In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner addresses this crucial question posed by Joy, a leadership coach looking to expand her practice to include an online course for emerging female leaders.
How do you take the 'ick' out of networking when you need to scale your business? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner addresses this crucial question posed by Joy, a leadership coach looking to expand her practice to include an online course for emerging female leaders. It all comes down to identifying ideal connection avatars and adapting your networking strategies to reach a larger audience. That way, you can leverage your existing skills for business growth. It’s Sequence over Strategy in building sustainable and successful businesses.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. For over 15 years now, and working with more than 1,000 clients, I've helped small businesses grow. And during all that time, I've noticed the same trend everywhere.
When business owners are confused, or they're not growing the way they want, they're actually all facing the same problem and trying to solve it in the same incorrect way, and they don't even realize what they're doing. So what are they doing? They're throwing out a bunch of popular tactics at their problems.
Maybe they're posting on social media a ton trying to grow followers, or releasing new products, hiring a bunch of new team members. Maybe they're raising prices, or lowering prices, or researching how to price things correctly. Maybe they're launching a podcast, a YouTube channel, or a podcast that's also a YouTube channel. I literally had one client tell me that a former coach said if she didn't post 15 times a day to LinkedIn, she would never get any clients.
Now listen, none of these things are inherently bad or wrong, except maybe the 15 posts per day thing. But all of these things ignore one foundational problem. A problem that if we just stopped to solve it, would help us build in a stable, steady way without all the noise or waste or frustration that we come all too familiar with as entrepreneurs.
Think about it.
Imagine building efficiently with less drama and more confidence. But as entrepreneurs, we've set ourselves up to fail at that most basic goal, no matter how good it sounds. And that's because we spend so much time throwing so many things at the wall, just waiting for something to stick, that it's hard to know why something sticks when it does, which makes it hard to repeat the wins. It also makes it hard to understand any losses. So unfortunately, in all that chaos of the day-to-day, it's way too easy to get lost trying to do all of the things. And when you do that, you're never going to build something sustainable and growing. You're never going to build a sturdy business.
And look, I get it. It's very tempting to look for the trends, the popular tactics, or the perfect playbook that can make it feel like you're in control and you have an instant winner. It's also very easy to throw that spaghetti at the wall. We've all done it. We've all been there. But the real skill we need to master is different. The real skill we need to master is taking a breath before making the throw to make sure we're asking the right questions first. If we did that, we'd realize an important thing. We'd realize that it's more important to figure out the right order for our actions than it is to take any action at all.
Yes, you heard me right. Rather than throw that spaghetti at the wall, rather than just taking a bunch of action, or rather than looking for a perfectly polished playbook, what we need the most is to understand sequence over strategy. That's the idea that it's more important to do things in the correct order than to do things correctly. I'm going to say that again.
It's more important to do things in the correct order than it is to do things correctly.
The perfect strategy for your pricing won't matter if you don't sell something people want. The perfect strategy for this podcast doesn't matter if I hadn't proven my ideas elsewhere or built a small audience of passionate supporters already. What you do next is the most important decision you can make right now.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy, a show about small business entrepreneurship. My goal on this show is to help you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than someone else's theoretical strategy. And I'm going to do it all so you can build a sustainable business that serves you for all the things that matter the most, your time, your energy, and your profit. In every episode, I'm going to answer a question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business.
Today’s Listener Question
Today's question comes from Joy Poole, who's a leadership coach.
“I completed your Networking That Pays course a couple of years ago and the results have been fantastic.”
Well, we love to hear that.
“I've built a really strong one-on-one coaching business by making meaningful connections. I still get the ick from networking. The question: I'm now expanding my practice to include an online course for emerging female leaders. I know I need to expand my audience in order to achieve my goals with this. What role does networking a.k.a. meaningful connections have to play here? I've used this approach to go deep with individuals, but it feels harder and less obvious to achieve scale through this approach.”
Thank you, Joy. Thank you for this question. And before I get into the answer, let's give everyone some context in case they don't know what you're referring to when you talk about Networking That Pays. And in order to do that, let's start with a story.
