Finding New Fixers
Crowdfunding is more about the crowd than it is about the funding.
This is part two on storytelling, you can read part one here.
Once you’ve practised weaving in the six storytelling Cs, you need to keep telling that story to as many folks and as varied an audience as possible.
The crucial thing about getting these elements woven into your story is that it can do two things:
Build a following
Diversify your following
If you imagine the “is there a doctor in the house” trope, the best way to ensure there is a doctor on hand is to fill the bus with as diverse a range of people as possible.
You need to build a diverse following of stakeholders. They don’t all have to be customers, or employees, or investors, they can just be interested folks who want you to succeed.
You don’t need everyone to commit, you just need them to want you to win for now.
McGraw-Hill Magazines
There was a great advert that ran in the 1950s which is still one of the best ways to explain this 65 years on.
Known as “The Man in the Chair”, this 1958 Business Week advert has stayed relevant for so long thanks to its simplicity and depth.
I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY.
I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S PRODUCT.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOUR COMPANY STANDS FOR.
I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S CUSTOMERS.
I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S RECORD.
I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S REPUTATION.
NOW - WHAT WAS IT YOU WANTED TO SELL ME?
Despite being written nearly half a century before the advent of social media, it captures that need to gain trust before trying to sell or engage.
When you need to get sales, you feel like there’s a need to cut to the chase, but sales is rarely as transactional as walking into a supermarket and buying a banana.
Martyn Baker wrote a great piece on this. Why do we try to close sales in the first meeting?
Martyn is an exceptional story-based sales expert, and his model perfectly encapsulates the need to be patient and build the trust in the sales process.
Your goal with every interaction is not to rush to the end, but to take the next step.
It’s more like snakes and ladders, or a cha cha, two steps forward and one step back. The step back doesn’t have to be seen as a set back, it’s just part of the dance.
Being able to deal with this disappointment and getting back up is a vital way to develop the resilience required to start a new organisation that will thrive.
You don’t go on a first date and propose there and then. You don’t assume that every date will be successful and you know that committing to the wrong partner isn’t good for either of you.
Of course, you don’t want to get to the alter and realise they were never going to commit - so you have to keep savvy.
Sales, relationship building, and stakeholder engagement can be the same thing.
Selling to the right customers is much more rewarding in time than hard selling to the wrong people. If you rely on word of mouth, as near every small or growing business does, then you need a high proportion of your customers and partners to be singing your praises as often as possible.
Bad customers - or perhaps bad-fit customers - don’t do this, and become a time sink in countless other ways.
Ecosystems
You need to give a lot of thought to the ecosystems you need around you to succeed.
Customers are one group that enable you to do what you do, but you likely have a range of other stakeholders around you that you indirectly (and often directly) rely on to do what you do.
If you’re doing a Business Model Canvas then this is the section where you’d list your key partners.
When we’re going into a new area we complete a comprehensive ecosystem mapping exercise.
We look at ten areas that play an active role in what we’re hoping to build and what our community will rely on.
These ten areas are:
Business support programmes
Public sector
Investors/funders
Media & press
Community groups
Professional services
Education, HE & FE
Established businesses
Startups & freelancers
Networks/associations
We list all of the organisations in these sections, whether local, regional, or national. The next step is to colour code them based on the current relationship that we have with them.
Finally we look at how we think these relationships might develop - what exactly are we asking for (if anything) and how will it play out.
If we can actively build this rather than assuming it will passively happen we can turbocharge our chances of success.
Ecosystems can enable so much more than we can achieve in isolation. You need to find the people who have the same goals and ambitions and shift the narrative away from competitive to collaborative.
I’ll write more about this in a future post, but this can be harder in some ecosystems where there are established patterns of mistrust and cynicism.
This is where the previous section comes back into play. You can’t assume people are going to give you their full faith at the first engagement.
They might see you as a threat, they might have been burned before, they might not see their role in the bigger picture immediately.
Don’t let ecosystem development become a passive endeavour. Let the compound interest build by constantly investing into it.
Social Selling
You don’t build community on social media by selling with every post and tweet. Social media is not a billboard, it’s a place to converse.
I’ll talk more in the future about reciprocity, but this has another role to play in simply getting the algorithms to work.
If you only ever see ads and salesy content then chances are you’ll soon disengage. That decreases the likelihood of any future content getting a second chance to make a good impression.
Your social strategy has to be social in nature.
More able folks than I have made the case for this elsewhere, but it’s an important thing to remember if you’re trying to build a long-term strategy.
This forms part of your effort to show the authenticity of the goal you’re pursuing.
Again, this isn’t just about sales. This helps you to recruit better, it helps you to get insight and guidance on your blindspots, and it can improve idea flow and information sharing. It can also help with gossip, which I’ll talk about in a future post but is a vitally important and under-appreciated social lubricant (sorry if this phrase causes ick).
Part three comes next week and focuses more on this in the context of crowdfunding.
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