Leo Martin: What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Secret Agents

What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Secret Agents - an Interview with Leo Martin.

Agents and entrepreneurs have one thing in common: if they want to be successful, they must build trust. An interview with a former agent - about charisma, similarities, and genuine relationship work. impulse: Mr. Martin, your name is a pseudonym from your intelligence service days. What can an entrepreneur learn from a former secret agent? Leo Martin: Building trust! It's never about saying, "Can you trust me or not?" It's always about, "What exactly can you trust when dealing with me?" That's a world of difference. For entrepreneurs, this means: position yourself as clearly as possible - and your customers can better assess what you stand for! Your counterpart needs a crystal-clear image of you and your values and decision-making criteria. This gives the customer a secure foundation for their decisions. Building trust was the foundation of your previous work. How can one imagine your old life? Leo Martin: My targets were criminals with connections to the former Soviet states. My job was to recruit informants - in other words, to become the first point of contact in the life of a young Russian who had gone astray. I would then deliberately build a basic level of trust with these individuals and persuade them to cooperate with us in the long term. How many people did you recruit during your time with the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution? Leo Martin: I had about five to six targets per year. My success rate in recruitment was around 80 percent. That's quite respectable. You never get 100 percent. How do you exactly gain the trust of a stranger? Leo Martin: Trust cannot be bought, forced, or talked into with rational arguments. It can only be achieved through genuine relationship work. Through experiences and shared moments. When recruiting informants, we always used a contact strategy involving multiple meetings, where I would regularly appear in the target's environment - such as during leisure activities. How can I picture this: Did you play poker with the Russian mafia? Leo Martin: It was less about poker for me. It often involved sports activities or other common interests that I had researched beforehand. Or I would use the same travel routes as my target. The informant I wrote my three books about is a real person. He was a courier for drug money and regularly flew from Amsterdam Schiphol to Frankfurt am Main. I constructed my legend in a way that perfectly matched his: as a project manager for a planning office in Frankfurt, I oversaw the interior design of a yacht owned by a wealthy Russian. This made it clear that we would regularly encounter each other on his travels. You call it a legend, one could simply call it a lie... Leo Martin: I never saw it as a lie. The legend is the tool of the agent. I need it to be successful. Just like a baker must master his recipes for his bread to taste good. The mafia deliberately isolates itself from the outside world. They camouflage and deceive to keep their networks and methods secret. You have to fight with the same weapons. It's interesting that a lie only destroys a relationship when it affects the core of that relationship. With an agent, no one can expect to ever learn the real name or location of the agent. That may be true. But as an entrepreneur, you don't want to deceive your counterpart... Leo Martin: I would strongly advise against that as well. As an entrepreneur, you typically don't deal with criminal mafiosi, but with honest customers (laughs). Entrepreneurs, especially smaller ones, have another advantage over us agents. They know their customer base much better than we know our targets. It's easier for them to highlight commonalities, respond to desires, or create experiences with their own products. How do I do that? Leo Martin: My job was always to be as emotionally appealing and exciting as possible for my targets. When I had to approach my target, that was always the second-best way. The ultimate discipline for agents is: "Make the target approach you." Translated to the business level: your product must have a certain appeal and stand out. Then customers will naturally come to you. And they will come back.   For more information about Leo Martin, visit here: https://www.speakers-excellence.de/redner/leo-martin-buchen.html Experience Leo Martin live at the 5th South Tyrolean Knowledge Forum