Linda Coles - Start with Hello: How to Convert Todays Stranger Into Tomorrows Client

About the author

Hello! Im Linda Coles, an international speaker and author with short spiky hair. I run a small company called Blue Banana and mainly work from my home office on a fig orchard in New Zealand. Paul is the love of my life, Stella and Monkey are my two cats and Daisy and Molly are my two goats.

My background is mainly in retail management working in some of the UKs biggest retailers, but life in the slower lane beckoned and so Paul and I moved to green pastures south of Auckland. The slower life never really happened, and I continue to work with some really great brands by helping them to build relationships with their customers online.

I speak a great deal and write about building relationships, an important part of being successful in business, and I wrote the book Learn Marketing with Social Media in 7 Days in 2011. I also write regularly as one of only 220 LinkedIn influencers, along with Richard Branson, Barack Obama and Arianna Huffington, which sounds very grand and I am very honoured to have been asked.

Mark Twain once said The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. And Albert Einstein said I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots. I guess I have made it my purpose, my find out why, to keep people talking to each other, to help them become less focused on their smart phone and more interested in what and who is around them at any given time.

This book is very practical and very easy to read. My goal is to make this book accessible to everyone and so you dont need an MBA to be able to understand the concepts and the ideas. Above all, I want you to finish it, use the information, then pass it on to someone else, maybe a stranger, someone you dont know yet.

Feel free to look me up and say hello.

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Email linda@lindacoles.com

Acknowledgements

My inspiration has come from many people and places, and I would like to say thanks. Thanks to everyone who submitted their stories and there are many of you. To Seth Godin for your daily inspiration, to Dave Kerpen for stretching my ideas, probably without even knowing it, to all of those people who have followed, connected and friended me adding more ideas into the pot, and to the great Team Wiley who have a knack for making a book a billion times better than the original raw manuscript.

Introduction

Let me start with hello.

Businesspeople all over the world are looking for new and alternative ways to market themselves and their businesses. By going back to good old-fashioned small talk and saying hello to strangers, more business opportunities and business connections will arise. People buy from people they know, like and trust, so get to know more people!

Talking to strangers does not come naturally to everyone. Thats where this book can help. It guides you through the key skills you need to learn to start building effective relationships.

This book is for anyone wanting to:

build business and social connections today and in the future

meet more people but find it hard to start a conversation with someone they havent met before

be inspired with real-life examples of others who have taken the plunge by simply saying hello to a stranger

mix up their daily schedule a bit to see where a little serendipity takes them.

By developing the art of saying hello to someone you dont know and starting a brief conversation you will be able to develop productive, profitable business relationships easily.

Peppered with real-life stories of how chance conversations have led to business relationships and new opportunities, Start with Hello will show you how valuable a chance conversation can be and how lucrative the return on investment (ROI) can be.

Divided into five parts, Start with Hello offers productive, creative ideas on:

why we have historically had an aversion to talking to strangers and some easy ways of overcoming this and starting to engage and communicate with strangers

the practicalities of networking with others, how to start a conversation and some freestyle networking ideas

how to network effectively online using the most popular social networking sites and services

how to develop a strategy for successfully connecting with new people and how to determine what sort of person you are talking to, using behavioural profiles

how to use the art of chat to connect with people and build personal relationships because chance meetings are not limited only to business.

By the time you have finished reading this book, you will be filled with the confidence to make the first move and to start a credible conversation with someone you dont know yet.

So start with hello, and convert todays strangers into tomorrows clients.

Opening story

I picked this story about Erwin to begin this book because it is such a good example of someone saying hello resulting in something great happening. Why, saying hello to a stranger and sharing a drink in a bar not only earned him a substantial fee on a project, but it was also a turning point in his life. How proud Erwin must feel when he passes The Hague and sees the fruits of his labour displayed there for many thousands of others to enjoy too!