Using Infusionsoft to Earn Trust

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Patrick

In online business it’s hard to earn the critical “know, like & trust factor” when you’re asking people who you’ve never met to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to work with you. Using Infusionsoft you can automate this process of trust building and – best of all – this can happen immediately after you get started with Infusionsoft.

Using Nurture Sequences to Build Trust

One of the first things your Infusionsoft Certified Consultant (ICC) should teach you in the software is how to set up a campaign, and one of the best types of campaigns to start with is called a “nurture” sequence.

Nurture sequences acknowledge that not every lead is immediately ready to buy your products and services and may need more information or time before making a buying decision. These sequences are less intense than sales campaigns which often drive toward a goal date such as “buy by Friday for 50% off” or “group program closes on the 30th!”

Instead, nurture sequences are designed to drip out content over time and answer objections, educate leads on the process and share success stories. These sequences aren’t just for new clients – you can create them for clients ready for your second or third programs.

Design a Nurture Sequence

It’s all about delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time. To do this you can use the power of Infusionsoft to segment and categorize your list into smaller groups. After all, you don’t want a long nurture sequence to sell a program that your lead has already purchased.

By using Infusionsoft’s powerful tagging feature you can separate your leads and clients by purchases, clicks, even psychographic and demographic information. Imagine being able to email just those leads in North America who have visited your sales page and have purchased from you in the past, but have not signed up for your May workshop.

With Infusionsoft this kind of nurture campaign is not only possible, it’s easy!

Nurture sequences eliminate the need for large sales teams keeping notes on every client call and interaction – Infusionsoft can track all of this information with incredible accuracy. The result to the client or lead is the that they get personalized messages that address their objections and concerns and you’re able to show that you understand their worries, which positions you as trustworthy.

Given the right timing of messages and copy, nurture sequences can dramatically improve your sales closing rate. Infusionsoft understands that many small businesses like yours may not have the brand recognition and marketing budget of Coca-Cola or Nike, so you need to build up the faith in your business with a consistent message.

While Infusionsoft gives you the tools to get started, you’ll need to design and implement your own nurture sequences. The easiest way to get started with nurture sequences that build trust is to ask yourself, “what if the leads don’t buy this program?”

Write down what you’d want to communicate and how often you should be reaching out with this content. While some programs are evergreen, also consider programs that launch annually or quarterly. By building up the program to your leads and then giving them another chance to work with you, Infusionsoft can help you stay in touch with warm leads and increase your conversions with minimal effort.

If you’re just getting started with Infusionsoft be sure to talk to your ICC about these campaigns or contact us to discuss which nurture campaigns you need for your business to increase sales and serve your clients.

Image Credit: sfxeric

Why Creating a Successful Business is like Winning in Ice Hockey

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Patrick

Coaching & Strategy

In hockey, the coach can make or break a team. A great coach inspires the players, guides them to follow a rock solid strategy, and helps them keep their head up when times are tough.

A great business mentor needs to have the same qualities. Although it may take “10,000 hours” to become a master in something new, you can certainly speed up your process by borrowing hours from people who have been there and back. Great mentors can give you a solid strategy to market your business, convert more sales, keep your customers coming back for more, and give you advice when things aren’t going your way.

A great business coach (and a supporting mastermind group) can make the difference between a business flop and a tremendous success. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but the fortune is in the execution. My business coach is offering a new challenge this week that will certainly transform some businesses for the new year!

Agility & Responsiveness

In hockey, players need agility to cut in and out of tight spots, turn on a dime, and re-act in super human scenarios, because a second late can make all the difference between a win and a loss. In running your business, you need agility to make changes on the fly when something you thought would be a huge success isn’t working.

While you’re running your big marketing campaign, you need agility to analyze and take action on results from split testing to achieve maximum profits. With the speed at which the modern world operates, failing to react quickly to signals can mean the difference between a massive success or a disappointing failure.

Coordination & Teamwork

In hockey, having the best players in the world isn’t always going to lead to a win. The use of great teamwork and coordination is just as important as the skill of the players. We’ve seen this many times when underdogs “outplay” the teams expected to win. This happens in all sports and many times it’s a matter of superior teamwork and coordination that leads to winning the game.

In business, it’s critical to have all of your systems and employees talking to each other and working together. If your email system doesn’t know which customers purchased products, you can end up with embarrassing emails going to the wrong people. If your team members aren’t aware of new promotions coming along, your customer support can falter from miscommunication.

Having alignment in your systems and team is incredibly important to having a business that runs smoothly and grows rapidly. This is one of the biggest reasons we love Infusionsoft so much – it makes this level of coordination easy and seamless in your business!

Stick-to-it-iveness & Commitment

In hockey, it takes incredible commitment to show up game after game with intensity and focus. Down the stretch when teams are tired and worn out, the best conditioned and most committed teams rise to the top and claim victory.