The Five Inch Stack
Back in the day when I was running a social impact startup, I did a lot of traveling and a lot of selling. And because of that, I was regularly upgraded to first class. And if you've ever had that experience, you know then that I was regularly seatmates with a lot of very stereotypical businessmen. And I clearly remember this one flight where I was upgraded.
I was heading home after sponsoring a conference in Washington, D.C. We'd had a booth in the exhibit hall for three days. And after those three days, I had a stack of business cards that were probably five to six inches thick of all the people that I had met at that event. And on the flight, I remember it was a Friday night, so I'm trying to get organized so that I can just get home and enjoy my weekend. And so, on this flight, I pull these cards out to kind of see what I had and just get them put away somewhere. And the very stereotypical salesman who is seated right next to me caught a glance at the size of that stack of business cards, and he said to me, wow, you had a great day.
And meanwhile, I'm staring at these cards thinking, what an incredible waste of time. I have no relationship with any of these people beyond the silly little reminder notes I wrote on these cards that tell me nothing. You know how when you're going to regular networking events, the big “tip” is to write something memorable about the person on the back of the card? Well, I had done that and it was getting me nowhere. I'm going to spend the next two weeks scheduling catch-up calls and wasting everybody's time.
And that, my friends, is why networking has the terrible reputation it does. Because done the way that 99% of people do it, it is terrible. It leads to these experiences. It's also a great example of the importance of doing things in the right order. Because when you don't, you find yourself sitting in first class with a million useless business cards in your hands. And this, again, is why networking has such a terrible reputation. I mean, even in this question, Joy says that for the last two years, she's gotten ick from networking, and so she's replaced it with meaningful connections. And that's because we don't approach networking in the right order.
There's nothing wrong with networking. It actually feels really great. And listen, this is coming from me. I'm a huge introvert. It feels great to do when you set things up in the right order. And that's why Networking That Pays exists. Networking That Pays is a self-paced course I offer that teaches you a simple system on how to network more strategically. We throw out every terrible networking stereotype and instead, by centering sequence over strategy, by thinking about things in the right order, we help you build a more intentional network and then teach you a simple system to keep that network active and working for you.
And I share all that because the answer to Joy's question lies in understanding some of the intentional networking basics I teach in the course. Here's how it works. Typical networking goes something like this. Everyone says you should network and you should make connections and you should meet people, but you don't really know what that means. So you do what everyone does. You go to some local event, or in my case I went to a big conference, or you log into LinkedIn and you start “meeting” people. But you have no idea who you should be meeting, so you just kind of meet anyone and everyone. I mean, within reason, of course, probably within your industry, or because they're connected to you in some way, or because they happen to self-choose to go to the same event as you. But this is still where it all goes wrong. because you and no one that you're talking to actually knows in any kind of specificity why you're talking to each other.
You're just connecting based on some random coincidence that happened, i.e. you're connected on LinkedIn, or you have mutual connections on LinkedIn, or you're in the same industry, or you're at the same event. Guess what? That is not specific enough of a reason for you to be connecting. And all that leads to wasted time and nothing accomplished. I mean, maybe there's occasionally a needle in a haystack moment where you meet someone fantastic under the system, but you're certainly not going to meet anybody in a sustainable way.
The Connection Avatar
And instead, what I teach in Networking That Pays is to first, right, here's the sequence, first, before you do any networking, identify someone I call your ideal connection avatar. And your ideal connection avatar is similar to your ideal client avatar or your client personas or whatever you may call them. But instead of clients, we're talking about who you want to connect with.
And think about this, because this may seem really obvious, but let me tell you, it is not. I promise you, it is shocking how many people, one question can't really give me a good answer to this next question. Why are you networking? What's the goal? And who can help you reach that goal? These are your ideal connection avatars. And when you don't know how to think about it strategically, this is when it falls apart, because you're going to answer me most likely in a very generic way. You're going to answer me and say, well, people who kind of do the same thing that I do, or people who fit this demographic, or something that doesn't really tell me that you know who you want to network with and why you want to network with them.
