How to Create an Offer

The simple 3 step process to creating Your Perfect Offer

What in the world should I sell? 

That is probably the number one question new entrepreneurs ask themselves as they get started.

Quickly followed by – how much should I charge? Will anyone really pay me for this? Can I really make an extra $1K per month online? 10K per month? 

Let’s map this out step by step!

One of the most challenging but important steps to launching a successful online business is to figure out exactly who you WANT to work with – and even more – who you don’t! 

If I asked you – who do you serve? And the answer is “everyone” or “anyone can benefit from my product” then this is for you. 

Even Wal-Mart does not serve “everyone”. So your first step is to figure out who you want to help. Who do you WANT to work with? Who do you enjoy spending your time with? Who would you be hanging out with even if they were not giving you money? 

For example, let’s take a restaurant. 

Restaurants know who they serve and who they don’t serve. 

Let’s imagine a young couple celebrating their 5th year anniversary that walks into any fast food restaurant out there. (McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc). Let’s imagine for a moment that they walk in with a tuxedo and beautiful ball gown dress. Let’s say they stand at the door and wait for one of the employees to walk over and ask them where they’d like to be seated! Let’s imagine that they ask for menus and for a tablecloth to be placed on the table. 

If you were the manager of that restaurant you’d most likely walk over to the couple and suggest that this is probably not the place for them. That there is a restaurant down the street that is more able to better suit them. 

It is just as important to know who you DO serve as to know who you DON’T. 

I find it is easier to get started making a list of who you don’t serve. 

So do that now. 

For example, if you are selling tickets to a 5K VIP day to help restaurant owners pivot in the new economy and start to get business online, the list of who you don’t serve could be anyone 25 and under that can’t afford your services.  You’d also immediately disqualify anyone that does not own a restaurant! You most likely don’t work with franchises as their franchise probably already has a platform for ordering online for their franchise owners. You also might not work with new or small businesses.

So who do you work with? 

  • Restaurant owners
  • Over 25
  • Not a franchise
  • Doing or have done at least 20K a month in revenue

This does not mean that you could not allow someone that did not meet your criteria into your program. It does mean that when you see someone that meets your criteria, you immediately know that they are someone you can help. 

 

 

Next, define what your message is going to be. Your message is a concise sentence that you can say in 30 seconds or less that can immediately explain the transformation you provide to your audience.  Some refer to this as your “elevator pitch”. 

There is a simple formula you can use to create your message.

Some examples are:

I help locally owned and operated restaurants to get customers online in less than 48 hours with my 2 day live virtual training program. 

I help churches create amazing visitor experiences through my half day virtual workshop. 

I help college students pass their next exam through my 90 minute tutoring intensives. 

So your turn. What is your perfect message?

And finally… your perfect offer! An offer consists of three parts:

  • Core Offer
  • Pre-Training
  • Bonuses

The first step to create your core offer is to map out the 5-6 things your audience needs to know to get the results they want. If your list is 20+ steps long, you need to break it down more. You don’t want to have a course with 20+ steps that covers everything and the kitchen sink! If you have more than 9 steps, you need to break your course out into two or maybe even three courses! 

So do that now! What six things does your audience need to know to get the results they want? 

Next, your pre-training.

Your pre-training is the 1-3 things that your audience needs to know in order to be ready to implement your core offer. 

What foundational things do they need to know to be able to be successful out the gate? 

Finally, your bonuses. 

Once your audience has mastered your core offer, what else could they do or implement that would help them to be super successful? These are your bonuses. 

And last but not least, pricing. 

How should you price your offer? 

The general rule of thumb is that they should get back at least 10x in value from what you charged. 

So let’s say that by implementing what you are teaching, your student will easily make back $1000 in the next 30 days based on what you know as their average order value and normal conversion rates. 

If that is the case, you can price your offer at $97 because you know that they can make 10x back their investment in the next 30 days if they just follow your simple steps. 

