What They Won`t Tell You About Infusionsoft

What They Won’t Tell You
About Infusionsoft
By Seth Ellsworth
www.50em.com
License: You may pass this around to whomever you wish but
you have no rights to change anything within this document.
Copyright 2014 Fifty East Media LLC
www.50em.com 1 Interested in private Infusionsoft files?
I hate it when software companies lock down their demo and
ask you for all kinds of personal details before letting you take a
peek under their hood. I understand why, but that doesn’t make
it any less annoying.
Well, I was able to pull some strings and secure (with
permission) some private footage from Infusionsoft’s Dropbox
and show it to you, no strings attached. No opt-in or personal
info required.
I MUST tell you though that this is a completely GENERALIZED
demo and is not customized to your use case or business. It’s
literally just so you can see what’s under the hood. Don’t think
of it as being any more than that, ok?
Just click here to watch the demo
www.50em.com 2 As much as I love Infusionsoft, this is the tale of something that
is three parts awesome and one part stupid. I guess you could
say it’s stupid awesome.
As a consumer, that just ain’t fair when you’re trying to make a
good business decision. So, here I am doing something about it.
I remember when I was shopping around for marketing
automation software like Infusionsoft or Office Autopilot
Ontraport. Those were the only two on my radar as the others
were enterprise solutions that were way out of my budget
($1000/month+) or smaller brands that lacked the true
automation that I wanted.
But what I didn’t know is if Infusionsoft was the best fit for my
business. Back then, I wish I had the following resources to
answer my questions and give me a snapshot of the use cases
and results I could expect.
Case Studies by Industry
Check out these brilliant case studies to see how people have
used Infusionsoft in just about any industry to get real results.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Advertising Agency
Consultant
CPAs and Accountants
Ecommerce
Education (Online)
Education (Offline)
Fitness Clubs and Gyms
Franchises
Health Care
www.50em.com 3 •
•
•
•
•
•
•
Information Marketing
Legal Firms
Manufacturing
Marketing Agency
Service & More Services
Software and Technology
Retail & More Retail
If your industry isn’t mentioned or you have questions about
your business, hit me up and ask me.
Me? I ended up using both Infusionsoft and Office Autopilot
Ontraport for different businesses. Weird, I know. But that’s
kinda why I’m able to come out with some intel that is valuable
when you’re evaluating one or the other. And with no brand
loyalty I don’t mind bashing one or the other when it needs to
be bashed, and both need some bashing trust me.
Now, open the windows and let in the fresh air… because this is
a big decision that you’re making and I want to do my best to
help.
It’s critical to know if Infusionsoft will fit your needs BEFORE
you make the investment because the decision to jump in is as
close to permanent as you can get in the software world. I say
that because moving from one software service to the other is a
royal nightmare and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even my
competitors.
So be sure to either watch a demo, get a custom
recommendation, or have your questions answered before
you jump in. There’s no free trial with Infusionsoft and it requires
an upfront investment. No refunds on the upfront kickstart
package either (see below).
www.50em.com 4 All About My Love-Hate
Relationship with Infusionsoft
My personal curse is that I love marketing and automation and
enjoy that side of the business so much that I don’t like to
delegate it. I do it myself. That means I run everything that has
to do with Infusionsoft myself. (read: I can be the bottle neck in
my business sometimes).
I know Infusionsoft extremely well. I use it every single day. It
manages my natural health supplement business beautifully and
I’m good at bending it to fit my needs so that it bows to my
marketing mind (in most cases).
My marketing mind is a plague of sorts because I lay awake at
night thinking about hair-brained marketing schemes and
automation that:
•
•
•
•
Runs seamlessly while I’m sleeping…
Makes sales 24/7…
Manages a remote team…
Follows up automatically with personalized content that
increases sales and makes customers happy…
• Adds unexpected value and goodwill for customers and team
members
That said, I love it and I hate it, which means I love it about
74.2%… for the record. That’s actually a high number for any
software I use.
There is NO perfect software solution. You’ll hear me say that
once or twice.
www.50em.com 5 I’m what I guess you’d call a power user, meaning I come up
with stuff all the time that the top success coaches at
Infusionsoft have never heard of and then we try and implement
it… haha. Infusionsoft has been able to do “almost” everything
I’ve wanted to.
With an especially critical piece of software that runs the guts of
my supplement business, I really put it to the test and so should
you.
