Let Go as a First Employee of Infusionsoft to a Million Dollar Company

CEO and Co-Founder at SixthDivision – Brad Martineau

Brad has a unique story! He’s related to the guys that created Infusionsoft – and he worked as an employee for many years. When he was let go- he wasn’t sure what to do! He ended up creating a new company will all of his specialized knowledge and has been crushing it in the few short years he has had it. Learn not only how he went from nothing to huge company in a few years – but also get tips on how to make YOUR email marketing kick butt!

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson
• IFTTT
• Zapier
• Zapya?- File transfer tool

Go to SixthDivision.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show I have Brad Martineau. He CEO of Sixth Division and he was the sixth employee at Infusionsoft. I'm super excited because I use Infusionsoft and I have a ton of questions for him - not tech support, thankfully, don't worry! I'm really excited to have him on the show. Thanks so much for coming on today, Brad.

Brad: You are very welcome. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Jaime: So what got you the job? Because I have friends who are number-whatever at Facebook and number-whatever at Mint but you're sixth at Infusionsoft - what got you that job in the first place?

Brad: I wish that I had a great, grand and glorious explanation of how I got the sixth position at Infusionsoft but it wasn't that. So the difference between Facebook and Mint is that you're talking about companies that started, raised a bunch of capital and kind of knew where they were going but I think that a lot of people forget about Infusionsoft is that they're over ten years old - they started before this whole craze of simple web-based products. They had a very serious debate early on about whether or not they should go web-based or build desktop software. It wasn't in passing - Clate, the CEO, was dead set on doing desktop software and luckily Scott convinced him otherwise. So it was a little bit different - they didn't come and poach me, it was more like "Hey, we're trying to make this thing happen," and it was a fledgling software company. At the time I was working at the University of Phoenix online, I was an admissions counselor, and just bored out of my mind and my soul was being sucked out of my body. They called up and started talking about CRM and I had no idea what CRM was but they started talking about it so we kind of went back and forth and then they said "Our support team is leaving," which was one person and I was ready to get out of what I was doing so I said "How much can you pay me?" I think I was making $35,000 a year at Phoenix and they offered me $28-29,000. I was like "Okay, but I get benefits, right?" because I had benefits at Phoenix and they were like "No, we don't have enough money for benefits." So I took the job and I'm forever thankful that I did. It was more a matter of necessity for them. Clate is my brother-in-law and Scott and Eric are my brothers so we sat down and had a conversation - "Before we do this, we need to make it really clear. We're owners, you're not, so you've got to be okay with the fact that if this thing takes off we're going to make a bunch of money and you're going to make a lot less money." I was just like "Whatever," I was too young and naive to really understand  but it wouldn't have changed anyway - it was totally fair, they had me going for three or four years, but I came in to the grand and glorious position of being the entire support team. That was me as the sixth employee at Infusionsoft.

Jaime: The ruler!

Brad: Yes.

Jaime: That's insane, though. Did you think, when you were that young and they had that conversation, "If this makes a lot of money, you won't," were you like "Yeah, but you're not going to make a lot of money," or were you "I can't wait until you make a lot of money and you don't?"

Brad: I was too young and naive to even know what that meant. It was "Okay, whatever. I just don't want to work there and I want to work here. I'm saving myself 25 minutes? drive time every day and this will be more fun," and all of that. In hindsight it would have been "Okay, cool, but if you really want to come you've got to double the amount of options you give me," or whatever. But hindsight is 20/20.

Jaime: You're doing okay now! So tell us the story about how you ended up leaving Infusionsoft and starting your own thing.

Brad: So I started out as the entire support team and then I hired some support reps 0 and I use the word "hired" loosely. I could put on a pretty good seminar about how to not hire people. So I hired some people and then I hired a support manager. So we were doing customer support and technical support as well as onboarding - so all new clients would come through us as well. After we had hired about five or six support reps I moved over and launched the very first implement-specific team. So we did implementation just on onboarding of new clients. From there I got into project management and spent about five or six years on that. Most people don't know project management is - I didn't know what it was, now I do - but basically my job was to work with clients, figuring out how they were using the software, what they liked, what they didn't like and then work with the developers to build a better experience. So for about a seven year stretch there was not a feature that was released in Infusionsoft that didn't have my fingerprints all over it. So I had the best job in the world because I'm a little bit of a geeky tech head but I don't know how to write code although I can read it and I could describe the database architecture of Infusionsoft but on the other hand I'm sitting in masterminds with Perry Marshall, Rich Schefren, Sean Greeley, Dan Bradbury, listening to what they're doing in the business so I literally had the best job. So I was there for about seven years - fast forward to March 2010 and I was working in product development on the product management team and they came up with this idea to move me into the marketing world and I was going to be the director of product marketing. The idea was to create something kind of similar to what Apple have done where if you look at an Apple advertisement there's consistency in the way they talk about their products in messaging and design because, at that point, if you bought off of our website and then you logged into our website it was a completely different experience - you would have thought you'd bought off a completely different company. That was the idea but that lasted about three weeks and then they decided not to do that. So I was over in the marketing team and at that point I didn't understand enough about how to run a marketing team and we're talking about a multi-million dollar company. I was a fish out of water and at the same time Infusionsoft hit a couple of slow months and they laid off about 10% of the company. We had about 150employees at that point and I got looped into that 10%. So I tell people I got fired just because it's more dramatic sounding and people say "Was it your brothers?" and I say "No, it wasn't that big of a deal." So I got laid off in 2010.

