Useful acquaintances open up endless possibilities for resolving issues in business and personal life. A strong environment helps to grow professionally, achieve significant results in commerce, and move up the career ladder.
Why Make Useful Connections?
Even if you are a purposeful and successful person, you should not refuse to expand your network of connections. New acquaintances will help to “cut off” on the way to the goal and save resources (energy, time, money). Business events remain one of the simple and convenient venues for acquiring new acquaintances.
A conference, profile exhibition, seminar, workshop, or training is a great opportunity to make useful contacts. As a rule, at such events, people are open to new contacts, willingly engage in dialogue, and are happy to communicate with interesting people. If you can find points of intersection of your interests and be mutually beneficial, then such a casual acquaintance can develop into a long-term relationship and even friendship.
Step-By-Step Instructions
At business events, such as CIO summit there can be tens, hundreds, or even thousands of strangers. How to choose among them the one with whom it is most useful to communicate? How to understand who you need? How not to waste time on empty talk and not go home without a single valuable contact? This problem can be solved if we act according to the proposed scheme.
Step 1: Look For Contacts In Advance
Analyze your audience ahead of time. Look at the list of participants in the event group on social networks, find the list of invitees, and study the pool of speakers. So before the event starts, you will already have an idea of the people with whom it may be useful for you to communicate.
Make a list of people you are interested in. Contact them in advance and offer to chat at the event. Think in advance about how you can be useful to a particular person and what help you expect from him. So you lay a possible basis for your mutual interest.
Step 2: Ask For Advice
It doesn’t matter if you see the prospect of a further relationship with the person you met or feel that contact may not be fixed, before saying goodbye, ask the interlocutor’s opinion about who else you would be useful to talk to. The recommended person can be both at the same event and outside it. Ask to be introduced or take contacts.
This does not obligate your interlocutor to anything. He does not vouch for you and does not recommend – he only introduces his acquaintance to you, giving the opportunity to get to know new people and everyone to decide on further prospects for communication. However, check whether you can refer to the interlocutor if you have to go to the proposed person in person.
Step 3: Don’t Stop
If you go free-floating without having a clear idea of who you want to talk to, then this approach can also give positive results. In this case, try to talk to as many people as possible.
Try to understand the capabilities and needs of your interlocutor in order to understand how useful and how possible your further interaction is. Thus, you will create a kind of dating funnel, among which there is a high probability of finding interesting and useful contacts. To make the most of your time, don’t spend too much time with one person.
Conclusion
If you understand that the interlocutor is not interesting to you or for some reason you do not plan to continue the relationship in the future. Then wait for an opportunity, thank you for the company, and say goodbye. In this case, there is no need to exchange contacts or give business cards. Just go in search of new interesting acquaintances. Take it easy on the fact that not every contact has to be useful.
Be business-friendly!