engagement harvester of sorrow

For the longest time, listening to "Harvester of Sorrow" on Metallica's late 80s masterpiece "…And Justice For All" meant I was playing FIFA with my roommates in Old West Dorm at UNC.

Nowadays that song plays in my head every time I say or type "engagement harvesting" – which has been happening a lot lately.

Thanks for reading!

Eric

Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss

PS - as a friendly reminder, you’re receiving this email because you filled out a form on revboss.com or because we interacted on LinkedIn at some point.

Just about every week now, one or two RevBoss client posts take off and generate 10s (or 100s) of engagements on LinkedIn.  Usually a big chunk of them squarely inside the ICP, many from second-degree connections — people they've never met.

At most companies, that’s the end of it and nothing else happens.  25k impressions! High five! I’m doing a good job!

Obviously, we see this differently – a like is a small, low-stakes signal that says "I'm paying attention to this topic, and to you." A comment is a bigger one. These are leads.

Unless you’re really lucky, these prospects aren't opportunities straight away but they’re 100% a cracked door into relationships with the exact people you want to sell to.

To rehash my analogy from a few weeks back – your content is tiki-taka football.  Pass, move, pass, move to possess the ball (or the prospect relationship, as it were). Possession drives chances and chances drive goals…it's just that eventually somebody needs to make a play.

Engagement harvesting is a cross into the box. It doesn't always result in a goal, but it always initiates action.

The mechanics for this are simple: watch the engagement on your content, filter it to your ICP, enrich the prospects, and take action.

Skipping over a key detail here – suffice it to say, there are LOTS of ways to get this prospect data from your posts…or (wink) any post.  And the filter and enrich pieces are very easy.

All the leverage is in the “take action” step…and man is it easy to screw it up.  You have the most delicate ember of a potential lead – immediately asking for a demo is (usually) a surefire way to snuff it out.

Here are some examples that work consistently well for us, both email and DM:

These messages get much, much higher reply rates than cold emails.  It’s not cold and you’re not a stranger, you're the person whose post they just raised their hand on.

The starting point is the newsletter add – you can actually automate it in most cases. It's the smallest possible ask and it converts a one-time like into recurring permission. It’s unlikely that someone that engaged with your content is in buying mode at that precise moment – so give them another way to take a step in your direction. 

Getting them on your email list gets you into their inbox every couple of weeks, indefinitely, for the price of one yes. 

Context cracks open the door to start a conversation.  If your outreach reads like a triggered sequence, you've burned the exact warmth that made the play work.

Four non-obvious notes about this playbook:

You can run this play for your entire team. One of our top-performing clients has seven (7!) people running a version of it. The benefit of going wide is that different people can carry different talk tracks for different customer profiles. The CEO stays high-level, exec-to-exec. The VP of Client Success works day-to-day customer content for the people actually using the product. Same playbook, seven different doors into the same market.

The outreach doesn't have to come from you. You might be the CEO, and the engagement lands on your posts — but the leads can route to your sales team or into your marketing process. The follow-up can be highly automated and enabled, or very surgical and personalized. Both work. Most teams should run a mix. Your face gets the likes; your team works the list.

Don't try to engineer the engagement numbers. Just be focused and consistent…and remember that you're telling an algo who you are and what you're about just as much as you're writing to an audience. It's great to get a 100+ engagement post because that can feed a few weeks of outreach. The more realistic case is a steady drumbeat of 8s, 16s, 21s, and 7s. That's fine – just keep going. (Seven likes with two ICP names in them is two crosses into the box.)

You can harvest fields you didn't plant. Your competitors' posts and brand pages generate engagement too — and the people commenting over there are, definitionally, your ICP thinking out loud about your category. Same rules apply, maybe double: be thoughtful, lead with context, crack the door open.

Lastly, a brief personal note about Dolly Parton.  Yes – quite the whiplash from a newsletter with a dozen Metallica puns.

Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that music is an animating force in my life. What might be less obvious is that country music is my first love – it's the music I was raised on.

And I have especially loved Dolly for a very, very long time.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried a little when I heard the news — for a lot of very complicated reasons, but largely because it felt like my grandmother died again.

My Maw Maw Catherine grew up a lot like Dolly did – 10 siblings in a poor, rural, farming family with deep musical and spiritual roots.  She grew up poor and more or less stayed that way until she died.  But she was so kind and so funny and so generous. I have a stack of birthday gift / gas money checks that she gave to me that I never cashed.

When my brother, sister, and I would stay at her house – we had our pick of four fuzzy broadcast channels and four movies on VHS: “On Golden Pond”, “Yours, Mine and Ours”, “The Bear”, and “Steel Magnolias”.  We watched Steel Magnolias dozens of times. 

And for all of her philanthropy, fame, and wonderful music and despite my foundational Dolly associations – notably performing with Pee Wee Herman – she’s always been Truvy to me. 

Dolly talked like where I come from, her mannerisms are like where I come from, and her values are like where I come from. And she “come from nothin” — which is what Maw Maw would say. Just like my grandmother. Just like my dad.

Of all the Dolly media I’ve consumed over the past 48 hours, I loved this performance of Dolly singing "In The Pines" with her family on her old variety show the most. Her mama and daddy and siblings are right there with her.

Dolly's mama sings the low harmony, just a little off key, just like my Maw Maw did.