What if one simple change to the way you approach networking could turn an event you dread into a reliable source of quality sales leads?
If networking feels awkward, stressful, or like a waste of valuable time, the problem may not be networking itself—it may be the lack of a clear plan.
Preparing before you walk through the door can help you focus on the right people, start better conversations, and get far more value from every event you attend.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to walk into networking events with a clear target list and a specific purpose, rather than wondering who to approach.
- How to reduce the anxiety and uncertainty that can make networking uncomfortable by giving yourself a simple game plan.
- How to generate higher-quality sales opportunities by deliberately connecting with the businesses and people most likely to become valuable customers or referral partners.
Play the episode to discover how a simple preparation strategy can make networking less stressful and help you turn more events into quality sales opportunities.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
I love a good case study and today I’m going to show you how a customer of ours hated networking but made one change that took the stress out of it for them and really quickly grew their sales.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host, Ben Wright and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s get started.
Ben Wright:
Networking, it’s the word that strikes fear if not a little bit of anxiety but certainly apathy and a real reluctance to get out and get involved in so many trade and small to medium businesses that I work with. They know it works, they know they need to expand their network because only a few good connections can make huge differences to their business but they hate doing it and a lot of this hate, if I use that word, it’s a strong word, comes from an uncertainty about what to do and I want you to pitch that moment.
I’ve certainly been there. You’re going to a networking event, right, reasonably fun event. You know there’s going to be a couple of hundred people there and there’s some good opportunities in that networking event for you but you get to that event, you walk in the door, you get nervous and you quickly look for someone to talk to.
Generally over by the food or at the bar, you find someone, you introduce yourself and you end up talking to them for a good part of the night. It might not be the whole night, it might be half the night or two-thirds of the night but by the time, Ben, you finish talking to them, they’re a nice person. Yeah, sure, maybe there’s some opportunity with business there but it’s not necessarily strong and at the end of the day, you’ve wasted that networking event, you’ve lost time from being near your family because often networking are at those awkward times, right, early mornings or end of days where you do have to sacrifice family time, right, and you walk out of that event going, yeah, I got two or three business cards.
Oh my god, I suck at networking. Now, if that’s not you, I’ll happily share that that certainly was me early in my career. Whilst I was confident talking to people, I really struggled when I went to networking events because I was worried that people were going to judge me.
People were going to think that maybe I was boring, right, or that I was just there to sell them something and turn their shoulder on me. What I learned across my career and one thing in particular changed the game for me when it comes to networking and now has made a point where any networking event that’s on, I am so happy, so confident to go to them because I have a game plan and a process that works for me. Now, how that game plan works is it’s really simple.
It comes down to preparation and it comes down to understanding the event I’m going to and in a best case scenario, who’s going, a lot of networking events will publish attendee lists so you can have a look who’s going but if you can’t do that, understanding the type of people that are going to be there because when you either know who’s going or the type of people that are going to be there, you can select your targets around who you want to be talking to. To give you an example around this, I went to a networking event. It was a large event.
It was all around the end of football season so we had a very diverse range of people attending but this event published a list of I think it was about 250 people that went and at that point in my business, I was targeting manufacturing businesses. I was able to look through that list, find there was quite a few. There was probably 20 to 30 people in manufacturing and I was then able to whittle that down to about 10 people that I wanted to meet.
I wrote those down. I had them in my phone. I knew exactly who they were.
I did a little bit of research on their business and it gave me a focus on what I could do at that event, who I wanted to target, who I wanted to talk to. So I walked into that event in this instance specifically knowing that the 10 people in the manufacturing industries that we were targeting that I wanted to talk to. So I could work my way through the room, work out where they are, work out what they look like and then across the night go and introduce myself to them.
Of course, because I was prepared, I had something to talk to them about to build that relationship and then work my way through. In this instance, it was putting solar onto their rooftops but work my way through into where their pain lies, energy bills going up, what they’re doing about it. In many instances, nothing.
