BRX Pro Tip: Networking for Introverts
Stone Payton : Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Stone Payton, Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, today’s topic is for people like you, introverts, and people like me, people who just hate traditional networking.
Lee Kantor: Yeah, the Business RadioX model was built for me, an introvert, and for you as someone who hates networking. So a survival guide for the networking averse, here you go.
Lee Kantor: If you’re an introvert, you want to be leveraging the superpowers that you have: your research ability, you’re listening ability, and your follow-up ability. And networking allows you to do that if you’re doing it in a manner that’s elegant, and it fits into the way you like to kind of interact with people.
Lee Kantor: So when you’re going to a networking event as an introvert, what I recommend is you want to focus in on quality over quantity. So you don’t want to look at this as kind of I’m going to go in there and get everybody’s business card. That’s the last thing you want to do. You don’t want to interact with 50 people.
Lee Kantor: What I would recommend is you kind of do some research ahead of time, understand who’s going to be there, and focus in on just connecting with one to two people who really matter. That’s it. Your goal is no longer to kind of interact with everybody. It’s to interact with the one or two people that are going to move the needle in your business, because you know that one meaningful conversation is going to be the dozen awkward hellos every single time.
Lee Kantor: So you want to research the crowd ahead of time. You want to choose who you talk to strategically. And then when you are talking with them, leverage the fact that you’re probably a great listener if you’re an introvert. Being a great listener is your secret weapon. People love feeling heard and understood.
Lee Kantor: Ask thoughtful questions. Watch how naturally the conversation flows. This takes all the pressure off of you. And at Business RadioX, since most of our introvert leaders are hosts of shows, they have a lot of experience asking a lot of questions, and this kind of leans into their superpower of being a good, active listener.
Lee Kantor: Number three, networking for an introvert can feel exhausting because there’s a lot of people there, there’s a lot of stimulus, and it’s easy to feel uncomfortable in that environment. So you don’t want to be a person that goes to this event. You’ve targeted your couple of people you want to interact with. You don’t want to just kind of leave then. You want to kind of follow up immediately after the event, and you want to kind of reference that conversation that you had with the person to keep you top of mind and keep you memorable.
Lee Kantor: So you want to make sure that you are following up because most people aren’t, especially the people who are professional networkers. They just go there, collect 50 cards, and then a lot of times they just put that into some sort of an automated system, and they never interact with these people again. You want to be able to create kind of something memorable and something that’s going to keep the relationship going because you targeted fewer people, so you have to kind of wring out the most value from those people.
Lee Kantor: So you have to follow up elegantly and effectively after the event, and you want to always keep it authentic. You want to keep it easy, and you want to let your introvert instincts guide you through this.
