A roundtable on how to approach famous people like Tony Robbins and Bill Clinton. Research them first, find a genuine compliment, and use mutual connections to get introduced. Larry Benet shares how he called mutual contacts before meeting Clinton to build name recognition.
Could we have him break down our little scenario with Tony Robbins when we met Tony Robbins? Because Mike and I pre game the Tony Robbins thing.
Okay.
And so we were gonna meet Tony Robbins. I don't know. We had like an hour with him in a little group. Right, Nice. And so Mike had previously been at some convention in Vegas for jets. Something about jets.
Okay.
And Tony was there. And you and Tony were looking at the same. What kind of jets were they?
Big jets.
Gulf Streams.
Gulf Streams. So you didn't say hi to him, but you saw him there?
Right. And so I was standing in line to wait to get in one of those.
That was Mike's opener. Yeah, but the mistake with our. Because we kind of like came up with this idea together, like what we were going to say. But our mistake might have been that that wasn't deep enough. Like, hey, you know, we saw you looking at jets.
Maybe it should have been about his charity probably because he, he was. It was interesting to watch. But he definitely, he definitely. I wouldn't say he was intimidated, but he wasn't open and friendly.
Yeah, we were hoping I was going to like, like just cut to the chase and tell us the truth and not put the mask on.
He had a huge guard.
Yeah, he had a huge guard mask. It was a question I asked him was. Would have led to something else. And he just chose to.
But our mistake might have been not going after a charity or going after his kids or something.
Going after his kids.
I was more. I was more. I wanted to see whether he would. He would engage in, in the, in like the shit behind the curtain rather than give the person, you know, the public face, his, his Persona that he sold everybody. And I gave him that opportunity to, to do that and he chose not to take it. I just, I was just curious just for that to see how he would react to it. So I got my answer.
But Larry wouldn't do that.
No, no, no.
Larry would give. We were playing games with them. Really.
Yeah, right.
We were testing.
Testing.
Yeah, yeah.
Listen, it could be a couple of factors. A, you know what, you know, what's the environment? Who else is around? Are there other people around? Is he. Does he feel he has to be in Tony Robbins mode or can he let his guard down when he's with Peter Goober and some of his buddies?
This is a high level group of Martin, like, like we understand all the shit that he's doing.
Sure.
I wanted to get to one of the core elements him. To where he was that I had gone through and See what he said about that. Because I know some stuff because I've talked to people who, when he went through the course, could have connected in a deeper level had he allowed himself that opportunity and he chose not to take it. Well, for whatever reason, it's his choice.
Yeah. Now listen, this is a true. This, this will happen. You know, if you took a hundred, you know, people that are influential and you're trying to connect with them, sometimes the initial connection may not go well. So then what do you do after the fact that, you know, who's the executive assistant who, who's like, in his case, it's his wife that really is one of the handlers. There's a few key people around him whose wife Tony Robbins.
He pointed a big.
If we want. Yeah. But if we want to.
Yeah.
We can just go, sure, Joe. Joe. Like really, what it's gonna get done.
Sure, I know, but there's no lesson in that, bro. Like, I know for the, for the audience listening, we did not get Tony Robbins email or phone number.
That's correct.
He was more, he was more probably put off by us maybe then wanted us to come hang out and take cold baths with them or whatever, or.
Listen to two chains.
But I mean, arguably too, I don't think that was our goal. But if I, if I take Larry's system and kind of what we did and I did a parallel. We were toying with them more than we were like, trying to give, trying to give value.
Right. Wait, right there is a mistake right there. Like, if we really wanted to, we should have been giving some kind of value.
Yeah.
Here.
It has to do with research.
Here's a foolproof way. First of all, if you throw a compliment, an authentic compliment about something he's done that's impacted you, impacted one of your employees, he's probably impacted someone in your, in your. You can drop that quickly. Obviously you were probably with Joe Polish or some mutual friend.
There's a hundred K group.
Yeah. So one of the things I do normally, if I'm with a very high profile person, I'll say, hey, we have a mutual friend in blank. Here's what I do with Bill Clinton. I literally knew I only had mere. As a matter of fact, I was with Joe Polish and Brendan Burchard and Dan Sullivan. And the only reason I went, they said I would be able to have a private conversation just like this with President Clinton. I'm like, well, that sounds pretty cool. And when I got there, that's not what it was. It was a photo op. And a handshake. Now you have 500 to 800 people behind you and their Secret Service moving you every few seconds. There's not a whole lot of time to go have a long, drawn out conversation with the former president. So what I did is an hour beforehand, I said, who do I know that if I called them, they could either give me insight into the president and. Or there'd be some name recognition in the thing.
So you could relate to him.
Yeah. So the first thing I did, I called Ken Cragan. He's part of my saying network. He created We Are the World. At the time I was raising money for We Are the World. That was with Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones, Justin Bieber and all those singing.
Jamie, I was just about to say, would you like me to sing this?
Yes. We are the world.
We are the world.
Yeah.
But anyway, so going back to, you know, with him, I said, hey, we have a mutual friend in Ken Cragen. By the way, he says hello. And by the way, I know you love music. Would you. The We Are the World recording is coming up. Might you be interested in participating at the live recording? Now, I don't care who you are. That's a pretty cool gig. No matter who gets to go that. That's pretty. Even if you're the fastest president of the United States. So I'm always thinking, what can I bring a value first? What's a value gift that I can offer someone? But that's, you know, what I thought about when I met him?
