Brian Basilico November 23, 2021 
It’s that time of year again. It’s almost the end of the year and the beginning of a new one. And people tend to slow down and kind of chillax a little bit.
But it’s also the time of year where everybody’s sending out messages of thanks, gratitude, and holiday gifts to their clients and cohorts. The biggest problem with doing that is the fact that everybody else is doing that. So if you don’t want to be just another email in the inbox, or post in a newsfeed, you have to try and do something to stand out.
Whatever Floats Your Gravy Boat
I was working with one of my smaller clients who happens to be a chapter of a boating club. They asked me to put together an email for Thanksgiving. So I tried to come up with something unique. And what I did is I took a picture of a gravy boat and I put one of their boats making wake on a lake and said Happy Thanksgiving.
I am hoping it will be something that stands out above all the other messages that we normally see of food and cornucopia and all those Thanksgivingsy things. If you’re going to stand out amongst the barrage of posts, try to be creative and do something different.
I’ve often heard people say that if you send out Thanksgiving cards instead of Christmas cards, you will stand out more as well. And that’s kind of what I want to talk about today. Except I want to take it a little bit further. I want to share with you the 10 most powerful words in business (besides thank you.)
The Sweetest, Most Important Sound
Dale Carnegie once said, “A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” Most people’s favorite subject is themself. Now I’m not trying to say that people are being selfish or conceited, but you have to admit, it’s just nice to know that others care enough to ask us how we’re doing. It helps to say, “Hey (insert name here)…” then add the 10 most powerful words in business (in my humble estimation), “How are you doing?” and “How can I help you today?”
I’ll explain more on what to do with those in a bit.
But the key thing that we’re trying to do is ask how they’re doing, show them some empathy, give them an opportunity to respond, and say, “I’m doing great”, or “not doing so great”, or “something’s wrong”.
And the second one is, “How can I help you today?” It’s not meant to be, “What can I sell today?” It’s what, in my network, in what I have to offer, can I offer to you? It might just be an encouraging ear. Maybe it could be a tip. Or it could be a contractor because they have a project to get done. No matter what it is, you have resources and you’re offering yourself, your time, and your network to those people.
Asking people, “How are you doing?” and “How can I help you?” definitely will make you stand out and remain top of mind.
Celebrate Your Tribe
If you want to use this as a tool in business to truly make it the 10 most powerful words, then I suggest you systematize it.
You may have heard me mention the word TRIBE. And what I mean by TRIBE is that each one of us has at least 150 people in our immediate sphere that we should be keeping in contact with. It could be customers, or prospects, or coworkers, or networking partners, or contractors, whoever it is, just reach out to them, add them to your list, and make sure that you’re keeping them top of mind to keep you top of mind.
Every quarter you should be going through that list and basically scrubbing it, meaning the people that aren’t responding to you, maybe you should take them off and replace them with new people that you’ve met. And every single quarter, change that out. Some people will stay an entire year. Some people won’t even last a month, but the key thing is the more you visit that list, the better chance you have of staying top of mind with people that you want to stay in touch with.
You Choose Who To Keep In Touch With
The first thing you should do is identify them. I like to add them to my CRM and I like Nimble. I use Nimble because it’s super easy to use and I can go to LinkedIn and capture and update their contact information. Then you Identify your TRIBE and favorite those 150 people or tag them as your TRIBE.
However you want to do it, just find a way to search and sort them. Then you should make a note in each one of their records on how they like to communicate? Do they prefer email, phone, Zoom, text, smoke signals, whatever it is? You should note what they like best so you can reach out to them that way.
The next thing you should do is reach out to them. With 150 people, if you reached out to 10 per day, every single month, you could reach out to between 150 and 220 people. Now I’m going to offer you a secret. I do this in what I call my 10-10-10 strategy. And that is 10 people, 10 words, 10 minutes or less, meaning I’m spending less than 1 minute per person. What I do is I go into my CRM and I pick 10 people each day that happen to be top of mind out of that 150, and then I send them an email or I send them a text or I send them a direct message in LinkedIn or Facebook. I ask them, “How are you doing? And how can I help you today?”
Once you do that, you may get nobody replying back to it, but you may get some people that say, “Thanks for thinking of me.” You may get some people that actually require more time and say, “I’d like to set up a Zoom meeting.” Or “Let’s schedule a phone call.” Or “Let’s go have a coffee.”
You may have to invest a little bit more time. It’s up to you to choose whether you want to make the time to do that. So it’s your people, it’s your schedule and it’s your time. But if you communicate with 10 people, 10 words, 10 minutes, every single day, you’ll be able to reach out to over 150 people per month.
When you do this, make sure you’re going back to your CRM and taking notes about what you spoke about. That way, when you go to do it again a month from now, you remember what was said or whether they replied. Hence why I like putting it into a CRM. It gives me a data collection point that I can use to optimize and speed up the process.
This is the time of the year to give thanks. And I want to give thanks to all of you who listen to BaconPodcast.com on a regular basis, or those of you who read my blog posts on B2b-IM.com or those of you who I’ve reached out to, and those who’ve reached out to me. And some of you have even adopted my 10-10-10 strategy and started to see great results.
Final Thoughts
I’d like to leave you with some final thoughts. Don’t be discouraged if not as many people respond. This is a busy time of year. And it’s also a time where a lot of people leave work and are thinking about their family and friends.
Continue to do it and then build it up as a habit. If you take the last 2 months of the year and do it over the course of 60 days, you will go through two cycles of reaching those 150 people, and you will develop a habit. That’s how long it takes. If you do this every single month, I guarantee you that there will be better business opportunities, greater relationships, and a chance for you to make a difference in a lot of other people’s lives.
So… thank you and start connecting.
I would love to hear your thoughts on reaching out and connecting. What do you think are the 10 most powerful words in business? Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about connecting with others and their network.
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