Episode 88: Kimberly Weitkamp – Developing a Personal Approach to Audience Conversion

Kimberly Weitkamp  0:00  

Making sales social to me means just kind of like having the right mindset and reminding yourself that each sale is an actual person. And it’s not just about whatever it is that you’re selling, but it’s also about how it is that you’re providing a solution for a problem they have and how your solution is going to help them improve their life.

Bob Woods  0:17  

Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast, featuring the top voices in sales and marketing. Join hosts Brynne Tillman and Bill McCormick as they discuss the best tips and strategies they are teaching their clients so you and leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Here are your hosts Brynne Tillman and Bill McCormick.

Bill McCormick  0:55  

Welcome to Making Sales Social. I’m Bill McCormick.

Brynne Tillman  0:58  

I’m Brynne Tillman.

Bill McCormick  0:59  

So Brynne, who’s joining us today?

Brynne Tillman  1:00  

I have my new friend Kimberly Weitkamp who is an incredible marketer in audience conversion. We met through JVMM, which is a joint venture group. And I think we hit it off, at least from my perspective, right away, and I’m excited to have her join us. Kimberly, if you could say hello, and introduce yourself.

Kimberly Weitkamp  1:19  

Hello, and I’ll introduce myself. Hi, everyone. As Brynne mentioned, I’m a marketing strategist and a copywriter. And my whole focus is on just helping people kind of bring in the right people for their communities and for their audiences, and then lead them to the right conversion that’s right for both their clients and of course, for themselves.

Bill McCormick  1:39  

Questions are rolling in (unintelligible). So but before we get to those, Kimberly, we asked every guest the same first question, what does making sales social mean to you?

Kimberly Weitkamp  1:46  

Such a great question. And I knew this because I listened for a couple of episodes beforehand. Making sales social to me means just kind of like having the right mindset and reminding yourself that each sale is an actual person. And it’s not just about whatever it is that you’re selling but it’s also about how it is that you’re providing a solution for a problem they have, and how your solution is going to help and improve their life. 

I know in the world of marketing and sales, it’s really easy to get kind of lost in the numbers. Well, you need x number of people to get to X number of people to, you know, to convert x number of people to get X number of sales but that kind of makes us forget that we’re working with real-life people who have real-life lives, and real-life problems. And the reason why we got started in the first place was to help and improve that perspective for people.

Bill McCormick  2:32  

Great answer. I love the human-to-human point of view. And it’s so important, and especially in marketing, you can really kind of get lost in the numbers, because, right? You’re really talking a numbers game with marketing, you know, let’s see how much money we can throw up against the wall and see what sticks. So let’s talk a little bit about that from a numbers point standpoint, when you’re devising a marketing strategy, how do you make sure that you’re considering the individual, but then also building in such a level that it’s going to reach the masses?

Kimberly Weitkamp  3:08  

That’s a great question and it’s something that I try and remind my clients of a lot. No matter what marketing method you’re using, if you’re using old school marketing, like newspapers and magazines, if you’re using online, if you’re doing ads, whatever that is, we always forget that, yes, it’s a mass method in which we’re communicating with a lot of people but the reality is, is that each person is experiencing that individually. So while we are making a message that goes out to a lot of people, on the other end, one person at a time is interacting and experiencing that. 

So in terms of marketing and creating a strategy, really, what you need to do is hone in on that exact right person to be talking with. So many of us, when we talk about marketing, we talk about the mass approach. We’re worried about, “Well, I want to make sure I appeal to the most people,” and that doesn’t work and it’s actually detrimental to us. So the idea is really taking the time to sit down and decide, “Well, what does my ideal client look like?” And not just who is that person but who are they to me as well? How do I want to work with them? How do I want to communicate with them? What does that relationship look like? Because it’s your business and you get to decide who you’re going to work with. And so it’s important to take the time to figure out not only who is it that you want to serve and what does that look like but also what’s the reciprocal relationship?

Brynne Tillman  4:27  

I love that and you know, it’s interesting because, I’m going to go back to kind of, Bill touched on this and you touched on this, when we think of marketing, we think of one too many, and we think of funnels, and we think of like, you know, throw a ton out there, a few people will engage and then we lead score them and we bring them down to you know, a point when they meet certain criteria. Now, we’ll go to the one-on-one. As a marketer, how do you fight that?

Kimberly Weitkamp  4:57  

How do you fight the approach of lead scoring, if you will?

