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How to set up a Naming Convention in Infusionsoft

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Content provided by A weekly podcast delivering Infusionsoft strategies and Mindset shifts to help take your business to the next level! Hosted by Joshua R. Millage. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by A weekly podcast delivering Infusionsoft strategies and Mindset shifts to help take your business to the next level! Hosted by Joshua R. Millage or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

How to set up a Naming Convention in Infusionsoft.

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[transcript height=”200px”]

Joshua: Hey, everyone. We’re back with another episode of Tactical Tuesdays. This week, we’re talking about naming conventions and why it’s important to name things correctly, so you can find things in your app, and it just doesn’t become this hair-brain mess of an app which I know that some of you who are listening right now understand exactly what I’m talking about. Brett, take it away.

Brett: This Tactical Tuesday Infusionsoft tip is actually more of a productivity tip than anything else. I just want to show you what you can do when you name things correctly inside Infusionsoft. Okay. I want to go show you my list of campaigns in this particular app, and I want to just impress upon you the fact that there are 85 campaigns, and I have no idea what’s in which. Notice how the naming is all set. There’s not really a naming convention. Things are just set. I’ve done a decent job of naming what things are, but how many of these untitled campaigns do we have? How many unpublished campaigns? They’re all over the place.

Now, I want to show you a list that actually makes sense, okay? I’m going to go into the Campaign Builder in a different app, and I want to show you. This is the … This is our PlusThis app, just a list of our campaigns. You can see, these are all very well named. We have it all set, so that it’s going to actually send in … They all show up in the right order. You can see, first of all, we’ve got our marketing stuff in one place. We’ve got all of our fulfillment campaigns in one place. These are our active campaigns, and then once we … Once we deactivate a campaign, instead of deleting it, we actually just put it into this Archive category by adding archive to it.

You can see here, we have a webinar that I actually ran a while ago that I’m now going to go put into the Archive category. I’m just going to do that by jumping in to the campaign and going to “Campaign” menu, and then “Rename”, and then I’m just adding “z-Archive”. Just like that. What I’ll now do is drop it down in the list back to the bottom where … What that will do is just drop it down the list. Now, I have my active campaigns at the top, my inactive campaigns at the bottom, and I have some organization and actually know where the different things are that we’re running through.

This actually applies with everything, tags, campaigns, templates, everything. If you have a system, then when you name, it makes sense, and you can actually get back into it a lot quicker. This is something that saves hours and hours of time when going back and looking for different things.

Joshua: What’s up, man? Talking about organizational things today.

Brett: That’s right.

Joshua: Why the heck would we want to organize anything?

Brett: Joshua, I think … Organization is … It actually is like my mindset mode because I too ever since … Since the last time we talked, I’ve … Because I went and I got the Hazel thing, and I just started thinking. I’m addicted to it already [inaudible 00:03:12].

Joshua: I knew it totally be your cup of Joe.

Brett: It’s amazing, but I just realized that I think. That got me on a kick where I was going through my … I have a filing cabinet down here with just papers, old stuff. I was like, “You know what? There is no reason for me to have all those papers down there. There’s no reason for me to be doing anything on paper, keeping documents, and things like that. There’s no reason for me to holding on to all that dead weight.” The only reason, the only thing that’s been keeping me from it is the fact that I’m scared of putting it into a place where I’ll never be able to get it out again.

I was just like, “You know what? Forget it. What I’m going to do is just get everything into Evernote, and then I’ll categorize it the best I can based on what’s there. Then everything that comes in in the future, it’s going to be like I’ve created a system for myself.” Paper comes in in the mail, it’s either thrown away, scanned if I need it, and sometimes I actually will keep like marketing stuff, like people … The credit card offers and the … All the things that people send. I’ll use it. I keep it because I want to … I like other people’s marketing ideas. I like to steal them.

Joshua: It’s like a swipe file.

Brett: Exactly. I’ll take pictures of those, and then everything goes straight to the recycle, and I don’t keep … Now, I have a digital copy of everything. It’s nice because I don’t have to worry about … If I had to get up and leave, and I needed all my stuff with me, I just got to take my computer and that’s it.

Joshua: Even then if it’s on Dropbox or something, you’re still good.

Brett: The real beauty of it is the organizational system, once you have … I have a somewhat loosely organize … Like a loose system. I guess I shouldn’t say loose. It’s a pretty decent system in Evernote if I do say so myself. The fact that I know I can just go click, click, click, and go find the document wherever it’s at, I’m actually like …. I can actually get to it quicker. It’s not like I get to those documents all the time.

If I need to, I don’t want to spend an hour trying to find the document when I could just put it at Evernote and then search for it. The whole thing with organization is just … It’s not … Brad always used to say and I love this. I’ve thought about this a lot because this is … He and I think a lot alike in this way. He always used to say, “When you put things away, you need to put them away in preparing for you to take them out again.”

Joshua: Yeah. It’s good. Yeah.

Brett: He had a way of saying it. I don’t remember what it was, but it was like put things away, so that you can get them back out again. Not put things away, so you can be done with it as fast as possible and get it done. It’s put it away, so when you come back to it, when you do need it, it’s there and ready for you. I think we tend … I know that I’m like this all the time. We tend to procrastinate in ways we don’t even realize. Here’s an example. This may seem trivial to a lot of you. All of you probably, but I’m going to share it anyway. In our parking garage downstairs, we have a spot. We have a parking garage as part of this, as part of the place we live.

I noticed a lot of people back into their parking space. I thought, “That seems weird like what … Why would people back in their parking space?” Then I tried it. When I take the extra 30 to 45 seconds to pull and back in to the parking space leaving, it’s literally … When I need to get out and leave like whenever I need to go, it’s just car on, drive, go, and that’s it. I’m sacrificing present me. When I’m pulling in, I’m sacrificing my … The 35 seconds for the feeling of pure … I can’t even describe it. It’s pure acceleration being able to just go.

It’s like, “What? I don’t have to like back out and turn, and I don’t have to check my mirrors and do all these stuff. I can just go.” I think it’s the same thing with anything else that we do in life. If we set ourselves up so that when we come back to something, it’s easy and quick to do. Not only do we … Not only is it easier and quicker to do, but I think our minds can rest a little bit easier because we’ve done it.

Joshua: Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think that’s the thing too when it comes back to Infusionsoft organization and what you talked about in the video is also organizing things in a way that makes … Like creates a universal language, so your numbers or your archive. That’s the thing. I get into some client apps. I’m like, “You clearly wrote that for you, and you understand what that means, but no one else does.” It does take a little bit of frontloaded work to figure out what that naming convention is or what that codification is. In the long run, it’s totally worth it. You snip, and then the person, and they all know what it is.

Brett: Yeah, yeah. I think what’s really important to remember is that you may … You say … You mentioned on top of this all the time. It may makes sense to you when a person is doing it [inaudible 00:07:55]. Here’s something very interesting. What ends up happening most of the time is when you say, “Oh, this makes sense to me,” what you’re describing is … What you’re actually saying is, “This made sense at the moment when I did it.” Right?

Joshua: Yeah. That’s actually true.

Brett: Anytime you go back and this happens time, and time, and time, and time again, anytime you go back, and try and put yourself where you were before, it’s next to impossible because we don’t have that type of clear crystal memory retention. If we did, we’d begin to get paid a lot of money to do other things. Right?

Joshua: Right, right.

Brett: It’s all about forcing ourselves to adhere to a system, and the system, it doesn’t matter what system it is. If nobody else is going to see what you’re doing, you could come up with a number system that nobody could crack. That’s fine. It’s got to be systematic though, so that you in the future can get to what you need quicker. If you do need someone else to come in and look, it’s just, “Oh, yeah. You got to go here, and here, and here,” and then boom, done.

