In this episode of the "Guy who knows The Guy Podcast," host Michael Whitehouse discusses his preparations for the upcoming JV Connect event, scheduled for December 12th-14th, 2023. He emphasizes the importance of using a booking link like Calendly to streamline the scheduling process and increase the likelihood of attendees showing up. Michael shares insights into how to use Calendly effectively, including setting up reminders to ensure a high show-up rate and the benefits of having attendees answer a series of questions to provide clarity and structure for the upcoming meeting. He also highlights the importance of growing your email list by asking permission to add attendees to it, as it's an excellent way to maintain valuable connections.

Furthermore, Michael stresses the importance of being well-prepared for networking events and explains how utilizing a booking link and effective communication can help you make the most out of these opportunities. He invites listeners to grab their tickets for JV Connect early to secure the best pricing and promises a valuable experience for all attendees. In summary, the episode provides practical tips for effective networking and event preparation, making it a must-listen for those looking to maximize the benefits of such gatherings.

Mentioned in this episode:

JV Connect, December 12-13, 2023

Join us for JV Connect, the dedicated networking event December 12th and 13th, 2023 https://www.jv-connect.com

But what I'm doing in the run up to this, in these. Solo episodes is sharing with you some insights, some training that you will find valuable when you attend JV Connect. Of course, it's valuable for any networking event, but I'm building the event to be the optimal networking experience to use with what I'm teaching you.

Obviously, if I'm creating an event, then I'm building it to be the best event that if I was going to attend, it would be exactly what I want to get the results I want. So last week we talked about. How to introduce yourself, the simple form of the Russo intro, and that's very powerful. But when you go to an event, the outcome you're looking for is to meet the right people, find the right people, and then get on a call with them.

Because you're not going to do the thing at the event. And I call it a deal making event, but you're not going to make deals at the event. A networking event of any kind is a It is meeting a lot of people. So you can find the people who are worth connecting with, so you can follow up with them, and then have that follow up meeting.

And before you can have the meeting... You need to book the meeting. So, in an event, you are not going to have time to go back and forth and say, Oh, yeah, how's next Friday? Well, next Friday's not good, but then Monday afterwards. Ah, Monday was good, but then it says book. How about Tuesday? Ah, not Tuesday. How about Thursday?

You don't have time for that, especially because when I went to the event, the precursor event, the event that inspired JV Connect, I came out with 40... Eight meetings on my calendar that were booked out as much as three months. Can you imagine if I tried to go back and forth by email, I would have booked 12 of them and everyone else would have given up, would have been crazy, but I used Calendly, you know, the booking software in order to book all these appointments and made it very simple.

I was able to send people a link, boom, here's my link. Book a call. Let's talk now. I, what I, and what I wanna share is how I use Calendly. What inspired, this was a Facebook post that I saw today, the day on the day that I'm recording this, in which someone was saying, if you book a call in this case with discovery call, that's true for any call.

If you book a call, for crying out loud, show up. Because if, especially if you're meeting with someone who is highly introverted, very shy, neurodiverse, something like that, they may have to really work themselves up for a call. You know, they're gonna be talking to someone face to face, they gotta psych themselves up, they gotta prepare, they gotta get that energy together, maybe they canceled something else, maybe they turned down something else, whatever, you are taking their time.

If you don't show up, you're wasting. Their time and it really sucks and I said yeah, that's I completely agree People should show up if they book call but on the other hand If you book the call Right and use the right tactics and tools People will show up and I, there's a, when I first got into the online space, I was taught to use Calendly and use a particular set of reminders that would make people either show up or cancel.

That part's very simple. I would teach that right now. So with Calendly, with the paid accounts, 15 bucks a month, if you're in business, you should have some kind of booking software. I recommend Calendly because it's, it's as big as Zoom, but in that booking space and. If two people have Calendly, then the calendar, it's got some advantages and it's kind of cool, but whatever you're using, it should have the feature of being able to send reminders.

If it can't send reminders. It's garbage. Get something better. Set the reminders to send a text and an email 3 hours, 1 hour, and 15 minutes prior to the event. In the reminder should be the contact information. So here's the Zoom link. In Calendly, it's the location tag. Includes the Zoom link. Took me a while to figure that out.

