A couple of months ago, I wrote about the importance of networking at tradeshows and what strategies you can employ to build new contacts. Today, I want to expand a little on that topic and spend a little bit of time talking about the importance of maintaining those contacts once you leave the show.
Everyone meets a whole bunch of people at every show, and half of those contacts are starting to fade by the time the jet-bridge is moving away from the plane before you even leave the show city. All of the hard work we put into building new contacts can easily be wasted if we don’t follow up and keep relationships alive. The techniques of staying in touch with networking contacts are not that dissimilar to what you would be doing with important customers.
Of course, the best way to do that means doing something of value for that contact. Ideally you have the occasional prospect or opportunity you can refer. Opportunities aren’t always that easy to come by, so staying in touch in general is often the only option.
Send e-mails, make the occasional phone calls, send a post card and if necessary, get a carrier pigeon or try smoke signals. Needless to say, you don’t want to become a pest, but your communications have to be somewhat meaningful to maintain your contact’s interest. So what can you do?
- Send business referrals.
- Send updates about vendors you met or learned about, and ask if they’d be interested in getting connected.
- Solicit feedback on things you are working on, and ask if you can help with something your contact is working on.
- Send birthday cards or even a little gift. Social media usually makes it easy to find all sorts of information you can use as a reason for communication.
- Send industry articles that you think your contact may find interesting.
As with any relationship building, the most critical component is to communication is listening. I can’t stress this enough: listen, listen, listen. It’s the only way you can truly find out what your contact’s needs and interests are. There is nothing worse than trying to build a relationship on the assumption that you know what the other side is really interested in and cares about. So make sure you pay attention to the information you get back.
Maintaining your industry contacts is not unlike maintaining relationships with your customers, and I have a couple of clients that go as far as using their CRM system to keep track of networking contacts and set reminders and activities. But you don’t necessarily need the help of your IT department to manage your contacts and communications, a simple spreadsheet that shows your contacts and respective communications.
When you see that someone is falling off, make it a point to put reminders into your calendar to make yourself stay in touch.
You should also try to meet up at other industry shows. Asking your contacts if they will be at a specific show is a reason to contact them in the first place. If you do manage to meet up, that’s even better.
Since you do have limited time, you can’t simply add to your list of contacts and actively pursue them for the rest of your life; at some point, you have to prioritize. There are only so many active relationships you can productively maintain. At least once a year, you should go through your active contacts and rank them by importance. That way, as you meet new people, you decide where they fit in and who can be pushed down the list to make space.
Homework:
- Make a list of your networking contacts and rank them. It’s not always practical to rank them from one to last number and you might be better off creating a couple of categories or groups. For example, you may want to have three or four categories such as key contacts, important contacts, contacts and maybe optional contacts. Use whatever tools you are comfortable with. If you have something like CRM or a business contact manager, use that. But a simple list in a spreadsheet will do just fine.
- Look at your number of contacts and decide how much time you can devote to each group. Then create a schedule similar to what I showed you above. Again, use the tool you are most comfortable and then schedule some activity in your calendar. If you find that you simply have too many contacts, look at your ranking again. While personal, individual contact is best, you might have to move a whole chunk to less personal approach in order to find the time to really stay in touch with the people that matter.
- If you haven’t read the column on the importance of networking and common techniques, click here.
That’s it for today. Don’t forget that tradeshows are the perfect place to refresh and strengthen your relationships. Hopefully I will get to see many of you at the EXHIBITOR2012 show.
About Linda Musgrove, The Tradeshow Teacher
Linda Musgrove is founder and President of TradeShow Teacher, a full-service tradeshow training and management firm. Through her result-driven formula, she specializes in teaching companies to significantly improve tradeshow results through strategic, customized tradeshow management and training for individuals, departments or entire teams. Training options include phone consulting, webinars, seminars and one-on-one in person coaching. Musgrove authored “The Complete Idiots Guide to Tradeshows,” published by Alpha Books/Penguin Publishing. Learn more at http://www.tsteacher.com and follow on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/tsteacher.
