Michelle breaks down why relationship marketing needs a totally different scorecard, using real examples (hello, bat colony email) that prove impact isn’t the same as reach.
Most marketing KPIs will tell you you’re “winning” while your best relationships quietly slip right past you. So are you measuring the stuff that actually moves people to action?
In this episode, Michelle breaks down why relationship marketing needs a totally different scorecard, using real examples (hello, bat colony email) that prove impact isn’t the same as reach. You’ll learn how to spot the leading signals and where real conversations are coming from, before you waste months chasing numbers that don’t convert. If you’ve been doing “all the right things” but can’t tell what’s truly working, this one will sharpen your instincts fast.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 plus years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence.
Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
When “Good Opportunities” Don’t Perform
And today we're going to start with a couple of examples, because it's kind of funny, you know, I just said we don't want to blindly follow someone else's strategy. Well, guess what? I ask you to relationship market because I believe in that as a strategy, especially if you're a service provider.
But if you don't know how to measure it, you're kind of blindly following my own strategy. So that's what we're going to talk about today. But before I get into it, a couple of example scenarios that happen in my business relatively frequently.
First one, I jump on podcasts pretty often. And more often than I would care to admit, if we're being honest, I will talk about business design, you know, on a decently sized show. And there will be a supportive host, a.k.a. I will get a great trust transfer out of it. We'll have a great conversation. It feels like it goes in a really strong direction. But what happens?
Again, more often than not than I would care to admit to it, a few folks reach out to me on LinkedIn, and that's about it. And so over time, my podcast strategy has become to do less and less of them. And when I do them, it's usually as a general kind of visibility thing.
And I don't really think about them as core to my relationship marketing strategy anymore. At the same time, I very often do small guest teaching gigs. And when I say small, I mean tiny, like the last one, six people showed up.
So a lot of times when we think about guest teaching or doing a webinar or speaking in front of an audience, you know, in our heads, we're thinking about 100,000 people, you know, certainly not six people. But what happened from that one? Five people showed up.
Five people reached out wanting to talk about working together. So given those scenarios and what I've kind of teased here, I've got a question for you. If you had only looked at those scenarios on the surface, if I had only said, hey, well-respected show, great audience, connected audience, I got to talk about business design, we really clicked, got a great trust transfer from the host, or guest teaching in front of five people, if I hadn't shared what happened after, which one of those would you have thought was the better opportunity?
Even within the world of relationship marketing, right? Which one felt like the better opportunity? And then before we answer that, here's another set of examples.
The Bat Colony Email vs. “Good” Emails
These are from my newsletter, right? So marketing that I do that's more on the traffic side of things, but I certainly think about it on the relationship side in terms of the mix of the different strategies that I'm doing. So a couple of different email examples of things that I've sent out.
And those of you who have been around here for a minute, you may be familiar with my famous bat colony email. And that's when I shared, this was a couple of summers ago now, thank goodness. But when I shared about a bat colony, I discovered was living in my attic.
It was a whole thing. I had to move out of my house for a week. But I wrote this email about how I had responded when I discovered that, and I first discovered it by bats flying through my living room.
And mostly it was a funny email because it was a sequence over strategy email where I described that I did everything in the complete wrong order in my panic. And then when I went back to think about it, I was like, oh, this is definitely sequence over strategy. I was just throwing a bunch of strategies at the wall, hoping these things would leave.
Because it was like 11 at night and I did not put any sequence behind it. So it was a funny email. It was obviously had some shock value when you discover that a bat colony is living in your attic.
But at the end of the day, it was a strong email. It had a really high open rate, which is great, but that's typical of my emails. But what was more interesting to me were the replies and not just the number of them, but the quality, what people said.
People weren't just writing back saying, ha ha, oh my gosh, that's terrible or whatever you would expect people to say when you're sharing that you discovered you had a bat colony in your attic. They were responding in really specific ways that told me they took the message in. Like they got the sequence over strategy message that I was trying to convey.
And then I think and I compare that to other emails that I've sent that maybe, you know, just announce a new podcast episode is live, or they're a little bit more teachy. And then I get into something and I try to explain to you how to do something. Those still have high open rates, right?
So if we're living in a traffic world where we're kind of tracking those types of numbers, they did well, but the replies were never as strong, right? I'll get one or two replies. And a lot of times those are quality, but nowhere near the quantity.
Or I'll just get a reply that says thank you for this. And that's not showing a ton of investment. And that's an interesting back and forth, right?
And what all these scenarios are starting to tell us a story about is how we measure relationship marketing and how measuring it usually looks a lot different than measuring traffic marketing, which means that if you are ever in a situation where you're trying to decide, hey, how do I measure if my relationship marketing is working so that I'm not just blindly following Michelle's strategy? How do I think about that? Because if you were to Google marketing KPIs, they're going to give you a lot of traffic ones.
