#TalkInbound - Episode 1

We discuss "Marketing a Local Club (Business)", "Best Intro for a Cold Call", and "Number of Licks to the Center of a Tootsie Pop".

You asked questions... I answered them.
 

A few days ago I posted a video asking you to submit some questions in a few different areas, online marketing, sales, revenue generation, anything you really want to. So today we're gonna start off by answering some of those questions.

Question: JJ asked, "How do we market Crown Town flag football league in North and South Carolina?"

Answer: I had a quick chance to look at your site and look some things over and it looks like you guys have a lot of cool things going on. I like the fact that you are using Sumo Me, those tools are great. So some of the things to keep in mind when marketing a club or a community is the individuals in that community. What I mean by that is, tell their stories and use their stories to help promote what you guys are doing as a whole.

Some of the best mediums for that might be videos, interviews with them, whether it's with an iPhone, or with a flip camera (if those still exist) or a GoPro and just take videos of different people and get them to tell their stories. What will happen is if you put that on your site, they'll get super excited about it, they'll tell friends and all of a sudden you'll have all their friends (who probably have a lot of similar interests), checking out Crown Town football.

You can see a lot of examples on cross fit gyms, what they will do is they will post the daily work out the next day and always post a photo of whatever happened previously and will highlight one member or a couple members in that photo. Then it becomes little bit like celebrity appeal thing where you feel like "Sweet, I made the page, I made it on the website."

SEE ALSO: Power of Visual Communication [Infographic]

For new members it's awesome because it includes them, they feel special and they feel highlighted. A great place to start is get some videos, get some stories and try getting some more photos and start highlighting who this people are on your website.

Question: Anthony asked, "What's your best intro/warm up for a cold call?

Answer: Great question Antony, I have to give a quick back story before I can answer this question though. We at Hüify do not cold call—I know, shocking. With our marketing efforts, we get a lot of inbound leads. Because we do a great job at our marketing, we get a lot of people contacting us to basically figure out if our services are good fit for their business. Therefore all the calls we make are warm calls because we're not just calling out of the blue.

A lot of times people are trying to make a lot of cold calls, they're trying to jam through a sales script, they're trying to hit a certain quantity, a certain number of calls versus hitting a number of quality calls. So some of the places you can start there is try to decrease the amount of calls you are making per day, so you can spend more time on each call individually, preparing before every single call.

Here we try to prep anywhere from five minutes to an hour before each call. Now, why would there be such a huge range? The reason is some of the calls, if we get a lead on the website, we try to respond within five minutes of receiving that lead and try to get them on the phone. Obviously because we're trying to respond within five minutes we don't have an hour to prep. However, if we're doing a follow up call or if we are calling them go over the weekend or something like that, then we want to prepare a lot more and prepare for up to an hour for that call.

Why is that important? If you prepare that much for every call, you can come into the conversation knowing some of the problems that they might have and you can have educated questions. One of the gauges that we have on how well a call has been is if the other person we were calling has talked more than we have.

If we've done that then we know that we've been asking them good questions, and it's a good dialogue happening. So I know I haven't really answered your question just yet, that's the back story and insight there. Let me actually answer your question. What is the best way to intro for a cold call? or we'll just say what's the best way to intro for a call because like I said we don't cold call.

The best way to intro for a call is to ask them how you can help them. One of the ways we start here is we will  say, "Hi Anthony, I saw you filled out a form on our website and I have a few minutes. It seems like you got some questions, and I've got some time. I'd love to help answer some of the questions you might have."

SEE ALSO: How Inbound Marketing Fits Into Your Sales Process

Then I just shut up. After that, I let them talk and I field their questions so they really know I'm listening and that I can sit and figure out what exactly is a good thing that they might need depending on the problems that they might have.

Question: Luke asked, "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop.

Answer: All right Luke, I'm glad you asked. I'm gonna have to get back to you on his one, I'm going to have to do some research, and figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center of this lollipop.

Thanks so much for the questions you've submitted! In this show we want to try and cover three main topic areas: Online marketing, digital sales (basically driving revenue through any digital means), and honestly anything you want to talk about. So please ask your questions and we'll answer!

Have a question you want me to discuss? Ask it in the comments below!