6 Steps to Creating a Constantly-Improving Sales System

Sometimes, it helps to take a step back and look at the BIG picture of different areas of your business.  When it comes to sales systems, one big picture view that bears examination is the process by which a good sales system becomes a great sales system

If you follow these six steps with some degree of consistency you can’t help but see increasingly better results from your online selling efforts. Of course, the more consistent and focused you are the better your results will be.

Step 1: Plan

Before you start to build your sales system, give it a bit of thought. You don’t need an exhaustive plan, and it need not take you a long time, but make sure you know what you are building before you build it.

I’ve found that the easiest way to plan a sales system is to create a map, like this one…

If you are a VisiOlo member, you can use the set of template maps we have created for you. If not, no sweat, you can create a map easily with a pencil and paper.

Step 2: Build

This one is pretty clear, right? The next step after planning is building.  You’ve probably already built a sales system or two, but I can offer some advice from my experience.

First, it’s really critical to separate the Build process into stages; write the copy, design and format the pages, set up autoresponder, set up ecommerce system, test. When you are writing, for instance, do very minimal formatting, just enough so that it is clear where the headlines, sub-heads, and text emphasis should be.  For instance, if you want a box around a testimonial, don’t create the box, just put a note in brackets saying [box here]. You don’t want to lose any writing momentum you have built by switching suddenly into design and layout mode.

Second, many of the tasks in this stage are perfect for outsourcing. If you can afford to outsource anything, I would suggest starting with the design or ecommerce system setup. For instance, if you use Rapid Action Profits, John Burnette will do a complete setup for you, including testing, for just $45.  He’ll do a great job and you won’t have any of the headaches.

Step 3: Deploy

Now that your system is set up, you need to turn it on and start driving traffic to it.  For brand new systems, I’m not an advocate for a big ‘event type’ launch.  There are plenty of ways to do re-launches, or special events using launch tactics after you get rolling, but until a system is tested and refined a bit, I think glitches, mistakes, and missed opportunities absorb a lot of the launch energy.  Along those lines, many times, I prefer to have a ‘hidden’ launch before I open up the real thing.  A hidden launch is a private offer to previous customers or members of a certain community and it’s a good way to start momentum rolling for a new sales system.  Plus, you’ll get testimonials and some conversion rate history to share with possible JV partners.

After deployment, there is always traffic coming into your system through your promotional efforts, But the focus of this post is not really traffic generation. The Deploy step is more about getting the system up and running than anything else and it takes a bit of traffic to do that.

Step 4: Measure

Now that you have deployed your system you want to measure your results.  You’ll need data on at least two levels 1) a summary level that gives you key metrics and 2) a detail level that allows you to measure conversion rates for each step of your selling process and also how each traffic source is performing for you.  There are ways to get this data with various free tools, but, of course, VisiOlo makes it a lot easier.  This is, after all, what we are best at.  Regardless of how you get your data though, please don’t ignore the overwhelming significance of easy access to marketing metrics.

Step 5: Plan

Based on your measurements, you should be able to identify areas that you would like to target for optimization.  The biggest improvements come from making improvements to your offer pages — perhaps improved headlines, or a sweeter offer.  But there are many places in your sales system where you can either add offers, build feedback loops, remove extraneous steps, or communicate better. Target one part of your sales system and develop a plan for improvement.  Again, your plan does not have to be extensive, but just writing down a few steps will keep you focused.

Step 6: Optimize

With your plan in hand, all you need to do is make sure the steps get done.  If you do *anything* to improve your sales system after it is deployed, you will be miles ahead of most people. It can be a simple step, but any step toward improved performance will be well rewarded.

Now, simply repeat steps 4 through 6 consistently, and, over time, you will find you can make substantially more profit, and create substantially more satisfied customers if you follow this process.

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As I completed my last post, which was about operating principles for my business, I realized that It would probably be helpful to explore these ideas a little deeper. To show you how they might look when applied to my business.

