Posts tagged as:

conversation

Dave

One Message Does Not Fit All

Using conversation to recruit a blood donor for an appointment is more of an art than a science. You cannot just assume that you have found the method most effective to recruit donors and then stick with it for all donor types.

Just as it is critical for a blood center to know the type of blood they need, it’s critical for a donor recruitment professional to understand the type of donor they are speaking with and cater the conversation to that donor and their situation. There are parts of a recruitment conversation that are consistent regardless of the type of donor you are speaking with, like your intro and your closing statement for an appointment, but all of that conversation that occurs between the intro and the confirmation should be tailored to your specific donor type.

When speaking with a current donor, acknowledging that they are a regular donor, using language that lets them know you know they are familiar with the process, and acknowledging past donations and loyalty programs (if the blood center offers them) are all important parts to strengthening the relationship. If you are speaking to a lapsed donor, it’s critical to try to understand why they are a lapsed donor. What caused them to stop donating? At one point, they were donating, and now they have stopped. But why? If you really want to have a true conversation with that lapsed donor, you must understand why they do not donate now, and attempt to overcome that hurdle before you just try to push them into an appointment. Asking the right questions, asking them the right way, and then responding appropriately are key components to having a productive conversation with a lapsed donor.

A conversation that will drive meaningful results and strengthen the relationship between that donor and the blood center is always the goal. When a lapsed donor knows you are truly interested in them as a person and truly interested in helping them, they tend to be more willing to listen to your pitch and more willing to roll their sleeve up and try donating again. After all, at some point in time, they understood the benefit of donating and believed in the cause.

With a staff of real Conversational Marketing Experts (CMEs) and extensive recruitment training, you cannot only keep recruiting your current donor base with success, but you can reactivate your lapsed donor base and begin immediately putting more blood onto the shelves.

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Brian

Finding Common Ground

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve started a conversation with someone based on what’s on their t-shirt.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I am not one to judge a book by its cover, but when I see someone wearing something like a Radiohead t-shirt or any other band I like, I always have to say something.

How do you initiate a conversation?

This actually happened recently after I took a quick motorcycle ride to the local ice cream stand in town. When it comes to predictable weather patterns, it is safe to say Ohio should see a shrink, because it seems bipolar. It went from raining almost a week straight to a scorching 90-degree three-day stretch of which I was currently in the middle. The cure to beat the heat, you ask? That would be a 64-ounce Blue Moon milkshake.

After ordering my monstrously large dairy treat, I noticed that a guy in the group of people in line behind me was wearing a Radiohead t-shirt from their 2008 show at Blossom Music Center, one of the first real concerts I attended. A tiny bud of excitement burst, and almost instantaneously I blurted out, “Did you like their new album?” Low and behold, a conversation was started. We must have talked for about a half-hour, not only about the concert we both attended but about our musical tastes, jobs and multiple other interests. A great conversation with a stranger at a roadside ice cream stand started with finding common ground.

At Incept, when I’m recruiting blood donors, I try to use the exact same approach. Granted, I cannot see the person that I am talking with to tell them, “Hey, cool t-shirt.” Nonetheless, I can try to connect with them by being conversational and, in my short time on the phone with them, find common ground to strengthen the relationship. The short tale of a meeting of the musical-minded variety above is just one of the many different examples of finding commonalities with another person that lead to having productive conversations that produce meaningful results.

My challenges to you is to try to find someone randomly in public, and do what I did. Put your conversational skills to the test by trying to find something in common to talk about…

How do you attempt to break the ice when starting a conversation?

Photo Credit: http://www.whatupgoingon.com

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Stephanie

Interviewing: Getting to Better Know Your Clients And Their Needs

There’s more to interviewing than just looking for a new job.

Interviewing is a conversation – an investigation even – but we never stop and think about the mechanics of it. It’s not just about asking questions and receiving answers, but about reading between the lines and understanding what’s not being said.

