What’s in Your Membership Toolbox – Association Hustle – Episode 212

There is a handful of fundamental “items” that need to be in your association’s membership toolbox. Listen in as JP Moery, president of The Moery Company, explains the three main items you should focus on for successful membership recruitment and management.
 
 
 
 
 
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. President of the Moery Company, JP’s mission is to arm today’s associations with insight and strategy to thrive in a progressively complex and competitive business landscape. Twenty First Century associations must move forward with a little bit of hustle and revenue development at their core. Here’s JP.
Hi, welcome to the Association Hustle Podcast. Today’s question is: what’s in your membership toolbox?
I think there are some fundamental things that you got to put in that toolbox that you’ve got to take to work every single day so let me give you a few thoughts. Number one is the value proposition of your organization. Not what you put in a brochure ten years ago and you just continue to update and put some different graphics around it. What is the true value proposition of your organization according to the members of your organization? I want their real-life stories. Why they join, what they gained in terms of value from the organization. Tell me about a specific situation where the legislative affairs program helped them. I’ll give you an example. The other day I heard from a member of a manufacturing association that understood from a webinar [about] potential tariffs that were coming into their industry. They pre-purchased a lot of commodities because of the tariffs that we’re getting ready to happen and saved possibly millions of dollars. I want those specific stories.
The second [tool] is testimonials and referrals. Pick half-a-dozen association members that are willing to send a quick email [or] leave a voicemail message, in some way endorse or refer prospects to you. We need someone during the sales process at a strategic time to speak on our behalf and tell a story that goes something like this, “Hey, I was a small business, too. I wasn’t sure if the association was a fit for me. My perception was it was for big businesses but then once I joined and I went to the annual meeting I was able to meet some of the VIPs of this industry. I do work for them now and my business has grown exponentially because I was a member of the association. I was in the same situation you were and I decided to make the move and it’s absolutely changed my business.” Hard stop. But we need those kinds of testimonials. You’re probably not going to get them at scale but, man, two or three of those will be very helpful.
My third thing [that should be] in your toolbox is Salesforce CRM, or something similar to it. We’ve got a golden rule in this company: if it’s not in Salesforce it didn’t happen. I realized that’s a double negative but you’ve got to log every single contact you have with a prospect. Over time you start to learn what’s effective. You start to identify how many calls it might take to close a deal. You might see the tactics that work. Is it better to email? Is it better to make a direct phone call? Is it better to have a face-to-face meeting? You start to really learn the cadence of your membership development work. But if you don’t put it into a Salesforce [type] system, or a CRM where you can get a pipeline on a moment’s notice, or you can’t generate an activity report when somebody requests it… you’ve got a problem because your process isn’t sound.
Let’s revisit these real quick!
One: value proposition from the members perspective. Why?
Second: testimonials and referrals from members that have something tangible to talk about.
And third: develop that sales process including a great CRM that can keep track of things.
Hope this was helpful to you, thanks for listening, I’m grateful. Please share our content with someone else if you found it valuable. See you soon, bye bye.
We hope you enjoyed this edition of JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. We’d love to connect with you! Check out our blog at MoeryCompany.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You can also connect with JP on LinkedIn and Twitter @JPMoery as well as the Moery Company’s Instagram and Facebook page. To purchase a copy of JP’s book, “Association Hustle: Top Strategies for Association Growth,” go to JPMoery.com.