In business, it’s a similar story. My good friend Lynan once gave me some advice when I was starting a new project. She said, “This part is a sprint, the rest is a marathon”. Sometimes you need to be able to take a few blows while testing new ideas to see what works, and stick in there when things are getting tough. You can’t always give up after the first try.

With that said, it’s also imperative to give yourself time for recovery and rest. Otherwise you risk burnout which can be detrimental to your focus for a long time. Hockey teams regularly take breaks from practice to recuperate. This is essential for solid performance in the long haul!

Hunger & Hustle

In hockey, commentators regularly say that the best players are “hungry for the puck”. They’ll do what it takes to get the puck on their stick to make a play, score a goal, etc. A little bit of extra hustle can mean a big difference over the course of a game or season.

In business, companies have to be hungry for the sale. This isn’t to say that you should compromise your values and integrity – that’s a whole different topic. However, if you don’t ask for the sale and fail to give your customers a clear and obvious path to buy from you, they will never convert from prospects to customers.

Getting the Right Support

If your team needs support in the sprint or needs help preparing for the marathon then it may be time to invest in a strategic coach to help you reach your goals. If you want to discuss how better marketing automation can support your business and launches click here to schedule a call.

In other news, I am so glad hockey is back!

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Image credit: 5of7

How to Build Your Perfect Customer Lifecycle Brick by Brick

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Patrick

“It won’t happen as fast as you want, but it won’t take as long as you think”

This is one of my favorite quotes from my friend Johnny Dzubak. Johnny is an expert in the personal development field and teaches people how to hone their social skills. But today I was thinking about this quote in the context of growing and marketing your business – and there’s a TON of parallels!

In our busy society, we all want immediate results – and if you look at the ads on TV, it’s obvious as to why. In the world of “6 minute abs” and get rich quick schemes, we’ve lost our patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day!

I have some good and bad news for you: building a business won’t happen overnight, but if you consistently take action it will grow and attract new customers impressively fast.

One of the well known statistics in marketing is that it typically takes somewhere between 5-12 “touches” with a prospect before they will be ready to buy from you. However if you try to fit all 12 touches into one day, you’ll likely scare away your prospect and come across as overly needy.

Luckily we have client relationship marketing tools that can spread these points of contact out over time in a way that feels authentic and natural to your prospects, yet automated so that you don’t have to remember to reach out to each person those 5-12 times.

I really love the concept of the “Perfect Customer Lifecycle”. In essence, it’s the process of breaking down your interaction with each customer in a systematic way that WOW’s them, follows up appropriately, addresses their reservations, nurtures them towards a sale in an authentic manner, and ultimately turns them into raving fans who promote your business for you!

You can download a free workbook to check out the process here. I go through the Perfect Customer Lifecycle with my private coaching clients and it always amazes me to watch the transformation of their business as we apply these systems.

It can be daunting when you look at the whole customer lifecycle so remember “It won’t happen as fast as you want, but it won’t take as long as you think!” Begin today with the very beginning of the process and be consistent in building it out piece by piece.

If you need to implement quickly with an expert guiding the process, reach out for support and accelerate your results! One of the best parts of investing in this process is that – while you may tweak things over time – once it’s done your marketing and follow up is on auto pilot and creates so much freedom in your business!

Need help getting started? Head over to my contact page and get in touch!

Put Your Social Media on Auto Pilot

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Patrick

I’ve recently been playing around with a few options for automating my social media posting. There’s a few commonly known solutions – like Hootsuite – that work very well.

But being the automation nerd that I am, I wanted to find a solution that would automatically syndicate all of my WordPress blog posts to all of my social media channels in a way that’s appropriate to optimize each channel (for example twitter locks you at 140 characters, while facebook allows you to have a thumbnail image and longer text).

My New Favorite App – IFTTT (If This Then That)

My favorite aspect of Infusionsoft is that I can set up automation triggers. If I want to trigger a certain outcome based on an event, all I have to do is set up the appropriate actions and rules. For example, if I want to have a followup email sequence automatically send to a customer after a specific product is purchased, all I need to do is set up an action set to make this happen.

But what about social media? I want to be able to publish a new post to my site and have it automatically syndicate across all of my social media channels – Facebook, twitter, google+, linkedin, etc.

I’ve found a few solutions that attempt to accomplish this, but I wasn’t pleased with them because each of them had a substantial delay between the kickoff action (publishing a post) and the resulting effect (publishing to social media). I wanted this to happen immediately!

Then I stumbled upon IFTTT. With this amazing (free!) app, you can create “recipes” that work very similar to actions in Infusionsoft. For example, take a look at my recipes for syndicating my materials across social media as soon as I publish a post:

As soon as I finalize and publish this post, it will automatically post a snippet to my Facebook fan page, Twitter, and Linkedin. But what about Google+? Although it isn’t natively supported yet, I have a hack for you: Set up a new recipe to watch for a facebook fan page post to go live, then once it does, have that post to Google+ through Hootsuite!