Jaime: Did they feel bad? I mean you'd worked with them forever.

Brad: They did. Scott and Eric are the other two co-founders and they called me at two o'clock in the morning. When I go to sleep I'm out so my wife answered the phone. They had called three or four times but finally she heard it and she answered the phone, woke me up and say "Hey, Scott and Eric are coming over." I'm trying to process this because it's two o'clock in the morning and at that time my parents were living either in Porto Rico or South Africa and she's like "Did something happen with your parents, maybe?" so we're going through all of the worst case scenarios. They had had a late night meeting at Infusionsoft and they wanted to come to tell me so that I didn't show up the next day. they felt super bad and I put on a pretty good face - I can take pretty much any news like "Cool, okay," but inside I had no idea what I was going to do. I've since talked to my brother-in-law, Clate, and he said "That was one of the hardest decisions because I was the only one who was for it and I just knew that I needed to happen but nobody else was and I couldn't explain why." It was a good 18 months to two years of me just suffering through it and learning what it takes to build a business. So it was a joyride after that but I said if I'd been in the room I would have been the first person to say you should let me go. If I had to go through everything again I'd be the first person to propose my name because I wouldn't change where I am now for anything in the world, as hard as it was when I was going through it. So I was there for six or seven years, in March 2010 I got fired, laid off, and it was the week before Infusionsoft's big user conference - InfusionCon, now ICON - and I was scheduled to do three presentation. They laid off 10% of the company and Nicole Shoots, who ran all of the events at the time, was freaking out because half of her presenters got fired. I said I would do the presentations, no big deal.

Jaime: Wow, good employee!

Brad: In hindsight, again, I was like "Oh, yeah, I'll do them, for sure, because I can get up in front of all of your people and sell them my services," but I didn't quite know how to do that. I looked around and I said what I know how to do really well is I know Infusionsoft better than anybody else because I've been building it for the last seven years so I decided to do some freelance consulting, realized really quickly that I just hate that, it's not me at all. On my own, sitting at home - and I've got five kids - nothing's happening, there's no work happening there. I need to be with people and I need to be building something. The idea of "Hey, let's get on a phone call. We'll talk about what you need. We'll spend an hour and I'll diagram everything you need," which is where the real value is, "and then I'll show it to you and hope that you decide that you want to pay me some money," and then I spend another hour fretting about how much I'm going to quote you, about whether you're going to buy it or not and all of that, it was just completely draining for me. So I worked for about six months and then just stopped working because I had some savings and I had a severance package and then a funny thing happens when you stop working - you run out of money.

Jaime: Who knew?

Brad: Yeah, crazy idea, right? So I got compelled back into doing something. I decided to launch a membership site the next year at InfusionCon. Launched that and, in hindsight, did really well. I sold about 80 people into it, out of about 320 in the room, but it was at $50 per month and in my mind, if $4,000 per month doesn't pay all of my bills that business clearly won't work, so I just didn't do anything with it - heaven forbid that I would market it and continue to sell it and grow it. So that kind of filtered off until the next year where I teamed up with my now business partner, Dave Lee, and he had actually gotten me to come to work at another company here locally, it's about an hour away from my house, that does what we do here at Sixth Division but for people that use Market and Sales Force, so enterprise companies. I lasted three weeks there because, one, it's an hour drive each way and, two, dealing with enterprise companies is just not fun. I want to deal with the entrepreneur, the business owner, so to make a long story short he ended up leaving that job with a multiple six-figure salary and we decided to start Sixth Division. We officially, legally created the entity in December 2011, went six months without taking any money out of the business, we had some employees and were trying to figure some stuff out and hit ICON in 2012, we committed to a three year lease on our current building with no real revenues and we got about $20-30,000 in sponsorship at ICON. We had a session where we were going to present and sell and I woke up the second day of ICON and every single one of my bank accounts was overdrawn - business and personal, all of the e-mails were coming in and I was like "This is great. Life is so great right now." So we went that night and we sold and it was like of like "Well, I hope this turns into money because if not we've got some problems." So we went and sold that night and we did really well that night and then we put our heads down and we just started sponsoring every event we could. We broke seven figures in our first year but it was really crazy. Really it was seven figures from the end of March to the end of the year. It was a crazy schedule. So our 2013 was grow by dollar but reduce the pace by half - we grew about 20% and cut our pace in half and now, in 2014, I'm not doing any of the direct implantation work - we've got a process, we've got a team of people who are amazing - so we've got staff built up and now we're into the scaling mode and looking to double this year over our first year, probably about 50-60% growth over last year. So it's going well. It's a struggle and I definitely went down to the very bottom before I decided to start making stuff happen but that's how I got here.

