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Identify Your Top Networking Prospects

By: Andrew Rossillo

Networking can produce some extremely lucrative fruit for your business through enhanced discovery, sharing and execution of new business opportunities. However, since life is essentially one large network, many small business owners are often overwhelmed by the task of getting stared with their networking efforts. The best quality and longest lasting results require planning. You will optimize your networking efforts by maintaining a targeted and focused approach; one which avoids random soliciting. You need to identify your top networking prospects before you dive into the murky waters of the business world or your competitors lurking below may eat you alive.

Finite Goals for Infinite Success

While spontaneity may help keep marriages fresh, random business efforts are often time and money killers. Disciplined, well thought-out networking will generate a larger volume of high-quality results with a vastly greater degree of efficiency. Therefore, it will help for you to define parameters and establish finite goals that you want your networking to accomplish. This will help you focus your efforts, allowing you to create specific action steps. Clarifying exactly where you want to go will help you determine the best way to get there.

Here are some of the top goals that networking can help you accomplish:

* Expand your resources
* Keep your knowledge pool fresh
* Improve industry awareness, e.g. trends
* Establish yourself as an authority in your niche market
* Increase your exposure and amplify your market presence
* Improve customer and partner loyalty
* Expand your key business affiliates, associates and industry contacts
* Build your client prospect list
* Grow your customer base

Non-compete Prospects

Among your best chances for successful networking involves identifying absolute non-compete prospects. The general idea is to create allies, not sleep with the enemies. Your first wave of networking should address prospects that have absolutely no degree of competition which will help eliminate perceived risks regarding your offer.

However, there are some immense opportunities for expanding your networking efforts into affinity markets; those with similar characteristics. And since there is often a fine line between what business owners consider to be potential competition, you must maintain awareness of this tentative balance or you might quickly kill some potentially lucrative networking opportunities. Exercise tact when you introduce yourself to these prospects, presenting your business in a way that illustrates how all the benefits of working with you would far outweigh any potential threats to their sales.

While the obvious advice would be to completely avoid businesses with any potential for competition, networking with these fine-line prospects could provide the boost you need to launch your business to new heights of success. Reaching out to these types of businesses is well worth the effort if you are aware of key contacts, relationships, market opportunities, etc. that those businesses might be able to connect you to. In addition, even businesses in direct competition with each other have been known to help each other out if it means keeping their clients happy. For example, if a company fears the loss of a client due to the request for specific services not offered by that company, chances are they'd prefer to promote client loyalty and shop out or outsource that portion rather than lose the client.

Target Networking Prospect Profiles

Generic marketing burns time and marketing bucks. Instead of tossing a bunch of stuff up against the wall and seeing what sticks, define the profile(s) of the target networking prospects that are most important to your business success.

What does your business need in order to break out and establish itself as the lone orange among all those apples out there? You need to identify non-competing groups that have a dominant presence established in your target market; those that would benefit from helping you generate increased exposure and not perceive your business as a threat to their sales.

You should also consider auxiliary, second-level groups that deal with those dominant, first-level groups. These are the groups that provide services and products that cater to the first-level businesses. You may have better success reaching out to these prospects because of your potential to help them provide their clients with an improved experience-the little guys teaming up to provide the big guys with superior value, so that they themselves can eventually become the big businesses of the industry.

Symbiosis for Success

Lastly, it will always prove to be an immense help in identifying key networking prospects if you respect the concept of symbiosis-long-term, interactive relations between dissimilar types of business operating under mutually beneficial conditions. Look for prospects that will scratch your business' back just as much as you will scratch theirs.

Article Source: http://articles.tiptopweb.info

Andrew Rossillo writes about internet marketing for Content Crooner. Content Crooner drives traffic to your website by giving you everything you need to create great content, automate its distribution, and track your impact. It's fast, easy and very affordable. Visit us at contentcrooner.com.

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Identify Your Top Networking Prospects