CHAPTER 5

Building e-Relationships Throughout the Digital Buying Journey

Now that we’ve looked at many of the platforms and mediums we might employ as part of our overall digital selling strategy, let’s dig into how we use these platforms and tools to advance our relationship with our prospective customers over time. Let’s explore how to lead people through what I call the customer relationship journey.

To illustrate how powerful it can be to leverage inbound and outbound into a cohesive strategy, I’ll share a quick story with you about how a combination of these two approaches can enable you to build e-relationships with your prospects before, during, and after any personal interaction with you.

About a year ago I was chatting with a business owner I know about how to clean up his aging contact list by getting updated email addresses for the people who’ve changed jobs in recent years. He ended up finding an online service called Seamless.AI (which I mentioned in the previous chapter) to obtain current email addresses and even add landline and mobile telephone numbers for most of those contacts. Way cool! That was my first exposure to Seamless. But over the coming months, it was as if I started seeing Seamless everywhere I looked.

I started noticing posts on LinkedIn talking about how sales pros and marketers can leverage Seamless, most of which featured founder and CEO Brandon Bornancin. Naturally, I took a look at his LinkedIn profile, read all about his incredible serial success as a young entrepreneur, and instantly became a follower and an avid fan.

Some months later I saw an online offer on Facebook to download a free guide on cold-calling from Seamless. I gladly exchanged my contact information for it. As you might imagine, I soon received an email and then a telephone call from an SDR (sales development rep) who helped me understand the overall promise of what Seamless could do for my business. I didn’t bite.

A month or two later I happened to notice Brandon’s book, Seven Figure Social Selling, on Amazon.com and ordered it. It’s a great book that’s chock-full of examples of exactly what to say on the phone and write in your prospecting emails in hundreds of different sales scenarios. Get a copy!

Then, I stumbled across a couple of really useful videos Brandon shot and posted on YouTube, so I subscribed to his YouTube channel. A few weeks later I got another call from the same SDR, agreed to see a demo from his AE (account executive), loved what I saw in the product, and still didn’t buy.

I continued to appreciate the new YouTube videos as they were released as well as regular emails containing helpful prospecting tips that I received as a subscriber to the Seamless email list. A couple of months later, when we decided to double down on our outbound prospecting at my company, we realized that we needed to clean up and expand our prospect lists. I immediately called back the AE with whom I had previously built a relationship and signed up for a yearly subscription with glee.

It took several months for me to walk through that journey, but I never once looked in the direction of a competitor. I even avoided numerous cold calls and emails from other companies along the way. Brandon and his team had built a relationship with me. I didn’t want to look around!

After receiving the free guide and free tips via email and on YouTube, meeting a couple of different Seamless employees, and buying the book, I was already a customer. I just hadn’t handed over my credit card for the full product yet. It was the combination of the digital assets as well as the persistence of the SDR and the connection I had made with the AE that brought me back when the timing was right.

Interestingly enough, I decided to approach Brandon to interview him for this book. He graciously accepted my request for a live video meeting, and here’s the first thing he said:

“It’s great to finally meet you, Bill! I bought your book, Think Like Your Customer, back when I was getting started. I still use some of the ideas I learned from your book today!” Is that crazy or what? Here I was blown away by what a masterful job he and his team had done building e-relationships with me, never imagining that I had begun an asynchronous relationship with him more than 10 years earlier and didn’t even know it!

As you gathered from this story, Brandon and his team at Seamless employed both inbound and outbound techniques to lead me through my buying process over a period of many months. Their ability to combine these two approaches into a cohesive strategy moved me through the customer relationship journey in a highly effective manner.

One of the most important points of this story is . . .

To align with how your customers live and buy today, invest in building e-relationships with people wherever they are in their overall process. Then, be willing to continue to invest as you lead them through the customer relationship journey one step at a time, if needed.

Every person you encounter, whether you actually interact with them or they just partake of your digital content, falls into one of three categories:

1.   A prospective customer right now

2.   Someone who may become a prospective customer in the future

3.   Someone who could recommend you to a prospective customer at some point

Put yourself and your heart out there on every medium you can find. Start pouring into people’s lives. Take all the knowledge you have about improving your customer’s world and give it away in every format you can think of. Bless people with your insight and advice. And don’t expect anything other than goodwill in return. I’ll have much more on this as part of our discussion on building your personal brand in Chapter 6.

Using a combination of inbound and outbound, you can create and maintain contact with a virtually unlimited number of prospects as you foster trust, earn preference, and lead them toward an opportunity where you can serve them and add value to their lives.

The Three Phases of the Customer Relationship Journey

The heart of digital selling is learning to leverage a variety of digital assets throughout the complete customer relationship journey, which I break down into three major phases:

1.   Pre-Conversation Phase: This is the time when we attract and build e-relationships with prospective customers who are in the early stages of their buying process. Or perhaps when they are nowhere near beginning a buying process yet. It includes any one-way (us-to-them) communication that occurs before any real-time conversation takes place.

2.   Conversation Phase: This is when we have made contact and begin having person-to-person interactions with our prospective client. This might involve face-to-face, video, telephone, chat, DM, or email conversations. Through this phase we are building personal relationships with our prospective customers. We help them work through their buying process as they actively explore, compare, select, and ultimately commit to buying something.

3.   Post-Conversation Phase: This is the period when we continue to foster relationships after our customer makes a purchase. Here we want to continue to add even more value to their world and potentially create new opportunities to partner with them. This includes the time after any traditional “sales cycle” when we are no longer actively engaging with the customer around a specific project or sales opportunity.

Of course, if you sell in an environment where you never personally communicate with your customer, then any and all “conversations” would actually be e-conversations. Millions of companies are thriving these days selling strictly online. A lot of customers absolutely love it, and many even prefer it!

