Technology that Will Get You Banned from Networking Events

 Hello, and welcome once again to the Guy Who Knows A Guy podcast. I'm your host, Michael Whitehouse, the guy who knows a guy. We are counting down to JV Connect, which now has its very own snazzy new website, jv connect. com, putting more and more stuff on there. As I record this, we have a guides page, so you can see a number of our guides.

We have over 60 guides signed up, but, uh, I sort of forgot when I invited them to include, uh, is it okay if I share that you're coming and share your, your headshot and whatnot, and I don't want to put you on a website without asking. So I had to go back to everyone and say, Hey, can I put your stuff up there?

And you know how emails are. So we've got 60 coming. We've got, as I record this, uh, I'm recording this on October 26th. Uh, you're listening to this probably a week or two later, but, uh, as I record this, we have, I think a dozen guides on there, but that's just a sample of the awesome people who are there.

If you're wondering what the heck is a guide guides are. Uh, guides are established, experienced, ethical entrepreneurs who I personally know to be so and have invited, so they can put the word guide after their name. So when you're at the event, you know you're not just hanging out with a bunch of newbies, a bunch of people who have just watched some YouTube videos and now they're pontificating them.

Because when you go to a lot of network events, people are like, oh, I help so and so to such and such. Great, how many clients do you have? None, I've never actually served a client. But, uh, I will be helping them any minute now, yeah. As opposed to our guides, they've helped many, many people. They've got...

Functioning business, six, seven figure businesses. They know how to do it. They've been there. They've done that. They have proven programs and we have, as I said, dozens of them there. So it's going to be a very high value event. Um, so you can check that out. Uh, as I record this, we have 117 people registered, but as said, it's October 26th that I record this.

And you're probably listening to this somewhat later. So that number has certainly gone. Up, if you don't have your event membership yet, go to jv connect. com and be sure to get your membership before the rate goes up again. Uh, it's going to go up about 20 every few weeks. It's 150 if you buy it last minute.

The, the real membership rate is 150. But in order to encourage people to take early action, because people love to wait till the last minute, I'll just buy a ticket. You know, I'll just sign up. When I'm going in, I don't want people to do that because I want to know how many people are coming. I want to encourage people to bring their friends and to make some connections.

So... But I'm also going to be providing some education leading up to it, including this podcast, but other education as well, bringing in some guests, going to have a guest, uh, guest series of education. So, I want to make sure people sign up early, and the way I get them to do that is I offer a substantial incentive.

You know, the price will be three times what it is now if you wait till the last minute. So, why wait? You want to wait? I'll take three times the money. That's cool. I'm okay with that. But I'd really rather you pay me less and get the same value for free. Only 50 bucks as I'm recording this and as this comes out if you waited too long obviously the price will be higher than that, but But definitely make sure to take advantage of that now So what I wanted to talk about today was how not to get banned from JV connect for life That seems like an important topic.

And, uh, something that people may not realize... Now, obviously, there's the obvious ways to get banned. You know, don't come in and start swearing in a blue street, don't start insulting people, don't, uh, show us your butt, whatever. Um, that's the obvious stuff. I think we all probably know the basic decorum of business and, uh, hopefully Zoom at this point.

But there's new technology coming along, which seems very innocuous. Which will get you banned from this event and many others. So I want to talk about how to do proper follow up and how to do, how not to do proper follow up. Uh, if you follow my content, you may have, have seen some of my talk about the five corruptors of networking.

And one of the corruptors is the Automator. The Automator has amazing technology that will make networking more efficient and better. Now there's some great... Efficiency is I've seen. I saw something called flow chat. Flow chat is a software which allows you, it facilitates human DMing, right? It's not a mass DMing software.

It facilitates sending out a message. To have an actual conversation. So it's not an AI chat bot. It's not about having VAs have conversations. It is about facilitating, getting you into conversations efficiently, but you might need to send out your initial message a number of times to get into that conversation and you need to keep track of who you're sending it to.

So flow chat manages that, but it facilitates getting you the human. into more conversations. That's good automation. There's another tool, I'm not going to mention the name of it, that what it does is scrapes chat logs of Zoom meetings so that you can put them into your CRM, turn them into prospects, and engage with them.

