks that Infusionsoft can

totally change your business life and it’s certainly done that

for us.

Trent: And for me as well because I’m also a very happy Infusionsoft

user and by the way a few, a lot of my audience is not in your

business Dustin, they have their own marketing agencies or

variety of other types of small businesses and if that’s you and

you’re listening don’t tune out because the principles that

we’re going to talk about in this interview are applicable to

your businesses just like they were applicable to Dustin’s and

this is going to be, it could be a game changer for you.

Obviously for Dustin using the software it was. For me, it has had a

huge impact on my business as well and when I was at InfusionCon

I met entrepreneur after entrepreneur after entrepreneur who

were just raving fans and one of them in fact said, “With

Infusionsoft you can hit 1 million by accident.” I thought was

great.

Dustin: That’s a great point. Yeah, that collection of individuals and

businesses is unlike anything else on the planet. If you’ve

never been on InfusionCon, this is on YouTube, I agree with

Trent. This is something that you really can get so many great

ideas and most of them, you had a great point which is most of

our big breakthroughs in business have come from outside of our

industry.

So the idea of, well, I’m not orthodontist and I’m not from Kansas

City, so I’m going to tune out to this episode and listen to one

when Trent starts to talk about my business and my particular

part of the world, I would caution you against our biggest

breakthroughs have come from outside of our industry. So the

hours we set, how we train customer service positions in our

office, down to how we communicate with our patients, none of

that I have learned from other orthodontist. So it’s a great

point.

Trent: Yeah, and thank you for echoing that. All right. So let’s jump

into, I want to make sure that people understand when they might

want to consider using Infusionsoft, so tell us a little bit

about your business and what you were using before Infusionsoft.

Dustin: Good, it’s a great question. We tried everything because we hit

a wall. I think when you look in your business and say, “It

seems like there’s something that could be a little bit more

streamlined.” In other words, we seem to be doing the same task

over and over and over again.

So a good example might be a new client or a new customer welcome

sequence. So they purchase a product or service from you and you

want to follow-up with that individual to make sure they’re

happy with the product or service. You want encourage referrals

and get feedback, you want to make sure that they come back

again and again to purchase either another product or to renew

that service.

For us that sequence was the same thing over and over again. It had

to be somewhat customized to the individual. But we were wasting

a lot of time manually printing letters, manually sending email,

so we start to look at some email automation tools, constant

contact and mail jumper to the very entry-level one of those,

AWeber was a little bit more sophisticated, but when you get

into that world of marketing automation, you’ll quickly hear

about or meet someone or even get into a sequence from a company

that’s using Infusionsoft, and you start to compare the benefits

of Infusionsoft to a lot of the others. We found it was far

superior.

And so our initial drive to get into something this sophisticated was

to take that the mundane, those repetitive tasks you’re doing

over and over again, your staff is just completely strapped down

with these repetitive tasks. For us, getting that off of our

staff so they could focus more on spending time with our

clients. That was a huge initiating drive for us.

Trent: And so just so that people know, Infusionsoft is your customer

relationship management software. It’s your e-commerce shopping

cart software. It’s your email marketing software and your

marketing automation software all wrapped into one beautiful

package that works together. And I think that’s one of the

reasons why it’s so popular because when you’re using multiple

systems, trying to get them all talk to each other can be a real

nightmare, especially for someone who’s not technical and

doesn’t understand what an API is and doesn’t want to hire a

programmer and all this other stuff which causes friction in the

whole idea in marketing and in running your business is to avoid

friction.

All right, so Dustin, can you just tell us a little bit at the high

level and we’re going to drill in with details here and follow-

up questions, but how are you using Infusionsoft in your

business?

Dustin: At this level, we get this question a lot, and we kind of joke

with a smile and say, “I’m not sure of any way that we’re not

using Infusionsoft.” So it’s from everything as like you

mentioned with marketing. So how we attract and convert leads

into customers, how we nurture those customers to encourage

referrals.

So we’re using it to drive new business. We’re using it then at that

point with new customers to drive new referrals. We’re using it

to increase their satisfaction, so all our surveys and all of

our quality assurance measures are run through Infusionsoft. If

you boil down to the very nitty-gritty, we’re actually using it

to train new staff member. We’re using it in HR. We’re using to

nurture referrals from, for me would be B2B type referrals. As a

dental specialist we’re using that to nurture relationships

amongst our general dentists to send us patients.

So on every level of the business, it’s back to basic management.

Peter Drucker says, “If there is something you can’t measure,

you really can’t manage it,” so any number in your business that

you’re measuring you can turn that on to Infusionsoft. So for us

it was new clients for us, so generating new patients. Where are

all those new patients are coming from.

So managing those leads, in other words automating the process of a

patient or a parent requesting a free report that now goes out

automatically, we don’t have to put it in the mail, it’ll

actually would go to our fulfillment center of its requested via

mail, and go via email if it’s requested that way. That’s all

automated. This happens without us even knowing it, you just set

up inside Infusionsoft and let it run.

So new patient management has been huge for us. We went from about 50

new patients a month to over 170 new patients a month just

through automation because we couldn’t keep up with it. It

wasn’t consistent and it really was kind of a mess if you’re

trying to manage it manually. So, on every level business we’re

kicking numbers that matter and we’re attaching and automating

the steps in the process to increase those numbers.

Trent: I want to go down my first of many rabbit holes here for just a

second because you talked about, you’re going to give a free

report and automate it and so forth. And I don’t know that

everyone that’s listening to this I understand exactly what you

mean, but I think there’s some people on who are listening who

might not grasp this free report lead generation what is that

all about?

So essentially what you’re doing is you’re putting up a page where

you’re offering a report that is relevant to a problem that

people are searching for? What’s the report? How you get traffic

to the page and then and don’t spend too much time on this

because there is so much other stuff I want to cover, but I

didn’t want to skip past because I think it’s important.

