I’ve been on a 10-day, road-trip vacation through the Midwest with my wife and five kids.  We saw 10 states, a ton of interesting sites and more corn than I care to mention.   With the exception of three 10-minute glances at my Blackberry, I left work completely alone.  It was great and my family LOVED it.  My oldest son said on the last day of the trip, “This is the best vacation we’ve ever had!”  Success.

Last Monday, we went to an amusement park.  The roller coasters were great, the games stole a bunch of my money and the stuffed animals I won were, well, cheap.  But we had a good time because my kids and I love riding roller coasters.  The interesting thing was a comment my wife made as we left.  I thought the day was a huge success, but she said, “Well, it’s certainly not Disneyland.”  I thought the rides were more fun than Disneyland’s.  But she was annoyed that the grounds weren’t clean.  I started asking her questions about what she loves about Disneyland.  It all came down to cleanliness, familiar characters and happy, cheerful employees.

Truth is, I think the characters were the least important part to my wife.  She spreads word-of-mouth wildfire about Disneyland because of clean grounds and happy employees.  She won’t tell anyone about the amusement park we went to the other day.  Considering the cost of acquiring new customers, this was a great lesson for me.

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?

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?

Through my many years of working with small businesses, just like you, one thing I have come to realize is that “Cash is King”; and everything in the business revolves around budgeting for the current cash on hand and the expected incoming cash. Therefore, “wants” are a luxury that most small businesses cannot afford; and as we know there is a big difference between a need and a want. Small businesses have to be smart with the investments they make in their business, and they are constantly evaluating each investment for how much of a return they can make on those investments.

Typically a small business evaluates headcount (whether it is a full-time employee or a contract employee) as the largest capital investment they make. And it is easy to relate back an additional headcount to the amount of time it will save the “Owner” or how much top line revenue they can make by adding this person. Unfortunately, this is exactly the wrong way to look at this. What a small business should be asking themselves is “Will an automated system free up my time, save me the cost and headaches of hiring additional people, and still perform all the necessary tasks?”

How do you automate your business today?

I am going to break from my sales process blog for a minute here and share with you an awesome experience I had this past weekend.

I attended the Mark Victor Hansen Mega Business event this past weekend in Irvine, CA, as a keynote speaker. I got to meet incredible people like Bill Bartmann , Cameron Johnson and Marshall Sylver , and even better yet I got a chance to hear them speak.

I found the seminar to be incredibly powerful for the entrepreneur, all the amazing knowledge they were getting in a short 3 days was amazing. The “Pearl” I took from the event was this, everyone has the tools for success, it is whether or not you choose to use them.

How cool is it to be able to be on the same stage as the man who wrote “Chicken Soup for the Soul”, what an incredible experience.

Every business has a sales department.  And every business has a marketing department.  Sometimes those departments are one in the same.  And sometimes those departments are one person wearing (at least) two different hats.  But the point is, we all recognize there are two hats.

Well, a recent article on InsideCRM suggests there ought to be a third hat: the lead warming department.  Why?  Because so many leads die in between the marketing department and the sales department.  As pointed out in the InsideCRM article, we recently ran a survey and found that follow-up failure is the biggest challenge business owners and entrepreneurs face in their marketing efforts.

Most of the CRM software solutions out there will help business owners get organized in their marketing efforts.  And that’s a step in the right direction.  But what business owners really need is a software solution that not only organizes the marketing, but automatically executes it for them… which is why I love what we do at Infusionsoft. 

My last blog was about the theory of educating your prospects, as I stated I am now going to share with you a few fundamentals that have helped me to successfully perform the education process.

The first fundamental of educating your prospects is to know “Your prospects will buy from you when they are ready to buy, NOT when you are ready to sell to them” (quoted from Michael E. Gerber , E-Myth ).

The second fundamental is “80% of your prospects will buy from someone within 12 months”

Third fundamental is “Of the 80% that buy, on average only 1% will buy from you if you aren’t following up with them on a regular basis with valuable, educational, pertinent and timely information”

Fourth fundamental is “It takes on average 7 touches to get a prospect to take action with you, so don’t give up after three attempts”

Fifth fundamental “Make your prospects follow your educational process, map it out and build the educational process before you attempt to launch”

What education fundamentals have you found that work?

Last week, Scott Martineau, and I spent a couple days in the Bay Area and then we flew out to Cleveland for a day of consulting with Dan Kennedy.  The Bay Area was great, as always.  I love the entrepreneurial vibe that oozes out of San Jose.

Sidebar—a couple funny stories.  First, our car got towed from metered parking when we were seriously no more than 120 seconds overdue.  Those dang tow trucks in downtown San Francisco are Johnny on the Spot.  Our car was towed to an impound yard called “Auto Recall—We Care!”  Whatever.  Second funny story had to do with the dinner Scott ordered at the Village Pub.  Let’s just say that “soft-shelled crab” is nothing like Alaskan crab legs.  When the waiter brought Scott his plate, all he could say was, “Wow!  There’s a mamma crab and a papa crab,” and they were staring right at Scott, waiting for him to dig in.  I don’t think Scott’s recommending soft-shelled crab these days.

Anyway, back to my point.  The long flights to and from Cleveland gave me a chance to read a couple of books: one by Dan Kennedy called Ruthless Management of People and Profits; the other by Michael Gerber called Awakening the Entrepreneur Within.  Dan’s book is a pragmatic, realistic, no-holds-barred approach to managing people to build a profitable venture.  Michael’s book is an idealistic, optimistic, dream-the-impossible approach to building an enduring, world-class organization. 

Both books have so much good in them.  I recommend them both.  But it’s the blending of the two philosophies that I think provides the real power to think big and swing for the fences.  I consider both Dan and Michael to be world-class entrepreneurs.  Both have had a profound influence on me and our company.  And I recommend all entrepreneurs study both of their works.

Since it has been a while since my last post I will recap quickly what the first blog was about. Three simplified high level stages of a sales process, education, buying facilitation, and closing. In this blog I will start to break down the first stage “education”.

In my experience 40% to 50% of every sales process and sales cycle is educating your prospects to get them to take action and enter into the buying facilitation process with your organization. How do most companies facilitate this education process? Through the use of human capital, a lead comes in, sales person calls, and starts throwing up all the great things their company can do for them. Sorry to say this is exactly the wrong process to follow.

Don’t feel bad, this is the way I have always done it as well, until now. After coming aboard at Infusion I realized the error of my ways. Why use human sales capital (the most expensive capital within your organization) to qualify your leads? Why not make your prospects jump through a certain number of hoops that you the buying facilitator deem appropriate before a sales rep gets engaged.

In order for this to work the business owner that is selling a product has to realize they must deliver valuable, educational, pertinent and timely information to their prospects in order to gain their trust and build the relationship.

If you are reading this blog and you are a VP or Owner in an organization I would ask you to stop reading right now and make a list of all the great things your company does for your customers.

This is your "Value" and exactly what you should be educating your suspects about. In my next blog I will cover the fundamentals of educating your suspects along with how you can automate this process.

How do you educate your suspects?

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of getting to know Anita Campbell, an expert on all things small business.  Anita runs www.smallbiztrends.com and she recently invited me to be a guest expert on her site.  I gladly accepted and I now blog on her site each month.

My first blog was posted yesterday.  I wrote about “Your On Again, Off Again Marketing Relationship” and it generated a bunch of great comments.  Check it out.