Personal Experience vs Personalization Across the Buyer Journey

By Mary Matton on October 13, 2020

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In this episode of Office Hours, MK meets with Samantha Stone, Founder & CMO at The Marketing Advisory Network, to discuss the impact personalization has on delivering a Personal Experience throughout the buyer’s journey.

Transcription

MK: So those of you that are just dialing in and joining us, thank you so much for joining for another live episode of office hours. So office hours is a series dedicated for folks like me, who didn’t have a great time learning in a formal learning capacity, but really found that value of learning in between your class sessions by getting to talk to your professors one-on-one. I am thrilled to be able to host today’s guest Samantha Stone, to talk to us about the difference between being personal and personalization across the buyer’s journey. Samantha, thank you. And I’ll tell him to clarify it is Samantha right? Not Sam, right?

Samantha: It is Samantha. Thank you for asking as well.

MK: I always get clarification on my name. M K as well too, but. I imagine there’s a story behind the difference that the name, the name you now go by with Samantha instead of the Sam.

Samantha: Yeah. You know, um, it’s, it’s funny that you should ask. Cause it’s one of those very personal things.

I really think names, um, you know, when we’re born, we’re given a name. And are parents you think, generally speaking, give you a name that they like and somehow is meaningful to them. And I happened to be given given Samantha and I actually likes me at the quite a lot, but it wasn’t, you know, I didn’t pick, pick that now, but as we get older, we actually get to.

Um, take names that are meaningful to us. Sometimes it’s our full name or version of our name, or sometimes it’s totally different. And as we get older, those, we get to pick a name that’s meaningful to us and Samantha’s meaningful to me up. You know, it really derived out of being a young woman working professionally way over my head, to be honest.

So when I first went into the workforce, I was Sam. I was Sam my whole life. My dad called me Sam, my. Mom and my friends, I was always Sam. And so when I went to work, I was sent people, call me Sam, and I thought nothing of it. It was just something that went along with it. And I kind of like it because it made me feel a little.

Um, stronger. I don’t know something about Sam made me feel a little less feminine and a little bit bolder because one syllable, one word, right? Yeah, I get it. I get it two years old with no experience in these meetings. Like with this job, I was super lucky to have, and people were giving me this camp, but I, I wanted to be bigger and bolder and older and more.

Experience and everything that I did. So Sam was purposeful, but I kept going into all these meetings with people had, had an email and talked to, um, somebody had talked about me being there and I’d walk in the room and they’d, you know, variably, it was all men. And at some point soon after that meeting, I would get, everybody would look at me and go, so is, is your boss Sam coming?

Cause we’re waiting. And it would happen enough times for me to be like, timeout, Sam, what do you mean? Like, what are you talking about? And there wasn’t enough embarrassment actually in the room as a reaction to that comment. And it was sort of like, Oh, okay, well, you should have said something when you walked in the room.

And so I being who I am said enough of this, and that’s when I started really using Samantha and Samantha became, you know, what it is. And you know, sometimes people, I joke, you know, who really do know me, will you say, um, and I’m not offended by it, but I really do prefer Samantha and it’s purposeful and I chose it.

And so when I get a solicitation to me and somebody says Sam in it, I know they don’t know me. Like. It’s an instant flag to me. They think they’re being familiar. They’re think they’re trying to be personal, but they’ve actually missed the Mark because that Samantha is meaningful and important and it started for a really real reason.

MK: There are so many little tendrils of this that I want to acknowledge the first of which is reclaiming your position as a leader and being at the table with a female in a position of leadership and how few folks actually risk first off, weren’t even embarrassed or responded by the fact that they had like mislabeled the whole situation.

Um, I think that’s really important for you to have reclaimed if you will, the name’s Samantha and use that as a nod to the experience that you’ve gone through as a symbol of your strength. Um, but also now as a way to talk about like you, you don’t know me, if you’re calling me Sam and trying to iterate on this, what could be deemed as a personal moment, but ended up actually going in the completely wrong direction, completely wrong direction.

