Relationships and Networking. You can't have one without the other. The process of building a relationship is also the process of adding to your network and vice versa. You cannot build an effective network without building relationships and every time you forge a new relationship you add to your network.
Most people think networking involves handing out as many of your business cards to as many people as you can, as fast as you can. Nothing could be further from the truth. Networking is the process of building deep, long-term relationships based on mutual benefits. In fact, a good rule of thumb for all relationships is to seek first to help others before seeking others to help you.
We all have goals that we are striving for. If you want to find the quickest way to make a friend, find out what their goals are and then find a way to help them reach those goals.
Another rule of thumb for relationships is to not expect anything in return for helping others. The rule of reciprocity will take care of that for you. The rule of reciprocity is sort of like Karma. If you help others without expecting anything in return, you will be paid back somewhere, sometime and typically your return will be exponentially compounded.
If you want to know if you are an effective networker, ask yourself when was the last time that you helped out someone in your network. Maybe someone looking for a job. Or perhaps you gave someone a hot sales lead. Maybe you just introduced two people together because you thought they might hit it off. These are just some of the ways that you can become an effective networker. The bottom line is that if you want to be an effective networker, you have to consciously find ways to connect people together. The more you help people in your network, the stronger your network becomes and as your network becomes stronger, it becomes a much better tool for you to use to your advantage.
Think about the internet. When it was first created, the world wide web was limited in its usefulness because not everyone had a computer. In addition,at its inception, the internet was not very organized. But as personal computers began to take hold in more and more households, more and more people began to contribute time, work and other resources to the internet in the form of more and more web sites. As the amount of people using the internet grew, the amount of resources available also grew. The internet is really only about a decade old and it has already become a major source of education, intertainment, research and even just plain old flippant distractions. What's even more exciting is that we on just barely on the cusp of the internet's birth and there is no telling what new ideas might result in the future. All because we "networked" all of the world's computers together.
This is the same idea behind networking. Everyone in the world is connected by six degrees of separation. If you keep this in mind, along with the fact that nothing great was ever accomplished by a single person, then the power of networking not only makes great sense, but it makes no sense NOT to do it.
Hector Cadena is a 25 year sales veteran with a successful track history of building strong relationships with his customers. Cadena shares his proven sales knowledge with others on his web site at http://www.hectorcadena.com