Networking Strategies for Introverts with Matthew Pollard: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like DTC Pod. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down networking strategies for introverts. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Matthew Pollard and the EO Fire Studios. Matthew is called The Real Deal by Forbes. He's the bestselling author of The Introverse Edge, which is Amazon's eighth most sold book of the week. And Book Authority is number two, best introvert book of all time.

0:34In today's value bombs, Fire Nation is the power of the digital world, allows you to reach people who support your mission and your work. How many introverts struggle in networking world because they think networking does not work? It does, you're just doing it wrong, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Matthew and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators and your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

1:08AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Matthew, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. It's great to be here, John. And I think the thing that most people don't know about me is that, you know, I'm incredibly introverted and I actually don't get out that much. So during the COVID crisis, you know, I actually loved being at home that whole time.

1:47And, you know, I was actually probably happier during that period than anything else. See, for me, it's kind of funny too, because even though I am an extrovert, I really love like this feeling of not being able to travel because now I just don't feel guilty when I'm not traveling. I'm like at home. I'm like, oh, I could be in Paris this weekend, or I could be in Rome or this or that. And I was always kind of like, oh man, I should do something like that. But now I'm just like, well, I'm stuck here. I'm going to make the most of it. I've got my dog. I've got my girl. I'm just going to hang out and make it happen.

2:17So even the extroverts, I think, that are out there, I can feel that vibe too. So that's very cool stuff. And Fire Nation, if you don't recognize Matthew's voice, he's been on Entrepreneurs on Fire before, of course, especially when he was here to talk about the introverts edge, which was Amazon's eighth most sold book of the week. So really, really impressive stuff what he's done with that. And that's where I want to start, Matthew, because your first book crushed it. Tell us what motivated you to write that book specifically. And of course, as entrepreneurs, we want to know why was it so successful?

2:51What strategies and tips can you share around that? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the thing that surprises most people is, you know, I actually didn't want to write that book. You know, I, it kind of happened because of the situation that I found myself in, but you know, I actually had a reading speed of a sixth grader in late high school. And because of that, I was luckily enough diagnosed with this thing called Erlen syndrome when I was 16, which basically means I put on a pair of funny colored glasses and miraculously, I can learn to read, not like everyone else. I can start the process of learning, but that with my acne and braces as you can imagine I wasn't the most extroverted person on the planet I was super shy and luckily enough I hustled through the last two years of high school got in the top 20 % of my state but everyone could tell I mean I was exhausted I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life so I just convinced my family that I you know was going to take a job to find myself for the year and I took a job at a real estate agency and I'm sure people are thinking oh he's doing a sales job.

3:51But no, I wasn't. I was the guy in the back office with a look on my face saying, don't speak to me. I'm here to do data entry and find myself. So what happened though, is about three weeks into the job, my boss comes up to me and says, Matt, unfortunately, we're going to have to let you go. They've just decided to close down this office. I mean, this was just before Christmas in Australia. So we go on holidays for about a month there. It's summer and Christmas at the same time. And the only jobs I could get were commission-only sales roles. So I took a job selling door-to-door commission-only telecommunications.

4:22And I got put into the business team because I was the only one that showed up at an interview at that time in a suit. And after five days product training and not a single second of sales training, I get thrown on this road called Sydney Road in Melbourne, Australia. And literally, I just had this realization. No one told me what to say. I didn't know what to do when I walked in the door. So I begrudgingly took a deep breath, went in and got told to leave. And then after that, I got sworn at. I got told to get a real job. That was always my personal favorite. But on the 93rd door, I made my first sale.

4:54I made$70. I still remember being ecstatic for about 45 seconds. 45 seconds. Yeah, I was horrible. I mean, you got to remember the next realization I had was I got to do this again tomorrow and then the next day and the next. It just wasn't okay. And I think a lot of the entrepreneurs listening probably have been in that situation. And two things come to mind. Am I going to hustle through it? Which is, you know, the hustle mentality is great. But that would have meant every day was likely going to suck for this introvert that was terrified of selling. Or am I just going to give up? And I mean, I watched my dad break his back 80 hours a week to support the family.

5:27There was no way I was going to say, day one's too hard. I'm out of here. So I decided to take responsibility. And I went, OK, sales has got to be a system. So I went looking for that system. But remember, I had a reading speed of a sixth grader. So picking up a Brian Tracy or a Zig Ziglar book, not going to happen. So it would have taken me a year to read it. So I literally hopped on YouTube and I typed in sales system and all these videos came up. Well, every day I'd go out eight hours a day selling and then I'd go home eight hours a day practicing. And weekends were great. 16 hours I'd spend practicing.

