There’s no question that first impressions count. What’s horrifying about it is the fact that you’re constantly meeting people, which means that you’ve got dozens (or possibly hundreds) of first impressions being made every day.

If you want to make a solid first impression you need to do your homework. It’s not unlike preparing for an interview or a (really hot) first date. You need to anticipate a few questions and polish your answers.

Specifically do some prep work for questions like “What do you do?”, “Who’re your customers?” & “Is ABC your competitor?”. They may seem trivial, but the slickness & interestingness of your responses to this sort of question is what will form first impressions.

I recently spoke to someone who described his customer as “Anyone that owns a laptop.”, instead of sounding like a product with an enormous potential market, it sounded more like he wasn’t really sure who his customer was. Though it is actually an awesome product that I’ve read alot about, his answer didn’t do wonders for my opinion of the business.

Think about all the people in your company, specifically non-sales people, and how they may be casually introducing your business to the world. You may even want to consider this as your offline social media effort?