Networking is a great way to sell yourself – potential customers can get to know
and trust you; joint ventures can be formed and extra income streams created.
It can also be a great way to put your foot it in and wind up looking stupid and over the top if you say something thoughtless without engaging your brain.
Here are three classic networking conversational gaffes to avoid like the plague:
TALK, TALK, TALK
You start a conversation about your business, followed by some in-depth details about yourself, then round things off with a history of all the people that you do business with. By this point you will probably be talking to the wall – your poor listener will have fled to the nearest even vaguely animated being ( a pot plant, say).
Don’t fall into the trap of just trying to sell yourself whenever you chat to someone at a networking event. Take the time to find out about them.
COMPLAINING
“I never meet anyone new at these things”…”These pitches go on forever, don’t they?”…and so on. Start moaning and grumbling in this way and people will be put off – firstly because they don’t want to hear more negativity than necessary, and secondly because they might just take your complaining personally (“Is my pitch really that bad?”) .
BAD-MOUTHING COMPETITORS
As tempting as this might seem, as justified as you might feel – don’t do it. When David Cameron was asked to comment on Gordon Brown’s ‘She’s-a-bigot’ gaffe during the 2010 election campaign, he replied that there were bigger issues at stake and he refused to comment on this one incident. Whatever you think of the Conservative leader, it illustrates perfectly how not stooping to put competitors in a bad light shows you as someone with a great deal of integrity.
No comments:
Post a Comment