Business networking is something that has been around for donkey’s years and can be the most effective way of doing business as it works on the premise that people buy off people. This fact has gotten diluted to some degree in the context of a global boom. In the market conditions that we found ourselves over the last 10 years or so businesses have been growing every year as a result of a global boom, this meant that instead of having to fight for most of our business, revenues grew simply because there was more employment and people had more money in their pockets. As a business was growing so to were internal budgets which in turn meant more money being spent which also resulted in further growth. Unfortunately all this has changed; the global market is going through one of the worst recessions since the 1930s. What does this mean? First of all what it means is the way we have been doing business over the last 10 years has to change, every business will have to restructure to cope with a recession and then reorganize so that they survive in a more competitive environment. It is often said that survival is the new success.
Business networking is one of the key ways of how a business can operate differently in an ever changing environment. In lots of ways it just means going back to the old way of doing business, whereby we meet as many people as we can in order to raise our profile and to educate people on what we do. Word-of-mouth is by far the most powerful method of marketing and business networking is by far the best way to use the power of “word-of-mouth” marketing. There are lots of organizations out there to help you improve the way that you network because it takes work, it takes preparation and also helps if you do something for somebody without asking for anything in return. There are lots of organizations out there like BNI, 4N, BRX and Venture that will help you improve your networking abilities so that you can get more business.
As a result of the recession business networking groups has grown substantially as SME’s try to find new ways to do business in order to survive. The more people you meet more chance you have of doing business because in the current environment we all have to fight harder for less business. However once you know that and accept that you already have a better chance of surviving than most, business networking is a very effective way to get introduced to more people. One famous car sales man was asked how he was so successful and one of the things he said was that if you give me 1000 business cards I will be asking for more business cards in two months time, however if you give some of my colleagues 1000 business cards they will have 500 left at the end of the year. We are all good sales guys, it’s just that I meet more people and therefore I have a better chance of doing business.
This article was written by Fergal Tully of http://www.v2020.ie – Business Turnaround Specialists in Ireland who help with corporate recovery and business turnaround