Samantha: Yeah, you might have one of those things where, when I, at the time, I’ll be honest, I sort of attributed to my age versus my gender. But then when the Sam versus Samantha thing kept coming, I’m like, no, this isn’t about me being young. This is about me being a woman and I need to change the dynamic. So there, um, going into the meeting, Expecting me and good or bad or indifferent, I’m going to call out the difference in how you perceive my voice in those meetings based on it.

And like, I was really lucky. Um, I didn’t know better. And so I, I didn’t know better and I didn’t care what other people thought. So, um, I felt comfortable doing that, but I know there’s an awful lot of people in the world who don’t feel comfortable in their voice and who won’t. Interrupted meetings say, Oh, I know not your fault, but I prefer Samantha.

MK: I I’m comfortable doing that. A lot of people aren’t. And so I, I really try very hard to, um, remember that right. When I’m interacting with other people. I need, when someone does that, they deny you, they call you Sam. They deny you that remembrance. They deny you that moment where you can really be your whole self and you can really bring with you that journey that you have been on.

Now, one thing I want to zoom in as well too, is that you said that some folks have reached out to you using Sam as a sense of familiarity as a sense of being personal, but it sounds like that’s just gone completely awry completely, right?

Samantha: Yeah. You know, it happens quite a lot actually way more than I would expect.

I think people see, I mean, I don’t use Sam anywhere you like, if you go to LinkedIn and Twitter or Facebook or presentation that I’m giving on stage or my book spine or an email signature, I do not use Sam. I always use Samantha. So anybody who has gotten me in their database has got to have Samantha in there.

That, that is the only name by which I use. And yet people will shorter just like David’s will be Dave and Stephen’s will be Steve. And I catch myself. My husband’s name is David and I only yell at them when I say David. Right? So like, I don’t want to say David to somebody because I’m like, now I’m mad at you.

And that comes through in my voice. And I have a, Steven has a son. Who’s not a Steve, right? He’s not a Steve. And he’s a Stephen and that’s, you know, how he prefers to be competition. So we, I think sometimes people are doing it out of goodness in the Hartley. Like they’re not trying to annoy me. They’re, they’re trying to do what they think is right.

And maybe they know us, Samantha who likes Sam or they’ve, you know, it’s a common thing, but it backfired because if I am not using it in my profiles, There’s really no reason a stranger who’s never met me before should assume that they know how I like to be spoken to assume what I wrote was the correct thing.

Yes. And make the assumption, what I put out there and it happens. It really happens all the time. At least three or four times a week. I’ll get an unsolicited LinkedIn note. I get. Invited to meetings all the time. When people say Sam, what’s your thought? And well, I’m actually not Sam, but let’s keep going.

MK: Well, of course, correct. Which so I’m sure folks are like, is this a podcast or an episode just about how Samantha Stone and not Sam, I promise you we’re all building to a point. And the point being actually you pointedly stated it earlier is the fact that despite someone’s intention. Despite the fact that someone had good, good intention was that they were trying to do.

They inadvertently took a personalization. They took a moment where they could have been personal and use that personalization as a way to actually alienate you. Instead of actually getting closer to you. It’s a perfect way to think about today’s episode of office hours, where personal and personalization are not the same thing.

Now the suffix at the end of personalization or personalized means a cross set. And when you build a process into being personal, you lose this layer of authenticity and relate-ability and what you’re trying to do to establish a bunch of establishing really good relationships. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that differentiation between personal lives and personalization.

First is personal. You, you literally wrote the book and personalization.

Samantha: So I think there’s a really important distinction. First of all, let me just say both are good. I don’t think personalization is bad, but sometimes when we talk about it, it, it comes up with negative connotations. Personalization is a way to proxy understanding the person that I’m communicating with and my audience and responding to them in a way.

The problem is that we have defined personalization as copy and paste. Take industry, name, company, name, abbreviation insert here. And that we have defined personalization is, is doing that because that’s the easy thing to do. It’s also the wrong thing to do. Personalization. The process piece of this is really on how we segment our audience to say, who would be interested in this white paper?

Let me not just tell everybody, let me find the segment of people who have given me a signal that’s personalization. It might be. I come to my website. And the page of information on displayed is different because of the company’s IP address I’m coming from. Now, it worked when we were back in our home offices, a little less and less, I’m sure.

