Common Networking Mistakes

Common Networking Mistakes Networking is a term that didn’t exist (academically) until almost 40 years ago. It’s a word uttered in and around the business world every day, yet is unclear to most as to how it actually works. Still, it’s a fundamental tool to the success of any business. By definition, the term networking is the development and maintenance of mutually valuable relationships. It’s not schmoozing; it’s not just handing out business cards, selling, marketing or small talk. Those activities are part of networking, but unfortunately, many people’s misunderstanding of the term causes them to network ineffectively. The following are some habits of unskilled networkers, and they can stand in the in your way of developing mutually valuable relationships. So, next time you attend your Chamber or Association meeting, keep these ideas in mind so you can offer the most value to your fellow networkers. Habit #1: Attitude Much like the development of any skill, networking begins with attitude. Unfortunately, unskilled networkers have the wrong attitude. If you’ve ever attended a networking function before, perhaps you’ve encountered businesspeople who act in the following ways: The hard sell – they believe networking is about one thing and one thing only: selling products and services to everyone in the room. Business only – they’re not there to make friends. They’re not there to have fun. And they’re certainly not interested in developing mutually valuable relationships. It’s all about me – they don’t take the time to help and share with others, but rather focus on their own needs. In other words, they can’t spell “N-E-T-W-O-R-K-I-N-G” without “I.” Attitude is fundamental to effective networking. In fact, it’s the most important habit to understand. Habit #2: Only Dig Your Well WHEN You’re Thirsty. The key to successful networking is making your friends, establishing contacts and developing relationships – before you need them. Getting what you want by helping others get what they want first. Networking should be a big part of your marketing plan! Enter the unskilled networkers, who only network because: a) They need new customers b) They have a new product or service to sell c) Their boss forced them to do so Take my friend Bill, for example. He’s quite successful in the insurance business; however he recently approached me about using networking to obtain some hot leads. “My numbers are down. My manager is on my back. I gotta get out there and start networking…or else! What do you suggest?” “Networking takes time,” I explained, “and you can’t expect to come into loads of business or dozens of potential clients without developing the relationships first.” As you already learned, networking is the development and maintenance of mutually valuable relationships…over time. If you try to dig your well WHEN you’re thirsty, you may never find a drink. Habit #3: Dealing Out Business Cards is a terrible habit, and it happens all the time. Have you ever seen people distribute 173 of their business cards during the first 5 minutes of the event? They move as quickly as possible from one person to the next. They don’t make eye contact, they don’t ask to exchange cards – they just deal them out. This is guaranteed to make people feel puny and insignificant. Notice these unskilled networkers don’t spend time actually meeting and establishing rapport with new people; but rather concentrate on giving out as many cards as possible. Your business card has no value when they are dealt out without conversation. Habit #4: Unskilled networkers don’t wear professional looking name tags. When you wear a name tag it makes you much more approachable and helps people remember you and your name. Remember that when you wear a name tag you will always be able to measure the benefit by the conversation that results from people that approach you. When you don’t wear a name tag you will never know what you lost as a result of not being approachable! Habit #5: Unskilled networkers not only attend meetings with their friends and/or coworkers, but they talk and sit with them the entire time! These are people with whom they’ve worked 5 days a week, 8 hours a day for the past 3 years! This is not a good technique to maximize your company’s visibility. This habit creates an elitist, unfriendly attitude. And think how uncomfortable this makes the one or two people sitting at the table who don’t work for that company! It’s unfair to them because they’re unable to meet a diverse group of people with whom to develop mutually valuable relationships! Remember: If you’re sitting with YOUR company – you’re sitting with the WRONG company. Habit #6: Unskilled Networkers believe there is only one specific time and place for networking. It’s called “A Room with A Sign Posted Outside That Says So.” In other words, they only network when someone forces them to. They don’t believe networking opportunities in places like elevators, busses, supermarkets or parks. That’s it? A measly half hour for networking? Doesn’t give you much time, does it? The truth about networking is that it can happen anytime, anywhere. There is a time and a place for networking – it’s called ANY time, and ANY place. Network to win in 2010!

