Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Are You Making the Mistake of Handing Out Your Business Cards too Freely at Networking Events?

Networking events are great meeting places and as the name implies, they provide a venue to work within a group - usually of professionals. Like any other successful method of marketing, there is an art to networking that involves many areas, but we'll focus on just one for now. What is you goal when you attend networking events? Is it to quickly tell everyone who you are, what you do, hand out as many cards as possible, then leave?

If your goal is to get your card into the hands of as many people as possible without taking the time to find out who they are, what they do and how you can help them, then your purpose for attending would have failed. It's important to remember that networking is about building relationships and to achieve this it is important to be others focused. Get to know people by asking questions about them. Ask simple conversation starters like: What do you do? You can follow with questions like, How long have you been in business or working this particular business? Who is your target market? How can I help YOU?

Someone may say that if all they're to be concerned about is the other person, what's the point in attending these events? The point is that when you show that you care about others, they begin to build a measure of trust in you. People are so accustomed to being pitched to so that when you display the opposite behavior they lose some of the defense wall surrounding them and will more readily want to learn more about you and find out how they in turn can help you.

Go with a mindset to GIVE, and you'll be pleasantly surprised how much you GET.

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Please feel free to comment on my blog, and I would love to know what topics that affect Relationship Marketing you would like to be discussed.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks Yvonne,

    This was a wonderful post. I think that small up and coming business owners can benefit a great deal from this article. We should always keep in mind that we are here to provided a service to others, productively helping society, not to simply be "successful" or feel our wallets. In order to help people we must find out exactly what they need.

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  2. Hi Marcus,

    Thank you for commenting on my blog post and I appreciate the points you made.

    Best regards,
    Yvonne

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