Dialing in on my VPN now. Right. But it is a way to say, Oh, I recognize you’re from this company. This company is a customer of ours. So I’m going to treat you differently than. If you were a prospect, who’s not bought our product before. That’s the process part of personalization. It’s really important. And it’s hard to do.

Personal is something completely different and you personal, you cannot scale and automate personal is something where you really understand the person that I’m talking to. And you know, that Samantha is more important than Sam, right? It’s not that I. Have on my LinkedIn profile, this cracks me up. So I took a leadership course at Bentley and that is on my LinkedIn profile.

And I get all these Bentley alum communications. I’m in a Bentley alum, I took one six week class. They, they tried personalization, but they failed because they didn’t take the time to look at what it said. They just saw the logo of a college and they said: you must have this personal association with it.

Well, like don’t have a personal association, a personal association with Trinity college where I went for four years. And if you looked at my LinkedIn profile, you would see that that’s the difference between personalization and personal to me. And it takes a different type of effort. And it’s really about who I am as a, as a person.

It’s not about flags that I might easily be able to see.

MK: Yeah, I think that’s a very clear and important distinction that we make that personalization was meant to help us be set up, to be actually faster and more efficient at our jobs. It was never meant to replace authenticity in being personal and as one-to-one as possible and making the blanketed assumption that someone’s, you know, Alma mater on their LinkedIn profile is what they live and breathe now.

In this household, we do tend to be my Alma mater was the Ohio state. So we, my partner went to Iowa state. So she does have an allegiance to that. So, but that said just because our household has that type of allegiance, that our Alma mater doesn’t necessarily mean. Everybody has that type of thing. The affiliation with the, where they went to school and granted I’m dating.

Like I went to school a long time ago, so. I went longer ago than that. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that today you’re still as passionate about fording, you know, the colors of your school and that the pride in your school. Um, but I L I love the way that you’ve, you’ve really framed this for folks that are on the line.

Um, I just want to send a reminder to everybody. If you do have a question, feel free, add it to the chat. I know we have quite a few folks dialing in today, uh, who are BDRs or looking for help and assistance on being more personable and using personalization to help you be more efficient with your outreach.

But if you have questions for Samantha, I please fire away in the chat. Um, But what I want to dive in a little bit more on that concept of personalization. Um, and when you’ve seen someone use personalization to deliver a personal moment when they’ve really just nailed it, like they have put in the time and energy and effort to know you, and that has actually been fruitful for their outreach attempts.

Samantha: Yeah, I’ll give you a good example of just this week, two contrasting communications that I received either. So, so one worked beautiful and it came in this morning and I was begrudgingly going through my LinkedIn messages and I was full quite candidly of a lot of garbage.

Um, and then I got this message that, and it was someone who had read my book and all their message said was, Hey, I love your book so much I bought it for my boss and they told me who their boss was and what their role was. That’s what made the difference. It wasn’t. I could, they really had, I knew they had read it. They had told me who they were going to share it with. No, I’m not going to go call that person and bug that person.

It’s not, that’s not what this is about, but I, it was a sincere, they found something that was important to me and they reached out and they express that. Right. It doesn’t always have to be deep in meaty and, and secretive. Right. I put this book in the world for people to read it. Yeah, the, and, and what I liked about their note, wasn’t just that they, they read it, but that it, it moved them to do something.

So when, when we, when we’re out in the world and we’re sharing an update on, you know, Facebook or LinkedIn or somewhere else, and I, you know, maybe I let folks know that I was coming to this. Uh, discussion today, right? I want to know how it moved them. I tell me you registered. Don’t tell me I saw that and, you know, great job.

Well sure. Great jobs are nice, but it was that moment of I did something with the information. It spurred me to take action that I thought was really personal and really great. I contrast that to another message that I received that needed attempt to do what I think most people think of as personalization.

