Seven Surprising Tips to Generate More Leads (Infographic)

Every marketing and sales person is always looking for ways to generate more leads.  Because of this we wanted to put together a quick guide at the intersection of marketing and sales.  We looked at how sales funnels, landing pages, and lead management need to come together to make a sale. Here's your weekend infographic that reveals seven surprising tips to help you generate more leads.  

Ten Days to a Thousand Twitter Followers

Twitter is a great way to reach an audience.  However, it’s really hard to get to the first thousand people – the point where your content can drive organic growth.  So, I spent a couple weeks learning the ropes on Twitter and in just ten days I built up over a thousand relevant followers.

Each day I’d spend less than an hour on twitter  - following the simple five step process laid out below.  At the end of this process we were able to drive over 300 visits from complete strangers to seed Contastic's initial user base.

1 – Build Your Profile

This is your elevator pitch.  In 160 characters you need to explain who you are (one sentence) and what you’re doing (one sentence).  Each should be packed with the most eye-catching details about yourself that will make someone want to follow you.  

2 –Follow Other's Followers

Following another user generates a notification for them and has a good chance of encouraging them to follow you back if it is relevant.  I identified a couple similar companies with significant followings and then would systemically follow 1-200 of their followers a day. Followers are ranked on Twitter chronologically, so each day you can through to see their new followers (at the top) and scroll down to find older ones.  I work top to bottom (newer followers are usually more engaged).

3 – Favorite Relevant Tweets

When you favorite someone’s tweet Twitter also sends them a notification.  This is another way to get on a user’s radar to generate a follow. TargetPattern is a great service that enables you to quickly favorite hundreds of tweets a day from relevant topics.  As a bonus their analytics are pretty good, so you can get a sense for which keywords drives the highest engagement.

4 – Make Friends

Since we’re on Twitter to engage real people with our product (just just get a big number of 'vanity followers') it’s important to respond quickly to everyone that contacts you.  I ended up sticking with the web interface since mobile/secondary providers/email were very unstable and ended up in tweets being lost most of the time.

5 – Content

As you develop a real following your content becomes more important.  The name of the game is to generate content that others will share.   At the end of the day that is how you can grow your account from one to ten thousand followers. 

Unless you’re already famous nobody cares about your opinion.  Focus on statistics, news or images. Generate value by curating or creating facts that your audience will find useful.  That’s what get’s widely shared (and grow your followers).  And even when posting as a company, follow the 9&1 rule – you need to tweet nine interesting general comments for each post about your company or product.

As you post be sure to strategically use @ and #.  @ will notify a user hat your tweet is about them – generating a higher chance of a share.  A # will go out to everyone following that topic – again generating more shares.   It’s especially important to focus on groups you belong to (Schools, Companies, Professional Organizations).  These groups are more likely to be supportive of you and share your content.

A Quick Note on Twitter Practicalities

While Twitter sends notifications to users for most system activities (follows, favorites, @mentions), the intent is not to allow people to spam the entire system constantly.  So, when putting the steps into practice err on the side of patience rather than volume.  While the technical limit is  1000 follows per day, consistently doing that will certainly get you banned.  The reason this took me 10 days (without getting banned) was that I did just a bit every day – manually and organically building relationships.  For more see:

https://support.twitter.com/articles/66885-i-can-t-follow-people-follow-limits

Also, once you follow 2000 people you won’t be able to follow anymore.  Use JustUnfollow to cull the list of folks who haven’t followed you back after a couple days. 

Happy Tweeting!

How I Manage My Personal Network with Contastic

Every day people in your network have opportunities that are perfect for you.   To get access to those opportunities you need to be top of mind with your contact at the same time as the opportunity is.   Contastic provides an easy way to stay top of mind with your contacts in three ways:

Keeping Track

On a daily basis I use Contastic before and after every call.   It combines my mail, contact information, and notes all in one place.  The profile card gives me an at-a-glance view of the contact’s essential information.

And the top of the data pane shows our recent email conversations, interests, and my notes.  Notes are critical in quickly understanding what our last conversation was about.  As we chat I’ll add a couple lines to the notes for each conversation to make it easy to pick up where we left off. 

Building Relationships

On a weekly basis I try and spend some time nurturing new relationships .  If I’ve just met someone at an event or through an introduction I tag them with a ‘developing’ tag.  This creates a tab in Contastic that enables me to review my list of ‘developing’ contacts at any time. This ensures I can revisit them often to continue nurturing the fragile new relationship. 

Contacts can be tagged with multiple tags (a friend may also be a prospect).  And these tags are an easy way to manage your pipeline.  I’ll make sure to label prospects, leads, and customer accordingly.  This way I know who to reach out to with sales materials, project suggestions, and referral requests respectively.

