When you attend business events i.e. go networking, you should only be selling one thing – yourself! Don’t sell your services or your products in the first instance; people always buy people before anything else.
This means you need to believe you’re a nice person and as good as anyone else at the gathering. As long as you spend more time focusing on others, people get to like you quickly and you build positive relationships.
You then need to be enthusiastic about the job you do and the organisation you represent. If you don’t, why would people want to do business with you and your company? I used to be an accountant so I am interested to watch the body language of someone I meet who is an existing practising accountant. I ask them “What do you do?” and I often get a response like ‘Actually I’m a boring accountant’ as they look away or down at their shoes! I think if that’s what they think about themselves why would I want to do business with them?
Dale Carnegie, who wrote the world’s best-seller ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ was credited with the quote ‘Enthusiasm- the little known secret of success’. Enthusiasm is like measles… it’s highly contagious!