Dustin: I think what we found is a in my industry, a lot of parents are

considering not just, you know, do I need orthodontist, but when

should the kids go see an orthodontist. When should they get

braces? So we started looking at a lot of, you can go to Google

and actually see what people are searching for in your industry,

and for us it was a lot of parent searching for, “How much do

braces cost,” and “When is the best time to get braces?”

So we generated and created free reports that answer those questions.

So what you’re going to do is take really a question or problem

you can solve for your customer, your client or your patient and

you’re going to boil that down into just great contents. So this

is not a sales message. This is all about providing great

content to potential customers and the goal is to get those

potential customers to raise their hand and say “I’m interested.

This is something I’m interested in.” And then you capture their

contact information.

So we would generate free reports on landing pages and you can

advertise those through, for us, a lot of mommy blogs, so a lot

of moms that are talking about events in our area will advertise

on those websites. We’ll advertise in traditional media, we’ll

advertise on the radio, Google AdWords is a great lead

generation tool. We’ll also do some Facebook advertising.

So any lead source that works for you. In other words, where your

clients are coming from, whether it’s the Yellow Pages or

newspaper print, postcards, webinars, what you want to do is

think about how can I solve a problem for this patient or this

customer or this client, and then how can I then nurture that

relationship? Because not everybody is ready to buy.

So for lead generation for us we’ve automated that process and in

turn we’ve had parents stay in our sequences for up to 11 months

before they make the decision to actually call one of our

offices and schedule a complementary consultation. So for us

that blew our minds. We assumed when parents were ready for

braces, the buying cycle was within a few weeks, maybe a few

months, but a lot of these parents are staying in the sequences

for 11 months. Could you imagine trying to nurture someone for

11 months and keep in contact with them manually? For me it

would be impossible.

Trent: And that’s just what I was going to say is that the whole

automation of the follow-up is one of the reasons why

Infusionsoft, people that use it are such evangelists for it

because there’s no way you could do this manually. The wheels

would fall off, like I have a friend who’s a realtor, and he

spends all this money on postcards to generate leads and his

call to action is a phone number, and I said to him, I go, “Why

do you not capture an email address?” He goes, “Well, it’s risk-

free. They can call.” And I said, “No, that’s not risk-free,

people don’t want to talk to you yet.” So I said, “What you’re

doing with the people that don’t call?”

Okay, so now he started to capture email addresses. But he doesn’t

have an automated follow-up system so they get the email to

respond, and they reply back and if the person doesn’t write

them back, again they don’t do anything more with that email

address ever.

Dustin: Wow.

Trent: And I said to him, I said, “Do you understand how much money

you’re leaving on the table?” And so I sent him some podcast on

realtors and so forth and so the light bulb is starting to go on

and I hope that if you’re listening to this and you’re capturing

email addresses and you don’t have an automated follow-up system

that allows your prospective customer to self-segment themselves

and will get into that little bit later on, you’re really

probably leaving a substantial amount of profit on the table.

Dustin: Absolutely.

Trent: Okay. Wow. I actually, my next question can you describe your

process for tracking and capturing leads? I think we just kind

of covered that one. All right.

So the content that you are using for lead magnets are all very heavy

information base to answer questions that people have and I want

to reference another podcast that I did. If you go to

brightideas.co and you search for Marcus Sheridan, he’s the pool

guy, and he has got the most highly trafficked pool website in

the world because he just decided to create a whole bunch of

content to answer people’s questions. So really don’t

underestimate the value of the simplicity of just thinking what

are people asking before they buy my stuff and figure out a way

to get that information to them.

All right. What is next, because you just answered a whole bunch of

my questions in advance. So, yeah, you said the results from

lead generation you went from 50 new patients a month to 170 a

month that’s pretty substantial.

All right. Let’s talk about nurturing and conversion then because

just because and you alluded to this stuff and you said some

people stay in the nurturing process for 11 months. So

obviously, not everybody that gives you their contact

information is in the same space from a psychological buying

standpoint. So can you talk a little bit about how you nurture,

and if you’re segmenting, how you segment?

Dustin: We do. So I mean the nurture process for us and Infusionsoft

has completely changed our business and the reason is obvious.

When you look at, so a good example is, you know, the other day,

I’ll tell you a story. I was at Costco and if have Costco, these

are like big-box retail stores, lots of people buying some

things for the business and buying some fruit and berries for

the kids at home and I see this lady. I kind of tell you she is

looking at me and she’s looked over a couple times and we’re

walking out to the parking lot, and she says, “Are you an

orthodontist?” I said, “Yeah,” and now my brain is rapidly

trying to think of who is this mother and what is her child’s

name because I’m assuming she’s a patient of ours.

And she could kind of tell that I was just hesitating and she said,

“We’re not a patient of yours yet, but we’re coming to see you

tomorrow. We have a new patient exam schedule tomorrow.” And I

thought that was really odd, and she said, “Well, we’ve seen

your YouTube videos and then we’ve requested some information.

We read one of your books.”

And so we went back and I made a mental note to remember her name and

I thanked her, and I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow and I went and

looked her up and she was one of these parents inside

Infusionsoft who had been in the sequence for months and months

and months, and so nurturing that that individual when finally

and here’s the main point, when she was ready to schedule the

appointment we were there and available to her. That wasn’t on

our terms.

It wasn’t on our time, it was on her terms and her time because what

we did previously to nurture was you would call the office much

like a real estate friend after lead generation via postcard or

direct mail of some sort and you would request some information.

We would send it to you and if you didn’t schedule appointment

we really didn’t do much else. We just assumed you were

disinterested and went somewhere else.

And what we found if you study consumer trends is we’re wildly

distracted. That mom, she didn’t purposely neglect scheduling an

appointment for her child, she’s got busy, she got busy with

life. I talked to a mom the other week that she had… so our

customers are primarily mothers aged 22 to 44 and she had eight

volleyball games in one weekend with her kids.

