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Lesson Info

Special Guest Mario Martinez : A Party Without Pants

There's many ways to connect when we're with somebody in person. We talk about finding a commonality based on values not vocation. We talked about digging deeper. We talked about earning credibility by giving our customer what the internet can't. But what's missing? Online. This whole idea of connecting through social media. Kind of important. In fact, the statistics are staggering. And how do we take all of this information that we know about connecting to build trust and transfer it to connecting to build trust online? Because of course, the goal is to take these online relationships offline so we can make a sale. And I can't even tell you how excited I am that this human being is now in my life. We haven't known each other long, but I felt immediately like I had known him all my life. He is a powerhouse, a dynamo. And you may not know that this morning you were sitting with the CEO of the number one digital transformation company on the planet. Ladies and gentlemen, Mario Martinez. ...

(applause) My buddy. Thank you Sharon. I love this guy. Hey guys. How can you not love this face, right? I mean this is a face, right. And not to mention. I love your pajamas. I love your pajamas. Well thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yours look a little cuter than mine, but I got this little tail thing going on. Oh you do. Yeah, you see. Here we go. There's the tail. He's wagging his tail, that's good. Wagging the tail. And these are my Eisenhower pajamas. I used to have a dog named Eisenhower. Now I have a little Boston Terrier named Mamie Eisenhower. So these are my Eisenhower pajamas. And the reason that we call this segment a party without pants is because when I first met Mario, I'm going to admit it, I am a little bit older than Mario. And I didn't really do LinkedIn, right. I thought LinkedIn was sort of like a stuffy Facebook. I was like, why would I do LinkedIn? Who would do this, right? And then I met Mario and I had this big a-ha moment. You ever had like a big a-ha moment? We've all had these whoa. So I had this big a-ha moment that LinkedIn, connecting on LinkedIn, is no different than connecting at a networking event or a party. The difference is, we can do it in our homes without pants. And no one knows. No one knows. I'm pretty positive that everyone in this room and everyone in the audience listening in from home has had a meeting without Pants. Well maybe they had pants on. But maybe they didn't have the right type of business pants. Or maybe you haven't had pants. I don't know. (laughter) Well and think about how today, right, we're all using GoToMeeting or Zoom. Free advertising, I love Zoom. Me too. We're using these video, and again, connecting with video, let me just say, if you are on a phone call and you're attempting to sell something, use video. The connection is much deeper. It's much better. There's all kinds of stats on that that I think you may make us aware of. But it's really really important. And what Mario and I are gonna go through is five ways that connecting on LinkedIn is exactly like connecting at a party, but without pants. But first Mario, I would love you to tell the audience just a little bit about digital transformation, what you do, and why it's so critical for sales people, artists, anybody who wants to get their product or service out there. Why is it a must? Yeah well digital sales transformation. And I think that's one of the things we need to be thinking about is is, most of us in the room, some of us are young, but most, I've been in sales for 21 years. This is my 21st year. 18 of those years were spent in corporate. And what we used to do back when I started out at 19 years old doing a telemarketing role, now called SDR role, what I used to do is not what I'm doing today. In fact, the dramatic shift in change from emailing and calling people, as to what I call the traditional based selling methodologies, have now shifted to this digital sales environment whereby we are required and responsible to engage with our buyers through a multi- or omni-channel experience. And so if you think about this from what are today's buyers like. Well I like to call it, there's four cardinal attributes. So if you're writing this down, here's a good opportunity to write down the four cardinal attributes of today's buyer. Number one, they are digitally connected. How do we know this? How do we know this Shari? Well because the numbers, I think there's more cell phones today than toilets. I think I saw a statistic. (laughter) That's a good one. That outta tell you something right? That outta tell you something, exactly right. I don't know who counted 'em though. Who's the counter, right? What a job. That's a good one. But if you think about this, you're exactly right. Thinking of digitally connected, on average there are 3.64 connected devices that everyone of us own worldwide. 3.64 connected devices. Now you have to ask yourself which means some people have seven and other people have none. That could be true Could you imagine? That could be true. Like you probably have 12.6. Yeah, no I wish. Which would bring the average. I do have a holster that I carry my cellphones in. Just kidding. I don't do that. (laughter) But the point is, is that if you have a connected device, what do you think you might be doing on a connected device? Everything. Connecting. There we go. Connecting, right? So we know today's buyer's digitally connected. Number two. We also know that today's buyer is mobile attached. Now, I don't have, I left my cellphone. I don't have a cellphone, but how many of you have gone to a restaurant and you sit down and you're having a conversation and you look over at the next table, family of four, mom, dad, two children. And this is what you see? No conversation taking place. Now this may be your experience as well. And this class is not for that. However, we know that everyone is mobile attached. So they are out there. They are connecting. They're mobile attached. They're engaging with information and content. They're pulling, they're pushing on their mobile devices. The third thing that we know about today's buyer is that they're socially engaged. How do we know that? Well just look at the US alone and in the US, 24% of the US population had a social networking profile in 2008. 