Let’s say your offer is going to save them time. How much is their time worth? 

If your course will easily save them 10 hours a week, and their time is worth $50/hr, then you know that in the next 30 days you are going to save them $2000. You can easily charge $197 for your course as you know they will get 10x the value. 

What if your product or service is something intangible. Maybe you are helping them lose weight or save their marriage.  

In that case, you can position yourself as to what they are already spending for other programs or systems that are not working.

Or you could get away from the dollar value comparison all together and position your pricing as what it would be worth to them to have their problem solved. 

For example, for the person trying to lose weight, how much is it worth it to them to have that painful problem solved, if they knew 100% that you would be able to help them.  $50? $500? $2000? 

So let’s summarize! 

STEP 1: WHO aka Your Perfect Audience

STEP 2: WHAT aka Your Perfect Message

STEP 3: HOW aka Your Perfect Offer

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The Ultimate Automation Strategy? Systemize Your Business!

The Ultimate Automation Strategy?

Systemize Your Business!  

How much time do you spend managing the day to day operations of your business?

When I ask this question to most business owners they tell me, “just a few hours a day.”

Then I ask them, “How much time do you spend working on growing your business? How much time do you spend developing new marketing strategies or reviewing new innovations in your industry?”

You know what they always tell me?

“I don’t have time for that! I am way too busy running the day to day operations of my business.”

Do you see the catch 22 here?

Today I am going to show you exactly how you can systemize your business so that you can put growth back into your organization’s priority while reducing company overhead. You’ll learn the 4 key steps to systemizing your business as well as 18 of the best tips for practical systemization.

Now let’s get started!

Step 1 

Map out the main departments and revenue generating tasks of your business.

This is akin to building an organization chart.  Below are some examples;

If you’re a startup, you and your staff may be wearing multiple hats. That’s okay! You get to figure out exactly how everything SHOULD be run without having to redo someone else’s previous system.

Step 2

Further map departments into essential tasks and responsibilities

Look at each department of your business and think through all of the different high priority tasks that need to be completed, as well as their frequency.

Let’s use the finance department as an example. The hierarchy might look like this:

  1. Finance

1.1. Accounts Receivable (Daily)

1.2. Accounts Payable (Weekly)

1.3. Payroll (Bi-weekly)

1.4. End of Month close (Monthly)

1.5. End of Year close (Yearly)

 

Give priority to preparation

Take some time on this step. Eventually you will be creating significant rules for everyone to follow so it’s imperative that the planning stages are thoroughly thought through. Think of this process as establishing the foundation to your business. Remember, nothing grows big without a strong foundation.

You should consider interviewing your employees and gathering data about their day-to-day activities.

Most people are not natural systematic thinkers. In fact, many employees are too focused on the next thing they need to do to consider systematic task organization. As a quality, it is commonly found in executive programmers, project managers and operations professionals but it’s not common among creatives, certainly less so within marketing and sales. Consider getting assistance from people within your organization who exhibit these qualities.  

How to interview your employees to participate in systemization

Prior to your interview with the employees send out an email and excel template requesting that employees list their top 10 highest priority tasks and ask them to order the tasks by degree of importance. Later, when you sit down to your meeting, gather their input into which tasks they feel could be better streamlined for efficiency. When you are done, you should have a succinct list of main priorities to focus on systemizing. This is also a good time to check-in with employees and get a good measure for how happy they are in their current role.  

Now, sit down in 1:1 meetings with each of your key employees and together, work on the outline of activities that will break down into tasks. Keep your eyes open as there may be many hidden opportunities to add automations to the tasks that will boost your employees efficiency and productivity!

Here’s a sample table of how a Social Media Manager’s priority task list might look like:

Step 3

Determine which systems and procedures currently exist and assign the ones that do not.

To better understand what resources are currently available you can review assets that are on employee computers. You can note the software they are currently using and any online subscriptions that they need. Be sure to inform your employees of this review and enlist them to provide you with assistance to reduce the time you have to search.

