“Go make some new friends.” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 1114
How is your network?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I want to talk about your network. The people you know who might be in a position to help you one day. I saw several really explicit examples of how life-altering this can be with some people in my network this week. Most people probably overthink this. It’s really just about making friends and knowing people who are in relevant positions but let me break this down just a little bit.
If you do it right you should have some built-in networks with people you work with and those you’ve worked within the past. These are the peers on your team, your boss, and folks like that. It’s easy to take this one step further and work to build some type of relationship with your executives and key players in other parts of the business. Beyond that, you need to have a peer network. These are people in similar roles, but at different companies. People you can bounce ideas off of or even just complain to. It never hurts to have that kind of an outlet.
From there you need to think about your mentor network. You should know people that are a couple of years ahead of your career-wise and are in the type of position you can see yourself in. They’re in the perfect position to help guide you through the steps ahead because they just went down that path themselves.
Finally, it never hurts to cultivate an even more senior network that might be 5 or even 10 years ahead of where you’d like to be.
Now for most people, this doesn’t happen overnight, but if you put just a little bit of energy into and proactively seek out these types of relationships you can easily make a couple of new connections a month, and in a year that’s 25 new friends in your network. Of course, you can always be an ultra overachiever.
I talked to a startup CEO earlier this week who has talked to 350 new people in the last 6 months. KD, Kevin Dorsey tells a story about being a new VP and reaching out to 5 other VPs a week for a year looking for mentorship and advice. That’s over 250 people.
So I just want to encourage you to give this some thought. How is your network? What can you commit to doing to build and reinforce that network, because if you have that. Your ability to pick up the phone and reconnect with 20 friends when you’re in a tough spot and need some help can be life-changing.
Now that we’re here I realize this is maybe a little bit more specific to building your sales career network. I didn’t even touch on your potential customer network. Guess that’s another topic for another day. I’m guessing that you know what you need the most. Go make some new friends.