Networking Now:

As I’ve said time and time again, I firmly believe that the way to survive and thrive in an economic downturn is to ignore the doom-and-gloom headlines and focus instead on what you can do to grow your business despite fluctuations in the economy.

That’s why I’m hoping all of you will join me in participating in Make a Referral Week, which is a campaign inviting everyone around the globe to make 1,000 referrals during the week of March 9-13.  It’s an entrepreneurial approach to stimulating the small-business economy–one referred business at a time.

The goal of generating 1,000 referrals to 1,000 deserving small businesses highlights the idea that by taking one simple action and generating one referral to a small business, you really can make a difference and help jumpstart the economy.  Small business is the lifeblood and job-creating engine of the economy, and if we all pledge to make one referral, we could possibly generate millions of dollars in new business.

The weeklong, virtual event also features daily education programs focused on teaching small-business owners and other marketers how to tap the power of referral marketing. I’ll be featured, along with my friends Bob Burg and Bill Cates, on Tuesday, March 10.

Click here to learn more and join the campaign.

If you do join me in participating next week, I’d love to hear back from you about the referral(s) you generated.

As I was playing chess during my lunch hour yesterday and mercilessly dominating the game (Norm, BNI’s CEO, who I was playing against might possibly tell a different story but don’t believe him . . . after all, this is my blog), I was struck by the thought of how valuable of an experience it was when I coached my son’s school chess club a few years back.

It’s common knowledge that if you want to improve your skill, then you should teach someone else.  By teaching young people the rudiments of chess strategy, it inevitably made me focus on improving my own game.  It’s the same with networking.  When you become a networking mentor for someone else, it will improve your networking skills by acting as a refresher for what you’ve learned and it gets you to refocus your efforts on areas you may have forgotten. 

Perhaps there is someone who already considers you a mentor, or maybe you know someone you’d like to mentor–someone who reminds you of yourself when you were just getting started in business.  If so, don’t let the opportunity to be an active mentor pass you by.    When you selflessly share your wealth of knowledge to help others succeed and help them avoid making the same mistakes you made, not only will they benefit greatly but so will you.

Do you have an inspiring story about someone who has been a mentor to you, or someone that you’ve mentored?  If so, leave a comment and share it with everyone else.

Last night at dinner, I asked my son the dreaded question . . . “So, Trey, how’s that homework coming?”  Needless to say, I received the typical, teenage, roll-of-the-eyes response and the standard “I was going to finish it after dinner” answer. 

Even if you don’t have kids, at one time you were a kid so I’m sure just about everybody can identify with this scenario.  Being held accountable for completing your homework as a kid was never fun, but face it–when we’re held accountable for our actions, performance, and commitments it tends to heighten our awareness of what we are responsible for and what we have promised to do.

So it is with networking your business: accountability is important.  When you make a commitment to yourself to get out of your cave and attend productive networking functions, the reality is that sometimes other things come up and we forget those promises or push them to the back burner.  So why not find and accountability partner for networking your business?  That way, every time you commit to a new networking strategy, your accountability partner can keep you to the task.  Each week, perhaps by phone, meet with your accountability partner to identify your strategy for the week and because you have someone waiting to hear of your progress, you’ll be more inclined to focus on the task at hand.

To find the right accountability partner, ask yourself these questions:

1.  Who do I highly respect as a business colleague?

2.  Who would not be afraid to push me and keep me focused?

3.  Who would I never think of disappointing?

4.  Who is also interested in networking her business so that we can be accountability partners for each other?

5.  Who knows me–and my tendency to procrastinate?

6.  Who will follow through on this commitment to me?

7.  Who has the time to help me?

Think about it.  No one likes to knowingly disappoint someone else, and no one likes to waste her time or have her time wasted by someone else.  The urge to comply compels us to perform at a higher level and this leads to greater networking results.

Welcome to the third annual International Networking Week (Feb 2-6).

Now, more than ever, we need to ignore the doom-and-gloom headlines and focus on what we can do to promote our own business growth.

International Networking Week is about celebrating the key role that networking plays in the development and success of business around the world. It’s about creating an awareness of the process of networking.  Not just any kind of networking, but what I call “relationship networking,” an approach to doing business based on building long-term, successful relationships with people through the networking process.

