by John Hall
I’ll leave you with this on authenticity: There are certain things to which people are naturally drawn, things we’ve got a sense for, and I firmly believe that authenticity is one of them. My three-year-old daughter loves the movie Aladdin so much that she wants to watch it together basically every night.
Now, if you’ve ever seen Aladdin, you know that one of his three wishes is to become a prince so that he can impress Princess Jasmine. When she starts getting suspicious of him, the Genie advises Aladdin to just drop the act and tell her the truth already, later turning into a bee and whispering “Bee yourself” into Aladdin’s ear.
This is the part where my daughter gets so frustrated (and it’s kind of amazing to watch). She throws a fit every time and says, “Daddy, why is Aladdin being like this?” My three-year-old can tell when something isn’t authentic, and I don’t think that ability goes away as we get older. In fact, I think we get better at sensing it. We become more skeptical and, therefore, even more attracted to authentic relationships (and brands).
Helping Others
If you’re still skeptical about whether it’s possible to create opportunity for yourself, try doing it for someone else. It might sound counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to help yourself is to help others.
It’s easy: each time you speak to someone, simply close the conversation by asking, “How can I be helpful to you?”
Being this direct will give you insight into the barriers that stand between this person and his goals—and how you can help dismantle those barriers. Sometimes doing so is easy and all you have to do is shoot off a quick e-mail or make a phone call to connect people to the resources that will help them meet their goals.
Recently, a member of my publications team was at a conference on the West Coast that was hosted by a particular media outlet. We were using Slack to catch up, and I asked if there was anything I could do to help her out. She was struggling to set up a meeting with this media outlet, and it turned out that I knew the SVP of that company. With an e-mail that took me a total of 30 seconds to write, I reached out to him, and he provided my team member with exactly what she needed—and we made a new business opportunity happen. My employee was so grateful. I could tell that something as simple as an e-mail went a long way to building more trust between us.
If it weren’t for people introducing me to their strategic contacts, providing constructive feedback on my pitches, and sharing valuable industry insight, Influence & Co. would certainly not be where it is today. Minor though they may seem individually, these acts of helpfulness add up and have determined the course of my business and my life. I’ve never forgotten the people behind them.
More cynical readers might accuse me of advocating bribery. Not true. A favor with strings attached may achieve some sort of immediate quid pro quo, but it has no lasting power. It’s far more effective to help others without expecting anything in return. Most people will feel deep appreciation, and appreciation is a ladder to top-of-mind position. When helping others becomes the framework through which you interact with the world, you’ll find yourself at the top of many minds.
Likability
I tend to think of myself as somewhat of a likable person. I grew up in the Midwest, after all, which is like coming of age in a likability boot camp—or so I thought. Then I read Jeff Haden’s article “How to Be Exceptionally Likable: 11 Things the Most Charming People Always Do,”2 and I realized I had some major work to do.
Likability matters. It’s hard to trust someone you don’t like. Because we are passionate, high-energy people, this is something that many entrepreneurs and executives struggle with, as the intensity of our passion can easily rub others the wrong way. It’s necessary to find a balance between intensity and accessibility, one that neither suppresses nor sacrifices authenticity.
Finding that balance starts with understanding yourself and your personality and exactly what kind of “likable” you want to be. Jeff Haden offers some great advice, and later, we’ll go into more depth about applying his list of advice to your unique brand of likability. It takes work, but investing in your likability will pay off in trust.
Familiarity
Familiarity is the other side of the likability coin—it evokes a sense of closeness, a feeling of genuine connection. Familiarity emerges at its purest in face-to-face conversation.
Imagine yourself at one of those networking sessions where everyone you talk to is looking slightly beyond your left ear, scanning the room for someone more important. After a few of these interactions, you meet someone who is actually curious—not only about your business idea but about you as a person. The questions are real without being intrusive. Where did you grow up? Where do you get your ideas? What do you love about what you do? Just imagine how this person would stand out from the rest.
I had an experience like this recently. I was at St. Mary’s University, waiting around to address students at their graduation ceremony. With some time on my hands, I approached the organizer and struck up a conversation. Within minutes we made the surprising discovery that we had grown up three blocks away from each other. Three blocks.
The sense of familiarity I feel with him now is as strong as if I’d known him for years. Had one of us looked slightly past the other to find someone else or stuck to superficial small talk, we would still be strangers. Cultivating a sense of genuine curiosity and learning to ask the right questions will help build familiarity with others and transform you from random outsider to trusted insider.
Brand and Thought Leadership
If you treat your brand as an afterthought, you’re simply fortifying the barriers between yourself and opportunity creation. A vibrant, flourishing brand is one of your most powerful tools in creating trust and opportunity.
