Stay in Touch: Systems and Habits to Sell during COVID-19 (For Non-Sleazy Business Owners)

Again, yeah. In lieu of a physical activity for Give Local York, today we're doing this online workshop and we, the Grotto is always very excited to do all things, anything, process driven company. Layla has been there since the very, very beginning with us. She helped us like implement our systems and processes and good practices. So we appreciate her and we always love any insights that she's willing to share with our member group and crew. So at this point, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you. We'll go from there.

Sure. So thanks again today. I kind of wanted to talk about, if you guys probably heard me freestyle before we started here, is that I want to talk about reactive sales right now because there's been Deb did a fantastic webinar about selling in this environment, finding your niche, talking to your ideal client. And I tried to put some of that stuff into practice and some of it worked and some of it just felt gross because I'm introverted, because I'm, you know, all the things that I'm carrying in myself. It felt like there was probably an easier way for me to sell and grow my business in this environment. And while not an expert in sales, I wanted to share today kind of what I'm doing, what systems I'm instilling, what habits I'm building that have actually been working in in this environment to land sales like I have. I am pleased and surprised to admit that I have been able to continue making sales in this environment. And I'm crediting this process as it stands today. It'll keep improving. But this all started kind of the topic started when I was in a Mastermind group and one of the business owners in the group said, what is a good use of time right now because everything feels so temporary. Do we pivot? Do we shift? Do we invest in ads? And my response was something along the lines of reminding people that human interaction still exists. Even as an introvert, I find myself craving interaction with other people that aren't just my dogs or the people who live in my house. And so I've used that insight that I just blurted out in a Mastermind session to design a process that we're all going to work through today for staying in touch with people and facilitating more human interaction during this weird week, weird time. So that's what today's about. And like Chelsea said, this is all in support of the Grotto. So the link is there to actually donate to the Grotto. This is a free event, but the Grotto is a nonprofit co working space and I'M sure they would appreciate your donations during this point. Shameless plug.

Thank you.

And a stolen photo. So I wanted to ask, and I know we don't have many people here, but if you are, and I know some of us might be eating lunch or multitasking, if you, if you wanted to leave a comment in the chat area below of like, what exactly you're looking to get out from today or of today, it would be great to have a comment in the chat. Just saying, like, I was interested in this because, or I'm here because that would be helpful to make sure that we're actually talking about things that are relevant to you rather than me talking about my business, yada yada yada, rather than making it applicable to you guys. So I promised today was going to be sticky notes and I want everyone to grab six sticky notes. And if you don't have sticky notes, a piece of paper. You really don't have a piece of paper. I'm somewhat okay with you typing this, but I'm going to be in favor of a pencil and paper right now. So I'm going to let you guys grab that piece of paper with five boxes on it or five sticky notes and a pen, pencil, whatever you write with.

I perfectly had five sticky notes left.

I planned this just for that. Actually broke into your house, took all the other sticky notes you had and made sure you'd be perfectly prepared. So sticky note number one, I want you to think about your business. So whatever you're going to put in the chat, in terms of what you want to get out of today or whatever you're thinking about in your head. When I say, what do you want to get out of today? The first thing I want you to think about is where do your clients interact with you? Now, your clients could be your audience, your clients could be your raving fans, your clients could be your members. Where do your clients, your people interact with you? And put that on a sticky note. So if you're just joining us, grab five sticky notes on the first sticky note right at the top, where your clients interact with you. The hint I have on here is you posting lots of things and no one responding is not interaction. That is called yelling. And we all do it on certain platforms. That's me on Instagram. Don't check me there. It's really depressing. But where are people actually engaging with you? It could be a Facebook comment, a message. It could be a like, it could be a share. Where are you seeing interact? It could be your email, maybe it's people responding to your newsletter or maybe they just respond to you in person. Where do your clients or prospects interact with you? The people you want to get connected with and keep those relationships warm? That's a pretty easy one. So I'm going to keep going and we only have a short amount of time. If you didn't fill the entire sticky note, which I probably should have warned you. Also on that same sticky note, write how it might be a verb, like they like or they comment or they DM or they forward an email to you or they click a link. How are they interacting with you there? So we're on sticky note one of five. We're writing two things on it. Give you a second here. This could be on sticky note. Or if you have just some pieces of paper lying around, get these two pieces out of your head. Clients could also be referral partners. Whoever helps you grow your business, how do you interact with them?

