A few weeks ago, my team and I were off-site, putting in place the Q4 operating plan. The quarterly plans are what drive our annual plan, which drives our BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal).

I shared an update on the annual plan several months ago, in June, on this blog. Today I want to update you on the annual plan and tell you about a few Q4 priorities that really excite me.

To understand how these fit into the bigger picture, I recommend reading one of my earlier entries about our strategy and operations.

Email Excellence

We’ve made a ton of progress on this priority in 2009!  From stellar relationships with ISPs to an all-out education campaign to customers, to enhanced tools in the app that allow our customers to better manage their email reputation, we’ve done a lot to ensure high deliverability for our customers.

And the work is paying off: our weekly 3^rd-party reporting shows we have regularly achieved 98%+ email deliverability across our customer base for the past few months. In addition to deliverability, the Email Excellence priority pushed us to create a cutting-edge Outlook Integration that enables our customers to work in Infusionsoft right from Outlook. You can search contacts, add notes and tasks, tag people, start follow-ups and do a ton of other stuff in Infusionsoft… without ever leaving Outlook. This feature is awesome and it’s getting rave reviews from our customers.

The last big piece of our Email Excellence initiative is something we’re working on in Q4: enabling beautiful and easy email authoring. I won’t go into too much detail, but I’m stoked about it. Our customers are going to LOVE it!

Get Profitable

We continue to make great strides toward profitability. We’re conserving the venture capital we raised, consistently hitting our net income goals and making good progress toward becoming cash flow positive, which I expect we’ll do early next year. Employees have been great at identifying opportunities for us to remain efficient, which is has resulted in us making great progress in this goal.

Double Your Sales

The DYS Guarantee and Club were announced earlier this year. Those programs are running strong. We launched the DYS Coaching Program to our customers and we have about 400 members in the program who are learning the growth methodology that underlies the software.  We are excited about ramping up the DYS Coaching Program. We also shared how we individually contribute to the success of all customers on a passionate video project named I2XYourSales. You can watch how I double your sales, too.

Voice of Customer

I’ve mentioned in the past all of the survey and interaction methods we use for gathering the customer voice.  Over the past few months, we’ve been working to amplify the customer voice within the walls of Infusionsoft by doing things like circulating all customer comments (good and bad), posting comments in public areas, even projecting the customer survey results and comments on big, public wall inside the office. We read your Tweets, comments on our Facebook and your emails that you send us.

The effects are showing: we achieved a 93% satisfaction rating and over 95% of customers would recommend us a couple months ago and we’ve consistently been rated between 87% and 89% over the past six months. We’re driving hard to get that rating consistently above 90% and with several enhancements to the product that should debut the end of this year, combined with our compassionate service — we’ll get there.

Make Self Service a Reality

When we shifted our business model a few months ago, we no longer required new customers to purchase the consulting package that went along with the software.  Instead, we gave customers the ability to set up the software on their own. That has worked well for most folks, but we’ve found that some people need a little more help in fixing their follow up. We know that if you fix your follow-up, you’ll double your sales. But sometimes it can be confusing for customers who don’t know where to begin fixing their follow-up. That’s why we recently kicked off an initiative called Launch Your 1^st Campaign. It focuses new customers on the first thing they should do to fix their follow-up… so they can get on the road to doubling their sales. This is an initiative I’m really excited about.

Build the Infusionsoft Family

This initiative is all about developing our people here at Infusionsoft, while specifically focusing on our Core Philosophy (comprised of Core Purpose and Core Values). We’ve created departmental development plans, a library and book club for continuous learning and personal development classes that go beyond any role training related to the employee’s position at Infusionsoft. I’m excited about these initiatives and I feel like we continue to amp up the culture at Infusionsoft.

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All of these priorities are about propelling Infusionsoft to accomplish our Dream of revolutionizing the way small businesses grow.  Our purpose is to liberate and empower entrepreneurs. We’re doing it. These priorities help us to deliver for our customers. It’s not easy; it takes extreme amounts of energy, dedication and focus. But it’s worth it when we see our customers succeeding. It’s worth it to know that we’re making the Dream come alive for our customers. And for me, it’s worth it when I see Infusionites (that’s what we call our employees), doing amazing things every day to serve our customers and help them fix their follow up so they can double their sales.

You might also like these blog entries:

• The Infusionsoft Success Path, Revisited.
• 5 Customer Support Changes You’ll Love
• Thank You to Our Infusionsoft Fans!