Reduce Effort and Boost Confidence: Infusionsoft’s Goals to Help Small Businesses Improve Sales and Marketing

This video interview was recorded on September 16, 2015, and originally posted on SMB Group Spotlight.

Laurie: Today I have the pleasure of talking to Terry Hicks. I’m used to talking to Terry when he was at Intuit, but today he’s here in his new role as Chief Product Officer at InfusionSoft, which provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solution for true small businesses. I’m really happy to be talking to you today, Terry, and would like to hear what you’ll be doing in your new role. But before we get into this, you were at QuickBooks fifteen years or so. I’m really curious, you had a really successful role there, so what brought you to InfusionSoft? What inspired the change?

Terry: Well, I think one of the things that inspired me coming to InfusionSoft was really the passion for small businesses. Over my fifteen years at Intuit, I got a lot of personal energy, and felt like I was doing something good in the world, but I decided that it was time to take on a new challenge. Intuit’s a great company, I’ve learned a lot, but I just decided personally I wanted to take on a new challenge. I was very open-minded in what I was looking for, but the things that I wanted was a great group of people, who I really enjoy and trust and feel like I’d want to be in the trenches working with them every day. And an interesting problem to solve, where there is a big opportunity to make a difference. It could have been small business or some other space, but when I met the InfusionSoft team, I really connected deeply both with who they are, and the mission that they’re on. So once that happened, I just said, “Hey, this is the next right place for me.”

Laurie: That’s great. Tell us a bit about your role at InfusionSoft, and what you’ll be doing.

Terry:  InfusionSoft has an all-in-one sales and marketing software for small businesses and I’m the Chief Product Officer. What’s included in my role is the product management team and the design team, and also the payments business and the marketplace. So we’re looking at how we revolutionize all-in-one sales and marketing software for small businesses to make it much more appropriate from an experience standpoint, from a basic use standpoint, and solve these problems in a new and modern way.

Laurie: InfusionSoft, already has over 30,000 small business customers, there are millions of small businesses out there, so is the challenge how do we get to that next level of growth?

Terry:  Exactly. A lot of what we are solving for is multi-system chaos. A lot of small businesses start using many, many tools to try to solve a problem. The may say, let me try this tool or let me try that tool, before really slowing down and starting to think about, what am I trying to accomplish in my business? So a big opportunity for us is to translate the years and years of expertise that InfusionSoft has to what we call the small business success method or life cycle marketing. We can translate that into both the product experience as well translate that knowledge and grow that knowledge through our ecosystem of experts. These expert partners help small businesses get started, and guide them to success with different strategies. That, I think that’s the big opportunity. It’s move more to, what are you trying to accomplish into the process from the start. As we build that into the experience of the product, it means less work for small businesses to achieve success.

Laurie: So if there’s one message you’re really hearing over and over and over again from the customers you see, like to really do this for me, what would that be?

Terry: Customers really connect with the potential benefits of InfusionSoft–such as I’m trying to grow to sales, I’m trying to get organized.

Laurie: Number one in our studies: Grow my business.

Terry: That’s right. And also saving time because small businesses are time starved, they wear all of those hats. So the number one thing is, I love all of those benefits, help me achieve them with less effort, with more confidence. Help me connect to the actions that I should take in my business to achieve those outcomes. So that really what we’re trying to do.

Laurie:  Make that roadmap more straightforward Okay. So what are the biggest challenges to do this. As we all know, software, whether it’s in the cloud or on premise, it can automate things for you, it can take care of things for you, but you still have to spend time getting things set up and configured for your business. So how do you overcome those challenges of really making that more drop-dead easy to use.

Terry:  Well, the number one challenge is when you have an existing base of customers, they’re comfortable with the way things work. And so, as you start to change, even though the benefit is very attractive, it is still reflected as change.

Laurie:  You’re talking about your existing installed base customers?

Terry:  Yes, that’s something we’re going to be very mindful of. The other thing is how do you build confidence? When the experience changes from building something from scratch to selecting from recommendations that are either tailor-made to look like you with your words, or maybe changing the activity a little bit, how do you build confidence that that’s the right thing for your business?. So whether it’s bringing the expertise of other experts into the experience, whether it’s providing reviews and ratings and performance metrics around it, that will be a big challenge because small businesses are skeptical. They don’t want to waste time or money on solutions that don’t work and could actually hurt their business more than help. So building that confidence is a big challenge.

Laurie:  I think we’ve all been there, no matter what size business, of trying things and it ends up to be such a time-sink and then you’re like, “This thing doesn’t work for me anyway.” So what are some ways you might address that challenge? I think a lot of small business owners have been burned already. They spend a lot of time if not money as well, but time is so key and it was just like, “This was just a big waste of time.” How will you circumvent that?

Terry:  Well, fortunately there are many patterns that exist in design that are successful. So just like our customers, we don’t need to reinvent all of those wheels ourselves. We can adopt many of the best practices that are out there in terms of getting started. Another big advantage though, that’s unique to InfusionSoft, is we have a large network of experts who help small businesses every day. Some of those experts actually work at InfusionSoft. So it’s really bringing those people and those personalities into the experience so for the customers who are more self-directed and inclined to analyze the recommendations and adopt them–they’ll be fine. But for the many who have a question mark of “Is this right for my business?” they’ll have more access to experts from the ecosystem of folks who already support InfusionSoft customers, as well as some of the key members of the InfusionSoft team that can help them get over that problem.

Laurie: So you can personalize it to your style and your preferences.  That’s great.

Well Terry, it was so great to see you again and congratulations on your new role. I’ll be looking forward to InfusionCon next March to see how everything’s going and catch up with some of the new things that you’re doing then.

Terry:  I really look forward to catching up with you. I’m sure we’ll have made a lot of progress by then and I’d love to share it all.