Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • 1 more blog post

Results:

  • System.ly Month to Date Revenue –
    • MRR: $21,342
  • Closed 2 new clients
  • Had 5 sales calls one of which was with a big time online personality and excited at the opportunity to work with them.
    • 1 of which we’re having a secondary call today on
  • Sent out a broadcast promoting our latest blog post and already got some good feedback on that
    • We have 2 of the next 3 weeks blog posts already scheduled (both are guest posts)
  • Spent the week onboarding my new assistant and she’s a rockstar already. She’s helping me with putting together project timelines for upcoming initiatives we have planned and she’ll be starting to help manage my email and hold me accountable on what I will say yes to and no to.
    • Talking a lot about how to better systemize the business
  • We posted the part time Account Coordinator Position which is essentially a customer support role and have have a few applications start coming in there. We need to get this role filled ASAP
  • Got our designer/developer team working on the updates to our pricing page with our repackaged plans.
    • Reviewed the final updates this morning and should be live later today or Monday at the latest.
  • Started doing research and planning on building our Master followup sequence.

Plans:

  • Finalize the Account Coordinator Position
  • Finalize our stance on what we will say yes to and what we won’t do.
  • Finalize the outline for master followup sequence and start writing at least 1-2 of those emails
  • Doing research on Infusionsoft courses in prep for planning our own and create an outline of the course materials/content

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • Didn’t get to focus a whole lot on the demo process. Did make a call to a demo automation company, but I’ll get into that later.

Results:

  • LeadFuze software revenue is $16k MRR.
  • So I mentioned last week that we’re running negative now as we begin switching full focus to the software and away from the done-for-you service. This led to some radical changes in the way we’re thinking about customer acquisition and free to paid conversions:
    • Partnerships
    • Affiliate offers
    • Lining up Joint Venture opportunities
    • Asked my mastermind partners if they had connections to people with agencies / founders in their list to see if they could make introductions.
    • Going to try to get into AppSumo
    • And just a hard core focus on onboarding and talking with customers
  • Signed up for Live Chat Ninjas to man our Intercom support. We are getting a lot of out of country users that try to start a chat, and by the time we respond the next day they are already long gone. In addition, the time sink for me has been difficult to adjust to. Not just in terms of time commitment, but in terms of the context switching.
    • I was initially going to be involved in this business over a year ago, but decided not to move forward.
    • In any case, I agreed to pay $20 for their trainability test where they go through your whole app and try to learn everything and then you test them with questions you normally get from your visitors or users.
    • A few days later they came back with an 18 page document walking through every part of LeadFuze. I was actually blown away and was totally NOT expecting that level of research. I’ll actually be able to use this document for when we bring on a customer success person.
    • I was still questioning how well they would handle the live questions part, and Michael was telling me to not outsource it. I was going to hold off on this whole thing, but I went through the questions and was blown away how much they knew of the app.
    • I planted a couple questions that looked like tech support even just to see how they handled it. One was, “I can’t export my list” and another was “emails aren’t sending.” For both of those they knew the answer… I honestly do not even know how they possibly knew the answers as we don’t even have it in documentation. This just told me they REALLY took the time to understand the app.
    • I ended up signing up and this has been their first week. What a huge relief. They are literally providing 24 hour coverage 6 days a week. They take a weekend day off which is our Saturday. So this has been monumental and I think helps our onboarding experience as well. They’ll also proactively trigger chats based on the page they are on.
    • Our pricing plan is their high end plan at the $269/mo level based on our alexa ranking, but just two conversions and this service is paid for. Their plans start at just $79/mo so HIGHLY recommend you check them out.
    • Right away we saw immediate value. In fact, on the second day one of the users they were helping ended up upgrading to an annual professional plan for $2,500.
  • Our organic search traffic is still a fraction of what it was, so I did a full SEO audit and uncovered some issues with 404 errors, page speed issues, no sitemap was submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and some code quality issues that we got fixed up. I’ll be doing another audit in a week or so just to see if there are any other issues remaining and to give Google some more time to recognize the updates.
  • Reshifted my mindset to be in a “Lets Go!” mode. What can we do immediately to continue the growth trajectory for LeadFuze?
  • Michael and I put together an email blast with a pretty crazy offer this week to create email sequences for anyone that signs up to a paid plan for the software. We sent out a blast on Monday to offer this until Friday. We sent a reminder on Thursday and then a final reminder will go out today, literally as we are recording this. So I’m expecting some last minute stragglers to come through with this offer.  
    • Our goal is to try and add $10k MRR to the software by the end of the month. We added $3.2k this past week. My original goal at the end of the year was for the software to be at $23k MRR. We’re about a month behind because we were just over a month behind in launching version 2. That said, I want the rest of this month hyper focused on us catching up and putting us back on pace to be at $1M ARR by the end of the year.
    • The trick now is, how do we keep the momentum once the offer ends tonight? How can we keep this wave of momentum going… it is so hard to get momentum and once you have it, you want to ride it out as long as possible.
  • Michael also came over to my house on Tuesday. We actually started to call free trial sign up that we could to learn about their use case, see if they had any questions, and to offer to help them write their email copy if they signed up. This is part of our hyper focus on onboarding right now. Didn’t get through to many so I started sending some personal emails to them to setup a time to chat and this has worked really well. So I’m going to try and carve out time to do this with everyone the day after they sign up.
  • Had a conversation with a JV Broker, but he was more interested in being a paid media consultant and affiliate himself. We’d have to put up the budget and pay him the affiliate commission though, so not sure it made sense. I think I’d rather just pay a consultant for paid media a one-off fee to get things set up for us and scale it out from there.
  • Had a call with Consens.us (used to be DemoChimp) to automate our demo process. However, they wanted $8500 a year. They were willing to do monthly, but it would still come up to $750 or so per month. Just not sure that I’m quite seeing the value at this point of our business. I was thinking it was going to be $200 to $300/mo. We will probably go back to step 1 and create our own demo video process.
  • I finished up mapping out ideas for simplifying the prospecting process which is going to continue making it easier for people to get started.
    • In addition, it also includes us providing some email templates to make it easier for people to get started. Like we talked about last week from Ben Orenstein’s talk at MicroConf – it is easier to edit something than create something.

Plans:

  • Go live with some of our new onboarding updates to prospecting and pre-populated email sequence templates
  • Finish creating all of the email sequences that we had from people who signed up this week
  • Offer to do this for people going forward on a Professional or Rainmaker plan, but time it based on their sign up date. So the idea here is to replicate the deadline element and provide that sense of urgency.
  • Get our webinar ready. We want to look at driving some paids ads to the webinar.
  • Continue to make time new trial users
  • I want to also reach out to anyone who has canceled in the past to let them know about new updates and try to get them back with some sort of win-back offer.
  • Inbox Zero

Resources Mentioned:

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