CHAPTER 6

SMALL TALK

THE SEEMINGLY MUNDANE ACTIVITY THAT MAKES A HUGE DIFFERENCE

The subject of what to talk about, whether at an event or at the start of a meeting, is of concern to a great many people. Confidence about small talk will stand you in good stead in both the networking and meeting phases of your business development activity.

When we meet someone for the first time we begin to establish a relationship by indulging in an activity known as ‘self-disclosure’. We do this via what we all know as small talk or chit-chat.

Those in business often knock such talk as frivolous nonsense. They worry that they won’t be taken seriously or regarded as professional if they aren’t keeping the conversation to matters of business, which is why all too often I’ll hear people start up a conversation with something like: ‘So, how’s business?’ Or (one that I have heard a few times of late): ‘So, what’s keeping you awake at night?’

The first is hackneyed as an opener and the second just warrants a reply along the lines of: ‘Well, I think my partner’s having it off with the Eco-box delivery guy and my youngest has expressed an interest in banking.’

Topics

Interestingly enough, the topics regarded as suitable for small talk depend on where in the world you live. Given this book is for the UK market and that’s the country I was born in and live in, I’ll stick to that. In the UK it’s OK to talk about:

The Weather

There are societies and cultures in which being polite is an overt, active thing. North America is one such society.

An American you have never met before will be quite happy to walk up to you and introduce himself to you with a hearty handshake and something like: ‘Hi, my name’s Hank, I’m from New York. It’s the greatest city in the world.’ (I met someone who had this said to them!)

Now, for someone from Great Britain, that’s too much information, too soon and, dare I say, a tad presumptuous. We can get chatting to someone and talk to them for half an hour before saying ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name’, in the full knowledge that we both know neither of us has told the other our name.

The reason is that in our society, being polite means not imposing ourselves on others – leaving them to themselves, respecting their privacy – which is why we have, over the years, come up with techniques to initiate conversations that do not make either of us feel uncomfortable, such as making some comment about the weather.

The reason the weather is such a good subject in the UK is, first, that it varies a great deal; secondly, we all experience it; and thirdly, it’s a great leveller. In a society that is still largely founded in the class system, the weather transcends all social divides. No matter how old or young you are, how little or how much money you earn, where you were educated or brought up, the weather is something we can all chat about. In fact, Kate Fox in her superb book Watching the English devotes a fascinating chapter to it. As an Englishman who’s lived in Scotland since 2000 but who travels throughout the UK for work, I can say it is as applicable to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish as it is to the English.

Don’t get me wrong: you can’t spend 25 minutes talking to someone about the weather – unless, of course, your target market is meteorologists, in which case dive in!

Travel

For some reason we are obsessed with finding out how people we meet travelled to that location. We want to know and compare routes and modes of transport, and share travel horror stories with one another. The conversation often goes something like this:

‘How did you get here today?’
‘Oh, I got the tube.’
‘Really, where did you get off?’
‘Holborn.’
‘Oh yes. I suppose Chancery Lane is a bit closer but Holborn’s somehow easier, isn’t it?’
‘Do you take the Central Line for work?’
‘Yes, but I normally get off at Bank and walk over London Bridge.’
‘Really, so where do you come in from?’
‘Liverpool Street, because I live just outside St Albans. Well, to be fair, it’s more like Watford, but you know what I mean.’
‘Yes, so you work south of the river then. Isn’t there a train direct to London Bridge from where you are?’
‘Well, yes, but it would mean catching a slightly earlier train from St Albans and then changing at Blackfriars. I refuse to leave the house before 6.30 am.’
‘I know what you mean. I seem to spend my entire life commuting.’

If the weather has disrupted the travel system, then we are in small talk heaven! As Kate Fox observes in her wonderful book, we actually like moaning and use it to bond – so don’t knock it.

That said, you don’t want to be one of those dreary, pessimistic networkers whom everyone attempts to ditch as soon as they can. For some the glass isn’t just half empty, it’s cracked and the water’s stagnant!

Sport

People love talking about their pastimes, passions and hobbies, particularly sport. You may worry that you don’t know much about sport, but in fact you don’t need to.

I don’t play golf or rugby, but I meet loads of blokes who do and have and I can still have a conversation with them. I’ve picked up enough stuff about golf to be able to ask questions, which is great, because it takes the pressure off me to be interesting and I get to know more about the other person.

So, I ask them what they play off (their handicap), what club they belong to, which is their favourite course and which course they would play if they could pick any one in the world. And each time I get answers to these questions I learn more about golf for the next time I meet a golfer.

The same works for rugby or football: Which team do you support? How long have you supported them? Do you get to go to the matches? How are you doing this season? Who’s the best player right now? And so on.

If you want to know a little of what’s going on, then all you need do is glance through the back pages of the Metro on your way to work, which will tell you who scored how many against whom the day before.

I’m not going to go through all the other topics for small talk, I simply wanted to point out how we use conversation to build rapport, and to learn more about one another – self-disclosure. These introductory subjects of small talk – travel, holidays, the weather and good old footie for the majority of blokes – lead inevitably on to other subjects, such as where we live, whether we have kids, where we went to school or university and what we do at the weekends. It’s information that you glean by indulging in this kind of talk that is invaluable.

It’s where we find common ground, see if we have shared values, and it’s where we establish and build rapport: we discover whether the person with whom we are talking is like us. This is important, because people tend to buy from people they like and they like people like themselves.

Talking about Yourself

The information you learn during small talk will help you remember the person long after you’ve parted company, but it’s also what you reveal that will enable them to remember you among all the other people they may have met over the previous few weeks.

I want you to be honest with yourself for a moment. If you and I met and got chatting at a networking event and you told me what you did and what your job title was, and I wasn’t from the same industry or sector as you, would it mean anything to me and how long would it be before I forgot what you’d said?

When I was a lawyer I worked in the ‘Commercial Dispute Resolution’ department and specialized in contentious health, safety and environmental matters. (Oh, how the winter nights just flew by at my house!) Saying this to another lawyer or someone who worked within a law firm would be OK, because they could ‘place’ me and ask relevant questions to learn more. But if you know nothing about law the information would be utterly meaningless and, more importantly, completely forgettable. If networking is about making an impression and being remembered, then you would have failed.

Some years ago I arrived at a hotel in Derby, where I had been booked to talk to 70 trainee lawyers about networking skills. Before I did my bit, I got chatting to the senior partner of the large, national firm with which these delegates were going to work.

This guy was very well presented, exceptionally well spoken and by any objective standard what the vast majority of us would call seriously posh. Not so much a plum in his mouth but the entire orchard, complete with pickers from former Soviet states.

We did the handshake and pleased to meet you bit and fell in to easy conversation about Casino Royale (the film had recently been released), the role of Daniel Craig in comparison to previous Bonds, the way the director had interpreted the book and so on. I then made some comment regarding this guy’s footwear, which resulted in a conversation about men’s shoes, tailoring and suiting.

There was a natural pause in the conversation and I remarked to him that all we’d done for 20 minutes was indulge in small talk. I explained that one of the things I was going to talk to the 70 trainees about was this very subject – the importance of this kind of chit-chat.

He paused for a moment and looked thoughtfully before saying: ‘Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever won a piece of work based on my technical ability as a lawyer; not one. I’ve won clients because I play tennis, because I have an interest in men’s fashion and because I have a house in the South of France, but never solely on my knowledge of the law.’

His observation reflects what all those who earn their living in sales can attest to. Customers and clients buy things from and deal with people they like.

A final point about small talk: it shows that you’re human and that you’re in possession of a personality.

Are you a senior civil servant, an HR professional, an actuary, an investment manager, local government worker or accountant? Good: I’ve got a preconceived idea about all of those jobs – and so has every person you meet.

If you play a pivotal role in deciding housing policy for your local authority, then when we meet you at an event and you tell us that you’re in local government, we all have a ready-made, off-the-shelf, nicely prejudiced view of what kind of person you are. Yep, people regard those in local government as scruffy, lazy – all on flexi-time – and incapable of making a decision without going through five committees, having a vote and then thinking about it for five months because not all the ‘stakeholders’ have been consulted fully. Oh, and you all have the obligatory four weeks’ sick leave a year.

That’s absolutely unfair, yet you need to be aware of how what you do and the sector in which you work are viewed by other people. If you are an accountant and you know that the rest of us think you are dull, anal and badly dressed, make sure that when people meet you they are pleasantly surprised – and that you don’t conform to their stereotype.

I’ve mentioned already that not everyone you meet while out and about is going to end up being a client; and that this doesn’t matter. What absolutely, positively and most definitely does matter is that when you part company, they come away with a favourable impression of you, as someone whose company they really enjoyed. You may not be mates for life, but they should feel that they’ve met a genuinely nice person.

