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Getting in front of people with round robin articles.
Video length: 2:59
Dave Harries: Grant, there’s a very nice and interesting technique you talk about in the book for getting in front of people in an incredible way, and I think you refer to it as “round robin articles.” Tell me a little bit about that.
Grant Leboff: One of the things, the challenges that salespeople have got is cold-approaching people in today’s business environment doesn’t go down very well. People are, “When I’m ready, I’ll go find it,” because they’re empowered to have that information, and actually, if you bash down the door, you kind of devalue yourself a little bit as well, because people in today’s world think, “Well, if you were that good, I’d come to you, why would you have to bash down the door?” How do you get in front of people in really credible way? Round robin articles is one way of doing that.
The idea is this: Everybody has a channel today, and therefore, everybody’s hungry for content, because nobody can produce enough content to constantly feed the Web, and it’s just hungry for content. One of the things you could do is, imagine you want to approach accountants, okay, and they have their bible, their magazine, their portal that a lot of accountants use. One of the things you could do is you could go to the accountancy portal and say, “I’m going to write an article about the state of marketing,” if it was me, “in the accountancy world, and I’m going to interview the marketing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, at Deloitte, at Grant Thornton, some of these big accountancy well-respected firms. Would you take that article?” You can almost guarantee the editor is going to be salivating and saying, “Yes, I’d love that article if you do it.”
Having got their commissioning, you then ring up Grant Thornton, and you say to the PA, “I’m doing an article for Accountancy Magazine, and we’d love to get the views of John Smith, your marketing director, on … Would I like to interview him?” Of course, she’s going to put the phone and say, “I’ve had Accountancy Magazine on the phone, they’d love to interview you for an article.” Of course, he’s likely to say yes, because it’s his definitive magazine, looks good for his reputation and everything else. In that way, what you do is you start to get a lot of credibility in the industry, because you’re not just a salesperson now, you’re a player. You get face time, or phone time, depending on how you do the interview, face time would be the best, but it might be phone time, with one of the major players in the industry, or a few of, people you’d actually like to be your clients eventually.
It’s very, very credible, you’ve added value to the magazine, you look like a player, because you can refer, that’s a blog article, you can have links back to that magazine when you’ve contributed to the magazine, so credibility and trust goes through the roof. You get in front of the right people, but in a very credible way, because you can, “Oh, are you a journalist for a living, then, Grant?” “No, no, I actually run a consultancy, but I’m doing this for Accountancy Magazine.” “Oh, that’s interesting.” You start that engagement with that client, but in a very credible way, where you’re not selling anything, so it’s just a great way of building reputation, of creating value, of building relationships, of getting in front of the right people. It’s just a nice technique.
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