Trent: Wow.

Dustin: And so, this isn’t a mom who is disinterested in doing what’s

best for her child or who doesn’t want to buy what you have to

offer. She just really, really busy and what we want to do is be

there when that mom is finally ready to make the decision to

come into our office. So for us nurturing is a monthly process.

It’s highly loaded to the front-end.

So if you get into one of our sequences, we communicate with you

pretty frequently. We’ve tested this. We found that people, if

you give them a free report, and you don’t say anything else for

a couple weeks they usually forget about you. So we’re

frontloading the information heavy in the first two to three

weeks and then we stay in touch each month via newsletters, via

audio CDs that go out talking about specific topics. We have

free books, free reports, we sponsor a lot of events in the

community and we remind those people that we’re going to be

sponsoring those events. So it’s a monthly process and when that

patient or parent is finally ready to say yes, I can guarantee

you we’re the only doctor that stayed in touch with them that

long. So we become the obvious choice.

Trent: That is the beauty of it. Can you talk a little bit in detail

about frontloading the follow-up? Can you give us some

specifics, how many emails in the first couple days or week or

two-three weeks?

Dustin: Exactly, Trent. We tested this, so we used to do a weekly

email. If you got into one of our reports, free reports, or a

free audio CD or a free book, what we would do is we would send

you a thank you email that sent you the free report that you

requested and then a week later, we would follow up with you and

then in a week later we’d follow up to you again and a week

later, so it was about four-week process.

And what we’ve done now is push that higher into the frontend, so

those first-three emails go out on days one, three, five and

seven. So we’ve communicated with you four times in the first

week and then our conversion. In other words, patients who then

call us after those initial contacts has gone about 20% to 30%.

Because think about anything you’re ready to buy, whether it’s a car,

may be a jet ski or maybe a new boat, in this part of the

country we’re coming up on warmer spring weather so it’s getting

close to boating season and if you’re interested in buying a

boat and you call a boat store and ask for some information and

they send you some information and you don’t hear back from them

for a week. There’s a lot that can happen in a week. Another

opportunity might come up, you might get busy at work, you might

get distracted, get distracted with free vacation offer from

some other company.

And the reality is so we’re sending those first-four emails that used

to take a month, we’re sending those all now in the first week.

Initially to me with hesitation in testing was that we would be

really kind of annoying people with too much information. We

have actually found that our conversion rates have gone up

significantly. So I would encourage people to look at two or

three emails kind of tight in sequence from the first two or

three weeks and those patients and parents and clients who have

an interest do tend to convert higher when they get the

information they want much quicker.

Trent: In an email number one you’re thanking them and delivering the

content or report. In email two, three, and four, what are you

talking about?

Dustin: So it seems little silly, when we first tested this we thought,

should we just deliver more content so they have more and more

and more? What we found and you might be guilty of this, all

request a free report and get maybe a package and a DVD on some

something from a house for my business and I’ll set aside and I

might have not read it all the way, I might’ve looked at it and

glanced at it.

So the second email is reminding them why they requested the

information the first place. So it will be something along the

lines of, “Hey, I hope you got the free report that I sent. If

you’ve had a chance to look over it, you might have a question

or two and these are some the most popular questions we get

after new patients look at this reports. So we’re reminding them

first why they requested the free report it’s another chance,

it’s another excuse to stay in front of them and to give them

another email is we want to make sure if you any questions after

reading it.

And then we also, we break it down, we say, if you haven’t read it

yet, “Hey, we know life gets busy, let me go and summarize the

first main point,” and so that might be a little bit about how

much braces cost and why they cost what they do and how you

might be able to save for it, or how you might be able to sign

up for insurance and again solving problems for your client. If

they are about to purchase that product, what’s the first

problem they might encounter?

So for example, the real estate agent might say, “I’m just not sure

how to get my house on the market, I really want to sell my

house and I requested some information from this real estate

agent how I might list my house and I got the free packet, but I

haven’t taken the first step yet.” And so that that real estate

agent might remind that client potential lead, why they

requested the information the first place and then give them

kind of the first, almost like, it’s almost like you’re spoon

feeding them. You’re really kind of breaking up the free report

into bite-size pieces and that’s really worked well for us.

So we can track inside Infusionsoft, who clicks on what and when they

click on it, and for us, it’s actually the second email that

converts the highest. So the first email, it delivers what you

promised. The second email then reminds them why they requested

it and encourages them to take the next step.

So for your friend who was the real estate agent, could you imagine?

Our second email is the highest converting. What if we stopped

after the first email? We’d be losing the majority of our new

leads and new clients. So it’s a testament to follow-up. For us,

those next few emails are all about getting the patient or the

client to do the next step.

Trent: And our email number three and email number four is just a

version of what email number two is again.

Dustin: Exactly.

Trent: Reminding them and maybe summarizing some other points that you

haven’t talked about yet.

Dustin: The next point and then we’re delivering it in different media.

So if you look at our first email, the free report it’s usually

PDF. The second is the kind the first step in that report. The

third might push them into going to a video series. So maybe

they don’t want to read it, maybe they want to watch it and so

for us we have a site called burlesonorthodontics.tv, and those

are bite-size little webinars, two or three minutes in length

that talk about a particular question a patient or a parent

might have, and so we’ll push them to the video.

And then the final one really kind of gives them, so the final email

in that sequence is giving them what we call an Irresistible

Offer. And so for us or for your clients you might find, what

would be the final thing that might really get someone to call

in? You’re summarizing the first three emails you sent, because

frankly, some of them might not have read the first-three

emails. Don’t assume that everyone’s reading your content and so

we’re summarizing and then encouraging with the irresistible

offer to come in and schedule that first.

For us we do are selling face-to-face. We can’t sell braces over the

Internet, you have to actually come to my office and we have to

put them on your teeth. So it’s the final push to get them to

call. We use an irresistible offer to do that in the fourth

email.

