Blueprint | 05 How To Develop Relationships Online

B L U E P R I N T HOW TO DEVELOP RELATIONSHIPS ONLINE In this session, you’ll learn how to build relationships online through research, to learn who people are and what they care about. HOW TO START A CONVERSATION ONLINE How do you start a conversation? - Get referred in. How do you ask for an introduction? - “Do you know someone who would benefit from a similar service that we provide to you?” How do you start a conversation with someone you’ve never met before, online? - LinkedIn is the most common way. You can direct message someone, but start the message with education. Instead of pitching right away, show what you know about them and what led you to want to connect with them in the first place. When connecting on LinkedIn always add a custom note and don’t be generic. Use the RRR framework to write your message. R. elevance - Make the opening relevant R. eward - Give them a reward that makes them want to talk to you such as an article or insight. R. equest - Don’t request a meeting or their time, but ask “Is there something else that’s a priority to you?” This messaging is very similar to how you would write an email, but keep it shorter on LinkedIn. Starting a conversation in the public domain ● Active touch - Requires a response, such as writing a personal message. Tag them in a post that you think is useful to them - “Dan, check out the thoughts on paragraph 5.” ● Passive touch - Liking someone’s post, or liking the same post as another person. UPHILL SELLING TO STAKEHOLDER MEETING In complex sales, one of the most important meetings to get to is the stakeholder meeting. There are a few steps to how we get there. The fastest way is to start your conversation with a provocative message, which you can put together by doing research. Research can include viewing the company’s 10k statements and seeing what executive goals are for the year. Describe in their words how your solution can solve what they are trying to solve. Once you provoke them, the next stage is building out the decision process. Take into account all stakeholders that may be part of the meeting - Who needs to get involved at which points in time, not just based on hierarchy. After this moment, selling becomes much easier because you have all of the right people aligned on what you’re trying to sell to them. The process to get there is called uphill selling - Trying to build engagement over time with you doing the work to maintain the momentum.