Intelligent networking

If you are to be successful with your marketing exploits you will need to practice and perfect your new wisdom on networking with people. More importantly, you will need to find opportunities to connect with people. Your ideal contact is someone who themselves may be well connected. This does wonders for your referral business. Always consider what value any contact can add over the longer term. This implies the need to build relationships with the ‘right’ type of contacts.

 Your contact should also have the potential for a number of changes in his life to occur that may result in his needing your services, products or upgrades of your product. It helps too if your potential client has the resources and the authority to make the decision that leads to the acquisition of your product or service. If you are ever in a situation where your attempts at providing, or even obtaining assistance are met with a NO, remember my rule that you should never, under any circumstances, in your business or personal lives accept a NO from someone who is not empowered to give you a YES in the first place. If you follow this rule you will achieve a far greater number of yeses than before. Remind yourself when you get a no that gatekeepers are often instructed to say no by a decision maker. Once you manage to get yourself in front of the decision maker a NO very often becomes a YES. Try it next time especially when you are trying to obtain better service.

          If you are the introverted type and crowds and talking to strangers really bother you, here is some news you’re going to like; you gain more from a networking session by listening and asking a few prepared questions than by doing all the talking yourself. You should not ever attend a networking session with the intention to sell, rather attend with the single purpose of being the person who helps others by offering up referrals. This will make everyone you meet think you are great because you helped them and made them feel good. And because you have helped them, they now know that they owe you, so when you next make contact with them you will probably be well received and any reasonable request made by you will most likely be granted. If you focus on helping others at networking functions your confidence will grow and in no time you will have plenty of referrals coming your way from past contacts who seek you out to greet you and return to you the favours that you have unselfishly bestowed upon them in previous discussions.