Trent: And what is that irresistible offer look like?

Dustin: For us it’s free whitening and so we always offer free exams

and consultations with one of our doctors. But we add on top of

that a free whitening offer, so they can get up to a $500

premium, and it’s free professional whitening and if you bought

that as a patient in our office, it actually does cost $500 so

we’re throwing that in for free if they call by a certain date

and time so there is a scarcity on how many of those we can do

per month and so that for us works very well.

Trent: And do they need to get braces to get the free whitening or can

they…

Dustin: Exactly, so it’s a premium that goes with coming in and getting

braces, you’re exactly right.

Trent: Okay. So buy one thing, and over this limited time, I’m going

to give you this other highly valuable thing for free.

Dustin: Exactly. We’ve tested that, we have tested discounts, we’ve

tested what we call premiums or giveaways and for us the

premiums giveaways protect our price strategy, so we’re not

discounting our fees, but we do still convert a higher rate and

so for us you might test that, but for us premiums work better

than discounts and this is about the best offer we’ve been able

to together in multiple tests and that works pretty well.

Trent: So you’ve talked a lot about testing. So I’m going to maybe go

down another rabbit hole here. Let me proceed that with this

question, on your lead capture pages, so just so folks know

landing page basically has one thing to do, there’s no

navigation, I’m assuming at least in my mind there’s no

navigation. There is only thing there is to do is read the copy

and put your email address in or leave the page.

Dustin: Exactly.

Trent: What types of conversion rates, in other words what percentage

of the visitors that view those pages are giving you their

contact info?

Dustin: I’m going to back up this to just to segmenting the list,

because it depends on where they came from. So if these are

internal referrals, we push a lot of patience to landing pages

based on referral cards. So if you become a new patient in our

practice and let’s say, you get braces and then and you love the

experience so you refer a friend and you hand out a little

business card that on the back has a QR code that goes straight

to landing page that’s mobile-friendly. Those convert a lot

higher. So we’ll see 50% and 60% conversion on internal

referrals, which is amazing.

For cold leads coming from mommy blogs or Google ads will convert

anywhere from 5% to 10% of those that actually get into, in

other words eventually become new patients. I would say a high

convert. Once they visit the page, the number of people actually

giving us their email address is pretty significant, because

this isn’t like a get-rich in real estate program. This is like

people that are looking for braces, the kind of pretty, it’s a

pretty unique little niche.

So I don’t think most people wake up in the morning and go, “I wonder

how much braces costs and I just want to drive round town and

meet a bunch of orthodontist.” These are parents who are pretty

far along that process if not at least convinced that their kid

need some help. So our conversion on getting email addresses is

above 80% out of those landing pages. Getting patients, it

depends on where we’re segmenting and where those come from.

Trent: Yeah, and so the testing part of my question is do you use

split testing software?

Dustin: We do. So we’ll use split. There’s some that are built-in to

Infusionsoft and we use them, one of our vendors is ELaunchers

and they are a certified consultant. I’m trying to think of the

one if it’s AB split test but there’s a plug and you can use,

you can then randomly assign different headlines, randomly

assign different images and randomly assign different offers. So

for us, we usually test the headline, the image and the offer.

Now you can really get detailed and for businesses that do the

majority of their new patient or new client generation online, I

mean they are testing the color of the of the opt-in button,

they are testing the placement.

For us, we have tested, we use pictures in the background and if the

person in the picture has eyes looking towards the opt-in thing

or away from it that actually does drastically change your opt-

in rate, but most of this because we’re a little spoiled these

patients are somewhat interested in what we’re doing. It’s not

like a cold thing, like and say, “Make an extra thousand bucks

from home,” is not that type of an offer. The lead does mention

“braces.”

So I think we get a little spoiled in having higher conversion, but

certainly with direct mail, with all of our tests, minimum for

us is a 1,000 pieces and we’ll measures those results based on a

different tracking numbers, for Infusionsoft it’s super easy

because you can have different versions of the landing page.

Trent: Yeah.

Dustin: Yeah, I would test everything. You can always be your control

and sometimes you won’t, but it’s worth the test. Certainly in

landing pages, it doesn’t cost that much.

Trent: It is and if you’re not yet using Infusionsoft, there is tool,

and even if you’re using Infusionsoft, there’s the tool that I

use called Optimizely, Optimizely.com. You can, I think it’s…

I don’t know if you get a free account, but it’s 20 bucks a

month, it’s not expensive, and you do not need to understand how

to program any HTML. The interface is very, very easy to use,

and I was able to after I did an interview with Stephen Woesner,

if you come to brightideas.co and search for it.

I was able to double my conversion rate by taking into account some

of the things that I learned from him in that interview and then

using Optimizely, and now I’m a religious split tester. So I

would encourage that if you’re not split testing at something

you probably want to start.

All right, is there anything else before we leave the nurturing and

conversion part of our discussion Dustin, have I left anything

out that you think is particularly important and want to talk

about?

Dustin: I think like you mentioned initially we could talk about it all

day, but a quick recommendation that we have used in the

nurturing is to really survey your clients before. If you’re

doing this, in other words, if you’ve never used Infusionsoft,

you’re not sure what type of content you need to put out there,

you could spend months or years building content that has no

relevance to your client or to your new patient or new customer.

And so, I would ask them, basically you could start with the top

questions you get and then you can also then just ask people in

your process of buying this widget or buying this servicer from

us, what was your biggest fear or frustration? And then will

talk to you about price and they’ll talk to you about being able

find some they can trust and you’ll get some ideas on what type

of content.

So in the nurturing process, make sure you’re nurturing with

something that they want and not something that you think they

need. You might think because you’re inside of your business day-

to-day, you might think there is something your patients or

clients or customers really need and they might have no interest

in it whatsoever. So we used a lot of surveys before we built

out our content and so our articles get really, really good

download rates and they get a lot of good pass-through rates and

that would be my one piece of advice on nurturing is to make

sure you’re giving them what they want.

