Moving Your Networking Efforts To Higher Levels

Know your networking plan

Cutting-edge networkers are reaching higher levels of networking by adding to clever positioning within the marketplace.  They have established action plans as answers to the following strategic questions.

  • What is your networking strategic plan: your agenda for the next 12months; activity in trade-professional industrial groups; public speaking and/or seminar facilitator engagements; contributing articles to various publications; plans to increase your contact base; etc.?
      

  • What are your targets, i.e., who do you need to meet: your ideal prospect; your niches, target industries  and companies; size of target businesses’ specific companies and specific people’s names and titles?  Remember: If you do not know what you need or who you want to meet, how can anyone else help you?
       

  • Do you make the most out of your speaking engagements: How can you market yourself in exchange for the usual pro bono presentation? Do you ask to be a guest at another meeting rather than the one at which you are speaking or have you requested a byline in the association’s newsletter or can you showcase at another meeting or have you asked for the association’s mailing list?
       

  • Do you avoid prejudgment: Do you negate building a relationship with people who cannot buy directly from you? When you meet people ask yourself; who do these people know or will know who will need any of my products and services? Build on their networks. 

As mentioned before, it is not enough to be out there. It seems that everyone is out there “networking”, i.e., exchanging business cards, giving leads, waiting for leads, even joining lead-generating groups. These are good starting points, and yet, to bring networking to higher levels of effectiveness, strategic goal-setting and follow-through as well as the tracking of networking efforts must be set into place. Your investment of time and money should reinforce the fact that it is not who or what you know that counts; it is who knows you and what they believe you can do for them. 

After all, cutting-edge networking involves aggressive communication, aggressive giving and, eventually, aggressive receiving. Since this business tool is here to stay, it requires fine tuning and sharpening as do all tools to attain the most desirable results.

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