Networking Unleashed: Building Profitable Connections. An Interview with Gal Borenstein and Michael A Forman
- mforman521
- 5 days ago
- 23 min read
Welcome to Networking Unleashed, building profitable Connections where relationships aren't built on hype volume, or clever tools, but on trust that holds up over time. Today's episode hits a nerve for leaders, entrepreneurs, and brands trying to stand out in a world flooded with automation, polished messaging, and AI generated everything.
Because when everyone sounds smart, trust becomes the real differentiator. My guest specializes in branding, strategy, and trust frameworks. We're digging into how brands quietly lose credibility in digital spaces and what it actually takes to keep trust in that intact, where AI is part of the equation.
If you've ever wondered why some connections deepen while others fade, or why cer while certain. Or why certain brands feel solid while other feels disposable. This conversation will sharpen how you think about networking in today's environment. Wow, that was a mouthful. I would like to introduce to the podcast today, gal.
Gal, who is an expert in all of the above. And gal. I just really, before we get into it, gimme a little, the cliff notes of your background and how you got here today. Sure. I'm the founder and CEO of the Bourton Group, which has been in business for 30 years. And the majority of my clients were the C-suite type folks.
And a lot of CEOs that were entrepreneurial founders. And as we kinda went through the process of branding companies. And when it was analog, if you will, when it was marketing brochures all the way to websites, all the way to digital and social media and incorporating ai, what I found that one thread that has recently gone through a real transformation in terms of the value that it brings to.
Clients and really the worries as well that it brings to clients is way bigger than what I thought. Being the person that typically knows where the bodies are buried, if you will. And what's very interesting, it happens so fast, and yet most companies have a very difficult time seeing.
What's happening in their company. And then as a result of it, when you think about branding and advertising and PR as a kind of a narrative that you take to the market and you don't know those things, you really gotta pay attention. Very good. And that's a lot to think about. I started out as with a design firm.
I was the owner of the design firm. I grew it. Rather large. And so that's where I started my marketing, my design and everything else. And that was a hundred years ago, things have changed a little bit. Okay. In a world where everyone can sound polished online, how does trust actually get earned through networking today?
I think you just described two mechanisms that are really kind of social mechanisms to creating opportunity to build trust. The old school, which is really the time where we did not have distributed workforces and everyone was in the same building. You had lunch with your boss or the executives and the team, and you were able to really gain a sense of trust on an emotional level, on a cognitive level, on an idea and brainstorming level and come out of it united or unified.
About what's wrong and what's right, and then you could follow up with another meeting and take somebody to lunch doing all the things that we call human communications. And not that it was perfect, but by having the person to person communication, you able to rely on the fact that if you have a disagreement, if you don't trust the other person, the other organization.
You can diagnose it and move forward. But as COVID ended trade shows ended opportunities to press the flesh, if you will. We were forced into showing up on corporate videos with 16 people on the same call, where half of them basically are not even comfortable being in front of a camera.
And then. Having basically a cacophony of information that it has to stick to an agenda, and the agenda has nothing that builds trust in a relationship. So the networking really was the fundamental way of creating human interaction when the digital evolution which included.
Let's distribute the workforce because it save o overhead. We lost a human touch, and the human touch was replaced by ai. And AI is the greatest industrial revolution that we've experienced in, especially in information technology. It's still young and it's still very much, something that you can improve upon and make it your own.
But the problem with AI is that it could produce a polished piece, as you mentioned before, but it is not differentiated. And the reason it's not differentiated, it's a machine. It's supposed to mass replicate and force, multiply the message that you have. And the worst part of it, it doesn't have feelings.
So if you were having a personal diagnosis of a medical condition, AI can give you sometimes better analysis than what your doctor will communicate with you. But think about it in a business environment where the output that you get might be accurate, but it doesn't consider your feelings, it doesn't consider.
The situation that you're in whether you're an executive, whether you're in sales, whether you're in business development, whether you're in product development, right? And the result of it are two. Number one is we're not able to trust anything without having interaction with people and putting this subjective opinionated good sense of judgment that it really is required.
To build trust. So to me what I'm seeing with branding and marketing does going up right now is a lot of garbage of content that is being sent. And the worst part about it is we're still using KPIs that apply to engagement percentage of how many meetings you got really old KPIs that.
