We’re introducing a new kind of episode to the mix! We’ve got director of content Carey Ballard teaming up with small business success expert David Bonney to talk through the strategies, how-tos, and tactics you need to grow your small business. Carey and David talk with Scott Martineau about the concepts behind Infusionsoft’s Small Business Success Method, which helps business owners go from where they are to where they want to be through incremental, repeatable improvements. And no, you don’t have to be an Infusionsoft customer.
They also chat about David’s experiences with entrepreneurship, the biggest mistakes he sees small businesses make, and making the incremental improvements that will be game changers for your business.
Transcript:
Scott Martineau: Oh he did all kinds of things.
Carey Ballard: What’s the most out there? That’s the one I want. [Laughing]
Scott Martineau: The most out there was he actually had a production company that focused on bringing in key speakers that would help with – which back in the day was new-age concepts – but would bring in speakers like Depok Chopra and Barbara De Angelis to be able to talk to corporate employees about the things that were going on in their life so that they could improve their performance.
Carey Ballard: That’s amazing.
Scott Martineau: Welcome to this episode of the Small Business Success podcast. This is Scott Martineau, this is where you say “and I’m…”
David Bonney: And I’m David Bonney.
Carey Ballard: And I’m Carey Ballard.
Scott Martineau: Toady we’re going to switch up the format a bit. We’ve spent a lot of time having successful small business owners share their stories of success; today we’re turning the focus to –
[0:01:00]
Scott Martineau: A new approach that you can implement in your business so that you will increase the success stories that you have and that you’ll show up on this podcast and tell us all about all the amazing progress that you’ve made.
Carey Ballard: That’s right.
Scott Martineau: And Carey and I are very excited today to have David Bonney with us. We’re going to try to make this as uncomfortable as possible as is what we try to do with all of our podcast guests.
Carey Ballard: It’s only fair.
David Bonney: I’m not surprised.
Scott Martineau: David first of all, welcome, good to have you.
David Bonney: Thank you.
Scott Martineau: Why don’t we start out and I’ll probably interject some commentary here but why don’t you give a little bit of a background about who you are; tell us a bit about your story and we’ll jump in. And just to give the listeners awareness, we’re going to talk today about the small business success method which is fantastic but I wanted to start David by giving you a chance to tell more about yourself.
David Bonney: Great. So I am the son of a serial entrepreneur so growing up my brother and I we got to live that life and see the –
[0:02:00]
David Bonney: Ebbs and flows of income and see the ebbs and flows our father’s daily life as the entrepreneurial journey can be rocky. So with that journey I found that there was a very real sense of passion and empathy that I had with a natural entrepreneurial spirit as well.
Scott Martineau: What did your dad do by the way?
David Bonney: Oh he did all kinds of things.
Carey Ballard: What’s the most out there? That’s the one I want. [Laughing]
David Bonney: The most out there was he actually had a production company that focused on bringing in key speakers that would help with – which back in the day was new-age concepts – but would bring in speakers like Depok Chopra and Barbara De Angelis to be able to talk to corporate employees about the things that were going on in their life so that they could improve their performance.
Carey Ballard: That’s amazing.
David Bonney: You know this was back in the 90s before that was really a fad so, but yeah –
[0:03:00]
David Bonney: So that journey about seven and half years ago led me to Infusionsoft and when I got to Infusionsoft I saw a passion lit inside of me for the work that we were doing here and over the last seven and half years I’ve gotten a really good opportunity to see the things that work for small business and the things that don’t work.
I’ve had the chance to start my own entrepreneurial journey as well to be able to see that first hand and understand those pains. But yeah, through that time period there’s a formula that starts to develop – that starts to rise up from the patterns that we start to look at and really what we’ve been trying to do here is figure out what are those patters, what is that formula so that we can start to deliver that to entrepreneurs so that they can take advantage of that and serve the communities that they really are passionate about serving and that’s why they’re entrepreneurs.
[0:04:00]
Scott Martineau: So how many – if you can think back over your experience in sales in talking with small business owners about the challenges they’re suffering from and then you know, there was a season in your career here at Infusionsoft where you were leading the team of people that help small businesses who were coming on board and actually implementing the strategies that would help them overcome those challenges. How many small businesses would you say that you’ve been essentially over and watched through the process through you and your team members? I don’t even know, I’m kind of just curious what the math would be.
