About Us :SalesPipelinePros.com

About Us

Six months ago we had hit a wall in our CCPro business, and were ready to walk away from it all.

Hi, Cameron and Tanya Outridge here.

Welcome to our Carbon Copy Pro outsourcing service SalesPipelinePros.com

If you are a member of our team, it is likely that we have spoken with you personally about this service and why we felt the need to develop it. If not, perhaps understanding our background and CCPro journey will go some way to explaining why we have taken this step.

You will not be getting a “we were struggling in our business” style of story here, as that has not been our particular experience. And we will only go back far enough that it is relevant to you in your online business, and to give you confidence that we can deliver what we say we can

So, to begin at the closest point of relevance, Cameron is a professional journalist and I have a degree in Behavioral Science. We spent the first 11 years of our entrepreneurial career as the owners of a community newspaper called “The Range News” in a little town called Maleny on the Sunshine Coast of Australia.

It was a baptism of fire into the world of business but as we had put our family home on the line we had to get our heads down, learn how to build a profitable business, and in the process become professional publishers.

In the beginning, we did what every marketing novice does and hit the streets to sell advertising space in our newspaper. The problems with that approach are many and (with the benefit of experience) obvious.

Our distribution area was very large, and traveling around the streets “cold calling” businesses at random is a particularly un-targeted and un-leveraged way to spend your time. In fact, it kind of smacks of ‘old school’ MLM marketing strategies.

In the interests of providing a better and more professional service to our advertising clients and improving our bottom line, we embarked on a ten year long journey, learning how to market.
We have both come from entrepreneurial backgrounds, and as such share a passion for helping other small business people to build their businesses, and to perhaps work smarter as well as harder.

We spent countless hours and tens of thousands of dollars buying marketing books and CD’s, and attending marketing training seminars.

This was a whole new world to us. We had never heard of direct response marketing and copy writing before (in fact, writing commercial features was generally sneered at by most of the journalists Cameron had previously worked with – they considered it beneath them to write a piece of copy for marketing purposes).

But it was during this time that we learn t about the power of long copy advertising. And we started to develop business features that were seasonal, industry specific or topical, and targeting our advertising base of clients via email broadcasts.
We developed an autoresponder series, educating our advertisers with information about marketing, advertising and promotion.

After we committed to this process of educating business people about advertising, we noticed that a couple of things happened that completely turned our business around.

Firstly, we did not have to hit the streets selling advertising ever again. Business people called us, wanting to book advertising space in the latest feature we were promoting.

Next, they were booking larger spaces because they wanted us to write long copy “advertorial’ style ads for them in lieu of the stock standard display style ad. We were selling more, to the same group of people, and they were becoming very happy repeat customers who were referring their friends.

The feedback we would get from our advertisers was absolutely overwhelming. They would tell us that after their advertorial had run, they would sell out of stock, or be over-run with inquiries, or have to employ more people to come and help out. As you can imagine, it was immensely gratifying.

The most significant thing though, was that our turnover well and truly went over the seven figure mark and we attracted the attention of a large newspaper company (APN Australian Publishing) who made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.

We sold the paper in December 2006, and spent the next 18 months managing it on their behalf. Having decided we were ready for our own business again, we looked to Network Marketing, and basically had the same experience that 97% of people in the industry do.

We were spending far more money than we were making, and were only being taught offline and “old school” marketing strategies. Not a good match for what we were looking for, and we knew that using the Internet was the way forward we wanted to pursue.

We joined CCPro in November 2008, and spent our first two months training and setting our online business up. We pulled the trigger on our marketing in January 2009, and what happened next was pretty overwhelming.

At our first Pro event at Lake Tahoe in March 2009, we were recognized by CCPro with a Master Marketing Award.

And our CCPro experience confirmed that in order to build a powerful (and more importantly, profitable) business in direct sales, it is vital to understand the principles that make this type of business work, and that there are many, many moving parts, which make up a profitable sales pipeline.

We built a large team relatively fast, as we implemented Attraction marketing and Information-marketing strategies into our own sales pipeline. But even more important, we used our professional publishing skills to brand ourselves, and define ourselves as serious business people within the Ccpro system very early in the piece.

We were thrilled to have a team of wonderful people who wanted to work with us to do what we had done, and also create the life of their dreams. We knew pretty much straight away that having the type of sales pipeline we had built for ourselves (and as other top earners have also done), was instrumental to the success we had enjoyed.

A commitment to team building has always been important to us. As we built our team, we knew that in order for others to be successful, it was critical that they developed their own presence online as well. This is not important purely from a marketing view point, but search engines like Google also demand that online business people present themselves in an honest, transparent and professional manner, and offer value to prospective customers. All good.

Over the past 12 months we have trialed a number of ways that we thought would be best to mentor our team in this aspect of developing their businesses online.

We initially tried group-training calls. Now, this is a good way to leverage our own time for sure, but we didn’t think it was terribly helpful overall because we could not really deal with people individually in that forum. And with different time zones, different levels of understanding, and the individual commitments that our team members have, they were generally quite poorly attended.

So, back to the drawing board.

We have produced a large volume of additional resources (manuals, videos and training sites – some of which have been used by CCPro in the Black Box back office for all Pro members) for people to use in their own time.

Pretty neat idea, but ultimately, it created MORE reading and learning, without necessarily giving individuals a specific strategy for their own business.

Righto.

We are tenacious souls, so we took our training on the road, heading across the Tasman for a training boot camp in New Zealand. We compiled a comprehensive manual to use, and we stood and delivered the content of that manual over two days. We felt triumphant by the end.

Absolutely certain that this would help people connect all the pieces that are necessary to build a successful online sales pipeline. The process, the technology, the lead generation, the rapport building, and the sheer “dark art” factor that must be combined to have any hope of building this type of business.

After a couple of weeks though, we saw that few people had made a lot (if any) progress in their business. And the main reasons for this that we could see where that they continued to struggle in some key areas:

1. I.T. – setting up hyperlinks, URLS, Autoresponders, tracking and dynamic keyword insertion etc

2. Design skills – website or blog building, landing page layout, personalization, photos, headlines, look and feel, congruency etc

3. Marketing skills – Or the “show me the money’ skills as we like to say. Copy writing, understanding human buying behavior, keyword research, identifying a niche, pipeline linking, and transition marketing, just to name a few

4. (And here is the biggie) Time – most people are working other jobs, often around a family, and barely have the time to devote to learning how to do these complex tasks, let alone actually doing them.

So then it occurred to us that we had to do something different. After all, repeating a strategy in the belief that it will result in a different outcome is the official definition of insanity, right? We knew that we had to approach this challenge differently. We could see that it required some serious “thinking outside the square” and planning, to deliver a solution that would be of value to everyone involved. Good business should always involve a “win-win” scenario.

It was then that we almost unconsciously stumbled across this solution. We could see that we were going into uncharted territory here.
And we decided to do something that, to our knowledge, has never been done before in this industry (and by this industry, we mean the online direct sales industry).

We were unwilling to bring more people in to our business, until we could be sure that we were able to offer them powerful outsourcing solutions that would potentially deliver the sort of results we had experienced.

And so SalesPipelinePros.com was conceived. We decided that it was time to roll up our sleeves, and get into the workings of our team’s sales pipeline, regardless of which stage they were up to in set up or marketing. And we know that this will have to been done on an individual basis. There is no room (as far as we can see) for a “one size fits all” solution here.
In our opinion, that model has had its day, particularly in the context of the recent changes in search engine compliance. The bottom line is, searchers (your potential customers), are looking for relevant, unique and valuable content when they go looking online. Google is committed to delivering this. And if you, as a businessperson cannot present your business in accordance with these requirements, you are dead in the water.

We have put together this site and services in order to mentor those who have the desire, but not the time to build this type of business. We have endeavored to “fill the gaps” in information, as we see them for those who want to learn how this fascinating process works.

We have developed a business model, which will cater for the DIY business people as well as those who want to hand it over to experts and have it done for them. And not just one aspect of a sales pipeline, but everything from the personal branding, to the lead generation, to rapport building, and finally, funding your marketing proposal through affiliate marketing.

So there you have it. As we said earlier, this was not intended to be your typical “we were struggling” story. Although, there is a good reason why that type of story is used for marketing purposes, but understanding why requires a solid understanding of human buying behavior, and the “dark art” that is direct response marketing.

We have developed a System Audit process, and a Sales Pipeline Set Up process, details of both are available by clicking on http://salespipelinepros.com/

Our commitment is to having more company on the “inside” with us