A great meeting with Marcus Roberts today where we joked, talked and made fun of ourselves and others with questionable elevator pitches. Nothing better than being sharp, honest and accurate we say!
As I am still fighting through my cold (getting there slowly I must say!) it’s been a tough ride on me from a range of perspectives. Every moment I am doing right now hurts, but then I SO LOVE what I do it just keeps me going and going.
I will get some rest tonight and in my last waking moment I wanted to talk about a cool fellow I met up today with. Marcus Roberts is a Financial Planner I met through the 4Networking Australia Business Community and we caught up to talk business, shop and life in between.
He is getting used to the Sydney Business Networking Scene (which is one interesting subculture for sure) where everyone knows each other and even though Greater Sydney has a population of coming to 5,000,000 people, it is surprisingly small in this regard. I quite enjoyed meeting with Marcus, I was trying not to cough and it was a challenge getting my words out and we were laughing on the really lame 40 – 60 second elevator pitches we have heard. He has only been on the scene for a few months and we had heard some doozies as well as some very genuine and authentic compelling dialogue.
Talking to the negative (ok you got us, we were having a fun bitch session) he asked me some really funny questions. One I quite liked was:
“Edward, you have heard thousand of these [elevator pitches], do you ever get tired of them and think here we go again?”.
It was a brilliant intelligent question I thought and as I contemplated what he said, I realized that there was a mixed answer:
“Marcus, I love people that are genuine and real like yourself and I am sick of whacko’s that make stuff up and bore the whole room”.
That fine remark really cracked the ice and our “Bitch Session” was just awesome after that. We started comparing what we heard and had a whacky conversation. Talking more to intelligent behaviour and not two guys late on a cold Tuesday poking fun at ourselves and others – it made us both consider and respect people who are just direct, polite, don’t ham things up and just tell it as it is.
Even though I can’t remember word for word, I quite liked Marcus’s first elevator pitch – he basically said “Hi Everyone! I am Marcus Roberts from Mirador Wealth Management and I help people plan their finances for life. Come see me if you need a hand!” I couldn’t help but immediately liking him, he didn’t patronize anyway, try and use fear tactics on us (e.g. if you don’t hire me you are doing to be eating Cat Food when you are 60+) and was man giving great tips on the house.
Some of you reading this post will be going (and quite reasonably so), “DERP EDWARD!” – of course I know that. I don’t mean to speak down to any of you (and apologies if I have), but the reality is that a chunk of people who go to Networking Events don’t practice this line of thinking. They can often get up there, put the audience down, tell everyone to hire them and when they don’t get any sales in 250 seconds, “Networking sucks and it doesn’t work”.
My advice and answer to this line of “Networking doesn’t work” is quite an easy one. I have seen people doing the SAME JOB, for the SAME BROKING FRANCHISE let’s say within groups 10km from each other. One writes say 80% of their business from 4Networking on the other doesn’t write anything because “Everyone sucks and all that”.
The good thing is that only awesome people read my articles so I know you are not of them, so my advice? Keep these thoughts in mind and be wary of people that visit your networking group just to sell stuff and go home (without adding any value to the group).
We love givers in this world and I am the first to say THAT GIVERS GAIN!
Thank you to Marcus for letting me use him as the poster boy of this winter article and appreciate you taking the time to read this article. Edward Zia – Marketing Mentor who loves Honest Pitches!
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