These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the Rumor team, formed by Xavier Burruezo & Sergi Consul.
Once you are out on the “real world“, looking for an opportunity, you can’t rely on a stellar résumé, great grades or a fantastic business idea to be successful out there. In today’s world, young, uninitiated and inexperienced entrepreneurs need to rely on something else, networking.
Networking is the art of using your contacts to generate other contacts; in other, more accurate words, it is the activity by which groups of like-minded people recognize, create, or act upon business opportunities (definition). If we keep it simple, it is the way a young entrepreneur has to find their dream career, a way to connect themselves to their dream job through people who can provide them a chance.
If you spend 10 minutes surfing the Internet, you will be able to find many blogs and sites (i.e. Wily Business blog) talking about the importance of communication, manners, and personal skills to succeed in personal and business meetings. They will also try to explain how much you can get by getting a nice presentation card and skills you need to develop to succeed in a networking business event (The Networking Gurus site).
To sum up, after some surfing and reading about this topic, we reached a simple article (Scott’s Allen Being Memorable article) that focuses on a key aspect you need if you want to succeed in networking: be memorable. In fact, when you are trying to do some networking in a business event, what you really want after the meeting is over is to be remembered by people you just met.
We have thought it would be a good for all of us, inexperienced (and not so inexperienced), entrepreneurs to take (at least) a quick look at:
- Be distinctive. It would be a starting point, but which is the easy, simple way you first think of when you want to be remembered from a crowd of people? Some brightly-colored tie, a good cologne or even just impeccable grooming. “It’s not that you want to be identified for that, but anything that helps people separate you from the crowd…”.
- Be fully present. “Be completely there”. Many people seem only to be “half-there”, that won’t help standing out. You need to listen well, respond promptly, maintain eye contact, … These are small pieces that would help people realize you were “fully there”.
- Reinforce your keywords. Usually people can’t remember long descriptions or even that perfect pitch TetuanValley(@tetuanvalley) is teaching us how to get. We have to, al least, try to make people remember key things about us, like: name, company name, business, product, location. Does your project have an unusual name? What’s the story? What does it mean? (you can always make one up…), have it ready! Anything you say that helps reinforces one of the items mentioned before helps being more memorable.
So, a good CV isn’t enough, a revolutionary business idea isn’t either, networking isn’t everything…but good networking, a good CV and a good innovative business idea can get you through a nice entrepreneurship start. Just remember the key for good networking: be memorable.
