8 Mental Shifts to Making $100 Million in Your Business

Question: Have you hit a ceiling in your sales or profits?

Maybe you’ve been successful, made a few million, but you want to really maximize the potential of your company.

Or maybe you’re still doing everything solo and have maxed out how many hours in a day you can realistically work. It’s time to scale.

Either way, you’re going to love today’s guest on The School of Greatness.

Josh Bezoni is an incredible guy with a huge heart, not to mention a very successful businessman.

I met him 5 years ago at an event he hosted in Austin, TX, became friends, and I’m back in that city this week for the book tour.

We finally got a chance to sit down and record a podcast, which I’d been wanting to do for a long time.

Josh is an incredible marketer, having worked for some of the best in the business early on in his career.

Fast forward 20 years and he and his business partners have built a fitness supplement company from an inital investment of $1 million to $100 million . . . in just a year.

In our conversation, Josh goes over the top 8 mindset shifts that have made the difference for him in bursting through the sales ceiling he had been hitting in his previous companies.

Get excited to take notes and have your mental framework re-built around business in Episode 260 with Josh Bezoni.

Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher Radio or TuneIn

The School of Greatness Podcast

“Aptitude plus obsession equals greatness.”

Some questions I ask:

• Do you think you can be successful without a charitable aspect to your business?
• How do you build redundancy into your team?
• What if you don’t have a lot of cash to start up your business and build your team?
• How does an entrepreneur know what metrics to track and how to do that?
• Why are you so driven to push your profits and company?

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• How Josh and his co-founders took $1 million and turned it into $100 million in one year when they founded their business
• The power of writing good copy and direct response marketing to maximize your sales

The 8 Mental Shifts to Maximize Your Sales

1. Create a charitable mission around your business
2. Promote your passion
3. Go into an industry that you can disrupt
4. Form allies
5. Build your infrastructure at 20x what you think you’ll need
6. Force focus
7. Know your numbers
8. Fire yourself

• How they built an email list of millions in just 3 years
• Josh’s best hiring tips
• What bad  supplement manufacturers do (and why to avoid these practices)
• Plus much more…

“Money without meaning is meaningless.”

Continue Seeking Greatness:

• BioTrust
• Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength
• Joe Polish
• Scientific Advertising
• Get 20% off BioTrust products by using coupon code “Lewis”
• FOLLOW JOSH

Website | Facebook

• LAST CALL TO SEE ME ON THE BOOK TOUR! GET TICKETS TO THE AUSTIN AND SAN DIEGO EVENTS HERE

• Music Credit: Kamikaze by DREAMER x LOUD

You may also like these episodes:

• How a Huge Vision Becomes Reality with Bryan Johnson
• How a Gang Kid Becomes a Multimillionaire Entrepreneur
• How to Be a Jedi and Master the Mind with Tom Bilyeu of Quest Nutrition

Did you enjoy the podcast?

Josh is the man and gave some incredibly useful tips in this interview. Which one are you going to implement first in your business?

“The biggest lessons in life I’ve ever had are the failures.”

The post 8 Mental Shifts to Making $100 Million in Your Business appeared first on Lewis Howes.

5 Tips for Marketing to Conscious Consumers

With do-good mentality on the rise, it's important for marketers to understand the evolving customer decision-making process.

Why You Should Invest In Inbound Marketing Before CRM Implementation

Since the beginning of time, humanity has sought to answer unanswerable questions, like which came first, the chicken or the egg? Recently, I’ve come across a question with increasing frequency, that may not be as significant, but is probably even more important if you’re looking to embark upon a journey of accelerated sales growth.

What should you focus on first, building an effective inbound marketing/lead generation process or implementing a CRM to manage your sales and customer acquisition process? While both are important, the question is should you focus on one before the other?

To be clear, both are very important to making growth predictable, sustainable and scalable. If you have the resources and bandwidth you should be pursuing and enhancing both of them simultaneously. However, if you must choose between them, the decision you make will have a significant impact on your growth outlook.

