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Exactly Why Small Businesses Fail — Michael E. Gerber Interview

In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Michael E. Gerber, the author of The E-Myth and the father of business systems themselves. He lets us in on the business systems he’s used to grow his consultancy (and hundreds of thousands of other companies).

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Small business expert, Michael E. Gerber, lets us in on the business systems he’s used to grow his consultancy (and hundreds of thousands of other companies). These are time-tested systems he’s honed over a period of 30 years. From The E-Myth’s first publication in 1987 to the present day, he’s written over 20 books on business processes. It’s safe to say, there are very few people who know more about business processes than Michael E. Gerber.

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What is Business Process Management? A Really Simple Introduction

What is business process management

If there ever was a three-word phrase that sounded dull enough to be a sedative, it’s business process management. 

It’s probably the vagueness that’s so off-putting. Which process? Managed how? Who’s business? In the last chapter, I went deep into what a process is and then why processes are important. I’ll recap so you don’t have to skip around.

A process is “a collection of interrelated work tasks initiated in response to an event that achieves a specific result”.

But what happens if that process isn’t achieving the result, or if it’s not achieving it very effectively? Every business has goals, but the interesting part — and what business process management actually is — is the exact steps a business will take to achieve those goals.

These goals could be anything from sending a newsletter on time every week to hitting $1,000,000 in revenue. Whatever the goals, your business processes are the roadmap for getting there. Not so boring, right?

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The Future of SaaS, AI Programming and Robots Taking Your Job — An Interview with Dennis R. Mortensen

In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Dennis R. Mortensen, the creator of x.ai about his AI Amy, SaaS product retention, providing the best UX possible, and much more.

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This episode of Business Systems Explored is a real treat for developers or anyone interested in the techy systems behind SaaS businesses. Dennis R. Mortensen — the founder of x.ai — talks to us about how conversational interfaces will change SaaS and how dashboards will die.

Find out how x.ai developers solve the problems you get with natural language processing, and why Dennis isn’t going to bother building a Slack integration.

Discussing everything from AI programming to philosophical moral dilemmas, this episode is well worth a listen, if only for Dennis’ eye-opening predictions about how AI will change the job market.

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How Processes Protect Your Business From Crashing and Burning

Benefits of Processes

Let’s start off with something lighter than outright, embarrassing failure…

What’s your general feeling about assembling flat-packed furniture?

After putting together a desk and a couple of chairs yesterday, I’m still irked. Every hole is drilled about half an inch wrong so you have to have some kind of vice to align the damn thing, but that’s not the main problem…

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How to Master Conversion Rate Optimization with Tim Paige of LeadPages

In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Tim Paige, of LeadPages, about the tactics he’s used to help LeadPages grow to an impressive 40,000 customers, and 170 employees.

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Tim Paige is the Senior Conversion Educator at LeadPages and the host of Conversion Cast, a podcast for performance focused marketers. Since joining LeadPages, he has hosted over 400 live webinars and recorded over 100 episodes of his podcast.

Tim shares his journey from door-to-door vacuum salesman to a marketer that helps LeadPages get tens of thousands of customers, and rips apart the systems he used along the way. We learn about a different approach to the 80/20 rule and why there’s another hidden rule there that’s just as important.

Use the links below to listen to the episode, or subscribe on iTunes so you never miss out.

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Kate Erickson on Niche Marketing, Content Creation and Managing a Virtual Team

In this episode of Business Systems Explored we speak to Kate Erickson of the fantastic Entrepreneur on Fire.

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Kate’s talking to us about how her content helped propel EOFire to one of the biggest podcasts ever made, and how she’s about to do it all over again with her new blog, Kate’s Take. Kate lets us in on her marketing processes for creating high quality, actionable resources and how she makes damn well sure these resources are a perfect market fit.

Use the links below to listen to the episode, or subscribe on iTunes so you never miss out.

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The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies is Here

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The essential customer success book to boost MRR at your SaaS company

A SaaS company without a customer success system is like a lion without teeth. You can chase customers all you like, but when you catch them you’re thinking “now what?”.

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If you haven’t got a customer success team or set of processes in place at your SaaS company, it’s bad but not the end of the world.

