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Today on Infusioncast, Joshua Millage talks with Clint Hosman, executionist at SixthDivision, a company that helps users implement Infusionsoft into their businesses. Clint tells us how he went from being a professional mountain bike racer to working at Infusionsoft, and then made the move to SixthDivision.
There are a lot of ways to implement Infusionsoft, and often the best way to leverage it is unclear. Clint saw an opportunity with SixthDivision to help people get the most out of Infusionsoft for their specific business needs. SixthDivision walks users through the steps to a successful Infusionsoft implementation tailored to their needs. They offer an individualized consultation, or a 2-day intensive makeover for your business. After visualizing and clarifying your operation and goals, you can structure Infusionsoft’s immense automation capabilities to best serve your purposes.
Clint talks about how Infusionsoft users also have to be developers. Development requires a blueprint for execution and a level of expertise that most users don’t have. SixthDivision bridges the gap between idea and implementation by helping the user to construct a detailed map of their business, visualize where they want to go, and set a timeline for goals and expectations. Infusionsoft can then be developed along those lines.
Most people want to use as much of Infusionsoft’s capabilities as they can, but you may only need 10% of those capabilities to accomplish your goals. Anything more will add complexity, but not necessarily value. Infusionsoft is a vehicle for moving the content of your business forward; it is not an element of the business itself. The purpose of the tool is to simplify your operations by automating as many necessary tasks as possible so you can stay focused on accomplishing the primary tasks you need to do.
Infusionsoft is also scalable so that as your business grows you have the capability to update and expand in response to changes in the market, new technologies, and your changing organizational environment. Therefore, the tool is never set – you will always be in development with it. In fact, if you aren’t consistently reviewing and updating your implementation, it’s a sign your business is stagnating.
Clint employs a basic three-step process for implementing Infusionsoft:
Most people want to customize first, but you have to have a vision and know your campaign elements before you can set up the tool to help you achieve your goals. You also have to learn to harvest and use hard data for planning. Infusionsoft will help you get that data, but you have to decide which data you actually need to gather and measure. SixthDivision exists to help you with that as well.
At SixthDivision, Clint and the rest of the team can help you get down to the fundamentals – marketing, strategy, and decision-making. They identify what works by quantifying campaign effectiveness through gathering and measuring relevant data, then build an Infusionsoft implementation that will free you to be productive and stay on track while you grow your business. They help you simplify your work so that you can accomplish more.
Thank you for joining us.
You can connect with Clint Hosman on Facebook and Instagram.
Show Links:
[transcript height=”200px”]
Joshua: Hello Everyone, welcome back to another episode of Infusioncast. Today I had the opportunity of interviewing Clint Hosman, and Clint has been a friend of mine for about three years. I met him at a SixthDivision makeover when I traveled out to Arizona, and we became fast friends. One of the things that I love about Clint is his clarity of thought and his no-BS style of presenting Infusionsoft theory and tactics, and you’re going to get a lot of that today in this interview.
Clint has probably worked with more applications than the majority of people. He started as an Infusionsoft support rep and then moved into helping SixthDivision with their makeovers and helping people implement high-level campaigns into their applications, so Clint is a wealth of information. I really encourage you to connect with him, too. He gives some ways that you can connect with him at the end of the episode and he really is just an incredible person, he’s very helpful. If you’re looking for a turbo or nitro boost in getting your application up and running, I can recommend SixthDivision and the services that they offer, so I would highly encourage you to go check out sixthdivision.com and talk to Chase. He’s another good buddy of mine, and he can get you hooked up with a makeover. Without further ado, let’s get into it.
Speaker 1: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast, the only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host, Joshua Millage, as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.
Joshua: Hello Everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Infusioncast podcast, the only podcast where we teach you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. My guest today is Clint Hosman. Clint is the executionist at SixthDivision where he helps empower entrepreneurs by igniting the power of their Infusionsoft applications. Clint, welcome to the show.
Clint: Thanks a lot, Josh, glad to be here.
Joshua: Man, you’re probably one of my first Infusionsoft friends, if I think about it. If I go back in time my origin story involves coming to a SixthDivision session where I got to know you and Bret, and we’ve been good friends since. I’m curious what your story looks like. Everyone seems to have a pretty interesting story, especially if you’re connected to SixthDivision. Where did you start? Tell me what it was like to get involved in this crazy community.
Clint: It’s actually kind of a weird thing. If you would have told me ten years ago that this is how I’d be providing for my family and making a living, I would have told you you’re crazy. I made the really expert decision, the nutshell version is I made a really fantastic choice, all sarcasm intended on that, of dropping out of college to race mountain bikes professionally.
I dropped out of school, proceeded to focus all of my energy on mountain bikes and eventually race professionally and manage a team out of Southern California called Evomo. The owner of the team was a … is still a Disney Imagineer, graphic design guy, who loved racing bikes, so I managed the team, sponsorships and all this stuff, and by the time I wizened up and realized I needed self-focus and self-discipline and went back to school, know that that’s a path everybody has to take, I realized I needed to personally go back to school, and I was working towards a master’s degree and like, “Oh, I’m going to graduate and go into the outdoor industry, because this is what I do and this is how I do it.”
That was about 2010, and then economy tanked so pretty much all of my connections in that world were getting let go from the respective companies that they were in. My wife, simultaneously to all this, is an insurance agent here in Arizona, and we had bought the Infusionsoft app for her business. At the time, Infusionsoft was actually only two miles down the road from our place.
Joshua: Nice.
Clint: Yeah, it was coincidental. We went through all of the learning challenges of implementing Infusionsoft when we bought it, they didn’t do any of the on-boarding, and so between the two of us, I tell people, it was like a couple of monkeys staring at a math problem for the first six months. We were looking at each other and go, “We’re smart people, right? We can figure this out, right?”
Eventually we got to a workable level. I graduate with my master’s degree, and I start looking around and I’m, “Well, things aren’t going well in the outdoors thing, so I need to get a job that actually pays.” I’m, “I know Infusionsoft, they’re down the road,” and so I applied there and went through a really awesome interview process with one of their guys named David Bonney, which is a completely different conversation about how to hire people. He has a product called HireToFit, which is fantastic, but knew that I wanted to be on that team and got hired there. I did success coaching, kick-start coaching, whatever the crap you want to call it, whatever they’re changing the name to this month.
I did that for two months … not two months; for two years and realized I was hired on as employee one-sixty-nine at Infusionsoft and by the time I left there were over five hundred employees. There was a big amount of change, and I’m looking around at it and, of course, you can only … everybody’s all, “Find your Why and then you’ll never work, and it’ll be exciting.” I don’t believe that, I believe that you find your Why through doing, and at the time I was struggling to, “What is my place at Infusionsoft?” I realized I wasn’t finding my place at Infusionsoft, because I’m not cut out for corporate America, and that’s where Infusionsoft is going. They’re going to be a corporation, fantastic. That’s no way a knock against them, but at about the same time I was realizing that this isn’t where I belong anymore. Dave Lee and Brad Martineau reached out to me, they’d heard what I was doing over there at Infusionsoft and asked me to come over and chat. I came over and had lunch.
I had no intentions when I came over, when I first started talking with them, of ever working here. “We’d like to talk to you.” I’m, “I’m really happy where I’m at.” I was still in this, “I’m going to climb the corporate structure, be a manager and blah, blah, blah.” Looking back at it, I’m almost embarrassed to say that. After a month, month and a half of conversations with them, I went to ICON 2013 and Brad was presenting there, and he’s going through what would essentially become the SixthDivision methodology. This is version negative 1.0 on the methodology that we utilize now.
He goes through this presentation of the breakout, it’s a crowded room, and I’m in there because I just want to hear how he’s presenting and I’m really trying to make a decision … I should actually backpedal just a minute. Five months before this the then product manager/whatever his title was at Infusionsoft called all of support together and said, “Look, Guys, I was talking to Brad Martineau at SixthDivision and he told me he does the same five things for every client.” He looks around, there’s a dramatic pause. He looks around, and he’s all, “Guys, we need to figure out what those five things are.”
Everybody got this serious glassy-eyed face, “Yeah, we can do this.” I’m the only one looking around, I’m all, “Son of a bitch! Do you realize what just happened there? Guys, we’re all on the losing team! No! We’re trying to define somebody else’s process, we’re supposed to be the smartest people in the Infusionsoft building, and we’re trying to copy what somebody else is doing!” That was my inclination that the jig was up for me in services there. Being a competitive athlete, I knew I was on the losing team. When it comes to implementing Infusionsoft, I was on the wrong team.
Joshua: In a way, it was that SixthDivision had a productized service and process that because … Brad is brilliant and all of you are brilliant, you guys have a process you take people through to give them an outcome, and it sounds to me like Infusionsoft was more of they were kind of matching and reacting to what everyone was bringing to them. Is that a correct assessment of the two worlds, I guess you could say?
Clint: Yeah, you’re right. Look, anything that I say about Infusionsoft, Josh … I love Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft keeps my babies fed, and I love the Infusionsoft family but Infusionsoft, everybody … and this is getting to a later conversation as well, there’s so many ways to do any one thing inside of Infusionsoft that it creates its own confusion. Everybody there at Infusionsoft who implements Infusionsoft has their own methodology for doing it. If you have forty different people developing forty different ways, now be the tech support rep who has to understand potentially forty plus different ways of doing Infusionsoft, it becomes difficult to manage.
