7 Pointers for Building & Maintaining Great Connections in Business
Take the time to meet people at every opportunity you have - you never know who you might meet.
Building relationships for business is key to creating awareness, but it's also important on a personal level (especially if you're a solo business owner), to have people you can connect with over coffee or chat business with. Not just for your own gain, but for helping connect other business owners with each other.
These 7 pointers below can help you find the best ways to build your business through great connections:
Create great online awareness with your social media, website and blogging - Online presence plays a significant role in staying connected with your network. Face-to-face connections are great (I love networking personally), but so much of our business is done online nowadays. Cheer on and support your online connections. It creates awareness of your business and shows support of theirs.
Keep a contact list of people you meet - Create a little black book of contacts. Not just for yourself but if others are needing an introduction to a fellow business connection. There's nothing better than seeing a referral work out.
Build trust & a reputation - People do business with people they trust. Trust is the one thing that builds strong relationships, and if you invest the time, you’ll reap the rewards with a great reputation.
Offer to help others when you don't need help yourself - Share your talent, by offering to do a business-related favour. By offering to assist someone, you are seen as helpful and positive in encouraging others to succeed.
Be authentic - Let people get to know the real you. Be as you are. It's all too easy to create online personas. I'm an advocate for networking in person so you can build a natural connection and a feel for the personality of that person, and vise-versa. In most cases, YOU are YOUR business..
Recognise the importance of connections - Follow up with people you meet. Make your follow-ups meaningful and timely. Stay in touch but make sure you have reason to.
Maintain your relationships - Whilst it's important to create new connections, it's also important to nurture the ones you already have. The network you have created could be the key to signing up a new client, the source of a new job, or being introduced to a new useful connection.
Want to connect?