Connections can make you if you have them. They can make success take far longer to achieve, if you don’t. To connect for success and results, follow these four basic steps:

1. Strategize
2. Be creative
3. Be prepared to exchange
4. Plan ahead – things always take longer than you think they will

Let’s take a closer look at each step:

1. Strategize

You have a vision or goal (whether you realize it or not, you do).

Knowing that, what resources do you need for success? Of these resources that you need, which ones do you already have? What gap in resources is left that you must still fill?

Perhaps you need connections for these and other reasons:

- Build your market
- Find the right people to work with, or for, you
- Get the business or financial resources you need, in the right flow
- Find the right materials at the right price
- Get the right information easily
- Test and refine your product or service
- Figure out the easiest way to make your product or service

Once you know the reasons you need connections, you can start to plan where and how to get them.

2. Be creative

Remember a time in your life when you were especially resourceful, perhaps at a time when the odds seemed to be against you.

What connections did you need at that time to make success happen? How did you create or find these resources and connections?

You can be that creative and resourceful now.

3. Be prepared to exchange

There’s a big difference between reaching out and actually connecting with the people you need to know. And while you can attempt to make a connection, it’s not something you can control.

What’s in it for the person you’re trying to reach, to connect with, or help you?

To get their time and attention, consider what you have, or can offer, that can help them meet one of their goals.

Keep their needs as well, foremost in your mind as you try to create a connection that will serve both of you well.

4. Plan ahead – things always take longer than you think they will

Making connections, like many things in life, often takes longer than you expect.

For example:

- Someone you hope to meet and get advice from has a calendar that’s impossibly full.
- Another person turns out not to be the right resource at all, but knows someone else who may be able to help you.
- Still another person has a competing project, and can’t help you now.

You see how this goes.

Reaching, finding the time to try to connect, and then actually connecting in a meaningful way often takes far longer than you hope.

Start now to have the connections you need, when you need them.

Create the right conditions for connections to thrive. Your connections will grow when you’ve prepared and tended your grapevine well.

By: Jan Richards

One of my favorite things about WIC is our collaborative approach to building our businesses. That’s why I thought I’d share with you an event I heard of being coordinated by WIC member and KIT List founder Sue Connelly.

Wednesday, September 29th
6:00 – 9:00pm (panel at 7:00pm)
Bistro 412       
412 Emerson
Palo Alto, CA

This special event is designed to harness the power of friends helping friends to find great projects or work. This informal meet-up allows consultants, job seekers, employers, recruiters, and friends to connect and should be a fun way for people to meet, share leads and job search tips, and find encouragement — with the emphasis on fun or “FriendWorking” as Sue is calling it.

There is NO CHARGE for this event, but you’ll need to pay for your own drinks or food directly to Bistro 412.

Also, Sue has arranged a collection for the San Bruno fire victims as part of the event. If you desire, you can make a voluntary donation at the door of $10 (or whatever amount you wish) to the Red Cross specifically for the San Bruno victims.

You can RSVP for this event on Evite at http://www.evite.com/app/publicUrl/PKKWDJVJDVTJPLDFPQYN/KITLIST.

All are welcome, including the WIC community, KIT List members, consultants, job seekers, recruiters, employers, and friends.

By: Avery Horzewski

Networking Etiquette

Women in Consulting is a great place to network to meet potential clients, friends, and referrals. But let’s be honest, we’ve all had days after a meeting where we get bombarded with well… SPAM. Here are a few rules of etiquette that I suggest for those attending WIC Events, or any networking environment similar to our meetings.

1. Just because you got someone’s card doesn’t mean you have permission to SPAM them.
While it is true that the CAN- Spam Act (see http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm)
allows you to contact people once you have received their information by personal means, this does not mean that you should. Bombarding people with your newsletters, personal rants, or marketing attempts does not endear you to your fellow WIC members or motivate them to hire you or refer you.

Due to the nature of our table networking, you collect cards from a number of other individuals at the meetings. This does not, however, necessarily mean that they are interested in your services or want to receive marketing email from you. If you feel that you made a real personal or professional connection, feel free to add them to your email marketing list. But if you made no personal or professional connection, don’t add them to your list.

2. Don’t sell, transfer, or aggregate WIC email and contact information and pass it on. I don’t believe this has been an issue, but just in case, I’d like to remind everyone to please respect the privacy of our members and do not pass on contact information to people that may utilize it for any other reason than they requested a referral.

3. Represent yourself! Networking is all about first impressions. Make sure you’re bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to talk about what you are doing and why. Make sure that you don’t hog the networking time. You don’t want to look selfish or self-important.  What you do want is to act interested in other people. And I should scarcely need to remind you that you should dress like you’re meeting a client for the first time—because it’s just possible that you might!

By: mfrank

As my term as president of Women in Consulting comes to an end this week, I find myself reflecting on all the incredible experiences I’ve had throughout the last two years.

