How to get meetings with people too busy to see you | Hacker News Reader

How to get meetings with people too busy to see you

steveblank.com

145 pointsibrahimcesar31 comments

For my inbox:

Turn-offs:

  - obviously sent to many others
  - obviously boilerplate
  - buzzwordy
  - uses the word "coffee"
  - no apparent direction or desired outcome
  - previously insulted me on-line

Turn-ons:

  - already know them
  - already respect them
  - referred by someone I know or respect
  - mentions something I said or wrote
  - kind words without sounding contrived
  - mentions something I'm irresistably curious about
  and most importantly:
  - builds or expands upon something I said, wrote, or am passionate about

"- previously insulted me on-line"

This one gave me a good laugh! Do you go by memory off of real names in blogs and the like, or have you made a list that you keep up to date?

And you thought the USA was the only group collecting data on you!

Listen asshole,

Can we meet for coffee next week?

I'd like to discuss our shared synergies around online advertising. I believe you could be a huge value-add to our preliminary discussions.

Upvoted for beating me to the punch, and I'm leaving a reply before someone unrelated to the intended recipient doesn't get the humour and takes offence to your strong wording.

"kind words without sounding contrived"

In the late 90's I was quoted many times in the press simply as a result of sending emails to writers that lead with telling the how much I liked their article on "X" (something I knew about). Then instead of telling them what they said that was wrong [1] I simply told them that if they did another story on the same subject to feel free to contact me in the future. I only said positive things nothing negative. It worked very well.

[1] Because as you know anytime you know much about something you always find multiple errors in stories in the paper. So the tendency (which you have to overcome) is to correct people. They don't like that. They don't thank you. They don't say anything. For many reasons (most people don't like to be told they made mistakes obviously) but mainly (I concluded) because they are on to the next story and it simply doesn't matter anymore.

So "tea" is okay?

What's in it for me?

Answer that question for the person you are selling to, pitching to, requesting a meeting with, etc and your chances of success increase dramatically.

This isn't new wisdom, it's arguably one of the oldest tenets of sales. Humans, by nature, are selfish beings. The majority expect a return for any effort put in on their behalf.

This is where 'social engineering' comes in super duper handy. 'Interview' them for a 'publication' and pepper them with fluff as well as the questions you really want to ask.

Most people with a few year's experience have long been inoculated against that - usually after having given a couple of pseudo-interviews and later understanding they have been played like a banjo...

Okay. What about the next time you want to speak with them?

This can backfire and create resentment from real potential customers.

I agree 100% - it's sometimes hard to imagine that we actually have something to offer a successful or powerful person.

The only thing I would be wary about is that you may write "let me tell you something fascinating about XYZ which I have discovered." A busy person may read that as "let me take up even more of your time boring you to tears with some bullshit about XYZ that I made up so you'd take my meeting."

If you don't truly have something interesting to share then you shouldn't write that just to get a meeting. The OP posted that specific text, but I think what he was really getting at was just being considerate and original.

But who is offering to teach me something I don’t know.

If I had to guess, I would also say that Blank does something like what I learned to do: look for people who are already proactively engaged in something. I wrote a similar essay called "How to get your professors' attention, along with coaching and mentoring" (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-pro...) that described how I began to filter requests by looking at whether the people making the request had some skin in the game, or have done something to show investment and the ability to be helped.

Most people appear to learn how to do this through trial and error, but it's also useful to codify them.

Not too bad advice but the key lies somewhere else:

0. Stop chasing the one investor or selected perceived important people but rather get a sense who might be important

1. First and most important: ACHIEVE something, create something unique, build strong traction, DO something where others raise their eyebrows, get people impressed, everyone!

2. This is now what most people don't get: you do not network by just going to networking events or by mingling with other people, no: your achievements will be your networking vehicle -- you network by achieving stuff -- you don't have t ask for meetings anymore, people will approach you. Or you have just to talk about your achievements (to everyone) and the rest comes by itself. And when you want ask for a meeting, don't -- just tell your achievements and the other party will ask to grab a coffee together. So, create or work towards a situation where others approach you some day. Really, the key is to work on achievements and nothing else.

It's definitely not enough to tell the other party "in exchange [...] what we learned about" this and that, you have to achieve something, tell them where you succeeded! They don't want another boring conversation with a flimsy excuse. Imagine some developer who wants to work for your startup and approaches you and tells you about what he learned about some random technical topic -- this would lead to an awkward situation where you just want to escape the conversation with a needy guy. Instead imagine the same guy telling you that he build the first Sinatra-like framework for Openresty/Lua that blows Go and the JVM together and he would love to show it to you since you need some high performance web framework devs. Big difference.

Sidenote: everybody is important and will bring you one step further on your journey, not only VCs or angels. Most underrated target: other entrepreneurs, in particular those which are on the same level like you or a bit ahead because they are most willing to share thoughts or meet up and because they are your real peers (this is what I totally missed when I started).

As odd as it may sound, we think this process should work much like online dating: what can you say to pique a stranger's interest and encourage them to meet with you?

