Forgot your password?
The Power Of Groups
Document Actions
|
11 The Power Of Groups From trade associations to members-only, lead-sharing clubs, learn to leverage the power of the group to generate wins for everyone.
Statistically speaking, attending association meetings, chamber of commerce functions, coffee clubs, happy hours, and so on, is a dogged way to find people who are ready to buy from you. The odds of meeting someone who fits your prospect profile in any given group are small. On top of that, you must factor in the additional odds of running into this prospect at a time when he or she is ready to buy, and then figure the odds that this prospect is already locked into some other solution or has some showstopper that will keep you from being the provider of choice. When you’re done totaling it all, your odds are somewhere around one in one thousand – really bad when you consider that other activities, such as creating and mailing a decent cold-letter, can achieve a 2 percent or higher return. Despite these long odds, however, I find that many salespeople spend their networking time looking for sales appointments. They flit around the room offering their business cards to as many people as they can, in the hopes they’ll hit the networking lottery. You know the type: As he shakes your hand and hands you his card, he asks, “What do you do?” (without letting go of your hand). During your response, he realizes you aren’t a good prospect, so he relaxes his grip, pulls his hand away, turns to the next person in your conversation circle and, cutting you off, asks that person, “And what do you do?” Honestly, I have no idea whether this method produces sales, because I’ve never tried it. But as the person on the receiving end, and one in the conversation circle, I do know a few results it produces – condescending laughter, disdain and lack of respect. If your objective at networking functions is to find sales appointments, then you’re missing the entire point, because networking is not a prospecting activity, it’s a marketing activity. Yes, the ultimate goal is to build the relationships you’ll need to find and close business, but trying to reach the end goal while you’re at the event is like trying to land the plane before you ever took flight. While finding sales opportunities at networking events is an incredibly long shot, generating sales opportunities by attending networking functions is actually quite easy, but only if you’re fully prepared and organized. But before we start getting you organized, let’s do a short exercise to see where you are right now.
I don’t mean this to sound condescending or arrogant, but I’ve yet to meet a salesperson who passed that test, unless I had already convinced him or her to get things documented – as I tried to do with you, earlier in this book. (Of course, salespeople who are organized generally don’t need my help, so perhaps that’s why I haven’t met any of them.) Regardless, of whether you passed or failed, I think the best place to start leveraging the power of groups is to tackle a strategy that will improve the success of not only your networking efforts, but the rest of your marketing efforts as well. Then, after we increase your global results, we’ll tackle some specific types of groups you can join or form, and give you ideas for increasing success there, too. Organizing And Integrating For Success Because attending a networking function is a marketing activity, to achieve maximum success, you must have a plan that includes before, during and after activities. I’ve conducted many workshops on networking, and when I get to this portion of the workshop and ask people to define before and during activities, almost without fail, I get the same response – silence and stares. Honestly, walking into a room of people to shake hands and talk is not a highly complicated task. So it’s not surprising that people struggle to invent before and during activities they can use to produce better results. The first time I tried to figure this out, I too had a blank look on my face. So, if you’re struggling for ideas, don’t be alarmed. The good news is that the solution is as simple as the problem. Instead of designing before and during activities that will improve the results of your networking effort, design before and during activities that will improve the results of your other marketing efforts. What can you do before and during a networking event that will either increase the success of other marketing efforts, or save you time when implementing those other plans? For some ideas, have a look at the following before, during and after outline included in my marketing plan. 
Before Event
During Event
After Event
Let’s examine the results of adding these steps to my networking marketing plan. First, I have what I call a “referral marketing plan,” that includes a step that says, “Every Monday morning, introduce two people I met last week to two people I already know.” The only way I can accomplish that task is by learning about people while I’m networking. I didn’t even have a referral marketing plan until I created my networking marketing plan, because the act of organizing one spawned the other. Imagine the number of reciprocal referrals you’ll get over the next 10 years, if you add this concept to your own marketing plan today. How many quality introductions do you think you’ll get as a result of making a thousand quality introductions yourself? Second, during the first two years of the Honest Selling Breakfast Club, enrollment was directly related to the topic – if I had a great topic, I had high enrollment. During the following two years, when I started taking “Member-For-A-Day” postcard coupons to networking functions, Breakfast Club enrollment was directly related to how many networking events I had attended. Regardless of my topic, if I attended five networking functions the month prior to my Breakfast Club and handed out postcards, I always had 50 to 100 percent more people come to the Breakfast Club than during the months I was too busy to network. (Remember, the Breakfast Club was my most productive marketing effort during that four-year stretch – and the more I networked, the better it did.) Third, by asking people at the networking functions for interviews for the various things I was writing, I virtually eliminated my need to cold-call to get interviews while implementing my writing articles marketing plan – as long as I networked, I got all the interviews I wanted. This saved me an immense amount of time implementing my various writing plans, and allowed me to create relationships with both the executives I interviewed and the people who introduced me to those executives – doubling the number of relationships I created. I kid you not that it took me fewer than 30 minutes to create the before-during-after list above, and fewer than four hours to create the postcard invitations and method for quickly generating my cash-cow prospect list – and I’m confident you can achieve similar results if you’ll invest the time to organize your plan for maximum effectiveness.
