Dave Clarke, writing on the Business Networking Blog, made the following quote in one of his posts. I found this quote to hit the proverbial nail on the head when thinking about the effectiveness of networking - particularly in the context of networking through social media, such as LinkedIn.
Success in networking (offline and online) comes down to building a manageable number of relationships amongst people with influence amongst the right audience. Then motivating that network to advocate you.
So many individuals consider networking to be the accumulation of contacts. A more important element of collecting contacts is as Dave Clarke mentioned - those contacts are influencers with your target audience. How many of your contacts have numerous (let's say more than 10) trusted and influencing relationships with CEOs that would be excellent candidates for your group?
Let's take the example of TAs. You interview the TA as someone you would like to build a relationship with over time and obtain referrals from. Let's pretend the TA is the Managing Partner of a local law firm. The TA claims to have numerous relationships with CEOs. After two years and zero referrals for your relationship-building efforts, you actually discover that he has lots of CEO contacts in his rolodex, but very few trusted and influencing relationships among his clients.
Does this suggest you should be more careful in selecting whom you're willing to invest time with in relationship-building? OR does it suggest that a better approach is needed to validate and verify the claims made by those whom we are trying to strike up a relationship in our network for the purpose of generating leads and referrals to CEOs?
This is my major contention about why networking for leads and referrals fails so often: The individuals to whom we are connected do not have strong trusted and influencing relationships with their connections.
To read the full article on the Business Networking Blog, click the link below:
Are You Building Strong Ties with Your Network?
Barry Deutsch