As an aside, If your team members have documents in Word that are not in the cloud, invest in a cloud storage service like Dropbox or a Google Drive account. Sharepoint is also common but has a higher learning curve. Consider investing in G Suite – Google apps for your business.

This next part takes a little bit of project management skills. Look at what is left on your list of things that are not yet systematized, and assign an owner to each one.

Each process or system should take about 30-60 minutes to document and create. Make sure you don’t assign more than 20-40 processes to any one team member. 

For example, our social media manager may have a systemized task list like this:

 
Maintain Posting Schedule for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest

  • Review content management Gant
  • Check Hhootsuite posting line-up
  • Write creative status updates
  • Check projected audience for boosted posts


Remember you want to keep your workforce agile so don’t go overboard with systemization, this is especially important if you are a start-up. Systemization can stifle creativity so make sure you strike a balance between procedure and creative work.

Step 4 

Build the missing systems.

This is where most people will tell you to take it slow. They will tell you to have your employees create 1-2 systems each week over the course of a year and by the end of the year, your business will be systemized.  

This never works.  

Your employees are always busy. There is always a bigger priority.

To truly knuckle down, bite the bullet and have a systems week.  

Systems week is the week where everyone works intensely on creating as many systems as they can in one week.

Yes, you will have to push pause on all of your other projects.  But what you will have at the end of a week will enable you to grow and scale your business in a way you could never have otherwise.

If you take a whole year to systemize your business, you are literally putting your growth on hold for another year.

Still, if you truly can’t take a whole week off, take 1 day per week for the next 5-6 weeks until you are done.  Make a game out of it and reward your employees to further incentivize the process. Consider pairing employees as you will undoubtable have some employees that are better at systemizing than others. 

It will take an organized effort to successfully systemize your business, but with careful planning, patience, and lots of review you too can get your business operating like a well oiled machine.

If you think this blog post was a help to you, leave me a comment below!

3 Lies about Outsourcing and How to Overcome Common Outsourcing Mistakes

Outsourcing has become the entrepreneur’s key to earning more revenue while working less. It’s the answer to making business dreams come true. Or so it seems.

But here’s the thing. Outsourcing could lead to several mistakes that will cost you MORE time, MORE money, and LOTS of headache and frustration. Outsourcing can be a smart way to go … and there’s a smart way to do it. Let’s start by taking a look at the common mistakes – the lies you might have heard – that could lead you down the wrong path.

In January of 2006 I first heard about the concept of outsourcing. Basically, a business owner pays someone else to do tasks that need to get done for the success of the business. These are tasks that many times business owners either don’t want to do, or someone else could do less expensively … some tasks, for instance, could be outsourced for as little as $10/hour.

And so, let’s say you chose to do that task yourself, you’d essentially earn only $10/hour. Since you most likely charge your clients more than that, it makes sense to outsource that work.

Sounds pretty nice! Decide which tasks to outsource, hire someone, and then tell that person what to do!

And that’s where it get’s tricky …

Communicating what you need and how it needs to be done to satisfy you and your clients takes TIME. And suddenly you’re spending a great deal of time explaining and communicating to get the task done to your satisfaction … and suddenly you wonder, “Am I really saving any money here?”

Many business owners have a hard time communicating what they want someone else to do.

You know what you want, you can visualize it. But you and the person you hired have different backgrounds, experiences, and knowledge bases. Misinterpretation results and you don’t get the product or service you expected.

It takes time to learn how to convey your ideas to get the result you want! And that means money, too.

In April 2007, Tim Ferriss presented an intriguing concept in a book he authored. Have you heard of The 4-Hour Workweek? Sounds good, right? But here’s the thing. Tim himself does not work just 4 hours per week. He doesn’t clock in for half a day per week and then hit the golf course. If you know Tim, you know he works just as hard as the next entrepreneur.