We celebrated our 10th anniversary in 2008 with not only a gala event, but a new look & feel for our website and a new blog. In 2009, we expanded our social media presence to include LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

We expanded the reach of our organization, with strong and vibrant satellite groups in San Francisco, the East Bay and North Bay/Marin, as well as the South Bay and Peninsula.

We created a mentoring program and offered workshops to help consultants grow profitable businesses.

We expanded our Leaders Network to provide a venue for seasoned consultants to meet and exchange thoughts and ideas with their peers.

We expanded our profile in the community–partnering with a wide variety of organizations and associations, including the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, the Association for Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP), FountainBlue, Astia, IMC NorCal, NorCAL BMA, and others.

We provided benefits to our community from groups like People OntheGo, SD Forum, Cubes & Crayons, Vertical Response, MarketingProfs, Egnite, WeMeUs, Zoomerang, and PR Newswire. And we continued our partnership with Million Dollar Consultant Alan Weiss and the Society for the Advancement of Consulting.

We held silent auctions to benefit Girls for a Change and collected donations for the Georgia Travis Center in San Jose.

Not only did we offer a top-notch set of outstanding speakers for monthly programs, but we launched teleseminar and webinar programs as well.

We continued to offer outstanding value to members and affiliates through our renowned mail list and other resources.

In fact, through the worst recession in nearly a century, we grew our community to be nearly 500 strong–with our ranks of full members swelling by nearly 40% this year.

And we did all this as an entirely volunteer run organization, with over 100 consultants taking on pro bono consulting roles for WIC.

Why, in a time when many organizations are struggling or even closing their doors, is WIC thriving? Because in addition to everything I’ve already mentioned, one of the most important things WIC provides is a strong, collaborative community–a place where consultants can come to learn as well as to socialize, to build their businesses as well as to connect with colleagues, to share experiences and develop referrals, to grow as individuals as well as part of a bigger whole.

For all of these reasons I feel extremely lucky to have had the privilege of guiding this organization over the last two years. And I feel extremely confident in turning over the reigns to the extremely capable and passionate Avery Horzewski to take WIC to the next level.

Thank you to all of you who are a part of WIC. WIC is community and I am grateful for the opportunity to work with each and every one of you. Here’s to more wonderful WIC happenings in 2010 and beyond!

By: Linda Popky

I’ve been tweeting for about five months now and loving it. It’s become a regular part of my day and work life and I’ve gained boatloads of insight, access to information and more, which I wrote about earlier.

I’ve noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in some tweeting though, something that brings me back to Business Communications 101 with a heaping dose of Internet Etiquette 101: you are your own PR team, and anything you put on The Internets can and will come back to haunt you. Or at the very least, could leave your followers with a less than golden impression.

Case in point: I’d been following a certain tweeter’s posts since Day 1 of signing up for Twitter. This person has a rather ascerbic style which I didn’t particularly like, but I found enough of her tweets interesting (at first) that I decided to keep her on my follow list.

Over time, what seemed at first to be a slightly sharp personality felt more and more like negativity. When I tweeted about a very fun evening I’d had out (a somewhat rare personal tweet for me, I keep it strictly business, for the most part), she promptly tweeted back with a cutting remark, trashing what I’d tweeted about. It was then I decided that was enough.

Oversensitive? I don’t think so. Had it only been that one tweet, I’d agree with anyone who said that. But it wasn’t. It was all of her tweets. Rarely a positive or helpful thing did she have to say. A lot of griping though. A LOT of griping.

I should mention that — thanks to TweetDeck, a must-have app for Twitter lovers — I had even moved her out of my ‘favorites’ in order to get less exposure. She was a prolific tweeter, so the influx of bad vibes was pretty heavy. Nonetheless, I understand the power of networking and there were aspects of her presence in my circle that I valued.

On the day she totally trashed my tweet however… she tipped the scales and I decided that her value wasn’t worth all the negativity I had to wade through to get to the good stuff. Did she mean it that way? Was it something I’d misunderstood? Well, at this point, it didn’t really matter because my overall perception of her was that she was not someone I wanted to communicate with. Life is short, and all that.

I removed her from my network. And proactively searched for lots of other tweeters. And found so many, with such useful, funny, insightful and enthusiastic things to say. And I haven’t looked back. And tweeting is fun and worthwhile again.

What is particularly unfortunate for this consultant is that she is someone I would have potentially hired. She is well-respected, talented and probably does her job very well. But what would working with her really be like? What if something went wrong on the project? Her overall down attitude gave me a lot of insight into how she really ticked, and I didn’t like what I saw. So not only did she lose a follower… she lost future jobs.

With the rise of social media tools such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., I am seeing what I call the ‘Do All — Tell All’ mentality. Because there is some gray area between personal and business usage of social media tools, I believe there is a danger of forgetting the basics of good business communication. If we’re not careful, it can be really easy to let a little loose and say and do things we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before Social Media gained the foothold it has firmly wedged for itself in the world of marketing.

