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!

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

Just concluded another successful Fix Your Follow Up Failure workshop on Infusionsoft at Commerce Bank of Temecula Valley.

I’m now showing Doug Castino of Champion Bookkeeping the power of internet marketing with social media to act as a lead generation tool and then automating your marketing with Infusionsoft.

A web based CRM like Infusionsoft lets small businesses “fire and forget” by building their marketing campaigns once and letting them run all day everyday until your prospects “buy or die.”

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.

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

There is no company in existence that cannot solve all its problems with a 100% increase in sales. (Now you may have a whole different set of problems then, like where to stash your money, but I hear Charlie Rangel can help with that and he’ll have some extra time on his hands soon, anyway, and will be looking for some “consulting” work.)

That’s why Infusionsoft offers a refund if you do not double your sales in 12 months by using their hosted platform for automating your lead generation, marketing, prospecting, nurture campaigns, client education and sales processes.

Based on my discussions with hundreds of business owners and sales managers in dozens of industries across the country you all have the same issues when it comes to growing your business. These issues revolve around three types of customers and prospects:

1. You have current customers in good standing, using your solution, keeping up maintenance / service contracts and they are pleased with your service and support.
2. You have past clients still using your solution but not keeping up their maintenance contracts. Chances are there has been turnover and/or cutbacks in there company and the main point of contact has either been promoted, let go or buried with an increase in duties and responsibilities and since your solution works so well it has become a classic case of “out of site, out of mind.”
3. The final category is “the rest of the marketplace that have not heard of you.” We all know that it is more expensive to get a new customer vs. getting increased business from existing customers but marketing is the top priority of a business owner and prospecting is the top responsibility of a sales person.

However, sales people hate to prospect, sales managers hate to have sales people burn through cash only to whine and complain and miss their numbers and business owners hate to pay for marketing that either does not work or, worse, does work and the sales people drop the ball by either not corresponding in a timely and/or professional manner, which means you paid to have your prospects NOT buy from you!

Infusionsoft, when configured properly and used daily to attract prospects and market to them effectively (that means good content, attractive offers and compelling reasons to buy now!) will eliminate all of the problems described above in the same way robots in Detroit cut down on extended coffee breaks, workers comp claims and healthcare benefit expenses.

Infusionsoft works 24 hours a day to attract prospects, turn the pipeline into an assembly line and guarantee the proper, consistent, accurate messaging is delivered to your prospects 100% of the time to 100% of the prospects.

Without sales you have no company.

Without effective marketing you have a haggard, weary sales team.

Without Wes Schaeffer, The Sales Whisperer®, and Infusionsoft you have either no system, or worse, 2-3-4-5-6 systems that do not all talk to each other, require error-prone double and triple entry and end up being incomplete because sales people do not and will not consistently do menial tasks that either detract from their selling time and/or could provide information that could be used to replace them or help you act as “Big Brother.”

So it’s time to automate your sales and marketing so you can take your business to the next 3 levels and beyond in the next 12 months.

Your competition is not waiting.

They are happy if you are distracted. Now’s the time to focus, roll up the sleeves, skip a few reruns of MASH or Friends or House and get a leg up on your competition while they are either distracted themselves or are underestimating your tenacity.

I can help you with all of the above beginning as early as next week if you are ready to turn your selling and marketing processes up a notch.

Happy Labor Day Weekend.

Click the Infusionsoft Logo for your30-Day Free Trial!

Wes Schaeffer, The Sales Whisperer®, Infusionsoft Certified Marketing Automation Coach

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.

www.sxc.hu/photo/676701

I was recently asked:

“How could sales force automation (SFA) affect salesperson productivity, marketing management and competitive advantages?”

To which I resonded:

If you automate non-compelling marketing drivel in an intellectual, ineffective attempt to generate qualified leads that in turn motivates incompetent sales people to meet and/or exceed quotas blindly assigned by a narcissistic CEO you are simply accelerating the pace at which the marketplace discovers the weaknesses in your offerings and you all get re-acquainted with Monster.com.

Most SFA implementations I endured as a sales person became little more than expensive spreadsheet-producing torture devices whose manipulation and hourly generation were used by confused and inept sales managers to justify their further isolation from their staff.

These same managers then used the 87 different reports as enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) to cajole inflated pipeline guesses out of their scared, under-quota sales people during weekly sales beatings meetings.

The answers the sales staff gave – and the managers accepted – reminded me of Darren Stephens explaining to his boss on “Bewitched” why he had a monkey wearing a tutu riding a donkey in his living room.

During the boom-boom years of the late 90′s and early 2000′s most companies didn’t have to sell because people spent money more freely than drunken politicians on a Madoff junket investigating the viability of franchising Nevada brothels.

Instead of looking inward to see who and what needs to be reassigned or released, companies turn to SFA platforms in a technological attempt to cure what ails them. But rotten eggs carried in a Rolls Royce still can’t be used to bake an award-winning cake.

Now the good news: “Perfect practice makes perfect,” as Vince Lombardi used to say. If you create and automate tested, effective, constantly-updated marketing campaigns with proven “next steps” that are triggered by key events, i.e. a prospect downloads a free report or white paper, signs up for a webinar, requests a quote, your sales staff will become exponentially more productive and profitable because they will be spending more time with educated, hot leads ready to buy rather than chasing “investigators” and “SeeMores” who cannot make a decision.

When you spend less time educating and more time connecting with decision-makers that are able to buy sales cycles are shortened.

And in sales it’s all about compressing sales cycles.

If you can do more, faster and better with fewer people you will bury your competition and dominate your field and you’ll do so despite working less hours than your competition, charging higher prices, selling at higher margin, with less stress and more fun.

It’s all about automating the proper message to market to media match. How fast do you want to bury your competition? Contact me if you’d like to start today.