In the early days at Infusion, we did very little marketing.  Consequently, we got very little business.  We did, however, excel at Unreal Tournament.

That’s why we hired Mark.

Mark was on the payroll for a couple of years and helped us out tremendously with our marketing efforts.   During his employment with us, we dramatically increased our lead flow and the number of deals we closed.  The thing about Mark was that he didn’t know anything about marketing – he didn’t  really know anything about anything because he wasn’t a real person.

Shortly after Clate Mask joined the company, he came to us a bit puzzled as to exactly who this “Mark” guy was that we were paying $3,000 a month.

So we explained to him:  “Mark” was the persona we had given to marketing.  We knew that marketing was critical to the success of our young business, but like most start-ups, we didn’t have a CLUE how to market ourselves or our product.  So we decided to start by budgeting $3,000 each month to marketing and that we’d figure things out from there.   Our only rule was that we spend all the money.  Kinda like Brewster’s Millions, only with $3,000 instead of $30,000,000…

And we put him on the payroll to make sure that “he” got paid before we did.

Of course, Clate turned that $3,000 budget into a successful pay-per-click campaign and with the help of influential marketing coaches like Reed Hoisington, Dan Kennedy, and Bill Glazer, we were off and running.

What was your first experience marketing like?  Did you have a coach?  Did you just figure it out?  And what have you found that works for you?

In working with business owners and entrepreneurs over the years, I’ve noticed that when it comes to acquiring new customers, most of them are hunters.  They pounce on new leads, chase the prospects, make themselves readily available to the prospect and then bend over backwards to land the new customer.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that the most successful business owners and entrepreneurs take a different approach to customer acquisition: they are harvesters.  They gather in all their leads, work hard to prevent any from slipping through the cracks, cultivate those leads and then harvest them when the time is right for the customer.

The most interesting thing about these two styles is that the hunter usually gets tired, a bit humiliated and ends up getting small margins.  On the other hand, the harvester stays fresh, confident and usually earns higher margins.

What I’ve described here is the difference between a sales mentality (hunter) and a marketing mentality (harvester).  Every business owner or entrepreneur who experiences some level of success has hunting skills… and that’s good.  But the difference between minor success and major success is the difference between hunting and harvesting.

Oh, and just so we’re clear… I’m not saying that harvesting is an easy, non-aggressive job.  When it’s time to harvest, you swing the sickle sharp and fast.

Happy harvesting!

I am back on the fundamentals that have helped me to successfully perform the education process, in this blog I will talk about the automation portion of the education process.

Vision this, a lead comes through a web form on your website, the next automated step is they get an email explaining just enough about your company and your products that they want to click on the embedded link you have given them inside the email. The prospect clicks on the link and then downloads information from your organization. Two days later they get an email inviting them to a special event where you are giving an in-depth look at your products and offerings. In order for them to participate they have to fill out a full information form with name, email, address, phone number, etc. The prospect attends the special event and invests an hour of their valuable time.

It is now at this point that you should assign this lead to your human sales capital. Your sales person is now playing where they can win, as they are now working with a prospect that has raised their hand and stated I am a much better qualified buyer.

By following this qualification approach you are now educating your prospects much better, you will be running prospects through your funnel like water, and you will need LESS sales people to achieve much higher results than before. In fact may I dare say you could “double your sales” with the same amount of human sales capital you have today!

How do you educate your leads & prospects today?