[groups_member group=”Coaches”] COACHES NOTES
Occasionally, someone you are coaching will have reservations about our deliberate strategy of connecting with people on LinkedIn we don’t know (yet) for the purpose of getting to know them and introduce them to others at the Hub.
This is more likely when the person you are coaching is someone you knew and personally invited to the Hub (rather than someone you first met on LinkedIn and then invited)
The following section is designed to help the person you are coaching to become positively enthusiastic about our process.
This is especially important when this seems to be contrary to LinkedIn’s policy which states that you should only attempt to connect with people that you already know.
It is also important that your new builder understands that the main reason for inviting someone they don’t yet know to meet them at the Hub is to help them meet relevant contacts rather than to try to create immediate transactions.
It can take a new person a little time to get their head around this. However, when they access this page and view the following video, it will usually help them to make the paradigm shift more quickly.
END COACHES NOTES
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The Secret to Great Opportunities?
The person you haven’t met yet.
Tanya Menon speaks, writes and consults on collaboration. Her research focuses on how people think about their relationships and the habits that allow them to build positive connections with other people.
Why you should listen to or watch this video
One of the most powerful game-changers available for people to meet those they have not met yet is via the Connect Collaborative Hub.
It’s a game-changer because it means that everyone can easily invite a large number of people over the course of a year. Which enables the exponential network which benefits all contributors.
It’s also a game changer because the people you are inviting have the opportunity to meet selected others who may be great contacts for them.
However, it is important to understand that this is counter to the culture that generally exists in society today. As such you (or people you may be coaching in the future) may have some reservations based on old paradigms.
If so, it’s really good to view videos such as the above talk it over with your coach.
Most of us believe that if we have been “cold contacted” it’s because the person who is attempting to contact us wants to sell us something or wants something from us. Why else would they be trying to contacts us? So we are naturally wary.
Most of all, we don’t want to be annoying person who is doing the cold contacting – right?
What if instead, a stranger wants to meet you purely with the intention of building a mutually beneficial relationship?
And the main goal of this person (that you have only met digitally) is to introduce you to selected others who may be ideal contacts for you?
What a refreshing paradigm – Why Not?
But why would a stranger want to do this?
What’s in it for them?
When you think this through in the context of the way our Hub works it extremely powerful.
Your goal at the Hub is to build trust with as many people as you can.
Firstly let’s look at this from the point of view of the person you met on LinkedIn and have invited to the Hub.
When you are new, you may not know many of the people in the room.
However, you can easily introduce your guests to your coach who will usually know many more people than you do.
So, very quickly, your guest can be introduced to others in the room who could be ideal contacts for them.
We become very good at quickly deciding who could be a good contact for our guests.
In fact, in many cases, we have already worked this out by looking at their LinkedIn profile and from the conversation that has taken place online. And prior to the Hub our guest is attending, we may even have let others in the room know we will be introducing them to our new guest.
Important Note: you can introduce but not authentically advocate for your guests as you don’t know them well enough – yet.
Through this process, you rapidly build trust with like-minded you have invited to the Hub.
At the same time, you are also building trust with the people you have specifically selected to introduce them to – because there is a good chance that they may be able to help one another.
The payback for you comes when those that you have built trust with start introducing their guests to you (and that could be for a business or other purpose that you did not have when you first started network building with us).
That can be a very large number of people potentially introducing people to you that you may be able to do business with.
Let’s think for a moment about how you are helping others on LinkedIn.
We know that people usually do business with those they know like and trust. Which means if they amass yet more digital-only connections, it will make very little difference to their actual results.
An often tried alternative is to select likely business partners online and invite them to have a coffee with them. However, if they are not meeting regularly with those people, it is unlikely that a productive relationship will be built.
All of these problems are solved by people regularly meeting at our Hub which has a culture of building trust by first trying to benefit others (the go-giver principle).
In order that the guests you have not met yet quickly understand that you are inviting them to the Hub primarily for their benefit (rather than yours – you will only benefit if they do) we encourage builders to adopt a theme on their LinkedIn profiles similar to the following:
“Although it is unlikely that we may be able to do business together, it is almost a certainty that I will know people who will be good contacts for you”
And when this is backed up by messages along the following lines:
Thanks for connecting!
Reading your profile triggered me to think about a few people I think could be good contacts for you….
Would you like to meet face to face?
Obviously this has to be authentic and in most cases would be accompanied by a reference to something on their profile.
In conclusion, we have a well thought out process designed to reassure our guests that first and foremost we are inviting them for their benefit. If they benefit we will start to build all-important trust with the parties involved.