In the latest episode of Mastering Modern Selling, we head into the heart of modern sales techniques with the hosts, Tom Burton and Brandon Lee.
This episode highlights the evolving landscape of sales, offering a fresh perspective on engaging with the modern buyer.
Five Essential Insights:
The episode wraps up by bringing together all the ideas and strategies discussed, showing how important it is for sales professionals to adapt to modern selling techniques.
Building relationships, engaging digitally, and focusing on the customer are essential in today's sales world.
Use these insights and strategies to improve your sales approach and make more meaningful connections with your customers online.
In the latest episode of Mastering Modern Selling, we head into the heart of modern sales techniques with the hosts, Tom Burton and Brandon Lee.
This episode highlights the evolving landscape of sales, offering a fresh perspective on engaging with the modern buyer.
Five Essential Insights:
The episode wraps up by bringing together all the ideas and strategies discussed, showing how important it is for sales professionals to adapt to modern selling techniques.
Building relationships, engaging digitally, and focusing on the customer are essential in today's sales world.
Use these insights and strategies to improve your sales approach and make more meaningful connections with your customers online.
Welcome to Mastering Modern Selling relationships social and AI in the buyer-centric age. Join host Brandon Lee, founder of Fistbump, alongside Microsoft's number one social seller, carson V Heddy and Tom Burton, author of the Revenue Zone and co-founder of LeadSmart, as we explore the strategies and stories behind successful executives and sales professionals. Dive into business growth, personal development and the pursuit of excellence with industry leaders. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your backstage pass to today's business landscape.
Speaker 2:This is Mastering, modern Selling, brought to you by Fistbump, brought to you by Fistbump.
Speaker 3:It's been a week plus the webinar. You missed the webinar.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, I saw part of the webinar, I just wasn't on the webinar.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it was good, I mean, for everybody. I think Carson did a great job sharing his playbook and had a lot of great feedback from people. In fact, I had two calls today with people that came to the webinar and then schedule calls with me afterwards and a lot of great things and you know, I think a lot of people it's uh, I've heard it multiple times. I've heard Carson called a machine and it's true, he is a bit of a machine and it's. It's hard for a lot of salespeople to look at Carson's playbook and go you expect me to do all that, but take components of it, find the little gold nuggets for each person and start to implement and then grow into it. What's the expression? How do you eat an elephant?
Speaker 2:One bite at a time.
Speaker 3:One bite at a time. So I think that's my encouragement for everybody that may have been a little overwhelmed by the webinar. So welcome everybody to Mastering Modern Selling, episode 79. If you're with us on the live event inside LinkedIn or YouTube or X or Facebook, love to hear who you are. Butch is popping up from ATL. Welcome Butch. And if you're on the podcast, we sure appreciate you. We don't mean to neglect the podcast compared to the live audience. Hey, if you're finding value in this, we appreciate you. We love the ratings. Give us a review and give us feedback on how we can provide more value to you. Our goal is to help those out there that are on the marketing side or on the sales side, that are struggling with creating pipeline and creating demand. That's our goal is to help you. We know things are hard and things have changed and buyers don't behave the way they're supposed to bad buyers Well, that's what we're going to talk about today right, the revenue generation flywheel for the modern buyer absolutely and, uh, carson.
Speaker 2:speaking of carson, he is at the end of this quarter so he um, I guess, was unavoidably detained on some microsoft stuff. So, brandon, you're going to be kind of our guest today on kind of taking us through the modern revenue generation flywheel, and I think this is going to be really, really insightful. I think this is going to be a key episode and kind of set a foundation for a lot of other things that we're talking about over the next few weeks the messaging around the webinar.
Speaker 3:A lot of our own content got more clear and a lot more conversations with sales leaders, with C-suite. We know there'd been pain, but there's something about 2024 that the conversations have shifted. A lot of the conversations we're having with people is hey, this is serious now. It's been hard but now we're hitting those critical points and a lot of people are like we want to, and I get it. It's a human nature. We want to go back under stressful times.
Speaker 3:I have a friend who's besides Moeed, who was our neuroscientist last week, who was who's besides Moeed, who was our neuroscientist last week, who was brilliant and awesome. I have another friend who focuses on this and she's an expert in NLP as well and she said look, when times are stressful, our human nature is to go to what we know and we can see it carrying out. I mean, I do this when I'm under tremendous stress, like when I want to escape, I go and I watch rerun episodes of either the big bang theory or modern family and I watch the reruns and I'll I'll binge watch two or three of them in a row. And why do we do that? We want something familiar. We want something that there's a there feels like there's control in it and even though you're just passively watching, like I know I've got control because I know what's going to happen, I don't have to be surprised, I don't have to wonder what's going to happen. It gives you that sense. And I think right now, with so much change between AI and the buyer changing and budgets are changing and capital is more difficult for companies to get, we want to go back to the activities that we know, that we can feel like we control.
Speaker 3:If I can make 100 calls, I could get 20 people to talk to me. Okay, well, I'll do 150 calls and try to get people. I'll do 200 calls. And I was talking to someone today. He said you know, if you're two out of 10, you feel like you're in a slump. But if you're two out of 10, you feel like you're in a slump. But if you're two out of 20, you start to think something's wrong with me. And then, when you're two out of 40, you know something's wrong with you. And when you're two out of a hundred, you feel like you're a failure and you're just waiting for the hammer to be dropped. And unfortunately for a lot of salespeople right now, they feel that way because those motions that we want to go back to to give us comfort aren't providing any relief.
