What is Networking?

In life, you’ll often hear the phrase ‘it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know.’

This is absolutely true – but when it comes to networking, it goes a stage further than that. Yes, who is more important than what: but more important is how well you know people. 

Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t realise this, and look at networking as an opportunity to sell to people. I can still picture my very first networking event, when having just walked in the door and got a coffee, an enthusiastic gentleman came up to me, shook me warmly by the hand, and asked if I wanted to buy his combined domestic fire and security solution, available today for the amazing introductory price of £199.95? Er… no.

Most people reading this will have been hard sold to when networking. Whether it’s an encounter like the one with my security salesman friend, or a LinkedIn connection that as soon as you accept wants to offer you 25% off – it happens to all of us. You’ll often hear that the best way to generate new business is by networking. Many of us put untold pressure on ourselves because we go out networking trying to make a sale or two. After all, we’ve all got to put food on the table.

However, this pressure to make sales drives people to become increasingly desperate in their attempts to sell: but they get no tangible results. This leads them to think why do they even bother with networking. Fears of it being a waste of time are realised, and the end result is no business being generated.

I believe that a lot of people fear networking, either because they consistently get hard sold to, or because they’re doing it wrong and don’t get any results.

Here’s the issue. So many people go networking to sell. But no one ever goes networking with the intention of buying anything! See the challenge? We’ve got to cut the selling!

So what is networking?

Networking is nothing more than talking to people. It’s having conversations. It’s building relationships. It’s about meeting new people, and re-engaging with existing contacts, and getting to know them better. Once we get to know people, we tend to get to like people. When we get to like people, we tend to trust them. It’s only once trust has developed that we’ll really start to be able to generate profitable networking relationships.

Picture your best friend. Imagine that it is 4.30am, and they are calling you. Would you take the call? You would, wouldn’t you? Why? Well, because you’ve got a good relationship with them, you want to help them. 

Don’t worry, I’m not saying that you have to take calls from people in the middle of the night to be a successful networker: but we do need to develop good relationships.

And those relationships can form anywhere. Because networking is just talking to people – you don’t have to be at an official networking event or a conference. What about having coffee with a client? What about having dinner with a group of friends, now we’re allowed to do that again (albeit outside)? What about chatting with colleagues at the coffee machine in the office?

All of them are relationship building opportunities: it’s how we use those relationships that will define our success with networking.