Have they ever thought about LED lighting or battery storage or solar? If they’re interested, bang, we have that conversation. These are senior business owners so normally they then introduce me to their procurement people. I think coming out of that network or out of that event, I had six or seven really strong leads that came from that.
It all came down to being prepared before I went there. Now, what I will recognize is that was a textbook networking meeting where the list was published and it made it really easy for me to work out who I was going to target and who I wanted to talk to. Now, it’s not always that way.
Quite often we’ll go to a networking event and it’ll be a chamber of commerce event or it’ll be an organized networking type event like a B&I, for example, or it’ll be an event around a sporting occasion, around a season, around customer Christmas parties, an industry event, whatever it is. There’s lots of events where the list of people attending isn’t published. However, for us as individuals, if we’re able to get really clear on the types of people we’d like to meet in that event, i.e. in my example, manufacturing, if you’re working with homes, homeowners, if you’re working in businesses and I’d say networking in businesses is a really impactful one, the industries they’re in or the type of positions that they’re in, what that allows us to do is get really clear when we’re going from person to person who we want to talk to because in most networking events, we see badges on people.
It’ll say their name and their business or their industry. We’re able to walk around the room and look for people that we want to connect with. By having that game plan ready, who we want to talk to and what we want to talk to them about, it allows us to be a little bit more focused.
On top of that, when we get there, there’s normally event organizers who’ve brought the people together and they are the great first stop to go to and say, hey, thanks for having me. These are the type of people I’d love to talk to tonight or today. Who are the ones you’d recommend? They’ll point them out in the room.
It also comes down to when you meet one person in the room is to ask and say, hey, really nice to meet you. I’m here to try and meet these types of businesses or these types of people. Do you know anyone in the room I can talk to? It takes a lot of the guesswork out of where you need to focus but for me, the most impactful thing that it did was it gave me a job to do.
By having that job, I was focused on it. Rather than walking to that event going, oh my God, who am I going to talk to? Are they going to think I’m pushy? Are they going to think I’m boring? I was like, okay, these are the people I know I want to talk to. Focus, game face on, let’s get out there and do it.
Now, it didn’t completely take away all of that fear or anxiety. I want to acknowledge that but it brought it down to a level where I was able to operate effectively. Now, certainly where I’ve got a targeted list of people that I want to go and talk to, very, very little fear or anxiety creeps up in me.
But where I don’t, but I go in still with that pre-prepared game plan, I’m able to have enough confidence in what I’m doing that my focus wins over my fear or anxiety. I walk into that event confident, not always successful but certainly successful most of the time and certainly getting good quality leads that come out of it. So I’m able to make sure that I get something from that event.
So that’s the change, this one simple change that took out the stress for one of our customers and I’ll be really honest, took out the stress for me as well when it came to networking. So as we’re moving out of today’s episode, I want you to have a think about if networking is in your business, are you effective at it? Are your team members effective at it if you have team members and what could you do to get them performing more effectively? Could you get them looking at lists before you go to events? In fact, could you only go to networking events where the lists are published? Could you get them really clear on the types of people they want to meet when they go to these events so that they can focus in on them? And how can you make sure that you yourself, if you go to networking events, set yourself up to succeed? Because in my experience, many businesses don’t necessarily need more lead generation activities. They just need better either quality of leads when they’re generating themselves or that they convert more of these leads.
To do that though, you’ve got to change something so that you can get more money in your bank, so you can be happier, so you can work less, whatever it may be, less stress. To do that, this is a great way to do it if networking is part of your business. Now, spoiler alert, we’ve got some amazing programs launching in the coming months.
They’re going to be running off a wait list. They’re going to be talking about without doubt prospecting and lead generation. So if you want to make sure that you get notified about these, all you need to do is click on the link in the show notes.
We’ll let you know when you’re launching so you can be one of the first to hear about it and some of them actually won’t cost you anything. So if you can do that now, it’ll take you 30 seconds, you’ll be on the wait list. If not, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.