Now, done right, This could mean literally put into your CRM so you then have a list of people to follow up with Individually to reach out and say, ah, yes, I remember Bob Bob talked about this and let me let me reach out to him about That oh, I remember James. Yeah, I definitely talk to James about something and that's how you should do it What are most people going to hear that instruction as?

Put them into your CRM and start sending them automated emails. Now, it was just an event recently run by JV Directory. It was a quarterly, sort of an elite roundtable event. And one of the things they explicitly said was, Do not add the emails from this chat to a mass mailing list. Do not even send a single mass mail to everyone.

If you're going to reach out to people, you must do it. Individually and preferably personally about, you know, what they're, what you want to talk to them about. I take that one step further. I say, do not add people to a list. Do not mass mail them. Do not send them one mass email unless the one mass email is something explicitly, clearly saying, Hey.

I saw you in the room. We didn't have a chance to talk. If you're interested in connecting, here's a little bit about me. Let's talk. You are not on a list. You will not get another email after this. If, if you do it very carefully, that's okay. But if you take the list of contact information from JV Connect, and you put them on a mailing list, or you mass mail them in an inappropriate way, you will be banned from JV Connect.

Now, there's a way to get unbanned from that, which is a 500 fine. So So, you're either gonna pay me 500 to get back in, or you're gonna get banned. Now, I do also offer a sponsorship, so if you don't want to be the jerk, uh, you could say, Hey Michael, could I reach out to this audience? Yes! You could pay me! I could email them and say, check out this sponsor, they're so cool, they've supported JV Connect by being a sponsor, and here's what they'd like to talk to you about.

That's, that's a totally legitimate way to do it. But to take the chat log, where people have put their contact information into the chat, so that people could communicate with them and network with them, and then scrape it using AI, using some special tool, and then dump it into your CRM, and mass mail them, is just spamming.

It is... A technological equivalent of shoving your business card into the hand of everyone in a networking event. It is the equivalent of taking a brochure and maybe a couple volunteers or a couple team members and running around and slapping that brochure into everyone's hand or sticking it under the windshield wipers of everyone's car at a networking event.

Does that sound like something you do? Does that even sound like networking or does that sound like spam marketing? It is spam marketing. And here's the crazy thing about this tool. You don't need the tool. You want to do this? Claude dot AI will do it for you. Not saying you should just saying this tool is all gimmick because the freely available AI tools can do it for you.

You know, this technology is available if you know how to use it. The point is. My concern with this particular platform that I saw, and maybe you've encountered other things, which is why I'm talking about this. My concern is, the way it's marketed, is this is going to make networking so much more valuable and so much more effective, and people are getting so much value out of this.

The use case that the founder shared was That Susie Q had all these old chat logs, and she ran them through the tool, and the tool found her 482 prospects out of these otherwise unused chat logs. I said, what? Those aren't prospects. Those aren't prospects. Those are networking opportunities. Networking contacts.

If you are going into a networking event, and seeing a room full of prospects, There's a red button in the lower right hand corner of Zoom that I encourage you to use. It says leave. Get out. Because you're doing it wrong. If you're going to a networking event and seeing prospects. Now, does this mean you can't make sales at a networking event?

Absolutely not. You can totally make sales at a networking event. The way you do it is you have a conversation with people, and in that conversation they identify they have a need. Which you solve with a product you offer. And you will say, so I noticed you mentioned this need. I actually have a solution to that.

It's an offer I have, something you pay for. Would it be okay if I shared a bit about that? Can we get on a call later? I can share that with you. And people often say, yes, oh yes, you have a solution to my problem? I would love to hear about a solution to my problem that I've already talked about. That would be great.

But if you go into a networking event and you're like, Hey everybody, I do this amazing thing. 19 out of 20 people don't know how to do an elevator pitch. And it's probably 21 people. Whenever we go around the room and everyone's talking about their amazing thing, I'm ready to doze off. Because almost everybody does it wrong.

They don't, they don't specify what problem they solve. They don't specify what makes them unique. They don't specify what makes them different from a thousand other people in their industry. So. If you are coming into my email box telling me about your generic solution, I, I get amazing solutions with Facebook ads.

Yeah, so do 20 other people, four of them I know personally and trust them. You're a stranger. Don't get in my mailbox and tell me that stuff. Now if you want to get in my mailbox and say, Hey, I saw you at the event. I'd love to get on a call and see how we can help each other. Not how I can sell you something.