Brynne Tillman  5:00  

Yeah, like that idea of I just want to get, you know, for us, we’re sales, we focus on sales, we do so much one to one, everything we do is — well, not everything, but an enormous amount of what we do is about getting it into the inbox and engaging with someone individually based on who they are. I mean, we do a lot, I shouldn’t say, because we do a lot of one too many with videos and content but when it comes to creating opportunities, it’s really in the inbox, it’s really on the one-on-one. 

So as you teach your clients to convert their audience, how do you scale it on a personal level? I have so many questions I’m trying to get, like, How do I hone this in? But ultimately, how do you fight, you know, that these are human beings, not just leads? And how do you fight the getting it through the “seven layers of funnel before I’m willing to talk to them” kind of mentality?

Kimberly Weitkamp  5:54  

Completely. It’s a great question. The way I kind of fight that — I’m also really focused on email and being in the inbox, but of course, in a marketing perspective, and the way I kind of combat that, if you will, is it starts with knowing your audience, right? Who are you talking to? And literally having someone in mind every time you sit down to work on that marketing piece. Not a, “Oh, here’s my avatar,” but like an actual person, especially if you’ve worked with somebody who is a great fit for that in the past. 

Okay, I’m writing this for, you know, Mary, she just came to me with this question about email marketing, about, you know, the importance of the subject line, and I was explaining to her, that it’s actually not the subject line, it’s the front line, and how do you make sure that when you hit someone’s inbox, you’re the important person? And one of the best methods I tell people is to use a “welcome series.”

So when you approach your marketing as a two-way conversation, even though they may not respond back, so you start with yourself, so you start sharing a little bit about yourself, making you a real person to them, which is why they’re going to stick around is why they’re going to stay interested. So you take your welcome series, which is the first few emails somebody receives, when they join your list in any way, shape, or form, and letting them know about you, why you’re doing what you’re doing, who you’re serving, how you can help people, and making you a real person as well, because oftentimes, if we get a ton of emails from somebody, it’s very much a, oh, here’s the next offer, here’s the next offer, here’s the next offer. And we forget why we were interested in that person in the first place.

Brynne Tillman  7:21  

Interesting. So you know, it’s funny, we talk a lot about you have to earn the right before someone’s going to care about you. Yes. So do you believe and if you don’t, I’m open to the conversation, that you have to bring value before you talk about yourself.

Kimberly Weitkamp  7:37  

So I think you can incorporate them. And I think that, you know, in the age of Google, literally any question you might have, somebody can turn to Google and ask and get an answer. But the reason why they’re gonna get advice and experience and be interested in working with you as opposed to somebody else is because of your approach, the way you talk about things and what you bring to the table. And often those things that we bring to the table, it has nothing to do with our knowledge or with our experience, it’s because of the way people like that we talk or because they like that I’m a hockey fan, or that I love sci-fi, or that I’ll talk about my travel stories. So I think you can incorporate them from the beginning. 

So you know, when when I talk about welcome series, and when I teach it to my clients, I have them kind of balance it. So it’s like you balance what you’re talking about and connect that to your experience, connect that to what you’re currently doing and connect it to how you’re going to help other people because of who you are.

Brynne Tillman  8:31  

I love that. So just kind of talk a little bit about “welcome series.” Is this when someone opts in to something or what is welcome series mean to you?

Kimberly Weitkamp  8:40  

Yeah, so welcome series to me is, you know, there’s a lot of different ways for people to get into our world, right? Maybe we have 10 different lead magnets, right, that’s 10 different free downloads, or a checklist or whatever, for somebody to get into our world. So they get into our world with a bunch of different ways — summits, giveaways, a gift, whatever and that’s all they know about us, right? They know that we know this one particular thing, but there’s so much more that we can offer. 

So after they receive the gift, after they get the one particular thing, everybody gets the same welcome series, which is about five to seven emails. And the purpose of it is to build rapport, showcase who you are and who you serve, and how you’re going to help somebody with the big problem they came in with. So when I talk about that five to seven email series, yes, it’s your opportunity to build that connection. Because think about the last time you went on vacation, or you missed a day of work, or you came back from a three-day weekend, right? You skimmed through your inbox, and you didn’t read the subject lines first, what happens is you skim and you look at the names. “Oh, that person I want to stop. Now I’m gonna go look at the subject line and see if it’s relevant to me.”

So you want to be one of the people that people stop skipping for, whether it’s been an hour or a day or a week since they checked their inbox. And the way you do that is by quickly building a connection that people are like, “I like reading what they have to say they give me value and I’m interested.”

Brynne Tillman  9:57  

Interesting. What if it’s company-driven, like newsletter-driven versus one-on-one — can you, you can’t build rapport with a company, right? But can a company create some kind of connection or loyalty where it’s the logo coming into the inbox and not the human being?

