infusionsoft

How to Recruit, Hire, and Train a full-time Infusionsoft Consultant for Your Business

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It was during a phone call with the COO of a multi-million dollar company that I was consulting with that I could literally hear the pain coming through the phone lines.

“Where in the world do you find these people?”, he said to me in reference to how to find an in-house Infusionsoft consultant to run the back end marketing automation systems of their company.

 

Over the last few years while primarily rolling up my sleeves and getting back into the trenches in the day to day activities for some top info marketing companies, I have found that the struggle is real.

I remember one client who had hired me to come in to consult with what seemed like a straightforward project.

There were three main areas: Billing Automation, Financial Forecasting, Conversion Tracking.

For the billing automation system, they wanted to have the ability to send out email reminders when a payment failed or a credit card expired – but also wanted to be able to do financial forecasting.

For the financial forecasting, they wanted to be able to actually tell how much money would be collected over the next 12 months.

For the conversion tracking, they wanted to find out what half of their marketing was working.

These were seemingly straightforward requests but they did not have a person in house that could create a system to do any of those three things. They did not have anyone on their staff that had the advanced knowledge and experience with Infusionsoft to know all of the “gotchas”.

So that is where I came in. As an Infusionsoft Certified Partner with years of experience and the ability to envision solutions to problems in my head – they had me come in to help them.

There was one problem though.

As soon as I came in I realized that they were not ready to start at step 1. There was a lot of foundational work that still had to be done – and that foundational work was going to take a lot of time and resources.

I quickly realized that they needed more help and worked with the COO to create a job description so we could start to recruit, hire, and train additional resources.

What we soon found out though, was that this was going to be harder than we thought.

I had the privilege (or responsibility) to be part of the interview process. Their internal team did an initial screening and then passed them to me for the technical screening.

That is where it got rough.

Literally none of the candidates, one after another, would pass even a basic technical test. They all needed a lot of training and what they needed was someone to jump in right away and get started.

So back to the drawing board.Back to the drawing board

We decided to reverse the process. Instead of wasting the time of the internal team up to 8 different interviews before passing to me for the final technical screening, we decided to start with the technical screening first.

I created a 3 step method to screen the applicants.

Step One: Initial Interview with Scenario Questions
Step Two: Skills Test in Infusionsoft Sandbox App
Step Three: Internal Team Interviews for Cultural Fit

Of course legal and HR did their checks as well and of course never skip the reference check step!

So how can you use this in your company?

Recruiting

Before you can begin screening the applicants, you first have to have applicants to start with!

Contrary to popular belief – the people on your email list are probably not going to be the best candidates for the job – especially if you have an info marketing business with entrepreneurs on your list!

If you are primarily teaching people how to be successful entrepreneurs – the contacts on your email list are probably not going to be the best fit for a full-time employee job. They are on your email list and opening your emails because they want to know how to break out from the 9-5 and launch something on their own!

If you are looking for full-time in house person, the best places to get candidates is on the traditional job board sites, through a recruiter, or by posting the job offer directly on your site.

You can also get a little crafty and start to run some FB ads to employees of other companies that have really good talent. (But shhh don’t tell anyone I said that!) 🙂

Once the applicants start rolling in, be aware of red flags. You want to look for people that have been working as an employee – not someone who has had their own successful business.

Freelancers might be okay if they have previously worked as an employee.

Look for other red flags like anyone that has stayed in the same role without a promotion for more than 3 years. Also look out for anyone that only holds a job for 18-24 months and then has gaps before their next job.

Something that I like to see is someone that stays about 3 years in a role or job and then is promoted or moves on to something new. If you can find that person – that will be gold!

Interviewing

Job interview infusionsoft

After you have found some qualified candidates you can follow the following three step process to screen and interview them.

Step one is to research and design the right questions for the interview. This is more than just the culture fit but do they have the ability to think strategically. You want to really figure out if they know the software but also if they are willing to say they don’t know something as well. There is nothing wrong with not knowing – there is a lot wrong with pretending you do!

The scenario questions should be based on real life problems that your company had and have recently been solved with Infusionsoft. Something that took you a few hours to figure out the right way to do it.

Always write out the scenario questions and ask them in the exact same way to all the candidates so that you are giving an even playing field to the candidates.

Depending on what they answer, dig deeper. Then dig some more. Why did they choose the solution they did? Would they consider a different way? Have they built something like that before? What are some of the “gotchas” that should be considered?

If they pass the initial interview tell them that you will be sending them a follow-up email with a skill test with a login to a sandbox app of Infusionsoft. Be sure to ask them if they will have time to finish the test and get a verbal commitment as to when it will be done. This also helps you see their own time management!

Step two is to send the skills test. The skills test can be three scenarios that they need to build in a sandbox app of Infusionsoft. Be sure to give the exact same instructions to all the candidates even if you discover in the process that your instructions were wrong somehow. If you really want to test them, leave a piece of critical information out and see how they adapt for that scenario!

