Episode 268 with George Torok: Building Relationships for Business Success

On this episode of the Ready Yet?! podcast, my guest is George Torok, founder of Superior Presentations and an expert in executive communication. Join us as we discuss common networking mistakes and the power of relationship-building over shallow sales pitches. George shares actionable advice on making strong human connections, why leading with empathy matters, and how to use language effectively to engage your audience.

GUEST RESOURCES

George Torok is a seasoned communication coach and speaker with over 25 years of experience. From overcoming his own shyness to becoming a sought-after expert, he understands the challenges and rewards of effective communication. His mission is to empower business leaders to communicate with confidence and clarity, believing that a more connected world starts with better conversations. Through his books, podcasts, and workshops, George offers practical strategies and a touch of humor to help individuals enhance their messaging and achieve their goals.

https://www.speechcoachforexecutives.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgetorokpresentations

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Transcript

Episode 268 with George Torok: Building Relationships for Business Success

Transcribed by Descript

Erin Marcus: All right, welcome, welcome to this episode of the ready yet podcast. I'm excited. I can always tell when we have to finally stop ourselves and hit record that it makes for a good conversation because if you and I can have a good conversation without the little red dot. That we're recording once that red dot is on and we get a little bit more focused, it's going to help people.

Erin Marcus: So I'm so excited to introduce my guest today, Mr. George Turok, and I want to say it with the accent you just explained, but I don't think I could do it. But before we get into our conversation, why don't you tell everyone who you are and what you do? 

George Torok: Sure. I'm the company's called superior presentations.

George Torok: And what's that all about? I encourage people to be superior because inferior never wins when it comes to communication. And I've been doing this for 25 plus years. My key target audience is senior executives, CEOs and presidents of medium sized companies. 

Erin Marcus: Love it. And I just thought as you and I were dialing in our Kickoff topic that I set you up to do it the way that you and I don't like to do it.

Erin Marcus: We were just having this conversation. So I want to dive into this because I think people find themselves in this situation all the time. You went to a new chamber. You met a bunch of new people, and you realized they don't really know the best way, or even a good ineffective way, to have these one on one conversations.

Erin Marcus: And yet, I asked you to start out with a label, because we have to get the ball rolling, but that's not what we want in people, right? Tell me more about what you were seeing, and where you think what are people missing? 

George Torok: Here's the typical conversation when I'm talking to another person.

George Torok: Hi, my name is I work for, and we do. And and my response is my inner voice was, Who cares? Who gives a crap? And here's another version of that. A lawyer was talking about their law firm and started to listen. So we're, you know we're a general law firm. We do criminal law, we do wills, we do divorce, we do this, we do that.

George Torok: Who cares? None of that. You never asked if I was interested in any of that. And that's the big mistake. People. are talking for their own benefit, not the benefit of their listener. 

Erin Marcus: And it's not even, yes, 100 percent agree, but not only are they starting way too they're jumping steps. They're going into a monologue sales pitch before you even get the other person's name.

Erin Marcus: But the other thing is they're completely missing the opportunity. Forget business. What about humans? I I don't shop that way. I don't, these are relationships we're building. Could you imagine? It's like dating profiles. What? 

George Torok: Very much. And you're right. It's more about the relationship, especially at the chamber type events, because a lot of people, most of the people you talk to are not your prospects.

George Torok: However, they could become advocates. They could create introductions. They could, it could be as simple as the next time you show up and they see you come in, they're so delighted because of the conversation you'll have, that they actually call across the room and say hey, Aaron hey, there you are, great to see you.

George Torok: And everybody looks around saying, who the heck is Aaron? Maybe I should meet her. 

Erin Marcus: The best, oh my god, so this just reminded me, and I haven't been part of a chamber in a while just because of the way this business is formatted, but my previous business, I was way involved, and we would have a women's luncheon, and part of that luncheon every month was people would thank other people.

Erin Marcus: And the rule was, You didn't ever thank somebody for being your client. That was the one thing you couldn't do, is thank somebody for buying from you directly. So who do you think everyone in the room wanted to meet? The person who got the most thank yous. And you will not get the most thank yous for helping other people and referring to other people if all you do is pitch your widget the second you walk into a room.

Erin Marcus: And by the way, if you remember the phrase, pitch your widget, it'll get you to stop doing it.

Erin Marcus: So what do they do instead? I think, I like to lead with empathy. And I think what happens is a lot of people don't know what to do. A lot of people were taught the wrong thing to do. A lot of people are nervous. They're not like me, who was like, Oh my God, a captive audience of 50 people. Yay. Like a lot of people don't feel that way.