Tim is using semantics. His definition of “work” means something that you do not want to do yourself. You still need to do all the other parts of the business that you enjoy. If there are tasks  you don’t like to do, then that qualifies as work. He’s telling you how to only do four hours a week of THAT work. And to get down to four, he’s telling you to do what I call delegation. Delegate the tasks you don’t like doing!

For example, a social media presence is probably an important marketing tool for your business. But do you love scheduling your posts across all your social media accounts? If you don’t, that’s something you might outsource. But coaching your clients or designing websites for your customers … the part you like doing… that’s not work.

Outsourcing seems like easy money. It’s not. Not usually. Sometimes we get a new lead, a new prospect, but we don’t have time to do the project or task. So we think, “I’ll hire someone to do this for me! I’ll charge the client more than what I pay to outsource the project! I’ll make some money and not do any work … how great is that?!”

Yes, this sounds like a no-brainer.

But consider this:

  • It takes time, money, and resources to attract the client and manage the project.
  • You become the liaison, the go-between, the back-and-forth communicator between the client and the person to whom you outsourced the task to.
  • When clients are not happy with the results or request a change to the service, this must also be managed and communicated. That takes time and energy and suddenly your profits become less and less, perhaps even a loss!
  • Small or growing businesses demand a prioritization of resources. Essentially, you need to be ready and able to accept more profitable opportunities. In other words, don’t grab at every little chance to outsource – that will ultimately make you less available for better and bigger projects to build your business. It’s okay to say no to projects. And as a leader of your business, you need to figure out what is worth a “yes” and what demands a “no”.

Now let’s explore the outsourcing mistakes that will cost you money and time

Outsourcing your business processes will work for a while and you’ll probably get the results you wanted. For awhile, right up until the point where you need to switch from one virtual assistant to another, or move to a different marketing company.

When you don’t have your own business processes established and instead let the assistant or team you hire to create them for you, you are setting yourself up for a disaster. Big mistake.

Let me share the results you’ll get, but don’t want, when you jump into outsourcing without a plan. Each result here will end up costing you money and time to overcome.  

Outcome #1 – The One-Timer

The person you hire, especially at $10/hour, isn’t a business systems thinker. They won’t be thinking in terms of your future projects. They don’t think in terms of business systems that work for you overall. You’ll have that one project in okay shape, but it won’t work for future projects and things get complicated.

Outcome #2 – The Past-Present-Future Challenge

The person or team you hire in this outcome is a business systems thinker. But – and it’s a costly one – they won’t know about your pre-existing systems in order to make your operations seamless. The system this person sets up for you will work about half the time. Not the odds you want. They either ignore the past or don’t know enough about it, and, when they leave, they’ve left you nothing to help your future teams. No documentation available, so your business systems are, once again, starting over from scratch. Tick-tock, Ca-ching.

Outcome #3 – The Hodgepodge

After hiring multiple people or teams, you have a hodgepodge of business processes that do not communicate together. This results in broken systems and a lot of extra manual work for things that could’ve been automated by now.

I know this one well as an Infusionsoft Consultant. When my Infusionsoft Concierge clients hire me to fix their business systems, I sometimes go into an app that’s been there for awhile.

When I go inside the product, I can tell when a lot of admins have been in there working. I can predict what I’ll find when I see names I recognize. Admins have their own styles with different naming conventions, different standards, and different ways of doing their work inside the app.

You can imagine what happens over time when many hands are in the pot, so to speak. Different admins means different schools of thoughts, different training experiences, and different business strategies.

Sometimes it takes dozens or hundreds of hours to research all the different pieces left behind by different admin users.

Another mistake – please don’t expect your $10/hour assistant to be your business thinking partner or strategist. At that price point the person is rarely qualified to be that person. You may find a diamond in the rough who can become that person with mentoring and training over a long period of time.

 

Our best tips to successful outsourcing

Should I outsource, then?