Give them a few days to build the scenarios and tell them to email you when done. After that, check their work! It is best if you have 3 or more candidates doing the building test so you can see if it is a candidate issue or a test issue if they are not building the campaigns correctly.

Finally, it is time to check if a cultural fit. I can’t stress enough how important it is to find out if you are going to like working with this person! Especially in a small company – you are not hiring them to do a job – but to become part of your small family. Make sure your team LIKES the person and is excited about them joining the team as well.

Hiring

After legal and HR sign-off and the references are checked – you will be much more likely to have recruited a winner!

Onboarding / Training

To make sure that all your hard work was not in vain, make sure you have a very smooth onboarding process. Meet with your new hire the first day and welcome them to the team. If you have an all company meeting, prepare an intro and introduce your new team member with sincere and lavish praise. Show how excited YOU are that they are there joining the team.

Have at least 2 weeks of written down activities of exactly what they need to be trained on. You can have other employees help you with this! Some examples might be:

Digital Set-Up with Email, Slack, Trello, LastPass
Legal Forms signed and filled out
Who is who in the company and who they can go to for help
Scheduled 1:1s with all stakeholders ie the copywriter, the developer, the graphic designer, etc. Even if it is a quick 15 min call – make sure your new recruit meets as many people as possible during the first week! Most of their success will depend on the relationships that they build with others. And finally technical training. If you have documentation about how to do things, make sure they have access and have the time to read up on all of the processes.

And there you have it. How to recruit, hire, and train a full-time Infusionsoft consultant for your business!

Was this helpful? Let me know! I would love to hear how you used these tips to recruit, hire, and train your next team member!

How to identify spambots and kill them like the cockroaches they are

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Recently the Infusionsoft community was disrupted by a spambot attack that put every single Infusionsoft user at risk of not having their emails delivered to their customers, to their prospects, or to any of the contacts in their database for that matter.

One of the benefits of using a hosted email provider such as Infusionsoft is that there should in theory be an increase in email deliverability. By email deliverability I mean – your emails get to the inboxes of your contacts. Guaranteed.

Remember the good ole’ days when the mailman had his route to hand deliver your mail to your mailbox. Wasn’t that much more direct? The post office had a saying:

quote

That’s kind of like what we’re saying about email deliverability. No matter what, if you use our service we are going to make sure we have the right equipment and the right people to get the job done.

There are times when there is a disruption in service. Those times are usually under extreme circumstances such as natural disasters such as floods or fires. For example this past weekend, there was a an internet flood.

What happened was this

Over the last few months (or years) spambots have been quietly exploiting a vulnerability in the Infusionsoft webforms. They did not come in masses of thousands or tens of thousands – because that is something we would have noticed. They also did not come dressed as spambots – they made sure to cover their tracks by slipping into our databases quietly in small groups of 20-30 always making sure to have a few real and legitimate contacts with them so as not to be noticed.

spam-bot2These spam bots were actually quite smart – though not that smart as we will see in a moment.

These spam bots didn’t just enter through the front door of an Infusionsoft web form – they also made sure they got into the daily operations of top Internet Marketers by automatically clicking and confirming the email addresses used.

What that means is that even when you as the Infusionsoft user is doing everything you can do to prevent sending out emails to spambots by requiring all of your contacts to double opt-in – all of your efforts are undermined with the wicked plot of the spambots.

How were these spambots identified you ask? Well, in this case they all came in on the same IP address – making it drop dead easy to identify them. (Amateur hour move spambots!)

Which leads us to this. What can you, an ethical Internet Marketer, do to identify and kill the spambots like the cockroaches they are?

How to Identify Spambots

If your site normally gets less than a hundred opt-ins a month, the process can be quite simple. You can use custom notifications from Infusionsoft to be notified every time someone opts-in to one of your forms.

infusionsoft1

Set up a special filter for these notifications in your email inbox and each day check how many come in. Spot check them for spammy looking email addresses. The whole process should take a few minutes a day. Not ideal – but easy to implement and low cost for most business owners.

If your site normally gets a few hundred to up to a thousand opt-ins a month, the process is more difficult to identify. You will want to set-up checks to monitor:

  • Spikes in Confirmation Rates
  • Spikes in Links Clicked in Emails
  • Decrease in Conversion Rate of your Email Marketing Funnel

Measuring spikes in confirmation rates or links clicked is quite easy to do with tools such as Graphly.

You can use the automation links to apply a tag anytime someone confirms their email and set-up a report in Graphly to measure how many contacts get the tag applied over time.

graphly-tags-applied

Measuring a decrease in conversion rate is a little more difficult if you are not already measuring the conversion rate of your email marketing funnels! (We will save how to set up that tracking for another day!)

Suffice it to say, if you have a decrease in conversion rate, one of the first things to check is the source of your traffic.  Export all of the contacts that entered your email marketing funnel over the time period of the drop and look at the emails. You should see a pattern. You should be able to quickly identify contacts that you suspect are spambots. Once you do this, you can check their history on their individual contact records to confirm your suspicions.  If you are applying link clicked tags on all of the links in your emails (which you should be doing), you should quickly see that these contacts not only opened every single email, they also clicked on every single email. Jackpot!

