What’s the problem if everyone is talking about small business?

The problem is this: Small business means different things to different people.

Small businesses come in many shapes and sizes. If you’re a solopreneur, you have different needs and challenges than a business with 10 employees. And you have widely different needs and challenges from a 100 person company.

What I’ve discovered in working with thousands of small businesses for the last decade is that there are seven stages of small business success. It’s important to remember you can have success at any of the seven stages. The goal of the seven stages is to help you articulate which stage your small business is in and the success factor you need to focus on. Having this focus helps you make intentional decisions about where you want to be in the future.

7 Stages of Small Business Success

Solopreneur

Of the 28 million small businesses in the U.S., 22 million of them are solopreneurs. In this stage, businesses have one employee and bring in $100,000 or less in annual sales. The success factor for the solopreneur is time. Ask any small business owner and you’ll hear that there isn’t enough time in the day.

Handling every part of the business, from finances to sales and marketing to everything in between, is a dizzying cycle that can ensnare even the best multitaskers. A shortage of time butting up against the ever growing to-do list can detonate the solopreneur’s chance of success.

The key to thriving in this stage is to establish a meticulous time management system. Devote the largest pieces of your time to what actually makes the business grow. Don’t forget to carve out time to take care of yourself, to be with your family and to remember why you actually became an entrepreneur in the first place.

You’ll stretch yourself thin, but you’ll at least stay sane while in this stage.

Partnership

Partnerships comprise 1.7 million businesses across America and make somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 annually in sales. The solopreneur grows beyond him or herself to two or three employees in this stage, which usually means bringing on a partner. There’s great value in strategic partnerships and they can really ramp up your business’ growth.

But, there’s a flip side to everything. The wrong partner can stunt your company’s growth and cripple its path to success. Start by evaluating your own weaknesses. If you lack financial know-how, find a partner who is passionate about projections and balance sheets. If your instincts are to act as a manager, a visionary entrepreneur that dreams big might be what you need. There’s not always a perfect yin to your yang, but look at each potential partner as an entire package.

Having partners in place allows you time to harness the main success factor at this stage– sales. It’s a bit uncomfortable for many entrepreneurial types to sell, but you have to get new customers to survive. You have to figure out how to talk about your product in a way that speaks to the benefits your customers need.

There’s no one in the world who’s more passionate than you about your product or service. So get over your fears and start selling.

Steady Operation

As your business steadies, you will reach this stage in which 1.9 million businesses also reside. A steady operation has four to 10 employees and annual sales of $300,000 to $1 million. Once your business has the sales operation running, you’ll need to get focused on marketing and service. It’s essential to get a plan in place to make marketing systematic and profitable for the business.

As a small business, you can’t afford to have marketing efforts not generating revenue. Learn to make smart marketing decisions that help you grow sales and keep customers.

Customer service is also something to focus heavily on at this stage. Invest in the people and systems that make your customers feel like VIPs and you’ll end up with a boost in repeat sales, referrals and a higher customer retention rate.

Local Success Story

There are 900,000 businesses nationwide that are local success stories and have between 11 to 25 employees. As your business grows from $1 million in annual sales up to the $5 million mark, the big picture must be at the forefront of your mind.

The success factor at this stage is setting the vision. You face the reality that you won’t always have a hand in hiring and you have to trust the people in charge of these decisions. It’s intimidating for an entrepreneur to relinquish the control he/she had over every detail of the business. But setting your vision and making it known to your team will go a long way. A clear vision will attract the right people to your business.

As your business expands into this phase, you will begin to be viewed as a success story in your local community. The growth of your company will be an inspiration to other small businesses in your area.

Your example of setting the vision and letting go will be an important model that others will follow.

Managed Organization

In this stage, your business has expanded to between 26 and 100 employees and annual sales from $5 million to $20 million. There are 200,000 businesses like this across America and the success factor of hiring in line with your vision will set companies in this stage apart.

Most CEOs feel that when they get to this level, all the focus needs to be on shareholders. If this is true, then you must turn your attention to employees and the company culture. Happy employees make happy customers who make happy shareholders.

Culture is what holds managed organizations together. Culture attracts the right people, ejects the wrong ones and ultimately guides a company’s path to success. Actively including every employee, regardless of rank and title, in the direction of your company will make your entire workforce feel invested in the business.

This can be a difficult stage as you add more layers of management. The wrong leaders will dilute and weaken your culture. Be sure to establish core values and a mission that can be shared among staff and valued from top to bottom. Employees will feel mutual respect and a culture they can’t resist.

This, combined with the processes you’ve already put in place will move your company forward like a machine.