To make this overall journey easier to visualize, I created a model to illustrate the three major phases and the steps within each phase that represent a complete customer relationship journey from total stranger to all-out champion (Figure 5.1). This illustration helps simplify the way we think about how to deepen our relationship with our customers over time. As you can see, this is quite a departure from the old school, Three C’s approach, which was mostly confined to the second phase of this overall journey.

Figure 5.1  The Customer Relationship Journey

Today, we can use a variety of digital strategies to engage prospective clients and move the customer relationship forward before any one-to-one communication takes place. The objective is to create a digital environment where our customers can seamlessly progress through these steps as they become more familiar with us, with our company, and with the ways we might be able to serve them.

You might be asking yourself, “Where do I start?” I’d say if you haven’t already done so, commit to establishing a strong presence on LinkedIn. If you run a strictly B2C business—or you are promoting a church, a charity, or an online community—Facebook or YouTube could be a better place for you to attract and connect with individuals. But for business networking and establishing professional connections with prospective B2B buyers, LinkedIn is the place to be.

I am blessed with a thriving following on Facebook where I post daily faith-based inspiration and encouragement. It’s the perfect platform and audience for that. On any given day, thousands of people read my posts on my author page (www.facebook.com/BillStinnettAuthor) or within the over 100 groups in which I frequently post. But most of my new business opportunities and prospective clients that originate via social come from LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/billstinnett). Connect with me and let’s build our brands together!

Choose a space where you can become known as a go-to resource for knowledge and insight that your target customers need at some point in their buying process. One reason I recommend LinkedIn is it also gives you the ability to reach out to your connections via DM, which is—at the time of this writing—probably the most effective platform for outbound prospecting that exists. That is a huge upside for investing your energy in crushing it on LinkedIn.

YouTube can also be a tremendous platform for creating a following. YouTube doesn’t give you the ability to interact with or send messages to other members the way LinkedIn does. But because YouTube is a search engine, people can easily find you when they search on the topics you post about.

An old boss of mine gave me a fantastic piece of advice many years ago. He said . . .

“You don’t have to close a big deal all in one conversation. Just help your customer take the baby steps toward the close.”

Today it sometimes takes a few baby steps to even close someone on agreeing to accept your phone call! Am I right? I often think of this whole process a bit like online dating. Our would-be customers often want to check us out and draw some conclusions about us online before they make a commitment to start any two-way communication.

Many of us who do our best work when talking to customers in real time would rather just skip all these early steps and get right to a live video or telephone conversation. But the quality of our live conversations and the likelihood of converting them to an opportunity improve substantially when we build e-relationships and earn some trust and rapport digitally before we get on the call. When you build e-relationships and engage in e-conversations, you allow your prospects to self-select and choose to move to the next step in the relationship journey on their timetable.

The Pre-Conversation Phase

Now, let’s further explore how to advance your relationship with prospective customers. We’ll start by looking at a progression of steps of the pre-conversation phase that are designed to move prospects from complete strangers to active opt-in email or text subscribers.

1. Stranger: No Relationship

A good example of a stranger would be users of a social platform whom we have not yet connected with. They could also be people actively browsing YouTube or Spotify who have yet to subscribe to our channel or podcast.

Of course, you can choose to simply purchase names and contact info of target prospects from a variety of sources and go straight outbound with telephone and email outreach. That’s fine if you are planning on calling a high volume of people where you can’t take the time to warm things up with an e-relationship before you reach out.

For a more focused approach on a shorter list of targeted prosects, I prefer to attempt to proactively connect or at least communicate with as many as possible on LinkedIn first. One way to start would be to look up a refined target list on LinkedIn Navigator and start just cold-inviting people to connect. Unfortunately, your response rates will range from “OK” to absolutely terrible, which may include being reported for asking to connect to a person you don’t already know outside LinkedIn. (Yes, that happens. I’ve been there.)

To increase your odds of success dramatically, start by looking at the profiles of target prospects and reading some of their recent posts. Add a like or a comment to some of their posts as a first step. Maybe even share one of their posts on your timeline if you think it’s good and that your own customers would benefit from it.

You can start a conversation with literally anyone on a social platform, even if you are not “connected” with them, by leaving a comment on their posts. I’ve been doing this for years. Often, I’ll even make mention of something that impressed me about their profile in a comment I leave on a post.

Here’s a great suggestion that you can use immediately . . .

Learn to use comments on other people’s posts as a way to start a dialog the same way you’d mingle at a live networking event. Simply join the conversation your prospect is already having with other people online.

Social platforms have become a hotbed for predatory sales tactics. LinkedIn is teaming with a zillion people trying to figure out every way possible to coax and cajole people into a “quick 15-minute conversation” the instant they connect. If you’ve been doing that, stop it! You’re burning opportunities to actually build quality e-relationships. Earn the opportunity for a conversation if it makes sense. But start with a legitimate connection first.

Leave some friendly comments for the people you want to meet. Engage with their content. Ask them some questions. Show them some love. Almost everyone will eventually acknowledge you. Then you may choose to send a request to connect once they know you are a human being. Also make sure to include a personal note in your connection request. My cutting-edge, top secret format for the personal note is something along the lines of the following:

Really enjoyed your post on _______________ , John. Thanks for your kind reply to my comment. Are you open to new connections on LinkedIn?

Keep it simple and keep it real!

To illustrate just how powerful this approach of starting conversations as comments on social posts can be, have a look at the executive endorsements printed on the back cover and just inside the front cover of this book. Many of those relationships—which have led to major training and consulting projects with some of the largest companies and most high-ranking sales executives in the world—began as conversations I initiated within the comments section of their LinkedIn posts long before I ever had a first-level connection with them. This works!

2. Follower: Connection Made

Followers could be a connection on a social platform or a subscriber to a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel. Growing your follower base is a foundational element of any digital attraction strategy. Whether you’ve just registered a new social profile or already have some connections, you’ll want to start sending new requests to connect, as appropriate.

In every workshop I do on this topic, I make this same suggestion . . .