David Bonney: Great question. I would probably have to say – we’d probably be looking at close to 10,000 – 10,000 to 15,000.
Carey Ballard: That’s amazing. So in talking to all of them and working with them and working with your coaches who were working with them, if there is one critical error that you’ve seen repeated multiple times what do you think that is?
[0:05:00]
David Bonney: I think the natural state of the entrepreneur having to wear so many hats. That sets up the foundation for this opportunity for you to overextend yourself in the things that you’re trying to get done. You build up passion, you see an opportunity and you start to bite off more than you can chew and you get yourself into a position where you’re trying to get too much done and ultimately nothing is getting done in the key areas of opportunity that you’re seeing.
And our ability to be able to focus on the right things and focus on the right amount of things in that thing is really critical to being able to see the inevitable results and the change that you want to see and if you do that over and over and over again, it’s the incremental improvement in your business that really starts to be a game changer for you as opposed to these big quantum leaps that rarely actually happen.
[0:06:00]
Scott Martineau: This makes me think about my wife – bless her heart – she’s the most amazing woman on the planet. But I do describe her occasionally as a schizophrenic vegan and the reason is because we’ll go through these phases where we’ll go watch one of these documentaries on the evils of sugar or whatever, right?
Carey Ballard: Yeah, only eat raw food.
Scott Martineau: Yeah, and my wife is like – there’s no middle ground in the way that she attacks her life and so it’s like, alright kids, we’re vegan! And then we go to like straight quinoa with no flavoring and –
Carey Ballard: Lots of kale – organic kale all day.
Scott Martineau: Organic kale. Then we’ll do kale chips.
David Bonney: You’ve got to have the kale juice too.
Scott Martineau: And we’ve joked because the schizophrenic part comes because that lasts for like, a week at best or two weeks and we end up kind of just back to normal. And I think it’s a fantastic point you make David and as we know that’s one of the core philosophies and elements of the small business success method is helping the entrepreneur to overcome this sort of chaotic –
[0:07:00]
Scott Martineau: Mix of two things I think: This chaotic world of opportunities and lots of noise. Like, do this, do that… And then at the same time this sort of tenacious desire to go and accomplish right? So the mixture of that usually just ends up putting people into these big projects that are frustrating and all while having to wear 17 by day and then you’re fitting this in at night.
Carey Ballard: Well and I think it probably manifests itself into two totally separate behavior mechanisms. One is I’m doing tiny little bits of everything and not succeeding at any of them or I’m paralyzed because only eating kale and quinoa is just too much.
Scott Martineau: It is a bit paralyzing.
Carey Ballard: That one is. But I think small business owners struggle with that; they’re either flipping their hat 60 ways a day and getting nothing forward or they’re just looking at the problem saying it’s just too big, there’s too many angles, I don’t even know where to start therefore I do none of them and I keep going backwards. And I think that they’re both manifested from the same root cause but they show up differently.
[0:08:00]
David Bonney: Yeah.
Scott Martineau: So let’s maybe keep this analogy going in a way to explain the small business success method. So here I am, I’m sitting here with my physic, I’ve got these little weak arms and a flabby belly – I’ve got like a one-pack and I see this specimen walk by and I’m like, dude, I’m going to be like that guy, right?
David Bonney: It’s uncomfortable that you’re talking about you and me right now.
[Laughing]
David Bonney: It’s okay, I like it. So for everybody, he’s talking about Scott and then the specimen is me.
Carey Ballard: The specimen is you. [Laughing]
Scott Martineau: David is, by the way, he and I used to play basketball together – I don’t know if you knew that Carey.
Carey Ballard: I did not know that.
Scott Martineau: David has hung up his basketball shoes because for him all he does all day is he just goes in and he does his arms. It’s like arms day, upper body all day, every day.
Carey Ballard: All day, every day. It’s hyper focused right?
David Bonney: Yeah.
Scott Martineau: So we can talk about that sort of like – oh, why are you blushing David? You know it’s true.
[0:09:00]
Carey Ballard: David Bonney fitness plan: All arms, all the time. Is that how that goes?
David Bonney: Yup.
Scott Martineau: And I think we all have different versions and I’d say as the entrepreneur you see this other business that walks by and you’re like, dang, look at that, look at those abs, those are freaking amazing, you know?