Kimberly Weitkamp  10:15  

I absolutely think you can still build connection even as a company. One of the things I tell people is, you know, who is that person most likely to connect with, to interact with? So yes, you’re a company but do you have a sales team? Do you have a customer happiness team? Do you have a chief — hey, there are people, that’s exactly what they call them — a customer happiness chief (cross talk).

Brynne Tillman  10:37  

In fact, I think I’m going to change my title from CEO to customer happiness person.

Kimberly Weitkamp  10:46  

There you go. So they have somebody who represents that part of the company. And you write them as if it’s from that person, right? It needs to match their voice, but it also needs to match the company perspective. So you can still kind of share the background of the company and how the founders got into doing what they’re doing.

And here, “Let me point you to a couple of resources that the company has put out,” but it’s still more personal than, “Let me tell you about why my corporate environment is better than your corporate environment. And let me talk about how we can help you and we can do this and we can do that,” when it’s not really making a connection with your reader.

Bill McCormick  11:19  

I love this idea about like I can’t get past the idea of thinking it as a conversation. So we talk all the time about converting your LinkedIn connections and the conversations and that’s synchronous communication. And you know, even if you have to wait, we think of newsletters, we think of email really as asynchronous but if we can write it from a synchronous standpoint, have an idea of I’m going to write this email and expect a reply back. I love that idea. So give me some tips. 

A lot of our listeners are individual sales reps, they don’t have a large marketing team, or if they do, they’re far away. They’re not in the same building. So they’re writing their own copy, oftentimes, they’re maybe using an email client and sending out a newsletter. So what are some ideas, I was going to ask you a question about subject line, you shot that out of the water. So give me some ideas and give the audience some ideas, some things they can do to get their emails open better, and that they can write in a conversational way?

Kimberly Weitkamp  12:22  

Absolutely. So number one, I will actually answer your question about subject lines. And that is, the number one rule when it comes to subject lines is be interesting and be relevant. So when I say that, I mean, whatever you’re writing about, it needs to be related to what’s inside the message. Oftentimes, people take the approach of, “Oh, I gotta get this email open.” And then it has nothing to do with what’s inside. And what happens is it breaks the trust, and it creates this bad experience and you’re like “I feel duped, I feel horrible, I don’t really want to keep opening those messages.” 

So when I say be interesting and be relevant, it should be relevant and interesting and related to what’s inside. So as long as you’re doing that, you’re on the right approach, right. And so ideas for how to make it more conversational, one of my absolute favorite hacks is to talk into your phone or your computer. I’m a huge fan of Otter, otter.ai, you can get a free account, it’ll transcribe as you talk. And what you can do is just talk about the particular topic, just brainstorm out loud, into Otter, then take the transcript as your ugly rough draft and start editing. That’ll already sound more conversational because it’s a different part of the brain when you speak than when you write. 

Now, if you find it really hard to brainstorm for yourself, have a friend like hop on Zoom with you and ask you a couple of really pointed questions about your most common topics. And then you’re just gonna be talking with a friend. Again, same type of thing, connected to a transcription service, get that rough draft out of you. Another great way to make your stuff conversational, is short and sweet is better. Remember that over 50% of people are reading their emails on their phones. So even in a business environment, you know, the likelihood that it’s going to be on a mobile device, as opposed to on a laptop is pretty high. Now, they might go back later and read it on a laptop and like go to the article or whatever that you link to but the first instance is going to be on your phone. 

So if you write a really long sentence, or if you write three sentences, and it makes really long paragraph, it doesn’t look too bad on your computer but on your phone, it looks like a wall of text that looks like work, it looks difficult, and you’re like, “I’ll come back to it later.” But what happens is they’ll never come back to it. So aiming for short sentences, for lots of whitespace, for space between paragraphs, for breaking up literally every single idea so it’s one idea per sentence and per paragraph.

Brynne Tillman  14:38  

I love that. What do you think of the difference then between a simple text email in a newsletter that has images and buttons and, you know, visit my podcasts like ours, right? Like we’ve got like 20 things in a newsletter, right? Is that less effective than if we just sent a conversational email?

Kimberly Weitkamp  14:58  

It depends on your purpose. So oftentimes people will use a mix, like they’ll send a newsletter once a week or once every two weeks. And then they also send those just plain text emails. Something else to keep in mind is that a lot of people are able to turn on filters and spam filters, and they’re becoming more restrictive. So when you do things like embed gifts, use graphics use design of any kind, you might automatically get sent to promotional tab or to spam tab, if you’re not using plain text but you know, having gifts, having embedded videos, those can also have a really great conversion for you too because it’s something different. 