Speaker 2:So totally agree. I mean, we see this all the time. I do agree with you that it's gotten more severe in the last, you know, first quarter of this year. It's gotten more severe even than what it was last year. I think people are realizing that it's probably not going back to some old way. So let's kind of use that kind of foundation there and let's talk about some different things.
Speaker 2:And the one thing, right, that we all talk about things that we all have grown up with, if you want to call it that, right, that we all talk about things that we all have grown up with, if you want to call it that the sales funnel right, we all think of a sales funnel. We've all had, I mean, we were all taught sales funnel. We build pipeline, we manage our pipeline through our sales funnel. All of that I don't know if you touched on this on the webinar or not, but we certainly have been touching on it recently is that the sales funnel may be a thing of the past. From a, from a sales strategy and a sales framework. Let's sort of random what you know, kind of summarize what you, when we talk about that, what does it mean that the sales funnel is kind of obsolete and what is, what is the difference and why?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a. It's a great question and it's a really important mindset shift. I mean, we talk a lot about the mindsets around what this modern revenue generation looks like and a big part of it is the mindset. So the funnel is simple you got the top. That's really wide and very narrow at the bottom and the concept is get as many targeted audiences we can up at the top and through this nurturing process, certain amount of customers are going to emerge and we'll close those deals. They'll have a dollar value, a deal value, and we can take a look and say, ok, for every thousand people we put at the top, we're going to get 10 customers. Each customer's worth 50 grand. We generate a half million dollars. So how do we get a thousand people at the top of the funnel for somewhere much less than a half million dollars to make this thing profitable and all the other expenses and everything?
Speaker 3:The challenge with that is the motions, the actions that we've done to get top of the funnel. Traffic are proving to be less and less effective. It's SEO, it's SEM, search engine marketing. It's paid Google ads. It's go out and buy the cold database and put in cold sequences via email, blast everybody and then get the names and phone numbers and hand it off to the sales team or the account executives and start making the calls and any form of that, even if it's a company like a lot of our people we talk to in manufacturing, they don't have the other part, but they know their targeted list and they start making calls.
Speaker 3:The challenge with all of those top of funnel activities is that they are more expensive, they take more time and they're proving to be less and less effective.
Speaker 3:So if we're thinking about the funnel, our data is all off.
Speaker 3:Buyers are resistant to go into the top of your funnel and the data is showing that buyers are now doing 80 to 90% of their research without engaging with sellers. The data is also showing we've had multiple guests on our show talk about this that when asked and this is across lots of different industries when asked buyers to rank order where they want to get their information from and who they trust in getting the information buyers or sellers, sales professionals, the company website and the company content or information ranks at the very bottom. It's what they want to engage with the least and it's the stuff that they have the least trust in. So that puts us trying to fill the top of the funnel at a huge disadvantage, and so that's why we say the funnel is, it's ineffective, it's somewhat obsolete.
Speaker 3:I mean, you can still try to think of it that way, but the traditional functions of filling top of the funnel traffic, throw up a landing page, create a white paper, create a case study. People are going to want to read our case study because they're going to want to see how they could implement it too. No, they don't, because they don't believe in your content. Anyways, they don't trust your own content.
Speaker 2:And they may want to read that case study at a certain point. But it's maybe not a top of the funnel, quote unquote. And again, we probably should be thinking about how we use those words. Maybe it's early in the journey and early in the relationship, versus talking about top of funnel or bottom of funnel. But what I'm hearing you say and I just want to make sure this is really clear to everybody the sales motion, marketing or sales, whatever you want to call it of let's go get a bunch of prospects, put them through our process and hope that some of them come out the bottom end is, if not completely ineffective, is very inefficient at this point in our career. And I think, going back to what you said, I think most people would agree with that. But then they're like okay, but what the hell else am I going to do? Right, just throw in a challenge and say, screw it. And I think that's where, again, we'll start talking about the modern revenue flywheel and the pieces of that, but it's.
Speaker 2:I guess what you're saying is, in order to really understand or be able to take advantage of the modern revenue generation approach, you have to be willing to let go of what we're doing yesterday. Is that accurate?
Speaker 3:It is, it is and it's a mindset shift. And I think the other thing is, if we're willing to say the funnel is challenged to, doesn't work, to obsolete somewhere anywhere in that realm, to doesn't work to obsolete somewhere anywhere in that realm, what are our options? And we look to marketing and all the marketing activities SEO, sem, more blogs, get higher page ranking, more ads, better ads. They're not working. Okay, well, let's shift. Maybe we need to put ads in Instagram, maybe our ads on LinkedIn? It's because it's LinkedIn, let's try it. Like, all of those motions are not working. But for marketers and I feel bad for the marketing team, because they need to get data to prove their value the problem is the data that they're forced to show isn't really good data. Right, we're showing open rates on emails who cares what an open rate is? But it's the only thing, because they're not getting the clicks. What else did they have to show to make their activities look like they're valuable? Visits to the website I'm sorry, visits to the website don't speak, don't mean nearly as much as what they used to. So marketing's in a tough spot.