Carey Ballard: I want that.
Scott Martineau: For you it might be I need to just get to the place where I have enough income that I can hire the employees so I’m not the one doing it all. Or you may have a team and you’re trying to expand and gain market share or whatever it is. Whatever the fine specimen you’re looking at; the small business success method is really – and I want to just have you, David, explain the high level concepts in it but it is the method that we have discovered and codified, and are continuing to codify the more that we learn, that basically says as we’ve watched business owners go from the place they are to reaching that place that they want to be – what are the patterns, what are the approaches that are most guaranteed to get them to success?
[0:10:00]
David Bonney: Yeah and for us what we talked a lot about is we talk about the fundamentals and the foundation and how do you focus on the right things. And when you’re focusing on the fundamentals, you’re focusing in on the 20 percent of things that are going to give you 80 percent of the results. And when we look at the method –
Scott Martineau: Like just doing arms?
David Bonney: Yes, exactly. I am trying to be an inspiring example for you and instead I get mocked for my attempt of service to you, but that’s okay.
Scott Martineau: I would actually say, just for the sake of the conversation, I will retract my comments because I think the small business success method actually is about a holistic approach to the business but it is about a focused approach and it allows for us to create priority in the focus that we have, right, to gain the most impact.
David Bonney: Yup.
[0:11:00]
Scott Martineau: And then it circles and the cycle of progress continues. So I’ll stop there.
David Bonney: No and that’s great because what the cycle does is it gives you something repeatable that you can do because you’re continuing to execute on the fundamentals and the foundations of executing on your sales and marketing projects or any project for that matter. As we’ve created this repeatable process what we’ve really wanted to do is how do we take these fundamentals and how do we distill down so the amount of time and energy and money that you’re putting in actually goes down while the results that you actually get from those activities go up. And if you think about that inverse relationship there driving one of those things down and the other one up, most people would say it was impossible but we knew it wasn’t.
And that was the moniker for this team when we set all this up; this is what we were set out to do and at this point we’re getting great results and it appears that that’s actually happening.
Carey Ballard: So you talked about the fundamentals and I think that’s a big part of it but there’s something before the fundamentals that I think are really key when we –
[0:12:00]
Carey Ballard: Figure out is it the arms, is it the abs that you’re starting with. Talk to me about that like, how different is each person’s plan or each business’ plan and how do they start figuring out which fundamental to start with because that paralysis happens when there’s six fundamentals in front of them.
David Bonney: The first thing that you have to do fundamentally within a project is you’ve got to go through and you have to accurately assess what’s going on in your business. You need to understand – brining in a way that we look at things here – you’ve got to understand what is your current customer life cycle looking like, where are the gaps and holes in your sales and marketing efforts where you’re just hemorrhaging leads and you’re just losing sales, you’re losing revenue.
Carey Ballard: Right. So somebody can be doing a great job attracting awareness, they’ve got lots of people coming to their sites, their social traffic is through the roof; if this is you, congratulations – that’s a good problem. But maybe they’re not capturing them right? So they’ve got all this attention, they’re not capturing it, that’s their hemorrhage point as boiling it down.
David Bonney: Yeah.
[0:13:00]
Scott Martineau: So as we’re assessing the business, right, we’re looking at the life cycle, what’s the magnitude of impact that we’re trying to create – we’re trying to identify and opportunity to create what impact? Does that make sense?
David Bonney: Yeah, it does in my mind. We want incremental impact. We want to be able to assess the business and understand the opportunities and we really want to say how can I get a 10 percent increase here? How can I create a 10 percent impact in my conversions in my revenues and if I can do that across multiple points across my customer life cycle, the compounding effect of that actually has a very significant impact on your revenues. And it does so in a way that systematically you can repeat them and you now don’t have to worry about from month to month is this going to happen again.
You run a marketing promotion and you get a great response from it, you’re a little worried going into next month – can I replicate that? But when you take the systems, when you take your customer life cycle, and you’re improving the repeatable processes that your prospects and customers are going through –
[0:14:00]
David Bonney: When you’re looking at that small amount of improvement one, it’s something achievable for you; it’s not something that’s so out of the realm of your ability to achieve. Two, it allows you to build momentum because once you work on that first area and you start to see improvement, you start to feel the belief, the energy starts to build and you can move to the next one and the next one and the next one. It’s critical when it comes to human psychology and our ability to actually see a return on the things that we’re investing in because once we do then we just want to invest more and we want to invest more.