A lot of times I just hear, well, because I want to find clients. Well, yes, but you have to get a lot more specific about how your networking will lead to clients. Who exactly can you meet who's going to introduce you to clients and any kind of relatively regular schedule, right? And that's what the ideal connection avatar work helps you to do. It takes a very vague goal that everybody has, everybody kind of knows they should be networking, but you can't act on it. And it makes it more concrete so that you can act on it. And once you have those ideal connection avatars identified, that first step in the correct sequence, now you can go out and you can meet people who match that profile. Which, by the way, is why you need to be specific with your goal again, because once you've set that goal, you have to go out and find the people who match that goal.
And now notice this is the opposite of traditional networking, when you're trying to meet anyone and everyone and you're leaving with all these business cards. I screwed this up. When I went to that conference in DC, I didn't know who I was trying to meet. I thought I was trying to meet clients or network with people, but I wasn't specific with my goal. So what happened? I met everyone and everyone. And all that left me with was a five inch stack of business cards that I didn't know what to do with. And maybe there were some wonderful leads in there. We'll never find out because you can't follow up with that many people and you can't follow up with that many people in a meaningful way.
So instead, when you first get clear on exactly what type of person who can help, then you're able to go out and find those people. And when you first think through who you want to meet at the depth and specificity I teach in the course, you'll actually want to follow up with everyone you spend time with. This joy is the key to the meaningful connections leap that you have made. This is where we take it from networking to meaningful connections, because you will have curated those people to be the ones that make sense to build a relationship with, which means it's not awkward. When you have done the work to know very specifically who can help you and who you can help in return, there's very little that's awkward about meeting them. And again, this is coming from an introvert, so I promise you I'm not the biggest extrovert who can go have a conversation with just anybody.
It takes a lot, but why I think about networking in this way, why I was forced to think about networking in this way, was because it is awkward. If you're not meeting people without enough specificity to really know who they are, then it is really hard to build a relationship and maintain that relationship because you're keeping it at a real surface level and you don't have anything meaningful to talk about.
But when you do know who you should be connecting with, then ideas flow, collaborations, partnerships, all kinds of wonderful things flow because it just makes sense. It becomes much more aligned and way less cringeworthy. And that is what Networking That Pays teaches you to do. And again, it's what Joy is referring to here when she says she has built her practice making meaningful connections. Those connections would have been with her ideal connection avatars. And that is what has allowed it to really help her one-on-one practice thrive.
Because when you build relationships with the right people, they will allow you to grow, in Joy's case, grow your practice or grow whatever you are wanting to grow. And of course, you will return the favor and it will be a really great collaborative relationship. And listen, if you're not familiar with this Networking That Pays concept, and you're curious, we'll link to a free training in the show notes. And you can go find it right now at themichellewarner.com slash free training. And I go over a lot of these different concepts. And that's covered in Networking That Pays as well.
But what I really want you to understand today is this idea of the ideal connection avatar. And when we're talking about making meaningful connections, exactly what I mean by that. I do not mean normal networking. I mean taking a pause, centering sequence over strategy, and first doing the work of identifying who your ideal connection avatars are so that you can go meet the correct people. And here, this leads us to the heart of Joy's question. Because now that Joy wants to expand her business in a new way, she wants to achieve scale with this idea rather than one-on-one connections, rather than one-on-one coaching. And she's wondering how to do it. She's built this skill set and she's wondering how does she now apply that to a more scaled business as opposed to a one-on-one. It's a wonderful question and we're going to go back to the sequence over strategy process I just described to find the answer.
Advice for Joy
So Joy, let's talk specifically about how you can scale by breaking down your questions and finding answers to each part of it. So I'm going to repeat parts of your question and we'll go over it together. First you say, I completed your Networking That Pays course a couple of years ago and the results have been fantastic. I've built a really strong one-on-one coaching practice by making meaningful connections, even though I still get the ick from networking, so I've replaced it with this phrase. Again, this is wonderful. And what this tells me, why I'm repeating this portion of the question, it is because, Joy, it tells me that you have a skill set in place. And in a world where we worry about sequence over strategy, where we worry about doing things in the right order.
