Hard Sell

I am not a very happy camper.

Last month I took a young business friend to a networking meeting with the idea that she might like to check out the group for membership. At this meeting business cards are exchanged with the idea of two parties meeting later to get to know each other better.

I didn't see which cards my friend received and she happily scheduled two networking appointments. She said, "This is great!"

I saw her just the other day. She has decided not to join the group right now. Seems like the dreaded multi-level marketing husband and wife team were one appointment and the other appointment kept her waiting for 45 minutes. The MLM people kept trying to get her to buy for two hours until she finally said she had to go. All during this time she kept telling them that she was not interested. But they kept bangin' away at her. Both appointments had nothing really directly to do with the group, but they did reflect back on the group. Badly.

I don't know what I am going to do about the MLM people. The other person had already demonstrated to me his loser mentality, so as far as I was concerned he was a non-entity. But I will tell you that from now on, any of my guests will be shielded from the MLM team. They will not get a chance to ruin the opportunity of a new member just because of their selfish ways.

Why don't the old fashioned MLMers get it? We don't like their hard-sell pitch.

You Don't Say!

Way back before I went on vacation, I held a preview for our upcoming classes that will start very soon.

There were two women from the same company who had attended together. In fact, Rebecca brought Kathy with her. Because our course tuition offers a very generous discount to those in the non-profit world, both women expressed interest. It seems that each is a board member of a charity.

Out of curiosity, I asked Rebbecca to tell me about the charity she was involved with. It happens to be the Aurora Gonzalez Community Center. I shared with her that last year Certified Networker shared profits from an event with the Center and also collected over 300 children's' books for them. Kathy perked up and looked at Rebecca and said, "The non-profit I am connected with raises money for those situations and we're looking for a charity to give to."

Now these two women sit by each other in the office each day and even share client opportunities. Yet it took an outsider (me) to be the catalyst to them figuring out how they could help each other.

Kathy laughed and said, "Yeah, we each know that we leave the office to go to these board meetings, but we had never asked anything else!"

Networking is about finding out about each other. Not just the surface stuff, but the next level and the next.

What are you in the dark about with your best friend?

Vacation Musings

Okay, I'm back from vacation.

Not to Costa Rica this year, darn, but to share a little over a week with my friend Marcia Housel. She is my friend who was diagnosed with Stage 4 Ovarian Cancer this summer. I am so pleased to tell you that as of right now, her tests say that she is cancer-free!

She received a certificate for completing her chemo and posted it on the door just like she does when her grandchildren bring her things that they've been recognized for. I thought I'd take a picture of her with the cert.

Also, in my email queue when I arrived home was an email from a friend who also has a friend with stage 4 cancer. This friend wanted to write a children's book as one of her "bucket" items. The link to the book is here. It is a true story about hair loss and the woman's pet cat. If you have someone in your life who is going through chemo, she might appreciate this book for the people in her life.

I think Marcia looks marvey without her hair and believe me, each day when I got up to my "hair all over the head" look, I was somewhat jealous. What Marcia has decided is that when her hair comes back in, her hairstyle will be a pixie type do instead of the old style that she had to tame each day. She has beautiful white hair, so it will look great.

And by the way, this is the view out their back window at dusk. I vacationed for years at this lake when my kids were little and this is the first time I saw it clothed in snow. Beautiful!