Keith Ferrazzi

Keith Ferrazzi's Key Accomplishments Include . . .
Keith Ferrazzi is one of the rare individuals who discovered the essential formula for making his way to the top -- a powerful and balanced combination of marketing acumen and networking savvy. Both Forbes and Inc. magazines have designated him one of the world's most "connected" individuals.

As Founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, he provides market leaders with advanced strategic consulting and training services to increase company sales and enhance personal careers. Ferrazzi strategically leverages the insight of executives, whose careers span the highest echelons of corporate America, utilizing principles from his best-selling book Never Eat Alone.

Widely recognized as a thought-leader among his peers, Keith Ferrazzi is a frequent contributor to CNN and CNBC. He has authored numerous articles for leading business and consumer publications, including Forbes, Inc., the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and Reader’s Digest. An early leader in the quality movement, Ferrazzi was the youngest examiner of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. He has been named a "Global Leader of Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum, one of the top "40 Under 40" business leaders by Crain's Business, one of the “Distinguished Young Californians” by the Jaycees, and listed as one of the most creative Americans in Richard Wurman's Who's Really Who. Ferrazzi's extraordinary rise to prominence, which includes a stint as the youngest Chief Marketing Officer in the Fortune 500, has even inspired a Stanford Business School case study.

More About Keith Ferrazzi. . .
Most recently, Ferrazzi served as Chief Executive Officer for YaYa Media, a leading interactive entertainment consultancy. Prior to that Ferrazzi was Chief Marketing Officer at Starwood Hotels, where he oversaw marketing activities for global brands including Sheraton, Westin, The Luxury Collection, St. Regis, and W Hotels.  Ferrazzi also served as Chief Marketing Officer for Deloitte Consulting, a leading global management consulting firm, where he developed and managed the industry's first globally integrated marketing organization. His creative marketing strategy drove the ascent of Deloitte's "Consulting" brand recognition from the lowest in the industry to a primary position and spurred the highest featured growth rate in the industry.

Ferrazzi actively supports numerous civic, charitable and educational organizations. He serves on the Yale University Board of Alumni Governors and is also a Fellow of the Berkeley College at Yale. Additionally, Ferrazzi founded Big Task Weekend, an executive roundtable that brings together some of the nation’s top leaders to focus on improving the health and wellness of Americans. Ferrazzi’s interests also include studying the relationship between leadership success and spirituality. He received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Keith Ferrazzi is widely regarded as one of the top speakers in the country. All kinds of conferences, corporations and schools want their audiences to experience Keith’s outstanding energy and to learn from his expertise in sales, marketing, relationships and career development. And given Keith’s extraordinary rise from his undergraduate studies at Yale to the highest echelons of the Fortune 500, he is one of the rare individuals who can truly connect with everyone from first-year college students to CEOs.

• Relationships for Career Success
  

  In this talk, students and young professionals acquire the mindset and skill set to take control of their careers through building mutually beneficial relationships. Setting goals is where most career development programs end, but that’s just where Relationships for Career Success begins. After establishing incremental goals for a range of 60-days to 10-years, participants learn to do the following: Identify people who can help them achieve career and life goals, Build and broadcast unique personal brands to stand out in the crowded marketplace, Ensure the people and resources in their own “back yards” are contributing to their success, Approach and engage mentors for guidance along the many paths of their careers, culminating in a dynamic personal board of advisors, and Develop a customized Relationship Action Plan to guide their actions and track progress.

• Instant Intimacy: Your Most Potent Weapon Against Prejudice
  

  It’s no secret that on campus or in the workplace, if we look or live the slightest bit differently than the “norm,” others have prejudices toward us. Although we can’t stop others from making these pre-judgments, we can endear ourselves to others enough that they come to care for us as human individuals, with all the wonderful hopes and dreams and insecurities that they have, too. In “Instant Intimacy,” participants will learn the secrets for turning only 10 minutes of conversation into the kind of human intimacy and acceptance they feel with close friends.

• Insider Personal Branding
  

  Although you aren’t in a popularity contest, per se, within your organization, your CEO and other superiors can be your best friends or your worst nightmares depending on your personal brand. Much of their information will come from your colleagues’ opinions and impressions of what they think you are doing, as well as the results you produce. And it can all affect your department’s budget and your personal career trajectory. Through Insider Personal Branding, participants will learn the following: Market themselves inside the organization, Deal with changes as they climb the corporate ladder, Articulate the value and ROI of their personal contributions and group initiatives, Adapt to management change and politics, and Enhance their brand through building influential relationships inside and outside the organization.

• Relationships for Revenue Growth
  

  Salespeople and entrepreneurs face the hard reality that more and more of their products and services are faster and faster becoming commodities in today’s competitive marketplace. In this environment, the one lasting strategy for consistently growing revenue is to proactively build genuine, lasting relationships with clients. Through “Relationships for Revenue Growth,” participants learn the following to do just that: Make more business relationships personal because selling is easier and more fun work with personal friends rather than strictly professional contacts, Build emotional ties that transcend transactions through demonstrating uncommon generosity with their clients, Uncover new leads and warm-up cold calls through cultivating their existing networks, and Close more deals by increasing their value proposition through relationships.

