1. Define your purpose
In order for your business networking to be truly powerful and be successful in helping you to achieve your business goals, you need to have a clear purpose in mind. Because by having a clear and specific purpose in mind, you’ll achieve a much more focused network opportunities and see much better results. So, to be able to plan and set out what your networking purpose in advance is a key skill.
This purpose could include aspects such as: to build 5 new business contacts and relationships; or to grow your business income by 20% over the next 6 months by helping and supporting other businesses to grow in your network.
2. Identify your passion
As you start to identify your passion, just remember this important point …All passion is not equal! Your big passion for your business has to be the driving force behind your networking activities, which means you’ve got to have a strong, powerful and positive passion backed by huge amounts of motivation and enthusiasm that will magnetically draw other business people towards you. And it also provides you with the incentive to get out there and meet and make connections with other interesting ‘like-minded’ business people.
So, to be able to decide on what are the list of your exciting business goals that always keep you motivated to go out and meet new people is a key skill (and if had to choose only one, which would it be?). Then focus on this one passion to connect and communicate with your network.
3. Turn your passions into business goals
This key skill starts with you a writing down your business goals that are central to your business thinking and which are related to your passion. For example, if you have an online business, then your goal might be to identify market influencers and potential partners who can help you build and grow that business by becoming guest bloggers. And remember that the best goals you create are those that are specific, measurable, realistic, achievable and have a time frame. In other words, they are …”SMART” goals. And then what that means is that when your goals are reached, you will be excited to create new and bigger goals that your business network will help you to achieve.
4. Make your networking goals work for you
The reality of business networking is that while you’re meeting and connecting with other business people and gathering their contacts, it’s vitally important to always have your passion and goals very clear and central in your mind during all your networking conversations. What makes doing this so special is that your passion and goals will lead you to the precise events and networking opportunities where the exact contacts you need will be attending.
This key skill then means that once you’ve made contacts and developed a rapport with them, you will look for ways that you can help them and thereby, they in turn will help you which will in turn lead to long-term relationships whereby you both help, support and refer each other. And that’s why this skill is like one continuous growing circle of new contacts. That keeps on growing and growing, especially through your social media networking sites.
And now you can see just why these four key skills are important to successful business networking. And that when you apply them, they can help you to achieving both your networking and your business goals.
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