LinkedIn Made Easy

In my workshops, talks and coaching sessions at the moment there is a great deal of interest in how to make the most of LinkedIn. This has been reflected in a growing number of books and training courses on the subject.

One such book is 'LinkedIn Made Easy', an e-book from Linda Parkinson-Hardman which not only offers a very simple step-by-step guide to using LinkedIn but through which Linda is aiming to raise £400,000 for charities The Hysterectomy Association, Kiva and BCCT.

At 42 pages Linda's book is a quick and straightforward approach to LinkedIn, taking you through some of the key steps to using it strategically. At £4.99 it's certainly very useful and it's all for a good cause.

CONNECTING IS NOT ENOUGH: The Anatomy of a Referral (Part Two)

This article originally appeared in The National Networker

Referrals should be the backbone of the development strategy in many businesses, but few approach the key skill of asking for referrals with the necessary understanding of what they are asking for, who to ask and how to track results.

In The Anatomy of a Referral Part One I talked about a client of mine whose lack of the knowledge outlined above has had a severe impact on their bottom line. We looked at what a referral is, in comparison to other types of business information such as recommendations and leads. And we discussed the impact referrals can have on the way you work and the results you get from the activity of your sales team.

We now need to move on and investigate where referrals come from, before next month, moving on to how to educate the people who are going to refer you, to make it as easy as possible for them to make the connections you are looking for.


Who do you ask?

If you are going to build a strong referral strategy, you need to recognise who your Champions or Advocates are going to be.

To do this, you need a firm understanding of the principle of Six Degrees of Separation. This phrase, coined by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the US in 1967, has caught the imagination of people across the World, leading to films and games with the same title. In short, the theory suggests that we are no more than five steps from anyone in the World.

For example, I recently wanted to source a signed Chicago Cubs jersey as a present for my cousin’s son. One of my contacts in the UK introduced me to his sister, who works in a senior position in the White House. In one simple introduction I was one step from the President of the United States!

You won’t necessarily want such high level connections, but if you have a clear idea of who is in your network and who they are connected to, it becomes much easier to recognise the routes you need to the connections you seek.

In another case, a participant on one of my workshops talked about me and introduced me to the father of one of the boys on the kids’ football team he coached. That father was the Sales Director for one of the World’s leading airlines.

Most companies who do have a referral strategy of any kind tend to focus on their existing clients, which is a sensible place to start. After all, there are two key elements that make people comfortable referring you. They need to have trust in both you and your product, and they need to understand your services and why people would want to talk to you. Who better to ask than your clients, people who hopefully have both of those elements in place?

Interestingly, however, the most popular time to ask a client for a referral is when they have just bought from you. At that stage I would argue that, although they have shown an element of trust by parting with money for your support, that trust is based on what you have told them, not on their personal experiences.

Surely the best time to ask for referrals is later on in your relationship, when they have witnessed the power of what you do and the impact on their business or life?

I discussed this point in a meeting with one company recently. They admitted that they asked new clients for referrals as a matter of course when they signed them up, but couldn’t recall a single instance of going back to those clients to ask again after delivery, or when their relationship had developed. As we discussed this they realised how nonsensical their current approach was.


Break out of narrow thinking

My concern is that most companies who focus on just asking their clients for referrals miss so many opportunities through such narrow thinking. They are not tapping into the support available from the people closest to them and with the greatest vested interest in their success.

During the workshop I ran with the manufacturing company I wrote about last month, the Managing Director suddenly realised that in the eighteen months he had worked for the company he had not recognised that a connection to a dream client was the person closest to him. As we talked about possible referral sources, he thought of his wife, who works in a senior position for a company who has the exact need for his company’s products.

Interestingly enough his wife had recognised the same opportunity at the same time. As he was talking about the possible connection in the workshop, she was talking to her colleagues about inviting him into the company to tell them more about what he could offer!

This wasn’t an unusual outcome from a workshop. On another occasion, a Deputy Regional Director for a major bank went out at the break and called his brother-in-law to ask for referrals. He had never asked before, or even thought of doing so, yet he walked back into the room with three promised introductions and the business relationship developed from there.

Why do we have such an obstacle about asking our family and friends for support? There is a reticence to cross the ‘line’ between personal and business lives. That is understandable but that line is becoming increasingly blurred as people make friends through their networks and realise the power of connecting people.

Besides, who decides where the line should be drawn and how thick it is? It’s absolutely right that you shouldn’t force your business problems on friends or family; I remember sitting stupefied through a friend’s flipchart Amway presentation when I was eighteen. But how would you feel if you found out that a friend’s business had folded and you could have helped; but they never asked?

A friend of mine recently found out what I do for a living, after knowing each other for fifteen years or more. We go to football together and never discussed work. It was only through becoming Facebook Friends that he started to see what my business is. He was mortified to realise that his firm had been working with one of my competitors for five years instead of with me!


The danger of pigeon-holing

In a coaching session last year with a web designer, we talked about the different people who could possibly refer him. One key place to start is with people who understand your business well (remember the importance of trust and understanding discussed above) and who are talking to similar customers about similar issues.
I asked my client if he used a printing company in his business and whether that printer regularly visits his office and chats with the team when he is there. As expected, the answer was yes on all counts.

I then asked where the printer would go when he wasn’t with my client or at his own premises. Of course he wasn’t just visiting one client; he was out and about going to deliver to a number of companies and getting to know their business and their challenges. Not only that but he was surely in a great position to refer a web designer as he would be talking to clients about their marketing and about changes in their business which required new print work. Such changes would often impact on their web strategy too.

So, had the web designer ever asked the printer for help with introductions and referrals? Of course not! Not only had he never had the discussion, the printer had just had a new website done and hadn’t invited my client to tender.

The reason for this was quite simple, the printer saw the designer as a client and the designer saw the printer as a supplier. These pigeon-holed positions dictated the conversations they had and the way they thought of each other. Yet surely the printer had a vested interest in supporting the web designer and helping his business grow. After all, the more successful the designer, the more work the printer would get and, hopefully, the more punctually the printer would pay his bills!

You are surrounded by a network of people who can help you. But if you are like most people, you are pigeon-holing them into particular relationships. Understanding how to develop a network of Champions starts with unraveling those relationships and recognizing that they all potentially have a network which could support you.

Look to friends and family, industry peers, clients, suppliers and social groups for people who could potentially refer you. Identify who has the greatest levels of trust in you, who wants to refer you the most, who understands your business and can recognise opportunities for you and who mixes in the right circles, talking about the right subjects giving them the opportunities to refer.

Make life easy for yourself and draw up a list of five or ten people drawn from all of these groups. People who you think may either be motivated to or positioned to refer you. You can then focus on building the levels of trust and understanding, working out the connections they have in their network and building these people into your team of Champions. Start with this group before adding to it.

In next month’s article we’ll take this group and look at how you educate those people so that they find it easy to make connections for you and become effective sources of new business for you. In the meantime, think about what you need to do to inspire them to want to do so and how you can help them first.

Does networking lead to people taking each other for granted?

While one of the biggest, and most often overlooked, benefits of networking is the development of a trusted network of suppliers for your business, it can become all too easy to take people for granted and have unreasonable expectations from them.

It appears that networking has generated a sub-culture of expecting people to do something for nothing. From the graphic designer friend of mine who was approached on Twitter by one of their followers to 'take five minutes to look at my logo' to organisations who ask professional speakers to plan, prepare and deliver talks for no cost, 'because it will be good marketing', people are increasingly dismissing the background work and expertise that go into providing a quality service.

Perhaps the root of this is the relationships that need to be developed as you build your network. I am continually urging my clients to build both trust and understanding among their network if they want to benefit from referrals, so it's a natural extension that they should give away their expertise to showcase their work....isn't it?

The danger, however, is that people's work and expertise becomes devalued. One of the major effects of the growth of social media is the amount of information that is given away for free, information that people would have paid for previously. Has this led to a situation where people are less likely to pay for the support they need because they feel entitled to receive it for nothing?

I was sent an interesting video last week by pricing expert Cliff Burgin. In the video, produced by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Dan Ariely talks about 'The Cost of Social Norms'. Ariely looks at how money can get in the way of social relationships and how we will happily do favours for our personal friends and family without charging for that.



In the video, Ariely says "We live in two worlds. We live in a social world where we do things for people as favours.....and we live in a financial world where we work for money. When the two worlds are seperate everything is fine. But when you try to mix things something happens, and that thing is usually not very good."

As people build relationships with people in their networks, those lines get very blurry. I have built strong friendships with people I have met through my networking, in some cases to the point where the personal relationship is more important than the professional connection. With many business-to-business service providers networking together, expectations of free support from each other are bound to grow.

And there's definitely a place for this. What is important is the definition of the term 'free'. An exchange of value that doesn't include money is common place now, with services being provided as a contra between two companies. But for the relationship to remain robust it has to be two-way.

What concerns me is that expectations of one-way support are growing, people's businesses, expertise and time are not valued in the way they used to be by others in their network and ultimately this can lead to a breakdown, rather than growth, in trust.

A game of cards?

Who wins the business card game?

In the early days of BRE we would start launch meetings of new groups with an ice breaker. Everyone present would have a few minutes to meet, and exchange business cards with, as many other people as possible. The people who had collected the most cards would be considered to be the winners and we presented them with a nice branded business card holder.

I soon stopped the practice when I realised that it sent out all of the wrong messages. After all, is there anything worse in networking events than people who run around like crazy trying to pass out and collect as many cards as they possibly can, never stopping to engage in conversation or find out something about anyone else in the room?

A reader of this blog was telling me this week about an event she recently attended where the same ice breaker was employed. Unimpressed, she decided to remain in her seat rather than join in with the game. The person who had been sitting next to her handed her his card before leaving to distribute his cards more widely. A couple of minutes later he came up to her and tried to pass his card across again. He had completely forgotten that they had already spoken and exchanged cards!

To me, an exchange of business cards should put the seal on a conversation, as a signal of the intent to build on the initial interaction. The example above shows the flipside, collecting cards without any meaningful interaction has the same benefits as picking names from the phone book.

The winner at networking events is the person pursuing conversations, not cards.

The dangers of using LinkedIn without understanding why.....

The rapid growth in the popularity of LinkedIn has led to lots of people setting up their profiles, building their networks and asking for testimonials without any clear idea of how that network can then help them get the job or the connections they are looking for.

I wonder if the authors of this wonderful cartoon have had a similar experience....is this really the best way to use LinkedIn?

Connecting is not Enough.... The Newsletter

The latest edition of 'Connecting is not Enough' is out now. The newsletter, packed with tips and hints on effective networking includes:

- Cultural differences when networking

- How to spot a good referral networking group

- Profile v Reputation on online networks

- The anatomy of a referral (part one)



As usual, there's a little bit of fun in there too. This time out, we share some extreme sheepherding. And there aren't a lot of networking newsletters that can say that!

Networking for Life

On Monday evening I was delighted to be invited along to the 10th Anniversary of the Precious Online Awards Dinner. The awards celebrate the achievements of women of colour in business and leadership.

It was inspiring to listen to the winners as they accepted their awards. What really struck me was that the real nuggets came not from the guest speakers but from the award winners themselves. One of my favourite quotes of the evening from one winner was, "Anything is possible......you've just got to work bloody hard to get it!"

Before the presentation of the main award, PRECIOUS Entrepreneur of the Year, the 2008 winners Natasha Faith and Semhal Zemikael who run a semi-precious jewellery business La Diosa, told the audience how the experience had affected them over the last twelve months.

Both Natasha and Semhal, like many of the women present, are young entrepreneurs in the early stages of their careers. Natasha talked about how supportive other women in the room and in the network had been and the friends she had made in the year since the last awards ceremony.

What was important, according to Natasha, was that such support and friendship should continue outside the event itself. "We have an opportunity to grow together and network for life", she told the audience.

Such long-term thinking about the power of networks is still rare. As networks have matured, we have the opportunity not just to make the connections to help us in our business now, but to surround ourselves with people who can support us throughout our careers. People we can grow together with, share our challenges and our achievements and with whom we have the chance to develop such a bond of trust that the support we can offer each other becomes limitless.

If you haven't done so already, look to your network and recognise those people who are of the same generation and who share the same vision as you. Ask yourself the difference it will make to you if you network with them not just for a year, but for many years to come.