6:00Probably not sounding fun to anyone, but every day I got better. Soon it was 71 doors. Then it was 48. Then it was 31. Then it was 26, 18, 9. Eventually, I got it down to, on average, three doors before I'd make the sale. Just surprisingly enough, six weeks in, my manager pulls me aside and says, Matt, we're kind of blown away by this because I was the quiet guy that handed my paperwork in downstairs and then went up to listen to all the boisterous salespeople talk about how hard the market was. And he said, you're actually the number one salesperson in the company. We just got the national sales report.

6:33Well, naturally, they thought then because I could sell, I could manage. So they promoted me and I got given 20 people. They all quit within three days because I had no idea how to manage. It was just a terrible situation. Back to YouTube, learn to manage, wonderful tool. And then fast forward about a year, I'd been promoted seven times. Fast forward a decade, I'd been responsible for five multimillion dollar success stories. So I'd gone from terrified to sell to teaching hundreds how to do it. But what happened with the book was when I moved to the US in 2014, I started teaching people what I call the three pillars for rapid growth.

7:08And sales is number three. And before that, because everybody seeing me from stage goes, that guy must be an intro, sorry, must be a natural salesperson, must have that gift of gab. So I tell my introverted story of how I became successful in selling. And while some people came up and said, Matt, you know, I really got some great value out of the content. So many introverts came up and said, I had no idea as an introvert I could sell. So I started telling other people to write a book on introverted selling and everybody kept telling me no one's going to read it. Who would buy a book on introverted sales?

7:42Well, I ended up working with a ghostwriter who came to me as a client that I took from 27 ,000 in 2013, I think 12 in October of 2014 when he came to me. We took him to 120 ,000 by the end of the year and just shy of 300 ,000 the following year. And this guy was scared of speaking on sales calls. He tried to sell via email beforehand. And he said, Matt, you've got to put this into a book. And I explained my issues. And he said, well, let's work together on that. Well, we put together the book and launched it in 2018. I mean, it's sold 31 ,000 copies so far. It's translated into nine languages already.

8:18It hit all the sales figures that you nicely mentioned before. But I think the real key to its success is the fact that it's got no competition. I mean, there are thousands of books written for extroverts, and this is the only one, I like to say, it's the only one written for us. And it just teaches introverts that our path to success is just different to that of an extrovert. And as soon as we embrace that and the power of system in the sales process, we can actually outperform our extroverted counterparts. There's so many interesting things here, Matthew. And I remember when we first chatted, we were kind of going through a lot of the different processes that you've created.

8:54and there's so many people that reached out to me and Fire Nation who were like, man, I was an introvert and I literally kind of thought I was in the minority, but then after hearing Matthew talk and just kind of going out there and exploring a little bit more in the introvert world, I realized that it's actually pretty much the majority and you know what? That's not a bad place to be because there's a lot of things that you can do in that. So you talked a lot about the book with the sales over 31 ,000. I mentioned in the introduction, how it was Amazon's eighth most sold book and Book Authority's number two best introvert book of all time, which is pretty phenomenal.

9:31Why above and beyond everything that we've already mentioned, was it so successful? Let's talk a couple of specific tactics and strategies that you use to really make sure and enable this book to really just hit the charts. Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of authors, they write a book and then they send it out into the world. And it's just like a business. If you have a business and you put up a website, you just hope people will come to it. It's going to be a long time before you start to make money. So I really took responsibility for learning how to promote a book. You know, I developed relationships with people at Audible who then promoted my book and actually got it out to their audience.

10:10I reached out to people like yourself, John, who gave me an amazing endorsement for the first book, people at Harvard, people at Princeton, people like Neil Patel, Marshall Goldsmith, and shared the content out with them. And they endorsed the books. Getting the endorses is really important. And then making sure that you turn those into social images and videos and sharing them on social media is incredibly powerful because you get to tap into their marketplace. I mean, social media is hugely powerful these days. And I would suggest, you know, you're talking to a guy that came from the offline world.

10:44Direct sales, direct marketing was everything I knew. In 2014, I didn't even know how to change the word that to the word they on a website. I'm almost ashamed to say that now. I thought online was a bit of a joke because I took pride in the fact that outbound sales was what I was good at now. And when I learned how to actually leverage the power of online to promote a book, wow, it was hugely powerful. But the other thing is you've got to get people behind your launch. the i mean we launched a podcast called the introvert's edge off the back end of the book and we interviewed what i call introverted titans and you're talking before around you know everyone's launching podcasts these days but you've got to have a mission that you're on and the book the podcast and the book is on a mission to help inspire introverts to realize that they're not second-class citizens their path to success is just different and so we started to interview I mean, these amazing people.

