This sparks a few questions: Do entrepreneurs have the necessary resources to keep operations running smoothly? Is there a better way to approach time management for small business owners? What’s the best strategy to get long-term growth without burning out?

To learn more about these time management and technology trends in small business, Ontraport conducted a 2021 survey of business owners in the United States. Over 500 entrepreneurs responded. They told us about:

• The kind of web presence they currently have
• What they know about today’s business technologies
• How they handle time management and hands-on tasks
• Whether they’re ready for big tech changes in the future

Here are the top takeaways:

The post Survey Results: Technology Trends in Small Business 2021 appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Of course, Ontraport has a lot of tools built in, so it would be reasonable to imagine that this thing is simply a bigger tool kit. Perhaps you think, “Hey, I know I need a hammer and a saw and a drill. I could go get those separately but Ontraport is a tool box with the hammer, saw and drill all-in-one, and that’s convenient because I don’t have three bills to pay, and I don’t have three logins, and I have one support team to talk to … so that is why Ontraport is a good idea.” 

That is not why Ontraport is a good idea. 

Yes, it’s convenient to have a bunch of tools in one kit but what’s important and unique about this platform is the data.

What’s important about the data? Let’s think about this in two parts. Part one is “Why is data important in my business?” and part two is “Why is Ontraport the best tool to manage and use data in my business?”

Part One: Why is data important in my business? 

First of all, what do we mean by “data”? Specifically, I mean information about each individual customer or prospect on your list. Interest data, demographic data, data about the history of your relationship, and so on.

Why is this important? If we want to grow our businesses, and particularly if we want to do that using the internet as a source of new leads and customers, it’s important to appreciate a couple of things. 

First, we need to create a system to get customers. The internet isn’t a place to go fishing for customers. You don’t toss a line in the water a few days a week and hope to hook something. Instead, the internet is a place to create systems that draw customers to your business in a measurable, repeatable and scalable way. 

Second, you have to appreciate that it is wildly competitive out there. You’re not just competing with everyone who sells what you sell. That is, if you’re a plumber, you’re not just competing with other plumbers on the internet. You’re competing with every other business in the world who is vying for the attention of your audience! And that’s a really competitive landscape. 

People have a limited amount of attention and all the marketers in the world are competing to try to grab the attention of your prospects. Someone’s selling them clothes, and someone’s selling a skateboard, and someone’s selling a course on how to succeed with potted houseplants. And if someone’s willing to pay more than you are to grab that attention, they’re going to be the one who gets that attention — and you’re not. 

It’s not just a matter of competing with our direct competitors. It’s a matter of competing with every other ad that’s getting placed in front of your audience. 

And if you’re going to compete in a landscape like that, you’re going to have to be good. This is prime time. It’s real work, and it’s not easy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you. 

So the question then is: How do I succeed at this challenge? What works? What do I need to do to effectively compete and get attention from my audience online? 

If we just think about that for a second, we find that the answer is obvious. People pay attention to what’s interesting to them. It’s that simple. What’s interesting to anyone — apart from grumpy cat photos of course —  is solutions to their problems. 

And if people are only interested in their problems, it’s your job as a marketer to get in front of them with a message that specifically, directly and precisely answers how and why you are the best solution for solving their exact problem right now. 

Saying, “Hey, I’m a good plumber if you need anything” no longer works. It may have worked 10 years ago because it wasn’t so competitive on the internet yet, but today that message doesn’t fly. It will fail every time, and you’ll be wasting your ad dollars trying to promote that message. 

What does work is to say, “If your toilet is overflowing right now, I am your best choice because I specialize in overflowing toilets and here’s why I’m better and here’s proof.” 

That ad cuts through. That’s the person I’m calling because when I have a problem like an overflowing toilet, I don’t care about trenchless pipe replacement or installation of new bathrooms or any of that stuff. The guy I want is the guy who’s an expert in my particular problem. 

Now, none of this is to say that you need to limit your business to only solving one problem. Most plumbers offer all sorts of services. The goal is to demonstrate why you’re the very best choice for bathroom remodels to the folks who want to remodel their bathroom and why you’re the very best for drain-cleaning jobs to the folks with clogged drains.

If you doubt that this strategy is as important as I’m claiming that it is, think of this: two of the three most valuable companies in the world, Amazon and Google, owe a very large part of their success to doing this exact thing better than anyone else. 

Google runs the world’s biggest ad network, and they’re successful specifically because they put the most relevant ad in front of each user better than anyone else. Why? Because that’s what works. Similarly, Amazon figures out what you want to buy — often before you even know it — and puts it right in front of you, better than anyone else. They do it because delivering the right message to the right person at the right time just works, and they are successful because they’re great at it.

Part Two: Why is Ontraport the best tool for the job?

In order to deliver the right messages to the right people, you’ll first need to figure out what each individual’s problem is. How is that done? Well, it’s done using data. 

There are several ways that we can find out what prospects’ problems are or what’s going to be interesting to them, and Ontraport built this particular set of tools — this drill and this saw and this hammer — specifically because they’re the tools you need to gather the data to understand what problems your individual prospects have. 

How do you figure out what problem your prospects have? You figure it out just the way Google does, by looking at:

• What ad they click on 
• What pages they view 
• Which ebook they download
• What they’ve purchased in the past 
• What their sales rep says they are interested in 
• What they tell you in a form, in a dropdown
• What links they click in an email 
• And so on…

Ontraport is the tool that is best designed to gather, and store, and segment and then use that data so you can deliver the kind of relevant, targeted, specific communications that cut through the clutter of marketing messages that everybody is inundated with today.

Gathering data about your prospects and customers

When you use Ontraport, there’s a lot of data that you can gather about your prospects and customers that is very challenging, if not impossible, to get when you use disparate tools to perform the same jobs in your business.

For example, Ontraport automatically tracks your contacts’ visit history, page by page, across all your websites. In order to gather that information, your web servers need to be able to identify specifically who your visitors are, and this can’t be done unless your web forms and email systems are tightly connected … which they are not if you’re using separate hosting, email systems and form builders. 

Ontraport also automatically tracks each contact’s click history, purchase history, ad click history, any forms they’ve ever filled out, anything your sales rep ever says about them and any messages they send you. All this data comes into Ontraport, and it’s stored in that system for you automatically so that you can use that data in the future to deliver more relevant experiences and communications to each individual customer.

Storing data about your prospects and customers

Ontraport is also a better tool for storing your data in a couple of important ways. 

First, it’s all in one place. If you have Mailchimp and Shopify and WordPress and Pipedrive, for example, you’re going to have different chunks of data in all those various tools. For those of you who have been through that situation, you know that’s just not workable, because you can’t realistically take data from six different tools and put it together in a way that allows you to turn around and use it.

Second, Ontraport is extremely configurable, and you can store your data in ways that make sense for how your business actually works but are impossible using other tools.

Of course, Ontraport allows you to create fields and sections and tabs to organize your data and, with the Permissions system, you can make sure everyone sees the data they should be able to see, and nothing more. 

