Recently I had the opportunity to travel on a short plane ride. I don’t care to fly! It isn’t my favorite activity for a number of reasons and usually I am content to bury my head in a book or try and sleep so the time passes as fast as possible. One of the things I rarely do is engage me seat neighbor in conversation – I never feel that social.
One of the key tenets of marketing is putting the focus on the other person. So this post isn’t about me, but rather the lesson learned from last week’s experience. It turned out that the gentleman next to me was also from the UK, and we began to chat when one of us made a passing comment about our home country and we realized we had that in common.
The result was an hour long, very interesting conversation spanning business, cultural differences we had noticed between the two countries and many other things. Now, in this case we are probably not a great “fit” for one another in terms of doing business together. However my fellow traveller works for a fascinating, fast growing company and I learned a lot. Hopefully there will be opportunities to help each other – maybe in business, maybe just socially. Who knows?
Opportunity almost wasted. And that’s the point. Apart from making the flight pass rapidly, you never know how either party might benefit from such an exchange. How many such opportunities are missed every day because you fail to make the effort to engage in conversation, or risk there being nothing to talk about, or fail to pass comment on something of interest?
This isn’t selling by the way. It is about being aware that there may be something useful coming out of the conversation, but really just following it to see where it goes. Give of yourself, see what happens. If there is nothing other than an interesting conversation, aren’t you better off? Even if the conversation is boring, what have you lost?
Always have your marketing radar working. It can be a struggle at times, maybe you don’t feel like it, but you never know where a great contact is sitting – maybe next to you on a 1 hour flight.
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