Jaime: What is that like, looking at your bank accounts, going "Oh, crap. I have to do something or this is going to be bad?"

Brad: It depends on how you decide to process it. It can go a couple of ways. The first way it can go is terrifying and then you can just not do anything out of fear which is a horrible, horrible thing to do - or it can be motivating. Just say "Okay, I'm going to go make something happen." I always tell my clients that the lesson I learned out of that is that the fastest way to get smart in a hurry is to run out of time or run out of money. Or, if you want to be smart, just pretend like either one of those happened because once you're out of time or out of money you can't afford to be stupid anymore. I was just bring stupid for two years - that's why I ran out of money - I was creating all of these bullcrap excuses about why I couldn't make stuff work or how I needed to run my business and then as soon as it was "If I don't make money today then my kids don't have food tomorrow," then, all of a sudden, all of the things that you hold on to just go out of the window. So, for me, it became a great motivator. You've got to make it a motivator otherwise you just shrivel up and nothing happens.

Jaime: You either stay in bed or you create this laser focus to actually see a result. 

Brad: Yes.

Jaime: Thankfully it worked well because your whole goal was to go and pitch and it if wasn't successful you would have had to figure something else out, right'

Brad: Yes, we literally walked into that room that night and I had no money in my bank accounts, we were printing order forms in the back of the room as people were coming in and I finished my presentation an hour before. I think that's an important part of the story - we built a seven figure company but two years ago I had no money and was printing order forms in the back of the room while I was finalizing a presentation. A lot of people talk about this anecdotally but understand that it doesn't look pretty. You can look at any company, even Infusionsoft, and they're doing amazing things but they're just chaos - that's part of what makes being an entrepreneur fun but the key lesson that I try to get through to people when I'm teaching is that there is always chaos and you just get comfortable with it because it never goes away. You just get comfortable with it and realize that to grow a business or to grow personally you're constantly living in chaos - otherwise you're not growing at all. That's just the way that it is.

Jaime: That's a huge point, though, because a lot of people are like "When I'm a millionaire? When this happens? It will all be sunshine and roses."

Brad: "It's different for them because they have money." No, it's not any different at all. "Oh, he did that because he worked at Infusionsoft." No - it's actually more of a pain in the butt for me to do anything with Infusionsoft because I worked there and I am related to the founders. I kind of wish that I didn't have that limitation.

Jaime: People have bigger problems too - like your brothers had to lay you off. A brother. That's a big problem to have. Laying off 10% of their workforce - that sucks. It's not fun even though they're a big company and doing really well. So tell us about Sixth Division in general and what you guys do so that everyone has an idea.

Brad: Our marketing tagline is "We make Infusionsoft easy." That's what we do to get people to listen to us. We're a services company specifically targeting our audience, who are Infusionsoft users, but really what we do is we help entrepreneurs tap into the power of systems and automation, which is kind of what Infusionsoft represents, to create amazing experiences for their leads, prospects and customers so that they can build what we call a small business success machine. It's one thing to create a successful business but what we're in the business of doing is helping people take their businesses and convert them into machines that produce success - so everything is systematic, it's predictable, it's consistent, you know what's happening, you're not this Van Gogh person behind a curtain trying to make a bunch of stuff happen, it just works like clockwork. So all of our offerings are geared to that end and we've found that some people are like "If you just show us what to do I'll do it myself," so we have a boot camp where people come out to our office and we do about ten businesses at a time and we've come up with a step-by-step methodology to go from the vision of how you want your business to work to implementing that vision. We talk a lot about "the gap" and the gap is when you have your ideas of how you want your business to run over here and then there's those ideas being implemented and there's this gap in the middle. So we have this step-by-step system which we call the bridge and it's how to go from the ideas that you have to those being implemented and we teach it to anybody. So that's for the person who wants to learn or do it themselves. On the other side there are a lot of people who are like 'I want to have it done," so we have a makeover offering where you come out and sit one-on-one with one of our coaches for two days and we show you this process because, ultimately, if you're going to master systems and automation, that's not something you just hand to somebody else - it's your business so you've got to know how to think through what you want to happen in your business so we share the process but then we'll go and build all the stuff out in the two days. Then we have ongoing offerings that kind of correspond to those two groups - i.e. they're "I just want you to show me and give me group support when I have questions. I'll do all the blueprinting and the business strategy and you just build it", or "I want you to help consult on how I should be doing the business and help me build." So it kind of depends on what you need but it's all geared towards leveraging systems and automation in your business so that you've got a business that runs like a well-oiled machine.