Mature Company

You’ve reached a place of substantial success to the tune of annual sales between $20 million and $40 million. You now have 100 to 200 employees and you’re in the same stage as 60,000 other businesses. You’ve become a stronghold in your industry. It’s time to unleash the success factor of strategic planning and mix in concrete performance measuring tactics. Without solid planning, your company will become stagnant and that’s when it becomes vulnerable.

Revisit your strategic direction and gauge its effectiveness often. If you notice a dip in progress, it may be time to reevaluate your strategy. The pulse of a mature company should be checked regularly.

A healthy culture combined with a strong strategic planning process will allow you to move into the rare space of corporate player.

Corporate Player

As the business escalates to annual sales between $40 million and $100 million and anywhere from 201 to 500 employees, entrepreneurs must make the terrifying decision to surrender even more control. There are 30,000 companies in the nation at this stage and the leaders of these companies have to make some tough choices. The vision is still yours (mostly), and the company is still yours (maybe), but the time comes to handpick a leadership team you can trust.

The success factor for this stage is leadership development and you must choose and develop leaders who share your vision and are every bit as determined to preserve your culture as you are. These leaders should be ethical beyond reproach, treat every member of your team with respect and exude their commitment to the business and its core values in their daily actions.

You want to trust the business is in good hands.

Every one of these seven stages is incredibly distinct and it is possible to achieve success in each one. Stop where you’re comfortable. Keep in mind that people are what make or break your business. Small businesses have needs of their own that cannot be sated in the same ways those of large corporations can. Small business owners must take the time to recognize which stage of success their business is situated in and act accordingly.

Success is in the eye of the beholder, but success factors can take you there.

7 Stage Photo via Shutterstock

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Small businesses tend to focus most, if not all, of their marketing and sales resources on closing hot leads — which means the not-ready-to-buy-yet leads end up getting thrown out with yesterday’s garbage.

This “get more customers now” mentality, combined with a lack of time and resources, hurts small businesses and often causes some serious inefficiency in the marketing and sales funnel.

Are you suffering from this problem in your small business? There are five signs your marketing and sales funnel is leaking leads and losing customers.

1.       You don’t use a lead magnet or Web form. You spend money and time driving traffic to your website, but then you bury your opt-in form. Or worse, you don’t offer a compelling lead magnet (e-book, webinar, demo, etc.) that people can opt in for at all. If you don’t have their contact information, you can’t follow up, and your conversions will be lower.

2.       You don’t segment your prospect and customer list. I suggest you segment your contact list three ways: by lead source, by demographics and behaviors (links they clicked on in an email, webinars they attended, etc.) and by selected interests (what information they’ve opted to receive).

3.       You don’t have a lead nurturing system in place. Without a system in place for nurturing and qualifying cold leads, your sales team waste hours on the phone educating prospects about the benefits your product or service provides. It helps to have an automated follow-up system in place so no lead gets lost in the cracks.

4.       You batch and blast. Your lack of time forces you to send the same message at the same time to your entire contact list. While your prospects and customers may share similarities, this one-size-fits-all approach will train them to ignore you or opt out of your messages all together. Track what actions they’ve taken, what information they’ve opted in to receive and their buying history. Then send only relevant, highly targeted messages that you know they will want to receive. This strategy will result in better open rates, higher click-through rates and more lead-to-sale conversions.

5.       Any nurturing ends after the sale. Once you get the customer, you get too busy to keep them happy, to upsell additional products or to ask for referrals. Automated follow-up can help satisfied customers remember to send their friends your way. Also be strategic about the products you upsell. If you have a system in place for tracking customer behavior, you can easily market your upsells to their needs. I know one small business that sends a pre-recorded voicemail automatically to new customers, thanking them for their recent purchase. That same business sends cookies when customers spend a certain amount of money (this is done automatically when the sale is processed). It’s about wowing your new customers so they don’t leave you for the competition.

Don’t fret if you find your marketing and sales funnel has some serious leaks. Just about every small business will experience and overcome these growing pains. In today’s world of technology, there are many marketing and sales tools available to help small businesses attract, nurture and convert leads.

The post 5 Signs You’re Throwing Leads in the Trash appeared first on Small Business Trends.

A recent report by the National Small Business Association showed that more than 41 percent of entrepreneurs are concerned about the survival of their small businesses. None of those numbers feel good to me—and I’d guess they don’t feel good to you, either. I agree with the NSBA that “more can be done to ensure entrepreneurship remains a viable, attainable option for every American.” I strongly believe entrepreneurship is the answer to many of the problems America faces.

So what turns the dream of entrepreneurship into a nightmare time after time?