Take a look at Tesla. If you’re not a luxury electric vehicle industry insider, you may not know much about the inner workings of the company. Chances are, however, that you’re familiar with Elon Musk’s reputation as rocket scientist/climate activist/genius innovator—or, as blogger Tim Urban calls him, the “world’s raddest man.”3
Perhaps you’re one of Musk’s millions of Twitter followers, or maybe you just notice when he’s quoted in an article on tech, which is all of them. The benefits Musk reaps from his stellar brand extend to his companies, too.
Now compare Musk to my friend Dave Kerpen. Unlike Musk, Dave isn’t a billionaire celebrity (though he is a pretty rad guy). But that hasn’t stopped Dave from becoming one of the most respected thought leaders in the field of digital marketing. To achieve and sustain this position, Dave maintains an impeccable personal brand—he publishes some of the most insightful content across the most relevant platforms, engages his audience in meaningful, personal conversations, and comes off as the great guy he really is. The success of Dave’s brand has been a huge asset to the success of Likeable Local, as well as Likeable Media—and will be an asset to any company he’s involved with in the future.
It is vital that you invest in executive branding—not just your own but your entire team’s. Each of your team members is a potential thought leader; the more thought leaders represent your brand, the more trust you generate with more audiences who can relate to you.
Content Triggers
Have you ever read an article that feels like it was written especially for you? Maybe it answers a specific question you’ve had on your mind for a while or it gives you some piece of advice that seems tailor-made to your life situation. When this happens, it creates a sense of connection to the author that makes you want to read everything she’s ever written and anything she’ll ever write.
Content triggers help foster this connection between you and your audience. As we talked about in Chapter 1, these triggers are the patterns that emerge when you listen to the demands of your target audience. The question to ask should sound pretty familiar to you: “How can I be helpful to you?”
When we started listening, really listening, to our audience, we learned that many
executives who were enthusiastic about investing in content marketing were getting insurmountable pushback from their CFOs. So we began crafting content around this content trigger, publishing articles like “4 C-Suite Objections to Content Marketing and How to Overcome Them.”4 By speaking directly to the needs of our target audience, we were able to gain their trust.
Education
Education is the most important trust point because knowledge is power. When you educate people, you are empowering them.
All of the previous touch points fall under the umbrella of education in one way or another. One of the most effective and easily scalable ways to unify these practices is through high-quality digital content.
Content’s potential as an educational tool is limitless. Use it to share whatever knowledge you have that others will find valuable—industry insight, best practices, experiential learnings—and they will reward you with trust.
If this all seems like a lot to take in, don’t worry. In the following chapters, we’ll explore tactics for transforming these trust touch points into habits. Once these strategies become second nature, everything you do will generate trust and get you closer to being top of mind.
3
BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS BY HELPING OTHERS
YOU INTERACT WITH PEOPLE in business every day, and you can handle these interactions in one of two ways.
1. You are strictly business-focused and actively think about what you can do to develop these interactions into relationships that serve your goals on your terms.
2. You’re more natural about your approach and care about other people for who they are, not what they can do for you.
I prefer the second option, and not just because I know it’s more effective; it also preserves my mental health and makes my life more enjoyable. Thinking about life and people like they’re pieces of a puzzle that exist to help me achieve my goals would be exhausting, and it’d make me feel terrible. Caring about people is more natural, and building mutually beneficial relationships based on that is, well, mutually beneficial. It just makes sense.
About three years ago, I met Scott Gerber, a man who so completely personifies the superconnector archetype that Shane Snow describes him as “the Pandora of Gen-Y networking.”1
As the founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) and CommunityCo, two professional communities, Scott plays gatekeeper to some of the most valuable networks in our industry. I knew that if I could build a good relationship with him and persuade him to work with Influence & Co., our partnership would be mutually beneficial.
Now, when you know that a partnership would be good for both of you, it can be hard not to take the first approach I outlined above—the business-first, swing-for-the-fences technique.
However, instead of pushing for an official partnership right away, we let a personal relationship emerge organically. After our meeting, we began helping each other out in whatever ways we could. We shared feedback on each other’s projects and made strategic introductions whenever the opportunity arose. In other words, we had each other’s backs.
Since then, our relationship has flourished. As Scott became a close and trusted friend, YEC became a close and trusted ally. We would do almost anything to help Scott and YEC succeed, and that commitment is mutual. This is a fulfilling relationship that pays off in trust, shared resources, and brand equity. As a result, the business relationship has become extremely strong, surviving hiccups that probably would have put an end to a partnership if the relationship wasn’t there.