Erin Marcus: So what do you do instead? 

George Torok: You, it helps to start with a question you can instead, you can say I'd like to tell you more about me, but first I want to learn what you do and what you're interested in and where your business is going or what are the challenges you're facing? Oh that's not me, I just talked to someone over here who I can introduce you to.

George Torok: And just that alone, instead of being focused on selling. Which you want to do at some point, but don't make it that your primary focus. Make it the focus that you are gonna talk to people and make connections, help them meet other people. I attended I remember attending a networking event years ago, and I went there and on the way there, I did this mental talk to myself.

George Torok: I said, why am I going here? Because my friend invited me. He's got this networking group. Okay, I'll go there. What's my purpose? I'm not here to find leads. My purpose is to introduce at least two or three sets of people while I'm there. And then that's what I did. So I now had a different focus.

George Torok: And so when I'm listening to people talk and I say, that's interesting. Have you met so and so here across the room? I think the two of you should be here. Come on. I'll go over and I'll introduce you. And so that's, and so I was playing the role of host. 

Erin Marcus: And there's so much It sounds so simple, but here's a couple things that does.

Erin Marcus: It removes all sales resistance. It removes all sales resistance because it's just not on the table. If somebody self selects into who you're looking for, that's great, but it's their choice, not your pursuit. And, again, it makes you one of the most popular people, and it takes all the pressure off you.

Erin Marcus: of you. One of the things I hear, and I know with your background in communication you come up against this. One of the things I get asked all the time is, I just need to figure out what to say, key phrase here, to get someone to buy from me. There isn't, right? There isn't. That's not how it works. 

George Torok: You can't get someone to buy something that they don't believe they need.

George Torok: Until they express a problem or a need, then you might be able to be of help. And it might be from you, or it might be from making that introduction. But you yeah, you telling people what you do is, you're wasting your time. 

Erin Marcus: Wait, it's inefficient. And people think that networking is it takes too long and then I'm building there's relationship.

Erin Marcus: Yeah, I promise you it's a lot more efficient than sending out 700 cold DMs to people who don't even know you until they accepted your friend request. 

George Torok: And here, Aaron, here's an example of what I did to prepare for this breakfast meeting today. So I looked at the registration list earlier this week, and I looked through some of the names, and I picked out about 10 names.

George Torok: And then I messaged them on LinkedIn and the message was like this. First of all, I said, hi, their name, I use their name. I didn't say, hey there which annoys me. I use their name and say, hey, I trust. I didn't say, hey, I said hi. I say, hey, 

Erin Marcus: it's okay. 

George Torok: I trust that you're going to enjoy the the economic update coming this week.

George Torok: Maybe while we're there, we get to say, hello, hope to see you. And by the way, let's connect here on LinkedIn to stay in touch. And so of the ten I sent out, I think six people connected with me. One person was, actually two people responded and said, Yes, let's be sure to say hello. And one person who wasn't, they weren't going to be there because their plans changed, but they said, let's set a meeting, a Zoom meeting, so we can get connect, we can find out more about each other.

Erin Marcus: Great! And what I love that you did, because I usually do it differently, is you did it before the meeting. A lot of times when we, you come home with your stack of cards and you connect on LinkedIn a lot of that still works and you connect, but you can make it even more efficient.

Erin Marcus: Speaking of LinkedIn and networking, there's something I'm watching younger generations do that to me, it doesn't work for me. And you can create that QR code on your phone so that you don't have business cards and people could just scan it and connect with you right then and there. Now, I get it, that's fine.

Erin Marcus: But to me, I will tell you, I won't that's the end of that relationship, because I won't remember your name. I barely remember my name. Come on. If I'm gonna meet if I'm sitting at a table and we're meeting ten people, and we're all taking turns introducing ourselves, or you're at one of those bigger meetings where everybody gets eight and a half seconds, you're not gonna remember anybody's name.

Erin Marcus: And so if you just scan a QR code and, okay, fine, we've connected on LinkedIn. No, you haven't. You've got another notch in your bedpost, but you don't actually know each other. There's no way to follow up from there. 

George Torok: And I am a fan. I know they're going out of style, but I'm a fan of business cards.

George Torok: I use them because 

Erin Marcus: I write on them. 

George Torok: It's a, yeah, one, I can write a note on it. And two, it's a physical reminder. It's this I can do with, but yeah, a scan QR code. I don't see that anywhere. 

