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hello and welcome to today's webcast entitled the strategic business blueprint my name is Nate Nell beer event specialist today we have a handout for you to download for today's presentation to access to hand out with on the presentation assets button on the left hand side of your screen and click on the document to download if you should need technical assistance at any time please type your import into the tech support box on the left side of your screen and click the send button if you're disconnected from the webcast you can login again using the login instructions provided to you you cannot log back in with these instructions please call support at eight six six two seven one seven five nine two it is now my pleasure to the webcast over to suzanne shaw weekend the floor is yours thank you so much Nate and welcome everyone to our december two thousand eleven webinar i always want to we always want to get an idea of where everyone is sort of joining us from and where they are in the stages of business so Nate if we can launch the first poll gives us a little bit of an idea of where everyone's coming from and what kind of where they are in their business life looks like a majority of folks are business owners and then good amount of entrepreneurs as well alright and let's let's see where everyone is uh everyone is located native you can launch the second poll excellent thanks everyone so we're very excited you also see on your consoles that we are integrated with Twitter and if you choose to tweet please use the hashtag nsv webinar that's a hashtag NSB webinar and i'm going to give Tyler a quick introduction here and I'll let him get started Tyler garnes is a small business and internet marketing expert who's passionate about technology Tyler spoken to audiences across the country about email marketing demand generation lead nurturing and marketing automation he presented marketing prof b2b forum inbound marketing summit and the 12 hours of technology event which was presented by small biz technology com Tyler writes for popular media such as small business trends one-to-one media marketing prof and the infusion soft blog he is also an avid surfer who who's addicted to killer waves and we can verify that because we looked at Tyler's youtube video page and saw him tear it up at down in Costa Rica so with without any further delay I'll turn it over to Tyler and then we'll let him guide us through the next 40 or 45 minutes alrighty well thank you very much I'm excited to be with you today I appreciate you inviting me to come and present to the small business owners and and and the other people that you have on on the line today so let's get right into this a topic is the strategic business blueprint which is basically a strategic way to plan your marketing and sales and since we're at the end of the year 2011 I figured it'd be appropriate to kind of frame this up in terms of your marketing plan for 2012 so you've got the the presentation hand out there if you didn't catch that earlier you can go to presentation assets on the left side of your screen and download the worksheet or the hand out there we're going to use that today my goal is by the end of the presentation that you've got a decent framework for your particular marketing plan that's going to take your business to the next level so go ahead and download that sheet and print it out and just have it on hand for the presentation we're going to walk through we call the perfect customer lifecycle it solid-state explain in a moment and that perfect customer lifecycle is a framework within which we will build this plan so as you're downloading that and printing it out I'll get on with the rest of the presentation here I wanted to highlight one really really important thing from the ADP National Employment report that was published in September it shows that organizations with 500 employees or more actually lost 5,000 jobs in the US market during those 30 to 60 days but people like you the small business owners the entrepreneurs actually created 60,000 jobs and you know this is one of the things are just really really exciting to me it's one of the reasons I love working at Infusionsoft and working with small business owners because you are the people that are actually moving our economy forward you're the ones that are making it happen at the same time there is the you know unfortunate reality of small business which is that a lot of small businesses fail and probably all heard the staff ever in a million times that eighty percent of small businesses fail within the first five years this is some data from an author named Scott Shane he wrote a book called the illusions of entrepreneurship he pulled together some census data that shows that it's not quite that bad but seventy percent of the businesses that start are gone in ten years and and this is like said the unfortunate reality that that actually although entrepreneurs are moving the economy forward there's a high price to be paid to have that activity happen there's a high price that's paid even when the business doesn't fail oftentimes families suffer marriages suffer the impact on the individuals is is drastic and so it starts you know causing me to ask the question why do small businesses die you know if we can prevent small businesses from dying if you can change this trend then that has a very very positive effect on the economy as well as our society as a whole and individuals lives and so we're going to talk to little bit about why small businesses die but we're going to talk even more importantly about what you can do about it so I believe that small businesses die because of what I'll call a failure to thrive the reason I use this term is give my wife's a pediatric nurse and I was pre-med in college and so I heard this term a lot used in the medical community it's used a lot with newborn babies when they stop growing for whatever reason sometimes it happens where baby stops growing and they call this failure to thrive and it's pretty much an emergency situation when a baby stops growing it's not a problem that they stop growing it's a problem because that's an indicator that something's wrong and that the baby will die if the course of action is not taken is not changed and this is the same with your business oftentimes I here business owners say well I don't really want to grow unhappy with the way it is the scary part about that is if your business doesn't grow it will die if you're not actively working on how to get new customers and how to move the business forward it will die and so he needed to have this kind of mind shift change this mentality change that you need to focus on the growth of the business and how this mentality Oh grow or die so as you do that is thinking okay I need to acquire more customers and you do it more efficiently and I should probably look at a marketing plan and so you go out and use research marketing plans and your typical marketing plan looks something like this you've got an executive summary you identify the challenge that's in front of you you analyze your situation or you can analyze that a bunch different ways you know what's going on with our company what do our customers look like