Jaime: That makes sense. The other day one of my marketing friends the other day was in my Infusionsoft and they were like "Why don't you do this? Why aren't you doing this?" I was like "I know I have to do that; I have not had a chance to do that. I have so many things going on." I love how you call it the gap because, yes, I know what I'm supposed to be doing, I'm not dumb, I've just not had a chance to actually implement it. So tell me a story of a before and after for someone so that they can get a tangible idea of what you guys do.

Brad: We'll take one that people have probably heard of. There are four or five of these on our website if you want other examples but I'll take Casey Graham from the Rocket Company - he won Ultimate Marketer in 2013.

Jaime: What's the Rocket Company?

Brad: They help churches succeed with a bunch of different programs. So they won Ultimate Marketer in 2013 and their business model is that they have online coaching programs which are membership sites - people sign up for a year at $97. One of them is called the Giving Rocket and it's a program to help churches increase donations and the churches sign up, pay $100 a month and then they're in this program for a year and every month they get a video of "Hey, here's how to go and do this," and a bunch of resources. So that's the business model and they won Ultimate Marketer. They Infusionsoft's user of the year in 2013 and because they won they got to come and spend a day with us and I talked to them while they were at the conference and they ended up buying two extra days so we spent three days in their office. I'll talk about the general results and also something specific that we implemented because there were actually some monetary results that he mentions in the video. The biggest thing that we did for them was that we slowed them down so that they could go faster - and that's a critical, critical piece that a lot of people miss. They were going so fast that it was like "Okay, today is Tuesday. We need to get a campaign out on Wednesday," and they would just build and there was no thought for "What are we going to do in the aftermath of this on Thursdays?" So they would just build and build and what happens is it causes this chaos and you just have this mounting chaos that builds in the background where, two or three years down the road, you're like "Hey, let me go and find all of the people who are in this subscription but haven't bought this," and I don't know how to find that because it's all over the place. So we helped them to slow down. The second thing we did is we gave them a process to implement to keep it clean and showed them how to plan ahead without actually sacrificing any time. So the biggest thing for them was we gave them a system for implementing, a methodology so that they could clear out all of the garbage that had been building and, as they moved forward, they knew what they were doing, so they had confidence, "I hope this campaign will go when I push the "Go" button." Then, what we did specifically was two things that came out of that - we discovered that there was a timeframe, a three month window or so, where they had clients who had bought something but because they were just kind of slapping things together they had bought and were paying but hadn't actually got access to what they were paying for so there was a big gap in the business so we closed that up and showed them how to get those people back around and we said "Okay, where else might this be?" and we identified all of those places. Then, we also created a frontend mini-funnel to sell one of those membership programs to people that were coming through who had already bought some of their other ones. I don't remember the exact details of that campaign I just remembered that when we built it and when we recorded the video it had been six or nine months and they had produced an extra $100,000 in revenue - not from new traffic, it was just additional traffic going through. They had picked up an extra $100,000 of revenue when we recorded the video, which was probably about six months ago, and I don't know what they've done since then. So, again, the big thing was that we found a spot where they could pick up additional revenue, found a spot where there was a big old hole in their business and then, this is going to sound funny, but we put structure around building structures and we put systems around building systems and automation - and that's one of the key things, if you really want to leverage systems and automation, not only do you have to have a plan of what that looks like but you also need to have a system to actually create it, otherwise all you've got is a jacked-up process for creating what is supposed to be a good process but it's just impossible to do if you don't have a methodology for how you're going to do it.

Jaime: Definitely. How does this apply if someone is in the first couple of years of business and still trying to figure it out? You know, when you're at the very beginning, going "I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing." How can we implement this or should we implement systems and automation and stuff like that if we're not this huge marketer of the year kind of company?

Brad: Great question and I'm glad you asked "or should we?" because that's a qualifier in this. Who is the answer being addressed to? Is this pre-seven figures, is this seven figures but chaotic?

Jaime: Pre-seven figures. We're talking about people who are 1-4 years in. We have a lot of people who listen to the show who are solo-preneurs or just have a handful of employees and are trying to figure it out.

Brad: Got it. Have you read the book "Ready, Fire, Aim," by Michael Masterson?

Jaime: I haven't read it yet but everyone keeps telling me to read it.

Brad: So you need to add that one to the list of things that you know you need to do but you haven't had time to do yet.

Jaime: No kidding, right?

Brad: The beautiful thing is that, for the sake of this question, you don't have to read the whole book. He breaks down four key phases that every business goes through - it's $0-$1 million, $1-10 million, $10-100 million and $100+ million. When you're pre-$1 million, don't even think about $1-10 million or whatever. He addresses, at every phase, the challenges that your business faces and the key thing to focus on in order to go to the next phase. I've read the first two sections - I don't need to know what it takes to go from $10 to $100 million or $100+ million until I get there. This ties into the whole idea of systems automation because from $0-$1 million, and my answer is assuming that you're trying to build an infrastructure around you to grow the business - because you get a lot of solo-preneurs who are like "Hey, I'm cool making my half-million. I've got super high margins," or whatever it is. So assuming you're trying to grow past that point I'm a firm believer in what he teaches - and this is what I tell everybody - your problem, pre-seven figures, is you don't know what you're doing.