Of course, I consider it unlikely that you will use the exact same operating principles in your business, but if you see what they mean in my business, I hope you will consider developing your own operating principles.

You may remember that one of the operating principles is “Focus on the Core.”  Today, I’d like to take a deeper dive into this principle because it is one of the top-of-mind challenges I’ve been working to resolve for several years now.  Without a major sharpening of my focus, I probably would not be here writing on this blog today.

A Bit of History

Let me just tell you where I was two years ago.  I had over 40 ‘active’ projects.  I was doing small business consulting on a fee for service basis, publishing a daily marketing tip ezine, I was involved in no less than 3 joint venture startups, I was dabbling in information products, and I had a big vision to build a new company around a software tool for Infopreneurs.

Oh, and I still had a couple of clients in the corporate world too. In short, my business was a mess and I knew it. I was working way too hard and the value I was providing was spread way too thin to have any real impact for me or my clients.

When I took a hard look at my business, I realized that there was one part that was bringing in consistent income, one part that made sense as the future foundation of my business, and many other parts that just did not fit at all. That’s when I resolved to focus my efforts on the core of my business, and clear out the rest of the projects and distractions.

Out of necessity, I have gotten much better at focus. Now, two years later, I have just one consulting client, and the rest of my focus is on creating VisiOlo (my #1 project) and making it the best it can be.  So, while my business still has two sides, it is much more manageable and I can build a lot more value for the markets I serve.

So, what I really have is two businesses. One is a high-involvement consulting practice where, at this point, I can only handle one client at a time.  I get deeply involved in their business and develop various marketing projects to help build their bottom line.

I don’t really write much about that business, I only mention it here because it is relevant to this idea of focus.  When I say “my business” on this blog, I’m always referring to the second business I run, which is a digital publishing business focused on software.  The publishing business has launched several products and publications, but VisiOlo is our #1 project — it’s the foundation of everything else we want to do.  More about those other products below.

I realize that my idea of focus is contrary to the way many people approach an information marketing business, especially with my strong belief that 99% of micro-publishing businesses (Infopreneurs) should focus on just one niche.  But this approach has served me well and I think it will serve you well too.

As a refresher, here’s how I described Focus on the Core in my previous post…

I think focus, or lack thereof, is one of the biggest challenges Infopreneurs face — self included . Everyone knows about focus in general, but what I’ve found helpful is to look at focus in my company as having 4 different elements:

• • Audience: Who is our ideal prospect? What are their core needs?
  • Best At: What are we better at than anyone in the world?
  • #1 Project: What is our most important project? Is this project a good combination of what our audience needs and what we are best at?
  • Next Step: What do we need to do next to move closer to completion of #1 project?

Given these 4 elements, let me tell you where I think my company is with each.

Audience

This was one of the things that came sharply into focus right after the ‘turning point’ I described above.  I knew that my entire business would depend on which audience I chose to serve, so the decision was not taken lightly.  It was, however, taken quickly.  I already knew that the place were I could serve best would be with the Infopreneur audience.  I did, however, take the time to run some numbers and do a market analysis.  All of the facts supported my desire to focus on the Infopreneur market.  Since then, I can honestly say that we have a great focus on this market as a company, and it is only getting sharper.

Best At

I have to give a big nod to Jim Collins and his book Good to Great.  This one took a while to define, and it is also a bit aspirational (in other words, we are getting there).  Defining what my company is best at was a bit challenging because we are very good at many things — we have a generalists organizational skill set — but we had not been clearly great at any one thing.  Or at least that is what it felt like at the time. But the answer, looking back on it, has been very clear all along.

What we are ‘best at’ is helping Infopreneurs measure and optimize the effectiveness of their online selling systems (make more money with the same or less expense).  Are we truly the best in the world at this?  I say, maybe… because it’s not really a contest.  I can honestly say, though, that for most of our customers we will absolutely be the best in the world at helping them measure and optimize the effectiveness of their selling systems.

