Do you find yourself struggling with networking? Do you find yourself asking “What’s my ROI?”
If you aren’t asking about your ROI, maybe you should start. ROI (Return on Investment) isn’t just about investing capital into your business. You are investing your time and your energy into something, you need to be thinking about ROI.
So what I want to address today is something drawn from what I teach my private clients called “Six-figure Power Networking”
I’m going to give you three basic hints on how to immediately shift and turn yourself into a power networker and instead of just another networker that just shows up to these events.
The three tips are:
Mindset: there is an important mindset piece you need to address.
Niche: your niche or your elevator pitch.
Game: how we make it into a game that helps you keep networking fresh, effective and productive.
1) Mindset
So we will first star with mindset. What is your mindset when you show up to a networking event?
It’s real simple: you should have a mindset of service.
What i mean by that as you are about to step into any kind of network environment, the question you should be asking yourself is “Who can I serve here today either through referral through my own product or service?”
And that’s it.
If you show up with that mindset and that energy you’re going to open yourself to a lot more opportunity because think of it this way: everybody that you meet in a networking event is an ambassador.
Each person is an ambassador for the entire network of their world that the people that you have yet to even meet.
Think about how you would consider an ambassador of a foreign country, you would probably want to treat that person with respect and you are aware that your conducts with this foreign ambassador could potentially go beyond just that individual but back to the entire country he or she is from.
And this is the same thing. Shift your mindset from seeing these networkers as potential customers but ambassadors.
2) Niche
Number two is niche, also known as your elevator pitch.
When someone asks you “What do you do?” are you able to communicate that in one single sentence?
The reason why we want to concise down our elevator pitch our niche one single sentence is simple we live in a world where technology has has whittled down the attention span of people to about two to four seconds, so if you can’t capture their attention and create intrigue or interest within the first sentence then you pretty much made the job 10 times more difficult, if not hundreds more difficult for yourself. This is especially true in a networking environment when there’s a lot going on.
If you’re going to create one sentence you want to make sure that the sentence includes:
- the problem
- the resolution
- and what is it that you do
For example in my particular case when someone asked me what do I do I say “ I help entrepreneurs who are struggling from and money anxiety to help eliminate that so that they can grow their business and grow their sales.”
Real simple. Key there for me is money anxiety. There’s always a keyword that will spark the attention of the person you’re delivering that too when you do that your goal is to open up the interest so that they continue the conversation.
3) The Game
Number three is this is the game. What is the game?
See, what you don’t want is to be that person that shows up with a handful of business card and starts passing them out like your dealer at the casino.
The game is: when you go to a networking meeting you have your cards ready only if someone asks for it.
Your goal is to create enough interest with both your elevator pitch in the conversation and what it is that you have to do so that you inspire them to say “Wow that sounds really fascinating do you have a card?” or better yet “I have someone I would like to refer you to” or “I would like to sit down and talk with you further, do you have a card?”
That is the game, to inspire enough interest so that they literally ask you for your card.
Part of the game is, if they don’t do ask, you don’t get to give them a card.
There are more tips and hints on power-networking but these 3 alone will help you immediately shift yourself from just being a regular run-of-the-mill networker to a power networker geared for six-figure success!