what our competitors look like let's do a swot analysis or strengths weaknesses opportunities threats you probably heard that acronym and then you've got your market segmentation alternative strategy short and long-term projections conclusion and an appendix and all these things and I see this and I just I just want to vomit I'm sorry but for small business owners this is not the easiest way to look at your business this might work for big businesses but for me anything that has an appendix is just way too long imagine you know hiring a new employee and sitting them down with a 30 page document like this and trying to help them come from letter with become familiar with the marketing plan it just doesn't work so I say scratch that small businesses need an entirely different approach that's much more simple and much more applicable to what you're doing first you need to understand the three black holes these are the areas of opportunity in your business where you're that opportunity is slipping through your fingers where it's there but you're just not able to grab on to it for whatever reason i'll i'll go through these three black holes in a moment you need to then map out your perfect customer life cycle this is the worksheet that you have that you printed out these i need to on that perfect customer lifecycle identify the low-hanging fruit what are the biggest areas of opportunity that you can tap into right now and then you need to go through and plug those three black holes in other words need to implement you do the work to make sure that that opportunity is not slipping through your fingers anymore the problem is as you go out and try and execute on marketing tactics and marketing plans in today's world it's extremely chaotic and that calf is growing and you just wonder well what the heck am I supposed to do there's pay-per-click google adwords facebook SEO linkedin twitter my website my shopping cart my email marketing system all these different things and those that set of tools is growing expanding every single day and so it just becomes extremely chaotic and it's hard to cut through the clutter and that's what i want to help you do today is to cut through all that clutter to be able to identify the key areas you need to focus on that will actually make a difference so let's first identify these three black holes and talk through what they are and what you can do about them black hole number one is lost traffic so i want you to ask yourselves a very important question how many people came to your website this month visited your website and then left without you capturing their information in other words you have no idea who they are and you have no way to follow up with them that should be kind of a painful thought that you're actually doing the work to drive traffic those people are coming but then they're leaving and you can't follow up with them for most businesses this is ninety to ninety-five percent of their traffic so that's a huge amount of opportunity that's coming but you're not tapping into it okay black hole number two is lost leads so ask yourself is how many of the leaves that we come that come into our business are we converting and then how many that don't buy right away are we converting over the long run most businesses converts three to ten percent of their leads into actual sales but one study shows that sixty-seven percent of businesses or sorry sixty-seven percent of people who respond to an advertisement will buy within one year so if you're only closing three to ten percent what's going on with all those other people in most cases it's just a matter of follow-up not following up enough to make sure that you close the deal black hole number three is lost customers so invariably some of your customers will come they can purchase from you and then make a repeat purchase from one of your competitors one study shows that sixty-eight percent of those people do so out of indifference so this doesn't mean that you did anything wrong that you take them off it just means that you didn't give them a powerful reason to become lifelong fans and to make repeat purchases from your business and so what we're going to do with this perfect customer life cycle worksheet is we're going to start to identify where we can plug those holes and what we can do about it at Infusionsoft we've been working on this for many years with thousands and thousands of small business owners and we really feel like there is so much opportunity there for small businesses and you're left with just so little of it when you operate the way most businesses you and we feel like we've cracked the nut on this particular problem through the perfect customer lifecycle framework and it's proven to work over and over and over with our customers so let's dive into the perfect customer lifecycle here and you'll notice that on this worksheet and on the screen there are seven stages of the perfect customer lifecycle and these are all things that you're familiar with you know you're supposed to attract traffic and capture leads and follow up with them convert sales got to deliver your serve so your product and satisfy your customers you up sell them and you get referrals these are all things you're familiar with but this framework becomes extremely powerful when you actually start mapping out the step-by-step process by which you are going to deliver that perfect customer experience for every single customer that comes in the door so as you go through this exercise and as you start to fill out that worksheet what I want you to do is remove all the constraints from your mind and what I mean by that is when you normally start thinking about marketing ideas it's easy to think pretty grandiose and start thinking wow you know if I really wanted to WoW my customers now every time someone became a customer I would send them a gift basket or on their birthday I would send them a handwritten card you know so you start thinking of all these great ideas but then immediately you start restricting yourself because you start thinking about the financial constraints that would be really cool to send a gift basket but I don't know if we can afford it or i'd like to send that handwritten card but I just don't know if I have the time to send that to every single customer and how we're going to keep track of it and all those types of things and so I want you to remove all those constraints and one easy way to do that is to think of only one customer so imagine this 2012 is about to start you have one customer and the success of your business is dependent on that one customer becoming a lifelong fan and if you were able to dedicate all of 2012 to taking care of that one customer what would you do that's the question you should be answering what would you do for that one customer so since it's only one you really can't worry about financial constraints or time constraints ok so that's why i say think of one customer so that you can remove those constraints now later after you put together the plan then you go back and figure out okay how can I deliver this in a profitable and efficient way for every customer out there much better to go at it from that direction than to immediately start discounting ideas so once you actually start building