In a previous post we talked about how being creative can benefit business, but now we’d like to see how it can benefit wellbeing as a whole.

I recently went on a hen weekend where one of the activities was a life drawing class.  Now initially you think girls being silly and lots of giggling, which I will admit there was some, but actually once everyone got into it they soon started to genuinely relax and enjoy themselves.  With the rat race that is life, this is sometimes a very hard outcome to achieve… which got me thinking…

At Well Connect we connect people and love doing so, we are also quite a creative bunch and love getting in the Christmas spirit, so we thought – why not experiment with combining it all!  This is why we’ve decided to run some Christmas Craft Workshops this year.  Our aim is to give people a comfortable creative setting to make new friends and relax whilst being productive.

Anyone is welcome, there is a small cost associated with the workshops as we need to buy some supplies, but we’re sure it will be well worth your investment.

As our office is quite small we ask that you reserve your place through EventBrite in advance.  If a date isn’t listed, but there is a group of you who would like your own bespoke workshop (perhaps for a birthday, company do or baby shower) please get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.

There were a few key themes that stood out for us from the week which were:

• Social media now plays a huge part in business, driving new client acquisition and providing a new type of effective customer service.
• Small companies can have a big impact on large players, which was demonstrated by Ella Kitchens glorious success in the baby food market, who now have something like 7 of the top 10 selling baby foods in the UK.
• The biggest risk to companies is to not go global. This message was particular strong at Entrepreneur Country Born Global event as you might suspect.  Julie Meyer interviewed the MD of UK Trade and Investments who reeled off stats such as global businesses are 11% more likely to survive and 1/3 more efficient.  The UK Trade and Investments are more active than ever before, now supporting smaller companies and rolling out a peer to peer platform ran by Yell next year.
• The media is counter-productive for business as most news is negative and can put off innovative new companies from getting started.  Both Lara Morgan and Neal Ghandi agreed that there is a need for more positive business related media and until that day they both pay very little attention to what is going on.
• The best time to start a business is in a recession - it teaches you to be more innovative and lean giving you competitive advantage in better times.  As a small business you can also move more quickly adopting new tools and approaches again resulting in competitive advantage.

A few events such as Fresh Business Live and Great British Start Up show were a little disappointing mainly due to same old, same old business event/conference format, which for an entrepreneurial related events isn’t really that appropriate in our view.  We’d like to see more creative and different events next year please #GEW.

All in all though the week was motivating and inspiring and we left with lots of new ideas for our self and our clients.

Small talk

1. Why did you come along tonight?
2. How did you hear about this event?
3. How do you know the organiser?
4. What did you think to the speaker?

Getting down to business

5. What sort of business do you run?
6. What’s your role in the business?
7. What is it that you love about your business?
8. What sort of projects are you working on at the moment?
9. How are you finding …(question tailored to their industry)?

Understanding how best to stay connected

10. Are you on Twitter/LinkedIn and do you use them regularly?
11. What’s your twitter name?
12. How about a coffee to discuss … in more detail?
13. Will you be coming to this event again?
 
In our experience it takes meeting someone two or three times at a networking event before a lasting connection is formed. Obviously there are some exceptions to this rule and how you follow up can make a quite difference,  so think careful before sending your follow up email.

If you’d like’d to be kept updated on more tips and tricks whilst networking please request to subscribe to our newsletter.
 

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We get a lot of questions about what you should include in your strategic business development plan, so we thought it would be helpful to provide a brief template you can adopt for your own business.  It is important to note that every business is different and this is only a template and will not be suitable for everyone, but hopefully it will give you a good starting point.

1. Current situation – historic sales revenues, source of new clients, past notable activities/campaigns by results
2. Objectives – business objectives, number of new prospects and clients, revenue, average client spend
3. Client profile – who are your most profitable clients and ideal prospects and why do they buy from you? (size, industry, location,  need, profile, decision making unit)
4. Engagement process – finding prospects, engagement techniques, sales methodology/process, account management, supporting marketing materials required
5. Partners and referrals – who are they and how can you get them selling for you?
6. Marketing initiatives – goals and budget, SEO, seminars, events, networking, social media, newsletter, pr, sales materials campaigns etc…
7. Sales people – training, location, strengths and limitations, and recruitment
8. New approaches – what new approach are you going to try?
9. Calendar of events – 12 month plan including: key dates, events, campaigns and new recruits
10. Measurement – CRM, forecasting criteria, KPI’s  and general measurement

We would be happy to spend 30mins on a call with you to discuss how you could adopt this plan for your own business.  If you’d like to arrange a time to do this, please send us a message with three times you are available, along with your contact details and we’ll get back to you to confirm.

Contact Emily to discuss further.

I find using virtual networking on its own can be pretty effective if used to build credibility and trust, but it’s when you combine virtual and face-to-face networking that you get the most value and here’s why:

Face to Face networking allows you to quickly get a sense of who someone is.  You get to see how they interactive with different people and most importantly you get to see if you connect in person.  The down side to face-to-face networking is it’s time consuming, often costly and is generally hit and miss.  The value you gain from it is only as valuable as the follow up you do, and if you’re an introvert you have to be quite brave to go along.

Virtual networking (online) is a huge growth area and there is a good reason why – you quickly get to target who you want to interact with and you can do this at your convenience (not the event organisers).  You get to build trust and credibility and evaluate if you want to invest the time and cost in meeting someone in person.  Even with all the advances in technology it is still not a replacement for face to face interaction though.

So, how can you combine the two?