Once you have verified that several of the emails are actually spambots you will notice patterns. You will see that they have a common domain in common. They might all be opting into the same webform. They might all be opting in a few minutes apart from each other.

This does take work – but there is not an easy way around it that I know of.

Once you have identified the spambots you can safely delete them from your Infusionsoft app. Use the domain blocking functionality of Infusionsoft to block any obvious domains.

infusionsoft-spam-filter

How to Close the Door to Spambots

Now that you know how to identify the spambots – the next question is – but HOW can I stop them from ever entering in, in the first place?

I have found that by implementing two steps, the spambot issue is greatly reduced.

The first is by installing Cloudflare on your site.

  • Enable the Web Application Firewall

web-appliction-firewall

The second is by installing the Wordfence plug-in.

  • Use Rate Limiting Rules to throttle or block excess pageviews

rate-limiting-rules

Since I installed both of these on my sites I have not had any issues with spambots. (Not to say that I never will or this is the permanent fix!)

Another option (though not a reasonable option for most) is to create custom opt-in forms that add the contact info to the Infusionsoft database via the API and bypass the Infusionsoft webforms.

One of the reasons this issue happened in the first place was due to a vulnerability in the Infusionsoft webforms – a vulnerability they have tightened up by blocking the offending IP so that no spambots can enter through that IP again.  This is great and exactly what should have happened but it will only be so long before the spambots find another door to enter.

Do you have questions on how to implement? Want help installing and configuring Cloudflare or Wordfence? Would you like my team to audit your app or set up a system so you can monitor your app to prevent this from happening to you? Please click here to schedule a free strategy session

Traffic Funnels – the right way!

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At the end of the day, it always comes back to sales!

Today I want to share with you the top 5 ways you can get more clients fast!

1. Get more leads.

It should go without saying, that if you don’t have any leads at the top of your funnel, your business is or is about to die.

So how do we do that? How can we easily generate more leads quickly?

Lead generation depends on 2 factors.

  1. The Traffic, and
  2. The Offer

leads

Traffic can be generated in many different ways such as:

  • Paid Traffic
  • FB Ads
  • Google Ads
  • SEO
  • Joint Venture Partnerships
  • Email Marketing
  • Paid ads on sites
  • Radio Ads
  • TV ads
  • Much, much more.

web-traffic

I am going to talk about how to get traffic to your website in the next few blog posts, so for now let’s talk about the offer.

The offer is what you are offering in exchange for their contact information.  The offer can be in many different forms but some of the most popular are:

  • Report or White Paper
  • Audio
  • Workshop
  • Webinar
  • CD, DVD
  • Book or eBook
  • Much, much more!

In order to capture their information, you will need to setup a landing page.  The landing page is where you send the traffic to so that your prospects can claim The Offer!

offer

After the prospect visits the landing  page, they claim the offer by putting in their name and email address.

And BAM! You have a lead!

 

2.  Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up!

One of the BIGGEST challenges as a solo-preneur is finding the TIME to follow up with leads!  Not all leads are created equal.  Not everyone is a good fit for your company.  There are many ways for you to follow up with your new leads.  Some are:

  • Phone call by a sales rep
  • Email follow-up
  • Mailing out a brochure or information packet
  • Sending text messages
  • Connecting on social media and engaging with them there

follow-up

All of the methods work, but only a few can be done on auto-pilot!  Autoresponders are emails that get sent out automatically using a marketing automation tool such as Infusionsoft.

When someone accepts one of your offers, you can have a series of emails go out to them automatically.  The emails should provide value and also have an opportunity to work with you.

Pro Tip: If you really want your business to explode, set-up different email sequences based on the actions of your prospects… something easily done with Infusionsoft!

 

3. Build Your Referral Network.

Having worked with hundreds of business owners over the last few years, I can say with certainty, that those that do the best, have a very strong referral network.

They say: Your net worth equals your network.

In many ways, this is true.

Just like clients, your referral network needs to be nurtured and taken care of.  It is one thing to go out and attend local meetups, live events, and more.  It is another thing to build relationships with the people that you meet.

referral-network

If you don’t have the benefit of having a first class assistant helping you to stay on top of your meetings and appointments, one alternative is Infusionsoft. Imagine heading to New York and within a few moments be able to send out an email invite to everyone in the local area that it is in your network letting them know you will be in the area and asking them if they want to meet for coffee.

Imagine never missing a birthday or anniversary again.

Imagine being able to send out postcard and letters automatically to everyone in your network every single month.  You can.

Building a strong referral network does not happen by chance.  You must have a plan to not only get out there and meet people, but to develop your relationship with them!

It all comes down to this.

You have to have a strategic plan to capture and follow up with prospects in order to get more sales.

In other words, you need a traffic funnel.  A way to funnel the traffic to go in the direction YOU want them to go.

strategic-plan

 

Tell me how many traffic funnels your business has set-up and I will tell you how successful your business is. 

 

What are you waiting for? Are you ready to get your first traffic funnel setup?