out your perfect customer lifecycle it will begin to look like this and don't worry if you can't see the exact detail of this chart I'm going to give you a link to a download at the end of the presentation where you can download a bunch of these what we call marketing automation plans it's the step-by-step process by which are going to deliver that perfect experience so anyways when you have this in place you have exactly that that step-by-step process you have that plan that you can you can print up and put in front of all of your employees and say hey this is the plan so let's not get distracted by the latest tool that comes out or the hottest tactic that everyone's talking about we've identified the three black holes we know that if we plug them in these ways our business will grow we'll move forward so we're going to do is walk through each of the stages of the perfect customer life cycle and I'm going to talk to a couple of different ideas under each of those and what I'd like for you to do is see if these ideas start sparking creative ideas for your business these ideas may not apply exactly but they should get you thinking about new and creative ways that you can plug the three black holes in your business okay so stage number one is the perfect customer lifecycle and on your worksheet you can start jotting down ideas underneath each of these stages stage number one is to attract traffic let's talk about how you do that the important thing to note today in today's world that content is really really important and so blog post videos things like that that are exciting for your target market are the types of things you should be putting on your website so that they are attracted to your website you can share those throug
social media and bring that social media traffic into your website online marketing like paper quick and SEO SEO is really fueled by the content that you create and then don't forget about referrals and partners and your existing customers that can also help you drive traffic to your website social media is a really hot topic always so let me just address that a little bit I actually get a little bit annoyed by all the social media talk out there because so much of it is fluff and the majority of people who talk about it don't actually know how to make money using social media and so I've developed what I call the social media money formula if you search it on google you'll find an article that I wrote that breaks it down in detail but let's talk about the basics the basic idea is you need to create some really compelling or interesting content let's just talk about it in terms of a blog post because everyone can understand understand that concept so you write a blog post it's really great for your audience very educational super valuable and what it should do is it should lead them to the next step which the next step should be for them to request more of that kind of information from you so ideally you put out that blog post and at the bottom of the blog post you've got a web form where they can fill out the form give you their contact information so that they can request more information once you have that setup then you go share that on your social site so what you're doing is you're going out to your social media sites you're saying hey you know I've got this great blog post three ways to XYZ and you you give them a link and then they go over there they read the post there they like it a lot and then you say hey if you like this blog post and you'd like some more information about this go out the form and we'll send you some more and that way you're capturing the leads and you have an opportunity as well as permission to follow up with them once you've done that and you followed up with them a few times providing value in education now you've built a relationship where you have an opportunity to actually sell them so it looks like this you've got a tweet or Facebook update or whatever it is saying hey I've got this great content drives them to your blog in that blog post you've got an opportunity for them to request more information and then you follow up with them with the sequence of emails or phone calls or whatever it is that's the right way to use social media if you go out into the social media world and you try and sell it won't go over very well you also need to realize that you need to do some work to build the relationships and build a brand in the social media arena of your particular expertise all right so let's move on to lead capture strategies most people are doing okay with driving traffic when you go out and you research internet marketing strategies everyone talks about driving traffic and that's where all the talk is and so much going to have problem with that the problem really resides with black hole number one which is capturing leads on your website or even capturing leads in person will talk about that in just a moment too but you need to develop a lead capture mentality in your business where you're always thinking about how can we offer something to our audience in exchange for their contact and from asian and the permission to follow up with them so you can you can offer tons of different things you can offer free reports videos premium content on your website for some service-based businesses it's easy to say hey request a quote you can offer a demo or a free trial if you have a commodity business it's easy to offer coupons and contest things like that you can always offer live events webinars teleseminars things like we're doing today let's talk to a couple of creative ways you can do that on your website of course you can offer a free report some kind of download lots and lots and lots of people do this and it is successful but I think it's great to think of more creative ways so I used to have this website actually still have the website think big arts com but I used to run it more actively it was to teach photographers how to market and sell online and what I did is I created a website test for them that they could enter in their website and it would give them feedback on their website and so this was a tool for them a valuable tool that they wanted to use to get feedback on their websites and it was also a lead capture opportunity for me so think about what ways or what little tools or things can you create for your audience that would be valuable to them and also give you an opportunity to capture their information and follow up with them chick-fil-a if you're right if you're familiar with that restaurant it's a fast food chain has chicken sandwiches well they often have these little tabletop displays on the tables but they hey if you'd like a discount if you like coupons go ahead and text to this number and so they're able to capture those leads that way through mobile devices now I was a capture detect the the cell phone number and then what they've done is they've been very smart about this on Tuesday afternoons they know that between about 2pm and 4 30 p.m. or 5pm they're paying lots of people to run their restaurant but barely anybody is coming in now they're in between those two main meals of lunch and dinner and so they use the text messages now to send out coupons during those slow hours to drive traffic so they say I chicken