If you are not yet familiar with Lisa Nichols, she is one amazingly inspiring woman. She’s one of the stars of the hit DVD movie The Secret, co-author of two Chicken Soup for the Soul books, author of the recently released No Matter What!–9 Steps to Living the Life You Love, and she is a great friend of mine. Lisa is one of those rare public speakers who is able to develop a connection with each person in the audience no matter whether she’s speaking to a group of 25 people or a crowd of 500. She ha...

My good friend Julien Sharp is a brilliant editor who has worked on a countless number of writing projects for me and done a top-notch job. She is also founder of Stylo Creative Communications, a fantastic networker and businesswoman, and an exceptional author who contributed a great article entitled “From Mickey Mouse to Cruise Ships” to my 2007 bestseller, Masters of Sales. The article talks about her early childhood dream to be a musical performer on The New Mickey Mouse Club, how that transitioned int...

I had a conversation with an associate recently who was surprised that she’d gotten flack from a referral source for taking five days to follow up with a prospect that the referral source had referred to her. My associate explained to me that she doesn’t like to follow up with prospects for four or five days because she doesn’t want the prospect to feel like she’s too eager. I told my associate that I strongly disagree with her follow-up strategy and my reasons why are outlined in the followin...

Networks are coalitions of business professionals who, through a mutual support system, help each other do more business. Notable networking, when done right, is anything but superficial. On the contrary, it benefits all parties, not just one. If you want to build a word-of-mouth-based business, it must be based on the concept that givers gain; that is, if you want to get business, you have to give business to other business professionals. I believe the evidence to support this philosophy is overwhelming. People who ...

If you want to create meaningful relationships and maximize your networking efforts, read below for three pitfalls that you must avoid in order to be an effective networker. Delusion No. 1: You should always get a referral when you’re in front of the referral source. If your strategy requires you to be present in order to get a referral, you’re putting severe limits on your potential business. Referrals happen when you’re in front of the referral source only if your system is dependent on your askin...

So many times we take our business cards for granted, and we so easily forget to carry and use this compact, energy-efficient, low-cost, low-tech instrument–a self contained device with no gears, springs or batteries that keeps working hours, weeks, years and even decades after it has left our hands. I’ve said this many times before. But since I haven’t blogged about it in a long time, I thought it’d be a good time to reiterate that the business card is the most powerful single business tool, ...

Whether you’re a master networker or you’re new to networking, we all face challenging situations at times, and sometimes we need to rely on the help and encouragement of others. I’m a big believer in learning to rely on the people who respect, admire and love you. Theirs are the purest motives for helping you. They are genuinely interested in you, mostly accept you as you are and will usually do whatever they can to help you achieve any goal. They may not have all the knowledge or information you n...

The following article was written by my friend and partner in the Referral Institute, Mike Macedonio. I wanted to share it with you here because it mentions some very important points regarding asking for referrals. After you read the article, I’d really like to hear what you have to say in response, so please feel free to post a comment. Just Ask. Right? . . . No. By Mike Macedonio I was recently attending a BNI National Conference and there was a lot of effective networking going on. With the culture of ̶...

Today’s blog is a unique one because normally you only hear from me; but this entry, which talks about building relationships, was fittingly co-written with my wife Beth, the person in my life with whom I have the strongest relationship. This summer, our family took a multi-day, small ship tour of the Great Barrier Reef. The first night we noticed that the anchor being used to secure our small ship in the middle of the Coral Sea was quite small compared with the size of the ship. The second night we were anchor...