Them?

All right, we're gonna grab sticky note number two. How frequently do these people. Again, we're all, we're always talking about people here. Even if you're B2B in a corporate, you know, manufacturing environment like we were talking about earlier, there's a frequency of interaction. So say you're on YouTube and you post YouTube and the type of interaction you're talking about is comments. Well, the typical person who consumes YouTube goes there a few times a week. So I would write that on this sticky note. If it's Facebook, people probably check Facebook every day. If you're working with a younger demographic but you're interacting with them on Facebook, it's probably less than once a day. But write down the frequency of which they log in. Maybe not how often they interact with you, but how often are they in that environment. Promise this is going somewhere. We're at sticky note number two of five. And what these sticky notes are going to do is when we put them together, we're going to have a process that you don't even have to worry about. Think about. You can start using. So sticky note number three or third area on your piece of paper is what can you ask them about that interaction? So even a like, even if it's on TikTok, where likes are really cheap, what can you. How can you engage them further based on that interaction? So if this is a reactive selling process, how can we react to their reaction? So if someone is commenting on your YouTube video, the response might be, for example, this morning I had someone respond on my YouTube video, say, wow, I love this. My Response is what did you love about it? If they're DMing you on or they're following you on Instagram, maybe they're not even messaging you, they're following you. Maybe you could respond with how did you find me? Or love your channel, what made you decide to follow me? The key here is thinking about something that is questioning, asking something about themselves. What is their intent? What are they feeling? What's their take or opinion on something? And this is actually taking it from this really shallow interaction, like a like or a follow, turning it into a conversation, which is where we get into actual relationship territory. Hopefully some of the wheels are turning here. Is anyone stuck on these pieces now? Okay, silence, silence. I'm gonna take that as a good thing. If you are stuck, feel free to use the chat and write down kind of the interaction you're trying to find a question for and we can troubleshoot together. So the example I gave of someone follows you and the question to ask, that can be a hard one for people to think about. So the shallower the interaction, the weirder it might be to ask a question. But you'll be surprised at what happens when you start asking rather than telling things. So I'm going to move on here to sticky note number four or fourth area on your page. They're going to respond. Most likely, I would say 90% of the time, someone is going to respond to your question about themselves. Because we all love sharing a little bit about ourselves. And what I want you to think about now is whatever they respond, what is a authentic way that you can respond? This sounds like it's scripting, but it's really not. It's about giving you kind of a playbook to go off of. So if someone follows you on Instagram and you reply, you send them a private message and you say, hey, thanks so much for following me. How did you find my page? And they say, oh, it showed up on my Discover. Your response might be something like, wow, that's really great. I see your page. I really like what you have going on there. Is there any certain content that you're looking to find from following my page? So here you're showing. You're validating the fact that they found you in a great way. Like, that's awesome. And then you're trying to add value by helping them or having them help you guide the content that you put out. So it's most helpful to them. Or maybe you can say, is there any specific information you are looking for? In which case you can then follow up With a link to that kind of information. Again, we are building from a shallow, like a shallow follow a shallow wave in the hallway. Because this could work in person as well to actually having a real conversation that they are initiating. And this already, I hope, feels really different than some soliciting someone in LinkedIn messages. If anyone does that, they send you a message saying, hey, how about you buy my awesome product? And you're immediately on the defensive. This is a flipped, reactive approach where they're setting the pace and they're initiating everything. So the third step, the fifth sticky note, is how could you re engage with this person? So I'm going to stick with the Instagram example here. If they DM or if they follow you, you DM them. You have a back and forth. What kind of thing could you do to be the person taking the first step? Next time for Instagram, that might be making a note to, hey, I should go comment on some of their stuff. If you don't naturally do that on email, it might be subscribing to their email newsletter. On Facebook, it might be just liking a bunch of their stuff because our social networks filter our information for us. I'm having you write this as a step so that way you proactively go out and seek that information. You're not just waiting for it to show up on your newsfeed, because it probably won't because Facebook doesn't know how important that person is to you yet. This works on any platform. LinkedIn especially is a really good one for this because you can maybe your note for reaching out next time could be sending them an article that you think would be helpful based on what you know about them. And this is for anybody in your world. So then it gets to become a process. The reason I wanted to keep this very simple. We have sticky notes on your desk right now, but this is a process that you can start using right now. So I put some arrows between them. But if you have sticky notes, just move the sticky notes to be in order and you have your playbook built out for engaging with people who you probably wouldn't have even registered, started liking your page or started following the conversations I've had from starting this practice during quarantine have been amazing. Like finding out why are people liking my Instagram, which is admittedly not very good. Finding out how they came to find me on Facebook. It's been really informative, interesting, and it has led to some really meaningful connections. You'll see that I have this little calendar icon on the very last Step. And so that's where the homework comes in. The frequency that someone is on the platform is the amount of flexibility you have with implementing this. So with LinkedIn, for example, maybe you're talking with students on LinkedIn. Students might be on LinkedIn once a week. And so you have about a week or so to follow up with people when they engage with you. So that frequency that they're on the platform is your breathing space for making this action. So Instagram, for example, people are on it just about every day, maybe multiple times a day. So if someone follows me on Instagram and I don't thank them for the follow, within a few days, it becomes a little tone deaf and feels a little staged for people who aren't naturally on social media all the time. I'm not having an actual reminder. I have one now for Instagram because I'm terrible at it. Every single day, whoever follows the Instagram the next day, I'll check whoever the new followers are and send them a message. Every day at 10am or whatever it might be for you takes about 10 minutes, but it's starting that conversation in the timing in a cadence that actually makes sense for the platform. So Facebook and Instagram and TikTok are very, very fast. YouTube, it can be a little slower. LinkedIn, it might be a little bit slower depending on your audience, but that is how much time you have to actually start acting on this. Initial reach, initial reaction. If you have any questions about this, I would welcome hearing it. But yeah, yeah.

