Web Forms

When you produce your Lead Magnet that your ideal prospects just have to have you need to create a way for them to request that free report.

When you’re doing it online that means Web Forms.

The dichotomy (for those of you from South Louisiana that means “two thingees against each other”) is that the less information you require of your prospects the more that will actually complete your opt in form.

The good news there is you are now generating leads. The bad news is you know little about them. (We’ll cross that bridge shortly…stay tuned.)

So how do you create Web Forms? You can learn HTML (and frustrate yourself) or invest in one of a couple of platforms that let you make them with point and click simplicity.

If you’re brand new to Web Forms and autoresponders you can get started with a 30 day trail for $1 of one of the simplest yet most capable platforms here. If you have been experimenting with Web Forms and autoresponders and/or have a decent sized list (2,000+ names) I recommend you hop on over to Infusionsoft and try their free 30-day trial.

Whichever one you choose I guarantee you’ll be fired up the first time you get a notification that your web form was completed and a new prospect entered your database. It’s worth the effort to master list building with Web Forms.

We cover this and a whole lot more in the Inner Circle Silver. (For a limited time you can participate fully in my Inner Circle Silver for just $37 by enrolling here.)

Good Selling.

The tag line here at The Sales Whisperer® is “Life is too short for follow up calls.”

What I mean by that tag line is that your entire sales and marketing process must be scripted and planned in advance and the people you meet should know when they will hear from you, how they will hear from you and purpose of the correspondence and/or meeting.

Good ol’ Woody Allen once said “80% of success is just showing up.”

In today’s Age of Disruption, your sales and business success is ALL ABOUT your marketing efforts showing up in the inbox, mail box, voice mail and text on a regular and consistent basis or you and your company and your features and your benefits and your patents and your new and improved gizmo will be forgotten

While most sales professionals and business owners and marketing folks understand this at a rudimentary level, i.e., send a folder with a full-color brochure to someone that fills out a contact form then call them 12 times until they answer then push for a meeting and try to sell them something, what I have in mind is a little more elegant, sophisticated and productive.

In order to get this right you must view proper follow-up as a way of life vs. a gimmick or tactic or quick hit for a short term revenue boost. It requires forethought and planning because to do it well you must take what you do naturally or “off the cuff” (Sin # 1 of The 7 Deadly Sins of Selling) and systematize it and apply it to every constituent group in your business.

Here are some ideas on how to take your follow-up “To infinity and beyond!” (I just love Tim Allen in Buzz Lightyear.)

Employees & Staff

• In my sales management training I instruct my clients to “manage activity and pay on results.” With the right marketing automation platform you can assign automated tasks and notifications to your employees to keep them focused and on point. Case in point is cold calling. In my prospecting training I teach sales people to develop not only a great opening line for speaking to prospects but to also deliver a storyline of sequential voicemail messages when they reach the inevitable voicemail in the majority of their calls. Your autoresponder can be set to deliver a message to your salespeople that it is time to call prospect #1,687 and leave voicemail message #3. If you can keep your people that focused over any length of time good things will happen!

Clients & Customers

• Build an autoresonder email series to deliver supplemental training to new customers. This is especially beneficial when you have a complex product or service with many subtleties or intricate features.
• Upsell or cross-promote to your customers and offer extended warranties, upgraded service packages or complimentary offerings.
• Send a survey to your customers asking them how they would rate your product, service and support. (Send an apology letter and/or gift if you’ve let them down.)
• Send an email asking for testimonials.
• Send an email or letter asking for referrals.
• Send handwritten notes and/or little gifts or articles about their business or industry.

Prospects

• Auto-responders: You need an autoresponder to “automatically respond” to your prospects in a timely manner. Simple autoresponders such as Aweber can be setup to deliver a series of emails, free reports, links to audio or video files on your site, announcements of upcoming webinars or tradeshows and even snail mail to your prospects over a predetermined time frame. Delivering relevant, credible, timely information on a consistent basis to people that asked for your information is a great and affordable way to stay top of mind and build trust. My personal favorite is more than just an autoresponder, it’s actually a complete marketing and selling automation secret weapon and they allow my readers to get a free 30-day trial vs. the standard 15-day trial. Check out the only software platform guaranteed to double your sales here.
• Social Media: As soon as I meet someone I’m checking out their profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and sending them invitations to connect. Then I stay in touch. I shoot a quick note to them and I make sure to comment on a couple of posts they make sooner rather than later to help them remember me and what I do.

Referrals & Referral Sources

• Referrals are like ATMs with hopes, fears, desires and goals. Cater to and address their needs and the profits will flow forth. Craft a follow-up process that not only helps you get and stay in touch with your referrals but also with the referral source! Keep them informed of the progress you’re making with the referral they sent your way. Let them both know they are appreciated and special.