Joshua: I think that’s the thing that you talked about that struck me is … We did take the time we have in our Code Blocks, Infusionsoft app, and then couple others that we have, Sandbox apps. Just to name things especially in development, we do that anyway. Good developers do, so that people can read the code. There’s all about commenting code. That’s one of the things when we’re hiring for a developer here is known to comment his code, that’s one. It’s a plus because then it’s easier to work in teams, it’s easier to communicate. I think doing that with tags, categories, custom fields, and campaigns is huge.

Even we can go so far as individual emails if you want, but those are the big areas for us. There’s tags. Tags are hugely important to name because then you could just get an absolute spider’s web of tags that have no meaning, different acronyms that no one knows about. It’s just horrible. Maybe you don’t … You didn’t know exactly what the tag is, but just like for us like the 100s are legion, so it’s like just keep them. We know those are legion. Not exactly sure what legion, but at least I know it’s legion. You can get more and more detail. I know that SixthDivision had an incredibly detailed way of tagging. We don’t go to that extent, but we definitely follow the basis.

Brett: To use Brad’s self-describing phrase, SixthDivision had an anal-retentive way of naming things in Infusionsoft, and it’s stuck with me because that’s how I am. I want …. Like I’m not a halfway kind of guy. I don’t … in fact when I was a kid, my sister and I … Always, this is the end of every dinner. In every dinner that we had when I was a kid was … There was a piece of whatever the meat or whatever the delicious part of the meal was left. There’s always one piece left. My sister and I would look at each other, and I was trying to guess whether she was going to want any because I would rather none of it than take half of it. Right? I’d rather just give it to her than have to share with her.

It’s that same thing like I don’t want to do anything halfway, so I’m … I go to the extent where I’ve got prefixes and like naming conventions all the way down. I know exactly where something fits in, but I also found that I like to take those little shortcuts. Without fail, every time that I’ve taken one of those shortcuts has come around to bite me in the butt in the long run. You have to remember that you don’t necessarily need to go crazy with it, but you do have to be consistent with whatever you decide.

Joshua: We’re definitely inspired by the SixthDivision one, but that’s exactly right. We didn’t need to go to that granularity, but it’s important for some people to do that. I think it’s … I think the overarching theme of today’s Tactical Tuesday is just do something to get organized. Do something. What you said in the video, it’s a two-minute video. I loved what we said in the little pre-interview there. It’s like it’s easy, man. They can just shut down the interview, jump right in to the app, and get something done. I think that’s what they should do today.

People are out there, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh. I never thought about organizing my tags. Maybe I have them in categories, but there’s subcategories.” Unfortunately, Infusionsoft really only gives you a couple options. The prepending something is really important to create your own subcategories because that functionality, that bucket functionality isn’t necessarily there. That’s okay though. It shouldn’t stop you. You just work with what you got, and it makes all the difference in the world with reporting, tracking, all of that.

Brett: Yeah, absolutely.

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: Organization I think from a deeper level, I think that there are a lot of people that … I assume there will be quite a few people that are going to end up watching this episode that are professional organizers. Right? That’s what they do.

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: Several of them, myself. Right?

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: They’re professional organizers, and they get what we’re saying. The interesting thing is top to bottom, no matter who you are, I have never met somebody who came either the PlusThis or SixthDivision. Never in my life have I met somebody who was already naming things appropriately before they encountered our stuff.

Joshua: Right.

Brett: Right? That’s not to say … That’s not to say they weren’t trying, but most of the time, what happens is we are really good about telling other people that things are disorganized and taking all the shortcuts ourselves. This is really like a “hold your feet to the fire” kind of thing where it’s like, “Look.”

Joshua: Wait a second. You’re telling me you guys don’t use all these crazy naming conventions?

Brett: Yeah. We absolutely do. I do because I know, because I’ve seen it a million times. I was like, “Hmm.” There actually was, so pull back the curtain a little bit. Brad will probably hate me for this, but whatever.

Joshua: He’s going to punch you?

Brett: Yeah. For probably the first eight months to a year that SixthDivision was around, we had the most disgusting Infusionsoft application. So bad in fact … Very few people know this. So bad in fact that we actually switched apps. We started over because it was so bad that we needed to start clean, start fresh, and build it all right in the new one. We got a new app, put everything into that one, and build it up right. Actually, the SixthDivision app is pristine. It’s a model of a modern major general or whatever that line is. It’s very, very well done.

Joshua: That’s cool.

Brett: We try to do the same thing in the PlusThis app. We do a decent job. Tags, I have the … I still fall on to this problem every once in a while where I’ll just need … I need a tag just for this one thing. I’m never going to use it again. What happens is six months later, I go back. I’m like, “What did I use this tag for? Why is this even here?” Then, I can’t delete it because I have too much attachment to it.

Joshua: Yeah, and when you don’t know what it’s going to break.

Brett: Right, exactly.

Joshua: Is it going to break something? Yeah. I totally understand. Yeah. That’s actually something I … I’m thinking about that just now like creating a category one-time-use, and then the naming convention tells what the use is. That actually might be useful.

Brett: Yeah. We’ve done that. SixthDivision has one of those. They’ve added probably three or four categories since you’ve seen what they do. I think there’s actually probably a couple extras since I’ve been there. Again, it’s not about the SixthDivision methodology. It’s not about somebody. It’s about having like a way to handle when it comes in.

Joshua: A methodology. Yeah.

Brett: Yeah. Everything has to fit into one of the categories, right? You got to … When you have … I think that probably is part of what’s scary for people is like having to go through and then “I don’t know what this tag is. Where does it go?” You got to put it into a category, and it’s got to be in that category, and you have to … When you organize things, you can’t just have like 10 boxes, and then like the leftovers. Right? Everything’s got to go into a box or it’s going to get thrown away. Everything’s got to get organized into a certain spot or else it goes away because you got to stick with the system, and you got to not let yourself stray from the system.

Joshua: What do you think the most important categories are?

Brett: In?

Joshua: In general. I personally think if you’ve gotten no idea where to start, start with the Perfect Customer Lifecycle.

Brett: You’re talking about Infusionsoft. I thought you were talking super general.

Joshua: No, no. No.

Brett: With Infusionsoft, I think the Perfect Customer Lifecycle is a great place to start because it breaks it up into the …

Joshua: Key buckets I guess you could say.

Brett: Key buckets. Yeah, how people are coming through. You’ve got legion. You’ve got initial marketing. You’ve got sales. You’ve got closing … Fulfilment, that closing, that awkward transition. Then, you’ve got referrals and PS stuff on the backend. You got to start with the frontend stuff and then move. I always like to go in order, right?

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: You don’t need to go make like 12 categories of tags, start to make them all right now. Just go start with your legion tags. Get those things organized, and move on to your marketing tags, and then move on to your sales tags, and all the way through the process that way. The other thing that’s interesting, so the SixthDivision methodology. I bring this up only so you see there’s a different way of approaching this.

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: The SixthDivision methodology doesn’t categorize tags by area in the business. It categorizes tags by use. SixthDivision uses tags in different ways. We’re taught … Infusionsoft teaches us to … This is starting to sound like a bible class. We’re taught by the Great Mother … No, sorry. We’re taught by Infusionsoft that tags are meant to segment our list which they are, but that’s like one of the uses. We use tags to indicate status which informs our dashboard. We use tags to indicate activity which is for segmentation, but mostly for history. We’ll use tags for profile data just to supplement what we’ve got on the contact record. We’ll use tags for …

Joshua: What goes out, right?

Brett: Yeah. We used to use tags for what goes out, and then they came out with the report that actually shows that. The reason why we had the tags was so that you could …

Joshua: Generate those reports?

Brett: Yeah. You could generate those reports, and technically, you could do segmentation, but we just found that’s like … That’s one of those. Being able to segment based on what email has been sent to somebody is like way out. Right?

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: You’ve got a long before that’s even … You should be thinking about that.

Joshua: Yeah, true.

Brett: Anyway, so just by breaking it up by use, and then we actually … One of the things I think that was the hardest for people to understand is we actually had a category of tags, and the only thing those tags were used for was starting and stopping sequences. It was not used for segmentation. It wasn’t used for status updates, for anything except they were just system tags. It was like, “This tag is applied. It starts the sequence.” The tag immediately gets removed, so we can use it again.

