No matter how confident you may be, the experience of entering a room full of strangers can be nerve-racking and leave you grasping for something to say. I believe the best route is actually the easiest – we all know that people like talking about themselves, so why not ask questions designed to draw them out a little more than standard shop talk?
Here are a selection I have found to be useful in establishing a connection with someone who at first glance appears to have nothing in common with me at all.
1. How did you come to be in your line of work? Often people fall into their job through a chance encounter or a stroke of luck – these stories are often interesting, and recounting them will bring your new contact alive in a way that a straightforward discussion about current business never does.
2. Describe to me your dream customer. You will learn much about their motivation and goals by listening carefully to this.
3. What changes are happening, or can you predict happening, within your industry? Tap into a source of inside information here – it may well have implications for your own business or give you ideas on doing things differently. It is easy to get into habitual patterns of thought without realising it. A totally different perspective can really sharpen you up.
4. What do you regard as your greatest achievement in business to date? Another great way of breaking the ice and getting to know someone better.
5. What do you love about your work? Someone else’s business will come alive for you if you listen to them describing their favourite activities.
6. Are there things you wish you could change? A natural follow-on from the above.
7. How would you like people to describe your contribution to your industry? This gets away from day-to-day business and allows them to discuss their deeper aspirations if they wish.
Any of these questions will provide you with a more enjoyable and memorable encounter, and with luck will ensure you are remembered likewise.
By: Andy Britnell
Posts Tagged ‘Job’
Networking Events – 7 Good Questions to Ask
March 15th, 2010Work At Home – Network Marketing Business Don’t Give Up Too Soon
January 11th, 2010It didn’t seem like too long ago that you had just begun working on your new network marketing opportunity. Each and every day you would talk about how much money you were going to make and what you had planned to do with the money when you made it.
Now for some reason you have decided to give up your dream and quit working with the network marketing company. When asked about it you answer half-heartedly saying I guess it wasn’t for me, it was just too hard, etc. After speaking to you a little more about it you reveal that your spouse was getting mad about how much you were spending trying to get your business off the ground. You can’t really blame your spouse for having a job mentality and not understanding that it costs money to make money when you are in business. You don’t just go in work for eight hours and go home with a paycheck.
After speaking with your spouse further about your business you learn that your spouse is really behind you on your effort even though they don’t understand it. The main objection was the amount of money being spent on the network marketing opportunity. There is a big range on what each network marketing business costs to operate. You really have to investigate the whole aspect of the business. If it claims to pay out a lot of money very quickly then it is safe to assume that the monthly requirement is pretty high. The high monthly requirement can be a budget challenge especially since you are not making any money yet.
If you have a budget you would be better off starting out with a less expensive network marketing opportunity. There are some as low as twelve dollars per month and they still include the free website. Of course you will have to do a lot more business to make the money that a more expensive opportunity will pay but because it is less expensive you may have a better chance of finding people interested in joining you in the business. Do your research and find an inexpensive opportunity to promote. Once you start making money with the less expensive company you can start working with the more expensive company if you would like and use the money from the less expensive one to pay for the more expensive one. Working it like that would be gentle on your household budget and keep your spouse happy.
Work At Home – Network Marketing Business Don’t Give Up Too Soon
December 11th, 2009It didn’t seem like too long ago that you had just begun working on your new network marketing opportunity. Each and every day you would talk about how much money you were going to make and what you had planned to do with the money when you made it.
Now for some reason you have decided to give up your dream and quit working with the network marketing company. When asked about it you answer half-heartedly saying I guess it wasn’t for me, it was just too hard, etc. After speaking to you a little more about it you reveal that your spouse was getting mad about how much you were spending trying to get your business off the ground. You can’t really blame your spouse for having a job mentality and not understanding that it costs money to make money when you are in business. You don’t just go in work for eight hours and go home with a paycheck. » Read more: Work At Home – Network Marketing Business Don’t Give Up Too Soon
Network Marketing – Your Reason Why
November 1st, 2009The strength of your motivation for doing network marketing is what will keep you in the game. Like all of life network marketing poses challenges. There are good days and bad days. And unless you are doing it full time, you have your job to fall back on if it does not work out. Being a home based business mlm tends to be something that is easy to quit when the going gets rough.
And yet we know that if we don’t quit we will win. “Winners never quit and quitters never win”. An there are those statistics that someone like Mark Yarnell will comment on: for those who remain in any network marketing opportunity for ten or more years 95% will become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. The other 5% were in it for the other benefits such as personal development and a bit of extra income and they will reach their goals too. So why quit?
There are probably as many excuses as there are people. But the underlying reasons are few.
