People do business with people they know.
When there’s uncertainty or absence of influence, there’s opportunity to influence
CAPITAL strategy
Follow capital strategy to improve your relationships.
CAPITAL stands for Consistent, Aggregate, Prioritize, Investigate, Timely Engagement, Add Value, Leverage
Consistent
- Set a recurring calendar appointment.
- Set an alarm on your device as reminder.
- Associate this to your routine (e.g. put a sticky note next to your laptop).
- Remember you’ll fall off wagon, and you will get back on track.
Aggregate
- Pick a database (even if it’s a spreadsheet).
- Import all your contacts there – personal, professional.
- Clean up the database either automation or manual.
- Archive relationships you are confident have no value.
- Set a monthly reminder to upload manual contacts.
Prioritize
- Based on your goals, what types of relationships are most likely to help you?
- Where can you find these people?
- Create buckets in your database for these people.
- Set action plan for each bucket.
- Start with regular 90 day follow up.
- Adjust the baseline depending on the priority.
- 10 people in the top bucket, 20 in the next until you go to 100.
- Set a weekly reminder to update prioritization.
- Set a monthly reminder to revisit buckets.
Investigate
- Follow up your contacts on social platforms.
- Subscribe to a service that notifies you of news or major updates relevant to them.
- During every interaction
- Take copious notes
- Engage in small talk, capture seemingly unimportant information.
- Enter all this into your database (including time and location).
- Set reminders for upcoming events, birthdays, anniversaries…
- When doing research
- Review past interactions
- Research their company, industry, interests, recent activities
Timely Engagement, and Add Value
- Identify how much resources you want to invest in your relationships
- Review captured intelligence
- Know there’s no single approach, if your interaction is valuable to them
- If there’s a specific challenge, attempt to solve that
- Show gratitude for good deeds they’ve done for you
- Update your ROI from it
- Buy gifts that touch them personally
- Lend your social capital and make double opt-in intros
- Create communal social objects (dinners, events)
- Send prewritten email with NNTR (no need to reply)
- Send handwritten cards
Knowledge advantage is quickly decreasing in importance.
Skills advantage is also diminishing. Given our human hardwiring, reputation advantage is likely not going anywhere.
New memories are more likely to be encoded if they differ from older ones. Naturally, if they’re like older memories, they’ll be harder to encode.
My inbox is just a list of actions that other people want me to do.
All relationships will not pay off
We’re placing (educated) bets as to who may be helpful in the long run. Just like the stock market or gambling in Vegas, it’s about the portfolio strategy across many different bets.
A large driver of our relationship marketing is not just about becoming known.
It’s about remaining known.
Get to know people, than businesses
If our business were to evaporate tomorrow, I would start a new business where the same people would come into play.
Experiences you can deliver when creating value:
Personal experience – one-on-one direct value transfer. This might be an email, handwritten card, meeting or gift.
Connection experience – providing the link between two people, and by creating that new social connection, delivering value.
Community experience – builds on the connector experience. It magnifies the value others see in the connector and social object around connecting experience. This could be as simple as hosting a dinner for a few interesting people.
Broadcast experience – involves publishing content, which, while delivering low value, can be done for a wider audience. This is usually done using social media or email lists.
Remember personal experience is always a staring point.
NNTR – No Need to Respond
Frame your message in such a way that they don’t need to respond to you. “I know we’re all busy! I just wanted to let you know I was thinking of you” works like magic.
Gift should focus on the receiving end
A gift by its very nature should be recipient-focused. We shop with our own eyes; we give for their own eyes. A gift should not be an ad nor branding.
Introduce. But be courteous.
Double opt-in method: Asking permission of each part before making the introduction.
Get your name out there before you even show up.
It’s always easier for someone to get excited about meeting you if your name is familiar.
See at multiple touchpoints.
Our tone on a social gaming site will vary from what we use on our corporate email.
Stand out from the noise of congratulatory likes and comments.
After 5 days – send them Congratulations note
25 days – send them check-in notes
30 days – research possible introductions at the company, business opportunities
1 year- send them happy 1 year notes
When they refuse to change the status quo.
I know you may not be looking to decide yet. All I ask is that when you start evaluating your options, I have the opportunity to share what we do and how we work.