Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • From last week:
    • Failed on Have an application page/process setup as well so that I can run ads into that…it may be a webinar or video training and then retargeting for direct to funnel discovery.
    • I did get a lot of it setup but not where I was hoping to be

Results:

  • System.ly Revenue –
    • MRR: $23,449
    • October One-Time Revenue: $13,500  (which will be $18k)
      • 2 more course sales ($2k)
      • 1 Webinar Package ( $5k)
      • 1 package sale coming in today: $4500
    • Vacationed hard and enjoying the rest of today to finish it off.
    • Held our S2S Group call
    • Sold an Infusionsoft App
    • Had my first EO meeting which was really good
    • We went to Telluride and Crested Butte, two amazing mountain towns that are pretty much in their off seasons right now so it was super slow but we did some hiking and tons of relaxing.
    • Details are finalized with Photographer for photoshoot this upcoming Saturday
    • Bought the new Macbook Pro

Plans:

  • Finish vacation today
  • Tomorrow I head down to CO Springs for a mastermind weekend.
    • Pete Vargas has been hosting a conference called Advance Your Reach Live and it’s going on this past wed-tomorrow and then he has a mastermind retreat which I Invested in and some really awesome people will be there.
      • People like Ryan Deiss and Nicholas Kusmich are co-hosting it with Pete and we’ll be at a campsite with no more than 30 people. We’ll be masterminding, doing a hike and having a halloween party Saturday afternoon through Monday afternoon so I’m pretty pumped for that.
    • Revamp my Webinar Funnel Blueprint opt-in
    • Finalize my application funnel

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • Map out all the content that will need to be changed on our website to highlight new features. We’ll have an all new sign up flow as well that needs to be accounted for.
    • Reason: Going to do this a little later. Just not important right now since we’re a couple months away from the new version going live anyway.
  • More design work for things that will be after V2.5 goes live
    • Reason: Same thing, just priorities. Waiting to get 2.5 going before I start this process back up again.

Results:

  • LeadFuze software revenue is $32.5k MRR.
  • Spent some time putting together the next few Slice of Sales newsletters. I had a good size backlog of sales content built up in my Feedly account so figured I’d spend some time getting ahead with this.
  • Worked on our content marketing strategy for 2017. This was all of Tuesday and most of Wednesday actually. I had several articles saved from the past several months that I went and revisited. I was waiting for this exact time to go back through them.
    • Basically, I broke this document into three phases. Planning, Producing, and Promotion.
    • I wanted to map out the types of content categories we’d create, which team member was going to be creating the content, and what that quota looked like.
      • So I’ll be creating 1 to 2 pieces per month on Founder or growth related topics
      • Damian will be creating 1 per month on sales leadership
      • Our sales reps will be creating 1 per quarter on sales processes
      • Our eventual Customer Success Manager will be creating 2 per month on LeadFuze best practices as well as a monthly case study piece
      • When we bring on a marketing person, they will be in charge of some of the list type articles (ie, # Ways to Do X)
      • I created a content checklist that we need to go through for creating each piece of content. This includes:
        • At least 1,000 words (bonus for 2,000 words)
        • Targets an Ideal Customer Persona
        • Has images
        • Edited for grammar / spell check
        • A peer review (perhaps where we get our dev team involved)
        • Has subheadings
        • Includes a content upgrade (which will be created for each category/topic)
        • Is it a candidate to be repurposed into a slide share, infographic, podcast, video, pdf, etc)?
        • Click to Tweet embedded?
        • Read entire post outloud to catch errors and improve flow
        • Start with a story and opening line grabs readers attention?
        • Remove any filler words so the posts are more concise
        • Call to action to content upgrade within the copy?
        • Closing asks questions or leads to commenting in some way?
        • Has short sentences and paragraphs?
        • Optimized for SEO?
          • Target keyword in headings and page title
          • Keyword used in first 100 words
          • Meta description contains keyword
          • Post URL includes keyword
          • Contains similar terms to our main keyword focus (LSI)
          • Alt tags optimized
          • At least 3 outter links
          • At least 3 inner links
    • A large portion of the document is dedicated to our promotion strategy. I’ll go into more detail on that in a future episode once we actually start that process.
    • I then spent a large portion of Wednesday trying to figure out what tools and systems we’ll use to track and keep us on target. We want to try and publish 100 pieces of content next year.
  • We created job descriptions for Customer Success and a BDR and got those live in Breezy.hr. We want to start rounding up candidates so that in January we will have people ready to go. With the holidays that gives people time to take an extended vacation if they want before starting with us.
  • We made progress on our move to AWS from Azure. This has been a lengthy process, but I think in the end it will be worth it. The move alone should fix a couple of our biggest issues with timeouts and process crashes.
  • I put together an email blast for AppSumo customers to remind them to upgrade. This led to some confusion about what was included, as I guess most people bought not realizing that. Hasn’t led to much of a conversion surprisingly. Especially considering we talked about the future price increase and so they could lock in those savings now. In any case, we’ll be turning the page on that soon enough.
  • Wrote a guest blog post on how to effectively close out your cold emails. So many people get this wrong and so wanted to share some best practices for a company that put together an insight sales related infographic. They will be contributing a piece to our blog as well.
  • A local developer I met up with last week is super interested in working for us and our technology stack. Not concerned about money. So this weekend our lead developer is going through a code review to see if there’s a place for him.
  • The office space lease has been signed! They wanted a personal guarantee covering the first 36 months. I knew this was coming given our short history, but it was a little longer than I was comfortable with. We countered with 24 months and they agreed.
    • Still waiting on contractor bids to see where we’re at there with everything. I may need to solicit separate contractors as well depending on the costs that they come back with. We negotiated a $20 per square foot allowance, but that can get eaten up quick if you aren’t careful.
  • Still maintaining inbox zero on a daily basis. This has probably been the longest stretch I’ve had of this since I focused on it a couple years ago.

Plans:

  • Monthly investor update email. Much better email this time around given we’re in a much better spot with our development team and app progress.
  • It’ll be first of the month, so want to run all our numbers for October and monitor progress.
  • Write another guest post.
  • Onboard our newest developer and determine fate of the other local developer.
  • Start development on version 2.5! This should be 90% of our focus going forward.
  • I want to try and SOP more of the 2017 marketing plan. I’ll have our VA help out with the non-outreach related items. I’ll be taking on the outreach responsibility until we have our marketing person in place at some point next year.

Resources Mentioned:

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