Power Connections - Engaging

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. This is video number 2 of the Power Connections videos in the Customer Mastery series. If you haven't seen video number 1 on beginning the Power Connections, then please go and see that first as it will make video 2 much more applicable to you. So in video number 2, this video right now, we're going to think about engaging and how we think about the context and the circle of influence that we've begun to develop from video number 1. Now here we're going to start with this whole idea of studying our environment, studying the context that we have, studying the circle of influence within our customers' world. Now, why is that important? Well, in video number 1, we started thinking about the influence, those things that are motives to the customer, those things that drive their fears and concerns, and the people connected to that. And then we looked at how we help personally and how we help with projects to ensure that we can get into that circle of influence and invite people into that area. Now, once we're there, we now want to study that environment. And we do that by first of all looking at the trends. So what we want to ask ourselves there are what are the specific recurring activities, recurring challenges, problems that we see our contact or the circle of influence having to deal with within their business? What are the recurring— what are the things that come up the most? Activities, things that you need to solve, particular things they need to do within their business that we can help with. So we need to track the trends. What are we actually seeing within our contacts that we can actually become much more influential in? We can go in and help. We can become that person of value. So first of all, trends. Then we need to decide what benefits can we actually bring. So based on the actual trends, what benefits can we actually bring to those individuals once we've seen the recurring activities, once we've seen what happens all the time, we're noticing, we're paying attention to what's taking place in our customers' world. This is really important. I'm not saying this will happen overnight. This takes some time, but the time is well spent because we're investing into our influence. We're investing into our persuasive ability of becoming the person that solves problems, of becoming the person that is the person of value, bringing benefits to that organization, and particularly to the circle of influence that impacts impacts how your contact makes decisions. So that's the first part. We need to study, look at the trends, and look at the benefits that we can add to. Then we move to this other section here, and what we want to do, we want to begin to craft our engagement. We start to craft what we do, and that begins first and foremost with making sure that we're visiting the right people often and frequently where that's appropriate. So what tends to happen here is that when we're engaging with our contacts and with other people within in their circle of influence, they tend to happen based on very contextual things such as projects, or we're reaching out on specific opportunities. What we want to do now is be much more intentional. We think, okay, we have a visit coming up right now with this specific contact. What is it specifically that we actually want to deliver for this person? What kind of influence do we want to have? What kind of persuasive outcomes do we want to take from this particular engagement? We want to start to craft our messaging, craft our strategy based on all that we know now about what's taken place, the motives, the benefits, where we've helped, the trends, the places where we can, we know we can add value and bring real benefits. We want to craft those visits so it includes us talking about those things and raising our persuasive ability, raising our credibility with those people. That's the first part. Then what we want to do is look to improve. So I'll tell you just a really honest, um, story here. The first time I started to think about power connections was about 6, 7 years ago. And as we began to try out these different areas, we started to build a really interesting circle of influence base where we were in touch with the CEO. We knew who the CEO influenced, and we started to look at the heads of operations, heads of finance, and who they listened to most. And sometimes it wasn't the CEO, sometimes as other people. We started to look at these connections and we started to make these different power connection maps. And as we did that, we started to make visits, individual visits to those people to see where we could support them in a particular engagement, even if there was no necessarily commercial value yet in that relationship. What happened was each time we visited that contact, we learned something new. We actually discovered something different. We recognized that actually the benefits we thought we had weren't just— weren't as applicable to them right now. It was something that we needed to go back and improve. So it's really important that this isn't about a one-stop, one-go attempt at these visits and crafting specific benefits for these individuals. Sometimes we're going to have to go back to the drawing board and improve our offers, improve the way in which we communicate and engage with those people, improve the way in which we approach them, improve the way in which they connect with us and we connect with them. We need to be open to being people of improving the things that we do, open to feedback from those contacts, feedback from the customer, so we can get better at what we do. The better we can be at ensuring that we become much more visible of all the things that's taking place and making these two connections really relevant for them, the more influence and persuasive power that we will have, the more credibility we'll gain, the more likely that person will point to us as a person they want to work with. This is really important. Strengths and benefits, really studying the customer and the context within that circle of influence, then moving to crafting our messaging, crafting it in a very intentional way once we've begun to really understand the world of the customer, looking at very intentional visits and looking to improve. Where can we improve directly so we can always be getting better with those contacts? So in video number 3, I'm going to walk you through how to embed and craft all of these different points into one seamless weekly a daily sequence that you can use to improve your ability to make power connections and raise your influence and persuasive power within those relational groups. Download the workbook because that's gonna help you in this particular process, and I'll see you in the next video.