Thursday, October 2, 2014

Fishing for Clients: Is Your Net Big Enough?

Is your networking building business for you? How do you bridge the divide between social media networking and traditional networking?  Younger employees might dismiss traditional for the allure of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.  A new, one-hour presentation is a compelling journey through the maze of networking possibilities. Is it time you put networking on your meeting schedule.

Networking is a critical element for success in any industry.  It is something that is hardwired into each of us.  We were networking as far back as elementary school.  We have an inherent need to connect with people. 

John Naisbit is the world’s best known observers and analysts of global trends.  His first book, Megatrends was published in 1980.  He coined the phrase "High Tech equals Hi Touch."  He came to this conclusion long before social media.

While everyone is enamored with  social media as networking heaven and are attracting followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, this acceptance of Hi Tech does not get us to Hi Touch.  Naisbitt’s premise was that as our culture becomes more dependent on technology, there will be an equal force causing us to connect more with each other more.

This is where the networking rubber meets the road.  They don’t teach this in college or graduate school.  Effective networking is hard work.  It doesn’t have to be a baptism by fire or trial and error.  Social media should work like a networking magnet, attracting people and clients to you.  But this is only one step in your networking journey.
Today, I want to take you on a journey that will open your mind to the simplicity of networking and the value it can bring to your career. 

How many principals and firm officers believe in the Golden Rule?  He who has the gold makes the rules?

This can be a curse when it comes to networking.  The attitude this presents produces one direction networking.  It is almost a clique type of networking.  You start to network only with people inside your cocoon. I don’t have time to go into the psychology of this, but simply want to say that networking is not your father’s climbing the corporate ladder.  Networking today is like the Double threaded helix of DNA.  It is more complex.  To understand this we need to go back to the beginning.
 
Where did the word networking come from?  It is an ancient word that began as two words net and work. It referred to the craftsman who put fishing nets together.  What is the most important part of a fishing net? There are different sizes of rope used for catching different types of fish.  But the most important part is the connections.  As the size of the rope increases, so does the size of the knots that connect the rope.  The knots have to be placed strategically depending upon the type of fish.  Too much space between knots and your catch gets away. 
Too little space and you catch fish that aren’t worth keeping. You should look at your networking this way.
Let me use LinkedIn as an example.  Your connections are called the first. If one of your contacts is connected to someone,  they are 2nd.  If that person is connected to someone, the person is third and so on.  The LinkedIn model is really based upon the six degrees of separation. It feels good to be connected directly to 500 people and indirectly to over 100,000.  Are these connections worth keeping?  How many help you secure business?  How many are really active on LinkedIn?
Is your network big enough or strong enough to capture the clients you need the most.  If not, how do you build it?
I worked with a networking genius when I first got into the industry.  He was the vice president of marketing and hired me to sell services in the Midwest.  His training program consisted of handing me a dozen project photos, telling me to learn the names of company officers and stating I would do fine.  I did, but it wasn’t because of that training program. It was because of the networking example he lived. He told me to join some allied industry associations and that I had to get involved.  “You get out of it, what you put into it,” was his motto.  You have to be active on committees and boards and not just attend meetings to hand out business cards. This guy was responsible for national sales for this engineering/architecture firm with nine offices across the country.  The headquarters was in Chicago. He lived in St. Louis. He left his house Sunday night or Monday morning and would return home on Friday.  He spent a lot of time on the phone next to binders of business cards.  He was successful because he kept in contact with people he met. He knew people in every industry but concentrated on developers and commercial real estate. On the outside, he met a lot of people who were not in positions to help him.  He would help the people who needed it the most but deserved it the least.  He was at a party in California playing tennis with Paul Tagliabue, then commissioner of the NFL,( He was a habitual name dropper) when the conversation of a new NFL stadium came up.  Our firm didn’t have any interest in it, but he knew an architect who worked for a firm that designed stadiums.  The architect had also turned him down on a recent proposal. Tabliabue gave him the particulars of contact people at the NFL team who would be looking to hire a design team.  Later that night, he called the architect with the news.  Fast forward three years, Disney is getting ready to expand Disneyland. It will include the largest parking structure in the world.  The architect’s firm has been hired to prepare a master plan and help Disney select consultants.  Disney was not thinking about selecting a specialty firm to design the parking structure, until the architect was called and told about the facility we were doing for Universal Studios in Florida.  We were chosen to design the parking structure at a fee in excess of $6 million or a project value in excess of $150 million. Some would have called this luck, coincidence or chance. I believe that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. It could also be called Networking 2.0.
The moral to the story: Your network is only as good as the trust you build with connections. You build trust by helping connections when there is nothing in it for you.  Clients in any industry have an aversion for helping people who always come to them with their hands out.
 
 
 












The complete presentation can be scheduled by contacting Tryst Anderson.  The one-hour program can be completed over breakfast, lunch or dinner during a retreat, monthly meeting or in-house training class.

No comments:

Post a Comment