The first thing to worry about here is to know that you have the skill set to build these relationships. You don't have to go learn that. You have a skill set in place that you just want to apply to a different type of business model, right? You understand ideal connection avatars. Everything I was talking about earlier in the episode, you understand that. and you're able to find them and you're able to build relationships with them. That's what I hear when you tell me you have built really strong connections for your one-on-one coaching business.
Joy has completed step one, which is understanding ideal connection avatars and applying that and being able to build relationships from that. So well done there. And then we get into the question, right? I'm now expanding my business to include an online course for emerging female leaders. I know I need to expand my audience in order to achieve my goals with this. Okay, we have an expanding practice and this is the heart of the question. How do you take the skill set that you have developed and apply it to an expanding business? Well, what can we assume when you're expanding your practice?
There's a couple of things we need to break down here. Think back a few episodes ago when we talked about relationship and traffic marketing. And if we remember that relationship and traffic marketing continuum, that all marketing lies on a continuum and relationship marketing is on one extreme of it and traffic is on the other, it tells us that as you grow, you're going to be moving from a strict relationship marketing, I would almost say extreme relationship marketing model.
You're very much on the extreme side of that continuum where you're looking for low quantity, high quality, high conversion set of leads. and you're going to be sliding over, right? You're going to be sliding off of that extreme end of relationship marketing. You're probably going to still be on the relationship marketing half of the continuum, but maybe you're going to be halfway on that continuum, right? Halfway over to the midpoint of the entire continuum. You're going to be starting to creep your way over to some traffic.
And what do we know about what happens as you move along that continuum? What we know is that the most extreme end of that relationship marketing continuum lines up with low quantity of leads, high quality, and high conversion… AKA, you're not looking for a ton of leads because they're going to convert at really high rates. But as you move over to the traffic side, that starts to change.
You need more leads, and when you need more leads, what happens? They are going to likely be lower quality, which means you're going to have a slightly lower conversion. You're not moving all the way over to the far end of extreme traffic marketing, so you're not going to be hanging out in 0.5% or 1% conversion like businesses on the far end of traffic are, but you're going to be moving away from that 70, 80% conversion that is on that extreme side of relationship marketing.
And so you need to recognize that when you're looking at this scale, what's going to be happening is that you are going to need more leads. When you are looking for those leads, they're likely to be a lower quality, and you're going to have slightly lower conversion. So even though you may think you just need more leads because you're trying to fill a group program, so of course you need more leads than you would need if you're trying to fill one-on-one. That's just simple math.
But you're going to need even more leads because your conversion is also going to drop. And so what does that tell us? What does that mean for your marketing strategy? And more specifically, what does that mean for how you can apply and think about your ability to make meaningful connections to help you? As you say, what role does networking and meaningful connections have to play here? I've used this approach to go deep with individuals, but it feels harder, less obvious to achieve scale through this approach.
Well Joy, I have good news. It's not harder or less obvious. You're going to be asking your networking and meaningful connections to play the same role. It doesn't get a new job within your marketing spectrum. It doesn't get a new job there. All it does is it gets a new ideal connection avatar to represent the new place that we just described your business is going to be on that marketing continuum.
Let's go back in order here. Number one, let's remind ourselves you built a skill to support your one-on-one business and it worked. That is a huge win. So number two, now that you have a new offer and with that offer, you know that your marketing alignment is going to shift from that extreme side of the relationship continuum to something that is moving closer to the center of the continuum between relationship and traffic. And we know, we just said, what comes with that? What comes with that is the need for more leads. They're probably going to be of lower quality. And because of that, they're probably going to convert at lower numbers.
Okay, so what jobs do your meaningful connections play here? Like I said, they play the same job, but they get applied to a new definition of your network, because before you were probably building meaningful connections, aka your ideal connection avatars, were one-on-one connections who could send you direct one-on-one referrals, meaning these were people you were connecting with because they knew individuals who wanted one-on-one leadership coaching. Now that's going to be different.
Your ideal connection avatars are going to shift a little bit. They are now going to be people who can offer you a different kind of access and a different kind of audience. And we want that access and that audience to be more appropriate to the new place that your business is going to lie on the marketing continuum, aka needing more leads. So you're going to be looking for people who can offer you an audience of some sort. And I put the audience in air quotes because we're not talking about thousands of people. But we are talking about meeting people one-on-one is no longer going to cut it.