As Sir Digby, now Lord Jones, former chairman of the CBI, said: ‘Contrary to popular belief, genuinely, nice, honest, decent people actually do rather well in business.’

If you are an estate agent (no one has a preconceived idea of what they’re like, do they?), you get chatting to someone and then move on after 20 minutes, you might not necessarily end up getting an instruction to buy or sell a house from them, but if back in their office a colleague asks how the networking event went last night and they can say, ‘Do you know, I met a really nice woman last night who was an estate agent. We had a good chat. It turns out that she does X as a hobby and that she used to …’, then that’s a good result. You left a favourable impression, you blew away their preconceived image of estate agents and you raised your profile.

Being Memorable

One of the single biggest benefits to networking only within the markets you have targeted is that each time you attend a relevant event you raise your profile. This is why you should always try to speak at events: standing up in front of your target market is the best way to stand out and be remembered.

The sector you’re in is probably no different to mine: awash with providers. There are countless firms offering training and coaching to every sector you can think of. So it’s vital to stand out, and that starts with when you meet people.

There are plenty of ways to stand out and be remembered, but what we are talking about here is ways that are appropriate.

A former colleague of mine was at a breakfast networking event, organized by a large, international law firm’s Glasgow office. There she was, buck’s fizz in one hand and smoked salmon nibble in the other, chatting away to the managing partner and the director of communications, when she became aware of a bloke hovering just outside the cosy triumvirate. A moment later, he barged in to the group, pointed at my colleague’s watch (a Rolex) and shouted: ‘Is that real?’

Rather taken aback by the unsolicited intrusion, she replied: ‘Yes, it is.’

‘So’s mine!’ the response came back.

Of course the people she was talking to were rendered speechless by what they had just witnessed, although they managed to continue their conversation. This guy can certainly claim to have stood out at the event, but not for the right reasons.

Standing out is about being remembered for your personality or for your clothing – maybe you have a reputation for wearing funky shirts, great ties, perhaps it’s your love of shoes or handbags. Maybe you are always the life and soul of the party? Perhaps you are the marathon runner within the office, or the sailor or the campanologist (look it up), or maybe you’re the only person who ever thanks customers and clients for their business or sends flowers or cards to organizers of events and admin people working behind the scenes, who almost always get overlooked?

You need a ‘story’, a few ‘highlights’, a few little snippets that make you easy to remember – for the right reasons.

The best way to illustrate what I mean is by sharing with you what I know people remember about me.

First of all, I’m 6 feet 3 inches tall, have a Mancunian accent and wear glasses, so there are certain physical attributes that people recall. Aside from the physical stuff, there’s also my work history and my hobbies.

My clients are the learning and development managers of law firms and they talk to each other, at their annual conference but also via email and phone. They ask each other’s advice: ‘Who do you use for this sort of training?’ ‘We’re contemplating using this person for this subject; do you know anything about them?’

One of my clients might say, ‘Yeah, we use Nick Davies,’ to which the other person says, ‘Oh, I have heard the name somewhere but I’ve never met him, although I’m sure Sean at Universal Exports was talking about him a few weeks ago.’

My client might reply: ‘Yeah, he’s that tall bloke from Manchester who used to be a lawyer. He’s got a thing about shoes, wears funky shirts, does a bit of stand-up comedy.’

‘Oh, yes, I know who you mean. I think Holly at Moonraker Inc. has used him recently. Have you got his number?’

Make sure people are talking about you and recommending you rather than your competitors! Stand out! Doing a good job is a given, so be remembered for other things.

Here’s another one of those quotes:

My biggest mistake, the one for which I can never forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obsessive pursuit of my own individuality.

Oscar Wilde

Write It Down

One last thing about small talk: write it down. Not all of the stuff you’ve heard and not while the person is talking to you, but make sure that afterwards – maybe while sitting in the car just before you leave the venue, on the train home or even next day in the office – you write down, on their business card, the salient points.

Start with the date and place you met them – it’s amazing how quickly you’ll forget. Then note stuff that’s personal to them, such as where they are going on holiday, what football team they support, how many kids they have and their ages, any big event coming up like a wedding or weekend away, what they used to do for a living, where they hail from originally.

Even better, if your organization has some kind of client relationship system (CRM), then put all you know onto that.

