I was recently sent to a trade expo in the gold coast to help members of the PIAA to join up to the company that I’m currently working for. It was my second time at a event and my first ‘attempt’ at networking. I was thankfully with a bit of a digital guru called Dean Power (look at his blog – Byron New Media) who gave me some good tips.
I always prefer face to face interaction because it’s much easier to get a decision from a person by judging their response. I also wanted to find out more about the pet industry, it’s not one that I was overly familiar with and being an ‘interest’ based market was extremely popular. However what I found out was that I was going about it in the wrong way.
I was attempting to tackle a face to face introduction as if I was a telephone discussion. Which is clearly a silly thing to do but at the time I thought it was a good approach. What I was forgetting is that in a ‘cold’ face to face introduction you have to explain the ‘product’ from a user prospective (apart from certain industries obviously) because otherwise they won’t even attempt to understand you. They’ll just tell you to go and start talking to the next person. You also need to get to know the person at a basic level before you can even think of entering any kind of sales process.
The solution that I found was to go back to basics and just talk to people about their product, listen to what they had to say and get to understand them as individuals. Not attempting to sell to them at all and just waiting for them to ask what I did. The main benefit of being there in person is that you can be more ‘personal’ and don’t have to use the majority of the ‘core’ selling techniques (open, match & close) because you can just get to know people.
Not only was I more successful when I was more personal but I also got to know some really awesome people who were passionate about what they did and hopefully I’ll ge to work with them. If I don’t then I just really appreciate them showing me what they do and I hope I’ll be able to see them again.
So the lesson to learn from this post?
Firstly, never fear failing but always question it, I could have easily given up there and then but I looked at where I could improve and tried another way.
Secondly, always remember that the environment is a huge factor in how you can approach people and you need to be sensitive to that. If you ignore it then you’ll just end up failing and never having any idea why.