#1 Project

Hooo boy, this has been an interesting one and a constant source of dissonance.  It took me a long time to realize it, but I was addicted to the energy, excitement and hope that comes at the start of a project.  I rarely, if ever, said no to a project.  If I had an idea or someone came to me with one I’d literally go from ‘that’s a great idea!’ to ‘let’s do it!’ without much thought in between.

At the same time, I have known that VisiOlo was my #1 project for five or six years now.  Hence the dissonance.  When you have a clear #1, and don’t really have much time to focus on it, you set yourself up for a lot of frustration.

So, it took all of two years to clear out (most of) the clutter but I can honestly say that my company is totally focused now on it’s #1 project.

I have even made the decision to close every other project and discontinue every other product (more details to come on each specific project, and maybe some deals

Next Step

This principle is clearly borrowed from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. GTD contains many components, but the idea of defining and focusing on the next step in a project has been a breakthrough for me.  Without this focus, I would have gone crazy about 6 months ago when it seemed like we would never get this project to launch.  Right now, every VisiOlo team member knows exactly what their next task is. It’s a huge productivity enhancer.  I use a mind mapping software (FreeMind) to maintain all of the task groups and tasks. It’s very easy to see what is next and we are pretty good at staying focused until it’s done.

We still get distracted, and make mistakes, but overall we are mostly working on the next step with good focus.

Conclusion

I hope it helps to see how these operating principles work in my business. As you can see, with these for elements of focus in place, we stand a much better chance of success in our plans.

Just by focusing on these four elements we can avoid common problems like… making a product that isn’t suited to the audience, spreading focus so thing among multiple projects that nothing gets done, getting distracted by shiny objects.  If we constantly re-visit these four elements, we generally stay on track and headed the right direction.

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It’s been almost a year and a half since I started the VisiOlo project. And during that time, VisiOlo has gone from an idea, to a concept, to a spec, to a prototype, to a multi-stage beta, and now, to a functioning software and membership site.

It’s been slower than I expected, more expensive than I expected, more intense than I expected, and more rewarding than I expected.  This project has been surprising, challenging, frustrating, and interesting, but most of all, it has had a galvanizing effect on how I look at and operate my business.

One of my old bosses used to say “when you drain the swamp, the stumps rise to the surface.”  What he meant by that is when resources are scarce and sales slow down, that is when you start to see the ugly stuff that lives under the smooth surface of a full lake.

That kind of explains the effect this project has had on my business, but not quite.  For me, this project hasn’t been so much about exposing the stumps as it has been about pushing the envelope of resources and expertise in a focused direction — this kind of push will reveal your weak points, for sure.

So, because this time of year is naturally conducive to both looking back and looking forward, and because I want my prospects and customers to understand where we are coming from, I’ve given some thought to the core operating principles we use at VisiOlo.  These are the ‘rules of engagement’ in our business — they are the basic components of our culture.  These are the principles upon which this business operates.

1. Focus on the Core
2. Prototype and Iterate
3. Consistent, Paced Improvement
4. Share Information
5. Create Indispensable, Everyday Tools
6. Remove Complexity from the Process

I’ll briefly explain each of these principles below, but this will just scratch the surface, so I’ll follow-up with more in-depth posts later.

Focus on the Core

I think focus, or lack thereof, is one of the biggest challenges Infopreneurs face — self included . Everyone knows about focus in general, but what I’ve found helpful is to look at focus in my company in light of four different elements:

• • Audience: Who is our ideal prospect? What are their core needs?
  • Best At: What are we better at than anyone in the world?
  • #1 Project: What is our most important project? Is this project a good combination of what our audience needs and what we are best at?
  • Next Step: What do we need to do next to move closer to completion of #1 project?

If we are clear about who our audience is, and we are focused on what we are best at (as a company), and we are focused on our highest priority project, and that project is a good match between what our audience needs and what we are best at, and we know what our next step is, I feel that we are focused on the right things and the rest of the details will fall into place.

Prototype and Iterate

Nothing beats a prototype for moving a project forward quickly. But, more importantly, prototypes also are the perfect tool for gathering user feedback.  The idea behind ‘prototype and iterate’ is this: the faster you can get a working prototype in the hands of users, the better. This applies not only to new product development, but also to business processes, brands, messaging, positioning, feature development — basically anything you want to create ends up better and becomes ‘real’ faster if you focus on getting the prototype made and into the hands of users. Then you get feedback, and go back and make the next iteration of your prototype.

• • Prove it Early: If it sounds like a good idea, prove it (early) by getting it in front of users.
  • Make it Small Enough to Deploy Quickly: The only way to move quickly, is to start small, so make the first step as small as possible, then make it smaller, then ask ourselves how it could be even smaller.  We, essentially, want the smallest first step that can generate revenue.
  • Iterate Based on User Feedback and Input: There is only way one way to learn how effective a product is, and that is to let our Ideal Prospect experience it and tell us what they think of it.  A little feedback can go a long way to aligning our solutions with the audience.
  • Consistent ‘Paced’ Improvement: Consistent improvement is, in my opinion, one of the secrets of running a profitable business.  But I also like to have ‘paced’ in there because I’ve found that we have to find our own pace if we want to last for the long haul.  It’s all about starting from where you are, then slowly increasing speed as you gain resources and streamline processes.

Facilitate the Free exchange of Information in our Topic Area

I’ve always enjoyed sharing what I know about Internet Marketing and running a digital publishing business and also advancing that knowledge through learning from others.  But, until recently, I’ve not had a really great platform for sharing my knowledge and that of my team.  VisiOlo was intentionally structured in a way that allows us to share our knowledge much more freely.

After the initial VisiOlo launch, we’ve got some exciting projects planned that will give Infopreneurs unrestricted free access to a large body of information about how to sell effectively online.  In a related project, we are considering a partnership with a non-profit, open-source repository of Infopreneur reference resources. If it pans out, it will be very cool .

Create Indispensable, Everyday Tools

A core focus would not be complete at VisiOlo without this key principle because what we are about is creating great tools for Infopreneurs.   But we don’t just want to create tools, we want to create tools that our users would not want to live without and ones they use every day.

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Have you ever noticed how the last 10% of any project seems to take 90% of the effort? Anyone who has been through a product development and launch cycle will agree, I’m sure, that the final stages of a project leading up to launch are all consuming.

So, if you have been wondering where I’ve been the last few weeks, let me just chalk my absence up to the fact that I am in the final stages of preparing for phase I of the VisiOlo launch.

Not only that, but I still have one active consulting client and I’m managing two major product launches for them. So, I’m in launch-phase times three!

It’s exciting, though. I’ve been doing all three of these projects for over a year, and now I get to see them roll out to the market.

VisiOlo is really coming along. We’ve already wrapped up all of the features I had on my “must have before launch” list. Now we are working on upgrades and enhancements. Let me tell you, it’s a lot more fun to work on enhancements than it is to be down in the weeds working on basic functions.

Today, I’m updating the help and tutorial content, which involves both written content and video content.

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Has it really been 15 days since I last posted?  That’s crazy. I really thought my last posts were just a week ago.

But last week was kind of extra crazy. VisiOlo started acting up because we are seeing higher loads than we have ever seen. What once was a not-perfect, but well functioning system became slow and almost un-usable.

So last week was an intense and focused effort to optimize the code so that the system could handle the number of database queries that are happening.  Code improvements plus an upgrade to a fast dedicated server have the application functioning much faster than it every has.  With further optimization, it should just get faster and faster.

I hadn’t realized how much I have come to rely on the information that VisiOlo provides — it was frustrating (to say the least) to not be able to get right to the information when I wanted it.  I’m sure the same goes for other VisiOlo users.  I was biting my nails for a while there, but after a push last week, we are all the stronger.

All systems go through this kind of process. They may work well with a ‘light’ load, but when the load increases, things start slowing down or breaking.

The same goes for sales systems.

The *best* way to improve a sales system is to put it under a ‘load’ to find the weak spots.  In this case, the ‘load’ is traffic and buyers. If you have a well-designed sales system and you have good tracking in place, you can quickly and easily find the low-conversion points in your sales system.  You’ll also hear about problems through your help desk (corrupted files, bad download links, etc.)

Only after you do this, will you have the confidence and information you need to drive traffic through advertising, affiliates, and joint venture partners.

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I’ve worked as a product manager and product management consultant for over 20 years. In that time, I’ve helped develop literally hundreds of products and none of those development projects have ever gone as fast as I wanted them to.

Products take time to evolve — sometimes way too much time.

But one of the things that can really help move a project along is to get people interacting the product as soon as possible.  For complex physical products, this can be a difficult task because oftentimes products require tooling or extensive manufacturing before they can be used.  At that point, the product is all but done.

But even with physical products, users can be engaged early with even a very rudimentary model or prototype.  Even drawings and 3D models can help.

With the VisiOlo project, we’ve had the pleasure of working with early users for the past two weeks.  These users have already started to add tremendous energy and momentum to the project. We’ve gained perspective on how users will interact with the tool. We’ve identified a couple of bugs and fixes that need to be addressed. We’ve learned what parts of the user interface are confusing. And we’ve already taken some of the ideas provided by our early users and started to roll them into our tool.

VisiOlo exists to serve the needs of it’s users.  And now that we have a growing variety of users, we can do much more to further that goal.

It’s also just a lot more fun to share the development process with engaged and interested users.

So if you have and existing product or one in development, know this: user interaction is where the magic happens. If you ask for feedback from your users, and act upon it, you are putting yourself way ahead of the pack.

The iterative process of learing from your users and improving your product is one of the hidden elements of creating a business that has maximum impact.

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I’m in the midst of assembling the beta user group and advisory team for VisiOlo and it got me thinking about some of the beta groups I’ve had in the past — especially the ones I worked with for physical products.

Doing software is so much more fun than physical products because, with the right programming team, product changes can happen really fast.  Physical products can be expensive and slow to change, so product evolution is slow and frustrating to an instant gratification guy like me.

When I was a product manager in the orthopedic implant world, it would take years to develop a product and every single prototype implant cost thousands of dollars.  Not to mention the fact that taking an implant for a ‘test drive’ is not the easiest thing to do.

Back in the day, when we wanted to get feedback on a new shoulder implant, I would have to bring in a team of consulting surgeons, and order up some cadavers!  We would all get in a lab and myself, the designing surgeon and our head engineer would literally walk the team of surgeons through the surgical technique.

At first, working with cadavers really freaked me out.  I had a hard time developing the separation that one needs in order to work with dead human flesh.  In fact, I never really did develop true separation, but I saw that the experienced surgeons in the group did.  I guess after years of medical school and thousands of hours in the operating room, the strangeness of working with cadavers isn’t a big deal.

Even though it was strange and a bit freaky working with cadavers, I was grateful for the opportunity to test the products I managed in a real-world environment.  I was also grateful for the generosity of the donors who gave their body to science when they were no longer using it.

Beta testing is always an exciting time. Insights come fast and weaknesses in the product are rapidly exposed. And I can honestly say I have never been as excited about a beta launch than I am with VisiOlo.

We’ve got an incredible advisory team assembled who will, I’m sure, ask questions we never thought to ask, provide insight where we didn’t know we needed it, and add a tremendous amount of energy to the project.

I’m grateful to have people in my life who are willing to jump on board in the early stages of a project, and still more grateful that, this time, I don’t have to wear gloves, use a bone saw, or smell formaldehyde.

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