And they were inviting me to a podcast and frankly, they were inviting me to a podcast. That’s probably a good fit for me. And probably something that, you know, I, I don’t really need to do, but I would maybe benefit from. And they started off with, you know, hello, Samantha. They used my proper full name

and then they said, Hey, I loved your podcast. You did on. And they listed the name of the podcast and they linked to it. Okay. They didn’t really they’re linking to my podcast, which means they probably haven’t listed to it. They didn’t call out a single thing about it that did anything. They just took a name because they wanted to be personalized and we think you’d be a great guest for, and they put the link to their podcast.

It was such a missed opportunity. They was so close. All they had to do is demonstrate that they particular episode of the podcast they heard. What did I say on that episode? That caught your attention. That sounded like I might be a good guest for the podcast. You’re inviting me to, it was clear. They’d followed a formula.

It said, dear name, insert somewhere. You saw them. We think you would be a good guest. Here’s all about us. Yup. Right. And they didn’t even at that point, even talk at all about why that audience would be useful to me and why I might be interested in their audience and et cetera, et cetera. I only know it was a good fit because I then, because I like to have walls of shame to remind me what not to do, went and looked up the podcast and like looked it up, but it was like, It was a formula.

You can’t use formulas to be personal. It’s just doesn’t work. Their intention was so close to good, but they blew it and this other, no, totally got my attention. We had a really interesting couple exchange back and forth and I sincerely will open the messages. Next message. That person sends me now because I felt like they at least attempted to get to know me.

MK: And what was important. Yeah. I mean, what’s so clear to me between these two examples. Um, in addition to the framework and the formula, I definitely want to zoom in on that as well, too, but is this concept of like hidden agenda underneath it, all the person who nailed it in this situation didn’t have a hidden agenda.

They were complimentary, they were engaging. They wanted to start a really authentic relatable conversation with you. Now the person who failed it in contrast to the person who nailed it, they clearly had a hidden agenda and it wasn’t even that hidden to be hiding it very well. Yes. And if that, and that’s okay to have an agenda when you’re trying to reach out to someone, but you also, then if you are going to reach out to someone, have a what’s in it for them mindset, what is the value of us interacting in this moment?

What is the value on the other side of having completed the podcast, the meeting, the details of the next step in our conversation, whatever that might be what’s on the other side. So that’s the agenda. Isn’t hidden, but it’s also very clear to the person what they will get in exchange for the most valuable commodity any of us have today, which is time.

If I could add more days and hours in the day, like, please. Thank you. Be great. Precious.

Samantha: That would be a very different conversation and I I’d want to have it. Um, if you figure that out, you know, I, I think it comes down to something really simple as, um, we have to play for the long game. What we want is a relationship with the person we’re reaching out to what we think we want is a, is a meeting for 15 minutes to meet some checkbox of, I scheduled so many meetings today, but it’s not what we want.

You don’t want a meeting. You want a relationship. And if we. Plan our outreach around a relationship with someone instead of around a meeting. When you do have a meeting, if you have a meeting, it’s going to be much better. I promise it’s going to be far more effective, far more useful, far more likely to share information.

That’s going to be useful and effective for you. So sure. We all have an agenda. We’re all out there trying to grow our businesses or get to know somebody new or whatever it is that we might be, um, selling. Right. But if, if, if that’s the purpose, we’ve missed the chance to be personal, because it’s been just all about my purpose.

MK: You know, it’s such an important point that you say you, you have to play the long game. Um, and for context, too, for everybody on the line, the BDR team, this actually sits under marketing. And it’s such an important moment in our relationship with our customers that we really think through what is that first.

Person to person interaction going to look like. And so for me, I always am really intrigued by organizations who hire really young, maybe inexperienced, that doesn’t have the professional depth that other employees might have into these BDR business development roles. When in reality, they own such an important and pivotal moment in the relationship that you’re trying to build with the folks you want to do business with.

Um, W, you know, I I’d love to hear your thoughts around that and playing the long game for folks on how playing the long game and being able to walk away from frameworks so that we get more personal and used personalized and personalization to help with some of the efficiency side of things, but not make sure that that first interaction goes over.

Samantha: You know, they have, BDRs have some of the hardest jobs. I actually, my very first. What I would call real Lish job out of college was doing door to door sales. I was literally knocking on people’s door trying to sell something. And so I really understand the challenge of what they do, but they are the front door to our brand.