Speaker 3:And then, from a sales leader perspective, you think and you go well, what are our options. Okay, well, there's social selling, and the problem with that term is there's. We've talked about this time and time again. We have Mike Weinberg on. We talked about the charlatans out there with their social selling, snake oil solutions and all the lead gen solutions. I get these messages all the time. People don't even look at my own LinkedIn profile like, hey, brandon, how would your business benefit if you got three to five new leads every day without doing anything? Wow, that sounds fantastic, but you know what it reminds me of? It's too good to be true. It probably is, and that is complete BS. It doesn't work. So you got these sales leaders that have tried some of those things and they didn't work. It's like okay, our MQLs are near zero. The MQLs we do get are not good. They're not really cued, they're not really qualified leads, we're not doing anything with them. Our sales team is still doing pretty good at converting from their pipeline, but their pipeline is anemic. What do we do? Social selling we tried it. It didn't work. No magic there. They're really in a tough spot and that's what leads us to the flywheel.
Speaker 3:And everything that we looked at is you know, over the last five years, I'm like you know there's value in LinkedIn, but and I tried the lead gen stuff I paid automation companies in 2016 to use my LinkedIn profile and do all that. I pissed a bunch of people off. I got my account suspended. I didn't get the three to five leads every day. The calls I did get weren't quality calls. They were a waste of time.
Speaker 3:You know, over the years I tried podcasts and POs weren't magically falling out of the sky and so we kept adapting, kept reinventing ourselves and I think over the last three, four years, really in post-COVID, we started to see like what motions are really working. How is this? And it's here's the ironic part. I went back to the beginning of my career. What did we do in the face-to-face environment? Relationship building, networking don't be salesy, salesy, pitchy, pitchy Actually build rapport with people, earn the opportunity, actually behave like a trusted advisor and then earn the opportunity to be perceived as a trusted advisor.
Speaker 3:So I went back and looked at all of that and then said, well, how do we apply this into this digital first environment? How do we be that, like our friend Larry Levine talks about no more empty suits, right Sell from the heart? How do we do that in a digital manner. How do we do that inside of LinkedIn? And that's where the flywheel came about, and we've been watching it succeed. We're looking at the data for the clients that we serve. We're watching our own business grow. We got another team member that we sent out a job offer to just today, adding another person to our team. The good thing is, what we sell we actually use to fill our own pipeline. Can't be better than that, right.
Speaker 2:So let's back up a little bit on the relationship part. Is, you know, back in the day, right, when we were using most everything we did was in person, or, you know, phone call. But in person, right, we built relationships. And inherently right, think about that, the more relationships, the more healthy relationships you had, the more momentum you had in your sales results. I mean, that's the fact of the matter, right, but you didn't build relationships overnight. You didn't build relationships by making 4,500 phone calls and hoping some. You built relationships bit by bit, piece by piece, by doing the right things and then, eventually, the momentum kept going and going and going. All of a sudden you have a really robust set of relationships and apparently a robust pipeline. You know, I know Carson, right. He said one of his key indicators or key metrics that he does with his team is how many relationships did you build this week?
Speaker 2:or how many new relationships that you build this week Real relationships, not phone calls, but how many relationships that you built. So it seems like fundamentally, it's no different, right? The fly wheel was created by building relationship, building rapport, building value, in the digital or in the analog world. We're now replicating that in the digital world and hopefully doing that at higher scale and higher even efficiency than I would have been able to do in the analog world.
Speaker 3:It seems like and less expensive and more repeatable right.
Speaker 2:More scalable and more repeatable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in the analog world, if we got in our car and we drove around and go meet with customers, we could meet with maybe four people in a day. Maybe you throw a happy hour in the evening type of thing. Maybe you get four to five people in a day. If we take that face-to-face shaking hands, relationship building, getting to know people, having good quality conversations and slowing down the sales process to walk at the buyer's pace, then we do that in a digital first way. We could do that to hundreds of people in a single day.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's where it really looks. So, instead of looking at the funnel, we look at the matrix, and a lot of the matrix stems from your book, tom, from the Revenue Zone and what you built with the Revenue Zone Matrix, but now we call it a relationship building matrix no offense to Tom, it's just that's the term that makes sense to me in my brain. But if you look at the bottom axis, we still need to focus on being known and liked and trusted In this digital world. I like to say it's more. Instead of the KLT, no, like and trusted I like to say it's the LTR, it's like, trusted and remembered. Because there's so much noise and there's so much competition, we have to be remembered, and that's a big part of the sales motions now.
Speaker 3:And then, on the Y-axis, going up this side, we need to use the actions that we can control. What do we publish in form of content? What do we do in the form of commenting? Where do we comment? Whose posts do we comment on to influence our target audience and what that is designed to do? That, the things that we say, the value we give, the way that we help people, the way we capture their attention, is moving them up the Y axis of building awareness to who we are and what we do, building some interest in who we are and what we do, and ultimately, the goal, of course, is creating demand. And that's why two key phrases that drive what we do how do we attract and retain customer attention? And all we can do is the activities that we can control. And then, how do we do that to create demand, instead of trying to capture the existing demand that's out there? And that's a big differentiator, because most sales organizations are trying to capture existing demand, and what that looks like is they're making calls and they're sending emails going.