Leading vs. Lagging Indicators
So let's dive in and talk about measurements, specifically what you should be paying attention to in order to know if your relationship marketing is working. Sometimes when you're doing all the right things, right, you're building relationships, you're showing up in the right rooms, you're having real conversations. Again, you're like, oh, I think this is working.
Like people seem to like me. But then again, we get into the traffic marketing measures. We decide this is almost like, you know, I talk about in relationship marketing that we have a bunch of referrals that we decide we need to market.
So we totally overcorrect. Same thing happens with measurement. We go from these moments of like, oh, yeah, I think people are liking me.
I think they're responding to my message. Until all of a sudden, gosh, I should measure this. So we overcorrect and start finding the common KPIs, like list growth, follower count, impressions, how many times did you post?
And the problem with that is that that stuff, it's playing numbers games. It's traffic marketing, right? That isn't counting any kind of quality of interaction.
That's just counting quantity. And did you reach the numbers? It's the numbers game of traffic marketing.
And we know relationship marketing is the opposite of that, right? Think back to the example up top about my guest teaching gig. I share examples like this one all the time, by the way, because I want you to realize that something's true.
By traffic standards, that was a disaster, right? Booking an audience to talk to six people, which I did recently, but also do frequently. That sounds like an author when no one shows up to their reading, right?
You see those kind of sad social media posts where they're sitting in an empty bookstore. But by relationship marketing standards, it's one of my best lead generation activities of the quarter. And I talk about it all the time.
I'm like, don't be as scared of a small audience if it's the right one. So again, like we want to make sure we have a measurement framework that actually fits because if I was using typical marketing KPIs, that would have been judged a disaster. And it was the most successful thing that I did and that I do each quarter.
So let's kind of start with the foundation in terms of how we think about measuring things. In any business, there are two kinds of metrics that I think about, leading indicators and lagging indicators. Leading indicators tell you what's coming.
They show like if your current activity is building towards results. They're often harder to see, but they are the most important thing to pay attention to if you kind of want to get ahead of problems than if you want to know where to double down. And then lagging indicators tell you what has already happened.
Those are things like revenue, conversion rate, how many clients did you sign, right? They're the scoreboard. And you need to watch it, but by the time you see a problem in your lagging indicator, you're usually pretty far behind and it's going to take a second to fix it.
And that's why we like to look at leading indicators because they catch problems sooner. So here's an analogy for anyone like me who's like been glued to the Olympics the last few weeks. A lagging indicator is did you win the gold medal or not?
A leading indicator is how your training times were like looking back in October, right? The training times are taking a dip. Then we probably shouldn't be shocked if you don't come home with gold.
But if the training times are looking out of this world and you're having a phenomenal training block, yeah, we can't control everything, but odds are a lot better that you're going to come home with the gold or with whatever your personal goal was. And so traffic marketing, it tends to produce these lagging indicators pretty fast, right? Because you post something, you send an email, you run an ad, you see clicks, you see the conversions, like the feedback loop is pretty short.
I will say that it's not as big of a problem if you're only tracking lagging indicators if you're doing traffic marketing. But relationship marketing has a longer feedback loop. Like it takes us a second to build these relationships and to get the system up and running.
And so that's why in relationship marketing, these leading indicators do matter more. Like they matter everywhere. I'm just a big fan of understanding your analytics.
So I'm never going to say that leading indicators don't matter in traffic, but in relationship they matter more because you need to know if the foundation is being built, right, before the results show up in your revenue. For example, you need to know, is your marketing message connecting with people? Is it causing the impact we need them to have?
Are you talking to the right people? Like all that stuff matters more because you don't want to go through cycles of it. It takes a lot of your time to relationship market.
You don't want to go through cycles of it without knowing. So now that we've talked about what leading and lagging indicators are and why you should be doing this, let's break it into what to actually track, okay? We're going to talk about leading and lagging.
What to Track in Relationship Marketing
So leading indicators, what do we want to think about? And this is, again, like Michelle, how do I measure relationship marketing success? This is the stuff that I look for.
Number one, if you are sending newsletters or you are posting like on LinkedIn or some other social media as part of your relationship marketing strategy, I want you to look for that post by content subject or message against sticky engagement. And this is the example I gave of the Bat Colony email versus the like announcing new podcast email, right? Sticky engagement means how are people responding and if they're not responding in generic ways, right?
So which topics are causing people to reach out to in really specific ways like that Bat Colony email and say, I got it. Like this just unlocked a whole new level of understanding for me versus somebody who's responding and being like, thanks, that's great. That is what you want to take a look at.
