Video Transcription
Ryan Tansom: How do you know that what you’re doing is the right approach when you’re building a community or doing that long term play like that? Because for me, I know it’s the right approach. But how do you prove that what you’re doing is the right approach other than just the gut.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, there’s proof points along the way. Okay, so for me, it all started by centering on what’s our purpose in the world? Who should matter to us? Why should we matter to them? How do we build something that gives them value? We started there with a hypothesis, right, tied to our vision and our purpose. Then we started implementing our hypothesis and started beta testing this program month over month. We committed, right? Like a commitment mindset. Like this is not an experiment, it’s a commitment. So we put out the dates, right, month over month. And then inside of that commitment, we’re looking for feedback loops, real time. We want to be agile and adaptive. We want to lean into the opportunity and back away from anything that doesn’t serve this community. So that happens in a couple ways.
I ask all the time, like my inbox is open, my phone’s open. I want to hear what’s working, what’s valuable to you. We do a real time survey at the end of every single meeting. And to date, 100% of those surveyed say they’re coming back again. That is a powerful indication that we’re on the right track and we’re doing something right and we need to lean in more on that. Right? We’ve brought on supporting partners as sponsors to help offset the costs. And because sponsors see value in connecting their brand to this community, we know there’s value, right? Like all these proof points along the way. And now we’re 18 months in and I can look at my pipeline of opportunities that I’m actively working on right now. And a huge percent of them are connected to this integrator community.
Not directly in a straight line way where you could look at my database and see the attribution. This is where B2B marketing is complicated. It’s the indirect ways where the person reached out to me on LinkedIn through a message because they’ve been noticing what I’m posting about it. Where somebody from within the community refers to someone else they know who uses our services. Where one of our supporting partners refers somebody in, right? It’s these threads that tie together that all are held together by trust. Imagine how different it would be if I had said I want to build a database of integrators and I want to market my services to them and I’m going to go out to Zoom info and LinkedIn and I’m going to scrape data.
I’m going to scrape data and I’m gonna push the data into my database and I’m gonna blast people with a message they didn’t ask for, didn’t want, brings them no value and is a pitch. Do you think I’d have the trust of a thousand people? No way.
Ryan Tansom: No, you get 10. There’s a. It’s a complete numbers game like you said, make your brand suck faster. And it’s like it’s one. It’s so interesting because I think that what you know that following the eos because you know you and I both talk a lot about that is like get the visionary salespeople that normally think in bubbles in charge versus like my old business is built on rows and columns with the finance but like for me, like I can go like well, because I got like and I and as I track our customer database and I’m giving my example so all the listeners listening, I hopefully that you can pull your own experience out of this is my database out of my customers. How did they get into this?
Well, I like actually building multiple columns in the CRM saying, okay, well I know this was the first contact but then I would I know they were nurtured by the podcast or like it’s so hard because it’s not a linear engagement like you said. And it’s like, well, I know the reason like I talked to this guy today. He knows this guy who knows that guy who saw me at this one thing that was on purpose like so I kind of expected this conversation, but it was random because I didn’t expect it today. But it was on purpose that there should be relationships being generated out of the activities that I’m doing. So like it’s that it’s so difficult and I think you know one when that’s what makes it so scary.
I think Jennifer to people that are going okay, I know I’m 5 million in revenue. I want to get to 15 for all the reasons that we know we want to grow a company. And okay, so then I’m going to go from me getting these highly qualified leads to what is it going to cost and how long is this going to take to do this on faith and it’s scary as hell.