Trent: Yeah absolutely, and I want to talk just very briefly about how

I do this in my own funnel. So as I mentioned off, we’re not

camera, but off air before we started. My audience has made up

of a lot of marketing agencies, local marketing consultants, and

business owners and those are kind of three very different

people, and they would be interested in different interviews and

in our various products and some of my products would be of a

lot of interest to some but not interest to the others. So if

you’re in that situation, you want to say, “Hey, buy this

thing,” to everybody because if only one-third of your audience

is going to be interested in whatever that thing is, the other

two-third is going to start to tune you out when you start

sending offers like that.

So what I do very, very early in my funnel and Infusionsoft is very,

very helpful of this because of this concept called tagging

where you can essentially categorize people and you can apply

these tags based upon links that are clicked. So anyone

listening to this knows this because they’ve been my funnel and

they’ll get an email on this “Hey. Tell me a little bit about

you, do you run a marketing agency? Or do you run a small

business? Or are you just getting started in business?

And when those tags get applied I can actually have-if you imagine my

funnel, like a three-lane highway or you can have as many lanes

as you like, I can send my traffic down, and it’s all automated.

I don’t actually have to do this; I just build the highway to

begin with. They go down the appropriate lane for them based

upon the links that they have clicked.

In other words, I let my list segment themselves within the confines

of the funnel that I’ve built and that helps with conversion

rates, it helps with engagement, it obviously it helps with

revenue. So there is a ton of things that you are going to

discover that you can do once you start to build marketing

funnels and take advantage of marketing automation.

Dustin: Yeah, everyone listening to this should have just heard

collectively minds exploding around the globe because that’s

what happens when people hear a statement like that, which is

your list can self-segment. And what people get inside of the

sequences, in other words, the content delivered to them changes

based on their interaction with the software.

This totally blows the minds of our coaching and consulting clients.

So in our industry for example if a patient requests information

on bleaching or tooth whitening and then downloads a free report

that talks about how to use and eventually purchases it, their

interaction with the software is totally different than someone

who got the email for the initial offering didn’t say yes. There

are getting totally different piece of information even though

they entered the sequence at the same time.

This really, really blows the minds of our of our small business

owners, which I think most dentists are small business owners.

This is so powerful. It’s almost like as a user or as a patient

or a client of your business, they open the email and go it’s

almost like, this was sent just for me. It’s customized and it’s

just incredibly powerful. So I would encourage everyone to do

not miss that point.

Trent: And that’s where the things like the AWebers and Mailchimps

send and what I will call the entry-level programs that they

didn’t do any of that stuff. AWeber, you can kind a sort of do

it, but it’s a really tricky to do and you got to have all these

different lists and you got to have them join one list and exist

the other list and it’s a royal pain in the backside.

The other thing that I wanted to add, if you’re marketing agency and

you’re thinking that you would like to use Infusionsoft, I have

built-one of the challenges for a new Infusionsoft user is when

will we get all the content, like all the emails and all the

stuff for marketing agencies. I have already built all of that

for you. I have designed, I have the webinar, I have all the

follow-ups, the funnel, the email, everything is completely

built for you, and I will give it to you for free if you decide

to become an Infusionsoft user.

Obviously, I’m Infusionsoft affiliate and if you use my link I get

paid for that. So that’s why I’m giving it to you for free, but

just an FYI. If you have questions about that please email me

trent@brightideas.co. Okay. Want to move on to referrals, up

sells and repeat business. Can you tell us what are some of the

things, Dustin, that you’re doing to encourage referrals in your

business?

Dustin: It’s driving our new patients and we used to rely solely on

referrals from general dentists and what we found with new

technology like Invisalign and Six-Month Smiles is that the

dentists really enjoy doing braces as well. So we have to

continually provide and push for the front our value as

specialists to our clients. And so what we’ve done then is

focused a lot on patients who have great experiences in our

office.

So a lot of this is internal marketing, but just because we’re

talking internal marketing doesn’t mean you can’t turn

Infusionsoft on to it to automate it. And so for us, we really

looked at the number of patients who were coming from existing

clients and that number consistently hovered around 15% to 20%,

and I really wasn’t in the least bit satisfied with that and

I’ll tell you when we ask, so you might just right now think if

you’re a small business owner or a marketing consultant to small

business owners is what is your number, how many of your new

clients come from existing clients? And I’ll tell you that

question usually stumps most of our coaching and consulting

clients because they just don’t know.

So first of all, with Infusionsoft you’ll know because you can set

patients up as affiliates and you can tag them, you can see who

they’re referring. So in our industry a lot of our internal

marketing is driven through in-office contests, raffle prizes,

rewarding good behaviors. So for us, patients who show up on

time, kids who keep their teeth clean and don’t break the

braces, and then certainly patients and parents who refer their

friends and family, we enter them in a lot of raffles, and so we

give away a lot of prizes.

And you have to check how you can do this legally in your state. For

us it has to be random and so we give away random raffle prizes

and you can enter the contest even if you’re patient of ours but

it encourages patients to refer friends and family and we reward

those people and we track all that through Infusionsoft. So to

fast forward, our patient-to-patient referral or existing client

to existing client referral has gone from 15% to over 60%.

So the majority, in other words, the #1 referral source now on our

business is an existing client and if you run a business or even

remotely have interacted with the business you know the best new

customers are those who come from an existing satisfied customer

and so for us and there’s no better area of your business to

focus on then on turning internal referrals and just setting

those things on fire, just blow those through the roof and you

take every, and this is the takeaway point, you take every new

client acquisition, you cut the cost in half when they refer a

friend or family member.