Erin Marcus: I'll never see it again. I, okay, great. You've increased your number of connections by one. But I don't, there's no way to follow up on that.

Erin Marcus: And I think that's some of, going back to why people don't do this properly. I think there's just been less and less. requirement for it as we rely on all the really cool technical tools, but too many of them have been designed to eliminate connecting as a human and now people have forgotten how to do it.

George Torok: And the funny irony that I find is that now with AI coming out, so called artificial intelligence people are even giving up more of their own intelligence. 

Erin Marcus: I don't know how you feel about it. So I have moved. This was my solution. We use AI tools. There's a bunch of things that we use them for, but to me, it's for efficiency, not, and a little bit of ideation, but not creation.

Erin Marcus: And If you want a noisy marketplace to get even noisier because now it's easier for everyone and there's no, less and less barrier to entry to the marketplace, the number one way to not sound like everyone else in the market is to not sound like everyone else in the marketplace. Which, there's no prompt that'll do that for you.

George Torok: And, the one way, yes, and the one way to stand out, to be different from everyone else, is to be yourself, and be the best yourself that you can, and to be pretty much consistent in whatever your personality is. For example, Erin, your personality is one that, that we remember. It is what it 

Erin Marcus: is. 

George Torok: Anyone who has met you would go, Oh yeah, I know her.

George Torok: Oh yeah. Hell 

Erin Marcus: yeah. And I've had to learn how to let that be okay. And know that I'm not for everybody and know that's fine. But going back to where you started If all you do when you meet someone is labels and provide them with a list, Then nobody knows who to send to you because they don't know enough about who you are to match you up properly, right?

Erin Marcus: I have there's a woman in my world, Tammy. She's amazing. She's absolutely amazing. She's more of a life coach where I focus on business, but there's Success mindset in there and one of our mutual friends says she wants me to motivate her in the morning and Tammy to read her a bedtime story, right?

Erin Marcus: Like Tammy and I agree on everything, but we're such different people that you wouldn't refer the same people to us, but a label wouldn't tell you that. 

George Torok: And, Aaron, when I instruct executives mid to senior level executives on presentations, one of the exercises that we do is I first ask them to give their typical self introduction, which is the boring introduction, and I say the reason we do this is because this is the baseline, and typically it's my name is, my title is, the company is, we do.

George Torok: And then I say, do it again, only this time, By the way, your title is meaningless because the titles are so vague and companies have different titles. So forget the title. Instead, tell us how you add value. Either to your organization or to your client. Now they have to think. And now they do it again. And then I debriefed them and I said, how did that feel differently?

George Torok: And if you can imagine, they said now I was interested in the person. Now I got to know something about them. Now I want to know more about that. 

Erin Marcus: I say this, Ray I, especially with these labels, if I am in a networking event, if I, List any of these labels like people will run away progressively faster business coach podcast Speaker if I say any of those things People because everyone has such sales resistance because the marketplace is so full Of these people screaming from the rooftops, pick me.

Erin Marcus: The rest of us have to suffer the consequences of everyone's bad behavior. And everyone thinks all I want to do is sell things to them. And I will promise you the last thing I do is sell I won't, I don't, I am way past the point of ever wanting to convince somebody to work with me. Because I don't want to work that hard, right?

Erin Marcus: That's just not how it works. But I've learned that if I introduce myself and say, oh my God, what do you do? And all I say is I help entrepreneurs make more money. Now that's a little bit more interesting. I help business operators get out of their own way so they can become business owners. I help, what, service professionals go from me to we.

Erin Marcus: Right now it's, At least there's a glimmer of hope that there is an interested response, right? 

George Torok: And Erin, why those phrases that you just used are so powerful is because now instead of vagueness you're creating both images and emotions. You're touching their emotions. So when you say we, we go from business 

Erin Marcus: Operator to business owner.

George Torok: Yeah. And people go, yeah, I like the thought of that. I'd like to do that. That would feel good. 

Erin Marcus: Exactly. It makes it easier for someone to know who I'm looking for or who might be a good fit for me, not even as a client, but as a partner and as a even who could help me, all different directions.

Erin Marcus: And it's the labels. The labels will kill you. Yeah. 

George Torok: And when it comes to speakers the phrase that really gets me is I'm a sought after speaker. Really? You didn't pay the bill again? 

Erin Marcus: The, one of the best pieces of advice I got when I started speaking was never use public speaker.

