Brenda Thomson's BLOG

Good marketing practice tells us that we should have a clearly defined target market and position our marketing activities in the places where you would expect our target market to easily find us. Where do they congregate, what other things do they buy, what do they read, what television shows are they watching and so on? Makes sense doesn’t it? So let’s stop and think for a moment: who attends business networking events? Typically small business owners. Logically this is why networking groups are absolutely filled with business owners and business development managers whose target market are other business owners. Generally known as business to business or B2B businesses. Attend any typical business networking event and you will find an abundance of web-designers, graphic designers, marketing consultants, printers, business coaches, book-keepers, recruiters and other B2B professions. Perhaps you are one of them. It stands to reason; they are positioning themselves in one of the places where their target market congregates. Even those attendees whose target market are not small business owners are frequently on the hunt for potential clients. After all small business owners are individual consumers too, perhaps they will want to buy your life coaching or your health foods, or whatever it is that you sell. But do you see a problem with this? When you attend a networking event are you there because you want to be sold to? Almost certainly not! Yet how often has the only result of a business card exchange at a networking event been to find yourself on someone’s database? When you attend a networking event think about what kind of relationship you are looking to develop with the people that you meet. I have lost count of the number of people who have complained to me that some networking group or another was not useful because the members “were NOT their target market”. But if you are there to grow your database from amongst the people in the room then you may be looking at networking the wrong way. Because if you are not there to be sold to, the odds are that the other people in the room don’t want to be sold to either. Not much likelihood of a WIN WIN outcome. Stop and think about this for a moment. What do you and all of the other people at a typical networking event have in common? You are generally all there because you want to grow your businesses, usually to find more leads and clients and perhaps also develop a support network and expand your business knowledge. Then what if, instead of viewing the people you meet at potential clients, you started to view them as potential team members. People that you could work with to help each other achieve your business goals. Help each other find leads and clients, share business knowledge and resources, provide a support network for each other. Smart business owners look for networking groups and opportunities where they can connect with people with whom they have the most in common. They approach networking with the objective of building mutually beneficial relationships, of building teams, NOT databases. If you have a strong team, a network of people working with you to help you achieve your business goals, and theirs, the database growth and the business growth and the profits will certainly follow. So the next time you attend a networking event think about why you are there!