While there are lots of CRM tools that allow you to create custom fields and dump a bunch of data in there, one of the things that sets Ontraport apart from all of those tools is Custom Objects. This functionality gives you the ability to create different types of data and relate them together in a way that reflects how your business actually works. 

For example, most CRM systems will have three different types of data that you can store. They’ll have contacts, deals and companies. That’s very typical for a CRM system and it’s what you’ll find in Salesforce or just about any CRM system out there.

But if you have any other type of data, it’s basically impossible to store that data in a way that makes any kind of sense unless you’re using an enterprise-grade tool. 

The reason every enterprise system allows you to do this is because it’s crucial to be able to organize your data in a way that makes it useful. The reason no other small business CRM platform enables you to do this is because it’s hard to build and a little confusing to set up, and they don’t trust you to deal with it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Segmenting your prospects and customers

There are two main ways we segment our data using Ontraport. 

First, we have a very powerful tool called Groups which allows you to manually slice and dice your database in endless ways. This gives you the ability to see and communicate with a highly targeted group. For example, maybe you want to send a particular promotion to “everybody who has visited my website in the last 30 days but doesn’t own this product and has this particular problem.” If your data lives in several different tools, that project becomes overwhelmingly challenging to the point that you won’t do it. In Ontraport, it’s a piece of cake.

Of course, the second way to segment your data in Ontraport is to do it automatically using Campaigns.

Triggers, conditions and goals are all designed to allow you to segment your list as they move through an automated process so that you can target them with communication that is directly relevant to their problems or their stage in your customer lifecycle.

So, we’ve now figured out that Ontraport is the best tool for gathering the data, for storing the data, for segmenting the data; the last thing we need is to be able to use your data to create more relevant and targeted communications. 

Using your data to create relevant communications

It turns out that Ontraport was designed to leverage the data you have better than any other toolset you could use. Why? Because you’ve got email, SMS and a task management system for your sales team built in. You’ve got the landing pages built in which allow you to take the data in your records and deliver conditional, targeted content to each individual contact. You’ve got membership functionality built in so you can show each contact just what is relevant to them. These tools are all designed specifically to take the data you’ve got and use it to create and deliver more targeted, more relevant communication.

That is why Ontraport was designed and built the way it was. That’s why we have these tools instead of other tools, and that’s how you should be thinking about leveraging this platform. I know that a lot of our customers are using Ontraport as a glorified email system, or they’re using Ontraport as just a CRM system, or they’re using Ontraport as simply a replacement for three or four tools that you would otherwise buy separately. And don’t get me wrong, we love every client just as you are. But if you’re thinking about Ontraport in these ways, you’re missing the biggest opportunity that using a system like this provides to your business. 

I can imagine you might be thinking, “Ok yeah, Landon, I’m picking up what you’re putting down, but how do I actually get this job done? I don’t have the data that I need. What data do I need? How do I actually organize my business to make this happen?”

I get it. You’ll need to learn about segmentation, specifically what data you should gather, how to get that data, and how to effectively segment your contacts and prospects into usable groups. It will help to understand how to use those groups to deliver more relevant, more effective communications.

Ultimately, that is the goal, because one-size-fits-all messaging does not work anymore. If you’re struggling with marketing, this is the path for you: to break your audience apart into segments and to communicate with them about specifically what they’re interested in. This is what works today.

Fortunately, you have the perfect toolset to make that happen.

The post Why we designed and built Ontraport appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

I have tried and failed so many times that I don’t even notice anymore, and this has become a strange sort of advantage for me. It keeps me always moving forward. Trying and failing is how we’ve found our stride at Ontraport. Once we started learning what really worked and what our customers really needed, we built it for them, and that’s when things started going well for us. But it took time and lots of experimenting to get there. If more business owners could approach business with a scientific mindset — willing to experiment with new things and to view mistakes not as setbacks but simply as evidence of what doesn’t work— I think we’d have a whole lot more successful businesses out there.

In business, you must persist in the face of failure. In order to do this, you need all of your information and all your data in one place so that you can see the results of your efforts and your testing immediately and accurately. This is the way to test and iterate quickly. And this is exactly what Ontraport was built for.

Simply put: You need to try smart ideas fast, and Ontraport equips you to do that. We give you the tools you need to run your business and analyze what’s happening in it and the tools you need to easily make changes to improve it. The ability to do this is at the core of marketing, and it’s what entrepreneurship is all about — trial and error, experimentation, failing and fixing. It’s the one skill that I believe ultimately matters more than anything else in terms of building a business.

If you can try new business strategies quickly, you will find solutions. You will figure out what your true problems are, which puts you on the road to finding the right solutions to those problems. Lots of successful businesses have been started by people who didn’t know what they were doing, and the only path to success was experimentation. They saw what worked and did more of that; they saw what didn’t work and stopped doing it. You have to get good at this process and persevere through the inevitable failures. This is the game. This is what entrepreneurship is.

Determine what works

In order to test and try new ideas, you need to be able to answer these two questions:

1) What smart ideas should I try?
2) How do I get good at trying ideas fast?

There are millions of ideas out there about which smart ideas you should focus on to be successful — but the reality is, you don’t have time to try them all. The more quickly you’re able to hone in on the best ideas for your particular business and weed out the rest, the less time and money you’ll waste trying to refine things that won’t move you forward.

The challenge is that it’s so easy to focus on the wrong problems because there are different people telling you what you need to be focused on to be successful. Everyone wants to tell you about the one thing that worked for them — and most of those people are trying to sell you something, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for businesses.

The most important thing for your business is not going to be the most important thing for the next guy. What we need is a tool that can help us determine the most critical thing we need to work on in our particular business. The tool we use for figuring out which ideas we should try is the Customer Lifecycle. We use it as a lens through which to view the machine that is our business.

Focus on the customer lifecycle

You’ve probably heard of the customer lifecycle, but maybe you haven’t thought about it as a tool that you can use to determine where to focus your energy in your business. The customer lifecycle consists of five stages (Attract, Convert, Fulfill, Delight, Refer), and the idea is that you build systems in each one of these stages to move people through them.

The point of using the customer lifecycle like this is to figure out what your problem actually is (rather than just guessing at it) so you know where to invest your resources. Once you can see which stage of the lifecycle where you’re underperforming (i.e. where your leads and customers get stuck and don’t move beyond), you can identify your weak spots and come up with ways to improve. It might be your marketing; it might be your fulfillment; it might be your management. It might be that your salespeople can’t talk their way out of a bag. Your goal is to figure it out. There are always going to be problems. Your job as an entrepreneur is to identify and solve them.

Unless you view your business through this lens, it’s easy to lose sight of your end goal. We went through this process early on at Ontraport. For a long time, we were just sort of ignoring our weaknesses. And because we did that for years, our customer lifecycle ended up being really strong in the fulfill stage because we had an amazing product, but our attract and convert stages were weak because we weren’t putting enough effort into marketing and telling people about what we’d built for them.

One Size Fits One

One of the most critical aspects of being able to test ideas quickly is to make sure that the things you’re testing with your audience and customers are relevant to them. This may sound like a given, but you’d be surprised how many people are marketing to an empty room.