Make it a habit of requesting to connect on LinkedIn with every person you meet in a business setting!

I am stunned how many people will not put in the effort to do this. For years I have endeavored to connect with everyone I meet, if possible. That has resulted in tens of thousands of connections. At this point, I truly believe that if I never met another person, I already have enough LinkedIn connections to find all the work I would ever need for the rest of my life. You can do that too!

Many of those connections are people who have attended one or more of my classroom or online workshops. So they’re actually more than just followers. They are my friends! If you haven’t yet done this, make a commitment to get it done in the next 30 days and stay current with it for the rest of your career. Connect with every single contact you have, every name in your CRM system, and every old business card sitting in a drawer someplace. That alone will open up a whole new world from which to grow.

Social platforms are constantly presenting you with “People You May Know” suggestions. Many of them have interests or connections in common with you and would likely agree to connect with you. But you might want to start by simply following them and making comments on their posts to begin with. Joining LinkedIn or Facebook groups of like-minded people can also be a great way to find those who have similar interests and backgrounds.

By default, every person you connect with on a social platform becomes a follower. But users are becoming more and more leery about connecting with strangers. Both LinkedIn and Facebook have cracked down on the practice of inviting mass quantities of people to connect and have instituted daily limits. The platform will also track acceptance rates. If you are approaching a lot of strangers to connect and getting low response rates, your account may be flagged, and the organic reach of your posts can suffer.

Of course, to cast a wider net and increase the chances of attracting and connecting with more followers who may one day become your customers, you have to publish content worth following. Read on!

3. Consumer: Reading, Watching, or Listening to Content

As a consumer, a person would partake of the insights and ideas you are making available to them through social media posts, blogs, articles, YouTube videos, or whatever other platforms you are leveraging. Social platforms often report how many views or impressions a post receives. But a “view” can be as little as a simple scroll by. That might qualify as an “impression,” but until people actually stop scrolling and read or listen to your insights, you’re not really changing hearts and minds.

Converting followers into consumers of what you publish is all about the quality and presentation of the content you post. As we’ve already discussed, people don’t follow you to see ads. They follow you to learn, to be informed, or to be entertained. Social media is the new TV. You can be known as someone who pummels them with “commercials,” or you can be the one who makes their day better, more interesting, more enriching, and maybe even more fun.

Take a close look at the content that does well (gets a lot of engagement and exposure) on whatever platform you are using to build a following. What are the characteristics of that content? Is it text only, text with images, images only, or video? All of these can be effective for different reasons.

Images get people to stop scrolling long enough to see what you have to say with your written content. Avoid stock imagery or anything that looks like advertisement. The images that draw people in, interestingly enough, are photos of yourself or snapshots with you and your colleagues. These pictures tend to make the post more personal and less “corporate.” An image is also great for a very short message superimposed over a compelling photo or graphic design.

This is important: when posting text, with or without images or video, always space your text with a blank line between sentences. This makes it infinitely more readable! But just as importantly, it makes your post twice as long as the single-spaced paragraph structure you learned in school. Algorithms track and love both “dwell time” (i.e., how long someone sits on your content) and the amount of time users spend scrolling on a single piece of content. So the longer the better, as long as it’s engaging.

The opening line of your post needs to be as compelling as possible. Some experts recommend polarizing statements, such as “Everything you thought you knew about _______________ is wrong!” Or “Your _______________ is costing you customers and profit.” Other good concepts for opening lines include, “Would you like to know how to _______________?” and, “Here’s a lesson I learned the hard way . . .” Much like the subject line of an email, the first sentence of your post needs to be interesting enough to get people to click on “See more.”

Video posts can be very compelling and engaging when done well. Quick tips: if you are using your phone, get a stand or a tripod so you can move it away from your face a bit more than just arm’s length. A huge face in the frame is not very appealing in a social post. Start smiling before you begin speaking, and for heaven’s sake, trim the first second or two of dead footage off the video before posting it. Nothing looks phonier than starting out with a blank, confused demeanor (as if you’re trying to figure out how to get your camera turned on) and suddenly becoming all excited and bubbly once you realize the video is rolling. (Eye-roll)

Video will typically get significantly less social “reach” than straight text. Which simply means fewer people will see it. But video does produce higher engagement rates and, I find, much higher conversion rates in terms of profile views and inquiries. One approach is to mix media by releasing some posts in straight text, some with images, and some video. Many popular creators have had success by establishing a signature format and “look and feel” that they use all the time. This produces a consistent experience and makes their content immediately recognizable to their fans.

For my inspirational posts on Facebook, I use the same style background every morning. Loyal fans tell me they open the app while drinking their coffee and start scrolling, looking for that familiar look and feel of my posts. I do the same thing whenever I post videos on LinkedIn.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to start using video effectively. A smartphone and a simple stand or tripod is fine. But upgrade to a higher quality external microphone if you can. The quality of the audio can make a huge difference in how compelling your video will be.

If you want to take video for social more seriously, a DSLR camera will take your game up several notches. You can also start editing your video and adding images and motion graphics when you are ready. If you want some suggestions on producing great video for social media, you can download a free guide I created called 7 Ways to Make Your Social Videos Absolutely Outstanding at: www.salesexcellence.com/handbook.

Here’s the main message that I’d like to convey . . .

If you want people to consume your content, you have to give them something more interesting and compelling than the three zillion other posts in their feed. And you have to do it extremely consistently!

What many people getting started with social don’t realize is that your posts are never seen by the majority of your followers. Most consumers (viewers) probably have hundreds or, more likely, thousands of connections. They’ll never scroll far enough to see everybody’s content. Social media algorithms determine the priority of what is displayed at the top of their feed, so the average user sees only a tiny fraction of the material posted by everyone they follow.

