Returning to the stage again this year was Lisa Myers, founder and CEO of Verve Search, who delivered her talk ‘True Grit – How to Build an Outreach Team that Delivers’.
I really enjoyed Lisa’s talk at the inaugural Outreach Conference last year, where she spoke about how a big part of outreach success is down to mindset. You can read more about that, along with a full round-up of the 2017 event, here.
This year she stressed the point that you can’t build a house by holding a hammer! You can have the best tools and the best processes in place, but the real material is the people.
She started her talk by touching upon something she said in her previous presentation, that there is no optimum way to write an outreach email – everyone is different and has individual preferences and styles.
Lisa says you have to trust people and to trust yourself to do the thing that is right for YOU.
Grit, collaboration and believing is the key to teamwork, and that’s really the basis for success.
To give an example, Lisa spoke about a campaign Verve Search had done for a client, which involved the world’s first gigapixel time-lapse of London. She revealed that the campaign fell through at the last moment, a couple of times, but her team didn’t give up. Even though it resulted in 111 links with 350k views, Lisa said: tThe real work was in the teamwork that it took to get it off the ground”.
She also mentioned that the skill and confidence it takes to collaborate with third-parties, on client campaigns, should not be underestimated.
Finding the right people plays a big part in all of this – but companies make the mistake of looking for experience on CVs, and that could lead to missing out on real talent. Passion + perseverance = GRIT.
She also thinks it’s important to find people who are different than you, with different strengths. “Help people be more of who they are,” she said. Once you’ve helped people be comfortable with who they are, you need to show them the way and help them to progress.
The last thing she mentioned was belonging; it makes sense that people do better the more they feel valued and part of a wider team. “Take care of people and people will take of the results,” she concluded.