If you are not relevant to your potential customer, you will be ignored. This means that it makes no sense to spend money advertising to people who are not at all interested in what you are selling. No matter how good your ideas are, if the content or product is irrelevant to the audience, it’s not going to work.

The demand for everyone’s attention is skyrocketing. Every distraction in the world is a click away, and the cost of capturing and keeping people’s attention is getting higher and higher. It’s a shame for most marketers; they spend money on ad after ad, but their target customer won’t actually see the ads unless they are actually interested or actively looking for a solution.

How exactly do you stay relevant?

The hardest part about marketing is figuring out who’s who and what each person is interested in. We’ve found that there are a few ways that you can segment your market that will allow you to send more relevant messaging. Those ways are: by what their specific problem is, by what their main objections are, and by where they are in the buying process. You can get this information in one of two ways: ask them (on the phone, in person, or they can fill out a form) or look at their data (look at things like page visits, email opens, link clicks, ad clicks and purchase history).

Once you have your clients and leads segmented accurately, you can deliver better, more relevant experiences to the right person at the right time. It’s no coincidence that Ontraport automatically collects the data listed above for you. We learned that this is the information you need in order to deliver relevant experiences to your audience, and we spent the last decade building the tools to enable you to do that.

How to Try Smart Ideas Fast

Ontraport is not a glorified email system. What we built is a platform that has all the tools you need to generate and collect the information that you use to figure out who is interested in what so that you can segment your audience and then turn around and deliver relevant experiences to that audience — and do so quickly. This is why we built these features — this is why we built Ontraport.

Trying smart ideas quickly is rooted in an ability to access your data — all of it — so you can be smart about what to do next. Doing so “fast” is about the speed of implementation. If you can only try one idea per month because you’re not set up to experiment quickly, it will take years to figure out what works. Using Ontraport, you can try smart ideas fast to figure out what works and what doesn’t without wasting tons of time and money.

With Ontraport, you have all of the data you need to make data-driven decisions in your business, and it’s all in one place — in fact, in the same place where you can also make the necessary adjustments to make improvements. You want to be sure that you’re taking full advantage of Ontraport’s abilities to get the most value from the platform.

When you use your data analysis (in Ontraport, this means using features such as our marketing analytics and tracking tools) to experiment with your products and your marketing quickly and regularly, you learn over time what sticks. When you have all your data and all your tools in one place, you can quickly find out what works and what doesn’t, and who is interested in what and deliver that to them.

If you are an Ontraport user, you already have all the tools you need in order to test and iterate quickly, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. You have the ability to make beautiful landing pages and lead magnets, to make forms to capture customer information and a robust CRM to store and organize that information. You have Campaign Builder to create tailored campaigns to every customer and email marketing to deliver your messages and promotions. You have membership sites to scale your content and reach more people. You have marketing tracking and analytics to help determine which aspects of your marketing and your business are performing best. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Dive in

Try smart ideas fast. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Be a scientist. Focus on the right problems by using the customer lifecycle. Keep doing what works and stop doing what doesn’t work. Scale it up.

The faster you move, the quicker you’ll get here and the more likely you are to actually overcome these challenges. Follow this process and eventually, you will have built a system that’s designed to deliver that extraordinary experience: You’ll be able to delight your customers and deliver your value to the largest audience possible. You’ll have built something of real, lasting value for yourselves, for your communities, for your customers. That’s why we built Ontraport.

The post Marketing’s Golden Rule: Try Smart Ideas Fast appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

What’s my “customer lifecycle”?

This isn’t a hard concept, but far too many business owners haven’t organized their processes and data around the stages that a prospect must go through to become a customer and a customer then goes through to become a happy, repeat, referring client.

Your process will look something – but maybe not exactly – like this:

To use Ontraport’s process as a specific example, our lifecycle looks like this:

Your process might include these steps or others. Maybe you book free consultations or webinars. Maybe getting the first appointment is a key part of your process. Maybe you offer a lower-priced entry level product (or tripwire) as part of your sales process. You could be driving in-store visits.

Whatever it is, the first steps are to:

A) Have a process.
B) Write it down.

This isn’t hard work; the point is to make it clear and make sure everyone on your team knows it. If I were to ask you what your customer lifecycle is, you shouldn’t have to think about it… you should know it. You’ll know it, because it’s what you work on and think about every day.

Why is having a clear customer lifecycle so important?

In his classic book, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber writes about the difference between working on your business versus working in your business. He describes the difference by reminding us that when you are delivering your product or service, you’re working in the business, and no amount of this kind of work will help you grow your business to the next level.

You can’t ever bake enough cakes or walk enough dogs or write enough contracts or coach enough students to build an actual business. The real “building” part of entrepreneurship is not the work you do performing your service or delivering your product, but instead it’s the work you do on systems and processes that are designed to get clients and deliver on your promises in a predictable and scalable way.

Until you are clearly focused on building those systems and processes, you are simply working a job that you built for yourself. When you start to get serious about systems, then you’re building a real business.

The way to organize and think about those systems is through the lens of your customer lifecycle. With the exception of internal operations systems like accounting and HR, all of the systems and processes you build in your business are in service of moving prospects through the stages of your customer lifecycle. The more effective those systems are at moving prospects from one stage to the next, the stronger your business is. Your ability to grow your business is 100% dependent on how efficiently your customer lifecycle works.

To see what I mean, look at two imaginary businesses:

Business A spends $1,000 to get 1,000 visitors to their site, and they have a website that converts 10% to leads and a follow-up sales process that converts 20% of those leads into customers. That means that for $1,000, they’ll end up with 20 customers. Let’s imagine the product is $100, so they’ve earned $2,000 on their $1,000 investment. Maybe that’s enough to break even after costs. Let’s also imagine that 30% of those customers buy a second product at $200 and 10% tell a friend. That adds another $1,200 in sales, for an average customer value of $160. That means those referred friends are worth another $320, so your grand total sales from a $1,000 advertising investment is $3,360. That’s pretty cool, but if you take costs into account, you’re maybe looking at $1,700 or so in profit… which is just enough to buy another $1,000 in ads while pocketing $700.

Meanwhile, Business B spends $1,000 to get 1,100 visitors (because they’ve worked to optimize their ads) and their website converts 15% of visitors into leads (because they’ve worked to optimize their website) and their follow-up process converts 30% of leads into customers (because… well, you get the idea.) That means that for $1,000, they’ll end up with 50 customers instead of 20. Then let’s imagine that 40% of customers buy that second product (instead of 30%), and 15% tell a friend (instead of 10%).

If you do the math, you’ll discover that Business B has earned $10,260 from their $1,000 investment. If we assume that they have the same costs as Business A (which can also be optimized!), they’ll clear a bit over $5,000 from that $1,000 investment in advertising. If they pocket $1,000 (instead of $700), they have $4,000 left over to invest in advertising next time.

Repeat this process just three times… and you’ll find out that Business A ends up with $2,100 in their pocket and a business that’s no bigger than when they started, while Business B ends up with $3,000 in their pocket and a business that’s 95 times bigger than their poor competitors. That $95k in revenue – which will keep compounding of course – is how you pay for employees, how you open new stores, how you invest in new products and services, and how you gobble up advertising space and become a major player in your market.

