Archive for business networking
Building Business Is Still About Fundamentals
Posted by: | CommentsIn these challenging economic times, we’re all facing the same question – How do I get more new customers and cut my expenses?
My Answer – Go back to fundamentals.
In the next several posts, we’ll explore how to take time-tested client acquisition fundamentals and apply them to new media tools that can help you grow your business, and have it be even healthier than it was when things were “booming”. There are lots of digital marketing tools to help us LEVERAGE fundamentals once we figure out what they are. And they cost much less than you think.
Let’s start with the basics – Who do you want to be working with?
It’s easy to find yourself all over the place trying to get business in the door it you aren’t crystal clear who you want to be working with. In fact, most of us started out with the “y’all come” strategy. And our customer base reflects that.
Unfortunately, when times get challenging, it’s difficult to spend resources to attract “everyone” and “anyone” because our marketing messages don’t attract as powerfully from that huge pool of customers with limited resources. It’s one thing if you’re a large corporation with a huge advertising budget – you can afford the “shotgun” approach. It’s quite another if you are a local business with limited marketing dollars.
So figure out who your Perfect Customer is.
Who’s your bread-bread-and-butter? Who is your most profitable customer? Create a profile capturing the essence of the clients who make your business profitable in this economy. You can download a worksheet from my website that will help you nail your profile down. Find it at here.
Once you know this – options begin to open up in terms of finding these folks and getting them into your sales pipeline. Additionally, you can focus your marketing time, resources, and messages to appeal to that Perfect Client.
In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss how to apply this idea to your digital marketing – such as drip-marketing via e-mail, blogging, tweeting via Twitter.com, using LinkedIn.com, Facebooking, and more.
Let’s look first, though, at what you’re currently doing – How do you get in front of people? Where do your leads come from?
Examine my first stab at a list of common lead generation strategies.
Imagine how effective you would be if you got crystal clear who you were trying to attract and applied it to what you were already doing. It alters what you say. It alters where you advertise. It alters where you network and how you network. It makes it easier to ask for referrals. It tells you what to say when you write an article, blog, tweet, or post on your Fan Page. Focus gives you insight into the psychology of your client, so you know what to write in your e-mail drip campaigns.
Spend 30 days and learn everything you can about who your Perfect Client is, what their issues are, what problems they have, what keeps them up at night, what groups they belong to, what websites they frequent, what publications they read, etc., and watch how it influences your interactions with and marketing to them.
Doing this work will prepare you to bridge the traditional and technological marketing gap.
Law Firm Marketing – Seven Steps for Using LinkedIn.com as a Business Development Magnet
Posted by: | CommentsOriginally published in the inaugural Edition of The Rainmaker Advisor – for attorneys
Let’s face it – you’re busy. You may even fall under the classification of “very busy”. When it comes to developing business, you are faced with all kinds of options: a website, blogging, networking, referrals from current clients. The question is often where do I start? And how do I manage the ethical considerations? Especially because I’m so busy.
My advice – start with what you’ve already got. Then leverage it.
Enter LinkedIn.com, a free online social networking site for professionals.
Unlike Facebook.com or Myspace.com, LinkedIn® focuses on a business demographic1:
- Average Age – 41;
- Average Years of Experience – 15;
- Average Household Income – $109,000;
- 46% of it’s users are Decision Makers;
- Executive from All Fortune 500 companies are represented inside LinkedIn®.
These are folks who use legal services.
I train my clients to view LinkedIn® as a technological backbone to place underneath their already existing network of relationships. With 21 million people using the service, you may be surprised to find that many of the people that you know professionally are already users.
Add three levels of depth (seeing who your contacts know, and who their contacts know) and a search engine to explore those resources, and you have an extremely valuable resource to leverage.
By having a systematic approach, you can use this free service to become a magnet for referrals, business opportunities, and profitable alliances.
Here are the Seven Steps for Using LinkedIn® as a Business Development Magnet:
1. Perfect your Profile
Your LinkedIn® Profile is an online hub for Business Development Objectives. A well designed profile lets your contacts, prospective clients, and prospective referral sources know who you are, what you do, and what you are looking to accomplish. Make sure that you spend plenty of time perfecting it. Fill out all of your education. Fill out your past employment and experience. People feel like they know you when you disclose those things. Because LinkedIn is a Social Media, you want to bring down the barriers that people experience to getting to know you and your firm. This step is critical.
2. Learn the system
The power of LinkedIn® is the platform. The social software allows you to do advanced searches, connect to your current websites and blogs, promote your profile to current connections and people who could be connections, answer questions of users who are looking for someone like you and your firm, etc. Understanding the capabilities of LinkedIn® will allow you to leverage them once you’ve built out your network in their system.
