Let's be honest: the internet is a mess. It's hard for buyers to find unbiased and accurate recommendations for new solutions. This is why buyers have turned to niche communities, and you see a new Slack community popping up every week. Buyers are trying to tap into folks they trust for recommendations and help. Cliff shared smart strategies to tap into these niche communities for growth as a seller. Here are four things that stood out to me:
00:00:00] Taylor Wells: Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to this week's GTN News Show. In this episode, I'm highlighting a conversation I had with Cliff Simon. He came on a recent event I did and talked about community led growth and really how can you as a seller tap into niche communities. It's very similar to social selling, but the idea really is is how do you really tap into communities that your ideal customer is hanging out in, and provide value, build those relationships over a long period of time.
[00:00:31] Taylor Wells: So So that could be Slack groups. That could be obviously in person events. That could be Facebook groups. Whatever it is. Wherever your your customers are hanging out your potential customers are hanging out, You go there.
[00:00:41] Taylor Wells: You provide value. You don't sell, but you build those relationships. You give first through these communities. The key in these communities And what Cliff will talk about is ultimately giving first. Right?
[00:00:51] Taylor Wells: You can't go in there and try to sell. It's a great way to get kicked out of those communities, That's a great way to have a reputation of somebody that's just trying to sell versus building those relationships. So let's jump in. Let's Thanks for coming on. You're gonna be talking to us all about how to tap into niche communities.
00:01:08 Building Revenue with Niche Private Communities
[00:01:08] Taylor Wells: And, even Mandy was talking about maybe more of the macro communities, the large communities, social selling on Like LinkedIn, Cliff, you're gonna kinda bring us some insights into how to build, drive revenue with tapping into more of the niche kind of private communities. So lay out for us, Cliff. Thanks for coming on.
[00:01:25] Cliff Simon: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. My name's Cliff. I'm the CRO at Caribina Group, and, We've grown pretty substantially over the last few years focusing on that community led growth motion.
[00:01:37] Cliff Simon: A lot of that shows up in places like Slack nowadays, but this is not something that's, like, brand new. Right? I this this stuff I was doing Years ago, pre pandemic, yeah, showing up locally. Right? Typically at those, conferences.
[00:01:52] Cliff Simon: And if your company wouldn't pay people to go to the conference, it was Showing up at the bars and restaurants and their places and sniping the people that had the appropriate badge rate. Building authentic relationships with people, getting to know them. Now that we're in a post pandemic world, we do that in places like Thursday night sales and sales assembly and pavilion and rev ops coop and rev genius and whiz ops and on and on and on and on. The secret to that is showing up consistently And actually building relationships. I think all too often, people are very willing to go into these places to try to reach some type of Commercial reward, but don't realize that no one wants to be sold to.
[00:02:35] Cliff Simon: Right? So you have to show up consistently with empathy, be helpful, And actually provide value to the community. And by doing so, you start building a brand. People start knowing you. And you start generating the word-of-mouth and referral business that so often drives most b to c brands.
[00:02:54] Cliff Simon: Right. There's definitely this undercurrent with the b to b of folks wanting to get there. And I think we've seen a lot of that over the last few years. Email is becoming really difficult as Jesse's talked about. Outbound is something that most people aren't well trained on, and there's still a lot of need for that.
[00:03:11] Cliff Simon: Social selling is still I think in its infancy, there's there's a lot going on. You need to be able to reach people and build those relationships, and that's what really drives the business. And that's what health care have been under so quickly over the last few years.
00:03:25 Building long-term relationships and driving revenue through authentic engagement
[00:03:25] Taylor Wells: That's great, Cliff. So it sounds like, obviously, finding those communities where Your ICP, your ideal customer profile lives, engaging with them authentically with empathy. How about some practical things? What does it look like? Answering questions, Getting on a 1 on 1 call and providing value, no pitching.
[00:03:41] Taylor Wells: Tell me about your your thoughts and and what what have you seen has worked to build those long term relationships and in Drive Revenue.
