The Stealth Networker Blog

No Time to Network? 5 Simple Things You Can Do to Save Your Sanity

Even though summer is in full swing, I find that nothing is slowing down and I have more on my plate now than ever, especially with the new book coming out in November. Many of my friends seem equally busy in their businesses.

Finding the time to network with an already packed schedule is always tough. So what to do? Here are 5 things I’ve tried lately that have helped me in a crunch:

Turn off Facebook and Twitter. It’s okay. Really. They’ll still be there when you log in tomorrow or the next day. Resisting the urge to update your status every 20 seconds or respond ASAP to non-urgent messages will allow you to stay focused on a single task.

Free your mind. Have an email or phone call to return from weeks ago? It happens. Rather than let the guilt continue to fester in your mind and take up mental bandwidth, take 60 seconds right now to do it, apologizing for the delay in responding, of course. You'll feel better immediately.

Batch your activities. Traveling back and forth all over the world the last 7 weeks made for some great new episodes for my Passport to Networking video series, but it also forced me to consolidate my networking meetings into a limited number of days when I was back in New York. I’ve continued this practice of dedicating a single day every other week or so for these types of meetings. When the day fills up, no more meetings until the next available day.

Make room on your plate. You can look elsewhere to find more networking time if you really need it. If a task has been sitting on your to-do list for weeks and no small children or animals have been harmed by your not completing it, scratch it off your list or get someone else to do it.

Give your toxic friends the heave-ho. Any of your Facebook friends cluttering up your news feeds or inbox with irrelevant group messages and stupid application invitations? If you have a vested interest in the friendship, you can send a polite message to request that they stop. If you don’t, simply unfriend them. When I started to do this, it was so liberating. You can read about my breakup with the lazy networker here.

More activity doesn’t always mean better results. Sometimes we need to get to a breaking point before we realize that we can’t, and shouldn’t, do it all. This is a great time to evaluate what’s really important and make whatever adjustments you need to get back to a good networking equilibrium.

Even the Privileged Need to Network

The bigger your goals in life, the more you’ll need the help of other people to reach them. You can’t do it alone.

As Beth Polish noted in her blog, the late Benazir Bhutto realized the importance of networking early and practiced it often despite belonging to a family already well connected. She may have had a head start with building a base of influential contacts, but she pushed herself to do even more. She understood the importance of relationships. Read more in the DROOM (Don’t Run Out of Money) with Beth Polish blog.

You may not dream of becoming a world leader, but whatever your aspirations for yourself, your business, or your family, engaging the help of others for advice, support, resources, and information, and keeping in touch even when you don’t need anything, will help you achieve them more readily.

Money, wealth and privilege can only get you so far. Relationships can help take you the rest of the way.

A Small World After All (So Thank Heavens for LinkedIn)

(On the road in Bali): While I’ve been away, my friend John Gordon, who's been underground for the last couple of years finishing up his MBA at Columbia/London Business School, emailed me looking for a recommendation.  Actually, he wanted to see if I might be available for marketing consulting, or could recommend someone who was.

John runs USA Corporate Services which has been around for 20+ years helping with incorporation services and the like.  I used USA in 2005 when I started my 2nd business, Center for Networking Excellence LLC, and they were awesome.  John gave me some great advice that saved me almost a thousand dollars.  They’re very responsive and know exactly what they’re doing, all for prices less than your accountant or attorney would charge you. 

He’s expanding the company and wants some help developing and executing an aggressive marketing campaign.  He first contacted Carey Earle of Green Apple Marketing, a branding genius who belonged to the same networking group as John and me.  She in turn put him in touch with Richard Fouts of Comunicado, whom I’ve never met but know of through a mutual friend, Nigel Edelshein of Sales2.0.  Richard then suggested John engage me as his outsourced chief marketing officer (thanks, Richard!).

So in a totally roundabout way, John finally connected to me.  However, I thought he might be better off working with an agency who could help him in with media placement, though off the top of my head (which has been on vacation for the last week in the tropics, mind you), none came to mind. 

I really wanted to help John, though, so I logged onto my LinkedIn account from my hotel room in Bali, scanned my contacts, and came up with the perfect name:  Steve Lauterback, whose firm focuses on small businesses.  Steve and I also belonged to the same networking group a while back, but since I haven’t been a member for a couple of years, I haven’t seen him a while.

But, because he had the foresight to invite me to join his LinkedIn network at some point, I was able to recommend him to John. 

I haven’t been proactive at all with LinkedIn.  I’ve lazily accepted almost 70 invitations, and I've been very strict about it, saying "yes" only to people I know (so I can feel confident about recommending them) and have invited just one person myself.  However, this experience has highlighted for me the importance of being visible, of taking up virtual real estate in someone’s contact database, or databases, wherever they may keep them. 

So once I get home, doubling my LinkedIn contacts by the end of the year will be a top priority.  I figure I can do this easily, simply by extending more invitations.  Not sure yet whether I might  need a more liberal policy for accepting invitations (anyone have an opinion on this?).

I’ve also continued to tinker around with Facebook while I’ve been away (does anyone else find it relaxing to be online when you have no deadlines?), so more of that story to come.

LinkedIn vs. Facebook

I’ve finally updated my profile on LinkedIn and now have a small network of 65 connections.  I haven’t been that proactive in using the site, just accepting invitations to connect (but only from people I know personally), and I’ve often wondered how to really use the service to its full advantage to help me further my business goals.