Before answering the question, let’s take a look at the fundamental purpose of each initiative.

The Purpose of CRM

There are several advantages of an effective CRM system with the primary purposes being:

• Building sales efficiency
• Providing management insight into the status and progress of the overall sales effort
• Ensuring compliance with the sales process
• Providing clear reporting
• Creating greater predictability throughout the entire sales process

The Purpose of an Inbound Marketing Program

Here too, there are lots of reasons you’d want to embark on an inbound marketing effort, with the primary purposes being:

• Generating greater awareness and engagement with your desired markets
• Standing out from your competition by creating and reinforcing relevant thought leadership
• Increasing lead velocity and generating more sales qualified opportunities for the organization

To reiterate, all of these results are very important, but I think it’s pretty clear which initiative should be focused on first. That is Inbound Marketing.

3 Reasons Why You Should Focus on Inbound Efforts First

1) CRM Doesn’t Fix Bad Processes, But Inbound Can

An effective CRM system provides tremendous value in increasing the efficiency of a good process. However, it does nothing to address an average or poor process.

For more than 20 years I’ve been working with companies looking to improve their results through CRM utilization. All too frequently significant investments are made in software, time is spent training on the system and absolutely nothing changes. The initial reaction is to blame it on bad CRM, when the reality is that it’s bad process that is the real culprit. Designing a CRM system effectively requires that you have a clear and effective demand generation process that can be mapped to the CRM.

While working on the CRM does little to address bad sales process, the process of implementing an inbound marketing approach does a tremendous amount to improve your sales process (and thus your CRM efforts).

Inbound marketing requires that you start at the top of the funnel and work your way through to the bottom. It makes you view demand and revenue generation from a holistic viewpoint, to understand your market better and to align your sales efforts to how your market behaves today. All of these things drive greater revenue opportunities and create the path to gain the very efficiencies that CRMs promise to create.

2) Effective Inbound Methodology Creates Better CRM Application

I deal with a lot of companies that have been using CRM for years. It is a rare event for me to come across someone who has either designed or implemented their CRM effectively. The data is, to put it bluntly, 90% crap.

A tremendous amount of the value you get from using a CRM comes from the ability to slice and dice the data to segment effectively and increase personalization. However, if you haven’t done the basic work of defining your buyer personas, designing the message to enable you to personalize and to determine how you are going to effectively nurture, you won’t have the clarity to use your CRM effectively.

In my experience, effective CRM reinforces an effective inbound marketing and sales approach, it does not create one. I’ve lost count of the number of times a client has had to substantially change their CRM as a result of the creation of an effective inbound marketing strategy.

3) You Cannot Have Predictable Growth Without Predictable Lead Generation

If I were to summarize the two most valuable benefits of a CRM it would be predictability and efficiency. As I’ve shared, inbound marketing creates the environment for an efficient process, but what about creating predictability?

Simply put, you cannot have predictable sales results or predictable growth if you do not first have predictable lead generation. While creating an effective lead generation strategy certainly involves more than just inbound marketing, inbound is a crucial component.

Inbound marketing enables you to build a true funnel that allows you to build a predictable pipeline for growth. Consider the following:

• The Content Marketing Institute reports that 80% of decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus in an advertisement (and by extension a sales call).
• Inbound leads cost 60% less than outbound leads. (source: State of Inbound Marketing Report)
• Companies that excel at lead nurturing (a core part of the inbound methodology) generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower costs (source: Forrester Research).
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (source: The Annuitas Group)
• SEO driven leads have a have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads have a 1.7% closing rate. (source: Search Engine World)

The natural focus of building engagement that is created by fully adopting an inbound marketing approach builds a more efficient and effective sales process and make CRM adoption a much easier, more profitable effort.

Additionally, a major benefit of inbound marketing is that it creates revenue. No matter how you slice it, CRM is a cost (a valuable one, but a cost nonetheless). Building an effective revenue generation process creates the environment that allows efficiency and predictability to be sustainable.

