RELATIONSHIP MARTECH
  • Martech
  • Digital Strategies
  • Blog
  • More...
    • Book A Call
    • About

Kevin Knebl's Social Selling Boot Camp

1/9/2019

1 Comment

 
Picture
Kevin Knebl
Speaker & Trainer

Knebl Communications, LLC
eWomen Network
Colorado Springs Country Club
Colorado Springs CO

Kevin Knebl (@kevinknebl) built on his lunch presentation with a very generous, complimentary 2.5-hour boot camp to go deeper into his social selling strategy. He started with the sales philosophy that propelled him to become the top salesman at four companies in four different industries: sales is about relationship building, even though so many people "make communicating with them like jumping through hoops of fire."

But, Kevin continued, assuming your are good at what you do, if you make yourself accessible, you will have a distinct advantage getting people to know, like and trust you. The "personal interaction" bar online is set "so unbelievably low," just using basic manners your Mom taught gives you a distinct edge in the marketplace.

If a non-threatening person stopped you on the street,  you would stop and have a short, friendly conversation, but many tend to forget fundamental manners online and act too busy. This gives you an opportunity to stand out from the crowd.

Kevin provided LinkedIn tips:


-- Max out the 120 characters available in the headline; don't just stop with your basic title, for example, of "Financial Advisor," but list it followed by how you help your particular niche.
-- If you want extra room, create your header on the LinkedIn mobile app which, due to an apparently undocumented bug, allows an additional 102 characters for a total of 222.
-- Copy and paste into your Profile icons like asterisks for additional formatting options.
-- Add all of your contact information.
-- Add your Profile to your email footer.
-- Maximize the 2000 characters available in your summary, and write in the first person to make it relational, not a biography.
-- Add video, including impromptu videos of yourself and your fans talking about you.
-- Get your fans to write LinkedIn Recommendations for you to create credibility.
-- Add white papers, Powerpoint presentations and other media up to the platform's cap of 15 files.
-- To whatever degree you're comfortable, be an open book so that Profile visitors will be more likely to know, like and trust you.
-- Customize your invitations using pre-written templates that enable cutting, pasting and small modifications based on the contact.
-- Use pre-written templates, too, for responses and other Connection messages.
-- Upgrade to LinkedIn Premium only if you have success and experience using the free platform and are willing to commit to using the advanced features.
-- Accept all Connection Invitations unless you believe they somehow threaten your income (rarely the case). Identify their Twitter handle and connect on Twitter at the same time and send a template-based welcome message.


How many Connections should you have? LinkedIn limits them to 30,000, but, if you email a request, they will expand your cap to an additional 2500-3000! You may not need 33,000, but Kevin maintains 28,000 and says that it is important to remember that LinkedIn is a database that allows users to search and find specific information on demand. Therefore, if you're in business, having more connections is better than having fewer connections.

Sometimes people have the misconception that connecting with too many people will require management of too much information. This is a flawed assumption, just like assuming that accepting a telephone book in the 1980s would require dialing all of the telephone numbers listed. LinkedIn manages the information for you -- just treat like a Rolodex (database) to select what you need.

If you're already good at what you, instead of spending 95% of your time improving the skills you use within your profession and 5% of your time building relationships, spend 5% of your time improving your professional skills and 95% of your time becoming a relationship black belt, using these techniques.

Then Kevin brings the point home. He rejects the title of guru, because there are actually many technical aspects about social platforms that he doesn't understand or care about. He cares about relationships. He describes himself as an excellent "relationship" driver who doesn't need to to know how to fix the transmission. Instead, he says to focus on principals that never change, not technology, an ever-moving target.

You can't control technology or even how recipients will react to your messages. But you can use their responses, or lack thereof, as a filtering system, enabling unfit prospects to self-select out of your system if they don't have a positive reaction to your friendly overtures. If someone doesn't react positively to a genuinely "friendly, non-creepy" message, you probably don't want to work with them anyway.

Speaking of what you can control, Kevin says it boils down to only two things: you can only control your work ethic and your attitude. If LinkedIn went away tomorrow, the principles of relationship-based sales would still hold true, and be just as applicable, like the constant of gravity: take a genuine interest in others and sales will eventually come to you. LinkedIn and social media just make it easier to connect with many more prospects than would otherwise be available.