So… be careful, Tweeps. Keep it positive, informative and helpful most of the time. Occasional bellyaching is okay (and can be good, if done well), but if the majority of your posts in a 24 period (or longer) are negative in tone, you might want to take a little break and realign your tweets with a different outlook that presents your most attractive face to the public at large. You never know who might be paying attention.

By: Rachel Cary

This is the second part of my recap of the EBWIBR Social Media Luncheon that I attended on Friday, April 3rd. I learned quite a bit in the two presentations given by Nancy Friedman of WordWorking and Kelly Parkinson of Copylicious. It was obvious both presenters had far more to say about Twitter and LinkedIn than we had time for, and I look forward to hearing these women speak in the future about Social Media. In the meantime, here’s a recap of Kelly’s presentation which focused on using one of LinkedIn’s powerful networking tools: InMails.

If you’re like me, you’ve set up your LinkedIn profile and you’ve got a nice set of contacts. Perhaps you’ve sent out recommendation requests and got those set up as well. Maybe you’ve joined a few LI groups. And then you let your account sit there. What a lot of people either don’t realize or aren’t taking advantage of is that LinkedIn can be a great social media tool as well.

Let’s talk results first: when Kelly tried InMail (initially as sort of an ‘experiment’, and not expecting huge results), she had a 41% response rate and 6 new clients. If that doesn’t make you sit up and take notice in this economy, I don’t know what will. I should note that I would like to know how many InMails Kelly sent because while that’s a great response, InMails do cost money. (And Kelly if you read this, please comment if you can.) But as the saying goes, sometimes you’ve got to spend a little money to make a little money.

What is InMail? InMails are a proprietary LinkedIn networking tool. It is a paid service and may seem pricey at first: $10 a pop. However, there’s an enticing aspect to this and for some, a significant upside: no cold calling. Now, if you’ve been in business for a while, you probably don’t do a lot of cold calling, or only as your last resort. But if you are new to the game (as Kelly was at the time), or in a, ahem, down economy, you might find it necessary to pick up that telephone. Before you break out in a cold sweat and do that however, consider InMails. Quick, easy, non-invasive and here’s a bonus: if they’re not opened, you get a 100% refund on the InMail and you can use it to send to someone else. You only pay for what actually gets opened. For me, that softens the blow of the $10 price tag a bit.

Also, keep in mind that you won’t be blasting to hundreds of people at a time. One of the myths about using LinkedIn that Kelly pointed out is that being a ‘power user’ is not necessarily the best way to go about it. Are you really going to have any meaningful contact or interchange with 8000 connections? Chances are more likely that if you cultivate a smaller but highly relevant set of contacts and selectively add to them when doing InMails, you’re chances of making contacts that actually go somewhere are much higher.

How do I use InMails? If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, you’ll need to get that first. And honestly, if you’re just getting started on LI, you’ll probably want to explore the basic features before you jump into InMails. But in the event you’re ready to jump in, or have been on LI for a while now, sending InMails is not rocket science. Basically you would want to do a keyword search on LinkedIn to find the people you’d like to contact. In Kelly’s case, she use ‘marketing manager cleantech’ as this was where she wanted to focus her work. Hint: as in any marketing outreach program, targeted InMails will probably get you a much higher response rate. Use the very user-friendly LinkedIn UI to set up the emails, compose your message and hit ‘Send.’ Easy as that.

What should I say in my InMail? Keep it short and suggest a brief initial contact: ‘Let’s talk for 15 minutes on x/x/2009, etc.’ Nobody likes to be sold heavily on the phone, or even in person, right? Bless your email outreaches with the same brevity and you’re more likely to get a response.

Another great tip from Kelly: as you’re going to send your InMails (and I think this works for almost any outreach marketing you do) remember that you are the expert and they need you. Approach this kind of outreach with the attitude of ‘why, of course you want to hear from me, because I can really help you.’ This takes the pressure off of ‘making that sale’ and comes from a more honest, non-aggressive and, I believe, successful position than what we sometimes are taught as ‘good’ sales techniques.

I haven’t tried InMails yet, but I intend to do so in the future. I’ll report back here with what success I have, if any, and I hope to hear from any of you out there on The Internets who have also tried InMails and what your experience has been.

In future posts, I’ll be exploring other networking features of LinkedIn and how to really work your profile. For now, I’ll be focusing on Twitter though as I’ve only begun to scratch the surface there.

By: Rachel Cary

Promise Phelon of UpMo recently wrote an article on “Tracking the Habits of Elite Networkers” based on an UpMo study titled “Professional Networking and Its Impact on Career Advancement.” Given that networking is a crucial component to all phases of consulting, from starting a consulting business to running a consulting business to growing a consulting business, I thought I’d share it with all of you.

By the way, I came across this article via LinkedIn, the online networking tool that study participants overwhelmingly cited in an open-ended question as the tool they use most often for networking.

Read “Tracking the Habits of Elite Networkers“

By: Avery Horzewski