Talk to Strangers: How Everyday, Random Encounters Can Expand Your Business, Career, Income, and Life (11 page)

Chapter 18

Discover the Buried Treasure

How do you know exactly what kind of potential this random encounter represents? Is this person someone who runs a department in a company? An entire company? Is this new connection an investor? A small-business owner? Retired? Undergoing a career transition? Maybe this person is none of the above but well connected to all the right people around town. Knowing what
you
are looking for—having a clear idea of your primary outcome—will allow you to guide the conversation to discover what is possible through your new connection.

Of course, you don’t want to come across as someone who’s disingenuous or blatantly hunting for leads. However, once you have initiated a conversation and proved you’re not going to steal the other person’s identity, you will want to determine whether that person is, in fact, someone worth knowing. Sure, everyone has something to offer; it could simply be good company for the ride (or the wait, or the party). And everyone knows someone who’s worth knowing. But if your long-term goal is to expand your business by expanding your network, your short-term goal is to determine whether this particular individual’s position, personal/professional network, or knowledge can be useful to you.

Qualifying your new friend and determining whether he or she represents an opportunity for you is an essential step in successful random connecting. Use your goals to determine whether it will be beneficial to pursue the conversation. After gauging the person’s willingness to engage, and starting with neutral questions or statements, you want to get to the meat of the matter: What does this person do for a living? Whom can this person connect me to? And is there something here that I can leverage for our mutual benefit?

You’ll want to assess quickly whether this individual is someone of influence. If you are selling a product or service, you want to determine whether your new connection is a decision maker with buying authority and money to spend. If you are seeking a job, you will want to assess whether this person has influence over hiring or can introduce you to people who do. You will have a profile—either formally or in your mind—of the type of individual who represents your best potential lead.

Time is your greatest ally, as well as a precious, finite resource, so you want to spend it where it will do you the most good. There’s an old story of an elevator salesman who was having a terrible time getting customers. He was sure he was doing everything right and couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t making sales. “I’m very professional when I talk to my prospects,” he said. “I know my products very well, so I think I am very believable when I discuss them. I listen well, and my presentation is very engaging. I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

He finally gave up trying to figure it out himself and decided to ask his manager to spend a day with him in his territory making sales calls. Wanting to help in any way he could, the manager agreed to go along and see if there was something this eager but desperately unsuccessful elevator salesperson was doing wrong.

It didn’t take any longer than their first appointment for the manager to identify the problem. The salesperson was calling on owners of one-story buildings!

The lesson here? Knowing your ideal customer or target contact’s profile is crucial in making effective random connections. If the person isn’t in your sweet spot, you will be having a completely different conversation than if that person represents the pot o’ gold you’ve been dreaming of.

My best type of random connection target is an executive in a professional services or business-to-business company who uses external resources (read “consultants”) to help improve their company’s performance, especially revenue growth. So after breaking the ice and establishing some rapport, I guide the conversation toward their line of work—sometimes going there immediately and directly, sometimes a little more slowly, depending on how the other person is responding. If the person is open to conversation, I ask the million-dollar question: “So what line of work are you in?” And I ask it sooner rather than later. If the new connection seems at all reticent, I might build the rapport a little more before focusing on the outcome. But I know what I want to know about the other person, and I try to get there as fast as I can, while always ensuring the person feels validated and respected regardless of his or her leveragability.

I uncovered opportunity quickly on a recent subway ride. A simple comment of mine opened the door to a high-potential conversation with a person who appeared ready to exit the train at the next stop. I noticed that this individual was carrying a backpack featuring a logo from a company I was interested in approaching. After a quick exchange about the fact that the air-conditioning on the train wasn’t working very well, I directed the conversation to something more productive. “So do you work for those guys?” I asked, motioning toward the logo.

“Yes,” she replied.

“That company is doing some really cool stuff,” I said. “What do you do for them?”

She explained that she was in product marketing, which happened to be the target of my inquiry. I asked if she would mind giving me the name of the director of marketing and if I could follow up with her later on. She gladly provided the name and gave me her contact info, along with an invitation to send her an e-mail—all of which occurred between subway stops.

A conversation with a complete stranger is a discovery process, one where you guide the interaction toward finding out about each other and determine whether there is a basis for further interaction. Determining whether the individual is of value to you is an essential step in successful random connections. Of course, everyone has value in
some
way, but some have more than others or are offering exactly what you’re seeking. Based on your goals and your ability to determine the other’s contact value as quickly as possible, you very well may find yourself uncovering a business or career opportunity beyond what you ever thought possible.

