You’d be hard pressed to find an SE who thought they didn’t have enough work to do. We’re all short on time for keeping touch points with our customers and looking for ways to reach farther. I covered this conceptually with communications platforms. Today I want to highlight a particularly effective piece of content you can create for that platform—the standing tech briefing.
These go by a couple names including tech fest, lunch and learn, birds of a feather, etc. The general idea is that you are committing to host a reoccurring series of meetings for your customers where attendance and agenda are not restricted to a single customer.
You might, for example, host a weekly meeting where you provide a free, one-hour training for an issue you had to overcome, or a new product feature, or an analysis of the latest computer virus that will wipe us out.
Your goal in all this is to build credibility in yourself & company, foster a sense of community around your solutions, and keep your customer relationships alive in a scalable/sustainable fashion. Easy enough right?
Actually this is a tough one to swallow. You have logistics, communications, content creation, and delivery. In all it probably takes 4 hours per session on average, more at first. But, if you compare that to making several phone calls plus 1 hour meetings to cover these subjects with potential individual prospects, you can start to see where you get your time back plus some.
So, how do you go about getting started:
- First, you need to have your communications platform in place
- Begin with an attainable goal, maybe 1 session per month for the first quarter
- Write down your first 3 talks, put some thought into the titles and make them catchy
- Socialize your plan with your manager and reps after you have ideas for the first 3 talks. You need their buy in because this takes time away from their specific selling activities
- Get their suggestions for potential topics
- Ask them to help you market it. Good attendance early on (i.e. social proof) is critical in building attendance longer term
- If you have a local office, take advantage of it and invite local prospects to attend in person. Offer food.
- Keep the published session to an hour including Q&A
- Ask your manager and reps to attend. Get their feedback
- Include your peers and partner community
After your first few sessions, you’ll likely be in that place where it’s not yet a habit (i.e. it still feels like a chore) and the value is questionable (i.e. you haven’t reached critical mass). Use the lessons learned to improve. If you can manage 1 session every 2 weeks try it. Push through for a second quarter before making a final decision. I think you’ll be happy with the results.
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For folks already doing this, I’d love to collect your tips for an advanced posting on the subject at a later date.
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