The Opt-In Advantage: Building Trust & Engagement in Business Outreach

Hello and welcome to the show today. The question I'd like to tackle or rather the issue that I'd like to tackle, are mistakes that people make in business outreach that make other people think that they are being intrusive. Now when we say business outreach for the purpose of this episode, we are just referring to any tips, any tactics, any strategy that involves you reaching out to other people. So whether it's you trying to hand Flyers to people, whether it's you trying to send WhatsApp messages, whether it's you visiting people's homes or offices or sending emails or LinkedIn connection requests,

Instagram, DMSSMS, whatever it is that you're trying to do, there are certain categories of actions that some of you take that make people look at you as being rude and being intrusive. And in fact, this is one of the reasons why the average business person doesn't want to do what they perceive to be sales because they're afraid of being thought of as intrusive and being thought of as a pest or as a bother. So when we say people are intrusive, what do we mean?

Intrusive just means when you're going forward, when you're trying to build a relationship without good 'cause or without permission. Now remember that qualifier when you're trying to build a relationship without cause or without permission. So for those of us listening to the show who are guys, remember back in the days, secondary school maybe? Yeah, Secondary school, junior secondary school, Senior secondary school.

There's this babe that you like and you know you wanted to be your girlfriend. Now you were intrusive. If you're trying to go forward and build that relationship without cause or without permission, you didn't have 'cause to think that she liked you and you didn't have permission from her to keep following her all all over the place or to keep pestering her. So that's the sort of thing that we're talking about. Now, these dynamics also apply in business as well, whether you are male or female.

If you're trying to build a relationship with a potential customer, with a potential client, and you're trying to advance the relationship, you're trying to go forward, but you don't have good 'cause for doing so. Nothing has happened that makes you think the person might be interested or is interested. You haven't gotten any green lights, you haven't gotten any permission, then you will be thought of as being intrusive.

The thing is just that the average Nigerian is a very nice person. The average Nigerians are very polite. So instead of them shouting at you or swearing at you down the phone, it has happened to me. Well, actually the first time it happened to me, I was back when I was in Scotland and the job that I had to do involved me being on the phone, so I got shouted at. Well Andy, that's the story for another day. And then back in Nigeria in my wedding photography days, when I

was calling wedding vendors to try and do business with them, I also got shouted at again. So it does happen. But The thing is, the average Nigerian is such a nice person that what they'll do is they'll listen to you and they will just ghost you or they will block your phone number or delete or whatever. But they're not going to shout at the phone and tell you to F off. So if you are going forward and you don't have any cause to think that the person might be interested, you haven't been given any green lights.

Nothing visibly has happened that might give you an idea that this person might be interested in you, your product, your service, Then you are being intrusive. Now let me come up with one example about how this can happen. Even though you might be well meaning there's a loyal podcast listener who has my contact details. Well, that's because I give them out after every single episode. And by the way, in case you haven't figured it out, the reason why I give you guys my phone number is because I

actually do want you guys to get in touch to say I've listened to these episodes. I liked episode 456 and I hated episode 678. I don't understand episode 9/10/11. What did you mean by this? Is this that? And the reason why I would like to hear from you guys is because that is what will make this podcast even much more valuable to you guys. So the person that I'm going to talk about in this podcast episode, let's just call him CJ,

this is not his real name. So CJ finds the podcast to be of value. Other people who've been following on LinkedIn, reaching out to me on WhatsApp, they find these things of value. Imagine how much more valuable this thing will be if you guys actually reach out to say, I heard you say this, I don't agree or I don't like this. And then we can have a chat about this and I can make it a podcast episode or you guys can say I understood this, but I

followed you up until this point where you just confused me. What did you mean by that? So I give my phone number out because I actually want you guys to connect and I want to hear from you guys. So back to the example of how you might be going forward with a business relationship in an intrusive manner. So CJ is a loyal podcast listener, but he misapplied my contact details and he put it into his marketing motions, his WhatsApp marketing motions.