So I have like two things, two separate categories. I'm going to start first with my personal Instagram following. Mine grew heavily out of my hand lettering workshops. And so it his like people interact and love most. Number one, when I do hand lettering stuff. And then number two, and it's actually my like my face or like something personal, which for me is like really weird. Like it's, it's uncharted territory, I guess for me and like why I follow different accounts. But I get like the personal connection part of it for me. It's like I want to start to educate people as well on the other categories of my business. Now that hand lettering is going anywhere, it'll kind of, I know it'll always be a part of it, but I don't know how long like workshops will be a part of it. How do you like test that audience to knowing if they're still there just for lettering or even see if they're open to seeing that. I also design websites.

I would ask them, okay, so I Mean, I think simple is better here. I would interact more with the people who are engaging with the content that you want to grow and figure out how they found you and why they love it because they're more likely to evangelize than someone is to convert what they. You know what I mean? The transition from hand lettering to web design, you're going to lose people and you could spend a lot of time on interactions that. Not to say they don't matter, but they're just not here for that. So I would prioritize the stuff you want to grow and then for the people you don't, especially a voice message. If you're talking Instagram, I would voice message them, say, hey, quick question. I noticed that you, you love all my hand lettering stuff. I'm trying to get in more web design. Do you have any interest in that or. Yeah, like did you know I even did that? I'm just doing market research.

Yeah. And it does, it feels like it's just like a category of its own in my business is my Instagram and it's hand lettering, which I guess I'm also okay with.

Right.

Like out of it has come some different like revenue generators. I don't know, it just, it feels, feels very segregated to everything else that I do.

But it's your personal brand, right? It's your name.

Yeah.

Then I think variety is the spice of life and if you're blending it, I mean I would have that conversation or even use that in the descriptions of your hand letterings stuff and I would just start talking about everything else as openly and proactively as you can. Maybe in mass if you're talking hundreds of people who are expecting hand lettering.

Yeah.

Even a video, I think could be a really good year. Like a video post on Instagram.

Okay.

Because that's more mass. But I think in this case mass communication might be the best way to transition people without freaking them out.

Sure, that makes sense. And then second question would be, would pertain to the Grotto's social media. Right now everything feels like super event based. Very like, hey, this is what we have coming up. We have like talked about doing member spotlights. But like when we reach out to members to see if they want like specific things on social media, they haven't been overly responsive. Some co working spaces social media stuff is like really active and people comment. There's one right now that's doing like a Where's Waldo themed content thing while everyone is home. We've seen our followers go up, but we don't see them interact. And so like, for me it's a question of like, why are they there and how do I get started?

