Sales Networking - How To Research Potential Contacts

I truly believe that every individual in the whole world is potentially only five or six contact steps away. This ‘five or six degrees of separation’ shows that even an entire population of over five billion people is still highly accessible.

However, for practical purposes, we don’t necessarily want or need to meet millions, or even thousands of people in different organisations, age groups, religions, professions, culture or places. We are just looking to develop a network that will eventually provide us with additional business.

Ideally therefore, we need some kind of filtering or research system that will help us to build a set of relationships of high quality, or a strong network that can find people and resources both efficiently and effectively.

First Steps

The first step in the filtering process is to establish what sort of contacts or relationships you think may be of value or benefit to you (or the organisation of which you are a part). This is not to run counter to the idea that networking is primarily about giving, but suggests that some relationships are clearly more valuable in the long-term for both sides, given careful thought in the first place. Only you can determine this ‘value’.

You may already know, or be close to, someone very powerful or influential but gain no benefit from association. On the other hand, you may find someone in the street where you live who can bring you great benefit if you build a relationship with them. You just need to know what you’d like to achieve in order to make reasonable assessment.

Networking Pyramid

When you start to network more widely, you quickly realise that there is a pyramid, or hierarchy of depth or quality in all of your potential relationships.