Social algorithms are designed to serve up content that the user is most likely to be interested in and engage with. Naturally, they’re going to prioritize a new post from the same person whose post you liked or commented on yesterday. Have you noticed how you see content from the same two dozen people every single day? Chances are those are people who post every day. And when you stop to read or engage with their content in some way, you’re likely to see their post again tomorrow. The converse is also true. If you never engage with people’s content, the algorithm will soon stop showing you their posts.

Likewise, when you put a barrage of ads or boring and unoriginal content in front of your followers, they won’t engage either. Once the algorithm stops showing them your content, it can be next to impossible to ever get back to the top of their feed. They are still followers; they just don’t see you anymore. So there is an element of “care and feeding” required to retain the followers that you worked so hard to get in the first place. This is why quality and consistency are so crucial!

Keep in mind that at the end of the day, what matters is not how many total followers you have on social media. What really matters is how many people actively consume what you post and what epiphany occurred or what new conclusion they reached when they read or watched it. The name of the game is changing hearts, changing minds, and inspiring people to take some kind of action.

4. Engager: Liking or Commenting on Your Content

Most people who post on social media cannot resist tracking the number of likes or comments their posts produce. It’s the ultimate in social gamification, like keeping a tally of how many points you score in your favorite video game. To be completely transparent, I find it absolutely addicting.

That’s why it’s so important to remember . . .

The goal of using social media for digital selling is not engagement in your posts. The goal is conversion from one stage to the next in the customer relationship journey!

Likes and comments don’t pay the bills! That being said, they do indicate that what you’re putting out to the world is resonating with people. Social engagement, as it is called, is what the platform algorithms use to determine whether or not to push your content out to more followers and viewers. Engagement determines reach! If you want more people to see your stuff, you have to get people to engage with it.

Engagement also provides social proof to everyone who sees your content that people support or endorse what you are posting. It can actually be a major factor in the overall impression you make on your followers. Whether it’s true or not, when people see a post with a lot of engagement, they perceive it to be more credible and worthy of attention and consumption.

Our aim should be to produce the most stimulating and electrifying content and insight available anywhere. But even the world’s most valuable and powerful insights are worthless if they never get into the hands of people who can appreciate them and do something with them. If your customers—past, present, and future—don’t see you or hear from you, it won’t be long before they find someone else to pay attention to.

Great social content that speaks to people should be designed with one of these four objectives in mind:

Instruct: Teach people how to do something, how to avoid something, how to fix something, or how to accomplish something.

Enlighten: Inform people and make them aware of some new trend, some new bit of knowledge, a new threat coming their way, or a new opportunity available to them.

Inspire: Provide encouragement to help people believe in themselves and what’s possible as well as the motivation to do something about it.

Entertain: Make people laugh, bring a smile to their face, or just give them a temporary escape from the tedious, the stressful, or the mundane.

Advertisements that basically say, “Here’s my product. Call me!” receive very little engagement. Ads simply don’t move people. For someone to muster up the energy to smash the like button or go to all the trouble of typing a comment, they have to conclude more than just, “I like this.” They have to feel compelled to tell the author and the rest of the world, “This matters to me,” “I identify with this,” or “Everybody needs to see this!”

Here are a few concepts for social posts that tend to drive a lot of engagement:

•   Give a shout-out to a coworker who helped you.

•   Publicly thank or brag about your customers.

•   Share a lesson you learned the hard way.

•   Talk about a personal setback, express gratitude for overcoming it, and give credit to whoever helped you.

•   Share some insight as if you were giving a keynote presentation.

•   Answer one or more frequently asked questions.

•   Share some observation you (or your company) have made about an industry trend that would help your customer take advantage of an opportunity or avoid making a mistake.

•   Provide six keys to do something that a lot of people want to do.

•   Share the findings of someone else’s research and tag them in the post. They will love you!

Stories that followers can relate to and identify with are very compelling. People love to show support when they can see themselves reflected in what they read or watch. These kinds of posts can really drive engagement, but make sure as many of your posts as possible contain highly substantive content related to solving your customers’ problems and helping them make buying decisions as well.

It’s important to show your human side. Share your personality. But make sure everything isn’t all about you. There is little business value in amassing a huge following if you’re not also helping at least some of your followers move upward through the pyramid of awareness toward becoming a qualified prospect.

Social algorithms tend to punish content that is designed to manipulate readers or viewers with phrases like “please like my post” or “leave a comment” in the body of a post. However, there are a number of questions that you can ask at the end of your posts that tend to trigger likes and comments. Once you read this list, you’ll start noticing these at the end of many people’s posted content. Here are some of my favorites:

•   Agreed?

•   Thoughts?

•   Suggestions?

•   Anything else?

•   What did I miss?

•   What would you add?

•   What’s been your experience?

•   Would love to hear your opinion . . .

Social platforms are also very sensitive to any content placed in a post that would take users away from their platform. If you put a link to your website in the body of a post, it will likely get very limited reach. One of the techniques that is widely used is to place links, hashtags, and any kind of self-promotion in the comments section on an original post. If you want to provide a link, you can add a note in the body of your post saying, “Link in first comment below.” This will make an incredible difference in the reach of the post.

Many creators now regularly place a little pitch in the comments section of their posts inviting people to a free webinar or providing a link to a YouTube video or some other special offer. A very recent trend is for creators to add a comment to their own post saying, “Please like this comment and leave a comment of your own and I’ll send you a free _______________ .” These trends are constantly changing, so just watch the most popular creators and copy what they are doing.

We all tend to be impressed when we see people with 100,000 or 500,000 social followers. But a much better indicator of their social media presence is the number of people who regularly engage with their content. My daily posts on my Facebook author page consistently get more engagement than some creators who have a million followers.

The ultimate way to measure the success of a social media strategy, however, is by the action that readers take after they see a post. This is impossible to determine just by looking at the post or the user profile. I’ve had many posts that received less than 100 likes produce a lead that turned into a $50,000 or $100,000 project!