When it comes to the power of groups, or networking, you can dramatically increase the success of your marketing effort by creating and implementing an integrated plan. Creating Your “Elevator Speech” Considering it’s composed of only four short words, it is actually quite astounding how a simple question – “What do you do?” – can turn a confident, self-assured executive into a quivering, tongue-tied mess. Okay, perhaps “quivering” is too strong a characterization, but “tongue-tied” is a perfect way to describe what happens to 90 percent of the people who must answer that simple question in a networking environment. As they say, you get only one chance to make a good first impression, so you must be prepared to seize the opportunity. What Makes A Quality Elevator Speech? First, the term “elevator speech”: Imagine getting on an elevator with a top executive – someone you’ve been trying to meet and who can control your future. In this scenario, you’ll have about 30 seconds to make that all-important first impression, so you must deliver an “elevator speech” that will impress, and be remembered by, this executive. If truth be told, there are literally hundreds of great elevator-speech formats, so I wouldn’t presume to tell you that my way is the best and instruct you to follow it. However, I can and will give you some ideas for what makes a great speech, so you have something against which you can measure the elevator speeches you create. An elevator speech should always be designed to accomplish three primary goals:
Some things to consider when crafting your elevator speech:
As for style and format, the sky is the limit on what you can do – you can say nothing more than “I’m a tax accountant,” or you can attend the function dressed like Mickey Mouse – whatever accomplishes the result you’re after. Working The Room – A Strategy For Success Before you create your elevator speech, you should have a clear strategy for “working the room,” because the style, length and content of your speech will be affected by that strategy. Having shaken thousands of hands at networking functions (most of the time evaluating how people introduce themselves), I have a pretty good handle on what you’ll encounter in a one-on-one networking situation, and how to make the most of your opportunity. So based on what I’ve learned, here’s a simple set of rules you can use to achieve the best result possible. Rule 1: Eliminate Their Fear I estimate (purely out of instinct) that 90 percent of the people you meet while networking will be uncomfortable, because they haven’t practiced their own elevator speeches. As a result, if you are the first to answer the “What do you do?” question, they won’t listen closely to your answer, because they’ll be worried about having to answer the same question themselves in a minute. So be the first to ask the question – giving them the chance to get past their nervousness before you begin to speak. Rule 2: Learn About Them First Remember how I said analogies are a powerful communication tool? (One of the most powerful in your arsenal, in fact?) If you learn about your new acquaintances first – by asking “What do you do?” and following with interviews about their businesses – when it’s your turn to talk, you’ll have the opportunity to tie your description into their business situations. For example, when I meet someone, I learn about his or her role in the company and ask a question related to sales or selling at that company. If I meet a computer programmer, I might ask, “What drives you nuts about having to support salespeople?” Or, if I meet a CEO, I’ll ask any question related to his or her role in business development – always worded so it’s a follow-up to whatever he or she already told me. This way, when my acquaintance asks me what I do, I give a short description and then tie my answer to what I learned. In the programmer’s case (which is a real example), she answered my question with, “The salespeople want real-time access to fulfillment schedules from a system that’s built for overnight batch processing. It seems like I’m constantly going into the raw data and assembling reports for them – I never get any real work done.” After I answered her question about what I do (related to building world-class sales teams), I followed by addressing her specific pain: “For example, if I were working with your company, I’d teach the salespeople how to get conditional commitments from clients without knowing the exact schedules. That way, they could close sales on the spot, without your having to create special reports and without your company having to rewrite its entire computer system.” Three days later, I got a call from her company’s chief technology officer during which we discussed strategies for getting the company’s salespeople out of his hair. I didn’t get the engagement, because the company’s top sales manager is, in the CTO’s words, “a real wacko,” but my elevator speech and strategy did the trick. Rule 3: Don’t Use Your Speech Unless You Must Easily half of the people I meet while networking never ask me what I do, because I ask the question first and then interview them, instead of talking about myself. At first blush, you might think this is nuts, because I don’t get the chance to make sure they understand what I do in relation to their situations. But because my strategy is a drip process that involves several steps, it actually produces great results:
Remember, shaking hands at the function is only one part of a marketing process that should contain multiple steps – so don’t worry at all if you don’t get the chance to use that wonderful elevator speech you spent so much time and energy creating! Rule 4: Have Fun Honestly, if you aren’t having fun, you probably won’t net many results from networking, so I encourage you to design a strategy you enjoy – don’t stop until you actually look forward to your next function. Once you achieve the have-fun objective, every problem you have networking will disappear, because you’ll be the person in the room who draws the crowd. Types Of Introductions You Can Use If you enter a room committed to the mission of learning about others, the importance of your own elevator speech will dramatically decrease. So, you can say pretty much anything you want, and you’ll still be head and shoulders above the crowd. However, you can increase your results marginally if you incorporate something unique into your speech. So why not do a bit of homework and produce the maximum results possible? What produces the maximum results, you ask? Simply put, anything that is unique. If You Are Boring, Be Boring No matter how much we try to make ourselves sound unique and innovative, the sad fact is most of us don’t do or sell anything that is all that much different or better than our competitors. I’m sorry, but attorneys are just attorneys, accountants are just accountants, widgets are often just widgets – you get the picture. In fact, while I’m giddy about the brand I created – Honest Selling – lots of other sales trainers and consultants advocate the same methods I preach. While this may be the sad truth, it also opens the door for an interesting twist. A tax accountant who is so dull and boring that he has nothing better to do than learn tax codes so he can save me money would be attractive to my business sense – wouldn’t you agree? So if you actually are a boring tax accountant, perhaps you can set yourself apart by saying so:
Now, this is a guy I would gladly introduce to someone with a tax problem. Humor Works In the past four years, I’ve heard a hundred versions of “I screen people who are being considered for employment” and “I help business owners make sure they’re hiring good people.” Problem is, I can’t remember the names or company names of any of the people who said these things. However, remember, in Chapter 1, when I cited the one elevator-speech response I remembered best?
