This is a presentation on lead nurturing we created for a webinar a while back. We think it’s kinda neato. Sorta spiffy. Swell, even.
That said, there’s no audio. Just slides. If there’s enough interest, we’ll record an audio track and add it to the preso. Cast your vote via email [info at falconrygroup dot com] or in the comment section. Democracy – don’tcha just love it??
A few years ago I moderated a webinar for a San Francisco B2B media company called Tippit, now Ziff-Davis B2B Focus. The presenter was Tippit’s CEO Scott Albro. Scott said something on that webinar I’ve repeated (always with attribution!) many times since.
“In social media, the people are the media.”
To the casual observer, social media can look like a cluttered landscape of tweets and likes and follower counts and Klout scores. But behind all of that are people building relationships with other people, doing favors, earning trust, conversing, relating, connecting, etc….
Social media strategies that produce real-world results – e.g., product purchases, event attendance or sponsorships, favorable reviews or inbound links — require time and a real human touch.
Sure, you can buy an automated tool that employs lots of gimmicks to rapidly increase your follower count. But nobody who is influential in social media is going to help your business succeed if your Tweet-stream contains a bunch of pithy quotes or random links, and is completely devoid of conversations with other PEOPLE.
Think of it like a cocktail party or networking event. The guy getting in everyone’s face selling a multi-level-marketing product might, just by sheer force of will, get 1 out of 100 people to “join his downline” at the event. But the other 99 will write him off as tacky and self-serving.
Instead, be the guy (or gal) who makes solid connections with the 10-15 connectors and mavens at the party, and then follows up to help them with THEIR goals so you can ultimately achieve YOUR goals.
Check out the #2daysinseattle Twitter conversation. The Seattle visitors and convention bureau hired an agency to line up 30 influential tweeps to curate content, converse with people online, and build awareness of Seattle tourism options. Here’s the list of curators.
My point in sharing this example is not that you must hire an agency to line up 30 tweeps. [Depending on your resources and level of urgency, that may be either be a master stroke or a catastrophic fail.]
But it does help to illustrate how the game works. It requires humans who can use machines to talk to other humans. And eventually, when trust and influence are in place, some of those humans will be inspired to take actions that create commercial value for other humans.
Building that influence and trust requires time and people. And yes, it also requires investment.
Tell me I’m wrong about all this in the space below. Or tell me that I’m partly right but missed a key point or two. Or tell me that I need to call my mother.
Happy New Year TLOTL readers. Even though this is the week when most of us are heading back to work, I’m kicking off 2011 with a post that is perhaps 80% frivolous, 20% serious.
After a holiday break that included a healthy amount of feasting, family time, and general decompression, I decided to finally join the ranks of individuals who feel compelled to remove most of their winter clothing and hurl themselves into near-freezing water on New Year’s Day. And even though I reside in Seattle — which, at 47 degrees and 37 minutes of latitude, is closer to the North Pole than it is to the equator — I figured that jumping into the chilly waters of Puget Sound wasn’t silly enough to suit my purposes.
No, clearly it was necessary to travel 144 miles north to Vancouver, where a throng of nearly 2000 like-minded, half-nekked individuals huddled on the shores of English Bay for the annual Polar Bear Swim. Here we waited for the (warmly-dressed, hot cocoa-sipping, and smirking) event organizers to inform us that it was finally “ok” to dive into Pacific Ocean waters measuring a very uncomfortable 6 degrees Celsius.
The photo to the right links to my Facebook album documenting 
this adventure. The combination of a large crowd — many of whom were feeling the effects of liquid courage, early-stage hypothermia, or both — and the presence of my 5 year old daughter prevented my paparazza (wife) from even approaching the designated plunge area. But the videographers at the Vancouver Sun captured the proceedings from the shoreline. And there’s a very entertaining, crowd-sourced slideshow of the event on Flickr.
You may be wondering what would possess an otherwise normal person to do such a thing. Of course I can only speak for myself. The answer lies somewhere on the continuum between “I have no freaking idea why” and “because I had to.” One does not typically over-contemplate the decision to join a Polar Bear Swim. It’s a commitment that is almost always made in haste. And I think that’s really my best answer to the “why” question, and also the tie-back to the “20% serious” claim I made at the beginning of this post.
Some who know me may disagree with this assessment, but I think I’m a fairly careful person, or careful enough anyway. I pay my bills on time. My life, health, business and property are all adequately insured. I try to leave a clean wake in my relationships. Before making important business or personal decisions, I have been known to (obsessively?) analyze them through multiple lenses, be they financial, spiritual, social, global, metaphysical, or “other.”
