What should a business lunch consist of?

I would categorize a business lunch into (5) categories:

1. Building a relationship and trying to make connections.

2. New prospective customer not looking to buy yet.

3. New prospective customer getting ready to buy.

4. Existing customers who you are building a relationship with.

5. Finding great food where you can be seen by other connectors.

When you sit down for a business lunch, make 1/3 of the conversation focused on relationship building. Share about those common interests or personal hobbies. And always try to make time to convey your business agenda.

Finally, try to establish a favorite spot that serves as your home turf. There's something to be said about knowing the restaurant staff by first name and making suggestions from the menu. My favorite spot is Cafe Patachou (Slogan - A Student Union for Adults) in the mid town area of Indianapolis. This location attracts several well known business professionals throughout the city.

3 Reasons Why You Should Post Updates on LinkedIn

1. Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA): TOMA owns the space that your product or service occupies between your prospects ears. That way, when they're ready to buy they think of you first. You can use LinkedIn to maintain top of mind awareness with your customers, prospects, and network. Once set up it's pretty simple and takes very little time. You just have to consistentily post content that is of value to your desired audience to maximize the results.

2. Real Time Knowledge: How else are you going to find out if a connection changed jobs, won a new award, joined a new group or found a new interest? With all the new updates, this opens up for a conversation with a prospect or solid potential contact.

3. Ease of Use: If you work off the social platform Hootsuite.com, updates and tweets can be scheduled in advance, thus allowing you to control when a post is created. My good friend Kyle Lacy, who is a recognized thought leader in the social space, creates several posts between 5-7am. Because time is of the essence for Kyle, he posts in advance and schedules the updates throughout the day.

"Follow Up" Sales Email That Doesn't Suck

Business professionals are writing (emails and text messages) more than ever before. We tend to also get caught in "voicemail dungeon", with no hope of catching people in their office. Today its more and more difficult to capture a prospects attention, yet alone a response back.

Try using this sample email (from Tom Batchelder) that gets a response and gets to the truth;

Subject Line: Lingering Situations

Hi John,

I tried reaching out to you a couple of times and haven't heard back. Unless you tell me otherwise, I will assume you are all set for the September study. If at any time you want to resume conversations about us helping you with one or all of your projects, certainly feel free to call me.

Warm regards,

Seth

In my past experiences, nine times out of ten I get a follow up response back from the prospect. Perhaps this might help you avoid the wasted time and effort in your sales process.

To building your network and your profits.