LARRY JACOB GAP for Infusionsoft
INFUSIONSOFT INTRODUCTION AND NURTURE CAMPAIGN

Here at Larry Jacob we’ve established the Larry Jacob Goals Alignment Process (GAP) for Infusionsoft. It’s what every LJIM team member knows to follow. We use this process for customer and our own internal projects. These aren’t just high-level guidelines or “good-to-follows.” These are step-by-step procedures established so every Larry Jacob team member follows our best practices and consistently delivers to the standards we’ve established for ourselves. Here’s an example of our “Larry Jacob GAP –Infusionsoft Introduction and Nurture Campaign.” It gives an overview of a package we offer that’s been implemented for many of our customers. The process enables us to assign it to new team members so they can follow it and deliver predictable results every time.

THE ISSUE

Anyone in sales or overseeing sales needs to generate leads and qualify the new contacts they make in order to grow the business. Sales is the fuel that keeps everything else running. But businesses often run into a problem.

They network and network and network and they cannot keep up with the number of business cards they collect. (You know the problem. They just procreate on the desk.)

What typically happens is that following up effectively with the contacts doesn’t happen and that defeats the whole purpose of networking to begin with. As a result, the lead stream begins to shrink.

OVERVIEW

Networking starts when you attend a networking event and collect business cards. You strike up a conversation. You chat with them. You learn something about them. Then you exchange business cards.

If you’re like our business which offers services that can be used by anyone, you don’t have to be very discriminating. Anyone can use our services. The process described addresses businesses that can target a general audience, but can be adjusted so it become more laser targeted at contacts that are better fits as prospects.

We are mimicking what I used to do in the old days. I would write them a “hello” email message manually reminding them where we met. I would send them a handwritten note. If I count my first encounter with them at the networking event, the email message, and notecard, I sent them, I would have “touched” them three times.

We would then add them to my email list so they would receive my monthly blog message. In the blog articles, I would showcase some aspect of the services I provide. Once a month, these new contacts and old ones get an email message with a link to the article on my site.

My biggest problem was the amount of time it would take. We had to enter their contact information into the email system, accurately I might add, write them an email, handwrite the note, and mail it. The even bigger problem is that the three touches this process provides from me, as time consuming as they may be, is minimal. Read any sales book and you know it takes 7, 12, and even more touches to complete a sale.

So how do we make this better?

THE PROCESS

STEP ONE - SCAN THE BUSINESS CARD WITH MY PHONE APP.

Forget manually entering business cards. The Infusionsoft Snap phone app, an app that comes with the Infusionsoft CRM, can be used to take a picture of the card. This is NOT an app that scans and uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology. We have tested solutions like CardScan and it can takes as much time to check the results of the scan as it does to type the information in manually.This Infusionsoft Snap app includes a human checker, someone that’s a part of the Infusionosoft team, takes what is scanned in and confirms it matches what is on the card. Our experience is that it’s extremely accurate. The app notifies you about in an hour or two when the card is ready for uploading to Infusionsoft.

STEP TWO - INTRODUCING YOURSELF TO YOUR NEW CONTACT

When the card is ready, you approve it for uploading into Infusionsoft. This includes tagging them in the phone app so Infusionsoft knows what to do next. That’s a trigger for the follow up campaign.

In the Larry Jacob team sales process here’s how we have configured things to illustrate how it works. Once the card is approved for uploading, we set a tag that either sends a standard introductory email or a custom messages. If you select the standard message, the standard email goes out and we go onto the next step.

The second option assigns the sales person a task which tells them to write a short introductory paragraph for the first email the contact gets sent. The task provides a form where you can enter something like this:

“It was so good meeting you at the xxx event the other day. What did you think about that speaker? Let me know how I can be of help to you and your business.”

You can get as elegant and specific as you want depending upon the interaction you had with the contact. The Infusionsoft campaign we have set up, takes this intro paragraph, concatenates it with copy we have written introducing the business and services we offer. This automatically goes out to them via email.