That’s its only function, and so that’s just everyone think about it. That’s probably like a second or third generation tags naming convention strategy like you want to start with something that makes sense to you in your head. If that makes sense, if that jives with you, then definitely go with that because that works for me.

Joshua: The other thing I tell people too is tags can be renamed.

Brett: Right. Yeah.

Joshua: That’s another thing. It’s like don’t listen to us if you’re listening to us at home and you’re like, “But I want to just start at the third gen.” It’s like, “No, start at the first. Just get the basic.” You can always go back through when you want to get more advanced, and rename everything, and become more advanced. It’s one of the things in Infusionsoft I really like in the sense of it doesn’t lock you into that like you don’t have to like build from scratch if you build in that direction. You can just continue to iterate.

Brett: The other thing, one other thing on this … I don’t want to beat a dead horse. One other thing on this though that I think is very important is in my opinion, in my experience, you should have a manageable number of important tags. You might have 10,000 people on your list. You should only have like between 10 and 20 tags that you use for segmentation that you use for reporting on a consistent basis because that is much easier for you to handle and because really, unless you have a massive team that’s using tags interchangeably and they’re running a bunch of things, if it’s just you and a couple other people even if you have a massive list, it just makes it easier if you know … Okay.

We have all these tags. A bunch of tags are getting applied. There’s some system tags, there’s data tags, whatever is happening. The tags I’m concerned about are like the top-level tags like the most important, so maybe there’s like 10 or 20 of those. For us plus this, the important tags are, are they an active … Are they a prospect? Are they an active member? Are they paying or not? Then, are they a referral partner? That’s it. Those are our five important tags. Everything else, we look at when we need to. It will give us a history about a particular contact. We can pull report if we want, but those are the tags that we really care about.

In your business, identify the big high-level buckets. Make sure you have a tag that represents just that because you don’t want to be going in to do a contact search and have to say, “Okay. If I need this group of contacts, that means I need this tag, plus this tag, plus this tag, plus this tag, plus this email address.” Right? Make a tag for that and just make sure one gets that one tag, and then use that tag for all of your reporting. Just consolidate all that stuff into thing.

Joshua: Got it. That’s great. That makes a lot of sense to me. That makes a lot of sense because that’s … Yeah. I think that will really help a lot of people who think that they need to use all these if-then logic to find if this tag, but not that tag, but this tab, but that tag to find that one group. Instead, just tag those groups.

Brett: We’re talking like for the high-level, the stuff you touch every day. The groups of people you deal with on a weekly basis, those are the … We need to have a single tag for those. When it comes to like the one-off reports that you run every quarter, it doesn’t matter about those things. It’s just a way to consolidate things down and not have so many different little things that you have to think about and go into.

Joshua: That’s huge, man. I love that. That’s really good. Is it the mindset moment?

Brett: Mindset moment.

Joshua: I love our like sporadic like hilariousness.

Brett: That just needs to be … We need to do it ourselves. Just making up our own.

Joshua: I think it’s better because it’s completely out of tune and just really spontaneous.

Brett: It’s perfect.

Joshua: Last time we talked, I led the charge with the mindset. I’ll put it on you. What do we talk about? What mindset shifts?

Brett: Mindset shifts for today. We went into a little bit with organization. That was a big piece, a big thing that I’ve been driving on, but one thing that I’ve alluded to a couple of times in a couple of the episodes that I really want to drive today is when hype is important and when it’s detrimental. Okay? In this industry specifically, in the Infusionsoft space, we are highly hyped. I don’t necessarily want to say overhyped, although I personally believe that we’re overhyped because that’s not really the point. I think that there’s a lot of hype that goes around.

What I mean by that is I think that we tend to “over positivise” things in a way we talked about it last time about how we think everything is awesome and you … It’s like the song from the movie, “Everything is awesome.” Everything is great. Everything is awesome. There are no bad things. We can’t tell anybody that anything is going wrong. It’s all about high-fives and yeah, and we’re rock stars, and we’re all small business experts, and all that stuff. All that stuff is well and good, and I think it’s good to have a positive outlook on life and to be very like to attack life and carpe diem. Right? All that kind of stuff.

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: I think what can happen is that the more we hype, the less we approach the situation realistically. The thing that I’ve run into several times is when I have somebody who’s trying to overhype something, when I say something to them that’s very serious, they almost get offended by it. It almost seems like I’m shutting them down like I’m trying to take away their happiness or something like that. I think the interesting thing is and this goes back to what we talked about last time about when do you know … That when do you know that you should like stop trying to pursue a course of action, and it’s when several people tell you to stop pursuing that course of action.

We need to invite into our businesses, into our lives people that are not super hype-y because that will keep the hype in check. The hype is a real thing, and the hype I think does provide motivation. It does move us forward, but it can also stunt our growth because we’re always being super positive and we’re never looking at the world realistically.

Joshua: The other thing too that I want to add to this is the hype, there’s … Marketing is in my mind always a moving target like there’s a level of efficacy that will taper over time like your marketing won’t always be as effective as it was last year this year. The mix of things you’re doing has to constantly be changing. I think a lot of small business owners don’t want to own up to that idea like, “Okay. You did direct mail for four or five years now, and you’re like ‘Yeah, yeah. It’s working.’” Now all of a sudden, it’s not working. It could be a time to do just less of that for a period and bring it back in. Combine it with something else, reconfigure.

All of that comes back to having this really, really solid mindset of looking up things objectively. I think that’s where having these people who are not … Debbie Downers in a way, but nor just more realistic because if you meet any real true hardcore just legit marketer, they’re that way. They’re just as much as scientists as they are creative. That science side of things really informs like their next big decisions. I mentioned to you I’m a big fan of Clay Collins. I think he embodies this. I think Noah Kagan of AppSumo especially embodies this. They have their key things that they’re known to do well, but they’re always testing other things, and they’re not afraid to let go of one and pick up another, and they take the overall theories with them.

A good example of that is Clay started with the blog, and then the blog worked when he start super charging that with the marketing show, parlayed that into LeadPlayer which people … A lot of people know about LeadPages, but they don’t know that started with another experiment with LeadPlayer, and then that came and went. Now, I’m not even supporting that anymore, and they doubled down on LeadPages. When you look at that and you go, “What if Clay because of his video marketing background with the marketing show would’ve said, ‘No. This is it. This is what I’m sticking with. This is working for me,’ and then see the opportunity?”

Now, I know I’m talking more product than any marketing, but I think it plays along in the same mindset of like following what’s working, not getting emotionally attached to one avenue. For me and like we talked the other day, I can’t even remember if it was on or off the show, but being okay with marketing channels that are working for you that aren’t sexy. Our biggest engine of growth in Code Blocks has just been very solid referral marketing strategy and engaging people to refer business back to us, creating partnerships that feed us referrals, taking care of … This whole strategy, it’s not exactly sexy right now.

It’s not Facebook ads. It’s not SEO. It’s not PPC. It’s not … It’s not any of these things and partly because those things when we tested them and we need to go back. That’s another thing, when you go back and retest things over the course of time, but that first round of testing through that stuff, it didn’t really provide the ROI for the amount of effort. At that business phase, that’s another thing, business phases, it didn’t work. We said, “Okay. We’re not going to spend time and money in all of these areas.” Now, we’ve entered in a new phase. We’ve got some real cool automation with referral things, and we found that content marketing, things like this are working really well. It’s tough. It’s hard.

Content marketing is timely, but still, people don’t come and buy really expensive websites that we build and sell through PPC ad. An SEO might be a good strategy, but that’s just the other slew of moving targets, and that takes a really long time. The content marketing goes hand in hand with that though. That’s the beautiful thing. We’re actually killing two birds with one stone. All that to say though, I think it’s this iterative mindset. It’s getting good feedback. It’s getting good data. Everyone right now has been in like podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast. Obviously, I’m drinking the Kool-Aid. We’re on a podcast.

