Category Archives: Networking

Networking Success Strategy: Use Your Best Social Skills When Meeting New People

Posted on September 1, 2010 by lelychayankabie13

What was the first thing Mom taught you when you headed off to school? Be polite to other people. Be nice and say please and thank you. She was teaching you social skills because she knew that these are the most important skills you will need to be successful in life. They are also one of the most important skills you will need to be successful in your networking strategy. It’s also one of the areas that cause the most stress and anxiety for many new networkers. Here are some of the most helpful tips I have learned in my seven years of intensive networking.

Comfort Level
It’s tough to help other people feel comfortable with you if you aren’t feeling comfortable yourself. Your conversation may be awkward or you may have a perturbed look on your face. Other people may not chalk that up to you feeling discomfort; they just might think you are not friendly or interesting, even though you are. You want to find a way to get a basic level of comfort with networking and meeting new people as quickly as you can. Practice and experience is a great way to do this of course. So are the rest of the tips in this article.

Practice
There is nothing wrong with planning what you are going to say ahead of time. Guys will rehearse their “pick up” lines and while we don’t want to bring in any aspect of cheesy schmoozing into real networking, it’s still a good lesson. You are going to be asked the same questions over and over again. It’s almost guaranteed that you’ll be asked “What do you do?” at a business events. “How do you know the host/organizer?” is another regular question. The drive to an event is a great time to work out what you want to say about yourself, your company and the networking group or club.

Be Interesting
We all sweat over how to be interesting and what to say that will show others how clever or funny we are. Dale Carnegie taught is that to be interesting, you must first be interested. Stephen Covey put it another way, “first seek to understand, then be understood.” Both imply that you’ll do more listening than talking. You know that practice session in the car on the way to the networking meeting? Think about great questions you can ask people that will show them you’re interested.

There are many more aspects of building your social skills than we can cover here. Start with these networking strategy tips and you’ll find yourself more comfortable and skilled all the time. And, if you really need advice, ask your mom.

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Tips to Open the Floodgates With Social Media

Posted on August 10, 2010 by lelychayankabie13

How can businesses open the floodgates? Is there a strategy for involving customers in your business decisions? These are the questions we are all asking as we examine and explore the power of the social media.

According to an editorial in Selling Power Magazine, Gerhard Gschwandtner said we must stop selling in the old way. He wrote, “… selling has fundamentally changed and pursuing the old tried-and-true tactics results in more of the same: high stress and lower sales.” He went on to discuss what he called the “conversation” economy and gave us action ideas that correspond with the new handshake: 1) join the conversation; 2) match your sales process with the way customers buy; 3) replace pitching with collaboration; 4) make buying easier and create social networks that showcase your knowledge.

In The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, we introduced a decision-making model that might help companies understand how to involve people and at what level. Tannebaum and Schmidt (T&S) created this model in the early 1970′s and published it in the Harvard Business Review. We combined and reworded the stages to make it easier to comprehend within the framework of the social media.

Basically, what T&S did was create a model based on participation and authority, theorizing that as you give more participation to groups in the decision-making process, you give up authority or control. This, then, becomes a clear and basic question companies must address as they become more transparent.

The model begins with complete authority in the Tell Mode: You simply tell people what you want and expect no feedback. As you move up the continuum slightly, giving up some authority, you move into the Sell Mode. Here you share your decision by “selling” or persuading others to your point of view. You really don’t want feedback, but you at least care about what others think. The third stage moves toward the center of the continuum where you’ve made your decision, but you are willing to change it. You are in the Test Mode. You throw the idea out there and listen to the responses and maybe you’ll change your mind. In the fourth stage, you move into the Consult Mode. Here, you have not made a decision. You wish to consult with others and listen to their views and then you will decide what to do. Finally, in the last stage, the Join Mode, you join with others to make the decision together. This is where you have the least authority and the most participation.