Vendors & Suppliers

• These are free eyes and ears for you and your business. Treat them like trusted, valued, appreciated extensions of your company by keeping them informed and watch your vendor issues decline, their satisfaction rise and their sales – and yours – soar.

To see what kind of follow up sequences we can create together click on over to my contact page and setup a free consultation.

Calling all tired, frustrated, duplicate-data-duped entrepreneurs and business owners!

How long will you grapple and wrestle and struggle and fight with various systems for your

• Online shopping cart,
• Contact management system,
• Project management platform,
• Auto responder,
• Reporting tools,
• Invoicing and order tracking?

It’s amazing how often my soon-to-be clients describe losing information, duplicating client records and orders, wasting time and money paying people to duplicate data entry and their nearly complete inability to segment their client/prospect list in order to follow up properly with prospects, inform clients and prospects of specials, offer upsells and basically sell to their clients.

After I first learned of InfusionSoft I went out to the Anaheim Convention Center in the summer of 2008 during their four city tour with Dan Kennedy. After quite a bit of due diligence I decided to not only make the switch to Infusionsoft but I chose to become a Certified Marketing Automation Coach (CMAC) with them. (More on the difference between a cludgy CRM and marketing automation later.)

Here are some of the big ways InfusionSoft simplifies small business operations:

• You can view a contact in InfusionSoft and see every product they’ve ever purchased, subscriptions they are receiving or belong to, emails received – and if they opened them – as well as any contact they’ve had with your company.
• You can process orders, customize sale prices, offer promo codes or discounts and otherwise modify and track unique transaction request efficiently.
• Your follow-up sequences can be customized and expanded to include not only emails but also phone calls, direct mail, faxes and even send attachments (don’t try this with 1ShoppingCart or Aweber.)
• Excellent deliverability rates.
• Outlook integration is a snap with InfusionSoft’s plugin. Now all of your calendar items and tasks can be synchronized to you desktop. You can also send an email from Outlook and tag it to the client’s record in InfusionSoft with no extra steps.
• List segmentation is nearly infinite. InfusionSoft enables you to target contacts any which way to Sunday:
  • Customers
    • Product
    • Service
    • Both
  • Prospects
    • Webinar attendee
    • Tradeshow attendee
    • Free report requester
    • Multiple report requester
  • Address: city, state, zip code, country
  • Custom tags
  • And you can do it all with the click of two buttons (rather than manually deselecting / unsubscribing individuals.)
• The affiliate module allows you to modify individual products so you can run multiple affiliate campaigns and offer different rates to your more productive partners.

While it may sound self-serving, you do need someone who knows InfusionSoft to transition your current systems, implement your new processes and even maintain it (even if just for 1-2 hours per week) in order to get the most out of it.

Remember, this is not a plugin or a stand-alone, bolt-on module like you’ll find at AppExhange. This is a COMPLETE system. Without retaining outside help you will at least take longer to realize the benefits of the system and at worst you’ll get frustrated and waste time. (I have documented the setup procedures and best practices that I share with all of my InfusionSoft clients.)

I know some people this is an expensive system and it looks that way when you compare it to a beginner email “component” from Constant Contact but that’s not a fair comparison.

InfusionSoft offers the most complete and affordable and functional system for small business owners on the market today.

They have eliminated the upfront fee so you can begin using InfusionSoft today for just $199/mo for the Basic and $299/mo for the Deluxe setup.

If you are already using two or more systems for your business today you will find that you will save time and money when you fully utilize everything InfusionSoft offers.

If you’d like a 30-day trial that is only available through CMACs like me please click on my affiliate link here.

Prospect: “We don’t really do email autoresponders but we’re looking into it. We’ve seen that AWeber starts at $19 per month. What do you think?”

Me: “How big do you want to grow?”

Prospect: “Well, ah, as big as possible!?”

Me: “How big will your list have to be to ‘grow as big as possible’?”

Prospect: “Probably several thousand if not tens of thousands.”

Me: “And you think simple email blasts are the way to get there affordably and in a timely manner?”

Prospect: “Well, er, yes? I mean, maybe…?”

Me: “How many emails do you get a day and how many do you actually read?”

Prospect: “I get a couple hundred a day and I don’t even read the emails I want to get.”

Me: “How good are you at writing and developing content?”

Prospect: “I suck at writing. I’m terrible at writing. I DESPISE writing. I’m horrible at writing. I’m too much of a perfectionist. It takes me a month to write a shopping list, for heaven’s sake!”

