Friends with Budgets
In business, as in life, friends are more accesible than strangers.
Friendship is fundamental to the Chinese approach to doing business. Most Westerners will do business for a while, before becoming friends. The Chinese take the opposite approach: there’s slim chance of doing business, if you’re not friends first!
So how can we learn from the Chinese to start building our network of friends we may be able to do business with?
People are fed up with the cold calling approach to sales, and the power of traditional advertising is diminishing. Introductions are the first step. If you can find a common contact and ask them to facilitate the connection your success rate will be a lot higher.
Current technologies enable us to connect with our own network, and expand it significantly. Phones, mobiles, emails, and the internet has made communications so much easier, quicker, and more fun (remember the days of writing a letter to family or friends overseas, and waiting 6 weeks for a response?)! Using tools such as Social Media websites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (the top 3 networks that generated $400M for Barack Obama), allows us to share ideas, and find other people with common interests. All these social media tools streamline the traditional introduction process.
Once you’ve been introduced online, it’s important to make the effort to form a relationship. If you immediately hit all your new contacts over the head with your sales pitch, you’ll stop getting introduced. Be evocative; tell people just enough to make them want to know more. Ask a question that is important to them. Ask about them rather than talking about you, people love talking about themselves and will value a good listener.
Once you know more about your new friends it will be easy to identify potential clients. You need to know just an enough to know that there is an interest a possibility – then find out more. Don’t try to sell to them until you know they’re interested. That is also the stage to make sure the relationship is being developed offline.
Always remember we are all first and foremost people, and we need first to connect as friends, and then to do business. We need to like each other, before we can work towards a common goal.
Recognise that we are all unique, and this is a GOOD thing! All we have is our own personal brand, and we need to make sure we are true to it. We need to stand out from the crowd, and show our point of difference. We all stand for something and have a unique identity. We just need to uncover it and sell it to the world. If you’re not sure what your personal brand is ask: how do others perceive me and what value do they place on that? The answer is your brand
Raz Chorev has 15 years of sales and marketing experience, from small businesses to corporates. During his sales career, Raz discovered that People Buy People, not just products. Raz’s real passion is to help other people become more attractive to others- to their potential customers, to future employers, or even to their social environment. Working with Australia’s leading People Marketing agency, Buzzle, Raz has co-founded JobCamp, an initiative to Get Australia Working.