Scott Martineau: Well it’s a lot easier thinking hey how do I go make a 10 percent improvement in this one thing, right? Like how do I turn this one pack into a one and half pack? Start there.
David Bonney: Yeah.
Carey Ballard: It’s a real thing and I think that analogy works really well because of that because it’s important to talk about the psychology of it because I think so many times – back to the paralysis or I’m trying to do all the things –
[0:15:00]
Carey Ballard: If you learn that just a little bit of focused time like 20 percent of your time focused on one task gave you this 50 percent lift, you’re going to do more of that. You’ve been rewarded, the rat’s going to go back to get more cheese in that area. And I think it goes back to the analogy of working out or eating healthy; if I just stopped eating sugar for a while – it’s not all the things – and it makes a big impact, then maybe I will commit the time to go walking more or go exercise more often or whatever that is. I love that, that’s a really important part of this.
Scott Martineau: We used to say that – I don’t know where this came from - but we used to say you do the one thing, the energy from the one thing, the one win, gives you the energy to do the next three.
Carey Ballard: Yes.
Scott Martineau: Energy from those three gives you the energy to do the nine and that cycle just keeps going; it kind of gets addictive.
David Bonney: Yeah. And the thing that I’m most passionate about and why I love entrepreneurship and this goes back to my childhood is our ability as people to identity problems and opportunities in our community and then notice that we have the skillset and we have the passion to go solve that – that makes our communities better.
[0:16:00]
David Bonney: But what that also does is it creates entrepreneurs out there who are really great at solving the problem out in the world but then the problems that they’re encountering and trying to build a business that can do that, they’re not as great at that. But entrepreneurs are being put into a position where they now have to become experts at that stuff and if we can simplify it down, if we can kind of demystify what it takes in those areas where there probably is already a little bit of lack of confidence for an entrepreneur – they’ve already tried it and not gotten the results. When we can demystify it, simplify it, allow them to get results, allow them to see that this can happen then that momentum definitely builds.
Carey Ballard: That’s fantastic.
Scott Martineau: Okay, so we’ve kind of jumped into the high-level principles of the small business success methods. Step one is you assess the business: You are uncovering the hidden growth opportunities in your business in a focused way with the intent of saying let’s find the one thing we can get the 10 percent lift on. What comes next?
[0:17:00]
David Bonney: So once you get that focused opportunity outlined then what you want to do is you want to bring it down to another level of focus. Let’s say we want to focus for example on reengaging the leads that we’ve already gotten because we see that that’s low hanging fruit, people that we already have, we don’t have to invest a lot there but we can reengage them and generate some revenue.
Scott Martineau: Which by the way, I think most entrepreneurs are well aware of the fact that they’ve got prior leads or customers or so forth that they just have not sufficiently followed with, they are kind of just sitting there.
David Bonney: Yeah.
Scott Martineau: It’s a common thing that we see, right?
David Bonney: Yeah. So that’s something that’s already really focused but then when we get to planning that out, we can actually over scope that; we can throw way too much sophistication into that marketing plan, into that marketing strategy. And what we want to do is we want to start to put – we have a project planning framework that you then take that strategy and you break it down at the most detailed level. What are the assets that you need? What emails are you going to send out?
[0:18:00]
David Bonney: Are you going to use video? Do you need to use video? Is that necessary? Is it essential or enhancing is what we always ask. And that’s a great question for entrepreneurs to always ask themselves: Is what I’m doing right now essential or enhancing? And if it’s enhancing I would definitely think twice before doing it. Do the essentials, see what the results are and then decide if you want to start to reinvest there and then start to execute on some of those enhancing elements.
But as we plan out the project, you’ll get huge clarity into the essential things that you need to do and make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew. While also doing that you can identify the gaps that you currently have whether that be in your skillset or your team’s skillset or your contractors. If you don’t have those contractors or if you have a contractor that usually takes three weeks for them to get copy back to you and you need this now; identifying those gaps will allow you to make sure that you can proactively overcome them as opposed to getting involved in the project and then all of a sudden having these dark corners that you didn’t realize were going to suddenly get in the way.
