Purposeful Networking: For The Networking Challenged

In recent years, I’ve been told by so many people that I should write a book on networking.  I’m so very grateful for the positive feedback but the truth is that for so many years before then I was not very good at networking… not at all.

I would be in awe of THOSE people that everyone knew, that could just stand in a busy room and attract people to them.  What on earth were they doing that made them a magnet?  Made networking so very easy for them?  I have always been an observant learner and after attending a fair share of events, what I realized was that their “secret” was not a single thing they did, but a culmination of cumulative things they did that made them purposeful in their networking.  

As a result, I started to think about what things I could do to become more purposeful in how I networked knowing that there were people that were simply better at it than I.  Since this is a blog, I will give you one super simple trick that fed into my competitive nature and pushed me out of my comfort zone when it came to meeting people I didn’t know, AND wanted to do business with.

BUSINESS CARD BINGO

This was a really easy trick I used to do when I needed to motivate myself to get out of my comfort zone and meet people.  Not many people still use business cards, but you really don’t need one to use this trick.  Any small piece of paper that you can write on will work as your BUSINESS CARD BINGO card.  

I would take one of my business cards and on the back would draw a circle in the middle and line to each side to make 4 quadrants.  

I would write the following set of letters, one per quadrant and one in the circle. 

They were my 5 GOALS for the event:

• SIK: Someone I KNOW

• SIM: Someone I MET

• SIH: Someone I HELPED

• SHM: Someone Helped ME

• MTG: Set a MEETING

This would become my BUSINESS CARD BINGO game that I would play at every networking event I attended, purposefully working to achieve these 5 simple goals.  What I soon started to realize was that not every networking event I attended was equal.  The beauty of the game was that it became a way for me to assess the value of the event and attendees.  This may sound harsh, but the truth is not all events are good, and not all networkers are good.  If any of the examples below ring true, then you know that these are not likely networking events you want to go back to:

• The host spends most of the time talking, not allowing the attendees to interact with each other.

• The attendees stay in small isolated groups and do not interact with each other.

• The room is awkward in shape and makes movement a challenge

• The people you meet are happy to tell you all about themselves and what they are looking for before moving on to tell someone else.

If I couldn’t get at least 3 marks off on my bingo card, then it wasn’t likely an event I was going to return to.  If I could get BINGO multiple times, then I wanted to know when the next one was, how to register early, AND would make it a point to use that information as a VALUE OPPORTUNITY for people I met at other events.  I would have great information ready for my SIH quad!

You can choose to take the game deeper and collect BONUS POINTS, as I eventually did by doing any of the following:

• Linking SIK with SIM to create connections that helped both those people

• Collecting business cards from SIMs that would go into my database.  I would really be purposeful and go into events with goals to get SIMs in specific industries that I needed to be immersed in deeper to help my clients or referral partners

• Set MTGs in stacks so that I could run meetings back to back to back on preset days and create introductions as they overlapped.  Or, if the people knew each other, meet in a POWER GROUP of 3 or 4 to create some good synergy.

Now as you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t spent much time on SHM and that’s because intrinsically, if I was doing all the others with purpose, intention and sincere joy, the people I was helping and introducing and setting meetings with would make it a point to want to help me.  I found that I didn’t have to go asking, they would ask me how they could help and go about doing so, happily!  The network became a net win!

I hope you find this information useful, and as with anything we offer, please do not hesitate to reach out and ask any questions.  We are always happy to help.

Diego Munoz

KW Commercial

diegom@kw.com