I love it when I get a call or a DM from someone whom I haven’t spoken to in years saying, “I loved your post today. We’ve got a new sales team that needs training on exactly what you were talking about.” Cha-ching! But here’s an interesting note: almost without exception, the person who makes that call or sends that message never actually pushed the like button or commented on the post. Go figure!

5. Promoter: Sharing Your Content

When people so identify with your content that they are willing to repost it on their own timeline, it represents the ultimate endorsement. In essence, they are saying to all of their followers, “Do you see this? I identify with this. I support this and I want you to hear about it, too.” Sharing drives your organic reach like crazy. For this reason, I like to make sure people know they have permission to share my posts.

If you say, “Please share my post,” the algorithm will read that and it will probably negatively impact your reach. I have had pretty good success simply saying, “Share as you see fit.” My favorite technique is placing a tiny bit of text embedded into the .jpeg image on my inspirational posts for Facebook saying, “Feel free to share.” But keep in mind that all the social platforms now scan your images and use optical character recognition to detect any text displayed in the image. Consequently, anything you embed in your images will be read by the algorithm.

One of the strangest things about social algorithms is that they boost your content significantly when other people share it with their followers. However, the reach and exposure of shared content for the person who shares it is absolutely terrible! Because of this, one huge mistake you can easily make when trying to grow your reach on either LinkedIn or Facebook is simply reposting or sharing other people’s posts. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing it. The original author will probably be thrilled. But the platforms, especially LinkedIn, strongly favor original content. Look at the recent posts of someone who primarily shares reposts of other people’s content. The reach of those posts is usually very limited, and they receive very limited engagement.

I’m familiar with one LinkedIn member who has over 200,000 followers and posts several times a day. But because he shares other people’s posts and hyperlinks to off-site articles almost exclusively, he’s lucky if he sees 20 engagements on a post. That means 199,980 of his followers didn’t engage and 198,000 of them probably haven’t even seen one of his reposts in years. Someone with only 3,000 highly engaged followers who consistently posts engaging original content would likely have far more organic reach and influence than he does.

One of the best techniques I’ve ever learned for sharing content and strengthening e-relationships is to take a few good points from someone else’s article or a post I read and then write my own original post about how much I loved the article. If you decide to use this technique, share the three main things you took away from the article, tag the original author in your post, and even place the link to the original article as a comment and add a note in the body of your post saying, “Link to article in comments below.”

This is a fantastic way to do several things all at the same time:

•   Provide great content to your followers.

•   Score major points with the original author because you share their content and extend their reach.

•   Get your post in front of their followers since you tagged them in your post.

•   Keep the algorithms happy.

. . . all at the same time!

6. Subscriber: Email or Text Opt-in

The email or text opt-in subscriber stage is one of the most important steps your customers can take in the relationship journey. They are basically signing up to hear from you whenever you have something new to share. People can subscribe to a blog, a YouTube channel, a podcast, or some form of email correspondence such as a weekly newsletter.

Social followers are awesome! But, as I mentioned before, typically only a small fraction of your followers will ever see your content. Ironically, the larger your following, the smaller the percentage of your followers will see what you post. As I explained in the previous chapter, email subscribers are far more valuable. Once someone has opted in to hear from you via email or text, you don’t have to try to outsmart the algorithms and constantly compete with every other content creator for placement in the feed.

Much of the content and insights we want to share with our audience should be posted publicly for all to see. But it’s also fine to hold some of it back to be shared only after a relationship has advanced to a stage where it makes sense to offer your best guidance and advice.

I save my very best material for those who are paying customers, of course. But I also freely share some of my stuff with prospects who agree to join me on a videoconference. I think of it as sort of an exchange: my ideas for their willingness to have a conversation about how we might use those ideas to improve their business. I also regularly create special articles, sales tools, checklists, and free guides to share with people as gated content.

The idea of gated content is creating some kind of gate that a person has to pass through to gain access to it. The practice of trading a free white paper, a free guide, or a free online course in exchange for your prospect’s contact info has been in use for decades, so this may not be the first time you’ve ever heard of this. But the question isn’t are you familiar with the practice. The question is, “Are you using gated content to convert your social followers to email or text subscribers?” If not, maybe it’s time to get started!

I use gated content on LinkedIn and other platforms constantly to grow my email subscriber list. My favorite way to leverage it is with a short video post sharing one tip from a special article, checklist, or a free mini-workshop I am offering. After I share some insight or a helpful tip, I usually say something like this:

If you’d like a copy, just leave a comment below and I’ll DM you the link to download it.

This approach accomplishes several things at the same time:

•   I provide one valuable tip for free (generosity).

•   My offer generates comments like crazy, which drives the reach of the post dramatically.

•   If I get a comment from someone I’m not yet connected with, it’s the perfect reason to reply, asking that they send me a request to connect so I can DM them the link. Note: it’s key to ask them to invite you as opposed to you inviting them so you don’t hit the daily invitation limits.

•   Every person who follows the link I send them via DM can subscribe to my mailing list by entering a name and email address to get access to the free content.

•   I send them other free tools whenever I release them.

Here’s an example of how effective this can be. I wrote an article in 2019 called 7 Good Reasons for Having a Conversation with Your Customer, which I offer as free gated content every four to six months on LinkedIn. Literally thousands of people have subscribed to our free tools mailing list (see www.salesexcellence.com/handbook) over the years as a result of regularly offering that one piece of gated content alone! I typically offer one new tool like this every month.

If you are a salesperson for a large corporation and you don’t have a website, blog, or newsletter of your own, you can certainly still leverage the idea of gated content as outlined here. Your marketing team probably already has plenty of valuable assets you can use, a landing page to which to drive traffic, and a mailing list people can subscribe to. Go partner with them! Put all those tools your marketing department already has to good use. They will love you for it!

