It’s hard to stand out in our noisy world. People are exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of messages a day and yours will easily get lost in the shuffle. It’s important to create a strong personal brand that your networking partners can associate with you. I call it “planting a flag”. If you can’t be clear about what you do and why you are good at what you do, there’s no way that your network will be able to connect you with opportunities and resources. Your message will degrade every time it’s passed along (like the children’s game Telephone), so the more clarity you create from the start, the stronger and more lasting your message … [Read more...]
7 Ways to Ask for Referrals Over and Over (Without Being Obnoxious)
Customer referrals are a powerful way to build your business. Getting these referrals involves almost no costs and often leads to an easier sale (because they trust the person who referred them). It's also a great testimony to the quality of service you provided the referring customer. By learning to ask for them effectively, you can see a huge boost in your career. Developing a strong referral pipeline is critical in professions well beyond the "traditional" salesperson. Even if you don't have "sales" in your job title, referrals are important. They matter because: Professionals like attorneys or accountants need new clients. Want … [Read more...]
Are you the Right Kind of Networker?
What kind of networker are you? In my experience, people fall into one of two categories. It’s an incredibly important distinction. The professionals in the first category put in an enormous amount of effort and still fail miserably at building their network. Those in the second find their careers blossoming because of their business relationships. Transactional vs. Relational Networking The Transactional Networker The first type is the transactional networker. People that follow this philosophy see networking as a series of brief encounters. And the goal of each encounter is to get something from it. These are the people at … [Read more...]
The Step-by-Step Cheat Sheet to LinkedIn Group Success (Part 2)
LinkedIn Groups can be a valuable source of professional information and business development, if used correctly. In the Part 1 of this article, we looked at how to determine the best Groups to join and how to set them up in your LinkedIn account. Now we can continue on the path and look at how to actually engage with the other members in those Groups. 6. Lurk in Your Groups. One of the biggest mistakes committed by new Group members is blindly posting off-topic or using a tone that doesn't fit the normal vibe that others use. It's like barging into a conversation in the offline world and beginning to talk without knowing what the … [Read more...]
The Step-by-Step Cheat Sheet to LinkedIn Group Success (Part 1)
I was at a conference recently to speak to a group of financial advisers about maximizing their social selling efforts on LinkedIn and other platforms. My session wasn't until the afternoon, and over lunch I started a conversation with an adviser from Minnesota, let's call him Bob. Once he found out that I was there to present on LinkedIn, he asked one of the most common questions I hear, "So what do you actually do on LinkedIn?" He immediately followed that up with a much more specific question, "All the articles tell me I'm supposed to use these LinkedIn Groups, but I get lost trying to figure them out. Are they really worth my … [Read more...]
5 Rules from Zombie Survivors for Business Development
An undead zombie is shambling towards the lone survivor, arms outstretched, low moan coming from its chest. The plucky hero raises a machine gun in an attempt to ward of the attack and fills the zombie full of lead...but the zombie keeps coming! Because the hero didn't shoot it in the head! And everyone who's seen a zombie movie knows that the brain is a zombie's weak point! ...It's frustrating to watch the characters in a zombie movie make the same fundamental mistakes over and over again. It's just as frustrating to watch sales people and business development reps fail to take care of the basics when they meet with prospective … [Read more...]