You must create face-to-face time with people. You must respect them. You must be remembered by them.

  1. Coffee or lunch can go a long way to creating a bond. Liberally invite contacts and prospective contacts to be with you face-to-face.
  2. Send a genuine, sincere compliment when it is warranted. Since email is so common, email is okay. But, curiosity and memorability rises when a physical card arrives with a legible hand-written note inside mentioning something relevant to the recipient.
  3. If someone gets an award, he or she, ought to get a congratulatory note or card from you.
  4. Use social media and reach out. Professional social sites are also very valuable. Reach out.
  5. Create an eco-system (use search box for “eco-system” to learn more).
  6. Leverage your skills, hobbies, sports, activities, entertainment, politics, likes or dislikes by using those attributes or interests to get involved with groups which have something in common.
  7. When you attend conferences, circulate to “work the room”. Measure your conferences by the number of hands you shake and the number of introductions you make not by the subject matter of the conference or by the number of lines of notes you wrote. How many good impressions did you make?
  8. Use the power of 6 degrees. Once you make a contact, ask that person to introduce you to, or arrange a meeting with, one of his or her contacts that may be of importance to you. Repeat with the new contacts. Do this when your contact has a good degree of comfort with you.
  9. Approaching new people is often unnerving. Be ready for rejections and cold-shoulders. But you can minimize rejections and rebuffs by having something interesting to say. Reference our entire section titled, “Ice Breakers” for plenty of topics to talk about.
  10. If you are willing to offer help, your willingness may make you more memorable. Approach people whom you most likely can help. For example, either ahead of the event or during the event, if you learned that someone could use your expertise or an extra worker, and you are willing to help out, then offer to help. Mind, you, don’t start your conversation with a new contact by immediately offering help. Get to know the person. If the person will be receptive, before you break off contact for the evening, be sure to extend a genuine, sincere, legitimate offer to help.
  11. Keep your promises, no matter how small or how difficult. If you mentioned you’d get back to someone about a particular topic then get back to them.
  12. Remember names and faces. There are plenty of mnemonic techniques out there pioneered by Harry Lorayne. Buy his books and apply his techniques. I continue to be amazed at how shocked people are that I remember details of them, or their comments from previous meetings. It creates quite a positive impression.
  13. Often the movers and shakers in the business world secure positions of decision-making capacity with associations. Those names are often published in seminar or association promotional literature, as are guest speakers, etc. Learn something useful about whoever you need to meet and use the socializing phase of the gathering to work those contacts.
  14. Be distinguishable and memorable, in a professional sort of way, by using props to help improve the contact’s recall. Perhaps by wearing a distinguishable lapel pin, or carrying a unique handbag, a unique ring, etc. Later when making contact you can use this to remind the person, “I was the person with the…”
  15. Hand out your business card with something special and noteworthy on it that stirs the prospective contact’s curiosity and leads you into a [very brief] discussion about it.