Ways to Adapt the T&S MODEL to Open the Floodgates

Excerpt from The New Handshake…

“1. Use the Tell and Sell Modes to create visibility. Your blog posts and your Tweets simply tell readers about your product or service. You might also add information about the proper use of the product or service and you could include testimonials from others. The Tell and Sell Modes’s purpose, then, is to create an understanding of the product or service, not to engage the customer in decision making.

2. Use the Test Mode to discover new ways to operate, to try out new services, and to explore how services are being provided. You ask them to react to what you have created or decided.

3. Use the Consult Mode to enable you to really engage your customer. If a large number of your customers are hooked into the social media-that is, your customers are actively involved by creating blog posts, they are responding to and bookmarking the content on the Web, or they are signing up on social media sites-you can engage them in many of the decisions that your company might face.

4. Use the Join Mode when you want your customers to make decisions with you. In the Join Mode, you no longer make the decision alone. Here you share decision making with the customer in a completely collaborative manner. This level of participation becomes messier. The best example of the Join Mode and the social media is with Wikipedia. The founders of Wikipedia decided to ‘crowd-source’ their online encyclopedia, with the idea being that many people have more information together than we each have separately.”

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6 Good Reasons to Shun “Corporate Speak”

Posted on July 12, 2010 by lelychayankabie13

We need to seamlessly engage 24/7 initiatives through best-of-breed actionable, client-facing items and proactively create 24/365 niche markets through backward-compatible, future-proof enterprise-wide e-services without turnkey systems.”

Does the above sentence sound like something that you’ve heard in a meeting recently? Actually, it comes from an on-line random corporate jargon generator which simply puts together the silliest things that are said within corporations and makes them into sentences that could be spoken by any CEO.

In these difficult and recessionary times, as people are changing industries frequently, it is absolutely essential to eliminate jargon, circumlocutions and other corporate double-speak from your interviewing vocabulary.

One good exercise is to explain, as if to a second grader, what you do for a living. Don’t use any jargon, corporate “buzzwords” or other words that a second grader would not understand. If you cannot do this, you truly do not know what you do for a living.

It is continually amazing to me and my colleagues how many of our executive clients cannot or will not do this simple exercise. Jargon is a killer of executive interviews. Here’s why:

• Jargon doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning from company to company. If the “corporate speak” at one firm is different from that at another, you may be saying something totally inappropriate or unintelligible in your interview. I often think of when I play with my daughter’s cat and “meow” at it. Sometimes the cat will give me a profoundly dirty look. Since I don’t actually speak “cat,” I probably just insulted its intelligence or fur coat or something. Ditto with “corporate speak.” I’ve seen too many executives get in real interview trouble from using jargon.

• Likewise, jargon does not necessarily retain the same meaning from industry to industry. Even within industries, different branches of the same industry may use jargon and even technical definitions differently. Misusing jargon is very easy to do when switching industries.

• Jargon is way to show that you’re “in the club” of the corporation for which you’re working. Only you’re not anymore. You’re trying to get into a different “club,” now. But you can’t use their jargon until you’ve been admitted to the club. If you try they may turn on you and tear you to shreds. Such is human nature.

• Jargon often covers ignorance. As the above jargon that sounds very managerial shows, even a complete idiot (a computer has no intelligence) can generate jargon. Only someone who truly knows his or her stuff can explain complex material in simple language. Employers have caught on to this, and many are downgrading their evaluations of those who speak jargon through the interview.

• Even something that isn’t technically jargon can be a shield against lack of understanding of what a job really does. For example, many people say they want to do “operations.” “Operations” has many meanings within the corporate world, yet some people cannot describe what they want to do without using the word “operations.” If you can’t describe what it is without using the word, you don’t know what it is.

• Further, don’t use pet corporate names for positions. The one that leaps to mind was common at Sun Microsystems, which insisted on calling people “Sun Evangelists.” Use common titles like “salespeople,” “public relations,” and so on. Companies shouldn’t have “evangelists.”