Brett: Right. I guess.

Joshua: I totally look at it totally different like because a lot of people are doing the podcast thing because they want to … They want to monetize the podcast in such a way that, that was like a blog monetization strategy. They want to build a list and do some sort of info product or something off the back of it. For me, that was never the strategy with podcasting. It was brand building. It was connecting with people through the interviews, providing great information, and then just believing that at some point along the lines, the monetization would almost take care of itself if I did a good job providing good information.

That’s already happened. We’re 11 episodes in today. These are going out, so this will actually be further along, but it’s happened. It’s a valid test. I’m going to do more of it. We’re doing more of it by creating this segment on Tactical Tuesdays, and it’s not … You’ll notice that we’re not pitching like go to Gogobox.com either. That’s another thing. Your marketing doesn’t always have to be …

Brett: Although you’re welcome to, right? Go to Gogobox.com.

Joshua: You’re welcome to, but it’s not … This is not like a direct-response podcast.

Brett: Yeah, I know.

Joshua: That’s the other thing. You get a lot of GKIC people. I love you guys. I was in the GKIC world for a while; but if you’re trying, especially if you’re trying to connect with the younger generations, the millennials, they’ve got a really good BS detector for sales like shady sales pitches, so that … That might work in other demographics. If you’re looking to connect with that population, be careful, be different.

Brett: Actually, I want to stop you for a second. I want to take us on a tiny little side tangent. When we as millennials, we will use the words “shady sales pitch”. What we mean when we say “shady sales pitch” is what the GKIC people are doing. We don’t mean that derogatorily.

Joshua: Across the board.

Brett: Across the board. We don’t mean that as a derogatory thing. That’s just the way that we respond to it. That’s the gut response. Now, I can understand it and I … Because I’ve worked … You and I both, because we’ve worked with people, we understand that that type of sales pitch, and so we’re a little bit more tolerant of it, but it’s not going to work in 10 years, in 5 years. Probably the next like … In the next 5 years, it’s going to become defunct because people don’t … The younger generation that’s going to start bringing money to the marketplace doesn’t like to be sold to that way, and so you have to get them a different way. I don’t know that we’ve necessarily cracked the code of what that’s going to be because they’re not in the marketplace enough for us to know what’s working.

Joshua: We can digress into demographics and millennials a lot, but I think one of the things is what we’re doing right here. They’re much more in tuned with community. They’re much more in tuned with personal engagement. They’re much more in tuned with “I want to know that person.” Why has all of these social media platforms taken off with them? It’s because it’s giving them the connection they haven’t received. I think direct-response principles will work into the future, but they got to be packaged much better than they currently packaged because for a long, long time and I think it’s actually because the millennial generation grew up in the heyday of the direct-response marketing.

We grew up seeing this direct mail packages, and pieces, and infomercials that we’ve become … We knew from our young age what’s going on. I don’t think asking for a response or putting something out there and offer is bad or wrong, but I think it has to be done in such a way that it’s consumed differently. A good case study of this, of this blend of like great direct-response marketing meets the voice of the millennial generation. I think if you go and unpack what the foundation did in terms of selling their entrepreneurial training program to the … Yeah, millennial generation.

I think they did an incredible job, and it was no pitch, no pitch, no pitch, no pitch, no pitch like very Jeff Walker style, like great prelaunch content. Great prelaunch content, but not even alluding to anything coming like serious investment in that prelaunch content. That’s scary, and I think that’s the thing with the direct-response people they’re afraid of is they’re afraid to invest that much time, and effort, and money into things that they have to give away for free because they don’t want to do that.

Brett: I think the beauty … If I can make a prediction, if I can pull a Nostradamus here for a second, I think that the beauty of that, of this whole concept of the fear and of the fact they were giving stuff away for free is that the millennials that we’re talking about that are going to be the majority of the market in the next 5 to 10 years, they are going to be more wealthy already than the older people are, and they’re going to be younger which means they’re going to be less like jaded about spending their money. They’re going to be more willing to spend money.

If this what we’re talking about of giving away free content actually allures them to a particular company, what’s going to end up happening is the return on the investment of the free stuff you give away is going to be like doubled and tripled based on what we … Based on like the principles that we’ve been using in the past. We might spend $10 to put out a $7 tripwire product to push them into an upsell that works right now for maybe the late end baby boomers which is not going to work for millennials because they’re not going to spend $7.

That doesn’t really jive with them, but something like this, a podcast where they can just get involved, and just loved it, and go through this whole thing. What will happen is if we start getting a bunch of listenership on this or viewership I guess if they’re watching like from last time, Hazel is going to get a ton of content, a ton of stuff. Right?

Joshua: Yeah, yeah.

Brett: It’s not because we pushed it. It’s not because we’re pitching it. It’s not because we have a webinar dedicated to getting them to buy it. It’s because we’re saying, “And here’s this, and here’s this,” and we’re giving away this content, and then they’re going to go check it out, and they’re going to love it, and stuff that they like, they’re going to go after. They’re going to purchase. I think we have … We as marketers and as salespeople moving into that … As we start to sell to that generation, I think we’re going to need to approach them a little bit differently. Anyway.

Joshua: I just want to reinforce what you said with one comment and that is what most people don’t understand about the generation is if you do that well, if you create that content well, we are not afraid at all. If you do get past our BS detector, we’re not afraid at all to share it. We’ll be the first ones to share it. In that, you won access to my social graph. Impress me. If you impressed me, then I will impress my friends because I got to find you first, and I’m going to tell everyone I found you first. It gives me credibility and social proof. That’s something that people really miss about that, but I am not going to share your $7 eBook.

Brett: No, never.

Joshua: That’s a joke like I’m just …

Brett: I’ll put it this way. Unless it’s eBook or Evernote Essentials, right? Something that a lot of people have.

Joshua: Yeah, that’s true.

Brett: I’m never going to share an eBook. I’m never going to download a free report. I don’t want a free report. I want … I want it now. I want some of this stuff. I want to take a look at it. I want to see whether I like it. If I like it, I’m in.

Joshua: Yeah. You’ve really … I think the big trend is we’re going to have to work a lot harder for people’s email addresses in the next 5 to 10 years than we ever did in the past. If you just think that this organic traffic of PPC traffic is all of a sudden is just going plop in and work, it’s not going to always work that way. I think we’re seeing this … Everything comes in cycles. You see the first part of the internet, there was no paid anything. No paid … It didn’t exist, and so it was this organic. We’ve gone through that phase. I think we’re going to cycle back out for a while, and we’ll get back in it I’m sure.

I think the next phase is going to be the efficacy of all the paid channels are going to be up and down. I know that there will be pockets where they still work really well. It’s always the case. On a general standpoint, I think if you start to think about this type of content … A great example too is my friend Megan who … She actually is my Podcast Accountability Partner. She is one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever met in my life. She is … Lives in the UK. She sends out this newsletter called “Self-Disclosure” in print, and it’s a paid newsletter. I am so, so, so, so happy to pay for this newsletter because of her content is so good and it’s not … She’s not selling anything, but her content is really good.

I bring that up because you’re like, “Well, there’s GKIC newsletter that you could pay for. There’s all these newsletters that you can pay for.” The difference is she’s just speaking directly from her heart about life and marketing, and it’s authentic, and it’s … I’m going to connect with her as a human being. This right here is the next generation of those types of newsletters too. I think some of these old direct-response newsletters and things won’t work. The tone has to change to connect with us, and the messaging, and how it’s packaged. The title of this one this month was “Marketing Lessons from the Clergy”.

It’s like, “What?” It’s like fun, and then she has like some really great point. It’s like, “Wow, okay.” This is interesting. Man, what a great mindset moment. We’ve gone … Went all over the place, but I think that it’s … Yeah. This stuff is … I hope it’s valuable to people, and we want to now. If you have any questions, hit us up at Questions@infusioncast.co. Yeah. Brett, you have any final thoughts? We’re a little shorter than normal, but I think

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How to set up a Naming Convention in Infusionsoft.