Speaker 3:We do this. Do you want a demo? In a nutshell, we do this. Do you want a demo? If they're not currently in market, it's like get away, you're bugging me. It's like a fly, leave me alone. I don't want to have that conversation right now, but when we create demand and we're providing information, we're providing data, we're providing tactics, solutions, ideas that will help them do their job today, to perform better today, to solve a problem today, to accomplish a goal today, something that's more tactical and practical. Well, they pay attention to it today, even if they're not currently in market for your solution and that's how we attract and we retain their attention. We continually provide that value. Now here's the challenge. It's a lot of companies out there.
Speaker 3:We use the words trusted advisor, we use it to customer centric content. We'll say that we provide added value content. We use the right words, but the content you produce isn't really it. It's still about your company, it's still about your product, it's still about your service, it's still more self-centered. But just because we go oh, we got this trusted advisor piece of content or this value add piece of content, just because you call it value add, doesn't mean it really adds value to them If your buyers are not engaging with it and they're not going wow, this is interesting, thank you. It's not it and you've got to change it. And our challenge is we're so stuck in what we've done for so long. We talk about me and me, and me and me, again and more about me, and then we wonder why our clients don't give a crap.
Speaker 2:It's interesting I was just thinking about I get a bunch of emails all the time from companies that they deal like with R&D tax credits, so I'll get emails saying you know you need to R&D tax credit, call us for a discussion on how we're going to make you a million. I didn't, honestly, didn't really even know what an R&D tax credit was or the relevance of it, right? So I'm getting these emails that are basically trying to, as you said, capture my demand right, or trying to capture my interest and go through there. I recently, though and I think I saw it on LinkedIn saw a really good carousel discussing the value of R&D credits in a business and I didn't fully especially a technology business, and what they can do to your taxes and all kinds of things, and it took me through in a simple way. It didn't try and sell me a thing.
Speaker 2:It was just like here's five reasons to be thinking about R&D credits, and I came away enlightened, right. I came away going oh okay, that was actually a relevant, valuable thing, and now my attention is actually a little bit not gigantic, but some of my attention is now on. Should we be thinking about R&D credits? Whereas and I'm not joking, I probably get 50 a week, 50 emails a week about R&D credits that I have completely ignored and never even thought about. Just like junk, junk, junk, junk, junk. But now I got my attention on something and now it's actually sticking my attention and so to some degree I'm now part of that flywheel and putting those things together and Tom is the company that provided that carousel.
Speaker 3:Are they at the top of your minds about R&D tax credit? I'm not there yet.
Speaker 2:actually I'm not even thinking so much about the company, but I would know it again if I saw it on LinkedIn and I would continue to look at them. I'm not at the point where I'm on LinkedIn and I would consume it as I see more of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so they attracted your attention. And now if they stop like we try to carousel and we didn't get a bunch of POs magically falling out of the sky and they stop they're never going to retain your attention. But if they keep going, right and they're more strategic with it. So if you were on their targeted list and they had sales people or customer success people or anybody on their revenue team that was consistently posting this stuff, maybe they had a podcast and they're talking about the different ways. Maybe they're bringing in a guest on their show that talks about how they used R&D credits to fund a new position or something like that. That's the type of stuff that gets our attention because like, oh, I can do that, oh, that's interesting, that pertains to me. But when it's pitchy, pitchy, salesy, salesy, we're all conditioned now to just ignore it.
Speaker 2:You don't need it. That relates to them. They don't know I exist. As I see more content, my logical thing could be following them, following somebody on LinkedIn subscribing to some content, possibly, who knows right, I don't even know which yellow brick road I would be following as I go through there, but now there's somebody again, there's momentum and eventually, whether it's me or somebody else, it's going to pop out the top of that and there's going to be a reasonable opportunity for them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so let's take a step backwards from the matrix, because there's four steps we like to look at at how we help encourage our buyers to move through the funnel, so to speak. But we call it to the top right of the matrix. Let's take a step back because you said something really important there the way buyers behave. Because we can, we allow and everybody. Think about you as a buyer. You might be a sales professional, you might be a CEO, you might be on the marketing side, but think about you as a buyer. What do we do? Well, we allow certain people close to us, and what that looks like is we opt into their newsletters, we follow them on LinkedIn, we connect with them on LinkedIn, we subscribe to different podcasts, we subscribe to YouTube channels. We allow the people we want to come into our lives and then we assign them words. They're experts, they're a trusted advisor, they're a speaker in our industry, they're a top voice, they're influential, they're a consultant, whatever. We let them into our world. And we let them in our world through a medium a podcast, a YouTube channel, a newsletter list. We follow them on LinkedIn, we hit the bell and we get notified every time they publish something, because we like the content that they share because it adds value. It's worth my time to ring this bell and get notified every time so-and-so publishes content, because I find value in it. That's the way we let people into our lives and we keep other people out.
Speaker 3:When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number? We actually have these cool things on our phones now. That'll say possible spam telemarketer. It's not even unknown, it just says man, this is a spam caller. Nope, nope, nope. We don't answer the phone. We get cold email all the time. When was the last time anybody checked their spam folder or their junk folder? We don't care anymore. There's so much coming in I don't even bother. 10 years ago I used to look in there and go maybe something important got through. I'm over it. We're all over it. We don't pay attention to email that did get through into our inbox and we don't know who it's from and we can see the preview and we know our own human spam filter. We know, based on the first sentence, that it's cold and trying to get our attention.
