To
Sell, or Not to Sell.
As
most of you know, I post a networking tip daily on
facebook & LinkedIn, and another one on Twitter
& NetOffer. Recently, I posted the following tip:
If you
are selling in your 1-on-1, you're losing business,
because you will get a reputation and people won't want
to meet with you anymore.
Mark
Kashar, a friend who's a great financial planner and
expert on disablity and long term care insurance, asked
the following question:
Jeff,
If
you shouldn't sell networking and not in a 1 on 1, when
is the appropriate time to break the ice on a sale?
By the way, I do agree with you on the above.
Mark
When one person takes the time to email a
question, that means that other people are probably
thinking the same thing, so I thought this would be a
good place to answer Mark.
It's
important to separate your networking activities from
your sales time.
Networking, like all advertising, is designed to create
opportunities for you to sell. We attend our
weekly/monthly networking meetings to Network,
not Sell. We're there to reach the 250 to 1,000+
people that everyone in the room knows. We're not there
to turn the people in the room into our customers.
We
should be spending our networking time finding out who
the people in our network want to meet and making warm
introductions for them. We should also make sure the
people in our network know who we want to meet so they
can make introductions for us.
Our
30-Second commercials are an opportunity to share our
referral requests one at a time. Our 1-on-1's are the
time to share lists of who we want to meet.
So,
to answer Mark's question, the time to sell is when
you meet the people you're introduced to when you
network.
Something
else that happens when we're networking is that the
people in our groups will ask about how we can help them
with our products and services. This is more likely to
happen if we do not use selling language in our
networking.
The
more we DON'T SELL when we network, the more people in
the room will become our customers.
But,
again, it's important to remember that we network to
reach the circle of influence of the people in the room.
Happy
Networking!
Jeff
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