One of the campaigns I did in Infusionsoft was printed out and
passed around as if it was a one-of-a-kind collector’s item.
Weird, but awesome.
I need to tell you that I don’t have experience using every inch
of Infusionsoft. There are some features that I don’t have much
experience with. I’ll tell you what those are as we go along.
Again, this is my take on Infusionsoft after lots of experience
with it.
www.50em.com 6 Sales Experience and Setup
Process: What to Expect
Infusionsoft Sales Reps
You cannot visit Infusionsoft’s website and buy their software.
That means you have to talk to a sales rep. Errr. That can be
intimidating for some people. But the ideal client for Infusionsoft
is a small business that’s used to a simple sales process.
To buy Infusionsoft, you’ll have to call them up or register for a
demo, etc. Then you’ll be contacted by a sales rep to go
through their pickings… one of those is an upfront coaching
package that I’ll talk about in a sec.
Luckily, Infusionsoft hires great people with integrity so your
experience will probably be as good as mine was.
If you send me an email I can set you up with my guy Trent
Barber over there.
As always, it’s their job to sell you the merits of using
Infusionsoft so don’t expect them to be forthcoming when you
ask the sales rep to compare Infusionsoft with it’s biggest
competitors, like Office Autopilot Ontraport. I do all that for you
here.
Monthly Rates and Start Up Costs
www.50em.com 7 This part can be a deal breaker for some businesses who aren’t
ready for Infusionsoft yet. There’s a substantial cost and there’s
good reason for it.
Monthly Rates: $199 − 379
( Click here for detailed packages and pricing )
Monthly rates start at $199 for the “essentials” version of
Infusionsoft.
Infusionsoft changed up their pricing structure a bit ago.
They’ve added a couple packages that fit different business
needs. This is the first time I can remember that Infusionsoft has
broken up the product into different packages and feature sets
and actually limited the number of emails sent. That personally
drives me nuts that they put a cap on emails but every
automation platform has to do that nowadays because of how
much data is stored about every email that is sent. It adds up
really fast.
If you take orders online, in order to get the full value out of
Infusionsoft you need to have the Deluxe E-Commerce
package which is $299 per month. That allows you to actually
make money and take orders… run an affiliate program, etc.
Start Up Costs: $2,000 – $3,000 Kickstart
( Click here for the detailed breakdown of what the kickstart
packages entail )
www.50em.com 8 Every new account needs the kickstart package which includes
the crucial coaching to get familiar with Infusionsoft and it’s use
for your business. The kickstart package does not include your
first month’s software subscription which is billed separately.
That said, they will not let you sign up without a kickstart
package.
Infusionsoft wants every customer to actually know how to use
the software so as to avoid attrition and create loyal customers
who actually benefit from the product (Yes, it’s shocking how
many people buy software and never use it… don’t be that
person).
I’m a quick learner and prefer to learn on my own, but even I
had to bite the bullet. Truth is though, I’m glad I did. It was
worth it and the money that pours into my business while I sleep
is worth it too.
Kickstart Coaching Sessions and Setup
First item of business after signing up for Infusionsoft is don’t
freak out.
This thing is a huge piece of software with all kinds of little
nuances and it takes time to learn it and set up your business
for automation. You must be prepared for that. Here’s a great
training about automation.
The coaching in the kickstart package is the one thing I think
Infusionsoft does right in their sales process. They don’t leave
you to figure things out on your own. Which would cause
www.50em.com 9 overwhelm and abandonment.
It’s critical to get the training you need or you likely won’t be
able to use Infusionsoft to it’s full extent and your resources will
be flat wasted.
That said, I do think it’s a bit wonky that they charge you to
learn the software you’re already paying for. I think they would
sign on a ton more people if they didn’t charge for the coaching
sessions but still made it mandatory that people take the
coaching.
But they like the added benefit of the one on one coaching
because it creates great retention. If it was me, it would be more
efficient if they had group sessions for the basics and one on
one sessions once you understand the software better.
Once you’re on board and you made it through the sales
gauntlet, they’ll run you through one-hour coaching sessions
that need to be used in the first few months.
It’s hands on training. You’ll be setting up your Infusionsoft app
while going through the coaching. It happens simultaneously,
which is by design. They take you through strategy sessions
and brainstorming potential uses for your business, etc, and
then help you put all that together in live campaigns.
