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Hello, and welcome to Networking Unleashed. Welcome to this podcast where networking is more than just handshakes and bad coffee.. It's an art, but here's the twist. It's an art and talent. Yes, even if you're the person hiding in the corner at every event pretending to check email. This is for you. Networking isn't just a skill to have, it's a game changer. You'll wonder why I haven't started soon. More connections, more opportunities, more profits. It's like unlocking a cheat code for life. So whether you're life of the party, or just a let me just stay in the corner type and text, we've got something for you. Stick around and let's turn those awkward, small test moments into big wins. Now, I've got a guest today. Thanks And his name is Lance Kessner. he's got really quite a story to tell. He created a consumer product right from his kitchen. it went viral. It's now selling in Walmart and I can't really do it justice, but if you just let me introduce Lance, then he'll be more than happy to share it with you. how are you doing this morning?
I'm fine, Michael. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
My pleasure. Tell me a little about your product.
To kind of boil it down to just a couple of sentences, what we've done is created a product that helps people kind of reduce their stress and anxiety and to help them with their wellness programs. It's broth and a teabag. It's a simple, simple idea that we brought to market. 12 years ago.
But what it did do is during COVID we went viral because we were discovered by Weight Watchers and that raised the awareness of this new kind of crazy idea of, combining a teabag with broth. And we ended up a year ago getting a commitment from Walmart to be in half of their stores.
And that just happened. About a month ago. And so you could say we're a 12 year overnight success.
That's great. so I guess, could you share with me a personal experience where networking itself impacted your, your career or your business? Silence.
won an award for our product. It's a very prestigious award that is Given out by the fancy food show in New York, and we won outstanding hot beverage of the year. And so it was the first time a broth had ever won that award. Normally it's tea or coffee or cider or something like that.
So we got the award in New York and after that meeting, somebody I had met. Years before was in the food business. And he always said to me, if, if you ever need my help with something, let me know. And so I called him up and said, I think, I think I need your help.
Can we meet for lunch? And he said, absolutely. Right away. We met for lunch and I told him that we won the award. And he said, yeah, you know what? You're right. This is a pretty big deal. Let me see what I can do. He took it to a couple of his customers and came back and said, this is a big deal.
We'd like to participate with you in building this brand. And right now he and his partner are partners of ours. And that all came from networking.
That's crazy. That's good. That's great. You know, trust is such a crucial component of networking, right? So, with that in mind, how do you maintain your professional contacts? with even, people in your profession, how do you maintain those contacts? Thanks.
You know, a lot of it has to do with Being comfortable with putting yourself out there one of the things I learned really early on in sales is that you kind of have to make yourself a little uncomfortable in a lot of situations I think the only person that knows you're uncomfortable is you other people don't realize that you're uncomfortable.
And once you get over that then it's easier to kind of connect with new people. Staying connected with people, it does require some effort. As an example today, I am having lunch later on with a person I met probably 20 years ago and helped him sell his business. And I just called him out of the blue cause I had seen an interview that he was on and I just called him and I said, Hey, I saw that interview.
You did a great job. Don't no need to call me back. And then a week later he calls me, he says, I'm taking you out to lunch. So, you know, it's those little things I think that are kind of fun. I'm a pretty social person. And so that really kind of fits my personality, I think another thing is, is that LinkedIn those types of networking sites are so easy to stay connected with people and share now, sharing stories, sharing experiences again, putting yourself out there letting people see a little bit of a vulnerable side to you.
Is also a great way to connect because they may be connecting with you and not saying anything. And the next time you see them, they'll kind of go back and go, Oh, how was that trip? Did you ever get that client, that kind of thing?
You know, networking is so very important if you own a company. Or if you're doing the sales for the company, but that trust you, it's such a major factor in networking and everything you're telling me, that trust factor is so important. You know, because even if you put some people on a drip campaign and you forget about them. About eight months later. You realize that they're going to call you and say, you know, how about that product or how about the sale or whatever, but that's because you've already established that trust factor. And it's very, very important. If you go to large scale networking events, I'm sure that you've done a few of those you walk in and you see a huge amount of people with tables and everything with people around them. How do you, you know, usually, there is a kind of a, secret sauce, so to speak, about when you approach a table and what you listen for and everything else. do you do that?
You know, I usually am at the table at those events. But I'll tell you how the most effective ways people have approached me and, and they're, they're very good. And I actually don't mind it because the, they instantly want to know about. Me, my product, what was the inspiration? They will take some time to ask me questions without talking about themselves.
And they're really thoughtful questions. You know, they're really asking, they're very interested in knowing what I want to do. The people who I instantly turn off are the ones who introduce themselves and what they do. And if they're not a buyer, which I'm there for, I really don't want to talk to them.
But if I think that they can add value or if they present themselves in a way that shows that it can add value to what I'm doing, I'll listen. And so, yeah, that's usually, the way in which, I advise people find something that you can connect with and express a sincere interest and you will get, you know, very positive results because the people at those boot, they pay a lot of money to be there, they're there to sell they may be there to network to but that's secondary.
It's true whenever you go to a networking event, you're always looking to give. You never look to get, because that is what you said. Everybody is aware that everybody is there to sell something or they have a service or something else. But if you can show the other people you have something that you are truly interested.
I have something called form, FORM, family, occupation, recreation, message that you can get onto the same level as them. And if you can talk to them, speak about their family, their husband, their wife, their sister, brother, son, daughter. It doesn't make a difference or the occupation or recreation.
Do they like to snow ski or snowboard or boating or something else like that? Get onto the same level. talk about it because people love to talk about themselves. They love it. So if you can get that, so you, you're building up that trust value. Okay. So trust, here it is coming back into the fold. So you're lowering their wall and you're building their trust value. So it's so very important. Me just ask you a question. What is your vision now? Okay.
we've taken two different ideas broth and tea categories and we've mixed them together. And, you know, we sell it as, as broth, right? You go to the soup aisle, you go to Walmart, you look in the soup aisle for our product.
