Transcripts

Anne Baber, author of the book Make Your Contacts Count, says in order to connect with the people you meet you have to be prepared to have a conversation.

You know people say, "What's new?" And a lot of people say, "Not much, what's new with you?" This is the dead-end conversation. You need to always have a story to tell, a short story - about you solving a problem, serving a customer, saving the day - so that you're teaching people about your character and competence.

Asking questions is a good way to engage people when you meet them.

One of the best questions you can ask people is: "What are you excited about right now?" Because it demands that your conversation partner be excited and it makes for a good conversation.

And Anne says, remembering names is always tough when you meet someone new.

So, the first thing to do is repeat the name when somebody introduces themselves to you. And when we do research on this we find that people think they do that but they don't really - only about twenty-seven percent of people repeat a name after they've heard it when they're being introduced.