If you’re like everyone who has ever started a career/business, you’ve made connection mistakes and you’ll continue to make mistakes. This can be a positive aspect of your business if you are able to cultivate the right mindset.
Look at the best results in expanding your connection network that you’ve been able to generate over the last year. It’s probably not due to some random idea that you implemented in 30 minutes. It was probably an idea that piggybacked off of another idea that you implemented in the past with decent success. It takes time to test, measure and refine your ability to connect with your ideal customers.
Most likely you took an average relationship, improved on it in some way, and turned someone from a customer into a fan.
If so, you cultivated the connector mind.
You asked yourself “how could I make this relationship better?” And this simple question propelled you to success.
People may find and connect with you in a different ways. Some customers are referred by friends over a cup of coffee, others searched for help and you were under the right keywords, while others found you through social media.
Each way sparks a weak connection, and then it’s up to you to find ways to deepen the connection.
I think there are 7 steps to deepening connections. Each step is important, but I believe #6 is probably the most important.
1. Review Past Outreach Techniques
Your career and business have seen success in the past, from going to a conference to sending out lovely letters to your target clients. You’ve been able to achieve this success because you’ve leveraged your connecting superpowers (passion, focus, and strengths).
Why did these connection techniques work for you in the past?
When you can answer this question, you can begin to improve your connecting superpowers.
2. Ask yourself “What could I do to improve my ability to connect with others?”
So you’ve got some connecting bag of tricks that you can rely on, this is great. The next step is improving on these techniques so you can get better results.
Let’s say you have a conference coming up next week. Maybe you are good at starting conversations, but not so good at follow-up.
What could you do to make the experience more fun for your contact and you?
You could send them a small gift like a thank you card with a $5 Starbucks card and include a print out of one of your most popular articles. Or maybe ask them for an interview for your podcast.
Look at multiple ideas and evaluate their potential.
3. Pick the one that has the best potential.
After coming up with multiple ideas, and especially if you are breaking out of your old ways of connecting, you need to decide which one would give you the best ROI.
And the ROI I’m talking about is not just your money, but also how much you enjoy the process of connecting. This is where most of my clients fall short. They do connecting (marketing) that they think will work instead of connecting from a place that makes them happy.
I like to call this “heart connecting”. When you infuse your personality into the process, you make it more fun for you and your potential new customer.
4. Come up with a hypothesis.
What do you think will happen when you apply this connection idea?
Say you are going to a conference that 2,000 people will attend, and you would like between 50 – 100 decent contacts.
Let’s say you get 63 and you try out your connection plan. You send a thank you card, Starbucks gift card, and an article that you think can help them understand and appreciate your business.
What will be the reaction? And how will you follow up?
5. Implement the hypothesis.
The next step is to get everything set in place to make this process easy to implement. Think about how you will capture people’s information… How will you make it easy for them to remember you?
Will you buy the “thank you” cards in advance? What could you do to make everything so easy that when you get back to the office, you just have to implement your idea?
Then just go for it.
6. Track the results.
Let’s say this idea cost you $2,000 to set up and implement, and 20 people respond back to you or your follow-up email. Out of these 20 people, 1 of them becomes client at $5,000. In that case, your ROI is good. You’ve made a $3,000 profit, not including your time.
Now if you try this again and you get 2 clients at $4,000 a piece, then you’re starting to see a pattern that you can track.
7. Final step is deciding to give up on idea or improve it.
Remember that most ideas usually don’t work very well right from the beginning. But once you have some data, then you can decide if you should let it go or improve it.
I suggest that you try an idea at least 5 times or for 5 months before you give up on it, depending on your reach with the connection campaign. For example, you can’t run an ad for just one month and expect it to work for you to create lots of connections. You have to give it time. Consistency is very important in building up your connections.
Putting On Your Connector Mindset Hat
Success is the byproduct of failure because it’s bound to happen, especially in the beginning of any connection campaign. Developing your connector mindset is letting go of your fear of rejection and embracing the curiosity hidden within. Too many people give up on great connection plans because they don’t see instant results.
This is where you need to separate yourself from the rest of your industry. If you believe you have a good idea that works for you, then try it, measure it and improve it until you get the results you expect.
I use this same technique with Google Ads and Facebook Ads by split testing out each idea from the ad to the landing page. The better you understand your customers’ desires the easier it gets to come up with a connection campaign that will create positive results
Your Turn
What connection system have you implemented in your business? Why do you enjoy it?
* Learn how to bring in more website referrals (30 Day Connection Guide) and close your website’s connection gaps e-course so you can reach more people. Join our community today and bring more heart (emotional connection) and quality testing to your online conversion, increasing your sales and happiness.