One of my friends in human resources told me that Terry Fouts, the Medical Director at GreatWest Healthcare, wanted to hire an executive coach to work with the eight physicians that were his medical directors around the country. And Bob said, "You really ought to give Terry a call."
So I said, "Bob, since you know Terry and work with him every day, how would you feel about setting up a meeting with Terry and sitting in with us?" Bob said, "That would be great, I'd love to do that."
The end result was that Bob set up the meeting in Terry's office, and then spent fully 50% of the meeting telling Terry how great I am, and the outcome of that was a $50,000 consulting engagement.
Matt: Wow.
BF: Could I have gotten that assignment myself? Maybe.
Could I have gotten an appointment with Terry? Probably.
But then it would have been a rather cold scripted sales meeting, where I tried to find out what he wanted, and tried to explain why I was the best person to do it. It could have resulted in some business, but that might have been six or eight months down the line.
Bringing Bob into the equation and letting him help me produced an immediate contract.
Matt: I can see there's great value in letting our friends help us.
BF: Let me talk about setting up a long-distance meeting, because many of our conferences these days are with person A in Chicago, person B in San Francisco, and person C in Atlanta. There's an online service called "freeconferencecall.com"