How we can work together. Okay, that's a different thing. But when you're telling me that somebody took a bunch of chat logs and found 482 Prospects, prospects, then that is telling me that this is a service designed to turn people into targets. People into marketing targets, into people to sell to. And if you have 482 of them, are you going to reach out to them and say, Hey, I'd love to get on a meeting and see how we can work together?

Probably not. Now, now there is a, a right way to do this, I suppose. Let's say you're in that situation, you've gotten 482. Networking opportunities out of old chat logs. Now keep in mind, some of these people, this person will have met with already. We'll be talking to be working with. So by mass mailing all of them, she's also going to sweep up some people.

She has existing relationships with, but most people understand automation will get too upset. But what would the right way be to do that? Well, I guess you could put it in and you could say it, you know, we previously attended a networking event together, which. That's a red flag alone to say we attended an event, but not specify which event.

But we previously attended an event together. And I don't know if we have the chance to follow up, but I wanted to reach out and I apologize for the impersonal nature of this email, but I wanted to make sure opportunities don't slip through the cracks. So if I may, I'd like to share a couple paragraphs about who I am and what I bring to the table in networking and how I support my partners.

And if you're open to it, here's a link to my calendar so we can connect. Now, 482. is about as many one to ones as you might do, as a normal person might do, in two or three years. So, that's a lot. If you're an intensive networker, that might be six months. But it's still going to be a lot. Uh, but not everyone's gonna respond, and, and so that makes sense.

But, you'd have to know that. And this platform, none of the training and support they're offering is telling people how to do that right. It's just telling people, yeah, use this, but you know what to do. Just throw in your CRM. You know, just do your thing. Most people don't know how to network. They only know how to sell and they're going to pitch.

So I encourage you certainly do consider taking there's some great technology out there. Great technology. Zoom now has a tool that will summarize a meeting. Doesn't work well with networking meetings, by the way. Uh, it doesn't know how to summarize a networking event. But, uh, it'll summarize meetings.

That's great. There's some other great tools, uh, out there to help you keep track of things. There might be better and better tools to help you find, uh, networking. Connections and find your way to connect with people. And, uh, I'm, I'm seeing there's this tool. My most trusted, uh, I've tried it. I'm not thrilled with the interface, but it seems to be a decent tool.

Uh, it's frankly, I was trying it out and then they had some announcement. It's a plugin to your browser that, that overlays on zoom on LinkedIn. I went to LinkedIn one day and it popped up a full screen thing. Every time I went to LinkedIn to tell me they had some new. Something or other. I don't even know what it was because I'm coming for LinkedIn.

So you want to pop something up that gives you a little things in the corner. Cool. I don't want a full screen thing ever overlaying on my, my LinkedIn. That's just me. That's not a. It's not a major issue. It's just, I got annoyed with that. So I was like, heck, well, they'll still come back in six months, see if they've gotten better.

Um, but they, they are improving rapidly. So my most trusted is certainly interesting. I have some concerns about some of the ways it does things. Uh, but. That's just and my issue is it doesn't in public. So it does some things and it posts for you and it sends out messages for you. And and you can certainly catch all these things and stop them.

But if you're not paying attention, you have a lot of emissions going out that are not being done by your fingers. So careful with that. But if you set the settings, right, it's it. Can be very powerful and it's very powerful for, uh, helping you to connect with real people through real people, which is what networking is all about.

So there's some great tools like that, but then watch out for these automation tools, these tools that simplify things, these tools that facilitate things, uh, a lot of these tools. A lot of, and, you know, computers have been doing this for years. They let us do whatever we do more so. So, we used to be able to send a letter, and then we could send a mass mailer, and then we could send an email, and then we could send a mass email, and, you know, sending a letter, no one minds.

Once you're printing out postcards and mailing them to everyone, you get a bunch of people saying, Hey, what the hell is this? Get it out of my mailbox. Once you, you send someone an email, oh, that's nice. You send someone a mass email, ehhh. You gotta make sure you got permission for that. So, my, my point here is, You should absolutely be reaching out to people from a virtual event, whether it's JV Connect or anything else.

You should have a calendar link. You should have a way to engage with people. You should not be making any kind of offer to them other than let's meet and see how I can help you. You should ideally be reaching out personally and saying, hey, here's what I wanted to talk to you about. Here's how I think I can benefit you, because they don't really care how they can benefit, how, uh, they want to know how you can benefit them, not how they can benefit you.