[0:19:00]
Carey Ballard: I love that. So a big part of it is not just figuring out what you’re going to do and what you’re focused on but how to do it and who to do it and with what tools.
David Bonney: Yeah.
Carey Ballard: That’s really the simplicity of it.
Scott Martineau: And you see – what I love about this is that before you launch headlong into the project that’s going to overwhelm you, you get to see details of what that work will be. So you can say “oh, this guy that I saw was doing X, Y and Z.” When you start to look a little bit at what that’s going to take it’s like, yeah, that’s probably not going to actually be the way we’ve got to start this.
David Bonney: Because those people that were doing X, Y, Z, they didn’t get there overnight. They built up to that point and you can now get visibility into where you can start just like they did if they were able to find successful outcomes and actually build it to that point. So once we have that plan –
[0:20:00]
Scott Martineau: This is like less likelihood of major lactic acid buildup after the mega full body workout that I decided to do day one.
David Bonney: Yes.
[Laughing]
Scott Martineau: Can I do finger curls to strengthen my fingers as a starting point?
Carey Ballard: Sure.
David Bonney: Absolutely.
Carey Ballard: It’s a great focus area and I think you’ll see incremental –
Scott Martineau: I actually have really fit hands if I do say so myself.
[Laughing]
Carey Ballard: I love everything about this.
Scott Martineau: I have had abs. My son by the way is so hilarious. Jeremy is like, Dad, look at my arm calf. He describes the forearm as the arm calf. He’s a riot.
[Laughing]
Carey Ballard: So to really build your arm calves it’s all about figuring out what your focus is on, is that right?
David Bonney: Yeah.
Carey Ballard: Start with some good finger curls.
David Bonney: Oil up those fingers, oils up those arm calves to get maximum definition. That’s good.
Scott Martineau: Shave the finger hairs to get better, more sleek… Alright, onward. Okay, so we digressed.
[0:21:00]
So I have properly assessed and found the most important opportunity, I’ve created focus, I’ve now narrowed that focus and gotten really clear around what’s essential, what’s enhancing and I’m not focused and I’m clear that I’ve got the capacity to accomplish that. And then what?
David Bonney: Yeah. And then you’ve got to go execute. You want to execute with the mindset of what I’m executing on, I’m going to test. Now that’s a key psychological element there. If you’re trying to create something that’s perfect that you’re going to release to your entire list that you’re trying to reengage, there’s going to be pressure there and perfection is going to start to get in the way necessity. And by the way, you’re going to be living in theory, you’re going to be guessing at what you think is going to make it perfect.
Now one of the things that’s great for us is when we can look at that execution phase, that’s where we now have the opportunity to start to create materials that actually help the execution of those activities to try to simplify that. So when I talked about –
Scott Martineau: You start with the template of what has worked in the past for others, right?
[0:22:00]
David Bonney: Exactly, yup. Because there aren’t a million ways to go do these things. There’s actually a pretty finite menu of activities that you need to do in your sales and marketing activities that will bring you overwhelming success. You will have increase in revenues that you will be far, far happier with than any of the kind of mythical stories out there on these one-time product launches or these very short term launches that people do.
Carey Ballard: I think that’s a big part it too is that when we joke around about it when we’re creating content, the best ideas are already out there, go take them and make them yours. You don’t have to spend time making it custom every single time, go figure out something that worked for somebody else, take it, apply it to what works for you.
Scott Martineau: Well the emotional dynamic here I think is a tendency to feel like my business is different. I remember we’d go to the marketing seminars that Dan Kennedy would put on; he always had a poster at every one that would say “But Dan, my business is different.”
[0:23:00]
Scott Martineau: He would spend an inordinate amount of time just saying “trust me people, I’ve seen this strategy work there, there, there and there and so don’t think that you’ve got it figured out.” Now I will say that part of the evolution as this method is implemented is that some people do get to the place where they’ve learned enough; they’ve learned enough about the tactics and they’ve learned enough about their audience that they do go to a place where they’re accustomed. But I would just generally say that in my experience there is enough low hanging fruit in every small business that is starting this process to probably triple or quadruple the size of your business through strategies that have already been proven. Why go through the energy of this blank canvas approach; start with what’s there.