Our vision is to let as many people know about that as possible, that, you know, Hey, there's this new thing that you can reach for instead of coffee, tea or cider that is savory. And, oh, by the way, your mom probably served it to you, you know, when you weren't feeling good. And, oh, by the way, we've been drinking broth for thousands of years.
Yeah. We just happened to put it in a more convenient format and make it very affordable. So you know, our vision is, is that. And that encompasses talking to people like yourself being in the press social media, and then also getting our product into as many places as people can taste it as possible.
That includes. Break rooms hospitals we would love to be in an airline beverage cart. Can you imagine that they have on the cart. But if they said, oh, how about. You know, some wonderful Thai lemongrass broth that you could, you know, just basically I'll take a cup of that.
Absolutely. So that's kind of our vision, I put it very simply, but I'll tell you, it takes a lot of effort to, to do all that,
Now, what you've said to me was the grand scheme of things, but I'm sure you faced some challenges. So can you give me an idea of a challenge that you faced and how you overcame it?
In our business, there are daily challenges that affect the manufacturing of the product or getting into a customer or keeping a customer. And I think I'd like to speak about the challenge of manufacturing a product when you create a product like ours my wife and I were not experts in making something like this, nobody was, in fact, when we came to the market, nobody had ever done this before.
We were the first ones to do this. Our challenge was finding someone who was crazy enough to work with us, who knew what they were doing and could grow with us. So that original challenge did take a while, but we did find a company, but we quickly realized that we outgrew their capabilities.
And I think that was the second challenge is realizing that our expectations going to be different than our partners. And we needed to be able to kind of lift ourselves away and look for Different opportunities and that was really hard because there's a comfort level when you're working with a partner like that and you don't want, you know, you don't, you don't know what's next.
There are continual challenges when it comes to growing and we expect that there are going to be other kinds of things that come along that we didn't really expect.
Yeah, there's always challenges and everything that you do, but if I were to ask you for my viewers? What is one essential networking tip that you would give them that you found be successful?
I think that I just attended a holiday networking event a week and a half ago and probably knew four of the 100 people or so. And in this case, I brought something that kind of broke the ice with people. We created something called the broth sloth. And so I brought this huge backdrop that people could take pictures with and get, hugged by the broth sloth.
And so I can't tell you how many people came up. They wanted to know what it was. I had a reason to say, Hey, you need to get a picture. The sloth has been waiting for you. Come and sit down and take a picture. And the smiles on their faces were, you know, just amazing. But I'll tell you if you have something that can break the ice with somebody in a way that they're not really expecting, you get amazing results very quickly.
And it may be asking them, how did they get to the event? Not, you don't say right away, what do you do? How did you get to this event? Ask questions that are very kind of sideways and I'll bet that that will break ice and you figure out whether you want to keep talking to that person or not.
That's you, you hit on so many things that I usually speak about just for general networking guidelines, and you seem to be doing everything the way you should be doing it. So I think you're going to do great. What would your favorite Marketing tactic B. Was it this or was it something else?
I can tell you that the broth sloth, we actually created it because we were at a very large conference in Minneapolis. And our booth was right in between two multi billion dollar companies. And I said to my wife, we need to figure out a way to stand out. People are, they're going to just walk by, they're going to look at, you know, they're going to look at General Mills, which is, Right in front of them, and they're not going to look at us, you know a two person company.
So we created the Broth Sloth. We had the next morning we had people waiting in line to take pictures with the broth sloth. We got our largest ever customer from that, and we're just rolling them out. Can't really talk about them, but basically that ended up being.
The reason why that organization brought over their executive director to find out about it, because what happened was if people were walking in front of our booth, I would go out into the aisle. And say the broth sloth is waiting to take a picture with you and totally catch them off guard. They didn't even know what we did.
I got them to sit down. They gave me their cell phone. All right. I took a picture with their cell phone. They did still didn't know what we did. I gave them back their cell phone and handed them samples of our product and gave them literally a five second pitch. That was, you know, I think that was the best marketing we've done.
And it did prove out to work very well.
Okay. So let me just say, because we're going to close things up here a little bit and I want you to give me and everybody else. One takeaway that somebody can use today or tomorrow, they can immediately start to use one networking
You know, go on LinkedIn and look at your network and reach out to five people that you haven't talked to in a long time and just ask them how they're doing. Just say hi, I was thinking about you maybe mentioned something that connected you to them, in the first place.
And I'll bet you that something will come out of that. And don't have any expectations. Just say, hello. How are you? Thinking about you and you might be surprised.
That's a great tip. One, which I, I do all the time. But I also recommend to everybody else. So I feel that is a very, very good tip. So Lance, if somebody wanted to get hold of you, ask you a question or ask about your product, how would they do it?
Our website is sipping broths or sipping broth. com. You can reach me on LinkedIn, Lance Kesner or we're on social media at sipping broths, plural. So any of those channels are open for communication. If you want to email me from our website, that works too. So yeah, all kinds of ways.
Great. Lance, this was terrific. You have done wonders with what you have. Your product sounds sensational. And honestly, I can't wait to go out and try it. So I want to wish everybody a happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and we'll get back to you soon.
Thank you, Michael.
Well, that's a wrap folks. A huge thank you to our special 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. 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 enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with someone who could use a little networking inspiration. Let's keep the conversation going. You can find me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or my website, MichaelAForeman. com. Remember, until next time, keep practicing, Keep connecting and keep building those relationships.
This is Michael A. Forman signing off. Take care and happy networking.
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.
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