Speaker 3:There's all these different strategies that people are trying to do, but the bottom line is all of those messages to us as a buyer, all those messages to your buyers. You're trying to get that one to three percent of people that are currently in market. But all that action, all that behavior you do, all that energy you spend is only after one to 3%. What if? Just what if? What if you had content that was extremely valuable to 100% of your target audience today because it was teaching them something. It was showing them how teaching them something. It was showing them how to do something. It was telling them something they should be aware of, something they should be planning for? What if it was doing that? And then we're sharing that in LinkedIn every day or consistently. Your team members are sharing that into LinkedIn every day. You have a podcast or a live show where you're talking about this on a regular basis. Your CEO is speaking about this on LinkedIn on a regular basis.
Speaker 3:Now, all of a sudden, you create a brand. You have a culture that is seen as a brand that educates the industry. Who gets the most demand? Where are people going to go when they're in market? So we got to take a step back. I appreciate that you brought that up and I call that the circle of trust, the buyer circle of trust. We all allow in who we want in. We allow them to come in the way we want. I love podcasts. I'm not as huge on YouTube channels. I like TikTok. I'm not a big fan of Facebook and, of course, I love LinkedIn. So I let people in my life through those different mediums, but I choose who I let into my life through those different mediums. And our buyers all do the same thing. So the question for all of us is C-suite as marketing leaders, as sales leaders, as sales professionals, what are you doing to earn the invitation into your buyer circle of trust? And if you're not doing any of those activities, well, that's why your pipeline is anemic.
Speaker 2:I think let's stop right there, because emails and phone calls are not likely going to earn your way into that circle of trust, no matter how many you send, right? If I send you 5,000 or one, probably the 5,000th email is not going to earn me into your circle of trust. That's there. So let's go back then to what do you do, right? Because let's face it as a sales organization or a market, we have to have some system. It can't just be all art. We have to have some science, and we talk about a flywheel, right? So the whole idea here is to be able to create a flywheel, not just for an individual but for an organization, right? And of which the individuals are going to be part of that organization, but the organization has a flywheel that is building momentum, building relationships. More and more people are inviting them into their trusted circle. As that happens, the momentum continues to have the I mean, you see this every day and then that leads to healthy connections and positive phone calls and, ultimately, opportunities.
Speaker 2:And it all kind of happens organically. It happens naturally. It's not forced, it's not oh my God, I pulled that guy into a demo or whatever. It just happens along the way. So what are the key ingredients, then, at a high level, what are the key ingredients that we've learned, you've learned, make up that flywheel, that cause it to spin. And what happens if you don't, if you use part of those ingredients, or you know we need all of the ingredients to get the flywheel to really for our organization.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's a. That's a great question and a good setup for this. And look, I think with most companies, start with a proof of concept and start small Change is scary. Digital transformation is scary. This is the epitome of digital transformation. Right? Our buyers have shifted.
Speaker 3:2024 is the year or two, and I forget the number. It's like millennial buyers are going to be responsible now for like $3 trillion worth of buying decisions, and millennial buyers like 70 some percent of them prefer a digital only buying experience. That should scare a lot of organizations. That should make a lot of organizations go. Wait a minute, because millennials don't want to be bothered with your sales team and they don't care to be entertained at lunch. They don't want to be bothered with your sales team and they don't care to be entertained at lunch. They don't care to have tickets to go to the ball game, like all the motions that we used to do are not as important to them.
Speaker 3:So what do we do? We start with the mindset shift that we have to acknowledge that a lot of this is out of our control. We can't expect if I do A plus B, it's going to equal C and it's not the quick 30 day. If I make five calls to the same person, I'm going to get certain percent of people to recall. Those. Numbers are all over the place now. They're not consistent. So we got to change the mindset to we are going to attract and retain customer attention as a way to create demand and we're going to be patient. And I know that's really, really hard for a lot of sales organizations. They don't want to be patient. At the end of 30 days, we need to do this. At the end of 90 days, we need to do this. We've got to trust the process. And so number one is the mindset shift. Number two is what's a proof of concept? Look, I think there's five key cogs in the flywheel. We see a lot of our customers will start somewhere. They'll start with one, maybe two, and see how it goes and then expand to a third, to the point where they go okay, we got this, this is making sense. And they'll add a fourth and maybe a fifth. But those, those key cogs are.
Speaker 3:Number one is your LinkedIn leader, preferably your C-suite. It's the same mindset of when you go to an event you want your CEO there and preferably you're you're event. You want your CEO there and preferably you're with the company, who your CEO walks down the aisles and people are like, ah, there she is, there he is. They know everybody, they're shaking hands, ah, good to see you. They have a reputation because as sales producers you get to leverage that reputation right. You get to say hey, you know, we're going to have a meeting, I'll have our CEO come in. Oh yeah, I know, you know, I've seen them, they've been on stage, they've been, whatever.
