Business Development Blog

It is difficult to stress the importance of technology for the management of our relationships. We run try to manage with PDAs, laptops, web apps, big and databases. But they all seem to fall short of actually tieing together our CONTACTS in a way the shows our RELATIONSHIPS.

Enter LinkedIn.

Now - I know what you are going to say - There are TONS of social network websites out there in Internet-land and hundreds of tools.

But I think LinkedIn stands apart for a few reasons - especially in terms of Business Development and actively generating referrals:

1. LinkedIn is primarily a network of "Trusted Contacts" Which means that you only invite the people you trust to your network - giving you access to the relationship you've built up.
2. As a permission based network, LinkedIn gives you a place to market yourself and your expertise without being to "Salesy" - a big deal for many people.
3. As your network begins to grow - you can actually SEE who your connections know. Granted, your connections must have this feature turned on. Think about this - if you are looking, for example, to talk with partners in law firms, you can browse through your connections connections and see who they know. You can also do a search through your network and see who has second or third level connections. I tend to focus on second level connections - because I can pick up the phone and ask my friends to introduce me. I've set many high-level appointments this way. And people who are trained have requested the same of me.
4. You meet extremely high quality people you otherwise would have never met. In a world that is rapidly going global, this can make the difference as you position yourself to capture the right kind of business for your enterprise.

To that end, I hooked up with Integrated Alliances out of Denver and am now offering the LinkedIn® Hands-On Webinar(TM) to help people setup and get the most out of their Linkedin Accounts. Check it out.

Combined with the Business Development Intensive training we do, this is a one-two punch for those of you who have large books of business and large networks, but have not really leveraged them fully.

For those of you who have completed our training, this Webinar is a don't miss!

Raymond Chip Lambert
602-334-7944
chip@network2networth.com