For being successful in your business life an excellent network makes things easier. As we already pointed out in “Identifying customers with social networking” knowing people is only a competitive advantage when people like you and trust your competence. Hand in hand with this goes that creating long-term relationships is very important as you can generate the best results for your business with them. Good reputation and trust are two reasons for this (see “How to get customer loyality through social networking“).
Rajesh Setty picks up this topic in his really interesting manifesto “Making the most of your time” on “Change this” as well as on his blog. Although the title might be a bit misleading as you would expect mainly notes about time management in general. Whereas you can find some very good thoughts about how to establish long-lasting, valuable contacts as well.

His answer of how to get people to like you and establish long-term contacts is pretty old: “Give first and then you get”. Or as others call

it more scientifically “the law of reciprocity”.

Here are some points to establish long-term relationship pointed out in the article:

• Create more opportunities for them as compared to the request you make
• Help people identify their strengths
• Introduce people in your network that are opportunities for each other

Especially the last point (introducing people with each other that are not yet personally connected) provides your contacts real value.
As doing this usually does not require much effort on your side, it is a highly effective practice. Whenever you talk to someone ask yourself “is there somebody in my network where it is beneficial for both of them to get to know each other”?

It’s simple. And it’s very effective.

In our recent series on project management, we covered a couple of aspects to consider when running a project.

In case you just don’t have the time to read through all of this, I would like to share a short cut with you. It is an advice I got from an experienced manager at Andersen Consulting when I was joining the firm in the early 90ies. And I found it invaluable since:

Project management is all about managing risks and expectations.

That’s it. Nothing more. This might sound surprisingly trivial. In fact, it’s not.

A project usually gets in trouble if it can not meet the expectations associated with it. Expectations about the timeline, budget or the final results. Expectations about required contributions from project members or outside ressources. Expectations about risks, difficulties or dependencies. About political support. Or the qualifications of team members.

Why is it important to actively manage expectations? Just think about the weather forecast: The forecast is for a mild spring day, sunny and warm. What do you get instead? – A snowstorm. And you did not bring a coat nor an umbrella. Of course, you are mad. If they would have announced the snowstorm, you would probably not like it either, but you could have prepared for it.

Now compare that with running a project. Nobody likes a project running late. But everybody hates the surprise to learn about it in the very last moment. What is a project causing running late or out of budget? Risks.

Risks are the other side of the equation. If you are aware of risks, you can plan for. And, even more important, you can communicate them early. In fact, you have to communicate them. “It is not unusual during this time of the year, that a snowstorm is coming out of the blue, so better bring an umbrella even if it looks sunny.”

Once you communicate risks, chances are that you get either support in avoiding the risks, or you can mitigate the potential impact of such a risk.

So, whenever you are about to start a project, even if you forgot everything else you ever heard about project management. Always remember this: Manage risks and expectations.

While numerous articles and books have been published on how to run projects successfully, most of them focus on formal aspects of project management: How to make gant charts, manage the critical path and how to do proper project controlling. In our experience, it is important to know the theory, but during the practical application, we experienced project management theory to contribute only a smaller part to the success of a project. In our series, we try to shed some light on some of the more informal aspects of successfully running a project. Usually, it is said that running a project requires good coordination. Well, yeah!

However, there is no single best way to coordinate a project

Project Set Up

Project success is highly dependent on the project characteristics and initial set-up. The size and form of the project hereby plays an important role. It is a major difference if it is a new, innovative project or a “standard project” that has been done before, or if it is made up of 5 or 30 team members (actually, we do not cover here very large projects, but rather the majority of the projects. The larger a project gets, the more important formal project management gets).

Running a project where team members know each other saves time and effort of building relationships. Due to the fact that they have already worked together, the team works more efficiently. If the members of the project team have not worked together before, time has to be invested (and planned for!) to get to know each other and to form a team.

Whether team members work full-time or part-time in a project also effects (or restricts) coordination and as a consequence, the results of the project. It is much more difficult to organize meetings and coordinate activities if a team member only works three days a week on the project. The physical distance to other team members also has impacts on communication and coordination. If the team works together in one office, information, problems, findings and results can be shared more easily and quickly. Whereas if the team is separated (either through separated offices or locations), it takes longer to communicate with each other and therefore, also requires higher efforts to coordinate. (more…)

Although knowledge, technology or methodology are main success factors in the modern business world, we believe personal success also depends to a high degree on personal values and ethics. In our opinion, a business codex similar to the “codex” of the samurai of ancient Japan could serve well as a set of guiding principles in today’s business world.

Just think about it for a minute while reading this article and you will find out that there are a lot of similarities between the samurai of ancient Japan and today’s business professionals. Both, the samurai and the professional, are employed or hired because of their personal attributes: their professionalism, their skills and their reputation. It is all about the professional. Their values are not based on external resources, on man power, infrastructure or even money, but just on themselves. Thus, their value can not be observed upfront, but needs to be trusted upon.

However, the value of a samurai or a professional can be judged by looking at the past. Here, results and behaviour are the relevant metrics. While most people pretend to only look at results, behaviour is at least as important. Take an engineer, for example, who is designing an innovative product for a company. If he then turns around and is developing a similar product for a competitor (assuming he is not acting illegally), people will notice. If he does it again, people might become hesitant to involve him in critical situation. One could construct numerous examples where professionals are not only measured by actual results, but also by their behaviour while achieving these results and by their behaviour towards their customers, partners or colleagues.

Here, the need for a business codex comes into play. We believe that such a business codex could draw a lot by having a closer look at the codex of the samurai. (more…)

Every phase of the sales process requires different activities and therefore different network structures are the most efficient ones. We have already talked about the best network structure for “identifying customers” and “finding solutions during a project”.

Now I would like to focus on customer care. Once the deal is closed (when you sell a product) or the project is successfully finished (when you sell a service) it’s crucial to know the best networking techniques to remain in the memories with your customer and maintain a good reputation.

When you’re doing project work the easiest way to find new business opportunities is during the project itself. At this time you have very good insight into your customer’s challenges and pains. Those are the best conditions for finding solutions to your customer’s problems, especially as you see things from a neutral perspective.

What should a successful network for customer loyalty look like?

• direct contacts to deciders of you customers
• deciders know other powerful contacts in your customer’s company or in the market (they have a bridge function)
• loose contact frequency

Employing this sort of network you can keep in contact with the influential people and you can quickly get new and exclusive information in an informal way. If a new business opportunity appears, you will be in a good position to take advantage of it.

Here are some examples for ways to maintain your reputation and keep touch with your contacts. Your customer will feel that he is in good hands.

Writing an email with “how are you?” or “I just wanted to say hello” is probably not the best way to stay in contact with your customer.

Communication to your customer should always have a value and a reason.
For example passing on clippings of relevant articles is a simple way to give valuable information to your customer.
Even if it sounds trivial, writing personal Christmas, Easter or Birthday emails are additional examples that produced good results. Many customers were happy about this way of addressing them and gave me a call afterwards to say thank you. Small efforts with a huge impact.

As important as it is to stay in contact with your customers you should always know when you are doing too much. The best network structure won’t help you then.

Chances are we all know an individual who uses every opportunity to get into business. He tries to do business in an obviously insincere manner or at an inappropriate moment e.g. when you run into him by accident. If you are always in a selling mode the chances are high that your contacts will get reluctant to keep in touch with you or do business with you ever again.