3. Reach out to people you already know and build your network
You’ve spent a lifetime making connections. You already belong to multiple networks: your firm, your law school, your alma mater, your professional organizations, your place of worship, the PTA. All of these people know people. They all have connections that have potential value to you. And you have connections that have potential value to them. By reaching out to your already existing contacts, you will quickly reproduce your existing networks and be ready to use the technology to explore the opportunities that already exist in your first level connections, as well as your second and third level connections. You will never know if you don’t build it.
4. Get strategic
Know exactly what you want to accomplish. Write out your Business Development Objectives clearly and concisely such that anyone who read them could tell if you reached them or not. Are they specific? Are they measurable? Once you are clear, consider that you have an enormous network of resources available to you via your LinkedIn® network. Now answer the following questions:
- · How are you positioned with the people in your network?
- · Do they really know what you and your firm offer? If not, why not?
- · How could you communicate that to them?
- · Does your firm have a newsletter? Put a link in your profile so people can subscribe.
- · Do you blog? Via your profile you can direct people to your blog so they can read more about you.
- · Who refers you on a regular basis and why?
- · Do you have enough of these people in your network?
- · Do the people you know have contacts that could be referring you?
- · Do you know the characteristics of the people who refer you?
Once you have the answers, look newly at the network you’ve built. You will see opportunities that you didn’t see before. They were always there. Now leverage them.
5. Use the system to manage relationships
The advanced features contained in the toolbars that LinkedIn® offers give you powerful tools to manage your interactions with the people in your network. Download them and learn to use them. You can keep track of birthdays and overlooked emails. You can get updates from the people in your network as their profile information changes. You can keep track of your searches. Via a scan of your regular emails, you can find new people to connect with and continue to build and cultivate your network.
6. Reach out to meet new people through your contacts
Once you’ve built out your network and cultivated deeper relationships with the people you already know, begin to browse their networks. Look to see if they know people that will help you achieve your Business Development Objectives. You can even do deep, specific searches to find experts, vendors, specific people, and specific companies. Using the built in features of LinkedIn®, reach out to those people through the people that you already know. Use some of that Social Capital that you’ve built up with people. You’ll be surprised how willing they are to help you achieve your goals.
7. Be Consistent
The key to any Business Development strategy is consistency. Schedule 10 minutes a day for the next 90 days to work inside the LinkedIn® system. Not only will you find it enjoyable discovering new sources of business, but you will also build a habit that will transfer into your day-to-day habits and translate into a profitable world of new opportunities.
Social Networking is not a new thing. Professionals have been doing it from the dawn of commerce. Social Networking Software like LinkedIn, however, provides an opportunity to take those networks you’ve built over a lifetime and put them to use.
By developing a systematic approach to developing your network, and a technological backbone to uncover the hidden connections contained in that network, you have the opportunity to set yourself apart from other firms, and produce the kinds of result that Senior Partners in the big firms produce on a regular basis.
In our next article, we’ll address privacy concerns, ethical concerns, and demonstrate how LinkedIn®’s system is built to handle this.
Meanwhile, enjoy building what will likely be one of the best Business Development
tools you will ever encounter.
Raymond Chip Lambert, of Network2Networth, is a Business Development expert who works exclusively with seasoned professionals to leverage their existing relationships through time tested Business Development strategies and online Social Media strategy thereby unlocking the value of their existing network connections. He can be reached at 602-635-4541 or www.network2networth.com.
1Linkedin.com-http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=advertising_info&trk=hb_ft_ads
Using LinkedIn to Make Money – Our LinkedIn 301 Webinar is Released
Posted by: | CommentsWe just released our LinkedIn 301 Webinar – Business Development on LinkedIn – Using LinkedIn to Make More Money.
If you haven’t done one of the webinars, I suggest you start with the 101 and work your way up – we don’t cover any info in 201 that’s covered in 101 and the same applies for the 301. If you don’t have the fundamentals down, the 301 won’t make sense.
In a nutshell, we apply some of the foundation pieces that I train in the Business Development Intensive to the LinkedIn system and that seems to unlock the true value of the tool.
I’ve got clients that are applying what they learned and beginning to see some impressive results. If you want to hear more, give me a call 602-635-4541.
I’d include the text here, but I’d rather have you click the link if you are interested.
I trust that you will have a profitable day
Raymond Chip Lambert
Network 2 Networth
Your Outsourced Business Development Training Partner
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Social networking is not new for business owners and entrepreneurs. Many of you belong to Professional Associations, Chambers of Commerce, Leads Groups, etc. For some of you, it may be your single largest source of business. Some of you have given up on social networking as a business generation strategy because it was a “waste of time”. Regardless of your opinion, when done well Social Networking can be an enormous source of leads, deals, and connections to resources.