Outsourcing is a fine option if:

  • You can communicate your vision to a team and provide a detailed plan of action.  
  • You have tasks that are skill-oriented, like transcribing or scheduling your social media posts.

Outsourcing is not a great option for you if:

  • You aren’t clear on exactly what you want or how to get what you want.
  • You need a strategic plan.

Some tasks lend themselves better to outsourcing. These include:

  • Lead Magnet Design
  • Landing Page Design
  • Transcription
  • Social media graphics and scheduling posts
  • Proofreading
  • Data entry

On the other hand, the following are not tasks that should be outsourced:

  • Developing a strategic marketing plan
  • Direct communications with your clients and customers
  • Any tasks that require core business competencies
  • Project management

Prioritizing from you needs to happen.  One of my clients once told me, “If you give a problem to a smart person – they will immediately sit down and try to figure out that problem – never stopping to think if that problem should even be solved in the first place.”

You might see this a lot with developers and programmers. Web development projects can quickly get out of control. Many web developers will find problems in the code and work to fix them without stopping to think if the problem really needs to be solved!

Let’s say the impact of the “problem” is minimal and only affects one or two contacts per day. If it takes the developer twenty or more hours to resolve, at a rate of $100+/hour, is it really worth paying over $2,000 to fix such a small issue? Sometimes it’s not a good investment to fix something that will only impact a few hundred people per year.

If you decide to give your team members free reign or limited direction, you’ll likely have well-meaning people headed down a rabbit trail, creating complicated systems to problems that aren’t problems to you, or aren’t the problems you wanted help with!

You must have a system. Not everyone thinks in terms of systems and efficiency. Every time you solve a problem in your business, think beyond that one instance. Think more systemically about your business and other problems that could and will arise.

Sure, you can slap a Band-Aid on quickly, but what if you really need surgery? Do you want to keep fixing over and over and over again? Take some time and do it right for long-term benefits.

You can read more about how to systemize your business in this blog post I wrote here.

Think of it as trying to stop flooding waters with sacks of sand … every time it rains. Wouldn’t it be smarter and more effective in the long run to build a dam and solve the problem once and for all?

You can spend a lot of your resources – time and money – if you choose the Band-Aid route, or you can fix it right the first time and avoid a lot of headaches, hassles, and money-draining fixes… which makes more sense to you? An ounce of prevention or a pound of cure?

When you fight your business battles – set yourself up for success. Fight not only the one battle – but all future ones by creating systems. Get an efficient system now. Piece-sealing and bandaging as you go, only cuts back on your profits, your energy and your time.

Document your processes. The difference between a small business and a big business is documentation. Before outsourcing, spend time documenting your processes. Again, it’s the smart thing to do to avoid wasting time and losing revenue.

You can read more about how to document your processes in this blog post I wrote here.

If you found this post helpful, leave a comment below.

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Are you waiting for permission to charge what you are worth?

 

Today I caught my 7 year old wandering through the house with a pair of scissors.  I don’t normally let my 7 year old’s wander around with sharp scissors so I asked her what she was doing. She told me that she was looking for her swimming suit – the one with the floating devices built into it – so she could cut out the floating devices as they were completely pointless now that she knew how to swim and they just made her swimsuit very uncomfortable!

Yeah! Welcome to my other life as a mom of 7 kids ages 7-16!

I asked her who gave her permission to cut the swimsuits up and she told me that she did not need permission since it was her swimsuit. Logical.

Reminds me of when I found out she had cut her hair to get the gum out of her hair. The gum she is not allowed to chew by the way. Yeah, so I guess she did not need permission for that either!

Before you go on thinking how horrible of a mother I am with my 7 year old, that apparently has an addiction to cutting things up – I confiscated the scissors and told her to go find something else to do.

What struck me though about this small interaction with her – I mean the whole conversation took about 3 minutes if that – was her absolute confidence that she could see a problem – come up with a solution – and then implement that solution – without asking for permission from anyone.