Erin Marcus: I'm not a public speaker. Any, the, anyone standing on the corner with a megaphone is a public speaker. And I'm like, oh, that was a good one. You're a professional speaker. You get paid to do it. I'm like if the guy has a cup, he also gets paid to do it sometimes. But, yeah. And the language matters.

Erin Marcus: One of the things that you and I were talking about was this negative bias in our brains and neuroscience and in our, pervasive in our culture and how that is creeping in more and more insidiously to the language we use every day. And you got to be careful. The words matter. 

George Torok: Yeah people get get fooled by thinking that the words don't matter.

George Torok: They get fooled to think, oh I didn't mean it that way. Or no, I don't. I only know what you said. And the words do matter. And you're, and the negative. For example, going back to today's the economist who, from the bank, naturally, as you can imagine, gave us lots of data, more data than we really want to.

George Torok: However, that's what she thought was valuable. It's that's her life. That's her job. But what she did, one mistake she made in ending up, And she said I hope that wasn't boring for you. Why would you say something so negative? Instead, you could have said I know that was a lot of information, but if you only remember one or two things, here's what it is.

George Torok: Now she could have summed up, and we could have gone, oh, yeah, that wasn't so hard to understand at all. But for some reason, I hope that wasn't boring for you. 

Erin Marcus: I'm sure as a data analyst and an economist, she's used to all the jokes, right? But our insecurities are the labels we think other people have for us, right?

Erin Marcus: They all seep out. And you can, it's crazy how you can do so much harm to your efforts with these tiny little words, I'm just checking in, right? We have these little minimizers. And women are much, much More affected by this than men are, and I was sadly very sadly reading a article this morning about they're now seeing this in younger and younger girls.

Erin Marcus: They're seeing it as young as three and four years old where they used to only see this starting at seven and eight years old. The minimizers, because the pervasiveness of social media and what they're exposed to, they didn't used to get exposed to this much. Even passively, right? Even passively as their parents were doing things.

Erin Marcus: The minimizers, the disqualifiers, it just kills it. It kills your confidence or the confidence the other person has in you without either of you knowing it. 

George Torok: That's key. That's key, Erin, because we, it registers and most people don't notice it. I notice it because that's the business I'm in.

George Torok: So I'm picky about the words, but most people don't notice it. Yet it still, it affects their thinking and their perception. 

Erin Marcus: It's the, it's part of like how a confused mind always says no your brain will back away slowly. It won't even know why, but it will back away slowly from things that don't sound you mentioned earlier being consistent.

Erin Marcus: I think that's part of it too, where Does the brand image, the brand emotion, the branding language, the physical appearance of all of it, if it's not consistent, people will back away slowly, and you won't realize, and they will often not even realize why.

George Torok: Very true. We. We want, you know what we want? We don't want, we don't want new information. What we want is we want what we already believe to be confirmed. And if it doesn't confirm what we already believe, we'll translate it that way anyways. Which is which is where we see the big example is, of course, is politics.

George Torok: We believe what we already believe. It doesn't matter what just happened today. 

Erin Marcus: And the algorithms just reinforce it. What is that phrase? Like people don't see you, they see how they see you. And so the words matter as well as not just going, not, not just stopping with labels.

Erin Marcus: that can't get you past any of that.

Erin Marcus: So if people want to continue this conversation with you and learn more, not just about how you can help them, but how they can apply all this to what they're already doing. Because one of the things I have learned, which is very good news. We, nobody needs to throw the baby out with the back with water.

Erin Marcus: This is usually tweaks. That which is fantastic news, right? This is usually just a few tweaks can make a huge difference What is the best way for them to find you and connect with you? 

George Torok: Probably two ways aaron one i'm easy to find on linkedin where i'm quite active My website the key website is speech coach forexecutives.

George Torok: com and for is the word F O R, speechcoachforexecutives. com, and you can find a robust blog there with comments as well. 

Erin Marcus: Awesome. And we will make sure that everything is in the show notes so you are just one click away from everybody. 

George Torok: Excellent. 

Erin Marcus: Awesome. Thank you for joining me today. I'm a big communications nerd.

Erin Marcus: So I love all this stuff and learning why it happens and what we can do about it and how to use it to get you where you really want to go instead of being stifled by it or stuck by it. 

George Torok: And the message of course, is that if you want to be ready yet, work on your communication skills. 

Erin Marcus: Exactly.

Erin Marcus: Start there. Just start there. 100%. Thank you so much. 

George Torok: My pleasure.