All of this information is not there in order for you to embark on a campaign of quality stalking, but so that in three months’ time, when you look back at your contacts, you’ll be able to place that person and use some snippet of information to help make the FOLLOW UP call a whole lot easier. You’ll be able to CONNECT with them, as I will illustrate later on.

Business Talk

Following on from the chit-chat there will normally come a point at which one or both parties instinctively feels that it’s time to move things on a little. There are no hard and fast rules with this – ‘Just do small talk for 7 minutes and then you must talk business’ – so you need to be aware of signals that may mean it is appropriate to conversationally ‘move on’. Peter Collett’s The Book of Tells is a great place to learn more about conversational cues.

Here are some to start you off:

All the above are what I might term ‘linking’ questions, great for moving on to work-related stuff. Asking questions is good, because as every sales person knows, selling is not about being able to talk, it’s about asking questions, shutting up and listening.

There are two reasons for this:

Just as there are topics of social small talk, there are topics of business small talk too.

This could be general, such as the country’s finances or the economic outlook. Then each sector has its topics of small talk: local government, construction, defence, law, accountancy, retail and so on.

Each sector then has areas within that, so taking law as an example these include construction, employment, real estate, plus many more. Sure enough, each one of those has certain subjects and issues that form the topics of conversation.

So if you are targeting the commercial property sector, for instance, then you should know what’s going on in that field (no pun intended). You won’t know as much as the surveyors or agents or lawyers you’re talking to, but a read through the latest copy of the relevant trade press (probably Estates Gazette) will give you a sufficient overview to be able to contribute to conversations and ask intelligent questions. That all adds to your credibility.

Listening

Talking is all well and good, but it’s listening that really holds the key in developing relationships.

We live in an age where we are bombarded by people and organizations attempting to get our attention. As a result, we are in what might be best described as a state of ‘continual partial attention’. We hear everything but listen to nothing. It’s like sitting in front of a conveyor belt of information: we see it but we register very little. The Metro newspaper sums up what I mean very neatly: we pick it up, read it and leave it, having got the merest taste of what’s going on in the world but not knowing about anything in any depth or detail. In short, we graze.

However, when you want to get to know someone, when you are looking out for the next client, when you want to CONNECT with them, then you have to listen to them, really listen. Not hear, listen.

You hear with your ears but you listen with your eyes. We all know this, which is why, when a man is watching the telly and a woman starts speaking to him, she knows that she is wasting her time, because even though he may say he’s listening, he’s not. He can hear her, but he sure as hell isn’t listening.

Really listening means listening and deriving meaning from what’s said. Often, particularly in networking situations, we get so fixated on what we think we should be telling the prospect about our service or product that we are not listening to what the other person is saying, we’re preparing our answer.

If you want to know more about the body language that lets you know when someone is listening to you, buy yourself a copy of Collett’s The Book of Tells or Barbara and Allan Pease’s The Definitive Guide to Body Language.

The only thing I’m going to mention here is that whether your stance or what you are doing with your body is comfortable for you is not of paramount importance. When you are talking to another person it’s not about how you feel, it’s about how they feel – and that should not be intimidated, uncomfortable or pressured. You could be the most fascinating person on the planet, but if you’re standing too close to or you keep touching the person you’re talking to, they’re going to leave as quickly as possible, with a bad impression. And even if what you had to sell was of tremendous value to them, they wouldn’t ever buy from you. They’d rather go elsewhere, even if it meant paying more for a slightly inferior product.

How to Move On

Many people ask me how to get away from dull people. Although I’d be the first to admit that there are quite a few members of the ‘seriously dull club’, they don’t tend to be in business or go to networking events. And while, as I’ve said, not everyone you meet will end up being a client, it’s quite rare to meet someone who’s not interesting. Maybe not straight away, on first meeting, but once you get talking, the vast majority of us do have something interesting to talk about regarding the experiences and adventures we’ve had.

Anyway, you’ve been chatting to someone for a while and you feel that the conversation has run its course. You may want to get an opportunity to meet this person again and chat further about matters that have arisen or areas that you have in common business-wise, but for now you want to move on to someone else.

First of all, do not fall back on ‘If you’ll excuse me I need to go and freshen up my drink’ or ‘If you’ll excuse me I need to pop to the loo’. The problem with both of these is that the other person may decide that they need to do the same and end up following you. While someone accompanying you to the drinks area might be a bit of a pain when you wanted to get away from them, it’s not half as awkward as them either sitting in the cubicle or standing next to you while you’re both having a wee.

