Networking – Overestimated Or Strategy For Success?
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The value of recognising the benefits, limitations and possibilities of various business strategies is immeasurable. Being able to deipher what’s hype and what’s real is so fundamental to the success of any entrepreneur that business Angels poke and prod all who pitch to them to see if they have this skill before considering them for investment. Networking is one such over-hyped strategy. So let’s investigate how much faith we should put in it and how much time and money we should be invest in it.
Employees network to win themselves a better job, entrepreneurs network to find new clients, and business Angels network to find new investments. Whether you’re speed networking, social networking or simply on a schmooze campaign, there is no doubt that networking has grown in popularity over the last twenty years. It has gone from dinner with select potential clients to secure new business, to a numbers game. Today volume seems to be king; how many people are following you on Twitter, how many friends do you have on Facebook and how many networking events do you attend?
In this flurry of business card exchanges have we lost sight of the real reason for networking, to win new business? As with many things in life it’s all about quality over quantity. If you spend too much of your time and money networking then who’s fulfilling the orders, working on the accounts or covering other marketing routes? If we network too much we run the risk of diluting business with this social activity.
Business Angels, by definition, have succeeded in their corporate lives to a point where they have enough spare capital to make a difference in someone’s new venture and the business know-how to pick winners from wannabies. As a result business Angels are analytical and focused by nature and therefore networking may well suit their needs. However, not everyone is as focused and the networking-obsessed run the risk of apportioning far too much of their valuable time socialising and not enough to other areas such as customer service, new product development and the day to day running of their businesses.
We have been told for years to network, network, network, as if it were the pathway to guaranteed business gold. But some people just do not suit the environment; some businesses will benefit little from the exposure and some will simply overdo things leading to other areas of their business suffering.
Business Angels know that good business is all about investing their time and money in the right place at the right time. So the most important advice that I can impart today is that every promotional tool that you use, even those that are socially accepted as THE way to do things need to be qualifyable. Is networking working for your business, are the new contacts that you are winning actually useful to your business, and are there other marketing tools that perform better for your venture?
Networking can be very useful, and in fact there are numerous businesses that rely heavily on it for their client relationships, but it’s not for everyone. So whether you’re an employee, an entrepreneur or one of those business Angels who just loves to get in the thick of things through networking, you should ask yourself, “is this really working for me?” Base your strategies on the informed answer to this question rather than blindly believing the hype.