11:38I mean, Zig Ziglar, we were talking about sales before and how surprisingly there's all these amazing surprise introverts. Well, Zig Ziglar, the most well-known sales trainer on the planet. I interviewed Tom Ziglar, his son on the podcast because Zig's no longer with us. And he talked about how his dad was introverted. Wow. You look at Jeb Blunt, who wrote the forward for my next book, The Introvert's Edge to Networking. He's one of the most well-known sales trainers on the planet now. He's introverted. You look at Ivan Meisner, who I interviewed on the podcast. Ivan Meisner founded BNI, which is the largest networking group on the planet.

12:11And I think they've got thousands of networking groups. Well, he found out that he was an introvert as well. He actually – there's a blog post, if anyone's interested, called Oh My God, I'm an Introvert by Ivan Meisner, where he was bragging about being an extrovert to somebody with his wife present. And his wife said, no, you're an introvert. And he's like, I can't be. You know, I obviously I started a networking group. It's the most successful in the world. I have to be an extrovert. But she said, well, whatever you want to believe. So he, of course, went away, did the test and found out that he was an introvert.

12:44What he discovered was that because he found networking uncomfortable, he went away and created a system to make it make more sense. And because of that, that's what created BNI. You know, he actually endorsed my new book saying, you know, the whole idea of process and system is what he created in BNI. And that's what my new book, The Introvert's Edge to Networking, does. It focuses on bringing systems to all of networking. But the focus around everything that I did to launch the first book, and now I'm replicating with the second, is it's about getting that mission out with like-minded people that care about seeing that mission succeed.

13:21and using other people who are already authorities to their own groups of people and leveraging to their audiences. That's truly a power that the digital world has made so easy now and allows somebody that, I mean, when I first met you, John, 2014, I was introduced by Judy Robinette, and I really didn't have a huge network. Now, I have an amazing network of people that support my work, but it's because they believe in my mission and because they understand I'm here to serve the introverted small business owner. And that's a group of people that they're also aligned with helping. Fire Nation, so much value here.

14:02I love how he was talking about the endorsements being such a big thing. And again, this is stuff you have to plan for weeks and months in advance. You can't just snap your fingers and have all these great endorsements. You got to work for them and earn them. And then once you do, of course, make sure you're sharing on social media because that's building up your credibility, tapping into their networks. And of course, get a launch team for your launch, Fire Nation. Get people excited about it. Like I love how you have that phrase, introverted titans, that make people feel like they're part of the family to get out the message to help make this a success.

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15:44And when they grow, the sky's the limit for your business too. Grow better, faster with HubSpot's all-in-one intuitive customer platform. Visit HubSpot.com to learn more. Matthew, we're back and you've now written a new book and this is going to be the second in the Introverse Edge series. And this time you're going to be focusing on networking. So why do you think that so many introverts struggle or even hate networking And of course, as the learners that Fire Nation is, what would you suggest that those listeners who are introverts do differently? I think one of the biggest hurdles when we see the networking world is we see two groups of people.

16:27You've got those transactional networkers that I would never want to be where they're just walking person to person. Do you want to buy from me? Do you want to buy from me? Do you want to buy from me? It's horrible. And that's why a lot of people, even extroverts, shy away from being that type of person. The problem is that that means that they go to networking events and they almost feel uncomfortable about telling people about what they do. So they end up fostering relationships with people, but they walk out with these loose relationships that you could call friends, but they already, especially introverts, they already have enough friends that they don't have enough time to meet up with.

17:01So those cards just sit on the desk collecting dust until they go to the next event and it gets added to the pile. or they have a loose conversation about what they can do for somebody. But the problem is that that conversation becomes, it's more of a data dump where they just throw all these ideas at somebody where they explain the functional elements of what they do and all of the information. Sometimes people even move into a full-blown coaching session and they think they're helping, but what they've done is they've actually opened up the fire hose of information. So they then get home and they're like, oh, I just keep helping people and they never seem to be willing to pay for me.

17:39But what they're doing is they're going home and they're putting the card on the desk again and hoping that that person calls. All of this is why most people think that networking doesn't work. The truth is networking does work. You're just doing it wrong. What I always suggest is that there's a third type of networking that most people don't do. And what I call it is strategic networking. but it doesn't start when you go to the networking room. I mean, so many introverts will book, they'll tell themselves out of desperation, I have to go to that networking event. They'll put it in their calendar and they'll do their best not to think about it until they begrudgingly get in their car and go, which means you've basically created this self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.

