Networking When You Hate Networking

One of the things that you or your marketing team may hate is networking with other businesses or even with customers. Networking is something that you need to focus on if you are going to make an impact in your industry. Training your employees on how to effectively network is something that will take a lot of time and training. Here are some of the things that you need to focus on when you are working on making an impression and really building up a name for yourself:

- Prepare. Any time you are headed to any sort of event you need to make sure you are properly prepared. There are all different types of events that you need to be involved with and not preparing ahead of time can leave you confused and struggling to understand what to do when it comes to presenting yourself correctly. Preparations are important as you may need to dress differently for some situations and there are other concerns that you need to focus on as well like what type of materials should you bring along with you? Business cards are usually the common thing to bring along with you as you will need to hand over something to your clients as you are presenting your business.
- Relationships. Networking is all about building relationships. You need to understand how to have social tact and to work on getting along with all types of people. You have to figure out how to create business relationships in order to create a strong network. What this means is that you need to be able to present yourself in a way that is open and understanding but you also need to be able to provide your customers with something in return. The goal is to not only meet as many people as possible but you have to really work on having strong, personal conversations with them. Doing this will help to give you the right type of relationships that you need in order to make a difference in your marketing efforts.
- Questions. Networking is not always easy for everyone and this is because people often get stuck on what they will say to others as they are past the initial introduction phase. What you really want to do is to work on asking a large variety of questions to the other person. This will help you to really find a way to get in touch with them and to see if you can provide them with some type of product or service that will benefit their organization. Some of the basic questions you can start with include the following "how long have you been in this industry?" "how did you get into this industry" "where do you see yourself going in the future?" As you are able to learn more and more about the person it will be easy for you to find a way to have engaging conversations with them.
- Honesty. One of the big things you need to work on is being honest with the people that you meet. You need to provide them with actual facts as they are far more impressive to them than you trying to make up false information. Just be genuine and be yourselfas this will be able to give your clients that right type of information that they are looking for from you.

You need to practice your skills on other people before you go in and start mingling with others. It is not always easy for people to learn how to be social and it can be very challenging for you to break out of your comfort zone and talk to new people.