Episode #18: Three Super Fast Ways To Market Yourself When Networking

Meeting new business contacts, expanding personal networks, promoting a reliable, trustworthy “Brand You” are the basics of business. Now given our first interactions with strangers are so important, are we getting the best result for ourselves and organisation? When we are out there representing our company and someone asks us, can we succinctly explain what we do, in a clear, informative, impressive and memorable manner?

An excellent formula is called the Wow & How. When we meet someone for the first time, after examining their business card, we should get the ball rolling and ask them about their business.

We can really get things moving by using a three step approach:

1. We start with a proposition that they can easily agree with. For example, in the case of my business: “You know how companies often really struggle with training their staff. They get really frustrated that the training doesn’t produce the results they require” . The listener by this time is nodding and silently voicing their agreement, because they can mentally picture the problem.

2. We embed a pregnant pause, then add the mega attention grabber, almost as a throw away line - “Well, we fix that completely”. At this point, we become as silent as the tomb and do not utter any follow up to our bold statement.

3. Their immediate internal mental reaction is “Wow, that sounds amazing” . Then their buyer supreme skepticism kicks in and they ask, “Oh yeah, so How do you do that?”.

They have asked the question from their side now, so this allows us to subtly lead with our differentiable advantage in the marketplace. This is brilliant, because we are responding to their request for more information and unlike everyone else, we are not pushing our unique selling points down their throats.

Importantly, our answer is more about the What we do, rather than the How we do it. We do this on purpose, because we want to explain the precise How in detail later, in the comfort of their office, rather than in short form at a noisy, distracting and crowded networking event.

So our answer would go like this: “Dale Carnegie has been around for a long time, so we have proven methods which trigger the behavior change needed to get the staff to produce outperformance”

Remember the steps: start with a proposition that they can easily agree with; add the mega attention grabber; let their buyer supreme skepticism kick in.