The One-On-One Meeting Misstep

Many years ago in a moment of pure frustration I am sure, a boss of mine said, “Bill you know what you know, if you stop to listen you’ll learn what other people know.”

The purpose of getting together one-on-one is to learn what other people know. You need to uncover their background, skills and competencies. You need to learn about them and the only way that you can do that is to be passionately interested in hearing their story.

This concept challenges how most networkers handle one-on-one meetings. They ask for a meeting and then proceed to either do a sales pitch or dominate the conversation with their stories. At the end of the meeting, they may even try to convince their new friend to send them leads. How would it work if someone did that to you?

Networking value and exchange is built by making matches. Connecting people who would benefit from knowing each other is how you earn goodwill. You can only make good matches when you have great intimacy with key people in your community. You need to have both knowledge about the capabilities of someone and trust in them to make a good introduction.

Accept for a moment the best referrals that you’ll ever get will come from your current or past clients. Then your one-on-one meetings need to be focused on building a bullpen of resources that can solve the problems most likely to be experienced by your key clients. The better your ability to solve the problems experienced by your clients the more likely they will be to advocate you...It is that simple.

Next week we’ll explore one-on-one meeting agendas...