I’ve got the reading bug. It started about 2-3 years ago. My wife thinks I’m nuts for reading so many books that have to do with entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, & business success. As she puts it, “why don’t you read something fun?!”. Well, to me, these books ARE fun, interesting, insightful, and have really propelled me. So, which are my favorites for entrepreneurs and small businesses?

• The E-Myth, Michael Gerber
• Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch
• Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Series (Ultimate Sales Letter, Ultimate Marketing Plan, Time Management, etc.)
• The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Scott Meerman

I recently came across a blog post by Mike Michalowicz on CNBC.com with his list that looked pretty solid.

I’d love to know what books you’ve read that you think should be on the list…

Entrepreneurs are usually pretty passionate about their mission.  But as the organization grows, it can be tough to add talented people who share the passion. Should the entrepreneur REQUIRE everyone to share the passion?  Or, should the entrepreneur settle for adding talented people who view his passion as an obsession?

I’ve thought a lot about this subject over the years. I was in an entrepreneurial venture during the dot com days when my passion gradually parted ways with the company’s passion. At InfusionSoft, as our company has gone through growth stages, it’s been interesting and challenging to keep every employee fired up about our mission.  There have definitely been times when an employee or two has viewed my passion as an obsession, not to be shared or appreciated.

So, the other day, when I read a couple of great blogs about the issue, I perked up.  The best place to go for a summary on the topic is Tim Berry’s post in Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends. Tim’s the founder of Palo Alto Software and co-founder of Borland International. He’s a seasoned entrepreneur who knows his stuff.

So, where do I stand on the issue? I absolutely do require all of our employees to share the passion for revolutionizing dthe way small businesses drive and manage their growth.  Our mission is too important to me to have a bunch of people on board who don’t get it.  But I also want our employees to have a life outside of InfusionSoft.  For the most part, I think we’re getting it right… and it’s one of the things I love most about what we’re doing at InfusionSoft.

A few weeks ago we had the 2008 Infusion User’s Conference held in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was AWESOME! This is the third year we have held the conference and it was great to reconnect with old friends/customers and meet so many new members of the Infusion family.  Small business and entrepreneur uber-guru Michael Gerber was the keynote speaker on the second day. It was great to be inspired by Michael again. He was a keynote speaker last year too. I have also had the great personal benefit and pleasure of having attended an In the Dreaming Room session with Michael early last year held in Napa Valley, California. Listening to Michael again at the conference reminded me of many of the things I learned in the Dreaming Room.

The experience literally changed my life.

I attended the Dreaming Room with Scott Martineau, the founder of Infusion and our Vice President of Product Management and David William Lee, our Vice President of Marketing.  Michael introduced us to the concept of “intentional dreaming” and he startled me out of my state of relative sleep to see things completely diferently.  I actually “woke up” from my day-to-day state of “waking sleep” to really, intentionally dream and discover the meaning of what I am doing personally, and what we are doing at Infusion.

Michael’s Dreaming Room changed Infusion also.  Scott, Dave and I came back from the Dreaming Room with our minds blown.  We felt like we were in a different universe with regard to thinking bigger and with more meaning than we ever had before.  We returned to the office with a new sense of purpose.  A few months after the three of us went to the Dreaming Room, our President Clate Mask and Sam Blackham our Director of Finance attended an In the Dreaming Room session with Michael.  Same result!

As the leaders of Infusion we all put our heads together and re-tooled our company, particurally with regard to the meaning of why were building Infusion to serve small businesses.  Clate later created our Dream, Vision, Purpose and Mission as follows:

Dream:
Revolutionize the way small businesses drive and manage their growth.

Vision:
Infusion will be THE sales and marketing software program small businesses use to grow their companies quickly and profitably.

Purpose:
Liberate and empower small businesses and their employees so they can enjoy doing business, wow their customers and better serve their families and communities

Mission:
To create the leading sales and marketing software program for small business that is easy to use and powerful enough to turn small businesses into big businesses.

It is not hard to see our focus and commitment to small business. We sometimes say that we are “stubbornly small business.” Michael taught us how to intentionally dream and it has made a tremendous difference, both for me personally and for Infusion. I can’t recommend the Dreaming Room highly enough.  Thanks, Michael.

To download your FREE copy of “The Edge,” simply fill out the form below.

This revolutionary e-book reveals the techniques you need to simplify your business and Double Your Sales!

If you’ve been in business very long, you probably know a few “truths.” 1) Growing AND managing your company is challenging. 2) There always seems to be a better way to do things. 3) Success is not easy to come by, but is worth the struggle!