Jaime: Good to know.

Brad: And the solution, or what you're trying to do, is you're trying to figure out how to sell your first product profitably and there's a whole bunch of things you need to do for that in terms of figuring out your marketing message and everything so my advice would be pick one product or one service - and there's no exaggeration when I say one. We did seven figures, grew 20%, made it half way through this year and we sold one offering - it was the makeover, two days, and we didn't do anything else. What people don't realize is that every time you create another offering you're basically creating another business inside your business because you've got to define the marketing message, you've got to define a lead generation strategy, you've got to find the sales strategy, a fulfillment strategy, and the fact is that there are more people who will buy your first offering so you're better off just spending all of your energy driving people into the main offering. So what I would do if I was starting over, going "Okay, I'm going to start a business off, I've got Infusionsoft," because I'll never run a business without it, so looking and going "Do I do systems, do I do automation, what do I do?" My formula is I would pick one offering I'm going to sell and I would sell the most expensive thing that I could sell that has the highest profit margins and then the systems that I would put in place would be on the marketing, like taking a lead and converting them into someone that's ready to buy, and then, on the fulfillment side, in terms of delivering an amazing experience. I don't want clients who are not super happy so one of the things we always focused on is we systematized and automated how we deliver all of our offerings and what a lot of people do with Infusionsoft is the opposite - they just focus on e-mail auto-responders. Our biggest value at Sixth Division out of Infusionsoft and systems and automation is how we deliver. I can go and use any other system and create an e-mail auto-responder with a sales pipeline, I don't need Infusionsoft for that, but what it allows us to do in terms of scheduling people for makeovers, making sure they're prepped when they come out and creating an experience when somebody buys from you is critical. I'm getting off track a little bit, let me go back.

Jaime: Okay, good, because I'm going to ask you more questions about that in just a second.

Brad: So there are two things I would focus on - one is I would nail the experience when somebody buys. The most important person in the business is the customer so I would start there and say "If I'm selling this, this is my offering, I want to know the experience," and then, from there, I would go and create really, really good free content and I would create my marketing like the classic frontend marketing funnels where there's a free video series, or whatever it is, and I would use the automation and systems of Infusionsoft to take new leads and turn them into people who are ready to talk to me and then I would create a system for delivering. In my case I assume I would be selling stuff over the phone - I'm not worried about that because if I get someone who wants to buy from me I can make sure that happens. I don't need a system to tell me what to do, I don't need to invest extra time to build all of that out. If somebody says "Hey, I want to talk to you about buying your $10,000 deal," I will make sure I find time to talk to you ' I do not need a pipeline to tell me when to call you back. So that's where I would start because it's all about leverage so the frontend piece is where I leverage and I use automation and systems to filter out the people who are not ready to buy right now and then, on the fulfillment, what I'm trying to leverage is the experience. We probably don't have time to talk about this but I learned this at Disney - I took my kids to Disney over the summer and had one of the most amazing experiences but it was completely systematic - so I would focus on the experience for customers because they're going to turn into referrals, they're going to turn into repeat customers and that becomes an asset that I can use in my marketing and everything else that I do. So that's where I would start - delivery and marketing and lead to prospect conversion in terms of systems and automation and I would forget everything else, because you've got one job when you're pre-seven figures - sell crap, period. Not crap - we should use a ledger for my terminology. I use "crap" interchangeably with "stuff" and by stuff I mean one thing. Pick one thing, sell it. I get people that come out and they're two people companies with 17 products. No - you've got fundamental business model issues before you even worry about systems.

Jaime: Thank you for saying that. You're preaching to the choir for me but so many people do not know this at all and they haven't figured out the one thing that they're doing in order to actually create that customer experience that you want. So I want tactics and techniques - what have you seen has worked on the customer experience side? If I'm looking at my offerings and I want to make sure that my customer has the best experience ever, what do you suggest? Are there certain touch points, are supposed to do certain things at certain times? Tell me what you've got.