So it’s something you have to weigh but you know, the other thing that people do online, especially on mobile is they skim. So with the newsletter format, as long as you make each section very visible, you bold it, you put it on all caps, you center it, so that they can skim through the headlines and say, Okay, what’s relevant for me, they’re not necessarily going to read everything, but they will find what’s most relevant to them.

Brynne Tillman  15:53  

It’s good to know. All right.

Bill McCormick  15:54  

Really, really great stuff. I’m there’s so many different questions and ways to go, I think the email part is really important because of who we’re dealing with. So let’s talk about, let’s kind of shift gears a little bit and talk more marketing, marketing tools for individual contributors. So I’m a sales rep, I’m all on my own, what are some things that I can do to market myself, to market my offering that will set me apart that I don’t need a lot of time for? That’s the caveat.

Kimberly Weitkamp  16:25  

So number one, with the bullets, no matter what, if you get nothing else out of this conversation, is to be yourself. Anything and everything you do with your marketing needs to be yourself. You might be a representative for a particular company but the reason they’re going to talk to you, as opposed to the other 15,000 people who also represent that company, is because they like you. You’re interesting. So having a mix between the personal and whatever it is that you’re promoting is always really powerful. Having a strategy that includes consistency. I don’t care what platform you’re on, it does not matter. What matters is your people are on that platform, and you’re consistent with it. 

So if you use email, great. Then make sure if you tell people you’re going to message them once a week that you actually message them once a week. If you’re going to use going live on any platform, right, there’s like three of them, I can think of right now that have a live component. It’s the same time each week and letting people know about it beforehand is also really powerful. So if you know you’re going to go live on Facebook at 10 a.m., well, announcing it the day before or announcing it to other places saying,  “Hey, reminder, I’m going live at 10 a.m. This is what I’m talking about.” So having a plan in place of what you’re going to do as opposed to “Okay, it’s time for me to put my marketing out for today. Gee, I wonder what I’m talking about,” because then it’s not as connected. 

And of course, always having a call to action is important. Even if that call to action is literally, go check out the website or go read this article, or go book a call, it doesn’t matter what that call to action could be. You could even say, “Hey, go check out this past post so that you get everything that we’ve been talking about in this series of lives.” That’s fine, too but give people a next step. (Brynne: I love that.)

Bill McCormick  18:01  

And let me just throw all of our salespeople out there. She said a call to action, not a call to sell. (Kimberly: Exactly!) Not a call to pitch. It’s a call to action. You’re asking him to do something else. You’re asking him to take a next step. Remember, we want to work towards a conversation and it doesn’t have to be a pitch of a product or service.

Kimberly Weitkamp  18:20  

Absolutely! Because if you don’t tell people what’s next, they don’t know. They’ll be like, “Oh, I feel I’m filled. I’m done. Cool, nifty. That was an awesome live, it was great information.” Maybe they’re thinking they want to do something next, but they don’t know what those options are unless you tell them.

Bill McCormick  18:34  

Yeah, so we have to lead them and direct them and guide them. So, great stuff, Kimberly. Thank you so much. We’re kind of winding down now. So tell our listeners how they can connect with you and find out more about you.

Kimberly Weitkamp  18:47  

Absolutely. So I’m on LinkedIn, not very active, I’m sorry to say, but I am on LinkedIn, Kimberly Weitkamp. And also, if you are wanting to create your own welcome series, I’ve got a guide at theaudienceconverter.com/giveaway And that’s a guide on how to craft the perfect welcome series and it talks about the top tips that you need when writing your own.

Bill McCormick  19:07  

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much and listen folks, I hope you go back replay this. There’s some gems in there on how to write conversational emails, stuff about subject lines, stuff about how to do marketing if it’s just you, yourself and you — that doesn’t convert to me, myself, and I, doesn’t convert to… (Brynne: No.) Anyway, there’s great stuff in there and make sure you go to the link. We’ll have that in the show notes and work on your welcome series. 

So Amy Weitkamp, thank you so much for being with us here on Making Sales Social and for those of you watching and listening, thanks so much for tuning in. And as you’re out and about this week, don’t forget to make your sales social. Bye-bye, everyone.

Bob Woods  19:55  

Thanks for watching and join us again for more special guest instructors bringing you marketing, sales training, and social selling strategy that will set you apart. Hit the Subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social Podcast. Give this video a thumbs up and comment down below on what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.

Resources Mentioned:

• Otter
• Kimberly’s Welcome Series Guide Giveaway