It’s called chaos and it is killing small businesses everywhere. What causes chaos? What are the symptoms? All-nighters at the office. Missed Little League games. Cold dinners and disappointed families waiting for you at home. Does this sound like you? These are all symptoms of chaos.

All seems to be going well for the small business owner until they get their first customer. That’s when chaos moves in and starts to take over. Before they can come up for air they’ve been sucked under by the business.

Don’t give up. There’s a better way to run a small business. You can grow a successful small business and still have a life, if:

• You get your mind-set right
• You get your systems right

Over the years I have talked to thousands of small business owners and, trust me, they have all experienced chaos at some point. Scott and Eric Martineau, my co-founders and I, experienced this chaos ourselves growing our business, Infusionsoft. Today, Infusionsoft has more than 20,000 small business users. We received nearly $20 million in venture capital. We have made the Inc. 500 list four consecutive years. Our culture is thriving. Sure, we still have moments where chaos creeps up. That’s normal. But you have to confront it, identify the root cause and put solutions in place that get you back on track.

In our new book, Conquer the Chaos: How to Grow a Successful Small Business Without Going Crazy, we talk about a six-step formula that will help you conquer the chaos so that you can focus on what’s most important—growing your business. The moment we got a handle on these six steps was the moment we went from a struggling start-up to a multimillion-dollar, fast-growth software company.

1) Build your emotional capital. Emotional capital is the currency you use to wake up every day and fight the battle. It’s the passion, enthusiasm and positive outlook that propel you through your day, keeping you driven to achieve your goals. It’s the balancing of work, family, and emotional and physical health.

2) Practice disciplined optimism. If you are going to survive the chaos, and survive it well, you must be prepared to handle all the pain and unpleasantness that comes with running a small business. It starts with (1) an undying belief that your small business will achieve the success you have envisioned, while at the same time, (2) confronting the brutal facts of your current reality, and (3) attacking those brutal facts because you want to, not because you have to.

3) Assert your entrepreneurial independence. You decide the fate of your business. If you don’t believe something is going to work, no one else will, either. Self-doubt leads to seeking approval and advice. At some point you must believe and trust your convictions, and that means not asking for so much advice. One of the reasons business owners seek outside input is because their objectives are not clear. If you haven’t decided the direction in which you want to take your business, figure it out.

4) Centralize and organize your stuff. As an entrepreneur, you have an especially complicated situation. Corporations have hundreds, even thousands of people to do the same job you’re trying to accomplish on your own. You’re the boss, sales team, marketing department, tech support, customer service and the janitorial staff. If you are anything like we were, you’ve got information, reports, records and financial statements everywhere. To build a solid business foundation and get one step further out of the chaos, you’ve got to centralize your operations.

5) Tap into the magical power of follow-up. The moment the Martineau brothers and I realized how important follow-up was to our business was the moment that accelerated our move out of chaos and quickly transformed our business into a multimillion-dollar company. When you fail to follow up, you’re losing out on incredible opportunities and causing yourself more pain and frustration. You’re stunting your growth and prolonging your partnership with chaos.

6) Burn the to-do list and move from manual to automated. Automation is the key factor to saving you time, money and manual labor. But automation also tends to be the one principle that is missing from most small businesses. Automation is intentional and purposeful and it will propel the entrepreneur out of chaos into liberation. With automation, you get the benefits of achievement without activity, productivity without busy-ness. Big businesses have learned to automate everything possible. But most small businesses are havens for manual, grunt labor that wastes time, costs money and enslaves the business owner to the business.

Taking these six steps will change your business forever–for the better–just as it changed ours.

The post Why Chaos Is Killing Small Businesses and the Formula for Conquering It appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Imagine you are out on a camping trip. You didn’t pack any food with you and you’re hungry.  You’ve got two choices:

• You can pluck a nice juicy piece of fruit from a nearby tree;  OR
• You can take your rifle out on a journey and try to hunt down your next meal.

Now, remember: you’re hungry. You’re tired. You’re not looking for adventure or sport. You just want to eat!

Most of us would choose the meal dangling from the fruit tree in a heartbeat. But that’s not the choice most small business owners make every day.

When it comes to acquiring new customers, most business owners go hunting instead of harvesting. And that’s a shame. Because hunting for new customers is tough work that causes most small businesses to go hungry. And many, many of those businesses end up starving to death.

Not only that, but hunting for business is tough stuff, even for those who manage to make a living at it.  When you’re in “hunting” mode, you’re dialing for dollars; you feel resistance at every turn; rejection is common; you get “price shopped” against competitors so margins are thin; and you waste tons of time working with prospects who simply aren’t ready to buy.