Some SaaS companies are more self-serve than others, but all need a way to retain important customers and start exponentially compounding revenue.

This book for putting the systems in place to retain customers, whether that’s by learning about their problems or by properly onboarding them.

Better yet, it’s completely free.

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What’s in the ebook?

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How to Leverage Your Thank You Page to Boost Engagement

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When we say ‘thank you’, it’s often at the end of a conversation.

In the marketing world, there’s no reason to see it that way. In fact, if you’re using your thank you page to signal the end of your customer’s path on your site, you’re doing it wrong.

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First of all, let’s look at when to use thank you pages.

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The Master of Building and Managing Virtual Teams Reveals His Tested Methods

In this episode of Business Systems Explored we speak to Chris Ducker – virtual CEO, keynote speaker and best selling author.

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Chris Ducker became one of the best-known British businesspeople when he popularized the idea of virtual teams. Mostly every company has VAs these days, but back in 2009, they weren’t readily available. When Chris suffered a shattering burnout, he reinvented himself as a virtual CEO and started to replace himself in his business.

With all of the experience gained, he then set up Virtual Staff Finder — a service where CEOs in need of virtual team members can go to hire VAs that have been thoroughly screened and trained before being accepted into the program. Virtual Staff Finder has linked 4300 virtual team members to companies and expanded to the point where Chris now has over 400 employees.

Chris knows that a solid team is the most important part of any business — especially if the CEO is going to stay sane. 

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How to Build a Kick-Ass Outbound Sales Team for Your Startup

In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Steli Efti, CEO of Close, a sales and CRM platform.

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Listening to Steli Efti is like soaking in the most intense sales wisdom you’ll ever hear.

He’s a born salesman, and this interview is full of his detailed processes and quick-fire tips. From building, scaling and maintaining a sales team to generating outbound sales leads and closing deals, Steli lets us in on techniques that have helped him build the successful Close from (surprise surprise) an outbound sales service to a CRM.

He explains his “AQC” model for measuring the effectiveness of outbound sales, and how many cold calls you need to make every day to get results. I really loved hearing about testing whether it’s your leads that aren’t qualified or whether your sales pitch just sucks.

Use the links below to get the episode!

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And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:
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Quote to Tweet

“Qualify, pitch, manage objections then go for the close. It’s a process, not rocket science” (tweet this)

Show notes

  • Steli reveals best practices and processes for building a killer sales team
  • What types of companies should bother implementing a sales team
  • Why Close don’t do outbound sales any more
  • Setting up an inbound sales machine
  • When to set up a sales team, and when not to
  • Using outbound sales as market research and pure hustle
  • Getting your first customer with outbound sales
  • A solid framework for outbound sales explained
  • Estimating the actual lifetime value of a customer to see if you need a sales team
  • Back-of-the-napkin math for calculating the cost of outbound sales
  • When it’s okay to pay $2 to get $1 back
  • A quick trick you can use to make outbound sales way more profitable
  • Identifying your ideal customer, and judging how hard it will be to implement outbound sales to go after them
  • The most overlooked ground rule of outbound sales
  • How to answer the question “does this scale?”
  • What to do when you run out of leads
  • Matching ideal customers to lead sources to reel in the best targets
  • Why trusting bought leads is pure stupidity and manual scraping is much more accurate
  • The types of professionals that are the easiest to sell to
  • A rarely used method of generating sales leads
  • You’ve got leads. What now?
  • Implementing a system to get consistent demos, meetings and sales
  • Planning out a month of sales activity in advance
  • The importance of testing constantly: emails, cold calls, offers.
  • Why 99.9% of outbound campaigns are high volume
  • What does ‘high volume’ mean? How many cold calls or emails is that per day?
  • Developing a minimum viable pitch
  • Overcoming the fear of sales
  • The most important outbound sales metrics to track when cold calling and emailing
  • Calculating your “reach rate” to measure your sale team’s effectiveness
  • The simple way to find out if a lead is qualified
  • Finding out if your leads are the problem, or if your pitch just sucks
  • Creating a list of common objections to close more deals
  • Why you should follow up forever

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