Event Description

Businesses are coupled with challenges in reaching out to their clients. In starting a business, the majority of clients would usually come from word of mouth or referrals. This is why businesses are seeking a bit more control over when and where their next client will come from.

In this exclusive webinar, Chalyse Elsasser, Senior Coach at MindMaven, provided actionable insights to generate more opportunities (in the form of referrals) that you will want for your business.

In this webinar you will learn: 

• How to identify and leverage valuable people in your network with the highest likelihood of positively influencing your business 
• The two factors that drive referrals to your doorstep that allows you to take control of inbound opportunities
• Five email templates that make it simple to stay top-of-mind, which allows you to access near-limitless opportunities from your network at any given time
• How to overcome the urgency of day-to-day life so you can focus on the things that move the needle most for your business

This Q&A-style discussion covered:

• How often can you reach out to someone without ruining your relationship
• Why you get no responses despite sending an email to your contacts frequently
• If we should send an email to someone before establishing a good working relationship with them
• The most effective way to get in touch with your network 

Are you interested in attending the next webinar in the Business Building series? View our upcoming events.

[00:00:04] Emily Stringer Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar - How to Generate Breakthrough Opportunities By Leveraging Your Network, featuring Chalyse Elsasser of Mind MAVEN. Chalyse, next slide, please. My name is Emily Stringer and I will be moderating the webinar today. A little background on me. I've been with MBO for eight years and have spent the last five advising and coaching our independent consultants. As a consultant services advisor, I respond to requests from independents who are curious about MBO's service offerings. This is done through consultation appointments where we learn more about your background and your needs and determine if MBO services are the right fit for your business of one. Next slide, please. MBO's mission statement is to make it easy for the independent consultant and their client to work together. We've built an ecosystem focused on the world of the independent. As a high level overview, we offer a complete, all-inclusive business operating platform for independent consultants. We take care of the administrative items that are typically outsourced to several different vendors like business entity establishment, contract review, invoicing, expense review and processing, tax withholding and payroll, plus access to tax efficient portable benefits. Additionally, we offer a proprietary marketplace for independence called MBO Connect. Within our network, you can view opportunities from Fortune 500 client partners and find your next independent consulting project. Next slide, please. Now for some quick housekeeping items on the webinar setup. First and foremost, you can see the controls listed here. Secondly, we will be emailing a slide deck and a recorded copy of the entire webinar to our registrants within the next week. Last, we will be taking questions throughout that will be addressed at the end of the presentation. And I encourage you to use the questions feature for any items you would like us to address. Any questions that we do not get to will be answered via email after the presentation. Next slide, please. If you would like to follow the presentation on Twitter, use hashtag MBOWeb to submit your questions and comments @MBOPartners. Next slide, please. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce you to our speaker, Chalyse Elsasser is a senior coach at Mind Maven, a company that helps professionals generate more breakthrough opportunities by introducing experience-based relationship management. Over the last six years, Chalyse has aggressively focused on helping her clients increase their productivity by optimizing leverage approaches, becoming more proactive with their time and dramatically improving their ability to deliver meaningful experiences to the people that matter most. She has worked one on one with some heavy hitters at companies such as Silicon Legal Strategy, Davis Polk, Partners for Growth, Sequoia Capital, as well as Post Series A Startup CEOs. In addition, she spearheaded Mind Maven's online course pilot program, which achieved a completion rate of over 60 percent, which is significantly higher than the nationwide average completion of only four percent for most online courses. Chalyse, at this time, I'll turn it over to you. Chalyse, at this time, I will turn the presentation over to you.

[00:04:21] Chalyse Elsasser Are you able to hear me?

[00:04:23] Emily Stringer I am Chalyse. Great. I was afraid we had lost you.

[00:04:27] Chalyse Elsasser Oh no. Yeah, OK, very good. So you can hear me OK now then?

[00:04:30] Emily Stringer Yes, I can. Take it away.

[00:04:32] Chalyse Elsasser OK, Emily, thank you so much. I was blown away by your introduction. I have to say it's been, it's one of the best introductions I think I've gotten in a long while. So very, very thorough. I think the only thing that I would add is a lot of the folks that I work with, you know, we have a lot of people that we work with based in the Silicon Valley. So sort of where a lot of this, you know, creative and talented startups are born. And, you know, I also have a lot of clients that I work with just across the US and overseas. So and I think the commonality there is the relationship piece that you mentioned and in wanting to become, you know, more pragmatic on how they manage their critical relationships as well as doing so at a weigh at scale with leverage and having the right productivity practices in place. And so without further ado, I want to go into three main things today that I would love to be able to accomplish in the time that we have together. And so the first and foremost is sort of the core of what I do, which is work with people on understanding how to gain what we call breakthrough opportunities from your network. Right? Those opportunities that you want to be hearing more about, that you care about that get you excited. The second thing is that this is a very common challenge that I face specifically with my start-up CEOs. So if any of you out there are in the same bucket, you probably will recognize this challenge it's called the urgent versus important challenge and how to overcome that. So I will talk about that as a second item. And the reason why that's important and what we're talking about today is because this notion of relationship management is certainly important, but hardly ever urgent. So how can we solve that? We're going to talk about that. And then the third and final thing is, I want to introduce to you what we have defined as what we call a true operator and understand what that is and why you want to become, one and how to do that. So that's what the three things that we want to get through today. And I want to start by, you know, introducing to you a saying that we probably have all either said or heard and believed in some way or the other. So here's the first thing. I think this is going to set the tone for us. I think this is a saying that the people, you know, have probably heard before, like I said, is this saying good things happen to those people who work incredibly hard and never give up. Right? And so I'm sure most of us would agree with this. Right? And this is this notion of hard work, the sweat equity that goes into building a company to achieving the level of success that you are aiming to achieve. This is the identity that we call the grinder. Right? A lot of brute force goes into this. And I think this is absolutely true in terms of achieving a level of success. So I don't want to  decrease the validity of this statement. But at Mind Maven, we believe in a second statement that is just as true, and that is that good things come to those who take care of people and make it personal. Right? And so this is the subtle difference in the way that we work and the way that we believe things should be here at Mind Maven. Now I want to give you a little bit of an analogy that I share with my clients all the time. And that is, you know, I don't know if any of you garden. I, for one, cannot seem to keep a plant alive. But I think we all know how it works. Right? Basically, there's the first phase of going in and in preparing the soil, getting your hands dirty and putting the sweat into it. Right? That's the bulk of the work. It's a lot of hard work that goes into it. Now, while that's still the bulk of the work, what's going to happen if you just leave that, you know, when you plant the seed, if you just leave it alone, nothing's really going to come, you know, come from that seed, or at least not the full yield. Right? But if you take this second statement, the subtlety that is there, it's more lightweight, of course, but our why out of that seed is so much greater than if you were to just plant it and leave it alone. And that is how we think about our relationships as well. You are constantly making new connections, building your network, and that's good. But if you don't nurture those relationships, you don't add value. If you don't manage those relationships optimally, you will not get the fullest yield out of it. Right? And so that's sort of how we think of things, and that is the identity of what we call an operator. OK, so those that's how we see things a little bit different here in Mind Maven. I just wanted to set that tone and, you know, I hope you'll stay till the end because I want to offer something that's really special and exciting to me. But enough of that will go straight into why we're here. We're here because we're talking about how do we get more opportunities? How do we get more of those opportunities that we care about? I think the first thing I have to ask ourselves is, you know, where do these opportunities come from? And most of us will say referrals, right? And basically, the best things that we see come to us in the form of referrals from people that we know and trust. Right? So we're going to talk a little bit more about this notion of referrals. And so we have to understand what actually drives these referrals to our doorstep. Right? Some people can say, yeah, well, referrals come to me if I just work hard. Right? I just know that grinder effort. Right? I think, yes, working hard is part of it, but not entirely right. So there's this you know, when I ask people, hey, how do you get referrals? What do you think drives referrals to your doorstep? I get a lot of sort of ambiguous answers. Some of them are, well, you know, I just work hard and then it magically comes up. Right? And I think, you know, the thing that we've learned is that it actually is a process that takes place, a process that repeats itself. In the more that we understand that process of what drives referrals, the more we can actually leverage that knowledge to impact our ability to drive more referrals to our doorstep. And so I want to talk a little bit more about what we've learned are the two main drivers of what drives referrals to our doorstep. And the first one you're probably surprised is timing. Right? So basically the moment in time when someone in your network comes across an opportunity that you care about or that you would want to hear about. Right? And this is constantly happening throughout our greater network. Right? The sad fact is that we're only hearing about a fraction of those things. But because we can't control timing, we can't make a need or an opportunity arise when we want it to sprout. Right? It just happens when it happens. And so, you know, I don't know if there [is] ever going to be a tool that where we can control timing. Right? But this is inevitably one of those factors that drives referrals. So that's one of the factors. The other factor is what we call mindshare. So mindshare is the ability of that person to think of you when he or she comes across that opportunity that you want to hear about. And this is highly correlated to how top of mind you are with them. And in that moment in time and the beautiful thing about this that we get really excited about is that you have almost full control of this and you can choose to manage it. It's just a choice that you have to make. OK, so that's where we're really going to isolate a lot of our focus today is how do we manage the mindshare with our network? So I want to dive a little bit deeper into this concept of what is mindshare. Right? Because that's sort of like a coined term that we use here at Mind Maven. So let's dive a little bit deeper. So Mindshare, for example, you know, I have 100 percent mindshare with you all right now because I'm talking to you. Right? And similar to you, if you were to meet with somebody in your network that you think is important when you're meeting with them in that moment in time, your mind share with them is 100 percent. Right? Now, you can see in this matrix or in this scale that you have mindshare on the left side from zero to a hundred percent and then you have time on the bottom that goes in the span of months. Right? And so what happens is you have a meeting with somebody or mindshare with them is that 100 percent meeting goes really well. And then months passed by after that meeting. And if you're not actively managing that relationship and touching them often enough, your mind share with them starts to decay lower and lower and lower below a certain threshold where they're, physically speaking not able to think of you. At least not fast enough before the opportunity is gone and elsewhere. Right? And this is actually the interesting thing about this is it's correlated to the way our brain works. Right? It's called neuroplasticity. And I'm not sure if any of you know that term, but basically, the basic way to describe it is that our brain is constantly rewiring itself to solve whatever current need it's facing. Right? And sort of like use it or lose it. Right? We've heard that before. We've heard it in respect to your knowledge or information, but that's just as true for our relationship and that's what we're leveraging here. So we want to keep the neural pathways that connect someone to you in the right opportunities. We want to keep those pathways clear, and so, for example, if you were to let's do a scenario here. So if you were to meet with somebody named Peter, have a lunch meeting with him and it goes really well, your mind share is one hundred percent and let's say six to eight months later. You think to yourself, oh, my gosh, it's been way too long, I need to reach out to Peter and I need to check in with him. So you have to ask for another meeting. You have another coffee with him and the conversation goes well. And he goes, oh, my goodness, I'm so sorry. I wish you would have reached out to me three weeks ago. I may have had a good opportunity for you. Right? And sometimes I have like a negative reaction to that, like a negative emotional reaction, like, well, shoot, Peter's kind of a jerk for not thinking of me. Right? But in this case, I think what we have to ask ourselves and Emily, I like to kind of like bring you in, like, what are your thoughts? Who do you think is to blame here?

[00:14:04] Emily Stringer Oh, we get this question quite a bit from our consultants, where it's almost too little, too late, but what we find internally is you have to actively engage and pursue your clients. So if you are not taking a proactive approach, it's very hard to say that the other party is to blame.

[00:14:26] Chalyse Elsasser I agree. We only can blame ourselves, in other words. Right? I totally agree. You know, you can't blame. Again, I think what I want to drive home here and then we'll move on is that it's not necessarily whether Peter likes you or not. It's the way our brain works, guys. So that's sort of what we're trying to do. We're trying to, you know, increase the likelihood that people have the ability to think of us. And if that increases, the ability of us hearing about it also increases. Right? Just as conversion ratios would dictate. So how do we fix this? Right? How do we fix this challenge? Because this is a very common challenge that we face with our clients that we work on. And so very simple. It's not rocket science, guys, but we want to do is we want to increase the amount of times or amount of touches that we have with the people that matter most to us. And we want to make sure that we're doing so on the basis of something that they're going to perceive as relevant, meaningful or valuable. So we're not going to come across as spammy, but we're nurturing that relationship. We're adding value to it. We're maintaining it and nurturing and so on and so forth. So this is what we're doing, whether it's through doing an introduction, a relevant introduction, assisting them with a professional challenge that you discovered in your last conversation with them or, you know, sending them a thoughtful gift or whatever the case is. Right? There's a lot of different ways you can do this. Right? And at the end of the day, one of the simple things I think you can start today is this following habit, which is we want you to be able to develop such a strong habit of sending one email a day to somebody that maybe otherwise wouldn't have heard from you. It's as easy as this because it really is only a five-minute activity a day. You know, if you think about one email a day, but think about the results of this. Right? So if you do this Monday through Friday for a whole year, that's two hundred and sixty emails that you maybe otherwise wouldn't have sent. And we have to ask ourselves, well, something could happen from that, right? I believe yes, of course, something good will come from that. And so that is something that I think if we stopped the webinar here and we said this is the one thing that I want to teach you, that would be a good place to start, but we're going to move on. And so all of this is sounding pretty simple, right? I think none of this is really like rocket science type of stuff. But at the same time, a lot of us are not doing this at the level that we want to. Why is that? Right? Otherwise, we wouldn't be here today. Right? So I think there's three main barriers that I want to talk about today that get in the way. Number one is, well, Chalyse, I don't know who I should be reaching out to, on any given day. I have a network of thousands of people. Who do I have to reach out to today or tomorrow, whatever the case is, so that's number one. Number two is, this is important, yes. But I also have urgency-driven things that I react to or that I need to jump on whatever the case is. Right? So the urgent versus important challenge, that's number two. Now number three, is arguably one of the most challenging things, because if you do know who you're supposed to be reaching out to today or tomorrow, what the heck do you send them? Right? How do you ensure that you're adding value or delivering value in that interaction? So we're going to talk a little bit about all three of these things. Obviously, we only have so much time, so we're going to go as much as we can into these things, starting with the first one, which is identifying the right people. So a little bit of context about how I work with people. I work with people who have at least five thousand people in their network. It's pretty large. Right? And there's a certain limit to how many relationships we can actually effectively manage in a meaningful way. And with technology, of course, it's a little bit you know, we can do a little bit increased in terms of what we can actually handle. But at the same time, we still have to acknowledge that we have a limit. And so we have to identify the right people so that we are focusing our time and energy and efforts on the right people and not sort of risking fatigue in this effort. So the way that we do this is by saying, well, who do we need to be top of mind with the most by saying, well, where do I get most of my referrals from? What are most of my opportunities come from that I get excited about? That I like working on and so on and so forth. And so another way to to to phrase this is, you know, think about the types of people that have access to the types of opportunities that you want to hear about, they have access to it, number one. And number two is that they are potentially willing to help you with those to refer people to you, to talk about you in a positive way and so on and so forth. And so, you know, I hope you don't mind. I want to take a few minutes and make this a little bit actionable. And this is one of the key sort of unique things about MindMaven because we aim to be pragmatic. And so like this stuff, maybe it's like, you know, three minutes or so and ask you guys to maybe jot down three groups of people that you can think of right now that you think have the highest ability to send you referrals that you care about. And don't just think about people that are top of mind right now, but also those that you think could be very powerful and that you want to have a more proactive effort in maintaining. So, Emily, you know, as we were allowing people to sort of maybe write down some things, are there common groups that you can think of that might be relevant?

[00:19:35] Emily Stringer Sure. So we, you know, we see a couple of things that happen here. So for one, we always recommend that our consultants begin reaching out to former employers first because typically there's some goodwill and good relationships to be found there. Professional peers, friends that are within the same field, are also a good place to start, even if you've never necessarily worked with them before. But leveraging your personal network is always the best place to start.

[00:20:08] Chalyse Elsasser OK, so, yeah, so I mean, I think we have a broader audience here, so I do want to give a couple of other groups that I hear very, very often, which is you know, current clients, former clients, board members, other general service providers that maybe are people that you watch that you work within that way and what we call influencers and connectors by people that are just impressive. Right? So so those are some ideas. So hopefully by now, everybody has at least two or three groups that they've thought of. And the reason why this is so important to do it this way is because if I if I ask you for 50 names right now, I'd be pretty difficult to narrow down 50 names. But you can you can start by saying here are the groups of people that I get the most relevant opportunities from. And then you get to say, OK, which people what names actually come to mind that fit into these groups? So that's that's why we do this here. And so that's the first piece is building that list. Right? That's the biggest piece is to start to make this a pragmatic part of the way that you that you change the way you do things today. And I think that would be very powerful in and of itself. And it helps to solve that first barrier of I don't know who to reach out to. And really and truly, when you build out that list, our recommendation is that you're touching those people at least every 60 days to keep that mindshare at a high enough level. OK, so that's what you would do with that list, is review that list often, make sure that it never goes too far beyond 60 days before you reach back out to that person. OK, so let's move on to the second barrier, which is the urgent versus important challenge right now. I'm not going to dwell too much on the slide here because you probably have seen this matrix sometime in your career. Right? Basically, it's showing us that in theory, we should be working on first, things that are both urgent and important and then things that are important, but not urgent. But very often it's more so that we were working on the urgent but not important things before the important, but not urgent. So we want to, you know, talk about this, because that's sort of our relationship management stance, is that it's important, but it's hardly ever urgent. So I have three tips that allow us to kind of overcome this or simple tactics that that can help, you know, overcome this. So I think the first one is make it important. Right? What I mean by this is shift your perception, make your mind believe that this practice of managing your critical relationships is just as important as that of your client work, for example. Give it that gravity. If you can do that, your mindset will shift and you'll stop saying, oh, I'll do that tomorrow. I'll do that next week. I'll do that tomorrow. Right? And you'll give it that prioritization in your flow. So that's number one, given the gravity. Number two is to find the right time. And so I want to talk a little bit about two different ways you can do that. What does that mean? Find the right time. Number one is what we call white space. It's a concept that we have developed here in Mind Maven to build in proactive blocks of time into your calendar to work on things that are important to you. So, you know, being able to focus on those things more proactively is really important here. So we have an ebook for that that we can share a link to, to learn more about what how to implement whitespace. But the whole idea is that people that are most successful are those that choose to make proactive work a priority. OK, so number two, in terms of find the time is, you know, this notion of what we call action triggers. And this is actually one of the most powerful things that sometimes we teach our clients. An action trigger is basically this idea of piggybacking a new habit onto an already established one. So, for example, we probably all like to get coffee right in the morning and we don't necessarily have to put get coffee on our calendar. We don't have to manage it. We just do it. Right? So that's something that's an established habit that you can piggyback this habit of sending my one email a day. And basically, in practice, it would look something like this. You would probably think, OK, I need to get my coffee and then we want that to trigger the thought of, oh, did I send my one e-mail a day? And if the answer is no, you say, OK, let me go ahead and do that. Five minutes, you're done. And sort of like a reward mechanism, you get to get the coffee right and all you've done is delayed getting coffee by five minutes. So it's not too drastic. Right? But that's very powerful. Things like that don’t have to be coffee. It can be, you know, other tier can be opening up a news website that you go to get updates or whatever the case is. So that's when action trigger is. So try that out. Identify what your established habit is that you do habitually without having to manage it, and then piggyback this one email a day to it. And then third and finally, this third tactic that we have here in terms of solving this urgent versus important dilemma is make it easy, right? So keep it simple. So there's two different ways. Number one is if you are doing the priority method and you're manually creating these emails once a day, keep it simple. Pick one person, decide what you want to send them and send it off. Now, the way that you can get left out of this is by getting leverage, right? And this is where you get a lot of scalability in this. I want to talk a little bit more about this piece here. So let's dive deeper into this, making it easy by getting leverage piece. And so basically, people a lot of people that I work with either have an assistant or they're getting ready to make that leap. And people, interestingly enough, you know, don't think of getting leverage in relationship management, and that's just something that we've found doesn't have to be the case, right? So if you are in a position to get leverage, make the leap, right? Hire an E.A. or you can even hire a virtual assistant because they're more economical and they can allow you to get more leverage out of your time in and out of these concepts. And then we want you to turn them into what we call an engagement manager or EM for short. And so I want to talk a little bit more about what that is and why do we have a new name for this? Why have we created a new role? Well, to us, an EM is a hybrid between an EA and a chief of staff. So it's sort of the natural evolution from an EA, and there's actually a little bit of a gap that we've noticed in between an EA and a chief of staff, and that's where the EM sits right in the middle. And this EM is somebody that partners with you to focus on getting more leverage on delivering better experiences to people you care about, frees up your time so your productivity can be, you know, dramatically increased. And then you have this freed-up time that you then have that you can use to reinvest and do proactive things that you maybe are not working on enough today. Right? So this is just something that I think is really important. I want to give you an example. So, Emily, I'm going to pick on you again. Would you agree that it's valuable to send follow-up emails for people that you spend at least 30 minutes with?

[00:27:09] Emily Stringer Absolutely.

[00:27:11] Chalyse Elsasser OK, I agree with that. I would argue that if you are investing that much time into people, it should be something that's important to you. Therefore, the follow-up email should also happen. Now, obviously, I think, you know, we have a lot of tips on how to produce a meaningful follow-up email and basically what I think is a challenge these days is that we're not doing even though Filipinos can be important and valuable part of the process of managing a relationship, we're not doing it as often as we want. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one is well, you know, I'm moving from meeting to meeting, I don't have the time. Right? I don't have, you know, the access to produce these follow-up emails. And when I do, sometimes I get to my desk and I'm having to put out two or three fires. Right? So maybe this is you or maybe it's not as extreme. But in some cases, we're either not doing it as consistently as we want or at the quality that we want to. And so, our solution to this and getting leverage and working with an EM in this way is you leverage a dictation-based workflow, right? Simple, right? And what we're leveraging here is the fact that we know people don't value you for necessarily writing the email. They value for sending it, right? That's number one. Number two is that we talk about four to five times faster than we can ever type. So speed is very apparent here. And the number three is, you know, the dictation system that we work with our clients on, it's on their phones was accessible no matter whether they're at their office or or if they're on the bus or walking to the next meeting, it doesn't matter. So the process works in a very simple way. You know, you take the dictation system, you sort of dictate what you want in the email. It gets sent to your assistant or your EM in this case, and then your EM produces the email and saves it as a draft. And all you have to do is develop the habit of clearing out your draft folder at the end of the day. Right? Pretty powerful stuff. So that's sort of some of the leverage ideas. But the whole idea here is follow-up emails are important. Sending one email a day that you otherwise wouldn't is a key habit that we want to do. And then following that is how do we then subsequently stay top of mind and manage those relationships on the long game, right? So that brings me back to that third barrier that we talked about, which is what do I say? How can I stay relevant to people? How can I reach out to people without being spammy? And so what I want to introduce to you guys is something that we call our five freebies. And so basically what they are, they're simple approaches that you can use almost always. You know, it makes it easier for you to stay top of mind with people and eliminate that barrier of I don't know what to send. So I want to go, you know, you can see there's five here, we're going to be able to go into each of them per se. But for example, there's the classic it's been a while, and I'm sure you probably have all either received something like this or have sent something like this is something to the effect of, hey, Joe, it's been a while. You know we should catch up or what's going on in your world these days. Let me know how you're doing. We've all had this. Then we have saying thank you, asking for help and then apologizing and then sending a compliment. So some of those are a little bit more challenging than others. I agree. And I think what I want to do is I want to go into the two that we like a lot, which is freebie number two, which is saying thank you. So let's dive a little bit into this. OK, so, this is a freebie that I think is absolutely powerful in terms of deepening relationships and it's something fun, something that is this positive, right? In saying thank you is expressing gratitude. And this can deepen relationships, especially if you have the right use case. And so, for example, you know, we have a little bit of example here on the screen about, you know, being able to express gratitude of support or advice that was received in this person's career. So stuff like that, something that is meaningful to you, that is relevant to that relationship in the history that you have with them. So the most important thing here is that no matter what approach you use to reach out to people, it must feel genuine, like don't force it, obviously. Otherwise, people are going to pick up on that from far away. But in some cases, we have to think about unique things that are a little bit outside of the standard way that we think that allows us to reach out to people and engage with them on the basis of something that's going to deliver something of value, even if it's a value, a positive emotion value. So I want to give you an example that I think is actually one of my favorites, and that is, you know, this thank you. Sort of like the delayed thank you. And the reason why I think this is so powerful is that think about when you get an introduction or you get an item of value from something. What's the first thing you do in response? You say thank you, right? Which is fine. We shouldn't stop saying that right now. I'm not recommending that you stop saying thank you as a response to that. But what I am saying is that oftentimes, because it's in reaction, in direct reaction to something you just received, it doesn't carry the weight or the gravity that maybe we intended it to. Right? So what we can do is we can do it delayed thank you a few weeks down the road, for example. Let me make this more real. If you get an introduction to somebody, you know, Joe introduces you to Sally. And you say, hey, Joe, thank you so much for the introduction. Sally, it's good to meet you. Let's get something  [00:33:05]coordinated, [0.0s] right? What happens is that you end up meeting with Sally a few weeks later, maybe have a few interactions with her, goes well, or whatever the case is. And then what I think should be like part of the standard way that you work is you send an email to Joe, like saying thank you again, saying, hey, I just realized that I never got the chance to properly or fully say thank you for the introduction to Sally. In fact, I've had, you know, two conversations with her and have to say that, you know, it's been really intriguing getting to know her. And I was happy to be able to help her with X, Y, and Z or whatever the case is, right? And say, you know, it was a home run of an introduction. Thanks again for thinking of me. Hope you're doing well. No need to respond. Just wanted to say thanks. Right? So there are a lot different variations to this. Right? But what you're doing here is you kind of break it down. What we're doing is actually like multipurpose, right? Number one is we're sending a delayed thank you which has so much more gravity than the reactionary or obligatory thank you. So that's number one. Number two is that we are giving this person an update because when you guys an introduction to somebody, we often want to know what came of it. Was it valuable? Was it the right introduction? So you're using this opportunity. Number two tip, to give a quick update. And the number three, you're in a very subtle way educating that person, whether or not that was the right fit. Was it the right introduction or making slight calibrations to future introduction that they might send to you. So you're in a subtle way educating them. So there's a lot of different things that are going on. But really the most important thing is that it feels genuine to you. But I hope that resonates with you guys. And I'm going to move on to the next one, which is a freebie number three. Freebie number three is can I ask for help? Right? So I really get a lot of like, you know, hold the brakes right now because why would I want to use this or this one is going to be hard for me, Chalyse. It's there's vulnerability suggested into this. Well, I think we love this because it's what we say, it's deliciously counterintuitive. Right? Sort of based off of that quote. If you want to make a friend ask for a favor. Right? And why does this work? Why is this valuable? So number one, I think as humans we are fundamentally driven and motivated to help others. And when we get to do that, we feel good. Right? We feel there's like that dopamine effect that happens. That's number one. And number two is if you use it for the right use cases, you can actually deliver a message of respect to the person that you are asking help from, right? So it doesn't have to be like, OK, can you send me a business right now? That's not what we're saying here. It's something about, you know, that's adjacent to what they do professionally as a part of their career. Maybe it's a personal interest. Maybe they are from a certain area that you're about to travel to and you want to get some recommendations on where they would say you should go visit. It could be that you are trying a new hobby like road biking, for example, or sailing. And you have somebody in your network that does that you can ask them for, hey, what's the best beginning tips that you have for me? Stuff like that. So it doesn't have to be heavyweight. And if you remove that sort of stigma, I think it makes it much easier and you have a much broader use case where you can execute against this approach. So that's why one of our favorites. So what we can do, too, is we have. Obviously running we can't go through all of these, but we do have an e-book as well on these freebies that we can share with you, I think to you after, as in via email, that you can kind of maybe dive deeper into this. OK, so that's sort of our what do we send? Right? And obviously, this is just scratching the surface of the more that you know about your network, what they care about, what challenges they have, the more you're going to be able to personalize the way that you reach out to people. And so be curious when you're having conversations with people, get to know what people are trying to solve, how you might be able to help, what's going on in their world, and you'll be able to connect a lot more ways to stay relevant to that person. So that's sort of what I have there on that barrier. So now I want to move on to the next thing, which is this identity that I mentioned before, which is called the operator, right? So a lot of what we just talked about is some of the components of what makes somebody a true operator. And I want to talk a little bit more about who is this operator person and what is the best way to get there to achieve this level of mastery? So I want to talk to you about those 10 traits really quick. I'm going to go kind of fast through them. But basically, the first one is that a true operator is able to clearly visualize and articulate their objectives. And then sort of a secondary piece of that is that they have people around them that they trust that keep them accountable. Now, this is not a new concept, right? When we think about financial goals, we think about health goals. What do we do? We say, oh, I want to lose 20 pounds. Right? That's our big, your final destination, right? And then we say, OK, in order for me to get there, I need to do this type of diet and need to do this type of exercise. I need to do this type of nutrition, whatever the case is right? Now, you do that on a weekly basis and you have somebody like a personal coach or trainer that helps you get there, keeps you accountable, helps you to look in the mirror each week and recalibrate, so on, so forth. That's true with any other goal that we have. So that's the first characteristic of a true operator, is that they're able to do that and they have an accountability system. The second piece is that these people have a very clear awareness of what types of opportunities they like, what types make them successful, what types make them happy. And then third, of course, what types of people are actually are connected to those, you know, who actually matters. And in respect to those types of opportunities, who can help us most with those, so on and so forth. So those are the first three things. Number four is that they're extremely proactive. So they're able to learn skills that allow them to overcome this urgent versus important challenge. They embrace growth and change and improvement. Right? So the fifth one is they love being helpful and they like to do so at scale, meaning that they like to add value to their network. They like being able to deliver interactions that are perceived as relevant and meaningful and that they do that they're not just like it, but they do it, right?

[00:39:54] Chalyse Elsasser So number six is they maximize relationship building, our ally with every meeting, meaning that they have the ability to drive conversations to a deeper level and learn more about what people care about and use that knowledge as a way to stay.

[00:40:41] Emily Stringer Excuse us as we are experiencing some technical difficulties with our audio, please bear with us.

[00:41:09] Chalyse Elsasser And am I back?

[00:41:12] Emily Stringer You are back, thank you, Chalyse.

[00:41:14] Chalyse Elsasser Yes, sorry about that. I don't know what is going on with my mic today, guys. I'm so sorry. So where did you lose me? Do you have... Was it just a few seconds ago?

[00:41:26] Emily Stringer Yes, it was about a minute ago,

[00:41:31] Chalyse Elsasser OK, so I think we were on this slide, right? We're going through the different traits of an operator. Right? And so I think we're sort of getting towards the more advanced skills, which is that operators are able to train their network on what they want to hear about and when people should think of them and that their network also knows what not to say about them. In a way that's visual and sticky and interesting. Right? Number nine is that they are masters at productivity and they have driven their velocity through the roof by having the right types of leverage. Right? So doing that by the priority method that we talked about before, we're having the right support team around you. And then finally, I think what we found is this was one of the other key components to an operator that they work with somebody that helps them get to the next level. Right? And this is because, again, we're talking about accountability. We're talking about this saying I don't know if you guys have heard this before. The saying is that what got you here won't get you there. Right? And so working with somebody that has done that before and can help you drive you to the next stage. Next level. OK, so those are the 10 traits of an operator. So that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of commitment and a lot of discipline, integrating the right workflows, and so on and so forth. And so, let's sum up really quick, so I promised you three things I promise that we were going to go through how can you leverage your network for success by staying top of mind and injecting those interactions with value. We talked about how do we get more leverage to save time to do the things that are important to us by having the right habits and having the right support. And then we talked about how what is an operator and what are some things you have to have in place to get there to get to that identity. So I hope that you got a lot of, you know, those tips and tricks throughout the short time that we had together. And at the end of the day, all of this what we just talked about is, going to be purely academic if we don't act on it. Right? So at the end of the day, the choice is yours. Right? You have to decide, am I going to change the way that I operate my business in the way that I manage my relationships to result in some powerful change, right? And some results here. So a lot of the times this is what I work on with my clients on a one on one basis is diving through each, doing a deep dive into each of those components of operator characteristics, integrating a workflow with an EM, having the right habits, knowing what to say, organizing the network into critical members and so on, so forth. So obviously, the thing that's a little challenging as we work with people who are, you know, are high level and our coaching is is not cheap. Right? Especially for the one-on-one thing. But we've we've developed a way. One of the things we've been really driven to do is how can we reach more people with the concept that we have because our content is not just relevant to those that are, you know [00:44:43]posteriorly [0.0s] CEOs or whatever the case is, right? We want to be able to share this knowledge to a lot of people that I think it is actually still relevant. And that's where we've actually created this crash course that I wanted to introduce, which is basically a way to go deeper into a lot of these concepts, is designed to go deeper into how to help generate more breakthrough opportunities from your network. And it's something that we hold very near and dear to our hearts because it actually allows us to go a lot more in-depth into these concepts in a way that's pragmatic and helps to kind of keep the value going. Right? And I think the goal is to master the skills to do this, to identify the things that actually move the needle foremost and generate the breakthrough opportunities to stay top of mind with you. Right? The right relationships. So the good thing is that I think we aim to be very actionable and very pragmatic in the way that we approach our coaching and how we work with people. That's the only way that we bring upon the right types of change that we know needs to happen to be successful. And we want to introduce that in this sort of crash course. And usually, it's something that we have on our website for two ninety-nine. But for the MBO community that's here on the webinar, we're slashing that year to ninety-nine. For those of you that want to learn more about that, we have a link here. So that should be something that you can go to if you want to learn more, if you want to dive deeper into these concepts that we discussed in this webinar. So I hope you can still hear me. What I would love to do, Emily, now is see if there's any questions.

[00:46:20] Emily Stringer Thank you, Chalyse, we really appreciate all of your insight and the wonderful presentation today. This is information that every last one of us can benefit from in terms of learning how to establish and maintain our relationships. That said, we did get quite a few insightful questions throughout the presentation and we will go through these one at a time. Most of these are revolving around email strategies and what we should or should not do there. So we'll read down [00:46:50]ghoulishly. [0.0s] Now I will quickly bounce these off of you. So first and foremost, how often can you remind someone about yourself without being annoying and or ruining the relationship?

[00:47:06] Chalyse Elsasser Yes, that's a great question. I think that a lot of people probably are nodding their head like, yes, that's one of my questions, too. Right? I think the biggest thing is that, know your history, use your history with that person. What do you know about them? Again, this is where if you can use your interactions with them, like your phone calls or meetings with them to dive deeper into like what's going on in their world and you're collecting information that will help you will carve that path to stay relevant. There's no saying how long you can actually sustain that. Right? Our goal is that this is a marathon. It's not a sprint. You're going to continue to do these things, learn more about people and then check in with them, offer them introductions, offer them tools, say congratulations to an important event in their life, whatever the case is. Right? So as long as it's something that is relevant to that person and that you learned about them that they care about. That is key number one that's going to allow you to kind of eliminate some of those anxiety points. Second thing is that and like I said before, I think one of the golden rules at my moment is that any interaction that you deliver has to feel genuine. And if it feels genuine, you truly believe it, you can defend it. Right? And oftentimes what we find is that this question specifically is, the core of that is that we often have a more negative perception of this than the other person does then the recipient does, especially if it is on something that you found out they care about. And so I think that it's an ongoing effort. Right? So you don't want to send the same evil over and over and over again then. Yes, that will become an annoyance, I'm sure. But you're going to do it on the basis of relevant things, meaningful things that you have found out they care about. And if you do that, then this is a long game. I hope that helps.

[00:49:08] Emily Stringer I think that's very helpful Chalyse, thank you. Next up, I send 2000 emails every Monday to all of my contacts. I've been doing this for about nine months, but have had no responses. What am I missing?

[00:49:21] Chalyse Elsasser OK, so two thousand emails a week. My question is, is that a newsletter or like a mass email? Because I think I've had a lot of, you know, real estate people that I've talked to, for example, do a lot of that where they send emails regularly. And I think that is one way to do it, to touch a large amount of people in a short amount of time. But the experience impact is minimal. Right? Because it's not a one-on-one interaction that carries as much as meaning as, you know, doing it in the mass way. So I don't know. I mean, that's sort of would-be my follow-up question is, is this a mass e-mail? If so, that's sort of my reaction is that it's because it's not personalized. It's not customized. So it feels like, OK, I'm just getting hit by this newsletter every week or every whatever cadence it is. And so I think for some people, that's OK. For those people that are not considered your most critical relationships, that's OK, because you're just really just trying to keep the state up with those people. However, for those people that have the highest propensity to help you with your opportunities, you want to deliver brilliant experiences to those people on more of a one on one basis. So that's when you have to you do have to invest into learning about what those what we call legends of yours care about what makes them tick. What are they trying to solve? What are they trying to overcome? How can you add value and do it in a one-on-one basis rather than group way? So I don't know if that helps. And I don't know if the mass thing was a part of the factor. But that's sort of my general reaction to it.

[00:50:59] Emily Stringer Great, thank you, Chalyse. I think that's helpful and your reaction to that is similar to mine. Personalization is key. We have about four more minutes here for questions so we can certainly get through one more. I'm going to try for two, so I'm going to move along here. Is email the most effective way to keep in touch with our network? In this day and age of sensory overload, many people receive thousands of emails a day. What about LinkedIn, social media, or phone?

[00:51:30] Chalyse Elsasser Yes, this is actually not the first time I've gotten that question. And I think it really depends on your relationship. I think email still is sort of like the command center for most of us, at least that's sort of what my experience has been. But LinkedIn is can be a helpful tool if, for example, if your history dictates with that person that they are more active on LinkedIn and by all means, yes. And or I mean, one of the partners I work with at a law firm in Silicon Valley, he does a lot of text messages. And he had, you know, he had once won a deal through just keeping top of mind, doing text message. So you have to use your gut a little bit sometimes you have to kind of customize your approach. But I think, generally speaking, email is still the hub for most of us. Keep in mind that, you know, this idea of staying top of mind at the end of the day is not a one-size-fits-all. It's not like a silver bullet magic pill thing. Right? You can use your history with people and what the quality of that relationship is to dictate the best path for you. But yeah, I found that email actually is a really good way to do that. And I still think that face-to-face meetings or what we call synchronous interactions, whether it's a video call or a phone call or face-to-face meeting, those will never go away. There's still a tremendous amount of value in that type of interaction because we get to connect more deeply with people. Right? Because the facial expressions, the body language, they're more connecting. So those will never go away. But it's an expensive use of our time, right? Not everybody can do that every 60 days with a large network of five thousand plus people. So we're not saying email is like the replacement to, but it's a good way to kind of stay top of mind without having to spend an hour with that person every two months. Hope that helps.

[00:53:25] Emily Stringer Great advice. Last one Chalyce. Should we send emails to someone before establishing a good working relationship with them?

[00:53:35] Chalyse Elsasser Should we sent emails, hmm? So, I want to make sure I'm understanding this question correctly. So is this like a cold outreach?

[00:53:46] Emily Stringer Chalyse, I think what they're getting at here is a warm outreach, someone you know a little bit but don't have a close relationship with.

[00:53:56] Chalyse Elsasser Interesting. Yeah. So in this case, again, this is a long game, right? So you might have to go in and, you know, even do the hey, it's been a while. You know you want to sort of check-in on what's going on in the world these days. This is where one of the concepts that were very powerful comes into play, where we call it the we met statement. Right? Always have clarity, no matter how big your network is, how the heck you got connected to that person, how did you meet them? How did you get introduced to them? Did you meet them at a networking event? Right? So that you can say, OK, you know, it's been a while since we checked in at X, Y, Z event or that since so-and-so introduced us and I just realized we never really got to continue our conversation. Right? Like that type of thing. And then that's sort of the preliminary thing. Now, that's OK to do as long as it's the right connection and you use that sort of we met statement to kind of reconnect, hey, why is this person reaching out to me? That's number one. Number two is that if you do get in front of them and you get, you know, get to spend time with them, use that conversation to learn more about them, right? That's the beginning of this. So this is all full-cycle kind of stuff like it's all connected. So when you have the conversation with somebody to continue to develop that relationship further, use curiosity in that meeting, learn more about them, and don't just ask them one question and leave it at that. Use what we actually have an approach we call the second dart approach, which means that you ask the question first. You allow them to answer, but then you also ask another follow-up question or a clarifying question, because oftentimes we find that when people answer a question, the first answer they give us is just sort of like setting the tone or they're giving you an answer that they think you want to hear or whatever the case is. But if you ask a secondary question, you get deeper to the core of it. And so use that and develop or identify the information and then make sure that you store that information somewhere that you can access at any point in time that you need it. And that's how you take a new relationship and you keep building and building and building.

[00:55:54] Emily Stringer Great, I like that approach as well, Chalyse. That said, we're going to get things wrapped up here and launch a couple of polls so we can get the correct information to the correct folks after this is over with. So we are going to go ahead and put those up on your screen at this time. First and foremost, would you like more information about Chalyse and Mind Maven? Yes or no? We will give everyone about 20 seconds to chime in here. I think this is going to be overwhelming yes, Chalyse, based on our feedback today.

[00:56:28] Chalyse Elsasser Very good. More important questions here?

[00:56:33] Emily Stringer Yes, and there are quite a few we did not get to that we will have to address the email as well. We'll go ahead and close out this poll. And we will get the next one up on our screen. Would you like more information about MBO partners? I see where we have quite a few familiar names on the line today. So some of you may already know about us. And we'll give everyone about 15 more seconds here.

[00:57:11] Emily Stringer And we will go ahead and close this one out. And last, we will get our last poll up. Are you interested in receiving an invitation to join MBO connect? This is our proprietary network where our Fortune 500 clients can post projects they would like to fill with our independent consultants. So for those of you who are seeking to leverage new relationships, this could potentially be a good tool for you. For those who do request us, we will get your invitation out within the next 48 hours. And we'll give you five more seconds here. And close this one out. So at this time, we will get everything wrapped up, Chalyse. Thank you so much for the insightful presentation today. It was a pleasure having your expertise on the line. We very much appreciate it to all of our attendees, we really appreciate you joining us as well. And we hope that you found this presentation insightful. Please be on the lookout for a slide deck and recorded copy of our webinar to be emailed out within the next seven days. And we hope to have you with us in the future.

[00:58:27] Chalyse Elsasser Awesome. Thank you, Emily, so much. Hey, this is fun. Everybody has a good rest of the week. OK? 

[00:58:33] Emily Stringer All right, great. Thanks. Please take care.