Summary: Synopsis One of the readers of Dr. Misner's blog asked about when it was appropriate to hand out a business card. (Blog post here.) Some people are "card-pushers." They think that networking is handing their business cards to as many people as possible. This amounts to cold-calling. Dr. Misner's advice is "Don't hand out your business card unless someone asks for it." So what happens if you want to make a connection and the other person doesn't ask? Easy: ask for their card instead. You can also ask whether they attend the event where you met them regularly. If they do, you'll have another opportunity to talk. Note: just receiving a card from someone doesn't give you permission to add them to your mailing list. You're more likely to offend them than to develop the connection. Brought to you by Networking Now. Complete Transcript of BNI Podcast Episode 390 - Priscilla: Hello everyone and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, CA. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. How are you and where are you? Ivan: Hi Priscilla. This week, I am at a Transformational Leadership Conference in Maui. I know it’s a tough place to be, but I guess there are worse places to have to do a conference. But we have some great BNI groups in Maui and it has been years since I have been to them, so I am really excited to meet a lot of BNI members over the next week during the event that I am doing here. Priscilla: Oh, that sounds great. Tell me what you want to share with us today. Ivan: You know, I received an email some time ago from someone who read my blog. I blog at IvanMisner.com, so podcast listeners, if you haven’t seen my blog, go on over there because I have a lot of content. Some of it similar but a lot of it on different topics relating to networking. It’s not BNI-centric. It’s about business networking and about business, as a matter of fact. I had a blog reader who asked the question, “How do you go about giving out your cards? Is it just spray and prey? Do you just go around there and pass them out?” They specifically wanted to know how to tell when it is the right time to offer your card to a new contact. I answered her there and I wanted to talk about it here a little bit on this podcast because I think it is an important topic. How many times have you been to a networking function and you have just had people come up to you and literally push their cards in your hand or your pocket? I think that is kind of card abuse. It warrants a phone call to the business card police. I call these people card pushers because they come directly from the school of this power of networking where they are taught to sell, sell, sell. Of course, they go to networking events and force their cards on every person they meet. They kind of use networking as a face to face cold calling opportunity. Their goal at each networking event is to kind of get rid of as many cards as they possibly can and have this delusion that simply having a card and passing it out automatically gets you to be part of their network. They really don’t make any real effort to make a connection or build a relationship. Obviously, you can’t build a relationship the first time you meet, but then they think it is just about handing out the cards and that is what networking is about. Being on the receiving end of these very aggressive card-mongering approaches to networking is really awkward and oftentimes, you feel very sold to with no consideration of your interests or their interests. So I really think this is basically a form of cold calling. Here, the seller, other than cold calling on a phone here- on a phone, they are out of reach. They are on the other end of the line. But here,
