Business Networking and Sex - Ivan Misner [36]
REMEMBER THE BUMPER STICKER “QUESTION REALITY”?
Think creatively and never be afraid to approach redefining your relationships. You may get a pleasant surprise. You determine your world! Don’t let gravity take control.
It’s important to note that this is a referral process, not a sales process. You might be in the profitability phase with a client in terms of selling them your products or services, but if you aren’t getting regular referrals from them, you’re not in that phase of the VCP Process©. In order for that to happen, they need to think that your service model is so wonderful that others should know about you, too.
The Survey Says . . .
Relationships First
In our experience the three phases of visibility, credibility, and profitability are key to forming a mature networking relationship. Both the men and women in our survey reaffirmed our belief that a good relationship is the prerequisite for a mutually beneficial referral business, and not the other way around. Men seem to relate to and get their identity from their businesses much more so than women do.
Actress and fitness instructor Nicole Brandon relates a story that reflects that tendency. She was working out at a gym when a man asked if she was an exercise trainer, to which she replied, “Yes.” He then asked if she could help him with the exercise equipment, because it was all new to him. She said that of course, she’d be glad to help and asked what he did. He said that he was the vice president of XYZ company and directed all the marketing for the organization.
She said, “No, I meant, what do you do in your exercise routine!”
Men most often present themselves by what they do. It’s how they relate.
The Transactional vs. Relational Approach
In this survey we asked people if they preferred the transactional approach to networking, focusing on business first and then on the relationship, or the relational networking approach, first building the relationship and then the business. The vast majority of respondents preferred to first build a relationship then focus on the business. However, when you compare the preferences by gender, an interesting result emerges. Within the minority of people who considered it better to focus on the business first, men outnumbered women by almost 53 percent to roughly 47 percent (see Figure 3.1). Conversely, the women outnumbered men by a small, but statistically significant number in their preference for focusing on the relationship first. This observation from one of our respondents lends insight on preferred networking styles:
I attended a breakfast event. When I arrived, I joined a group of businessmen who within a very short time were exchanging business cards. I then sat at a table of businesswomen. They talked about the speaker and conversed, getting to know each other a little better. Before they left, each woman at the table exchanged cards. They achieved the same results, with different timing. The men got straight to business first, whereas the women wanted to get to know the other person before they exchanged cards.
FIGURE 3.1 —Gender Preferences for Networking Focus
Going into this study, my co-authors and I had a working hypothesis about the VCP Process® and gender. We believed that women might have a tendency to get tangled and hung up in the transition between the visibility and credibility phases. We thought that women might be prone to linger in the credibility phase longer, procrastinating moving to the profitability phase, where they’d have to be asking for referrals and business. We also felt that men were more likely to try and skip right over that middle stage and jump straight from visibility to profitability.
The indication that women, by however small a margin, seem to put more emphasis on the relationship is no great surprise. Is it possible that women tend to move through the VCP Process® from visibility to credibility and get delayed there, whereas men jump the gun and