We recently held a webinar on how to be awesome at business networking and here is a video of that event and below are the slides available for download.

Our tips start with making some mindset changes as you try to be a better networker. The first change is to shift from a mindset of picking fruit and moving more toward one of planting seeds.

We also want you to shift from looking for prospects at networking events and change to looking for partners. As you talk to potential partners, try to keep in mind and apply the rule of reciprocity, and we explain that in the webinar.

Getting Out There
The tips that we discuss in this webinar won’t do you much good if you don’t get out there and network. We recommend that you try to set a quota for yourself for a goal of events that you want to try to attend each week or month.

Building Your Pitch
It can help to have a good when networking, and we provide some tips for that in this webinar recording.

Working a Room
There are some small things you can do to improve how you work a room. One tip is to get to the event around the time that it starts, and this can make meeting people and working the room easier. We provide some tips for meeting more people and how to break into conversations while networking in the webinar recording.

Navigating Conversations
The webinar will provide you with some tips on how to handle and structure the conversations you have at networking events. A couple of those tips are to keep most of the conversation focused on the prospect and also to keep the conversations to a maximum of five minutes so that you can keep working the room and meet as many new contacts as possible.

Post-Event Tasks
There is a very simple and productive process that you can go through right when you get home or back to your office after attending a networking event that will drastically boost your networking results. This process is to simply go through the business cards that you collected, and for each, follow these steps:

  1. Invite to connect on LinkedIn
  2. Add contact to your CRM
  3. Send a follow-up email
  4. Try to schedule a one-on-one
  5. Add contact to an appropriate email campaign

Meeting One-on-One
When you meet one-on-one with your contacts, try to learn more about them and see if there is a way that you can help them. This will help you to build relationships and could help motivate your contacts to try to help you – the rule of reciprocity.

Staying Top of Mind
Here are some steps that you can take to stay fresh or top of mind with the referral partners that you meet when networking:

  • Add contact to an email drip campaign
  • Produce helpful content (blog, ebooks, videos, etc.)
  • Post content on website
  • Send emails with contact to partners
  • Share content on social media and LinkedIn