They are the first interaction of what they do and we give them. The worst tool as an industry. Like not necessarily MKU and me personally, but like as an industry, marketers, we don’t arm the team well, and we don’t arm the team. Well, for a couple of reasons, one is we usually measure them by short term metrics that is all about that volume of activity.

And so we measure them by something that isn’t a little bit in contrast to what actually is going to make them good. And then we. We hurts them by giving them templates. We think we’re helping. We give them like, here’s your LinkedIn email introduction, template, art, art. We want to be nice. We’re trying to be helpful.

And our spirit is that they will use that to be a jumping off point in, in person, make it personal for the person they’re reaching out to, but it doesn’t work that way. It always comes across as a formula. We’ve all gotten so good. At okay. I know whose LinkedIn invitations has declined. Cause I know they’re going to be pitching me for a meeting and I test my theory, my, my, how well I’m doing this every once in a while.

And I like let people in that I know are going to do it just to see if my odds are right. And every time no one disappoints me, they keep doing it. It drives me crazy. Right. And it’s, it’s because they’re, they’re thinking about not the relationship, not the friendship that I want. I mean, it’s almost like a friendship, right.

That I’m trying to build with someone, if I want a business relationship in today in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic. Right. And if you weren’t already empathetic to buyers and wanting to have some connection to people outside of just the, what we do. This is going to push you over the edge. People need it, we need that connection and we needed it before, but now you, you can’t have it any other way, right?

We just don’t have the mind space for annoyance. And so we’ve got to get better at this. We’ve got to help those folks really it’s. I would rather my BDR spend, make 10 phone calls in a day that result in three phenomenal conversations. Then make a hundred phone calls in a day and get them all wrong. And that’s the trade-off.

I mean, you have to have some level of volume. I get it. I really do. I run a business. I really do understand I’ve run very large BDR teams at past lives that I’ve had. So I understand there’s some level of volume, but we can’t trade off scale for quality and BDRs are the key to quality and to personal.

They’re the only ones that can dig in and understand the person you’re reaching out to and make that connection for us. I love that as well, too. The cult there’s so many like blowing my mind right now. So the first thing is you have to approach your work. If you are a BDR, uh, with empathy, you have to understand that you have to care about the person, not the persona that you’re going after in your outreach.

The second thing that I think you’re, you’re saying in disguise is that managers, managers, leaders in the BDR organization have an obligation. To look for qualitative measurements of success. There are tools out there where you can look at the quality of conversation that people are having on the phone and reward that behavior instead of thriving activity at volume-based metrics for your team as well too.

MK: Um, I see, we got a question in from Katie. Katie asks, love the inside and playing for the long game. How do you balance this with needing to hit the volumes executive of BDR it’s stainless all this time and. From my perspective. I think a lot of that falls on the manager to reward and incentivize quality.

Samantha: Um, so that volume isn’t the only do North star that you’re going after. But how you’re getting to your goals, you’ve got to have meetings booked. You gotta have meetings. Held stick rates are really important. Yeah, but I’m trying to find it to be on a Megan insurer to actually find an alternative route to the volume game.

Uh, if you have the PR person who’s telling you that, like I can do this qualitatively, not quantitatively, you know, it’s, it’s really easy. And it’s so easy. We miss this. I don’t care how many phone calls you make. I care how many meetings you set up and if you’re measuring the impact, where are you in the BDR group?

I said that exact same line. It’s it’s true. And so, you know, if we measure the impact and not the, how we get there, because some people need to make 5,000 phone calls to do it. That’s their model. That’s how they operate. That’s their, their style. That’s, what’s going to work for them. Some people are going to have two conversations that just totally crushed it, but their mind is all on those two conversations and they’re studious and they’re analytical and it takes forever to prep full if they’re okay.

It’s, there’s not, we’ve treated BDRs. Like there’s this one way. Of being successful and yet not only are they all individual humans who have their own processes and things, they’re talking to bunches of different humans. So if we only have one type of BDR that does one type of thing, you will only appeal to a segment of the audience.