May have been even two years ago. Really good to kind of sense where you are. But now it's old and we gotta come up with new ways of communicating and measuring what we're communicating. So the focus really is, to answer your question, really, is networking in new arena have to go back take a step back and really involve.
Interact with a human being that is a subject matter expert that is your colleague, somebody that can actually bring the heart and the mind to the computer. And it's really funny that just in terms of that happens, answer of booking this podcast for today, perplexity just came out with computer, which essentially replaces the computer.
With prompts, and you don't have to code anything so anybody can do it, which is fantastic. Lowers the barrier to to entry. But at the same time, it is producing a whole world that is not monitored, does not govern. And most importantly if there's a mistake in it, it'll replicate it a thousand times and your brain reputation will go through the trashcan along with it.
That's where you the term trust, but verify really comes into it. Through perplexity and through everything else. You have all these AI tools, but what doesn't it have, it doesn't have the emotional. Connection. So it'll give you every answer you want, but it'll take out the emotional.
And really, when you're in sales, I was in sales for 40 years, that's half of it. It's how you emote and how everything goes. 'cause you have the know you, like you, trust you. They'll do business with you. And how you, how can you trust the computer when there's no emotion? So it's missing all that.
Yeah, you can't. And that's really the part that is the waste is being spent right now under the FOMO principle, which all companies saying if we don't have ai we're not on the edge of things. But they don't ask the question is, what is AI gonna help us achieve other than being the Xerox machine, essentially of intellectual ideas.
And what are the subject matter expertise that we can bring from our own people to the table to create a better product, to create a better concept, to create a better framework or code something in half an hour versus 30 hours or 300 hours. So the, they're great things that you can do with ai.
But right now, we're at the point where people are rushing into it because they really are afraid that they're gonna miss out on something, but they're making their company worse because they're making it impersonable it, they're making it heartless and they're making it very difficult to differentiate on an emotional intelligence level.
That's where AI doesn't have it does not have an emotional intelligence. It has IQ and iq. We had enough time to think about it, measure it, figure out if numbers mean what they mean. Emotional intelligence is still really in, in the infancy of development in the business world and in other places It's been used.
But think about as simple as you know the saying, when you go into a room, a good CEO can read the room in the first 30 seconds and make sure that the whole conversation is productive and is based on understanding the limitations and great assets that you have in the different people that are studying in the meeting.
That's not something that you can do using an app. You can even build. Customer persona, which is a hot thing in marketing and branding right now, where agencies and marketing departments are saying, Hey, now we have the tool to actually build a client persona before we market to them. But they still miss all the intricate things that fall under the category of know your enemy if this is what you're doing.
Competitive intelligence or know your prospect. Know your client once you earn that client, and just to kinda add a point to it why is that happening? Other than post COVID, it's really a generational thing as well. We in a Gen X generation really thought about trust as that pressing of the flesh, if you will, and having a con a conversation.
Between two human being pick up the phone, even an email. But now millennials came and Gen Z came, and the most extreme is Gen Z, which is very smart. Can get your answers quicker than all the master's degrees that you had. However, this generation is born with an iPhone, and the iPhone is not for telephoning.
Or for making any calls infra. In fact, if you ask any Gen Z that works in the workforce and is very smart and very talented, what would they rather do when they need to communicate something? Their answer is gonna be text. So if we don't hear each other, and the only way we're communicating via integration of text with Slack, that captures at least the information, but doesn't really give you any.
Judgment calls that are necessary to really achieve something that is a real challenge that is only growing. And the millennials, which were the generation before Gen Z knew about computers and definitely are very apt in being involved in computing and being able to make that work.
They're also are using apps. They're not using human thinking first, and when you have that, you don't have a human-centric organization. It that it's so true, and you made so many good and great points that I don't have time to dissect everything that you had said, but in a nutshell, what we're missing is our human touch is our, and what, this is what I'm all about.
I go across the country and I talk about this. We have to get back to networking events. We have to get back face to face because. Since the advent of Zoom. 'cause here you and I are talking and we're clear across the country from one another, but there's no physical connection. I can't feel the vibe of you, or I can't feel the vibe of your office or of your room.
