67: Networking and Events

good afternoon everybody what's going on this is john barrows j barrows consulting hopefully all had a fantastic weekend as usual uh mine was pretty legit just kind of hung out with the family and relaxed a little bit uh we're coming up on a very busy season for me and uh you know today we were going to have a guest talk about coaching and those type of things but for some reason we had a little bit of a schedule mix-up so i'm going to go this one solo and the one thing i wanted to touch on because of the busy season that we're coming up on right now is networking events so i mean september is jammed full of networking events and and just events in general so we have for instance uh ten bound which is out in san francisco on the 30th of august then we have uh hyper growth on september 4th which is drifts conference then we got inbound starting on the 4th as well here in boston for hubspot on the 6th there's an aaisp event here in boston then of course the big mother of all events the 24th dream forced out in san francisco so with that september is inevitably the biggest month uh for people just getting back into gear right getting back into all right let's get shit done here so and all these events are starting uh are just a great opportunity in a lot of different ways i always tell people the number one thing you can do as a sales professional to help you develop as a well-rounded sales professional especially if you're inside and you're looking to go into the field or whatever it is is to go to events because they're the perfect place to practice so if you've been following me before you hear that you know i've said this before where uh the i think i forget what the study is but it talks about how we communicate as human beings and it's broken down into 8 35 57 8 of the way that we communicate as human beings is the words that we use 35 is the tonality and how we use those words and the other 57 is body language right that's why face-to-face selling is so much easier than phone sales right anybody ever tells you that face-to-face selling is harder than phone sales tell them to shut up because if because i can sit in front of you for an hour and i could say something stupid and watch your face go a little sideways and be like hey i'm sorry i was just kidding on that one really you know and see and adjust right whereas over the phone i have no idea whether you're just putting me on hold or on mute and so with the phone we're only dealing with 43 percent of the way that people communicate but in person a hundred percent so that's why networking events i don't go to networking events to find business by the way if i do that's fantastic but the main reason i go to networking events and events like this outside of learning from whatever the presenters are there to speak about it's to practice my pitch because when you sit there and you say to somebody hey nice to meet you you know tell me what you do that's the typical hey what do you do right and you give them your elevator pitch if you watch their eyes glaze over or if you watch them look right you know across your shoulder instead of looking at you in the eyes or if you if you watch them drink their beer a little bit faster than they were drinking it before which is my little trick for getting out of crabby conversations i always walk around events with my beer about you know a couple sips left or whatever and then if i'm in a crabby conversation it's like hey i gotta grab a beer i'll be right back so if that's happening in front of you what do you think's happening over the phone and then forget about that from a practice standpoint practicing your pitch but also the additional benefits of going to events like this it gets you out of your comfort zone gets you comfortable with just interrupting conversations and trying to carry conversations which is huge so it's a confidence booster uh and if you find business out of it it's you know that's the cherry on top if you will now morgan and i have been doing a lot of uh analysis on his closed on all the deals he's actually closed over the course of this past year and a huge portion of them are tied to events where maybe he cold called cold called and had a conversation maybe sent an email and then all of a sudden that person showed up in an event he was at and we're able to meet him face to face and we're finding that him meeting people face to face at events right they're accelerating the deal process and the close ratio is way higher than if we don't so that's why this is the season to get after it all right and now hopefully everybody has kind of gotten recharged here in august and are ready to get back after it in september so that's what this this uh podcast is going to be about and let's make it happen so if you have if you have questions obviously feel free to chime in but i'm just going to riff here because a while back i did um i put out a post and we'll put it we'll include it here and you can google it it's on my blog it's a networking guide so it's a guide to getting the most out of networking events and take a look at it because it gives you some structure to go through to how to uh approach events and then how to like how to evaluate them in the first place and then how to approach them and how to get the most out of them so you're not just wasting your time there because i've been to literally hundreds of events in my career if not thousands and i can tell you when i go in with a plan i am so much more efficient and i get so much more out of them than if i just go and show up to see what happens so with that let's talk about how you even look at events in the first place because that's one of the things like there are so many events you got to figure out which ones are the best ones for you to go to um and especially if you're looking for driving business you got to take a look at the event make a phone call to the um to the host or whoever it is and just ask them what are the demographics who typically shows up they'll all have the numbers if they've done this event in the past of how many people have showed up to the last event what was the demographic of it were their leaders were their reps were they in certain industries because the more you can hone in on kind of what your ideal customer profile is and where they are from an event standpoint the better events you're going to get to and again every host will tell you the details they won't they won't give you the names of you know the companies and