So you have to look to see who has access to your audience in groups. Who can offer you an opportunity to meet with five, 10, or 20 of your great leads at once? Where can you go guest teach or present a webinar or be interviewed in front of a slightly larger audience, right? If you have been connecting with people who are sending you clients one by one, meaning you're connecting with your ideal connection avatars, you're telling them the type of clients that you are looking for, and they are essentially sending you referrals, That's a very one-by-one process and we need to change that to start moving into one-to-many.
So instead of talking to people who might be able to send you referrals, you want to talk to people who have a podcast, who maybe have some sort of mastermind group, who have some sort of group program, who have whatever where they can invite you in. They can invite you in and they can introduce you and offer you an opportunity to meet with a slightly larger group of people at a time so that you can find more leads. You can have more conversations and we can make the math work for the scale that you're looking for.
And so that's how you use your networking, is you're not looking to have conversations with each client who may come into a more scaled program. Instead, you want your networking and your meaningful connections to be focused on the people who can offer you opportunities to get in front of your clients, get in front of your new potential leads.
And when that happens, that's where we find scale. We're shifting the identity of the ideal connection avatar. So Joy, you are not throwing away the skill set. You're not doing anything other than asking your networking to do a slightly different job. And in order to do that slightly different job, you need to meet slightly different people. So you just need to shift who is in your network.
And since you have Networking That Pays, you can go in and look at all those great introduction strategies and find ways to meet those folks who you now need to meet so that the relationships you're building can offer you the opportunity to get in front of more people so that, again, your marketing math just works. That's all we're asking it to do. Exact same skill set, just applied to a different sort of person who can offer you access to a different sort of audience.
Okay, did we get all that? Let's review this in really simple terms and really step-by-step in terms of sequence over strategy, what we just talked about, because a lot of you are going to be facing similar things. And a lot of you are thinking about how do I build this? How do I scale? How do I get in front of audiences? And you start to go off the rails a little bit in terms of what your strategies are, when usually the same strategies that you have used to build a one-on-one practice can be applied to something that is more scalable and you don't need to throw out those skill sets that you have built.
So let's review. Number one, when you want to scale, you don't throw away your skill set. That ability to make meaningful connections, Joy, that is very very valuable. So we don't just throw that away because you don't see the obvious way in which it fits into a world of scale. Instead, you look at how you've been applying that skill set to date, which is to meet people who could introduce you to one-on-one clients, and you think about how you can adapt that.
And in this case, what needs adapting is the acknowledgement that with your shift along the marketing continuum from something that is really extremely on the relationship side to something that's a little more central, It means you just need to meet a different type of lead. And that means that the meaningful connections you're building, the ideal connection avatars you've identified, are likely going to change. And that's okay, and that's very normal. It means that you're going to build a new network. And you're going to look for people who can introduce you to larger audiences. Because the person who could introduce you to one-on-one clients is unlikely to be the same person who can introduce you to a larger audience.
And again, a caveat here, by larger audience, I do not mean hundreds or thousands of people. Some of the best opportunities here are someone who can put you in front of 5, 10, 20 very highly qualified people. That's what we're talking about. And so in order to scale, you change your ideal connection avatar and you begin building meaningful connections with the people who can introduce you to your new ideal client in the quantities that you need. And that's how you do it.
So this was a long way of saying, Joy, you have to change up your network. You have to go make some meaningful connections with new people who can fit the new needs of your business. And when you do that, then we get to keep the skill set that you have built. And it's a skill set that is so, so powerful for any business. And you had to keep that and you get to scale on that and build on that so that you can reach your goals for the growth of your business. And when you do follow up, let me know how it goes.
As always, I'll be back every other week with a new episode of Sequence Over Strategy, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. And if you'd like me to answer your question the same way I just answered Joy's in this podcast, head over to themichellewarner.com slash SOS for Sequence Over Strategy or just for help and tell me what you're wrestling with. I would so love to help you figure out an answer.
Resources
Networking That Pays