Whenever two or more business people are in the same space, they typically network. No surprise there. Here are some Networking Best Practices that will differentiate the networking pros from the networking amateurs.
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Surviving Q & A
Previous articles discussed some effective strategies for handling audience questions – you can choose to hold them until the end, invite them anytime or try one of the hybrid strategies described in detail. So, someone asks a question. Now what do you do? Here are some Best Practices to help you survive and thrive during Q&A.
Job Interviews & Workplace Presentations
A reader recently asked about the parallels between job interviews and workplace presentations. As a bit of background, one of my sustaining clients is an outplacement firm, where I serve as a part time career coach. I’ve also done hundreds of pro bono workshops for area job seeker groups on the topic of interview communication skills. Here’s a brief summary of some the Best Practices I typically share:
Networking with Class & Style
Professional association events can really fill up your days and nights with networking opportunities this time of year. You could easily attend 10 breakfast, lunch, dinner or happy hour events every week, gain 100 pounds and pick up lots of business cards.
But strategic networking isn’t a numbers game – it’s based on focused activity to accomplish specific information objectives. So define your networking objectives, choose your events wisely and prepare to make that best possible first impression. Networking with Class and Style is both very simple AND very easy. So, embrace these 10 Best Practices to clearly differentiate you from the amateurs.
Embrace Referral Power
Marketing research consistently supports the value of referrals. New prospects acquired through referrals from your happy customers generally make purchasing decisions faster, are nearly three times more likely to become your repeat customers, require less investment to make the sale and are twice as likely to make referrals on their own.
Gitomer Gets It
I just re-read Jeffrey Gitomer’s excellent ‘Little Red Book of Selling’. He’s one of the country’s leading sales experts, trainers and speakers … and a very entertaining writer.
He really gets Networking and defines it so well – ‘Networking is life skills and social skills combine with sales skills.’ He also advises that … ‘Networking is a mandatory function of business for salespeople and entrepreneurs.’
Slide into Successful Slides
Last time, we discussed how to avoid inflicting ‘Death by PowerPoint’ on your audiences. You should have added a few new or different tools to your Presenter Tool Kit as a result. So, let’s continue the process with a few more suggestions to enable you to Slide Into Successful Slides and maximize your audience-centric results.
Two More Punctuation Friends
Good to know some readers still care about accuracy in their use of punctuation. Thanks for your positive comments. Here are two more little friends to add to your Workplace Writing Tool Kit:
Your Friend, the Colon
I was pleased with reader reaction to my recent piece on contemporary punctuation guidelines. Several hoped there would be more. Not to worry … Today, get to know your friend, the Colon, when to use it and how to use it. But first, say hello to it’s little brother, the Semi-Colon.
How to Avoid ‘Death by PowerPoint’
How you use speaker support slides to reinforce and support your message has a direct impact on accomplishing your audience-centric outcomes. PowerPoint – or other similar software packages – has the capacity to provide you with efficient, effective and attractive slides. But, how and why presenters use this great tool makes all the difference. So, let’s add a few new or different tools to your Presenter Tool Kit and share PowerPoint Best Practices. To get us in the mood, let’s discuss Worse Practices first.
How many of you have been the victim of ‘Death by PowerPoint’? I see a lot of hands going up. Remember, it’s not the fault of the software, but of the user. PowerPoint will do most anything you ask it to do – even dumb things. It has user-friendly capacity, but no taste, soul or intelligence … yet.