Many people cringe at the thought of having to “network” to gain business for their cleaning company. But networking is one of the best ways to meet people and build relationships, and as you know, building relationships is the cornerstone of building a successful cleaning business.
If you feel uncomfortable with the thought of networking, then change the way you think about it. Most of us think that networking is an activity, an event to attend, or a “thing to do”, in order to market our business. Rather than think of it that way, look at networking as an attitude, or a skill to be developed. It’s something that can become a part of us every day, and can be shared with everyone we meet.
So how do you change your attitude about networking? Start replacing the negative self-talk with positive self talk. For example:
* “I can start networking easily by calling all the family, friends, and colleagues I already know and tell them I’m looking for referrals for my cleaning business.”
* “I am confident that the people I meet will offer to spread the word about my cleaning business because people like to assist others who ask for their help.”
* “When I approach people and ask their advice, they’ll be happy to offer it because they love to share their knowledge and experience.”
Now that you’re ready to start networking, you’ll want to do it effectively. In order to do that you need to be able to carry on a conversation with the people you meet. Ok, I can tell you’re cringing again… Not to worry. The key to keeping a conversation going is to ask lots of questions. Following are questions you can ask when you first meet someone at a networking event. Keep asking questions and the conversation will flow naturally.
* “How did you get involved with (name of group)?”
* “Tell me about your business.” (Ok, well that’s not a question, but it’s the typical ice-breaker)
* “How long have you been in business?” – or – “How long have you been doing…?”
* “How did you get your start in this business?” “What do you enjoy most about what you do?”
* “What challenges do you face in your business?”
* “What have you found to be the most effective way to promote your business?”
* “What advice do you have for someone just starting out?”
* “Who is a good referral for you?” (Let them know you’re interested in helping them with their business).
* “This is my first time attending this group.” You could follow up this statement with, “Can you suggest two or three other people here that I might meet?”
If you want people to be interested in your business, then you need to show an interest in their business. People like to talk about themselves, so don’t monopolize the conversation by only talking about your cleaning business. A good way to get them talking is to ask questions like:
* Can you expand on that?
* Can you explain that to me?
* Can you give me an example?
* That’s very interesting…tell me more!
Now that you have an idea how to change your attitude about networking and how to keep the conversations moving, it’s time to start networking! Check out local networking groups and see if they’ll allow you to attend a meeting or event to check it out. You want to make sure the group is a good fit for you. When you find one you enjoy and feel comforatble with, be sure to participate regularly and before you know it, referrals will be coming your way!
Copyright (c) 2006 The Janitorial Store
By: Steve Hanson
Posts Tagged ‘Business People’
Networking Tips for Cleaning Companies
April 30th, 2010Strategic Networking For Business Success
April 7th, 2010
Whether you’re a one person consultant or the owner of a business your success depends on establishing relationships that can lead to business. The best way to build new relationships is through strategic networking.
Networking can sometimes lead directly to new business but most of the time it indirectly leads to referrals. For example, the person whom you meet at a networking event will know someone else who needs your products or services. Many people go to a networking event hoping to do business immediately, but it rarely works that way.
Business is rarely done directly at a networking event; your goal in going to a networking event should be to make two or three solid new contacts, find a reason to follow-up and then start a relationship. Any future business will most likely come from an indirect referral where the contact you’ve made knows someone who needs your products or services.
Networking is all about making the necessary contacts and building upon them by talking to people about what you do and who you are. It is also about listening to see how you can assist other people in what they do. Giving as much or more than you receive is an important part of successful networking.
One of the most important unwritten rules of business is that people buy from people they like, know and trust. This is very true in networking. The contacts you make and relationships you establish through networking that lead to business only happen when the relationship is mutually beneficial. Networking is all about giving and receiving. For example, if one party does all the giving, then the relationship will not last and the networking is over.
You should target your networking events with the same type of research you do when you’re establishing your target market. In other words you need to strategically choose the networking events that leverage and manage your time to the optimum. For example, if you rely on decision makers for business, then, you need to attend networking events where decision makers will be in attendance.
