People are busy! As sales and revenue focused professionals, one of our biggest challenges is finding ways to cut through the clutter of a prospect’s busy life, in order to begin building a relationship with them. 

Creating or establishing a new connection however is also a challenge, often it can feel like we have to break through a cognitive firewall simply to gain a meeting or introduction. 

The cognitive firewall represents the internal thinking or belief systems that people have when assessing the value of meeting and/or connecting with you.

This short video briefly explains how you can overcome this challenge.

The 3 powerful approaches that you can utilise to connect with others and help hack a cognitive firewall:

• Referrals – See if you have any existing connections in common with the prospect that you are trying to meet. If you have a shared contact look to gain an introduction through that person, a warm introduction is always better than a cold one.

• Utility – Utility is about communicating how you can help that individual. Ideally this will be personalised to address the challenges or goals that they or their organisation might be faced with.

• Curiosity – Curiosity is about communicating in a way that sparks interest or intrigue. By leveraging curiosity, you are aiming to be deliberately ambiguous or vague so that you grab an individual’s attention.

PERSONAL REFLECTION: Are you actively and purposefully expanding your relationship base by connecting with new people? How successful are you in establishing introductory meetings? Can you better leverage referrals in your BD approach?

For more information on the BESPOKE SALES development program or to have an informal discussion regarding your development goals, please contact: philip@bespokeleaders.com