1. It Doesn’t Work
Whether it is people saying it to us or our own experience, this would be the commonest one out there. No matter how good any mlm worker is they are going to encounter “Nos”. And it can be those closest to you who will give you your strongest no. The stronger the connection the more someone can hurt you. Some people talk to only a few people – two or three (or even at times ten) and get all “no” replies. If even their own mother or best mate will not join them in the business or become a customer how will anyone else? That might seem reasonable but the reality is not everyone sees it. And their refusal can be based on their past experience either directly personal or of someone else they knew who tried it and failed or never did much with it. Probably most of us know or are related to people like this.
But that good advice of taking care of those you take advice from is worthwhile. Do you listen to those who are broke to learn how to make money? Or a billionaire? Anyone in any business who has got anywhere will tell you it took some work. That is effort, coping with nos and with failures at times. The reason the successful ones in any business, mlm or otherwise, made it was that they never gave up. Ask anyone who has made it to honestly tell you how their time had been on the way up. Every single one will have had some dark, extremely tough time, probably many of them, when it would have seemed so much easier to give up. Most successful entrepreneurs have failed several times before they finally made it.
2. The Failure Of Those Under You
In mlm we build teams. And the teams are made up of all sorts of people. You are told when you come in that you never know who the good ones will be. It takes time, several months, and with some people several years, before you will see who the great ones are, the leaders and so on. In a networking home business you become quite close to your team. You are training them and hearing regularly how they are doing. Many people feel responsible for those on their team. When they fail to achieve great things they can take this personally. To some degree there is a personal responsibility. We should have been trained well by our upline. At times this was not so. They were still learning how to do this business and may have messed it up. We tend to duplicate the actions of our uplines for those in our downlines. What else do we know? This multiplication of less than ideal methods can result in very poor results compared with those doing it well.
There comes a point for every network marketer where they have to assume responsibility for their business. And, as in all life, we can ultimately be responsible for our own actions only. We cannot force people (at least not very successfully) to do those things they are not willing to do. If we wrongly accept responsibility for others in our team, when they fail, we feel like we have failed. The only things that really fail are a poor system (everything duplicates, good or bad) and the individual who makes a decision what is important for them.
It is possible to have whole upline members quit. If you are in mlm long enough this is bound to happen. They will have their own reason for quitting. A main one is that lack of stickability when they feel there is not enough success. They will usually blame the business and head for another one. At times they may be right. It might not be a good business fit for them. But if it is otherwise a successful company that did not conflict with their core values their experience of another company is likely to be the same as the previous one. We take ourselves with us wherever we go.
3. The Pain Of Personal Development
One of the great benefits of mlm business is personal development. There is very little else out there that creates the need for this in the same way. It is simple to understand why. You have your own business which is virtually totally dependent on you (not for the underlying business, but for how it develops – it is a reflection of you) for growth and results.
Each step up the ladder involves more responsibility and expectation from those under you. You grow or perish – or at the least, don’t advance. If you attain a position beyond where your development is you can either lose your team as they find you are not a strong enough rock to relate to, or you can stagnate while your development catches up. And if you are going to become financially independent in this lifestyle living off the huge rewards of ever-growing residual income, then for the sake of the planet, it is vital you have developed far beyond where you were when you first started your mlm business.
4. That Reason Why!
This is it! Most of us were told this when we joined. And most of us were told we needed to commit some years in the business to getting there. But back of it all, to remain in those years, to do what you have been told and not get results, or maybe not do them and then come back, or to be bold to try some new ways, you need a strong reason why. Your motivation. It is everything in the end.
For many this can change as they are in the system. Initially for many it will be about a little bit of extra money to cover rising petrol prices, mortgages etc, or financial independence. But the question at the back of financial independence is what do you want to do when you are financially independent? Apart from having a decent holiday at last, getting the home you always wanted, or the car, or providing for your children’s education, once you have all that covered, then what? It may take some time to see. And it will be an individual idea for each one of us. But think of this: with a huge financial purse to fund it, what could you do in this world? How would the world be different for you being here? What would you like to see happen?
Using Your Unconscious Mind
And for all of us this is the conviction we need to fall back on when all else seems to turn to custard. There will be days everything falls apart and it all looks so black and so hard. But the more you have fed your unconscious mind on that deep overwhelming reason why, the easier and faster it will be for you to drive on forward. We need to regularly feed ourselves on this deep reason. Picture it. Read about it. Dream of it as you go to sleep at night – the time it is most easy to get in contact with your unconscious mind – that part that controls 95% of all you do. Like the crew on the ship, where the captain is our conscious mind, unless the unconscious shares the understanding of where we want to head, it is unlikely to help us get there. Those other unconscious beliefs, values and goals will drag us where they want to go. So feed that unconscious – with dreams, images everywhere, daydreaming and direct suggestions.
