You will be able to take real conversations through each step and record where they stall.
Open a spreadsheet and write down ten people who have engaged with you. That means someone who replied to one of your comments, commented on one of your posts, or viewed your profile after an exchange. Take most of them from the log you kept in lesson 3.3, A 15-minute daily engagement routine. You will follow these ten conversations for two weeks and use the steps from modules 3 and 4 to move each one forward. At the end you will know where your conversations go cold, and whether the connection note, the first message or the meeting suggestion is the step that isn't working.
Wei Ling's contacts run clinics. After a few weeks of the daily routine, about a dozen people had engaged with her comments. She had a few new connections, some message threads and two meetings in her calendar. She didn't know what had happened to the others. Some accepted her connection request and never answered a message. Some answered once and then stopped. She couldn't tell whether the problem was her connection notes, her first messages or her meeting suggestions. A tracker like the one below shows you which.
Give each person one row. Use six columns: name, how they first engaged, current stage, date of last move, what you last sent, and notes. Each person sits at one of four stages:
Commented: you have had a public exchange with the person. Connected: they accepted your connection request. Messaging: they replied to a direct message. Meeting booked: a meeting is scheduled.
Put each person at the stage they have reached today. Most of your ten will start at commented.
For each person, decide what the next step is, based on what you have learned about them so far. Someone who has engaged with you twice in public is ready for a connection request with a note about the conversation you shared, as covered in lesson 4.1, When to move from comment to direct message. Someone who accepted your request a few days ago gets a first message that carries on the same thread, as in lesson 4.2, The first direct message is about them. Someone who has described a problem you help with gets a meeting suggestion, as in lesson 4.3, Suggesting the meeting without the hard sell.
Move each person one step at a time, and only when the step fits. If someone is at connected, don't send them a meeting request in one message just because the two weeks are nearly up. A rushed step tells you nothing about whether the step itself works.
Update the row every time you send something. Change the stage if it has moved, enter the date, and write a few words on what you sent. If someone stops responding, leave them at their current stage and write in the notes that they stopped.
After two weeks, count how many people reached each stage. Then work out the drop between each pair of stages next to each other: how many people you lost, and what share of the earlier stage that is. The step with the biggest drop is your weakest step.
Wei Ling's tracker ended like this. All 10 people had commented. 7 accepted her connection request. 3 replied to her first message. 2 booked a meeting. From commented to connected she lost 3 of 10. From connected to messaging she lost 4 of 7, more than half. From messaging to meeting booked she lost 1 of 3. Her biggest drop, both in number of people and as a share, was between connecting and the first message.
Once you know your weakest step, read the "what you last sent" column for the people who dropped off there. The cause is usually in those messages.
When Wei Ling read hers, she found that all four people who never replied had received a first message ending with a link to an article and no question. The three who did reply had each been asked something about their clinic. Her change was to rewrite her first message so it always ends with a question about the reader's own clinic, and to put any article link second instead of leading with it. She wrote it as one line: every first message ends with a question about how their clinic handles the problem they discussed.
Change only one thing at a time. Then, the next time you run the tracker, you can tell whether that change helped. Some pointers on where to look: if few people accept your requests, look at your connection notes. If people message you happily but meetings don't follow, look at when and how you suggest the meeting.
Your weakest step may not be the same as someone else's. Arjun works in financial planning. His tracker showed that most people replied to his first messages, but few agreed to a meeting. When he read his meeting suggestions, he saw he had been offering "a chat about your financial plan", which sounded like a sales meeting. His change was to name the specific question each person had raised and offer 30 minutes on that question alone.
When you finish, you should have ten named people, each with their stage at the end of the two weeks, the date of their last move and what you last sent them. Under that, write the count at each stage, the step with the biggest drop, and one change for that step. If the change is to a message, include the rewritten message. The activity below asks you to run the two weeks and write that change.
Track ten conversations through each step for two weeks, then write one change for the step where most of them stalled.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).