If you’ve ever felt like your company is sitting on the edge of a breakthrough, if you’ve ever felt like success was just out of your grasp, if you’ve ever wanted to take your business to “the next level,” then,

is the book for you! Inside, you’ll discover the ultimate “SECRET” small business owners must know. Plus, you’ll learn:

• How to “Master” every selling moment
• Easy ways to generate more leads
• Techniques for becoming a better “salesman”
• What customers really want from you
• How to capitalize on your existing customers (and still have them love you)
• And, so much more!

Please post your comments to “The Edge” as well as your personal business building stories.

I have spent a lot of time trying to simplify for my own internal sales force as well as the outside partner community I work with how to look at what is called the “Sales Cycle”.

In order to simplify the process I have come up with three cycles most sales go through as they enter the top of the funnel to the point they come out of the bottom of the funnel.

Below is my simplified version of the sales cycle I am using:

Education

Buying facilitation

Closing

By looking at the sales cycle in these 3 simple steps I am able to start breaking down each stage into many steps and better educate my sales people as well as our partner community on how to treat new suspects, best avenues for education, when to plug in sales capital, and knowing when to close the deal.

I will be breaking down each stage in separate blog postings as I go along, however before I do that I am looking for your feedback, do you agree a sales cycle can be broken down into 3 categories?

Consider the following concept: feature suggestions, defects and change requests are really just like sales leads.

Right now I’m sitting-in on the inaugural Infusion ICC (Infusion Certified Consultant) training course. It is the charter class for ICCs and every seat is full (over 50 in all)! It is a 5 day course and it is going great! Tons of great CRM and contact manager information being exchanged by the group.  After all, almost everyone doing the ICC course is a CRM or contact manager expert.

Anyway, as the ICC course is proceeding everyone is encouraged to put feature suggestions and change requests on post-it notes.  We put them into a basket and we later enter them into our ticketing system.  We are getting some FANTASTIC suggestions listed on the post-it notes that we put in the basket!

Well, during one of the breaks a few of the course attendees and I were chatting and I was asked if I was cringing at all the post-it notes in the basket.  To their surprise, I answered ABSOULTLY NOT!  Fact is I LOVE all the suggestions on how to make the software better.  I explained that all the post-it notes are just like sales leads to me.  I consider all of the suggestions to be written on gold!  Make no mistake, I’m very proud of our product and all the functionality it offers our customers.’ Nevertheless, we have a great opportunity to get feedback from all the ICCs to make us even better and stronger.  I’m going to take every “lead” and chase it down and close it.

A few months ago our VP of Marketing David William Lee suggested the concept of bugs = leads, and I thank him for the idea. We are working every day here at Infusion to make the product better and I want to thank all the ICCs for giving me such great “leads” to work with.

Wow! I always look forward to getting together with a big group of our entrepreneurial customers. I know that I’ll learn a bunch and get invigorated from them. Plus, I love seeing a bunch of friends. But the last few days definitely exceeded my expectations.

I learned some really cool things some of our customers are doing with Infusion Software. I talked to a bunch of customers who were experiencing tremendous success (what economic slowdown?). And I got to speak with a bunch of guest speakers who are out of this world–people like Michael Gerber, Pat Sullivan, John Jantsch, Brent Leary and Ramon Ray. These guys are incredible entrepreneurs and marketers. They were all great fun to be around.

More than anything, I loved the vibe of the conference. I love entrepreneurs that are intent on learning how to more effectively build their businesses. And it definitely brings a smile to my face when I see the specific things our customers are doing to automate their marketing.

I was going to summarize a few of my favorite presentations, but I wouldn’t do the conference justice. Instead, we’ve posted the slides of all the speakers so you can dig in for yourself. Go to www.slideshare.net/infusionsoft/slideshows to check it out.

I’ve had an absolute blast at the Infusion User Conference meeting with Infusion clients and seeing the creative ways they’re using Infusion CRM to grow their businesses. Today, day 2 of the conference, I explained how we are using a PHP script along with Google Analytics to capture and track some very valuable information about new leads.

First, I’ll give an overview of what’s happening with each piece of the code and then I’ll show you the entire script.