Just after Christmas I ran into a business contact who observed that it’s normal for him to generate 10 good ideas, try to implement 8 of them, and be satisfied if none of them work, as long as he learns something in the process. I genuinely admire that about him. And what I think he admires about me is that I’m exactly the opposite. I love to generate ten good ideas, and then use my analytical skills — and those of my collaborators – to kill or “parking lot” the nine that don’t make sense right now, and use the remaining energy to execute well against the one that I believe will work.
Now, to be clear, I wasn’t trying to rinse off these personality traits in the frigid waters of English Bay. I think they have generally served me well over the years. But in joining the Polar Bear Swim, I very much wanted to celebrate the virtue of “not thinking about stuff too much.” And a great way to celebrate that virtue is to fullly experience the discomfort, and the thrill, that comes with it. And so if I’m going to be not comfortable while I’m not thinking too much, it’s preferable to be not alone.
New Year’s Day is just another day, but it’s a marker of change. Change happens all around us, and within us, all the time. I find that the company I keep, more than anything, is what makes that change manageable, rewarding, and, more often than not: FUN.
Happy New Year!
A slight detour for today’s post. Let’s pay a brief visit to the land of B2C retail fitness, to see if any insights apply to B2B sales and marketing.
One regular “client” of my consulting practice is the Pilates and personal training business my wife Heather and I have owned for the past 3.5 years. I have no formal training in Pilates or personal training, and to be honest, until this year, my physique more closely resembled the guy in the classic “BEFORE” photo than the slimmer “AFTER” version. For this reason and others, I’ve typically worked more behind the scenes in that business, handling finance, operations, and marketing, supporting our staff and Heather as they support their clients.
Heather wears several hats too, including the very important Head of Sales hat. This is a challenging and rewarding job for her. She helps people make and manage investments in their health. According to HealthyPeople.gov, a service of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, only about 23 percent of adults in the United States report regular physical activity for 20 minutes or longer 3 or more days per week. Heather’s trying to engage the subset of that population who:
So yes, Heather has a challenging and rewarding job. Her business is highly relationship-driven. I know, I know, everyone’s business is relationship-driven, but hers really is. She’s learned, and taught me, a ton about how these relationships get started and grow. And as good as she has become at listening to prospects, educating them, and building their trust, the old adage is as true for her as it is for any sales person: you can’t win ‘em all. For any number of reasons, some within and some beyond her control, not everyone she meets will become a client. But every potential client, whether she meets them or not, will ultimately make some kind of decision, conscious or otherwise. That decision may be about whether to become a client, or it may be about whether to visit the website, pick up the phone, or ask a current or past client about their experience. And this brings us back to the theme of this post: every lead converts.
To explore what I mean by this, let’s apply the sentence in the broadest sense possible.
For simplicity, let’s define “every lead” as every person that engages Heather’s business. Not just the people who call her to ask about studio services or rates, or come in for an introductory session, or consider a membership package, but everyone. Any person who ever:
Simplified Conversion Model
And now let’s define “convert” just as broadly. Not just the conversion of qualified prospects into clients, or of leads into qualified prospects, or even of traffic (foot, phone, or web) into leads. Let’s define conversion as any change in a person’s opinion of her business — no matter how strong or subtle, how temporary or permanent, or how grounded in fact or fiction — based on currently available information available.
And now, let’s go one step further and give a B2B-sounding name to this entire cycle of people gathering information and developing their opinions. Let’s call it: the considered purchase process.
Back here in the B2B world, we are trained to be efficient, mechanical, and sometimes even a bit mercenary about demand generation. And the military-industrial language we use to describe our trade – e.g., driving conversion, filling the pipeline, growing revenue (exponentially), launching multi-channel integrated campaigns, etc. – reflects the intense expectations of management that we take the beach deliver results.
But as we focus our energy on the relative few who ultimately decide to buy, it’s helpful to remember that every person’s opinion of our company changes as they interact with us. We may be leaving money or value on the table when we ignore those who don’t take our prescribed next step. Or worse, we may be creating headwinds for future sales efforts by handling these people in a careless way. Every lead converts, in either a good way or a not-good way. And unless you’re selling to a market of infinite size where no one ever bothers to share their impressions of your business, each one of those conversions matters.
Doing the things that get more leads to favorably convert, more of the time, helps us build healthier pipelines and more predictable revenue growth.