Me: “How much is a new client worth both up front and over the lifetime of them being a client?”

Prospect: “We make anywhere from $250 to $750 up front and we usually keep our clients a long time so the lifetime value of a new client is easily in the $1,000 to $2,000 profit range.”

Me: “So let me get this straight:

• You want to grow big and fast.
• You don’t read emails.
• You can’t write.
• You want and need to grow your list to many thousands of prospects and clients.
• You think starting with the cheapest, least functional email-only autoresponder is the way to catapult you to fame, fortune and fun?

“I’m not sure what you’re smoking but I hope you have a prescription and are in group therapy.”

Prospect: “What should I do?”

Me: “You’re on the right track. Email autoresponders help you stay in touch with contacts and prospects 24 hours a day, which is important. Creating and running multiple email campaigns including email newsletters is important as well. You also need the ability to create sign up / lead capture forms to embed into your website.

“To help you create these emails it’s important to not only have templates for the layout so the email looks pretty, it’s VITAL to have templates for the actual CONTENT and sequences you will be sending since you and 99.99% of business owners are TERRIBLE at producing letters THAT SELL! Wouldn’t you agree?”

Prospect: “Amen!”

Me: “Not only is it important to have relevant, timely emails that are delivered in the proper sequence but to really grow your business you must have the ability to create, coordinate and deliver multi-media, multi-touch marketing messages to your prospects such as voicemail and fax broadcasts as well as direct mail.

“I mean, come on! If you can make $500 per client up front, and $1,000 – $2,000 over the next 12-24 months from each new client, not counting their referrals, why are you looking at the cheapest, least-capable alternative out there to grow your business?

“So AWeber has a $19/mo plan that explodes to $149/mo as soon as you grow your list to any meaningful size but they can’t do multi-media, multi-step sequences, you have to develop all of your own content on your own, you have no trackable links to trigger additional targeted actions and you still have to juggle and massage your leads in and out of and between some type of CRM, which, by the way, is not what Outlook was built for, and what if your prospect wants to become a client and buy additional products or services from you? What will you use to generate and track invoices and orders? Will it integrate with QuickBooks or Outlook, for that matter, to track the history of your correspondence and orders?

By the time you pay for the 3-4 systems you’ll need you’ll be in the $249 to $399/mo range for the systems alone with no idea how much time you are wasting A) learning multiple systems, B) integrating multiple systems, C) duplicating data across multiple systems and D) losing clients because data wasn’t

“WHEW! I need a beer and a Tylenol just thinking about what your cheap, simple, basic, email autoresponders CAN’T DO!

“The ONLY way to grow today is to both outwork and out-think your competition. You have to be willing to do what they’re not willing to do and you have to do it over and over again, consistently and without fail.

“Generating sequences and action sets and triggers and trackable links and web forms and order forms and shopping carts and CRM platforms and email integration and QuickBooks integration is flat out hard work BUT…with Infusionsoft you only have to do it once for each product or service or special report you generate and then you let it run FOREVER!

“Then, while that product or service is making you money you can clone it, modify it slightly for your next offering and then let that one make you money. RINSE, WASH, REPEAT!”

If you’d like to see how Infusionsoft stacks up against ACT!, Salesforce.com, Constant Contact, AWeber and 1Shoppingcart follow this link.

If you’d like a 30 day free trial of Infusionsoft just click on the logo here.

Get Your 30-Day Free Trial of Infusionsoft By Clicking Here!

As a CMAC for over a year I like Infusionsoft and the people.

While I have had some frustration with some features (or lack thereof) the staff has treated me like gold and, no, I don’t think it’s because I’m a CMAC. (I’m not some world-renowned super marketer. Just a former Air Force football player with 6 kids building my own sales and marketing consulting gig in the bowels of SoCal with a passion for sales and marketing training/consulting.)

I am also certified as a trainer with Salesforce.com and I used SFDC since 2004 with various high tech companies.

With that experience I have no qualms recommending Infusionsoft to small business owners over SFDC. SFDC was meant for large enterprises. SFDC sucks when it comes to helping small businesses market and sell and grow.

I will stipulate that I approach using Infusionsoft from a sales and marketing standpoint vs. a programmer, which I am not.

Infusionsoft has been great for my small business clients that are looking to:
- embed web forms.
- build a database.
- tag that database for future, relevant correspondence.
- communicate with that database regularly with good, relevant content.
- codify and quantify their unique selling propositions to ensure their messaging is delivered to 100% of prospects 100% of the time.
- track open rates with HTML emails and trackable links embedded in the emails.
- process credit cards (ecommerce) for both one time orders and subscriptions via order forms and/or a shopping cart.
- offer an upsell at the time of checkout.
- store and share notes and files/documents with small teams.
- grow.

