Lee knows this and has astutely aligned her sales strategy to the Campfire Effect. When the energy of the interview has climaxed, she smartly shares an idea or two. The prospective client (guest) on the other end of the Skype connection is receptive to the ideas because of several key ingredients: For one thing, Lee is brilliant at what she does and she is sharing excellent ideas. Also, the guest is receptive because of the Campfire Effect and the value Lee has just shared by inviting the client onto her show.
Lee is airing approximately fifty to seventy guest interviews per year—so if her team continues to close 25 percent of the opportunities, then her podcast will help Double Forte on-board approximately fifteen new projects every twelve months. Think about that in terms of your core business and revenue model. If you could take on fifteen new projects from clients within the next twelve months, how would your business change? No doubt it is substantial.
One of the reasons Lee has been successful with her Campfire Pitch sales strategy is because she doesn’t approach the conversations with her guests as selling at all. She enthusiastically shares ideas with the goal of delivering value. One Onward Nation guest told me, “Selling is simply the transference of your enthusiasm over to your prospect.” Lee has mastered this principle. Her guests don’t feel “sold.” In fact, the exact opposite happens: They feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to be a guest on her show. Lee’s ideas were a value-added bonus.
Ingredient #2: The Social Media Warm-Up
The Campfire Pitch Lee Caraher uses is masterful. But, I also realize it might not be for everyone because not everyone feels comfortable about sharing ideas and selling so early in the relationship. I respect that. So I wanted to share a second sales strategy with you. We call it the Social Media Warm-Up.
The Social Media Warm-Up sales strategy is already baked into the overall recipe of your Profitable Podcast. In Chapter 11, you will learn how to promote the airing of each of your guest’s episodes via social media using two key ingredients:
Promoting the airing of each episode and the wisdom shared by your guest to your social media community.
Tagging your guests in each post whenever possible so they are nudged to share and re-tweet your content. This helps build your nation of true fans by exposing their community to your content.
But your social media strategy does more than help you promote your episodes and build your nation. By highlighting your guest’s wisdom in each tweet, and by tagging the guest, you are continually reminding your guests of the value they shared with your community. This makes your guests feel good—and rightly so. After all, they delivered massive value—you recognized that—and you are now shouting it from the rooftops. By doing so, you are continually stoking the Campfire Effect with each of your guests.
With some of your guests, the fire will begin burning hot so that when you reach back out to them to discuss how your core business might be able to help their business, one of the first things they may say to you at the onset of the call is, “Thanks for all of the tweets!” Then you will know that your Social Media Warm-Up opened the door exactly as you intended. I always smile when it happens. Rock-solid awesome!
However, there’s a key ingredient missing, isn’t there? How should you reach back out to your guests to reopen the door, tee up the potential sales opportunity, and then schedule the call to discuss? I am going to share the “door-opening email” we developed at Predictive ROI so you can revise the content to match your business model and sales process.
Figure 4-1 is a screenshot of the email responsible for opening the door to $2 million of revenue flowing into Predictive ROI over the next twelve months. The recipients of the email are Onward Nation guests. Onward Nation is our daily podcast for business owners, but my core business, Predictive ROI, is a content marketing and lead generation agency.
FIGURE 4-1
Good Evening Lee . . . hope all is well with you, my friend. Thank you again for sharing your wisdom and expertise during Episode 180 of Onward Nation!
I really appreciate it. Would love to have you back for an ENCORE! Just let me know.
Wanted to share some exciting news . . .
Recently . . . our team tested the waters to see if we could produce multiple podcasts simultaneously.
It worked—and—we perfected our iTunes Marketing Strategy in the process.
For example . . . we launched the Business Rescue Road Map podcast with Stacy Tuschl—and—she became the #1 ranked podcast in her iTunes category in just 48-hours.
So we took a deep breath . . . carefully reviewed our system . . . liked what we saw . . . and began to privately introduce our Sales Generating Podcast System to some friends of Onward Nation.
It is now a complete done-for-you podcasting and sales generating system.
Our system will help you:
• Build relationships with your dream prospects
• Deliver high-quality content consistently to your audience
• Leverage your thought leadership to further grow your audience
• And most importantly—it will accelerate your leads and sales
It would be an honor to talk with you about how we might be able to do the same for you.
We are sharing this with a small group of friends—including special pricing—until June 1st.
I’d love to talk with you about it.
Would you have time one day next week for a brief call?
Onward with gusto!
Stephen Woessner
Host of the Onward Nation Podcast
CEO of Predictive ROI
M: 608-498-5165
One Predictive ROI core service is helping owners of business-to-business professional services firms create and launch their own podcasts so they can grow revenue, expand their platform, and build a nation of true fans. So it seems reasonable that if a business owner was comfortable enough to be my guest on Onward Nation, then there may be some interest on behalf of some guests to have their own podcast, which is exactly what has happened.