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[transcript height=”200px”]

Joshua: Hey, everyone. We’re back with another episode of Tactical Tuesdays. This week, we’re talking about naming conventions and why it’s important to name things correctly, so you can find things in your app, and it just doesn’t become this hair-brain mess of an app which I know that some of you who are listening right now understand exactly what I’m talking about. Brett, take it away.

Brett: This Tactical Tuesday Infusionsoft tip is actually more of a productivity tip than anything else. I just want to show you what you can do when you name things correctly inside Infusionsoft. Okay. I want to go show you my list of campaigns in this particular app, and I want to just impress upon you the fact that there are 85 campaigns, and I have no idea what’s in which. Notice how the naming is all set. There’s not really a naming convention. Things are just set. I’ve done a decent job of naming what things are, but how many of these untitled campaigns do we have? How many unpublished campaigns? They’re all over the place.

Now, I want to show you a list that actually makes sense, okay? I’m going to go into the Campaign Builder in a different app, and I want to show you. This is the … This is our PlusThis app, just a list of our campaigns. You can see, these are all very well named. We have it all set, so that it’s going to actually send in … They all show up in the right order. You can see, first of all, we’ve got our marketing stuff in one place. We’ve got all of our fulfillment campaigns in one place. These are our active campaigns, and then once we … Once we deactivate a campaign, instead of deleting it, we actually just put it into this Archive category by adding archive to it.

You can see here, we have a webinar that I actually ran a while ago that I’m now going to go put into the Archive category. I’m just going to do that by jumping in to the campaign and going to “Campaign” menu, and then “Rename”, and then I’m just adding “z-Archive”. Just like that. What I’ll now do is drop it down in the list back to the bottom where … What that will do is just drop it down the list. Now, I have my active campaigns at the top, my inactive campaigns at the bottom, and I have some organization and actually know where the different things are that we’re running through.

This actually applies with everything, tags, campaigns, templates, everything. If you have a system, then when you name, it makes sense, and you can actually get back into it a lot quicker. This is something that saves hours and hours of time when going back and looking for different things.

Joshua: What’s up, man? Talking about organizational things today.

Brett: That’s right.

Joshua: Why the heck would we want to organize anything?

Brett: Joshua, I think … Organization is … It actually is like my mindset mode because I too ever since … Since the last time we talked, I’ve … Because I went and I got the Hazel thing, and I just started thinking. I’m addicted to it already [inaudible 00:03:12].

Joshua: I knew it totally be your cup of Joe.

Brett: It’s amazing, but I just realized that I think. That got me on a kick where I was going through my … I have a filing cabinet down here with just papers, old stuff. I was like, “You know what? There is no reason for me to have all those papers down there. There’s no reason for me to be doing anything on paper, keeping documents, and things like that. There’s no reason for me to holding on to all that dead weight.” The only reason, the only thing that’s been keeping me from it is the fact that I’m scared of putting it into a place where I’ll never be able to get it out again.

I was just like, “You know what? Forget it. What I’m going to do is just get everything into Evernote, and then I’ll categorize it the best I can based on what’s there. Then everything that comes in in the future, it’s going to be like I’ve created a system for myself.” Paper comes in in the mail, it’s either thrown away, scanned if I need it, and sometimes I actually will keep like marketing stuff, like people … The credit card offers and the … All the things that people send. I’ll use it. I keep it because I want to … I like other people’s marketing ideas. I like to steal them.

Joshua: It’s like a swipe file.

Brett: Exactly. I’ll take pictures of those, and then everything goes straight to the recycle, and I don’t keep … Now, I have a digital copy of everything. It’s nice because I don’t have to worry about … If I had to get up and leave, and I needed all my stuff with me, I just got to take my computer and that’s it.

Joshua: Even then if it’s on Dropbox or something, you’re still good.

Brett: The real beauty of it is the organizational system, once you have … I have a somewhat loosely organize … Like a loose system. I guess I shouldn’t say loose. It’s a pretty decent system in Evernote if I do say so myself. The fact that I know I can just go click, click, click, and go find the document wherever it’s at, I’m actually like …. I can actually get to it quicker. It’s not like I get to those documents all the time.

If I need to, I don’t want to spend an hour trying to find the document when I could just put it at Evernote and then search for it. The whole thing with organization is just … It’s not … Brad always used to say and I love this. I’ve thought about this a lot because this is … He and I think a lot alike in this way. He always used to say, “When you put things away, you need to put them away in preparing for you to take them out again.”

Joshua: Yeah. It’s good. Yeah.

Brett: He had a way of saying it. I don’t remember what it was, but it was like put things away, so that you can get them back out again. Not put things away, so you can be done with it as fast as possible and get it done. It’s put it away, so when you come back to it, when you do need it, it’s there and ready for you. I think we tend … I know that I’m like this all the time. We tend to procrastinate in ways we don’t even realize. Here’s an example. This may seem trivial to a lot of you. All of you probably, but I’m going to share it anyway. In our parking garage downstairs, we have a spot. We have a parking garage as part of this, as part of the place we live.

I noticed a lot of people back into their parking space. I thought, “That seems weird like what … Why would people back in their parking space?” Then I tried it. When I take the extra 30 to 45 seconds to pull and back in to the parking space leaving, it’s literally … When I need to get out and leave like whenever I need to go, it’s just car on, drive, go, and that’s it. I’m sacrificing present me. When I’m pulling in, I’m sacrificing my … The 35 seconds for the feeling of pure … I can’t even describe it. It’s pure acceleration being able to just go.

It’s like, “What? I don’t have to like back out and turn, and I don’t have to check my mirrors and do all these stuff. I can just go.” I think it’s the same thing with anything else that we do in life. If we set ourselves up so that when we come back to something, it’s easy and quick to do. Not only do we … Not only is it easier and quicker to do, but I think our minds can rest a little bit easier because we’ve done it.

Joshua: Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think that’s the thing too when it comes back to Infusionsoft organization and what you talked about in the video is also organizing things in a way that makes … Like creates a universal language, so your numbers or your archive. That’s the thing. I get into some client apps. I’m like, “You clearly wrote that for you, and you understand what that means, but no one else does.” It does take a little bit of frontloaded work to figure out what that naming convention is or what that codification is. In the long run, it’s totally worth it. You snip, and then the person, and they all know what it is.

Brett: Yeah, yeah. I think what’s really important to remember is that you may … You say … You mentioned on top of this all the time. It may makes sense to you when a person is doing it [inaudible 00:07:55]. Here’s something very interesting. What ends up happening most of the time is when you say, “Oh, this makes sense to me,” what you’re describing is … What you’re actually saying is, “This made sense at the moment when I did it.” Right?

Joshua: Yeah. That’s actually true.

Brett: Anytime you go back and this happens time, and time, and time, and time again, anytime you go back, and try and put yourself where you were before, it’s next to impossible because we don’t have that type of clear crystal memory retention. If we did, we’d begin to get paid a lot of money to do other things. Right?

Joshua: Right, right.

Brett: It’s all about forcing ourselves to adhere to a system, and the system, it doesn’t matter what system it is. If nobody else is going to see what you’re doing, you could come up with a number system that nobody could crack. That’s fine. It’s got to be systematic though, so that you in the future can get to what you need quicker. If you do need someone else to come in and look, it’s just, “Oh, yeah. You got to go here, and here, and here,” and then boom, done.

Joshua: I think that’s the thing that you talked about that struck me is … We did take the time we have in our Code Blocks, Infusionsoft app, and then couple others that we have, Sandbox apps. Just to name things especially in development, we do that anyway. Good developers do, so that people can read the code. There’s all about commenting code. That’s one of the things when we’re hiring for a developer here is known to comment his code, that’s one. It’s a plus because then it’s easier to work in teams, it’s easier to communicate. I think doing that with tags, categories, custom fields, and campaigns is huge.

