Clate Mask (co-founder of Infusionsoft) presents on "lifecycle marketing": small businesses waste substantial revenue by treating most leads as "bad" instead of nurturing them across stages (lead capture → nurturing → conversion → delivery → upsell/referral). He stresses that many sales occur only after repeated contact (e.g., the talk cites that ~80% of deals close after five calls) and argues small businesses can replicate big-business follow-up cheaply via automation and consistent, valuable communications. The talk also highlights practical barriers to manual follow-up (time, cost, lacking systems/content) and ends with a call to adopt automated lifecycle marketing.
Questions this video answers
Over 500 employees.
Conquer the Chaos (New York Times bestseller).
An assumed closing rate of 10% of leads (used for illustration).
About 80% of deals that close happen after five calls.
I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast.
All right, our next presenter is my good friend Clayton Mask. He is the founder with Scott, his partner of infusionsoft. And just to give you some history, we've known each other for about 12 years. I was the second customer of using Infusionsoft. So now what you can get for, you know, a few thousand dollars, if you want to get really awesome with what you do. Cost me hundreds of thousands back then. No, it wasn't that much. Now I want you to remember Clayton because I think in a couple years, he's probably going to be on the COVID of a lot of business magazines. They are growing like crazy. The company is doing some incredible stuff. They now have over 500 employees. Just did a interview on video with Clay a couple weeks ago, and he's the co author of a New York Times bestseller, which is called Conquer the Chaos. How to Grow a Successful Small Business Without Going Crazy. What's really cool about what Clay does is they see the very best marketers, best practices, what they do, how they do it, from every stage of the business. And so he's going to talk about life cycle marketing, how small businesses are winning the big business game. So I want to give it up for Mr. Clayton, who took a red eye to be here. He took a red eye to be here. Thank you. Awesome.
Thanks, Joe. Joe's one of my favorite people. Every time I get together with Joe, he gives me something. I love that I get together with him. His office is just down the street from us, so we get together every so often. And Joe, great job putting this event together. I love being in rooms full of entrepreneurs. There's nothing better. And I'm glad that I get an opportunity to talk about something, a problem that we've been swimming in for about 12 years and have been very, very intimate in dealing with this problem. And. And it's a problem that big businesses get it figured out and manage it pretty well, but for small businesses, it's very difficult. So I'm going to talk about how small businesses can win the big business game. So Joe said, hey, you got to make sure that in 10 minutes, you give $250,000 worth of value. And I said, you know, that's going to be no problem, because the reality is everybody in this room has hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, spoiling revenue in their business every year. It's just rotting. So I want you to remember this picture, and we're going to talk a little bit about it. We've spent a long time working with businesses to work on this problem and to get rid of some of this rot, this waste that happens. And what I'm going to do over the next nine minutes or so is share with you how you can attack this and begin to turn this rot into actual profit in your business. All right, so I want to ask you a question. What rate are you closing your leads at? What rate are you closing? Is it 5%? How many of you feel like raise your hand if you think you're closing 5% of your leads or more, Raise your hand if that's the case. Okay, all right, how about 10%? Raise your hand if you think you're closing 10% or more. Okay. Some people in the room are saying you need more leads. So how about you have no idea how many of you have no idea what percent of leads you're closing? Come on, be serious. I know there's a bunch. All right, so let's just assume for the next seven and a half minutes here that we are going to. That we're closing 10% of our leads. Okay, well, in a world where we're closing 10% of our leads, this is kind of what it looks like. And we think about the good leads and, okay, we've got those and we manage those. And then everything else feels to us like bad leads. And this is the way most of the world thinks about their leads. But this isn't reality. Reality is something much more like this. Yes, there's a chunk of leads that are good, and we'd like to think that we close all of them, but we don't. There's a lot more than 10% that are good, ready to go. These people are ready to buy now. And then there's a chunk of leads that could be ready. Maybe some are ready right now, maybe need a little bit of time. Then you got a group that are not ready right now. They're just not. They're looking around and they will be ready sometime in the next year or so. The stats say many of these folks are going to be ready. And then you've got the last group. You wonder, how did they find you? These people are never going to be ready. And it is truly a waste of time to spend time and energy on those leads. But this is the reality, not what we frequently think about with 10% that are good and the rest are bad. All right, so I want you to ask yourself this question. First of all, how many of you feel like you're viewing the world in this way where 10%'s good and the rest are bad. Do you feel like you're doing that? Okay, some brave souls are willing to raise their hand in a room full of ambitious marketers and say, I feel that way. The reality is, I've talked to business owners all over