The vast majority of MSPs are introverts but you can still go out and do networking or speak at a public event, if you know how. Also this week, why you should be thrilled when a Super MSP comes to your town, and what’s working best in MSP search lead generation right now.
Welcome to Episode 361 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.
How to ace networking, even if you’re an introvert
I want to start today by sharing something personal. For most of my career, I thought that I was an extrovert. I mean, after all, I was a radio presenter, literally on the radio every day for 10 years. And now today I speak at conferences, I did ScaleCon this year, I did MSP Global again this year. And I host this podcast. These are all the activities of an extrovert, right? Well, it turns out no.
A few years ago I had a guest on this very podcast who said something that completely stopped me in my tracks. They explained that extroverts gain energy from being around people, while introverts lose energy from being around people. And it made me realise that every networking event that I’d ever been to and every conference that I’d ever spoken at, basically every room full of new people that I’d ever walked into, I’d come home and I needed a very long lie down. And my partner at the time used to find that hilarious. I would literally come back from a two-hour networking and I just needed to be on my own and recover. And neither of us really understood it at the time, but now I understand why this happened.
I am an introvert who has learned to be extroverted when the situation demands it, and that’s become normal for me. And because of that normalisation over 30 years, that’s why I thought I was an extrovert. Now, I know that a lot of MSPs are in exactly the same position. So today I want to show you how you can do the same thing, because the benefit for you is you can go out and do more networking, you might even get up on a stage and speak at a public event, which might be a nightmare idea for you right now, but very powerful if you have the power to do that. Because experts speak and experts go networking, right?
So let’s understand what’s actually happening. Let’s focus on networking. If you come away from networking events and you feel completely drained, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be an introvert. And the vast majority of MSPs that I’ve spoken to over the years, not all of them, but let’s say 70, 80% are definitely introverts. It seems to be the channel is an introverted channel. And of course, being an introvert is not a weakness or a flaw, it’s just how you and I are wired, right? We are wired to be introverts. And the difference between introverts and extroverts is fundamentally about energy. So as I said, extroverts get energised by social interactions, so they go and look for more of that social interaction. Whereas introverts are depleted by it.
Both introverts and extroverts can be brilliant and can perform well in a room full of people. It’s just the introverts need to go and do some recovery afterwards.
Recognising this about yourself is the most important step because once you understand this, you stop fighting it and you start working with it. So the goal is not to try and turn yourself into an extrovert, you can’t do that. The goal is to go and do the networking or the public speaking or whatever you do, and then protect yourself so you can recover and you can go and do it again. So here’s a couple of ways that you might do this.
Before the event, you need to protect your energy. And this is something that most advice about networking kind of ignores, it kind of bypasses or doesn’t acknowledge it. And this is where as an introvert, you can make the biggest practical difference. So you need to treat a networking...
