C-level Selling Tip 7 – Leveraging Your Golden Network

You have a golden network of people. I call this your info/intro highway. These are people who have benefited from you in one way or another professionally. It could be customers, other vendors, consultants, association members, service people or other professionals in or outside your current company. These are people who can help you get information and introductions to whomever you'd like to see.

The two problems are: (1) You only use these people when there is a project on the table that you'd like help with. Your timing could be too late. (2) You only use a small fraction of the people in your golden network. If these people were pursued on a regular basis, they could provide a wealth of information and introductions that you could develop into a bundle of high quality leads.

Your golden network should be like a one-on-one association meeting that is scheduled regularly without fail. Yes, you meet with a few customers' people or prospects regularly, but imagine if you met with all the professionals you've worked with 4 times a year. Just think if you had a brain meld with your tech or service reps once a month. How much could you learn? How many people could they introduce you to? The answer is a lot and that's only your internal people.

This is leveraging. If you don't proactively seek out those that like you, work with you and those who have bought and benefited from you, you're leaving opportunities on the table and you're giving competition a chance to get involved. This golden network can connect you in various directions where you can learn a lot and develop new C-level contacts.

Common Situation
Sporadically Meet with Those on Your Golden Network

People don't consider the resources available to them until their back is to the wall. People are also reluctant or uncomfortable to ask for help with introductions. They may even feel it's just unnecessary to probe for information or to meet C-levels in their accounts until there's something going.

Resulting Problem
It Becomes too Late and Then There's Limited Access to Information and Key Decision-Makers

Without a steady diet of meetings and leveraging your golden network, you'll only become aware of projects, opportunities and information once they hit's the streets. Then information, referrals and help will be severely limited. If your main contact holds back, for whatever reason, you're stuck. You'll have no other points of entry. You'll have made little if any inroads for the project at hand and now you'll be on equal footing with competition.

Check Yourself

Score: 4=Always; 3=Most Times; 2=Usually; 1=Sometimes; 0=Never.

1. Do you tend to meet or call-on the same people for information about new projects? ____
2. Do you have your close contacts introduce you or set-up meetings with new people including their bosses and bosses' peers when there is nothing obvious going-on? ____

Scoring: 1 - 2 = ??
___ - ___ = ___

Negative is good;

Positive means you need to change