It was morning of January 2007. I had woken up at 4:30am. Drove to San Jose airport. Parked my car, took the shuttle to the gate, checked in. Bought ham cheese bagel with cream and black coffee. Boarded my flight. About 3.5hrs later, I landed in Dallas. As I waited for my connecting flight to San Antonio, I had a doppio with egg sandwich. 1.5 hrs later I was in San Antonio. Took the shuttle to Hertz rental, took charge of my ride for next 3 days and drove to the Marriott, which was to be my sojourn for the next 2 nights. 2 hours later I was parking at my client's location in San Antonio.
This was my bi-monthly routine for 12 months. I made about 20 trips to the client location that year. The receptionist and I knew each other by first name. I walked the corridors unaccompanied. The VP's knew me well and looked forward to meet me. The CXO would meet me once a quarter.
In the next few years, we grew this client to a multi-million dollar account and became the largest partner for this client.
But this just didn't happen, automatically.
Growing up, I was an introvert. Finding it difficult to connect with new people I met. I could always open up to my friends who I had known for sometime, but opening up to new people was always difficult. As destiny would have it, my first job out of college was in sales. Of course I couldn't sell if I can't connect with people and talk to them. I had to change.
That's when it all started.
I started building relationships.
I started keeping record of people I interacted with, where I met them, how I met them, what was their personality like, what I should or shouldn't do with them, what irks them, how was I introduced to someone, details of what they liked, what were their goals, when should I follow up next, etc.
It was like maintaining a card for each person I met. I would refer back to these details before I met them again.
But then how many cards can a person maintain, how often can you update the same? That's when I came across Dunbar's number, which states that we can only maintain 150 relationships at ay given time.
"150" meaningful contacts.
According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people – loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants. (Reference: BBC)
It was really interesting and I started looking at my cards that I had created over time and my "meaningful contact" matched closely. There were cards, that were discarded and new ones added, but the overall number stayed pretty much constant.
Different people = different personality. I had to treat them differently.
As the cards grew I also realized how different each individual was. While someone might like long email, the other would ask me to send just the action item. While one would like emails other would always prefer in-person meetings. While one would be happy to keep meeting without making a decision the other would say YES/ NO in the first meeting itself.
The next challenge was to connect and stay in touch with them to build Trustworthy Relationship, and that was only possible if I got to know their personality and treated them how they were.
Over time I realized that it took me at-least 5 meeting before I could understand the personality of the person I was meeting, and that is lot of time lost in sales.
Small efforts over time helps winner take all.
As James mentions in his post, about 1.4% of tree species account for over 50% of trees in Amazon forest which has over 390 billion trees of 16000 different species. How can only 1.4% of species account for approximately 200 billion trees among 16000 different species?
Imagine two saplings next to each other and one that grows just 1% faster. This difference gives this sapling the advantage of more sunlight, more rain. The next day, this accumulated energy gives it more power and the difference starts to grow over the period of time, till this plant captures most sunlight and rain and outshines the other plant. This "Accumulative Advantage", what starts as a small 1% advantage increases over time and winner takes all.
You would see something similar is sales, 80% of sales people fail to meet their targets.
The 20% successful sales professionals know how to win, they need to connect with their prospects at a personal level. Thats what I did continuously. I built deeper relationships, over time.
And how do you do that?
- How do you get to know your prospect better. Are they data-driven or prefer novelty?
- Wouldn't it be great if you could start your conversation with "Hey John, did you get to watch the Warriors game last night? What a win." rather than starting with "Hi John, how's the weather in San Francisco".
- How do you know what irk's them?
- Wouldn't you approach a person who can they take fast decisions and can take risks, differently than a person who cannot say NO often?
- What if you got to know that the person prefers in-person meetings to emails? Would you still send them drip campaigns?
But how do you achieve this at scale? That's what getBeyond AI helps you achieve.
As I spoke with numerous successful people, I realized that each one of them had their own way of staying in touch with "meaningful contacts", but couldn't replicate it at scale.
Relationships are not built on activities but moments, remembering the key moments with people and meeting their wavelength.
But how do you achieve this at scale? That's what getBeyond AI helps you achieve.
- Understand the personality/ person you are about to meet
- Get personalized icebreakers to connect faster and in a meaningful manner
- Understand the person better to build trustworthy relationship
In short, help you build deeper thoughtful relationships.
That's what we achieved with getBeyond AI, a beautiful, private and effortless way to nurture relationships and stay connected with people who matter.