Theses coaching sessions are GREAT for newcomers and for
those who feel like they need help setting things up with
someone looking over their shoulder as they start setting up
their Infusionsoft app.
www.50em.com 10 From experience, the average person will not be successful with
Infusionsoft without these coaching sessions. Love ‘em or hate
‘em they are important.
Advanced marketers. Because I’m an experienced marketer
and wouldn’t need that much handholding, I had them set up a
custom situation for me where I just set up appointments on an
as-needed basis. I learn software quickly and knew exactly what
I wanted to do with it. Infusionsoft was no problem for me to
learn quickly. There are a lot of tutorials and help docs if you’re
the hands on kind of person.
Timeline for setup: 6 − 12 weeks.
Though getting started doesn’t take much more than a phone
call, that’s just one step in the right direction… then the work
starts.
For the average person with average computer skills and a
business that they want to automate as much as possible, it’ll
take up to 6 − 12 weeks to get your head around things and
implement automation to where your business really feels the
full value of Infusionsoft… or any automation platform. It’s like a
delicious Walla Walla sweet onion with a bunch of layers.
You have to be committed to getting it done and implementing
it before you jump in. If you’re not committed, then don’t bother.
Find something else to tinker with.
There are ways to speed that up, you can hire a consultant or
attend InfusionCon or any other special implementation events
that they put on every quarter….
www.50em.com 11 If you have a time-bound event like a product launch you’re
planning for be sure to give yourself at least 3 months for
implementation or you’ll be disappointed and end up with a train
wreck. I’d recommend 6 months.
I’m an advanced user, and for my purposes, it took me 6 weeks
to carve out the time needed to dress up my health supplement
business to the nines with Infusionsoft automation, reporting
and API shenanigans.
It’s hard work, but glad I spent the time on it. I love the
automation Infusionsoft offers for that particular business
(Infusionsoft isn’t the answer for every business though, Office
Autopilot might fit your business better. Grab a custom
recommendation here).
www.50em.com 12 What I LOVE About Infusionsoft
The items below come with a disclaimer: it’s a big deal for me to
love something. I don’t have a long list here but there is a list
and that says a lot.
Most all of the features in Infusionsoft are just there, as
expected. The way I see it, the software should do what it’s
supposed to do and there’s nothing special about that.
But where an app over delivers is where I tend to love it. These
are a few features that to me are awesome.
24/7 Chat. This has saved me more times than I can count.
They do have someone there all night so those in other
countries aren’t inconvenienced and those that don’t want to
wait for 30 minutes to chat online with a customer service rep
during the day can get quicker access in the middle of the night.
To me, this effort to be available when everyone else is sleeping
goes a long way. I like it.
Worth mentioning that if you’re in the UK, they have people
there for you during business hours.
The fancy new campaign builder. This feature is the mother
load in Infusionsoft and it’s killer. When they launched it they
thought they won the world.
If you think the campaign builder will be a big deal for you, like I
did, you’ll want to schedule a demo to walk through it. It’s
awesome.
www.50em.com 13 This type of visual drag-and-drop drafting of campaigns was
only previously available in enterprise solutions like Marketo or
Eloqua. This one feature could be reason enough to use
Infusionsoft if it makes a difference to you.
The visual drag-and-drop campaign builder allows you to very
quickly draw out mind map style funnels and automation tasks.
You set up a whole campaign (campaign means just a set of
tasks to automate) and lay it all out visually. All you do is drag
and drop then connect the dots and add your content, then
publish.
Revolutionary (said with an Aussie accent).
The campaign builder literally does nothing to add to the
functionality of the software itself but the advantage it adds in
user friendliness is unmistakably awesome.
It makes drawing out sales funnels and autoresponders really
easy once you get the hang of it. Luckily, the campaign builder
is the most intuitive thing to learn in Infusionsoft which is a huge
bonus.
If you’re really visual person and just can’t get your mind around
an autoresponder that’s drawn out in the typical linear fashion
then this one feature might make all the difference for you.
This was the keynote feature in Infusionsoft’s Spring 2012
release. That one feature was what made me give Infusionsoft
another try (I used them a few years ago when the software
should have been called Confusionsoft).
www.50em.com 14 You’ll set up all your landing pages (only hosted by Infusionsoft)
autoresponders and web forms in the campaign builder.
To get a glimpse of this thing just hang out in the support
section of the website.