So if you’re spending 200 bucks to 1,000 bucks to attract and

generate a new lead and that new lead refers a friend or family

member, you just cut the acquisition costs in half. So for us,

we put a lot of effort on this and Infusionsoft has built into

every sequence, new client new patient referral, referrals

generation, dentist, everyone that has a sequence in our office,

somewhere there is an invitation to invite a friend or family

member. It’s usually our business a coupon or a certificate for

a free new patient examine x-rays and sometimes depending on the

month and depending on our cycle we might offer premiums like

free iPod or free iPad or something exciting to get them to call

the office.

But Infusionsoft can track all that, the tag feature is tremendous.

We know in a split second, I can tell who’s referred, if they’ve

referred an adult or a child. That adult or child is an

Invisalign or in braces and you can custom tailor the message.

So for example, Trent, if you came to our office and got a

Invisalign, your follow-up sequence and inviting other people to

come experience our office would be tailored to what you’ve

experienced. So your referral postcard and your referral emails

and your referral letters would mention the benefits of

Invisalign because we’ve tracked a statistically, we know that

an adult Invisalign is probably not going to refer a 12-year-old

kid that’s in braces, but a 12-year-old kid in braces will

probably refer his friends who are also 12 year olds and need

braces. So Infusionsoft can do that. It’s so powerful and

referrals can just be taken to a new level, it’s really kind of

exciting.

Trent: I want to give a shout out two people, one of them is relevant

to something you just said, Dustin, have you heard of Contest

Domination.

Dustin: Yes.

Trent: You have. Okay. So Travis is a past guest and that is a

wonderful application for doing contests and it’s at

contestdomination.com and now that URL, I’m not an affiliate. I

don’t get paid anything to mention that. The other thing is

there is a podcast called I Love Marketing and it’s run by Joe

Polish and Dean Jackson and I’m a huge fan of their podcast and

so if you just check that on the iTunes store, I think you would

probably enjoy, I don’t mean just you Dustin, I mean the who are

listening to the show here today.

Dustin: Everyone can benefit from Joe Polish absolutely.

Trent: Absolutely, because if you’re in business, if you own your own

business, I believe before anything else, you are a marketer,

either that you’re poor.

Dustin: It’s a Zig Zigler line, “The poor salesman has skinny kids.”

Trent: Yeah.

Dustin: No, I think you’re absolutely right. This is about running a

successful business and if you believe in what you do you can’t

believe that’s worthy of hiding. You got to share with everyone

you can possibly share it with and if I’m on an airplane and you

sit next to me and you ask me what I do for a living? I usually

say I’m an entrepreneur and I teach other doctors how to market

their businesses and the more we talk that I’ll finally say I’m

a clinically trained orthodontist, but that’s just a very small

portion of what I do.

And if you don’t get serious about marketing, I can tell you the

world is changing and you’re going to be in basically the gig is

up right? If you think you’re going to just open a business and

wait for people to stumble across the threshold of your door or

stumble across your website without getting really serious about

marketing you’re really just kidding yourself. It’s not going to

be feasible; it hasn’t been in my opinion for years.

Professionals like mine are seeing historically. Orthodontist

did well with no marketing and we’re feeling the effects of

that. Since 2008, our industry is down 32% on average. In some

areas, up to 47%.

Trent: Wow.

Dustin: You’ve never seen dentist orthodontist go bankrupt; we’ve

actually seen that at record rates in areas like Arizona and Las

Vegas. So marketing should be your #1 focus on your business,

without a doubt you’re absolutely right.

Trent: Wow. That’s a huge decline. So very early in our show, you

talked about how Infusionsoft changed your life and marketing in

Infusionsoft so tightly correlated I think it’s a great segue.

Can you just, for the other entrepreneurs that are listening who

are maybe working too many hours and they have a spouse or kids

that don’t get to see them as much as they would like and

they’re just in that place where, “Man, I don’t feel like I can

work any less, because I’m just getting by, just getting the

bills paid.” What’s your life like now?

Dustin: It’s so drastically different. So I’ll fast-forward to the end

result, which I’m doing this podcast from home. My home office,

I got to the kids to school today and my three-year-old is still

at home, he’s not in school yet. So I get to have breakfast with

him and we were playing racetrack. We went out and had a daddy

date night last night. So we went and bought this cool little

racetrack with these cars, we were playing with that this

morning.

And so then I’ll get up and check some matrix on the practice. I’ll

check some things in Infusionsoft. I’ll check in with my team

leaders and site coordinators. We have three different offices

open today and today I will do some marketing, and I will see

patients later this week, but most of my job through the help of

Infusionsoft and really through the help of people like Joe

Polish and Dan Kennedy and people who have taught me to get

serious about marketing is that is that I get to really run a

business that operates on my terms.

And I would tell you I was in that place, it was in a dark and scary

place where I was working 16 to 18 hours a day not seeing my

wife and kids at all and feeling like the only way to get ahead

was to do more. To work, somehow work harder, even though I was

working six and seven days a week, and literally there were few

nights where I was at the office working on some marketing the

old-fashioned way, hammering it out, literally printing things

and stuffing envelopes and it was 2:00 or 3:00 morning I would

fall asleep, wake up in my shirt and tie, drive home, take a

shower and turn right back around to come back to the office.

So I’ve done, I’ve pulled all-nighters, and I’ll tell you there’s

nothing scarier than being in a position to own a business and

feeling like basically you’re an employee that can’t be fired.

In other words, you’ve got a job that can’t quit and I’ll tell

you, you got to think back to why you started your business in

the first place. You got to really write down your list of why

you’re doing this and for me it was to experience great things

with my family, to spend a lot of time with friends and to

travel and to help as many people as I could.

And there’s no way you’ll do that, if you’re the only person doing

everything in your business, you’ve got to get some help either

through delegation and for me Infusionsoft and so the

transformation has been night and day and you’ll hear the story

over and over again. My story is not unique. So to me

Infusionsoft didn’t just change the business, it changed my

life.