Investing the time, money and energy into inbound marketing first, puts you in a stronger position to both implement an effective CRM initiative and to accelerate growth.

The Best Times to Send Business Emails This Holiday Season [New Data]

This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

We’ve finally found an effective email strategy. Our open and clickthrough rates are optimized -- or so we thought.

Until one December morning when our metrics plummet. It must be a mistake.

Or, it’s the holiday season. Each year from November to January, email behavior changes and email strategies lose their effectiveness.

To combat this, we decided to look at 4,513,689 emails to analyze exactly how the holidays impact our one-to-one emails. The presentation below reveals all our never-before-shared insights.

Let's explore.

How have the holidays impacted your email activity? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

9 Ways Small Businesses Can Be Big on Google

With diligent attention to the tricks of the online business trade, smaller businesses can climb to that coveted first spot on the search page.

How to Create a 'To-Don't' List: A Productivity Trick for Focusing On What Really Matters [Infographic]

This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

When I got my first job, I was given one piece of advice over and over again: Say yes. Say yes to every opportunity that comes your way, raise your hand for side projects, and generally go above and beyond.

Going above in your role is a great way to learn and grow. But sometimes, saying no is just as important. And while you're probably already familiar with the to-do list, there's another list out there that might be even more valuable.

The to-don't list, as its name suggests, itemizes all the things you won’t do throughout your day.

Developed by Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, this tool helps you focus on what’s actually important and serves as a conscious reminder of what’s not.

So what does a to-don’t list actually look like? Use the guiding questions in the infographic below to create your own, and check out what Daniel Pink includes on his to-don’t list.

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Risk for the Dream

I’ve felt called to many quests in my life that people told me I was crazy to pursue.

I knew I had to chase them no matter how crazy they were, what I had to sacrifice, where I had to move or what I had to let go of to pursue.

I’ve been blessed to achieve most of these quests, and some I gained in a big way even if the desired dream didn’t happen.

What I do know is I’ll always regret it the rest of my life if I don’t go for my dreams. I’ll feel like I let my Creator down by playing it safe and living an average life.

I believe God made us to live extraordinary. He didn’t create this magical world for us to show up in an average way our entire lives.

Sometimes that means extreme pain, heartache, loss, letting go, and having most of the world not “get you” because they are too afraid to chase their dreams.

Just make sure you continue to believe in yourself, trust your personal truth and call to adventure because life is a beautiful journey and there is always someone who has your back.

Follow your heart.

Go all in.

It will lead you where you need to go.

Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher Radio or TuneIn

The School of Greatness Podcast

“When we’re grateful for what we have, we’re allowing ourselves to bring more things in to be grateful for.”

Continue Seeking Greatness:

• HAVE YOU READ THE SCHOOL OF GREATNESS BOOK YET? HTTP://GREATNESSBOOK.COM

• Music Credit: Eau Claire, WI (Bon Iver Tribute) by Aeuria

Did you enjoy the podcast?

What is your dream?

The post Risk for the Dream appeared first on Lewis Howes.

Why Last Year’s Holiday Ecommerce Sales Numbers Are Changing 2015 Expectations

You don’t need anyone to tell you that the holidays are a major opportunity for retailers everywhere (online or offline). But you might be surprised by the level of importance they carry and how some of these trends are changing.

RJMetrics analyzed data from hundreds of ecommerce stores. Some of what we found wasn’t too surprising – Black Friday and Cyber Monday are major shopping days for any ecommerce retailer. But some findings were a little more unexpected. The big one? For the past five years online retailers have been generating a decreasing percentage of their annual revenue during holiday months.

Read on for what’s behind these trends, and how they are changing expectations for the upcoming weeks.

How Important Was Last Holiday Season to Ecommerce Companies?

Overall, the months of November and December account for more than 20% of total annual revenue.