So I'm missing out on half of the connectivity that I need for a good sale. So it's very important. Okay. Where are brands unknowingly breaking trust during everyday networking moments? That includes emails, dms, follow ups, and even introductions. I think in my book don't believe the hype, I really address the big elephant in the room.
Thinking about it in the executive management board or board meeting where you find out that there a narrative that. Runs the company values of whatever it may be, innovation, integrity, caring about the environment. But once you go a level below to middle management and then you go to the third ring, if you will, of employees or staff or factory workers, it doesn't really matter.
People don't agree with each other about what it is that they're selling. In one company the management team wants to focus on customer experience, but they never actually interviewed or spoke to the people that are working on the, on the floor. And people are working behind the cubicle and they never spoke to them.
So what is happening is almost the reverse engineering of what it should be. Number one is you've gotta basically think about a company now in this new generation with AI and digital marketing and networking as three layers that are really a nexus if management does not communicate the values and what is important to them as a corporate culture.
To the middle management and then middle management does not com communicate it to the staffers. What is likely to happen and it's happening is your narrative is no longer staying within your company because now we have social media and not only Twitter or any of the other, sign, where you can get like a, five second attention span messaging.
But now we have review sites. So disgruntled employees can basically ruin the reputation of your company over three to 10 bad reviews which tell recruits that they shouldn't work for the company. And most importantly. It creates a narrative that is completely different than what you sold them on.
When people came into the company said we're a employer of choice. We're the best company to work for. And then if that doesn't happen, it used to be you stop it by firing the person because they're negative. No more the case because you can't do that anymore because everything is public.
So even the most private companies. Can't hide those blemishes. And because they're published in places that other people can see like a narrow casting TV, if you will, or relate into the new arena what happens is if you don't listen to what's going on in the outside world and what people are saying about you or about your company, about your brand, then whatever you're doing inside.
Could fall flat on its face when it goes outside and to give you a very kind of common attitude I use come from Jeff Bezos of Amazon is he was asked, what is branding? And his answer was, it's what people say about you when you're not in the room. And I think the reason it's so relevant.
To building that trust is you gotta have trust within your employees. You gotta have trust within your kind of management team. And wherever there is friction, you gotta work on a friction in-house first before you gonna promise something to the world and then not check in and see if it actually receiving the feedback that it's supposed to.
Because what do you have then? In terms of networking, you probably have done this throughout your life and career, which is you meet business developers from other company and they basically tell you that their product is crappy and they're embarrassed to sell it. And what does that come from?
Lack of trust in operations, lack of trust in technology, but moving forward. The digital trust allows us to use a lot more tools to really create systems and frameworks where what I'm talking about can be parlayed into better product, better company, and a systematic belief in a way that builds trust that can be monetized.
In different ways. It could be that we become the best company or the best employer. It is that our product, our technology product is much better because we listen to feedback from people from the outside, not just the beta testers. It could be everybody that writes about a company that are in social media, whether it's Facebook or Twitter, or whichever tool we use.
Are saying this is the best company to work for, and we really love the fact that there's a ping pong table. All the stuff used to be one sided. Yeah. You have it's building up the culture of the work environment and the culture of the company. And, but the culture does not come from the ground.
Up it comes from the owners on down. And if they don't carry through with the culture, then the people at the bottom aren't going to, and you're gonna have all that misinformation, right? And it takes a lot of work to keep that culture and you have to really stay on top of it. And I go into companies all the time and I talk about this and I say, look, I can talk to your masses.
I can talk to the salespeople, the warehouse, people, back office, and I can tell 'em everything on the follow up and how important it is and everything else. But if the C-Suite executives don't change the way that they handle all this, change the culture of the company, everything I'm saying is gonna be for North.
So it goes from the top down. So you're right. Again, you hit so many points that I don't wanna delve into 'em, but you, you are absolutely right and I just came up with, as a whole, it's the culture of the company, which used to be a secret. Secret, would used to be secret.
Because we don't own the narrative anymore. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And that, whether we like it or not, people take it, either they take it and they. Hold it. And they say, okay, look, we have the narrative. But other people who don't, they'll just never get it. They'll just let everything go.
