Would you like to put customer acquisition on auto-pilot? Just imagine how it would feel to have a steady stream of qualified leads that were all happily buying your products on a regular basis.

Now imagine that they were also telling all their friends to do the same.

Sound too good to be true? Well…you might be surprised to learn that if you embrace something called Lifecycle Marketing in your business, that one day in the not too distant future, the scenario I’ve just described will become the reality of your business.

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Scott Martineau Co-founder of Infusionsoft, ranked by Inc Magazine as one of the fastest growing software companies in America. Infusionsoft is absolutely amazing software and I can’t imagine running my business without it. If I did, I’d have to work far longer hours and my business wouldn’t be nearly as easy to run as it is now.

I recently attended ICON, Infusionsoft’s annual business conference, and while there, I had a chance to meet Scott and ask him to come share his story here on the show.

When you listen to this interview, you are going to hear Scott and I talk about the following:

How they first started Infusionsoft back in 2001
Why their first idea wasn’t working and the one thing they changed that has allowed them to create a 400+ person company today.
Why Goldman Sachs invested $54 million in Infusionsoft and what this means for the future of small business in general
The consulting business model vs the product business model and what you need to understand about the massive benefit of one versus the other
The importance of picking a target market and how to do it correctly (20:15)
An example of some early challenges and how Scott and his partners turned this challenge into a huge opportunity (26:15)
Why it is so important for an entrepreneur to have a strong mind and 3 thing you can do to make yours even stronger (33:15)
An overview of Lifecycle Marketing and why to embrace it in your business (39:45)
What’s next for small business owners (55:15)

Links Mentioned

More About This Episode

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

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

Listen Now

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.