Joshua: That’s right.
Clint: When I flash back to ICON 2013, I’m sitting there with this backdrop of all right, I understand that I’m on the wrong team. I know that I want to implement Infusionsoft, and I want to have an impact on people and their businesses. I know that it can actually work but I’m not seeing it work. Brad goes through the beginning stages of what would become our academy process and he’s presenting. He goes through and he lays it out, and then he makes his pitch.
As soon as he makes his pitch, I’m sitting there watching, literally people get up and start running to the back of the room with order forms. Running, and I’m, “That’s it!” People were so hungry for our methodology, our proven strategy that they were running to the back. When anybody says, “No, no, no! I know what I’m doing.” People are, “Perfect, take my money. Guide me, show me what to do,” because everybody else understands the capacity of it, they just don’t know how to do it.
That was kind of the decision point for me of, “All right, yup, I’m out.” The very next week I turned in my resignation, and I came over her to Sixth. That night they actually sold out. At the time SixthDivision only did makeovers, and the makeover is a two-day intensive, you fly into our office, and we figure out what’s going on, what you want to get done, and we crush it out. Not only do we go through the strategy portion of it but we actually build it. That’s nice …
Joshua: I will say it’s a beautiful thing, because I can say with one hundred percent confidence, it was the lightbulb in my … when I became conscious of not only the power but the speed that I could implement things, as soon as I knew how to think about it, I could get after it and get it done. I don’t actually ever really endorse things this heavily on air, but I can say if it wasn’t for SixthDivision I don’t know where CodeBOX would be, and I really don’t know where we’d be with our new plugin LifterLMS, it’s because it all started there, sitting in that conference room with Bret sketching things out and really learning how to think about the system.
I think what it does, Clint … I’m going to go on a tangent here, but what it does is it’s a BS detector to see what you know about your business. If you have a poorly functioning business, your app’s not magically going to make it function better. You have to have an idea and a vision of where you want to take things and the experience you want people to have and then you build that into your app. Then there’s a way of doing that that’s really done well, and I think one of the things that I learned at SixthDivision was I saw a bunch of ways to improve my business. It went way beyond the app. That’s something that you guys should maybe sell. “We’re also a business therapy.”
Clint: That’s the thing, is where we’ve come in the last two years we’ve taken that methodology, and we’ve packaged it. What we realized specifically is people get the potential of Infusionsoft and what they don’t tell you at Infusionsoft, bless their hearts, is they’re going to sell you on sunshine, send one message to the red-headed gingers in Edinburgh and send a completely different message to olive-skinned people in Spain. Through the powers of automation you can make that happen.
Everybody’s, “Yeah, okay! Awesome, I see that. I see it!” What they don’t tell you is when you buy Infusionsoft, you’re buying two hats; you’re buying the user hat, which is what you want to be, but you’re also buying the developer hat, which is what you don’t want to be. You have to develop that thing to get the message to the red headed ginger in Edinburgh and the olive-skinned person in Spain. Creating that, what we refer to that as is the gap.
On one side of the gap, if you’re imagining a canyon, you have idea. On the other side of the gap you have implementation of the idea, and in between there is where all good ideas go and die. The business owner comes in, they have a fantastic idea. They see Infusionsoft as the tool that can make that happen but they get so caught up in the implementation of the idea and the minutia of Infusionsoft that they never actually see the idea come to fruition. What the person does is they see their dream home, they see, “Oh my business can automate, it can do this and I can do this.” Then they go to Home Depot, and Home Depot is Infusionsoft, and they say, “Hey, I want to build this business, what do I need to do?”
“Uh, well, you’re going to need a hammer,” says Infusionsoft, “And this is a great hammer, see it swings and it pounds nails. Then you’re probably going to need some lumber, so you’re going to need to send some email stuff.”
What entrepreneurs do is they misconstrue the tool, which is Infusionsoft, with their vision, which is the home. If I was to take you, Josh, and I was to say, “Josh, let’s build your dream house,” just on a very fundamental level, before I ever go to Home Depot and have a build list of what I need, what do you have to have?
Joshua: You have to capture that blueprint and that vision of what’s being built.
Clint: That’s it, you got to have a blueprint. You have to sit down with an architect and you have to be able to map out, “Here’s what I want this room to look like. I want two floors on this thing, and I want this, and I want that.” The architect’s going to tell you, “Josh, that’s not possible.” Or the architect’s going to say, “That’s fantastic, Josh. Here’s the tools that we’re going to need to build that house.” But Infusionsoft isn’t architects, that’s not what they do. They sell a tool. Unless you go out and you pay somebody to do it for you, it’s up to you to put on that architect hat, blueprints before you ever start building.
Joshua: Yup, couldn’t agree more with that. That’s what …
Clint: I don’t … go ahead, sorry.
Joshua: I was just going to say one of the fundamental things that I learned when I was at my SixthDivision experience with you guys was about building things out of the app and organization, and the importance of doing those things. When you go through the process of that, of even just naming conventions and things it really, “Okay, I’m going to categorize things based on stages and processes in my business. Oh, wait a second, I don’t have any yet,” so you have to really start to think. It’s such high leverage stuff, and I think depending on where the listener’s at in their business life cycle, I think there’s always a … it’s always a good idea to go check back in with where you’re blueprint is at for you current state of your business and where you’re headed to next, at least by yearly or on a quarterly basis. We kind of do it on a quarterly basis at CodeBOX and LifterLMS. Structurally and strategy-wise this is where we’re going, and then we spend that quarter executing and building things in the app, but we know where we’re headed, because we have that map, and we’ve spent that time thinking through where we want to go.
Clint: That’s it exactly. The entrepreneur themselves love it. Entrepreneurs suffer from severe ADD. We go through, and we spend the majority of our time putting out fires. As much as we’d like to think about that we’re proactive, the reality is most entrepreneurs are reactive. The first step to any process in building is taking a step back and thinking about the process before you … we call it “blimplementing” where they’re blueprinting while they’re implementing. It’s the equivalent of this architect saying, “I’m going to jump in there and I’m going to put out the fire with this magic of Infusionsoft,” before taking the time to consider and the time to review, like what we’re talking about; what is my priority?
Then once you have that priority set, you have to have that laser focus. You have to have that laser focus and the commitment that no matter what the fire is that comes up, I’m going to stay on this for the quarter, for the week, for the month, whatever it is, and get that idea executed, but then understand that, especially inside of Infusionsoft, everything’s interrelated. That I may be implementing a marketing strategy, but now how does that marketing campaign or that strategy connect to the other components of my business?
We have to take in reality and even bigger step back and look at my business, and I have to be able to say, “I have marketing leads, marketing campaigns, what do I want them to do? Do I want them to customer my sales rep, go online and buy something?” Whatever it is, and you have to be able to look at the business holistically, dive down into the individual component, and build relative to understanding that it’s going to connect to these other components of my business.
Joshua: That’s right, absolutely. I’ve been involved in the strategic coach circles and kind of the listening to a lot of Dan Sullivan stuff, and he talks a lot about that high leverage activity, and that is a high leverage activity. I think as entrepreneurs we get emotional about, “Well, I don’t want to make time to do this, because it’s not actually getting my hands dirty,” but you got to step back and look at what you’re building.
Clint: You have to deal in reality as well. We look into things like that high leverage, what is your most valuable thing? What do you do? “I’m a real estate guy.” Okay, so real estate guy, what is your one thing? “My one thing is that I close people.” Fantastic! Then they’re going to tell you, “Then you need to focus on that one thing.” Fantastic, great idea and concept. Now, what if you’re a one man show in real estate? You read that, you hear that and you go, “My one thing is closing. I need to be closing.”
Okay, cool. Now you don’t have any time to develop Infusionsoft, and so just being honest with yourself with where you’re at, “Okay, my one thing is closing, however, I don’t have the resources right now to pay somebody to do Infusionsoft. I have to take the time to put on my developer hat and build this resource,” or, do I pay somebody to do it? Everybody’s in a different position in their business, they’re either the “solopreneur” … our advice to everybody is, ultimately, as you scale your business, you’re going to need somebody on your team that owns Infusionsoft.
Reality is there’s limited time in the day, and you’re not going to have endless amounts of time to do Infusionsoft forever. The goal is to get you to this level where you can focus on that one thing, but what is it going to take today to get you to that level, is the real question.
Joshua: Yeah, Man, that’s really good advice, especially for the entrepreneur who’s on that cusp of extreme growth. They’re up against that. I think entrepreneurship is actually, and I wish someone would have told me this when I started, but it’s actually an exercise in surrendering things. If you can get that early on you’re going to excel so much faster, because it shifts … you look at something, you identify, “Oh, here’s a process, or something that I need to do,” and instead of just doing it you actually develop a system so that someone else can do it and Infusionsoft has taught me a lot about that. I will say that.
