What's Your Fishing Line?

Your “fishing line” is what you say at a networking event when someone asks you what you do. Always keep in mind what Zig Ziglar said, “People buy on emotion and justify with logic.” If folks have a need for what you’re selling (I’m assuming you have a quality competitive offering) and they like and trust you, then they’ll buy from you.

Many of us have been trained to give folks an “elevator speech,” but oftentimes the people you meet are not patient enough to hear you out. Your brief and direct fishing line is a better way to start a potentially rewarding conversation.

A good fishing line is short and sweet, and it has three main components:

1.    It’s one brief sentence

2.    It gives a 30K foot overview of your products/services

3.    It creates enough interest/excitement to prompt follow up questions

For example, if someone I’ve just met at a networking meeting asks me what I do, I say, “I help leaders in the Atlanta region double their revenue and have fun doing it.”

For starters, this is true because I have the track record to prove it. Also, I want people to know that I work primarily in the Atlanta region, and that I have two deep buckets of expertise: 1) business scaling, and 2) happiness.

My fondest hope is that the person will find what I’ve said interesting enough to ask a follow up question something like “Wow, that’s a bold statement! How do you do that?”

Then I would say, “Well, there are a lot of moving parts to my process. What are you most interested in?” because I don’t want to inundate them with information they don’t care about. I don’t want their feelings to change from excited and interested to bored.

So, what’s your fishing line, and is it working the way you want it to?

Don’t be a stranger. (770) 993-1129. tdockery@TheResolveFirm.com