In this episode, the Founder of NxtStep Consulting Sean Boyce talks about the problems with in-person networking, how to be more efficient in your relationship building, and the importance of having a hook when building a relationship.
Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn’t able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services. To solve this Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time. Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:
- The inefficiency of in-person networking.
- The opportunity costs involved in physical events.
- The problem with selling at conferences and shows.
- How to build relationships virtually.
- The importance of having a hook when building a relationship.
- What makes a good relationship development hook.
- The celebrity effect of podcasting.
Resources:
Connecting with Sean Boyce:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 2:50 – “The in-person stuff is important and I still do some of it but I’ve cut back on quite a bit especially once I found out how effective something like building relationships virtually or asynchronously by having a valuable hook for your prospect like inviting them as a guest on your podcast, what we do at Podcast Chef once I found out how effective that was it changed everything for me.”
- 3:44 – “With having a great hook that enables you to build relationships that way I can reach out to specifically the person at the company that I want to build a relationship with, I can even build a list of those folks and because the response rate is so strong I can get a lot of responses back and build a lot of great relationships rather efficiently and that’s the big thing is in-person networking and in-person stuff is effective but it’s not efficient, leveraging something like a valuable hook for your prospect like inviting them on your podcast is both effective and efficient.”
- 6:37 – “I don’t know why anyone thinks that striking up conversations or having relationships is supposed to be all about talking about themselves it should be all focused on who you’re talking to way to, it’s taken a long time for people to figure that out but even for the ones that have they still go way too hard way too soon with something and you just ruin it from the beginning so instead I like to keep it short and sweet and offer something or value so that we can actually get to a conversation relatively quickly and then figure out is this going to be a good fit for the show, by the way, do you have these problems or challenges if so I might be able to help you out and not all of those are going to turn into deals right away but some of them will over time.”
- 12:19 – “When I do the in-person networking events I try to be present and have a real conversation with whoever I’m speaking with understanding that I’m only going to have a handful that is what it is and it is a problem to a extent but I’ve got a buddy who takes a completely different approach and tries to speed round meet everyone in the room and only spend a couple of minutes talking to everyone and to me that doesn’t make any sense at all because you’re not remembering anything you’re not really knowing who you met and you just don’t have enough time to make it seem like you’re really interested with having a relationship with that person.”