that type of thing but they'll give you the the demographics okay um and you want to see if anybody else has been there before like if you if you can kind of look in your network maybe post a post it out there on linkedin or something and say hey has anybody ever been to 10 bound before and what's your feedback from that i'd love to get your insights because i'm trying to figure out where to maximize my time from an event standpoint this year so once you do your due diligence and just like prospecting you tier out the events you got your tier one events your tier two events and your tier three events your tier one events are that whoa those are the ones i absolutely have to go to the tier two events are the ones like hey if i can get to them definitely in the tier threes if you have extra time or if you want to practice on certain things you do but i tend to focus my efforts on mostly the tier ones these days and sometimes the tier twos if i have an extra you know night or something like that which is rare these days so with that as a kind of a preface to okay now i'm going to go into this event now i have this strategy here now i'll take a look at again who are the who are the sponsors because a lot of times those are prospects for you and and what based on who shows up what are your goals for this event right now goal setting you've heard me talk about it before is one of the most important things you can do at any stage of the sales process at any part of your career and you write down goals right y'all like crossing stuff off a list right there's something oddly satisfying about crossing something off a list so make yourself feel good right so write down what are your goals for this event my goals typically revolve around how many people in my target audience i want to talk to how many cards or contact information i want to get and how many follow-up meetings i want scheduled from that event okay so usually it's in the realm of if it's say if it's a one or a two hour event usually it's in the realm of you know i want to talk to 10 people who are in my target audience um i want to get five uh follow-up meetings scheduled with those people on the calendar right not just oh yeah let's talk next week but actually schedule them on the calendar and i want to try to find at least one piece of business out of every single event so if i go 10 5 1 now what happens is you can actually divide up your time and you can be very very objective about your approach so here's an example if i go in to uh say it's a say i know i'm going to be at the event i only have an hour to be at the event and my goal is to get 10 conversations and five follow-up calls well that means if i'm only there for an hour 10 conversations that's six minutes per conversation and the good thing about timing your conversations at least mentally here is that now you get in and out of conversations whether they're good or bad all right so if you're in a good conversation the challenge with getting in good conversations with people is you want to keep talking to them because it's a great conversation and it becomes very comfortable to stay in that conversation but the problem is there is if you're if you're having that conversation and it's a potential lead for you for instance you might oversell yourself you might you might talk too much and then there wouldn't be any need for a follow-up call because sometimes we get so enamored with oh this is somebody and i want to close them right there you're not going to close them on your solution right there you can close them on the next step and so if you think of it as every engagement as a timed engagement where you have six minutes to get in and get out then you can do six you know six minutes 10 meetings 60 minutes there's your 10 conversations um and then your five meetings for instance the way that i typically approach things is you know that's what i'm trying to schedule i don't want to send you an email after the event saying it was great meeting at the end event whatever and send a typical marketing crap out there that everybody else does if you are interested in what i am saying that i'm going to try to lock you in right then and there for a follow-up meeting next day and this leads to another part of our approach to events which is you want to come up with what i call your attention grabbers so when somebody says what do you do you want to figure out what do i say in that five to 15 seconds to get them engaged in a conversation and if you go back to the old school glengarry glenross a-i-d-a right attention interest desire action those are the four mental stages we all need to go through before we buy something and we have five to 15 seconds to get someone's attention two minutes to earn their interest and then we close them on something to drive their desire and action so at an event really all i'm trying to do i'm not trying to sell j barrows consulting services right that there's not enough time to do that and and it's not the right format to do that what i'm selling is i'm selling time i'm selling the next step so what i'm doing is i'm hitting you with something that's ideally an attention grabber that's relevant to your persona i'll give you an easy example here when i go to dreamforce right vps of sales in the sas industry at dreamforce when they say john what do you do i don't go sales training consulting for fortune 500 companies it guarantees you the results you're looking for at every stage of the sales process meh nobody gives a shit about that but in that scenario to that persona at that event when somebody says john what do you do attention grabber i train salesforce how to sell and wait for it right because inevitably i'm going to get the how do you do that and that's the response you're looking for when you tell somebody what you do you're looking for them to say what or tell me more how do you do that and then you give them a little bit interest right i give them a little bit more say hey you know what um so i so i trained salesforce out of self how do you do that well i've trained about 5 000 other sales professionals on prospecting techniques to drive immediate business into the pipeline it's all about doing some research on an account you know coming up with five six different messages telling a story and then fired off to an executive getting a referral down and we get about a you know a 10 to 15 response rate on that having a good time doing it interesting tell me more well now that i know i got your attention