the country and the reality is most people are thinking this way. It's a default mentality and they think more about sales. They're not thinking about the opportunity to nurture and get and harvest the crop of leads that they have. So what would it be like in your business if you were actually adopting this mentality and practicing it? So many of you know that the game of following up with leads is a tricky game. There's an art to it and there's a science to it. But it starts with a mindset that says that's what the world's actually like. And it is. Like Joe said, we've worked on this for many, many years with some of the best entrepreneurs, best marketers, and we've seen what happens when you consistently follow up. So this is kind of, there's a lot of information on this slide. I'm just going to get right to the punchline because this is a 10 minute deal. So here's the punchline, the bottom bar there. What that's saying is on the left. We're saying the percent of calls a company makes. So we're saying that most companies, 50, 60% of the companies make one call. And then you go down to the next level and we're talking about 20, 30% of the companies that make two calls down, three calls, four calls. The last row down there is saying that about 10% of companies make five calls on a lead. But look where all the deals happen. The deals are happening after five calls. The fact is most people aren't ready right now. But if we'll stay in touch, continue to follow up, continue to call. 80% of deals that close happen after five calls. All right, so if we know that, and we know that nurturing our crops is going to create a much better yield for us, why don't we do as J. Abraham just said, the positive Chinese water torture. I like that. That's very good. That is consistently providing valuable information to our leads and our prospects. Why don't we do it? I want to just hear you just blurt out some answers. Why don't we consistently, effectively, methodically follow up? Okay. Expensive. A lot of people won't open emails. What else? Too busy. Thank you. What else? Don't have a good follow up program. What else? Don't have good content. Great. What else? That's a big one. The point that Jay made, valuable information that we're consistently sending. What else? Don't like the customer. Don't like the customer. All right, So I ask this to people over and over and over. They consistently say I don't have enough time. I, I don't have the systems to do it. It's a really manual labor intensive process. Going out and sprinkling water over your fields is going to help, we would all agree. But it's hot, sweaty, tiring work that is not very fruitful in terms of the effort that we're putting in. So kind of low ROI when we're doing it manually. All right, There are big businesses that solve this problem and they have a big bushel of fruit that they bring in out of their fields and they do it by hiring salespeople and putting systems in place. And they consistently work at this. Maybe that's why they're big businesses. Maybe they follow up because they're big businesses or they're big businesses because they follow up. I don't know. Think about that. But big businesses do do this in pretty expensive ways and yet it yields great fruit for them. So everything that I just described in terms of following up with leads actually also applies to customers prospects. It applies all across the life cycle. The game is follow up and how to do that effectively so that you get more than that slice of 10% off of your, off of your crops. So we call this lifecycle marketing. There are several stages to it, but the point is all across the customer's, the customer's experience in your business. The point is to follow up. And so down at the bottom you see the stages following up through the process of attracting interest, through capturing the lead, through nurturing prospects and turning them, converting them to sales and then in the delivery and satisfy process, as well as upselling customers and getting referrals. Follow up is the name of the game at each of those stages. And what we see in businesses is some do a great job in following up with customers right when they get started, but others do a good job following up with customers to get referrals. Some do a good job of following up with prospects or leads right out the gate, and some don't do a good job of any of that. But there's always low hanging fruit to be plucked in one of these areas. So the great news is this, you don't have to get your watering can out, you can actually do this in an automated way and have the nurturing going on in your lead field, in your customer base and have that happen without you having to do all of that expensive, time consuming, manual, hot, sweaty, dirty labor that is difficult when you get a small yield out of each increment of effort you're putting in. And so the game is to do this in an automated fashion. And when you do this, you are able to get a, you're able to play the big business game, but do it in a cost effective way. And so that's my big message I want to share with you, is to, is to orient your world to not a 9010 black and white, but to recognize that in your lead base, in your customer base, with your partners, you actually have opportunities at all those stages. And the game is follow up. And doing it in an automated way where you're providing valuable content so that you are building that relationship is the trick. The trick that large businesses master and small businesses more and more are beginning to master through automation. So stop letting your profits rot in the field. Invest the energy to solve the problem. The great thing is that this can happen automatically. And you can find out more about what we call lifecycle marketing or the game of follow up for small business@infusionsoft.com claytlcm for lifecycle marketing. Thank you.