Speaker 3:So number one is your LinkedIn. We call it your LinkedIn leader. That a leader is leading the way with a consistent strategy and implementation and a presence on LinkedIn. They're sharing content, they're commenting, they're building a reputation for themselves and therefore the brand many. They're building a reputation for themselves and therefore the brand. That's one gear. The next gear we call the social, the digital evangelist mastery. How do we then equip and train the team? Put in some guardrails, because we can't just make LinkedIn all this carte blanche.
Speaker 3:But from a POC standpoint, maybe you take a couple of people on your team and you train them and you implement how to do this and see how it works for them. Compare their pipeline to the other team members pipeline. Give it, give it six months and compare. Give it 90 days and do a comparison. But this is individual producers that are selling in this way. They're they're relationship first. They're creating content, they're commenting, they're going slow through the process, they're looking at building healthy relationships. They're sharing content that's very, very much customer-centric as a goal of get people to go. You know, that's really interesting. I'd want to talk to you and learn more about it. They're not asking for a sales demo. They're saying you keep sharing stuff. That's really interesting. I'd love to talk to you about it because it helps me as we move them down that path. So maybe we start with a couple of people on the team.
Speaker 3:The other option is we start with a live show and a podcast, and I know there's a lot of companies out there that said, oh, we tried a live show or we tried a podcast, we tried a YouTube channel and it didn't work. I think a lot of people thought that if they just did a show, that it would magically create POs, and they didn't really do the nuance of how do you then leverage the content? How do you strategize who your guests are? How do you strategize what you do with the show besides just record it? But a live show and podcast is equivalent to paying big sponsorship dollars for your big event of the year so that you can have breakout sessions or get your CEO on stage. A live show and a podcast gives you a weekly stage that you can fill the room. You constantly have a room to invite people to and you're constantly able to adjust the content in order to find what your buyers are interested in and what is it that's going to add value to them.
Speaker 3:And the last two cogs. So those are three. We got your leader, we got your team members or individuals on your team, you got the live show and podcast. We have the webinar right. The webinar is a really good gear in this because we go back to the matrix.
Speaker 3:Our four steps are healthy connections, a willingness to converse or engage. So maybe they do get on a call with you and have a chat. Maybe they start to engage with your content, with their comments and ask questions and ask for clarity. But the third step is a desire to learn. If our buyers if the data is true and they do 80 to 90% of their research before they ever want to talk to us. A webinar is a great way to help them move from step two to step three.
Speaker 3:They can still be in the anonymous zone. Mostly they register for your webinar. It doesn't mean they have to accept their emails and all the other stuff, but they can register and they can sign up. They can watch your webinar live, or maybe they watch the recording, but they're using it to educate themselves. But they still want to do it in an anonymous way. They still want to be back. They don't want to be bothered.
Speaker 3:So that's the fourth gear is the webinar, and just do a plug for us. We've got our next webinar coming up on April 18th. We just did one last week with Carson. We got one coming up on April 18th and we're talking to the marketing people in that one. How do you create content that your team wants to share and actually adds value to them in building pipeline? That's what we're going to talk about and we're going to just tell everybody like this is what we do, this is how you do it. Go do it for yourself. And oh, by the way, if you want help, we'd love to help you, but it's a webinar. That's just going here. Do this, implement this for yourself. We're adding value to people.
Speaker 3:And the last gear is what we call the booth magnet. How do we do all these things around a specific event in order to get people walking in our booth going? I've seen you guys all over LinkedIn. I've seen you all over YouTube. I've been paying attention to your podcast. I knew you're going to be at the show. I want to talk to you.
Speaker 3:How do we create demand and use all those same demand creation activities or those demand generation activities focused on a very specific event? So those are the five gears of the flywheel. And for somebody to start, I mean start where it's most comfortable. We have a customer right now where the president of a company said I know I need to be more active on LinkedIn, but I really don't know what to do and I don't have time. We moved them into our concierge program where we started working with them and then, as they started to experience some of the benefits of it, they're like I think we need to do a live show and podcast too, and they started to implement that and that's a pretty normal, typical path for a lot of companies. Because we got to do the POC, we got to get them comfortable because this change is tough.
Speaker 2:Well, but let's you know, lots of companies right do webinars. I mean there's tons of webinars out there and tons of companies also obviously go to shows and do live shows and have booths and stuff like that. I think and you certainly, I think is a good witness to this last week with the webinar. Most of the time again, the more traditional ways of dealing with webinar I go mail my list and I invite them to the webinar. But what you're talking about here is using the webinar as part of a bigger holistic strategy so that when people end up at the webinar they're already slightly interested.
Speaker 2:There's already some relevance 's already some relevance. You have some relevance to them. You've already maybe even been invited into their circle of trust. And so the quality of the webinar. I mean I think you last week said you had what? 160 signups but 80. Some people showed up 80. I mean over 50. That's gigantic. I mean most webinars at best get a 25 to 30 percent show up rate for the people that actually sign up. So that shows that people were actually excited and interested to attend, because not of necessarily the webinar itself, but because of what was done prior to the webinar through the flywheel and so forth.