People were like, where's the Zoom link? I can't find you. It's the location tag. Location variable text. We'll include the zoom and it should also, it will also automatically include the cancel and reschedule links. The result of this is that 97 percent of people either show up or reschedule or cancel prior to the event.

So now for me, it's not a big deal. I'm a super extrovert. I get on the call if they're not there, whatever, but if I get on the call and they're not there and they're no show, I got to sit there for five, 10 minutes. Maybe they're late. Well, that really does throw off my rhythm. If they cancel ten minutes in advance...

No big deal. I got other things I can do. If they cancel three hours in advance, even better. Does still block a spot on my calendar, but I know in advance and so I can, I can get something done during that time. But that three hour, one hour, fifteen minute thing really, really, really increases show rates dramatically.

So I definitely recommend you do that. But the other thing I recommend is that you have a series of questions. In your booking link that prepare you for the call and I'm going to share with you a bit about the questions I use and then also a bit about how you know why they're valuable and what I've learned using them so let me share some of the questions that I have on my call on my my booking link and some of the, the applications and value this creates.

So the first one I have is if I could introduce you to one key person that would change a lot for you, who would it be and what difference would they make in your life? And then in parentheses I add, not a wish, I may actually make this introduction before we meet, it's happened before. I added that because before I added that, that parentheses at the end, people were saying, oh, I want to meet Elon Musk, I want to meet Richard Branson, I want to meet Donald Trump, whatever.

And it It was, you know, I want to meet Oprah. It wasn't someone they thought I could introduce them to, it was just pie in the sky stuff, and it didn't give me any useful information. Of course, everyone wants to meet Oprah, but what would you do if we actually met them? Once I added that, people actually started thinking, well, I really want to meet...

Bob Berg. I want to meet I don't know, some, some coach or they'll, they'll give me a category. You know, I, I really want to meet a, a successful money mindset coach who's successful in this industry, who could be a mentor to me, something like that, and this has actually allowed me to make introductions before we even have the meeting.

You want to make an impression on someone. Introduce them to someone before you meet them. Then I next ask how what is the big goal you're working on currently? How would you like support? Now this does two things. One is that it sets it up so I can go into the meeting with some clarity of how I can help them, what introductions I can make and whatever.

It also identifies if there might be services I offer. That would benefit them. Not that I'm going to be pitching someone on a networking call, because that is no good. But I have that clarity of if that's something I want to make them aware of. The next question, similarly, What is your biggest frustration right now?

Those two really go together. Then, what kind of introductions would serve you well in the long term? Please describe the kind of people you most want to meet. This, again, helps me to know. Who to introduce them to. I then have, please share a one to three sentence bio that I can use to introduce you to people.

This question actually has not gotten the results I hoped. My hope was people would give me a bio and I could just shoot that right out to people and say, hey, have you met Bob? Here's his bio. Unfortunately, most people's bios sound like something you'd introduce them to a speech and not how you do an introduction, you know, introducing people.

So that hasn't done a lot. But. Again, it's one of those things, by being there, I get useful information from people. The next one, who introduced us, where did we meet? Without this question, and before I had this question, so many of my calls, and my calls are 30 minutes, first 5, 8 minutes, so how do we meet?

Oh, I think it was this. No, no, I think it was that. Oh, it was this person. Wasted time. Put that in. Boom. Then, since I started doing more joint ventures, I added, If applicable, please share what your ideal JV experience looks like. This gets a variety of answers. Sometimes it's very clear. Other times it's random hot luck.

But what's interesting is it lets me know what their knowledge of joint ventures is and tells me a bit about them. And then the final question is, Are you interested in getting very valuable emails from me and being in my email community? Yes or no. If they answer yes, I add them to my email community, my email list.

Now, when I first added that one, I was thinking a lot of people were going to say no. You know, I don't want this to be on my email list. I have since learned almost everyone says yes. Because people know how easy it is to get off an email list. Right? You want to get off, you hit unsubscribe, boom, you're gone.

No problem. But if you want to spend 30 minutes talking to me, you probably also want to get emails from me that teach you a bit about me and my world and what I'm doing, and once you get tired of it, you'll unsubscribe then. And I have learned that if someone answers no to that question, it is a red flag.