Brad: Let's just break down. The idea is how to make this amazing experience, how to make people happy, so let's just reverse engineer that. If you think about it, it's not that difficult. When do you have an amazing experience? Or, better yet, when do you have a crappy experience? Were you have crappy experiences is where what was promised was not delivered or you had no idea what to expect - because when you have no idea what to expect you're constantly on edge, as a consumer, like "Wait a minute, was that supposed to happen? Do I say something here? Because I think I'm supposed to get that but am I supposed to wait? I don't want to be the complainer person." So the two key underlying principles are to, one, make sure that there is complete harmony between what you're selling and what's being delivered - and that's why you want to create a system around delivery because then you know that what you're selling is going to be delivered every single time because it's systematized and it's automated - and, two, make sure that people know what they're going to get. You've got to realize that just because you know and you've told the last hundred people that have bought, the next person to buy is hearing it for the first time, so you can't just tell them once - anyone who has kids knows this. I have five kids - you can't just tell them once, it's more like you've got to tell them four or five times, so make it a tactic. Here's what we do - I'll just take our makeover, for example - our entire process is scripted out so when somebody buys the makeover from a sales rep, our sales rep is measured on the number of times he closes them, and we call it closing them correctly, and he's got a checklist he's got to walk through with them - "I just want to recap. This is what you're going to get - you're going to get this, you're going to get this, you're going to get this, you're going to get this." After he buys, our office manager calls the person and says "Okay, we're super excited to have you here. Let me just review what you're going to get - you're going to get this, you're going to get this, you're going to get this, you're going to get this." She's repeating what he said on the phone. Then there's an e-mail that goes out that says "Thank you so much for signing up. You're going to get this, you're going to get this, you're going to get this, you're going to get this." You want to reiterate exactly what they're going to get a minimum of three times and then you can move into the delivery of how it's going to happen. So, for us, they get another e-mail that says "Thanks so much for signing up. Here are the next three things that you need to do," and there are big numbers - One, Two, Three - in the e-mail. "So the first thing you need to do is you need to pick a date. After you've scheduled your date we're going to get you assigned to a consultant and they'll follow up to schedule your initial call. Second, I need you to fill out this survey." I don't remember what the third thing is because I haven't looked at that e-mail in a while but the third one is really important too, whatever it is. So the key is that, at every step of the way, I want to make sure that they know exactly what to expect. We've got a bunch of videos that say "Thanks for signing up. Here's how this is going to go down. I want to explain to you exactly what's going to happen when you get here." We sell out 6-8 weeks in advance so if you bought today you're not coming out for six weeks and it's really kind of a race - if I send you nothing I can almost predict when you'll e-mail me and ask me a question so what I do is, I try to get them two days before that and I have an automated e-mail go out to address the exact question that they're asking. So it's about predicting whether the person is going to be like "Oh, I don't remember exactly how this happened," and then, afterwards, we have an automated e-mail that goes out that asks for feedback - "What can we improve on? What can we change?" and they can say "It would have been nice to know about this," and we'll go and record about a video about a particular component. "I didn't realize that we were going to do this and go for dinner after the first day," or whatever, so either they just missed it or we can go and make sure that we have it in the videos. So I think, from a tactics standpoint, you've got to look at what you're selling, step away from the chaos of the business and say "If I want customers that are not just happy," because I'm not content with "That was cool," I'm content with "Holy crap, that was the coolest thing I've ever been through," so if I want that, what is going to need to happen? What do I need to make sure they understand? What are the misconceptions that might make them not have that good of an experience? Because your experience is completely driven by your perception and your perception is controlled by your expectations - so if you can control expectations and then manage perception of what's supposed to be happening by telling them every step of the way then it's a multiplier for their experience. I could go on and on but what I would do is take your offering, figure out where people need follow-up and script your offering the same way you would for a marketing or sales process, so that they're never sitting there, saying "I wonder what's going to happen?" If you do services in person, hire a camera crew, start outside your front door and say "Hey, I'm super excited to have you come down. This is how it's going to work. This is our front door," and you're going to walk through and the camera crew is going to follow you inside, "You're going to meet Erin, she's our office manager, she's going to be right here and she's going to say "Hey, do you want a drink of water?" She's going to have you fill out this sheet while she gets you a juice or a Starbucks. Then we're going to sit down here and do a group thing." So you walk them through so that they know what to except. I'm going to stop now because this stuff gets me going.

Jaime: This is awesome. This is the stuff that usually gets thrown to the side as "Oh, we'll do that later, it's not that important," or whatever it is. Setting expectations and letting people know so that they're not uncertain on what they're going to get is insanely important but most people are just like "I need sales? because they're thinking one to seven figures. "Okay, great, but I need to be selling more than doing this," so where do you see that in the growth of your business? If we're starting off with one person, when should we be implementing this stuff?

