I read a book years ago by author David Maraniss on the life of Vince Lombardi titled, “When Pride Still Mattered.”
A story that stood out to me within the book was one in which Lombardi walked into training camp of the Green Bay Packers in 1961 and said, "Gentlemen, (holding a football in his right hand) this is a football."
Think about it. Here’s Lombardi, coaching a group of professional athletes who, just months prior, had come within minutes of winning the NFL Championship. And yet, here he was covering the fundamentals. This was something for which he became known throughout his coaching years.
He assumed that the players were blank slates, who carried over no knowledge from the year before, and methodically covered the fundamentals—which ultimately led his team to win the NFL Championship.
This story has stuck with me through my years of being in business. I believe the game of business is won (or lost) based on how well the owner/entrepreneur executes the fundamentals. The fundamentals lie within Lifecycle Automation.
Keap defines Lifecycle Automation as, "providing your audience the kinds of communications and experiences they need, want, or like as they move from prospects to customers then, ideally, to advocates."
- RELATED VIDEO: Misty Kortes, your marketing coach, brings the motivation in implementing LCM to help your business thrive...
In this blog, I’ll share with you the nine campaigns I believe every service-based business needs to create a complete what I call a "Lifecycle Automation machine," which is a set of campaigns that work together to achieve the desired outcome.
Let’s dive in...
Campaign 1: Networking follow-up
Many salespeople find success in networking with other people so they can collaborate and exchange referrals.
The challenge for many salespeople is that most of the referrals they acquire will require them to follow up several times. That’s why I recommend that you create a networking follow-up campaign.
This campaign will allow the salesperson to enter the referral into the campaign, which will then send a series of emails to follow up automatically.
A campaign like this will ensure that no referrals fall through the cracks. After all, the fortune is in the follow-up.
Campaign 2: Online lead generation
This campaign allows businesses to capture leads online 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The strategy for this campaign is that the business gives away something for free in exchange for a person’s contact information. The free resource is often referred to as a lead magnet.
There are endless ideas on what could be used as a lead magnet. It could be a guide, ebook, white paper, video recording, etc.
The online lead generation campaign is simple. It should contain a landing page, an email confirmation sequence, and an email to deliver the lead magnet to the new prospect.
The landing page is used to capture the contact information of the visitor. The email confirmation sequence requires your prospect to confirm their email—ensuring that the business is building a quality email marketing list. And finally, the campaign should have an email that is sent to the new prospect that delivers the lead magnet.
Campaign 3: Introduction welcome campaign
Once you capture leads through your online lead generation campaign, I recommend sending your new prospects through an introduction welcome campaign.
This campaign is designed to be a formal introduction to you, your team, your mission, or any other messaging that you feel is important that your new prospect knows.
If you think about it, when you meet someone in person, you typically spend time getting to know more about each other. You may chat about your business, your clients, etc.
The introduction welcome campaign is designed to do the same thing—allow your new prospect an opportunity to get to know more about you and your business.
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Campaign 4: Nurture campaign
The nurture campaign continues building on the relationship you’ve started with your new prospect.
A nurture campaign is a series of emails you deliver to your prospect that they would find helpful, informative, or useful.
The goal is that you continue to deliver value that ultimately leads to trust over time. When someone trusts you, they're more likely to buy from you.
Campaign 5: Sales pipeline
The next campaign is critical—the sales pipeline.
The sales pipeline allows you to track where your prospects are in your sales process, and it gives you visibility into your business.
I’ve worked with multi-million dollar organizations that don’t have (or use) a consistent sales process, which seems crazy to me.
I had another business in the past where I trained over 1,800 salespeople. There’s nothing worse than watching a salesperson work their tail off and not get results. Most are paid on commission, and if they don’t get results it not only affects their confidence, it affects their bank account as well.
There are two keys to getting results:
- You must develop a proven system for closing sales.
- You must have a way to track where your prospects are in your sales process.
Campaign 6: Onboarding (impress) campaign
There’s nothing better than having your hard work pay off and finally acquiring a new customer!
Many businesses make the mistake in thinking this is where the journey ends, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The key to this next campaign is that you're intentional about creating a delightful and consistent experience for all of your new customers.
If you're consistent with your onboarding, it's more likely you will have happy customers, which lead to more referrals.
Spend less time copy and pasting messages, manually following up with leads and clients, and more time meeting and serving your clients. Automate your marketing, sales and data entry with Keap. https://t.co/oIAXo3ATG6 pic.twitter.com/U3Np775AUN
— Keap (@KeapGrowing) May 11, 2020
Campaign 7: Customer satisfaction survey
This campaign is designed to survey your new customers immediately following your onboarding campaign to ensure they're happy.
This is a super simple campaign that asks one question: "Did we meet or exceed your expectations?" Then we have two buttons—one says "Yes" and the other says "No.”
We've found that if your customer opens this email that over 80% will provide you with a response.
If they'e not happy I recommend that you have someone on your team call that customer and find out what went wrong and how you can improve.
Campaign 8: Online review
The next campaign that you should deploy is one that asks your customers to give you an online review.
I suggest that you choose no more than three platforms that they can post their review on. Most businesses will have their customers post their reviews on Google reviews and Facebook.
As you (probably) know, online reviews will help you gain exposure for your business, build immediate trust, and also help drive people to your website.
Campaign 9: Refer-a-friend
The last campaign that every service-based business needs is a refer-a-friend campaign.
Prospects are 4x more likely to buy when they're referred by a friend. And many businesses would agree that they would credit customer referrals for a high percentage of their new customers—yet, most businesses don't even ask for referrals. They wait (and hope) that their customers will refer them.
If you’ve grown your business off referrals, and you haven’t been intentionally asking for referrals from your customers, imagine what you could do if you had a campaign that asked consistently.
My guess is that you would see some amazing results.
Conclusion
And there they are, the nine campaigns that every service-based business needs!
As I noted earlier, "the game of business is won and lost based on how well businesses deploy the fundamentals."
I realized the true value of deploying the fundamentals when I made the shift in my business. I grew my business revenue from $250,000 as a solopreneur to $630,000 in less than 12 months when I implemented these campaigns and simple systems that positioned my business to scale and grow.
Through my marketing agency, I have helped over 2,000 entrepreneurs deploy these campaigns in their small businesses and have seen tremendous success.
You now have the "secret sauce" to laying a foundation for an amazing business. I'm confident you will see amazing results when you deploy the fundamentals in your business.
About the author
Misty Kortes is the founder of Your Marketing Coach and Pug Shop Design and the host of her podcast Shop Talk.
