Getting to the Right People:
Valuable Networking That Leads to Great Results for You and Your Business
By Monique Hayward
Do you approach networking as a welcome opportunity to make new professional connections? Or are you avoiding it until a colleague drags you to a local business event when you’d rather be home watching your favorite TV show? Are those business cards you collected at the last chamber of commerce luncheon still hidden away in the corner of your desk drawer? Love it or hate it, networking has become a necessary strategy for entrepreneurs to develop valuable relationships that ensure the success of their businesses.
However, in the last several years, more and more business groups, professional associations, and community organizations have jumped on the networking bandwagon. They have created an ongoing calendar of meet-ups, conferences, seminars, and events as well as a dizzying array of online communities, mailing lists, and directories, making it incredibly difficult for a busy entrepreneur to pinpoint where and how to spend his or her precious time. You feel like a politician as you shake a lot of hands, collect business cards at these functions, and endure incessant emails with sales pitches in hopes of meeting someone with a common interest who can really help move your business forward.
You are busy and time-constrained. You don’t need more contacts in your address book who you don’t call. Networking should deliver results for you and your business. Focusing your energy and time on developing high-value relationships with people who can help you take your business to new heights is the name of the game in today’s business world. Here’s how you get your networking working for you.
1. Identify Your Networking Objective
As an entrepreneur, your life revolves around your business and what it takes for you to implement new ideas, raise capital, acquire and satisfy customers, generate revenue, and control costs. Approach networking just like you would any activity for your business. Identify the objective you want to accomplish through networking so that it aligns with what you’re driving in your business. It’s networking with a purpose that delivers tangible results.
Suppose you’re getting your idea off the ground and you’re walking around with the business plan in your head. You need a formal business plan, and you want to network with successful entrepreneurs who can help you through the process. Translate that into a specific objective: Ask for a private meeting with the president of the local chamber of commerce to get his or her recommendations on business owners with successful track records who want to mentor up-and-coming entrepreneurs. That’s an objective targeted to get the exact result you want without having to fight through a crowd at a networking event.
2. Bring the People in the Background to the Foreground
Chances are you didn’t build your business by yourself, and you’re not conducting business with just yourself. You very likely have many people in the background of your business – friends, family, investors, bankers, suppliers, customers, clients, employees, advisors, mentors – who you need to bring into the foreground when it’s time. In other words, you don’t necessarily have to meet new people to make new connections because you probably already know someone who can assist with a problem you’re trying to solve or an opportunity you’re pursuing.
I’m a restaurant owner and I have identified Las Vegas as a potential city to expand my current concept in the next few years. As I think about what it’s going to take to make that vision a reality, I don’t need to make cold calls to commercial leasing agents on The Strip who wouldn’t even give a small business like mine the time of day. I already have key people in my network, like a mentor who is the CEO of a mid-sized public company who does business with casinos and an investor who is a commercial real estate developer throughout the western U.S., who can show me how to navigate that landscape.
3. See and Be Seen
Yes, it makes perfect sense to join professional associations and business groups and attend their events, seminars, and conferences so people know you’re out there. That’s when you tell the story about your business to anyone who will listen because you never know who might just have something valuable that could give you and your business an edge in the marketplace.
However, use this time wisely. Get creative and target people you know you want to meet. Often you can get a copy of the attendee list for an event which generally lists names, titles, company names, and contact information. This gives you a lot of intelligence to help you align your networking objective to the right people. Leave the event having met a handful of people who can make a difference in your business, not with a business card collection to add to your stack back at your desk.
Finally, successful entrepreneurs create visibility for their businesses and themselves as personalities by finding innovative, creative ways to keep the spotlight pointed in their direction and generate word-of-mouth. When you’re perceived as an active member of the local business community, high-value networking opportunities come to you.