Staying In Touch

On a monthly basis I’ll set aside an hour (yes – that’s all it takes with Contastic) to go through all of my contacts who I haven’t contacted in over 90 days (Contastic automatically creates a tab for them) to reconnect.  

I try and be brutally honest when reviewing these connections to determine if they should be categorized (focus more on this person!) or hidden (this person is not really relevant anymore).   If a person is important and I haven’t reached out I’ll find a reason to reconnect.  Usually the emails will give some clue as to a topic I can follow up with my contact about.

If that doesn’t seem fruitful Contastic recommends a series of articles based on your contact’s education, company, interests, and things you have in common. 

Often times these articles are great ways to keep up to date on things your contacts care about as well as providing an engaging way to rekindle the conversation.   Once written they can be quickly inserted into a template to be sent in seconds:

That’s how I get Contastic!  It is my daily CRM, my weekly lead nurturing tool, and my monthly means of staying in touch with my entire network.  I’d love to hear more about how use get Contastic in the comments below.

How to Fix a Stack Rank System: An Open Letter to the Next Microsoft CEO

With reports of a new CEO on the horizon I wanted to take some time as an x-msftie to give a foot soldier's perspective on fixing the performance review system - core to fostering great talent.

Recently, Microsoft did away with the dreaded stack rank – the system that forces all performance reviews to a curve with fixed ratios of low, adequate and high performers.  However, this may be overkill.

From my time in engineering and field teams it is clear that the biggest issue with the stack rank is each team is fitted to pretty much the same curve.  In the diagram below you can see that each team gets the same amount of rewards to play with - regardless of the team's performance as a whole.  This means that a rockstar team will have to give around the same number of reviews as a failing one. 

The reason for this is to create an organization wide standard that brings consistency to the review process across their 100k+ employees.  However, it creates perverse incentives where great performers will be paid more to contribute to weak teams than strong ones.  Great steadily revert to the mean as they compete to be mediocre +1.  Failing teams over reward the complacent best of the worst.

However, this isn’t the fault of the system – it’s just a failure of implementation.  Here’s how to get it right: 

1. Product P&L

When I was at Microsoft there were about 22 layers of management between a salesman and an engineer. The only person with true cross-functional P&L for those two individuals is the CEO (true fact).  This prevents any hard accountability from being enforced.   Products need to be re-structured into independent silos.   The organization needs to be restructured into GM-level accountabilities directly responsible for revenue.  While this will make collaboration more difficult, it does

prevent dead wood from accumulating and killing organizations.

2. Trickle-down stack.

A normal distribution can’t be assumed for all of your teams – simply put there will be good and bad performers.  So plan for it.  Each organization with P&L should be fitted to a curve (see below). 

Placement on this curve should dictate the skew of the distribution of reviews given within each team.  E.G. If you crushed it this year – everyone should be able to be rewarded.  If you failed, many more of you should get the axe.  This process will quickly filter people into superstar teams and remove deadwood quickly.

3. Intrepreneurship

As companies grow, they seem to deliberately remove incentives for employees to make revolutionary breakthroughs.   The intent is to avoid destabilizing an organization.  However, the result is always a stagnant top-heavy organization that is doomed to be overtaken by a younger rival (see disruptive innovation). In order to steadily create new products, individual employees needs to have the incentive and resources to break away from existing product teams to create their own.   When engineers only see a ~10% variation in compensation there isn't incentive to do 10x better work or be innovative.

The Next Step for Founders/Engineers: How to Get Traction

I had a great time talking with the hackers at The Next Step for Founders/Engineers: How to Get Traction (thanks Optimizely for hosting!).  As I was taking notes I was struck by how the different varied based on stage of the business.  So, here’s a breakdown of the nights top gems (IMHO) by stage of company it is relevant to:

Pre-product – you have an intuition about a product or idea you want confirm

• ID your customer – don’t waste time talking with or using feedback from people who won't buy – they are not relevant.
• Use a list – email your personal and professional contacts directly to get your initial users
• My favorite tools for managing customer conversations are Boomerang, Excel, and Contastic (of course)
• Go narrow and personal (direct emails/in person conversations) and only go broad (twitter/ads/content marketing) when you've scaled to hundreds of users.

Pre-Revenue – you have some users and are now looking for ways to find people who will pay

• Move to micro communities of under 100 people (i.e. Linkedin groups, FB, Techendo)
• Add a buy button for a couple days to see if people will click it.  This demonstrates clear willingness to pay.
• In the early stages the founder is more valuable than the product.  The product will be weak - people are betting on you to make it better.

