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Developing a membership plan is not complicated, however, it takes work. Take a listen to this week's episode for tips on how to get started, whether you're starting from scratch or have been in the industry for a while, to reboot your membership plan for a successful 2020 and beyond.                   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. 21st century associations must move forward with a little bit of hustle and revenue development at their core. Here's JP. Today's episode of Association Hustle is focused on membership growth. The ideas that I'm going to set forth are four steps with several steps within those. It's the exact way that we launch a new project to sell memberships with our association clients. These steps are very scalable for most organizations. These steps work whether you're starting out or if you need to evaluate your process again to make it a little bit better. Or, if you've been in the game for a long time, you need to reset. First, we're going to go through what I would call an association briefing. I want you to be really candid about these points. One, why should companies join your association? Second, compile specific circumstances of when you helped companies in each part of your value proposition. Let's say it's business development and networking, advocacy, and maybe education and training. Then, you need a testimonial from a member about how you help them and what happened when you did. The reason why they do not join is the third thing. Why are they not a participant in your organization? This is just as important to know as why they do join. And lastly, know your business model and dues model and get really specific about what works and what doesn’t. The second point is really important that you should not skim over it: data collection. Your data sets should include the names of the companies to contact, both with digital and face-to-face marketing, email addresses of multiple people within that ecosystem that might be decision makers, and their titles. This information is absolutely critical to the sales process. Because, more and more, I no longer see the situation where it's just one person making the call, it's multiple people. Then, I want you to get really narrow. Identify the ten largest, or most strategic, companies that you would like to recruit in the next year. Look at your contact sheet, your relationships within that organization, and see where it's really robust and gives you a chance to be successful. The third step within data collection: companies you don't know, but should join, based on your value proposition and your experiences in regulations, advocacy, networking, in education, and other areas of your value proposition. The companies that you need to get in touch with, that you don't have on the list now, that you'd like to attract. However, reach out only if they fit into your value proposition and you can move the needle for them in those critical areas. The third part is the sales plan. What are the key issues, based on your plan, for the association and what you're going to execute? What are the key issues to promote the association within this calendar year? Develop regular e-mail and communications campaigns about those key issues. Reach out at least once a month. Develop a plan to utilize live and in person events or webinars. How are you going to leverage when people get together? And, how are you going to utilize that for membership recruitment? Based on all these things, what are the specific sales talking points that you would use, or a volunteer would use, to talk about the organization? This is where I want to go back to those specific testimonials that you developed in the association briefing proce...