If you are a current (or aspiring) business owner or self-employed by any means, you already know you can only eat if you make sales. With that being said, what are you doing to keep yourself fed? When you’re out attending events, traveling and otherwise “networking”, what do you do when you get home?
Networking is only useful if you FOLLOW UP to build the relationship and actually make a sale/gain a referral/gain a resource to grow your business. Thus we have today’s quick tip: don’t waste time networking if you’re not going to follow-up on the contacts you make. Attending networking events costs money, time and resources, so why not take the initiative to follow-up with interesting people you meet? Note: do not become a spammy salesperson.
You can plan to meet for coffee (or a bagel, cocktails, you get the point) and get to know a person. You might be surprised by what you have in common or what you can learn. Remember, you already have a baseline for a conversation if you attended the same event.
You have a wealth of free social media tools at your disposal to stay in touch with your new contacts, so there is really no reason why you can’t build a relationship with people as you go about developing your business and your network of resources.
If you don’t want to do any follow-up, and you just want to sit around complaining about the status of your business, you might as well do something else better with your time and money, like skimming through the yellow pages for contacts…
Ciao,
Miss Kemya
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