Expos are a great way to learn more and expand your network. However, one of the difficulties many face is what to do after. How do you keep the momentum of what occurred and continue to use what you learn and work on your relationships? Elliot Begoun steps in and shares two important elements that will help you maximize the show after the show: radical persistence and controlling your narrative. He breaks down how you can apply these in your emails and relationships as you pave your road to towards success. Join Elliot as he shares how you can take what you’ve learned in Expos and really bring it forward.

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Radical Persistence And Controlling Your Narrative

I’m going to do something a bit different. I guess it’s not that different because I’ve done a few of these, but this is going to be a bit of a solo cast. Based on the timing of when this episode will be produced, it’s not long after we emerge from Expo West. I felt that the timing is such that it would be good to focus on a few stuff like, “How do you maximize the show after the show? How do you take the momentum of what occurred in Anaheim and bring it forward and be able to use it to move mountains?”

Most of you who are there, especially those reading this, you’re there for probably 3 or 4 primary purposes. The first is to attract new outlets, buyers and stores. The second for many of you is to hopefully have that serendipitous run-in with an investor and be able to talk about that next capital raise or those next dollars. It’s also building your broader network and rekindling relationships that have been left un-nurtured in the past years since we’ve had the last Expo West.

With that in mind, there are two particular things I want to talk about. One of them is radical persistence and the other is how you can control your own narrative. This is specific to when you present to retailers or present to investors because both are elements of how you can and should carry forward what you’ve done in Anaheim.

What Is Radical Persistence?

I’m going to go ahead and jump in with radical persistence and what do I mean by that? First of all, we’re all inundated with emails, texts, Slack and all of the other forms of communication, not to mention social media. As a founder and an entrepreneur, you’re so desperate for engagement. You’re so desperate to have that buyer and that investor, whoever responds and starts and moves forward to the conversation. We’re our own worst enemy for a couple of reasons. One is that we tell ourselves a story about, we don’t want to seem pushy and we don’t want to seem overly aggressive or desperate.

The second is that we don’t have a system behind this. It’s left to us trying to fit it in and making sure that we do the necessary follow-up and so forth. Think about this. How many emails do you get in an average day? As with most, hundreds or maybe thousands, if you’re honest about them, some of them may be interesting. Most are distracting. Very few may be a pain in the ass or annoying. Let me ask a follow-up to that and that is when you’re following up with a buyer or an investor, do you worry about, “Am I sending this email too soon. Am I going to be thought of as being pushy. Am I going to appear too desperate, a pain in the ass or any of those kinds of things?”

If you’re being honest, you’ll say yes to that. I certainly fall into that and do that, but here’s some reality. I don’t remember the source. I think this is some sociological experiment or whatever, but it takes between 7 and 12 touches to drive engagement. If you think about that, how frequently do you send follow-up emails?

If you’re sending follow-up emails, you send one and then you send the next one 7 days or 14 days later, that’s not a follow-up anymore. That’s a restart. That’s still kicking things off again. Let’s flip it around to the other side. Let’s put the empathic lens upon this. How do most of us deal with the information or emails? We triage it.

That’s what we do. We’re overwhelmed by the volume of inquiries and the shit that floods our inboxes. We respond to the things that are simple like quick, easy responding, “Get rid of them, get it done, no problem.” We review the stuff that is important and digestible. We totally blow off the distracting and then we pledge to return to the things that require more time and energy, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we rarely do.

The latter is where I think most of your outreach and follow-ups fall. That’s what we do. Buyers and investors get emails. Some entrepreneurs make brilliant, well-thought-out cases for their brands, but the challenge with that is that it requires emails that are voluminous. They’re long. They require time to focus and process.

Going back to what we talked about, the average person takes that and sticks it on the back burner and on the shelf. It’s well-intended, most of them saying, “I’ll get back to it when things slow down or I can catch my breath.” When do things slow down and when do you catch your breath? Never so you never get back. Ten days later, that same entrepreneur sends another long email trying to do the same thing again, trying to craft that brilliant argument and grab that engagement. The process starts all over again, like reading it, looking at it, “I’ll come back to it,” that type of thing. It just gets lost.

While all that’s happening, you’re sitting at your desk and you’re going, “This person’s ghosted me. They don’t care. They’re not interested or whatever.” You then soon talk yourselves out of any further engagement. That’s the typical pattern that I hear see and, frankly, used to fall into myself. Let me try to reframe it or shift your thinking a bit. I’m calling it radical persistence. It’s a way to artfully show tenacity, but it starts with well-constructed empathic emails that get the recipient’s attention. Those aren’t construed because they’re not aggressive and they’ll move the process forward.

Keep It Simple

Think about the person on the other end. How can you simplify responding to your email? Understand that it takes 6, 7 to 12 touches to drive engagement. If you’re going to move things forward, you need to do that. You need to get to that 7 to 12 and you need to let all the bullshit that you tell yourself go. You need to not do it.

Here are my suggestions. I want to give you all some actionable stuff here. I’ve tried this. I’ve been doing this for years. It works. I’ve talked to many people who do it. I’ve interviewed experts in this. This is not my creation. There are a lot of reasons as to why what I’m going to lay out here for you is effective. Make your subject line actionable. Make that your call to action. If you see it in a subject line and email, that makes it very simple. What do you want me to do with that email? You’ve already done some of the work for me. You’ve told me what it is that I need to do with this email instead of me trying to figure that out or me needing to read further or engage in the email to decide.

You think about it. Make it short and actionable. The next thing is to keep your email short. The magic number is somewhere between 50 and 150 words. Less is more here. Forget trying to make every point that you want to make. Forget laying out your entire argument or bringing forward all the data points that you want to bring because it doesn’t get read or done. Instead, make one strong point that can be impregnated in the mind of that person, whether they do anything at this first email or not. They likely won’t, but you’re scoring a point rather than overwhelming them with a barrage of information that doesn’t get processed, read or looked at.

Leveraging Technology & Cognitive Dissonance

The next thing I would tell you is to leverage technology. I want you to leverage technology for two primary reasons. Number one is that when left in your own accord to do this follow-up with consistency, accuracy and so forth, you don’t. We all get sucked away from the things that are happening in a given day and our best intentions are just that. The second is that it also helps you pull away from what you’re going to weave inside your own brain about. Is this too soon? Is this the right email? Am I being too pushy? All of that stuff goes away because once you’ve done it, you’ve done it. You’re not going to waste any more time thinking about it.

Leverage technology. Set up an automated sequence, one that is somewhere between 7 and 12 emails long. The first 3 or 4 might include one salient point of your argument. The next few might be gentle reminders. It’s things like, “Just bringing this to the top of your inbox. Just keeping this top of mind. We want to make sure that we don’t miss out on having this conversation.”

The next cluster could be some additional information like a recent win or an accomplishment or even an article that you thought might be interesting. When you get to the end of the sequence, when you get to numbers 11 and 12, you can be a little bolder then because you’ve set that up. A subject line that I find super effective is, “Is everything okay?” What I’ve found there is that it’s a wake-up to somebody that they’ve not responded and not engaged.

The benefit of using the sequencing is that it all happens in the background. It eliminates all the rumination around what and when to send it. It doesn’t allow that day-to-day busy-ness to intercede or to prevent you from getting it done. The other benefit is the psychological benefit. Most people are well-intended. Most people want to be liked and want to be thought of as kind and so forth.

When you create this email and communication stream, what you’re basically doing is slowly building some form of cognitive dissonance. You’re starting to build in that person’s brain if they’re getting an email. Now, these sequences should be fairly quick, depending on that. They shouldn’t be spread seven days apart. They should be 24 to 48 hours between each email.

You’re keeping gentle pressure on the accelerator. You’re keeping engagement again. None of them are like, “Why haven’t you responded to my email?” “I’m busy too. What the hell?” You should not do anything like that. You’re being radically persistent. You’re being appropriately tenacious. What happens if you’re doing that is slowly? There’s this cognitive dissonance that builds up in the mind of the recipient. “Elliot keeps reaching out and I’m starting to feel bad. I’m so busy. I don’t have time to do it.”

That story begins to build and percolate until, eventually, that cognitive dissonance is so real and visceral that it’s time. I’ve got to respond. Engagement then happens and it’s not a game. It’s not about trying to manipulate. It’s a recognition that well-intended people want to do the right thing. People do, for the most part, want to engage, but the realities of life are pulling them in the other direction. They’re getting buried by information. Their time is precious. They’re doing all of those kinds of things that pull them away from that engagement.

What you’re doing is simply pulling them back and trying to stay top of mind. I know this seems uncomfortable and that’s why, again, I’m going to go back to why I highly encourage you to use technology to do this because this is what’s going to bring you peace of mind because you’re not going to sit there wrestling with this all happening in the background. Click and forget.

I’ve got about 400 sequences running in the background and they’re all different kinds. Some of them are to follow up to move things forward. Some of them, quite frankly, are just to nurture relationships and friendships because I know I suck at it. I know that I’m guilty. I get pulled away and I get distracted. Suddenly, I haven’t reached out to a friend or a family member or something in months or even years. That’s horrible.

