Use Your Unique Qualities for Long Term Success.
I have a confession. As a sales expert, you would likely expect me to be an extrovert. Well, you’d be wrong. My confession is: I am an introvert by nature. An introverted salesperson? Weird. It’s true, and it’s why I am successful today.
The Introvert’s Advantage
I just read the book, The Introverts Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney, Psy. D (which I highly recommend), and she includes a series of 29 “True or False” questions in Chapter One to determine if you are an introvert or an extrovert. To be declared “pretty darn introverted,” as she calls it, your “True” answers should be between 20-29. My score was 24.
So what’s the point?
The point is, I never realized how good I was at building relationships. I did it because I knew it was important to my success, but I did not realize how crucial it was until I was fired in 2001 from a VP of Sales position and had only enough money to last me 4 months. I had a one year old, a mortgage, and all that comes with that.
When I was succeeding in my career before I got fired, I knew relationship building in business was important, and I was good at it because I was able to tap into the qualities that are notorious of an introvert: genuineness, good listening skills, patience. But I never did build an expansive network using those skills. Like most people, I built a narrow network of people that I connected with. If I didn’t naturally connect with them, I wrote them off. Huge mistake!
I was hard on vendors and never had the idea that, “Hmm maybe I should build a much larger network in case I might need some of these people and their knowledge and connections one day.” I realized when I got fired how blind I was, because at 51 years old, I couldn’t find a job. So, all I had was my network.
Helping Others Helps You in Business
Lucky for me, one person in my narrow network hired me to do a consulting job after 3 months of agony, anxiety, and cursing myself for not building a more vast and meaningful business network. I vowed that day that I would never make that mistake again.
Consistent long term success, I learned from that experience, is a result of 2 critical things:
- Being great at what you do.
- Building a large valuable network of relationships that will help you BECAUSE you helped them.
Zig Ziglar said, “You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.” But, how much is enough? I don’t know, but I know it’s got to be somewhere between 50-150. I have 8,200 LinkedIn connections, and every single one is important. The problem is, I can’t manage a network that size, and in reality, about 100 of those are indeed crucial to my long-term success.
70-85% of all jobs, according to LinkedIn, are gotten through our own business networks. Isn’t that enough to make you want to master this capability? If you do, visit jerryacuff.com and check out my virtual training on it. I created a system that makes it possible to build an expansive business network, and that system includes how to maintain those relationships as well as leverage them for mutual benefit. You will learn how to connect with people you don’t naturally connect with as well as how to see people that are difficult to see.
If you decide you want it, send me an email at jacuff@deltapoint.com, and I’ll give it to the first 250 people who email me, for half off.
Don’t make the same mistakes I made.
Treat EVERYONE like they are important because they are. Learn how to build that meaningful business network that will ensure your success and job security by learning the system I created. It includes a free app (ReallyLinked), my audio book The Relationship Edge in Business, and tons of other resources that will make it easy to build, manage, and leverage that network.