Networking to Win in 2010

As an business person, one of your primary goals is to continue to fill your pipeline with new business. One of the most cost-effective ways to do this–particularly for a smaller business–is through networking. Before you can begin to be an effective networker, it’s important to identify some of the strengths and skill sets that you bring to the table as a business professional. Are you a people person? Do you enjoy public speaking? What kind of professional background did you have before starting your business? How long have you lived in the area where you do business? What other natural skills do you have (such as time management, organizational skills or keeping clients focused) that may not fall directly into your business expertise but are valued by people? One of the biggest roadblocks to networking is the fear that being more of an introvert impedes any successful attempts at networking. In fact, it’s a question I get quite frequently: “How do I network if I’m not a naturally outgoing person?” Go ahead and breathe a sigh of relief, you don’t have to become Mr. Man-About-Town, to be a successful networker. Most business people, over time, naturally develop a certain level of comfort from dealings with customers, vendors and others in their day-to-day transactions. So even people who aren’t gregarious or outgoing can form meaningful relationships and communicate with a little practice..
Become a trusted source for quality referrals and contacts.
Another way to ease into networking is to provide a referral or contact. This could be a direct referral (someone you know who’s in the market for another person’s services) or a solid contact (someone who might be helpful down the road).Let’s say you’re networking, and you run into a person who owns a printing shop. You talk for a while, you hit it off, and even though you don’t know of anyone who’s looking for this person’s selection of print services right now, you’d like to help him out. So you say: Jim, I don’t know of anyone who’s actively in the market for printing services right now, but I do have someone who I think could be a big help to your business. Her name is Jane Smith, and she’s a marketing consultant. I know a lot of her clients need business cards, flyers and things like that printed, and while I don’t know if she has a deal on the table right now, I think you both would really hit it off if you got together. You see how easy that was? You stated right up front you don’t know what will come of the contact. But you then followed up by saying you do think this person could help and briefly described how. Chances are this will sound like a good idea to your new contact.
Business 400 will be hosting the monthly networking events at the beautiful Metropolitan Club in Alpharetta, Georgia on the first Tuesday of each month from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. There will be hundreds of dollars in cash prizes and hundreds of new people to meet. Please visit our website at www.Business400.com to learn more about Business 400 and all the exciting events that have already been planned. Our next monthly networking event will be on February 2nd. We are networking together to win in 2010!

Why Search Engine Optimization is a Great Investment For Any Company

How much money do you pay to have a sales person sell your services or products? How many hours does that sales person work each day/week/month? Did you know that your website is a sales person that works for you 24/7? Having an optimized website is the single most powerful marketing tool that every company should be aware of and implement into their business.

Here are 5 reasons why SEO should be implemented into your marketing strategy before your competition beats you out.

Absence of risk
Search engine optimization is free of any risk. In many cases, paid advertising (banner ads, pay-per-click) is subject to click fraud risk. There are people that that use software to click on their competitors ads, which cost you money each time it is clicked. Google AdWords has protection against this, but it isn’t 100%. Nothing can stop a competitor from clicking your link a few times, costing you money.

Reliability
Banner ads and pay-per-click campaigns work great until the marketing budget for these campaigns depletes for the month. When this happens, your website is no longer listed and customers can’t find you anymore. SEO obtains an organic listing and your company’s website will always be found by your customers. Consumers are more likely to purchase from a site ranked high in the search engine results rather than from a pay-per-click ad.

Brand Awareness
A website that is ranked high means that more people will see the name of your company and become familiar with it and it’s products or services, even if they haven’t made a purchase. Consumers recognize businesses ranked in the top 3 in search engine results compared to those appearing in banner ads. With so many people using pop-up blockers and banner blockers, many people don’t even see the banner ads that are being displayed.

Targeted Traffic
SEO brings those paying customers to you. When a consumer is looking for a specific product or service and you rank high, they will enter the key words/phrases that they are looking for. When they find your site, they are a target lead and more likely to purchase from you. How much money do you spend on sales people getting you targeted leads and sales?

