Successful Principles of Networking Meeting Groups--Part 1

Success Principle No. 1

Many people may be new to network meeting marketing. Raise your hand if this is your first networking group? In the next few blog entries, I will share with you four principles that make network meetings successful. Hopefully the experience of others can shorten your learning curve.

The purpose of a networking group is to offer inexpensive way to for small business owners to get exposure for their business and to tap into the best form of advertising--word of mouth advertising. When business owners get exposure and word of mouth advertising the network group is successful. When they don’t, they stop coming.

Here’s one success principle--you should always come to the group meeting with a referral for someone in the group. If you are waiting until the day of the meeting or waiting to hear people’s commercials to generate a referral, you have waited too long. Why do I say this?

Because, it is impossible to listen to 15-20 commercials in a row. Could you listen to 15 commercials in a row when you are watching TV? And besides, each of us is probably going over in our head our own commercial instead of listening to others.

Here’s a helpful suggestion, if you don’t have a referral for a member of your networking group by Monday morning, take out the roster of people in the group and match up one of these people with one of the 250 people you know. This exercise may take you 10-15 minutes. This is a commitment to the other people in the group to make it the group a success. The success of any group starts with individual members taking responsibility for their part in the group.

If someone in the group mentions something that sparks a referral from you, this is frosting on the cake. You now have two referrals, the one you brought with you and a second one. I know that we all become busy in running our businesses, but if we want this group to work for us, we need to bring a referral to the meeting and not just show up a hope something happens.

Will you commit this week to bring at least one referral to our meeting next week?

In the next blog entry, I will talk about successful Principle 2 of networking meetings.

Comments

[Susan]

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Susan

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