Yes. And that's where AI comes to play. We have a whole population of middle management and senior management that believes AI will displace them or replace them. And what I tell people, which I'm not, the only one is. If AI can replace you or displace you, means you're not adding value to what it is that your company deserves to get out of what you're doing.
AI is a tool. That's all. It really is. It shouldn't be able to replace you. You should be able to use AI to enhance what you're doing, but it takes a lot of training to train what you put into the prompts, because I know when I use it, I have an idea and I go through about 10 steps of prompts before I get to the right prompt.
Absolutely. So you have to be able to use it that way. Okay. Who has AI changed the way people perceive authenticity in networking, even when the message is well written? Yes. I think that what AI has done, and again as a result of what we just discussed about that disconnect in culture and in going out and marketing a product that it could be believable or a service for that matter.
What we're seeing again and again, that the data or the information be being presented in a, in networking situations is, oh, we're, we specialize in this. We have a niche in this area, which is the differentiation part. But what we're saying also is we're really not different than anybody else. And to give you a really pedestrian, but very very important.
Example of something that we deal with almost every day in writing is, what's your company value? I ask when you talk to a CEO of a company and they say we're all about innovation, and I'm talking about technology companies. So if you come into a networking event and you say our differentiation is innovation and you really believe in it, you believe in something that.
15 to 20 to 30 companies have just articulated. And then AI can support you in saying how you're innovative. But none of it actually connects to, we care about, let's say, veterans that need a product or service that will make their life better. That's a differentiation. If you're basically saying, we're marketing something that will help people walk, that's not a differentiation and.
AI is basically your tool to help perfect what you want to present based on research and what was tried and case studies. That's all great, but where you need to connect the dots is know that your spirit and your emotional intelligence. When you go to the networking event, for example, or networking online, it doesn't really make a difference.
Even on LinkedIn when you're sending a message to somebody you don't know you really can't be generic. And if you are generic you're basically the equivalent of a cell in a huge spreadsheet that can be ignored, eliminated, or become irrelevant. And the worst thing that can happen to a company.
Right now with AI is becoming irrelevant. It's It is so true. And when I ask somebody, what do you do? And he says I'm a bank executive, or I do this, there are 40,000 bank executives in the arena in the networking event in your town, and and that you need to tell me something that differentiates you from the pack.
And that's what I strive to, to get them to talk about how should leaders think about personal brand when automation and AI are part of the outreach and follow up? The single most important advice that I give people in this position is to really think about two things. Number one is, as a CEO or leader.
You are the brand. So if your brand is not solid, and for example, your LinkedIn profile says nothing or doesn't have a picture of you of you it doesn't have any kind of credentials, that show that you have authority leadership in the area that you're in. And then there's the company brand. That involves integrating marketing and branding, thought leadership and social media and all these elements.
What we see sometimes is that the company might be doing well from a brand perspective, but they're not getting to where they need to be. Because sometimes the CEO doesn't believe in the idea of being a brand because they're saying I'm a private individual. He can't be private anymore because I'm gonna look at your LinkedIn no matter what.
And as recent as just before recording here of this podcast, I looked up somebody who I'm gonna be talking later today. And first inclination is to go to the reliable source, which would be LinkedIn, which especially in B2B, is the new networking online environment. It doesn't mean that everything that is in your profile is even true, but if you have no effort that put into it, or you have a press release from 2019 as your credibility tool instead of updating your website.
Those are the things that basically kill a company brand and then not having the CEO speaking about things, writing, whatever your talent is, it doesn't have to be. You don't have to be a movie star, you don't have to be a podcast host, but you gotta have something that you're passionate about and you are able to articulate it in whatever talent you have.
Writing, speaking teaching, mentoring, other companies, there's plenty of possibilities and most companies in ignore that, or CEOs ignore that and believe that the business will take care of itself. It won't. Because everything is out there online. Being invisible is no longer an option unless you're working on a military operation.
And even then that information gets leaked within two minutes to media that doesn't check the even the sources and goes to all the social media outlets. And that becomes where we get a news source. So we own that. CEOs own that, and sometimes they don't get it. So I'm here to emphasize that's a sore point that needs to be addressed.
