Elevate is a networking community organized to help our members make more money through structured collaboration and referrals.
Recently, we discovered there was a lot of gold in the Elevate mine for us.
And then we discovered that our 85 members are each directly connected to about 5,000 people and collectively how we are directly connected to over 500,000 people, dozens of whom need our services today.
But sometimes the people that need us the most, might not even be aware that they need us, so they resist our best efforts to connect.
So we need to have different networking tactics to get in front of them, so today we’re going to talk about using networking to fill your Focus Groups and sell more.
I’m going to use Minal’s business as a case study, but please think about how this could apply to your business.
Minal’s best prospects are HR professionals that work at larger businesses.
And we know that the biggest mission of HR is to reduce turnover and reduce recruiting and hiring mistakes, which costs a larger business millions of dollars per year in expenses and lost productivity.
Minal has a service that solves this problem, but most HR people don’t know Minal; they don’t know that her service like hers exists; and they aren’t looking to pick up new expenditures, so they might rebuff her best efforts at outreach.
So how can she get in front of these people?
Maybe her weekly commercial should include something like this…
We already know Penny our resident HR professional, but I want to meet all the HR people that you know.
So do you work in a larger business that has a staff HR professional or an outsourced HR professional like Penny?
I would like to invite them to my focus group and give them a $100 amazon gift card.
If you know these people, please email or text me and I’ll tell you how to make this easy introduction.
Then she will tell you how to invite these people to her next focus group.
The key to hosting a successful focus group is to educate your prospects on something they don’t know about while requesting their feedback on your service while not selling.
Remember don’t sell at your focus group.
This will lead to a win-win situation.
The HR people learn about a new service that reduces turnover and recruiting costs.
Minal gets valuable insight into how her target market thinks about her service and then she can tweak her marketing and sales strategy to perform better.
And the bonus here is that some of those HR professionals will decide to call Minal and buy her service.
If you want more detail on this tactic, I discussed this at length at the last Elevator Accelerator, so go to the member website and watch the video.
Wrapping this up, if you have your fellow members make introductions to people that can attend your focus groups, you will get in front of your prospects, educate them on what they need to know, and some of them will call you to buy, and that means that you’ll make more money.
