Infusionsoft Do-It-Yourselfers Pay a Heavy Penalty
This past week I lost an Infusionsoft sale to Infusionsoft. It wasn't a big deal. It was a Infusionsoft license sale with an consulting project for building a set of campaigns to assist with their online lead generation.
I gave the client a proposal which I believed would best serve them. They wanted a lead generation program and I included what I recommended given my years of experience as an Infusionsoft consultant. I thought I priced it fairly.
The client instead decided to purchase Infusionsoft directly from Infusionsoft. The monthly pricing would have been the same as what I could offer them. The Infusionsoft Kickstart, which is how Infusionsoft on-boards new users, was about half the price.
Taking on Infusionsoft using this approach concerns me for this client in particular. Infusionsoft has some great success coaches running their Kickstarts. They are very competent. For a business owner that has the time to invest in learning Infusionsoft, this can work well. The assumption is the person has:
- the necessary technical aptitude,
- a good understanding of online marketing, and
- the time it takes to learn Infusionsoft well.
My biggest concern, and why I stress the heavy penalties solo Infusionsoft users are likely to face is that it's a one time thing. After the initial Infusionsoft Kickstart engagement is over, the business owner is flying solo. Unless they:
- join an Infusionsoft or marketing mastermind,
- find a community of fellow Infusionsoft users to guide them,
- have a team member trained and dedicated to working it, or
- hire an outside team to work with them,
progress is likely to be very, very slow.
Learning Infusionsoft will take a good 20 to 40 hours of dedicated time to learn. In this amount of time, the person will know how to use the aspects of the tool that are most important to them well. This will not make them an expert on online marketing. Unless you have prior experience, you would know what techniques are the ones that would work best for getting the results you need
A few months back, I had an engagement with a client that had spent a lot of time attending Digital Marketer training. They were well-versed in Frank Kern's techniques and terminology too. They knew about Digital Marketer's The Machine, 4-Day Cash Machine, Indoctrination, the works. They had the terminology down. They knew what these Digitial Marketing campaigns could do for them.
Where they needed help was in selecting the right next thing to do. Early on in our discussions, they said:
But our list is bad. We get very little from the list."
Given that their list had over 2,000 contacts and consisted only of people who had done business with them in the previous two years, I recommended sending them a net promoter score survey email. This is where you ask people on your list to rate from 1 to 10 how willing they would be to recommend them to people they know. They agreed to the experiment and they got an average response rate of 8. The people on their list loved them. The main reason they got any low scores was because some customer didn't live near their retail locations so they couldn't recommend it to people near them.
What we discovered that their list wasn't responding to them because they were sharing with them information that wasn't valuable to them. That enabled them to change their focus to engaging their list with more appropriate content.
The Digitial Marketer campaigns are still in their plans, but connecting with a team like us enabled them to:
- evaluate their situation for clearly,
- inventory their assets and
- go after the "lowest hanging fruit" project.
We frequently find that a less sexy, less sophisticated and less complicated solution is often the right next step. It can be easily overlooked because after receiving some training, the simple and sometimes more obvious solution seems too trivial and not in line with what the experts recommend.
Hope this helps.