Let’s switch gears real quick, Clint, because I want to get into some of the tactics and I’m excited to talk to you, because I know you’ve had so many, hundreds, probably, maybe even thousands of businesses you’ve worked with over your course of working for Infusionsoft and SixthDivision, and you’ve seen a lot. I’m curious if we were to do an 80/20 analysis, what are the over arcing, twenty percent of things that you think people should focus on to get that eighty percent of return on the Infusionsoft app? I want to preface this by saying I get really annoyed when people are going … when they use the whole pitch, “Use more than ten percent of your Infusionsoft application,” because the thing is, that ten percent could be giving you ninety … If it’s ten percent of really high leverage stuff, that could be all you’d actually need.
Clint: That’s right. You’re exactly right.
Joshua: I think it’s a poor mindset to put people into a feeling like they need to activate every little square inch. That’s not why you buy Infusionsoft, is to, “Let’s see how much of the capacity of the app I can use.” Let’s start from the perspective of your business. Let’s do that, I want to do that with you. What are some of the processes that you’re, “These are really just high leverage things that people should look at using Infusionsoft to help them with?”
Clint: All right. Feel like you’re only using ten percent of Infusionsoft to sell SixthDivision so you’re exactly right. The reality is everybody’s ten percent, though, is completely different. That kind of goes to the next point, which is okay, everybody’s ten percent of using Infusionsoft is completely different. My ten percent could actually be Josh’s one hundred percent, and that’s okay. There’s a certain type of entrepreneur, this isn’t everybody, that is a collector of tools. They’re going to be saying, “Clint, what tools should I be using to leverage Infusionsoft? Clint, what tools have you seen be really successful?”
You have to put the tool conversation to the side, and you have to focus on instance. Infusionsoft in and of itself is an amazing tool. In reality you don’t need a ton of add-ons. In my typical build, when I’m working with a client, and keep in mind I’ve implemented Infusionsoft for everybody from IBM to the Church of Scientology, in makeover in-depth process, and everybody in between.
Joshua: That needs to be on your bio, I wish that was on your bio.
Clint: I would except I’m afraid of the Church of Scientology, too.
Joshua: That’s true. Got it.
Clint: The reality is, what if somebody needs … the majority of, the majority of what a business needs out of Infusionsoft is contained within Infusionsoft. It’s just a matter of understanding the tool that you have and looking at it in a use-point of an instance. What we empathize with people is, number one, Infusionsoft and implementing Infusionsoft is a marathon, it’s not a sprint. You are never going to be done implementing Infusionsoft. I hate to break it to everybody, but your marketing campaign that you put out five years ago with the lead caption on your website is old and failed. You have to refresh it. That means it’s going to need constant rejuvenation. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Now going down from that, every campaign inside of Infusionsoft goes through a three-step iterative process. Number one, organization; you organize the idea, what it is you want to do, what it is you want to accomplish? You hit play on that thing, but you build in the ability for that play or that campaign to gather data. How well is it performing? What kind of metrics?
Every campaign is going to be different. If I’m doing a generic lead capture campaign, how many leads is it converting? How many leads did I get in today, last week, last month? You need to be able to have some basic metrics in place, because it’s going to come into this too; which is optimize. Optimize is, “Oh, I realized that email number three is actually converting better than email number one. I’m going to shift it around.” You start getting into, “Maybe instead of doing an email here I should have my sales rep do a call here.” You’re changing minor things about it.
Now the last phase that it’s in the life cycle of a campaign is actually the pipedreams that Infusionsoft sells you, which is customize; right message, right time, for the right person. Most people are going to step back, and they’re going to want to start at customize. The reality is the majority, I’m talking out of a hundred businesses that I‘ve worked with, two or three have actual hard data on customers, leads, prospects that translates into a justifiable reason to customize a campaign. We’ve got to get to the idea of you customize based off of data, based off of fact; not off of your gut instinct as an entrepreneur. Then we have to roll it back so the question is what should I be doing to leverage it? Restate the question for me so I can pull into context again, would you Josh?
Joshua: Yeah, in simple terms, what is twenty percent of the things that people should be focusing on when they open up a new app to get eighty percent of some sort of leverage? I know that that’s hard, because every business is different, but what I’m asking is if you could average all of the different conversations and experiences you had you can say … because I can’t ask that to everybody because they just don’t have an experience with a lot of Infusionsoft users, but you do, so if you could pull a trend line and be, “Yeah, these are the things that seem … it seems like most that come through the door, if I could them to buy into the fact then that they need to focus on these few things, they would just see massive growth.”
Clint: The number one thing that if I could get … anybody could buy into with implementing Infusionsoft … if you’re a new user, let’s start from that paradigm. You’re a new user, you just bought the app, the number one thing I would want you to do is not do anything inside of the app. You’re going to want to leverage the investment that you just made right now. If that’s broadcasting, fine. That’s okay but what you have to do is you have to take the time, first of all, to realize A, Infusionsoft is not my business. It is a tool to build my business. Number one after that … number two I guess it would be, what is my business? You have to take a look at your business, and you have to realize model and the different components that go into it. You have to take a step back and blueprint out what it is that you want Infusionsoft to do.
There’s essentially … if I was to be really simplistic, and this is the truth, there’s two types of businesses. There’s businesses that if I want to give you money … you’re the business owner Josh, I want to give you money I can either … business A is you have an online store, and I can just give you money, and you don’t have to deal, you’re fulfilled with me. Then there’s the business of to give you money I have to consult with you. There’s two types of businesses: businesses where I have to drive through a consultation, businesses where I have to drive through a sale directly. Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot of variance. What people confuse here is Infusionsoft is not your business. I’ll say that again, Infusionsoft is the tool that delivers the experience of your business in an automated way to your clients, to your prospects, to your leads. Infusionsoft, we always say, is like a cup, like a little Dixie cup.
Joshua: I love it.
Clint: Developing that Dixie cup is standard. I will take any business through and break it down first and then what you have to understand is your business is not the cup, your business is the flavor inside the cup. Your business is the Kool-Aid, your business is the Gatorade. That’s it. Infusionsoft is merely the cup of transferring the flavor of the experience of your business to leads, prospects, and clients. You have to take a step back and you have to say, “Okay, how do I want to administer this?” When you speed up the idea and the ability to implement ideas, and that’s what we’re really focused on here at Sixth, is we want to standardize the ability to cover the gap, the gap between ideas and implementation. If I can speed that up, because the reality is you’re going to have to go through ten bad ideas in marketing to get to one stellar idea.
Joshua: So true.
Clint: The entrepreneur’s going to spend five months developing, implementing one idea that in the meantime, if they actually get it done, the idea is old and stale. If I can speed up your ability to implement ideas, I’m going to speed up your ability to get through those ten bad ideas to get to one good idea, and so you have take … I roll it back one more time, and I say, “Okay, what’s the thing that they should be doing?” The number one thing they should be doing is developing a plan first. Once they have that plan, realize now I have to prioritize, what it is? I have marketing, I have sales, I have fulfillment. What is my priority? Once I have a priority, it’s either I’m in every entrepreneur generally, and I roll back. I’ll say eighty percent of entrepreneurs are always going to say, “I need more leads.”
More leads is seldom the issue. It’s generally, you need to follow up or leverage the people that you have, because if I dump more leads into a broken system, it’s just water out at the end of pole end. It’s out, it’s done. Worst of all, now they leave with a bad taste, they leave with a bad experience. More leads is seldom the answer. Typically where we start with a client and blueprinting is on the fulfillment side. CodeBOX, you guys build kick ass websites and apps and stuff like that. Now, when I would sit down with you guys is I would start at fulfillment, and I would say, “Okay, what do you sell, Josh?” We sell custom websites, we sell template websites, and we sell apps. I would list out, literally list out, in boxes the things that I sell. Now from that position I’m going to move backwards. Josh you sell website design generally, to do that do I have to talk to you first, or can I just buy that product remotely?
Joshua: Yeah, you’ve got to talk to me first.
Clint: I’ve got to talk to you, so now I draw a box under sales, and I would categorize it under sales as sales process. All right, cool. Now, in this instance, I know that I sell websites, to buy my website you have to talk to me first. Now I move over into marketing. Now I identify the different marketing campaigns and that now I know that all my sales have to go through a sales rep or whoever it is on your time. Now I have a purpose for those marketing campaigns. The idea is I speak at conferences, I do lead capture, whatever it is, but the end goal of each of those marketing campaigns is get them to talk to Josh.
Now I have a direction. I step back, and before I’ve implemented I’ve created a blueprint. I sell these things. I have a sales process. I need marketing campaigns to drive to this. Now I can take a look at that, and I can say, “Okay, where is my priority.” I do good on the fulfillment side, but I’m losing people that I talk to. I’ll have a really good conversation, I’ll put in a calendar reminding me to call them, I’ll get busy, but I’ll forget. You need a sales process. You need to standardize your sales process, so people aren’t falling through the cracks. You may legitimately have a solid sales process and a solid fulfillment process, and now marketing is the thing, but the reality is each person is going to be different in what their number one thing is that they need to focus on as far as when it actually comes to implementing. I don’t know if that answers the question. It’s long-winded but there’s really no simple answers.
