Infusionsoft recently had a contest that generated an outpouring of videos, blog posts, and Facebook updates from fans of the program. People who use Infusionsoft love not only the software, but also what it allows them to do – increase their bottom line without adding extra staff.

All around the world, people use this program because it is remarkably powerful. They’re not die-hard techies, just real business people who needed a trackable, all-in-one CRM and marketing program.

Six Features Which Outclass the Rest

If you’re shopping for an online CRM but remain confused which to choose, here are six features that may give you that extra tip towards Infusionsoft:

1. Tags. These became popular with WordPress.  Tag Clouds – a way to classify information so that it can be easily found – are also great for segmenting your list. These tags allow identification of the right message to the right prospect.
2. Action Sequences.  You can easily add or change a record’s status based on certain conditions. For example, a prospect buys “Product X” from you, you can change the record’s status from prospect to client, add a tag indicating that they’ve purchased “Product X”, and initiate the marketing sequence of emails for Product X – marketing your up-sell packages based on what they bought.
3. Trackable Links.  You can send an email with a link that says, “Please have someone call me”, and once someone clicks the link, it starts an action sequence – perhaps it creates a task, assigns it to a salesperson to follow up, and sends off a sequence of emails.
4. Infusionsoft API.  It’s one of the few systems that allows direct access to your database via an API (Application Programming Interface). Basically, this gives it unlimited scope to ‘automate’ business operations. Read 19 More Ways to Use Infusionsoft APIs
5. Subscriptions and Recurring Payments. You can create order forms that accept credit cards and even spread payments out over a period of time.  After you’ve sold something, this allows you to concentrate on delivering the goods.  It takes a lot of worry out of chasing payments, just “set it and forget it.”
6. Custom Reports. If you really like to keep a handle on things, Custom Reporting is for you. The possibilities are: Marketing & Sales Funnels (graphical), Google Analytics through API, Managing Marketing Budget, etc. Infusionsoft users can copy the code from this informative post. You can create custom reports by pulling data from Contact Records, Tags, Order History, Opportunity Records, and many other database tables.

Of course, some people need to see it working to fully understand the functionality. So if you’d like to see it in action, click here to see a demo or have a go at the 15-day FREE trial.

A lot of small business owners have a gut feeling that they should be using social media platforms to create a buzz and attract people, but they aren’t sure if they should expend the time.  First, let’s look at the reasons why businesspeople use Facebook:

• Consumer Brand building
• Personal branding
• Establishing yourself as a thought leader
• Creating a Facebook group as another touchpoint
• Advertising targeted to key demographics (this is not free – it’s pay per click).

Facebook is growing its offsite presence (it seems like an omnipresence) with ‘like’ thumbs-up buttons popping up on every website and blog, allowing users to ‘show interest’ in them and to share their message with Facebook friends at the same time. Within 3 weeks of the launch of this new ‘like’ feature, some brands were seeing traffic from the social site double (example IMDb.com, source ClickZ). So for consumer brands it works.

But for B2B, people who are looking for new opportunities and professional connections, they tend to use LinkedIn. It is easier to see if someone is credible and trustworthy, since most have their resume and recommendations from others.

But Should You Jump on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc?

There are no hard and fast rules to say you must have a presence on social platforms. If you’re flat out just following up the leads you have – why add to your stress with setting up social networking for business?

Don’t just jump in with the lemmings.  First develop a new Marketing Plan for business. See where your customers are coming from, what are they interested in, what is going to attract them?  From this information, your plan takes shape…including how best to attract, persuade and sell to your market.

You are probably going to need a central system to control your marketing communications and growing customer base.   Otherwise, with multiple databases and different lead campaigns, your worklife will become chaotic.  This is what I have found in many micro/small businesses.

So from Facebook or LinkedIn, Email marketing, Website leads, and offline leads, capture all this information together with a tool like Infusionsoft… so a step-by-step sales process can be easily set up, and you can go focus on the important work of building relationships.

You can do 50 different things to bring people to your website. But what about actually MARKETING to those prospects so that they eventually buy from you? 

One business owner I know had a website in a very crowded marketplace – gift baskets. Her site was nice enough but her conversion was very poor. If you’re in the gift basket industry in Sydney, you’d better be ahead of the game. If studies show that it takes an average of seven contacts from a business to convert a sale from a qualified lead, why do website owners often expect the people just browsing their site to instantly buy? Capturing people’s emails (with a tantalising offer just for subscribers) was my first piece of advice to her.

Where is Helpful Advice on Email Marketing?
Although there is a plethora of info on attracting people to your website, actually marketing to them and getting action (sales/calls/bookings) is often left to chance. 

Email marketing has been around for awhile now, but it is rare to get advice on what to send, how often, how to segment your list, and how to get a great response. So most business owners just send untargeted offers, which seriously under-utilises this low cost avenue for customer acquisition. (Of course I work with Infusionsoft, the tool to use to get those high performing results you want).

