When he first started out in his career, very few people knew who Connor Mulvey was. That’s the case with most up-and-coming professionals. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to go from the Connor Mulvey who was primarily known as a Loyola student and avid running fan to where he is today, a junior associate at the Genesis Group, LLC.
The path to this career outcome rested largely on his ability to build professional relationships with clients. In fact, it wouldn’t be too much to say that this may have been the single most important factor in helping to advance his career. As it turns out, this is true of everyone trying to build a career, claims Connor Mulvey.
Most articles on client relations talk about going to mixers and exchanging business cards with would-be clients. Those practices definitely have their place in the business world, and you shouldn’t stop doing them.
However, the focus of this article will delve more deeply into the importance of your social networks and some more 21st century methods of building client relationships, including using your influencer networks and the power of the right content marketing to forge relationships.
Just How Important Are Our Social Ties?
Two well-known books “The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success” and “The Millionaire Next Door” both tout the importance of our social networks. Albert-László Barabási, author of ‘The Formula” suggests that a person’s success isn’t about him/ her. Rather, it is about the people around the individual. In other words, a person’s success is about his/ her networks.
While it is important to strive for excellence in your work. It’s more important to have a community around you who recognizes your work and rewards you for the work that you do.
Additionally, social proof plays an important role in a person’s career. Those who notice the business celebrity of the moment first tend to influence the thinking of those who discover that individual later.
So, the question is how do you go about finding the right social ties in order to boost your visibility and therefore, your attractiveness to clients?
Affiliate with People Who Have More Influence
One of the reasons that people put so much stock in an Ivy-league education has less to do with the education and more to do with the networks. Being affiliated with a larger, more prestigious organization can boost your visibility quotient.
According to Barabási’s findings, those who are in underrepresented groups tend to gain the most social capital from being associated with a big school, meaning the network of people you meet on campus can help you in business down the road. This group of people not only include peers, but professors as well.
Additionally, for some the reputation of the school itself helps them forge the social relationships they need in order to be successful. The school’s name gets them in the door. However, an Ivy-league school is not the only place you can gain access to a more powerful network.
The same can be said for working at a company that has a high amount of prestige, like Google or Facebook. Lily Herman, a journalist for The Muse spoke about how she parlayed the work that she did for lesser-known newspapers and magazines to media outlets that had a great deal more prestige.
Once her work became syndicated in HuffPo and TIME, she began to get noticed by The Daily Muse and Her Campus. The clout of these publications rubbed off on her reputation as a writer (so to speak), and she was able to parlay the positive feelings that people have for HuffPo and TIME into other jobs. She used the brands and their network of readers to jump from one ship to another in a manner of speaking.
Give Them What They Need & They’ll Come to You
Lily Herman’s story indirectly highlights another important point in networking – the importance of the right people finding you rather than you going out to get them. For example, you may be trying to drum up business with new clients by cold calling them. However, this can lead to a great deal of frustration, especially if you’re trying to develop a relationship with a client who already uses another vendor.
Perry Marshall, author of the book “80/20 Sales and Marketing” spoke in his book about his early days in sales. He would inevitably call on the biggest accounts, only to be told that his competitor had already been there first.
He was trying to be the expert, but his competitor beat him to that distinction by writing a book about the industry, which made his competitor the expert. Marshall’s would-be clients found his competitor because the competitor’s book got to the client before he could.
He turned this around by developing relationships with the top magazine editors in his industry. Over the course time, he wrote a hundred pages or so for these magazines.
Eventually, clients started finding him because of his writing efforts. These relationships, developed through the power of the pen, allowed him to turn his sales career around. That’s the power of content marketing. It allows your best would-be customers to find you and for you to build relationships with them. It also allows you to build networks with key industry influencers.
Marshall spent three to five percent of his time taking care of his top 10 clients. He spent another three to five percent of his time developing relationships with these magazine editors. In other words, these editors got as much of his time as his top clients did.
The point is that if you want to develop relationships with the important people in your industry, you need to give them a top spot in your time. Networking takes time. Some of your networking efforts will and should be about exchanging business cards with others at industry events.
However, in the age of the Internet, it’s possible to build your contacts by harnessing the power of relationships that already exist, either with the media or with others who are prominent in your industry.
