Growing up, we’re praised for getting good grades and doing well in school. So it’s no surprise that many of us might scoff at being told to aim at being ‘the dumbest person in the room.’ Not really the soundest advice, is it?

However, consider the endless instances when you’ve been around people who want to be the smartest at a meeting, or on an email thread. Their need for approval can become a detriment to any progress. Ironically, the most successful people are actually the ones who want to be the ‘dumbest’ at the meeting.

While highlighting your intelligence may seem important for your career or management, the opposite is true. Instead, by focusing on trying not to be the smartest person in the room, you’re more likely to be the most successful. Allowing others to be the ‘smartest; enables better input, more creative ideas and improved team performance. Here are some guidelines for how to be the smartest ‘dumbest’ person in the room.

Surround yourself with the best people available. Great people generate great results and you need to be willing to surround yourself with great people. These top performers are the ones who will drive success.

Everyone has good ideas. No matter how smart any one person is, there are millions of other very intelligent people on all levels, from the best physicists to the smartest marketers to the best product managers. While you may have some very creative solutions to a problem, do not think that others in the room do not have even better ideas. Letting everyone speak and respecting their ideas gives you the option of selecting the best one.

Great leaders are not great at everything. If you are a great leader, there is no way you are also great at every functional area you are responsible for. You may have wonderful leadership skills, but you should enable your team to do their best and defer to them as experts rather than trying to tell them how to do their work.

Measure on results, not sound bites. The measure of success of a meeting, or a working group, or an email thread is not how smart it made you look but that it generated the best possible results. These results are what will also drive your long-term success, not how much you impressed the others at the meeting or on the email.

Rather than trying to sound the smartest at a meeting, you should aim to be the dumbest. It is more important to surround yourself with great people who will bring performance to a level higher than any individual can achieve.

How many opportunities are you leaving on the table? I can guarantee it is at least 5… Here is my thinking!!

You should be checking in on yourself on a regular basis and evaluate whether or not you’re spending your time in the right way. Are you doing the right activities? Are you reaching the level you want to be at? Do you know how you’re spending your time and what you’re doing?

Take a look now at what you’ve achieved and see if you’re going in the direction you want to go.

You want to focus your time on the most important activities you need to do each week to accomplish your goals – the ‘right’ activities.

More likely than not, your key activities should focus around engaging with your network, creating conversations, engaging with your sales funnel and building your partnership teams. This is because these are the activities that will generate new business.

Your first step is to identify the specific ‘right activities’ relevant to your business.

Next, write down about 5 – 7 of these activities, following these criteria:

1.    Does this activity generate new business?

2.    Is this an activity I can (and should) do on a weekly basis?

Commit to these activities and create a plan to spend at least 75-80% of your time doing these things. Otherwise do what you can, even if it’s just a small amount each day.

Stick to this and you’ll be creating new opportunities every week, your business will build momentum and by focusing, you’ll take your business to another level.

Good business is all about what your interactions look like as one person to the other. Your focus needs to be on creating the types of conversations that help build relationships and build rapport.

Keep an open mind and remember that not every conversations has to lead to a sale. You might be creating opportunities to sell but also, very importantly, opportunities to partner or open another door.

You know you’re on the right track as long as the focus is on building the relationship because people buy from those they know like and trust. If have the right sorts of conversations that build trust, rapport and relationships, people will connect with you and are more likely to be able to help you.

Here are 3 quick to help you to understand the other person

1.    Do you have a similar audience? Could this be a cross promotional partner? Might this person be right for your referral team?

2.    Are there any doors you can help the person to open?

3.    Engagement and understanding. You must genuinely engage and be interested in the person, (if not, they’ll sense it). Doing so allows you to really hear them and to quickly identify if you have a solution to their challenge.

When you focus on understanding the person, hearing their needs and challenges and how you can help each other. You move away from a transactional conversation and into building a mutual relationship from which you can both grow and benefit.

Business and getting new business should be so simple and it is so simple when you have the right structure in place.

Focusing on the new website, the logo, changing the brand, the fancy new flyer is not what you need.

Focusing on FB ads, SEO, pay per click is what you need.

Unless you have your 3 segments to marketing all built out and working like a finely tuned steam engine.

In this ‘Get More Referrals’ today podcast I look at exactly what you need to make more sales into your business today!

Remember to grab our ‘Building Your Million Dollar Referral System’ Guide here – www.michaelgriffiths.com.au/guide

Remember to subscribe to us on…

I-Tunes

Spotify

U-Tube

The Referral Network On Facebook

{Interesting Experience} We all get frustrated, we all feel stress & overwhelm in different ways, but how you show up in one thing is how you show up across the board.

When you’re identifying possible partnerships, don’t underestimate the little guy. For some, it can be tempting to focus all their time and effort on the big companies. However, don’t rule out smaller businesses! The smaller and lesser known companies can often be your best partners.

They can help you build credibility for future partnerships, help you try out new products or work out kinks in a lower-risk environment. They may also be less likely to be developing multiple strategic partnerships if they’re smaller or in the early stages of their business, making them hungrier to work together. Of course, use your judgment and be cautions as to which smaller businesses have a solid grounding on where the business is going.

FOMO – the “fear of missing out” – is real. It is a phenomenon that drives social behaviour, and social behaviour drives business. When you build solid strategic partnerships, you can create FOMO for each other and in turn, help each other’s business grow.

As always, use your network. Reach out to your network and see who might be able to connect you to businesses that share a similar or complementary customer base. Finally, look for people with whom you can do the same. Before you approach someone to request an introduction, see who you can connect that person with. You’ll bring those people together and they’re both more likely to return the favour.

Last but not least, be confident in your service/product, but above all be confident in yourself. If you don’t believe in your product, you won’t inspire and partner with someone who does.

In this ‘Get More Referrals Today’ podcast we look at the importance of creating engagement with your clients and showing them how much you really care about them. Adding your clients to your social platforms is so clever and so easy to do, BUT there is another HUGE benefit that most of us don’t understand.

Tune in and look at some simple strategies for client engagement that turns them into walking billboards much faster for you.

Remember to grab our ‘Building Your Million Dollar Referral System’ Guide here – www.michaelgriffiths.com.au/guide

Remember to subscribe to us on…

I-Tunes

Spotify

U-Tube

The Referral Network On Facebook