So, you're going to say, hey, here's what I can do for you, and that's going to make it more interesting. It's going to frame the conversation. And, you know, you certainly want to do that. And then you may also be reaching out to some people and saying, Hey, I saw you in the room. I'm not quite sure what our area of common interest is, but you seemed interesting.

So if you're open to getting on a call, let's do that. That's why I have an open virtual coffee for those sort of catch all. You seem pretty cool, but I want to make sure we've got something awesome going on. So, um, let's meet in a group setting. Uh, the other reason for Open Virtual Coffee is it's not just for me to save my time.

It's also, if I'm meeting with you at the Open Virtual Coffee, then if we're not a fit to do something together, maybe someone else at the OVC is. And if you're curious about my Open Virtual Coffee, it's every Friday at 1 p. m. Eastern Time. And you can get there by going to guywhoknowsaguy. com slash openvc.

That's almost every Friday. We won't be doing it the Friday of Thanksgiving. Um, there's the first Friday in December. I think we're not doing it. And the last Friday in December, I know we're not doing it, but I do it most, most Fridays, unless I have something else going on. If people sign up. So that is my, my little bit of rant, a little bit of education, a little bit of thought.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Email me Michael at guy who knows a guy. com. Uh, but my event, my rules, uh, you come to JV connect. Do not, do not. Use any tool to scrape the contact information out of the chat and mass mail them and there's AI tools and also human tools Don't send the chat to your Filipino VA and say extract all the email addresses from this and put it in the CRM That also would be mass mailing everyone at the event There will also be a place people can put their contact info so you don't have to scrape the chat There's gonna be a place where people can put their contact information into a spreadsheet Because you're going to meet a lot of people and you might not get their contact info during the course of the chat.

So, I figure I would rather end up on a couple of lists and be able to have everyone reach me who wants to. Versus, uh, not being on a couple of lists but then missing out a few opportunities. However, that's going to be an opt in. By registering, you are not, not, not, not, not, not automatically put on a list.

You have to actually go to a form and fill it out to do that. Again, you put that on your list. You're banned. So, don't do that. The integrity of the event is extremely important to me, and that's the whole ballgame, is that people go to a great event, they make great connections, and they are treated with respect by everyone they meet there.

And if you're going to make my environment disrespectful, we're gonna have an issue. So. Uh, I'm sure you, listener, are not going to do that. And you, listener, are going to enjoy the fact that you'll be at JVConnect, and in that pleasant environment that we're creating, with these rules! See, this is why I rant, this is why I get upset, because this affects the spaces I'm creating, this affects my communities, my friends!

My new friends, who I don't even know yet. So I get really upset when someone's like, I've got an amazing new technology everyone should use, it'll ruin this environment! No, not here. Not in my house. So if you do not have your JV Connect membership yet, by all means, go to jv connect. com. Get your membership before the rate goes up again, or go after.

Give me more money. I don't mind, but I'm happy to take less of your money. And then, if you're really excited about it, you can become an affiliate. And if you bring someone in, you get 50%. So you bring five friends in, I gave you 125 bucks at the 50 rate. That's pretty cool. Let's think so by all means spread the word.

And some people are like, I don't care about 25 bucks, whatever. My business makes a million bucks a year. You don't have to, you want to make it simple. Just send them jb connect. com. Remember, remember the hyphen. Totally cool too. I appreciate that. So go to jv-connect.com. Click the purple button that says Register now.

And register now. Get involved. You'll get more updates and information as we go. And uh, I will be talking soon about the JV Connect Education series, which will be a series of guests prerecorded going out ahead of the event. to give you more education on various topics that I'm sharing here, because I might know a bunch of stuff, but I don't know everything, and some people know different things than me, some people know things better than me, and some people explain the same things in a way that you'll understand better than when I explain it.

They might be more focused. They might have notes ahead of time. They might not just ramble and rant. Who knows? Maybe you like me rambling and ranting. Probably. You got to the end of this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you got any questions, feedback, ideas, thoughts, whatever, email me michael at guy who knows a guy dot com.

That's michael at guy who knows a guy dot com. Thank you for listening and be sure to join me every Friday and Monday for new episodes on the Guy Who Knows A Guy podcast.