I published Anti-Sell back in 2019 – but occasionally I’ll randomly remember an old memory that could’ve been a chapter in the book if I’d remembered it at the time. It’s happened a fair few times now: when I remembered the time I tried to hard-sell someone, and – more recently – when a guy full-on angry-shouted at me at the first ever business networking event I went to.
I’ve just remembered another one: the scariest 1-to-1 networking meeting I ever had.
And hey – it’s Halloween month! 🎃 Perfect timing eh?
This is a story from many years ago (maybe about 10 year ago?), in my early freelancing days. I used to go to BNI meetings on behalf of an old agency employer, then did it a bit in my first year or so of freelancing.
For those of you who don’t know about BNI, it’s a global business networking event organisation that tends to follow a certain format. It’s typically held once a week in the morning (breakfast time), and the goal is to try to refer work to other members – the idea being that the more you refer to others, the more they’ll refer to you.
BNI also recommends that its members have one-to-one meetings with their fellow members – sort of a ‘getting to know you a bit better’ type thing. So I used to schedule some in whenever I could.
That’s when I met… ahh heck, I can’t even remember his name – so let’s just call him “Barry”.
The way these 1-to-1 meetings are meant to work is that you each spend half the time telling the other person about yourself, so that they can better refer you. So I tell Barry that I’m a freelance SEO, these are the types of clients I’d love to work with, yadda yadda yadda. Then Barry does the same back to me.
When I met with Barry, he launched straight into who he was, what he does, and so on. Fair enough – he goes first, I thought.
Then he started asking me questions about my needs – and my budget…? Huh?
That’s when I realised: Barry thought it was a sales meeting. And he thought I was a prospective customer.
I wasn’t sure if he misunderstood how 1-to-1 meetings worked, or maybe if he didn’t realise we’d agreed to a 1-to-1 meeting or… I don’t know what.
But halfway through his long sales spiel, I interrupted him and said the dreaded words…
“If you’re trying to sell me what you do, then I’m not interested – I’m sorry.”
And holy moly, Barry did not like this.
He started to raise his voice at me. He started to gesticulate wildly. And most concerningly of all, he banged his fist onto the table in front of us in frustration. 😳 I’m just glad we were in a public place (we were in the café attached to my coworking space), as it left me feeling largely intimidated and uncomfortable. Barry was a big fella as well (bigger than me).
As all of this transpired, at first I was worried I’d wildly misinterpreted what he was doing, and that he was upset and frustrated with me because I’d incorrectly assumed he was selling to me. Maybe it was a 1-to-1 meeting, and I’d just gotten the wrong end of the stick.
But then, something he said made me realise that he’d always intended for it to be a sales meeting, not a networking 1-to-1…
“So… Uhh… What is it you do, anyway?”
Ha! Yep. He didn’t even know who I was or what I did. If it was a networking 1-to-1 meeting, I’d argue that he would’ve done. You’d at least know a bit about the person – or research them in advance – in order to know what you’re going into / who you’re meeting with. You wouldn’t go into a meeting like that without knowing the basic information of the person (at least I wouldn’t). But nope… I was just a prospective customer to him. That’s all that mattered to him.
And that is the story of the weirdest and admittedly scariest 1-to-1 meeting I’ve ever had with someone. A few things we can learn from all this:
- Don’t dominate the convo,
- Don’t sell to the other person,
- Don’t bang your fist on the table if things don’t go your way.
Incredible eh? Follow me for more useful networking tips…! 😂😅
