Networking – ‘Not Working’?

Bristol Business School says 70% of business for entrepreneurs comes from direct personal contact – referrals and networking. Individuals and companies have been ‘networking’ for many years and referrals or personal recommendations often stop the competition in their tracks, reduce the sales cycle and create more opportunities.

You may think that you don’t have time to go to all those networking events; when would you see your family and loved ones? But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the last few years, we have seen an explosion of online networking forums including www.LinkedIn.com and www.tribe.net all of which for no cost or low cost enable you to ‘armchair network’. This is fine, and you can meet some great people online, but meeting face-to-face tends to help people to remember you when it really matters.

Again, you have no end of choices with opportunities to meet on a regular basis with networking organisations such as BNI and Business Referral Exchange (BRE), who both hold regular breakfast meetings.

Andy Lopata, Managing Director of BRE Networking says “With more and more people leaving corporate life and setting up business for themselves, networking is going to play an ever-increasing role in British business life. The traditional routes to market, such as advertising and cold calling, will become less accessible with increasing government regulation and tight budgets, so business people will have to focus on ways to increase the referrals for their business, meaning a rapid expansion of networking events across the UK.”

Yet how do you go about it? How can you make networking work for you?

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Building a network

To build a successful network you need to start collecting people, find out what they do, how you can help them. As you help more people, they in turn are more likely to remember you and return the favour.

When you take a business card from somebody, don’t just put it in your wallet and forget about them, make notes on the card or in your contact system. This will make it easier to find key information later. The more connected you are as an individual, the more attractive you will be to other individuals – you will start to be considered as a ‘mover and shaker’

You need to become a matchmaker.  If you know or hear of a need that could be fulfilled through somebody in your network, make the introduction. Your network will start to grow significantly and you will be recognised as a key person in your network. At the same time, respect geography; initially meet people in your locality, especially when networking outside of office hours – people don’t like to travel too far to network with others.

Practise and polish your elevator pitch: make it as focused and specific as you can in terms of the people you want to be connected to. If you can make it distinctive this will also help people to remember you.

Don’t make the mistake of treating networking like multi-level marketing: this is definitely not the way it works and you will probably end up offending people. A good network takes time and effort to build, but it will pay high dividends in the end.

What to do in a networking situation

Before you attend a networking event, make sure you have plenty of business cards – it’s surprising how many people forget! If you are naturally shy, you may want to arrive early and that way the first person to arrive will generally come and speak with you.

Try and focus on finding out as much as you can about the others in the room and what connections and business they are looking for; givers always end up receiving far more in return.

If you are out for a night of serious networking, don’t stay too long with one person, instead, make the suggestion that it would be useful for both of you to circulate. Where possible, take the lead and introduce people straight away to others, and as you start to work the room you will raise your profile and attract more people to you. If you make eye contact with others and smile, people will want to talk to you.

If you get to a point where everybody is networking and you need to join another group, then never interrupt two people talking, as they may be getting into a deeper level of conversation and won’t appreciate you interrupting. If you find yourself out in the cold like this, always join a group of three or more people, edge in and listen, and at an appropriate moment, ask a question or make a positive comment on the group’s topic.

Networking is becoming an important factor in the marketing mix and it could be a critical growth factor for your business. A Sandler Sales Institute Study recently found that cold calls are successful 1% of the time, word of mouth is successful 15%, but with referrals achieve between 50 to 80% success. If you think that networking is ‘not working’ maybe you should think again.

Written by John Bancroft

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