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Sphere Of Influence: Letting Current Customers Create Future Wins

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

If you’re a Sales Development Representative, or are responsible for lead generation, you need to watch the video below. It will provide you with the fastest speed to revenue cycle you’re going to find. Of course you need to follow up on any inbound leads you may receive. But if you’re looking for the fastest way to create a lead from scratch, this video is for you.

The fastest way to new leads is through the Sphere Of Influence lead generation.

How does it work?

Let’s say you have a customer success story that you’d like to sell to other potential clients. Begin by opening up PowerPoint, and place the success story customer’s logo in the center of the screen. This represents the middle of the universe for that customer.

Sphere of Influence

The Sphere Of Influence says that the only people who will care about the success story that you want to sell towards (marketing can help you create some content that tells the story of working with that customer), are people who are within one degree of the Sphere Of Influence.

These one-degree connections include:

  • Past employees;
  • Current employees;
  • Vendors of that company;
  • Competitors of that company; and
  • University alumni of the decision makers, champions, and influencers that work at that company.

This is who you want to target. As a lead generation mechanism, after putting the customer’s logo in the center of the page, create a quadrant, which might include any of the one-degree relationships discussed above. This helps you to create a roadmap from LinkedIn profiles and competitors’ logos. You’ll then copy their LinkedIn profile pictures or logos to the PowerPoint into the correct quadrant. Road-mapping all of these relationships will help you create a relationship tree to the story you’re going to sell.

The fastest lead generation tool that we like to use is LinkedIn job change alerts. Advanced LinkedIn searching allows you to monitor anyone who has worked for that customer and has now moved on to another company. Fast forward the video above to the 1:15 mark to visualize how. This is also known as doing an advocate marketing search. These former employees of your customer are a great place to begin your lead generation efforts. And by using LinkedIn job change alerts, it’s also the fastest route to lead generation.

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