sandwich is 50% up for the next two hours and they send that during that slow time now they've got a line out the door of hungry customers and now they're not paying their employees just to sit around so what ways can you use mobile and use these other creative ways to capture leads another mistake today that I see often is with restaurants that you know sit in restaurants where you go and you check in and you say okay we need a table for four and they give you this buzzer and they say hey will buzz you when your table is ready I just think this is a huge mistake because everyone's already got a buzzer in their pocket it's called a cell phone right and so what the restaurant should be doing is saying hey give us your cell phone number and we'll text you when your table is ready sure no problem here's my cell phone number hey we can also send you occasional coupons and discounts for our restaurant is that something you would like us to send sure go ahead and send me those text messages now you've got permission to follow up and you've got a cell phone number and you can drip out those promotions in a very effective way and so think about like the restaurant and what areas are you interacting or interfacing with your customers where right now you're missing out on opportunities to capture their contact information in exchange for something valuable and permission to follow up with them if you're familiar with Sephora it's a beauty store they they sell all kinds of beauty supplies and they've launched this campaign recently which is kind of cool to have this beauty roulette you put in your email address you spin the wheel and you might get a free lip gloss or free shipping or ten percent off and so with commodity items it's really about the discount but in the process of doing this they're building an email list and they're getting permission to follow up with these people okay the next stage once you capture those leads you've got to follow up with them all right this was black hole number two how well do you follow up with your leads as you do so you need to realize they're not everybody's different and so it's really important to create custom campaigns for different groups of leads the people that are hot and ready to buy right now those are the three to ten percent that most businesses close but then there are a bunch of warm people did you start ready right now they might buy in two months or six months or a year and so you're going to follow up with them in a different way and some people are just cold leads maybe they'll never buy or maybe they're a long ways away from buying you need to talk to each of those people differently if you were to talk to them live you would you would talk to them in an extremely different way but if you're following up with email or if you have sales reps following up with them you want to create campaigns that are specific to each of those groups or maybe you want to slice and dice your list a little bit differently maybe you want to talk differently to the men on your list and the women or the older people versus the younger people either way you need to find ways to personalize your message and keep it always relevant and useful to them when they're not ready to buy that's okay realize that they will be ready at some other point in time in the meantime you can't continue to try and sell and sell and sell and so you want to make yourself useful provide valuable information this is again where the content comes in handy follow up with them in a way that helps them see you as the valued experts and we talked a bit about social media earlier one of the reasons I get a little bit ticked off with the way that people talk about social media is because the data doesn't support what they say so let's dig into this just a little bit this was a study that was done at the end of last year during the holiday season these were people who made purchases online so the researchers were trying to figure out what effect social media had had on those people's buying decision so they wouldn't ask them a really important question what was the primary influence on your website visit where you made an e-commerce purchase the majority of people said familiarity with the brand they probably just typed in the website I target com or the next biggest group of people said promotional emails that was driver number one after familiarity with the brand but social media felt kind of low on the list there at five percent and so the researchers went a step further and they said okay well how would you prefer to hear about sales and promotions the vast majority people said promotional emails so we're talking about follow-up right we're talking about lead nurturing we're at that stage of the perfect customer lifecycle the majority people are saying here I want you to follow up with me or in essence i want you to tell me about yourselves and promotions through email social media fell down on the list at eight percent what they're saying is I don't want you to tell me about sales and promotions via social media okay so the researchers I think we're really trying to make a case for social media so they took this a step further and they asked another question okay of the social media websites out there which one would you prefer to hear about sales and promotions on luckily they didn't absolutely screw up the study and they allowed people to say none because the majority of people said none we don't want to hear about sales and promotions in social media now if you're going to do it it appears here at least for retail online retail that the majority of people would prefer to hear about sales and promotions on Facebook versus the others but the overwhelming message here is social media is not the place to follow up and try and sell people it's a great way to build relations and relationships and build expertise and drive traffic to your website but it's not a selling platform so don't get caught up in all of the hype about social media and just realize that social media is a great traffic source you got have been capture the leads but it's so so important to follow up so remember this tool that I said I created for photographers there was a tool that would test their website well I was doing a little personal experiment and testing to see if I could basically build an entire business and launch a product to this audience solely on Twitter since I knew I was doing all this activity on Twitter I collected these peoples Twitter handle in my web form so in addition to getting their email address i also got the twitter handle to test and see hey how could I follow up with these people via Twitter now I just told you but selling through social media is not always the greatest idea but I think if you do it right or at least if you follow up with people the right way in a personal way then it can be extreme powerful and so this was an entire automated campaign that was triggered when someone filled out the form what would happen is they would get a tweet immediately sent to them this is all automatic they would get an automatic tweet that said hey this person just submitted their photography site to the overexposure seven second test help out and review it so I have built a good list of followers on