Usually when you’re interviewing someone, you’re trying to learn more about them. When Incept interviews a client, we’re looking to better understand their needs. We want to ask them questions that show them as more than just a client or an account, but as a person. By focusing on their goals and concerns, it lets us help them on a more personal level. Their clients, concerns and goals become ours as well. Our goal is to become partners with our clients, not just their vendor.

What keeps a client up worrying at night can be a great indicator of something we can work to fix.

During the interviewing process, we want to ask questions that will elicit emotional responses. What are you excited about? What’s going well for you? What keeps you up at night? What are you least excited about for the coming year? These are all questions that will help us gain insight into who the client is and what’s important to them.

Most of the clients we work with are blood banks, so it’s important for us to remember that their clients are the hospitals and patients who need blood. By remembering that, it lets us focus on what’s most important: the patient receiving the blood. The client’s goals become our goals.

So the next time you’re at an interview or maybe interviewing someone yourself, think about what drives the interviewees. It’s a whole new perspective that will help you find the best way to work with them.

What are some things that you think about going into an interview?

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Stephanie

Interviewing the Incept Way: A Note on Conversations

Interviewing is starting a conversation with someone.

When I heard the word interview, I used to think only of the obvious meaning: dressing up and meeting with a potential employer in hopes of getting a new job. There’s a lot more to it than that.

Interviewing someone is starting a conversation. It’s getting to know them as a person and not just as a resume or a potential client. Here at Incept, we have the privilege of working with blood centers across the country, and each relationship with a client began with an interview.

When a blood center first contacts us to see if we can help them, we like to get to know them personally. I had a chance to sit down with our own interviewing expert, Billie Johnson, to ask her what she looks for when she’s working with a blood center.

Interviewing in person is the best way for Billie to get to know a blood center and identify their needs. By meeting face-to-face, she’s able to talk to them as an actual person and not just as a potential client or faceless file. Our goal is to become partners with the blood center, to care about their clients (the hospitals and patients that need the blood) as much as they do.

Billie says that it’s also important to speak the language. It wouldn’t help anyone if she went into the interview and only discussed right party contacts (RPCs) or used jargon that only made sense to someone who worked at Incept or in the telerecruitment field. By understanding a little about the blood bank industry and speaking the same lingo, she’s able to stay on the same page as the blood center and understand their goals and needs. After all, knowing the difference between an apheresis donation and a whole blood donation is very important!

The next thing Billie focuses on is identifying the areas in which a blood center might need help. In some cases, all that might be needed are thank-you calls or reminders. For other centers, however, it helps to have us call the donors to schedule appointments. Occasionally, a blood center doesn’t need help at all.

Summertime and around the holidays is when blood is needed the most. Fewer people donate at these times, and the amount of blood needed by hospitals increases, so it’s important that blood centers are able to provide their clients with the blood they so desperately need. For some centers, it’s easier to have us call for them during these busier times of the year.

Billie had a great analogy for this type of work: we’re like a faucet. When the holidays or summer approach, blood centers can turn us on, and we’ll be ready to help (in about 48 hours). When things start to go back to normal, and the blood shortages become more manageable, they can turn us off until they need us again.

By letting us make calls for them, the blood centers are able to free up some of their resources. Many centers pay their staff by the hour to make phone calls. Incept bills not by the hour but by the amount of blood that actually makes it into the center. It doesn’t matter if it takes an hour or three hours to get a donor to come in and donate successfully, the blood center only has to pay for the blood that actually comes in. This helps the center reduce the amount they have to spend to get the same results and frees up more of their resources to do what they do best: collect blood.

By working with us, blood centers are better able to reach out to their donors for their support. After all, working with blood centers and blood donors is what we do best here at Incept. We’re Conversational Marketing Experts (CMEs) for a reason. So give us a call, and see what Incept can do for you. We’d love to put your clients first.

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Stephen Smith

Community Management Tools of the Trade: The Whiteboard

I’ve talked before about the tools I use to execute the Incept social media plan, but as my position and responsibilities have evolved so have my preference of “go-to” tools.

