Thursday, July 31, 2008

Networking - The Life Blood of Your Company's Future

CEO's like to see results. While theories are nice to ponder and spreadsheets look pretty, they fail to have the impact to the bottom line. Regardless of your job title or function, you should be looking for ways to help drive your company toward success. Results are always noticed and rewarded.

All opportunities come from people. I do not care what industry you work in, doorknobs and ink pens do not bring you new clients (unless you are an innovator in the doorknob and ink pen industries...and even then, your product alone cannot make things happen). Other people are the catalysts that lead you to potential customers knowing you exist.

Are you working hard to connect the dots and make new connections with those who can bring you new business? Or are you fooling yourself in to believing you are too busy to network???

It happens everyday - professionals make excuses as to why they do not got to networking events or keep their precious relationships alive and thriving. If you are not cultivating your connections, your contacts are withering on the vine. Soon they will be dead. You can be replaced in the minds of those who can refer business. OUCH.

Think about it this way: If you have a relationship / friendship with someone who can be a good referral / information source and you are not talking to them regularly..... your competitor is probably talking to them.

Guess what? Out of sight is out of mind.

You need to constantly be communicating with your network, growing relationships and keeping friendships up to date or you will wake up and have nothing.

CEO's hate to lose. Those who see relationships as the life blood of their company's future would blow a gasket to know that many of their employees just don't care about investing the time in making, growing and keeping business relationships. Go ahead, ask your CEO if they cares if you just ignore people as long as you do a good job at your assigned tasks. Tell him or her that you think creating relationships with other people is a waste of time, and thus you just wont do it anymore. Think he or she will care?

Not networking is a gift to your competitor. They should send you a hand-written thank you note!

Have A Great Day.

thom

Have your read one or more of my books? If yes, THANK YOU.


Click here to view a list of my current and pending book titles.

Also, we just released "Some Assembly Required: A Networking Guide for Women" - it makes a great gift!

2 comments:

Megan Fitzgerald said...

Hi Thom,
Great post. This begs the question - why is networking not an assigned task? Why not schedule it like any other task?

I have my clients schedule 15 minutes a day to start. And they set goals (however they want to measure) and track progress - just like any project.

You can be strategic in how you invest your time and authentic and organic in how you engage...

Buona notte!

Megan

Katie Konrath said...

Today I'm actually too busy networking! I accidentally signed-up for two events on the same day. One is a big young professional event, and the other is with my alma mater. So I'm just going to both.

Thanks for the reminder that networking is important. I needed the extra boost today!