Joshua: You’re right. It is a very difficult question but I think you did a great job answering it. A follow up question that I have around that, because I agree with you, is that very few people do a good job of following up, and so what’s … what do you recommend for people when it comes to that? I’m guilty of it, too. What I’ve seen it’s even just the … a basic newsletter is light years ahead of doing nothing. Is that something that you would recommend, and is there anything that a rule of thumb that you tell people, “Hey, try this sort of follow up campaign.”
Clint: That gets into a strategy question. The basic idea is, yeah, anybody that you don’t close should be going somewhere, and Infusionsoft is really a game of what if. What if somebody opts in but never converts? What if I have a conversation, and they don’t call me back? I’m always planning on the “what if.” There’s a number of strategies around any given scenario. What a lot of entrepreneurs will do is they’ll get it back and forth on the mental ping pong of strategy. Digital marketers say that I should do this, and Kennedy says that I could do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everybody has got a personal opinion on strategy.
The bottom line at the end of the day is I don’t, and this pisses people off, I don’t know what strategy works for your market. I don’t know. I do know that any strategy is better than no strategy. Let’s pick one, let’s build it, but let’s build it with a way that gives us reporting so that we can measure its effectiveness. Seriously, you name Infusionsoft or a marketing strategy that’s leveraged in the community I’ve built to it. There’s no magic pill for these things. You literally have to get done with the mental ping pong of positive … if you’re always comparing if I have two … this is the … an entrepreneur is going to build a pro and con list to every decision and they’re going to say, generically, I have the Dan Kennedy strategy, I have digital marketer strategy. Pro to digital marketer strategy is this, con to digital marketing strategy is this, and they’ll do the same thing to whoever else they’re comparing against. Whatever idea, somebody who says they know what they’re doing tells them.
What we do in that instance is we compare the pros of one to the cons of another. If we’re doing that continuously, we’re never really going to come to a positive outcome. We’re going to be stuck in this limbo, because I’m comparing pros to con. What I have to get in the habit of when thinking of a strategy is what are the pros? Do the pros of the digital marketer outnumber or outweigh the pros of the alternative? Yes or no. Make a decision. Make a decision and go with it. I’ll tell you this though, the majority of the people, and keep in mind who we’ve worked with like the majority of the ICON Ultimate marketers. The majority of everybody in between, I go back to that organize, optimize, customize. I would say of all the people I’ve worked with, there’s only four to six people that are actually in the customize phase, legitimately. Everybody wants to think that they’re the exception to one rule, Josh, and that one rule is fundamentals. Everybody’s an exception. Everybody’s a freaking genius. Everybody’s the exception. Nobody’s crap stinks. Everybody’s got the best idea. Fantastic. Stop considering yourself the exception and focus on fundamentals.
Fundamentally here’s what you need to be doing. You need to be capturing leads. You need to be following up with your leads. You need to plan for what ifs. What if I don’t covert? You need a long-term nurture. You need some kind of crawl-back campaign. What strategy do I implement? Freaking pick one. It doesn’t matter. Just pick one and roll with it.
Once you just pick a strategy, and again it doesn’t matter what strategy it is, and just implement it, you’ll start seeing immediate results, because it’s something more than you’re currently doing. I have opinions about strategy. Like Dan Kennedy content, if I had landed on a long form web form or webpage or open page, whatever, I’d shoot myself. I’d never buy from that person. Crap sells like hotcakes. I have to get myself out of the idea of what I like to see and I have to put myself in what do my clients like to see?
Joshua: I want to reiterate something you just said before we go, or before you go on to our next point is that just implement something gives you three to five percent wins, and I think everyone gets really, frankly, just pissed off. They’re, “Oh, I’d only improve things by a couple of percentage.” It’s,” Yeah, you do ten of those at two percent and look how far you came.” Stop looking for that ninety percent growth lever. If you keep doing and implementing, you’ll hit one of those every now and then, but that’s like a lotto ticket.
Clint: It is.
Joshua: I agree with exactly what you said, it’s pick a strategy, implement it and then implement some other things, and then come back around at some point in time or weekly, or whatever your cadence is, and look at what’s working and then iterate accordingly. Everyone hears that, but no one actually does it.
Clint: That’s right.
Joshua: No one actually reviews the effectiveness of their campaigns and then therefore they go, “Well, it’s not making me a million dollars yet.” It’s, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not right now.”
Clint: Yeah, totally right.
Joshua: Chip away.
Clint: Look, Josh, everybody gets a trophy nowadays. Everybody’s the exception and everybody’s the exception to the rule of fundamentals. Not everybody, not everyone … I have three kids, and I love my three kids. They’re beautiful children. They’re not rocket scientists. They’re not splitting atoms at five and a half, two and a half, and six months. Stop thinking of yourself as an exception and start realizing taking … having an honest conversation with yourself or with your team and saying we need basic implementation, we need basic strategy, we need basic … whatever it is you need at that point and focus on the fundamentals.
If you just focus on the fundamentals you’ll leverage a lot. You’ll leverage so much. Having been in so many people’s Infusionsoft apps, we see everybody’s dirty laundry. The realty is a lot of people don’t even know how they got to where they’re at. The reality is the people that are telling you, you need this nurture and that nurture and this nurture aren’t living off of broadcasts, and that it’s dangerous. If you’re going to sustain growth, you have to know what messages are actually relevant and which ones are actually hitting with your people. You’re not going to do that until you put the baseline in first.
Joshua: Right. It’s so good Clint. I want to be respectful of your time. You’ve been so generous spending this much time with us, and I want to wrap up the interview by asking you about what you do to put yourself in a peak state of success, because I know you’re not a superhero even though in my mind when I picture you, you are wearing a cape.
Clint: Nah!
Joshua: You seem to have such a positive outlook on life, Clint, I’m serious about that though. Every time I’ve seen you at ICON in the past few years and whenever we talk, you give me a big huge hug and it makes everything better in my life, and I really do appreciate that. How do you stay there? I know you probably have off days, we all do, but is there any routines that you have? I know you’re very active, and you get outside, is that part of it? I’m just curious, because I think that what I love what about this kind of segment at the end is that I love to see how human everyone is and what they do to improve.
Clint: Lots of caffeine.
Joshua: I’m guilty of that one, too. I literally have an account open at the coffee shop, I kid you not. I don’t even have to pay or to give them my name. It’s pretty bad.
Clint: Just put it on my tab.
Joshua: Put it on my tab.
Clint: For me it’s I’ve realized what I am and what I’m not. This may be a little bit too personal, I don’t know, natively I’m kind of a depressed person. Natively I’m really an introvert who’s learned to be an extrovert, because that’s how I make my money. I’ve accepted that. I’m okay with that. I realize that to function well for me, day-to-day, I need a couple of things. One, I need … personally I need structure, and I need physical activity. I raced mountain bikes for ten years now. When a business comes in, I’m sitting at my desk with them for ten hours a day. That’s hard, and so I have to really tune into my scheduling. My mornings are like clockwork. I wake up at 4:30, and I go to CrossFit to work out for an hour. I get the demons out of the building.
I come home. I’m religious, spiritual, whatever you want to call it these days, whatever is cool, I read scriptures, I journal, I take some reflective time. I go outside, I feed my dogs, I feed my chickens. I come inside, I shower, I get ready, I make breakfast for my little girls, I wake them up, feed them, and I’m generally out the door. That’s literally how every morning for me works. If I deviate from that process I get in a funk. I have to have physical activity to just get the energy out. I call it get the demons, and it fights the sads that come on. I work out to Counting Crows, because they make me depressed even though I love them. No August and everything after, if it’s at CrossFit it has to be all upbeat.
Joshua: Wow. That’s really interesting. That’s very, very similar to my morning routine actually. I don’t have children, although hopefully someday I will, but I do physical activity in the morning, I’ve been getting up at 5:00, not 4:30, so you’ve got me there, maybe that’s a modification I need to make.
Clint: Just roll it back five minutes every month and you’ll be there in a half a year.
Joshua: You know what is, I just have a hard time getting to sleep in time. I need a solid eight hours so I’m in bed by 9:00 or so. I think having some reflective time, some prayer and meditation for me, reading scripture, all of that comes into play and calibrates me, and it puts the little tiffs and things during the day into a greater perspective which is really helpful.
Clint: Totally.
Joshua: I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share your story with the Infusioncast audience. Clint, if there’s any way that…any questions that the audience has and they want to get in contact with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Clint: You can always hit me up on social media. It’s Clint Hosman on the face tube. You can look me up in Instagram as well. Generally I suck at emails, so don’t email me, because I’ll usually take a week or so to get back to you because I have clients in-house. Those are usually the best venues to get at me, and then if you’re interested in SixthDivision we look at … there’s an order to what we do, and everybody goes through the gatekeeper, which is our sales rep before they ever talk to me.
Joshua: Chase is a fun guy too.
Clint: Totally. He’s my warrior.
Joshua: He is. He is a warrior. I’ll put links to all that fun stuff on the website at infusioncast.co/clint-hosman. Clint, thank you so much for being on the show.