Brad: A couple of things - I believe in ROI. This crazy idea, right? I didn't make it up, but ROI activities of the time that I've spent. Just recently I've gone through this exercise of clearing off everything I'm committed to and I'm only going to bring back the things where there's an ROI and I'm going to start backing out of things that don't produce an ROI. So when you start out and you're just a one or two man shop, let's just be real - more than likely your schedule kind of sucks. Unless you're an info marketer and you've got massive margins you probably have a lot of stuff going on, especially if you're trying to build a company and trying to get it to where you have employees. You're not working 40 hours. In full disclosure - I didn't get back to a 40 hour work week until this year. It's just part of the game, it's what you do. There are two keys - one is to realize that you get to choose how much you give to your business and how much you give to sales. This I learned because my wife and kids go to bed at 9:30 or 10pm and then I start working and I'd stay up until 2am. One day it hit me - "You know what? I'm choosing to stay up until 2am. I could stay up until 4am and then I'd be a walking zombie or I could choose to go to sleep at 10pm and have more energy." The same principle applies to sales - "I've got to get sales so I've got to go and sell." Yes, but it doesn't do you any good if you're getting sales and then you're dropping them into the garbage. You've got to do a balance so I would say you're already working crazy hours so carve out one Saturday or a Friday - believe it or not, your business will not crumble and fall if you carve out a Friday - put out an out of office, "I will not be available on Thursday and Friday," and go and architect your experience on the fulfillment side. I can almost guarantee that anybody is pre-seven figures, if they make an honest accounting of their marketing and sales activities, they could probably cut out a third of it and not have any impact on their revenue numbers, which means they've got a third of their time to dedicate to the fulfillment and delivery. Again, if you pretend like you have no money and no time then you'll only spend money and time on the things that are guaranteed, as much as they can be, to produce a result. But a lot of the time what we do is we pretend or we trick ourselves into thinking "I've got to spend 80 hours selling." No you don't - if you can't close crap in 40 hours you've got bigger problems. Much bigger problems. So spend 40 hours selling. Force yourself to be honest and accountable to those 40 hours and then spend the other 20 creating an amazing experience. Everybody has the same amount of time and people have done it so that tells me that there's no good excuse when it comes to time.

Jaime: Definitely not. One of my favorite quotes is "Time is a created thing. To say you don't have time is to say you don't want to," by Lao Tzu. I'm like "Yes! That is so important."

Brad: Amen to that.

Jaime: We're going to have to wrap up in just a second and I do have my last question but before we get into that a lot of people are asking traffic questions - you should create some content, some amazing stuff - do you have any advice on getting people into the funnel? Because a lot of people ask me questions on that too. What's the best way to get people excited and into the funnel so that we can start them through the Infusionsoft process?

Brad: That's two different questions - excited and into the funnel. One lesson that I learned a long time ago, and maybe this will be helpful, I don't know, but I was talking with Brian Johnson who is a really smart marketer and he talked about this idea and concept of having list, copy and offer. So the list is your audience - it doesn't mean you have to have a list, it's just your audience - so if you run a Facebook ad you have to consider who the audience is and what they need. What do they hunger for? What do they walk around thinking about all day? Then you have your copy and your offer so what is the messaging and the words that you put on the page? The words that you use will have a big impact into how excited somebody is and the offer that you create. I think one of my favorite things around how to get people into the funnel and capturing leads and getting them excited came from Perry Marshall. I was at his house doing an interview with him and he said "The idea that's been coming across lately is that people keep saying "My lead magnets aren't converting as much." You know what? It's probably just because your offer sucks." A lot of the time we want to think "Oh, no, something's wrong with the people. Something's wrong with the source. He was like "No, maybe a free report on the seven reasons why just isn't good enough anymore." So my approach in terms of excited and into the funnel - and this is not a traffic question so much as if you can get people into the page, how do you get them to convert? My rule of thumb is I want to create a frontend lead magnet that I can sell for a couple hundred bucks and if I can't, then it doesn't work for me. So the seven things that you spit out in a 15 minute afternoon that's the same crap, there's no creativity to it - don't use that stuff. Our lead magnet is an interview series with other top entrepreneurs and we did sell it - that was our membership for a long time, people would pay $100 per month to get it - but there's real value there. Again, it's about creating an experience for your leads, prospects and customers. So if your lead comes in and you start off giving them crappy stuff then there's no reason they would be excited about what they're going to pay you for, but if your leads come in and you give them amazing stuff on the frontend then there's that much more to be excited about. Then it's just a matter of figuring out where does your target audience live? Where are their eyeballs? Gary Vaynerchuk talks about when he started his lemonade stands when he was younger and he says "I hired people to stand at the stands. My job was to go around and watch people's eyeballs." Maybe he made up the story to prove a point but it doesn't matter if the story is real or not, the point is still true - he would do was sit at corners and watch people come up to the stop signs and he would watch them and see where their eyes went when they stopped at a stop sign and that's where he would put his advertisements. So the same principle applies for our prospects and customers - where are they? You've just got to figure out where they're going and then you create something that's tasty, that would be awesome to have, and then you've got a platform or a foundation to be able to shift somebody into a paid offering. I hope that answers your question.