He insists you can build your profile to the heights described in only 15 minutes  a day, once you understand the techniques and form a consistent habit. He adds that "every system is designed perfectly for the results it achieves," to underscore the importance of good habits.

Kevin demonstrated searching for prospects on LinkedIn and then narrowing the search results by interest. Because his network is robust, he is able to generate many potential leads and connect to them with a well crafted email that offers help in the form of referrals and ties into a mutual interest from the prospect’s Profile, using tactics he learned years ago from two relationship marketing experts: Dale Carnegie who wrote How to Win Friends & Influence People and Harvey Mackay who wrote Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition.

Even when he doesn’t get an immediate response, he can put the lead into his simple but very effective high-tech, high-touch contact management system which can be set up online or on paper that establishes contacts via quick social media interchanges, greeting cards and telephone calls. Kevin adds that in our connected world, old-school methods like mailed cards work better than ever.

He uses his simple lead generation system to work with 30-75 prospects whom he prioritizes as A Contacts  of 10 - 25 people who get touches monthly), B Contacts (of 10 - 25 people who get touches every two months) and C Contacts (of 10 - 25 people who get touches every three months). He adds that if he needed a bigger pipeline, say if he were building a new business,  he might expand it to 100-300 people, and that each person will find the right balance as they use the system.

Touches include:

email
Personal Note
Phone Call
Drop-in Visit(if possible)


Each touch is fast, about 60 seconds. He even tells telephone recipients and prospects that he's visiting that he only has a minute and keeps to his word. This way, keeping up with all A, B and C contacts takes only a few minutes each day. He also never mentions his product or service unless the recipient brings it up. This way, he can be sure that the recipient is more interested in discussing it than he is.

This goes against the training we all have that tells us to "seize upon the prospect like a pit bull," but that's the traditional marketing that offends so many, why newsletters are too often thinly veiled sales pitches and why a quick voicemail with no sales pitch that shows genuine interest are so rare. "Most people are running around at Mach 5 going broke, instead of slowing down and taking a genunine interest in people, which, ironically, would get them rich."

In a more interconnected world, it’s more important than ever to know that you’re in the relationship business. LinkedIn is a great tool to develop relationships that you can nurture. If you carefully nurture enough relationships, you will never struggle in business. Kevin offers more training on his website and invited the audience to connect with him through his social channels any time.

1 Comment

Social Selling & Relationship Marketing

1/9/2019

1 Comment

 
Picture
Kevin Knebl
Speaker & Trainer

Knebl Communications, LLC
eWomen Network
Colorado Springs Country Club
Colorado Springs CO

Kevin Knebl (@kevinknebl) has made a career of teaching people how a positive and outwardly focused online presence will help you become better known, liked and trusted, and that that is the foundation for profitable business relationships. I have followed Kevin's career since he was teaching LinkedIn clinics here in town. Since then, he has developed an international speaking and writing career getting his message out through presentations in a different cities every week, his well reviewed book The Social Media Sales Revolution and, of course, his ebullient social presence.

Kevin Knebl described his background as a piano-player turned reluctant salesman who found success as LinkedIn arose. Since then, he has helped clients earn $250mm in revenue using social strategies. His advice: don't overthink things. He credits a God-given gift for being able to break complex things down into simple, easily explained concepts. In 1993, he heard Bob Burg say "all things being equal, people will do biness with and refer business to people they know, like and trust," and this has been a guiding philosophy.

In earlier presentations, Kevin would begin by clarifying to the audience that social media is not a passing fad, but now it is so well established that this is no longer necessary. (He recommends treating Facebook like a giant 24/7 cocktail party and eWomen Network members seemed to agree.) There are only three steps to succeed with social media.

  1. Identify the individuals or organizations you would like to work with
  2. Start a conversation in a manner that doesn’t get the door slammed
  3. Nurture and deepen the relationships so that they want to do or refer business with you.


As simple as this sounds, it involves unlearning what American culture has taught us about sales where people move too quickly into pitches instead of taking the time to develop the relationship first. "Since money is just an expression of value, we need to remember that making more money involves delivering more value," according to Kevin.