Speaker 3:And that's where, if you, if you look at these five gears, you know LinkedIn leader, the team live show and podcast your webinars and then around a booth, as those all start moving, all of this moves faster and it starts moving people through it a lot faster. And what you were saying practically is our show. What we're on right now builds, capture, creates, attracts and retains customer attention. Because we're not selling, we're teaching, we're showing people how to do things. We bring great guests on that show them how to do things. We bring a lot of guests on that are our competitors. We're just like hey, you're doing good stuff, tell everybody how to do it. So we have a show and it attracts and retains their attention. And then, from the show, we talk about the webinars and the webinars we still teach them how to do things, but we go a little bit deeper.
Speaker 3:And then meanwhile, I'm very active on LinkedIn and I don't sell from LinkedIn. I provide content that helps people in their day to day. I build healthy conversations with people that lead to talks and Zooms and teams meetings and we got those three cogs plus the team is doing their stuff and we got that cog and we currently don't go to events. We do a lot of events for clients, but we don't go to our own events to exhibit right now, so that clogs cogs just sitting there, that gears just sitting there, but when all of those start working together. That's why we do things with our webinar and we get 160 people to register and 84 peaked people attended. And you know what? We went long last week and at the 50 minute mark we still had 79 people in there. We were providing such valuable information that people stayed and they wanted to keep learning.
Speaker 3:We've created a brand, I believe, where we give and train and coach and provide so much value that people were willing to stick around a bit longer if they could. And that's the flywheel, and you've got to trust the process, though. We're not salesy, salesy, pitchy, pitchy ever, but our pipelines are full. Our growth is fast. I mean I I think this next month we're going to have another 100 growth month because the amount of new business that's coming in and it's we sell by not selling. We sell by being valuable to people and there's enough customers out there that go. I really like this. I need your help and that's what we do.
Speaker 2:They feel safe to ask for your help, right? I think that's a key thing is that if you get invited into the circle of trust, then it's okay to ask for help and they don't feel like it's a safe thing to ask for help. Even if they're not ready to buy at this exact moment. They're willing, they know they can have a conversation or get some information without a hard sell or a hard pitch all the way along the line. I want to emphasize one thing here. I know we're kind of moving along on time here, but I want to emphasize one thing At the end of the day, a lot of the same sales metrics, right.
Speaker 2:What are the opportunities? What are the 30, 60, 90 day opportunities? What are the probability? All of those things still exist here, right. We still need to manage and track and forecast and do all of those things. What we're finding is our ability to more accurately forecast, have higher quality forecasts that are not just well, we hope through. This model is much, much better, and that when people do move into an opportunity, their probability of closing and becoming a customer are much higher than if they move into an opportunity from a less relationship centcentric approach, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and let's break that down for people. This is a part that if you want to show your CEO or you want to show your CMO or your sales leader that this social selling thing isn't just willy-nilly social, here's the steps. We start with a list of either named accounts or a targeted list of leads that you want to focus on and we go find them inside of LinkedIn and what they're doing. Now we still have the database. We can email them and we can call them. We're not saying don't do that. You can get on a plane and go visit them. You can call them and say I'm going to be in your neighborhood, can I take you to lunch? All of that still applies. But we start with that list and we look at the four steps and we can assign probability based on each step, like we would do in any CRM.
Speaker 3:Number one is do we develop a healthy connection? And we define that. A healthy connection isn't just did they accept my connection request. A healthy connection isn't just did they accept my connection request. A healthy connection is more of did they like any of our content? Did we comment on something that they've commented on? Did they comment on something that we've commented on? Did we both comment on a post? And when we send the connection request, was it personal? Did we have a little bit of a chat and how that looks? Hey, tom, you and I keep commenting on Seth Godin's post. I love what you said about XYZ on his post. The other day. I looked at your profile. I see we're not connected. Is it okay for us to be connections? And if he accepts it and it says yeah, I saw that comment too. That was great, appreciate you. I'd love to be connected. We say thanks for connecting, have a great day, be done, don't be salesy, salesy, pitchy, pitchy. Well, guess what? We hit the healthy Yep.
Speaker 3:Our next goal with that person is willingness to converse or engage. As we are publishing content and we're commenting on posts that they're probably looking at, maybe they're reacting to, maybe they're commenting on. Do they comment on anything that we do? Do they comment on our post? Do they like our post? Do they routinely view our profile, all those things? We can quantify that data and then we can move them into that stage. If they comment on my content, I move them to that stage. They have a willingness to converse or engage. And then what I do is we say let's ask them for a chat, and I use that word intentionally because we're still not selling.
Speaker 3:If we start to move into sales motions too early, buyers are like skittish cats I'm out, don't sell to me, I'm out. So we don't. We don't have a demo, we don't have a sales call, we have a chat. Hey, it's been so great getting to know you, tom, online. We keep commenting on the same stuff. I appreciate your comment on my post the other day.
Speaker 3:Would you be open to a get to know each other call, just a chat, no agenda, and you got to mean it. You've have to mean that. No agenda. This is networking, is what we talked about at the very beginning today. This is networking, this is relationship building.
Speaker 3:We're earning the opportunity and if they want to get on a chat and we get to know them hey, we're at step three of the four then we can invite them to one of our webinars. We can start sending them links to post to shows. Hey, tom, we're doing this show on this episode and I know, as a founder of a tech company, this might be really valuable for you. I'd love for you to come if you can. And Tom responds you know what? Oh, I can't make it at that time, but is it going to be recorded? Yeah, I'll be glad to send you the link when we're done, moving them on to that fourth step, as we're sharing content and I'm not saying never ask them for the sales call. This isn't passive, but make sure that we're doing it at the right time. And we got, sometimes we, I've done it, I've tried selling too soon, and then I'm like hello, hello, ah crap, scared them off.
