Networking For Success – Marketing Your Business Face To Face
Networking is one of the best marketing strategies that you can use in your business. It’s people that buy your product or service, and business networking meetings offer you a fantastic forum to introduce them to those people. Whatever time of the day, there are meetings happening near you where you have the opportunity to promote your product or service.
Networking Attitude
1. One of the first rules of networking is, don’t expect anything. If you go to a meeting expecting to make a sale and get business, you probably won’t. I’ve found it is better to go to a networking meeting with an attitude of what can I do for others -how can I help other businesses – either by giving them referrals or by giving some of your knowledge away for free and not expect anything back for it directly.
2. It’s much better to be a farmer in attitude, when networking, and not a hunter – in other words, cultivate relationships, you’ll be able to harvest in the future, that will bear good fruit. A typical hunter is more focussed on selling rather than creating relationships and prefers to just talk about their product or service and how good they and their business is. Imagine going to a party and while there, just talking about you and how wonderful you are, it just wouldn’t work and the same is true at business networking meetings.
3. Offering to run part of the networking group, is a great way to be seen and get noticed as someone who helps out, so wherever you can, get involved even if it’s clearing tables at the end of a meeting.
4. Do make sure that you meet up with the other members (on a 1-2-1 basis), so you can have a chat over a coffee. This way you can build a relationship and find out how you can help each other, and learn about each others businesses. Don’t just talk about business though, talk about hobbies, interests and background and you may find you have some common ground.
5. In your chosen networking group, you should get to talk about your business for 60 seconds or so. The best thing to do, is to prepare and keep to the 60 seconds, I’ve seen business owners go well over the usual 60 seconds and you can tell that people in the room don’t enjoy that, it is also disrespectful to the other business owners that do stick to their 60 seconds. Two rules to keep in mind should be less is more and fail to plan, plan to fail.Where Should I Network?
It’s best to go to a group where you’ll see the same people meeting after meeting, so you can build a relationship with them, however it should be a group where they have regular visitors coming through that could potentially join the group as well. Find a group that meets at least every two weeks. Once per month really is not enough time to build relationships with 20-30 people. Remember to keep in touch with the group on social networking forums too, such at Twitter, Google plus and LinkedIn. This will help to build those relationships even further.
Networking Summary
Business networking is great for your business marketing. However you can get so much more from it, than just a referral for business, you can get trusted suppliers, advice and support, you can also start-up joint ventures and of course there are new friends you will make too. Don’t expect it to work straight away, it can take time! I have seen people get business straight away and I also seen people not getting anything for a year or so, however they stuck at it and when business did start coming in, the flood gates really opened up. Just remember to give rather than take.
