Coffee meetup yesterday got me second-guessing my whole networking strategy

I met this guy Frank at a Phoenix chamber event. He said he never exchanges business cards or pitches his service at mixers. Just asks people about their biggest challenge and listens. That hit different because I've been doing the opposite for 2 years, collecting 50 cards a month and following up with generic emails. Half my leads never even reply. So is the old 'spray and pray' method dead, or does his slow-burn approach only work for certain industries? Curious what others have noticed works better.

2 comments

2 Comments

the_riley25d ago

The "collecting 50 cards a month" part jumped out at me. What if the real issue isn't spray and pray vs slow burn, but that nobody goes to these events to buy anything? They're there to sell too. So Frank's trick might just be that he's treating the mixer like a focus group instead of a sales floor. He's learning about people's real problems for free, then only pitching to the ones he knows he can actually help.

sagep1923d ago

Makes total sense. I've gone to those things thinking I'd find customers and ended up spending the whole night listening to people complain about their invoicing software or whatever. Turned out that free info was way more useful than any pitch I ever gave, since I could actually tailor what I offered to the exact pain points I heard. Frank just figured out the same thing but smarter, using the mixer as his research lab instead of a sales pitch.