Well, you’d have to be in a cave not to have noticed that the process has gone online – and that has some pretty staggering implications for business generation and lead generation.
Social Media describes a wide range of on-line applications which provide a technological backbone where you can manage and create relationships with current and potential customers, suppliers, vendors, team members, channel partners and experts.
In future articles, I will be exploring how Social Media can impact your bottom line by taking the documents, articles, photos, conversations, problem solving, and issue management that you deal with on a daily basis and involving the people in your networks in such a way that they come to know and engage you and your business deeply and profoundly.
Increasingly, the current and potential stakeholders in your business are going online to find out about you and your services. If you are not managing the process of strategically placing information about you and your business online, your current and potential customers will be migrating to your competition.
Where do you start? I recommend www.LinkedIn.com. It is one of the largest B2B centric Social Business Networks online. By completing the profile well, you will become instantly findable on the Internet.
In my next post, we will discuss the impact Search Engines have on driving business to you and examine why Social Media – worked into your already existing business networks – can make or break you as your stakeholders move online.
Raymond Chip Lambert
Network 2 Networth
Deep Business Development
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In the Media – Just Posted on My Website
Posted by: | CommentsIn the last few years I’ve been interviewed, written about, and have contributed articles to various publications.
I’ve just posted a resource page on my website for those of you who are interested.
Network 2 Networth in the Media – Click Here
I hope they help build the case of the importance of establishing yourself in your markets and letting people know about what you are up to.
Also, you may find them useful resources to share with your business partners to help them understand exactly what it is that you are trying to achieve in your own quest for Business Development.
There is a lot going on and I will be writing about it extensively over the next week or so – stay tuned . . .
Raymond Chip Lambert
Network 2 Networth
Deep Business Development
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CAN – FAN – PAN
Posted by: | CommentsLooking at your networks newly unlocks the potential of the relationships you already have.
I recently listened to a podcast from Stan Relihan and Christian Mayaud (two big names in the Social Media space) and in their conversation, Christian talked about how he manages the contacts and relationships in his networks. He shared his taxonomy – CAN (Currently Active Network), FAN (Formerly Active Network), and PAN (Potentially Active Network).
As I thought about this and the application to what we teach in network and business development, this struck me as especially powerful. Think for a moment; You’ve got a new product, or market, or what not, and you do an audit of your network to see what resources you already have – CAN-FAN-PAN. You see that you can reach into your networks and begin the planning of how you are going to position yourself and you have people who you already know who can help you.
With the power of LinkedIn, you can also quickly ascertain who you need to meet in the space, and you can look to see who you used to know. You may need to do some work to rekindle or build some of those relationship, but you will not be needlessly wasting your valuable time and resources.
I recommend that you take a few moments now to do this exercise. It will open your eyes to a whole new world.
Build it deep and build it strong!
Raymond Chip Lambert
Network 2 Networth
Deep Business Development
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Building a Network of Value – My first Event
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Last Tuesday I launched Integrated Alliances here in the Phoenix Market with a VIP, invite only event at Ruth’s Chris Steak house.
With two colleagues, Bill Austin and Bob Denton, we generated 113 RSVPs and 86 VIPs in attendance – in 2 weeks.
I’m completely floored – even with all the training I have. And something even more interesting is happening – I am now perceived differently in the communities I already participate in.
Why am I sharing this with you? Well, it illustrates a few things.
- The power of a network and a clear focus. With very little time and a clear outcome a great event was created. With it’s focus around the LinkedIn Platform (a network), a few key individuals (a network), and a clear vision, mountains got moved.
- Be a leader in your network and cause connections – real world connections – it alters how your network perceives you. I cannot even begin to describe the shift that has happened within the conversations I’ve had in the last week. It’s surreal.
If you are in the Phoenix Metropolitan area, a high-level player, a reader of my blog, and a user of LinkedIn, I’d like to invite you to join our mailing list for the IA – Linkedin Live! Events. Go to www.integratedalliances.com/phoenix_events.php and join the list. We’d love to have you join us!
Here’s to the power of networks, of people coming together around a common cause, and of the magic that gets created when they collide.
Raymond Chip Lambert
Network 2 Networth
Deep Business Development
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And We’re Off
Posted by: | CommentsWelcome to the first post on the Network 2 Networth Blog!
Over the next year I will be sharing practical tips and insights that come directly from my work with professionals as they engage in “Deep Business Development”.
I look forward to sharing the journey with you.
There are lots of exciting developments under way and I am excited to reveal them as they unfold.
And – We’re Off!
Raymond Chip Lambert
chip@network2networth.com
