Delicious lunch at the Crown River Room. Plus a fantastic and extremely interesting speaker - John Fleming Ph.D. is a Principal at Gallup and Chief Scientist for Gallup's Customer Engagement and Human Sigma Practices. What does that mean? Basically it's all about how you can improve your bottom line 2.6 times more than your competitors if you combine your focus on maximising both customer AND staff engagement! Engaged employees X engaged customers = increased profits. And who doesn't want to do that???
Like to find out more Fleming is the co-author of the Harvard Business Review article "Managing Your Human Sigma".
However the other interesting thing I picked up at this lunch was to do with how small business owners need to behave when they are networking with bigger businesses. I had a chat to a couple of bigger business owners and this is the feedback they gave me.
1. Don't talk about yourself - listen, listen, listen and when you do speak - focus on the issues and problems the other person has been discussing. Makes sense huh? This particular person mentioned two examples - one with the sixty second infomercial about themselves - they got absolutely no-where. And another person who spent the whole lunch quietly listening to the conversation - then rang later to discuss the possiblilty of a solution to the problem under discussion. They got the contract.
2. Follow up! the other person I spoke to mentioned someone they met at a lunch. Rapport was built. The person I was talking to was genuinely interested in exploring what the small business owner had to offer. Guess what? He never heard from the other person again!
Really no different from how you should behave wherever you network.
Listen and follow up! What more can I say!
Want to know more about how to network effectively and what questions to ask to make the follow up easy? Visit www.networkingworld.net.au where we help you network SMARTer not harder!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment