Jon Stow has an interesting piece on the topic of networking where he asserts that:
A couple of months ago I wrote an article in another place which in summary asserted that it is no good expecting instant results from networking. However, people are so impatient and many tend to be hunters looking to sell and being surprised when they don’t get results…
…I wonder how many others have been surprised that suddenly seeds planted a very long time ago have suddenly produced good business?
I’m torn on this. On the one hand I’ve seen people enjoy tremendous success in relatively short periods of time. Often it has come of the back of recommendation by a heavy hitter. At other times I’ve seen people labour away for very little tangible result. I remember one case where a person was blogging away, trying to support the local community but seeing very little coming back. They gave up. Perhaps the timing was off. Perhaps nobody cared enough. Who can tell?
Jon’s point about sowing seeds in the dim and distant past sounds reasonable but then I wonder whether his recent success isn’t the result of plain old serendipity? Things just dropping into place at a random point in time.
What Jon doesn’t say but implies is that you’ve got to stick at these things. That’s something to which I will readily attest. My upcoming travel schedule is punishing. Vienna, Zurich, Las Vegas, Boston…and possibly London – all in quick succession. This will be my busiest autumn season in years. Check out the events diary for me an my colleagues. Trust me it’s not fun to the point where I turned down earlier gigs in Orlando, San Francisco and cannot make a gig in Brighton as I’m elsewhere. But then none of these opportunities would have arisen if I hadn’t spent several years banging away at a keyboard talking about the things that matter to me and the people I write for. Indeed, my latest wee venture with Enterprise Advocates would never have happened if I’d not renewed an old acquaintence via the internet and made three fresh ones in the last couple of years.
That culminated in our delivering our first webinar yesterday. Me in Spain, colleagues in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Tampa, Florida. You could say that was something of a firecracker experience because we only started talking about putting something together at the end of July. We pretty much wasted August for a variety of logistical reasons. The website launched earlier in October. And getting our slides together was little short of a miracle with me finishing a complete re-write the night before.You could also say that I’m unusual in that I am remotely located and have little choice but to foster relationships in this manner. But what i you live in the Outer Hebrides? Isn’t it the same thing?
I guess you could argue that the seeds for this collaboration were sown many years ago – maybe as many as 12. Then again I only struck up a relationship with one colleague in the last year or so.
I think what it all comes down to is less to do with planting seeds as such but more to do with the development of relationships among people with whom you are able to feel comfortable fairly quickly. The internet is a great place to do that. And curiously, it doesn’t necessarily require that I meet people on any regular basis.
There is of course no substitute for face to face meeting but if you can develop a large enough virtual network then I suspect that online opportunities can accelerate. At least that’s what I’ve found and what I am seeing increasingly among the saas players who look after their customers. What do you think?