And you want to take a look at which types of emails or posts or messaging, and this is even true if you're out speaking, right? This doesn't have to just be content. If you're out speaking and you're doing a webinar or you do a workshop, which workshop topics cause people to come up to you afterwards with a really blown mind and a new level of understanding versus the ones that come up to you and are like, oh, thanks, we appreciate your time so much.
Those are different things. And that is not something that you can go back and like look up the number on your social media. You can't like go back and look up the number of likes and, you know, put that in your little spreadsheet.
Something you have to be aware of and you have to be looking at. And I don't mean you have to like have your phone out keeping a tally of each one of these if somebody is telling them to you, but you do need to be aware of it so that when you go back, you can say, did that get sticky engagement or did it not? And that's what you want to think about is were people engaging in it at the level where you were really delivering an impact or were they just being polite and thanking you for your time?
Again, kind of the generally useful, right? And then again, content type. So is your written content doing better than your video content doing better than your workshops and your guest teaching?
This is going to show you real fast where you can actually draw some impact. And this is why I talk a lot about not using social media as the way that you initially meet people because when I consistently track this across myself and my clients, what we see is that we get that sticky engagement when we're spending enough time with people. It's not because they read one post.
It's because we spent time with them. And so I would guess that if you're tracking this, you're going to see that time spent guest teaching or on podcasts is going to lead to better sticky engagement than time spent posting a social media video. And that's going to lead to better sticky engagement than, you know, just written content.
So that's why you hear me say, we're not going to meet people on social media. I don't want you to do that because I know that the analytics show, the leading indicators show that that is not going to stick with people in the way that actually going and spending time with them is. And then again, let's bring in the borrowed audience factor here, right?
Let's bring in that trust transfer. How is information that you are putting out via a borrowed audience being responded to versus information you're putting out on your own? And again, this is where all of my recommendations come from when I say when you're relationship marketing, you know, you don't want to be having people meet you on your own profile because we don't see the stickiness.
The leading indicators don't line up that that is as effective as going out and inserting yourself into where they already are. And then we can get into kind of, you know, lead sources by inquiry calls booked by lead source and taking a look at where are your people coming from? And this goes back to, again, like the examples of my borrowed audiences when I'm on a well-respected podcast versus teaching six people.
When I looked at lead source, I found that the well-respected podcast wasn't bringing in nearly as much, sometimes nothing, compared to five out of six people in a borrowed audience. And so there, right there, my leading indicators tell me go book more small audiences that you can spend time with because your conversion's going to be out of this world versus going for a numbers game. Your leading indicators tell you that stuff.
And that's why we want to be paying attention to those leading indicators because when you're looking at where are calls coming from, where are all those, you have time to course correct. You don't wait for it to get all the way to the end of the sales cycle, right? You know immediately after that.
You know immediately after that, hey, do I think that worked or not? I know immediately after, as soon as that podcast goes live, I know within like three hours, what kind of responses am I getting on LinkedIn. After guest teaching, I know within an hour what kind of response I'm getting.
So I don't yet know what's going to close, but I can watch and say like, oh, I can see which one had impact or not. So I'm not waiting until an entire cycle ends to maybe change up how I'm doing and thinking things. But there are also lagging indicators that we do want to pay attention to.
Like there is a scoreboard involved in this, right? Like you're in business, you need to make money, so we need to look at those conversions. And so when we start thinking about the results that show up for the relationship work and how could we figure out what to double down on, we ultimately do want to look at the scoreboard and what came in as a lagging indicator, what is concretely true about what happened once something got through an entire cycle.
And by that, right, we can look at new client conversion by channel. And by channel, I mean, how did you meet these people? Again, it's going back.
New client conversion by podcast appearance, by posting on social media if you're still doing that, by guest teaching, by all that. Look at where your clients are coming from. I know that sounds obvious, but wow, in the day-to-day of running a business, it can get lost.
And then you're also looking at current client retention. Are people sticking around? What was your experience working with them by channel, right?
Did you find better clients when you were doing one thing versus another? So we're talking about all the way at the end of the cycle, not even at the end of the sales cycle, but again, at the end of the working cycle, how did those clients pan out? Did you love them or not?
That can be a real lagging indicator telling you where to focus and what's working or not. Because you can say, oh wow, I spent some time doing this kind of marketing and people bought, but they just didn't end up being the right people. That's important to know.
Sales velocity is something that I consider a lagging indicator. What is sales velocity? Sales velocity is the time it takes from first contact to buying from you.
And so this is just how long are they in your marketing funnel, right? And what I find and what we want to see with relationship marketing is that sales happen relatively quickly. We don't want it taking six months or a year.