And so because of that, I started receiving some WhatsApp solicitations from CJ Oh, by the way, at this point, I didn't know that CJ was a podcast listener. So I sent a message, the same sort of thing that I always do because when I started receiving unsolicited messages from people, oh, by the way, unsolicited. That's just a fancy word of saying uninvited. I hope you guys are getting a theme here from today's episode that things would work better if it was invited, permission was given, or it was asked for in some particular way.

For some reason, people are wed to this whole idea that this week I sent out 500 messages. There's no point in sending 500 messages and then only closing one deal. How about you taking the time to only send out messages or do outreach that people actually want to hear from you and then maybe you send out 500 and then 200 and 250 people respond and all of those 250, you end up doing 10 business deals. So it's not about the volume of the outreach, but that you're doing.

It's about how effective and the level of engagement. If you're sending out 500 and only one person is responding, that is not very that is not very good. So don't beat yourself on the chest to say this week I sent out 500 messages or this week I made 1000 outreaches. It's not just about the volume of outreach, but how effective. So I received C, JS, WhatsApp solicitation for his Facebook advertising product. So I sent a message, you know,

who is this? Either I get your phone number. And then last time, me and CJ got chatting and I got a little familiar with him. Oh, by the way, like I said, CJ, not his real name because I didn't give get his permission to refer to him in the episode. But since he's a loyal listener, I trust he's going to listen to this anyway and I know that he's going to get the point. Now this is the mistake that CJ made. First off, there was an error of misapplication.

So he applied the message or rather he applied my contact wrongly. So that is one mistake that a lot of people make. Instead of you going and applying segregating people one way or another, you should allow people to self select. You should allow people to opt in and then that way they can be, they can be tagged or categorized appropriately and people are going to receive the messages that they gave you permission to send them.

It is always much more effective when you have some cause or some permission to reach out to them. So trying to apply people correctly or allow people to opt in could be any number of things. You can send a message by that very same WhatsApp saying hi, I got your contact details from XYZ and then you ask the question, do you run Facebook ads in your business? Because remember CJ is selling Facebook ads. This is a very short message.

Most likely it's going to be 3 or 4 lines, so it'll be easy to read and it's going to be straight to the point. It's going to give the person the contacts of how they got your contact details. And of course in Nigeria we know how 419 is prevalent now, so lots of people are nervous from the get when they receive messages from strangers. So this way they know for sure how they got, how you got their phone number. And it's a simple question about whether they run Facebook ads in their business.

So imagine I received the message saying, hi, I got your contact details from the podcast. I'm a loyal listener. I've been listening for the last six months. Do you run Facebook ads in your business? Would have turned out to be a different, much more promising conversation. Now of course, I wouldn't have bought Facebook ads, but you can see how from the beginning I wouldn't have thought of CJ as intrusive. That's before I knew who he was.

And so it's the same with all your potential customers. Hi, I got your contact details from Nina. Do you run Facebook ads in your business Now? Let's not worry about the people who say no, or the people who ignore, or the people who ghost. We're only going to deal with people who engage positively. You want the people who will say something like, yes, I run Facebook advertisements. Why are you asking? So there you can have positive conversations.

Ignore the rest. What we are trying to do is we are looking for engagement. So we send out these messages, we ask for permission, we give people a chance to opt in, we try and see if people are interested and then we deal with those people who are engaging positively and then we ignore the rest. So when you do these kinds of things, then the perceived intrusion goes down and people's guards are not up. Because like I say time and time on the podcast, I responded and I said who is this?

How did you get my contact details? My wife, on the other hand, will block you instantly. The same thing with my mom, sorry, with my mother-in-law, My mom on the other hand would normally block you. My mom would do report to spam and blah blah blah. And that is how people's accounts get into trouble. You find out that your WhatsApp number has been flagged for spam. You know, you call somebody on Truecaller and the person say it's not you guys calling me like this.