Trent: Yeah, you mentioned metrics. So I’m going to do another rabbit

hole here for a minute. So for people who don’t use

Infusionsoft, they won’t know about this dashboard thing and

when you talk about metrics, are you talking about looking at

the Infusionsoft dashboard and all the custom reports.

Dustin: We have customized some of it inside of our business as well so

there exactly, but yeah.

Trent: Can you expand? Tell us a little bit about the dashboard with

some of your little box of widgets are, some of things you’re

tracking and then maybe we can go little further and you can

explain some of the custom stuff you’ve done.

Dustin: So inside of Infusionsoft, you can track, open rates, so how

many people are opening your emails, how many people are

clicking on things, how many people have opted in the web forms.

You get a pretty good picture day-to-day and hour-to-hour how

your online lead generation is working and then if you’re a

slower pace, if you’re using direct mail, we do a lot of offline

to online lead capture.

That means we mail you a postcard, it pushes you to a website which

is really a landing page like Trent mentioned, there is only one

thing you can do and that’s give me your email address. We’re

seeing how many of those patients are opening, how many of them

then are clicking and downloading. So we can get a good idea if

the email really stunk, a lot of you opted out, it looked too

spammy, so we want to change that pretty quickly. So inside of

the digital realm of like what we’re doing to capture leads

that’s one thing.

On a grander scale, we’re looking at acquisition costs. In other

words, how much are we spending per piece, so if spent a certain

amount money on a Google AdWords campaign that’s pushing to a

certain part of our website or maybe our new video series or

perhaps on a postcard, we want to know how much it cost for each

one of those patients to show up at our practice. So for us, we

track acquisition cost pretty severely. In other words, we

really, really monitor that. We’re always trying to get it to go

down. So some of you might consider this cost per lead or cost

per sale. You want to figure out, in other words, you’re going

to see differences based on the media. So based on the lead

peace, in other words, where these new clients are coming from.

So you don’t want to be too fast to disregard, in other words if you

know your numbers, you might say wow were spending $200 per new

client in this area, like Google AdWords but the postcards,

we’re getting them for $85. So we should cut out the $200 and we

should focus on the $85. You got to really look at our biggest

metric than this lifetime value per customer. So how much does

that customer spend, how much do they potentially refer and you

might realize pretty quickly that a higher cost per lead has a

customer or a client or new patient that spends a lot more money

with you.

And so you really have to know your numbers and I can’t stress this

enough, you should know daily. It should not be a mistake, it

shouldn’t be guesswork. Like I know potentially within $100

exactly what will generate today, and I know what we should

generate by noon and you can break it down by hour. So if you’re

not monitoring how many new patients or new clients come to you

per month, per week, per day, there’s no way you can set goals

to improve that.

And so inside of Infusionsoft you can track all the stuff. So some of

this, the cost per lead and in cost per sale, you’ll have to

monitor and adjust if you’re using additional media outside of

just email marketing and online advertising because you’ll have

to plug. In other words, Infusionsoft has to know how much you

spend on the direct mail piece, how much was the postage, how

much was the postcard, but you can do it.

You should be getting a daily report, even if you’re the only

employee, you should have a daily report that’s how many new

customers came in, where they came from, how much it cost to

acquire those, how much they spend or how much they could

potentially spend in a lifetime, have they referred people or

not, how much was produced, how much was collected and is there

bad debt outstanding. All that should come daily in report; you

can do that inside Infusionsoft.

Trent: So I want to dive a little deeper there. Let’s talk about, so

people come in and they become a patient and spend some money

with you, they’re are not checking out online and using

Infusionsoft shopping cart features. So how are you getting, you

just have staff that like do you have an API to your bookkeeping

system, do your staff manually, enter how much they spend, how

does that get there?

Dustin: Well, I tell you. We used to do the painful way and we built, I

say, we hired a brilliant team called Dentama to build a bridge

between our practice management software and Infusionsoft so

there is an API that daily then uploads all the data.

Appointment times, broken appointments, missed appointments,

whatever braces they are wearing, how much they owe us through

last payment, their date of last payment, all that information

goes back and forth between Infusionsoft and our practice

management software.

So most dentist have some sort of in my industry, a piece of software

that the stores and organizes x-rays and clinical notes. It

would store insurance information and then their contracts and

payment information. For me, ideally I’d build the whole thing

inside Infusionsoft and we’re kind of working on that, but for

now the two communicate with each other inside of API that was

built by a group of guys and it’s called Dentama.

And so that for us was a game changer because now we can then track

pretty easily inside Infusionsoft how much. If I want a list of

how many people have not bought whitening, I can quickly send an

email to just those people which is convenient enough and

increases are open rate.

But now think about direct mail, how much more efficient would it be

to only send postcards because then we’re talking hard cost.

Emails are essentially is free, you don’t pay for the service,

you can send emails all day long. Sending out direct mail to

15,000 or 20,000 people gets expensive pretty quickly. So we can

then inside Infusionsoft see if the lifetime customer value is

low for a group of people and we want to increase that we can

send specific targeted pieces to just those people. Usually for

us, it’s increasing referrals of friends and family.

So if there’s two kids in the family that have braces, we can about

30% of the time get mom or dad eventually to come inside to the

practice and get Invisalign. There are already there anyways,

they are waiting in the waiting room, you might and they

probably got quick at teeth. So for us, the upsales are

referring friends and family and then also selling additional

services, like whitening or like night guards or mouth guards

and things like that.

Trent: Okay. So all of that revenue data is now making its way into

Infusionsoft. So it’s very easy to calculate then the lifetime

value of a customer.

Dustin: Yes.

Trent: So let’s get back to the beginning, you talked about cost of

acquisition of a lead and you talked about Facebook advertising,

Google advertising, advertising on mommy blogs, direct mail, so

we’ve got spend that is occurring in a variety of different

medium, none of which are connected to Infusionsoft so how is

that data getting into Infusionsoft.

