Networking for Business - Part 1

Your Attitude & Your Approach

Your attitude and your approach both set you up for success in networking. Just think about it for a second. Why do you go networking? The reason we all go networking is to promote and market our business, our products and our services to other business people in our local area.

But nobody is there to buy anything. Let me repeat that – nobody is there to buy anything. You don’t go networking to buy anything do you? No! We all network for the same reasons – those same reasons all wrap up into one main reason – We all go networking to market our businesses, to let other people know about our business, to let people know about our products and services in the hope that they might buy from us. But nobody goes networking to buy from us! We’re there to let other people know about our businesses.

So approach networking with the right attitude and go along to listen and to find out about other people’s business. If people are only there to tell you about their business, their products and services; then go along and in a completely counter-intuitive way turn up to listen and find out more about the other people in the room. Don’t be the kind of person who comes along and just tells people all about what they do and how wonderful their business is. Don’t be one of those people who just hands out business cards to everyone. People aren’t interested! Stop selling because nobody's buying!

Listen to what other people do and think about how you might be able to help them; who you might be able to put them in touch with. And by being that kind of person, I promise you, you’ll be staggered at the serendipitous things that can happen.

That’s my word of the year by the way – Serendipity! I’ve had so many serendipitous moments on the back of networking – it’s been incredible.

So approach networking with the right attitude and don’t go along to sell anything. In my next blog post I'll be explaining about how and why you should share your story.

Related posts:
In case you missed any of the other articles in the series just click the relevant link below:

Networking for Busines - Introduction
Networking for Busines - Part 1
Networking for Busines - Part 2
Networking for Busines - Part 3
Networking for Busines - Part 4
Networking for Busines - Part 5
Networking for Busines - Part 6
Networking for Busines - Part 7