Jaime: It totally did. I really appreciate it. I think it's going to help a lot of people because a lot of times we're like "Oh, I need a lead magnet. Let me create something that could just be a free article," and that's not good enough, it's just not anymore, and I really appreciate you saying that. I need to finish with the last question - what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Brad: That's such a great question and the difficulty is not with the ideas, but with just one. We have a presentation we give called "The Six Laws of Small Business Success - The Six Laws of Implementation," and the fundamental law, I believe, for success, for being able to do massive implantation, to getting anything done in life, comes from a question that my dad used to ask me every day growing up to the point where I would roll my eyes. I'm the sixth of ten kids and we were getting into the Suburban and going to watch "Aladdin" when it came out, so this is a big deal for a family of ten. We're going to the movie theater, my dad turns around and he asks this question - "What do we want to have happen here?" I'm like "Dad, I don't know what you're saying, old man," but the power of the question is in getting very, very clear on what we what to happen. I'm going to make this specific because I know you want specific and not generic so give me a second. I think that most people have directions but they think they have goals and I think that's the fundamental reason why people can't get to $1 million. People walk around saying "I want to make more money, I want more time off, I want to lose weight, I want to have more time with my kids." Okay, those are not goals, those are directions. Goals say "How much money do you want to have, specifically? How many days off do you want to have?" Where I would start, because, for me, the fundamental foundation is if you're really trying to get to $1 million, if that's really your goal, the first question I would ask is "Do you have that printed in your office space, in your home and in your bathroom?" If you don't, you don't really want to get to $1 million = you're just pretending that you want to get there. You've got to get clear on that number. You may not to set it at $1 million - if you're doing $100,000, set it at $250,000. Give yourself a realistic goal, but set your next goal to get to $1 million. You want to set the date that it's going to happen and then you need to identify the business model in the simplest terms. I would have a sheet and write it out and here's the format - here's the number I'm trying to get to by this date, and then it's the product offer I'm going to sell and this is the price point times this many units to get there. Just put that on your wall so when you wake up and you're brushing your teeth it's right there on the mirror and when you're sitting at your computer it's right behind it - and that's all you need. Pre-seven figures, that's the only thing you need. If you want to go a step further, you say "How many leads do I need to capture in order to get to that?" You just reverse engineer success. If you don't have that idea in your mind, if you don't have that written down with the date that you're looking at every single day, then you're never going to get to $1 million. That's the foundational step. There's another idea that I picked up up from Stu McLaren, founder of Wishlist.

Jaime: Stu's a friend too.

Brad: Stu's an amazing guy. So "If This, Then That," is this automated tool and you can use it to send yourself text messages. I use it for some stuff that I'm working on personally, to make sure that I don't make agreements to do anything unless I have it on my calendar or on my list, but it's a mental shift for the brain so I've started sending myself text messages. Here's one - it says "Don't make agreements without a plan to keep them - Brad," and I have different variations of it scheduled throughout the week to get it in my head. So if you have your number go to "If This, Then That," it's free, sign up for an account and have it send you a text message, not at the same time every day, take an extra ten minutes to set it up to come at 8:30am on Monday, Tuesday at 9:15am. Do it two or three times a day so that it's just "Heads up - just so you know, right now, your goal is that you're going to sell 13 of this unit times $10,000 so that you get to $130,000 for this month," or whatever it is. So you have things coming in at weird intervals so that you don't get conditioned to it and you don't ignore it.

Jaime: Best tip ever! I just wrote a whole webinar where I went back through the past 150 interviews and what you just said as your first tip was one of the biggest things that everybody said so I think that's huge and you iterated it extremely well so I'm probably going to quote you on the webinar but I used "If This, Then That" and I've never thought about doing that.

Brad: The other one is Zapya. I was at Genius Network and a guy gave a ten minute presentation on how he automates his podcast and he had three or four different tools where he would record it, stick it in Dropbox and there's this tool that looks at your Dropbox files, finds one that's a named a certain way and moves it over here. Zapya does something like that. He had automated his whole workflow like that and I came away thinking "You know what? I live in a world of systems and automation and I feel like I'm archaic." So I'm starting to look at all of those tools where I can simplify my reminders to myself or the work I need to do or whatever.

Jaime: I love all of this. Thank you so much. I haven't actually used Zapya yet. I'm recording a podcast right now and I'm going to have to split it and move it over to Dropbox. Thank you. I appreciate it, Brad.

Brad: If you remind me, I'll send you the workflow. It's got the whole workflow of how he does his podcasts.

Jaime: Please send it to me.

Brad: I actually have a video of the talk. It just came up on Facebook - I'll send it to you.

Jaime: That would be awesome and hopefully we can link it up too. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Brad. Where can we find more about you and your company online?

Brad: SixthDivision.com. like I said, there are some stories there about the people we've worked with. Somewhere on there is an option to opt-in for some video series. If you do a search for Sixth Division TV we've started doing a web TV series with episodes a couple of times a month where we talk to top entrepreneurs, people who are in the trenches, trying to figure stuff out and come up with "Hey, here's how to build this." SixthDivision.com is the place to go to get everything.

Jaime: Perfect. Everyone should check that out, especially if you use Infusionsoft. Thank you so much for coming on, Brad. I hope you have an awesome day.

Brad: You're welcome. Thanks a lot.

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Tags: Brad Martineau, Business Building, Business Growth, business startup, Email List, email marketing, infusionsoft, list building, millionaire interview, Startup

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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