If you don’t yet feel you have a strong reason why ask your unconscious mind to work on finding one for you. It will work for you while you sleep in the same way it will wake you before the alarm at some time it has been vital for you to get up early. The easiest way to do this is to address it directly three time in three different ways. Before you go to sleep (or if you wake up in the night not being able to go back to sleep) tell it then: “Unconscious mind I want you to search for a huge reason why I should be doing my network marketing business. As I sleep I want you to search all possibilities and present to me a massive motivation for doing my mlm business. By the time I wake unconscious mind I want you to reveal to me the best reason I should do my home business.” You can instruct it to help you remember it too. It will! It is like an obedient crew. It needs definite and clear instructions for what it is to do, and it will perform. Otherwise, with no clear direction, it will give you that sort of result. You can instruct it in the same way to give you a great night’s sleep as well. Try it. It works!
Once your motivation is sorted and it is locked deep into your unconscious mind there is no way you cannot succeed. When you meet an obstacle it will work out for you, if necessary overnight, how to get around it. It will give you new and creative ideas as to how to grow your business. And it will seem to magnetically draw people and opportunities to you – those who will best help you in the accomplishment of the task. Did you ever read Napoleon Hill’s “Think And Grow Rich” book and wonder at the end what it was all about?
By: Mark Denekamp
Some Guidance From Work at Home Moms
October 22nd, 2009for choosing to read my article and taking the time to do so. I hope the information that I provide here is exactly what you were looking for.
Very often the right information can change a person’s life. Carefully read the following advice from successful work at home moms. I hope that this information helps you in achieving your own work from home goals.
Naturally, as a mom you inherently know of a number of ways by which you can aid your family in succeeding in life, and as you probably will agree, one of them and possibly the most significant, is of course to devote as much time as you possibly can to them. Unfortunately that’s not always possible because if you are a mom in the same situation as the majority of moms are these days, you have to leave home each day to go to a job that you probably don’t even like that much, but which you need in order to help your family make ends meet at each month’s end.
A solution to this problem would be to find a job like data entry for example, or some other job that you have experience in and are comfortable with and which you can easily do at home on your computer. Or, if you’d rather not work for somebody else anymore, you can start your own home business and build up a nice residual income through multi level marketing programs being offered by many reputable and well established companies doing business on-line . Just as so many other successful work at home moms all over the world do, you’ll be able to remain at home and earn a comfortable living.
The number of work at home moms has been growing steadily in the last few years, and the vast majority report that as work at home moms, they feel that it really helped them to understand what it means to be a parent and what it means to be able to have control over all the things that they love doing. Working at home as opposed to going to some office, often far from home and leaving your family to basically take care of themselves, means that you’ll be able to do things your own way and on your own time and as you see fit. Working from home, be it a job or your own business, is probably one of the best things that you can do for your family, and is quite possibly the easiest decision that you’ll ever make as many work at home moms have already done. It can bring you time as well as financial freedom, and most important of all, you will truly be there for your family, which they will undoubtedly appreciate as countless work at home moms attest.
Many experienced work at home moms give the following advice. When searching for a work at home job or a suitable company to start a residual income business, there are several things that you need to keep in mind. First of all, be selective. Often, the very first company we come across seems to be the one to go with but it’s a good idea to keep looking while keeping a record of each one so that you may then compare between the ones that seem to be the best bets to then make an informed and final decision. You can be lucky of course and find something that’s just right for you on your first search, otherwise, shop around as much as possible for that perfect job or business opportunity that perfectly fits your needs. Just make sure you’re exploring all the options that are available to you before you give it a try. You’ll feel that you’ve finally gotten your life back as you probe the Internet for that perfect work from home job or business opportunity and realize that it is simply waiting for you to reach out and take hold of.
As successful work at home moms also report, researching prospective companies is essential. The reason is that you must to be absolutely certain that when you do find that promising work at home job or business opportunity, it’s the one that’ll bring you the most benefits and not one that will just make you waste your valuable resources as well as your time, only to find that you must drop it and start over. You want to make sure that the company is a reputable one and that it is well established in the market. You must be certain that the compensation or pay plan is generous and that the product or service being offered is in demand by a great number of people all over the world and not just regionally.
Because you’ll be using the Internet, there’s no reason to limit your home business to local or regional markets.This is very important because it can mean the difference between success and frustration and disappointment . In conclusion, just make sure that you do your research and that you know the job or business will be perfect for your needs as well as your family’s and also, be selective. You’ll be much better equipped by so doing, in dodging possible scams that inevitably and deplorably do exist and of which one must be aware.
Thank you for your visit and for taking the time to read my article. For additional information and helpful tips on the subject of working from home be it on-line jobs or home business start ups, be sure to follow through and continue looking around. I hope that this information was helpful and that you decide to follow the advice of experienced and successful work at home moms.
For maximum success be sure to follow through with your search by visiting relevant web sites for additional articles on this subject as well as references to on-line data entry jobs and reputable and well established companies offering residual income opportunities.
By: Manuel A DaCosta