[00:03:50] Cliff Simon: Yeah. No pitching. 100%. Right? With places like Pavilion and Wizz ops, you know, the way we leaned in originally and Where I leaned in originally was, you know, I've come from almost 2 decades of go to market experience, varying industries.
[00:04:04] Cliff Simon: I blame and just offer advice. It wasn't a hey. I'm gonna solve this problem for you. It was I've seen has sort of dealt with it in x, y, or z fashion before. I'm happy to workshop that idea with you and See if we can help you come to a conclusion and, you know, we'll meet each other in the process.
[00:04:20] Cliff Simon: And it was never asking, oh, we do this, not, or we can build this rule. What that ended up turning into was people being interested in reciprocating. Maybe they didn't listen. That was they they asked at the end of the conversation that was inevitably deep. What can we do for you?
[00:04:38] Cliff Simon: I'm like, well, If you know anyone that needs help with rev ops, if you could remember my name, that'd be fantastic. And I can tell you the amount of times that folks have reached back out 3 months later, 4 months later, I just had one speech 18 months later. Right. And so these things Do it the right way. It's about building a relationship between people like people, and good things do come.
[00:05:03] Cliff Simon: If you're looking for really practical ways to go in and do it, Slack has a fake keyword notification. You can go under the preferences, set up your keyword, And you can switch into those keywords when they show up. Right? It it's super super straightforward to point where I was booking an average 83 meetings on using the tech. Very easy.
[00:05:28] Cliff Simon: If you want me to show you how to do a tick So you do that coupled with a a DM and yeah. Again, you're not asking for time. You're you're offering your your expertise and your help. Don't go in there selling. Yeah.
[00:05:44] Cliff Simon: There's nothing that'll ruin your personal brand and your image first.
[00:05:49] Taylor Wells: I love it, Cliff. And any advice you have? So I know there's a lot of situations where, I think about I know a lot of folks are in the cybersecurity industry that are on this, event, and they may be an account executive, and they're selling to, you know, a CISO, you know, chief information security officer. And, there's they're they're they may be asking really technical questions. How do you navigate when they're asking a question that's beyond maybe your expertise?
[00:06:15] Taylor Wells: How do you bridge that gap? Do you bring in resources? Do you find somebody that's the expert. Any thoughts there for the I know it's kind of a unique situation, but, any thoughts there?
[00:06:26] Cliff Simon: So what I would say to that in any situation is You should be sliding to learn all of those answers. If you want to be the expert and have your customers and And folks in the community see you as an expert, you need to take the time to actually put in a look. Right? This is not an overnight thing. Right?
[00:06:43] Cliff Simon: We had fantastic results in communities, but it took, On average, 4 to 5 months for us to get a first deal out of PMI, and then it started building up. The other thing to remember with this too is that it's not just digital. Everyone seems to be going back to in person. All my CRO buddies who are having success right now on top of funnel, the majority of the deals are either coming from word-of-mouth Referral from people that they're meeting in person. Local events, dinners, conferences.
[00:07:11] Cliff Simon: So getting back out person and building human face to face connections. Really important. That's why I'm where I am today in at home in New York. Seeing folks. I'm gonna be in Scottsdale next week, seeing folks gonna be with San Francisco, maybe, because the face to face is so
[00:07:28] Taylor Wells: Love it, Cliff. Awesome. Any final thoughts in the next 30 seconds? Anything to leave folks with that we haven't covered?[00:07:33] Cliff Simon: I think the biggest thing is treat people the way you wanna be treated. Right? The golden rule exists for a reason. If you can remember once and to think long term, the the things that you do today, especially if you're early in your career, same thing. If you do things the right way and focus on a long term plan of success before we begin.
[00:07:55] Taylor Wells: love that. The golden rule. Yeah. I think that's, so powerful when when so much of, marketing and sales is Not that. Right?
[00:08:03] Taylor Wells: We're trying to, you know, hack our way into a meeting versus actually treating people how they wanted to be treated. So using some empathy. So cool, Cliff. Thanks so much for coming on. Safe travels.
[00:08:13] Taylor Wells: Really great insights. Talk to you soon.