Twitter that were all photographers and they love reviewing each other stuff and so as soon as the tweet would go out the photographer who submitted their site would get a bunch of reviews almost immediately and so that was good positive reinforcement couple days later they would get another tweet from me that would say hey welcome to overexposure so overexposure was the name of the product that I was going to sell learn how to market and sell your photos on the web and then there was a link to a page where I explained what overexposure was all about now after this I had another email that went to them that explained about the product and that i was going to launch it soon and that it was going to be a few hundred dollars but they could get it free if they referred three friends and i told them that would be sending them an affiliate link via twitter so they needed to follow me so I could send it through a direct message so if you're familiar with Twitter I direct message is like a private message I can send it to one person and no one else can see it but they have to be following me first so that email went out and then they would get this direct message and said hey welcome to overexposure this is your affiliate link be sure to tweet it so now I'm leveraging these people to expand my message and to expand my reach and to kind of in a viral way start to attract a lot more people and a lot more traffic and then after the launch actually happened they would get another direct message or another private message from me saying hey Tyler or is you know Joe or whoever the person was the overexposure launch is still going strong here's your affiliate link tweet it now and make some money so this is a very effective way for me to expand my reach very quickly by leveraging the relationship that I had belt built with them on Twitter and asking them to help spread the word now here's why it's so important to follow up here's a study that was done with organizations that have sales reps making follow-up from calls follow me here on the very very top row you can see here that forty-eight percent of companies that have sales reps making follow-up phone calls so that's a really ugly circle I'm Jenny he's the two of the draw a circle but forty-eight percent of sales reps will make only one follow-up phone call and that's where two percent of the deals are actually closed now you can see the trend down the line and you can see that only ten percent of companies out there will make five or more follow-up phone calls but that's where more than eighty one percent of the deals actually happens so the question earlier about why are you only closing three to ten percent of the leads that you get in the door is answered with this chart here because it shows that if you only follow up one two or three or even four times that's the range of the close ratio that you're going to be working with but if you want to be in the elite group of businesses that are growing fast and being super successful what you need to do is follow up more this doesn't mean call every day with a sales message which means follow up build a relationship provide value and essentially be there when the time is right so important to note that people buy when they are bedded ready to buy not when you are ready to sell probably want to write that one done people will buy when they are been ready to buy not when you are ready to sell and this is why follow
up is important so that you can stay in front of them and continue to be that respected resource for them until the time is right in other words most people just give up too soon eighty-one percent of sales are made after the fourth call by which time ninety percent of sales reps have quick quit calling maybe or maybe don't have sales reps or maybe you're not making phone calls but even if you're doing it by email or social media follow-up is so important alright the next piece is that you've got to convert the sales if you're using sales reps you want to automate the communications that they're sending think about it they're answering the same questions all day long they shouldn't have to sit there and write up the email every single time use templates automate that to a certain extent you want to proactively handle objections this is part of the purpose of your follow up during the nurture backstage that follow-up should be proactively addressing objections that come up in the sales process so by the time they actually get to the close of the sale those objections are already handled and of course you want to provide supporting evidence for your product or service and once you get a customer in the door it's so important to wow them and to create an amazing experience I used to have a business where I was building websites for small businesses and i'll tell yah after doing all the work to attract the customers convince them to have me build their site and actually building the site and then having them change the requirements every every time i can't i came back to them and rebuilding and rebuilding it rebuilding it i was tired by the time i got a new customer and i just wanted to relax in so i go back to go find more customers and what I should been doing is spending time to build a lifelong relationship with those people and so you want to welcome those new customers in make it very personal and relevant to them you want to be very systematic about quality delivery so how can you wow that one customer that we were talking about earlier so you're focusing on just one how can you absolutely wow them but then the next question is how can we be systematic about this how can we do this in a scalable way and then you want to measure satisfaction and take action we'll talk about that in just a moment here's an example jermaine grades is one of our customers he has a website called here and play calm he teaches people how to play music by ear really cool products and he has a new customer sequence of emails that go out to his customers that has done amazing things for his business in fact what has done it has increased his lifetime customer value from ninety dollars to 375 dollars so before implementing this campaign on average his customers over the life of being a customer with him spent 90 dollars after this they spent 375 dollars so I it's so important to allow your customers and essentially this is a follow-up issue again so important to follow up with your customers he does this in a very friendly personal way all the while presenting new opportunity these and new products and other things that people can buy and believe it or not they buy them they were getting value out of his initial product that they bought them so they continue to buy so ask yourself what would it mean in your business to quadruple the value of every customer he's not spending any more money on marketing he's not spending any more any extra money on advertising or staff or anything it's got an automated follow-up campaign going out to every new customer and that has quadrupled the value of every customer how can you do that in your business alright the next step which is part of Jermaine's strategy with his new customer welcome sequence is to upsell customers right you've all seen this you can upsell right at the time of