In addition, pay-per-click advertising to attract customers can get quite expensive if 95% of the prospects sail away before any contact. Email marketing works brilliantly with PPC advertising because it allows businesses:

• to tell them more details about the services/products
• to learn more about their visitors’ real interests
• to offer value through information prior to purchase (i.e. handy tips, news, events)
• to keep the relationship between business and prospect alive, right after they showed interest

Fortunately, I am working on a solution to help end the marketing confusion generally circulating in the small business world. It will be an exclusive Business Builder’s membership program. Stay tuned for some interesting, results-focussed advice.

Some E-marketing Tips

You need to encourage people to give you their email address, so what do you give them in return? While it is the most popular, you don’t necessarily have to offer a newsletter. Other options are: a free white paper with some facts about your industry, a free consultation or evaluation, or a free webinar or teleseminar.

Thank them for signing up to your list (automatically of course), personalising this message based on their encounter with your website. Once they read your newsletter/email, track which links they clicked on, and then target mailings to their interests and habits. You can even segment people who found you through search engine marketing in a separate mailing list from your general list.

CRM software is great isn’t it?  If you’re out visiting clients, it still sends out email follow-ups, builds trust through rich information, and sends out time-limited offers… doesn’t it?  Oh… yours just stores information that you’ve collected.

This problem came up recently with a prospect who is using SugarCRM. He says that it doesn’t DO anything for him; it’s just another place to store data.  After forking out his valuable time in setting up this system, he now realises that he needs something EXTRA that is going to automatically communicate to people, based on what they buy and what they request on his website.

This busy business owner wants to save time and effort when communicating to people in his database, so he is looking into Infusionsoft for both marketing and customer relationship management purposes.

The Right Tool
I guess the basic problem is having the right tool for the job. Also to be considered is, a lot of Customer Relationship Management systems available, especially Enterprise CRM, were designed for large companies with various departments. They are too cumbersome and expensive for the one-person to five-person small business.

Managing Opportunities
There is another segment of CRM which focusses on Opportunity Management.  Recording sales opportunities is important in most businesses, so every good CRM should include this facility. You can note multiple tasks against each contact, record activities likes meetings and calls, and note possible sales. Reporting tools also help you keep up with progress on a weekly or monthly basis.

Marketing is Left till Last
Save the best till last… while most large CRM systems are used with Enterprise Resource Planning, tracking customer data, and even recording all sales force activity… they do not automatically send out information, offers, and newsletters (by SMS, email, fax). That’s the work of yet another external system and an administrator as well.

So that’s why, when my new customers have got to the stage of seeing the Infusionsoft demonstration on automating their marketing to a segmented list, it’s like the light bulbs go on – because they realise it’s all simple enough for just one person to manage. Hooray.

As I come across a lot of different business types in the small business sector, I often notice similar problems crop up within the very heart of the business: sales & marketing.

SME owners without adequate systems often struggle to keep up with different enquiries from different sources, trying to remember who gets what and when. Prospects are at different stages of the sales cycle, and it usually falls on the SME owner to keep track of each prospect and send them the right information, to keep building trust one step at a time. Utilising a great sales & marketing process can mean the difference between having a successful business, or a busy job.

If this sounds familiar, it might be time to seek some assistance. As Greg Chapman says on Business Builders:

“By systematising your business, you make your business more efficient, reduce your costs, and ultimately, make your business run without you.”

If you are too busy, you dread opening your email, or your work style is haphazard at best… an integrated system like Infusionsoft that combines Automated Email Marketing, a powerful CRM that keeps all sales activities on track, and a helpful person to set it all up… could sound like business nirvana to you. After all, if you can make part of your business run without you, you get that most precious commodity of all back: TIME.

You probably already have some way of recording customer contact details, right? Excel spreadsheets, Outlook groups, post it notes, or even a database that was set up once, but is now gathering dust. Is this costing you time and profits?

Some micro business owners feel caught in the middle – they do not have the time or resources to use the full functionality of the large CRMs built for medium to large enterprises – but they could do with a contact management system to keep it all together in one place, as well as build targeted marketing campaigns.

With a well-executed CRM system, you can better service customers, increase customer loyalty and repeat business, streamline tasks, and of course ensure long-term profitability. The more information you gather in your system, the better you will become at seeing where the opportunities lie.

Unfortunately, while all business owners know they are vital, these strategies are rarely implemented consistently and easily, so let’s look at some of the sticking points.

Problem Overcome – Under-Marketing

Often we overlook marketing our other services/products to people that we have already sold to. This upsell or cross-sell can be an easy way to add to your profits for little extra costs. But how?  One way is to market to a segmented list with a special offer for that particular type of client.

Many business people have been doing it the manual way so long, that they are surprised when I show them a system that does it all so easily … often automatically. This frees up their time as well as aids their brand recall.

