2019 is shaping up to be a fantastic year for conferences in Australia, with plenty of digital/web, marketing and startup large events to attend. See my curated list, sorted by month below.
Conferences such as these can be a great opportunity to network with your peers, build new relationships, learn a few new things, and possibly just enjoy getting away from the desk. See my article, Why You Should Attend Two Conferences a Year.
Note: where an event is marked TBC, I have used the month it ran in 2018 to get a sense of when to expect it.
Do you know a marketing, digital or startup conference I missed, or have further information on one of the events listed above? Reach out and let me know via Twitter.
For all of those people who have asked me, with my long gap in blogging, what happened with my $99 side project, yes I sold it at the start of 2018, less than 13 months after starting it, for a little more than 1,600%.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the process of so much reading every week for a year, but at the time of being approached, I felt like I needed a break post festive season time off.
The whole idea of this side project came from my desire to show people that you can literally start something for less than a hundred bucks. I did it, and more than covered costs along the way.
To hand it on to a new owner, for a significant multiple (even if in real dollar figures, it isn’t much) was the icing on the cake.
Rather than re-hash the lessons along the way, here’s the articles I wrote during 2017, when I was working on it.
The $99 Side Project Series
Here are the articles I wrote, in chronological order…
I urge everyone to try something out. Sure, you may lose a little cash, and waste some of your personal time, however the lessons you can take away are far more valuable than what you put in.
Onward and upwards for my next adventure into side projects!
If you are an established small business or startup, and have a need for some simple sales or outreach process, here’s a semi-automated method for genuine engagement.
We get new trial customers signing up to 6Q most days of the week, and although we have a very nice on-boarding email flow, there is nothing like an old fashioned, manually written email from the founder, to say hello.
The first step in this (the semi automation I refer to) is to take the details of every new trial sign up, and place it in our simple CRM.
I’m a huge fan of Trello, and given we don’t have thousands of leads at any one time, or want yet another CRM tool, we use a simple Trello board for the sales process.
There are five columns on this board, which follow our sales workflow. This is Signups > Emailed > Replied > Engaged > Decision. I’ll explain the steps further on.
What I do, is have each of our sign ups (which are stored in Customer.io) create a new Trello card, which is then placed at the bottom of the Signups list.
However, rather than just send over a name and email, I’ve got it sending a description, along with a few other key elements.
Typical Trello card
Using Zapier, I have the card set to be due in 48 hours from when they sign up. If I don’t get to them within 2 days, it alerts me that it is overdue.
The card is also labeled in green, which means ‘new lead’ with our labels.
Zapier magically imports their full name, company name and email address to the description field of a Trello card.
It also creates a clickable link, which is a search query for the person and company name on LinkedIn. An example format would be “Miles Burke” +6Q site:linkedin.com as shown below.
Checking them out on LinkedIn
For every new sign up, I click that link and take a look at their LinkedIn profile, if I can find it (90% of the time, it’s the first result).
Google search results
I do this for a number of reasons; mostly to ensure there’s a result. If there’s no result, I may save my effort researching and emailing, especially if the person’s email address is a free email provider.
Secondly, many LinkedIn users look at who is visiting their profile. If they see I have gone to the effort of finding them on LinkedIn (also known as light stalking), then there’s a greater chance of me getting some form of conversation started.
Thirdly, I can find out a little about the person for the email I’ll send. I see what they do, if we have mutual connections, and read their summary.
Sending an email
Instead of just sending an automated email, which is very easy for me to do with customer.io, I like to send a genuinely manual email to say hello.
Manual welcome email
You’ll notice a few things about this email. I start with their first name, properly capitalised (around 10% of our sign ups use all upper or all lower case, so it becomes obvious when it’s an automated email).
Then, I tend to sign off with the day of the week. This shows that my email is likely to be manual, and can be a risk if I was in a different timezone. However, given my timezone is +8 hours, most of the recipients are behind my time, so will still be waking up, if not still sleeping.
Finally, I use a BCC email address tied to Trello, so it automatically imports the email into Trello, like below.
Automatic email import using Trello
Doing this saves me time, and also allows me to see what I wrote. I often will add a personal note to the email, such as ‘Hope Singapore is doing well today?’ or ‘Hey, I’ve visited Brooklyn and I loved it’ based on my research above.
I find by being manually written (to be honest, it’s a few minutes of effort), I get a far better response rate than any automated email (at least double if not higher in replies), and I tend to engage better as well.
Sorting cards into lists
Once I send the email, I move the card from Signups to Emailed list in Trello. That way, I have an instant to do list, being any cards that remain in signups list.
The lists are literally a reflection of my workflow from here, which goes like this;
Emailed
This is the list of people I’ve sent an email to, and am waiting a reply. The cards here may get a follow up or two from me, if there’s silence.
Replied
This is when the person replies, if at all. It is a good reminder for me to reply and follow up if needed.
Engaged
This is when we’re discussing on-boarding, or answering any questions. It could be that I need to run a screen sharing session, I am writing a customised proposal or we are going through due diligence for the enterprise sized customers.
Decision
The final list – this is where each card ends up, either labelled as a Yes, No or Undecided (that is, a stale contact where we’re not engaging after a few attempts).
In Summary
So here’s how I approach sales for my little SaaS product. I believe the more effort you put in to any direct marketing, the better the response rates. We’ve all seen those Hello %FIRSTNAME% emails before.
By having Zapier do some of the automation, it saves me time cutting and pasting, and ensures I spend my efforts where they are most needed; in manual relationship building mode.
If you’re looking for a sales process for small teams, I hope I’ve given you some food for thought.