I’m glad Infusionsoft dropped the $5,000 setup fee. I was not a fan of that at all.

Infusionsoft, when installed and used properly like Gregg LaPore described above, is PERFECT for the one-office dentist, Realtor®, mortgage broker, promotional items company, IT VAR, restaurant owner, etc with 1 – 25 employees and thinks marketing is putting a wrap on their car and their picture on their business card and expect the phone to ring.

I’ve been selling and/or training since 1995 and I can tell you that Infusionsoft and Dan Kennedy made me stretch to fully comprehend and begin to master the art of marketing through persuasive copywriting, consistent follow up and upsells.

Did Infusionsoft sell a little more than they could handle? Probably. (How many small businesses [or former small businesses] wished they had that problem?)
Did it cause some pain for some users? Obviously.
Are some of their sales people a little pushy and cheesy? Yes (but none of them have been through my sales training courses!)
Do any of the sales people possess the power of telekinesis or Jedi Mind Tricks that forced people to buy? Not that I know of.
Do the support staff blow people off? Apparently but they’ve never done it to me nor any of my clients and I don’t have ESP, telekinesis or Obi Wan’s powers.
Are the support staff inexperienced? I noticed an influx of rookies 6-8 months ago but that seems to have tapered off and the folks I’ve spoken with since then have been fine if not superb.
Is it a better solution for the small businesses I listed above compared to hobbling together Outlook, Excel, 1ShoppingCart, aWeber and ConstantContact and Salesforce.com? Without a doubt.

If you’re a 90 person company with 65 SKUs and you’re growing 50% a year and you’re adding 5 products a month…Infusionsoft may not be right for you…but they admit it.

If you don’t have a list, you’re just starting out online, you’ve never created a webform and you’ve never even used the “Categories” feature in Outlook to segment your contacts, might you be better off with a ConstantContact account for $19 or $29/mo? Probably. But how big do you want to be and how quickly? If the answer is “BIG” and “fast” then it may be worth it for you to start out with Infusionsoft.

If you’re a 10 person company with two sales people and you, the owner, are involved in sales and and you’re doing manual, duplicate entry and sales and leads are falling off the table then Infusionsoft can be a life-saver.

But if you’ve never written a follow-up sequence or exported contacts as CSV files or tagged/categorized contacts, and you can’t explain your own company’s USP and you can’t rattle off in your sleep 3 COMPELLING reasons why I should buy from YOU then you’d be well-advised to take the $4,000 you just saved on the Infusionsoft setup fee and retain someone to help you set all of this up for you FROM DAY ONE!

Why?

Because sales and marketing are:
A) Not the same.
B) Not as easy as it looks.
C) Friggin’ IMPOSSIBLE to master in a timely fashion for the typical “E-Myth” technician that thinks “I can shimmy a door better than my jerk of a boss” and goes out on his own to open his own contracting business only to have his ass, kidneys, liver, lungs, nostrils, knee caps and esophagus handed to him a mere 6 months later after he’s run out of fancy business cards and relatives he can beg business off of.

If you try to duct tape your marketing and bootstrap any platform, in 4 months you’ll be out $800 in fees, $8,000 in lost opportunity costs, and 60 hours of software-induced frustration and you’ll be posting on here how much you dislike Infusionsoft.

Remember, Life’s too short for follow up calls.

Are you a sales manager or business owner that is:

• Frustrated with sales people not making enough prospecting calls?
• Upset at the complacent, whiny, wimpy nature of your sales people when it comes to getting new business?
• Concerned that your marketing budget is being wasted but you don’t know what else to do about it?
• Maybe even ANGRY that despite pouring your heart and soul into your business revenues are down and you’re not quite sure how to turn it around?

If any or all of the above describes you please join me Wed Sept 9 from 8:30 to 9:45 for a live webinar entitled “Fix Your Follow Up Failure” where I will show you how to DOUBLE YOUR SALES GUARANTEED!

This is not a small claim that I take lightly. During our time together I will show you a system that, when and if followed, you will double your sales in 12 months or your money back.

WARNING: This is not a get-rich-quick-scheme. This is a system that will require some work and thought and planning and effort but both the Infusionsoft staff and I will be with you every step of the way.

Statistics show that 48% of sales people NEVER follow up with a prospect, 25% make a second contact and stop, 12% of sales people make three contacts and only 10% of your staff will ever make more than three contacts.

Yet 80% of all sales are made on the 5th-12th contact.

Learn how the top 4% of all salespeople make 60% or more of all sales and how you can bottle up their “magic” to double your sales.