And all that comes from relatively minor improvements in the efficiency of your customer lifecycle. Those improvements are made through trial and error — testing out new ideas, tracking the results of those tests, and doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

That work is the real work of business building. That work is what ultimately separates the truly successful from those who just manage to get by.

This isn’t a theory. This is the whole game. If you’re not focusing on this, then you’re not building a business.

What do I do with my customer lifecycle now that I’ve written it down?

Ok, you know this. Maybe you’ve got your lifecycle written down, and that’s a great start. Here’s the rest of the process:

c) Track every prospect’s progress through your lifecycle.
d) Know your conversion rates between each stage.
e) Work to improve those conversion rates.

The rest of these steps are the nuts and bolts of your business maintenance. They’re not hard, they just have to get done.

Track progress through your lifecycle

To track your prospects’ and customers’ progress through your customer lifecycle, you’ll need a pipeline to move each contact through. In Ontraport, you can do this by using a customized dropdown field.

In Ontraport Plus accounts and above, there’s a default field called “Sales Stage” that you can customize and use, or you can make your own by adding a custom field. Either way is fine; just add one dropdown value for each stage of your customer lifecycle. Here’s how you might set that up in your account.

The next step is to ensure that each contact in your database has the correct value according to where they are in the lifecycle. You’ll probably want to create groups of contacts for each stage and then use the Update Field group action to set that value for all of them at once.

Finally, you’ll want to automate the process of updating these stages so you don’t have to worry about it going forward and can count on your data always being accurate. Use a campaign to update the value of your dropdown field whenever a contact moves from one stage to the next.

For example, we have a campaign that changes prospects to leads when they fill out either the “Get a Demo” or “Free Trial” form. Similarly, when they upgrade, we flip that field from “lead” to “customer” using a campaign.

Once you’ve got this all set up, you’ll always know how many contacts you have at each stage, and you can keep track of how people are progressing through your lifecycle. Nice work!

Know your conversion rates between each stage

The goal of your business is to move the most people from one stage to the next, as quickly as possible. And, as they say, “What gets measured gets managed.” So, measure this.

It’s easy when you automate it in a platform like Ontraport.

Create a campaign, and make a trigger at the top for “Contact is added to Database.” Then, add a goal for each of the stages, with the goal setting “Field is Updated” and the condition “Field has Stage = [the next stage].”

There’s a template campaign for this in our marketplace called High Level Customer Lifecycle. Try that out and tweak it to match your process.

Once you’ve got that set up and published, it’ll always be easy to see how many contacts are at each stage (they’ll be sitting on the wait element under the related goal) and what your conversion rate from stage to stage is (look at the Funnel Conversion Report in Performance Mode). You can click on any of those stats to get a list of the specific contacts in each group.

Work to improve those conversion rates

Of course, this is where the rubber meets the road, and I can’t tell you exactly how to get this done in your business. But, focusing your team around improving these conversion rates is the best thing you can do to make sure you’re working on the most important projects in your business.

Are your landing pages not converting traffic to prospects? Split test your page design, make a better offer, experiment with advertising to a different audience, improve your copy. There are a million things you might try, and you won’t know what works until you test and measure.

Are your leads not buying? Improve your follow-up campaign, train your sales reps better, experiment with your pricing, improve your sales pages, make sure you’re attracting the right leads… the list goes on.

The first day of the rest of your business life

This concept is simple, but it’s the most powerful framework there is for staying focused on building a real business that works, keeping track of what matters, and making sure that you’re always improving things instead of just randomly making changes.

And, though it’s a simple concept, it’s not always easy work. All the example projects I mentioned above are real projects that are labor intensive and will require investment of money and/or time. But you’ll tackle those projects knowing that you’re doing the real work of business building, not chasing fads or getting distracted by shiny objects. Each project will serve a particular goal of improving the efficiency of your customer lifecycle and of your business as a whole, and over time you will optimize your way to success, project by project.

This is how great businesses are built, so start today by making sure you have the foundation in place to understand, track, and finally optimize every stage of your customer lifecycle. Good luck!

The post Dear reader, it’s time to get your life(cycle) together. appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

It typically goes something like this: You start with a website builder like WordPress or SquareSpace.

Then, you’ll realize you need to start sending emails, so you go and get an email service like Mailchimp or Constant Contact.

Next you’ll need to sell your product, so you pick up a shopping cart like WooCommerce or Shopify.

And on and on it goes.

By doing this, you’ve inadvertently chosen to run your business using single-point tools wired together with integrations (aka a tech stack), rather than a complete business platform.

Sooner or later, you get frustrated with all these singularly focused software tools that don’t work together.

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So many logins, so many integration issues, so many monthly bills, and so many challenges with actually getting your marketing to work.

You begin to consider tossing it all and moving to a more robust platform. So you start asking around in your communities about possible options. It’s right around here that you discover that many entrepreneurs have strong opinions on the subject.

The entrepreneurial world can be neatly divided between those who extoll the virtues of using an all-in-one platform and those who insist on the superiority of their tech stack of single-point tools.

Obviously, at Ontraport, we come down pretty clearly on the side of all-in-one platforms.

It turns out that pretty much all larger businesses have also discovered the many benefits of keeping their data and tools under one roof, but many entrepreneurs remain steadfast in their belief that single-point tools are the future for small business technology.

The argument presented by the single-point tool crowd seems like a reasonable one. They’ll argue:

1. Single-point tools are cheaper.
2. Since single-point tools don’t have as many features as an all-in-one platform, they’re simpler to understand, set up and use.
3. Single-point tools must be the answer since there are so many of them. Plus, it’s nearly impossible to make an all-in-one system.
4. Because single-point tool providers can be laser-focused on just one thing, they can do that thing better and with more bells and whistles.

There are several problems with these arguments, though, so let’s take them one-by-one:

1. Tech stacks cost you time and money.

If single-point tools have one thing going for them, it’s got to be the price. $9 a month just can’t be beat, am I right?

It’s reasonable and responsible to be cost-conscious as an entrepreneur. And it’s true that most serious all-in-one platforms have a starting cost that’s more than that of a typical single-point solution.

But it’s also important to consider the whole picture, because sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

Those little price tags add right up.

It gets expensive when you’ve got five or seven different apps hitting up your credit card each month (which is going to happen).

Add in overages and upgrades, and you’re probably right in the ballpark of what a solid all-in-one platform solution is going to run you, if not much more.

But the real cost to your business isn’t the monthly fee. It’s two other things that entrepreneurs too often undervalue: your time and your speed.

Your time is the most important asset you have in your business, and using it to muck around with APIs and integrations and trying four different apps until you find the one that sort of works with the other apps you’ve got is not effective.

If you’ve been through the single-point tool nightmare already, you know this from first-hand experience.

The other cost is speed.

As a business owner, you need to be able to move from idea to implementation quickly.

If you can’t, then great business and marketing ideas end up in the “to do someday” pile (aka the trash can).