Chapter at a Glance

 

• Have a clear profile of the kinds of people who are your best potential connections.
  
 

 

• Know what you want to know.
  
 

 

• Assess whether the person you are talking to can be of value to you, while preserving the relationship.
  
 

Chapter 19

Leave No Stone Unturned

Knowing the profile of those you want to meet is essential for maximizing your random connecting efforts. And these people don’t always have to be directly involved in buying something from you. Their value may lie in their ability to direct or introduce you to people who can. Maybe they work for a company; maybe they work for themselves. If you are seeking an employment opportunity, they might be directly responsible for hiring; or maybe they are simply influential in the process.

The ability to assess your new connection’s precise leverage point requires multiple levels of mental processing. In other words, you have to concentrate on a few things at once. To begin with, you have to broach the conversation in a friendly, nonthreatening way and attempt to build some rapport. From there, you steer the conversation in a direction that will help you gain the information you need to determine where the opportunity exists. If you’re in the business world, seeking new customers, a new employer, or new contacts within a target company, you will, of course, want to know this person’s line of work.

Asking high-quality questions with a sense of authentic curiosity will help you build an interpersonal connection and assess the opportunity. Once you know where this person works, it’s very natural to then ask what exactly that person does for the company. It’s an intuitive, logical, sequential conversation path of information gathering that does not threaten or intimidate your new contact. As you gently direct the exchange to uncover this basic information, listen carefully to the answers while focusing on the person and considering how his or her professional affiliation and/or specific job function can be useful to you—and how you can be useful to your new contact.

When you meet someone who you think has value as a contact, think about how to leverage that person during your conversation. Ask yourself how this person could be valuable to you. Is it through direct influence or the ability to introduce you to someone else? Is it from something that you can learn from him or her, an opportunity within this individual’s company, or perhaps even a different channel? Also determine where and when the best time is to act on this; is it now, or later, when the person is back in the office on his or her home turf?

It would be wonderful if everyone we met had resources they could control or allocate directly at their immediate disposal. Sometimes they do, and sometimes the way that they can help you exists in their extended sphere of influence. You’ll ideally make random connections with people who you can leverage directly—people who will buy something, hire you, or invest in your company. But everyone you meet has an extended sphere of influence, and this is often where the greatest opportunity rests.

Every contact you make has
some
value, and there’s something important to keep in mind here: it’s not just where this person works now that could help you out, but where this person worked before—and where he or she might end up working in the future. It’s not just a person’s direct authority to make purchases that matters; it’s whom that person can introduce you to. It’s not just what a connection does; it’s what that person’s family and friends do. If you want to expand your business, career, income, and life, then figure out how to make the most of everyone you meet.

Even people who aren’t in your target profile can often be conduits to others.

The circle of influence almost everyone has includes:

 

• Coworkers at their current employers
  
 

 

• Coworkers at their past employers
  
 

 

• Industry colleagues
  
 

 

• Customers
  
 

 

• Vendors
  
 

 

• Spouse
  
 

 

• Children
  
 

 

• Parents
  
 

 

• Extended family members
  
 

 

• Friends
  
 

 

• Neighbors
  
 

 

• Personal service providers, such as attorney, accountant, financial planner
  
 

 

• Networking associates
  
 

 

• Fellow college alumni
  
 

I once met a woman at an outdoor café whose son worked for a major company with which I had been trying to do business. After a 15-minute conversation with this stranger, I had gained her son’s name and contact information. I was on the phone with him the next day and was able to gain valuable insights about his company’s strategy and key decision makers.

Everyone you meet provides some kind of networking opportunity; sometimes it’s just in the form of being a conduit to someone else who has the influence, authority, or buying power you
really
want. Creating profitable business relationships through random networking is often a result of the stepping-stones you put in place to get to the person who will do you the most good. It’s a process, and even if you determine that the person you are talking with is not a person of influence, there’s a good chance that he or she knows someone who is (see
Table 19.1
). If you manage your interaction with the initial person effectively, you can come away with invaluable networking information—be it names, opportunities, tips, or insights for how to get to the people with direct influence.

Table 19.1
Everybody Has Something to Offer, Even If It Isn’t Obvious

Sometimes people you meet can give insights about those you
want
to meet. In cases like that, getting inside information about them and their degree of influence is a random connection success. If you are selling to the corporate market, then it’s invaluable to discover exactly who’s who—and to verify who
really
has the power to make buying decisions. Titles don’t always reflect where the true buying authority sits within an organization, so your best insights will come from someone on the “inside” who can tell you who really calls the shots.