Good things happen when you help people out rather than treating them as extensions of your business plan. For one thing, helping others tends to make you feel pretty good about life. Your network becomes a group of people you like and trust. Your interactions become friendly, genuine, and infused with humanity. That’s why helpful people often radiate a sense of confidence and gratitude.
But the benefits aren’t only emotional. It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the most effective ways to develop a competitive business advantage—even if you’re operating in a cutthroat industry—is to be helpful to others. And I’m not talking about doling out Frank Underwood–style quid pro quo favors; I’m talking about being a kind, supportive person without expecting anything in return.
My friend Brittany Hodak, CEO of ZinePak, once said in a Startup Weekend speech, “Don’t be intimidated by hard-to-get relationships. At each one of these brands or organizations, there are people behind it, and all you need is a solid relationship with one to create a spark.” She was referring to her strong partnership with Walmart and obtaining that partnership as a startup.
Think about the industry leader you admire most. He or she is most likely a knowledgeable, well-connected, credible person who faces few industry barriers. And though some leaders might blather on about climbing the ladder through sheer force of will alone, most are eager to acknowledge the helpful people who have been invaluable to their success.
I remember one of our first clients, Drew McLellan, owner of Agency Management Institute, who helped make us a stronger company when we honestly didn’t know what we were doing. He and his feedback helped us become the company we are today; he’s come to me since then to ask for help because he knows I’ll be there for him. Now, Drew isn’t my best friend or anything, but we’ve formed a bond that continues to be mutually beneficial. Without these kinds of helpful people and mutually beneficial relationships in life, who knows where we’d be.
By helping your partners, business leads, clients, and other industry connections, you not only win their gratitude, you also position yourself as a person with knowledge, resources, and credibility—the makings of an industry leader. What’s more, when you practice helpfulness as a leader, you inspire your team to do the same. And companies known for their amiability and expertise aren’t just profitable; they’re beloved.
But what if you’re not an inherently altruistic person? Just like mindfulness, helpfulness is a practice that you can learn and develop so that it becomes second nature. But you can’t treat it as some fluffy afterthought; helpfulness requires authenticity, consistency, and intention. And as this chapter progresses, you’ll learn more about the techniques for incorporating helpfulness into everything that you and your team do.
If the notion of a corporate culture steeped in altruism sounds like a stretch, consider this: A couple years ago, Influence & Co. hired Matt Kamp, a guy fresh out of college with very little sales experience whose sole responsibility was to help out the people in our network—not only to help those we would see the highest returns from but to genuinely offer our resources, relationships, knowledge, and so on to the people in our network who could use them, just for the sake of being helpful to them.
He has a touch point system in place to regularly connect with and lend a helping hand based on each contact’s needs, whether through press opportunities, referrals, or simply relevant information. As a result, Matt—who was not initially even a member of our sales team—has become one of our leading sales performers. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s so naturally likable, either. His personality is a perfect match for this type of role.)
In addition to his sales performance, hiring Matt as our “director of helpfulness” has been an incredibly powerful way to build thriving relationships across our growing network. As a result, we’ve gained a massive community of brand advocates who are constantly promoting Influence & Co. and sending referrals our way. In fact, partner referrals accounted for our largest lead source for new revenue in 2015. Our helpfulness practice positions us at the top of countless minds, providing us actionable, profitable opportunities every day.
So how can you do the same?
Putting Helpfulness into Practice
When we’re talking about how to help others, there are no universal formulas or absolute rules to follow. Helpfulness is not a science; it’s a personal, intimate practice. It’s up to you to define, shape, and develop your practice in a way that is authentic to you.
That said, there are so many potential ways to “do” helpfulness that the prospect of incorporating it into your professional life may seem overwhelming. Therefore, it’s worth mapping out some broad guidelines for how you can easily and effectively make life better for the people in your network—and identifying the tools to help you execute those guidelines.
As you read this chapter (and those that follow), you’ll notice references to the Resource Library at the back of this book that contains lists of tools, software, and more designed to help you execute your top-of-mind mindset. As comprehensive as I’ve tried to be, resources like these change all the time, so I’ve created an e-mail address ([email protected]) that you can use to reach me or someone on my team if you’re looking for more specific information or if you have questions in the course of your research.2
As you go through the following list of best helpfulness practices, you’ll notice that none of them requires you to spend any money (except possibly “give gifts,” but even with this one, you don’t have to spend much at all). In fact, most can be done with just a quick e-mail, phone call, or friendly conversation.
Note that these guidelines are based on my own experience and personality. Some of these will work for you; others may not. Feel free to use these as a foundation for your practice and interpret them however you see fit. The CRM systems such as Contactually, SalesforceIQ, and others listed in the Resource Library at the end of this book can help.