Wait three months after someone joins your B2B community before pitching them. By month four, after a few conversations with your community manager, you can start lead-generation outreach. The key is building relationships first, not pushing sales right away.
Chapters
Now, at what point in time can I sell my event? At what point in time can I tell them I've got this amazing product, I've got this amazing demo I've got, or we're amazing at this product. How does that work? Okay, events and demand generation are two different things really. For events, it's about volume. You really want to have quite a lot of members. And look, you know, if you got to a community in three months of 2000, boom, you know, invite them, individual invitations, promote it in the group, recommend the post. But what we do as far as social selling is concerned from a demand generation perspective is we talk about three months. So you want a member to join. And on month four, the community manager's already had three or four interactions with that particular person. The person may or may not have responded or posted because, you know, in social media terms we talk about, you know, the ratios between engagement and not, you know, 1% of your members will be highly engaged, 9% will be semi engaged and 90% will lurk, be lurkers. So 90% of your audience won't engage. So, you know, you know, again, this comes down to, you know, the more members you got, you know, the higher percentages of active and semi active members. But as far as social selling is concerned, the community manager has had two or three interactions with that particular individual. In month four, we will start doing a lead generation program on that particular individual. So we've got a nurturing process and look, one of the killer methods, and this is basically how I establish the social effect. You know, I went to, you know, I went out for lunch somewhere, some guy in London goes to me, I've got an agency, you know, social media, we don't do it, there's no roi. And I was like, well, actually, I tell you what, there is ROI in it, you know, and I went to LinkedIn groups. So here's how we did it. And this is the first time we went, oh, this actually works. The community manager has had interactions with a potential prospect. Two or three, month four, the community manager goes, hey Ricardo, I was talking to Peter about what you do at this particular company. I think it'd be great to connect you two for a conversation. I just, you know, just for, just for a chat. Would that be okay? So in social media terms that, that's called a bridge. So you got a bridge. So the community, community manager then bridges the relationship between, you know, prospect and community owner, put them together. And when we first ran that, we had 50% of the members saying more than happy to speak to this particular individual. So the answer is, it's a process. And typically, after three months, you'll start that now. That's below the iceberg. You know, it's not on top. No one's seen that. It's below the iceberg. That's where all the magic is below.
