You don't know anything until you've had 100 meetings
The first time I looked for a job I accidentally learned one of the most important lessons of my entire career.
The first time I looked for a job I accidentally learned one of the most important lessons of my entire career.
In 2006, I moved from Charlotte to Nashville after getting engaged. This move required a real deal job search - no university recruiting process to hold my hand.
Knowing only a few people in Nashville, I began building a professional network and ultimately found a job about 5 months later.
Bottom line - it is going to take 100 meetings.
I kept a meticulous spreadsheet of every meeting during that initial job search - the right job presented itself around the 100th meeting.
Since then, that number has continued to repeat itself. Whether it has been starting businesses, finding support for non-profits, or watching other friends in their own job searches, the number 100 continues to repeat again and again.
Why 100?
First, 100 meetings allows you to begin broadly, but distill down over time to the best possible recipients for your product / service / idea / etc. For many things in life, you do not know who your audience actually is. You will need enough points of contact to both figure out who resonates with your message, and then begin to develop relationships in that vertical.
Second, you need enough conversations to have a reasonable sense of the market’s needs. You may have an idea on a potential market for a new product or service. You need to get enough feedback to determine the actual point of view of your potential customers.
Finally, you will hear the vast majority of questions and objections to your pitch. For most things, there are only a handful of common objections. 100 meetings allows you to hear these common points of pushback. More importantly, it will also give you a chance to script the best possible response to an objection, and then test it out and determine whether the response is well received.
It’s not never-ending persistence
The simple take-away is if you are not seeing results, you probably are quitting too early. That probably feels too vague to be helpful.
Instead, give it 100 meetings.
I’ve seen this now play out repeatedly both personally and with others. I’ve seen it work with starting businesses, selling products, services, and job searches.
If you get to 100 meetings and there are no results, you’ve got a bigger problem and should take a material pause to reconsider your course of action.