Even we can go so far as individual emails if you want, but those are the big areas for us. There’s tags. Tags are hugely important to name because then you could just get an absolute spider’s web of tags that have no meaning, different acronyms that no one knows about. It’s just horrible. Maybe you don’t … You didn’t know exactly what the tag is, but just like for us like the 100s are legion, so it’s like just keep them. We know those are legion. Not exactly sure what legion, but at least I know it’s legion. You can get more and more detail. I know that SixthDivision had an incredibly detailed way of tagging. We don’t go to that extent, but we definitely follow the basis.

Brett: To use Brad’s self-describing phrase, SixthDivision had an anal-retentive way of naming things in Infusionsoft, and it’s stuck with me because that’s how I am. I want …. Like I’m not a halfway kind of guy. I don’t … in fact when I was a kid, my sister and I … Always, this is the end of every dinner. In every dinner that we had when I was a kid was … There was a piece of whatever the meat or whatever the delicious part of the meal was left. There’s always one piece left. My sister and I would look at each other, and I was trying to guess whether she was going to want any because I would rather none of it than take half of it. Right? I’d rather just give it to her than have to share with her.

It’s that same thing like I don’t want to do anything halfway, so I’m … I go to the extent where I’ve got prefixes and like naming conventions all the way down. I know exactly where something fits in, but I also found that I like to take those little shortcuts. Without fail, every time that I’ve taken one of those shortcuts has come around to bite me in the butt in the long run. You have to remember that you don’t necessarily need to go crazy with it, but you do have to be consistent with whatever you decide.

Joshua: We’re definitely inspired by the SixthDivision one, but that’s exactly right. We didn’t need to go to that granularity, but it’s important for some people to do that. I think it’s … I think the overarching theme of today’s Tactical Tuesday is just do something to get organized. Do something. What you said in the video, it’s a two-minute video. I loved what we said in the little pre-interview there. It’s like it’s easy, man. They can just shut down the interview, jump right in to the app, and get something done. I think that’s what they should do today.

People are out there, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh. I never thought about organizing my tags. Maybe I have them in categories, but there’s subcategories.” Unfortunately, Infusionsoft really only gives you a couple options. The prepending something is really important to create your own subcategories because that functionality, that bucket functionality isn’t necessarily there. That’s okay though. It shouldn’t stop you. You just work with what you got, and it makes all the difference in the world with reporting, tracking, all of that.

Brett: Yeah, absolutely.

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: Organization I think from a deeper level, I think that there are a lot of people that … I assume there will be quite a few people that are going to end up watching this episode that are professional organizers. Right? That’s what they do.

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: Several of them, myself. Right?

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: They’re professional organizers, and they get what we’re saying. The interesting thing is top to bottom, no matter who you are, I have never met somebody who came either the PlusThis or SixthDivision. Never in my life have I met somebody who was already naming things appropriately before they encountered our stuff.

Joshua: Right.

Brett: Right? That’s not to say … That’s not to say they weren’t trying, but most of the time, what happens is we are really good about telling other people that things are disorganized and taking all the shortcuts ourselves. This is really like a “hold your feet to the fire” kind of thing where it’s like, “Look.”

Joshua: Wait a second. You’re telling me you guys don’t use all these crazy naming conventions?

Brett: Yeah. We absolutely do. I do because I know, because I’ve seen it a million times. I was like, “Hmm.” There actually was, so pull back the curtain a little bit. Brad will probably hate me for this, but whatever.

Joshua: He’s going to punch you?

Brett: Yeah. For probably the first eight months to a year that SixthDivision was around, we had the most disgusting Infusionsoft application. So bad in fact … Very few people know this. So bad in fact that we actually switched apps. We started over because it was so bad that we needed to start clean, start fresh, and build it all right in the new one. We got a new app, put everything into that one, and build it up right. Actually, the SixthDivision app is pristine. It’s a model of a modern major general or whatever that line is. It’s very, very well done.

Joshua: That’s cool.

Brett: We try to do the same thing in the PlusThis app. We do a decent job. Tags, I have the … I still fall on to this problem every once in a while where I’ll just need … I need a tag just for this one thing. I’m never going to use it again. What happens is six months later, I go back. I’m like, “What did I use this tag for? Why is this even here?” Then, I can’t delete it because I have too much attachment to it.

Joshua: Yeah, and when you don’t know what it’s going to break.

Brett: Right, exactly.

Joshua: Is it going to break something? Yeah. I totally understand. Yeah. That’s actually something I … I’m thinking about that just now like creating a category one-time-use, and then the naming convention tells what the use is. That actually might be useful.

Brett: Yeah. We’ve done that. SixthDivision has one of those. They’ve added probably three or four categories since you’ve seen what they do. I think there’s actually probably a couple extras since I’ve been there. Again, it’s not about the SixthDivision methodology. It’s not about somebody. It’s about having like a way to handle when it comes in.

Joshua: A methodology. Yeah.

Brett: Yeah. Everything has to fit into one of the categories, right? You got to … When you have … I think that probably is part of what’s scary for people is like having to go through and then “I don’t know what this tag is. Where does it go?” You got to put it into a category, and it’s got to be in that category, and you have to … When you organize things, you can’t just have like 10 boxes, and then like the leftovers. Right? Everything’s got to go into a box or it’s going to get thrown away. Everything’s got to get organized into a certain spot or else it goes away because you got to stick with the system, and you got to not let yourself stray from the system.

Joshua: What do you think the most important categories are?

Brett: In?

Joshua: In general. I personally think if you’ve gotten no idea where to start, start with the Perfect Customer Lifecycle.

Brett: You’re talking about Infusionsoft. I thought you were talking super general.

Joshua: No, no. No.

Brett: With Infusionsoft, I think the Perfect Customer Lifecycle is a great place to start because it breaks it up into the …

Joshua: Key buckets I guess you could say.

Brett: Key buckets. Yeah, how people are coming through. You’ve got legion. You’ve got initial marketing. You’ve got sales. You’ve got closing … Fulfilment, that closing, that awkward transition. Then, you’ve got referrals and PS stuff on the backend. You got to start with the frontend stuff and then move. I always like to go in order, right?

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: You don’t need to go make like 12 categories of tags, start to make them all right now. Just go start with your legion tags. Get those things organized, and move on to your marketing tags, and then move on to your sales tags, and all the way through the process that way. The other thing that’s interesting, so the SixthDivision methodology. I bring this up only so you see there’s a different way of approaching this.

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: The SixthDivision methodology doesn’t categorize tags by area in the business. It categorizes tags by use. SixthDivision uses tags in different ways. We’re taught … Infusionsoft teaches us to … This is starting to sound like a bible class. We’re taught by the Great Mother … No, sorry. We’re taught by Infusionsoft that tags are meant to segment our list which they are, but that’s like one of the uses. We use tags to indicate status which informs our dashboard. We use tags to indicate activity which is for segmentation, but mostly for history. We’ll use tags for profile data just to supplement what we’ve got on the contact record. We’ll use tags for …

Joshua: What goes out, right?

Brett: Yeah. We used to use tags for what goes out, and then they came out with the report that actually shows that. The reason why we had the tags was so that you could …

Joshua: Generate those reports?

Brett: Yeah. You could generate those reports, and technically, you could do segmentation, but we just found that’s like … That’s one of those. Being able to segment based on what email has been sent to somebody is like way out. Right?

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: You’ve got a long before that’s even … You should be thinking about that.

Joshua: Yeah, true.

Brett: Anyway, so just by breaking it up by use, and then we actually … One of the things I think that was the hardest for people to understand is we actually had a category of tags, and the only thing those tags were used for was starting and stopping sequences. It was not used for segmentation. It wasn’t used for status updates, for anything except they were just system tags. It was like, “This tag is applied. It starts the sequence.” The tag immediately gets removed, so we can use it again.