The greatest part is that you can customize how each snippet will look. For example, with Twitter I only have room for the very basics (title of the post + a shortened link), but for Facebook it will automatically post the title, description, and try to pull a featured image.

Need help getting these set up? I’ve shared a few of my “recipes” here. Click each of them to create your own off of my models.

WordPress Post publish to Facebook Fan Page

WordPress Post publish to Twitter

Imagine how much time this saves if you are posting to all of these multiple times per week! Talk about saving time through automation.

Taking Automation Further

Do you pay any virtual employees or business expenses through Paypal? If so I have a cool recipe for you:

Any time I make a payment through Paypal, this recipe will automatically save a copy of the receipt to Evernote. The possibilities are endless and only limited by your imagination.

How much time would this save in your business? Post you answer in the comments below.

How Can Lawyers Use Infusionsoft Automation Marketing?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Patrick

I recently watched a funny video about using Infusionsoft to power a law practice. You can check it out here:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6D3XQILrjg&vq=hd720

Traditionally, we can think of some great ways that a law firm would use a fully functioned CRM solution. Keeping your client data up to date and clean is essential for a solid business! But how could we utilize the advanced automated follow-up abilities of Infusionsoft?

As with many professional service businesses, lawyers face an issue of deliver valuable content to clients who’s issues vary greatly. Depending on the practice, you could be dealing with estate planning, traffic violations, criminal cases, tax issues, and on and on. So how do you set up a system that will automatically send the right targeted information to the right people?

Segmenting Your Leads

The solution is through properly tagging and segmentation. By monitoring your incoming leads closely, you can apply tags that automatically segment your leads into groups that address their specific issues. For example, leads who are coming to you for traffic violations could be served by receiving a specific follow up sequence that details all that they need to know about points on their drivers license, how to dress for court if needed, and what information about their vehicle and the incident will be required to work on the case.

By segmenting these leads on the front end, you can save yourself tremendous time sorting through your leads on the back end. You’ll have the piece of mind that the right information is automatically filtering to the right people!

Just as importantly, you can automate your internal processes. Let’s examine your on-boarding procedures for when a new client visits your office. As your client signs the original welcome packet, your assistant can enter their information into your Infusionsoft system so that the new client welcome sequence is triggered. The client will receive a friendly email welcoming them to your practice, followed by a questionnaire and instructions on what to do next.

Now this is where the power of automation truly kicks in. In a perfect world, the client would promptly fill out the information and return it to your office. However, we know that everyone has a lot on their plate these days – so what happens if your new client forgets about the email? We can automatically trigger a reminder email to the client that sends a few days after the initial meeting, as well as a task reminder to your assistant asking them to reach out to your new client via phone.

Automating Your Followup Process

Similarly, we can automate all of the next steps of the process: setting up an appointment for your new client to come back into the office, tasks for your assistant to make all of the appropriate legal copies, etc. Ready to reward your excellent new client? Use a service to send out a free gift such as cookies automatically once they have completed their assigned tasks…. who doesn’t love getting cookies in the mail?

Complete the sequence by sending out requests for testimonials and referrals, annual followups, and more – all automatically!

Interested in using Infusionsoft to power your business?
>> Click here to check out an awesome free demo! <<

*image credit

Want to Increase Your Sales by 80%? Use Automatic Followup

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Patrick

Followup is one of the most important practices in a good business and a key to increasing sales.

Take a look at this static released by the National Sales Executive Association:

[box border=”full”]

2% of sales are made on the 1st contact
3% on the 2nd contact
5% on the 3rd contact
10% on the 4th contact
80% of sales are made on the 5th-12th contact

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Why is following up so important to your success? We are all SUPER busy. We have lives packed to the gills with responsibilities, tasks, interruptions and more — and in the hustle of our everyday life we often lose track of our intentions.

Can you think of a time where you forgot to reply to an email or follow up with a prospect? It happens to all of us! That’s why automatic followup is so incredibly powerful. Using tools like Infusionsoft, we can design an automated system that takes care of the followup for us.

Keep in mind that situations change – a product that isn’t needed today might be the perfect fit in 4 months. Take the time to set up a system that works FOR YOU so that these opportunities aren’t slipping through the cracks.

Remember that in business, like life, following up too quickly can be a sign of neediness and desperation which is an easy way to lose clientele. Design your followup system so that it feels natural and authentic.

Can you think of at least one way that you haven’t followed up with leads or clients that you can implement now? It’s time to put it into action.

Need help designing a campaign with intelligent follow-up in Infusionsoft? Click here to schedule a discovery call and we’ll get you set up with a system that works for you!

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*Photo credit

Patrick Conley

Automation * Intelligent Marketing * Web Technology

Category Archives: Followup