Navigation. You’d think that decent navigation should be a
given, but compared to their earlier versions of the software,
their new look is worlds better. Maybe if I hadn’t used their
earlier version the navigation wouldn’t be a big deal but I just
like it the way it is now.
Making your way around isn’t a big deal anymore. It looks good
too. It only took a few minutes to get the hang of where
everything is. There’s nothing hiding anymore.
A quick timesaver is a feature that lets you save favorites in your
app navigation for pages that you visit often.
The set up process for ecommerce is a dream. They finally put
everything you need all in one place so that you just roll through
six step ecommerce setup and you’re good to start taking
orders.
Email templates and editor. The email editor is awesome. This
of course is one of the most used features. If you email a lot
you’ll really appreciate the email editor. I’ve never used crazy
design heavy HTML emails, but for my use I love how fast I can
draw up and send out a broadcast email. Plain text HTML
emails look awesome on every mobile device because they
scale nicely.
www.50em.com 15 The template system makes it two clicks to have an email ready
to edit and send out. You can also create templates to use for
later just as fast.
It does have Spam Assassin style email rating now, which is
nice too. You are able to maintain many different from email
address and reply-to email addresses.
Searching. Again, seems simple but the ability to search based
on dozens of different criteria is great. When you need to find
contacts, orders, affiliates, tasks or anything else quickly,
there’s a box at the top right that lets you have anything at your
finger tips. That’s nice, but only one small piece.
What’s better is the built in ability to search for any contact or
order, etc and save that search into a report. This functionality
has saved me as I haven’t found anything that I couldn’t create
reports for except for a couple fulfillment issues. Reporting isn’t
at-a-glance easy in Infusionsoft but this feature has been
awesome. I can always find what I need very quickly.
This makes the CRM side of Infusionsoft very intuitive and it’s
easy for employees to learn how to manage contacts.
Data cleanup. Ever had a list with a bunch of duplicates and no
way to clean them up? Well, Infusionsoft’s data clean up feature
is awesome. It’s like a database scrubber on steroids. Makes for
real easy management of a big list.
Fantastic community and events. Infusionsoft has an
incredible community of users and developers. They have
forums that are great for connecting and getting answers,
especially great for developers.
www.50em.com 16 Infusionsoft also has local meetups and groups where you can
connect with other users to brainstorm and learn about how to
use the software better. Those are extremely useful. Infusioncon
(a big user conference) is epic. They bring in awesome speakers
and have tons of break out sessions for whatever you need.
They also have Infusion University where you can take basic and
advanced courses. Last is implementation days where you
come in to the Infusionsoft offices in Chandler, Arizona (by
Phoenix) and get your stuff done with an expert walking you
through it.
Nice move Infusionsoft. And now for the stuff you’ll never hear:
www.50em.com 17 What I HATE About Infusionsoft
Disclaimer: when something really makes you mad or has cost
you money you tend to not forget it. No software is perfect, but
Infusionsoft really misses it on a few things. That said, as a
human, I tend to remember the negative stuff pretty easily so
there’s a lot more here to vent about.
This in no way means that Infusionsoft is a bust and a lousy
piece of software these are just the things that really drive me
nuts about it.
What I’ve heard from you as I’ve answered questions is that you
appreciate the negative stuff more than the glowing reviews you
always here.
So here we go, buckle up.
Customer Service. While I can’t say they’re horrible in this
department, I’ve been disappointed so many times. There’s no
real personal touch as far as their customer service goes.
You do get an account manager but most people will never
meet or talk with them unless they have accounting issues.
All of your support issues are taken care of through phone
(fastest), chat (be prepared to wait 30 minutes), or by support
ticket (all your complicated questions have to wait for the senior
techs which can take up to TWO DAYS to get answers).
For the most part, if you have a question, just call them.
Otherwise you’re waiting forever. If you’re okay with that then
www.50em.com 18 this won’t be a big deal.
Reporting is meager at best. This isn’t what they’ll tell you
upfront because in their mind their reporting is awesome. But
from a marketer’s perspective, that’s just not the case.
True, Infusionsoft has some powerful reporting built in as I’ve
already mentioned, and I love that functionality, but for accurate
reporting, it’s far from ideal. All reports are based off of the
ability to search for field values in contacts and orders and that
is annoying.
You literally have to configure your own reports if you want any
worthwhile data. It comes with a few default reports configured
but they’re mostly worthless.