Let’s walk through a tangible example. When Lee Caraher was my guest on Onward Nation, she crushed it. Wow. We had an incredible conversation so it was easy to see that Lee would be an incredible host if she had her own podcast. We aired on February 26, 2016. In March, April, and May we had no openings. Our production capacity was full because we had just on-boarded several new podcasting clients. But around mid-May we could begin to forecast availability in June. My team and I also wanted to increase our pricing to improve our margins.
So, I began reaching out to more Onward Nation guests to gauge interest in two things: Would they like to come back for an encore interview? And would they like to have a conversation about how our podcasting system might deliver value to their businesses?
I sent the email in Figure 4-1 to Lee on Sunday, May 15, 2016. She got back to me the next day with the email you see in Figure 4-2. Lee and her team move at an uncommon pace, so we swiftly scheduled a brief call to consider the opportunity.
FIGURE 4-2
Hi Stephen—good to hear from you.
1. I’d love to return to your show—I think I mentioned my next book comes out next April—can we schedule this in conjunction with this rollout? This fall or early next year—unless of course you want me 3 times!!!
2. I’d love to talk with you more about your podcast biz—I’m ccing my colleague Liz O’Donnell here who is in charge of making our podcast a reality—I’d like to have her on the phone too—ok?
3. Ccing David here to help with scheduling
Thanks
Have a great day
Lee
SAN FRANCISCO | BOSTON | NEW YORK
Lee McEnany Caraher | President & CEO
T: 415.500.0602 | M:650.302.3457
Twitter: @leecaraher |@DoubleFortePR
E: [email protected] | W: double-forte.com
Meanwhile, I worked with Lee’s assistant to schedule the encore interview, which took place at the end of J
une. When Lee and I connected, she let me know they were just a few days away from making a final decision about their own podcast. Awesome.
And as promised, she looped back to me with her project approval before our new pricing strategy went into effect.
The Social Media Warm-Up is an efficient sales process for three key reasons:
Onward Nation guests are successful leaders and business owners in their industries, so they can fund a program like what we are offering.
We provided an exceptional experience for them as guests on our show and now they have the opportunity to put that same system into place for their businesses.
We stoked the Campfire Effect via social media and shared the wisdom and expertise from their Onward Nation episodes with our ever-growing community.
All of which equals significant value leading into the sales process.
Before we close out this chapter, I want to offer some important words of caution. The Campfire Pitch and Social Media Warm-Up sales strategies are simple to execute, simple to measure (you either sold something or you didn’t), and simple to adjust and modify. Plus, they produce results quickly. But don’t let the simplicity fool you. Some business owners think the strategies are too simple to be effective. “How can these strategies deliver results without having to rely on complex systems or software?” Then the business owners go down the path of creating databases, marketing automation tools, landing pages, webinars, and a variety of other systems instead of concentrating on the vital priorities right in front of them.
Don’t let this be you.
Your podcast is your Trojan horse of sales. The sales strategies do not have to be complicated. Keep them simple. And by doing so, you will grow your revenue.
SALES STRATEGY CHECKLIST
Have you crafted your monetization strategy? Remember, “I’m going to sell ads” likely isn’t it.
Have you completed the EPSM found in Chapter 2? If not, go back and complete this step because it will be extremely challenging to succeed in generating new leads and revenue if your current vital metrics are askew.
You and your team should review the twenty steps in the launch process outlined in Chapter 3 and then decide who will accomplish what vital function.
Decide if the Campfire Pitch or the Social Media Warm-Up will become your sales strategy.
CHAPTER 5
EXPAND YOUR PLATFORM
In my opinion, there are two sides to expanding your platform. There is the technical nuts and bolts side, which we will cover in this book’s production-related chapters. There is also the content side, which we will cover in this chapter. The quality of your content, and your intention for creating the content in the first place, are key ingredients in determining your ability to expand your platform. Expanding your platform is not about spending large amounts of money on Facebook campaigns, buying email lists, running Google AdWords campaigns, or investing in the myriad other ways you could buy traffic to your website. Instead, it’s about having an intentional strategy for creating and delivering valuable content to your audience (your nation!) in such a way that a relationship is formed with an audience who loves you and what your platform represents.
Expanding your platform through your podcast will give you the opportunity to attract an audience who will ultimately become your nation of true fans (Chapter 6) if you execute and expand properly. The more and better-qualified traffic flowing into your platform, the better your revenue opportunity will be.
This chapter will take you through the definition of what a platform is, why expanding your platform matters to your business and your audience, and how your podcast represents an excellent content marketing and platform expansion opportunity all rolled into one.
