Sensible Branding

Meeting, meetings, boring meetings.

I have to ask the value in handing round our business cards week after week to the same people. Or telling and retelling those same people what we do in a ten-minute slot. Add in venues where breakfast or lunch aren’t always well-cooked, or well presented, with people we only get to know skin-deep even if we meet them on a regular basis, and you have a really unappetising recipe for business networking.

And yet this seems to be the normal stuff of networking! The very reason we do it is to get more business. So we meet the same people over and over again, sometimes in different network groups, like goldfish swimming round a bowl. And new work seems to elude many of us.  What is the point?

People + room = business?

Most business people are only too aware of the need to increase customers, make contacts and generally get our name ‘out there’. However many people would not class themselves as natural networkers, and even fewer are naturally gifted sales people. In fact many would shy away from walking into a room full of people brimming with confidence and bonhomie. Even fewer business people have taken the time and trouble to work out a pithy and professional ‘elevator’ pitch to sum up in just a few seconds what they do and what makes them different.

One of the biggest pre-conceptions about networking is that it produces results almost immediately. We think that if we join a group of people in a room they will potentially be customers. That may or may not be the case. Tell them a couple of times how great your business is, and of course you expect some of them to jump right in and give you some business! (After all, every group extols how many business opportunities it generates, so we look for the proof).

Very often, the truth couldn’t be further in the opposite direction! I wouldn’t take anyone on face value (I said there were a few cons out there) so why would anyone give me business without knowing my values, integrity and the quality of my company? That doesn’t happen instantly, it takes time, sometimes years.

Differences rule

There are, of course, a wide range of networking groups, and good, and some just plain dire. Even within a single network of groups, each group will be slightly different, although the meeting format may be the same. It has been said that it isn’t the people in the group that matters, as much as the connections they have. This always smacks (to me) of using people for your own ends. I’d personally rather make friends and see where that leads (if anywhere).

Then again there are different ‘levels’ of businesses, and one network may work well for plumbers and electricians, beauty consultants and the inevitable ‘life coach’, but would not be right for ‘Mr PLC’. In my own experience, I could not refer a local plumber into a major client based miles away. And they couldn’t refer me into ‘Mr PLC’ because ‘Mr PLC’ just wasn’t in their circle of influence. Yet I would be required to bring referrals. It just didn’t work for me or for them.

So I discovered that many networking groups just wouldn’t be of benefit to my company or theirs. Finding a group that contains a similar ‘level’ of businesses as your own is therefore vital. If, as ‘Mr One-man band’ you want to contact householders, then find a group that has businesses with householders as their customers, not just more ‘consultants’. If on the other hand you want ‘Mr PLC’, (or are Mr PLC) then you’ll need to choose groups carefully and possibly pay more for the privilege of joining. Peer-to-peer networking is always preferable.

Either way, the benefits will not come from formal group meetings; they will come from holding relationship-building meetings away from the group. These are far more valuable as what you put in is what you get out. Leads may sometimes be generated within the group, but I have also discovered that people do not always follow up on leads, which is embarrassing for all concerned.