They say it’s not what you know, but who you know that counts. That’s because knowing the right people is essential for business success. It’s also why you’ll never meet a successful person who hasn’t built an extremely valuable contact network. Today, I want to help you build an equally valuable network of your own. 

It starts with a question: How many business contacts do you have?

You can easily get an approximate figure by adding together your LinkedIn contacts, your social network followers/friends and the contacts in your address book, etc. For some reading this, the number will be in the hundreds. For many it will be in the thousands or tens of thousands. And for others it will be a hundred thousand or more.

Here’s a far more meaningful question: How many business relationships do you have?

Business relationships are harder to count. These are the people you connect with on a deeper level. Not just numbers on the social networks you use. Not just names in your address book, who you have no real history with. 
 

Vanity metrics 

Building more and more contacts can be intoxicating. These contact numbers are often referred to as vanity metricks, because most of the numbers are visible to others, such as our social network contacts, and how many followers or online friends we have.

It’s a way for normal people (like me) to finally be like one of the popular kids at school. Even though we know hardly any of these people, we have the BIG contacts number. Go us!
 

Business relationship building

The number of meaningful business relationships we have is a lot less public than our vanity numbers, but a lot more meaningful and massively more valuable. With this in mind, how much time do you dedicate each day or each week, to building and nurturing business relationships? 

Here’s a tip to help you get started.

I want you to imagine you already had meaningful relationships, with 6 people who are useful and/or influential. Now write those 6 names down. Next, take time over the coming week to learn a little about them and how to get in contact with them. Finally, get in touch with each one, introducing yourself and letting them know how YOU can assist THEM.

[Important] Read this: Bring your seed, not your need.

The number of positive replies you receive will depend on lots of factors. This includes things like, how useful your assistance is to the other person, how effective your initial introduction is, how interesting you make yourself sound, and even how good your timing is, etc.

But if you stick with it, always seeking to improve your approach, you will find yourself building extremely useful, mutually beneficial business relationships, with amazing people.

Plus, they’ll get to see just how awesome you are, and introduce you to their contacts. 

Build a better contact network, starting now was written by Jim Connolly and originally published on Jim’s Marketing Blog