Last year, International Networking Week was recognized by tens of thousands of people around the world, and it has garnered acknowledgements from several governmental agencies across the globe. It’s expected that the number of people participating in this year’s worldwide celebration of the week, through hundreds of large events and thousands of smaller events, will be double what it was in 2008.

If you belong to any networking groups, be sure to tell them that this is International Networking Week and let them know they can visit InternationalNetworkingWeek.com for more information.  Let’s join together in celebrating the things we can do do promote global prosperity, instead of worrying about the things we can’t control.

Watch this 10-minute video talking about International Networking Week 2009.  Share the video with anybody and everybody, and feel free to show it at your networking meetings during International Networking Week.

So what will you be doing to recognize International Networking Week?  Share it with us here–we’d love to hear about it.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in networking is to dismiss someone too early, to assume that he or she has nothing to offer you because of his or her professional background or some other reason, and not pursue the relationship.  Unfortunately, I see this happen a lot.

The truth is, you simply never know where your next great referral is going to come from.  You should make it a point to consistently connect with high-quality professionals from all fields, from any and every background. Forget about trying to contact the VPs and high-level executives–they don’t want to hear another sales pitch. But any professional who is good at what he or she does will be well-connected to other highly successful businesspeople.

Take my painting contractor, for example. Through his work he has come to know A-list Hollywood celebrities, among many other affluent people. He’s one of the most connected people I know.

I have a favorite story, which I think illustrates this point perfectly.  In this case, a multimillion-dollar referral (one of the biggest I’ve seen recently) was given by a dentist in Malaysia. She briefly shut down her practice to attend a networking conference. When she reopened, one of her clients asked her about the conference and, as a result, she was able to connect the client with someone she’d met at the conference–which led to the the multimillion dollar referral.

If you want to hear the details of this powerful story, watch my latest show on yourBusinessChannel.com.

By the way, my shows on yourBusinessChannel are related to my involvement in the Million Dollar Challenge.  The Million Dollar Challenge invites promising businesses across the globe to take the challenge and have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform their business and skyrocket it into success with a team of acclaimed business experts.  CLICK HERE to find out more.

At the BNI International Conference in Long Beach this past November, I had a great conversation with my business partner in the Referral Institute, Mike Macedonio (pictured to the right).  He was explaining why he feels there are only a few criteria that must be met to make people referrable by him.

The first criterion is that the individual is must be an expert at what he or she does.  He looks for people who have invested in learning their trade and continue to invest to master their trade.  Do they specialize in a certain area?  What achievements have they attained in their area of expertise?

Another one of Mike’s requirements is that the person is passionate about what he or she does.  This, especially, makes a lot of sense to me because if you’re not passionate about what you do, how could you expect other people to get excited about working on your behalf?

Mike’s last criterion stipulates that the person he is referring understands and honors the referral process.  More specifically, Mike wants to ensure that the person receiving the referral understands his or her number-one responsibility.  To quote Mike, “The number-one responsibility when you receive a referral is to make the person who gave you the referral look great.”  As long as the people Mike gives referrals to are doing this for him, Mike can remain confident that his reputation will be protected.  It also compels him to continue giving these people referrals.

Mike’s list of qualifications that make a person referrable is short, yet very powerful.  After discussing it, we both agreed that we should expect others to evaluate our referrability by these same criteria.  Are we invested experts, and do we continue to invest in our trade?  Are we passionate about what we do?  Are we practicing what we preach?  Do we make our referral sources look great?  I’m glad to say that I’m confident we both do all of these things.

So what makes people referrable by you?  I’m sure many of you have some great ideas in response to this. I’d love to hear them, so please feel free to leave a comment.

Many of us are taught as children that we should refrain from bragging about our successes. But there’s a caveat to those rules that our parents usually didn’t teach us: The rules apply to our individual, personal lives–not our businesses.

Success stories about businesses and entrepreneurs are vital for those of us dedicated to learning all we can in order to make our own enterprises as successful as possible.  What’s more, having your own success stories heard could bring you opportunities to network your business far beyond the playing field of the typical networking arena.

Here are four approaches to capturing your success stories:

1.  Ask for written testimonials: Get satisfied customers or colleagues to write letters on their own letterhead to spotlight their positive experience with you and your business.

2.  Write down two success stories: Highlight your successes to help your network understand who best represents your preferred client.  These stories should clearly emphasize what you do better than anyone else.