For a short informational video please follow this link.

The Great Lies of Sales & Marketing

“Pick up the phone and bang out more calls today than you did yesterday.”

~~~

If you can still make money banging out calls then knock yourself out. But in my 14+ years of selling I am seeing this form of client development really diminish as an effective use of a sales person’s time.

And if the return on your time investment is diminishing, the answer is NOT to spend more time doing it. That’s just dumb. Besides, unsolicited phone calls performed by product-pushing, commission-hungry sales people is just plain annoying!

Today, when you hear a “rah-rah” guy on stage getting you pumped up to pound out phone calls, get thick skin, ignore rejection, “they’re not saying no to you but to your offering,” picture this: your son’s 7th grade flag football team lining up against the Dallas Cowboys with a great attitude and screaming as they plunge into the pile of 300 pound men.

A handful of little ones will survive by quick-footed, focused, intelligent luck but the odds aren’t in their favor. Even if they do survive is that the goal? To survive? Or is the goal to prosper?

If your thick skin and positive attitude when dialing for dollars are your only weapons in sales you’re running into a painful game that will end ugly. And as this next decade unfolds, the problem’s going to get worse, not better.

Look at it this way: 30 years ago factory workers began facing competition from machines and cheap foreign labor. The worker cost $22 per hour but the robot only cost $1.75 per hour but could work 24 hours a day, didn’t take breaks, have babies, hurt its back or steal toilet paper from the men’s room.

Are you willing to work for $1.75 per hour?

Lots of you in sales are doing just that when you add up all of the time you spend preparing and following up and cold calling and chasing leads and preparing proposals and sending literature and hoping and praying your ship comes in.

Websites and Marketing Automation and Salesforce Automation and drip campaigns are displacing old school sales people. (When was the last time an Encylopedia Brittanica sales person came to your door? They were quite common just 40 years ago. How can they compete with Amazon or Borders or Barnes & Noble?)

The answer, of course, is they can’t. That’s why they are a thing of the past. My kids will never meet a door to door encyclopedia sales person because they can’t compete and provide their customers with the level of service or selection we’ve come to demand.

A person selling books door to door is not much different from an insurance or telecommunications or computer sales man today.

But there’s HOPE: IF you carve out a niche (I’ll cover that in later installments) and IF you use automated tools like your website and Infusionsoft and direct mail, you CAN become more efficient, more competitive and more profitable, which means you will win.

As an added bonus you won’t pester and annoy your prospect base in the process and it’s amazing how motivated you’ll become!

I’ll say it again for you hard-headed types: You MUST carve out a niche, and you MUST use communication tools to deliver relevant content in a timely manner with the cunning and planning of a fox.

Most of your competitors will not do this. Most websites not only have no particular purpose in mind, most are just static brochure sites that just sit there and inform – barely – those unfortunate enough to stumble upon them. Most people don’t have a clue how to create a direct mail piece that will make the phone ring. (That’s why they think direct mail doesn’t work.)

BOTTOM LINE:

1) You MUST have automated marketing tools that do the grunt work for you.

2) You must adjust, modify, tweak, measure and test those tools until they’re effective.

There is no silver bullet. A lot of what you try won’t work the first time.

But the good news is, once it works, it will usually work for YEARS.

That’s why time spent on marketing is absolutely the best time investment you can make – IF you’re educated about what truly works and what doesn’t.

Tomorrow I’ll another big Lie in the realm of Sales and Marketing:

“You’re not giving enough presentations!”

The typical sales person cannot tell you what it takes to make a sale happen.

If you ask them to define their sales process half will tilt their heads like my white lab, Decker, when my son’s playing his trombone…25% will say they “bond and ask open-ended questions” and 20% will just ramble aimlessly, tell a joke and offer to buy you a shot of whiskey and compare Fantasy Football rosters.

The 5% that have learned to codify and systematize and automate their sales processes are the ones making all the money.

It all starts with putting the science into the art of selling. (And don’t try to BS me into believing “sales people are born not made!” because I hate choking on my Coke and making the fizz come out of my nose. It burns and makes my eyes water.)

Shakespeare seemed to make some beautiful pieces within the confines of the sonnet structure. You can do the same with your selling process but you first must look deep and think deeper.

There are precise, exact reasons you can and do win and lose sales. So do the things that win sales and avoid the things that lose sales.

This is the beginning of not only your salesforce automation but your life. Because as soon as you stop working in your business and start working on your business you can raise your prices, work only with people you like, get home in time for dinner and relax.

Marketing automation and salesforce automation go hand in hand. The sooner you learn both the sooner you’ll meet and surpass your business goals.