Technology has definitely changed the way we do business. I’m about to spend two months in Bali, running my practice from there thanks to the internet, Skype and cheap phone calls. It can be much easier to do business virtually – to have a webinar rather than a seminar, to communicate via the internet – than face to face. But sometimes there is no substitute for actually sitting in the same room as someone, being able to look them in the eye and have a real life conversation.

My good friend Chami runs a very successful recruiting business in the narrow niche of business intelligence. If you need to hire someone in that field, he’s your man. After living in Sydney for about a year, he just moved back to Melbourne. So I caught up with him for lunch.

I asked him how it was being back. He told me he had had 120 meetings since he got back … and that he had drunk a lot of coffees. He’d been back 3 weeks. 120 meetings in 3 weeks. I did the maths on that – its 40 a week. Pretty phenomenal.

I think all of us in business can learn something from Chami – and that is very simply to meet more people.

In the Million Dollar Expert Program we talk about meeting 150 people in your market for coffee such that you end up with 150 people who know and value what you do. For most of us that would take a year. Chami would probably take a month.

There are lots of other effective marketing strategies, but when we are getting started, when we are launching a new offering, and for those familiar with the white belt to black belt model, when we are below blue belt, nothing is half as effective as face-to-face meetings.

So take a leaf out of Chami’s book, and get face-to-face and belly-to-belly with twice as many prospects as you think is reasonable.

Love to hear your thoughts and experiences – you can leave your comments below.