The Conversation Phase

The purpose of all your efforts in the pre-conversation phase is to earn enough trust and rapport with your followers that those who need your help will either contact you or provide their contact information to you. Once you establish this connection, you can continue to communicate with them while you build rapport and preference. If you decide to incorporate outbound into your overall strategy, you’re now ready to start your outreach, when you think the time is right. Ideally, you’ve already had some interaction with at least some of these subscribers via comments and replies to social posts.

7. Contact: They Provide Full Contact Info

For this discussion, we’ll define a contact as someone for whom we have complete contact information, including full name, company name, title, email address, phone number, and ideally even a mobile number. A mobile phone number is surely the most coveted and powerful bit of contact info for today’s digital seller.

When people provide their information in exchange for something of value, such as the kinds of digital assets we’ve talked about, there is an implied expectation that someone’s going to contact them at some point. You’ll have to determine what you are comfortable with when it comes to outreach. I’m of the opinion that reaching out to someone once we’ve established an e-relationship and engaged in some form of e-conversation is a next logical step! Inbound purists will disagree, of course.

Many outbounders subscribe to the “pick up the darn phone and call them right now” school of thought. If I’m already connected to them on LinkedIn, I actually favor scheduling an appointment for the conversation by sending a 60-second video or audio message via the LinkedIn smartphone app as opposed to just surprising them over the telephone. I simply prefer to invest my live-conversation time with prospects that have already heard from me and have elected to join a call.

Sometimes, I use the short video to simply let my prospect know I’ll be calling them at 2:45 the following day as opposed to asking permission to call. I’m also having success sending a meeting invitation to people that includes a link to a short, custom video—which I shot just for them—explaining why they would find value in taking my call. I also let them know that they can reply with a suggestion of a different time if my proposed time doesn’t work for them. I’ll have much more on digital prospecting in Chapter 7.

8. Conversation: Personally Interacting with You

For any of us who grew up in the world of synchronous selling, a “conversation” is synonymous with a meeting, videoconference, or telephone call. But with today’s digital communication capabilities, there are a number of innovative options. One that is gaining incredible traction is live chat with people who have come to visit your website. This is a fantastic option to give visitors the ability to ask questions in real time without having to talk to you in person.

Companies like Drift (www.drift.com) and others are truly changing the game by offering “conversational marketing” tools that enable customers to literally converse with a salesperson entirely digitally while maintaining control of the communication and even protecting their own anonymity. Definitely check out the Drift website for a visit to the future of enterprise-class virtual selling! Likewise, anyone with a website can install a simple and very inexpensive plugin app such as LiveChat (www.livechat.com) and not only be notified every time a new person arrives on their site but hold live chat conversations with visitors through a free smartphone app. Amazing!

Since we installed LiveChat on our website (www.salesexcellence.com), the number of inquiries (i.e., conversions) nearly doubled. Additionally, we’ve been able to start conversations with visitors immediately, while they are still on the site, instead of minutes or even hours later. Almost no one opts to use the antiquated “Contact Us” form anymore. Simple but powerful technologies are creating opportunities to have digital conversations in ways that were never before possible.

But even with all the cool tech, let’s not forget the importance of a good old-fashioned telephone conversation. In the story I told at the beginning of this chapter, the consistent outreach from the Seamless SDR was a critical element of me moving forward through my customer journey—as was the live product demonstration and relationship I developed with the AE over live video.

As far as building relationships and persuasion are concerned, whenever we can engage with people one-to-one in real time, it beats asynchronous selling any day. But in the Seamless story I shared at the beginning of this chapter, it was many of those asynchronous digital touches that kept me loyal, actively engaged, and progressing toward becoming a customer in between those conversations with a real person.

9. Trial Customer: Testing or Trying Your Product or Service

In situations where it’s possible, offering your customers a free trial of your product or service is one of the very best ways to advance the relationship beyond the conversation stage with little or no risk to them. By now, all of us have surely signed up for some type of an online service that offers a 30-day free trial. Sometimes companies make you enter your credit card and cancel within 30 days if you want out. Sometimes no credit card is required.

Here’s my suggestion . . .

Regardless of what you offer, you should come up with one or maybe a half dozen ways that your customers can try you out before they buy.

Here are some examples:

•   Free assessment with reported results

•   Free consultation

•   Limited time access (14 or 30 days)

•   First visit free

•   Loaner system

•   Purchase with a right to return

•   Cancel anytime. Pay only the installation fee.

However, I frequently suggest requiring some kind of commitment from the buyer in proportion to what it costs you to provide the trial. If your fulfillment costs are next to nothing, you don’t have much to lose. But if it’s going to require hard costs, capital outlay, or someone’s time, I want the customer to have skin in the game. The best free trials require the customer to actually take them seriously and be prepared to move forward with a purchase if the trial goes well.

The aim here is to advance the customer journey to a stage where the perspective client starts consuming or partaking of the payback our product or service delivers. Ideally, they can even start to see and measure the results! Providing your customer with some sort of trial to experience what it’s like to be your customer is a vital component of the overall customer journey, and today’s technology makes this possible now more than ever.

10. Starter Customer: Bought Insight or Something Small

One outstanding strategy that is gaining momentum for advancing relationships is giving people the opportunity to become what I call a “starter customer,” thus moving them one step closer to being a full customer. The psychology behind this is that an individual or a company might be willing to invest a little money with you even if they are not quite ready to invest a lot.

Applying this strategy may not fall solely under the responsibility of sales and marketing. An element of product development could be required. The idea is to create some kind of an inexpensive offering that represents a small commitment for your prospective customer so they can get a taste of what it might be like to work with you. It’s another baby step your customer can take on the way to buying your full product or service. Some marketers call this a “mini-offer” or a “micro-offer.”

Here are some examples of a mini-offer:

•   Paid needs assessments

•   Paid feasibility assessment

•   Paid product trial

•   Limited consulting engagement

•   Three-month discounted membership

•   Pilot engagement

Examples of a micro-offer could be information and insight that you can deliver entirely online or hands-off, such as these:

•   Book or e-book

•   How-to guide

•   Results of polls or surveys

•   Access to special research or reports

•   Online courses

I especially like these kinds of marketable assets because they . . .

