Last time I checked, the telephone was a good way to further a connection with someone you wanted to explore a business relationship with before meeting them in person. It’s also a good way to dig into what each of you might be looking for and to find common ground.
That’s why I have been totally flabbergasted lately about some contacts I’ve had. Two people (that I don’t know well), in as many weeks, have contacted me via LinkedIn and asked to connect in person. I’m absolutely okay with the contact — that’s what social networks are about and how I’ve developed some long lasting business relationships with people around the world.
But I’ve learned from experience that the driver behind these types of “invitations” are normally a request for free consulting. I don’t mind sharing my knowledge with anyone and do so quite frequently, but an in person meeting normally ends up taking about four hours from getting ready to getting home.
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That’s a lot of time when you consider a phone conversation to ferret out the real reason behind the contact and help the person if possible will normally take less than an hour.
So I offered up a phone conversation with each of these people and then never heard a word back from them. Is there something wrong with the telephone?
I’d love to hear what you think. Let’s talk about it. Please leave me a comment.
Photo credit: marxpix photos on flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
About Denise O'Berry
Great post.
Many people think that if they “pay for the lunch”, then the $30-40 that my lunch costed them entitled them to pick my brains for free for two hours… and of course, follow up phone calls of free consultaing to “follow up” on what I said at lunch.
Free advice is good- many people contact me or meet me at events after my speech and it’s my pleasure to spend a few minutes telling them some valuable information to help their business- but that type of free consultation invariably leads to a good percentage that realize that they are hearing eye-opening information that warrants a paid consultation with me…
and where it doesn’t, it leads to referrals of people they know or to speaking invitations…
I use linkedin to find people that I think are a good fit for me to connect with in business, and then always try to move that conversation either to email, or even sometimes with the intermediate step of reading their tweets and finding common ground (and making sure they aren’t a twitter spammer.)
another benefit of linkedin is that by the time you get on the phone with the person you already have alot of background about their business life, skills, background, personal life…
so there is a lot of backstory that enables on zeroing in for how you can help the other person you are connecting with and provide them with value- so they see you are of value yourself!
Izzy