Clint: You bet, Josh.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on the episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to imbed Infusion forms web forms into your WordPress website? Head over to Infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin, FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms into any WordPress website with a simple shortcode. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
[/transcript]
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Infusioncast with Joshua R. Millage - The #1 Infusionsoft Podcast
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Today on Infusioncast, Joshua Millage talks with Clint Hosman, executionist at SixthDivision, a company that helps users implement Infusionsoft into their businesses. Clint tells us how he went from being a professional mountain bike racer to working at Infusionsoft, and then made the move to SixthDivision.
There are a lot of ways to implement Infusionsoft, and often the best way to leverage it is unclear. Clint saw an opportunity with SixthDivision to help people get the most out of Infusionsoft for their specific business needs. SixthDivision walks users through the steps to a successful Infusionsoft implementation tailored to their needs. They offer an individualized consultation, or a 2-day intensive makeover for your business. After visualizing and clarifying your operation and goals, you can structure Infusionsoft’s immense automation capabilities to best serve your purposes.
Clint talks about how Infusionsoft users also have to be developers. Development requires a blueprint for execution and a level of expertise that most users don’t have. SixthDivision bridges the gap between idea and implementation by helping the user to construct a detailed map of their business, visualize where they want to go, and set a timeline for goals and expectations. Infusionsoft can then be developed along those lines.
Most people want to use as much of Infusionsoft’s capabilities as they can, but you may only need 10% of those capabilities to accomplish your goals. Anything more will add complexity, but not necessarily value. Infusionsoft is a vehicle for moving the content of your business forward; it is not an element of the business itself. The purpose of the tool is to simplify your operations by automating as many necessary tasks as possible so you can stay focused on accomplishing the primary tasks you need to do.
Infusionsoft is also scalable so that as your business grows you have the capability to update and expand in response to changes in the market, new technologies, and your changing organizational environment. Therefore, the tool is never set – you will always be in development with it. In fact, if you aren’t consistently reviewing and updating your implementation, it’s a sign your business is stagnating.
Clint employs a basic three-step process for implementing Infusionsoft:
Most people want to customize first, but you have to have a vision and know your campaign elements before you can set up the tool to help you achieve your goals. You also have to learn to harvest and use hard data for planning. Infusionsoft will help you get that data, but you have to decide which data you actually need to gather and measure. SixthDivision exists to help you with that as well.
At SixthDivision, Clint and the rest of the team can help you get down to the fundamentals – marketing, strategy, and decision-making. They identify what works by quantifying campaign effectiveness through gathering and measuring relevant data, then build an Infusionsoft implementation that will free you to be productive and stay on track while you grow your business. They help you simplify your work so that you can accomplish more.
Thank you for joining us.
You can connect with Clint Hosman on Facebook and Instagram.
Show Links:
[transcript height=”200px”]
Joshua: Hello Everyone, welcome back to another episode of Infusioncast. Today I had the opportunity of interviewing Clint Hosman, and Clint has been a friend of mine for about three years. I met him at a SixthDivision makeover when I traveled out to Arizona, and we became fast friends. One of the things that I love about Clint is his clarity of thought and his no-BS style of presenting Infusionsoft theory and tactics, and you’re going to get a lot of that today in this interview.
Clint has probably worked with more applications than the majority of people. He started as an Infusionsoft support rep and then moved into helping SixthDivision with their makeovers and helping people implement high-level campaigns into their applications, so Clint is a wealth of information. I really encourage you to connect with him, too. He gives some ways that you can connect with him at the end of the episode and he really is just an incredible person, he’s very helpful. If you’re looking for a turbo or nitro boost in getting your application up and running, I can recommend SixthDivision and the services that they offer, so I would highly encourage you to go check out sixthdivision.com and talk to Chase. He’s another good buddy of mine, and he can get you hooked up with a makeover. Without further ado, let’s get into it.
Speaker 1: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast, the only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host, Joshua Millage, as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.
Joshua: Hello Everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Infusioncast podcast, the only podcast where we teach you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. My guest today is Clint Hosman. Clint is the executionist at SixthDivision where he helps empower entrepreneurs by igniting the power of their Infusionsoft applications. Clint, welcome to the show.
Clint: Thanks a lot, Josh, glad to be here.
Joshua: Man, you’re probably one of my first Infusionsoft friends, if I think about it. If I go back in time my origin story involves coming to a SixthDivision session where I got to know you and Bret, and we’ve been good friends since. I’m curious what your story looks like. Everyone seems to have a pretty interesting story, especially if you’re connected to SixthDivision. Where did you start? Tell me what it was like to get involved in this crazy community.
Clint: It’s actually kind of a weird thing. If you would have told me ten years ago that this is how I’d be providing for my family and making a living, I would have told you you’re crazy. I made the really expert decision, the nutshell version is I made a really fantastic choice, all sarcasm intended on that, of dropping out of college to race mountain bikes professionally.
I dropped out of school, proceeded to focus all of my energy on mountain bikes and eventually race professionally and manage a team out of Southern California called Evomo. The owner of the team was a … is still a Disney Imagineer, graphic design guy, who loved racing bikes, so I managed the team, sponsorships and all this stuff, and by the time I wizened up and realized I needed self-focus and self-discipline and went back to school, know that that’s a path everybody has to take, I realized I needed to personally go back to school, and I was working towards a master’s degree and like, “Oh, I’m going to graduate and go into the outdoor industry, because this is what I do and this is how I do it.”
That was about 2010, and then economy tanked so pretty much all of my connections in that world were getting let go from the respective companies that they were in. My wife, simultaneously to all this, is an insurance agent here in Arizona, and we had bought the Infusionsoft app for her business. At the time, Infusionsoft was actually only two miles down the road from our place.
Joshua: Nice.
Clint: Yeah, it was coincidental. We went through all of the learning challenges of implementing Infusionsoft when we bought it, they didn’t do any of the on-boarding, and so between the two of us, I tell people, it was like a couple of monkeys staring at a math problem for the first six months. We were looking at each other and go, “We’re smart people, right? We can figure this out, right?”
Eventually we got to a workable level. I graduate with my master’s degree, and I start looking around and I’m, “Well, things aren’t going well in the outdoors thing, so I need to get a job that actually pays.” I’m, “I know Infusionsoft, they’re down the road,” and so I applied there and went through a really awesome interview process with one of their guys named David Bonney, which is a completely different conversation about how to hire people. He has a product called HireToFit, which is fantastic, but knew that I wanted to be on that team and got hired there. I did success coaching, kick-start coaching, whatever the crap you want to call it, whatever they’re changing the name to this month.
I did that for two months … not two months; for two years and realized I was hired on as employee one-sixty-nine at Infusionsoft and by the time I left there were over five hundred employees. There was a big amount of change, and I’m looking around at it and, of course, you can only … everybody’s all, “Find your Why and then you’ll never work, and it’ll be exciting.” I don’t believe that, I believe that you find your Why through doing, and at the time I was struggling to, “What is my place at Infusionsoft?” I realized I wasn’t finding my place at Infusionsoft, because I’m not cut out for corporate America, and that’s where Infusionsoft is going. They’re going to be a corporation, fantastic. That’s no way a knock against them, but at about the same time I was realizing that this isn’t where I belong anymore. Dave Lee and Brad Martineau reached out to me, they’d heard what I was doing over there at Infusionsoft and asked me to come over and chat. I came over and had lunch.
I had no intentions when I came over, when I first started talking with them, of ever working here. “We’d like to talk to you.” I’m, “I’m really happy where I’m at.” I was still in this, “I’m going to climb the corporate structure, be a manager and blah, blah, blah.” Looking back at it, I’m almost embarrassed to say that. After a month, month and a half of conversations with them, I went to ICON 2013 and Brad was presenting there, and he’s going through what would essentially become the SixthDivision methodology. This is version negative 1.0 on the methodology that we utilize now.
He goes through this presentation of the breakout, it’s a crowded room, and I’m in there because I just want to hear how he’s presenting and I’m really trying to make a decision … I should actually backpedal just a minute. Five months before this the then product manager/whatever his title was at Infusionsoft called all of support together and said, “Look, Guys, I was talking to Brad Martineau at SixthDivision and he told me he does the same five things for every client.” He looks around, there’s a dramatic pause. He looks around, and he’s all, “Guys, we need to figure out what those five things are.”
Everybody got this serious glassy-eyed face, “Yeah, we can do this.” I’m the only one looking around, I’m all, “Son of a bitch! Do you realize what just happened there? Guys, we’re all on the losing team! No! We’re trying to define somebody else’s process, we’re supposed to be the smartest people in the Infusionsoft building, and we’re trying to copy what somebody else is doing!” That was my inclination that the jig was up for me in services there. Being a competitive athlete, I knew I was on the losing team. When it comes to implementing Infusionsoft, I was on the wrong team.
Joshua: In a way, it was that SixthDivision had a productized service and process that because … Brad is brilliant and all of you are brilliant, you guys have a process you take people through to give them an outcome, and it sounds to me like Infusionsoft was more of they were kind of matching and reacting to what everyone was bringing to them. Is that a correct assessment of the two worlds, I guess you could say?