Affordability
In comparison to banner ads and pay-per-click advertising, SEO is a much more affordable service. With banner ads and pay-per-click, you set a budget and when that budget is met, the ads are gone. This could happen a week into your campaign. This means you would go three weeks before your ads appear again. With SEO, your website will stay listed on the search engines and won’t drop off.

As you should be able to see, search engine optimization is vital to your business. If you have a website and people can’t find it when entering keywords of the products or services that you sell, then why did you pay all of that money to have the website built? Remember, your website is a sales person that works day and night and has a global territory. Can you afford to pay your sales person to work day and night?

Five Reasons to Start a Business Blog

Five Reasons to Start a Business Blog

In a competitive environment where businesses are hard-pressed for advertising dollars but anxious to reach and impact a finicky consumer base, savvy businesses have turned to blogs.

Five reasons businesses find blogging beneficial are

1. Economics
Dollar for dollar, blogs are less expensive to create and maintain than traditional ad campaigns. They are convenient to utilize and can generally be launched and maintained at a fraction of the cost and effort of yesteryear’s advertising venues.

2. Infinite Branding
Blogs are “tagged” with key words and “linked” back to a business’s social media and website to build a digital footprint that builds upon itself. While many traditional ad campaigns can fizzle out over time, a properly maintained blog will build momentum and gain “advertising speed.”

3. Intimate Exposure
Blogs are an ongoing journal that share a company’s history, value system, announcements, progress, and new products and services. Companies use blogs as a forum to collect readers’ opinions, invite feedback, and educate people about their products or services. Blogs are a strong tool in relationship-building and allow consumers to do business with people they can get to “know,” like, and trust without traditional face-to-face pressures.

4. Consumer Trust and Confidence
What if you could build a sales force of people who represented your company just the way you wanted them to, 24/7? That is in essence what a blog can do for you. You construct your message and it reaches people intact without being diluted by other factors.

5. Outlast the Competition
In the past five years alone, there has been a strong, (startling!), and measurable shift in the way companies reach their customers. While blogging has become an advertising triumph for those in the know, those who cannot or choose not to enter the digital media ring to compete will soon find themselves knocked out.

Questions? Contact ShellyKent@comcast.net

Attitude

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of Attitude on life. Attitude, to me is more important than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the Attitude we embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people act a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play the one string, we have, and that is our Attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our ATTITUDES.

Author of “ATTITUDE” Chuck Swindoll

Reasons to Keep Your online photos up to date

Reasons to keep your online photo presence professional and up to date
Posted by photographeratl on December 17, 2009

Dec 1, 2009, Atlanta, GA—On Time Photos is pleased to announce an added convenience for its customers, on-site photography for corporate headshots.

This “Professional Picture Day” allows business people to update their head shots for their business cards, print materials, and website profiles. “The advantages,” says On Time Photos owner Jerry Morris, “are the overall cost savings for the individuals and less time away from work to update their portraits.”

Today, business photos are more necessary than ever due to business’s increasing utilization of social media and website advertising. “Businesses have burst onto online forums such as LinkedIn and Facebook. You simply cannot leave the online profile photo blank and be taken seriously,” Morris explains.

Indeed, studies indicate that consumers find a business person more trustworthy and likable when they see who is serving them, and out of touch or irrelevant in the competitive marketplace when their photo is severely dated.

To maintain a professional image, Morris suggests that professionals update their photos every three years or anytime they experience a noticeable change in appearance such as hair color or style.

The idea to hold “Professional Picture Day” for organizations came as one of necessity when individuals would pull Morris aside during companies’ group photo sessions and ask for individual photo sessions after the shoot.

Morris says there are certain things people should be mindful of in their business photo. “Keep styles basic and classic,” he says. “A head and shoulders shot is appropriate for business cards and printed materials, while a closer shot works well for an online profile photo.”

On Time Photos also offers a great solution for corporate gifting: gift certificates for a family portrait. Morris photographs family and corporate events, weddings, holidays, maternity poses, and tasteful intimate portraits to gift that special someone.

Networking Comfort Zones

The temptation in this atmosphere is to get very close to another person so they can hear you and you them. This can result in being too close to another person sometimes making them very uncomfortable. This discomfort is heightened when we have been consuming alcohol and the person we are talking to have not.

