Off the Cuff: Networking Your Way to Success: Part 1 of 3

SALES & MARKETING

Off the Cuff: Networking Your Way to Success: Part 1 of 3

June 21, 2010
By Mark L. Venit, MBA, Contributing Writer

New to the industry? Been in the biz awhile and looking for new accounts without spending a fortune to find them? Are you a good networker? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, read on.

Networking — a process of sharing and developing contacts, information and services among individuals and groups having a common interest — is perhaps the most affordable and highly effective means of building an account base. For newcomers, though, it’s the means to starting to build an account base.

Being a good networker assumes having — or developing and sharpening — the basic social skills involved in making contacts, meeting people, and being comfortable and willing to exploit one’s contacts to further relationships to a point where they’ll eventually put some cash in your pocket.

Networking entails a commitment to facilitating your own success. When the initial goal is to advance your ability to grow your account base, networkers must exude a sense of professionalism, while proactively and constantly projecting a strong, positive company identity. Anyone investing the time to network needs to commit himself or herself to following up on the contacts made and the information learned.

How to Get Started
Networking opportunities abound. If you don’t know where to find them, just open your eyes! They’re all around you — from local civic, social and service clubs (Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis and Elks clubs, Moose Lodges, your Chamber of Commerce and local business associations) to your church, athletic association, interest groups, and political committees and causes. Regularly attending meetings and other functions and activities of these groups will help you integrate with the membership. Of course, if you don’t or won’t make the time to attend regularly, don’t waste your time and money and the organization’s good will, as “checkbook memberships” preclude most networking abilities.

Speaking to school groups and local organizations also gives you opportunities to advance your business. Various groups are always looking for speakers, whether it is to teach lessons from the real world, or to talk about interesting personal pursuits and life experiences.

On what subjects can YOU share your knowledge or insight? First, it’s your company: what you do, what you sell, how you started your business and what you’ve learned from the experience. Second, it’s your interests, particularly those that you can define as “passions” and areas where you can document expertise.

To attract invitations to share your story, mail or e-mail the group with your offer to speak, a brief explanation of the subject(s) you speak on, how long your presentation is (or can be adapted to various time slots) and, where appropriate, material you’ve had published online, in newspapers, in books and articles, etc. If you have wall paper (degrees, commendations, awards), list them.

Get Up Close and Personal
If your company has a commercial location and does in-house apparel decorating, you can amplify networking by bringing your opportunities into — inside — your business! Inviting groups to tour your facility gives you the platform to speak about your company and demonstrate its resources to lots of “witnesses.”

Who wants to see your company in operation? Start with high school and college art classes; your invitation to bring groups into your shop should be sent to department heads or to the class teachers. The benefit to the students is that they get to see what they’re learning about in class being done in a real-world environment (even though we sometimes think our businesses are anything but “the real world”). They’ll get to talk to the artists and see how art undergoes a transformation via screenmaking, digitizing or other pre-production technologies, and then executed through your company’s various production methodologies on a variety of products.

Inviting high school and college business classes presents a great opportunity for students to see your business from start to finish — how and to whom it markets and advertises, as well as how orders are gathered and processed, along with all the pre-production, production and post-production phases of your operation.

Other groups simply want to make field trips to interesting places — like yours! Considering the whole world wears our products, lots of people are fascinated to see exactly how they’re done live and in person. School groups, women’s clubs, seniors, church youth groups, summer camps, special education students and lots of other organizations will welcome a chance to see your business up close.

When bringing in tours — especially public school kids and campers — advise them that they’ll actually get to take home an item they will see produced on your premises. For schools, it’s a parent permission slip and a notice to send the kids to school on the day of their tour with a T-shirt – or offer to provide one at $2. For other groups, you might ask the decision-makers to authorize an order than everyone will see produced.

In addition to sending invitations to tour your facilities, list this service to the community on your Web site and, where appropriate, in local ads.

Aside from meeting people, dazzling them and having some fun, tours can generate buzz among the groups, get follow-up mention in their newsletters, meetings and perhaps with photos to local newspapers. You get rave reviews and referrals from those who’ve seen and heard about your professionalism, enthusiasm,and the pride you take in all phases of your operation. And from all that you get business, especially from groups you’ve had difficulty penetrating through advertising, such as schools, colleges, senior centers and local organizations, to name a few.

The fringe benefits of hosting tours include meeting potential employees — from artists to summer help to salespeople — and the publicity that is generated. To grab a little more attention and be thanked in the process by the group you hosted, send a press release and photos to local newspapers about the event, post photos on your Web site and forward video footage of the event’s participants on YouTube and other social media.

Another way to attract the attention of schools and colleges is to provide internships to students, especially budding commercial artists, marketing majors and other young people who would like to work in your business. The various arrangements may require little from your company beyond giving students the opportunities to participate and learn, as well as completing some paperwork for their evaluations. In other cases, especially work-study programs, you are required to provide some compensation, usually minimum wage at the least. You get low-cost labor and fresh eyes, and the students get real work experience that’ll help them on their resumes.

Conducting on-site experiences and tours, and providing internships don’t necessarily guarantee business, but at very least you get inside the decision-making ranks of the organizations, schools and other groups you’ve served. What you should get in return is at least the opportunity of doing business. And then it’s your move to escalate the contact and the relationship to something gainful.

In Part 2, you’ll receive a prescription with specifics for following up on leads to maximize their potential to become customers.

Mark L. Venit, MBA, is president of Apparel Graphics Institute Ltd., Ocean Pines, Md., which provides management and marketing consulting and proprietary research to apparel graphics companies throughout the Americas and Europe. He also is the chairman of ShopWorks Software LLC, a provider of industry-specific business software. Venit teaches pricing, strategic marketing, salesmanship and other business management topics at the Imprinted Sportswear Shows. You can contact him at markvenit@cs.com.

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