How To Build Real Business Relationships

It is quite common to hear entrepreneurs talk about how important it is to build a relationship with somebody before asking for a referral or for a sale. In fourteen years of building a networking organization, I believe I've heard this conversation thousands of times. Most people agree that business relationships are important, however, most people don't know how to build a real business relationship.

People show up to the networking meetings and they shake hands and work the room. Then they go home with a stack of business cards. If they have time they do some of the follow-ups but most of those business cards land in a box somewhere. When they are meeting people in online Zoom meetings, they gather the chats. But in the busy times of life, most of those chats are forgotten and not followed up on.

Real relationships don't start, nor grow in a networking event because people don't take the relationship outside of the event. Some people will get as far as the one-on-one. Those who are more accustomed to networking, will realize that a one-on-one is necessary but still the one-on-one is still not far enough to get a real relationship going.

Think about it, how many one on ones have you had? Most business owners have had many one-on-one meetings, and most of them did not result in sales or referrals. And how many of those one-on-ones produced a business relationship that gives you three referrals every month? Why?

The Know, Like And Trust Factor

We talk about it all the time at networking meetings. We need to get to know and trust somebody in order to give them referrals. When we meet somebody at the networking event, we have only established that we like them. And that first one on one meeting doesn't take the relationship much deeper than that. They were fun and they were not rude. Maybe they did not pick their nose in the meeting, but we do not know them, and we don't feel like we trust them.

After one event and one time with them in a coffee shop or at a zoom meeting, we are not likely to open up our best contact list and share our very top clients with this person. Sometimes we have a really good meeting with them and we say that we will send them one referral, but we usually don't because we truly do not know them that well yet. We have not established trust with them.

So we walked away from the one-on-one, feeling good about this person because we liked them. But “like” isn't deep enough to send somebody a referral. And once again, we're going to get too busy to even think about them once we are no longer in their presence.

How Do We Fix This?

When we establish that we like somebody and we have found out that they could potentially give us referrals we need to take it to the next step. We need to  invest time into that relationship in order to get those referrals.  We don't have time to do this with every person that we meet, but we should try to do it with those that have the same target market as ourselves, because they could potentially feed us many leads over time.

Additional Meetings Count

It can take years to get to know somebody if we don't have a plan. We would have to show up where they were and we would have to run into them over and over. Repetition makes us feel more like we trust them, and then we may give them a couple of our best clients. If we're only seeing them at a weekly networking event, it's going to take a long time for us to start feeling warm and fuzzy enough to share the very best clients that we have. The weekly networking group is still not enough because we are not having deep conversations with anyone at a networking event.

In my book, SMART NETWORKING - The $150000 Method I go through a detailed plan on how to make this kind of relationship happen faster. It can literally be done in four meetings from beginning to end. We just have to orchestrate discussions around things that really matter. We need to talk about deeper subjects so that we can see the heart of the person that we are speaking to. When we share things like our vision and we hear what their vision is, we start to get a feeling for who this person is, and we determine if we like them and know them and trust them. If we talk about why they do what they do, then we can understand where they are coming from. We don’t need to take a year for this to happen. It can happen in 30 days if we know how to do it properly.

Know, Like, Trust And Then NEED

By following a planned method where we follow the steps, we not only can establish that we know them and trust them, we can quickly fall into a pattern where we are needed by them. If I am sharing three to five  warmed up leads of buyers with a referral partner, then they not only know me and trust me, they are soon going to need me. They are going to start coming to my barbeques at my house and they will be the people that I end up doing life with. This relationship is going to go a lot deeper than the handshaking and the polite conversation that happens at a networking event. 

By systematically building five of these relationships over the next 6 months. I will easily add a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to my bottom line over the next year to eighteen months. Building strong and real relationships is good for my business and it is great for the quality of my life overall. These people end up being the mentors for my kids and the people that we go on vacations with. It is a win/win/win over and over again.

In chapter nine of SMART NETWORKING - The $150,000 Method I go over this method of growing a business in great detail. You can find out where to get a copy HERE .