The dream of at-a-glance statistics is still a dream with
Infusionsoft. You can’t really pull off awesome reports with
Infusionsoft and that drives me nuts. Reports are critical.
They have a dashboard widget called the “Box-O-Stats” that
can be configured to show you some stats but it’s very limited
to the most simple calculations. That’s what I’m using currently
to try and get a snapshot of how things are going.
There are three big problems with the lack of thorough and
comprehensive reporting:
• The most valuable reports don’t exist and have to be created.
This is too much work for something that should be
included by default. It’s inconvenient and creates a poor
user experience. Plus, most people don’t know what
www.50em.com 19 reports are needed so why not configure the most critical
ones?
• There is no such thing as “conversion reports” with real at-aglance marketing data that matters. This is the most
frustrating report that is missing. If you want this data,
which you MUST have, you have to do your own math or
buy third party apps that do it for you.
• There is no visual representation of the data. You have to
figure out how to tie in the data via API to a business
dashboard like Leftronic or Domo if you want to see all that
data in a nice chart and have it all at your finger tips.
Poor web analytics. Infusionsoft has “web analytics” now since
the Spring 2012 release but they are so weak and I haven’t
found them to be accurate. Definitely not reliable tracking data
that can be used to determine crucial conversion rates,
customer value and all that stuff that matters to determine
marketing effectiveness.
Worst is that you have to buy additional third party software for
$49/month to really use Infusionsoft’s ability to track the lead
sources. That is another massive oversight.
A critical piece of data that is nice to have is to know whether or
not a contact has visited your site recently. Infusionsoft doesn’t
track user visits.
No split testing. There is no easy way to split test anything with
Infusionsoft… emails, landing pages, subject lines. Best solution
is to create two versions of something or use tags to tell which
version you send to a certain group of contacts (send one
version to A – L and another to M − Z). Really? That
complicated? Yep.
www.50em.com 20 Unless they fix this, real marketers are going to go elsewhere
I’m afraid.
Price creep…. Your core monthly cost doesn’t tell the whole
story. That’s rarely what you’ll be paying at the end of the day
because a lot of the things you will need cost extra.
Why? Because the things I’ve mentioned above don’t exist in
Infusionsoft but smart people have created third party software
that does those things.
Especially since they received $57M of investment from
Goldman Sachs. This kinda nickel and dime-ing (that’s what I
call it but they have every reason to charge for those things) is
likely to increase as they start acquiring complimentary software
companies, like GroSocial.
• Need a membership site? Infusionsoft’s Customer Hub is
awesome and turnkey but it costs extra.
• Need real analytics? That’s extra.
• Need better reports with charting? That’s extra.
• Need on demand post card follow up? That’s extra.
• Need text messaging capabilities? That’s extra too.
Many features that I think should be included in a core product
cost extra because Infusionsoft doesn’t have that functionality
and you’re left to pay a third party software company to provide
the functionality. Those costs can add up and more than double
your monthly if you decide you wanted that functionality. But it’s
not necessary for the majority of people.
In all seriousness, in the long run, the price doesn’t matter,
convenience and time saving solutions do, which Infusionsoft
www.50em.com 21 and it’s marketplace of vendors are full of.
Once your business gets rolling on automation you’ll be saving
more money and making more money so that the cost of the
automation software becomes superfluous because the value it
provides far overshadows any cost.
API nightmare. This is the biggest joke of all and it’s cost me a
lot of money. You probably will never need to mess with any API
development so this is meaningless but just so you know,
Infusionsoft’s API is a mess. It’s like the Fire Swamp from
Princess Bride. There are only a couple dozen people in the
world that know it well enough to cost effectively get stuff done.
The average API programmer is befuddled by it.
If you need API stuff done, let me know and I’ll set you up with
someone that can get it done.
And don’t think you can hire someone to figure it out. You
probably won’t want to spend months and thousands of dollars
for their learning curve. I’ve seen the API baffle guys that have
15 years experience in API programming.
Truth is, Infusionsoft has grown over time to be way more than it
was intended initially. What happens is that they keep building
on top of a foundation that wasn’t meant to hold a house that
big.
The result is that the API has been bootstrapped and adapted to
fit the growing software.
The architecture of Infusionsoft is something they won’t want
www.50em.com 22 you to bring up in a sales conversation because there’s nothing
good they can say about it other than they have really good
programmers. There’s no way to sugar coat it. The API is a
nightmare.