Choosing the right networking event depends on what your goals are. If your goal is to continue and further already existing relationships then going to a social networking function such as an after-hours chamber of commerce affair where you will know a lot of people is a good function to attend. On the other hand if your goal is to make new business contacts it would not be.
Once you’ve chosen the right networking event to attend your goal shouldn’t be to pass out as many business cards as you can, rather, your goal should be to receive as many business cards as you can. Remember, networking is about obtaining information and making new contacts that will lead to increased business. Then, after the networking event you can set up a follow-up visit and meet one-on-one with your new contact.
The people whom you want to target at networking events are those businesses that have the same types of prospects and the same common interests that you do; firms or businesses that compliment your products and services. For example, if you’re a photographer, then, someone who is a wedding planner or a caterer would be a good contact for you.
The key to success in relationship building is being interested and to trying to be interesting. You want to show a genuine interest in the other person, in his or her business, family, and goals. Actively listening to the other person is much more important than giving your sales pitch. Many times when you actively listen, you will pick up signals about business potential, such as a problem that the other person is having that you are in a position to solve.
The key to networking success is follow-up. You must follow-up with your new contact by sending a note, card, or email immediately after the event to set up a meeting over coffee, lunch or even after hours. When you send the note or talk to the person highlight key points of your initial contact. The more personal the better, it could be something he she told you about their son or daughter or a sporting event he or she was interested in.
Networking is one of the strongest business tools that you can use, but you have to do it right. When you plan and set clear and realistic goals for your networking it will be on target. The key is, attending a networking function without expecting to get an order or business at the function, but just to make contacts and then follow-up. When you can do this your networking will result in finding new markets, expanding product lines and consistently flowing income.
Copyright
Home Based Business: How to Pick the Right One
December 27th, 2009As more and more people are joining the ranks of home business ownership the decision of what to sell, who to join, what does it cost, what is the pay plan all weights into the company you finally choose.
If you’re thinking of starting a home based business part-time or full-time you need to do your homework first. You want the time and effort you put into building the business to be time well spent, not money down the drain.
If you follow these four key elements you are sure to find a winning home business opportunity.
Product
You must know and understand the product. It should be something you are proud of and not embarrassed to sell to friends or your mother-in-law. Is it a product someone would use even if there was not a business opportunity attached to it? Will you use the product on an ongoing basis?
If you can’t say yes to these questions then this is not the product for you and you should continuing looking.
Pay Plan
Is there a lucrative pay plan? By lucrative I mean is it good money and worth your time and efforts. Is it worth you time to make $10.00 a sale or are you looking for larger sums of money like $1,000.00 per sale.
Understanding the pay plan seems to go without saying. However many network marketers get into a company thinking they understand how the plan works, only to be disappointed on their first payment.
Company
You should know or be able to find information on the company. Ideally they should be a stable well established company. If they are knew to the market, you should know something about the founders. Know they are well established marketers or business people.
The most important aspect in your investigation of the company should be to ensure they are not some fly by night operation. If you are going to spend your time, money and efforts selling a product for them, you want to know they are going to be here tomorrow.
Support
Who is there to help you? Very often when you join a Network Marketing company there is no one there to support you; the person that signed you up might have just joined a few days ago themselves.
Make sure the company emphasizes a team atmosphere. Know you will have at least a support desk to contact with questions. This is your business, but being left out in the cold can be lonely and self-defeating.
By following these four simple steps you have a much better chance of success in your home business venture.
By: Bob and Cindy Floyd
Finding Your Niche In A Home Based Business
December 22nd, 2009Positioning yourself as a leader solution provider, not as a sales person takes time to build trust with your customers.
The key to effective marketing is to promote and sell a generic solution and system, instead of your business opportunity on the front end.
People would rather learn how to so something than actually do it. By providing your prospects with valuable knowledge that can help them get what they want and make their life easier instead of pitching them some opportunity, you instantly set yourself apart from the masses, and you begin to attract them to you ‘magnetically’.
You position yourself as an expert who has power to offer others who associate themselves with you.