OK, let’s admit that most of us are ordinary folks with no access to celebrities or the clout to grab headlines in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Nonetheless, you have opportunities to partner with experts in your local community – e.g., authors, local luminaries and celebrities, well-known business people – and associate yourself and your business with the latest trends, news, and causes that complement your business strategy. Here’s where having relationships with a few local reporters can be advantageous when you have a new product to launch, an event to promote, or a cause to support to keep your name circulating. If celebrities and big businesses can keep their names in the papers, there’s no reason why you can’t, too.
4. Look for Connections That May Not Be Obvious
You are already in tune with the trends and directions of your business and the industry and subscribe to a number of news sources to keep up with the latest and greatest. Take that one step farther: Start paying attention and tracking the people who get quoted in articles, appear on news programs as experts, and speak publicly on your areas of interest. Don’t be afraid to reach out to these people if there’s common ground on which you could potentially build a mutual beneficial business relationship.
For example, the PR strategy for my business focuses on generating positive press coverage with local media outlets, and I have successfully placed numerous stories with the major local newspapers, TV, radio stations, and online media. Now I’m pitching my story to national media outlets to generate broad awareness for our unique concept. This is no small task because I’m competing on a national scale with other businesses that are all vying for media’s attention.
Recently, with the help of a friend who has connections in the talk-show business, I created a package to send to the producer of a top-rated nationally-televised show who would potentially find my story compelling and newsworthy. Shortly after sending this package to the producer, I attended a conference where a panel discussion featured women entrepreneurs. One woman told the story of how she started her small business out of her home and eventually grew the company into a successful brand of beauty products. Along the way, a talk show producer discovered her when she was showing her product line at a holiday event, and that producer contacted her to feature her story on the show. After that TV appearance, her business took off and she was well on her way.
After the panel discussion, I made my way to the front of the room to introduce myself to this fellow woman entrepreneur and to share how I’m pitching national talk shows about my story. It turns out that the producer who discovered her was the same one to whom I sent the package about my business. With this entrepreneur’s help, my blind pitch, which had been sitting on the producer’s desk for months, suddenly had a familiar name attached to it, and the producer returned my phone call.
On the surface, restaurants and beauty products don’t have very many paths that intersect, and I went into that panel discussion not expecting anything more than hearing the perspectives of successful women entrepreneurs. My eyes and ears were open to the possibilities of looking for connections that were not obvious from the title of the panel discussion.
5. Give Back
As with any relationship, there’s give and take. If you are taking too much from your network, it won’t be long before you drop to the bottom of your contacts’ call-back lists. Think strategically about your network and who would naturally benefit from knowing one another, and don’t hesitate to make those introductions. If you can create a high-value connection on someone else’s behalf, it strengthens the network and ensures the success of all its members. It seems simple but you will be rewarded in small and large ways for doing good unto others and not just thinking about your own needs or interests. Never let competitiveness drive you when you’re dealing with your network.
When you have the opportunity to involve people in a high-profile activity or opportunity, think about the best people in your network who would appreciate and benefit from it. Recently, I’ve had the good fortune of Hollywood celebrities dining at my restaurant in Beaverton, Oregon, a rare occurrence, to say the least. I created my “short list” of people who I wanted to make sure had a seat when those celebrities showed up, and the goodwill that simple act created will last a lifetime.
Summary
You meet people every day, but are you meeting the right people who can help you get great results for you and your business? When you clearly identify the objective you want to accomplish through your networking, analyze how to leverage your existing contacts, make yourself visible in the community, think broadly about opportunities, and look for ways to give back when you’ve been helped, those people are well within your reach.
Monique Hayward is the president & CEO of Nouveau Connoisseurs Corp., the company she founded in April 2004 which owns and operates Dessert Noir Café & Bar in Beaverton, Oregon. Monique is also a senior marketing manager at Intel Corp. She has over 12 years of business experience in high-technology and has managed highly visible programs in marketing communications, public relations, and business development. Monique has an MBA in marketing from Case Western Reserve University and a BA in journalism from the University of Maryland College Park.