i know you're interested why don't we take a step back and talk about your situation and see if it makes sense for us to take the next steps here with your with your company right and and usually i'll say look it's a mess around here there's a lot of people going going back and forth i'm sure you're here to meet as many people as i am so why don't we just schedule something next week where you and i can actually have a dedicated conversation about this um you know what actually do you have your iphone on you and then see what happens right i know you do it's right there in your pocket right why don't you take it out why don't we schedule something right here i so i schedule meetings right and i make it awkward i'm like yep it's right there uh because if they're serious they're genuinely interested in what you're talking about there they'll they'll no problem schedule that call so my calendar after events like that is littered with 15 to 30 minute qualification calls and i don't send one of those it was great meeting you a dream force meet uh messages afterwards that every marketing department sends out afterwards okay so the concept there is ai close on 15 minutes attention interest close on 15 minutes close on 30 minutes close on that next step another approach that you can use is is to actually qualify while somebody is asking you the question so for instance when somebody comes up to you and says hey john you know so yeah what do you know nice to meet you what do you do he's be like well i do a lot of different things you know um let me ask you real quick uh what what kind of what company do you work for again what industry is that in and uh and what's your role within that industry okay cool um so for clients like you for people in you in your situation in those type of industries this is what we do right because your message should be tailored to the different personas of the value you bring right because the value i bring to a vp of sales is is different than the value i bring to a vp of marketing or the value to a ceo right and so if i can figure that out well we show vps of sales how to this or we show vps of marketing or directors of marketing how to this and that's how they leverage our training because the more specific you can make to that person's persona if you will the more the more they're going to engage with you in that conversation so i'll ask them a couple of qualifying questions even though they it doesn't seem like i'm qualifying them i'm just putting some context around my my value proposition so if you come up with those if you understand if you're going into an event you understand the types of personas that are there you come up with two or three attention grabbers and you know what your goal is as far as meeting 10 people having five follow-up meetings and closing one piece of business now you go in with a game plan and now you're just you're grabbing every single person you know hey nice to meet you uh what do you do and then after you get into a little bit of a conversation again the easy out whether it's a good or bad conversation six minute mentality here to say you know what again thank you so much it looks like there's more for us to talk about here why don't we schedule some time next week so that you and i can both get the most out of this and by the way throw this one in there too who else are you looking to meet here just out of curiosity is there anybody any anybody specific you're trying to meet here at this event because as i go around and talk to other people if i come across somebody like that i'll point them i'll point them in your direction is that cool so now you can kind of give them value by the way by by saying hey who else are you here to meet and if you meet one of those people i'll point them your direction all right so with that approach again now you can get in and out of conversations it doesn't matter you don't have to feel rude walking away because you put it on them i'm sure you're here to meet as many people as i am and get the most out of our bed together here so i'm going to give you some time back here why don't we just follow up next week so now you got your goals down you got your messaging right you know what you're closing for you're not trying to get stuck in conversations and then you you know obviously make sure you come prepared with business cards and all that stuff even though i don't know a ton of people that use business cards in the sass space anymore but if they do um a quick tip i have for you on this one is if they use a business card all right right after you get out of the conversation with them what i i usually carry a pen with me so after the conversation if it's a really good hot hot lead if you will or a really good prospect for me what i'll do is i'll take their business card i'll fold it over like this right because a lot of times i'll come home with a stack of 15 20 30 business cards and i don't want to have to follow you know a lot of them are just not necessary to follow up with but i want to know the ones that i should be following up with right so i'll put a little i'll fold this over and i'll write on the back some key points during the conversation so talked about growth of sales team you know he or she likes this whatever it is so in my follow-up email to them or in my follow-up conversation with them i can reference those points of conversation um so that so that you know they can tell i was paying attention all right so make sure that you write down on the back of your card some key points that you have the conversation about so in your follow-up emails or your follow-up conversations you can reference those and then you're good to go um you know events you can you can go with colleagues okay but please don't get stuck talking to your own people or the people that you're most comfortable with because that is just a waste of time all right i got plenty of friends out there i you know i don't spend enough time with my family and friends for crying out loud so me for me to go to an event for two hours and talk to friends and people i know is an absolute waste of time i'm going there to make money to practice to to practice my pitch or my flow or whatever it is so that's why going in with a goal and if you have teammates if you have people who are there with you whether it's at a trade booth or something like that you can tag team and say okay cool you take that side of the room i'll take this side of the room we'll meet in the middle right um this