81% of the US population had a social networking profile in 2017. A dramatic growth experienced, if you think of the social networks. Now, that study included every possible social networks including dating.com sites. But if we can just think about what are the top big six. And maybe for those of you that are actually connected at home, type it into the chat window. The top big six of what you might think. But in the room, let's grab those mics. I'm gonna start you out with a couple of 'em. Go ahead and grab the mics and we're gonna speak out which ones do you might think would be the top six. Let's start with LinkedIn. Someone else? Twitter. Someone said Twitter, okay. Facebook. Facebook good. Instagram. Instagram, good. Pinterest would not be one of the big six, but it's close. YouTube. YouTube. YouTube, number one. Yes YouTube. Most people forget that. You stole my thunder. YouTube, exactly. And what else? Did someone say Instagram? Yes. Snapchat? No. No, we didn't say Snapchat. Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, right. These are the big ones that our buyers are actually engaged in and engaged on. And so we wanna be thinking about that in terms of how do we as sales people, how do we as business owners, engage with where our buyers are at? Now think about this as well. Think about when you're on social media today, what are the two things that you stop at on social media as you're going through your news feed? Funny videos. Funny videos or videos. What else? Close members doing something crazy. Okay, but that's usually a video there. What else might we have? Announcements or big news. What is it that stops you? Ads. But what's in the ad? Pictures, yes. Someone said pictures? Videos and pictures. Those are the two things that we stop at. Now ask yourself this question for those of you in the audience and those of you listening. When was the last time that you engaged with an authentic, real video that provided value to your buyers through any one of those social platforms? It's huge. We've gotta go to where they are. We have to go where they are And we were talking earlier about interest span. And interest span, what are the numbers of if you send a video instead of an email back? And this is something you probably wanna write down and do. It's not hard. The technology is there today. But instead of writing an email, here's what I heard, here's what we discussed. Shoot a video. Hey Jay, just heard that such and such, the open rate alone, what's the open rate on video compared to email? So you can actually, there's a number of different stats, but you could actually increase your open rate on an email by a minimum of 19% just by placing a video into your email and putting in the subject line, video. Which is the fourth cardinal attribute of today's buyer, is that we're video hungry. Someone mentioned YouTube in the audience earlier and if you think about YouTube, YouTube is growing 100% year over year and is the world's second largest search engine in the world. So we know that our buyer's are engaging with video and every one of us, Shari, when we have a how-to question, where do we go? YouTube. YouTube, right. So our buyers are consuming video at an alarming rate. In fact, Cisco just published a study that showcased that by 81% of the world's internet traffic will be as a direct result of Video. Consuming video. So those are our four cardinal attributes. Digitally connected, socially engaged, mobile attached, and video hungry. Now as entrepreneurs, business owners, sales people, we have to stop and say, what am I doing, or ask, what am I doing to be digitally connected, socially engaged, mobile attached, and video engaged with my buyers. And these are all parts of connect, okay. So when we talk about connect, we talk about what we do when we're together. And we talked about how to build rapport. I see rapport as empathy light, by the way. So think of it that way. But we think about, what are the things that we do when we're next to each other. But as sales people, we've gotta prospect. We've gotta get those customers in the first place. And we've gotta move that relationship. We've gotta move that sale down the pipeline. And I also talked about with connect, how to add value every step of the way. So ask yourself, am I adding value? Am I keeping their interest span and am I doing that through video. So Mario, let's go ahead and look at, and again, there's a lot of people that are watching, I'm sure, that are like, oh my god, but I don't know how to do it. So just to show you how easy this is and how pleasant it is, 'cause you can do it at home In your PJs. In your PJs. Just don't stand up in the chair. Just don't stand up. Yeah, don't stand up in the chair. We're gonna talk about the five rules, right. How LinkedIn or any social media, any social engagement is just like networking at a party. What's the first thing you do when you realize you get invited to a party. I'm gonna ask Suzanne. What's the first thing you do? What's the first thing you think about? What are you gonna wear? Right. Right. And what are my shoes gonna look like. And what are my shoes gonna look like. All right? So the first rule of connecting online is when we go to a party we need to look our best. But online, we need to look our best too. I didn't realize how bad my LinkedIn profile was until I looked at a good one. This is how people are assessing us today. So in the real world, yes we're going to a party and we're thinking, okay I wanna look my best. On the online world, what are you posting? What does it look like? Do you look like you're in this century? Or is it bad? So any comments on that? Yeah, well the thing about this is whenever you engage with a prospective buyer, if they have any level of remote interest whatsoever in what you have to say, the first thing they will do is look you up. Now the question you have to ask yourself is what do you look like? Do you have the dazzling suit, the