Questions

I just want to meet him for a quick coffee (I know time is valuable and when visiting from another country, these kind of people are generally open) and I do know some people that know the person I want to reach out to, but I don't know how to ask them.

James Altucher (famous investor/author/entrepreneur) has some advice for this. As an entrepreneur myself, I totally agree and virtually any other strategy is wasting your target's time. The advice is (I'm summarizing here, it's not 100% accurate to Altucher's words):"Give-Give-Give-Give-Give, Ask". In other words: do a number of things for him/her for free, without asking. Send him/her your own (solid) suggestions about capturing more of his/her company's market, with a lead-in like "I know you're trying to dominate Industry X with your Company Y, I noticed there are three critical things your competition isn't doing that you guys can, here they are and why I think they are important" etc. etc., then do something like "I read your interview with Inc. Magazine about Product X, and when commenter James Doe said that Product X has no use today, I countered him with these 3 salient points..." etc. etc.....Then another time, email him with "I noticed your company Z has no lead generation on its site. My suggestion is offer this white paper I wrote for you on your industry, and offer it as an incentive for people to sign up to your mailing list (thus generating an email list of targeted customer. Oh, I use Email Platform ABC for that on my site, if you need some help implementing it, I'll be happy to advise you." Etc. Etc....THEN after you've given-given-given-given, ask her/him for 'coffee and 15 minutes of his time, no more" because then he/she will be like "ok this guy/gal has been helpful and he/she hasn't wasted my time." Good luck!


Answered 10 years ago

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