Each of us has our own comfort zone boundary. This is a space around us that when another person enters we begin to feel uncomfortable. A good way to relate to this is to remember if you have ever had an argument where someone got right up in your face and possibly even pointed their finger very near to it. Remember how that made you feel? In most cases it makes a person feel more angry.

In a networking environment it is important to maintain a distance from a person that you are talking to. This distance should be almost an arms length. Most peoples comfort boundary is about the length of their arm. If you find yourself getting very close to someone in conversation, imagine if you raised your arm and that is the distance that you should be from the other person. If they move closer to you in the course of conversation, it is acceptable to them to be closer. If it is acceptable to you then continue with the conversation at that distance.

You can sometimes tell if you are standing too close to someone if they seem to be moving back while you are talking to them. If they appear to be getting further away from you, do not move to be closer to them. They will stop when they reach the distance that they are comfortable with. If they turn and walk away of course it is time to find someone else to talk to.

To be most effective in your attempts to build relationships with others, it is most important to keep these things in mind. Remember that it makes no difference what you say to a person if they are not engaged in the conversation. Good observance of boundaries can give you the edge you need to make networking work.

Choices

Think about that. One choice, just one, can change your life forever. Simply put, your life today is what your choices have made it, but with new choices, you can change directions this very moment. For me, that idea alone is highly motivational because it offers tremendous hope, regardless of circumstances, for a better tomorrow.

Your life-changing choice may be to switch careers, to leave an abusive relationship, to go back to school, to stop drinking, to adopt a child, to start a business, to lose weight, to start a charity…to name a few. If you have the courage to do so, you could make any one of those choices, or others, today. And you would change your life.

Sometimes it’s a different kind of choice. It can be to not quit, to not giving up in the face of adversity. We’ve all been there.

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen received 77 rejections for their idea Chicken Soup for the Soul. They had to make a decision each time…should they throw in the towel and say enough is enough, or should they keep trying to pursue their dreams? You know the rest of the story. The 78th publisher said “Yes” and they went on to sell over 100 million books.

So never forget that you are only one choice away from changing your life. Do you have the courage to make it?

How long does it take to build good relationships

Have you ever heard that it takes at least seven points of contact before someone will consider doing business with you? I have heard this many times and I believe that it is true that it takes many points of contact, tho I am not sure that it has to be seven.

The fact is that usually we will not do business with someone we do not know. Of course the exceptions to this rule come in the form of shopping for personal or home items when we go to the mall, or we stop to get a burger for lunch. I am sure you do not really know the person that you bought your washer and dryer from , or do you?

Buying decisions for the most part are made up from collective experiences. We might decide to buy from a particular store because we have shopped there a lot and had a good experience with it. We might decide to visit that store on the recommendation of a friend. Sometimes just plain old advertising draws us in and out of curiosity we find a new favorite place to shop.

In most of the businesses we encounter in networking, we want to know more about the business before we make a buying decision. In particular, we want to know more about the person who is talking to us. We want to be able to trust this person before we buy from them. Why is this? In some cases the product or service that a person is selling does not cost much, yet we need to feel comfortable in making a buying decision.

In order for someone to trust you enough to buy from you, you have to be able to let them get to know you. You can accomplish this by making contact many times and being a real person when you do. If you frequent many meetings a month, you should always take the time to say hello to people whom with you have previously met. Ask them how things are going for them on a more personal level than just asking, “how’s it goin?”.

Show genuine concern for their answer by listening. Listening and responding will help develop a deeper relationship. Be more than a passing face in the crowd and you will build deeper more valuable relationships with people.

The biggest mistake that we can make in networking is to be superficial. If we do not let people know more about us than our name and what we do, we will never be as effective as we can be. As people get to know you, they can make a decision to buy from you or not. In this realm, price and features have no meaning. It is you that makes your product better.

They may say that seven points of contact are required to make the sale, but the quality of that contact determines the outcome. Be sure to be yourself when you are out there, be genuine, be concerned, be human, and most of all be comfortable with it. This will help you to generate success that you never thought was possible.