A lot of my clients, what we're aiming for and the natural patterns that I see is that there's usually one bump at around two weeks after meeting folks. And then there's another bump somewhere between like 30 to 90 days after they've gotten to know you. And that's where we want the bulk of the sales to come from.
So you can look at your sales velocity by channel and see are they matching those patterns? Or is it getting too dragged out? Because when it gets too dragged out, that's just going to be more inefficiency, more lost sales.
So that's a lagging indicator you can look at. We could also look at things like sales volume by channel. Again, we kind of talked around that.
And that's just making sure you know what percentage of your sales are coming from what lead source. And that's important to track. We're kind of tracking it individually by saying new client conversion by channel.
But then over time, over the course of six months or a quarter, whenever you're checking in on your revenue, just making sure, hey, where did that sales volume come from? What percentage is coming from where? And then same thing, kind of revenue by product line.
Those are all lagging indicators that you can take a look at and can confirm what you saw with the leading indicators. And when you put those things together, that's how you're measuring it and understanding whether or not it's working. And you're probably going to get some signals that look opposite of what Google's going to tell you when you ask what you should be looking for in KPIs.
Because all of that is, again, it's all numbers driven, and it's all based on traffic marketing mechanisms. And a lot of times what you're looking for in relationship marketing is the opposite. And it's not something that's easily, again, captured like on a spreadsheet.
You can't go have your assistant go back to all of your posts and write down how many likes it got, write down how many impressions it's got. That's not the game we're playing here. A lot of this has to come from your gut instinct of realizing what's happening.
Some of these lagging indicators an assistant can help you with, but a lot of those initial impression things, a lot of those leading indicators just require you to be paying attention to the minutiae and to what is happening from opportunity to opportunity and coming back afterwards and thinking about the different patterns and what worked and what didn't.
Putting It All Into Practice
Here's what I ultimately want you to take from this episode is that measuring relationship marketing, number one, it's not optional. We do need to measure it in the same way, even though it's a little bit more of a soft skill than traffic marketing.
We need to measure it, even though it can feel fuzzy, right? But you want to do that. You want to make sure your marketing is working.
And so think through these, get some high level stuff going. Think through, okay, like what are my leading indicators? What's one or two things I'm going to start paying attention to?
What are my lagging indicators? What's one or two things I'm going to start paying attention to? And then you will start getting in the habit.
You'll start seeing patterns really quickly and you can expand that and you can get some really great data to know if your relationship marketing is working and more importantly to know where you should double down with your time and your effort going forward because you will start seeing the patterns. You'll see the patterns like I have where I'm going to back away from podcasts a little bit because they just haven't been working in the way that they used to and I'm going to lean even harder into a lot of the guest teaching that I do because that's working like crazy. And when you can see those patterns, that's when you're not wasting time, you know, book in 10 podcasts a month.
And by the way, this is not a universal statement for a lot of my clients. Podcasts are still working really well. So this is not the takeaway I want you to take that podcasts are no longer working.
They absolutely are. Just for whatever reason for me, something is working a little better right now. So you need to find out what is true for you there.
Do not have the takeaway that podcasts no longer work because that would not be the correct one. Anyway, rant over. Just wanted to make sure I was clear about that.
So when you're tracking these things, you're going to see these patterns. And if you have an individual pattern like I do with the podcast versus the guest teaching, you'll be able to respond to that faster, waste less of your time. If you do have that pattern that I'm seeing, like I don't have to spend a lot of time every month now, like booking podcasts and looking for that.
Something comes along the way, I'm happy to do it still because I think it's fun and visibility and blah, blah, blah. But I'm not putting a ton of effort into that. Instead, I know where to put my effort into in other places.
And that's what I want you to take from this is that no, there are ways to measure this and it is good if you do so.
All right, friends. As always, thank you for being here.
If this episode helped you, I'd be so grateful if you shared it with someone else that it might help. If you'd love to review, that helps others find these episodes as well. And as always, you know, if you want to go deeper on the relationship building side of this, if you're still looking for how do I build the right network?
How do I think about this? I have some resources for you. There's a free training at themichellewarner.com/free training. That's going to walk you through all the network building piece of this. And if you're new to this podcast, you can always go to themichellewarner.com backslash podcast and scroll down to the bottom of the page and I have some specially curated playlists for you there where you can binge all the previous relationship marketing episodes I've done. Or if you happen to be a business design person, you can binge all those episodes.
But we tried to build some specially curated playlists there so you don't have to pick through all the episodes. Instead, we divvied it up for you so that, you know, you can quickly binge the episodes that are right for you.
All right, my friends. With that, I'm going to see you back here in two weeks and we're going to get into something else related to sequence over strategy because it never goes away. Sequence over strategy is always there. I will see you then.