For example, let’s say you want to send a promotion to the segment of your list who have visited your pricing page in the last 30 days but haven’t bought your product and aren’t already talking to your sales team.

If your pricing page visit data is in one system, and your email marketing is in another and your sales team uses a third system… well, you may not be able to pull this off at all.

On the other hand, if you’ve got all that data in one system, that project will take you about one minute.

The value of having that kind of power and ability to move quickly is hard to overestimate. There’s no question it’s more than the cost of any of the tools you might be thinking of putting to work in your business.

2. Single-point tools aren’t easier to use.

To our mind, the idea that single-point solutions are easier to use is a bit silly.

Which is easier to use: your phone camera or your Nikon DSLR? The phone camera, of course, which is built into your pocket-platform.

“Easy to use” is a function of design, not a function of feature-richness (or lack thereof).

There are single-point tools that are mind-numbingly obtuse just as there are solid, all-in-one platforms that are straightforward. And, of course, the opposite is true as well.

It’s understandable that some people have a bad taste in their mouths around large platforms. It wasn’t so long ago that legacy providers proudly touted and sold systems that required a parade of engineers and consultants to install, train and support. Big set-up fees and long contracts that locked clients in were the norm.

Today, those practices are archaic, and providers win based on their merits, providing value each day and standing behind their products and services. A bad user experience is a recipe for terrible online reviews and a slow business-death.

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It’s simpler to learn one platform instead of 10 tools.

Whether you like it or not, learning a new piece of software takes a little time. With single-point tools, every time you add a new tool you have to start the learning process from scratch. And they all work differently.

With an all-in-one platform, there are typically some core concepts which, once learned, apply around the whole app.

For example, in Ontraport you have to learn how to create a landing page. Like all new tools, it takes a few minutes.

The advantage is that once you’ve learned how to create a landing page, you’ve ALSO learned how to create an opt-in form and an email because all three of those things are built using the same editor.

The same is true for reviewing and sorting data.

You learn how to do it once in Ontraport, and you’ve learned how to do it everywhere. A list of contacts looks and acts just like a list of landing pages, or emails, or users, or transactions, and so on.

Because of this kind of organization, the time you spend learning a new tool in Ontraport is time much better spent because you’ll use your knowledge again and again.

3. Cheap, disposable tools will always outnumber quality products.

The idea that the proliferation of single-point tools proves the validity of that model is simply wrong.

It’s just a lot easier to create a single feature than it is to create a complete, robust platform.

And because software is a hot market these days, the number of single-point tools on the market is exploding.

In fact, Silicon Valley has created a kind of business-religion around the idea of building a “MVP” – or Minimum Viable Product – to see if you can sell it to customers and then iterate from there.

It’s a low-risk process for founders and, more importantly, for the investors who back them because they can own lots of ideas cheaply, and then let their very few successes turn into big financial wins.

That model is not designed to create the best solution for customers.

Instead, it’s designed to create profitable businesses for investors.

No VC will fund a founder who says, “Hey, I need $5 mil to create a complete solution for entrepreneurs that includes w, x, y and z. I’ll be done in 4 years.”

They won’t fund it because that’s really hard to do, and it takes a lot of time and money to get to a point where you can even find out whether the market wants what you’re selling.

Instead, the VCs fund the other guy who says, “I need enough for spaghetti and rent for six months while I build the next great single-point tool.” That’s good for the founder and the investor but not good for consumers.

All-in-one is the dream.

Some proponents of single-point tools will admit that all-in-one is the dream but will then dismiss it as impossible.

They say, “It simply takes too long to build quality software these days to try and compete in five different arenas.”

But, as Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Fortunately, there are a few companies (like Ontraport, which started over a decade ago) that have invested extraordinary amounts of time and money into creating real all-in-one marketing platforms.

Salesforce, for example, has completely taken over the enterprise market and created a $5-billion-a-year business, not by limiting their vision to one feature set, but by creating a true solution for enterprises that know they can’t run their businesses on a kludge of single-point tools.

It’s true that having more features does mean having more code to manage over time, but it’s not true that the model is less efficient than the single-point tool model.

Here’s why:

There are several big projects that a software company has to take on in order to be a viable, scalable, long-term provider for serious entrepreneurs.

Some of those include:

• Developing infrastructure scalability and redundancy
• Monitoring and managing security
• Developing a high-quality code management and release process
• Dealing with messaging
• Handling payments
• Recruiting and training
• Building a support team
• Building a sales team
• Building a marketing team
• Learning to run an efficient organization

And on and on and on.

That’s not to mention all the traditional overhead a business has to build and maintain, such as renting office space, buying desks, managing billing and accounting, keeping HR up to snuff, buying insurance and legal services, doing your taxes, etc.

You know the drill.

All together, these things add up to a massive cost in terms of both time and money.

Unfortunately, each single-point tool provider has to deal with all that technical and business overhead individually.

Each one has to incur the costs, spend the time, learn the lessons, take the risks, and try to build a lasting business.

Of course, some are better at all this than others.

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Platform providers already have the kinks worked out.

So, for example, in 2015 when we decided to completely revamp Ontraport’s landing page tools, we didn’t have to go create a new company… we just built a landing page tool on top of our existing platform.

In nine months (from initial scribbles on paper to done and out the door) we developed and launched an amazing and extremely competitive landing page and form builder for our clients.

We were able to do that because so much of the hard work was already done.

We already had robust and scalable infrastructure in place.

We had security worked out.

We had interface components already built, and uptime monitoring and testing suites and databases already in place.

We had a support team, a billing team, a marketing team, an accounting team. And on and on.

We’ve made a real investment in our all-in-one platform, which is why we’re able to actually support our customers and provide the features they need, whereas single-point tools are simply one and done.

4. Entrepreneurs need problems solved, not more software tools.

Finally, advocates for single-point tools claim that they’re inherently the superior option because they only need to focus on creating one tool and, therefore, their tool is better.

They also assert that the specialized features added to their tools give their users an advantage.

Our experience says otherwise.

That experience has taught us a lot, and one of those things is that most entrepreneurs didn’t get into business because they love messing around with technology all day.

While any categorization of a group as large and diverse as “entrepreneurs” will always fall short of complete accuracy, our experience is that there are two kinds of entrepreneurs:

• Tech geeks
• Everyone else

Tech geeks actually represent a very small portion of the entrepreneurial community.

To most entrepreneurs, technology is a hurdle to overcome, not a fun hobby.

The reality is that the vast majority of you got into business not because you love geeking out on landing page conversions or other web-marketing technologies, but because you love what you do, are good at it, and are out to improve the lives of your clients by making a real difference and doing great work for them.

Yes, building a business today means getting online, and getting online means learning some software. There are some basics that need to be handled, like how to get a website online, how to follow up with leads, how to deal with email marketing, and how to take orders online.

It doesn’t mean that you must become an expert-level marketing tech guru who knows and uses a bag full of the most cutting-edge technologies available.

But, that’s what many single-point tool providers want you to believe.

If you ask any of them what the secret to business success is, they’ll tell you the story of how their tool unlocks the ultimate hidden power, without which you are doomed to be beaten by their other (smarter, insider, early-adopter) clients.