Carey Ballard: I love it.
David Bonney: Yeah. And you’re talking about doubling and tripling. What if you could just see a 20 to 30 percent increase in your monthly revenues? How many entrepreneurs would sign up for that?
[0:24:00]
David Bonney: You could see that within a month, within four to six weeks, that is where we have an opportunity to start to build that foundation that builds momentum that starts to put more revenue into the business so that then we can reinvest that revenue into maybe some more customized solutions as we’re starting to see some of the analytics and some of the reporting that’s coming through on how everything is reporting.
Scott Martineau: Love it.
Carey Ballard: Perfect. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about then we talk to David Bonney on these podcasts.
Scott Martineau: I have one more high level question too on optimizing. So I’m testing and then I come back; how do I think about if this is the first time I’ve run a campaign to reengage my list – I mean I probably broadcasted a bunch of bad email promotions or something to them. But let’s say we’ve got this new strategy, it’s proven, it’s tested, I launch it. How do I think about – like I don’t know how to evaluate whether that, I guess if I get a bunch of sales that’s one thing, but how do you think about where to go optimize in a campaign? I don’t even know what to do.
[0:25:00]
David Bonney: Yeah, so the first thing is you don’t want to test it just to see if it works. You’re not testing for functionality reasons to see if the links are working. That’s not the testing that we’re talking about. You want to do that as well but that’s a different –
Carey Ballard: Before.
David Bonney: Yeah. What we’re talking about is we’re actually talking about let’s take 10 percent of that list and let’s send this out to them so we can actually test what the results are to your point. And what we really want out of this is when we’re looking at building a business, getting sales is great but the better opportunity is to be able to look at the response that you’re getting back from your audience so that you can start to tweak and adjust specific areas –
Scott Martineau: So give me some examples.
David Bonney: Yeah, so to your question what we want to first look at is we want to look at how many people did we send this out to? And then from there how many people opened it and that open rate is directly tied to our subject line and the preview of the email which is that first line or half line of your email.
[0:26:00]
David Bonney: Let’s say everything else is the same, every other conversion point is the same. If I run two tests and one gets twice as many opens as the other and every other number is the same from a conversion perspective, I doubled my sales just because of that one subject line. That is so very, very important.
Then from there once people have clicked on the email and they’re reading that first engagement with the email, if you put a block of text – even two to three lines in that opening paragraph – psychologically that just turns people off. They hit a wall and it’s like, oh, do I really want to spend the time reading this right now? How can we have a one or two line maximum opening that really asks an engaging question that really guides the reader into what it is we’re trying to talk to them about. So that makes it easy for them.
Scott Martineau: So the idea here is, depending on the type of strategy you’re implementing, we have key measures that directly tie to a specific approach like in the case of the subject line or opening text.
[0:27:00]
Scott Martineau: And it’s about watching those measures and knowing that there might be I don’t know, how many measures would you say in this campaign we’re talking about – the reengagement – five or six?
David Bonney: Yeah you’ve got open rates, you’ve got your CTA – called your action click throughs – and then you’ve got your ultimate conversion.
Scott Martineau: That’s huge too because I remember Clay and I talked this on the blog but we got this fantastic deal on this list one time, it was our first postcard campaign. Sent out 5,000 postcards and we’re sitting by the phones and we had literally zero calls and it was like the postman just dropped them in the trash or something or that’s what we told ourselves. But we were sitting there like, well, that sucked. That was maybe not the best use of the money but we didn’t – and by the way digital marketing gives us a lot more leverage to measure but we didn’t have any clue where to go look.
[0:28:00]
Scott Martineau: Now I’m like, never buy the $25.00 list you idiots. I get that, but I think the guidance for knowing how this campaign strategy – what’s working, what’s not – and then what to do about it is really key.
Carey Ballard: Right. And then that analogy, to use David’s plan you’ve got, maybe buy a smaller list or test a smaller list with a certain postcard that looks a certain way and then another one that looks a little bit different and another one with a different offer and another one that does these things and then maybe the list was okay. Maybe for some reason they didn’t like glossy paper. It could be so many nuances and this is where the beauty comes in the testing and the iteration and figuring out. The other thing I think is really important is evaluating what exactly you’re expecting out of each one just as a baseline and you might be completely wrong, but you’ll learn.
