Being a peakcock, Noah Kaganās Affiliate Summit West keynote
One of my businesses is private label manufacturing for nutraceutical products (pharmaceutical + nutrition). We manufacture herbal supplements in various delivery methods like dark roast instant coffee, gummy bears, gel caps and powders. We mostly service network marketing companies, but we will work with anyone interested in our whitelabeling services.
Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas was coming up, these events can be a great source of potential new leads & business for our little vitamin lab in Tennessee, so I decided to pack my new Minaal bag and head to Vegas for the weekend with my partner, pictured above.
After I registered I saw that Noah Kagan from SumoMe.com was giving a keynote. I had known Noah (through skype) since 2011, after I saw an interview with him on Mixergy.com and reached out. In the interview he talked about wearing Ex Officio underwear, so I sent him a couple pairs of Saxx underwear. He ended up becoming an advisor for a game business I was starting, and he made many valuable introductions that I am still thankful for today. We lost touch after a while, so I was excited to say hi and meet him IRL.
There were 5500 attendees. Look at the lineup just to retrieve your badge for the event.
At these trade shows & conferences, you really should stand out. Getting a booth helps, but even that is not going to be enough for important people to stop and talk to you, as there are hundreds of booths on the tradeshow floor.
Walking through the meat market, getting pitched every 10 feet, gets tiring. Attendees will do things like put up walls, shut down or totally ignore the vendors on the conference floor.
Vendors will try to increase foot traffic to their booth offering drinks, treats,eye-candy(booth babes), or gifts like portable power packs and water bottles to try to attract people to stop.
When I saw that the badges came with colored ribbons, indicating your role at the conference, I instantly found a mini-game that would help me hone my negotiation skills, make me stand out while walking the conference floor, or at least put a smile on someone's face :)
It was my goal by the end of the conference to go FULL PEACOCK and collect all of the different color ribbons for my lanyard.
The ribbon collecting game helped me in a few ways. Mainly, I don't know a lot about the business yet, my partner has all the experience. He is dynamic and memorable, and he knows the answers to all of the questions people will ask. He is a great salesman. My goal was to get them to talk to him, or distract them long enough for him to finish talking to someone else so they wouldn't walk away.
Here's how Peacocking helped me:
Walking around, more people smiled at me. Smiling is always good.
At the booth, more people came by to ask me what I did, instead of me trying to start the conversation. It was an ice breaker.
I could use self-deprecatinghumor to have fun and laugh with people. "I'm just here to collect ribbons, yeah I know I'm an idiot, maybe you should talk to my partner instead." or "I just bought this booth so I could try to get your orange ribbon. How much do you want for it? Trade for a drink ticket?" 4) It forced me to talk to staff, speakers & sponsors (the most coveted ribbons) who I wouldn't have met if I just worked the booth the whole weekend.
But what if you aren't the type of person that wants to look foolish, or what if you're not comfortable standing out in that way? The easiest way to challenge yourself and stand out, without being extroverted or overly energetic is don't take business cards with you.
While that may seem counter intuitive, this was another of Noah's nuggets. I had already been practicing the art of saving money by not printing business cards when I heard Noah recommend it in that Mixergy interview back in 2011. (I thought I was just a cheapskate, but I guess I was being out standing :)
Lets say you are looking for a web designer, and you meet a few of them at a conference who want your business. Which of these 2 guys are you more likely to remember?
1) You have a short conversation with a web designer, he gives you his card, you put it in a stack of 100 cards. You both say you will follow up after the show.
OR
2) You have a short conversation with a web designer, you ask for his card and instead he whips out his cell phone and asks you for your name, CELL number & PERSONAL email address. -Then he asks if it's ok to take a selfie with you for the contact card so he remembers your face.Ā
^^^Guy number 2 is most likely going to stand out in your mind, if only a little bit. That interaction was much different than the hundreds of other people you talked to at the conference (not counting after parties and nefariousness).
Not only will you stand out more, you can imagine the after follow up call going something like this:
Guy #1 calls office number (formal point of contact)Ā
"Hello?"
