/booking is the key metric_

The emergence of the revenue team is solving a lot of headaches for organizations struggling to integrate marketing with their sales teams. The revenue team brings marketing and sales together in the same department to do a better job of understanding what really matters for the company as a whole.

For revenue teams, yes, the eye is on expanding revenue. We don’t care as much about where the revenue goes afterward. That’s operations and finance’s job to make sure we are keeping the money and managing cash flow; but in revenue we care about revenue.

And revenue is predicated on bookings. Does your marketing drive bookings? That’s the metric that matters. Impressions, clicks, mql’s, cac, sure they are interesting to look at. They tell a story. But when you look at the data. When you compare campaign activity. When you stack all of the numbers up together. They all point back to, does this increase my conversions on bookings or does it not?

You can have a really robust website but again, go in and look at the data. Where do people spend most of their time? It’s usually one dominant page and at a distant second another page. That’s where the attention goes and because of that when a booking occurs we really have no idea how informed that person is.

Sure, we are reading that the script has flipped. That motivated buyers are doing the research before they reach sales. Motivated buyers who have done their research and who are among the 70% of people ready to be before they talk to anyone, yes they have done their homework.

In an inbound funnel, they have done their homework. But inbound funnels plateau. And the only way to push past the plateau is to adapt a more outbound strategy. Here’s where I think marketing can benefit from the sales team.

Marketers can be surprisingly introverted and stand off-ish. Alright, I’ll say it. Marketers are really bad at sales. And they don’t like sales. That’s why they are marketers. They like the idea of attracting new business more than they like fulfillment. But sales feels painful to them.

However, we’re in a new world. And top of the funnel marketing is becoming more social. Not just get a bunch of likes and followers social. It’s getting more human. People enjoy learning about companies for the first time through other people.

That’s not really new. We’re just a culture that is so focused on maximizing exposure that we are willing to sacrifice interpersonal human interactions for computer human interactions. But people to people business isn’t over. Relationship driven business isn’t over. Conversation based marketing is potent and it is enabled now more than ever because of zoom calls.

We can now talk to a group of 30–100 people and have real time engagement — conversational engagement — right then and there. We can gather people together from all corners of the earth and have a real conversation for an hour about whatever we want.

There is no marketing campaign or funnel that can be designed to be as versatile and adaptable as conversation. Here’s what’s going through the buyers mind when they are looking for a purchase. “Can it solve this problem? Can it solve this problem? Can it solve this problem?”

To answer that question as a website or a commercial, you have to know exactly what the problem is and produce content that not only answers that question but is written in a way and distributed in a way to find those people who are looking. But if you get asked those same questions in a conversation and you’ve done the work of building a relationship how much work does either person need to do?

Let’s play the question out in a conversation:

“Can it solve this problem?”

“Yes”

That’s it! The answer is yes. Most of the time you don’t need to show it. You don’t need to produce 100 different landing pages. You don’t need to write an ebook that’s connected to a drip campaign that goes on for 365 days until they convert. You tell the person yes and they say “awesome, sounds like it does the trick.”

Because of that there is a ton of untapped potential in top of the funnel conversation based activities. If you are not having back to back conversations with qualified buyers asking to buy, you need to have conversations with your target audience before they are ready to buy. And you may think, why would I want to grind out that many conversations? And my answer is you’re not doing anything otherwise so you have the time. Start with one to one conversations. When your schedule gets full of those switch to a group setting. When your groups get too full, switch to broadcasting to thousands.

But don’t just post and post and post hoping that you get likes without actively trying to book conversations.

The reason I post is in reverse of why I think others post. I post so that the people I’ve already met, have a reminder and a good reason to keep in touch with me. I don’t have a huge interest in having a million followers. I have an interest in meeting people who can help me and I can help them. And I want to stay connected to those people.

I trust that that list will grow over time and I trust that the timing of it will be lucrative for me.

I don’t care about getting fans. I care about connections. I care about having real conversations. I care about knowing people by name.

That’s the strategy I think people will win with. Knowing people by name and being helpful.

That’s why bookings are the metric that matter. You have to book the conversation. What’s amazing about this is it is exactly what people with the biggest impact and the biggest reach do. If you look at Seth Godin, what does he do?

He keeps it basic. He writes his daily blog. He publishes a book because he’s a writer and that’s what he does. And all of his YouTube content is an interview or a talk hosted on other people’s channels. That’s all of it. He has his product which is writing and then he goes out and books interesting conversations with people. That sells books. That gets speaking gigs.

So I’ll list it out. Here are the kinds of conversation bookings that you can consider:

• Group zoom call bookings
• One to one zoom call bookings
• Podcast guest booking
• Speaking/Talk booking
• Consultation booking
• Estimate booking
• Appraisal booking
• Audit booking
• Workshop booking
• Coffee booking
• Whiteboard session booking
• Discovery call booking
• Demo booking
• Trade show booking

Just book something already. Haha. You have to put a time on your calendar to be in a position to talk to the people who have to have what you have. And the only way you’ll really know what they need is if you ask and listen.

That way when they ask you what you do, with a few simple but tailored messages you can tell them what you do in a way that is perfectly befitting to what they need.

Torlando Hakes is an author and a professional speaker. He serves as the Director of Business Development at Periodic. He is the host of the PaintEd Podcast and a regular writer on Medium. Follow at torlando.medium.com.

Periodic is the app that books. Design dynamic webforms, manage the booking for sales teams and service providers, and automate messaging.

To learn how you can design a conversion funnel that books more appointments feel free to hop on Torlando’s calendar at torlando.periodic.site. He would love to give feedback on your current conversion funnel and have a short strategy session for how to ramp up bookings on your sites.