Best Business Deals.

I love Networking to gain business and get referrals but it sometimes gets a bad wrap- you know, the sweaty guy in the cheap suit trying to press his business card in to everybody’s hands and get as many business cards as possible. He tries to sell his product to everybody in attendance. This is the type of guy that will never make a success of networking and then will complain loudly about how it never works.

He is getting networking all wrong. He is acting like a hunter instead of a farmer. He is out trying to kill his prey instead of cultivating his relationships to boost his business.

The first step in the Networking process is to make sure that people get to know of your businesses existence. If people do not know that your business is there then there is absolutely no chance of your business being profitable. Eventually you will go out of business.

However, successful networking does not end here. You need to build your network by meeting a lot of people. You need to get out there. As you go about meeting people you will come across some people who you would like to develop further relationships with. Developing these relationships can enable you to get better referrals more often.

Most novice networkers spend 80% of their time on the visibility side of their networking and only 20% of their time on developing further relationships with the right contacts. You need to flip this on its head.

You need to spend 20% of your time meeting new contacts and 80% of your time on developing relationships with those contacts who can best help you grow your business whether through further education you on how to run your business or providing you referrals so that your business grows.