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When you meet one of the wealthiest & most powerful persons in your country in a 45 seconds elevator ride, what do you do?
Sometime ago, I was fortunate to meet with one of Nigeria’s most influential businessmen (name withheld) in an elevator ride. I was already in the elevator when it stopped to pick him and his personal assistant & a security attaché along the way. I had a little less than a minute with him in the elevator till he stepped out and all I could muster to him was a half greeting & a very broad smile.
Truth be told, I am not the type of person to dull myself in such situations as I am always battle ready to network with the high & mighty but on this fateful day I froze in my tracks. I just couldn’t find my voice or muster the courage to engage him in a conversation. This was some years ago.
I had this pressing idea to start a football tournament in secondary schools to bolster the growth of football from the grassroots but I didn’t have any form of sponsorship whatsoever & having that conversation with this man might have been the game changer as his company had a nark for investing in such long term projects for impact & profits.
• Do I regret not chatting with him? Absolutely!
• Did I learn any lesson(s) from that experience? Most certainly!
• Will I repeat such a mistake next time? Your answer (guess) is as good as mine; definitely not!
Here are some of the lessons I picked up from that encounter that has helped me so far more than 3 years after.
➢ Value Begets Opportunity – What value are you offering to the person you’re approaching? If you’re selling a skill, an idea, a solution or yourself, attach a commensurate value to your offering, something the person you’re selling to can’t easily resist or has to think it over before letting it slide.
➢ Build Confidence – Learn to always communicate confidently. Hold a firm gaze, smile, articulate your point with hand gestures and watch closely for body language. Nevertheless, ensure that you know what you’re saying or you’re saying what you know or you’re saying it like it’s what you really know. Influential people know when someone is confident or just bullshitting them; so know your cards & play them with maximum confidence. (not to say you can’t bullshit people confidently though, I’ve seen it in play a lot of times too)
➢ Be Pitch Ready – Go straight to the point with your pitchand keep all the details in the earliest words. Don’t go around in circles with plenty praise and fail to hit the nail on the head selling your pitch right. You might just say three sentences & hold the attention of the influential person while someone else might spend ample time talking to the same person & not strike a cord in their ears. Either ways, know your pitch & be battle ready with it at all times.
➢ Manage Time – Always practice your best pitches to say a lot, with content within the first 30 seconds after you start talking. Your identity, your experience, your idea, in 2/3 breathes & in less than 30 seconds. The quicker, clearer & more articulate your pitch is in good time, the higher the chance you’re able to buy yourself more time to chip in one or two other words and earn yourself further ear time with your person of influence.
➢ Ideas Rule the World – Many times we’re scared that we’d share an idea with someone, work on the fine details of the idea & they'd in turn take the idea, use it & not give you any credits or rewards at the end. This true to an extent but I like to look at it this way: How you package & present your ideas will determine how well the person(s) you’re presenting them to trust you to deliver results in the execution. So damn the consequences & look at the positives, if the idea you share makes sense, you’d be most likely to get a chance to run it with their support so go for it.
I’ve had a handful of experiences where I didn’t hesitate to make useful connections with highly influential persons & I ended up sharing good time with them. If you take your time to work on yourself, you’d find out that it’s actually quite easy to network vertically like horizontally.
Virtual networking works quite similarly but the dynamics can change drastically in a lot of scenarios.
Have you ever had an opportunity to network with an influential person before? Please share your experience how you went about it and how it ended.
Connect with David across all social media platforms @thedavidadesina