Matt Holmes is the awesome genius behind the Handshakin Video Series where they interview top entrepreneurs and networking strategies featuring billionaires, members of Congress, and venture capitalists on the show. Recently, they launched a service called Handbrander that helps other entrepreneurs network better, helping founders create content for their personal brand.
Listen in to find out more about how you can build better relationships to help you improve your sales.
Here are the highlights of my conversation with Matt:
Why an emphasis on the personal brand:
- Technology has now taken us.
- Implement strong personal feelings with your business.
- People trust a person first before trusting their service.
How to leverage relationships with people you don’t know:
- Always see if you can find a warm introduction.
Using LinkedIn for instance, when you go to connect with someone and you have secondary connections, LinkedIn has an easy way to send a contact or request for that warm introduction.
The screen can be a warm introduction. Get your name and picture on your computer screen, phone, or email inbox. Do that enough and they will start to recognize your name and by human nature, once you recognize something, you’re more warm to it.
The next thing they glance after seeing the picture and name is an interest that you two have in common.
- Know the best resources to help you with your goals.
Anymail Finder – pulls ups people’s emails with five different alternatives and takes its best guess on which one is the email.
Conspire – sign in with your Gmail and you can search for someone where you get to quantify your second degree connections on LinkedIn and see if there is a likely relationship on the line or not.
Check out www.handshakin.com/resource
- Provide value.
Serve the other person first and be sure to be able to provide value in the first five words and hopefully they make it on your next sentence.
- Ask someone if you can interview them about their success.
Blogs, podcasts, video series are a great way to offer and give someone else extra exposure. Most people are going to say yes to this. Of course when you go to billionaires, you have to be more creative than that because a lot of people would want to interview them. Be humble and just focus first on the other person and listen to them to increase your chances.
3 Powerful Concepts in Relationship Building:
- Join the community.
Start with networking which you can start before you quit your full time job. Start meeting some other people that have also recently quit their full time job. Start with meetup.com in your local city and search for startups and entrepreneurs. Connect with them and follow up after a few days.
- Get feedback.
Ask for feedback but identify those people to ask. Whether you do it in person or shoot an email, they are more likely to respond.
- Befriend mentors.
You want mentors to get vested in your success. Identify mentors that are able to see themselves in you. This means, before they reached success, they were practically asking the same questions you were. Most successful entrepreneurs give back and pay it forward. When you start to meet some of the mentor’s friends, then you know they’re vested in your success.
Are you too busy for networking?
Make it a priority in your life. You have to walk away from salary to launch a business. Networking is part of launching a business. You’re never going to find new clients if you’re never meeting new people.
How to measure your success in networking:
Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on everything that you can make time on.
For networking events, talk with 5 people and try to stay in contact with at least 3. Follow up with them and meet them for coffee. Maybe one of them turns into a client and another turns into a mentor. Who knows?
It takes time.
It’s going to take time but you will be able to fine tune the process as you continue to grow. So don’t give up.
Matt’s Major Takeaway:
Online brand is important. What you do in person is being reflected online. Take a moment to reflect on what social platforms you’re active on and which ones you’re not active on. Go and look at the ones you’re active on because when people Google you, you’re going to want all of that to be aligned with how you act in real life. Make sure your profile and descriptions are aligned with what you’re doing today and make sure to always maintain it regularly.
Episode Resources:
Get Matt’s book Six Networking Strategies for Entrepreneurs and download it for free at www.handshakin.com/free
Get a free audiobook download and a 30-day free trial at audibletrial.com/tse with over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or mp3 player.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS