Big Deal Energy

How to become the person that prospects love to meet with

• Laura Khalil

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In this episode of Big Deal Energy, host Laura Khalil offers invaluable advice on optimizing your approach to meetings.

Ever felt like just another item on someone's overloaded meeting schedule? Laura shares powerful insights on how to stand out and make your meetings unforgettable. She unveils the secrets to building genuine connections and leaving a lasting impression.


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Laura Khalil:

Hey friends, it's your business bestie, laura Kalil, and on this episode of Big Deal Energy, I am going to tell you how to get more meetings and how to actually get people excited to talk to you when you ask to set up a meeting or when they decide to set up a meeting with you. It all starts from this mindset shift. Now, as we're talking about this, I want to put you into the mindset of the customer. So let's go into their mind for a second and poke around and understand where they're coming from. The client or customer or whoever we're dealing with, especially if they are in a larger organization. They are typically on five to eight hours of meetings a day. In fact, they're in so many meetings that many will bemoan that their job then has to get done at the end of the day, uh, or, or, you know, in the evening, and it really sucks. And those meetings typically, if you ask them, hey, do you love those meetings? They will tell you a resounding no. It's extremely draining. And here I am on this episode telling you how to get more meetings when people are already like, oh God, another meeting, right, okay, so that's the mind of the customer. The mind of the customer right now is they have a lot of meetings and they're very draining, and so, instead of adding to that and making ourselves just another meeting they have to have, I want you to go in with this mindset. How can I make this the best meeting they have all week? So let's just address some basics of what helps people feel good to be around us. Those basics include they feel seen, they feel heard, they feel understood. So what that will boil down to is that when you go into a meeting, it's not about you trying to prove your value of what you offer or what you sell by speaking the most. It is not about you jumping on everything they say and making it about you. It is about truly listening to another individual and what is going on with them, and asking deliberate questions to uncover where they may need help, support and how you can be a resource to them. That is what will help people feel really, really good.

Laura Khalil:

An analogy I love to give when we're talking about doing business is dating, because there are just incredible similarities between the world of dating and the world of business. So, whether you're single or you've been married for 25 years, stick with me, because every one of us will resonate with this example. Imagine you're going on a first date to meet a stranger and you sit down at you know the restaurant table and they arrive and they have you know a briefcase with them and you say, oh hi, it's really nice to meet you. And they say, oh, it's great to meet you too. Now let me show you what I offer. And they, they pull out of their briefcase to start pulling out. They've actually made, you know, brochures and they've made vision boards of their future life together with you and how you two can work together, and they just launch into a full on pitch of like why you should pick them. If you're anything like me, you're going to be calling the police after that. Okay, that would be crazy, but this is how people think they're supposed to do sales. We're dealing with human beings, okay, and so when we're dealing with another human, none of us want to be quote unquote sold to that way, and so I always want you to remember if I were meeting someone in a casual context around dating or making a new friend, I would not want to be approached this way, and what we're doing in business development is we're making friends, right, we're getting to know people. So we want to use our social and emotional intelligence to get to know people. So I'll give you a great example of this.

Laura Khalil:

I had a gentleman who found me through an event that I spoke at and he asked to meet and I said, great, here's my calendar, let's put some time on it. And so I didn't hear from him for a couple of weeks. He didn't put any time on my calendar. So now I would like to meet with this guy. I want to know who he is. I don't know if we can do business together, I don't know what we can do, but I'm trying to make friends, build connections, all that. So I wrote him after I didn't hear from him for a couple of weeks and I just wrote this sound Psss. That was it. That was the note, nothing more. Nothing like hello, sir, it would be such a pleasure to talk to you. Do you have time to discuss how I help people just like you? No, fuck that. I just injected a little bit of my personality and my playfulness and he immediately responded. He said this is the best, uh, you know, outreach message I think I've ever gotten. He put time on my calendar. We had a great discussion and, uh, it was really fun. And what did I do? I allowed him to tell me about himself. I allowed him to speak. He gave me the opportunity to share about myself. We just got to know one another as people. It was a great meeting and it was really fun and illuminating.

Laura Khalil:

So I want you to think about when I am connecting with people. We've got to again take off the corporate mask and use our social, emotional intelligence to treat someone as another human being. And how would we want to be treated? We probably want to be treated with a little bit of levity, a little bit of playfulness, a little bit of informality where appropriate, and that helps people feel at ease, giving people a space to talk. And I want to give you a little bit of a recipe for how to make this a really, really great meeting for someone, so that they do want to work with you.

Laura Khalil:

The first thing is, if they have not already been asked to be sold to. You are not going to actively sell on this call. That's not what this call is about. You are going to go in the position of listening. You're going to go into the position of hey, tell me what's going on in your world. I'd love to know what's going on. Giving someone five minutes to talk about what's going on in their business one is not only helping them sort of release the steam valve so that they can breathe a little bit more. It's also giving you a lot of information about what's going on in the organization and places where you may be able to serve, or just context for what's going on that can help inform how you approach a sale in the future. So it's incredibly helpful for them and it's incredibly helpful for you.

Laura Khalil:

The second thing is I want us to all, for just one second, drop the whole corporate mask that we wear. There is, I feel like I'm doing like cult deprogramming or something when I am working with my clients on how to not sound corporate. You all are not a corporation. You're human beings and you're doing business with humans, and so there's something here really spectacular about approaching another person as a human and not as I am here to sell you best in breed solutions to optimize your synergies among business units. Oh my God, like no. We want to focus on just being ourselves and being a human being and having conversations with people One of the things that I love to do to put people at ease.

Laura Khalil:

When I get on a call and it happens very naturally this is not like a contrived thing. If I can find something to compliment them on, I will. Either it could be like something in their background or it could be something I love about something they've shared. I often try to lead with a compliment, if I can, to put people at ease or even just saying oh my gosh, it's so great to meet you or it's so great to see you again. I've been thinking about you. How are you Tell me what's been going on in your world? And they may actually say, oh my gosh, girl, things have been crazy. And you're going to say come sit on my couch, tell me more. You use this sort of levity with people. You use this sort of friendliness with others and they love it. And you go from being another vendor or prospect to gosh, she or he or they are so cool. I really enjoyed our conversation and so the next time we go to meet with them, if there's a follow-up from that meeting, they actually want to talk to us. They're not likely to cancel the meeting because you're making the meetings fun. You're making the meetings enjoyable.

Laura Khalil:

I love to, as much as possible wrap up my meetings with an offer that is again, not necessarily a sales offer, but an offer of like what do you need? What would help you right now the most? Do you need a connection? Do you need a resource? Um, or is there some way that I can help? What are you looking for?

Laura Khalil:

I cannot tell you how rarely this is asked, and if you've ever been on a call with people who just like suck the life out of you, you know they will never ask this. What if you give, what if you lead with giving them something that they may need? They may say, hey, do you actually know someone at such and such company? Or hey, can you think of a place where I can be a podcast guest? Or do you know who's running this event, who I could speak to? Or do you know anyone in this industry?

Laura Khalil:

Whatever it may be, helping facilitate connections, helping be that connector for others, will always pay you back in spades, and the reason for that is that it helps bolster our reputation, and our reputation is how people talk about us when we're not in the room. Our reputation is how we are referred to among strangers, and your reputation is everything in consulting and so at least offering to be of service is incredibly kind and incredibly generous and it makes people feel really cared for and often it will trigger reciprocity. So if I ask what do you need? And then they may ask back, well, what do you need, laura? And so we get this beautiful wrap up to the call and I'm frequently told people really enjoy speaking with me. I have been told this by clients for years, in particular my corporate clients. One client said and they were a huge company they said Wednesday mornings are my favorite morning of the week because I get to talk to you. We worked together for four years. We grew the account over four years and delivered great value for that client because they like to show up, they like coming to the meetings. They were engaged with us, they were curious to see what more we could do for them.

Laura Khalil:

Part of what has really helped me get into this mindset of playfulness, of having fun, of generosity towards the people that I'm speaking to came through reading the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, and in this book he talks about really stepping into what he would refer to as your zone of genius. And the zone of genius is this amazing place where your natural talents and your enthusiasm come together and intersect, and if you haven't already heard this, enthusiasm is like a virus it's absolutely infectious and you can move mountains with enthusiasm. So, when you're in your zone of genius, what you're really doing is you're taking advantage of your unique abilities and doing what you love, and this creates an unfair advantage over your competition, because you are using your gifts to your fullest extent instead of being constrained by what you think you should be doing, ought to be doing, or maybe even what you're good at doing but are not passionate about. And so in this book, gay Hendricks provides what he calls the ultimate success mantra. He gives in the book that he encourages you to repeat to yourself every day.

Laura Khalil:

Now, I am not a big mantra person. However, I am a very big let's run an experiment person. So I decided that I was going to say this mantra to myself for about 10 minutes every single morning and just see how I felt and see how I walked into my day. And so this is the mantra I expand in abundance, success and love every day as I inspire those around me to do the same. I'll say that one more time I expand in abundance, success and love every day as I inspire those around me to do the same.

Laura Khalil:

I say this to myself for about 10 minutes every morning and it puts me in such a great mindset of gratitude, of openness and really of honestly like abundance, and it has helped me, when I go to do my outreach to folks, to come from a place of abundance and not come from a place of scarcity. So I offer that to you because it has really helped me with this reframe around making my meetings great. How can I make this a really fun meeting? How can I make this the best meeting of the week? No, you don't need to show up in a clown costume and do weird stuff, but using some empathy, using some deep listening skills, offering to be of service to others and lift them up on this journey we call life, will pay you back in spades. So try it out this week, let me know what you think and until next time, giddy up.