Are You Just Blowing In the Wind?
While I was driving home from the holidays at the end of December I was radio surfing and stopped on a station where a minister was promoting a new education series his church was offering. He was talking about the story from the Bible where Nicodemus visited Jesus during passover. One of the verses he read was John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
Now it may say something about my state of mind that I heard this and thought about networking. But I think this verse really describes how many people network.
They go to a networking event or a trade show or some other opportunity to meet people and when they meet someone new they immediately judge them based on their ability to BUY their product or service. They don’t look past the immediate gratification of making a sale and look at the persons ability to introduce them to potential clients or referral partners. These people we meet are like the wind, we don’t know where they came from (who they know) or where they are going (who they will meet in the future). We here them talk but instead of truly listening to them, we think about “How long are they going to talk to me?” And how “I would rather be talking to that person over there.” Or “How do I get out of this conversation?”
The best referral I received while I was selling cellular phones and data applications a few years ago was to the facilities manager at the local IBM facility. I had talked about how the company I was working for at the time had a data application that worked on BlackBerry phones that allowed facility managers to send jobs to their service techs and track the status of the jobs. Since it was technology based, one would think that I would have received that referral from someone in technology, computer networking or something of that sort. But that isn’t who passed me the referral. The lady that makes gift baskets is the one who made the introduction!
Little did I know that she had worked for IBM in the facilities management department at the IBM headquarters. She knew ALL the facilities managers and was able to make a personal introduction to him for me.
If I hadn’t taken the time to build a relationship with her, and instead wrote her off as someone who couldn’t help me, I would not have had that opportunity presented to me.
When we meet people, we can never know what is going to come of that meeting. If we don’t make the effort to learn about them and how we can help them we may be losing the chance to meet our next client. Now not all the people we are going to meet will be able to help us like that, but until we make the effort none of them will be able to help us.
So the next time you meet someone who doesn’t have what you think is the right title or job to be able to use your services or be a referral partner, take time to find out more about them. It will keep you from just blowing in the wind.