• C-Suite Selling
  

  Not getting results with a bottom-up approach to sales? Tired of your salespeople investing valuable time and resources to convince mid-level managers to make a purchase, only for their recommendation to be rejected by senior executives? In “C-Suite Selling,” participants learn the ins and outs of selling to the most desirable clients—top executives. Everything from securing an initial meeting amidst their crazy schedules to engineering a value proposition that fits their most pressing issues and high-level strategic visions, “C-Suite Selling” prepares participants to sell to the real decision-makers.

• Maintaining Your Network: Executive Relationship Management (ERM)
  

  Do you agree that relationships—not tasks—are what power the growth of your organization? But are you just a bit unsure of how to set up a system for maintaining your key relationships, or do you find your days to be so inundated with putting out fires that you just don’t have time to figure it out? ERM is the most efficient starting point for executives to identify and record the individuals most important to their organizational and personal success. ERM also helps executives understand best practices for approaching these individuals, building personal relationships, and creating a system for maintaining contact on a consistent basis, even amid the flurry of daily responsibilities.

• Wallet Expansion
  

  Everyone knows that it costs much more to acquire a new client than it does to sell additional services to current clients, but do you know exactly how to expand the wallets of your current clients? Through “Wallet Expansion,” participants learn to assess a client’s overall situation by mapping out the relationships they have throughout the client organization. Participants learn to weigh the influence of each player and strength of relationship they have with each, as well as to creatively find ways to enhance those relationships through personal intimacy and generosity to maximize the opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling throughout the organization.

• P2P Selling: Relationship Selling To Avoid Margin Erosion
  

  To get outstanding revenue results, you must forget about B2B selling. Businesses don’t sell to businesses; people sell to people. Unless you start thinking P2P and striving to add value to your clients through personal relationships, you and your products and services will become commoditized. In “P2P Selling,” participants learn to go beyond selling features and benefits to offering total solutions by understanding what their clients really need through developing deep personal relationships.

• Relationships for Group Success
  

  A group’s success fundamentally depends upon how its individual members work together, and individuals work more effectively and enjoy their work more when they have genuine personal relationships with their colleagues. Relationships for Group Success helps participants to stop seeing colleagues merely as vice presidents or lower level managers and to start seeing them as human beings. Great for resolving common problems that arise from cross-functional collaboration and geographic separation, Relationships for Group Success sparks a culture of generosity and accountability to help participants do the following: Help each other succeed in both professional and personal pursuits, Have more fun in the workplace, Facilitate direct, honest communication for resolving conflict, and Contribute to the firm’s success by proactively building relationships with people inside and outside the organization, And more that will lead to increasing employee retention and shareholder value.

• Accountability and Conflict
  

  As powerful as it is to create true intimacy and practice abundant generosity, there’s more to being a successful leader today. In relationships with subordinates, peers, and superiors, there's also a need for transparent feedback and constructive criticism, even if it's not the easiest thing to do. Drawing lessons from Keith Ferrazzi’s experience with accountability groups from his days an undergraduate at Yale to the ongoing monthly meetings inside Ferrazzi Greenlight, “Accountability and Conflict” helps participants turn these difficult conversations into an integral piece of maintaining relationships. Participants learn why people are much more resilient than we presume, why it's their responsibility to let people know when they under perform, and how to set up a process for continuing this crucial, transparent communication.

• Intimacy, Generosity, and Conflict…The 3 Pillars of Leadership…
  

  In order to be a leader today you need to be able to be intimate, generous and know how to properly manage (not avoid) conflict. Our leadership model is based on the belief that while all business must be run as effectively and efficiently as possible to stay competitive that business is human and people are messy. How we lead today—whether we lead ourselves, others, others who lead others or ultimately an entire business unit –is different than many of the leadership models we were exposed to early in our careers. When most of what we are exchanging in the marketplace today is intangible (think professional services, financial services, etc) or highly commoditized our competitive advantage is in most cases our people. Failure to lead them in a may that has a positive impact on the business AND on the individual is a formula for disaster.

• Cross-generational Leadership: Mixing Boomers with Generations X, Y and Beyond
  

  Are you tired of hearing people in your organization say, “They don’t get it,” or “That’s not the way we used to do it”? Competing in today’s marketplace demands not only the effective use of cross-functional teams but also cross-generational ones. Cross-generational Leadership helps participants recognize the different motivations and needs of baby boomers and Generations X and Y that derive from familiarity with technology, education background, and cultural differences. Participants then learn models and tactics to deal with these challenging issues so these groups will work in harmony and contribute to your organization’s strategic objectives.

"Everyone in business knows relationships and having a network of contacts is important. Finally we have a real world guide to how to create your own high powered (network) tailored to your career goals and personal style."

---Jonathan Miller, Chairman and CEO, AOL

"I've seen Keith Ferrazzi in action and he is a master at building relationships and networking to further the interests of an enterprise. He's sharing his playbook for those who want learn the secrets of this important executive art."

--- Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld, CEO, Siemens AG