There’s rumor that they are rebuilding the API which is good and
bad. Bad because those like me who have spent thousands to
develop some custom stuff are in jeopardy of that going away
without notice. (Infusionsoft has a track record of doing things
without notice). It’s a good thing because if they fixed the API
the software could literally be a dream to work with.
NOTE: if you’re wanting to automate fulfillment via Infusionsoft
API don’t even start. You’re looking at a massive project that will
take months. I hacked a way around it if you’re curious just
contact me.
Phantom misfires that cost sales. It’s happened several times
that several customers have called in on the same day saying
they can’t order for some reason. As you can imagine, that is a
big deal. If they can’t order that means other people can’t order.
Granted, this has only happened a few times, but each time I
call up Infusionsoft and go through the rounds to troubleshoot
with their techs and because they couldn’t reproduce anything
on their end, to them there’s nothing wrong…
Well, that cost me $1000s and there’s nothing wrong?
“I’m sorry sir, there’s just nothing we can do for you. We can’t
reproduce the problem.” That’s true technically, but it’s no
consolation as you can imagine.
www.50em.com 23 This wouldn’t be a big deal if it didn’t jeopardize my trust that
the software isn’t costing me money at some level and there’s
nothing I can do about it. While some customers know us
enough to give us a call and say that it’s not working, how many
others just go away and never come back?
To be honest, I have very little confidence in the architecture of
the software and it’s codebase… until it’s entirely reworked,
especially the API.
Again, for most people with the most common uses, this API
conversation is meaningless, but to me, being a tech guy, I like
my stuff to be solid.
Does Infusionsoft work? Of course it does.
Black listed Infusionmail.com. This doesn’t happen anywhere
near as often as it used to but this is a big deal if you are a high
volume email sender. Infusionsoft has all their email going out
through the same domain, infusionmail.com.
If some idiot spams a bunch of people and infusionmail.com
gets blacklisted one day, you’re screwed for that day and so is
everyone else. If that is in the middle of a product launch or an
important campaign, there’s nothing you can do.
It takes the Infusionsoft team a bit to fix things and while they’re
fixing it, your delivery rates suffer… and any email your affiliates
send out with your link in them can get junked as well.
Again, this doesn’t happen as much any more and all told,
Infusionsoft is pretty dang good at delivering email nowadays.
www.50em.com 24 They’ve especially improved on email broadcasts. Their delivery
rates rival everyone else’s except for when the domain gets
blacklisted.
That probably won’t be a big deal for you but I have to mention
it.
New “fancy” order forms aren’t fancy. This one I thought was
a joke when I first heard about it. The Summer 2012 release
included some new order forms that are actually decent looking.
I was excited about it, until I talked to Infusionsoft about them.
Here’s the kicker… they’re not letting you host the new order
forms on your site any more because they don’t trust us to run a
secure site.
The old order forms, which you could use on your own domain,
are now considered “legacy” software which will be phased out
eventually.
What that means is that all orders have to be taken from
*.infusionsoft.com. That sucks for conversion. It sucks for
tracking. It sucks for branding. It sucks on just about every level
I can think of except one… if you don’t have your own SSL or
don’t want to deal with managing a secure website, then this
isn’t a big deal at all. To me, it’s a big deal and it pisses me off.
www.50em.com 25 Future Proofing: Is Infusionsoft a
Good Long-term Solution?
Since switching to any other platform once you’ve built out your
Infusionsoft app is a horrible nightmare of the worst kind, it’s
important to ask if Infusionsoft is where you want to be long
term.
If your business meets the profile I describe for ideal
Infusionsoft customers then you can’t go wrong.
If you do have any questions as to whether Infusionsoft is a
good fit, please drop me an email and let’s talk about it.
Beyond that there are a couple things that need mentioning that
nobody is talking about…
Thing one. This one thing makes me the most nervous about
Infusionsoft’s future:
They are quick to talk about the $54M they got from Goldman
Sachs as if that’s a kiss from the business gods.
I don’t see that as such a good thing. In fact it makes me
nervous. I hate it when companies sell out or get bought out.
The worst thing that can happen to a software company is to
have to answer to investors that don’t care two spits about
customer service. That tyrant-ish relationship effectively
disconnects the company from the customer’s real needs and
forces them to focus on one thing: growing revenue.
www.50em.com 26 It’s a delicate task to cater to investors and have the customer’s
best interest in mind at the same time. Few companies can do it
effectively and since Infusionsoft has struggled with customer
service already, that’s not a good sign. Not at all.