3.  Write a personal introduction: Provide your network with material they can use when talking about you and your business with people who fit your preferred client profile.  You don’t want your sales force making stuff up about you, right?  This simplifies their task and ensures accuracy.

4.  Toot your own horn: Tell people about the good things your business does.  This isn’t about crowing over your amazing golf handicap or complimenting your own fine taste in silk ties.  It’s about spotlighting your business’s strengths, as well as its legitimate good works in the community.

I’ve written a few articles about refusing to participate in a recession and I recently had someone e-mail me saying, “Don’t bother telling me . . . tell my customers. They are not as willing to accept a platitude as you feel I am.” (Ouch, I guess he didn’t like my thoughts on this matter.)

Well sir, I’m afraid we’ll just have to agree . . . to disagree. You see, I don’t think it’s a platitude, I think it’s an attitude!

Today’s news is full of economic soap operas. In the United States, Congress, the White House and the pundits have all debated about the bailout of yet another pillar of corporate America. European nations and others around the globe are struggling with recessionary pressures. Voices everywhere seem to be spouting economic doom and gloom.

Now, please, lean in close and listen carefully. I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult, yet very important: Ignore all those doom-and-gloom voices.

It’s not that I want to deny reality. Nor am I even judging whether all those important voices are right or wrong.

What I am saying is, all those voices are sending you useless information. Not only are they urging you to be afraid . . . very afraid . . . they are completely ignoring the solutions on which you need to focus. Nothing like freezing a good entrepreneur in his or her tracks with old-fashioned fear.

When Franklin Roosevelt wisely said during America’s depression that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . . he left something out. When you are in business, at any time in any nation, the other thing you have to fear is: inaction. Not very poetic, I know, but it’s true.

Let others worry about the macro-economic picture. You have a micro-economy in which you are a vital and central player. Does the government or an economist know the ins and outs of your business better than you? Have you received any calls lately offering to bail you out with taxpayer money if your business slides to the brink of ruin? I’m guessing the answer is “no” to both questions.

You already know this in your gut: No bailout is coming your way . . . unless you do it yourself. No rescue plan is being prepared for your business . . . unless you do it yourself. And no solutions to your problems will be developed . . . unless you do it yourself.

The more you focus on fear, the more afraid you will become. The more you focus on obstacles, the larger they will loom. And the more you focus on today’s global economic doom-and-gloom headlines, the less time, energy and faith you’ll have to focus on building the prosperous, successful, well-networked business you really want.

If you tell yourself, “I can’t succeed in this economic downturn,” you’ll very likely prove yourself correct. But if, instead, you focus on specific solutions to the particular issues, challenges and opportunities of your business, your niche market, your current and prospective customers . . . you are very likely to enjoy more success than all the naysayers put together would have predicted.

What the bigwigs on Wall Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, the London Financial district or the European Central Bank don’t seem to understand is, out here in the real world of entrepreneurial small business, by sticking together and helping one another, we can face down the doom and gloom. We can build our businesses despite the headlines, and we can show others around the world the economic power of persistent, skillful and focused networking.

Join me and the many other successful businesspeople. Become someone who sees opportunities when others see problems, become someone who seeks growth when others expect collapse, and be someone who sees success when others see failure.

I refuse to participate in a recession, now more than ever!

If you have a great business or a great idea that you want to take to the next level, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to apply for yourBusinessChannel’s Million Dollar Challenge contest. The contest is the result of yourBusinessChannel’s upcoming, online TV series “The Million Dollar Team,” which features entrepreneurial advice and instruction from a team of business experts–which would cost more than a million dollars if they were hired in the real world.

Ahead of the show’s launch, its producers are calling for businesses to fill 25 “hot seats” to get direct input into their businesses from the Million Dollar Team.

I’ve been asked to sit on the team of experts alongside experienced and talented businesspeople such as Kevin Roberts (global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi), Penny Power (Founder of Ecademy.com), Tom Smith (acclaimed social media expert from Universal McCann), David Meerman Scott (viral marketing guru whose online campaigns have sold more than $1 billion in products and services worldwide) and many others. These people are world-class experts in their field and, between all of us, we have helped thousands of businesses to prosper.