I'll still meet with them, but it informs me what kind of meeting we're going to have. The kind of meetings I have when they answer no tend to be much more agenda driven with their agenda. They got something they want to do, they're like, I got a plan, we're doing something, we're doing it my way.

Sometimes that is a call I want to have, sometimes less so, but it lets me know what's happening. The other thing about these questions is, the big value of these questions is, when we go into the meeting, I seem like I've researched. I didn't do research. I've just got the questions they answered, but I'll come in and I'll say, okay, so you're looking to meet such and such kind of people and your business is doing this, but you're having this challenge like, Oh yes, yes.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. How'd you know? And I like, cause you told me when he answered the questions, they don't remember, but we can jump straight to it. It allows us to have a meeting is 15 minutes shorter because we don't spend all this time feeling around. Oh yeah. So what do you do again? What are you working on?

What's happening? I've got that starting point. Now, here's the other thing that I have learned through hard experience. You don't answer these questions, we're not meeting. Unless, I mean, sometimes I'll talk to someone, I'll say, Yeah, just book this link, don't worry about the questions. We'll talk. Or... We've talked before, I know them, they skip over the questions because they feel like I already know them, and, and that's fine.

But, the other day, I went to a, a networking event, and sent a, gave my link to a few people, and a couple people filled this out very thoroughly. And one person, it was short answers, sentence fragments, a couple words. And the answer to the last question was, Wow, this really is a lot of questions. Now if he hadn't said that at the end, I would have said, Oh, short answers, he was busy, whatever.

But the last answer, I didn't like the vibe of it. So I emailed him back and I said I'm gonna need you to answer the questions, or at least these. Three questions, because this helps us go into the meeting productively. So I know what we're talking about. We can have a productive directed conversation.

So, could you please answer the questions? And he came back at me with this thing that looked like a weird sort of haiku with the weird line breaks. But he basically said, you know, you shouldn't need all this information. You shouldn't just be meeting with people who want, who want to buy from you. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now, this is weird because I actually have nothing to sell him except a JV Connect ticket. But he just... He was like, I want to do the meeting my way. We're doing it my way. So I can tell you, and I could tell you what this meeting was going to be. He was going to tell me how amazing he was, how many years in business he had, how much experience he had.

And then he was going to tell me who he needed to meet. And then it was going to say, so when you meet them, please refer them to me. And he wasn't, and maybe he would have been interested in reciprocating that exact same kind of thing, but I didn't know the guy. Right? I'm not going to refer him prospects, especially with that kind of attitude.

If I don't know him that well, that takes some time to develop. And so with the questions, I was able to save myself not only the half hour, but the unpleasant experience of that meeting. Because I... You know, put them through that, that test. So, I mean, it's not supposed to be a big challenge, but it lets me know what we're getting into.

And, if you know me, you know that my mind is like a steel sieve. Goldfish, you know, I envy goldfish for the strength of their memories. So, if I meet you today, and we're booked for a week from now, I'm barely gonna remember who you are. So you filled out all the notes, and I'm like, Oh, I remember, I remember how we met, I remember what we're talking about, let's go, let's have a productive meeting.

And the person who, the people who did fill out the, the questions completely, we had a phenomenal meeting. Amazing connections came out of it, I was able to introduce them to people who were very grateful, and all kinds of great stuff came of it because they answered the questions. So if you are, and this is great for any networking setting also, and in fact, the, the, the reminder sequence where it's three hours, one hour, 15 minutes, I learned that for sales.

So that was sell by chat, then booking into a call and even for sales calls, discovery calls. If you set them up right. I was still getting a 90 percent show rate for sales calls. My networking calls are even better than that. So, that worked really, really nicely. So, in summary... of what I'm teaching you in this particular session.

You must, MUST, if you are networking online, have some kind of booking link. I recommend Calendly because it is the quickest and easiest. The more hoops you make me jump through, the less likely I am to actually book the call with you. Calendly is great. Because if I have Calendly and you have Calendly, it's going to sync to my calendar, which means when I look at it, I'm going to see green dots on everything on your calendar.