David Bonney: But having some target.
Carey Ballard: But having some target will make you feel better when you achieve that or exceed it. And also recognize it’s going to take work if you’re not there.
David Bonney: Yeah and then converting that into – when I go back to the opportunity that’s there for the business owner –
[0:29:00]
David Bonney: Let’s say we send that launch out and we test it, we find some opportunities to make some tweaks in those key conversion points because we see the data and we understand what it relates back to in the execution and we get it to a point where it’s actually performing in a way that we would want, where it’s hitting the target, right? The real benefit there isn’t the sales that we got out of it, for the reengagement strategy there, now it’s all about hey, every lead that I collect and drive to an offer if they don’t convert I have something that I tested that’s been proven that I can put a one to two week timer on and have them drop right into that and I know the results that I’ll be getting on that systematically every single month.
Carey Ballard: And you can predict that?
David Bonney: They’ll be proven. Yeah, they’ll be predictable and that’s what it’s all about for entrepreneurs; we want predictable revenue. We have payroll, we have family, we have expenses that have to be met and to me that is what’s most important. Not the few deals that you got out of that initial launch –
[0:30:00]
David Bonney: It’s the continued improvement over the systematic sales and marketing execution across your customer lifecycle that is truly invaluable that is truly life changing for an entrepreneur.
Carey Ballard: That’s fantastic.
Scott Martineau: Well, sounds pretty compelling and I’m excited. We will be diving in deeper to the small business success methods sharing more concrete examples probably diving into different aspects of it in the coming weeks.
Carey Ballard: Yes, we will.
Scott Martineau: But I don’t know what would be better for the small business owner to say hey, we have a method for helping you identify these opportunities, create a 10 percent lift here, 10 percent lift there, 10 percent lift there and every four to six months we’re growing that business by 50 percent without having to take on these massive overwhelming projects and not have any clarity on whether it’s going to be successful. It’s clarity and energy along the way, it’s brilliant. Love it.
Okay, hopefully as you’re listening to this today listeners – actually, any final thoughts Carey?
[0:31:00]
Carey Ballard: No, I just think that the essence of what we’re going to be talking about is how to create plans that allow you to get incremental improvement in your business and cut through the paralysis, cut through the too many things to do and each episode we’re going to be digging into examples and you can walk away with actionable results for you and your business.
David Bonney: In a way that takes in the natural human psychology, the elements of things that just get in our way, which a lot time the things that get in our way the most are ourselves. It’s the real stuff, it’s not theory, it’s not stuff that we think could work. It’s not some bleeding edge new idea out there, this is after looking at tens of thousands of businesses that have come through Infusionsoft doors and what are the commonalities and the execution and really looking at all that stuff so results can actually be there for the business.
Scott Martineau: So if any of our listeners are not Infusionsoft customers, is this an Infusionsoft specific thing?
[0:32:00]
David Bonney: No, not at all. I love to look at Infusionsoft as potentially the greatest lab in the world to look at small business success because we have so many entrepreneurs, so many small businesses, coming through our doors on a daily and monthly basis, this is the lab. As long as we look at the activities the right way we can pick apart what’s working, what’s not working, what are the things that are getting in the way, what are the problems, isolating those problems and creating solutions. So this is all for entrepreneurs, not Infusionsoft customers specifically.
Carey Ballard: So basically if you want to get in shape, doesn’t matter the gym, we’re going to give you your plan.
David Bonney: Yup.
Scott Martineau: If you’re ready and willing just say no to the one pack. Move beyond the finger curls.
Carey Ballard: That’s right.
Scott Martineau: To have the most amazing arm calves in the world followed by the physic of David Bonney. You’re going to want to tune in; we’ll be covering this in the next several podcasts.
[0:33:00]
Scott Martineau: By the way, what business owner friend do you have who you think needs to benefit from this? Probably all of your friends, so please share this podcast, please subscribe. You will not find a place in the world where people are more committed to you and helping your business succeed. We want to do that for you, we want to do that for your friends, so stay tuned in and we’re going to call that a wrap for this episode of the Small Business Success podcast.
Alright, thanks everybody for listening in to the Small Business Success podcast. Don’t forget to rate on iTunes and share and subscribe. We look forward to the next podcast. Make sure you tune in.
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