When you do this business right, you don’t have to sell
When you do this business right, you don’t have to ask people to join your business. They will ask you!
When you do this business right, you don’t have to post ‘work at home’flyers
When you do this business right, people PAY YOU to prospect them.
When you do this business right, anyone can duplicate your success just by plugging into the system.
When you do this business right, you and your team members make cash quickly, even from the people who don’t join your organisation.
When you do this business right, anyone can plug into the system and make money.
The problem is majority of network marketers don’t do it right because they were not taught to market.
They were asked to make a list of 100 to 200 people with the aid of a memory jogger. This works great for acquiring customers if you have a super hot product, approach them in the right way, have some credibility with a few people and actually go out to sell it.
When they run out of warm market lists, they may be prepared to purchase leads. The problem with buying leads is that it’s going to take an average person four months to a year minimum before they can recruit well enough to build an organisation large enough to break even on the expenses. Buying leads can be expensive. And most of the time; the quality of leads is questionable. Lead generation companies sell their leads many times over to different customers.
Buying leads will work but it is just inefficient. It is not smart business.
So, what is the best way to successfully build a network marketing business?
REMEMBER THIS: The Fastest Way To Get Rich in Life Is To Solve Other People’s problems.
So, I don’t place the initial emphasis on my mlm/Network marketing company. That’s just selling people another problem.
Most network marketers need help in recruiting customers and business builders. I market a complete solution to that problem in the form of a franchised system. When they want that piece of the solution, I become a valuable resource to them.
After I market the ‘How’, only then I market the Who, What, When, Where and Why of my primary business.
How To Find Your Best Prospects
Effective marketing is really about two basic things:
1. Getting the right marketing message and right product in front of the right people.
2. Positioning yourself as a leader solution provider, not as a sales person but as an expert who provides solutions to those who are actively looking for what you have.
You will want to have an idea as to whom you are targeting. You have to figure out who would realistically be interested in your products. Figuring this out will end up saving you a lot of advertising money, time and headaches.
Thus it is crucial to know Your Target Market. Understand where they are coming from. Ask yourself:
What problems of theirs can I help solve?
What questions of theirs can I help answer?
How do I relate to them?
What is my unique selling point (USP)?
Why should they take a look about me and my product?
Why would they want to act?
Answering these questions will help you in writing and coming up with a marketing campaign for your ideal customer.
You Cannot Give Away, Let Alone Sell, a Steak to a Vegetarian!
So, Who should you retail your front end product to?
There are quite a few markets to ‘bull’s-eye’ in but I am going to take just two target markets here.
1 Networkers.
2 Business Opportunity Seekers.
We want to market to people who have bought a home based business at one time or another for several reasons:
Network marketers already believe in the business model.
Network marketers have already spent money on this industry.
Network marketers want to succeed
Network marketers are willing and eager to purchase anything that will help them succeed
When it comes to recruiting new distributors, only invest in ads that target network marketers. You must be thinking it is crazy. They already have a business of their own. Network marketers are opportunity buyers and we sell a business opportunity! If they are looking at the ads, they are looking for a solution to their network marketing business problem. Makes sense.
Of course, you can go after talented and successful people in your warm market, and I suggest you do, but that should happen as an ‘add on’. In other words, go after your warm market contacts when the opportunity arises, but do not make them your sole focus.
If you want to make your life easy, make a lot of cash, and have a lot of fun doing it, stay within your target market which is other network marketers and those looking to buy into network marketing.
Master your marketing skill, then venture out into other target markets. The world becomes your oyster.
Where to find contact information for network marketers?
Advertise.
There are free and paid advertising.
You are going to advertise two things:
1. Yourself as A Leader. This is because people don’t join business opportunities, they join leaders.
2. Your marketing system. That system should sell your company’s products.
You can place ads on ezine, industry journals, work at home magazines and Google. Google Adwords, in addition to the organic (aka – free) results that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN display whenever someone looks for something online, they also allow people to pay for their ads to be shown as sponsored links on the same page. This is done on a Pay Per click basis.