checkout or you can upsell later in the relationship at the time of checkout it's the classic you know would you like fries with that and with the hell with fast food that's a perfect upsell it's really easier the people are already salivating they've already requested a burger and to put fries in front of them for an extra buck or so is a really easy upsell so what up cells can you put in front of your customers realize that you have done the work the really hard work of getting someone into buying mode that is the hardest thing to do you've done all the work to get them to the point where they're pulling out their wallet they're showing out cash for your product or service if you've done all the work to get them to that point you should take advantage of it fully now don't get me wrong you're not taking advantage of your customers that's a very different thing okay you're giving them more opportunities to get value from your customer now if you don't have a complementary product or service or sell you need to find a partner whose products you can sell or offer at that point because again you've done the work to get those people into buying mode don't let that opportunity slip through your fingers okay and lastly we have our referral strategies it's important to note that you get much better response when you offer both the referrer and the refer all a discount or a bonus or whatever it is sometimes you don't want to discount your product or service so you add a bonus or at some other type of incentive but if both people are incentivized by the referral then it works much better and realize also that your referrals don't have to just come from your customers you can use your existing traffic and leads to drive referrals for you let me show you an example a few years ago here at Infusionsoft we were offering this ebook called master of the moment and you can fill out the form and download the e-book but on the page where you downloaded the e-book we have some additional information we said hey look we have a bonus that goes with this ebook it's essentially an appendix and it has 45 additional marketing samples 14 powerful templates and all these additional things in this bonus section and we'll give it to you for free if you just refer to friends then we gave them an opportunity to refer up to 5 there and what happens whenever I tell people about this as they say well don't people just put bogus information in there so that they can get the bonuses yes absolutely a lot of people do but who cares they're free leads right and so although we got a lot of bogus information and we just of course deleted those we did actually end up getting a lot of good leads and I did some analysis on this particular campaign just a couple months ago and it turns out we have a lot of long-term Infusionsoft customers who came to us as referrals through this system this is a very effective way of leveraging brand new leads these are brand new people that just came in and downloaded our ebook and then they refer to other people to the e-book and that sold our funnel more with lead that we could leverage alright so let me take you through a couple of examples of real businesses walking through the entire perfect customer lifecycle so this is a service-based business this is a heating and air conditioning business a customer of ours and this is what their perfect customer lifecycle looks like and don't worry again if you can't see the detail i'll give you a link to where you can download these PDFs and you can look at them up close but this was the marketing automation plan that was developed by one of our success coaches every new customer gets a success coach and they go through this process of developing the plan but you'll notice here and we can walk through this in detail is that they got every step planned out so they know where the traffic is coming from online it's pay-per-click SEO and social media offline they do trade shows and some people call in and they've got a way to capture them at each stage and then the people they come online and saw out the form they're following up with them with an automated email campaign that drives them to a sales rep if they're interested if they're not interested does it make any sense to hit them over the head with a sales message and so we put those people into a long-term nurture sequence to continue to build the relationship until the time is right for them sales reps job is to set the appointment when they do that they fire off in an automated reminder sequence to make sure the person doesn't refer get their their appointment then we've got the installation and payment process that happen that kicks off the new customer welcome sequence to make sure we wow these people now we talked about measuring satisfaction and taking action just a moment ago here's where that happens the new customer welcome sequence ends in a customer satisfaction survey here we're asking them in an email or in a web form are you happy with our service or not if they're if they're satisfied then they automatically get routed to a campaign where they can request testimonials and referrals if not of course we're not going to request testimonials and referrals from someone who's not happy so they get routed to a customer service campaign where we ask what went wrong and we trying to figure out what how we probably can make it right and we try and turn that unhappy customer into a happy customer so think about what it would take to deliver this see how it's a very different process instead of going out and saying hey what are the hot tools out there what are the latest tactics and chasing those things around you now have a plan in place and you can figure out what tools to put in place so this would take a website and email marketing system a contact management system an email autoresponder opportunity management a payment process or collections referral tracking you need to put all those things in place that's a little chaotic and so what you want to do is focus on all-in-one tools or comprehensive tools to help make this a lot easier you want to streamline the process for your business and your employees so you're not stuck in the mire of the systems but the systems are actually delivering on the experience for your particular customers all right let's go through another example this one is actually a case study that we did this is an online retail company that was selling educational products actually have spelling products so they're working primarily with homeschool parents that are trying to teach spelling to their kids will deal with them was a three-month case that he might go with them with to double their sales in three months yeah this was a couple years ago as fairly new with Infusionsoft and I was so proud of our software and said you know what I thought working double people sales in fact I think we can do it in three months let's go do it and so they were already using an email autoresponder and they already had a shopping cart but since those two systems weren't integrated they couldn't segment their list they couldn't promote two separate groups they couldn't upsell very well so the business was growing but it wasn't driving and so we put the perfect customer lifecycle in place and here's