Food For Thought Raising the Barr Weekly Memo: Issue No. 34

This week’s reflection point: Executive breakfast meetings are a fun and effective way to invite and network with you prospective clients, share your ideas, learn from them and grow your business. I just conducted and facilitated such an experience, inviting successful executives, entrepreneurs and business owners to attend. I was thrilled with the success of the event and the feedback we received from our attendees, and would encourage you to consider doing the same in your business.

Here is what to do:

• Assemble a powerful group together by investing the time, prior to the event, to mine your databases and exploit your existing relationships.
• Invite one or two of your clients to attend to add credibility and so they may comment on the value and success they achieved by virtue of working with you.
• Select an attractive and impressive venue.
• Develop an invitation that outlines and demonstrates the potential high-value the attendees are going to receive from your event.
• Send out your invitation.
• Follow up to make sure they received it and contact them prior to the event to get a firm RSVP.
• Using your invitation outline, prepare for a short presentation that demonstrates your expertise, high value to your clients and enables a conversation with the attendees.
• Show up to the event, focus on having a fun and valuable conversation and make sure to involve everyone including your guest. The key here is to also provoke them to think differently and to facilitate an engaging and helpful discussion with everyone.
• Help them create a simple blueprint they can follow and take action.
• Send them a recap of the meeting and follow-up after the event.

Here are my reflection points:

• The more you mine your databases and your relationships, the better the quality of the attendees. This is where I would invest most of the time.
• The content presented is critical to keep them engaged and make them think of the possibilities.
• Most individuals and organizations struggle with ineffective content or a complete lack of content.
• No matter how successful a company is, most if not all share similar challenges such as: how to attract more clients and how to leverage the web and content to transform their business success.
• No one has all the answers even with the talent that exists in-house.
• Show them the possibilities of where they could go even if they are successful.
• The web can and should be used as a competitive advantage tool. Most struggle to understand how to leverage it.

So why not chew on this for a while? It may just be the food for thought you need to digest.

This week’s tip: Breakfast meetings, if leveraged well, are a powerful element of your marketing activities.

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