Now blogger Jeff Pulver has said that he’s leaving the network to focus more on Facebook. 

Read Confessions of a LinkedIn Dropout on BusinessWeek.com   

And Jeff’s original post on his blog

As well as some commentary from guest blogger Chris Brogan

Exploring Facebook had been on my to-do list for a while, but reading this article spurred me to action.  So I went to Facebook earlier this week and registered.  I didn’t find it that intuitive.  Rather than search for and connect to specific individuals like on LinkedIn, you join established networks of people by region, school, or company.  Hm, that’s interesting.

Although Jeff mentions “there are thousands of groups across a variety of business topics” in Facebook, I didn’t find any.  This would be extremely helpful as I’m more likely to want to connect with other speakers and entrepreneurs no matter where they are located, rather than to people who just happen to live in New York City.

You can also upload your address book contacts from hotmail, yahoo and aol and see if any of them are already on Facebook.  But that seemed like more trouble than it was worth considering that I use those services only for online shopping, and therefore don’t have any important contacts stored there.

I know Facebook has been getting a ton of buzz right now (did you hear about the new deal with Wal-mart?), and this is only going to help. I’ll keep poking around and eventually get my profile up, but I’m still not sure what all the fuss is about.  Or maybe I’m just too old.

What Scares Corporate Types Away from Networking

Interesting article at BusinessWeek.com about how entrepreneurs and corporate workers network differently.  The biggest difference?  The latter group doesn’t do much at all.  Some just don’t understand why they should bother, while others are “afraid of being hit up by job-seekers and service providers.”

I’m fairly certain I could change people’s minds about the first reason, but I have to admit, I see their point about the second reason.  My husband has a high-level position at a Fortune 500 company, but I never mention it in networking situations and really try to downplay it as much as possible when asked.  It seems like EVERYONE has an idea or a product they’d love to sell into his company (heck, so do I!), but I don’t want him to be bombarded with sales pitches and requests for introductions.

In general, people hate to be in a position where they have to tell you “no” – no, we’re not hiring, no, I don’t know anyone at my company who is, no, we don’t need that service, no, I’m not in a position to introduce you to someone who does – and on and on and on.  It makes them uneasy to admit that they aren’t quite comfortable with you yet to refer you on, or that they may not have the connections inside their company to get you to the right place anyway.

So keep that in mind when you’re networking with corporate folks.  Don’t just jump into sales mode and focus on what they can do for you, before you even know what they do.  Approach them like you would a fellow entrepreneur, with the intent of building a relationship first, learning about them, and uncovering ways to exchange value FIRST.  You can't credibly offer your service as the answer to their problems, when you haven't spent enough time understanding their situation.

© 2007, Liz Lynch
Liz Lynch is founder and executive director of the Center for Networking Excellence which develops products and programs to help professionals learn how to build profitable relationships. If you're ready to start networking smarter, get your free networking tips now at www.NetworkingExcellence.com .

80/20 Networking

Working with a client in my consulting business, I’m delighted to see that one of the things they are finally starting to do is prioritize their work to focus on launching the products that will have the biggest bang for the buck.  Of course, one can’t know for sure which products will be a hit and how big, but by applying some business judgment and common sense, they can rule out many opportunities that would seem to have a disproportionately small payback for the large amount resources it would take to launch them.

In essence, they’re applying Pareto’s principle, or what most of us know as the 80/20 rule, which states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes.  It was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population. 

The assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes, and it’s a good rule of thumb for decision making. 

Just as in product development, the 80/20 rule makes a lot of sense for networking as well.  80% of your leads may come from 20% of your contacts or 20% of your activities.  Because time is as precious a resource as you can have, taking an objective look at what’s working with your networking, and what’s not, is important to networking smarter.  Spending less time on the least effective sources will give you more time to spend with the most effective ones, and take your networking results to the next level.

© 2007, Liz Lynch
Liz Lynch is founder and executive director of the Center for Networking Excellence which develops products and programs to help professionals learn how to build profitable relationships. If you're ready to start networking smarter, get your free networking tips now at www.NetworkingExcellence.com .

Spell Out Your Needs Specifically

My friend Nigel Edelshain of IvyTech Partners reached out to me last week to let me know about some new directions for his consulting and outsourced sales solutions business.  After we chatted, he sent me a copy of his new company overview and promised to follow up with a list of prospects and types of prospects he’d like to work with.

That’s a great example of tapping into your network with a specific request.  Often we just leave it to our contacts to do the work to figure out how they may be able to help us, but let’s face it, we’re all so busy with our own pressing needs, that as much as we want to be helpful, we don’t have the time or creative bandwidth left over to do much heavy thinking for others.  I appreciated being given a specific “assignment.”

While this may be too much to ask from someone you just met, because Nigel and I have known each other for almost five years, it was completely appropriate given the level of our relationship.  And because of that, he knew to close our conversation with asking, “What can I do to help you?”

Smart guy.

© 2007, Liz Lynch
Liz Lynch is founder and executive director of the Center for Networking Excellence which develops products and programs to help professionals learn how to build profitable relationships. If you're ready to start networking smarter, get your free networking tips now at www.NetworkingExcellence.com .