Conceptual Overview:
As you’re collecting leads information on your website, you always want to know where those leads are coming from. If you’re advertising in a specific place, driving people to a specific landing page, then hardcoding the leadsource in the form is not a bad idea. But many of your leads should come from various sources of internet traffic. This script allows you to pass a value in the url to set the leadsource to a specific value OR the leadsource will be set dynamically by the referring domain. Here’s the code for that section:

This code takes a value from either ‘ls’ or ’source’ in the query string and sets it as the leadsource. If neither of those exist, the referring domain is set as the leadsource. You’ll notice that we store the leadsource in the $source variable as well as in the ‘LeadSource’ cookie. The reason is because cookies are set on the first page of your site that a visitor visits and is only available for reading on the subsequent pages. If someone lands on your site and fills out a form on the first page, the cookie won’t be set yet. So, once you set the leadsource as $source, feed it into a hidden field in your form

We also want to know the exact URL that linked to our site. So, we store another value (referring URL) in a custom field within Infusion CRM.

// SET REFERRING URL
if (!isset($_COOKIE[’Referer’])) {
setcookie(”Referer”, $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’], time()+10000000, “/”, $domain);
$referurl = $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’];
} else { $referurl = $_COOKIE[’Referer’]; }

Next, we read the Google Analytics cookie and chop it up to harvest the data it contains. This cookie contains two pieces of data that we store in custom fields with each lead record. The first is the “type” of referral. The values for this field are (none), organic, cpc, or referral. The other data is the keywords that the visitor used to find your site if they arrived via a search engine search.

// SET COOKIES FROM GOOLGE-ANALYTICS COOKIE
$info = $_COOKIE[’__utmz’];
// Get rid of id stuff
$holder = split(”u”, $info, 2);
$string = “u” . $holder[1];
// Parse String
$ga_vars = split(”\|”, $string);
foreach ($ga_vars as $var) {
list($key,$value) = split(”=”,$var);
if ($key == “utmcmd”) { setcookie(”Type”, $value, time()+100000000, “/”, $domain); $type = $value; }
if ($key == “utmctr”) { setcookie(”Keywords”, $value, time()+100000000, “/”, $domain); $keywords = $value; }
}

We also always store the form URL - in other words, the actual URL that the form is on.

The last section in this code is to store a click history for each visitor. WARNING: this is probably not a good idea for two reasons. We found that this cookie can become too large for the browser to handle and the browser denies access to the site - that’s a bad thing. The other reason is because the click history has to be manually searched and interpreted. It can’t be searched, sorted, or analyzed in mass. So, I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND using this part of the code. We actually turned it off shortly after implementing it.

So, here is the entire PHP code. Any good webmaster can take this code and convert it to the language that your site uses if its not PHP.

The last thing you need to do is put those values in to hidden fields in a form:

<form action="https://crm.infusionsoft.com/AddForms/processForm.jsp" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="formid" value="22" />
<input type="hidden" name="type" value="CustomFormWeb" />
<input type="hidden" name="Contact0LeadSource" value="<?=$source?>">
<input type="hidden" name="Contact0_LinkType" value="<?=type?>">
<input type="hidden" name="Contact0_Keywords" value="<?=$keywords?>">
<input type="hidden" name="Contact0_FormUrl" value="<?=$formurl?>">
<input type="hidden" name="Contact0_ClickHistory" value="<?=$clickhistory?>">
<input type="hidden" name="Contact0_ReferringURL" value="<?=$referurl?>">
First Name: <input type="text" name="Contact0FirstName" value="" />
Last Name: <input type="text" name="Contact0LastName" value="" />>
Email: <input type="text" name="Contact0Email" value="" />
Phone:<input type="text" name="Contact0Phone1" value="" />
</form>

Hopefully this helps many of you. If you have any questions, feel free to post them here. Thanks.

I love our annual Infusionsoft User Conference.  Not just because it’s great to see longtime friends and customers (which it is), not just because I love to see our numbers growing stronger each year (which I do), but because I love the entrepreneurial fire that each customer brings to the conference.

Tomorrow we kick off our annual, three-day event.  See www.infusionuc.com for details.  We’ll have nearly 200 people in attendance.  Each attendee is learning, studying and working to grow his or her business.  We give our attendees all sorts of advice and suggestion on how to do just that: grow their businesses, quickly and profitably.  That’s what this event is all about.

This year, we’ve got a great line-up of speakers, including Michael Gerber, Pat Sullivan, John Jantsch, Brent Leary and Ramon Ray.  All are accomplished entrepreneurs.  All have great wisdom to share with our customers in attendance.  I can’t wait.

Of course, we’ll also be sharing tips and strategies on how to use Infusion Software to the fullest to automate small business growth.  And many of our customers will be sharing the details of their favorite ways to use the software to quickly build their businesses.  It’s going to be a great time.

Stay tuned for my favorite encounters, takeaways and insights.