You’re trying to capture who likes that. Everybody else goes away. My favorite BDR of all time ever. Who was it attended? Today’s call. I worked with directly. Thank you for that directly. Um, she was. Of a grandmother who was like, had no idea about technology and saw this. She was the most successful. And you know why?

Because people don’t hang up on grandma. And so she had a grandma voice and she used it and she was slow and sweet and the opposite of me and like every way shape, if I cheat drove me crazy, I couldn’t have a meeting with this woman. Like she drove me crazy. It’s like, you cannot call me. But she was fantastic at the people she connected with that she, she built this relationship with and we have to remember that and, and we have to remind people that they have to do that.

So to me, the balances. You measure the impact. We also have to remember that this is a game of building a pipeline, just like we build a pipeline for sales, you have to build a pipeline, so you can have consistent predictable performance for your activities as a BDR. So your first couple of months, it’s going to be hard it’s because you don’t have any pipeline.

You’re starting from scratch and there’s not much you can do about that except hustle. And. Learn and practice and talk to a whole bunch of people and make a whole bunch of mistakes. But once you get a couple months in now, you start to build that pipeline of people that I can go back to. And I don’t have to call them this week and get a meeting this week.

Cause I have 10 people that I met a month ago that said, call me back in a month. That’s how we get to volume is by building up that pipeline, not by creating fake urgency. On our time line. Yes, please. Thank you again. There’s that hidden agenda. There’s something that’s disingenuous and people are now conditioned to be able to sniff out when someone has that hidden agenda has something else up their sleeve.

MK: One thing that I really want to highlight here for those on the call is that BDR superpowers, but not all of us have this advantage of being an adorable woman who had his tone of voice comes across with the elderly who can build really good relationships. But if you’re a dynamite subject line writer, hone that craft, if you know how to graph that first opening line, when you get someone like someone on the line, Double down on that, figure out that’s your super power and use that super power to your advantage.

To your point, the point to take practice, you’re going to need to refine and figure out and identify. And ideally you have a manager who’s invested in your personal success who can help aluminate your super power can give you visibility into that, but you have to understand what that, that BDR superpower is of yours and know when to pick it up.

No one to use it to your advantage as well too.

Samantha: Yeah, absolutely. I’m so glad that you said that because if there, there, isn’t a way of doing this, we’ve got to figure out what your strengths, just like everything in our life and our work, what are we leaning? Like we spent all of our schooling learning what we’re bad at.

I think school is designed to school just to do that. Even from like, I wasn’t really good student, but just because I learn in the way that school was designed for. Right. I’m actually not that smart. I just. It worked for me. Right. So I, you know, but. We learned, we learned what we were bad at. And then we honed in the opposite happens when you go to work, all of a sudden, when you become a BDR or a marketer or sales salesperson, or you found a company, or you do anything else, you now get to lean in on your strengths.

And then you have a team of people that you work with that compliment you. And it is a wonderfully rewarding thing, but we forget that sometimes. And we fixate on. I’m not very good at. Um, you know, math, right? So I don’t calculate my forecast correctly, maybe. Right. Or I’m not really good at subject lines.

So my open rate drops fine, buddy, up with the person who’s great at writing subject lines. You’re great at something that they are not and figure out how you compliment each other and work together. I think that is such great advice. Barter your skills. If you will help each other out there, we want to be the right.

Should be a team sport. But we don’t treat it like that. We treat it as an extremely competitive type of scenario when it really should be about surrounding the audience and working together and figuring out how we lift each other up.

MK: I love that. I mean it’s and on that note right there, lift each other up.

BDR is a team sport, right? Personalization is a way for you to develop a framework so that you can spend the rest of your time being. Personal, would you say that’s the right way to be thinking about personalization and personal? Uh, on a scale, a sliding scale, a hundred percent personalization works when we don’t know much about somebody, right.

When they don’t have a relationship with us, it is the tool that we can use to start to build up enough to earn the right to be personal. We’ve got to earn that right. And we do that by getting to know you that’s exactly the correct way of looking at it. And if you’re a BDR and you’re looking at your role and be using personalization to drive your efficiency and velocity, and you’re selling.