Yeah. I'm a former restaurant owner, and my employees were the backbone of the restaurant. So what the first line was the waiters or the busboy. That's what everybody saw. So if they weren't. Overly customer service. They weren't overly nice in what they could do for everybody.
If that wasn't the case, they didn't work for me. Because they, because every customer had to have that feeling of they want to come back. And so the, some people just aren't like that. They're like, alright, what do you want? So I saw the value of the employees right away, and of course I had to speak to the vendors and the employees and everything.
We're all trying to do the same thing, but differently. Okay. When trust breaks, is it usually caused by a big mistake, a small repeated misalignment or in how someone shows up?
Trust breaks is when a set of values that exist in Let's take the innovation lab within a technology company that produces outstanding new patents and new frameworks and new technology let's say in cyber. But then the information goes to marketing. And marketing makes promises that the technologists in the company don't believe, like this performs five XA hundred x faster than the other competing product, and they have no evidence to support, and then they put it out there and there's no social proof.
It's basically empty statements that any competitors. Can take and pick apart because now everything is visible. Okay? So you put an article that you call thought leadership and you say something is gonna be a hundred x per productive more than what I got right now. People will scrutinize it.
People will look at, where's your study, where's your compliance report? So from a marketing Brendan perspective. The breaking of trust happens when we don't listen to what people on the outside are thinking about and believing about our product. We need to always index and kind of benchmark, if you will, the meter for the three or four most important criteria for having innovation that is trusted and will be trusted.
And then going back to the company itself, making sure that the company employees believe that your statements, that your narrative is actually something that you're willing to die for on a business level. And you can tell companies that have a strong culture of evangelists that are actually going out there and putting their heart and soul into showing how excited they are about something.
Then you see companies that you go to a trade show who pass by the booth and two type of people sitting in a chair and free coffee mugs, which basically is not how you build trust on any level. Abso absolutely right. We, I, I. I just hosted a business show, an expo here in Johns Creek, Georgia, and it's amazing.
I had 20 businesses, 20 tables, and two or three of them were just like that. They were sitting back just letting everything happen, and you had the other people standing in front of their tables inviting people and inviting questions, and they got so much more out of the expo than those other people. So it really depends on the part of your brain that you're trying to say, okay, look, I need this.
You brought up Jeff Bezos and I'm, I have to bring in an apple just a little bit sooner than that. I learned that, the owner not cook. Steve Jobs, he, when he first started, he said, okay, I need to get the people in that I am the weakest, right? So every area that he was the weakest, he hired the CMO, the CFO, the C every, everybody around his weaknesses.
So together as a group, he was the strongest and he developed that culture that we're talking about originally. And that is a perfect example because what you described is something that I talk in my book don't believe the hype, which is, has to do with that trust architecture that has to be in place.
And one of the two most important elements in that is vulnerability, collaboration, and transparency. So when the CEO like cook at the time says, I'm not good at this, but I'm gonna get the best person. And everybody sees it within the company. The CEO brand becomes more likable and more open to having exchanges that you're not comfortable doing when you know it's a closed door environment where you can't communicate anything that will move your company forward.
Why don't you give us just an outline of what your book is, the latest release. Your book was absolutely outstanding, and just so all my listeners can truly understand where you're coming from, give us a little synopsis of your book. The book is called Don't Believe the Hype When Trust is on the Line and how to Keep your Brand Resilient.
It really boils down to the idea that if you continue to act in the same way with digital and AI taking kind of a part in your enterprise, you are likely to fall victim to the outside world, which you don't control. So it really is, the book is a wake up call for executives, for leaders, and when they say leaders, it could be a small business owner as much as it has to be a corporate leader with 5,000 employees is you gotta listen to what the outside world has to say and you gotta know that no matter what you do inside the company, it's gonna be interpreted a little bit differently and you gotta be prepared for it.
The way you get prepared for it is making sure that every part of your organization is aligned and has a strong belief and trust that what we're selling is actually something that works. And you can find a book on amazon.com. Don't believe the hype. And there's another book that I just released for small business owners specifically that don't know what to do with ai.