On average, these “holiday shopping months” bring in 30% more revenue than non-holiday months.

Is This Normal?

Without a doubt, the holiday season is an important time for ecommerce companies. But you can add some additional context when you segment this data by year.

Since 2010, the holiday months of November and December are comprising a shrinking portion of total annual revenue. While ecommerce sales as a whole are growing – up 15.4% since 2013 according to the U.S. commerce department – retailers are generating a bigger chunk of this revenue during non-holiday months.

This chart does not in any way indicate that the health of ecommerce is decreasing, only that the holiday season is becoming less important to overall sales numbers.

Are All Categories of Ecommerce Decreasing Their Reliance on the Holiday Season?

As you can probably predict, this breakdown differs across ecommerce categories.

When we looked at the importance of the holiday season by category, predictably Apparel/Accessories and Computer/Electronics companies are much more “holiday-sensitive”. This means that a greater percentage of their total annual revenue is generated during holiday months than Food/Drug, Health/Beauty, and Housewares/Home Furnishings categories.

The decreasing importance of the holiday season over the years is even more pronounced for holiday-sensitive categories.

The two holiday-sensitive segments, Apparel/Accessories and Computer/Electronics, are being disproportionately impacted by this trend. In 2010, holiday-sensitive categories were generating 32% of their total annual revenue during the holiday months. In 2014, they generated 20% of their total annual revenue during the holiday months, a massive 12 percentage point drop over the past 4 years.

Interestingly, since 2012, holiday shopping has made up only 16% of annual revenue for “holiday-insensitive” companies, which means that these categories actually generate less revenue during the holiday months than they do during the rest of the year.

Why the Leveling Out?

With data it’s often easier to answer “What happened?” than it is to answer “Why?”

"Traditional retailers, both catalog and brick-and-mortar, rely heavily on holiday shopping to hit their annual revenue targets. But today’s most innovative online retailers—companies like Mizzen & Main, Harry’s, Plated, and more—build relationships with their customers throughout the year. They use subscription models to create regular purchase habits, build high-quality brands to nurture affinity, and use effective (but not always discount-based) retention marketing. Because of this, they’re less reliant on holiday shopping than traditional retailers."

While the Holiday Season is Losing Some Importance, Black Friday and Cyber Monday Continue Surging

When we looked at revenue on a daily timeline, we saw that Black Friday and Cyber Monday were huge contributors to the revenue generated during the holiday season.

The holiday season is decreasing in importance for most companies, but the days from Black Friday through Christmas still pack a punch, generating 50-100% more revenue than the other non-holiday shopping days throughout the rest of the year.

This uptick is even more pronounced for the “holiday-sensitive” categories we mentioned earlier.

Specifically, Cyber Monday is important for any ecommerce retailer. While online sales in general rose 23% YOY from Thanksgiving day to Cyber Monday, last year’s Cyber Monday generated $2.3 billion, 29% higher than 2013’s figures.

IBM also reported that Cyber Monday sales were greater than both Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

What Does This Mean for Your Ecommerce Business?

There are two important takeaways from this data that every online retailer should be paying attention to:

1) Focus Your Efforts on the Key Shopping Days

While November and December aren’t carrying the same weight as they used to, it’s clear November 27th to the 30th will still be crucial to any retailer looking to close out the year with strong numbers.

There are a number of strategies to help you maximize your sales efficiency during this period, from optimizing your mobile buying experience to personalizing your interactions with shoppers, building customer loyalty from customers looking to change brands to changing your Google Adwords bidding strategy during the holiday season.

2) Invest in Your Year-Round Strategy

Ecommerce retailers are less reliant on November and December sales, and that’s a good thing! Holiday shoppers are notoriously demanding of discounts and 71% expect free shipping (47% expect free returns). Rather than relying on the holiday season to be their primary growth driver, forward-thinking businesses are finding ways to drive growth throughout the year.

To dig deeper into these trends, check out the full Ecommerce Holiday Trends report from RJMetrics here.