When looking at your association’s goals for membership growth, you might need to switch your mind to a seller’s mentality. Ingrid attended the Wisconsin Society of Association Executive’s Virtual Sales Workshop where selling the idea of your membership was the focus.
This concept all starts with evaluating the buyer’s journey and in this case, your potential member’s journey. The potential member needs to trust and ideally like you and understand the association’s value before hearing a breakdown of pricing. This will require you to help them connect the dots between their needs and your association’s offerings.
Once you understand the potential member’s journey, it is helpful to develop an elevator pitch. Answer why members should invest in your organization, explain your association’s buying power, what percent of the market is represented, any projects the association is working on, and anything else that would be important to a potential member. Having this spiel prepared will help you to clearly and accurately explain the association and why this potential member should join. We often stumble over our words or leave important details out when just speaking off the top of our head.
If you don’t have a potential member standing in front of you, find some! Phone calls can be incredibly effective when it comes to new member recruitment. Calls can be split up among volunteers with the goal of bringing in non-members who have attended past events, people or companies that fall into your target market, or recommendations from other members. This is a great time to put that elevator pitch to good use!
Another tool that you can provide volunteers with, is an infographic. Give them something that quickly breaks down membership, key points, and who to contact with questions that they can share with potential members via email. This saves them the hassle of writing it all out but gets the point across. Something like this can be made easily in Canva.
Preparing yourself and other volunteers for conversations with potential members is an important piece in membership growth that often gets swept under the rug. Help volunteers to understand everything from the buyer’s perspective and work from there to welcome in new members.