dapper bow tie or do you have something on your profiles, not profile, profiles, that you're like, An old shoe. just another sales rep. An old shoe. An old shoe. Exactly. Another sales rep. And now this is an interesting one to me. For those that are sales people, I love this one. I see this thousands of times in the summary. Best contract negotiator. What buyer wants to deal with someone who's the best contract negotiator? Now if you're an entrepreneur, usually you have your LinkedIn profile as a resume. But what it really, write this down, what it really should do, it should speak to who you help, how you help, and what business problem you solve. Big. Who you help, how you help, and what business problem that you solve. And that should start from the very first things that someone would read, which is the headline on your LinkedIn profile. And in addition to that, please on your picture, LinkedIn performed a heat map study that was done several years ago. And that heat map study showed that the first thing that somebody looks at that determines whether or not they drop off your profile or stay is your picture. And so if you have a picture of you with your best friend, a half cut off shoulder, maybe someone's back. Turn around Shari. Maybe someone's back like this. Or maybe you're so far back that they're like, who is this person? Go to the mall, $ And make it a professional picture. Yeah. All right, so we're gonna hit these other four quickly. And the next one is bring a gift. My mama told me a long time ago that when you get invited to somebody's house, what do you do? You bring a gift. You bring chocolate, you bring wine, you bring something. Well, again, when we talk about lead with empathy, what a lot of people do on LinkedIn, and I see this all the time, is they don't have anything to offer. And like I said before, they pounce on you the moment that we connect. So what does bring a gift mean? Give them something. Again, give them a study, have videos, have articles. If you really wanna be a thought leader and an influencer, you gotta have thoughts, right. So that means that we've gotta write articles, videos. If you don't have your own, that's not your expertise, gather some that are interesting. Gather some about your company. But give something to the other person. Bring a gift. The next thing we do when we go to a party is if we're good, we make it about them. How many times have you gone to a party and you meet somebody and it's yak, yak, yak, yak, yak and they tell you all about how great they are? Right? What does that make us wanna do? (laughter) Right? Walk away. Pardon. Walk away. Right. So I always tell my son who's 13, be interested, not interesting. May wanna write that one down. It's from the book Just Listen by Goulston. But be interested, not interesting. Ask about them. This is all about lead with empathy. Same thing in a party as it is when we're on social media. And I like to use this as a demonstration, Shari. If I met you live and in person at an offline, face to face networking event, I am not going to walk up to you and say, (laughter) let me talk about me. So hi Shari, nice to meet you. I am Mario Martinez, the CEO of blah blah blah and then just keep talking all about me, no. I wanna know about you. I wanna be interested in you in order for them to find me interesting. Right, you will be amazed how if you let somebody talk about themselves for 20 25 minutes, they will think you're the most interesting person they have ever met. And you become a good friend. And you become a good friend. They go that's a really nice guy. That's how I met Shari and became friends with her. (laughter) I know. 'Cause it was all about Mario. But we listened to each other. I think that's the idea. And again, this sounds simple, but if you're not doing it, it's advanced, make it about them. And so when you're connecting online, one of the things tactically you might wanna do is, oh you went to University of Colorado. That's awesome. I'm a this fan. Oh I saw that we have mutual friends. So again, these are the little tips and the things that people don't do. And it's very annoying. I just delete, delete, delete, delete if somebody starts trying to hit me up and sell me something. Next, and this is huge, what makes somebody great at a party? The big connector. The one who says, oh my gosh have you met Lisa? Lisa is fantastic. Lisa just got married. She runs training for this amazing company. Lisa, I want you to go ahead and meet Suzanne. The two of you have a lot in common. So what I'm doing is I'm setting up other people for success. And we wanna do the same thing on LinkedIn, right Mario? Yeah, absolutely. It's called be a master connector, right. So connect other people together. And a very short story. Somebody was prospecting to me as the CEO of our company, and after hearing what it was that we needed, he ended up saying, you know what, we're actually not a good fit. And you know who is a good fit? Our competitor. And I was like, whoa, wow, okay. He was like, call them up. And I did and of course, they were a good fit. And what happened was next time someone came around to me and said, hey who are you using for, I didn't actually refer the person that I bought from, I actually referred the person that sent me to the competitor because he introduced me to someone else. And it compelled me to want to help that individual because he identified that he could not help me, but there was somebody else that was better that could. So he was a master connector. Yeah, and on LinkedIn there's that @ function. So I might say, I have this new article, Party Without Pants, that I wanna talk to. What do you think @Katie Eldridge? What do you think @MarioMartinez and if you just type it in there, you can connect people very very quickly on LinkedIn. And this gives you influence and it makes you the bell of the ball at the party. And who doesn't wanna be the bell of the ball at the party? You wanna be that great master connector. And finally, what did our mama tell us to do once we get invited to a great party? Once we leave, what are we supposed to do? Send a thank you note. What does a thank you note look like on