Success is created, most often, not by tech-tricks but by excelling in the basics.

It may sound odd coming from the CEO of a software company, and maybe it’s risky for me to say so, but in my experience it’s true.

Here’s what really matters:

• Is your product or service the best it can be? Are you providing the most value?
• Do you have a compelling lead-conversion offer in place?
• Do you have a web page for each marketing campaign that incorporates well-known best practices for page conversion?
• Are you following up with your leads over time, automatically, to position your company as the leader, ensure you handle objections, and stay top of mind?
• If you’re taking payments online, is that process simple, streamlined, and secure?
• Are you using best practices with your email marketing to ensure high delivery rates?
• Are you split-testing your email and web-page copy to see what works best?
• Do you systematically provide an ultra-high-quality new client experience, to make sure they get the most from your product or service and to generate word-of-mouth referrals?

Too often, these simple systems are overlooked in favor of some hot marketing strategy of the day.

However, it’s my experience that ensuring you’ve got the fundamentals in place will ALWAYS make a far bigger difference to your bottom line than some new feature.

You need a strong foundation — not gimmicks.

While single-point tool providers will always continue to add on endless bells and whistles in an effort to differentiate themselves from their competitors, that doesn’t mean you need those bells and whistles to succeed.

Can those features make a difference?

Sure, they definitely sometimes can.

But the vast majority of businesses we encounter on a daily basis would do much better by ensuring their fundamentals are in place.

It’s true that once your business is doing high volume, and you’ve optimized every part of your conversion process and client experience, then little improvements at each stage of your customer lifecycle can mean big bucks, and Ontraport makes that optimization process possible.

But that doesn’t describe most entrepreneurs who need to focus on getting up and running quickly with some high-quality basics for lead capture, lead management and order processing.

All-in-one platforms are better — look at the smartphone.

The providers and promoters of single-point tools have a primary argument which is this: Because they can focus on one feature, they’ll inevitably be better at it than anyone who takes on more.

However, the world is full of extraordinary examples of the opposite being true.

The smartphone, to take the most obvious example, is not better than the best camera.

• It’s also not a better computer.
• It’s not a better messaging device.
• It’s not a better mapping device. It’s not a better gaming device.
• It’s not a better wifi hotspot. It’s not a better radio or clock or calculator.

Heck, it’s not even a better phone.

For almost everyone, the smartphone is a better choice than having the best, most cutting-edge devices in each category.

The vast majority of people don’t need a Nikon DSLR. And they don’t need a scientific calculator. What they need is to get the basics done well. And Apple and other smartphone makers have done the basics so well that they’ve transformed the world.

Today, for the first time ever, everyone you know carries a phone in their pocket at all times. Nikon could never have created a camera so great that over four billion people (more than half of the people on Earth) would buy one and walk around with it in their pockets at all times.

All-in-one platforms are the smartphones of software.

It’s virtually impossible to imagine a world where everyone signed up for an online private-messaging service, a photo sharing service, a publishing service, and a news feed, but Facebook rolled it all into one, and now billions of people are there.

It’s our strong belief that the future of small business technology will follow that pattern.

Entrepreneurs will not be required to research, select and buy a web builder and an email tool and a CRM system and a payment system and then figure out how to use each, and how to string them together and make them work right, and then spend their time logging in to these five separate systems all day long.

Instead, one platform will emerge as the leader, just as Salesforce has done in the enterprise market, and single-point tool providers will need to adjust their business models to focus on providing add-on services to clients of the platform leader.

All-in-one platforms are a true solution for the problems faced by the vast majority of entrepreneurs, instead of a short-term fix that will simply need replacing again and again over time.

You can’t ignore the advantages of an all-in-one platform:

• You only need to research, buy, install, learn and train your team on one tool.
• Having all your customer data in one system allows for a level of personalization and automation that is simply unachievable with an array of single-point tools.
• Having a complete record of all interactions with each contact and customer that touches your company gives you information and insight that’s otherwise unavailable.
• Having one team to call when you need support saves endless hours and headache.
• There are no weak links, which are rife when integrating multiple tools via APIs, in your system.
• And much more…

Does that mean single-point tools will disappear?

Certainly not.

Just like there’s a great market for Nikon DSLRs for photography enthusiasts, there will always be tools for marketing-tech geeks. You may even have a nice DSLR gathering dust at home, like I do, because the idea of taking professional photos is compelling.

But, man… my phone is just so small, and always there, and it does a great job…

At the end of the day, technology should serve entrepreneurs and remove hassle from their lives, not add to it.

Large enterprises know that having a single database of everything you know about your customers and prospects enables you to make better decisions, create better experiences, and deliver more relevant, targeted marketing.

They’re willing to spend millions of dollars to get those abilities from companies like Salesforce, Netsuite, Oracle, and SAP.

Today, small business owners have the same capabilities as large businesses available to them at unheard of prices.

Ontraport, for example, offers flexible pricing plans that can be adjusted depending on your needs and business size. You can literally start from day one with a system that will power your business for years to come.

Unfortunately, too many entrepreneurs are still learning this lesson the hard way, compelled by the big promises and low prices offered by a tidal wave of coders who put together a feature and sell it as the solution.

But, just a few years ago, entrepreneurs didn’t know what an autoresponder was.

Now they do.

As a group, we learn and evolve and get better and more sophisticated over time. There’s no doubt that running your business on a complete platform is a more powerful and more efficient option, and every day more entrepreneurs are leaving behind their hacked-together systems and taking advantage of the most powerful tools available.

And they’re spreading the word: All-in-one platforms are the future.

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The post Why you should shrink your tech stack and build your business instead appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

With everyone getting Tweeted at and Instagrammed and Facebooked and advertised to and inundated with all manners of promotion and entertainment all day every day, your prospects’ attention has become an increasingly expensive commodity.

That’s a bummer because to sell more and grow your business, you need more prospects looking at and considering your offers.

To get people looking at your offers, you need to somehow capture their attention for a few moments. There are lots of ways to do that in business, but none of them are cheap. You’re either:

• paying in cash (advertising, affiliate marketing, etc.) or
• paying in time (content marketing, networking, etc.)

Because getting a prospect’s attention is always expensive, you have to carefully maximize every effort. That is, you absolutely must get every ounce of value out of every dollar (or hour) you spend.So, how do we maximize our efforts? Well, lots of ways. Split-testing is one tactic that will certainly bear fruit. By improving the response rate you get with every interaction (every email, web page visit, order form, etc.) you’ll end up with more leads and more buyers with the same amount of traffic (and the same amount of money and/or time invested).

Another very important tactic is personalization, which is proven to be one of the very best ways to improve marketing results.

There are two kinds of personalization:

1. Use your prospect’s name in marketing materials such as emails or on Landing Pages like this:  

This works because people’s eyes are naturally drawn to their own names in the same way you hear your name when someone calls it out in a crowd. It’s simple, but it’s proven to work.

By the way, we call these  PURLs, or Personalized URLs, and you can use them in emails, on Landing Pages, on postcards and in SMS messages to increase clicks.

