Building Key Contacts in Your Industry: A Guidesubmitted on 25 April 2020
You must be able to build critical contacts and forge strong relationships in your industry, but this is where many people struggle with. When you can develop and maintain strong profes-sional relationships, it can help to present new opportunities and open doors, build your pro-fessional reputation, and increase awareness about your brand, amongst many other benefits. It can be difficult to know the best ways of doing this in today’s day and age when so much in-teraction is digital, but there are a few practical strategies that should help you to build critical contacts in your industry.
Attend Industry Events
The best way to build critical contacts remains the old fashioned method - face-to-face networking. While online networking is worthwhile (more on this to come), you cannot beat face-to-face communication as this is much more memorable and allows you to build a stronger re-lationship. Attending industry events is the best way to do this and try to focus on a few critical individuals as opposed to meeting everyone in attendance.
Online Networking
Leading on from this, it is essential to have a presence online in today’s day and age, and this is a great way to build an extensive network and keep people informed. It is smart to meet people face-to-face as above and then to add them to different online networks, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Avoid relying on this method, though, and always try on the phone or in-person to build stronger relationships.
Renegotiate
You should never shy away from renegotiation with suppliers because this can help you to build stronger partnerships as well as help you to get better contracts. It is essential to under-stand that interests and needs change, so renegotiation is a smart way to maintain positive re-lationships with those attached to your business. This should be viewed as a positive experi-ence, and you should work so that both parties are happy to forge a stronger working relation-ship.
Return the Favor
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when building key contacts and networking is only seeing it from their point of view. These contacts might be able to help you, but you may also be able to help them, and offering value will balance the relationship and help to improve your reputation. Additionally, try to avoid seeing networking to get ahead and instead try to see it as a positive and social experience. This could involve introducing contacts to one anoth-er and having fun while retaining professionalism.
Stay in Touch & Make Small Gestures
It is essential to meet key contacts, but this is only the start of the relationship, so you need to make sure that you stay in touch and find ways to strengthen your relationship. Much like any kind of relationship, this can be achieved through listening, showing an interest in the other person (social media is good for this), and gestures such as taking them out to lunch or dis-counts.
Hopefully, this guide will help you to build critical relationships in your industry and enjoy all the benefits that this can bring.
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