is also relevant to trade show booths so if you're in the in right now if you're going to be at inbound and you're going to have a booth you're going to be a dream force and you're going to have a booth these are selling engagements this is not just pure marketing ladies and gentlemen people who come up to your booth are very are potentially interested in buying your product so that's again practice your attention grabbers when people come to you and say so what's this all about right instead of just giving the the elevator pitch again qualify so what role are you what kind of company how many employees do you have at your company oh okay cool for companies like you people like you and your roles and your companies this is what we do right is that something of interest to you actually it is because you know how are you currently doing that now and then tailor your conversation towards what their needs are but don't try to oversell them and then yeah make sure you get the badge right you get the so marketing can send the emails but if they ever seem to be pretty interested i would always have my laptop in the corner of of a booth with my calendar open and say hey you know what why don't we just pick a time now for next week where we can schedule some time to talk we'll talk through it in detail if it's not a right fit it's not a right fit but at least this way we can kind of get something on the calendar now we don't have to play chase right because everybody knows what happens after an event right when somebody comes in and puts their card in or gets scanned they know they're going to get 700 emails from people so let's just cut through the crap and talk about what we can actually you know have a realistic conversation around um so those are some tips that you can do to get the most out of events and trade shows another one actually lucas brought up my colleague here which is a good one is take a look at the hashtags uh for the event itself so you can follow those hashtags and then you can actually follow the people that post based on those hashtags so you can see who's going to be at the event and try to follow people who are more of the influencers or tweeting or posting about it and maybe it's not them that you want to go after but you know their company is going to be there so we identify somebody else at the company who's going to be there that you're going to try to get in front of so those are some tips on getting the most out of events use them as practice i can't tell you the value that that's um networking events have had my career and and i'll kind of go way back in the back in the in the time machine when i was starting thrive networks my first company else when we did outsourced it services right i had no i mean i was 25 and we literally had no money i mean there was no money we were self-funded and so i had to do everything i could to find out how to how to drum up business right so i looked at channels channels of sales so cold calling was obviously a channel uh seo and website optimization or inbound leads was a channel partnerships was a channel events was a channel and i would look at events very specifically to say how many meetings can i generate out of a very specific event and that played into my strategy moving forward because the more events i went to the more people i i wasn't able to connect with and i looked at it very specifically as how much money i could generate right but early on in my career you know i i was part of this group called uh bni which is business networking international and for anybody who's kind of just getting into sales i'd really recommend taking a look every single city has one uh there's every town has one almost it's called bni business networking international and it's a group where you meet once a week it's usually like seven o'clock in the morning or something like that and uh and everybody there's probably anywhere between 10 and 30 people in every group and you can't have a competitor in the group so there if there's another sales trainer in there i wouldn't be allowed in what you have to do is you have to stand up it's a very structured way of networking so you have to stand up you give your 30 second pitch to everybody every day or every time you meet and then you go around and you actually give leads and these leads aren't all this person you should call this person this is not all this person expecting your call they need your services okay the reason i bring them up is because their mentality and what they instilled in me early on was the whole actually their tagline is giver's game right giver's game which means the more you give the more you get back and i i mean it was absolutely 100 true when i would give out a ton of leads i might not get some that day but four or five six weeks later all of a sudden people would start giving me leads right so that was my mentality when going to events is i was always looking for ways to make connections to people and not always just like hey i want to sell you something obviously right nobody wants to be around that guy um i mean you know you've always if you've been to events you know the uh what is it the um life insurance reps like i love them to death right my i got my life insurance guy mike you're great but life insurance reps i mean all they want to do is talk to you about your situation and ask for referrals to everybody else that you know your family your friends all that stuff and it gets a little annoying so if you're constantly pushing on people of closing and asking for stuff like you know that's going to get a little old fast but if you're constantly looking for ways to help other people out then you'd be amazed what happens right because i focused a lot of time i probably went on i probably went to i don't know three to four events a week in boston a week like every day i would go i was part of three or four networking groups in the mornings every week right and then i would do my cold calling and meetings all day long and then i would go to three or four events every single week and um i did that for a very long period five or six years um again we had no money so i was our marketing department right and uh and i would help out people i'd make introductions oh you need to talk to that person and this person and this person and eventually it would come around to me you know every once in a while but where it really came around to me and those relationships that i developed through bni through networking helping making connections