what it looks like and I'll show you in a moment the results but the main thing is we put a lead capture device on their website they had a web form on their website that was sign up for our newsletter which is kind of the typical small business thing to do but most people don't want to send it for a newsletter they're looking for specific information so for these people we put this form on the website that says free report 20 best tips for teaching spelling so if your homeschool mother you're trying to teach spelling to your kids and this free report is promising 20 best tips for teaching spelling that's a compelling offer I'll give you my email address so that i can get that download now here's the interesting part at this very point in time they were starting to branch out and sell their products to school districts as well and so in the form they ask these people are you a homeschool teacher or are you a classroom teacher and depending on what they selected they got very different messages in the follow-up so you can see in the perfect customer lifecycle that there's a branching at that point home school teachers got one set of follow-up emails and classroom teachers got an entirely different set of follow-up emails and that's because they have different needs so what ways can you segment out your customers and your prospects so that you're talking to them always in a very relevant way now of course that follow up there is geared towards providing value in education but also selling and driving them to the shopping cart now in the shopping cart we don't just sell them the product are looking for of course we have opportunities for upselling and so in their cart had seven different levels of their spelling kits if you put level one into the cart it would then give you an opportunity for what they call cobweb the cat which was an upsell that you could throw into the cart with the level one now after people brought purchase level 1 level 1 is designed to be consumed by the student with in about 60 days and so their follow up after the purchase was then geared towards up selling them to level 2 and then of course after they purchase level 2 it up sells them to level 3 and on through all through all seven levels of their spelling sister this is one of the emails that they get you know after 60 days of being a level one customer hey we'll be happy to be having a sale on level two now if you buy it right now you're going to get a discount basically the message so the results well we actually doubled their sales in 72 days their prospect list grew from 5,000 to 10,000 they have built the five fouls the list of 5,000 people over the course of about 18 months and then in three months we doubled that their average sale increased sixteen percent this is due to those upsells in the cart they also implemented an affiliate program or referral program that brought in 49 additional sales and so the number of sales or the card transactions increased from almost 600 and the prior three months to over 1,200 in the three months that we worked with them and so the reason I show you all this is because plugging those three black holes in ensuring that leads can't flip through the cracks and that the traffic doesn't leave without opting in and that you create lifelong customers with or lifelong fans with your customers that implementing the perfect customer lifecycle actually works it can create a drastic difference in the growth trajectory of your business and so important to focus on these key areas and plugging those holes and creating that perfect customer experience for every one of your customers first and then go find the tools and the tactics to deliver on that if you do it the other way around you'll always be chasing the latest tactic and the latest tool so what would it be worth to you to not have slipping through the cracks to make sure that every customer hears from you consistently to know that you have a proven customized strategy for your business and you have one system with all the customer data and automatic upsells and you've got referrals happening and really the peace of mind and the confidence in the ROI you can ask you is what would be worth it because it takes work to put all this in place you have to implement right you've got that worksheet and hopefully you've written down a bunch of great ideas but those ideas won't do you any good unless you go implement them bill grazer who's a marketer extraordinaire says the difference between an ordinary business and an extraordinary businesses implementations and so please I'm begging you you've got those ideas you've written down on the perfect customer life cycle worksheet don't let those just stay ideas put them in place remember you're very simple plan for 2012 which is first to understand those three black holes map out your perfect customer lifecycle identify those lay low hanging fruit and plug the holes in other words implement and actually put this stuff in place now I've got some bonus materials for you like I said if you want to access them there at this link bit ly / PCL dash maps as bi t ly /p CL for perfec
customer lifecycle dash maps this will give you eight different business blueprints that you can look at their across all different industries so hopefully there's one that's similar to your business you can look at and start to identify other ways that successful businesses these are these are coming from very successful customers of ours so you can look at ways that successful businesses are following up with customers how are they're capturing leads and how they're implementing their perfect customer lifecycle and hopefully this will give you ideas to model your marketing plan after so thank you so much for being attentive and attending this webinar I'll go ahead and open it up to questions I'm not sure exactly how we do that so maybe I was turn the time back over to to use to again and we can go from there yeah actually we'll take questions to the console and actually have a couple queued up so we'll jump right in but one of the questions from Joshua is what type of mark you recommend for company that those medical weems so they're trying to get ahold of doctors surgery centers hospitals people in the medical field what are some strategies or tactics that you could recommend for them that's a great question it's funny I actually used to work in pharmaceutical sales this is quite a few years back and so I know this I know this arena just a little bit you've got a few different options there one thing is to realize that when you're working in a b2b situation typically your sale cycle is longer and it requires a lot more human capital you can't you can't automate quite as much although you can still have email campaigns and things like that you can still be doing SEO to attract these people but it might just require some feet on the street you know it might it might require some face-to-face representatives out there doing doing some of the work but what I would start doing if you want to transition online and you want to start building a presence there if you haven't already I would really focus on the content first the reason this is important is because it's not just going to help you online but it will also help your face