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The Recognition of Relevance

Written by: Andy Lopata

Article Overview: How well do you know the people around you? Who do they know who you could connect with or would benefit from introductions you can make? The key to successful networking lies in recognising opportunities to connect other people. But to achieve this, sometimes we have to change our natural interactions.

The Recognition of Relevance

You are going to hold a dinner party on Saturday night. Who are the first people you think of inviting? They may be close friends or possibly members of your family.

Now stop for a moment and ask yourself a few questions. Do you know what your guests do for a living? Do you know which company or organisation they work for? Do you even know their job title? Are you clear about the kind of customers they have or the products they sell?

If you are typical of most people I expect you will have struggled to answer some or all of these questions about your dinner guests. It’s funny how we invite people into our houses and can spend a whole evening talking and enjoying their company but we haven’t really got a clue what they do at work. We don’t know because we don’t ask them.

The reason for this is very simple; we don’t think or ask ourselves what many of our friends and our family do because it simply isn’t relevant to our relationship with them. And, as a race, we tend to only think of people according to their relevance to us.

If you play golf you may think of your associates there in terms such as ‘Bill from the Golf Club’. I have a friend who has a section in his mobile phone address book reserved for his friends from football. They include ‘Charlton Jon’, ‘Charlton Vince’ and ‘Charlton Paul’.

This view of people doesn’t just apply to our friends and family, it tends to extend to everyone we know. Think of your clients and suppliers. How much do you know about their businesses outside of the areas where they either supply you or you supply them? Are you aware of the full extent of the services or products they offer? Do you know about the problems facing their businesses or their plans for the future? The chances are that in many cases you don’t because that information is not relevant to you in the relationship you have with them.

Overcoming this natural barrier to finding out more about our friends and contacts is the key to successful networking. To be an effective networker, you need to be able to see not only how people are relevant to you but how they may be relevant to others in your sphere. Otherwise you will remain merely a friend, a family member, a buyer or a seller.

Successful business people tend to be effective connectors. They see opportunities for one party to help another even when there is nothing in it for them. They connect others because they can and because they want to. And they take the necessary steps to put people together. They build a reputation of being a Centre of Influence and they do this by knowing more about the people in their network, which in turn leads them to be able to spot opportunities for them.

This can only happen when people both take the time and make the effort to listen for each other. Once again, the natural reaction is to listen to what others are saying and process their words depending on how that information is relevant to us. To network effectively, you need to take a step back and ask yourself why you are being told this, what is the need of the person speaking to you and what could you do to help? Obviously this is not so important when you have simply stopped someone to ask them for directions, but becomes more relevant when people are talking about themselves or their business.

As you increase your knowledge of what people do, who they can help, what they need to build their business and how they can help others you are in a stronger position to make connections, to introduce people to each other and to help other people in your sphere.

So why should you want to do this? Why take the time and effort to learn about other people’s needs and businesses and to connect them? Surely you have enough to cope with building your own business without worrying about other people.

You probably already know about the Law of Karma, ‘What goes around comes around’ and the belief that if you give you will receive. When you help others they really do feel more inclined to help you in return. In addition, the moment you start to be seen as a Centre of Influence then more people want to know you and to help you, and that can only work in your favour in the long run.

Thomas Power, the Chairman of Ecademy, puts it succinctly when he said in a recent article:

‘The more connected you are the more appealing you are to meet. The more connected you are the more people will phone you for ideas. The more connected you are the more opportunities will come your way. The more connected you are the more people will beat a path to your door to listen to your point of view, be it right or be it wrong.’

The more people listen for others, look to find out about others and consider how they can use their contacts to help them, then the more effective the whole networking process becomes. And the key to this success is breaking out of old moulds and starting to look beyond selfish interests.

So, take steps towards becoming a more effective connector now by finding out more about the people around you. Ask them about what they do, and how they do it. Find out what they need and what their contacts need too.

Find out how you can become more relevant to them and how they might become relevant to other people you know.

Finally, when you really know someone well you can ask yourself the most important question of all: ‘who can I connect him to and why?’

And remember, the key to networking success is the recognition of relevance.

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