Sounds about as much fun as a major root canal without the anesthetic, doesn’t it?

On the other hand, when you’re in “harvesting” mode, you’re working smart and scooping up sales left and right. You’re like the fisherman with the irresistible bait, drawing your prospects to you. You can spend your time closing deals on the phone with hot leads or go out on the golf course because you know your prospects will call you when they’re ready to move forward.

So, the big question is How can you spend more time working with hot leads and less time-even no time-with the cold leads? How can you actually make the shift from hunting to harvesting?

To understand how to do this, you need to know about a fundamental business problem at the heart of nearly every company on the planet. Here’s the problem:

• They have a “lead generation department” (marketing); and
• They have a “lead closing department” (sales); BUT
• They don’t have a “lead warming department.”

To make the shift from outbound hunting to inbound harvesting, you need a lead warming function in your business. Simple as that.

Lead warming is about communicating with your prospects from the moment they express interest and then if they don’t buy right away, that’s OK because you then don’t let them slip away and instead breadcrumb them with information they’ll find valuable about your product, service or company. You time that campaign that sends them messages over email, voicemail or direct mail — whatever your combo choice — and you do that in an automated way that doesn’t require an employee to have to remember.  This way, none of those warm leads slip through the cracks.

When that prospect is ready to buy, whether it’s one week, one month or one year later, they want to buy from you, and not your competitor.

Another way of looking at it is you have people that have filled out a form on your website, whether it’s a newsletter, or downloaded an ebook, or attended a demo they’re saying, “hey I’m mildly interested in what you have to offer.” Your job now is to stay in front of them with relevant information so that when they are ready to buy, they buy from you. Most companies fail to do anything with those warm leads that expressed interest but didn’t instantly buy from you. They forget about those prospects and move on to the ones that are hot at that moment.

So, let me give you five tips to help you make the shift from hunting to harvesting:

1. Arm yourself with an arsenal of “information magnets” that will attract prospects to you.
2. Send relevant, valuable information to every prospect regularly.
3. Communicate with prospects efficiently, not in the normal, time-consuming, one-on-one methods.
4. Log all communications between you and the prospect in an organized, accessible fashion.
5. Track the progress of each lead through the sales pipeline so you always know where every lead stands.

The good news is that it’s actually very easy to do all of this and you can have it done for you effortlessly with an automated system.

When you make this shift, you’ll enjoy your work more, you won’t dread pounding the phones, and you’ll have more freedom because your prospects will call YOU when they’re ready to buy.  In short, you’ll be plucking ripe fruit from a tree instead of trudging through the wilderness, hunting for your next meal.

The post Hunting vs. Harvesting: Which Method Describes Your Customer Acquisition Strategy? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Despite the many tools out there, I find that most of us have a similar sentiment.

The nagging feeling stems from the fact that our sites bring in tons of traffic of all sorts:  prospects, customers, partners, competitors, friends, wanderers, etc.  There are many different tools to help us analyze these different types of traffic. It can get pretty confusing when you start to throw all of these tools into the mix.  And it certainly seems that even with all these tools, we can still be left guessing about some of our traffic.

So, what are some of the tools that help us make sense of it all? I’ll share a few off the top of my head:

Google Analytics is great to help us systematically tailor our message to attract the prospects we want. With Google Analytics, we’re able to monitor the pulse of conversions with their stellar Goal Tracking abilities. Heat maps, multivariate testing and extensive SEO efforts are great ways to target more ideal prospects and cultivate more educated customers. The goal in using all these features and tools is to obtain actionable data that you can make decisions with.

But what about mining your site visitor activity for prospect data that your sales reps can act on? You can use custom code and various triggers if your IT team can put it out on the site and maintain it, but I’ve found that a simple tool like LeadLander is a better, easier way to go. Your reps can get notified when someone is visiting the site and they can see reports in real time to find out who’s really kicking the tires.

LeadLander is also pretty good for providing insight on the competitors that are snooping around your site.  You can see what pages people visited, what they did on your site and what time they were there.  This data is useful competitive intelligence, but if you want to take it a step further (and cough up more dough), CI Radar is a great service to really keep tabs on your competitors.

All of these tools offer great value. I’ve used these tools, as well as a few custom tools to capture site visitor data, and yet I continue to have the nagging feeling that we’re not learning enough about our website traffic.

The more I talk to folks about this, the more I realize I’m not alone.  What are you using to analyze your website traffic, how do you act on that analytical data and do you still have that nagging feeling?

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About the Author: Clate Mask is the President and CEO of Infusionsoft. He loves to turn small businesses into big businesses. In addition to running the day-to-day operations of Infusionsoft, Clate also writes at the Infusion Blog about marketing and entrepreneurship topics.