2. Adjust your messaging based on user data.

This is a far more sophisticated strategy and very powerful.

The simple insight here is that people give their attention to what they’re interested in, and different people are interested in different things. For example, some people are more interested in getting the best price while others are looking for the highest quality.

It makes good sense to communicate with each prospect about what they’re interested in. And it works. Marketing types call this “being relevant,” and it’s one of the keys to success in getting the most out of your investment in marketing.

When you’re speaking to a prospective client in person, you do this naturally. You ask questions, and respond to their answers in ways that make sense. When you get the feeling that the person you’re speaking with isn’t interested, you’ll simply change your approach or move on.

Unfortunately, when you’re using automated tools to communicate your value proposition, this doesn’t come quite as easily. Too often, people don’t care about what you’re sharing, but your marketing machine keeps blabbing on as if it had a rapt audience.

This leads to all sorts of bad outcomes for your business, such as fewer sales and poor email delivery.

But, if you’ve got the right tools, you can adjust your messaging to each prospect based on what you learn about him or her over time.

To do this, you’ll use different bits of data that you capture and store about each prospect. In general, there are two categories of data you’ll use:

• stuff they tell you in forms (their title, gender, age, budget, timeline, etc.) and
• stuff you gather based on their behavior

For example, if we want to find out what’s most important to you when selecting a software vendor, we can simply ask for a click like this:

When considering technology for your business, what’s most important?

• Best Price
• Most Powerful Features
• High Security and Reliability
• Best Usability and Support

We’d consider that button-click to be interesting information about you and your business and, based on that, we could follow up with you in the future with more relevant content and offers. For example, if you are most concerned about price, we might share a comparison table of what you get as an Ontraport Basic user vs. choosing several other tools. If your main interest was having the most powerful features, we’d probably want to share more details about all the fancy things you can do with Ontraport.

Of course, a “click” is only one example of the kind of behavior you can track in Ontraport. For every contact in your system, you’ll have a complete history of every email opened, clicked or responded to, every page visited, form filled out, purchase made, SMS sent and much more.  

Whatever data you use, once you start speaking to prospects according to their own interests, your results will dramatically improve.

_________

The post How to Personalize Your Messages to Attract Customers appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs end up with all sorts of online tools to run things: a website or landing page builder, an email marketing system, a contact management system, a payment processing system, and on and on.

While it may seem sensible to start with a bunch of inexpensive single-point solutions instead of a complete business platform that will grow with you over time, the problems show up pretty quickly.

The biggest problem is that your data is all over the place. You’ve got website traffic stats in one system, customer data in another, email open and click data in a third system, purchase histories in another, and so on.

Why does this matter?

It matters because your ability to understand and respond to what’s happening in your business is mission-critical. Without clear data at your fingertips and the ability to act on that data quickly, you’re at a serious disadvantage. One of the reasons more than three-quarters of Ontraport’s new clients are migrating away from using multiple single-point solutions is that as they gain experience, grow their businesses and collect more tools, the costs really start to add up in ways they didn’t expect.

Here’s what typically happens:

You start out and think you just need a website or a couple of landing pages, and maybe you spend $30/month on a system (or hosting) to take care of that for you. That looks cheap compared to a serious “all-in-one” platform (Ontraport offers customizable pricing plans to suit businesses of all sizes). You figure you’ll start out with an inexpensive single-point solution and save the money. You’ll move up to a more serious toolset later.

Then you realize you need to capture email addresses to follow up with prospects, so you pick another tool that starts around $20/month. That fee grows as your list grows, and pretty soon you’re paying $70/month for those two tools alone.

Then you decide it’s time to take payments online, or launch a membership site, or get organized and add a CRM tool to keep track of things — and pretty soon you’re paying a whole lot more. Plus maybe you’re paying for Zapier (or something similar) to string all the parts together. Then you’ve got that lightbox tool someone recommended at a conference. And that thing that does that other bit …

Suddenly, the monthly fees are adding up and the collection of tools you’ve created isn’t looking like such a bargain.

But what really sends costs over the top is when you factor in your time. The painful process that all entrepreneurs seem to have to put themselves through always includes days or weeks (or months or years) of researching, selecting, buying, learning and launching a bunch of different apps — and then tearing out half of them to replace them with something else, again and again. We hear this same experience from entrepreneurs all over the world literally every day.

It’s heartbreaking because this all takes time that should be spent actually growing your business: talking to customers, creating new products and services, growing your team, improving your marketing, or ANYTHING except screwing around with technology for days on end.

The cost to your business — in both money and time — is an important part of choosing which software you’ll use to power your business. Our guide to selecting software will help you do complete research and think through all the details to make sure you make a decision you’ll be happy with for years to come. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

The post What You Get When Your Data is in One Place appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

At the very least, you need:

• A website or landing pages to share your business with the world online
• A system for capturing leads and sending marketing emails
• A contact management system to keep track of your clients and prospects
• A payment processing tool to collect orders and charge credit cards

And that’s just for starters. When your needs get a bit more sophisticated, you may need full-on marketing automation, response tracking and lead-source metrics, split testing, sales force automation, lead scoring and who knows what else.

Plus, it seems as though every day there’s another “must-have” piece of software or new tricky feature that you’re told is required to be successful in today’s business world. Each vendor will tell you that they alone have cracked the code to some cutting-edge tactic which will make all the difference for you.

Because you’re committed to your business’s success and are a persevering entrepreneur, you painstakingly research, purchase, learn, string together, launch and manage one after another after another, only to find out — after days or weeks or months of tech-battle — that this one tool you bought doesn’t do that one thing you really need, so you’ve got to tear it all apart and start again.

But, you keep at it, and pretty soon you’ve collected five or 10 different tools and get it all working well enough. Then your business grows or your needs change a little, and suddenly the technology isn’t a fit anymore, and you’re right back in it.

Frustrating, to say the very least.

You’d think that by now, with the thousands of providers of software out there for businesses that this crazy-making situation would have been solved once and for all.

Read that article here.

There’s also a lot more to consider when selecting a software vendor than most people imagine, and quick decisions often lead to regrettable (read: expensive, time-consuming) mistakes.

To help you make decisions about the tools you choose for your business, we put together a marketing automation Buyer’s Guide that’s yours for the clicking. Check it out here, and you’ll be on the right track to choosing the best possible tools for your business (even if it’s not Ontraport).

The post Which Business Software Is Right for You? appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Attract > Convert > Fulfill > Expand

These are the stages of a typical customer lifecycle. Yours might be a little different (and this isn’t exactly ours) but the idea and general outline is always the same. Each category will contain lots of different systems.

Attract is all about how to get more prospects to become aware of your business. This includes systems for advertising, networking, content marketing, SEO, public relations and anything else you do to get eyeballs on your business.

Convert includes everything you’ll do to turn prospects into customers. That includes things such as optimizing your website’s lead conversion, following up with prospects, giving demos or presentations, making offers and taking payment.

Fulfill is where you deliver the goods. Here you’ll want systems for fulfilling orders, encouraging usage, delivering support, ensuring customers are happy and so on.

