As promised a couple weeks ago, I wanted to provide a little update on how we’re doing with each one of our 2009 annual priorities. It’s important to me to maintain this transparency and open communication as to the progress we’re making together to revolutionize the way small businesses grow.

As you know, I’m very proud to cross these milestones, provide valuable services for customers and attract new ones. And we have many more goals set ahead of us to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses.

Double Your Sales

We launched several “Double Your Sales” initiatives into building an intuitive product that has consistently increased customers’ revenue by over 200%. On a side note, it’s really motivating to see that we are actually doubling sales for our customers.  (If you haven’t read my e-book, I recommend you do it now.) We have a Double Your Sales Guarantee, Double Your Sales Club, Double Your Sales Coaching Program and many customers have joined. We created the Club for our Infusionsoft customers who have proven they’ve doubled their sales since using our software. The Guarantee is available for customers who choose the Deluxe or Pro editions of our software. This annual priority has traction and is picking up steam.

Voice of Customer

We integrated customer satisfaction surveys in our application, we survey customers after support interactions, we launched a new help center known as the Fusebox and we have a Customer Action Team that huddles daily to find any fires, solve the specific problems and systematically troubleshoot broader issues. The VPs and I review the results (I personally review results every Friday morning at 10:00-I love it). We’re listening to and implementing customer requests on our Infusionsoft Ideas page and we’re constantly monitoring the conversations across the social media platforms. These listening mechanisms give us great data to respond to customers’ needs-to heed the voice of the customer.

Email Excellence

Much of this focuses on email deliverability, reliability and beating industry standards. We launched an email marketing resource center within our Fusebox, which helps our customers understand best practices so their emails get delivered. We ran a pretty creative “Don’t Pee in the Pool” campaign which educates customers about email reputation and how to protect their (and our) email reputation. We also put together Webinars to educate customers and prospects about email sender practices. I’m so excited that we’ve also developed new features to be released later in the Summer that will empower customers to manage their spam complaints and how to avoid them. In addition to our deliverability work, we released our long awaited Outlook Integration (it’s about freakin’ time!) and we’re working to improve the templates and email authoring to make it easier and prettier to send email through Infusionsoft.

Getting Profitable

This one’s easy: we’re on a quest to be profitable by the end of the year. We’re making great progress on this by ensuring that we spend wisely and keep unnecessary costs to a minimum. We’ve also released our product to be more accessible for more people so we can continue to grow with more people. Those editions have different price points to better match the needs of new customers.

Building the Infusionsoft Family

This one’s all about the fantastic work culture at Infusionsoft.  We invest a lot of time and effort in making Infusionsoft an amazing place to work for our employees. We expanded into a larger space in February. The bigger space enabled us to break down physical walls between departments and open up the collaboration. We’re also doing a bunch of other activities to bring folks together: a company talent show, community service projects, KIVA donations to fund dozens of entrepreneurs in 3rd-world countries, cross-team lunches, social media initiatives, etc. The other big thing we’re doing is driving on individual accountability through our internal performance management system and group accountability through the liberal and open use of public whiteboards. “Where performance is measured, performance improves. Where performance is measured and reported, performance improves dramatically. Where performance is measured and reported PUBLICLY, performance improves exponentially.”

Enabling Self Service

This is the big one that contributes to all the above.  It involves product simplification, automation and better training resources. We have built checklists, guides and a setup progress meter into the implementation process. There are tons of sample campaigns our customers can now choose from. We automated the app creation process so a new customer can buy online and immediately begin using the software. Soon, we’ll be enhancing our data import tools to make it easier for customers to get started with the software. In terms of training resources, we have built out our Fusebox (training center) with more articles, conceptual whiteboard videos, product how-to videos, a more dynamic user’s manual, daily webinars and many other resources to help our customers help themselves. We have more work to do here, but we’re making great progress. The new account management system is a big accomplishment, which literally cut the time to get started with our software from days to minutes. I’m very proud of that and so are our customers.

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So, those are just a few highlights on the progress we’ve made toward our annual priorities and some direction as to where we’re going. To compliment these priorities, we have quarterly Tactical Operating Priorities (TOPs) and related SMARTs that, when accomplished, further the progress of our annual priorities.

Phew… This was a long post!

Nevertheless, hopefully the real-life examples of what we’re doing will help you apply the planning methodology to your business so that you can proactively build your business. At the very least, you know what our priorities are at Infusionsoft and you know how we’re working to knock out those priorities.

If you have questions, suggestions or are curious about any of the above, share it in the comments.

–Clate

You might also like these blog entries:

• Annual Priorities at Infusionsoft (‘09)
• Inside Infusionsoft’s Strategy and Operations
• Happy Independence Day Weekend!