That’s its only function, and so that’s just everyone think about it. That’s probably like a second or third generation tags naming convention strategy like you want to start with something that makes sense to you in your head. If that makes sense, if that jives with you, then definitely go with that because that works for me.

Joshua: The other thing I tell people too is tags can be renamed.

Brett: Right. Yeah.

Joshua: That’s another thing. It’s like don’t listen to us if you’re listening to us at home and you’re like, “But I want to just start at the third gen.” It’s like, “No, start at the first. Just get the basic.” You can always go back through when you want to get more advanced, and rename everything, and become more advanced. It’s one of the things in Infusionsoft I really like in the sense of it doesn’t lock you into that like you don’t have to like build from scratch if you build in that direction. You can just continue to iterate.

Brett: The other thing, one other thing on this … I don’t want to beat a dead horse. One other thing on this though that I think is very important is in my opinion, in my experience, you should have a manageable number of important tags. You might have 10,000 people on your list. You should only have like between 10 and 20 tags that you use for segmentation that you use for reporting on a consistent basis because that is much easier for you to handle and because really, unless you have a massive team that’s using tags interchangeably and they’re running a bunch of things, if it’s just you and a couple other people even if you have a massive list, it just makes it easier if you know … Okay.

We have all these tags. A bunch of tags are getting applied. There’s some system tags, there’s data tags, whatever is happening. The tags I’m concerned about are like the top-level tags like the most important, so maybe there’s like 10 or 20 of those. For us plus this, the important tags are, are they an active … Are they a prospect? Are they an active member? Are they paying or not? Then, are they a referral partner? That’s it. Those are our five important tags. Everything else, we look at when we need to. It will give us a history about a particular contact. We can pull report if we want, but those are the tags that we really care about.

In your business, identify the big high-level buckets. Make sure you have a tag that represents just that because you don’t want to be going in to do a contact search and have to say, “Okay. If I need this group of contacts, that means I need this tag, plus this tag, plus this tag, plus this tag, plus this email address.” Right? Make a tag for that and just make sure one gets that one tag, and then use that tag for all of your reporting. Just consolidate all that stuff into thing.

Joshua: Got it. That’s great. That makes a lot of sense to me. That makes a lot of sense because that’s … Yeah. I think that will really help a lot of people who think that they need to use all these if-then logic to find if this tag, but not that tag, but this tab, but that tag to find that one group. Instead, just tag those groups.

Brett: We’re talking like for the high-level, the stuff you touch every day. The groups of people you deal with on a weekly basis, those are the … We need to have a single tag for those. When it comes to like the one-off reports that you run every quarter, it doesn’t matter about those things. It’s just a way to consolidate things down and not have so many different little things that you have to think about and go into.

Joshua: That’s huge, man. I love that. That’s really good. Is it the mindset moment?

Brett: Mindset moment.

Joshua: I love our like sporadic like hilariousness.

Brett: That just needs to be … We need to do it ourselves. Just making up our own.

Joshua: I think it’s better because it’s completely out of tune and just really spontaneous.

Brett: It’s perfect.

Joshua: Last time we talked, I led the charge with the mindset. I’ll put it on you. What do we talk about? What mindset shifts?

Brett: Mindset shifts for today. We went into a little bit with organization. That was a big piece, a big thing that I’ve been driving on, but one thing that I’ve alluded to a couple of times in a couple of the episodes that I really want to drive today is when hype is important and when it’s detrimental. Okay? In this industry specifically, in the Infusionsoft space, we are highly hyped. I don’t necessarily want to say overhyped, although I personally believe that we’re overhyped because that’s not really the point. I think that there’s a lot of hype that goes around.

What I mean by that is I think that we tend to “over positivise” things in a way we talked about it last time about how we think everything is awesome and you … It’s like the song from the movie, “Everything is awesome.” Everything is great. Everything is awesome. There are no bad things. We can’t tell anybody that anything is going wrong. It’s all about high-fives and yeah, and we’re rock stars, and we’re all small business experts, and all that stuff. All that stuff is well and good, and I think it’s good to have a positive outlook on life and to be very like to attack life and carpe diem. Right? All that kind of stuff.

Joshua: Yeah.

Brett: I think what can happen is that the more we hype, the less we approach the situation realistically. The thing that I’ve run into several times is when I have somebody who’s trying to overhype something, when I say something to them that’s very serious, they almost get offended by it. It almost seems like I’m shutting them down like I’m trying to take away their happiness or something like that. I think the interesting thing is and this goes back to what we talked about last time about when do you know … That when do you know that you should like stop trying to pursue a course of action, and it’s when several people tell you to stop pursuing that course of action.

We need to invite into our businesses, into our lives people that are not super hype-y because that will keep the hype in check. The hype is a real thing, and the hype I think does provide motivation. It does move us forward, but it can also stunt our growth because we’re always being super positive and we’re never looking at the world realistically.

Joshua: The other thing too that I want to add to this is the hype, there’s … Marketing is in my mind always a moving target like there’s a level of efficacy that will taper over time like your marketing won’t always be as effective as it was last year this year. The mix of things you’re doing has to constantly be changing. I think a lot of small business owners don’t want to own up to that idea like, “Okay. You did direct mail for four or five years now, and you’re like ‘Yeah, yeah. It’s working.’” Now all of a sudden, it’s not working. It could be a time to do just less of that for a period and bring it back in. Combine it with something else, reconfigure.

All of that comes back to having this really, really solid mindset of looking up things objectively. I think that’s where having these people who are not … Debbie Downers in a way, but nor just more realistic because if you meet any real true hardcore just legit marketer, they’re that way. They’re just as much as scientists as they are creative. That science side of things really informs like their next big decisions. I mentioned to you I’m a big fan of Clay Collins. I think he embodies this. I think Noah Kagan of AppSumo especially embodies this. They have their key things that they’re known to do well, but they’re always testing other things, and they’re not afraid to let go of one and pick up another, and they take the overall theories with them.

A good example of that is Clay started with the blog, and then the blog worked when he start super charging that with the marketing show, parlayed that into LeadPlayer which people … A lot of people know about LeadPages, but they don’t know that started with another experiment with LeadPlayer, and then that came and went. Now, I’m not even supporting that anymore, and they doubled down on LeadPages. When you look at that and you go, “What if Clay because of his video marketing background with the marketing show would’ve said, ‘No. This is it. This is what I’m sticking with. This is working for me,’ and then see the opportunity?”

Now, I know I’m talking more product than any marketing, but I think it plays along in the same mindset of like following what’s working, not getting emotionally attached to one avenue. For me and like we talked the other day, I can’t even remember if it was on or off the show, but being okay with marketing channels that are working for you that aren’t sexy. Our biggest engine of growth in Code Blocks has just been very solid referral marketing strategy and engaging people to refer business back to us, creating partnerships that feed us referrals, taking care of … This whole strategy, it’s not exactly sexy right now.

It’s not Facebook ads. It’s not SEO. It’s not PPC. It’s not … It’s not any of these things and partly because those things when we tested them and we need to go back. That’s another thing, when you go back and retest things over the course of time, but that first round of testing through that stuff, it didn’t really provide the ROI for the amount of effort. At that business phase, that’s another thing, business phases, it didn’t work. We said, “Okay. We’re not going to spend time and money in all of these areas.” Now, we’ve entered in a new phase. We’ve got some real cool automation with referral things, and we found that content marketing, things like this are working really well. It’s tough. It’s hard.

Content marketing is timely, but still, people don’t come and buy really expensive websites that we build and sell through PPC ad. An SEO might be a good strategy, but that’s just the other slew of moving targets, and that takes a really long time. The content marketing goes hand in hand with that though. That’s the beautiful thing. We’re actually killing two birds with one stone. All that to say though, I think it’s this iterative mindset. It’s getting good feedback. It’s getting good data. Everyone right now has been in like podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast. Obviously, I’m drinking the Kool-Aid. We’re on a podcast.