to people not only did it help me practice and hone in on my skills of being able to connect with people in a short concise way but it also paid bared fruit when i started my own company so when when basho for those of you don't know the story you know i sold that little company to staples staples then fired me uh or offered me another position and then i worked for basho and basho you know year and a half i'm doing the training everything's good new ceo comes in tanks the company fires everybody you know and now i'm looking for now we basically me and my other business partner we took over basho as as kensei partners and it was funny because as soon as we were like we were fired we had to start a company and it's not trivial to start a company i mean all the things that that this is why it always cracks me up when people are like oh yeah i could be an entrepreneur i could you know i could run a business really do you know all the details that are involved in running a business as far as payroll as far as finance and accounting and and uh hr and all these different resources like you need to set up a lot of shit to get a business really going and like a legitimate business right and so when we split it was like oh crap what do we do and i remember i called up every single person that i knew that i had done tons of favors for earlier in my career and i called in those favors and so i was i called up my buddy who did payroll and i was like hey mike um you know what i'm starting i gotta get my company off the ground i need payroll right now can you help me out he's like yeah you know what john i'll give you free payroll for six months let's just get you set up and let's get you rocking all right great thanks legal hey yeah absolutely john let me send you over some contracts why don't you just start with those and then we'll build from there uh you know phone uh set up uh accounting like you name it it was a phone call away and i just called in all those favors and we website right all that stuff so literally in a week fully functioning business legally certified all these different things i remember my business partner was like holy shit like how how did you make how did you get this all set up so fast right and it was like well you know i did a ton of networking early in my career and all those people i know and trust and uh they're all more than willing to help me out based on all the effort that i put in early so for those of you out there trying to take a little bit more control over your career for those of you out there who are trying to build your own personal brands um and and really figure out how to hone your craft in sales networking events is is one of the best ways you can do it but make sure you're structured and make sure you're prepared because if you're not like i said it can be a huge waste of time um and there's other things that you could and should be doing otherwise but i really do think taking a planned approach to networking events will help you understand what the roi is and then you can go back to your managers and look for more you know funding for or or more expense accounts to go to more events if the results are there and if you do the 10 5 1 type scenario and your average deal size is i don't know anything north of 10 grand 20 grand or something like that two hours to get twenty thousand dollars worth of revenue for probably 50 bucks that you have to spend on that event you're even five hundred dollars that you spend at that event is totally worth the investment right there were some people um we were at uh uh what was it um i forget the event we were at a few weeks ago oh flip my funnel and what was so encouraging to me was i saw more than a few reps out there who had taken pto right time off and and and took just to go to the events and their company had paid for it but they literally took time off out of their out of their you know paid time off stuff to come to these events which first of all again was a little frustrating for me to hear that that uh executives were forcing reps to take time off to go to events but that's a different story but those reps like guarantee you those are the reps that are going to excel and succeed in their careers whether it's at their existing company or not them having the initiative to say i want to go to this really put them on the map from my perspective as as reps who gave a shit who wanted to improve themselves and were putting themselves out there and there's ones that i remember and if they come knocking one day i'll definitely give them the benefit of the doubt as far as having a conversation with them just because of seeing their effort uh one more tip that just kind of popped into mind and this is where i think video comes in really really handy uh because we're almost up here on the hour but you know video in uh we're working with video to do video prospecting where video is actually fantastic in my opinion is following up from events so for instance a kid got me last time at sales loft what he did was we had a rainmaker we had a good conversation and then right after that conversation he did a snapchat video to me he was like hey john thanks so much for that conversation i really appreciate it um and then after that so that was during the day so i saw it on snap and i put the name to a face again and then the next day he sent me a video video saying hey john thank you so much for the call yesterday here's what we talked about would love to get some time on your calendar and out of all the people that i talked about talked to during that um during that event he was the only one i followed up with so use video as well okay all right so we're going to wrap it up here um we're going to post on this on the facebook live session here uh the networking guide so you can go take a look at that and use that to help get yourself prepared it has a lot of the stuff that i talked about it in today uh we're probably going to put a blog post out there about it this thursday so you can look for it there and uh for anybody listening on the podcast just google j barrow's networking guide and you'll find it all right so hopefully everybody's having a great day and getting ready to crush it in september here if you're still chilling out and relaxing please recharge those batteries so that you can hit the ground running come uh after labor day here and uh let's go make it happen all right everybody have a great week so so so so so so so so so so so you you you you you you Thank you.