You say, yeah, it's me, I'm calling you, but then the person shows you on True Call and say look now he says flagged as spam by 153 people. That is how it happens, from outreach like this, from emails like this. So we actually should be looking for permission, gaining OPT in, keeping our messages nice and short straight to the point so that people can figure out who you are, how you got their phone number and why you are reaching out.

So these are just some general guidelines that I'm sharing over here on the podcast, not just for the benefit of CJ who has found the podcast to be useful and I'm hoping that he's going to find this segment to be useful as well. But for all your other dear listeners out there who also use WhatsApp as a way to grow your business, because I do, I'm sending out unsolicited messages all the time. But I am trying to get some permission and I'm trying to get people to opt in.

And when people are not interested, I do the needful. I take them off my SMS list, my emailing list, my everything list. When somebody says leave me the hell alone, then please, by all means, leave them alone. I'm in Abuja. Abuja is a big city. Last time I checked, they said about 30 million people in Abuja. It's it's a it's a big market relative to me is big and almost infinite. So if someone says leave me alone, then by all means leave them alone and go look for the next one.

So as a general guideline, confirm that the person is interested. Those should be some of your early questions before you start broadcasting them to say these are my services, so confirm are you interested in blah blah blah. Do you have a problem with XYZ? Ask simple questions like that in the first set of messages before you go into the lengthy WhatsApp message that you send to say this is who I am, this is what I do.

This is how I can help you grow your sales. This is how I can improve your business, this is how I can improve your love life, this is how I can improve your blah blah blah. So apart from confirming interest, you should also allow for opting and the simple message like if you would like to be included in my WhatsApp group, if you would like to be included in my channel, if you'd like to be included in my e-mail list or my broadcast or my whatever, please text yes or please text 01.

I've seen some people say please text hit reply to this message and text let's go exclamation mark. You know, something like that. But you have asked people to carry on some action that gives you 'cause, that gives you signal to show that they might be interested and it gives you permission to keep in touch with them in the future. So if you follow these simple guidelines, then people are not going to feel spammed. And this is my message today to loyal listeners like CJ who are listening to the show and who are using WhatsApp and e-mail for business outreach.

These are the simple ways that we can improve on our outreach to make sure that the engagements on the things we put out go up and the number of business deals that we close at the end goes up. And most importantly, that the number of people that we're reaching out to who think we are spammers, who think we are scammers, who think we are intrusive and who think we are bothersome, those number of people will go down. Because if you're doing good business by sending 500 messages and you're doing business with maybe 10 other people, but then 490 think you're a spammer,

you're a scammer, you're a cockroach or whatever. It is not going to be good for you over the long run. Because believe me, there are people who have been in that situation where you're talking to someone and you're like, yeah, let me send you my phone number. Now that's in the purely social context. You get the person's number, you call, the person has through colour, and then The thing is flashing across the person's screen and it says 253 people report as spam.

That is not a situation that you want to be in. You're in a purely social context or you're in the business context. You're trying to get to know someone. You're trying to get to build trust. It will not help when you're in front of this guy. You're in front of this girl, you exchange phone numbers, you flash and then the person sees X number of people reported as spam. So let's try and reduce the number of people who think we are being intrusive.

So that's all for today. Remember to connect with me on WhatsApp. The phone number is 0806466 2140. The country code is +234 for those of you who are not Nigerian. And by the way, if you reach out to me, yes, I will reply, send a few messages, try and figure out who you are, what business you're involved in and if you have any questions for me. And also if there are any things you want me to clarify from the podcast episodes.

I also be making the podcast episode about that if you reach out because we have to increase the love. That's the whole point of this podcast anyway, that we share the learnings with the community in general. Also, connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Tavishima Ayede. I'm the host of the show. You can confirm the spelling of my name so you can search correctly on LinkedIn. If you just use the link where you're currently listening to this episode, the correct spelling of my name is there.

My e-mail address is there. Some other details that you might be interested in are there as well. So thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next episode.