That's open on my calendar, which saves me the trouble of having to open my calendar next to your app and going to da, da, da, da, da, da. But whatever, whatever you want to use is fine, but you want to have those reminders, three hours, one hour, 15 minutes. And by the way, you may say, well, that seems like a lot of reminders.

Again, anyone who's ever complained they got too many reminders, that warned me what kind of call it was going to be. Any call that started with, you sent me a lot of reminders, it was too many, the call was crap. I might as well have just hung up right then. Most people, and I've done this over a thousand times, possibly 1, 500 now, don't complain.

Or they say, I really appreciated getting all those reminders. I had someone who said, yeah, I saw the three hour reminder and I said, oh, yeah, right, one o'clock, cool, I'll be there. And then I got distracted, and I got the 15 minute reminder, and that's why I'm here. So, giving all those reminders is very important.

And then have, now you don't have to use my questions. I was using those as an example. You don't have to copy my questions. Think about, what are you going to want to know at the beginning of the meeting? If you had an assistant booking this call, what notes would you want your assistant to be handing you?

When you get on the call, maybe what is their LinkedIn address? Keep in mind asking someone for the LinkedIn, the their, their LinkedIn link is gonna be a pain 'cause they're gonna have to go look it up. Nobody has it, it, unless they've used pretty links. My LinkedIn is guy who knows the guy.com/linkedin and I can talk, talk to you at pretty links in a different episode.

Pretty links by the way, is a WordPress plugin. And if you have a WordPress site, that's pretty much all you need to know. Anyway, unless they have something like that, most people are going to have to go look up their LinkedIn profile. So, you can't ask for that, but it's going to be a pain. Have a series of questions that give you the clarity you need to have a good call.

But make it fairly simple things that someone could answer quickly because when they're filling this out They're going to be doing it in the middle of a networking event. So don't ask them for their life story So you want to kind of strike the balance and actually I might even knock a couple questions of the out because There are a lot of questions but they are very valuable as well.

So have some questions so that you have clarity when you go in. Also, you're going to look more professional. You're going to look more organized when people are like, Oh, wow, look at all these well thought out questions. And have that question at the end that says, Are you interested in getting very valuable emails from me and being part of my email community or something like that.

Basically, can I add you to my email list? It's full of great stuff. Share what it is. Most people say yes. This is the easiest way in the world to grow your list. Meet with a lot of people, put them on your email list. If they're in your target audience. So, you know, give them a chance to opt in there. First 700 people on my email list.

Were that and in fact, there's a decent chance that if you're listening this it could be because You heard about it on my email list and you might be on it because we met and you answered Yes to that final question so that's some things about having a booking link getting people to show up to the calls and Having the link that you will need to get the maximum results from an event like JV Connect.

So After, so you come out, you don't say, well, that was fun. You come out and you say, that was fun, and now my networking calendar is filled the next three months. So I am ready to rock and roll until the next one in March. Or whatever. So, if you have any questions, feel free to email me, michael at guywhoknowsaguy.

com you can get your JV Connect tickets, j guywhoknowsaguy. com slash jvconnect Or if you don't like putting slashes in, just type guywhosaguy. com and click the button at the top of the website that takes you to the JVConnect site. The price of the event is progressively increasing. So there's an early bird rate, and there's a slightly less early bird rate, and there's a slightly, slightly less early bird rate.

So whatever the price is right now is the lowest it's going to be for this event. So don't wait! Get your ticket now. Don't think about it. Just get it. And it will cost less than if you get it day of. You get it day of, it's going to be 150. But it is far less than that right now. If you're listening in October, it's going to be either 30 or 50, depending on what day in October you're listening.

So quite a bit less than 150. So I recommend you get the ticket now. Unless you want to give me more money, in which case, that's cool too! Always happy to take more of your money. But seriously grab your ticket now, invite some friends, it's gonna be fun, it's gonna be powerful. My goal is that everyone gets 100, 000 of value from attending this event, one way or another.

Feel free to grab a tie. That's how you do that. I'm Michael Whitehouse, the guy who knows a guy. You have been listening, and that makes you super awesome in my book. And be sure to check us out on Monday, when we have our next interview coming out. And then of course next Friday, with more great tips, counting down to JV Connect.

See you there!