Clint: Yeah, you’re right. Look, anything that I say about Infusionsoft, Josh … I love Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft keeps my babies fed, and I love the Infusionsoft family but Infusionsoft, everybody … and this is getting to a later conversation as well, there’s so many ways to do any one thing inside of Infusionsoft that it creates its own confusion. Everybody there at Infusionsoft who implements Infusionsoft has their own methodology for doing it. If you have forty different people developing forty different ways, now be the tech support rep who has to understand potentially forty plus different ways of doing Infusionsoft, it becomes difficult to manage.
Joshua: That’s right.
Clint: When I flash back to ICON 2013, I’m sitting there with this backdrop of all right, I understand that I’m on the wrong team. I know that I want to implement Infusionsoft, and I want to have an impact on people and their businesses. I know that it can actually work but I’m not seeing it work. Brad goes through the beginning stages of what would become our academy process and he’s presenting. He goes through and he lays it out, and then he makes his pitch.
As soon as he makes his pitch, I’m sitting there watching, literally people get up and start running to the back of the room with order forms. Running, and I’m, “That’s it!” People were so hungry for our methodology, our proven strategy that they were running to the back. When anybody says, “No, no, no! I know what I’m doing.” People are, “Perfect, take my money. Guide me, show me what to do,” because everybody else understands the capacity of it, they just don’t know how to do it.
That was kind of the decision point for me of, “All right, yup, I’m out.” The very next week I turned in my resignation, and I came over her to Sixth. That night they actually sold out. At the time SixthDivision only did makeovers, and the makeover is a two-day intensive, you fly into our office, and we figure out what’s going on, what you want to get done, and we crush it out. Not only do we go through the strategy portion of it but we actually build it. That’s nice …
Joshua: I will say it’s a beautiful thing, because I can say with one hundred percent confidence, it was the lightbulb in my … when I became conscious of not only the power but the speed that I could implement things, as soon as I knew how to think about it, I could get after it and get it done. I don’t actually ever really endorse things this heavily on air, but I can say if it wasn’t for SixthDivision I don’t know where CodeBOX would be, and I really don’t know where we’d be with our new plugin LifterLMS, it’s because it all started there, sitting in that conference room with Bret sketching things out and really learning how to think about the system.
I think what it does, Clint … I’m going to go on a tangent here, but what it does is it’s a BS detector to see what you know about your business. If you have a poorly functioning business, your app’s not magically going to make it function better. You have to have an idea and a vision of where you want to take things and the experience you want people to have and then you build that into your app. Then there’s a way of doing that that’s really done well, and I think one of the things that I learned at SixthDivision was I saw a bunch of ways to improve my business. It went way beyond the app. That’s something that you guys should maybe sell. “We’re also a business therapy.”
Clint: That’s the thing, is where we’ve come in the last two years we’ve taken that methodology, and we’ve packaged it. What we realized specifically is people get the potential of Infusionsoft and what they don’t tell you at Infusionsoft, bless their hearts, is they’re going to sell you on sunshine, send one message to the red-headed gingers in Edinburgh and send a completely different message to olive-skinned people in Spain. Through the powers of automation you can make that happen.
Everybody’s, “Yeah, okay! Awesome, I see that. I see it!” What they don’t tell you is when you buy Infusionsoft, you’re buying two hats; you’re buying the user hat, which is what you want to be, but you’re also buying the developer hat, which is what you don’t want to be. You have to develop that thing to get the message to the red headed ginger in Edinburgh and the olive-skinned person in Spain. Creating that, what we refer to that as is the gap.
On one side of the gap, if you’re imagining a canyon, you have idea. On the other side of the gap you have implementation of the idea, and in between there is where all good ideas go and die. The business owner comes in, they have a fantastic idea. They see Infusionsoft as the tool that can make that happen but they get so caught up in the implementation of the idea and the minutia of Infusionsoft that they never actually see the idea come to fruition. What the person does is they see their dream home, they see, “Oh my business can automate, it can do this and I can do this.” Then they go to Home Depot, and Home Depot is Infusionsoft, and they say, “Hey, I want to build this business, what do I need to do?”
“Uh, well, you’re going to need a hammer,” says Infusionsoft, “And this is a great hammer, see it swings and it pounds nails. Then you’re probably going to need some lumber, so you’re going to need to send some email stuff.”
What entrepreneurs do is they misconstrue the tool, which is Infusionsoft, with their vision, which is the home. If I was to take you, Josh, and I was to say, “Josh, let’s build your dream house,” just on a very fundamental level, before I ever go to Home Depot and have a build list of what I need, what do you have to have?
Joshua: You have to capture that blueprint and that vision of what’s being built.
Clint: That’s it, you got to have a blueprint. You have to sit down with an architect and you have to be able to map out, “Here’s what I want this room to look like. I want two floors on this thing, and I want this, and I want that.” The architect’s going to tell you, “Josh, that’s not possible.” Or the architect’s going to say, “That’s fantastic, Josh. Here’s the tools that we’re going to need to build that house.” But Infusionsoft isn’t architects, that’s not what they do. They sell a tool. Unless you go out and you pay somebody to do it for you, it’s up to you to put on that architect hat, blueprints before you ever start building.
Joshua: Yup, couldn’t agree more with that. That’s what …
Clint: I don’t … go ahead, sorry.
Joshua: I was just going to say one of the fundamental things that I learned when I was at my SixthDivision experience with you guys was about building things out of the app and organization, and the importance of doing those things. When you go through the process of that, of even just naming conventions and things it really, “Okay, I’m going to categorize things based on stages and processes in my business. Oh, wait a second, I don’t have any yet,” so you have to really start to think. It’s such high leverage stuff, and I think depending on where the listener’s at in their business life cycle, I think there’s always a … it’s always a good idea to go check back in with where you’re blueprint is at for you current state of your business and where you’re headed to next, at least by yearly or on a quarterly basis. We kind of do it on a quarterly basis at CodeBOX and LifterLMS. Structurally and strategy-wise this is where we’re going, and then we spend that quarter executing and building things in the app, but we know where we’re headed, because we have that map, and we’ve spent that time thinking through where we want to go.
Clint: That’s it exactly. The entrepreneur themselves love it. Entrepreneurs suffer from severe ADD. We go through, and we spend the majority of our time putting out fires. As much as we’d like to think about that we’re proactive, the reality is most entrepreneurs are reactive. The first step to any process in building is taking a step back and thinking about the process before you … we call it “blimplementing” where they’re blueprinting while they’re implementing. It’s the equivalent of this architect saying, “I’m going to jump in there and I’m going to put out the fire with this magic of Infusionsoft,” before taking the time to consider and the time to review, like what we’re talking about; what is my priority?
Then once you have that priority set, you have to have that laser focus. You have to have that laser focus and the commitment that no matter what the fire is that comes up, I’m going to stay on this for the quarter, for the week, for the month, whatever it is, and get that idea executed, but then understand that, especially inside of Infusionsoft, everything’s interrelated. That I may be implementing a marketing strategy, but now how does that marketing campaign or that strategy connect to the other components of my business?
We have to take in reality and even bigger step back and look at my business, and I have to be able to say, “I have marketing leads, marketing campaigns, what do I want them to do? Do I want them to customer my sales rep, go online and buy something?” Whatever it is, and you have to be able to look at the business holistically, dive down into the individual component, and build relative to understanding that it’s going to connect to these other components of my business.
Joshua: That’s right, absolutely. I’ve been involved in the strategic coach circles and kind of the listening to a lot of Dan Sullivan stuff, and he talks a lot about that high leverage activity, and that is a high leverage activity. I think as entrepreneurs we get emotional about, “Well, I don’t want to make time to do this, because it’s not actually getting my hands dirty,” but you got to step back and look at what you’re building.
Clint: You have to deal in reality as well. We look into things like that high leverage, what is your most valuable thing? What do you do? “I’m a real estate guy.” Okay, so real estate guy, what is your one thing? “My one thing is that I close people.” Fantastic! Then they’re going to tell you, “Then you need to focus on that one thing.” Fantastic, great idea and concept. Now, what if you’re a one man show in real estate? You read that, you hear that and you go, “My one thing is closing. I need to be closing.”
Okay, cool. Now you don’t have any time to develop Infusionsoft, and so just being honest with yourself with where you’re at, “Okay, my one thing is closing, however, I don’t have the resources right now to pay somebody to do Infusionsoft. I have to take the time to put on my developer hat and build this resource,” or, do I pay somebody to do it? Everybody’s in a different position in their business, they’re either the “solopreneur” … our advice to everybody is, ultimately, as you scale your business, you’re going to need somebody on your team that owns Infusionsoft.
Reality is there’s limited time in the day, and you’re not going to have endless amounts of time to do Infusionsoft forever. The goal is to get you to this level where you can focus on that one thing, but what is it going to take today to get you to that level, is the real question.
Joshua: Yeah, Man, that’s really good advice, especially for the entrepreneur who’s on that cusp of extreme growth. They’re up against that. I think entrepreneurship is actually, and I wish someone would have told me this when I started, but it’s actually an exercise in surrendering things. If you can get that early on you’re going to excel so much faster, because it shifts … you look at something, you identify, “Oh, here’s a process, or something that I need to do,” and instead of just doing it you actually develop a system so that someone else can do it and Infusionsoft has taught me a lot about that. I will say that.