"Hey it's Business Card Guy from the conference, remember we talk about doing some web design for you?"
"Hmmm...sorry I don't remember, I just got so many business cards that day."
"Oh it's ok, it was the glossy one, remember I had that booth?"
"Sorry I actually don't remember...but why don't you mail me your pricing and portfolio and we can have a call afterwards?"Ā
OR
Guy #2 calls cell phone (personal point of contact)
"Hey whats up!"
"Hey it's Selfie Guy, remember we talked about doing some web design for you and you gave me your cell number to follow up?"
"Oh yeah man, I'd like to get started right away, here's all of my fiat currency and some of my bitcoins!"
The last day of the 3 day event rolled around, and I was doing ok collecting ribbons. I went to see Noah's keynote, which focused on "Power of Friendships" in regards to turning traffic/leads into subscribers/customers.
To illustrate the importance of the power of friendships in financial terms, he started by asking who in the audience would give him
4 people raised their hands and said yes, to which he jokingly quipped, "thanks for ruining my talk. Nobody was supposed to say yes!" To Noah's credit, 3 of us knew him, and the other girl probably thought she was at the strip club, what with Noah's tight shirt.
Still, 4 out of the hundreds of people in the room was a shitty conversion rate.
Then he asked how many people would take $5 from him, 70% of the room raised their hand. Point being that the conversion rate to start the relationship was much higher when he offered something of value first.
More nuggets from his keynote were his preferred methods of reaching out to nurture relationships & stay first in the mind of friends, business associates or customers;
Email is cheap.Text or phone call is much better.
Unique gifts are memorable. Something that he does with SumoMe.com affiliates is find a great restaurant in the persons city & mail them a gift card or have a TaskRabbit tasker deliver it to them.
Boardroom Dinners. He invites 4 people that he knows to dinner, and asks them to bring 4 people he doesn't know. If you'd like to learn more about how to plan dinners, check out the book Mastermind Dinners by Jayson Gaignard, it's available on Amazon
Plus 1 Technique. When you travel somewhere, ask someone you know in that city to introduce you to 1 person that they think you should know.
Lastly, Noah blocks out 30 minutes a week in his calendar to pro-actively meet the right people and nourish relationships. I've heard a similar strategy from Dan Martell of Clarity.fm (video)
Then he did an experiment which I don't think anyone expected.
He gave away his speaking fee to the audience.
He took out 5-6 stacks of cash, asked everyone to get up and go sit with a random stranger.
Then he started throwing the stacks around the room, instructing us to talk to our stranger for 5 minutes, take some cash and then go buy them something.
This experiment accomplished 2 goals:
Nobody in that room is going to forget who Noah Kagan is. He wasn't just another speaker...it was the 'no business card' method on crack.
It was an exercise for us to take what he talked about and put it into practice right away. Listening, connecting (instead of "belly staring") and practicing building relationships based on giving rather than asking.
I sat with a guy who's name tag just said "M". I saw his old Petro-Canada work shirt and crazy Einstein black hairdo and figured he would be interesting to talk to. I learned that his name was Mark, he was pretty successful at buying and parking domains, and with the old gas station shirt he was wearing, he wasobviouslyinto vintage clothing. Like myself, he was a 30-something Canadian.
After I asked him a few things about himself, the conversation was kind of awkward, since we both didn't "want" anything. We struggled to figure out what to get each other, but then it hit me. I used to work at Blockbuster, and while I was purging some stuff in a storage room earlier in the month, I came across some old blockbuster work shirts. I offered to send him my old authentic Blockbuster work shirt and his eyes lit up.
Then he suggested he use the money to get me some more ribbons for my badge. IT WAS PERFECT.
I got his cell number & mailing address in case we didn't run into each other again, and told him where my booth was.
A few hours later after doing some more strolling around & talking to people, I came back to the booth to find this:
Drink tickets, a ribbon that I didn't have, and more money to help cover the shipping of the Blockbuster shirt :)