A few years ago I found myself next to an older gentleman who was traveling from Atlanta to the Northeast. I knew nothing about him except that I wanted to know more. Distinguished looking as he was, I could tell he wasn’t in the prime of his career; yet he had the distinct look of success about him.

“Where are you headed?” I asked with simple and sincere curiosity.

“To see my grandchildren in Pennsylvania,” he responded.

“How fabulous,” I said, thinking to myself,
Likely retired. . .out of the mainstream. . .nice man but probably not leverageable
. However, I kept an open mind and decided that I would pursue this random encounter and see where it might lead. “How many grandchildren?” I asked, staying on the level of pure personal relationship building.

“Three,” he replied.

As these few moments of preliminary conversation unfolded, I began to get a hunch and continued to guide the conversation in an attempt to find out whether he was in fact retired and what he was retired from. I thought to myself,
Maybe he knows people in his old company, especially if his retirement was fairly recent
. I wanted to open a conversation pathway that would allow me to discover what he does or did and what he is really all about.

“It must be great to have the time to travel like this,” I suggested.

“Well, yes, one of the great benefits of retirement,” he replied. “I looked forward all my life to having this opportunity with my family.”

Wanting to keep the conversation alive and build rapport, I lobbed back, “I look forward to having the same opportunity when I retire,
if
I ever get to retire,” I said with a smile. “So how long have you been retired, and from where?” I inquired.

What I heard in the next sentence was a random connector’s dream: retired, yes, six months ago as CEO of the largest office products company in the Southeast—and the country. And did he still know people there? You bet! All the ones who matter. As I explained what I do and how I offer some unique services for business-to-business companies, he also became intrigued. He was more than happy to provide names of key execs who would surely take my calls if I just mentioned his name.

This ex-CEO knew everyone. And he was happy to share the information with me. Of course, since he was no longer actively involved in the business, he clearly did not have any direct influence in decision making. But he was a gold mine of information about the people who still did. He told me who ran the marketing organization and the general direction that the marketing strategy was taking (as best he knew)—and he invited me to use his name when approaching those key people.

Within six weeks of this random encounter, I was sitting in a conference room at company headquarters with the three top marketing executives. The CEO’s suggestion that I get in touch with them carried enormous weight in getting me on their calendars. I had instant credibility and a receptive team of decision makers who found great value in my presentation—all because I met a grandfather on his way to visit his grandchildren in Pennsylvania.

At the end of the day, everyone you meet has something to offer, even if it isn’t always obvious and it doesn’t always monetize. This traveling grandfather didn’t have to be the retired CEO of a multimillion-dollar company to be worth meeting. Had he been a service technician at the same organization, he would certainly know who ran the department, the division, and maybe even the entire company. And if not, I would have opened a conversation pathway toward his third sphere of influence: family members. I would have inquired: “Do you have children?” and “Did they follow your career in office equipment servicing, too?” If they didn’t, I’d ask, “What line of work are they in?” And don’t forget spouses: “Does your wife understand technical talk at the dinner table?... Oh, so she is in a different type of work. . .What does
she
do?”

You can direct the conversation in any way you want, uncovering what you want to know by creating natural conversation pathways, all the while building rapport, processing what you’re hearing, and keeping in mind your ultimate goal of finding the best leverage point with your new connection. It may sound like a lot to juggle, but if you keep these points clearly in mind, it gets easier with practice.

Most of the time all you have to do is ask. Simple questions will do the trick: “Do you know the person in your company who is in charge of (whatever your area of interest is)?” Or “Do you know anyone in HR who is responsible for recruiting?” When you are getting acquainted with a random connection who mentions that he or she has grown children, you could ask at the appropriate time, “So what line of work are your children in?” If someone mentions knowing someone who you would like to meet, you can simply ask, “Would you mind giving me an introduction?” You may find your way to an influential person simply by asking about your new connection’s sphere of influence.

Exceptional random connectors know how to optimize every contact they make. That’s why it’s so important to make every connection you can and pursue every one for what it’s worth, as well as where it can lead. It’s also why it’s so crucial to regard every connection you make as worthwhile, valuable, and leverageable.

Chapter at a Glance

 

• Everyone you meet has something to offer.
  
 

 

• Sometimes the value of your new connection is through whom they know.
  
 

 

• As you build rapport through your conversation, think about how the person can be of value to you.
  
 

 

• Often it is through someone’s extended sphere of influence that he or she can help you the most.
  
 

 

• If the person doesn’t fit your target profile, ask for introductions to others who may.