Do you think Goldman Sachs cares about you? Nope. They care
about your money and how quickly it can jump into their
pockets.
Thing two. Then there’s the temptation to grow too quickly now
that you have a budget to do whatever you want… that could be
a big problem if it’s not done methodically and systematically.
Quick growth means launching features before they’re ready to
add revenue, buggy systems, new customer service reps that
don’t know the software at all and frustrated customers.
This probably won’t effect your uses for Infusionsoft but here’s
what I think is going to happen:
• They’ll start buying up more companies to fill ancillary needs…
like GroSocial.
• They’ll try to bootstrap some solution to integrate them all.
• They’ll hire more people to cover the customer support needs
that aren’t well trained and customer support will suffer.
• They’ll start adding features that don’t really matter while
overlooking the things that do… all for the sake of adding
more sexiness that is marketable (perfect example: though
I love it the campaign builder adds no functionality, just
sexiness).
Does this mean that Infusionsoft is dead in the water? Not by a
long shot. Clate Mask and his team are good meaning dudes. It
www.50em.com 27 could mean that they come out with some stuff you really like
and I hope it means they make their software better.
I don’t think this hurts Infusionsoft’s long term viability as a
solution for your business because Infusionsoft isn’t going
anywhere. It’s growing rapidly. Infusionsoft works and it works
well for almost everything that you’ll need and it’ll stay that way.
I’m sticking with Infusionsoft for my supplement business
and I’m perfectly happy with that even though we’ve had a
couple disagreements.
And hey… if we fired everyone we’ve every had a disagreement
with we’d be broke, alone, and homeless… so if Infusionsoft is
your bus, jump on and stick with it. Go grab a demo.
www.50em.com 28 Concluding Infusionsoft Remarks
Happiness. Infusionsoft contributes to my happiness every
day… while every now and then we have a bad day or two.
No software is perfect. No software can do everything you want
exactly how you want it unless you build it yourself.
You just have to figure out how to use the resources available to
get things done in a way that will work for your business.
Infusionsoft allows you to do that.
Does it work? Absolutely. It has increased my sales by at least
85% in the last few months alone.
It takes time to get things together. To learn it. To apply it and
get things running smoothly but once you do, it’s amazing.
If your business fits the criteria, make a commitment and run
with it and don’t look back.
Recommendation. Would I recommend Infusionsoft? Yes I
would… and I do a lot. That said, I want it crystal clear that just
as with Office Autopilot Ontraport, I will reserve the
recommendation of Infusionsoft to only companies or
individuals that I know would be a good fit.
Click here to find out if you and your business are a good fit
for Infusionsoft.
www.50em.com 29 It’s true, Infusionsoft could literally work for any business, but I
don’t think it’s the best solution for certain types of businesses.
I go through all the details here.
I’m sure you wouldn’t want to waste time and money on
something that I knew wasn’t ideal.
Hopefully I make that clear because when I was shopping
Infusionsoft and Office Autopilot Ontraport, there was nobody
there to point me in the right direction. I had to experience the
software for myself in order to know if it fit my business or not.
I don’t want you to go through that.
As a marketing strategist and a productivity and business
automation junkie, I won’t steer you wrong. I promise.
Features I’ve never used…
I’ve never used the sales pipeline and lead scoring functionality
in Infusionsoft because my supplement business is not a B2B
thing. I’ve heard really good things about it though.
I’ve just now started digging in to running an affiliate program
with my supplement business. I’ve never heard a negative thing
about the affiliate program that Infusionsoft has, it’s one of their
strong points. Only issues is the rare blacklisting which rarely
happens anymore.
www.50em.com 30 I also stay away from using their shopping cart. It’s not a self
hosted solution and therefore I don’t bother with it. I like to have
full control of my shopping cart.
I literally use everything else to the nines.
Infusionsoft Resources
What’s interesting about this is that Infusionsoft doesn’t do a
great job of providing upfront info about their product but they
do a great job of educating about business automation.
Here are a few of the resources they offer:
• FREE Product Demo
• The Perfect Customer Lifestyle Workbook (PDF)
• The Small Business Marketing Guide (PDF)
• Marketing and Automation Blog
Discover How to Automate Your Sales and Marketing www.50em.com 31