LinkedIn? Wow. Well, what I like to do is I like to actually send a video message through LinkedIn. So, some people like to do hand-written notes. Fantastic. Go for it. That methodology's not dead. But record a short video. Send that video. Thank you Shari for inviting me over to your home and for having myself and my family over and enjoying a great dinner, right. So make sure that you spend the time for the added value touch and bring them some value by showing your face. Because from video perspective, we all know, and the studies show, that this right here, your face, is what builds trust. Connecting face to face is what builds trust. So, send a thank you note. And I would, whether you had a meeting, whether they bought from you, whether they didn't buy from you, make sure you thank them for engaging with you. That's awesome. So a party without pants. And I wanna take just about five minutes here and any questions for either me or Mario about a party without pants. Or from the studio audience, do we have any questions about, and again, the goal is to take your relations online and bring them offline. Yep. Absolutely. That's the goal at the end of the day. Well I'm asking this question because definitely audience wants to know about this. What is a frequency, you know in the social media, how frequent I can ping my prospect? The frequency is a very big dilemma questions everyone has and any inputs I would appreciate it. That's a great question. And so I like to answer it with, you're gonna leverage social media as a way to warm up a potential outreach, a big outreach. It could be a phone call. It could be an email. It could be an InMail, right. So how do you warm it up? Well, write down this cadence. Number one. There's this little function called follow. So if you go to my profile, Mario Martinez, Jr. and you find my profile, LinkedIn as an example, and you hit the three little buttons or the settings if you're on Android, there's a word there that says follow. Follow that person. And what it does is it sends me notification, oh Brandon, Aroon has followed you. And naturally, you're first inclination is, oh someone followed me. Who is this Brandon or Aroon that followed me, right? And so that really opens up the starting the warm touch. So you're building a social cadence that helps to warm up the end result. So what does that look like? Follow, like, comment. After you follow, like, and comment and that could be over a series of one to three days, now your next point is, do I call, do I email, do I text, do I send a video? Those are your four options that you have right there. And in some cases, you're going to use all four to get a response. So that would be an example of follow, like, comment. Make a decision how to engage. Call, email, text, or send a LinkedIn message as an example or tweet at them, right. And so in terms of the frequency that you should do that, well we all know there's about seven touch points before you actually solicit a response from a customer. And so these methodologies that I just mentioned are just so super simple. But you wanna make sure that when you're following, liking, or commenting, that you're actually adding something of value. Something of value. We talked about that earlier. Or connecting. Or connecting someone. Or connecting. Let's do one more question. Thank you. I've been asked in discussion, can we outsource our LinkedIn management? Is it something practically possible to outsource your social media management or is it something that you have to do? So social media management is different than outsourcing your LinkedIn prospecting. Just to make sure we're clear, there's two different things here. Social media management is pushing content out to your network so they can see content in your feed. It's very important to understand, pushing content to nobody that's gonna listen produces no results. So you have to develop a prospecting cadence to connect with your targeted audience and your prospects. Now, LinkedIn prospecting, can you outsource that to somebody else? By LinkedIn's definitions of their terms and conditions, it is absolutely prohibited. Let me repeat that, prohibited. Anybody who logs into your account is prohibited by LinkedIn, other than yourself. However, are there services that are out there that people utilize and that work very very well? Yes. And do we know what those services are? Absolutely. You're welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn and follow up with me. But they are specifically prohibited by LinkedIn. But do they work really well? You're darn right they do. Alright, well let's hear it for Mario, A Party Without Pants. (applause) Thank you Shari. Thank you Mario. Thank you for being on Creative Live. And Mario will be around if you'd like to ask him some specific questions. But again, really what we're talking about is connecting. And there's many different ways to connect. There's many different ways to get with your prospect. And if you're watching in the studio audience, many of you, we've got several of you who filled out the quiz the Heart and Sell quiz to find out if when you connect, do you lead with empathy or competency? Now I don't mean in the beginning. I mean do you tend to be more empathetic or do you tend to have more courage? There's no right or wrong answer. And let me also tell you, it changes. I find for me, sometimes I feel like I'm being much nicer. I'm being much more like a Susie. And then other times, maybe I'm a little nervous. Something happens with my emotional state and I might ask for the money a little too early or a little too hard. So there's no hard and fast science to it. But I did want you to be able to take the quiz and then have the workbook to follow along. So, connecting. That's what we've just discussed. How to connect to build trust. And however you connect, whether it's online or offline, the whole goal at the beginning of any sales encounter. When we're talking about the call method. If you remember nothing else, remember connect. Lead with empathy. Before you ever try to sell anybody anything, make it about them, find a commonality, and make certain that you've got trust 'cause no trust, no sale.