Pick up an appointment with whoever you want, when you want

We are all inundated with requests for appointments. It is easy to say no to the most inflated of them, like that of the perfect stranger who recently contacted me to propose that we meet on a specific date so that I coach for free on his career. However, although I have always avoided disturbing people to ask for free advice on my CV, I must admit that I also found myself in the position of the unhappy applicant, seeing my requests for interviews refused or simply ignored. In fact, we have all been. In a world where we are more and more pressed for time, we have less and less time to meet "just like that". Here are the strategies I developed over time to increase my chances of getting a positive response to my solicitations.

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Set your starting position. A close friend can easily send you a short message informing you that he will be visiting your city and wants to see you. "Some levels of intimacy allow you to write in a very direct tone," said Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, a classic about networking. "But when you do not have that level of intimacy, you have to bring in a bargaining chip. In other words, one should never assume that a person wants to meet you - in this case, it's the opposite. Your first message should give your interlocutor a good reason to meet you. You can suggest him to put it forward (by interviewing him for your blog, if you have one), to teach him something about your expertise (how to improve search engine optimization, for example) or to introduce someone he wants to meet. Express clearly what your added value is; otherwise, your interlocutor may underestimate you and assume you have nothing to offer.

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Start modestly. An hour or a half hour, it does not seem much. But if your request for appointments is among the twenty or fifty solicitations that your interlocutor received in the week - which is not unusual for many professionals - this can quickly become too much. Also, do not ask for a lunch; aim smaller, to make it easier to accept (a strategy I describe in " How to get a spontaneous canvassing interview"). I recently agreed to a telephone interview with a young author who assured me in his email: "You must have a very busy agenda; I will get to the point so that the call does not exceed 10 minutes. In the end, I did not talk to him for 10 minutes; our interview, which proved very interesting, lasted 30 minutes - while I probably would have refused an interview of this length beforehand. It is this same strategy as Robert Cialdini, a renowned psychologist, discovered during her first research on United Way door-to-door fundraising campaigns. Grace to the addition of five words to the standard pitch ("even a penny would help us"), the association saw the contributions double. "How to say no, if even a cent is admissible? Explained Cialdini in an interview for my next book. "We doubled the number of people who gave, and nobody really gave a cent. We do not give a cent to United Way; we donate that is appropriate. "

Play the card of cordiality.  Whatever your success in your field, there will always be people you want to meet who have not heard of you yet. The challenge is to make sure they see you as a colleague - someone "like them" - rather than a stranger who is encroaching on their time. Finding mutual contacts is one of the best ways to get there. Even Fedrizzi, known for his networking prowess, still has "high-profile contacts" he would like to meet. In this case, he says, "I use my network to help me meet people. Facebook makes things easier, thanks to its "friends in common" function; LinkedIn - which tracks second- and third-degree connections - makes this even easier. Asking one another to put you in touch puts you on an equal footing and makes your relationship start in the best possible way.

Just as the act of sitting has become the new form of smoking, time has become our new motto. Today, no one can afford to give it away carelessly. If you ask a stranger for half an hour, or even 10 minutes, you must make your request as a venture capital pitch. Why should he talk to you? How to establish your credibility from the start? How can you help him? How to optimize the return on investment in the shortest time? If you can answer these questions, you should be able to get an appointment with just about anyone.

Source: IT Business Consultant