We're borrowing from online dating to create a community of professionals open to receiving coffee meeting requests. No one is guaranteeing that they'll meet with other members who reach out to them, or that they'll even respond. But by joining, everyone implicitly communicates an openness to at least receiving meeting requests from people outside their network. This is already proving powerful:

www.treatin.gs

There is a bit of irony here in that the advice article on how to get people's attention waits until 2/3 into the article to practice their own advice of _teaching us something we don't know._

I don't know Steve Blank; are all his articles like this?

I worked with Steve in the 90's. Can't comment on the rest of his articles but you have a good point.

Not whether it is relevant in this particular case or not (people will most likely read the entire piece because it's short and it's by Steve Blank) but as a general rule in any writing such as this you have to draw people in, make them curious, and make them want to read the entire piece you have written.

You can't rely that without the correct first paragraph or sentence that they won't bail on you before you get to your conclusion or are able to make your point. I guess a good headline might also take care of this. "How to get meetings" is just a so so headline. It's like "how to make more money from your clients". Sounds bland.

Personally as far as this statement which Steve made:

"“I’d like to have coffee to bounce an idea off of you and in exchange I’ll tell you all about what we learned about xx.”"

I would have flipped and restated "I'd like to tell you what we learned about xx if I can have a small amount of your time to get your thoughts on yy".

In other words leading with the benefit at the start of the sentence. Saying "I'd like to have coffee" as the first part of the sentence might act like a trigger that makes the person not even read the rest of the sentence or the email. You have to grab people's attention when you have it.

Thanks for your response!

I agree with your point, and see why one would want a hook to draw people in.

To me, this begs the question as to whether we should focus on adding so much content to make a blog post when a twitter-length blurb followed by short anecdote or commentary would be sufficient.

I thought Steve's post was insightful and well written. The article would be even better if the author made two small improvements to spelling and grammar:

1. "1960's" should be written as "1960s." It's incorrect to use an apostrophe. 2. Semicolons should separate complete, related sentences, not fragments such as "an hour from Stanford on the coast, but that hasn't helped."

I'm taking a moment to offer this feedback because I know that all good writers can benefit from constructive criticism. I look forward to reading more of the author's insightful posts.

I believe I have used the apostrophe when writing 1960s, etc. Good to know the rule, even though I'll need to get used to no apostrophe looking right. Does the same rule apply when abbreviating 1960s as 60s. In this case, would an apostrophe go before the 6, thus '60s?

Apostrophe has two uses as far as I know... one is for elision ('60s indicates that "19" has been elided or omitted) and possession (The 1910s' greatest author was Franz Kafka)

The "grocer's apostrophe" or "grocers' apostrophe" is what's incorrectly added to the plural form like what you're describing, the short answer is yes. '60s not 60's.

Single quotes have another use. Which is to mark off quotations inside of quotations.

Technically speaking you use single quotes there, but not apostrophes. However I mention it because the quotation mark that you used is a single quote.

Thanks. My keyboard only has one apostrophe/single quote key, as I suspect most do, but I have been learning to use the compose key and I appreciate little details like that.

The apostrophe has three uses:

    To form possessives of nouns
    To show the omission of letters
    To indicate certain plurals of lowercase letters

Rules and examples (including the decade examples): http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/

According to the New York Times style guide, official NYT style is to write 1960's for the plural. The motivation is that in all-caps headlines, 1960S is hard to read, so they used an apostrophe. For consistency, they used this in body text too. (They may have changed the style guide away from this recently, though.)

The larger point is that many grammar things I thought were matters of right and wrong are actually matters of style.

(Just sharing a random factoid stuck in my brain, not trying to start a grammar flame war.)

Summary:

"Silicon Valley has a “pay-it-forward” culture where we try to help each other without asking for anything in return."

"So I’ve come up with is a method to sort out who I take meetings with."

"I now prioritize meetings with a new filter: Who is offering me something in return."

By the way, I agree with the advice provided, it's just the way the author gets to the point is a bit too winding for my simple mind :-)

Not being in SV, I am jealous of "pay-it-forward" culture of SV. Seattle doesn't seem to have same culture. Actually, even remotely by phone, I had better success with SV people giving me some time for discussion compared to Seattle people.

Personally, I take any meeting/concall request from entrepreneurs as long as I have relevant domain knowledge and I know I can add something positive to the conversation. I invariably learn more from such discussion specially when I rehash the discussion in my mind afterward.

I recently got introduced to a long time entrepreneur who sold his latest company recently by a friend. At the end of our coffee meeting when we were about to leave, he asked me if I know what is WIIFY to which I said no. He smiled at me and said that when you are running a business, its a most important thing that you have to think about(What's in it for you) and it actually applies to everything from getting users to sign up or getting some investors to speak to you.

On a side note, he also told me that people like him also get interested in knowing the failures you had in running your business and how you recovered from it.

I guess at the end, it's a matter of persistence and may be some luck that your pitch will arouse interest in someone's mind and they will say yes to meet you. Until then keep building your product and learn as you go.

Shamless plug : I am building a dating platform for working professionals :)

www.jointruffle.com

You don't want to meet those people anyways, seek the path of least resistance, you'll come out further in life.

90% of networking requests come with purely selfish intent. I recall the ONE time that someone showed up to a meeting with a book that he heard would interest me. Of course I went out of my way to assist.

Give first then get...

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