Not too long ago, my 16 year old got interested in graphic design. Honestly this was a moment I had long been waiting for – I have never wanted to push my kids into learning a specific marketable skill – I just teach them that they should never work for anyone else and need to have a marketable skill so they can pay their own way through college… Since I won’t be paying it for them! But I digress.

He decided he wanted to learn graphic design and started to actually create some really amazing graphics. As a mom I loved watching his face light up as he told me about all the things he was learning. This graphic below was one of his first designs. 

My husband is a missionary pastor here in Puebla, Mexico where we live and have our church. Even though we are in Mexico, our goal is to always do things first class (as much as possible). One of the big gaps in our church for the last few years, is that we have not been able to find anyone to make graphics for the announcements. We have a big screen t.v. that hangs on the wall above the platform area where we show the lyrics during the worship service. One thing I have been waiting on for years is for someone to make graphics about the upcoming events so that the graphics can serve as a visual reminder of what is being said.

My son saw this problem and had come up with a solution – he started to make some graphics for this purpose.

When he showed them to me – I was thrilled to say the least!

Then he said to me that he was hoping that they could get used in church – if he could get permission. 

“Permission? From who?” I asked. “Who do you need permission from?”

He thought about it and inferred from the look on my face – that he did not need permission.

Graphics we now have! (As Yoda would say!)

A few years ago, during a conversation with my own mentor, I mentioned a long-term goal I had for my consulting business. At that point, I had 20 or 30 busy clients with smaller projects and felt almost overwhelmed as a result. I wanted to scale back the number of clients I had to five or so per month, and provide each client with a tremendously valuable and focused service.

Instead of giving me a reassuring pat on the back, my mentor asked me why I’d placed that objective on the long-term goal list instead of the short-term goal list.

Why didn’t I reorganize my business that very month? Why not tomorrow?

Initially, the thought of such a sharp change in direction set me on edge: I worried about losing all my clients, about putting food on the table and about paying my staff. What if everything went wrong? In the end, however, I decided to trust my mentor, and within 36 hours I was on the phone with my clients.

I let them know that we had a new business model and going forward we would only be accepting 5 clients at that there was a new minimum monthly requirement.

Then I did what my mentor told me to do. I shut my mouth. After I gave the offer I stopped talking. There is a rule in sales – after an offer is given – the first person to talk – loses. My mentor told me that I needed to stop talking or I would soon be talking them out of doing business with me!

Within 24 hours I had a completely new business. I had 5 clients come in under the new pricing model and then as a bonus – I had a prospect in my funnel that I happened to talk to that same day – and he came in with a contract for $60K.

In literally just 6 phone calls my entire business changed. My LIFE changed.

I began thinking, WHY had I not done this sooner?! Why did I let myself be stuck for SO long undercharging for my services? What was I waiting for?

Then it hit me. I was waiting for permission.

But you know what… your clients are never going to call you up on the phone and tell you, “Hey Nicole… you are seriously undercharging for your services. This month instead of charging us x dollars, charge us this new amount.”

Never!

I am so grateful for the mentor that challenged me on my thinking and helped me take that one step that has literally changed the trajectory of my life.

I wonder how many of you are waiting for permission to do the right thing in your business or personal lives? Are you waiting for approval before reshuffling your own company or before reorganizing your department? Are you waiting for clients to come to you and offer you ten times more than you currently charge them—because things don’t generally work that way! You have to take the bull by the horns if you want people to recognize your worth.

 

Here are my challenges to you:

  1. Think about the aspects of your business or personal life that you’ve been waiting for someone to give you permission to take action on.
  2. Give yourself permission to take action on those things. Make those changes. Announce your worth to the world.

When you’re done, tell me all about it. Send me an email or post on my Facebook page, because I’d love to know how you feel, having freed yourself from the need to ask permission to do the right thing.

Now, go out and shine!

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

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!