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.

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?

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. 

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.

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.

I’m a huge Phoenix Suns fan.  I have enjoyed their strong regular season win-loss records for the past 20 years.  No team in the NBA has a better regular season winning record than the Phoenix Suns over the past 20 years.  But championships aren’t won in the regular season.  Championships are won in the playoffs when mental toughness, not talent, is the most important characteristic of a team.

This year I hoped we would finally break through.  We traded Shawn Marion (who I love as a player) for Shaquille O’Neal.  As much as I hated to lose Marion, I believed it was a good trade that would help us in the Playoffs when toughness would be required.  Shaq’s tougher than Marion.  And some of the other guys have stepped up their toughness.  But one thing is still missing…

The leader of the team is the coach.  And although I like a lot of things about the Suns’ coach, Mike D’Antoni, I really don’t like his mental toughness.  It’s weak, simply put.  In Game 1, he made so many crucial mental mistakes in crunch time that I was yelling at the TV like an idiot.  I’ve since seen the error of my ways and calmed down… a little 

Toughness.  NBA Championship coaches have it and their teams mirror their coaches’ toughness in the way the teams play.

What does this mean for entrepreneurs?  You’ve gotta be mentally tough to win, to lead your team, to accomplish something so many others say you can’t accomplish.  You’ve gotta be smart, calculated, hard-nosed and tenacious in your pursuit of your entrepreneurial goals.  And if you’re leading a group of people, I can promise you this, if you don’t develop the mental toughness your company needs, your people will not exhibit that toughness in their work every day.

When I did my MBA program about 10 years ago at BYU’s Marriott School of Management, there weren’t many schools in the country offering an Entrepreneurship track.  I had one class on running small and family-held businesses, which was outstanding.  But beyond that, there wasn’t much offered.

Lately, I’ve noticed more and more universities and b-schools offering up Entrepreneurship degrees and MBA tracks.  I think that’s GREAT!  And I have some pretty strong opinions about what should be offered.

So, the other day when I read Scott Shane’s post on Anita Campbell’s blog, I had to chime in.  Scott’s original post and the many replies are seriously worth the read for any entrepreneur.  Check it out.

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I’ve talked with thousands of entrepreneurs. Some very successful and some not-so-successful. This morning I was thinking about the not-so-successfuls and I realized they could be bucketed into two groups: those with the Big Idea Syndrome and those with Analysis Paralysis.

With all due respect to Donny Deutsch’s The Big Idea (love his show), the big idea isn’t worth jack. It’s all about the execution. But those who suffer from the Big Idea Syndrome jump into idea after idea, full of excitement and ambition, only to fall flat because they fail to realize success comes from execution, not the idea.

On the other end of the spectrum are the entrepreneurs who are too afraid to act. They think, analyze and talk till they’re blue in the face, but they don’t take action. Their paralysis keeps them in their cushy corporate job or in the comfort zone of their modest small business. They’re paralyzed and unable to jump in and act.

I think the key for successful entrepreneurship is to be in the middle of the spectrum: act on the idea (almost any idea will do), but realize that execution is the key.