Speaker 2:Sell too soon. A lot of times they'll reach back to you even before you're there. Right, it's like you know. You never know when that moment is going to happen, and that moment can happen organically at a lot of different places along that point can happen organically at a lot of different places along that point.
Speaker 3:And here's a big, important part of the tactic, and I get questioned this a lot. People say you know, brandon, you do a lot of selfie posts, like I do. Do you read the content? Well, yeah, you have really good content, but why do you do selfies? Because you paid attention to it.
Speaker 3:I was showing somebody today I'm like just started going through my feed of post there was one that I did in the airport on a trip selfie Dunkin' Donuts in the background, big line of people waiting for coffee. But my message was about creating demand versus attracting or capturing demand. And it was right around the Super Bowl and the other Dunkin's commercial. And I talked about creating demand. Well, that selfie picture helps connect, helps capture human attention. And then the content if it's valuable to them, they keep reading it, they pay attention and go wow, that's interesting. And it was one of my highest performing. You know I'll share everybody. It was a little over 5,000 views, had 60, some comments on it. It was one of the best ones I had over the first quarter.
Speaker 3:I'm not one of those guys that get 50,000 views on every post. I'm. You know good post for me is about a thousand to 1400, a really good post. It's that five to 6,000. Occasionally I hit something that hits a 10 to 12,000 range.
Speaker 3:But that human element is so important in moving people down your four path of the matrix because they still need to know us, they still need to like us, they still need to like us, they still need to trust us and if we're not showing some of our human side, we're not showing some of our personality, we're not showing like, who are we when we're not working, we're missing out on what we always did offline, which was hey, tom, what do you have? What you know? Happy Monday. Why Did you have a good weekend? What'd you do? My family had a reunion and we did this. Oh, that's really cool. How big's your family? Right, we talk about those things. So if we're not leading with those inside of LinkedIn and again, I'm not, please do not hear Brandon said LinkedIn is Facebook. No, but business has never been purely business. Business has always been personal I'll jump off that soapbox because I like that soapbox flywheel is fueled ultimately through the relationship.
Speaker 2:The relationship is fueled by your ability to build and attract and retain attention with somebody and then use that as a way to build relevance. And again, the flywheel does this more at scale. So we're not doing one relationship a year or something, but we're constantly building more and more relationships, more and more just healthy connections all the things that you just went through and it just naturally starts building the momentum. And once it reaches a critical mass of momentum, then we're inherently building pipeline that we can predictably forecast and put into place.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and there's an acceleration factor to that too, and what that looks like is I shared the four steps of the matrix. Some people come to my awareness at step three. We didn't even intentionally move them to step. Get them to step one. Step zero, step one. Step two they come in and I get a direct mail, direct message from somebody on LinkedIn that says hey, brandon, been following your show, love your content, you captured my attention. We were talking about creating demand versus capturing demand. Can we have a talk? Absolutely. They come in at step three because, as you talk about in your book, they sit in the anonymous zone and they're researching and they're watching, they're reading, they're listening, they're watching shows, they're reading, they're doing all that and then, when they pop into your life, they're further down the matrix than you know. Yep.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, this has been a lot of information, a lot of really good information. It was a firehose day yeah, a firehose day, but I do think it sets the foundation Definitely. Maybe you can drop it in the LinkedIn comment, brandon, the replay to the webinar, because I have a feeling there's a lot of much deeper information from your Carson webinar last week that people can find, and if someone wants to connect with you and learn more, where should they do? That Is our is our final guest tonight.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely Well, the. You know I'm on LinkedIn and everybody knows that. You can find me on Mastering Modern Selling LinkedIn page. You can go to Brandon Lee, which is the forward slash is Brandon Lee digital on LinkedIn and, like you want to, you want to learn anything about what we do? We have nothing to hide. Go to get fist bumpscom. We even put our pricing on there. Like I, we know the way buyers behave. You guys want everything crystal clear right in front of you so you can make a decision without having to talk to us. It's all right there.
Speaker 2:Transparency.
Speaker 3:Transparency.
Speaker 2:All right, well, thanks everybody. Thank you, brandon. Really good stuff. This is one to kind of listen to a couple of times, I think.
Speaker 3:Thanks, tom, and thanks everybody else. Look, I appreciate the opportunity to be a guest on our own show because we got a lot of really good stuff to share. We've been learning a lot, especially in the last 18 months, and this flywheel isn't like something we made up. This flywheel came about as we were just looking for it.
Speaker 2:It was discovered versus developed, I think. It was discovered because that's what actually was working.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we just kept going where the data was leading us, what's working and the flywheel appeared, and now we're just sharing it with everybody.
Speaker 2:All right, thanks again. Thanks everybody, have a good week and we will see you next week on Mastering Modern Selling.
Speaker 3:Bye everybody.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much you to help us improve. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue to uncover modern strategies shaping today's business landscape. Learn more about Fistbump and our concierge service at GetFistbumpscom. Mastering modern revenue creation with Fistbump, where relationships, social and AI meet in the buyer-centric age.