Post-Revenue – you’re off to the races with product market fit and are looking for ways to grow

• Reference customers.  For Optimizely having the Starbucks logo was a key demonstrate of credibility. 
• Use twitter to meet and research people.  Find common interests to connect over.
• **cameo from Pete Koomen (Founder Optimizely) – force people to unsubscribe by emailing you ask them. They got invested enough to be annoyed.  Find out why.

After the talk I got quite a few questions about sales.  Here’s what early stage founders need to know:

1. Use a list (keep it in Excel, Paper, Google Docs).  Just make it simple and and continually keep it up to date with you you talked to, what they said, and what the next step is.
2. For (Every sales call) {close a sale, get a feature request, or disqualify;  If (disqualified or sold) {ask for a an intro to a new prospect;}}
3. Stay in touch.  Jupiter research estimates 50% of qualified leads aren't ready to buy.  Just keep asking and a large proportion will convert (Contastic was made for this).

How to Send New Years Notes

With the New Year on our doorstep I'm thinking back to many of my important contacts that I've fallen out of touch with simply because there was never a pressing reason to reach out.

So, I'm making the time now to reconnect with these people to hear what they’re up to and share my own updates  And, just in case you haven’t gotten around to sending out Christmas Cards (or emails), here’s the process I use to send holiday update emails for the New Year.

The Template 

As with any communication the goal is to maximize your signal to noise ratio.  Make it short and relevant.  I generally like to include a greeting, one cue about a common thread we talked about last time, and an update:

Hi [name]

It's been a while since we caught up! How has [their job/project/hobby] been? I just wanted to shoot you a quick note to wish you a Happy New Year! 

Cheers!
Cy

 While this can be done with mail merge and excel, I've started to use Contastic exclusively to automate this process:

1.     See who you’ve fallen out of touch with

Contastic scans your gmail to figure out who you haven't exchanged emails with recently.  Next to each of your contacts we'll show you how any days it's been since your last contact.  A good rule of thumb is to stay in touch every 30-90 days.

2. Prepare your NYE template

In the Contastic template builder you can write an email in your own voice while inserting dynamic content that will customize the email using your contact's LinkedIn information.  The goal here is to make a personal email with the least amount of redundant effort.

3. Send!

Once you hit 'email' we'll pre-fill a template with custom content tailored to your contact and send the whole package to gmail or your mail client of choice (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.).  You can edit and send it from there!  We bcc our mailbot (he's harmless we promise) on the messages so we can learn which content you liked best for you!

  

This is the perfect opportunity to revisit folks you’ve fallen far out of touch with (on Contastic this would be your 90+ bucket).   I’ve also had some friends combine Contastic with Boomerang to schedule their messages to go out on New Years Day.  I hope this helps you stay in touch in the new year!

How to Validate Your Product Idea

The default answer is yes.  Ask anyone about your idea - that's what most will say. Yes is free.  Yes may even earn them some brownie points.  Yes is easy.  Yes is worthless and not to be trusted.

No is expensive.  It risks insulting someone’s life’s work and ruining a relationship.  Very few will invest a No in you when they can cash in a Yes.

So, how do you figure out if your idea is a good one - and worth building?  These are the three steps we use at Contastic to make users invest with us – this is the real meaningful yes:

Emails (Attention) 

The first step to validating any venture is the landing page.  Mock it up to look exactly like it will after you product is launched.  However instead of a payment form you’ll have a signup form for people to ‘pay’ with their emails.  This is giving you permission to message them about you product.  It signals that they have a problem and your product at least looks like their solution.  Also, when you do launch, you’ll have a set of beta users ready to go. Shoot for 100 – it’s a nice round number that generally extends beyond your close circle of friends.  This is an investment of their attention.

Users (Time)

After gathering an email list of interested users create a quick and dirty prototype. This should be the bare minimum where it is useful to users.  Note that this does not at all mean easy to use, polished, or pretty.  As soon as it can add value in anyway to your users – launch it to your list.  Then, watch to see if people use it regularly.  You can learn a ton about how people are using it, and their regular engagement will be a sign that you’ve hit the mark.  They are now investing their time.

Customer (Cash)

Cash is king – and in this exercise it’s no different.  There is nothing harder than getting a customer to open up their wallet and part with some hard earned cash.  Use the existing landing page from step 1 and convert the email collection to a payment form.  Now that you’ll getting some dollars in the door – congratulations – your idea is now validated!

To be sure, this is not where the validation ends, the Customer Development Process leverages a similarly progressive framework to validate all areas of your business form acquisition to retention.  If you have any other tips and tricks for validating your product ideas let me know in the comments below.