to face representatives if you use them to start driving business initially so the more content you can create that is expert content that these people need so you're talking to doctors surgery centers hospitals and talking them to them about their their financial the financial aspects of their business which is really important to these people so you can provide some very powerful content for them that helps them to understand their finances better to understand what's going on and understand the opportunities that they have that's valuable to them so I've put that kind of stuff on your website have that lead them into into your your funnel and then also your your reps could leverage that stuff live so it has a dual purpose but don't forget that the most important reason you put it on your website actually probably the second most important season you put it on your website it's for SEO purposes right and so you want to write that powerful content or create that powerful content ensure that you are creating it and presenting it in a way that the search engines pick it up so that if the doctor goes and searches on medical lien or a hospital administrator searches on medical liens that your stuff starts coming up and that way you'll start attracting that traffic they start seeing you as a respected resource because your content is awesome and then you can start building that relationship excellent thank you another question from that is do you recommend a program that can handle some of the you know the email automation or the opt-in things like that yeah so you know obviously I'm here on this webinar from Infusionsoft Infusionsoft as a system that helps you do all of that it's an all in one comprehensive system that does your email marketing your CRM as well as your e-commerce now Infusionsoft isn't for everybody and so if you're kind of starting out with this online marketing and you're starting out with some basic email marketing tools there are others i would recommend there much they're much less expensive and teams off is kind of the the premium product for businesses that are growing a little faster and a little more ahead of the game but if you just started starting out with this email marketing stuff there are great tools like aweber which i think you can get a weber for 20 or 30 bucks a month to do some of this automated sequencing what will happen is you'll find that as you put all these tools together that eventually the volume of traffic and leave that you're driving starts to create chaos because these tools don't work together that's why we created Infusionsoft because it's an all-in-one system that helps you to deliver this stuff in a scalable way but there's no problem with using something like aweber or eye contact combine that with a low-cost shopping cart like one shopping cart and you've got it you've got a system there that will work you'll just run into limitations as you grow but another question what tactics do you recommend for the legal profession potentially looking for bankruptcy clients yeah so the legal profession is an interesting one we actually have quite a few customers that are that are lawyers or legal offices and you run into some some regulatory issues because there are certain things you can say and you can't say based on your state bar i think is the way it works i haven't worked personally really closely with many of our legal clients but i know that is one of the issues and so your ability to self-promote and do those types of things in the legal industry is hindered just slightly by those those regulations but I know that a lot of our customers who are lawyers do exactly what we've been talking about where they create content that their particular audience is looking for so for example if you are a divorce a torrent attorney you might create a free report that's ten things you must know about divorce law before you hire a divorce attorney or ten ways to know if your divorce attorney is going to rip you off or you know ten ways to you know make sure you don't lose your all your money in the process of it of a divorce and you get the idea so in really this is a matter of stepping into your customers shoes understanding at a very deep level what are their pains what are their fears what are their wants and their desires that you can kind of tap into with the information that you provide to them and then when they want that information and they download it and request it and exchange for your contact their contact information and you've got a lead and you can follow up so content marketing with those types of things I seem very successful with some of our customers excellent another question is how often should people post to their social media channels it's a really good question i have found and this probably doesn't probably doesn't apply across different industries i'm assuming that all all industries are slightly different in this aspect but i have found that if you are logging less than once a week or once every other week then it's just it's just not enough to maintain that relationship with your audience and if you're posting to your social media networks whether it's Facebook or Twitter or whatever than once or twice a day then again that's just not enough so that that's where this content becomes really really important because you run out of things to say and if you're just posting status updates hey you know I'm having lunch today then that doesn't create the X the it doesn't set you aside as an expert for your audience and it doesn't build the relationship that you need and so it's a matter of pushing out content and resources saying hey you should check out this or hey I have this free report or you know and commenting on industry news and things like that so that you become that resource excellent one will do one more question if people want to get the worksheet some people weren't able to download the worksheet can we can they tweet you can they get ahold of you what's the best way to get ahold of you yeah they can definitely tweet me and I'll tweet out the link i think the link if IG if i remember correctly i created the bitly link on this a little while ago is its bit ly / pcl dash worksheet so the same link we had up earlier for the bonus materials but instead of dash maps its dash worksheet so bi TDY /p CL worksheet oh yeah go ahead and tweet me and i'll tweet it out so that everyone had that yeah for everyone that's on the call your twitter handle is prominently placed at the bottom of the presentation so yeah right well we we at nevada state bank Thank You toddler for your time this morning and to the to the audience members thank you so much for a wonderful 2011 and some great webinars we look forward to 2012 also one at ease everyone with a brand-new nevada small business comm look for that to launch very very early in 2012 brookside giving it a new look and feel and hopefully all of our business clients and folks will be able to get a lot out of this website so again we really appreciate everyone's attendance and tyler we appreciate your time this morning thanks no problem thank you so much appreciate it thank you ladies and gentlemen a does conclude our meeting for today thank you for your participation you may now disconnect
