25 March 2018

Meet Misty Henkel: business networking aficionado, sales guru and people connector

| Nina Gbor
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Photo by Joy Studio.

Most people shy away from sales but not Misty Henkel, Master Salesperson and Networking Coach, who runs 6-week networking classes on “How to get Sales from Networking.”

In 2002 Misty decided sales was her calling during a seminar in Melbourne where the speaker was talking about sales, customer experience and customer service. Spellbound by the speaker, Misty left the seminar saying, “I want to be that guy! I want to travel the world and teach people about sales and making money doing what they love.” For the last 10 years, Misty has worked hard at honing her craft in sales testing theories and experimenting, working in sales selling different products and services and creating talks and workshops. Several years ago, Misty came to realise it’s not what you are selling that makes you successful, but the list of people you have to sell it to.

Photo by Joy Studio.

Round about this time, Misty coincidentally came across networking. Having been a salesperson for over 15 years, she was mystified to find that no one in retail or hospitality appeared to know about this. She refers to networking as “the missing component to all sales.”

Photo by Hot Shots Photography.

Since then, she has spent the last 5 years attending more than 1500 events and taken notes on over 5000 elevator pitches to work out why some things work and some things don’t. And for the last 2 years, she has been working on how to grow groups and membership databases.

Misty says Canberra has an estimated 500 regular networkers and over 11,000 small businesses, so she is looking to increase the number by another 500 over the course of the year.

Misty reckons the biggest problem we have in business is obscurity – not enough people know who we are and not enough people associate us with our product. But our most costly mistake is not following up appropriately with the person who has noticed us in the marketplace.

For those reasons, Misty works on two arms in a business – getting noticed and following up.

To learn more, contact Misty on Facebook: @Misty Henkel

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