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Many business owners I know have talked to me about being in the zone.  Usually “the zone” in business has a lot to do with operating in a frothy economy or in a white-hot industry.  Certainly it is easier for us as business owners to find the zone in a hot market.  But let’s face it, we ALL find ourselves in a challenging market at one time or another, even if we’re not all in the challenging market at the same time.  For example mortgage brokers might be up while repo men are down and vice versa.  You get the idea.

So, how do we as business owners find “the zone” in a tough economy? 

There’s no doubt that marketing expertise makes it easier to find the zone in a tough economy, but I want to focus on a characteristic that can quickly help anyone find the zone (even in tough times) if they’re willing to embrace it. 

I call it “Disciplined Optimism.” 

Disciplined Optimism is a combination of positive attitude, tenacity and hard work.  It requires the business owner to: 

• Constantly think positively (read Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking)
• Tenaciously pursue the success you have envisioned; and
• Work hard to remove obstacles, always believing you will achieve that success (google “Jim Collins Stockdale Paradox” for more on this) 

I believe Disciplined Optimism is the heart of entrepreneurship.  Unfortunately some small business owners are not entrepreneurs — they have not cultivated Disciplined Optimism.  And that’s too bad.  Because business owners who possess this trait are able to find the zone, even in tough economies … while those business owners who do not possess this trait struggle mightily to find the zone, especially in a tough market. 

If you’re finding yourself bogged down by the negativity surrounding you, I can’t recommend highly enough Peale’s book and Collins’ writings on the Stockdale Paradox.  I also recommend you follow the advice my Dad taught me many years ago.  It’s amazing how the power of positive thinking enables business owners to work tenaciously toward their goals… and find the zone that makes success come easily.

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About the Author: Clate Mask is the President and CEO of Infusionsoft. He loves to turn small businesses into big businesses. In addition to running the day-to-day operations of Infusionsoft, Clate also writes at the Infusion Blog about marketing and entrepreneurship topics.

The post Finding “The Zone” in a Tough Economy appeared first on Small Business Trends.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that the most successful business owners and entrepreneurs take a different approach to customer acquisition: they are harvesters. They gather in all their leads, work hard to prevent any from slipping through the cracks, cultivate those leads and then harvest them when the time is right for the customer.

The most interesting thing about these two styles is that the hunter usually gets tired, a bit humiliated and ends up getting small margins. On the other hand, the harvester stays fresh, confident and usually earns higher margins.

What I’ve described here is the difference between a sales mentality (hunter) and a marketing mentality (harvester). Every business owner or entrepreneur who experiences some level of success has hunting skills … and that’s good. But the difference between minor success and major success is the difference between hunting and harvesting.

Oh, and just so we’re clear … I’m not saying that harvesting is an easy, non-aggressive job. When it’s time to harvest, be sure you swing the sickle sharp and fast.

Happy harvesting!

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About the Author: Clate Mask is the President and CEO of Infusionsoft. He loves to turn small businesses into big businesses. In addition to running the day-to-day operations of Infusionsoft, Clate also writes at the Infusion Blog about marketing and entrepreneurship topics.

The post Are You Hunting or Harvesting? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Well, in speaking with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and business owners, I’ve found that many have the same on again, off again relationship with their marketing. They do a few things to stir up business, then neglect the marketing and go to the “fulfillment” side of the business. When things start to slow down, they say to themselves, “I’ve got to do some marketing to pick things up” and they invest in marketing. The cycle goes on and on, with good times and bad times, ups and downs, but no real long-term progress occurs.

Does this describe your marketing relationship? If so, stop yourself, snap out of it. Because this on again, off again marketing style is certain to hold back the growth of any business.

If you’re serious about growing your business, and I assume you are, you need to come to grips with three fundamental small business marketing truths:

1. You are a marketer, not a provider of product x or service y. You are a marketer.
2. You are a marketer of information about the problems your product or service solves. You’re not a marketer of product x or service y.
3. Your marketing must be “always on” not on again, off again. “Always-on marketing” is what you need to really grow your business.

Let those three truths sink in. I can promise you that the entrepreneurs and business owners who are most successful have adopted these three marketing truths. Get out of your on-again, off again marketing relationship and apply these marketing truths to your business. When you do, I promise you your business will grow faster.

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About the Author: Clate Mask is the President and CEO of Infusionsoft. He loves to turn small businesses into big businesses. In addition to running the day-to-day operations of Infusionsoft, Clate also writes at the Infusion Blog about marketing and entrepreneurship topics.

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