Simply means you write an ad for your target market for your website, select a group of keywords that you want to trigger that ad, and set a maximum cost per click amount for every one of your keywords. You only pay when a website visitor clicks on your ad.
People who are already in a network marketing company use search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN just to name a few) to search for an answer to their problems. What are the biggest problems that network marketers face?
They want more people
They don’t like contacting family and friends
They don’t like cold calling
They don’t want to spend a lot of money promoting their business without making any money back
They want more skills
They want training
People who are actively seeking to join a network company are looking for a team or a system where they can follow to guarantee their success.
They are Already Telling Google What They Want
Get Google to tell you what it is!
You get to choose the questions which your products are well suited for. This affords you much more control in specifying whom you want to interact with, i.e., who gets into your funnel. This translates into money in the bank because of your appropriately selected audience.
The best part is that; not only can you define your market, you pay very little for your marketing or you only pay when your audience clicks on your ad.
By: Jackie Khor
7 Ways to be a Successful Leader in Network Marketing
December 16th, 2009It’s not difficult to fall into the trap of being a follower in Network Marketing. From the moment you sign your name on your business registration form, you are guided into a certain direction designed for you by your upline. Some people find comfort in signing up for expensive lead programs and wind up quitting, while others choose to follow outdated techniques taught at monthly trainings and wind up quitting. The people who do not quit are the ones who understand the importance of being a leader instead of a follower.
It’s great to get guidance when you first begin something new and exciting, but owning your own business means you have to be in charge. Leadership requires more than simply making a decision that you are not going to follow someone else. Here are seven characteristics that you must strive to understand and practice.
1. Be Strong: This doesn’t mean you should go to the gym every day and pump iron. (Even though it’s always a good idea to exercise). Being strong means standing up for what you believe in and refusing to let obstacles stand in your way. It is important not to come across as rude. You don’t need a strong and forceful personality, you just need strong conviction for what you want to achieve.
2. Be Humble: Your success is not a means for you to be better than anyone else. This business requires you to help people, and it is extremely difficult for a leader to accomplish this with arrogance. Being humble means you put others first, and the more you take the focus off yourself, the more successful you will become. Successful leaders do not look for applause or think they should deserve it after every good deed.
3. Be Bold: This one is sort of like being strong, but it has to do more with the way you talk to people. It is important to get your point across to people in a direct manner. Everyone is busy and if you are serious about what you do, your boldness will speak volumes. Do not be a bully about it though. No one likes to be pushed into anything, especially by someone they look up to for support and guidance.
4. Be Thoughtful: People who take on the challenge of wanting to work from home and earning extra money usually have a very good reason. A good leader understands the circumstances that people have gone through to get to the point where they need mentoring. The world can be a tough and cruel place, so thoughtfulness and compassion are necessary to encourage people to keep moving in a positive direction.
5. Have humor: It is always a good idea to have a sense of humor while you are mentoring people. If you make everything serious, no one will have any fun or breathing room. You want your distributors to feel as though they have made the right decision by investing in you to help them. Having humor does not mean you are teaching them to take their business lightly. It just means you are teaching them that they can find joy in the process of obtaining success.
6. Be An Optimist: Save pessimism for the bosses of corporate America where it belongs. Successful leaders know that the more you focus on being positive, the more the negativity gets pushed aside and forgotten. It is rough enough to turn on the news every day and hear nothing but negativity. You do not want your people to think that building a business is all weeds and no green grass. Work is work, but having optimism makes it easier to accomplish goals.
7: Have Vision: Successful leaders build confidence by showing people the possibilities of what they can become, and that requires vision. Painting the picture of prosperity is an important part of being a leader, so talk to people about what could be, then help them improve. When people have a light at the end of the tunnel, it helps them go through the journey of working toward their goals with desire and conviction.
I was a follower for ten years before I realized I had to stop falling for every popular fad that came around and start focusing on being a leader. Sometimes you feel like quitting, but you know that is not the answer. When you realize you have to be strong enough to break from the turn-key systems that are designed to do nothing more than drain your savings account, you will begin to find success with network marketing.
By: William Winch