And it's called. Meeting Goliath with ai. Oh, that's good. Which takes the idea that small business owners shouldn't left, be left behind or overspend on ai. They just need to learn what are the questions that you need to ask before you make that decision? That's great. I didn't know about that book, and I will actually pick that book up.
Okay let's bring this podcast full circle. If someone wanted to protect their brand while still growing relationships at scale, what principles should guide them should guide their every interaction. You have to assume that you have to build trust. Trust is not given. It's earned, and it used to be clearer to older generations.
Now that we automated everything to a point where you get an email from somebody that is in the same position that you're in a different company and there's no differentiation, there's nothing that makes it personalized that trust is not gonna get built. So you can measure it literally in time if you think about it as a timeline.
The companies that use the ability to accelerate the build of trust by making the right moves in the beginning, which are likely to be human-centric, not automation, are the ones that are winning more proposals getting more invitations to the dance, if you will. And the companies that are automating everything are missing the point that.
The trust mechanism that they're using might have all the proof points that they're doing something or going through the motion, but it actually hurts their sale because now a three month process becomes a nine month process because I never met you because I never had a conversation about what your kids are doing after hours.
All the things that really bring your personality to life and. Your CEO's personality as much to the company. Very good gal. This was absolutely great. If you're such a great guest. If somebody wanted to know more about you, about branding, marketing, anything like that, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you?
The best way to get ahold of me since we work almost exclusively in the business to business space and is to really hit me up on LinkedIn check out my profile, it's god bornstein, and really connect with me and then to all your listeners that are interested. I'm offering a free consultation.
Just connect through LinkedIn. I mentioned the name of the podcast and I'll be happy to spend a good 30 minutes with you going through what are your needs and what are the places where you're stuck and that advice can take you to a next level or that advice can give you the right questions to ask before you proceed.
And spend money in the wrong places or getting you to do it correctly. And of course, you can find us@boursteingroup.com, which is the agency that help create the creative, if you will, behind the messaging. Oh, that's great. Great. Here's the bottom line from today's conversation. Trust isn't built by tools.
It's built by patterns of behavior people can rely on. AI can help with speed and consistency, but it can't replace intent, judgment, or how brand makes someone feel after the interaction ends. Every message, follow up and conversation either strengthens trust or quietly chips away at it. If this episode made you rethink how your brand shows up in conversations, take that insight into your next interaction and slow it down just enough to be real.
That's where trust lives, and if you're a leader or organization looking to strengthen. Brand credibility through clearer communication and stronger connections. I work with teams, keynotes, workshops, and coaching focused on trust, clarity, and results. Thank you for listening to Networking Unleashed.
Protect your brand, honor, trust, and make every connection count. Gal, thank you again for coming on my podcast. You were wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.
Well, hold on folks. Don't go anywhere. Let's hear from our sponsors. David Neal, co-founder Revved Up Kids. Revved Up Kids is on a mission to protect children and teens from sexual abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. They provide prevention, training programs for children, teens, and adults. To learn more, go to RevD up kids.org.
Henry Kaplan Century 21. When it comes to making the biggest financial decision of your life, leave it in the hands of a proven professional. Henry Kaplan Henry is a global real estate agent with Century 21, celebrating his 41st year in business. No matter where you're moving, Henry, has the right connections for you.
You can contact Henry at 5 6 1- 4 2 7- 4 8 8 8.
A huge thank you to our guests for sharing such incredible insights today, and of course, a big shout out to you, our amazing listeners, for tuning in and spending your time with us. If you're interested in my digital courses being coached or having me come and talk to your company, just go to MichaelAForman.com and fill out the request form.
Remember, networking isn't about being perfect. It's about being present. So take what you've learned today, get out there and make some meaningful connections. If you've enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to subscribe. Leave us a review. Share it with someone who could use a little networking inspiration.
Let's keep the conversation going. You can find me on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, or my website michaelaforman.com/podcast.
Michael is a business networking expert specializing in enhancing professionals' networking and communication skills to drive profitability. As a leading authority in this field, he is highly sought after for his dynamic presentations and workshops. His extensive experience has consistently led to significant improvements in corporate profitability by empowering individuals and organizations to connect more effectively and efficiently.
Digital Courses
Comments