LinkedIn, which now has 600 million members and acquires 2-5 new users every second, is a useful database to building relationships. Making a good first impression is even more important in the social-media era, and LinkedIn enables users to accomplish Task #1. Kevin demonstrated its many search filters that allow users to target ideal customers and the accomplish Task #2 and Task #3.

If you're interested in more information about Kevin's social strategy, stay tuned for the forthcoming Social Boot Camp to be posted after his afternoon session's deeper dive.




1 Comment

New Year: New Look at the Eisenhower Matrix

1/6/2019

1 Comment

 
I took a Brian Tracy class on Effectiveness, and at the time I really dove into the Eisenhower Matrix. I added a picture to a new tab in OneNote called "Daily Priorities," and resolved to use it during a "Power Hour" I began scheduling every weekday morning.

Several years later in this seasonal time of new beginnings, I realize I've underutilized it and can get much more out of it. I still do my Power Hour (most mornings), and one of the tasks is to review Daily Priorities, but I would generally be too busy, still scrambling to finish yesterday's priorities, to think a lot about urgent vs. important.

But this morning I read an article by James Clear that updated the matrix with action verbs in consonance: Do, Decide, Delegate and Delete. That's a phrase even I can recall quickly. ​

Picture
I also liked the article's observation that elimination (starting with the bottom two quadrants) is more important than optimization, quoting Kevlin Henney's quip regarding programming that “There is no code faster than no code." He also touches on an issue I have of wanting to work faster rather than smarter:​
"Too often, we use productivity, time management, and optimization as an excuse to avoid the really difficult question: 'Do I actually need to be doing this?' It is much easier to remain busy and tell yourself that you just need to be a little more efficient or to “work a little later tonight” than to endure the pain of eliminating a task that you are comfortable with doing, but that isn’t the highest and best use of your time. As Tim Ferriss says, 'Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.'

​I took a deeper dive and found another article that suggested limiting each quadrant to no more than 8 tasks and another, by  Michele McDonough, that pointed to the matrix's chief point of failure: categorizing tasks consistently, which I had not seen the value of before and, consequently, passively deleted out of my matrix routine. To counter this, she gives very tangible definitions of "urgent" vs. "important.": "A task is considered important if your goals are furthered by completing it....[while a task] is considered to be urgent if you or someone else feels it needs to be addressed immediately."

Of course, probably no one has written more about the Eisenhower Matrix than Stephen Covey who covered the concept well in 
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First but, surprisingly, didn't seem to mention President Eisenhower's invention of the concept. Perhaps that's because the former President accomplished too much to be thought of as merely a project manager.
1 Comment

    Author

    Tom McClintock is the owner and founder of Relationship Martech.

    Archives

    January 2021
    October 2020
    September 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018

    Categories

    All
    Age Of The Customer
    Arts
    Automation
    Beauty Products
    Bots
    Brand
    Business Growth
    Business Process Management
    Colorado Springs
    Community
    Consumer Experience
    Content
    Content Mar
    Content Marketing
    COVID
    CRMs
    Data Science
    Digital Marketing
    Ecommerce
    Email
    Email Marketing
    Generational Marketing
    Globalization
    Hardware
    Industrial Revolution
    Klaviyo
    LinkedIn
    Lockdown
    Marketing
    Martech
    Millennials
    Owned Marketing
    Owned Revenue
    Paid Marketing
    Personalization
    Prioritization
    Privacy
    Product Launch
    Product Marketing
    Project Management
    Relationship Marketing
    Relevance
    Reopening
    Repetition
    Retail
    Retention
    Sales Funnel
    Seniors
    Social Media
    Software
    Startup
    Storytelling
    Targeting
    Technology
    Time Management
    Wholesale
    Workflow

    RSS Feed

Relationship martech

The Power of Marketing Technology to Deepen Relationships.
Colorado Springs, CO
Picture
Picture
Picture

    Subscribe to The martech revolution Today!

    Get updates regarding the latest in marketing technology right in your inbox.
Subscribe to Newsletter

© 2018 – 2019 Relationship Martech. All Rights Reserved.
  • Martech
  • Digital Strategies
  • Blog
  • More...
    • Book A Call
    • About