Brett: Right. I guess.

Joshua: I totally look at it totally different like because a lot of people are doing the podcast thing because they want to … They want to monetize the podcast in such a way that, that was like a blog monetization strategy. They want to build a list and do some sort of info product or something off the back of it. For me, that was never the strategy with podcasting. It was brand building. It was connecting with people through the interviews, providing great information, and then just believing that at some point along the lines, the monetization would almost take care of itself if I did a good job providing good information.

That’s already happened. We’re 11 episodes in today. These are going out, so this will actually be further along, but it’s happened. It’s a valid test. I’m going to do more of it. We’re doing more of it by creating this segment on Tactical Tuesdays, and it’s not … You’ll notice that we’re not pitching like go to Gogobox.com either. That’s another thing. Your marketing doesn’t always have to be …

Brett: Although you’re welcome to, right? Go to Gogobox.com.

Joshua: You’re welcome to, but it’s not … This is not like a direct-response podcast.

Brett: Yeah, I know.

Joshua: That’s the other thing. You get a lot of GKIC people. I love you guys. I was in the GKIC world for a while; but if you’re trying, especially if you’re trying to connect with the younger generations, the millennials, they’ve got a really good BS detector for sales like shady sales pitches, so that … That might work in other demographics. If you’re looking to connect with that population, be careful, be different.

Brett: Actually, I want to stop you for a second. I want to take us on a tiny little side tangent. When we as millennials, we will use the words “shady sales pitch”. What we mean when we say “shady sales pitch” is what the GKIC people are doing. We don’t mean that derogatorily.

Joshua: Across the board.

Brett: Across the board. We don’t mean that as a derogatory thing. That’s just the way that we respond to it. That’s the gut response. Now, I can understand it and I … Because I’ve worked … You and I both, because we’ve worked with people, we understand that that type of sales pitch, and so we’re a little bit more tolerant of it, but it’s not going to work in 10 years, in 5 years. Probably the next like … In the next 5 years, it’s going to become defunct because people don’t … The younger generation that’s going to start bringing money to the marketplace doesn’t like to be sold to that way, and so you have to get them a different way. I don’t know that we’ve necessarily cracked the code of what that’s going to be because they’re not in the marketplace enough for us to know what’s working.

Joshua: We can digress into demographics and millennials a lot, but I think one of the things is what we’re doing right here. They’re much more in tuned with community. They’re much more in tuned with personal engagement. They’re much more in tuned with “I want to know that person.” Why has all of these social media platforms taken off with them? It’s because it’s giving them the connection they haven’t received. I think direct-response principles will work into the future, but they got to be packaged much better than they currently packaged because for a long, long time and I think it’s actually because the millennial generation grew up in the heyday of the direct-response marketing.

We grew up seeing this direct mail packages, and pieces, and infomercials that we’ve become … We knew from our young age what’s going on. I don’t think asking for a response or putting something out there and offer is bad or wrong, but I think it has to be done in such a way that it’s consumed differently. A good case study of this, of this blend of like great direct-response marketing meets the voice of the millennial generation. I think if you go and unpack what the foundation did in terms of selling their entrepreneurial training program to the … Yeah, millennial generation.

I think they did an incredible job, and it was no pitch, no pitch, no pitch, no pitch, no pitch like very Jeff Walker style, like great prelaunch content. Great prelaunch content, but not even alluding to anything coming like serious investment in that prelaunch content. That’s scary, and I think that’s the thing with the direct-response people they’re afraid of is they’re afraid to invest that much time, and effort, and money into things that they have to give away for free because they don’t want to do that.

Brett: I think the beauty … If I can make a prediction, if I can pull a Nostradamus here for a second, I think that the beauty of that, of this whole concept of the fear and of the fact they were giving stuff away for free is that the millennials that we’re talking about that are going to be the majority of the market in the next 5 to 10 years, they are going to be more wealthy already than the older people are, and they’re going to be younger which means they’re going to be less like jaded about spending their money. They’re going to be more willing to spend money.

If this what we’re talking about of giving away free content actually allures them to a particular company, what’s going to end up happening is the return on the investment of the free stuff you give away is going to be like doubled and tripled based on what we … Based on like the principles that we’ve been using in the past. We might spend $10 to put out a $7 tripwire product to push them into an upsell that works right now for maybe the late end baby boomers which is not going to work for millennials because they’re not going to spend $7.

That doesn’t really jive with them, but something like this, a podcast where they can just get involved, and just loved it, and go through this whole thing. What will happen is if we start getting a bunch of listenership on this or viewership I guess if they’re watching like from last time, Hazel is going to get a ton of content, a ton of stuff. Right?

Joshua: Yeah, yeah.

Brett: It’s not because we pushed it. It’s not because we’re pitching it. It’s not because we have a webinar dedicated to getting them to buy it. It’s because we’re saying, “And here’s this, and here’s this,” and we’re giving away this content, and then they’re going to go check it out, and they’re going to love it, and stuff that they like, they’re going to go after. They’re going to purchase. I think we have … We as marketers and as salespeople moving into that … As we start to sell to that generation, I think we’re going to need to approach them a little bit differently. Anyway.

Joshua: I just want to reinforce what you said with one comment and that is what most people don’t understand about the generation is if you do that well, if you create that content well, we are not afraid at all. If you do get past our BS detector, we’re not afraid at all to share it. We’ll be the first ones to share it. In that, you won access to my social graph. Impress me. If you impressed me, then I will impress my friends because I got to find you first, and I’m going to tell everyone I found you first. It gives me credibility and social proof. That’s something that people really miss about that, but I am not going to share your $7 eBook.

Brett: No, never.

Joshua: That’s a joke like I’m just …

Brett: I’ll put it this way. Unless it’s eBook or Evernote Essentials, right? Something that a lot of people have.

Joshua: Yeah, that’s true.

Brett: I’m never going to share an eBook. I’m never going to download a free report. I don’t want a free report. I want … I want it now. I want some of this stuff. I want to take a look at it. I want to see whether I like it. If I like it, I’m in.

Joshua: Yeah. You’ve really … I think the big trend is we’re going to have to work a lot harder for people’s email addresses in the next 5 to 10 years than we ever did in the past. If you just think that this organic traffic of PPC traffic is all of a sudden is just going plop in and work, it’s not going to always work that way. I think we’re seeing this … Everything comes in cycles. You see the first part of the internet, there was no paid anything. No paid … It didn’t exist, and so it was this organic. We’ve gone through that phase. I think we’re going to cycle back out for a while, and we’ll get back in it I’m sure.

I think the next phase is going to be the efficacy of all the paid channels are going to be up and down. I know that there will be pockets where they still work really well. It’s always the case. On a general standpoint, I think if you start to think about this type of content … A great example too is my friend Megan who … She actually is my Podcast Accountability Partner. She is one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever met in my life. She is … Lives in the UK. She sends out this newsletter called “Self-Disclosure” in print, and it’s a paid newsletter. I am so, so, so, so happy to pay for this newsletter because of her content is so good and it’s not … She’s not selling anything, but her content is really good.

I bring that up because you’re like, “Well, there’s GKIC newsletter that you could pay for. There’s all these newsletters that you can pay for.” The difference is she’s just speaking directly from her heart about life and marketing, and it’s authentic, and it’s … I’m going to connect with her as a human being. This right here is the next generation of those types of newsletters too. I think some of these old direct-response newsletters and things won’t work. The tone has to change to connect with us, and the messaging, and how it’s packaged. The title of this one this month was “Marketing Lessons from the Clergy”.

It’s like, “What?” It’s like fun, and then she has like some really great point. It’s like, “Wow, okay.” This is interesting. Man, what a great mindset moment. We’ve gone … Went all over the place, but I think that it’s … Yeah. This stuff is … I hope it’s valuable to people, and we want to now. If you have any questions, hit us up at Questions@infusioncast.co. Yeah. Brett, you have any final thoughts? We’re a little shorter than normal, but I think

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