1.   Give your buyers a chance to experience being your customer. Once they spend a little money with you, spending more is less of a psychological hurdle.

2.   Provide substantial value and insight that can further sell the value you can provide and propel your customer through their buying process.

3.   Offer a way to differentiate yourself from any competitor who doesn’t provide this kind of guidance and advice.

To come up with ideas for mini-offers or micro-offers that you can use to create starter customers, think about “unbundling” your comprehensive offering. Of course, there is a risk that your mini-offer could cannibalize or negatively impact the sales of your full product. This is why I often recommend starting out by simply offering some of your advice, as a micro-offer, at an affordable price and not necessarily offering a significant portion of your normal deliverables. This can give you a chance to demonstrate your expertise as you enable your customer to come to know, like, and trust you even more.

The best micro-offers will help your clients conclude that they need your full product. Today, many of our corporate engagements come as a result of someone buying one of our online courses to use as a test drive. If they see the quality of one module—and the impact it can have on the thinking and sales behavior of the learner—they are much more likely to take the next step toward a larger investment.

One of my favorite stories to tell about using the “starter customer” concept involves one of my very first engagements with a Fortune 500 company back in 2002. My prospective client liked me (it seemed), and they liked the overview of the training program I had custom-tailored for them. But they were still concerned about hiring an unknown one-man shop to train their enterprise sales team. I said, “If you pay for my travel expenses, I’ll come and do a pilot workshop for you. If you don’t love it, there will be no additional charge. But if you do love it, I’ll invoice you for my usual fee.”

All they were really committing to was the travel expenses. As I suspected, once they saw the complete program—which I had built based on their expressed needs and to their specifications—they were absolutely thrilled. They not only happily paid the full fee for the pilot but then proceeded to send me to over 20 cities on four continents to train their entire global sales team.

11. Customer: Bought Full Product or Service

If my hunch is right, I don’t need to explain what a paying customer is. Nor do I need to convince you that becoming a paying customer is a step you want to help as many people take as possible. The most important point I want to make here is that it is just too easy—once we get a signed contract and receive payment—to emotionally disengage and start looking for the next one. This is probably the biggest mistake we can make, but we are all guilty of this, at least once in a while.

Don’t forget that there is an entire third phase of the customer relationship journey after someone becomes a paying customer. Let’s not disappear on them the instant the ink dries on the contract. This last phase is where the real value of the customer relationship starts to emerge and the big returns on our investment of time and energy are found.

Let me emphasize that throughout the conversation phase, and especially once someone becomes a paying customer, make it a point to establish a connection with them via every communication channel you can. Make sure you have all their telephone numbers. Connect with them on LinkedIn—and maybe even on WhatsApp and Slack, if appropriate—so you can keep in touch with them even if they change companies. Most of all, come up with a reason to initiate correspondence via text message. Get into their contact list on their smartphone and get them into yours. Once you have a text connection, you’ve got a hotline that can be strategically used to reach people even when they don’t have the time or the bandwidth to respond to your phone calls or emails.

The Post-Conversation Phase

Once your customer completes a purchase or an investment—meaning they buy something and you deliver what you’ve promised—we enter what I refer to as the post-conversation phase. Sadly, taking care of customers and fostering repeat business often becomes a time management challenge. We wrestle with the question, “How do I balance the time it takes to keep in touch with my current clients while trying to land new ones?”

One of the best ways to literally multiply your time is to use digital assets to keep moving your client relationships forward even when you can’t be there. Now let’s look at the four remaining stages of the overall customer relationship journey.

12. Repeat Customer: Bought Multiple Things

In earlier chapters, we talked extensively about treating our existing clients like brand-new clients. Ideally, we would frequently reengage to figure out where they are now and where they want to go next. But we can also use digital communication to literally help them recognize the problems they are encountering in their current state and envision a compelling desired future state.

Start using your opt-in email subscriber list and your social media accounts to do more than just advertise “special offers” and limited time “discounts.” Educate and inform people with both short-form and long-form content that either helps them right now and/or prepares them for the future. Try creating assets on topics such as these:

How to Get the Most out of Your Investment in _______________ (what you sell)

4 Impending Threats for the Future of the _______________ Industry

3 Alarming Trends in the _______________ Industry That Every Company Must Prepare For

5 Secrets That Leading Hospitals Are Using to Minimize Theft by Employees

6 Ways to Keep Your Best Sales Talent from Being Poached by Your Competitors

Of course, you’ll end up mentioning new solutions you are bringing to market. You’ll also probably showcase your full stack of products and services as a means of making your clients aware of all the ways you can help them. But you’ll do it within the context of empowering them and equipping them to overcome the challenges they face in the present and achieve their goals and objectives going forward.

These kinds of insights could, of course, take the form of an article or a text-based post. But I want to encourage you to explore shooting video that you can include in an email, within your social posts, or upload to YouTube. Once you have a relationship established—such as you would have with someone who has bought from you before—a video is a much more powerful way to keep yourself top-of-mind. It’s much more engaging and helps maintain the feeling of familiarity and the rapport much better than written words alone.

13. Steady Client: Ongoing Investment

For some of us, there is a stage beyond repeat customer that we’ll call the “steady client” stage. Depending on the solutions you provide, perhaps you already offer a product or a service that your customer can commit to on an ongoing basis. Maybe it’s a yearlong contract instead of doing one-off projects. Maybe it’s a service agreement instead of only providing repairs on a “break/fix” basis.

In many industries, creative companies have recognized and devised ways to continue to bring value to customers on a regular basis as opposed to only when a new perceived problem arises. How could you support and empower your customer beyond Point B (the transaction) and help ensure they actually arrive at Point C and achieve their desired results consistently over time?