18:2190 % of networking is done before you even go into the room. And I think that the biggest thing that you need to prepare before you go is how are you going to introduce yourself? Now, I have to tell you, when I first came to the US, I wasn't the best networker. I mean, because of my success in sales, you know, I was able to create some really great businesses and my success in business actually made me pretty successful and well-known in Melbourne, Australia. When I moved to the US, you know, I met a girl. Every good story starts with a girl, right? So I moved to the US for her. And I mean, she was more introverted than I am.

18:57So she didn't know anyone. She just moved to Austin herself. So here we are, these two introverts that know no one, and she's got a full-time job, but I've got to start a business. But this is the first time, instead of selling a product or service that was external to me, I decided that I wanted to teach people, small business owners, how to obtain rapid growth in their business. So instead of going out and direct selling, which is something that I would always suggest you do yourself, it's hard to direct sell when you're trying to charge high fees as a coach or a consultant. So what I did is I said, okay, well, I have to do this through networking.

19:32The problem was I had no idea how to network. As a matter of fact, my first experience networking was really trying to foster a friendship. I met this guy at the apartment complex I lived at, and he owned his own gym. And he told me all about his gym, and then he asked me what I did. And I said, oh, I'm a sales trainer, thinking that that was a cool thing to call myself. I hadn't really worked it out yet, but I thought it was going to be something to do with sales. and he said, oh, I had this really bad experience with a sales trainer once. You know, the way he described it, that person was one step above a con artist.

20:07Now he's looking at me like I'm one step above a con artist. So I then start explaining that sales needs really to have much more of a marketing approach and a lot of the heavy lifting could be done. And now I felt like I was selling to him. I didn't even mean to. He just asked me what I did and I told him and now I'm defending who I am. Now, that was hugely awkward. I mean, after that, I felt uncomfortable walking past him in the hall. So luckily enough, we moved out a couple of months later, but that was networking for me first. So I went, okay, now I'm going to go to these networking rooms.

20:39I'm definitely not going to call myself a salesperson or a sales trainer. I'm going to use the word marketing. And what I found is the responses people gave me was I'd say I was a marketer and they'd say, oh, that's nice. And then there was that awkward pause. and if I hadn't asked them what they did yet, I would then ask them and they would tell me and then we'd all make excuses to go to the restroom. Or, I mean, that's just what happens in networking, right? Or they would say, oh, I need a marketer. How much do you cost? And now I'm talking about price without even explaining my value, which no one should do in selling.

21:10No one should do in networking. It's the worst thing to answer that question. But now you seem like you're dodging the answer. So I started to look up what to do and I discovered this thing called the elevator pitch. Now, for me, that whole, I do this for this group of people, even if they had this kind of objection or problem, that to me felt so transactional, so salesy. And I felt like if I said that to someone, this person would be thinking, wow, this person's really suave. They're really salesy. I need to get away from this person. So I went looking for another way to introduce myself. And what I discovered or what I created was this concept called the unified message.

21:50Now, the unified message is designed to really change the balance from somebody seeing you as a commodity and either not being interested or asking what you cost to leaning forward and going, what exactly is that? Now, the key to a unified message is not fitting into any box that they know. I'll give you an example. I worked with this client, Wendy, in the past, and she was a language tutor. So, you know, she successfully charged$50 to$80 an hour for private consultation for nearly a decade. But the problem was there were all these people moving into California, wanting to start their own businesses, charging$30 to$40 an hour.

22:26She's now competing in this global marketplace we live in. So there are people over in China willing to do it for$12 an hour on Craigslist. And thanks to our friends in Silicon Valley, there are now people, you know, I'll teach you Mandarin, you teach me English. We won't charge anyone anything through these software programs. So she's competing against free. So she comes to me for sales training to understand how to compete in that crowded marketplace. And I said, there's no competing. What we've got to do is sidestep that battle altogether, or eventually it's going to come down to a conversation about price.

22:57What I did is I started to look at all the customers that she'd worked with. And what I realized is that the hundreds she'd worked with over the years, there were these three executives, sorry, two executives that she'd worked with that really she helped them with three things. The first one was this concept, well, it's the Chinese word for rapport, Chinese way of developing rapport. So, John, if I was to sell you something in the U.S., if I was a really bad salesperson, I might say something to you at the end of 45 minutes, something horrible like, so do you want to move forward? And you'll say, yes, no, everyone's favorite.

23:31Let me think about it, right? Well, in China, they're going to want to probably see you five or six times before they even discuss business. They're probably going to want to see you drunk over karaoke once or twice. You can't get straight into sales. It just doesn't work. And she helped them understand that. She also helped them understand the difference between e-commerce in China and e-commerce in the Western world. And the third, she helped them understand the importance of respect, how to handle a business card, why it's so important you do it the right way, why learning their language isn't as important as reducing your accent.