I’ve moved away from Word documents and Excel spreadsheets (which still have their place, of course), and I’ve started to realize that being able to get hands-on with ideas instead of digitizing them really lets the creative floodgates open up.

The Changing Tide

The age of the social media guru is coming to an end, and the age of the community manager is fast approaching. For me, community management means a number of things. Most importantly, it means planning for the organic growth of a socially networked community.

You can talk all you want. You can pump out tweets faster than the competition. You can write blog posts that score above the fold on Google until the cows come home. However, if you don’t have a solid foundation laid for the community you are trying to build (and then rally to your cause), you’re going to fail, plain and simple.

Enter the Whiteboard

Enter my dear friend, the whiteboard. It never fails that every meeting I get involved in at work starts the same way: everyone sitting at the conference room table with documents neatly stacked in front of them, taking notes. They all end in the same way too: everyone up out of their chairs, leaning on cabinets, desks, etc. And there’s always someone standing at the whiteboard directing the symphony of brainstorming while making sure that only the best ideas stick.

The beautiful thing about brainstorming this way is that it’s all interchangeable. Ideas that don’t make the cut just get a swipe of your thumb, and they’re gone. You can make ideas that are important bigger than less important details. If you run onto a mental side street, you just grab another color out of the marker cup and allow your train of thought to run its course. Exploration is the key, as letting ideas flow freely allows our team to explore all of the options available to us. Then once we’ve narrowed everything down, we just organize it into some form of readable layout and snap a picture for reference.

The “Isn’t There an App for That?” Mentality

Right now, you might be thinking, “But Stephen, there has to be an easier way to do that!? There’s got to be software that can do that for me, right?!” My response is simple, “Why have the ‘There’s an App for that’ mentality?” What happens when you start digitizing the “think tank” is that you lose the human element that makes team brainstorming effective.

Community management is all about developing the human connection. Social media has the potential to build a wall around people, to make them feel as though they aren’t obligated to become involved. If things get too intense or require too much personal connection, they can always just close their browser window and forget it ever happened. Building a community online is about breaking down that wall and making people aware that the connection they share within their social media networks makes them a part of something more personal than they think.

If you plan a community without ever meeting in person, or sharing personal interactions or insights, you’re predisposed to creating a network that mirrors the model you used to build it – cold, lifeless and impersonal. Your community reflects the model you used to create it, so by meeting in person and brainstorming, you create a personal connection with the members of your team. That personal connection is going to be the foundation of your community.

And what better tool to use to organize your collective thoughts and ideas than a whiteboard? What tools do you use to plan your communities or projects?

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meredith

Live the Brand | How to Moderate a Meeting

At Incept, I’m part of the Live the Brand subcommittee, Learning Never Stops.

The group is made up of conversational marketing experts (CMEs), coaches, supervisors and Sam Falletta, President of Incept. We meet once a week to discuss how to help our fellow employees meet their personal and professional goals through education.

When I first joined the group, I assumed that Mr. Falletta would be leading our meetings. Instead, every week we take turns moderating. Almost everyone has had a turn so far, so I’ve been able to observe a half-dozen different leadership techniques.

The Incept Conference Room

Here are the top-5 ways to lead a meeting:

  1. Sit in the middle of the group. I mean that literally. In the Incept conference room, there is an oval table with black office chairs around it. A leader’s natural seat is at either end of the table – not physically above the group like a throne but slightly separate. I’ve noticed that the leaders in my committee purposefully sit in the middle chairs. This action communicates “I’m with you” rather than “I’m above you.”
  2. Begin and end the meeting on positive notes. The Live the Brand committee meetings start by sharing “Wows.” We go around the circle and everyone talks about a “wow” moment they had that week. Usually, we’re “wowed” by another employee who went above and beyond their job description. The meetings end with each member stating what they thought was the most productive part of the conversation and the most meaningful result. Then members pass out an Incept poker chip. The chips are given to fellow employees who did something that represented an Incept value. It’s a way to publicly reward exceptional work.
  3. Keep everyone on task. It’s always difficult to stay on topic, especially when the people in the meeting are friends you want to catch up with. The fact that they are friends can also make it harder to rein them in when they get off topic. It’s OK to let people inch from the main subject for a few minutes, but like any good shepherd leading sheep, a leader has to steer the conversation onto the most productive path.
  4. Summarize. Every few minutes, especially if you’re about to go to the next topic, make a decision or if everyone in the group has different opinions, be sure to summarize the discussion. Make a one-sentence statement that mentions what you’ve accomplished so far, what you still disagree on and what steps to take next.
  5. Ask questions. The moderator of a meeting has to always be prepared to ask questions. It could be a question to an individual group member to clarify what he or she is saying, or it could be a general question to keep the group thinking.

What additional advice do you have for moderating a meeting?

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meredith

The Importance of Being Objective During an Interview

Is the sky orange-yellow or yellow-orange?

Billie Johnson, Vice President of New Client Results at Incept, interviews blood banks to see if they would like to become partners.

She assesses their strengths, weaknesses and needs in a face-to-face roundtable discussion and interview, known as Incept Listen. One of the many things Billie has to keep in mind during the interview is remaining objective.

Objectivity can be defined as being “undistorted by emotion or personal bias.” Being objective is especially important for honest business practices, and there are five ways to remain objective in discussions like the ones Billie facilitates:

  1. Don’t assume. Everyone’s situation and opinion is different. Remember, even in a business situation, not every customer’s need is the same.
  2. Keep an open mind. You may be the one conducting the interview, but that doesn’t mean that the other people around the table don’t have better ideas than you.
  3. Don’t expect everyone to agree with you. The sky could look orange-yellow to you and yellow-orange to someone else. It doesn’t mean either of your opinions are wrong, just different. Even in business, you can’t please everyone.
  4. Remember that you’re evaluating facts. You’re not evaluating your emotional reactions to said facts or to the people giving you the information.
  5. Be honest. If a blood bank is doing so well that there’s nothing Incept can offer, Billie is honest about that in her recommendations. She doesn’t try to sell something that they don’t need.

That fifth practice is what makes Incept unique! Many businesses will try to push their product, regardless of the need. How many businesses do you know that are willing to admit that their services aren’t needed?

Do you think that it is important to be objective?

Photo Credit:

Feathered Monkey Art http://www.featheredmonkey.com/gallery_main.shtml

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Lawrence Prather

The Battle of the Decade: Google Hotpot vs. Yelp

With the current trend of posting your whereabouts to your friends online (aka being geo-social), applications such as Gowalla, foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Latitude are available to you, but Google Hotpot and Yelp are the two that stand out to me.

What’s the Difference?

All of these apps allow for “check-ins” to spots on a map via geo-location. From there, you can earn badges, pins, titles and various other miscellaneous virtual prizes to tell your friends about just for checking in to a certain place the most. The difference between Hotpot, Yelp and the others is that these two check-in services also offer the ability for a user to rate, review and provide advice about a place they just visited. Recently, Yelp has even started testing “Yelp Deals” (one-day sales coupons for its users), something which Hotpot is not doing.

Hotpot

Hotpot is what happens when Google Places and Google Latitude get married and have offspring. Latitude is a check-in service that shows your Google friends and various other social network connections where you are. You can ping them and have them check-in too. It can also show you where your friends are at.

Places is a consumer’s guide to all things local. It allows you to rate and/or review the restaurant you just enjoyed. Your friends will then know which restaurants they should go to and which ones they should avoid. It’s better to find out what type of place you’re about to go to from your friends (who likely have similar tastes) than to accept the random four-star rating of a stranger who didn’t leave a review. Places is not limited to just restaurants, either; you can also rate and/or review parks, coffee shops, retail stores, etc.

If you own an Android device, guess what? Places is already installed – there is no need to go to the Android Market and download. And – surprise surprise – Latitude is already installed too. These two applications, Places and Latitude, work hand-in-hand. For example, let’s say that you’re in a new city and want to find a great restaurant to get something to eat. All you have to do is fire up Places, select restaurants, look at all of the available options, read the reviews, choose a spot, visit and check in (with Latitude) so your friends can see where you are. Finally, you can open Places back up, fire up Hotpot, and leave a rating and a review of the restaurant you just tried. Then, you’re done.

“Hotpot is really going places: to a Google search box near you and around the world. In addition to this, Hotpot will be also available in 38 new languages that include French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Korean among others. Hotpot also comes seamlessly integrated with Google Maps (especially Google Maps for Android).” ~ Hotpot project manager Lior Ron

Watch this video (created by Google) to see a brief overview of how Hotpot works:
YouTube Preview Image

Yelp

Yelp may not have been the first online recommendation service available to people, but it was – and quite possibly still is – the best service available. The idea of Yelp is that it helps to promote local businesses by getting users to rate and review their experiences at these places. Yelp is centered around the community at large. A local business can register with Yelp and then advertise if they so choose. Then customers will experience these area places and rate and review them. Other “Yelpers” will then see this activity and decide whether or not they should venture out to these places themselves. If you have questions about any place listed on Yelp, one thing that you can do that you can’t with Hotpot, is have a conversation with the person who rated and reviewed a place. This type of interaction amongst Yelpers is, in my opinion, why Yelp got to be as big as they are today.

About a year ago, Yelp introduced check-ins. This is an incentives-based type of offering. A Yelper will check in at a business and – should the business be a willing participant – take advantage of some type of reward for doing so. Even foursquare has a loyalty program for their “mayors.” This type of loyalty program went live on March 10 at SXSW with Google Latitude. For this loyalty program to work, a local business needs to register with Yelp (for free, might I add), set up advertising, converse with customers, review the trends within the community, and adjust their promotions and marketing accordingly.

Decisions, Decisions

With all of the choices available, how do you pick one? I have been using everything mentioned above for quite some time now, and it is difficult to say which one is the best. They all have their strengths, and they all have their weaknesses. With anything involving Google, you have a vast amount of information at your fingertips; all you have to do is enter a search query, hit enter and a lot of information is returned to you. With Yelp, you sign up, become a member of a large community that has similar ideas and thoughts as your own, with ratings and reviews that are more personal than Google, foursquare or Gowalla.

Which is your preferred service for reading reviews and looking at ratings?

Video courtesy of Google: Discover Places You’ll Love with Google Hotpot

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Lawrence Prather

Facebook Etiquette: Some General Do’s & Don’ts

I, along with 500 million of my closest friends, have a tendency to use Facebook at least once a day.

I’m sure most of you log in more than once daily. That’s okay. I’m not judging. I am not going to get into demographics or even statistics because that is beyond the scope of this post, and that’s not what I intend to actually discuss. However, I have provided an image that shows a breakdown of user stats from 2009 compared to users in 2010.

Facebook stats

Status Updates

Let’s start with an example: “I’m eating a cheeseburger right now, and it’s tasty.”

Great, glad to hear that you are consuming sustenance for your body. Quite frankly, however, I just might not want to know that you are eating a cheeseburger. Instead of posting something as mundane as that (and not garnering any attention from your friends), why not try giving the update some context. For instance, “I’m eating a cheeseburger with BBQ sauce, topped with onion rings, bacon, arugula and a grilled lobster tail. Jealous?”

What this example has done is draw the interest of your friends, which may, in turn, elicit a response. Status updates aren’t about common, everyday events that no one really cares about. The status update is a way to be creative in communicating the trivial tasks you’re letting your friends know about. Then again, no one really cares that you went to the dentist either. Creative or not, don’t do it (but that’s just my opinion).

Profile: Bibliography

This is where it can get kind of tricky. What it comes down to is this: if you are going to use your profile for personal means or your personal/professional ones (i.e., you use it personally to connect with friends – but at the same time, you have work friends – Facebook provides you with a multitude of options. If you choose to use Facebook for personal/professional use be wary of the privacy settings that have a tendency to change without notice and quite regularly. Knowing how to set up friend lists (so only certain friends have access to your social network) can save your personal life, online social reputation and professional career.

Don’t be afraid to share some easter eggs about yourself, but don’t get so creative that nobody understands what you are saying. Social networks, in general, encourage bits of narcissism, and with the amount of space allowed by Facebook, it’s bound to happen. Go ahead and share, I say. Having the same interests and commonalities as someone else can provide for a lasting friendship, whether virtual or not. Just remember this: less is more.

A word about age (rather a quote, if you will): “While you may want to include your birthday on your Facebook profile, you should exclude the birth year. Your friends and family know how old you are, and there’s no reason for your professional ones to know.”  ~ Kirsten Dixson, a reputation management and online identity expert.

Content: Links, News, Videos, Photos, etc.

Posting content is great. Not only does it inform your friends of the happenings of the day, it can also showcase your interests and your areas of expertise in your profession. Of course, some of your friends may not want to know about how “Little Zeus the Hairless Cat Won a Lock of Justin Bieber’s Hair” in an auction or how “Bristol Palin Can’t Stay in the Lines of a Coloring Book.” Try sticking to something that is relevant to you and your area of expertise. However, every now and then post something random. A penny for your thoughts: humor works every time.

If you’re posting photos, try not to post photos that are embarrassing to you and/or your friends in the photo. If the photo made you laugh, great. Unfortunately, that funny picture (of whatever it may happen to be), could be extremely embarrassing to your friend(s), so don’t get “tag happy.” This could possibly hinder their social credibility, and you could get unfriended, both virtually and personally.

A word of advice: if you have to think about it, it probably shouldn’t go up.

Photo Credit: istrategylabs

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Jim

The Human Element of Conversational Marketing

I am often asked by contact center groups why blood centers hire us. While there are usually several motivating factors for outsourcing, a common requirement that all clients make quite clear is that is that they want us to add the human element to their donor interactions.

If our clients didn’t think there was value in us adding that human element they’d just send a dog with a note, right? All kidding aside, they could use web chat, IVRs (those computerized systems that you key in or speak information to), direct mail and/or other communication mediums. They expect and even demand that we put our individual personalities into conversations, because being ourselves provides a better customer experience and enhances the relationship.

“Conversational” means sounding natural, not canned, not monotonous and not rehearsed. It also means sounding empathetic where empathy is needed and sounding appreciative for the donor support. We’ve all experienced those kinds of calls at home from ill-prepared telemarketers. They probably annoy us more than they inspire us. I don’t think that anyone would argue that a conversation, by definition, also means two-way dialog. That means not just telling prospects or customers what we want to say, but actually listening and responding to their wants, needs and concerns.

It’s probably just as important, though, to recognize what conversational marketing isn’t as it is to recognize what it is. Being conversational doesn’t mean that we can just say or not say anything that we want. Take, for example, legal disclosures. Are legally required disclosures and conversational marketing mutually exclusive? Of course not! Even if the conversation goes in a direction that makes it challenging to give all the required information, would our customers want us to put them at risk by not providing said disclosures simply because it was easier for us to ignore them? Absolutely not.

The same can be said about gathering emails. If our client really wants to collect email addresses for additional touch points with their donors, should we say, “No. We won’t ask for those because it hinders us from being conversational marketers?” That would be a silly position to take. If I were the client, I’d go to a partner who could gather email addresses AND hold a professional, two-way conversation.

When our call quality folks note that we have failed to spell back information or cover something that our client wanted us to, that doesn’t mean that we have to abandon conversational marketing to fulfill those client requirements. We can certainly be conversational without resorting to just saying anything we’d like. Being yourself, listening well, responding professionally, sounding appropriately appreciative or empathetic, and still covering what needs to be covered is part of the fun of this business and are the signs of a true professional in this channel.

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