Our Secret Networking Hack
Article From Entrepreneur Brain Dump
You go to conferences, meet ups, masterminds, gatherings, events of any kind to do what?
Most would say to network, learn, meet people in the industry, make connections, etc.
Yep. All legit answers. But what’s your plan?
Normally it’s about mingling.
Getting around and chatting it up.
Then dropping a business card, exchanging emails, phone numbers and leaving it with a “let’s for sure stay connected.”
But do you?
This is all good. It’s what most do, and it generally works fine.
But you’re not most people. You don’t want to be mediocre.
You are a badass with BIG dreams.
And you KNOW that no one is self made and that your network is your NET WORTH.
This means you need to be better than the rest.
This is how
Own your platform and bring people into your spiderweb.
In police work (by day I’m a cop), we are always aware of not getting caught in someones spiderweb. We bring them to ours.
This means that when there’s a potentially dangerous scenario in a house that we don’t have to go into, we call the suspect out.
In sports this would be called “home court advantage.”
Whatever you want to call it, it’s about owning your audience and bringing people to you.
But how do you do this without making it seem selfish or all about you? You make it about THEM. People want to talk about themselves. So you make it easier for them to do that on your terms.
Here’s how we do it.
We built a blog and a newsletter talking about business building, entrepreneurship, turning ideas into action and other valuable topics.
Then when we're at an event, this is how the scenario goes:
We meet someone that’s building a great business.
They tell us about how hard it was for them to get off the ground, but “THESE FEW THINGS” they learned completely changed the game for them. Obviously we want to hear more. We want to learn from them. We want to work with them. We even want to BUILD with them.
It’s selfish, but always want to be looking for opportunities to work with awesome people.
So we have two choices…
Response 1:
“Wow! That’s awesome! We’d love to pick your brain on those things sometime. We’re trying to do something similar and it’d be cool to connect over zoom and see what you have going on”
That’s a fine response
But what they’re actually hearing is that they would need to spend 30-60min or more on a zoom call to show someone else what they’re doing without anything in return…
All of this out of the pure kindness of their heart.
They’re busy.
They’re building sh*t.
They have kids and things to do.
You’ll for sure meet amazing people who will give you that time, but let’s talk about response 2 and see if that’s any better.
Response 2:
“Wow! That’s awesome! We LOVE what you’re doing! Hey, so we actually run a blog and newsletter that is sent out to several thousand readers. We talk to awesome entrepreneurs about the ideas that have brought them both success and failures and the lessons they’ve learned from being in the trenches. We’d love to send you some questions or hop on a call sometime to learn more and feature you on the blog. Is that something you’d be interested in?”
This makes it about THEM.
It’s flattering.
It highlights what they are doing and it gives them incentive to talk to you.
This idea can be done with a blog, newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, social media page, whatever. It works for all of those.
We chose a blog/newsletter because it works for us.
We feel called to writeIt’s easy for people to connect and respond to a few questions from us before we feature them in an articleReaders are leadersBuilding an email list is one of the most important things you could ever do for your business.
But you need to do what works for YOU.
Next time you go to an event, set up your spider web and bring the awesome people you meet on to YOUR platform.