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Lesson Info

Social Sales Funnel

Next up is gonna be AJ, who is going to discuss building a social sales funnel. And he is right here, so give him a warm hand. (applause) Al right. What's up. So, earlier today, I heard a few of us sorta wracking our brains, trying to figure out who in our network we can provide introductions to, or give value to, and some of us right now might not be happy with our social circle, with our support group, with our friends. And in starting AOC and getting involved in entrepreneurship we had to hire a sales guy. And the sales guy that we hired followed a very strict sales funnel. So how many of you here are in sales or familiar with sales funnels. All right. So we started thinking, well, if we have this great sales funnel to get us leads and customers to The Art of Charm, what if we used a sales funnel for our social life? So that we could attract, qualify, and close friends. So, I wanna walk you guys through a very simple system so that you, when you meet people, just as Jordan said, y...

ou're out and about, not only networking, but turning these people into friends, right? It's digging that well before you need it. How great would it be to have some friends in other industries that can send you referrals, can connect you with other people. So our social sales funnel is made up of three components. The first component is obviously, meet. We have to go out and meet people. So there are a variety of ways to do this. Obviously networking events are great. Meetup.com has a lot of themed events where you can meet people with like-minded views, sharing the same passions and interests, but essentially we need to go out and find some leads for our social life. So using the tools that I taught you earlier today, how to walk up to people, engage them, start to build a little bit of a connection with them, right, we're gonna get their phone number. And the easiest way that I've found to get someone's phone number, is to not ask for it, to demand it. So what I want you to do, next time you're having a great conversation, you had a laugh, you're really connecting with someone, I want you to just pull out your phone, have the contact page open, and just say, this was great, throw your number in my phone. And the best part about this is when you hand them your phone, they're gonna be putting in their contact information. So maybe you're like me, you forgot their name. Oh, how do I spell Kaitlin again? What's the last name? Or what if they give you their email? Right, wouldn't it be great to have not only their phone number, but their email, so you could find 'em on Facebook. So I literally just hand someone my phone and I just casually turn away. So I'm not looking at my phone, I just hand it to 'em. Obviously smart phones these days are 600, 800, $1000, right, so people aren't just gonna drop your phone. They're gonna be holding your phone and now this social pressure says, oh, well I should put in something. So I've found that sometimes I'll even get phone numbers from people who didn't anticipate giving me their phone number. (audience laughs) Right, imagine being in that CEO setting. Hey this is going great, you know what, throw your number in my phone. Just turning your back, he's gonna feel that social pressure like oh, now this is awkward, I gotta like, get AJ's attention, no I don't wanna give you my contact info. So, now that we have their contact info, well what do we do with that, right? How do we engage them and start building this friendship, building this connection where maybe we don't have anything to offer them right away? The second step in our social sales funnel is the invite. So we're gonna create an event ourselves that showcases our personality, that allows us to have fun and feel comfortable, and then we're gonna send that to them. Hey, you know what, it was great meeting you, I think it would be great if you came over next Sunday, I have a bunch of friends over we're watching NFL Sunday Ticket. Right, being in L.A., I'm a Detroit Lions fan, but I'm constantly meeting people from other cities who can't watch their local team in L.A., so they're super excited to come over to my place to watch their favorite football team on Sundays. We all have very simple things we can do to invite people. And it doesn't even have to be your house. You can use a bar, you can use another space, you could invite them to the beach, a picnic. My old apartment building had a pool so I would host pool parties. Naturally in L.A. the sun was great. But I always had an event so that I was giving them something to think about as I got their contact information. I was not them waiting, two weeks later, oh, I gotta follow up, oh how can I reengage them, right? Top of mind, I said, hey, you'd be a great fit for football Sundays at my place I'll shoot you the info next week. And I love to make the event standing. What that means is repeatable. So I try to figure out whether it's once a month or once every other week, or if I'm really ambitions, once a week. That standing invite. Because I know everyone has a busy life. There are gonna be times where my event doesn't match up with them. But if I'm using social media, I create that little Facebook event, and then every second Sunday I'm having people over to my place, I can start getting people invited to my events who maybe I met three, four months ago and couldn't make the first or second one. And the great part about social media is, I snap a couple photos, right, I do a little Instagraming, oh look at all the guys eatin' chicken wings, watching football, and of course it's in their feed. Oh, man I missed out on that. And now I'm using FOMO. How many of us have had FOMO? We had that event that we wanted to go to and whatever happened and then we're like, oh, you see all these people at this event? I didn't know AJ knew that guy. So I'm using social media and some FOMO to build anticipation for the next event. Now the third and final step is connect. So what I'm doing to filter in people is I'm showcasing my personality with the invite. Right, I love football so naturally I want some guy friends in my life who also like football. Unfortunately if you're like Jordan and you don't like football it's gonna be tough for us to be friends. (audience laughs) So I want you to be specific. I want you to pick an event that showcases your personality that will allow you to be comfortable. Don't get outside of your comfort zone and go, oh, this week I'm gonna learn spelunking and I'm gonna invite all these people. That's not gonna work, you're gonna be nervous and they're not gonna know what's going on. So pick something that you're already doing that you know you'll have a couple close friends at, and offer the invite. And you would be amazed at how many people just need an invite to show up. You make it easy on them. You set the date, you set the time, you set the place and now their social life becomes your social life. And at this event, what I'm doing is I'm paying attention to my friends' interactions with these people. Do they get along? 'Cause my friends know me really well. So they're gonna be able to tell me real quickly, AJ this guy likes the Packers, he ate all the chicken wings, you know. (audience laughs) Knocked over a few beers and just left. And I've saved myself time, because I'm not going to one-on-one coffee, lunch meetings with people that don't fit my life. The connect is the third step. After they've had fun at my event, we've had a good time, then I'll say, hey, you know what, I didn't get a chance to really chat with you, the football game was on, it was a little crazy. We should grab lunch this week. Now they've come to my event, they see that I have a social life, that I have people to offer them outside of just selling them a service or selling them my business, and I've wowed them. So now they're even more excited to get that one-on-one time with me. So I'm valuing my time, and I'm setting up a funnel that filters in quality people into my life. But you have to go out there and meet people. So that's what segment two is all about. How do we use these social skills to meet people? Now, you're gonna see in your notebook, of course, your workbook here, a worksheet on page 58. So, got a little way for you to remember this, right. Meet, invite, connect. Mic, get it? (audience laughs) I know, it's been a long day. So, in your workbooks, I want you to write down three things that you can attend in the next two weeks to meet people. It could be that meetup group you've been putting off. It could be that networking event that you've been a little scared because you didn't know what to do at the event. But I want a plan for three things you can do, within the next two weeks, to meet more people. The second column we have, invite. I want you to start planning your event. And as I said, I'll give you some more examples, it does not have to be your own place. I happen to live in a small apartment in Los Angeles. I can't host 30 people. So, what do I do? I'm trying to get out doors more. I do 7:00 a.m. hikes every Thursday. And I invite entrepreneurs in L.A. on these hikes. I'm outdoors, I'm walking with them, which means a lot of conversation, chance to mingle, and my stipulation for my event is you get to bring one friend. So now I'm amplifying my network. I'm going out I'm meeting people, but, hey, if I thought that guy was cool, his friends are also probably cool. So I've thrown poker parties, as I said, pool parties, I've hosted people for football. You can set up a trivia night at a local bar. You could host your own networking event. The idea is, set up a monthly event. So start thinking about what your interests are, what kinda shows off your personality, gives people a better opportunity to meet the full you not your social mask, as Johnny was talking about. But shows your personality and you know your friends are definitely gonna be at, so you're not the only one at the party. And the last column, connect, I want you to identify three people that you have their contact information, but you haven't really reached out to them and tried to connect. And I want you to make a plan to invite them to lunch or coffee over the next two weeks. So we're recharging some connections we made before this class. Because now you know what to say, you know how to be vulnerable, you know how to connect more. So I want an action plan of three people that you can reasonably engage and connect with over the next two weeks. And, if coffee goes well, if lunch is great, invite them to your upcoming event. When you leave here, you're gonna send those emails as Jordan said, and then you're gonna hop on Facebook and you're gonna create a little event page. You're gonna arm twist all of your friends to reply yes, even if they're not showing up. So we get a little buzz around your event. And we're gonna pick a time for that event that we can repeat it reasonably. Right, so every second Tuesday of the month I have taco Tuesdays. Throw in some pork and chicken in a crock-pot, I go to work, I come back, I have my friends over, they bring some tequila, we're hangin' out. So now we have an action plan for turning all of these contacts, all of these business cards, into real relationships. So we're not chasing their business, we're offering them something with the invite, we're showcasing ourselves, and if things go well, we're connecting with them. And what I've been so amazed by this whole process and doing this over and over, I did this in my dating life, I've now done it my entrepreneur life, you have the event, you can't possibly interact with everyone at the event for a reasonable amount of time, but they see you having fun, and you'd be amazed at how many people reach out to you after that event to invite you to their event. So I'm amplifying my social life, my business life, at every level. At the top level, I'm going out two to three times a week, collecting those contacts. At the invite level, I'm having them bring someone I haven't met. And at the connect level, I'm offering them an opportunity to be welcomed into my life, which means they're going to do the same. That act of reciprocity. So if I host one event a month, after two to three of these events, I'm gonna be peppered with invites to other events, and now my entire social calendar is built for me. And all I had to do was host one event. And make it simple on yourself. Hey, BYOB. Right, I'd rather pay for the maids at my apartment and have everyone else supply the alcohol or supply the food. I end up with a clean apartment and everyone had a great time. So now we have an action plan for all of the skills we learned today. So it's not just, oh, I passively learned it, or I streamed it online for free. But no, this stuff has to be actionable because, as Jordan said, it has to become habit. When it becomes habit it's not a dread anymore, it's fun. And I look forward to my monthly events. I look forward to Thursday morning hikes. I've met some really amazing people simply by extending the invite to one other person. And sure, there's gonna be some broken eggs, there's gonna be some broken beer bottles, some people that just don't get the invite again. But you control the guest list. You can block those people and move on. Find new people. So you're not wasting your time on people that don't matter. Which a lot of this business card contact collecting happens, that's what happens, you end up, hey, this guy's great the first five minutes, you know, oh I had a couple drinks at the mixer and, well, now that he's hanging out with me at dinner, I realize that I don't like any of his stories and he's really braggy, versus, well he's at a party of mine and he's interacting with my friends and we get a much better picture for who he is. So one of the things I've run into is I host a lot of barbecues and then after a couple, that realization of, eh, not my favorite, but then you have kinda this standing invite. And so I don't necessarily invite people, but they end up showing up. What's a good way to kinda handle the other end of like, you know... So, what I will say that has happened through this is I shoot for three events. When you're starting this process, host three events. And then, your friends should be having fun, so now we can start rotating, so that other people are hosting these events. And in the off case where it really is just these people show up and they trash my place, move it to a bar. You know how many bars would love to have your business on Sunday eating chicken wings drinkin' beer if you take over the whole booth. You can take over a whole side room. So if you find yourself in that situation, I've been fortunate enough that, I think I'm pretty good at judging up front, and I also rescind the invite privileges, so they can't bring friends anymore, right? So if the party gets too outta control, the event gets too outta control, then I back it down, okay, now we're just limiting it to 10 people. So then like a B to B setting, do you think a company could throw like, a company event and maybe invite adjacent partners and sort of thing to where you may not be inviting prospects or clients, but by just having the people adjacent in your network, you know, they'll have a better image of you, like have you ever used it that way? Yeah, so what we do at The Art of Charm is we host alumni barbecues at the house. We do 'em about once every two to three months. We typically coordinate around a fight night, like a UFC fight or something like that. And what we do there is we have our current customers there, who are excited to be there and meet other customers and talk about their experiences. And then we invite a few of the leads who are looking to kick the tires, right, is this for me, I don't know, I wanna meet some of the guys. And then I invite my entrepreneurial friends. Because here's the thing, I can never do what I do for a living as much justice as my satisfied customers. So if my satisfied customers are sitting there eating ribs at the barbecue and they're talking me up saying how amazing I am, that's far better than me going into salesman mode and telling these potential leads and customers how great I am. So that's how you can use a corporate event where maybe you can get some sponsorship too. And you gear it towards your existing customers and you slowly open the doors to leads and companies that you wanna partner with. We had a question that did come in from the online audience. So, I know we heard from Jordan on some of the tools that he uses. Do you have any other software recommendations or anything that you use to keep track of all these events that you're running? So, I strictly use social media. Facebook handles everything for me. When it comes to the contact stuff, I have a really good system with my assistant so that I'm not having to live on Facebook where it filters in the right stuff for me. And I also try to focus my best on in-person. So on these hikes, then I'll invite them in person, versus relying on technology. So I'm a little bit different than Jordan in that. And that's why we wanted to put together the bonus materials as well, 'cause you can do a deep dive into the tech and the settings and I know there's gonna be a bajillion questions about it, but I'm much more of a face-to-face person.