Let’s switch gears real quick, Clint, because I want to get into some of the tactics and I’m excited to talk to you, because I know you’ve had so many, hundreds, probably, maybe even thousands of businesses you’ve worked with over your course of working for Infusionsoft and SixthDivision, and you’ve seen a lot. I’m curious if we were to do an 80/20 analysis, what are the over arcing, twenty percent of things that you think people should focus on to get that eighty percent of return on the Infusionsoft app? I want to preface this by saying I get really annoyed when people are going … when they use the whole pitch, “Use more than ten percent of your Infusionsoft application,” because the thing is, that ten percent could be giving you ninety … If it’s ten percent of really high leverage stuff, that could be all you’d actually need.
Clint: That’s right. You’re exactly right.
Joshua: I think it’s a poor mindset to put people into a feeling like they need to activate every little square inch. That’s not why you buy Infusionsoft, is to, “Let’s see how much of the capacity of the app I can use.” Let’s start from the perspective of your business. Let’s do that, I want to do that with you. What are some of the processes that you’re, “These are really just high leverage things that people should look at using Infusionsoft to help them with?”
Clint: All right. Feel like you’re only using ten percent of Infusionsoft to sell SixthDivision so you’re exactly right. The reality is everybody’s ten percent, though, is completely different. That kind of goes to the next point, which is okay, everybody’s ten percent of using Infusionsoft is completely different. My ten percent could actually be Josh’s one hundred percent, and that’s okay. There’s a certain type of entrepreneur, this isn’t everybody, that is a collector of tools. They’re going to be saying, “Clint, what tools should I be using to leverage Infusionsoft? Clint, what tools have you seen be really successful?”
You have to put the tool conversation to the side, and you have to focus on instance. Infusionsoft in and of itself is an amazing tool. In reality you don’t need a ton of add-ons. In my typical build, when I’m working with a client, and keep in mind I’ve implemented Infusionsoft for everybody from IBM to the Church of Scientology, in makeover in-depth process, and everybody in between.
Joshua: That needs to be on your bio, I wish that was on your bio.
Clint: I would except I’m afraid of the Church of Scientology, too.
Joshua: That’s true. Got it.
Clint: The reality is, what if somebody needs … the majority of, the majority of what a business needs out of Infusionsoft is contained within Infusionsoft. It’s just a matter of understanding the tool that you have and looking at it in a use-point of an instance. What we empathize with people is, number one, Infusionsoft and implementing Infusionsoft is a marathon, it’s not a sprint. You are never going to be done implementing Infusionsoft. I hate to break it to everybody, but your marketing campaign that you put out five years ago with the lead caption on your website is old and failed. You have to refresh it. That means it’s going to need constant rejuvenation. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Now going down from that, every campaign inside of Infusionsoft goes through a three-step iterative process. Number one, organization; you organize the idea, what it is you want to do, what it is you want to accomplish? You hit play on that thing, but you build in the ability for that play or that campaign to gather data. How well is it performing? What kind of metrics?
Every campaign is going to be different. If I’m doing a generic lead capture campaign, how many leads is it converting? How many leads did I get in today, last week, last month? You need to be able to have some basic metrics in place, because it’s going to come into this too; which is optimize. Optimize is, “Oh, I realized that email number three is actually converting better than email number one. I’m going to shift it around.” You start getting into, “Maybe instead of doing an email here I should have my sales rep do a call here.” You’re changing minor things about it.
Now the last phase that it’s in the life cycle of a campaign is actually the pipedreams that Infusionsoft sells you, which is customize; right message, right time, for the right person. Most people are going to step back, and they’re going to want to start at customize. The reality is the majority, I’m talking out of a hundred businesses that I‘ve worked with, two or three have actual hard data on customers, leads, prospects that translates into a justifiable reason to customize a campaign. We’ve got to get to the idea of you customize based off of data, based off of fact; not off of your gut instinct as an entrepreneur. Then we have to roll it back so the question is what should I be doing to leverage it? Restate the question for me so I can pull into context again, would you Josh?
Joshua: Yeah, in simple terms, what is twenty percent of the things that people should be focusing on when they open up a new app to get eighty percent of some sort of leverage? I know that that’s hard, because every business is different, but what I’m asking is if you could average all of the different conversations and experiences you had you can say … because I can’t ask that to everybody because they just don’t have an experience with a lot of Infusionsoft users, but you do, so if you could pull a trend line and be, “Yeah, these are the things that seem … it seems like most that come through the door, if I could them to buy into the fact then that they need to focus on these few things, they would just see massive growth.”
Clint: The number one thing that if I could get … anybody could buy into with implementing Infusionsoft … if you’re a new user, let’s start from that paradigm. You’re a new user, you just bought the app, the number one thing I would want you to do is not do anything inside of the app. You’re going to want to leverage the investment that you just made right now. If that’s broadcasting, fine. That’s okay but what you have to do is you have to take the time, first of all, to realize A, Infusionsoft is not my business. It is a tool to build my business. Number one after that … number two I guess it would be, what is my business? You have to take a look at your business, and you have to realize model and the different components that go into it. You have to take a step back and blueprint out what it is that you want Infusionsoft to do.
There’s essentially … if I was to be really simplistic, and this is the truth, there’s two types of businesses. There’s businesses that if I want to give you money … you’re the business owner Josh, I want to give you money I can either … business A is you have an online store, and I can just give you money, and you don’t have to deal, you’re fulfilled with me. Then there’s the business of to give you money I have to consult with you. There’s two types of businesses: businesses where I have to drive through a consultation, businesses where I have to drive through a sale directly. Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot of variance. What people confuse here is Infusionsoft is not your business. I’ll say that again, Infusionsoft is the tool that delivers the experience of your business in an automated way to your clients, to your prospects, to your leads. Infusionsoft, we always say, is like a cup, like a little Dixie cup.
Joshua: I love it.
Clint: Developing that Dixie cup is standard. I will take any business through and break it down first and then what you have to understand is your business is not the cup, your business is the flavor inside the cup. Your business is the Kool-Aid, your business is the Gatorade. That’s it. Infusionsoft is merely the cup of transferring the flavor of the experience of your business to leads, prospects, and clients. You have to take a step back and you have to say, “Okay, how do I want to administer this?” When you speed up the idea and the ability to implement ideas, and that’s what we’re really focused on here at Sixth, is we want to standardize the ability to cover the gap, the gap between ideas and implementation. If I can speed that up, because the reality is you’re going to have to go through ten bad ideas in marketing to get to one stellar idea.
Joshua: So true.
Clint: The entrepreneur’s going to spend five months developing, implementing one idea that in the meantime, if they actually get it done, the idea is old and stale. If I can speed up your ability to implement ideas, I’m going to speed up your ability to get through those ten bad ideas to get to one good idea, and so you have take … I roll it back one more time, and I say, “Okay, what’s the thing that they should be doing?” The number one thing they should be doing is developing a plan first. Once they have that plan, realize now I have to prioritize, what it is? I have marketing, I have sales, I have fulfillment. What is my priority? Once I have a priority, it’s either I’m in every entrepreneur generally, and I roll back. I’ll say eighty percent of entrepreneurs are always going to say, “I need more leads.”
More leads is seldom the issue. It’s generally, you need to follow up or leverage the people that you have, because if I dump more leads into a broken system, it’s just water out at the end of pole end. It’s out, it’s done. Worst of all, now they leave with a bad taste, they leave with a bad experience. More leads is seldom the answer. Typically where we start with a client and blueprinting is on the fulfillment side. CodeBOX, you guys build kick ass websites and apps and stuff like that. Now, when I would sit down with you guys is I would start at fulfillment, and I would say, “Okay, what do you sell, Josh?” We sell custom websites, we sell template websites, and we sell apps. I would list out, literally list out, in boxes the things that I sell. Now from that position I’m going to move backwards. Josh you sell website design generally, to do that do I have to talk to you first, or can I just buy that product remotely?
Joshua: Yeah, you’ve got to talk to me first.
Clint: I’ve got to talk to you, so now I draw a box under sales, and I would categorize it under sales as sales process. All right, cool. Now, in this instance, I know that I sell websites, to buy my website you have to talk to me first. Now I move over into marketing. Now I identify the different marketing campaigns and that now I know that all my sales have to go through a sales rep or whoever it is on your time. Now I have a purpose for those marketing campaigns. The idea is I speak at conferences, I do lead capture, whatever it is, but the end goal of each of those marketing campaigns is get them to talk to Josh.
Now I have a direction. I step back, and before I’ve implemented I’ve created a blueprint. I sell these things. I have a sales process. I need marketing campaigns to drive to this. Now I can take a look at that, and I can say, “Okay, where is my priority.” I do good on the fulfillment side, but I’m losing people that I talk to. I’ll have a really good conversation, I’ll put in a calendar reminding me to call them, I’ll get busy, but I’ll forget. You need a sales process. You need to standardize your sales process, so people aren’t falling through the cracks. You may legitimately have a solid sales process and a solid fulfillment process, and now marketing is the thing, but the reality is each person is going to be different in what their number one thing is that they need to focus on as far as when it actually comes to implementing. I don’t know if that answers the question. It’s long-winded but there’s really no simple answers.
