We spend a lot of time getting better at presenting our companies. But after many conversations and meetings in Vasatorp Business Club, we have started to wonder if we are sometimes practicing the wrong thing. The people that others are happy to seek out again are rarely the ones who managed to say the most about themselves, but often the ones who showed the greatest interest in someone else.

Briefly summarized

Being able to explain what you do is important, but in a first meeting the ability to listen and understand is often just as valuable. Our experience from Vasatorp Business Club is that people who ask good questions and show genuine curiosity tend to be easier to remember, while also gaining a significantly better understanding of where future business opportunities may actually lie. Perhaps we should therefore spend a little less energy on the perfect pitch and a little more on the perfect conversation.

There is a question that almost always comes up when two people from different companies meet for the first time: “What are you doing?” It's a completely natural question and usually a good start to a conversation. We need to understand who we are dealing with, what business the person represents, and what the company does in order to be able to find common ground.

At the same time, we have become very trained in answering it. We work out elevator pitches, hone presentations and try to find the wording that will make someone else understand in thirty seconds what makes our company relevant. Of course, there is value in being able to describe your business clearly, but after many meetings between entrepreneurs at Vasatorp, we have started to wonder if we sometimes put a disproportionate amount of energy into what we ourselves are going to say and considerably less into what we actually want to know about the person in front of us.

Because when you think back to a really good first meeting, it's rarely a well-formulated company presentation that you remember. More often, you remember how the conversation felt.

Those who make the strongest impression don't always talk the most.

There are people who are very skilled at making a conversation feel easy. They ask a question and actually listen to the answer, follow up on something that piqued their interest and let the conversation take a different direction than they might have initially imagined. Afterwards, they often learn much more than would have been possible in a traditional presentation about the company.

It may sound obvious, but in a business context it is surprisingly easy to do the opposite. When someone talks about their business, we almost automatically start looking for the connection to our own. We hear a challenge and start formulating a solution before the person has even finished speaking, or wait for an opening where we can talk about a service that might be a good fit. The conversation then easily becomes two company presentations happening next to each other, rather than an actual exchange.

That's a shame, because curiosity serves a much bigger purpose than just making the conversation more enjoyable. It helps us understand what's actually going on in other companies. What issues are they working on right now? What are they trying to change? Who are the people they want to connect with? What works well and what's more difficult? The better we understand the people around us, the easier it will be to discover opportunities that weren't obvious when the conversation began.

This insight goes both ways. Anyone who feels genuinely listened to also has a different picture of the person in front of them. You don't necessarily remember exactly what services the company offers, but you remember that the conversation was good and that the person seemed interested, knowledgeable or generous with their experiences. When you meet again, there is already something to build on.

We sometimes overestimate the value of the perfect pitch

This doesn't mean that the elevator pitch is dead or that companies should stop getting better at selling. If no one understands what you do, it will naturally be difficult for anyone to buy from you or recommend you. The problem arises rather when the presentation becomes the very purpose of the meeting and we judge a good networking conversation by how much we managed to tell ourselves.

Because it is not certain that the person in front of you needs what you are selling, and it is also not certain that they ever will. If the entire conversation is based on identifying a direct purchase need, the opportunities will quickly run out. If instead you try to understand the person's business and context, the meeting can take on meaning in completely different ways. Maybe you are facing similar challenges and can learn from each other, maybe there is a common contact or a possible collaboration, or you simply discover that there is a reason to continue talking.

It's also quite a liberating thought for those who don't love traditional networking. You don't have to walk into a room full of people and feel like you have to convince them of something. It's enough to be interested in who they are and understand why they're there.

Curiosity is also business knowledge

There is also a more business-oriented side to curiosity that is easily forgotten. A good listener is constantly gathering knowledge about their market. When you regularly talk to people from different industries, you start to see what questions come up, what investments companies prioritize, what problems they are trying to solve, and how their needs are changing.

In this way, a conversation can be valuable even if it never leads to an immediate deal. You might leave with a better understanding of an industry, an idea that changes something in your own business, or an insight into how other companies think about an issue you are facing. That kind of knowledge is difficult to gain through a presentation where both parties are mostly waiting for their turn to speak.

This is perhaps the most common misconception about how business is created. We like to think that our task in a new meeting is to make as strong an impression as possible by telling the person who we are and what we can offer. But sometimes a much stronger impression is created by the person who understands more than the person trying to convince.

Maybe we need to get better at asking questions.

After many meetings in Vasatorp Business Club, we have therefore started to think a little differently about what a good business conversation actually is. It doesn't have to end with a booked meeting, a request for a quote or an exchanged business card to have been valuable. Sometimes it is enough for two people to leave with a better understanding of each other than they had when the conversation began.

That doesn't mean the business is unimportant. On the contrary, the whole point of a business network is to create value for the companies that are part of it. But the path to that doesn't have to start with trying to sell something. It can just as easily start with asking a good question and being interested enough to actually listen to the answer.

Maybe that's why we shouldn't just practice what to say the next time someone asks “What are you doing?” Maybe we should also think about what we should ask ourselves when the person in front of us has answered.

About Vasatorp Business Club

Vasatorp Business Club brings together over 80 companies from different industries that meet regularly throughout the year, both with and without golf. Our ambition is to create meetings where people have time to get to know each other, exchange experiences and discover opportunities that rarely fit into a thirty-second company presentation.