Dustin: You can link in, so you can build there is companies that have

APIs that connect with QuickBooks. So if you’re good if you have

an accountant keeps actual hard costs, we might actually tag

inside of QuickBooks. So for us, we use one vendor for all of

our print mail and then we’ll have a specific code for that

piece.

So I know like the April postcard went out April 1st, we’ve got the

amount we spent on that and we can have that actually through an

API with QuickBooks tag into that. So inside of our

Infusionsoft, we’re not just running email sequences, we’re

putting people into direct mail sequences, and for us that’s a

simplest exporting the list. So Infusionsoft, if people aren’t

familiar with Infusionsoft, it’s not that some magical computer

system in the sky that that connects to a fulfillment house and

prints out postcard. You can do that, but for us we’ve got one

vendor that prints all of our hardcopy sales letters and

postcards and we tag into that, how much that costs we can track

and as those patients come out, you have to tag them, there is

some actual human effort here.

So when a phone operator in our business takes a phone call,

hopefully they use the call tracking number that’s on the

postcards. So for us there’s a whisper feature and the whisper

feature right before you answer the phone says April postcard

and so that that staff member on the phone knows that this new

client is calling probably with a postcard in front of them and

that phone number is only published on that postcard; we don’t

publish that phone number anywhere else. So that staff has to

tag that patient as being referred from that postcard and that’s

how we track that this me patients came from this piece and this

is how much we spent and this is our average acquisition cost

for that group.

Now as you go through the lifecycle of a customer, the long lifetime

customer value increases. So we can only base it initially on an

average when they start the contract, but we know historically

those numbers go up anywhere from 10% to 15% of what patients

initially signed to spend we can usually bump that in our

business by 10% or 15% as an average conglomerate into the

referral or through purchasing additional products and services.

Trent: And are you using QuickBooks online?

Dustin: We are. So there’s an actual…

Trent: Okay.

Dustin: There is a service, I don’t know if it’s just in our area

through your CPA, but it’s called bill.com and bill.com has an

online version of QuickBooks that actually works pretty well

with this.

Trent: Okay. So was there anything custom to get QuickBooks talking to

Infusionsoft or did you just use the service from bill.com.

Dustin: No, there isn’t, so ELauncher is the company, they’re an

Infusionsoft certified consultant who’s helped with that. So

anything, I can go to a certain extent and understanding a lot

of this, but when we start talking about programming APIs, I

just hire some people who know how to do that.

Trent: Yeah.

Dustin: That’s when I used it, I get to use the excuse, “Well, I’m just

a dentist.”

Trent: I don’t know how to program APIs either and I don’t want to

know how to program APIs because you just don’t need to know all

that kind of stuff, very easy to find people to do it. Okay. I

think I want to a wrap up with a lightning round because we’ve

been we’re closing in on an hour and I promised that would be an

hour. So I want to stick to the schedule.

So Dustin, last three questions what are you most excited about for

2013?

Dustin: I am most excited about expansion in our business. We got the

opportunity to take, now that we know are marketing systems

work, and they can be automated with Infusionsoft, we have the

ability to buy existing practices, and we’ve done this. So we’ve

grown from one location to four and we’re taking practices that

have a healthy patient base, but historically have done no

marketing and we’re taking small orthodontic offices that do 10

to 15 new patients a month and we’re bumping them within a few

months in 50 or 60. So for us it’ll be at a growth regionally

within our area to add new locations.

Trent: You are going to end up being a very wealthy man, my friend.

That’s a heck of a system, you’re buying businesses that have

patients that don’t understand how to market and you’re paying

whatever X of earnings as a multiple and you’re immediately

within three months able to bump up earning significantly and

roll all that up that. That’s a heck of a finance and leverage

strategy.

Dustin: Yeah.

Trent: Favorite business book.

Dustin: My favorite business book, oh my gosh, I’m looking at the

library like 400 of them. Anything by Dan Kennedy, anything by

Robert Ringer the probably number one, favorite business book of

all time would be Napoleon Hill’s, “Think and Grow Rich.”

Trent: Yeah, that’s a good one. Robert Ringer, never heard of him

before. Which one did he write?

Dustin: So he’s the guy back in the 70s, he changed it to be a little

less threatening but it was like “Looking out for #1” and

“Winning Through Intimidation” and then he’s changed it now to a

little less intimidating titles like one is called “Action:

Nothing Happens Until Something Moves.” That’s brilliant brand

strategy and that he did a lot real estate and really bright

guy, but a lot of his stuff is back in the 70s, but Robert

Ringer.

Trent: Okay. And in the off chance that we have, another orthodontist

listening to this episode are thinking, “Hey man, I want to get

in touch with Dustin.

Dustin: They can find me at burlesonseminars.com that’s where we have

coaching and consulting services available to orthodontists and

dentist as well.

Trent: Okay. Burlesonseminars.com. All right, my friend. Thank you so

much for doing this interview with me I thoroughly enjoyed it

and I hope that the listeners got just a truck load of good

ideas out of it. If you did and you have questions for Dustin

here in just a few minutes, I’m going to announce how you can

get to this episode, I can’t do it live during the interview

because I don’t know what that URL is yet, but I do in post

production. So you’ll be able to get everything you need and if

you have questions you’ll be able to put them in the post and I

would imagine that Dustin would probably keep an eye on that for

a day or two after it goes live. And if there are questions here

I will answer those. So Dustin, thank you so much for making

some time.

Dustin: Trent it’s always a pleasure. Thank you.

Trent: You’re very welcome. Take care.

Dustin: Thank you.

Trent: All right, to get the show notes for today’s episode, head over

to brightideas.co/56. When you’re there you’ll see all the links

that we’ve mentioned during this episode plus some other very

valuable information that you can use to ignite more growth in