Elizabeth's For the Love of Life Blog

Amovita Netwalking Schedule for 2009

Delightfully different networking!
For you to be successful in business you need to be visible, credible and well connected. Amovita netwalking is a revitalised approach to growing your business and your network.

It is the ideal framework to raise your profile, develop your messages and build great rapport in addition to receiving action-focussed, empowering coaching.

Connect with like minds on a 1 hour facilitated stroll with me in the beauty of nature.
This is a way of spending time on your business that is healthy, inspirational and excellent value.

With my support as facilitator and coach, effective networking really can be a walk in the park!

Get in touch with me today to book your place and give networking and your vitality the priority it deserves in your business.

My warmest regards

Elizabeth Cairns

We meet at the Dysart Arms Car park, Petersham and leave promptly at 10am for a walk in the park that lasts approximately 1 hour.
NetWalkers are invited to stay on for more informal netwalking over a drink in the pub afterwards.
Please bring your business cards, leaflets or flyers and wear whatever is comfortable for you to walk in.
We network whatever the weather and stay ahead of the rest.

Friday 23rd January – 10am, Dysart Arms, Petersham to walk in Richmond Park
Where are you going and what makes you…and your business tick?

Are you passionate about your business?
Can you confidently and congruently say "I love my work?"
Does that come across to your clients and your network?

If the answer is yes, great, come along and share your experiences and be passionate about your business.
If the answer is no, then come and explore possibilities in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.

What are your personal values and how well are they reflected in your professional brand?
Is work the fun it’s meant to be, or is it a hard slog and how can you inject some passion?

Each session has a slightly different focus enabling you to stretch yourself, your business and your network.
In this session as well as taking time to get to know other NetWalkers we will be exploring the answers to these questions and discovering more about what makes you and your business tick.  A great start to networking in 2009.

Friday 20th February – 10am, Dysart Arms, Petersham to walk in Richmond Park
Networking strategy – What’s yours and how can your network help?

An opportunity to work on an often neglected part of marketing, your networking strategy, elicit the help and feedback of fellow netwalkers to establish priorities and hone a plan to take you through the next few months.

Friday 27th March  – 10am, Dysart Arms, Petersham to walk in Richmond Park
Getting your mindset for success

Friday 24th April – 10am, Dysart Arms, Petersham to walk in Richmond Park
Exploring and developing the WIIFT factor for your business – essential for effective marketing

Friday 29th May  – 10am, Dysart Arms, Petersham to walk in Richmond Park
If you’re telling you’re not selling – are you really listening to your clients and network?

If you're telling you're not selling

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of speaking to a group of business owners at the Grow your business exhibition in Guildford. Fiona Humberstone and her team at printing.com and their sponsors including Ecademy laid on a great event where local businesses could connect and peope could be inspired, and re-motivated with advice tools and connections.

My talk for those of you who didn't make it was on unleashing you inner sales person and today i'd like to give you a snippet as food for thought for today.

If your telling you're not selling is a simple reminder of the power of elicitation when networking or "pitching". You've probably heard it said before that we have one mouth and two ears and they should be used in that ratio, well when networking it's true.

If you think back to a time when you were truly listened to, when you had the genuine interest and attention of someone that cared what you thought, how does it feel?...I'd like to bet, pretty good.

There is no substitute for genuine interest and curiosity when engaging with someone else, remember it's all about them.

So what do you ask them I hear you cry? Whatever you would ask someone that you are really wanting to get to know! Find out what makes them tick, find out what makes their heart sing, find out what their pain is, what they enjoy, what they most value and how they like people to do business (and friendship) with them.

Any only when they ask about you do you tell them. It's permission based marketing if you like at a face to face level. Don't start flogging immediately on sitting down next to someone at a networking event, it's a real turn off.

To borrow one of Stephen R. Coveys Seven Habits - Seek first to understand.

Have a wonderful and curious day!

Delightfully different networking!

For you to be successful in business you need to be visible, credible and well connected. Amovita Netwalking is a revitalised approach to growing your business and your network.

It is the ideal framework to raise your profile, develop your messages and build great rapport.

Connect with like minds on a 1 hour facilitated stroll with me in the beauty of Richmond Park.

This is a way of spending time on your business that is healthy, inspirational and excellent value.

With my support as facilitator and coach, effective networking really can be a walk in the park!

Get in touch by following the email link from the home page of this blog, or visit my website for more information.

Our next walk is Friday 4th April. We leave the Dysart Arms car park in Petersham promptly at 12.15 .

Hope to see you there

Elizabeth

Are you sticky - a word about networking messages

I was delighted that the sun was shining on my Amovita Netwalk yesterday and our small band of eager networkers took to the luscious paths of Richmond Park with vigour.
After an opening icebreaker and giving the participants a chance to circulate and share histories and interests I broached the subject of stickiness with them. It’s something that I’ve long been fascinated with from my time in sales, marketing and PR and it crosses over into everyday networking.

Stickiness is a phrase I borrowed from Malcolm Gladwell, I read his book “The Tipping Point” some years ago on a flight to Lisbon (I’m a quick reader). I was travelling to facilitate at a conference for a large organisation, more specifically their global sales and marketing teams. What Gladwell writes pulled together a few years worth of musings and reading into one of those delightful ‘a-ha’ moments for me, so much so that I made it the content of my keynote speech at the end of that conference.

Stickiness refers not only to how memorable your message is but how effective it is at spurring people to action. For those of us who network regularly both virtually and in reality, perhaps you wonder, as I do, what people actually remember about your conversations.
How would you like to influence more often what parts of your message get across and which parts stick?!

In our netwalking session yesterday some of us were surprised when given feedback on which bits of the message stuck out and stuck in the most. What people remembered I noticed was governed mainly by two things. They are what I like to call the Passion bug and the WIIFT rating.

The passion bug is simply your congruence and the passion while delivering your message and how infectious that is.  If we are outwardly passionate and enthusiastic about our message and it comes from the heart then it has a level of congruence and integrity that exudes and becomes sticky. That state is readily infectious. Gladwell uses the term “senders” coined by psychologists in the past, to describe those people with special personalities.  He notes that those of us who are good at expressing our emotions and feelings are far more emotionally contagious than others. How would it be if your passion and enthusiasm and love of what you do could be “caught” by others? How much more powerful would that make your business, if you had all those extra sales people walking around?
I experienced catching someone else’s passion bug on Thursday. I was on a call with Karen Skidmore of CanDoCanBe and she was talking about the virtues of auto-responders, not something I would normally think to get excited about. She’s mad about them (in a good way) and was eager to share her enthusiasm and I’ve got to admit I can see, and feel, what she means. I’m now hooked on the virtues of them for my business.

The WIIFT rating is something I’m sure you’ve all come across in one guise or another. Simply put it’s What’s In It For Them, your customers? People connect with a message at the point of value for them. In the context of our walk we were talking about our lives up until that point, and that’s a whole lot to cover and remember. We all noticed that those points that stuck in people’s hearts and minds were those elements that they could relate to, or were interested in from personal experience or had some additional value to them.

Just think of the phenomenal effect if the WIIFT part of your message is passionate and highly contagious.

Now I consider myself to be hugely blessed, being passionate about what I do comes easily to me because I LOVE IT and I’ve noticed how powerful being able to say that is to people. I love the process and most of all I love the benefits it brings and the way it touches people I work with. If you cannot say passionately and congruently I LOVE WHAT I DO then you might like to consider what needs to change so that you can.

Wishing you a wonderfully passionate day!