Let’s begin by defining the term platform. My good friend Wendy Keller is the author of the brilliant book Ultimate Guide to Platform Building. In it, she shares a practical and tactical definition for platform that in my opinion is spot on for every business owner:
Platform = traffic
Traffic = money
Therefore, platform = money
Get a platform, get money
Wendy also shares several helpful criteria I recommend you consider as you evaluate whether to expand your platform:
You want to grow your business by attracting new customers and clients.
You have a new business you are trying to launch.
Your sales are slumping—or never got off the ground.
You want to introduce a product or service to the market.
You would like to attract investors or partners.
You yearn to expand your brand.
You are searching for new streams of revenue.
You want to distinguish your career.
You are being eaten alive by the competition.
You are a speaker, coach, or consultant (or want to be) and you are putting your game plan together.
You just want to make more money.
I suspect most business owners who review Wendy’s criteria would agree that expanding their platform as a means to achieving all or a portion of that list would be a worthy pursuit. So to take this platform discussion deeper, I sat down with Drew McLellan, top dog at the Agency Management Institute and host of the podcast Build a Better Agency. Drew is also a three-time alum on Onward Nation. (If you go to OnwardNation.com and type the word Drew into our search bar, all of his episodes will appear so you can listen.)
During his third visit, I asked Drew to share more about why a business owner ought to build a platform as a means to serve and add value to others, not just to drive financial results—and why a person’s intention should come from the right place. Here’s what Drew had to say. It’s masterful.
Any platform I have, whether it’s a blog or if I’m speaking, and certainly the podcast is one of my critical platforms, but for me every platform should be a place where I am being helpful, where I am using my expertise, my connection, my experiences to teach someone how to do something better. Ultimately that’s really the whole point of Agency Management Institute—helping people run their businesses better. That’s very much my mindset; plus, when you think about all of the information that’s out there in all of the different platforms, blogs, webinars, podcasts, videos, or whatever it is, it’s not like people don’t have choices. So why in the world would they choose to give you their time over someone else?
They’re only going to do that if (A) you’re super entertaining, which I’m not. Or (B), you are helpful and you add value so that hour is an investment on their part where they get more out of the hour than it costs them to give you the hour, or whatever the time of consumption is.
When I add that kind of value and when I stay super focused on delivering, it comes back to me business-wise in spades. In marketing we often talk about how it is whoever is trying to sell something who is the one who has to provide value first so you have to sort of demonstrate your commitment to the audience.
You have to help them get where they want to go so that they can know, like, and trust you. Really that’s what platform building is about. Giving people an opportunity to get to know you and over time because, as your listeners have experienced, they do get a sense of who you are and what you are about.
So for some listeners they gravitate toward that, and they, like you and other listeners probably on my podcast, go, for whatever reason, “I don’t really love him so I’m going to stop listening.” After you get through the know and like, then over time when you consistently deliver value and good advice and good counsel, then they become ready to trust you and when they’re ready to trust you, not only does that mean that they will keep consuming my content. It also means that they are going to be open to an AMI workshop or one of the other things that we do that we actually make money at. It’s all part of a continuum, I think.
Ultimately, you’re doing it for a business purpose, but I think you’re doing it with integrity. I always want my clients to feel like they get more from me
than they give me, whether it’s money, or time, or whatever. I’m modeling that all the way through my content creation. I always want to give more than somebody is in essence paying for because then whatever I’m charging them feels like a bargain and to them it is a bargain; the value proposition and the value transfer falls in their favor. To me that’s smart business and so, yes, I’m doing it because it builds my business but I know that probably 90 percent of, for example, my podcast audience may or may not ever buy anything from me and that’s fine.
A lot of my current customers who were customers before I started the podcast are avid podcast listeners, so now that’s added value for them. Because they’re part of the AMI family they knew about the podcast and they listen and for them that’s like bonus value. For somebody who’s never bought anything from us or doesn’t know who I am, or doesn’t know how we can help their agency, this is a way for us to introduce ourselves.
The other reason why I think everybody should have a platform is because especially when you sell something and you say you’re an expert in something, saying you’re an expert is one thing, demonstrating week after week that you’re an expert is a completely different gig.
Again, it’s critically important for you to understand that your skill in expanding your platform is not about mastering tech but about building a relationship with your audience. And that relationship deepens based on the value of the content you deliver on a consistent basis. The value of the content you deliver is high when your intention is in the right place. Your audience will know if you are solely focused on conversion rates and revenue. Consequently, you will not grow your revenue and you will likely fall short of your goals.
Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned that your podcast represents an excellent content marketing and platform expansion opportunity all rolled into one. I am going to share several content marketing ingredients you should consider, but first, let’s bring in Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), to define content marketing. CMI defines content marketing as “the practice of creating relevant and compelling content in a consistent fashion to a targeted buyer, focusing on all stages of the buying process, from brand awareness through to brand evangelism.”1
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