It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that I’m not good at parsing out my day to say, “I’m going to use this time to nurture.” It can be used for this radical persistence. This constant communication can be used not only to forward your agenda from a business perspective but also to nurture the relationships that matter, both business relationships and personal relationships.

All of those are force multipliers to your efforts. They’re force multipliers and they’re enrichers to your life. Do it. I use a HubSpot as a CRM. I’ve got folks using Reply.io. One of the questions that came in is, “Does this look like a broadcast email?” There’s no unsubscribe button. This is not something that’s coming through some MailChimp or Klaviyo or anything along those lines. It’s coming from your inbox. It’s a personal email. It’s no different. The only difference is that you’ve pre-written it.

You can load multiple people into the same templatized version of it. Ping me and I’m happy to make any suggestions or answer any questions, but give it a thought. I think it’ll go a long way. Coming out of Expo West, you have these connections you’ve made, these leads you’ve got and all of this interest in and hopefully a lot of positive momentum going. It’s now up to you to use this. The expo is not the end.

Controlling Your Own Narrative

It’s the beginning. It’s the starting line. It is the opportunity to really leapfrog what you’ve been waiting for since we’ve really been able to have the normal interaction. Please, don’t let all of this time and all of this investment go for not. Use it to be able to take your business forward and be radically persistent. As I mentioned, I had two things I wanted to talk about. That’s the first. The second is a close cousin to the first and that’s around controlling your own narrative.

This is primarily as you try to share your business. This could be with a category manager. This could be with an investor, etc. Let’s use investors as an example in this conversation. I’m part of tons of conversations. I hear this all the time. I hear it in my sleep. I am a freak. For example, I hear an entrepreneur say, “I need to get my top line above $3 million to prove traction. I need to get to 5,000 or 1,500 stores to prove scalability. I need to get my velocity in all of the stores that I’m in above this.”

The worst thing that you can do as a founder is to aim for somebody else’s definition of success. To allow somebody else to draw the finish line on the pavement. The pursuit of another’s goal has been the cause of death for far too many brands. Your job as an entrepreneur within the constraints of the available bandwidth and capital that you have at this moment in time, the risk tolerance that you have, your job is to do as much as you can to prove the scalability and the opportunity of your business. Also, de-risk as many of the unknowns. Answer as many of the questions as possible.

Your job isn’t to prove product-market fit as defined by an investor or an advisor or anybody else. It’s your job to prove what you can within your constraints. Spending money to chase money is a fool’s errand. I see it all of the time. It happens all the time. That’s why so many brands are out there in that valley of death where they raise some money and now they’re chasing that next raise by trying to prove somebody else’s finish line and by subscribing to somebody else’s narrative. They’re out there and they’re spending money in the hopes that they can get to the next tranche of money and then they never do.

I’ve written a bunch. I’ve talked a bunch. I’m standing on my soapbox constantly about this funding gap that exists and it’s real. It is a bitch. I get it. Maybe now so because of it more than any other time in this industry, it’s become more and more important that you focus more on how within what resources you have you can prove what you need to prove or what you can prove. I’m talking about this theoretically or more at a high level but let me take it a little bit deeper. Let me give you some examples.

Let’s start with brick and mortar. Let’s say you’re in 1,000 stores. Cash is tight. You know some of those stores you shouldn’t have said yes to. You’re in a shit position. You’re down on the first shelf or up at the top shelf or you’re tucked away in the low shelf of a bunker or whatever. You can’t afford to try to make the case in all of those 1,000 stores. You just don’t have the money. You don’t have the bandwidth. You don’t have the team. You can’t do it. Where so many of you make mistakes is that you try. You try to go do that.

You try to go out there and make it happen, but it’s diluted to your efforts. Maybe you make a little improvement, but it’s nothing major. Instead, what if you said, “I got 1,000 stores. I got enough money in the bank. I got enough team on the bench that I can go crush it in 100 stores. I can do what I want to do in every store. I’m in 100 stores and I’m going to do that. That includes a merchandising plan, my shopper activation plan, my social media plan, my in-store efforts,” or whatever that is. Whatever those elements are, you pick that 100 stores and you use the remaining 900 stores as control.

You go out and you spend that money very focused and pinpointed on those 100 stores. Let me walk it back. You don’t overspend, you don’t buy velocity. You don’t do any of that stuff. You actually just say, “This is a reasonable budget that if I raise the capital I want to raise, these are the elements I would do in the stores, but I can only do them in 100 stores or 10 stores or 5 stores or whatever that number is that within your constraints.”

