It should be pretty obvious to just about anyone that networking is an essential piece to growing your business. This holds especially true if you're in the service industry and your paycheck is heavily dependent upon referrals from either your network of professionals or past clients. But how does someone begin to take their professional or corporate skill-set and merge it with the ability to be of use to others to the point in which they actually want to send the people that they care about directly to your office? Since there's not always a direct correlation to being able to be good at your job and maintain great social skills or even have a place in conversation in which your services are applicable. I'm sure you've come across someone who just felt the need to just randomly interject into the conversation that they do "affiliate marketing" or that they can help bring you more customers at an affordable rate.
While I'm not knocking the importance of putting yourself out there and earning your ability to put food on the table or keep the lights on. I am however, pointing out that there is a time and place for everything, and an unrelated conversation probably isn't the best place to try and drum up some new business leads for you. But you do need to be able to determine what a legitimate window of opportunity looks like. This can be a moment in a natural conversation, an event, or even a particular setting of environment.
Somewhere or a certain group that lines up as a natural avenue for you to plug the professional side of your life in to so that you can thrive. For some people, it's being out on the golf course chopping it up with potential clients that their trying to wine and dine out on the field. For others, it's a local bar that attracts just the right type of demographics which would serve as their target audience. Some people attend social gatherings which are specifically held to allow for new or young business-people to have a place to try and network.
Now each of these events or environments mentioned all have their own advantages or stipulations that make them more applicable to one type of service provider or another. Moreover, they also appeal to different personality types that tend to thrive in these different social settings. So why am I specifically writing about social settings in an article that is titled to build your professional network? It's pretty simple actually. Building your professional network requires that you cultivate your ability to socialize and provide some sort of personal value to those around you. With the insane amount of saturation of competitors that virtually every market has now, due to instant technological access from marketing through our phones and social media or other advertisement platforms, you'll never win the uphill battle of making your product stand out among the endless options of similar products or services if you're a brand new business owner or professional service provider. Not unless you have access to what would basically need to be an endless amount of capital and resources to freely use specifically to market yourself. Or if the company in which you work for is willing to invest their own resources to benefit you specifically. Since both of those later options are highly unlikely, then it's on you to find a way to grind it out and find your niche.
One of the best ways to stand out among the rest is both simple, and counterintuitive at first to some people. Give of yourself freely solely to benefit those around you. Attend every social event that you can possibly manage. It doesn't matter if it's a professional event or not. When you're attending, I recommend that you legitimately "socialize". Do so without the hook of trying to find an "in" for your business or to find a customer for your product. Remember, this is building your network. Which is an entirely different task than making a sale. That part will almost always come later, and if you build your network properly, it will come more often as well. Find someone or a small group of people and help them first. almost every single time I've gone to a professional networking event the vast majority of people were there with the fear of not making a sale written all over their faces. They would spend the whole afternoon or evening rushing into every conversation they could, not actually actively listening to the other person but instead just looking for an opening to plug in their services and try to turn that other person into a customer or client.
That is absolutely a recipe for failure over the long haul. I have no doubt that each of them were able to find a customer or new client here or there. Sales is a numbers game after all, but how many of them were asked to return to the next event or even invited to a different one with a new fresh crowd of people to network with? Networking for your business is so unbelievably similar to building your personal network that I often have a hard time understanding how it's so often mishandled. A network is nothing more than the building of relationships, and those relationships are built with people. These people, just so happen to also have professional lives that they may be able to fit you in with. But the person comes first. So take the time to actively listen to the people that you meet at events. Become interested in how you can make their lives easier and almost every single time, they will want to return the favor. Being likeable in a social setting, be it professional or personal, is far more valuable than just being a person who has an applicable service or product. People choose to work with who they like far more often than working with someone who just has "what" they like. The "what" can always be replaced in an instant.
If you're unsure of just how to take this approach, just stop over at www.buddconsolidated.com and book your free discovery call. We'll guide you through best practices for building these important business relationships and if we can find a way to work together in a more direct sense to help you build your network, we'd be happy to discuss options for that as well! Simply click on the button below to get started!
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