Greg’s Update

MRR: $4,146

Overall – this week feel like meh.

  • there are some good things coming out of it but discouraging parts as well.
  • Potential big opportunity for the Mobile Friendly podcast, which I’m not going to share yet but i’m pretty excited about
  • traction on some new offerings
  • frustration on current things.
  • The feedback from Patrick i think helped me solidify things.

Fails:

  • Sort of a fail – getting through the 50 prospects in this new sales cycle has been hard due to tech obstacles so I’m refining that.
  • Trying hard to not look at it as fails that I’m not growing as fast but…
    • prices are a bit higher
    • the people i’m trying to sell too are fairly more complicated to reach

Results:

  • 2 customers(1 new and 1 existing) coming in on a new product offering (Verbally committed)
  • 2 proposals of people that are really interested in trials
  • 50 prospects through one full week of new sales cadence – WIN SORT OF
  • Authority conference
  • Mom gets into town friday

Plans:

  • design pricing page / find someone to set it up
  • get the 20-50 prospects
  • email my list with the new plans and offerings

Biggest Takeaway:

  1. After I get back from PHX the only other conf I’m going to is this potential speaking gig. It’s breaking up my periods of momentum
  2. Keep plowing through – first batch of prospects hasn’t been super great so I want to optimize that process
  3. Automated email cadence with sendbloom vs the call part.

Justin’s Update

Fails:

  • Lost $1.3k. This was expected and I mentioned it in the last episode that we have a customer who is pausing things for 30 days so that was $1k of the losses. A separate customer who does VOIP services I actually told to cancel since it is such a timing thing.
  • Don’t have a CTO in place yet. That said, I think I’m going to go Jordan Gal’s route. I met Jordan (co-host of Bootstrapped Web) in Vegas as well as his Co-Founder Ben Fisher. Then I just recently heard Jordan’s podcast interview on the Talking Code podcast about how we worked with Ben as a contractor first just to see how it went and to see how they got along. That approach makes a lot of sense in my opinion for where we’re at and so I think I’ll be taking the same approach.

Results:

  • WIN – $11,130/mo in MRR – Lots of new business to offset the $1.3k/mo in losses. $1k of which was from one customer.
  • WIN – Had 15 sales calls this week. This is too much for what I’m doing since I have to balance product planning, customer onboarding, etc. However, since I don’t have a developer relationship finalized I was able to go a little stronger on the sales calls.
  • WIN – Had a listener to the show request to be our customer success manager. We aren’t at that point just yet, but it was cool to see how we are inspiring people.
  • WIN – This week was pretty hectic with so many new customers. It definitely is testing our onboarding process. This is a heavy manual process in getting customers setup since we have to create email sequences and communicate those with customers and get their accounts setup. Michael (my copywriter) is feeling a little overwhelmed. So this was an interesting week from that standpoint.
  • WIN – We shifted my VA’s responsibility to more of a backend support role. So I ended up preparing a presentation for her to cover that and review the big picture objective with LeadFuze.
  • WIN – I gave a presentation to 20 or so people at a little meetup workshop that recently got started here in town by a company called Tallwave. They brand themselves as a commercializer. Meaning they aren’t necessarily an incubator or an accelerator, but they help companies get to market, test ideas, and generate revenue. It’s a cool little meetup because it’s people really interested in sales and growth hacking which is definitely my crowd. They want me to be a regular contributor. I personally hate public speaking, but we’ll see how things progress I suppose.

Plans:

  • I want to have 10 more sales calls next week. I have 5 currently.
  • I want to get Active Campaign setup with automations. I plan to incorporate follow ups after a few days from our initial sales call. Then another one several days after that. The nice thing about Active Campaign is that it is a CRM + automation system.
  • Raising prices from $300/$600/$900 to $497/$997/$1497 (or possibly $495 or $499). Existing customers are grandfathered. What the new pricing allows us to do is spend more time working with customers on the backend to help them close more deals. In addition, it allows us to pursue potential partnerships.

Takeaway:

  • It is pretty amazing what raising prices can do to create urgency. I thought about raising prices incrementally just so I always have that as a go-to, but I figured with each new deal I would be losing out on revenue so it didn’t make sense.

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