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Face Time

As an Internet entrepreneur, I’ve been guilty of overusing email & IM for years, and not creating enough face to face meeting opportunities.  True, I’ve always advocated the importance of conferences and I attend a lot of them, but I often talk to employees and companies with which I have a partnership, via email primarily.  Email is generally efficient, but it falls so very short in a number of key ways.

In the past month, I decided to change my ways and start making an effort to have face to face discussions with some of the companies and people I work with.  I flew to Los Angeles a few weeks ago and met with  an advertiser for the first time, that I had been working with for years.  We had a very productive meeting and discussed many ideas on how we could work together.  The meeting brought together 6 people from different areas of their company, and the progress we made never would have been made by phone.

Recently as well, I decided to have a face to face meeting with a developer-consultant who I’ve worked with for years.  We took a two day trip to Las Vegas, shared some meals, and discussed all the ins and outs of a new project that we were undertaking.  It was a productive meeting, and we both appreciated finally getting to meet face to face.

I often shun traditional business and instead embrace all that the Internet has to offer in terms of automation, user generated content, automated-advertising programs such as Adsense which don’t require aggressive sales efforts, etc, but it’s taken me almost 13 years of working in this business to really see the benefits of meeting people face to face - of course, people who work in traditional offices take that for granted and might say “duh!”, but working via email and phone for so many years has its advantages too, but not as an all or nothing approach.

-When you visit with a company or an employee/consultant face to face, you make an impression.  You stick in their mind.  You are more likely to occur to them when they are thinking about projects and when they determine who they should work with.

-Brainstorming is so much more effective in person because body language and energy can only be utilized when you’re in the same room as the other person.  So much of communication is non-verbal and email/IM/telephone loses all of that.

-People are busy, and when you agree to meet with them and go out of your way to travel to them, they appreciate it.  They feel special, that you took time out of your busy schedule to visit with them.  This raises your value in their eyes.

Take a look at your top 5 biggest revenue sources and/or top 5 most important people who contribute to your company.  Then, send an email or pick up the phone and propose a meeting to touch base.  Offer to travel to them, if they aren’t local.  Come prepared to the meeting with a few top level questions or specific questions if they occur to you.  Make the meeting about them!  Tell them that you wanted to meet the person that you’ve been working with for so long.  Tell them that you want to make sure that their needs are being met, and hear any suggestions they have to improve your relationship.  In doing so, you will benefit.  I virtually guarantee you that if you haven’t met face to face with them in the past, this initial meeting could very well propel your relationship to the next level, flood you with new ideas and opportunities, and your business will thank you.

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Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 3:32 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.