Richard White specialises in helping IT professionals and organisations develop their business online and offline. We asked him for tips on how DQ practitioners can create a sustainable DQ business by becoming more effective in their business networking.

In this two part tutorial, Richard White will explain two key areas of business and personal development that data quality professionals in particular need to improve to ensure they don’t fall into the “feast or famine” trap.

This first tutorial focuses on effective business networking.

Whether online of offline, data quality practitioners need to perform some key networking activities in order to generate regular referrals and leads.

In the next tutorial Richard will teach you how to transform your networking events by crafting a compelling data quality proposition.

The 5 Key Elements of Effective Networking

If you run your own data quality business then you will know only too well that leads are critical to sustaining a healthy pipeline of work for you or your associates.

Being able to find out about projects involving data quality issues requires having a network of supporters and advocates keeping an eye out for you.

The best projects are never advertised and whilst cold calling can provide some results, most data quality professionals would rather chew on a razor blade!

This invariably means you have to undertake some form of networking. The volume of leads we receive is directly proportional to the effectiveness of our networking strategy. We want people to think of us when they have a project that requires our expertise or when they get asked for a recommendation.

If you want to have ample business referrals and leads then you should adopt the following key business networking strategies:

1. A – Activity
2. M – Market Focus
3. P – Prioritise
4. L – Leverage your network
5. E - Evaluate

Activity

In business networking you always reap what you sow. Sow liberally, nurture selectively, and reap abundantly.
In order to reap a good harvest you need to sow a lot of seeds and then nurture the seedlings. To develop 1 good advocate you probably need to meet 50 people and get to know them a little.

Of those 50 people you need to spend some time with 10 and nurture the relationship and then you can expect to develop an advocate that will recommend you to other people, in effect they become an unpaid sales person.

Unless you put in the activity it is unlikely you will get the response you need. You simply must do the activity consistently to avoid the "Feast or Famine" syndrome.

In order to fit it around your project work, use meal times to meet people.

Market Focus

You need to keep the focus on your target audience and their needs and pains.

Just because you have experience of carrying out data quality assessments on multiple sectors and numerous system technologies does not mean you should necessarily focus on all markets. You need to find a niche area to call your own.

There are now many more data quality specialists looking for opportunities than there were 10 years ago. You therefore need to provide specialist services in a chosen niche to help you differentiate and remain attractive to prospects. Having a clear market focus makes it easier to be remembered.

In networking, the more you become known as a specialist, the more people will refer opportunities to you. When you meet people and get to tell them about yourself, you need to be able to clearly articulate your market focus and how that market benefits from working with you.

“What you do” is only relevant to the extent that it gives your prospects what they want. People do not buy a drill, they buy a hole. The drill is just one way of getting a hole in a wall.

In fact they do not even want the hole, they want to be able hang on the wall a picture of their wedding day! Look beyond data quality and look at specific business problems caused within your market niche by data quality issues.

Prioritise

It takes time to develop trusted relationships. Your time is limited and you need to prioritize where you focus your networking time.  You need to find a balance between meeting lots of people for the first time and deepening the relationship with certain people by meeting more regularly.

In terms of trusted relationships, a relationship with any particular person will fall into one of three levels:

• Your outer circle;
• Your mid-circle;
• Your inner circle

When someone is in your outer circle, you will know them name and see each other from time to time but you do not know them that well or you know them but choose not to spend any time with them.

Your mid-circle will be full of people you have met up at least once on a 1-2-1 basis. You will have some level of trust and chemistry between you but its still in the early stages.

Finally, there is the inner circle. This is where there is a mutual bond between you. There is likely to be banter and you meet each other more regularly.

Referrals might come from any of the levels but it’s the people in the inner circle who are likely to be your biggest advocates.

For you to advocate them, they need to be in your inner circle. For them to advocate you, you need to be in their inner circle. The best place to be is where you both happily advocate each other; where you are in each other’s inner circle.

If you are new to networking then make sure you find a balance between meeting lots of people and nurturing relationships. It is better to have a small network of high quality than a large network of poor quality. However, you will only get the right number of quality relationships by doing the right quantity of networking.

Leverage

Many people have already built a trusted network and yet due to poor communication and the reluctance to ask for help, have not derived many benefits.

If you pay into the emotional bank account with people in your middle and inner circle, then you will be able to make big withdrawals when you need it.  Building the emotional bank account involves meeting up, helping them in some way and ideally passing them referrals.

The best time to build a trusted network is when you least need it - In the ‘feast’ times when you do not need a thing. Then when the time comes and you need help, you will have lots of people who are happy to return the favour and help you.

Don’t expect people to be thinking about you all the time – even if they are in your inner circle. If you have developed the emotional bank account there may be people in your network happy to help you but just waiting for you to ask. When you do ask you need to make it easy for them to say yes by making it simple and fairly low risk.

Asking to organise an appointment with one of their best customers is a much bigger ask than inviting you to an event where that person will be present.
One simple way to leverage your inner circle in the early days of building your business network is to ask them to introduce you to people in their inner circle.

Evaluate

People in your network may service a number of different functions. For example:

• A potential alliance
• A competitor you could potentially be referred business by
• A potential customer
• A potential referrer/advocate
• Someone who can potentially help you connect to the right people
• Someone who could just be interesting or fun to be around to recharge your batteries

If you only network for customers then you greatly limit the potential benefits you could gain from business networking.
By going through and evaluating your network, it is likely to increase your desire to keep in touch with certain people and nurture the relationship. If you leave it to the other person then it’s unlikely to happen!


Why not take a moment to review your current networking performance.
Here are some questions that will help you identify whether your networking skills could leave you open to a "feast and famine" situation:

• How many people are in your inner, middle and outer circles?
• Do you nurture these relationships or maintain only occasional contact?
• Is your DQ proposition focused on a niche market that is ideal for your skills?
• How many referrals do you get each month?
• Through which relationship circle do they come from?
• Do you actively leverage your network by asking for introductions?
• Do you evaluate the contacts you meet and put them into your networking strategy?
• Do you have a clear idea of your ideal prospect so that you can convey this when networking?

In his next tutorial in this series, Richard explains how to present a more compelling proposition for “what you do” by introducing the concept of story telling and why this could just be the missing ingredient from your DQ networking strategy.

Get the next tutorial in this series...

About Richard White

Richard White is a business development consultant and coach specialising in helping IT professionals and organisations end feast and famine forever. He does this by helping clients gain clarity over how they can win profitable clients and develop more business with existing clients. He holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management and is a member of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management.

Richard has a background in Business Intelligence and selling IT consulting services (including data quality) to large organisations.  Richard is a self confessed accidental salesman and went from hating sales and being useless at it, to falling in love with sales, overcoming his fears and outselling his colleagues. He now helps technically minded people make that the same paradigm shift much faster and with ease. Richard provides free online sales training at http://www.theaccidentalsalesman.com

You can contact Richard at Richard@theaccidentalsalesman.com or click here to view his Data Quality Pro profile.

Do you struggle to articulate the benefits of your data quality service? Do you find networking online or offline a struggle? Please share your comments below and we'll feed these concerns into a new business development initiative we are launching on Data Quality Pro shortly.