Planning sales “events” with social media while similar to the traditional sales model is not the same. During the #unGeeked conference last week I got a glimpse of the HubSpot social media sales funnel.
Sales will always be about the funnel. What changes is how the funnel gets filled and in my case how the sales are closed. Writing this post is a struggle because I share so much with you guys. The photo of my Moleskine notebook that accompanies this post give you 95% of the plan to bring back the ColorMetrix User’s Group Meeting in 2010. (We’ll get back to that last 5% in a moment).
A wide funnel at the top is the key to social media and community sales success. In order to fill our meeting with 50 people (my goal) I’ll need to reach about 5,000. I don’t plan to pick the phone up one time. I’ll use blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and some direct mail tools to get the word out that we are planning a 2010 meeting.
A LinkedIn Group will be the home base of planning and ideation for the meeting. In the past the meeting was planned and conducted by us for the users. This time around I am going to pull volunteers out of the LinkedIn Group to help us plan. I’d tell you more about the meeting but until the LinkedIn group reaches a critical mass I don’t know exactly what the meeting will look like or even where we will hold it.
I have a plan. You can see that by looking at the photograph of my Moleskine notebook. The LinkedIn group has been created and invites sent to key contacts on LinkedIn. This blog post is being written. CMUG 2.0 2010 (#cmug2010) will happen. I just have to do the work at the top of the funnel and attract enough interested people to the process.
Back to that last 5%. If some of my posts like this one seem like I’m leaving a little bit out, I apologize but I am. I give you 95% of what I do for free. Not many people write a blog post almost every day about what they are doing and how they are doing it. The last 5% is my secret sauce. The competitive advantage I have within my own industry and marketplace.
I’m working on providing limited access to the last 5% of my knowledge. Until I figure out what that is going to look like I am available on a very limited basis to do consulting with companies outside my marketplace. Not sure what that means? If you even think we compete in any way shape or form, we probably do and I’ll say no. If you want to know more contact me here.
That’s a glimpse into how I plan for sales success with social media and community tools. Does your strategy looks similar?
Jim, very intrigued by your idea here. Looking forward to reading how this develops. Just in the last couple weeks I tried to convert a few hundred people from an e-mail list of 7,500 to join me on a conference call, but only got around 50 people. It was a rude awakening for me.
Patrick, depending upon the nature of that list I'd have been looking for no more than 75 (1%). Sounds brutal but unless it's a very targeted list with a highly personalized marketing campaign 1% is better than good. 1/2% is success. With some micro-marketing campaigns I am running (lists of less than a 100) using print (direct mail) and email, I'm hitting 10% conversion rate, but again the message is highly personalized and the list is highly targeted. I'm trying to figure out how to blog about this success in greater detail without giving too much away to competitors.