I want to do it as a proof case. I’m going to do these things and I’m going to be able to show the difference between our velocity, our revenue, our success in the stores that I execute in versus the stores that I can’t. Now, you have a case to make. I would argue by the way that you shouldn’t go to 1,000 stores if you can’t support 1,000 stores yet, but sometimes we don’t have that choice.

Sometimes the fear is we view calendars the way they are. Let’s stick with that example and say you’re in a 1,000 and you focus on the 100. Now, in those 100, you’re driving results and that becomes your narrative. “When I have the capital that I’m requesting, these are the elements that we will do from a sales execution, merchandising, execution, marketing execution, etc. If I do those things in the store, there’s no reason to believe that what I’ve accomplished in these 100 stores, I couldn’t accomplish in 1,000 stores or 10,000 stores.”

It’s a matter of resources. With the funding that you’re giving me, here’s how I’m going to allocate that to make sure I have the team and all the arrows in the quiver to go out and execute it. Instead of defending velocity numbers in 1,000 stores, you point to the 100 that you’ve invested the right things around brand activation. You can show an investor that the money they provide will drive similar results.

A side benefit, by the way, is if you’re wrong, if the things that you’re trying to do if you’re merchandising plan, if you’re marketing and all of that, isn’t effective, don’t work, you’re wrong in 100 stores, you dust yourself off and you reapply new ideas, efforts and strategies, you learn. You learn in a way that isn’t an existential threat to the business. For the most part, you have to understand that you’re always going to be under-resourced, especially in the early days. How do you use those resources to build that case to prove to yourself and others that you have a scalable opportunity?

The same thing applies to eCommerce. We know stocks are rising like crazy and it’s unlikely you can afford to compete with more prominent, mature brands across the entire world especially. Pick a geography or a small segment of the market and invest in a targeted way. It could be geographic. It could be a specific user type. It could be a specific channel.

Whatever it is, pick it and invest in a very targeted way. If you’re successful, you can make a similar argument to the one I just referenced in brick and mortar. You could say, “I can’t afford to just randomly do a paid search or paid social. Globally, I chose this market or I chose this type of consumer or the psychographics or demographics, whatever it is and put my efforts against there. If I do that in a bigger way, here’s what I can drive.”

Let me back up one thing. Investors, for the most part, aren’t operators and even if they are operators, they haven’t been in a while. They’re not sitting in your chair. They’re not seeing what you’re seeing. They’re not watching the bank account like you’re watching the bank account. Although they try, they don’t fully understand your challenges and constraints. Allowing them to establish the goalposts doesn’t make good sense, does it?

Wrapping Up

This sounds easy. I get it. There are going to be investors who tell you to pound sand. They want these numbers. These are things that they need in their proof points to make them feel comfortable in pulling the trigger or get it past or investment committees or LPs and so forth and that’s okay. They’re not the right investor for you. You build a strong business case, one that you know can be replicated and scaled. You pitch a small tent, but you know that the inner workings of the tent and what you’re putting in in that tent will work in a bigger and more scalable way.

You find someone who will believe in you, then that’s exactly what you need. If you control your own narrative, develop a compelling story for investment that fits within your constraints, within your risk tolerance, your chances of success are going to increase dramatically. That’s ultimately what you’re trying to do. Also, what that means is that you’ll need less money. You’ll need to raise less money. You’ll be less reliant upon capital. You may find other pathways to build the business. I’m encouraging you to think differently and to focus.

I’ve made two points. I’m recapping quickly. This will be a relatively short episode. The first is radical persistence, 7 to 12 touches. Use sequences. Be different than everybody else. Don’t write that long, brilliant, artful email that nobody’s going to read. Be quick, be pithy, be funny or be whatever you need to be, but be efficient in your emails. Build those sequences, leverage technology and make sure it’s happening in the background. Don’t allow yourself to ruminate about when or how often. If you do those things and if you build that consistent persistence, then you’re going to move faster than the others who don’t.

The second is to control your narrative. Take control of it. Be a growth hacker. Build science-backed points of evidence, but don’t allow somebody else to tell you what those should be. Don’t let somebody else draw that finish line on the pavement for you. Do it yourself. Even if it seems small, even if it seems less important or something that doesn’t feel boast-worthy, don’t let ego and vanity get in the way. Do what’s right for your business. Be smart. Be in control of what success is defined as and what your narrative should be.

That’s it. Those are my two post-Expo thoughts. I’m going to encourage you all to take this and use it. If you think it’s bullshit, call me out on it. I’m completely fine with that, but please do. Congratulations to everybody on a great show. Congratulations to New Hope for bringing us all together. We’ll talk next time. Take care.

Important Links

• Expo West

• HubSpot

• Reply.io

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