We could have gotten more elaborate, but we haven’t. We could have had the system automatically send them a note card (Yes, Infusionsoft can send paper mail too) like we used to do with copy similar to the introductory message we wrote them. If you do this, the contact gets the email right away and a few days later they get the note card in the mail.

STEP THREE - THE INITIAL FOLLOW UP

We send them a few additional introductory messages. These are meant to engage with them more personally, increases the number of “touches.” Several days later, I send them a message with a link to short video explaining the typical challenges business owners face with their sales cycle. (You can click here to see it if you like.) It’s a presentation given by the Infusionsoft chief marketing officer describing a sales pipeline shortcoming that resonates with all the business owners I have met. It also positions Infusionsoft as a valuable potential solution for addressing this issue without sounding like it’s trying to sell them.

Our intent is to present this piece as a resource to a new contact. Just about anyone that receives it thanks us because it is informative and valuable to them. Our final message to them in this part of my interaction with them, is a link to a blog post we’ve written covering a lesson I learned from reading a book called, “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results.” It’s a resource that shares with them something that has helped us in our business. It doesn’t sell them on anything, but does show that we get small business owners and know we all need to improve we do business.

STEP FOUR - STAYING IN TOUCH LONG TERM

Once we have sent our contact the intro email messages and a few more messages, we put them into our long term nurture sequence. That means they receive our twice monthly email message promoting a blog article we’ve written that month. It’s an email that looks like it comes right from the sales person’s regular inbox. We use the same email signature we use for all our messages.

NOTE: These should NOT, and I repeat NOT, look like newsletters. We are not fans or advocates of newsletters in general. They don’t get opened as frequently as an email coming straight from you. You can view my article,“Regular Ugly Email Works Best, Here’s Proof” for the results of an experiment we ran on open and click rates for newsletters versus simple email messages.

Our blog articles are typically interesting pieces that we limit to 750 words maximum. We occasionally do some technical articles that start off as teaching aids for clients as part of projects we are delivering to them. We also publish best practices articles which sometimes contain short videos from our team’s knowledge base. It enables our team to consistently deliver solutions and serves as a training resource for new hires joining our team. We work to re-use the content we deliver constantly.

The point is to provide something that is interesting and continues to position you as the expert in their eyes.

Even if you are NOT a writer, writing a monthly blog article is very doable. That’s only 12 articles a year. You need a simple article promoting some aspect of the services and products you offer your clients. You can also include client success stories.

There’s a South Florida realtor we work with that taps into an article archive provided by a realtor subscription they have. It provides them with raw content they can easily modify and convert into blog articles. There are resources like this in every industry.

An attorney client of ours was struggling with his firm’s blog and a quick review of the only three articles they had produced in 8 months pinpointed their problem right away. They were getting way too technical. They were researching legal cases to site in their blog, including the details of Florida laws pertaining to insurance claims and explaining case law that most people would struggle to understand.

Our advice to the attorney client was to try and write at an 8th grade level as if his reader was his teenage son. With a couple of samples we provided him and some coaching, he and his team quickly took on this new approach and can now produce blog articles that better address the needs of their audience in much less time

STEP FIVE - USE SOCIAL MEDIA TOO. WHY NOT?

Finally, since you’re producing this content anyway, you might as well share it on social media. We actively use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Every time we publish a blog article, we publish links to them on the main feeds for those three. We also post it in several Facebook and LinkedIn groups frequented by our target customers. We also publish tweets to it using hashtags followed by target customers. Using tools like Hootsuite, we can automatically release links to articles on all of these mediums so the effort required to get the message out is greatly reduced.

This is the approach our team has used successfully for our lead generation. We have run projects where we have configured the appropriate systems and provided training needed by clients to do this themselves. We also have clients that outsource this effort completely to us. In all cases, this has been a positive step forward for them.