Expand is an important step that’s too often overlooked: It’s where you expand the relationship with your existing customers. This includes systems to encourage long-term retention, to upsell, cross-sell, resell or reactivate existing customers, as well as to solicit testimonials and referrals.

Ok. So that’s a bunch of categories. Now, where to begin?

Well, think about your business like a child growing up. Perhaps the important categories for tracking a young kid’s maturity might include:

• physical movement
• communication
• cognitive ability/thinking

(BTW, I’m sure that’s wrong; I just made it up. Stick with me.)

As a new parent you kind of expect — and hope — that your child will mature in each of these categories a little at a time and kind of in sync.

It would be weird, and rather concerning, for a child to be able to communicate like Shakespeare but not be able to walk. It would strike you as odd if your kid were able to slam dunk a basketball but couldn’t form a sentence.

Instead, you hope that walking and their first words come at more or less the same era of life.

If your kid is running around the house like a two-year-old but not yet talking, you’re probably looking forward to hearing some words pretty soon. If your kid is holding down a conversation about what’s for dinner but not yet standing up on his or her own…. well, you get the idea.

Weirdly, there are a lot of entrepreneurs who allow a similarly lopsided situations to exist in the maturity of their business. Don’t do that. You want to “grow up” little by little in each area, all together.
But you’ve got to start somewhere, so here’s what I recommend.

If you’re just starting out, work on the fulfill category. You need to be able to deliver a super-high-quality product and client experience, or all the rest is for nothing. You’ll know you’re doing a good job here if clients are raving about their experiences with your business and telling their friends. Fortunately, if you get this part right, the rest becomes a lot easier.

But, don’t get obsessed!

Once you’ve got a competitive product or service and you’ve proven you can make customers happy, move on. There’s no need to spend another two quarters messing around with the perfect invoice templates or having just the right color on your shipping box.

Instead, focus on the next most important area, which is convert.

Many entrepreneurs make a mistake here and think that “attract” is the next most important category. It’s not, and here’s why: The stuff you do in “attract” is expensive, because attention is expensive. It’ll cost you either money or time (the time to write great content pieces for effective content marketing or the time it takes to go to a conference and network). If you’re successful at attracting attention, but you’re no good at converting that attention into customers, you’ve just wasted your time and/or money. It’s like pouring water into a leaky bucket. You don’t do that; you plug the holes first.

But, again, don’t obsess!There’s a time for split testing (and Ontraport makes it easy), but that time is later in your maturity as a business, once you’ve got all the basics nicely in place.

After you’ve got the basics for lead conversion in place, it’s still not time for working on the attract phase. Instead, work on expand.Why? Three reasons:

1. “Attract” is expensive (see above).
2. Selling more to existing customers and getting referrals is cheap.
3. If you can’t sell more to your customers or get referrals (or at least get some good testimonials), something is rotten in the state of Denmark. You need to fix it before you spend your time and money on “attract.”

So, get some basic referral- and testimonial-gathering systems in place (but don’t obsess).

Finally, it’ll be time to focus on attracting attention to your business, because you know you have the solid basics in place to turn that attention into customers, to fulfill orders and delight your new clients, and to get them to help you grow by telling their friends.To sum all this up, I’d suggest making sure you’ve got the basics in place in this order:

Fulfill > Convert > Expand > Attract

1. Fulfill and Delight – Order fulfillment, new client onboarding, 90-day check-in, first-time buyer surprise gift
2. Convert – Lead capture forms, lead management, long-term lead nurture, sales team follow-up, sales presentation, online order forms
3. Expand – Post-purchase referral request, 30-day satisfaction survey, affiliate program
4. Attract – Content marketing, advertising, tradeshows, event sponsorship, networking

Once you’ve got the basics in each area in place, you simply improve things little by little. Fix the product some, try out a new Landing Page or free offer, create a paid referral program, then go fix the product some more.

Just don’t let things get out of whack. A healthy business, like a healthy child, matures in all areas simultaneously and slowly-but-surely.    

The post Overwhelmed? Start Here. appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

For business owners, the year-end is often more than just symbolic; it’s when we close our books, sum it all up, and see whether we hit our goals or not. Hopefully, we’ve already taken the time to plan for the year ahead, and we’re getting ready (after too much holiday chocolate) to hit the ground running next week.

At Ontraport, things are no different. I look back at the accomplishments of our team in 2015 and am blown away by what we’ve achieved. 2016 will mark our 10 year anniversary and, as most entrepreneurs can imagine, many of those years were spent very conscious of the wide gap between our vision of what was possible and what was actually occurring in our business.

While we’ve been successful now for several years, we always knew we could do better. The product wasn’t quite where we wanted it; the team wasn’t always organized the way we imagined it could be; our brand didn’t always reflect our commitment to quality. These are challenges and projects that, as every business owner knows, one takes on day by day, tweak by tweak, and we make incremental improvements until we find that we can take a step back and look at what we’ve put together and say, “Whoa, guys! Look what we built! This is actually pretty amazing!”

For us, 2015 was that year. Our vision for our product has been pretty clear since 2009, with work starting on our 3.0 platform in early 2011. After years of work, we finally launched it in the middle of 2014, but it took until spring of this year to really come into its own and fulfill our vision… and it certainly has. We now have a scalable, stable, modern platform on which we can quickly and confidently move forward and build the tools that will take Ontraport to the next level.

As if to prove it worked, the team took on Ontraport Pages and Ontraport Forms this year, and (in under five months from start to finish, excluding design time) we launched those tools to clients in July, and to the rest of the world in October, making it dramatically easier for you to publish your vision to the web.

The list of other improvements and additions to the system are too many to mention. While we still have a way to go before we are going to feel like we’ve nailed the ultimate vision, 2015 has brought us dramatically closer… and it feels really good.

We also made huge strides with our team this year. We’ve streamlined our internal operations, grown our management team, moved the entire company to one single project management and internal communication platform, and made huge progress in “systemizing” our operations.

We made our first international step toward Australia, which helped us determine that a permanent office there makes sense. We’re excited to announce that we’re sending a long-term team to set up shop for us in Sydney next month. It’s the big time, people.

As you’ve probably noticed, we made huge strides with our brand as well, launching a new website, blog, and a new overall look at feel across all company communications. We also held our fourth annual user’s conference in Santa Barbara, welcoming hundreds of clients and speakers from around the world. Always an amazing event.

And we had another year of business growth, winning the Inc. 500 for the fourth time, Deloitte’s Tech Fast 500 for the second time, and both Forbes and Outside Magazine’s Best Places to Work awards (for the second year running). Not too shabby.

All in all, it’s been another extraordinary year at Ontraport, really beyond my wildest dreams just a few years ago. As we look toward the future, we are more excited than ever about the opportunity we have to make a difference for our clients and the entrepreneurial community. Honestly, it feels as though we’re on the cusp of taking things to a whole new level, and 2016 feels like it’s going to be our year.

On behalf of the entire team at Ontraport, I want you to know that we are honored to have your trust and support and to have the opportunity to make an impact for your life and your business. We look forward to sharing another year of progress with you.

Happy new year!

The post Happy New Year From Ontraport! appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.