Professional networking is an art mastered by only a few. Like any professional activity, if there is planning and a pursuit of excellence behind it, it will give you excellent results.
If, on the other hand, you keep improvising day to day, going to and from professional events without a clear goal, you will go on thinking that networking is useless.
Stop right there! Start getting clear on your professional goals now, align them, get to know your abilities and design a strategy in which networking is what helps you find the opportunities and clients you are looking for.
Once again this year I have the honour of being one of the 300 speakers chosen for Salón Mi Empresa, to share my experience with you so you can apply it in your day-to-day work.
There are hundreds of events for entrepreneurs and SMEs in Spain, but none of them manages to bring together 15,000 people in just 2 days in an unbeatable setting, the Barclaycard Center. Are you going to miss it?
This year they have once again outdone themselves in number of speakers: 10 rooms running in parallel (some of them new) with countless hands-on workshops, talks, advice sessions for entrepreneurs and SMEs, networking meetups and their fantastic “elevator pitch”, where startups will fight it out to win the competition.
But as I was saying at the start, if you don’t plan properly you won’t get the most out of this great event. A few tips, or a ten-point checklist, before you go:
- Who am I and what am I good at, better than everyone else?
- How is my company different from the rest? Does it get that across well?
- Do I have a website that conveys trust, professionalism and my value proposition?
- Do I have business cards with a clear, clean, original design?
- Do I have marketing material to make myself known? Leaflets, flyers, merchandising…
- Have I rehearsed my sales pitch properly?
- When I go to an event, do I take the utmost care over my appearance?
- If people search for me on Google, will they find me?
- If people search for me on Twitter and LinkedIn, will they find me? Will I make a good impression?
- So far, have I looked after my reputation? Do my clients recommend me?
If you fall short on several points of this checklist, get your act together and, above all, don’t miss Salón Mi Empresa: I’ll be waiting for you in the “El perfecto seductor” (The Perfect Seducer) room. Tuesday the 16th at 11:00, and I’ll be taking the register.
In this talk I’m going to give you the main keys so you can start doing professional networking in a different way, being very clear about what you want to achieve and making better use of your resources. I don’t rely on books or theories from American gurus; I rely on my professional experience over the last 20 years, in which I have never been short of work or clients thanks to a strategic use of networking.
See you at Salón Mi Empresa 2016. Happy Networking!!
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