Joshua: You’re right. It is a very difficult question but I think you did a great job answering it. A follow up question that I have around that, because I agree with you, is that very few people do a good job of following up, and so what’s … what do you recommend for people when it comes to that? I’m guilty of it, too. What I’ve seen it’s even just the … a basic newsletter is light years ahead of doing nothing. Is that something that you would recommend, and is there anything that a rule of thumb that you tell people, “Hey, try this sort of follow up campaign.”
Clint: That gets into a strategy question. The basic idea is, yeah, anybody that you don’t close should be going somewhere, and Infusionsoft is really a game of what if. What if somebody opts in but never converts? What if I have a conversation, and they don’t call me back? I’m always planning on the “what if.” There’s a number of strategies around any given scenario. What a lot of entrepreneurs will do is they’ll get it back and forth on the mental ping pong of strategy. Digital marketers say that I should do this, and Kennedy says that I could do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everybody has got a personal opinion on strategy.
The bottom line at the end of the day is I don’t, and this pisses people off, I don’t know what strategy works for your market. I don’t know. I do know that any strategy is better than no strategy. Let’s pick one, let’s build it, but let’s build it with a way that gives us reporting so that we can measure its effectiveness. Seriously, you name Infusionsoft or a marketing strategy that’s leveraged in the community I’ve built to it. There’s no magic pill for these things. You literally have to get done with the mental ping pong of positive … if you’re always comparing if I have two … this is the … an entrepreneur is going to build a pro and con list to every decision and they’re going to say, generically, I have the Dan Kennedy strategy, I have digital marketer strategy. Pro to digital marketer strategy is this, con to digital marketing strategy is this, and they’ll do the same thing to whoever else they’re comparing against. Whatever idea, somebody who says they know what they’re doing tells them.
What we do in that instance is we compare the pros of one to the cons of another. If we’re doing that continuously, we’re never really going to come to a positive outcome. We’re going to be stuck in this limbo, because I’m comparing pros to con. What I have to get in the habit of when thinking of a strategy is what are the pros? Do the pros of the digital marketer outnumber or outweigh the pros of the alternative? Yes or no. Make a decision. Make a decision and go with it. I’ll tell you this though, the majority of the people, and keep in mind who we’ve worked with like the majority of the ICON Ultimate marketers. The majority of everybody in between, I go back to that organize, optimize, customize. I would say of all the people I’ve worked with, there’s only four to six people that are actually in the customize phase, legitimately. Everybody wants to think that they’re the exception to one rule, Josh, and that one rule is fundamentals. Everybody’s an exception. Everybody’s a freaking genius. Everybody’s the exception. Nobody’s crap stinks. Everybody’s got the best idea. Fantastic. Stop considering yourself the exception and focus on fundamentals.
Fundamentally here’s what you need to be doing. You need to be capturing leads. You need to be following up with your leads. You need to plan for what ifs. What if I don’t covert? You need a long-term nurture. You need some kind of crawl-back campaign. What strategy do I implement? Freaking pick one. It doesn’t matter. Just pick one and roll with it.
Once you just pick a strategy, and again it doesn’t matter what strategy it is, and just implement it, you’ll start seeing immediate results, because it’s something more than you’re currently doing. I have opinions about strategy. Like Dan Kennedy content, if I had landed on a long form web form or webpage or open page, whatever, I’d shoot myself. I’d never buy from that person. Crap sells like hotcakes. I have to get myself out of the idea of what I like to see and I have to put myself in what do my clients like to see?
Joshua: I want to reiterate something you just said before we go, or before you go on to our next point is that just implement something gives you three to five percent wins, and I think everyone gets really, frankly, just pissed off. They’re, “Oh, I’d only improve things by a couple of percentage.” It’s,” Yeah, you do ten of those at two percent and look how far you came.” Stop looking for that ninety percent growth lever. If you keep doing and implementing, you’ll hit one of those every now and then, but that’s like a lotto ticket.
Clint: It is.
Joshua: I agree with exactly what you said, it’s pick a strategy, implement it and then implement some other things, and then come back around at some point in time or weekly, or whatever your cadence is, and look at what’s working and then iterate accordingly. Everyone hears that, but no one actually does it.
Clint: That’s right.
Joshua: No one actually reviews the effectiveness of their campaigns and then therefore they go, “Well, it’s not making me a million dollars yet.” It’s, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not right now.”
Clint: Yeah, totally right.
Joshua: Chip away.
Clint: Look, Josh, everybody gets a trophy nowadays. Everybody’s the exception and everybody’s the exception to the rule of fundamentals. Not everybody, not everyone … I have three kids, and I love my three kids. They’re beautiful children. They’re not rocket scientists. They’re not splitting atoms at five and a half, two and a half, and six months. Stop thinking of yourself as an exception and start realizing taking … having an honest conversation with yourself or with your team and saying we need basic implementation, we need basic strategy, we need basic … whatever it is you need at that point and focus on the fundamentals.
If you just focus on the fundamentals you’ll leverage a lot. You’ll leverage so much. Having been in so many people’s Infusionsoft apps, we see everybody’s dirty laundry. The realty is a lot of people don’t even know how they got to where they’re at. The reality is the people that are telling you, you need this nurture and that nurture and this nurture aren’t living off of broadcasts, and that it’s dangerous. If you’re going to sustain growth, you have to know what messages are actually relevant and which ones are actually hitting with your people. You’re not going to do that until you put the baseline in first.
Joshua: Right. It’s so good Clint. I want to be respectful of your time. You’ve been so generous spending this much time with us, and I want to wrap up the interview by asking you about what you do to put yourself in a peak state of success, because I know you’re not a superhero even though in my mind when I picture you, you are wearing a cape.
Clint: Nah!
Joshua: You seem to have such a positive outlook on life, Clint, I’m serious about that though. Every time I’ve seen you at ICON in the past few years and whenever we talk, you give me a big huge hug and it makes everything better in my life, and I really do appreciate that. How do you stay there? I know you probably have off days, we all do, but is there any routines that you have? I know you’re very active, and you get outside, is that part of it? I’m just curious, because I think that what I love what about this kind of segment at the end is that I love to see how human everyone is and what they do to improve.
Clint: Lots of caffeine.
Joshua: I’m guilty of that one, too. I literally have an account open at the coffee shop, I kid you not. I don’t even have to pay or to give them my name. It’s pretty bad.
Clint: Just put it on my tab.
Joshua: Put it on my tab.
Clint: For me it’s I’ve realized what I am and what I’m not. This may be a little bit too personal, I don’t know, natively I’m kind of a depressed person. Natively I’m really an introvert who’s learned to be an extrovert, because that’s how I make my money. I’ve accepted that. I’m okay with that. I realize that to function well for me, day-to-day, I need a couple of things. One, I need … personally I need structure, and I need physical activity. I raced mountain bikes for ten years now. When a business comes in, I’m sitting at my desk with them for ten hours a day. That’s hard, and so I have to really tune into my scheduling. My mornings are like clockwork. I wake up at 4:30, and I go to CrossFit to work out for an hour. I get the demons out of the building.
I come home. I’m religious, spiritual, whatever you want to call it these days, whatever is cool, I read scriptures, I journal, I take some reflective time. I go outside, I feed my dogs, I feed my chickens. I come inside, I shower, I get ready, I make breakfast for my little girls, I wake them up, feed them, and I’m generally out the door. That’s literally how every morning for me works. If I deviate from that process I get in a funk. I have to have physical activity to just get the energy out. I call it get the demons, and it fights the sads that come on. I work out to Counting Crows, because they make me depressed even though I love them. No August and everything after, if it’s at CrossFit it has to be all upbeat.
Joshua: Wow. That’s really interesting. That’s very, very similar to my morning routine actually. I don’t have children, although hopefully someday I will, but I do physical activity in the morning, I’ve been getting up at 5:00, not 4:30, so you’ve got me there, maybe that’s a modification I need to make.
Clint: Just roll it back five minutes every month and you’ll be there in a half a year.
Joshua: You know what is, I just have a hard time getting to sleep in time. I need a solid eight hours so I’m in bed by 9:00 or so. I think having some reflective time, some prayer and meditation for me, reading scripture, all of that comes into play and calibrates me, and it puts the little tiffs and things during the day into a greater perspective which is really helpful.
Clint: Totally.
Joshua: I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share your story with the Infusioncast audience. Clint, if there’s any way that…any questions that the audience has and they want to get in contact with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Clint: You can always hit me up on social media. It’s Clint Hosman on the face tube. You can look me up in Instagram as well. Generally I suck at emails, so don’t email me, because I’ll usually take a week or so to get back to you because I have clients in-house. Those are usually the best venues to get at me, and then if you’re interested in SixthDivision we look at … there’s an order to what we do, and everybody goes through the gatekeeper, which is our sales rep before they ever talk to me.
Joshua: Chase is a fun guy too.
Clint: Totally. He’s my warrior.
Joshua: He is. He is a warrior. I’ll put links to all that fun stuff on the website at infusioncast.co/clint-hosman. Clint, thank you so much for being on the show.
Clint: You bet, Josh.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on the episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to imbed Infusion forms web forms into your WordPress website? Head over to Infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin, FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms into any WordPress website with a simple shortcode. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
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