Influence: How to Create It, How to Keep It
The longer I am in business, the more I realize that who you know and who knows you is only the tip of the iceberg for having your network work for you. Networking—creating a pool of contacts from which you draw clients, resources, referrals and opportunities—is only the first step in having who you know work for you and your business.
Who you have met does not matter. What matters is who trusts you, respects you, remembers you, has a deep understanding of what you do, and wants to help you. When you have been able to create all this with one of your contacts, you now have influence. Influence equals ease in creating what you want in business and in life.
Follow these steps to create more influence with everyone you already know and everyone you will meet in the future.
Connecting
This is the networking part. In addition to meeting people at business events and in professional situations, you will also meet people socially at parties, at family gatherings and online. Make sure you are doing something everyday online and every week offline that helps you to meet more people.
Creating Rapport
Once you have met someone, you then have to begin to get to know them and build trust. Some easy ways to do this are to remember people’s names, follow up on any action you agreed to take, and invite people to go where you are going to increase your exposure to them. Also of course invite them to join your online network within 24 hours of meeting them. Additionally because so few people send notes anymore a “nice to meet you” note will go a long way to begin to build up your influence.
Communicating Your Needs
Only once you have a strong rapport with people, this is the time to make requests of them for business or contacts. If you ask people to hire you as soon as they meet you, you will probably see hesitation on their part and sometimes even resentment. It is naive to expect people to use your services or refer others to you until you have created influence.
Take a look now at the people in your network. Do you have a strong rapport with them? Do you stay in regular contact so they remember you? If you have, then it is time to make a request that people work with you or refer others to work with you. If not, go back to step one. Remember, the more influence you have, the more of what you want will come to you with ease.
Leave a comment below to let me know what your experience or challenges have been!
Comments
Thank you for the great write up on the strategies to help small businesses to flourish in the present times. Your advice was especially useful as there aren’t many websites that actually tackle the needs and challenges of the small businesses.
-Sunoj
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