Researching Your Contact’s Interests
For people on your ‘A-list,” you need to learn something about their background and interests as this will allow you to communicate with them on things that are important to them. Everyone wants to talk about what they like and do and when you make a habit of focusing first on these areas of interest, the foundations of trust are established.
So the goals for researching your contacts interests are to build a small set of facts or details about each person that you can then use to find something relevant to give or share with them. A good example is that when I know you attended a specific college and that you like sports, then checking how that school’s football team is doing or how my contact feels about a big upcoming game might be a powerful conversation bridge.
So the steps for this activity will require you spending a few minutes researching each person’s interests on your “A-list.” As I said earlier when this is behind you, your week-to-week steps are going to be so easy from this point forward.
In summary here’s what you need to do:
- Research and learn something to reference later for everyone on your ‘A-list.”
- Capture that information and add it to your TribeUp “TRM” and further into their Engage Record.
- Ahead of every scheduled “touch” (coming up in next week’s lesson) you’ll look for something current or relevant on the internet to refer to or send along with… in your communications to your “A-list” people. This article or reference is called a “Value Item.”
Remember the foundations of building trust and getting referrals is to “give, give again, teach people how they can reciprocate and then you’ll receive referrals.” Finding Value Items and making these a part of your ongoing contacts with your “A-list” ( on anyone for that matter!) will lead to breakthroughs in trust building, make you stand out in the marketplace and produce the results you’re seeking!