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!

WOW Your Customers With Systematic Love

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Patrick

Lately I’ve been reading The E-myth Revisited. While this is a fantastic book for all business owners and is full of knowledge, there’s one particular story that really struck me.

The author tells a story of his hotel stay at a small quaint lodge located near the Pacific Coast on a particularly cold night and after a long day of travel.

As he checks into his room at the front desk, he notices that the hotel is warm, comfortable and inviting. He unloads his bags into the room, and heads down to the connected restaurant – also a warm and inviting place.

He was quickly seated (since this particular restaurant actually respects reservations), and after a delicious dinner and a pleasant chat with his waiter, he heads back to his room.

Along the way, he notices that the lights along the path had been turned up to compensate for the darkness of night.

Upon arrival in the room, he had planned to start a fire to keep warm – but someone had already beaten him to it! The pillows had been plumped and a mint rested on each one.

He noticed a card from the friendly receptionist welcoming him for his first night at the hotel. Along with the card was a glass of brandy – the same as he had ordered at the restaurant.

Compassion Through Attention to Detail

The following morning he awoke to a strange sound perking in the bathroom – upon inspection, he found another card – this time wishing him a good morning and a note that the coffee brewing next to him (automatically triggered by a timer) was his favorite brand.

How in the world would they have known? He quickly remembered that at dinner the night before they had asked what brand of coffee he preferred – yet so casually that he hadn’t thought twice about it!

Upon pouring a cup of coffee, he was greeted by a knock on the door. As he opened, he spotted his local newspaper – The New York Times. How did they even know he was local to NY, as this hotel was across the country? Aha – he remembered that the receptionist had inquired about his favorite paper upon checking in.

After such a fantastic experience, the author returned to the hotel many times. With each visit, he was greeted with exactly the same hospitality and attention to detail – without ever needing to remind them of his preferences.

How Can We Apply This To Our Business?

Customers love and expect consistency and attention to detail. McDonalds is not one of the most successful businesses in the world due to it’s quality of food products – it’s successful because McDonalds has developed an amazing system to provide customers with nearly the exact same super-detailed speedy service anywhere in the world at any time of day.

Today, as solo-preneurs and small business owners, we have tools to create this type of system in our business to provide a consistent and enjoyable experience for our customers.

Combining the power of a CRM, automated and well-thought-out emails, customized yet automatic promotions for complementary product offers – we can develop a system that truly suits the customer and nurtures a strong relationship.

Through intelligent data collection, we can pay attention to what our customers REALLY want – and hand it to them on a silver platter without even officially asking. This kind of interaction shows them that we care about them and their needs – which is what everyone truly wants deep down.

Look at the success of a company like Zappos, who built their brand by focusing on 100% Wow-ing the customer. It works!

What customer service tweaks have you tried in your business, and what results have you noticed? Leave your comments below.

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:

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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

How Effective Is Your Sales Process?

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Patrick

Keeping track of your prospects through your sales pipeline is one huge aspect that separates newbie small businesses from those generating serious income and impressive conversion rates.

I recently listened to a fantastic interview on Mixergy with Justin Roff-Marsh — the Founder of Ballistix, a management and marketing consultancy, specializing in Sales Process Engineering. I generally love everything on Mixergy, but this one really piqued my interested since my background is in engineering and systematically breaking down and optimizing a process.

Sales: Person or Process Driven?

Justin makes a fairly outlandish claim in the world of traditional sales: that the effectiveness of a sale is centered around the optimization of the sales process, not the salesperson. He makes the comparison of modern manufacturing methods compared to the artisan era of building.

We know that by tracking the history of manufacturing — accuracy and repeatability increase exponentially over time when using an assembly line (where each step can be broken down into its smallest pieces and optimized) as compared to a single craftsman building the entire widget from start to finish.

Justin believes that similar to manufacturing – sales can be improved by breaking each step of the process into its smallest elements, optimizing, and focusing each member of the sales force on being razor sharp at one particular piece of the process.

Automating and Optimizing Sales to Increase Conversion Rate

Whether you agree or disagree with his premise, we can learn from his company’s success and emulate his process through automating marketing and sales procedures.

In Infusionsoft, we have an incredibly useful tool at our fingertips: The “opportunity” sales pipeline. Using this tool effectively ensures that each prospect in the pipeline receives the same process and the sale isn’t dropped through the cracks.

Take a look at this sample opportunity pipeline in Infusionsoft:

Keep in mind that this process should be reflective of your business staff and operations — but it’s a great example to showcase the process. As a new lead comes into the process, he or she is marked as a “new opportunity” and the sales team is notified. If a direct phone call connection cannot be made at first, the sales team must leave 3 voice mails trying to connect — this builds consistency and helps to make scientific observations about where the process needs improvement.

After working the prospect and attempting to make a sale, the sales rep will mark the sale as “won” (and indicate which product was sold) or “lost” with a reason that the prospect was not able to be converted into a customer. This is fantastic from an analytical standpoint. Given enough data, we can start to determine where the holes exist in the sales process and make corrections iteratively!

This system scales with the complexity of the sales process, but it can and should be applied to any business that is selling products (aka all of them!).

What pieces of this methodology could you implement in your business? Need help setting it up? Check out my service packages.

How to Skyrocket Your Business with an Affiliate Program

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Patrick

Check out this video where I answer a few commonly asked questions about setting up an affiliate program for your business:

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Is your business leveraging the power of an affiliate program? If not, what’s stopping you? Using a platform like Infusionsoft, you can set up an affiliate program that is fully automated — your referral partners can sign up automatically, promote your products, earn a commission, and increase your bottom line and audience.

Share in the comments: What’s your biggest obstacle in setting up your own affiliate program?

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

[/box]

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

Livin’ the Good Life with Automated Marketing

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Patrick

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Last week I attended Fabienne Fredrickson’s conference in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I had an amazing time with a bunch of great entrepreneur friends, and made many new connections that I’m sure will lead to some pretty fantastic opportunities in the future.

One of the greatest parts of building an automated marketing system is that you have the freedom to take a trip like I did without worrying about missing out on potential leads. I was gone for about a week and didn’t sweat it because my emails, facebook posts, and more were being sent automatically without me touching a thing.

Location independence and freedom are two cornerstones of the modern online entrepreneur movement. However, they both require some big work up front.

Have you started building an automated marketing system yet? If not, what’s holding you back? Even if you aren’t ready to invest in a premium solution like Infusionsoft (check out my free guide to find out), you can still build some great automation with tools like Aweber and Mailchimp.

I want to know — what’s holding you back from getting your business automated so that you can focus on your passions? Leave your answer in the comments :)

*image credit: avrene

Patrick Conley

Automation * Intelligent Marketing * Web Technology

Tag Archives: automation