The Million Dollar Challenge is open to businesses of any size and stage, anywhere in the world. The key requirement is that they be businesses with real substance or promise that need an injection of leading-edge advice to grow to the next level, fast. I think this is a chance-of-a-lifetime opportunity. If you have a business with real potential, applying to receive free, extra-close attention from a “million dollar” team of world-class experts is a no-brainer. 

Take a look here to find out more about the contest and to apply.

I have found yourBusinessChannel to be a tremendous resource for entrepreneurs and businesspeople everywhere. You can keep your eye out for more of the site’s great shows by clicking here.

I have a series of surveys on networking up at my company website. One of them asks, “What is your primary objective for networking?” I have to admit I’m a little surprised that 75 percent of the responses were for “new business” (see below). I would have guessed that would be the largest percentage, but I didn’t expect it to be that high.

I understand that most entrepreneurs and salespeople network to some extent for all three reasons (new business, education, career advancement), but I didn’t realize that most networked primarily for new business.

What are your thoughts about networking for new business, education or career advancement?

I was invited to a very unusual event recently. It was a meeting about “storytelling.” It was hosted by Peter Guber. Peter is an Academy Award-winning producer of movies, including Rain Man, The Color Purple and Batman. He is the past CEO of Sony Corp. and currently chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment.

Peter is clearly passionate about the power of “story” and considers it the “secret sauce” that has enabled him to achieve his success. Consequently, he decided to create an opportunity for a diverse group of experts to come together to exchange ideas–be inspired, enlightened and enriched–but, most important, to share stories!

Peter invited about 16 people (including “yours truly”) along with individuals such as Warren Bennis–one of the world’s foremost experts on leadership; Keith Ferrazzi–author of “Never Eat Alone“; and Mark Victor Hansen–co-author of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, as well as many other “storytellers” from various businesses, backgrounds and areas of expertise.

Effective storytelling is an important part of one’s emotional intelligence. I’ve always believed in using stories to make a point but never really gave a lot of thought to some of the “hows” and “whys” of their effectiveness. There were a number of “take-aways” for me from this meeting that I would like to share with you.

Storytelling is about tapping into a passion about some topic. It is about taking the listener to a place that is visceral, visual, concrete, emotional and possibly unexpected. One of the participants, Dr. Mark Goulston, said that “a story is a portable storage unit for one’s dreams, fears, hopes, humor and sorrows that people visit–or visits people–from time to time for them to stay in contact with their humanity.” [The group really liked this definition, and so did I.]

Mark Victor Hansen said that when the authors were working on the Chicken Soup series, they were looking for stories that gave or gave people:

• God bumps or goose bumps
• Happy tears
• A change in perception
• Weakness in the knees
• Change in your life

One of the best comments of the day came from Peter, who said, “what if” is more powerful than “how to” in a story. Very true, indeed. Getting people to think of the possible rather than simply look at the present can truly help make a great story.

After spending an entire day talking about what it takes to make a good story, I verified the fact that it is very difficult to describe to someone “how” to tell a good story. However, you sure know one when you hear it!

I’m aware that it’s not just the networking die-hards who may be reading my blog, and I wanted to post something that I think is very important for networking newbies. (Don’t worry, it’s a good refresher for you die-hards as well.) When you’re just starting out in the networking world, finding a networking group can sometimes be intimidating and confusing, but it really doesn’t have to be. For those of you looking to join a networking group, here are some networking group basics.

There are at least seven types of business networking organizations to consider joining to develop your business through networking. Depending on your time constraints, you should select at least two or three groups to participate in. There are:

• Casual contact networks. These allow many people from overlapping professions and meet monthly.
• Strong contact networks. Their primary purpose is exchanging referrals. They meet weekly.
• Community service clubs. They provide an opportunity to give back to the community you do business in while making contacts and getting PR.
• Professional associations. They tend to focus on one specific industry. The primary purpose is to exchange information and ideas)
• Social/business organizations. They combine social activities with business or networking.
• Online networks. Includes groups such as Ecademy, LinkedIn and Ryze, which are social networks for businesses.
• Women’s business organizations. They are non-threatening groups for women to increase business. Many also allow men.

Don’t let chance decide where you’re going to spend your time and effort. Diversify your activities and consciously select a well-rounded mix of organizations. If you have associates, partners or employees, consider their participation when deciding which groups each of you will target.