Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • Setup our internal onboarding and fulfillment campaigns for our new product options
  • Get one blog post written for our site
  • My workouts suffered this week
  • Finalize site web copy

Results:  

  • MME Revenue = Same
    • MME $1988
  • System.ly Month to Date Revenue –
      • One Time: $2750
      • EMRR: $6087
      • Total MR: $8087
  • 4 Discovery calls
    • 1 closed at Landed a new customer on our pricing which will be a $2k setup and another $1k MRR
  • Upgraded one client to one of our new plans and they agreed to a 12 month contract
  • Had two calls with existing customers
  • Monday we had our first “leadership team meeting” which went well, I shared how we’ll be moving forward with that call
  • And we also had our first all hands meeting now that we’re 4 people. That went well and excited for how that evolves.
  • Finished Audit and now working on bringing that customer on to do the implementation so we’re actively trying to close 4 more customers that we’re talking to.
  • The biggest decision I’ve made was to modify our service to be a bit more premium than we already are. While I think we have really affordable plans in some cases we are going to be considered more expensive than many others but that’s ok.  With our new plans, my goal is to get to 30-40 customers on one of our new plans, so I plan on going to our existing customers and getting them to upgrade with a special offer, hopefully.
  • We’ve pretty much moved completely to Wrike, although I still use Trello for my content planning but that will eventually move over too.
  • I had a buddy of mine come over Wednesday and we filmed a bunch of video for the new site going live at the end of the month. So I spent the first part of the week writing out the scripts for the video. So shout to to Chris Kretzer here in Denver. Great dude and definitely an up and coming video guy.
  • I’ve laid out a number of pages that I want to create on the website that are going to be important for the business that do software comparisons
  • I’ve started organizing my ideas for content that we’ll be launching with for the site so I need to get into content creation mode like whoa here.
  • Need to map out our new fulfillment campaigns and process now that we’re leveraging this model of account managers.

Plans:

  • I’ll be going to PHX monday evening for PartnerCon and coming home thursday evening so will be interesting as I have a lot to get done while at that conference for existing customers and the team’s performance will be important to watch.
  • I have to take a couple strategy calls while I’m there too.
  • Onboarding our new customer
  • Write content for either a blog post or one of the key pages I mentioned earlier.

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • WIN – Bring on 2 to 3 more people to help with our current workload.
  • FAIL – I will be helping our Customer Success Manager put together a training kit so that we can onboard our new hires efficiently and get them up to speed quickly.
  • FAIL – I will also be focusing on the sales playbook and getting this completed for our new software focus. I have the done-for-you version completed, but this is an entirely new process.
  • FAIL – Put mockups together for version 2.0 of LeadFuze which we have already started development on.

Results:

  • $30.9k MRR – we had a handful of new software deals come through this week. We have been over 15 new trials the last couple days of the week as well.
  • I’ll start with the good news – we made yet another email algorithm update on Tuesday morning and this FINALLY solved everything with our email gathering. Bounces are finally in the 3’ish percent range now. No more algo updates coming from me for awhile. We have some built-in machine learning which will be incredibly strong once our next major feature is released, but that won’t affect bounce rate – it will just improve our “hit” rate on valid emails… meaning we’ll get a higher percentage of them.
  • We had been using Trello and Google Drive to manage everything, but at a glance it was difficult to see where everything stood. So I went through Trello and came up with a whole new naming convention for the cards. So we have the customers name, the billing date, and how many prospects we have built along with how many we need total for the month. I created a “Prospecting in Progress” list where Trello cards will get moved once we start work and our team will update the title as they finish the cards for the day. If you use Trello at all for client management, it might help you if you use a naming convention like I did to give you an at-a-glance view of the world.
  • So I went through every single customer to see where we’re at. Re-organized our entire workflow and met with the team to discuss this new system. It should be much easier to see at a glance where things are at and gives the team the information they need.
  • Made a big decision to fire the person who was in charge of all of this. This was the person I was having the tough love conversations with last week. So we’ll be looking for a new Customer Success Manager soon. For right now, Michael is going to be taking over customer communication while I manage the internal team and make sure things are flowing. I want to have the new person come in with a clean slate.
  • I can’t even tell you how much time this took. Literally was waking up anywhere from 2:30 am to 4:30 am to get a jump start on the day. I had back to back 14 hour days Tuesday and Wednesday.
  • I created instructional videos for our team for every customer and had to communicate all through out the day with Michael for things we needed or to keep the wolves at bay so to speak with upset customers while also prioritizing and communicating with the internal prospecting team.
  • On top of this, I brought on two new virtual assistants and did training with them on all day Wednesday. One didn’t work out as she wasn’t able to do the time zone change. I have another starting this upcoming week though.
  • Normally, how we operated was to build a complete list for a customer and then move on to the next customer. However, because we are behind on so many – I decided to work on a list and get about 25% of what we need and move to another customer. I would then take those 25% and start to get campaigns going. This helped tremendously because as of right now, we have FINALLY started every single campaign. The problem this causes is just massive chaos since nothing is every truly in a “Done” state. The hope is that we can get caught up and return to completing a list fully before moving on.
  • I had to set the table for the whole prospecting team Thursday morning and then I headed out with a buddy for some gold panning. First time every doing it, but it was actually a good time. He’s been going every couple weeks or so. I intentionally didn’t check emails or Slack messages as I didn’t want the stress while away. It worked, but I have a backlog that I’m trying to get through now.

Plans:

  • Continue getting campaigns up-to-date. My hope is to have every single campaign rolling this upcoming week. It would be quite an accomplishment considering some campaigns were a month or so behind and we had seemingly been this way for two months. It should have served as a warning sign to begin with, but I had a lot of confidence in the person that didn’t work out unfortunately.
  • New VA coming onboard Monday and so for this, I want to have a training program in place. I have already put together an outline of everything I am going to train them on based on my experience from this past week. In addition, I am going to put together a little quiz that asks them the key questions I need them to know to see what their answer is. This way I can work with them to see what they understand what they don’t.
  • Get 75% done with the sales playbook that I have had to put off for the last couple of weeks.

Resources Mentioned:

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