Well, that's why this. Yeah, that's what. So if you're seeing followers go up, are you messaging each follower? No, that is what that is. So that's the action. They are interacting. They're interacting by following.

Okay.

And so if they're not doing the next level of interaction, that's where that's your first question.

Okay.

Being like, hey, like why are you following? Or that sounds a little accusatory, but yeah.

Or just like figuring out some way of interacting with them on a level of like. Like for me to follow somebody, it must be because I actually want to see what they're gonna put up. I don't.

Yeah, but what kind of stuff?

Yeah, yeah, okay, I see what they're gonna put up. I don't.

Yeah, but what kind of stuff?

Yeah, yeah, okay, I see what you're saying.

Yeah, I would go through, and I know I said just previously about like keeping the frequency and cadence similar to that of the platform, but if you haven't done this at all, I would go ahead today, look through the Grotto's followers and see anyone who's been who followed you in the last two weeks and send a message, even if it's copy and pasted to every single one of them.

Noted.

With a question to find out. You know, I mean, just being really, really real, being like, hey, like what? How did you find us? And they might say, oh, I'm a business owner, I'm looking at co working. Or maybe they're saying like, I'm an interior designer and I just like the style.

Yeah.

That will probably help you figure out what's resonating. Yeah. Because that's fundamentally what we're trying to figure out.

Yeah.

And again, that's all the relationship versus just focusing on content or selling. This relationship stuff is fodder for so much. And actually let me just put it on here in terms of making this into that routine, like machine. This lesson or practice can go on any single platform, any type of interaction, any type of communication, any type of business or so what I've been doing, the way I've been applying this is setting this up as my. When people join my email list, I have an email that goes right out to them saying, hey, why did you join my list? And I've been, I've heard like people's life stories on the responses they've given to that email, which is automated. That One is. And people tell me, like, what their business is, like, how did they find it? What content are they looking for? Like, where they found me from? And I'm just. I don't know. I don't think. I don't see other people doing this, which is fascinating.

Yeah.

Similarly with the followers on Instagram or Facebook responding to reviews, responding to even the spammy messages on LinkedIn, especially the spammy ones, because you can really throw them off. It can be a really good way to actually learn a little bit more just by taking these five sticky notes and making them into a habit. And if you're someone who's a sales professional or you need to have B2B sales, this information, the answers to each question can then become a piece of data you put in your CRM so that make a note to remind to reach out to them later. That could become a task in your CRM. And CRM is client, relationship manager, or your sales tool. But this becomes the process that goes into that software. But if you don't have software, just put an event on your calendar saying, reach out to every new follow. And another event saying, reach out to all the people you messaged last week and you started for free.

Yeah. So makes so much sense.

I feel like my theme this week is really simple systems. And this is one that I just. I followed so many people this week just to see what would happen. And I have gotten no messages. No, like, just to see what, like, if anyone else is doing it. And I've been shocked.

Yeah. And even, like, I know there. Well, I think sometimes we take for granted, like, and. Or have that, like, idea in our mind that it's almost like a popularity contest of following and not following where. For me, like, I've had genuine people contact me after workshops and have told me that I've changed their artistic life because they thought they were not capable of anything artsy. And then they found something like, those things are huge and it's Instagram.

Yeah. And those things happen just from people consuming your content too. I think that's where we get thrown off is we think that, oh, a follow is a shallow interaction, which I've kind of been referring to it as. But there's stuff that's happening and you just don't know any of it. So if you're. You've got a control freak gene or you're just more of a wallflower, like, this is a good time to scratch the itch of knowing what people are thinking while actually building a network of relationships that could lead to sales and referrals. I have gotten referrals from people that I just randomly chatted with about why they're following me. And turns out they're following me because their brother in law had this. And. And it's. Yeah, it's like duh. But it took me three years or so to realize the duh. So I wanted to share it here because it's simple, it's free, it's cheap, and I do think that this is a reactive and empathetic way to sell. And that feels. It feels good to me. So that's it. A little boogie fever going on here.

Well, Leila, we as the Grotto can't thank you enough for taking the time to first of all spend time with us on Give Local York, but also be willing to share your wisdom and this process with us today. So thank you so much. And yeah, if you don't already follow Layla, follow her. She also has a group that pertains to ClickUp G suite and is extremely educational and helpful. So definitely keep Layla on your radar. It's fully worth it. All right, thank you everyone. We'll see ya.