“Corporate speak” is one way that the “insiders” of a corporation denote who is “in” and who is “out.” These kinds of silly and immature games should be left in middle school, because they are having a very negative effect on corporations. Think hard if you really want to work for a corporation where such absurd attitudes and practices exist.

When to use jargon

Having said this, there are times to use jargon and corporate buzzwords. They are:

• You are in the same industry, and the industry is jargon-heavy, such as government, military, technical or medical. Still use it carefully, but you must use enough to show that you are one of the “in” crowd. Failure to show appropriate and effective jargon use could doom you.

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Gracefully Handle Awkward Networking Introductions

Posted on June 24, 2010 by lelychayankabie13

So here it is, fellow advisors, planners, agents and reps: the most embarrassing situation I’ve ever experienced when networking (that I know of). Picture this: I’m traveling for business with Jackie, a top executive for a hotel chain with whom I was to co-facilitate a one-day training session with the management team of a hotel property. Now, Jackie and I have absolutely nothing in common. Zilch. She’s a bit older than I and reminds me of a college professor – she’s conservative in her manner, eloquent and articulate in her delivery, and highly intelligent. Now, this is all fine, but her personality is a bit aloof, so it’s not easy to connect with her.

We decided to break for lunch and found ourselves at a buffet; one of those places where everyone is holding Styrofoam plates, paper cups and plastic utensils. Lunch consisted of grilled chicken, steamed string beans and something orange I couldn’t identify. As Jackie spoke to me, I bit down on a string bean and (you guessed it!) released a stream of water that raced in her direction at warp speed. It’s important to note that while the water didn’t hit her directly in the face, it did, however, take an interesting trajectory and actually grazed the lens of her eye glasses, leaving a line of water that then dripped into her soda.

I tried to play it off as if nothing happened. As you might suspect, Jackie was on to me. She actually went cross-eyed for a moment as she looked at the line of water on her lens. This was now an uncomfortable moment, so my brilliant response was, “So what now?” That was all I could muster. Jackie actually smiled and asked if I would get her another soda, she would wipe her lens clean and we could call it even. Fair enough! The rest of the day went fine; in fact, it ended up being a great day, and a good relationship moving forward. Funny story, right?

Below are some fairly common awkward situations you may encounter in any number of networking scenarios and how you can overcome your anxiety to form effective networks.

How do I introduce myself?

This depends, in large part, on timing. Is the person you’d like to meet in the middle of a conversation? If so, excuse yourself politely and introduce yourself. On the other hand, if the individual appears to be heavily involved in conversation (transactional, personal or technical in nature), offer to return once they are finished speaking with one another. If you’re not interrupting anyone, then simply introduce yourself and ask some engaging questions – questions about them.

With every greeting, start with an assertive handshake: think of it on a scale of one to 10, with one being a floppy fish and 10 being nearly ripping someone’s arm out of its socket. In business situations, you want to shoot for a firm, but not too aggressive, handshake that falls around seven or eight on the scale.

If someone’s alone: Begin with a clear and simple introduction: “Good morning, my name is Michael Goldberg. It’s very nice to meet you.” Then move on to asking questions about them – in fact, you shouldn’t talk about yourself at all. Some questions that I’ll typically use include queries such as:

  • What type of work do you do?
  • For what company or firm do you work?
  • Do you like what you do?
  • What is it about your work that you love so much?
  • If they’ve attended before, I ask: “What keeps you coming back to the event?” “What other events like this do you attend?” I may also ask questions like, “Do you market your business, and if so, do you have a target market?”
  • If they’re a first-timer to the event and I am too, I’ll say, “Oh, great. Maybe we can tackle this together.” I’ll also ask things like, “How did you learn of the event? Did someone refer you? Who is your ideal prospect?” I also like to inquire about what they like to do outside of work for fun.
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