Quality AND Quantity

Not only is life about balance but so is networking. In the financial industry it’s called diversifying your portfolio. The key is that you want to make contacts to manifest short-term successes but at the same time have a blend of longer term strategic deals. For example, I deal with decision makers who are marketing directors at mid-sized companies. Direct, or shall we say “quality” connections for me would be the marketing titles at the companies themselves, or shall we say “quality.” Quality can be defined in many ways as it refers to networking and referrals. Either the quality of the person you are meeting, whether it be the CEO, CMO or DOM, or the quality of the company, such as a brand name Lexus. The ideal world is a decision maker who represents a company that you would want to do business with.

With regard to the quantity aspect of networking, I best define this as the number of alliances you build. I firmly believe alliances, not solo effort, create success. In a keynote presentation for a business technology organization I explained the concept of farming, meaning creating relationships with companies directly for nearer-term accounts and relationships with ad agencies and creative firms for longer-term clients. You have to balance your relationship between both areas.

In sales there is the saying of “keeping the pipeline full.” A way to do this is to list the “titles” that you typically sell to. If, for example, you are with an Internet marketing agency then your list would include the CEO (where there isn’t someone directly in marketing, usually for a small company), Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Director, Marketing Manager and Marketing Executive. Once you have identified these titles you need to find out what companies sell to these titles. In my case it would be ad agencies, creative firms, PR agencies and email and web marketing companies.

It reminds me of a baseball player’s batting statistics. He wants to have a high batting average, hitting singles and doubles, but, at the same time, hit some home runs to improve upon his slugging percentage. The same thing in business. You want to shoot for the stars as well as have enough smaller deals in the pipeline to bring results for you when you need them.

Too many contacts may cause lack of follow up. And the “fortune is in the follow up” was a quote I heard recently. So having many contacts but no follow up won’t work. The flip side would be few contacts, constant follow up. So when you get up to bat, remember that you need to have a balance of swinging for singles and doubles as well as home runs.

Before you can create that ideal balance of quality connections and enough of them to sustain your revenue goals, you are going to have make sure that you have fully defined who your customers are and what other companies sell to them.

George Washington once stated “Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation for ‘tis better to be alone than in bad company.” “It’s not enough to be busy … the question is: What are we busy about?” proclaimed Henry David Thoreau.

Please feel free to post comments on my blog at http://powernetworking.blogspot.com/

Suggested reading

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling by Frank Bettger