I’m going to furnish you with two options here, both of which work well and both of which require you to be assertive – and one that represents the very zenith of networking ability.

Tip One: Be Honest

I’ll illustrate the first tip with some dialogue:

‘Well, Tim, it’s been lovely to chat to you this evening and hear about your business and the stuff that’s going on, but there are a few other people I’d like to catch up with while I’m here, so if you’ll excuse me I’ll go and seek them out.’

This is assertive, honest and unambiguous.

Some people feel it’s a little bit mean, because it does result in leaving the other person to fend for themselves. But Tim’s a grown up. He’s been to networking events before and he understands that you aren’t there to spend the next two hours with him. If he’s the sort of guy who can’t handle parting, then maybe he should ring the Samaritans.

Tip Two: Introduce Them to Someone Else

When I think of networking being done well, one person always comes to mind: Vincent Connor. I’ve known Vincent since 2000, when I met him in my capacity as director of a recruitment business and he was heading up the Glasgow office of the law firm formerly known as Masons (now Pinsent Masons). Vincent moved on to head up the firm’s activities right across Scotland and Northern Ireland, before leaving to sunnier, slightly more humid climes to run the Far East Asian region of the firm. He now sits in a big office block in Hong Kong and is no doubt wooing the locals with his urbane Scottish charm.

What Vincent has in common with all good networkers is his ability to move around a room like a social butterfly. To watch him do this was superb. He’d welcome people with a warm, genuine smile, move easily into small talk and then glide effortlessly on to business matters.

One of his fortes, however, was moving on. Rather than leave someone on their own, he’d ask them if they knew ‘Joanne’ or ‘Dave’ or one of any number of people with whom he was acquainted. Again, I’ll use dialogue to illustrate my point:

VINCENT: Nick, have you had the pleasure of meeting Joanne from KPMG yet?
ME: No, I can’t say I have.
VINCENT: Oh well, let me introduce you to her. She’s just over there.

He’d then guide me across to where Joanne was standing talking to some other people, but while doing so would give me a bit of background on her, like where she used to work, whether she had kids, where she went to university or what hobby or sport she was into. Then the conversation would go like this:

Vincent: Hi Jo, sorry to interrupt, but there’s someone I’d really like you to meet. Nick, Joanne. Joanne, Nick Davies from the Scottish Legal Awards. Nick’s originally from Manchester/is a big footie fan/does a bit of stand-up comedy/used to run a catering business.

He’d choose something where he knew there was a connection or link between the two of us. Once the introduction was complete, he’d make his farewells, excuse himself and move on to someone else or a group of people.

You may be thinking that you’d have to know a bit about a few people for this to work, and I wouldn’t deny that. However, there are a great number of occasions when you do know at least one person at an event – and one will do.

Introducing someone to another contact is moving from ‘networking’ to ‘connecting’ people and is lovely for everyone concerned.

It’s good for you because you can move on to the next person in the knowledge that you haven’t left your current contact having to find someone else.

It works for your contact because they’re not in the awkward position of having to chat to a stranger and don’t feel abandoned.

It works for the person to whom you have introduced your contact, because they have now met someone new without having to go and talk to a stranger or break in to a group.

And here’s another thing. My contact and I might have had a good natter, swapped a bit of small talk, got on well enough, but there has been no business connection. Just because this encounter is not going to lead to anything, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the same will be the case for them and another person. They could get on like a house on fire and end up having a very profitable business relationship.

Think of this as like the dating game. In the course of trying to find the ideal partner, you will meet a lot of people you like, get on with and have a laugh with; it doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to take it further or that just because they aren’t the ‘right one’ for you, they aren’t absolutely right for someone else. Once again, the message surrounding networking has to be relax – it’s about chatting to people. If business springs from it, great; if it doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world.

Following Up

So relax, indulge in appropriate small talk, listen and be aware of how you are making the person to whom you are speaking feel. Be polite but assertive. Connect and introduce people to one another, write stuff down and always look the part.

Networking – at the right events – allows you to get through the CONNECT and MEET stages of the model simultaneously.

If you’ve read this book from the beginning, as opposed to skipping to the bits that take your fancy, and I’ve done my job properly, you should have FOLLOW UP and keeping control at every stage imprinted in your brain.

However, I now want to examine in detail how you follow up after meeting someone at a networking event. Having trained and coached many thousands of people in all manner of organizations, this is the single biggest area of concern for the vast majority of them – so it’s to this that the next chapter turns.