Engage and gain permission to communicate

Engage is all about gaining permission to communicate with someone, or having them ‘Follow’ you in Social Media.

You need to make it worthwhile for people to choose to engage with you, through the value you offer, expressed in the content you make available. So, for a start it’s worth taking about issues the other person may have, rather than jumping straight in and talking about your products, services or offers.

Permission indicates that someone is prepared to put in some time, so offer something of value to make it worth their while. You could offer insight that may help them understand an issues they are wrestling with and help them gain some clarity. You could sign-post people to useful resources, ones you provide or ones that other people provide.

How and where can you gain permission?

There are many places you can tempt people to engage with you, depending on your market and resources to follow-up.

For example:

• An email sign-up on your website or elsewhere
• A ‘subscribe’ feature on your blog, or your video channel or daily newspaper (www.paper.li)
• A ‘Follow’ to your Twitter account
• A Connection in your LinkedIn profile
• As a Facebook connection or fan of your business page
• And a plethora of other social media options.

Offline contacts and connections

And let’s not overlook that you might want to reach out to contacts you have made at exhibitions, networking events, partner meetings etc. (that pile of business cards you have collected) where you may initiate the connection by requesting they connect on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or you add them to your email distribution list (and best practice is to ask them to opt-in).

Segmentation of contacts

People who engage and give you permission to communicate may fall into four categories:

• ‘Buy now’ – They have a pressing problem they want to solve right now
• ‘Buy later’ – Not yet ready to make a decision but interested in researching the topic
• ‘Buy never’ – Inevitably some people who engage are never going to make a decision, for a whole range of reasons
• ‘Refer on’ – Some people may not have the problem themselves but may know others who could have

The purpose of the Nurture phase next is to move the relationship forward and to help you to determine which category they fall into.

I hope you will engage with me to find out more about the ideas I provide to help you improve your sales funnel.

I hope that through my own relationship nurture activities that I can respond appropriately to you, depending on what you are looking to achieve.

So, before you leave this sign up for our ‘Hints and Tips’ to get ideas to improve your sales funnel on a regular basis.