Problem Overcome – Crossing Over Tasks, Chaotic Working Style

In working with businesses, I have seen some partner businesses misallocating tasks, sometimes forgetting tasks, crossing over tasks, and having poor systems and tools. Once such couple I recently coached at length had all these problems.

When it comes to this couple, their working style was very different, one had more on their plate, and the unbalanced task allocation was having a big impact on their relationship all-round. A fresh look at it opened up some great answers, like using a journal for noting ideas instead of interrupting, respecting the spouse’s time, having a schedule, discussing business at a weekly planning meeting and prioritizing tasks.

In your team, who are doing similar tasks?  Which tasks could be streamlined?  If it’s a manual task or process then we see how it can be automated using technology or a simple system sequence.  Oft-times using a software tool can streamline a task into a few simple steps…  saving many hours of painstaking work.

You may even be paying for a bells & whistles CRM program, but haven’t seen the benefits yet as so-and-so was supposed to be doing it (i.e. a dusty database). Take charge and look at new ways to perform those regular repetitive tasks like quotes, proposals, invoicing, follow-up emails, newsletters, etc. I’d love to hear all your questions about how to streamline your tasks.

Every business owner I speak to has the problem of wearing multiple hats, chasing their tail and doing many things at once.  Is there an answer to this problem?  I think each business type is different but they all have common issues to deal with.

Because there are so many options, and so much information at our fingertips, many business owners get really frustrated and time poor. So what are some simple steps to get out of the mire and into productivity and growth mode?

Reminding ourselves to “Eat that Frog” and do just the most important things first in our day is the first step (recommended book: Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy).

Once you have your task list prioritised and under control, the next step is delegation of some tasks.  Sometimes you can outsource administrative/marketing tasks to someone who is either paid a lot less than you or else is much better at it, freeing up your time to focus on your core talent.

Next, you can set up a system to deal with repeated or follow-up tasks. You need a way to not only capture interested people’s details, but also build trust and respect. Say for example your system captures email addresses and emails a seven part course to interested prospects. It also tracks their interests and follows up with recommended products/services. They are invited to events you have put into the email service – and have a way of responding that is easy, like booking/paying through your own portal. This is all possible from within Infusionsoft.

What you are trying to achieve with these sytems is automation, to take less of your time and to increase the results from marketing activities. Infusionsoft is a powerful tool that enables business owners to leverage their time, grow their leads, and increase revenue and profits.

Hello and welcome to the first blog post for Infusionoz!  We’re in exciting times.  At least, we feel that we are!  And I hope you feel that way too.

I must share with you something that happened on the weekend that has got me thinking… and that has made me realise the ‘social media’ age that we are now living in and how important it is to be a part of it.

Last night I went to the Adam Hills live performance at the Powerhouse in Brisbane, seated just a few rows from the front (I love being up close so I can see expressions and the REAL person!!).  Adam came onto stage to a very excited crowd and within minutes he had discovered a man seated in the front row who looked a little like Santa.  Actually maybe a LOT like Santa! No kidding, and his name was Lex Cush.  Lex went along with Adam’s frivolity of wanting to take a picture of them both together and he then posted it on his blog page via his mobile phone, and then posted a tweet (on Twitter) to see who could come back with the funniest caption.

This might not sound that strange, however it was a live show and Adam was sitting on the edge of the stage with his mobile phone in hand, sending tweets and reading some back.  Not your usual stand-up comedy!  And it wasn’t just the photo of him and Lex that was posted either, as he found humour in some of the audience’s surnames (and admittedly it was VERY funny) so had to ID them and of course take more photos to post off.

After a little while Adam checked his mobile phone for responses and read out some tweets from around the world, with proposed captions for the picture of him and Lex, and we had a laugh.

What struck me as both funny and interesting is that one of the tweet replies came from a guy in the audience… who used his mobile to respond to Adam’s tweet.   As Adam remarked: “how funny that you’re communicating with me via a satellite and we’re about 15 metres apart”.

That is exactly the sign of our times:  tweeting, blog posting, re-tweeting, and using mobile phones to post comments and keep in contact with strangers all around the world, at any time, anywhere.

Not everyone is up with it though… it’s generally seen as a ‘young persons thing’.  Yet here was Adam Hills, an almost-40-yr-old sitting on stage with his blackberry taking photos, posting them and tweeting during his show.  Technology is available and accessible to anyone who wants it, and to anyone who chooses to get on board.

In business circles the traditional marketing channels are slowly being overtaken by our social media and technology advances in marketing automation such as Infusionsoft.  Those people who haven’t yet caught on are either looking in or choosing to let it go by.  I believe, to their detriment.

Regardless of what worked yesterday, we do know that things are always changing.  Traditional marketing of the past won’t bring the same results today or tomorrow, and with social media taking charge of the way we communicate – it’s something that simply can’t be ignored.

So with the memory of last night’s performance and Adam’s versatility with his tweeting and posting, I’m off to go tweeting myself.

Have a great week!

Aveline