I heard that four-second elevator speech more than four years ago. To this day, I remember the word-for-word introduction, the name of the guy who used it and the name of his company. If you’re naturally a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky person, then definitely try a humorous approach to creating an elevator speech, because you’ll be leveraging your strengths to their fullest. If you aren’t, try it anyway – ask a friend or colleague to help – because you’ll have more fun and most likely get better results. Using Analogies To Paint Pictures Especially when you’re selling something that isn’t mainstream and isn’t understood by most people, using analogies can be one of the best ways to describe what you do so you’re understood and remembered.
The more complicated your products or services, the better result you’ll get using an analogous introduction, especially if your analogy draws a comparison to something that is likely to be understood by anyone you meet. Generating After-The-Fact Curiosity Wouldn’t it be great if the people you meet keep thinking about you for days? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every time they saw your competitors’ products they wondered whether they were yours? Creating curiosity is the best way to accomplish that:
This is a great tactic for anyone who produces a very visible product. What could be better than having your competitors’ products advertising your services? Personal Branding In Chapter 1, I introduced the concept of establishing a personal brand. Using the curiosity example above, this saleswoman could help to establish her personal brand, if she simply added the following:
By adding this simple twist, and putting “The Sign Lady” on her business card, this salesperson would ensure that her elevator speech creates a positive impression, is clearly understood and is remembered over time.
Additional Group Strategies Whenever the subject of networking is raised, I often get asked, “Where should I spend my networking time?” Honestly, I have no idea where you should spend your networking time, but I can tell you how to spend it – producing the best results. I attended the Institute of Management Consultants meetings for years and produced only one client, but I learned a lot while I was there, so the trade-off was okay. Bottom line: You should invest your time wisely and consider all the types of returns on investments you may receive when making your choices. And, you should abandon any group that isn’t producing the results you want. That being said, here are three types of groups you should consider:
When choosing between networking functions, I always include the above types of groups on my calendar. But another very important type of group isn’t in that list – a type for which the primary purpose is for members to actively help one another close new business. Lead-Sharing Groups I left lead-sharing groups out of my list above for one simple reason: I’m not much of a follower, so if I can’t run it, I don’t want to play. In fact, about three years ago, I started a lead-sharing group that included an attorney, a web-strategy person, a finance person, a banker, a local newspaper owner and me. The first few months, we met at a local coffee shop, but it was hard to talk about things openly when sitting next to strangers. So one member offered to host our meetings at his office, and we took him up on his offer. Problem was, since this member was hosting the meetings, he took the chair at the head of the conference table and began to organize and control the conversations. I did nothing to stop this, because I was trying to let the group members control the direction the group would take. But after three or four months, he had completely replaced me as group leader. Once I realized I had lost control of the group, I dropped and started another one, because the leader of the group always gets better results than the followers, making running a different group a better use of my time.
My strongest characteristic in the DISC behavioral profile is “dominant,” so it’s no surprise I prefer to lead these groups. In fact, my propensity to form and lead groups is probably one of the reasons I started Yellow-Tie International, a business-development association designed to help entrepreneurs, service providers, advisors, brokers and agents develop a highly successful referral network or lead-sharing group. The [Your Name Here] Sales System: Groups To make the most of your networking time, turn the Sammy Schmoozer in you loose, but be certain that the Rachel Robot in you forces him to:
And if you simply can’t bring yourself to be the Sammy Schmoozer, then create a lead-sharing group, and find a Sammy Schmoozer who can help you overcome that weakness. Additional Resources I recommend reading “Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap … And Others Don’t,” by Jim Collins. While it’s not a book about sales, it will give you great insights for forming groups, selecting members and allowing the talents of everyone to shine. See the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association at http://www.yellow-tie.com for information on one of the most results-focused referral networking/lead-sharing group concepts around. < TOC Previous Chapter Next Chapter > Tired of reading on-line? Buy the book. (All profit goes to charity.) |