And you’re looking for those moments to be personal. The key is to hone in on that BDR superpower so that your personalization can be more expeditious, but you can use your superpower to be more and more and more and more personal. Every time you have honestly, the privilege of getting to interact with someone you want to do business with.

Samantha: Yeah. And you know, you really can’t fake this. This is something that you can’t pretend. I cannot go and spend a lot of people like I’m going to spend a half hour this morning. I’m going to go through my list. I’m going to look in, and I’m going to insert sports team. I’m going to insert city. I was living in, I’m going to, and that’s not going to work.

It’s, it’s a place to start. And you know, it’s, uh, it’s a better than nothing, but it more often and fails and it succeeded. You really need to care about the people that you’re reaching out to. Empathy and authenticity, those two ingredients combined with personalization at the bright time person know that the right moment, uh, and using your BDR superpower as a mechanism to get that done all, knowing that you have to be empathetic and authentic in the work that you’re trying to do.

Here’s my here’s what I remember. Just one quick thing. And then I let you wrap up because this is the most important advice. Ever for BDRs that I’ve ever really buried the headline on this one. It’s not like it’s not, but this is the really important thing you want to remember that every single person that you’re reaching out to, whether it’s a phone call, you’re having a meeting or I’m sending a note someday in a month from now in three years from now in 10 years from now, you’re going to want to reach out to them again.

And how do you want them to remember you? And that if you go into every outreach, thinking that I’m going to want to reach out to this person way past when this campaign is over. Yeah, it’s going to change how you interact with them. Yeah. And that will serve you well, because it promise someday in your career in some other jobs that you may have, you’re probably going to circle back around I’ve people in my world today that maybe I haven’t talked to for 10 years, but all of a sudden I’m doing a piece of research and their opinion would be perfect for it.

And I want them to fill out a survey and I, because I’ve fostered that relationship, I send them a note and I have like a 60% hit rate. Right. Uh, people who then did the research, right. Who are busy, who I haven’t talked to in 10 years. I just want to remind you of those things, right. Because I carefully crafted that relationship and I’m careful what I put in front of them.

MK: I love this. My dad always says your network is your net worth. And you thinking about playing the long game as you’re in business development. That’s the key. You’re not thinking about long game of like, after that deal is closed one. You’re not even thinking about that. And for new, all that comes up that you were thinking long longterm, I will eventually be in touch with this person because let’s face it.

Our world are all really smart. Tam is pretty much all the same as one another at this point in time. So you will more than likely interact with someone much later on down the line. Oh, I love it. Thank you so so much, Samantha, it was such a pleasure to just riff with you on these ideas about how personalization is a framework person know is about being empathetic and authentic, and that you need to use your BDR superpower to be able to get that authenticity and empathy in front of the folks you want to do business with.

Thank you so much for your insights and for teaching us this today and office hours.

Samantha: Thank you for having me. This was a great conversation.

MK: I mean, just, we just try to do what we can do the best we can out here. It’s my favorite dialed in for those of you that dialed in. Thank you so much for joining us live, but those of you that are watching on demand, if you have any questions, how can they get in touch with you, Samantha?

Samantha: Ideally not using the word Sam on a message. Send me a LinkedIn. Isn’t it really easy way to get ahead. Told me you can just go to Samantha Stone. I’m in LinkedIn, also marketing advisory network.com, easy ways to phone numbers and things. Um, and you know, call me Samantha and show me, you have a question and then I’m going to be the first to respond, right?

Like don’t reference Bentley. Yeah, Bentley’s not important to me. And I know that I live in Boston, but I really don’t care about the red Sox. And I’m sorry, I’ve not, you know, I know that offends a lot of people, but I just not a baseball person. I’m with you on that one. It’s a little slow for me as well.

MK: But again, thank you so much for joining us on office hours and I’d love to bring you back on another episode in the future. Maybe we talk about gender bias in the workplace. I don’t know that’s me. I’d like that. Yeah. Um, so thank you so much, everybody for dialed in. Thank you so much. We’ll talk to you soon and join us next week on another live episode of office hours.

Bye!