As with the mini-offers and micro-offers mentioned earlier, this has as much to do with product development as it does with digital selling. But often this kind of ongoing service and support can be delivered via some digital mechanism such as an online help desk, real-time chat support, electronic reminders, remote monitoring, etc.

Our business completely changed in 2012 when we started offering online training and coaching reinforcement to go along with our classroom workshops. The size of our average client engagement doubled overnight. And our clients received far more than double the value!

Figure out what your company already offers or can offer in this regard, and endeavor to enroll every customer possible in some form of ongoing service agreement, support plan, subscription, or retainer. There’s no better way to continue to pour into the customer partnership on a daily or weekly basis.

14. Advocate: Testimonials and Endorsements

Advocates are clients who are willing to testify on your behalf and tell the world how you’ve helped them. I can count on one hand (or maybe two) the number of companies I’ve ever worked with who’ve even scratched the surface of what is possible in terms of gathering and leveraging customer testimonials. This is an area where my company could improve, too!

Are we so crazy busy trying to find the next client that we don’t have time to assess and document the success and the results we’ve already helped our existing clients achieve? Here are two reasons why it’s so important for us to collect and leverage customer success stories.

The first is that a large percentage of the time, the effort to assess the value you’ve already delivered naturally leads to a conversation about how to expand the partnership even further. And second, documenting what you’ve already helped your current customers achieve can be turned into one of the best tools you could possibly have to attract and influence new customers!

Go back to every customer who’s willing to have a conversation and ask them if they’ve benefited from the relationship. Nothing builds your own confidence quite like hearing your customer telling you how good you are! And if there is some aspect of the relationship that they’re not happy with, at least you’ll know about it and have the opportunity to do something about it!

Once you have some evidence, write up a story about it and put it on your website. Shoot a video of your customer telling their own success story and post it on YouTube. Make a new post on LinkedIn talking about your mutually beneficial relationship, including a testimonial quote. You’ll get some virtually priceless exposure, and they will too!

In a world where anyone located anywhere can put up a website and call themselves the global leader in _______________ (fill in the blank), nothing speaks louder than a real client talking about how you added measurable value to their world.

What format should a success story take? Here’s a simple but powerful outline based on the customer results model from Chapter 2:

1.   Their Point A: The current state your customer was in when you found them, including the negative consequences surrounding it. Whenever possible, quantify those consequences in terms of one or more units of measure, such as dollars lost, hours or days wasted, number of customers lost, etc.

2.   Their Point C: The outcomes and results your customer wanted to achieve at their desired future state. Again, quantify with a unit measure such as goals they had around increasing revenue or throughput, reducing downtime, or minimizing customer churn, etc.

3.   Your B: The product and/or service solution you provided to help them get from A to C.

4.   Their Outcomes and Results: The tangible and measurable improvements they saw expressed in units of measure over a specific period of time. And—here is the really important part—how those outcomes impacted your customer personally.

I know of no other undertaking more important in the world of digital selling than documenting your clients’ successes and making those stories available online. Do something on this before this week is over!

15. Champion: Actively Recruiting and Referring Clients to You

The ultimate destination of the customer relationship journey is creating champions who will not only say a few nice things about you when asked, but will promote you and tell other people every chance they get. How do you do this? My approach has always been to literally join their team. I align myself with every major stakeholder I’m able to gain access to, understand their goals and objectives, and do everything I can to help them achieve those goals and objectives.

I recommend that sellers who want to build a real partnership should adopt their clients’ business philosophy and embrace their mission statement. Literally “go to work” for them! As one of my happy clients put it: “Sales Excellence literally became an extension of our own internal team.” That’s the goal!

You can, of course, simply ask clients to keep you in mind and to recommend you whenever they find the opportunity. But using the approach I just outlined, I’ve found that I seldom have to ask. When I become their champion, they somehow naturally become mine, too.

Here’s the next step: regularly equip your happy clients with insight and knowledge that is not only helpful for them but is packaged up so it’s easy to share with their friends. Create digital assets that are easily sharable, such as:

•   A one-pager covering how you can help solve three major customer problems with your new _______________ (fill in the blank) solution.

•   A research report showing how much _______________ (time or money) you helped your average client save last year using your _______________ (fill in the blank) solution.

•   A series of YouTube videos each talking about a specific business outcome you and your company can help your clients achieve.

You can include these in an automated email sequence you send to a mailing list of existing clients. But I like to send a personal message—my preference is DM or text—to my best clients every so often thanking them for their business and for helping let others know about how we’ve partnered together.

Before I attach anything, I like to ask, “Do you mind if I send you a document (or a link to something) we just released that you can pass along to anyone you think might like to see it?” Your strong supporters will be thrilled to look at it and forward it to others, as appropriate. People frequently DM me back saying, “Hey I just passed your one-pager on to the so-and-so manager in the other department. Here’s her contact info. Why don’t you follow up with her in a couple of days?”

Don’t put the burden on your champion to find and curate what you want them to share. Make it super easy to be your champion and spread the word about your value promise using digital selling assets that require as few keystrokes and button clicks as possible.

We’ve covered a lot of ground here as we’ve talked about helping lead people from stranger all the way to champion. Will they all make the entire journey? Of course not. But the reason I drew the diagram that I shared at the beginning of this chapter is this . . .

Some people will progress through the stages of expanding their relationship with you on their own. But if you become actively involved in leading them to each next step, far more will be willing and able to make the journey.

Don’t focus solely on making contact and having whatever conversations are needed in order to “close a deal.” Instead . . .

1.   Earn trust, rapport, and preference with people in the pre-conversation phase so that more of them will be willing to enter the conversation phase with an open mind and an interest in how you might be able to help them.

2.   Take the baby steps toward the close by coming up with creative ways to enable your prospect to experience more of what it might be like to be your customer even before they commit to buy your full offering.

3.   Continue to foster a collaborative partner-based relationship after they become your customer and invest the time to proactively generate repeat business, recommendations, and referrals.

Putting These Ideas into Practice