1. Use social sites such as Twitter and Linkedin to find like minded people, prospects and partners.
2. Listen to what they are saying and where they are going to influence where you go.
3. Promote that you are going to a specific event/conference through social networks, using the designated event hashtag if there is one.
4. Highlight the people you want to speak with through social media before the event and send them a tweet saying you’re looking forward to meeting them.
5. When at the event ask the host to introduce you to the people you have already been interacting with or following, and don’t forget to continue to network with new people too.
6. When meeting new people ask if they have a twitter name or if they are members of any industry social sites or LinkedIn groups that might also be relevant for you.
7. Send live tweets from the event with photos and quotes from speakers using the relevant hashtag again.
8. After the event, start following your new connections through Twitter and retweet any interesting and relevant comments they make to your followers, also publicly let them know it was good to meet using Twitter with hashtag again.
9. Send Linkedin connection requests to your new connections and look at their existing connections, if there is anyone they are connected with that you’d like an introduction to and it is appropriated ask them nicely to do so – of course do the same for them too if they ask.
10. Use Twitter and LinkedIn to continue your conversation and keep your new connection engaged.

I wanted to write about this for two reasons:

1)      It’s a brilliant example of a viral marketing campaign

2)      We’d like to reach our target – so please vote

Viral Marketing

What I love about this campaign is that it truly engages participants and encourages them to collaborate with one another.

It’s also extremely far reaching as each participant needs the same required amount of votes as they do money, for example we’re after £500 to help cover some of the costs of setting up our visual strategy room and we therefore need 500 votes.

So as a participant, I’ve sent an email to most of my email contacts, posted it up on numerous social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and spoken to people about it.

The campaign has engaged me as I’ve read their blogs, found out more about Enterprise Nation (who I didn’t know anything about before) and I’m thinking positively about Paypal and Intuit who are the sponsors.

I image the ROI for the sponsors and Enterprise Nation is very high with this campaign, they have set a limit of £5,000 per month, which isn’t very much in advertising terms and I’m sure the returns will be much higher.  The number of people who this campaign would have reached by the end of it is likely to be extremely high and easy to measure to some extent by looking at how many people voted, number of tweets, press etc…

This is a nice example of using digital marketing to engage your target audience.

With all this being said, all you need to do now is vote for Well Connect.  We’ll be giving away a ‘lavish’ prize to one person picked at random who has voted if we reach our target.

Vote now – pretty please, instructions below

All you need to do is follow these simple steps. It will not take you more than 2 minutes (tried and tested)

• go to  http://enterprisenation.com/sign-up-to-vote

• quick register and submit the form
• in the search box (top left) type in Well Connect Global and press enter
• click on Well Connect Global (the title NOT Facebook like, Twitter or G+)

• click ‘VOTE FOR ME‘ on the left-hand side below the logo

Related articles 

Intuit – Fund101 launches to help fill finance gap

Business Matters – Fund101 launches to fill finance gag

Freelancing Matters – Dragons Den a no… try fund101

Example Marketing – How important is Fund101, has it gone viral?

Here are just some of the key snippets that I thought were worth sharing:

Tristam Mayhew, @ChiefGorilla – Go Ape founder – Speaking at: Fresh thinking live at Cass Business School

“Draw a picture of what success looks like for you and understand what success looks like for your employees”

“Build a tribe”

“We wanted our children to think we were successful”

Lara Morgan, @IamLaraMorgan – Pacific Ocean founder – Speaking at: Fresh thinking live at Cass Business School

“Saying thank you is free, but so valuable to the person who receives it”

“When selling be nicely persistent, I once called someone seven times without a response, so sent them a pot of treacle with a note saying – getting hold of you is like running through this stuff”

“When I’m fit and well I perform better”

Rachel Elnaugh, @RachelElnaugh – Red Letter Days founder – Speaking at: Entrepreneurs Club

“We’re moving to a transformation phase where we need to be collaborative, ethical, more feminine and open”

“Build your tribe by joining with others with the same passion”

“Success is being happy not being materialistic”

Melissa Morbeck, @Caadv_uk – Executive Director CAADV – Well Connect launch

“Domestic violence costs businesses £1.9bn per year”

“Employers should empower employees and make a positive impact”

Alice Avis, Past CEO The Sanctuary Group – Speaking at: Entrepreneurs Club

“Know why you’re in business”

“Get your legal’s and payment terms right”

“Don’t wait forever, there is always an opportunity!

I personally fall into the category of someone who I would say is creative, however somehow over the years of working in the corporate life, this creativity has been suffocated under process, procedure, targets and general “this is how we do things” scenarios.

It’s only now, three months since starting Well Connect that I truly believe my creative juices have started flowing again.  Speaking with Doug who has already been having some success with creative workshops including holding a “World Cafe” session at the last #connectinghr has really inspired me to expand on this further… so watch this space…. 

But, why is it important to be creative?

Well, if everyone thought the same we’d never move forward, and we’d never innovate and evolve.   In business terms this can result in being left behind by your competitors or as Apple have demonstrated, done well creativity can result in competitor advantage.

It actually goes much deeper than this though – being creative can help open your mind to new ways of working and make business fun, resulting in engaged and motivated employees.  It can also be used as a tool to enable collaboration and bridge gaps between teams.

Quick exercise

I challenge anyone reading this to try this experiment – tomorrow start your day by spending 5 minutes drawing pictures of your key objectives and task for your day or week and let me know how you get on.

Here’s mine for today

It's not pretty, but it made me think and focus

I believe the majority of people, myself sometimes included often network for the sake of networking without having any strategies or goals in mind.  This can lead to negative experiences and low quality connections being made.

With a little preparation you would be amazed with how much more you can achieve for your business from networking.

Next time you go to a networking do, try asking yourself these questions and prepare your answers:

1. Why am I going and what do I want to achieve?
2. Who is going that I want to speak with?
3. What am I going to say to them when we speak to come across as interesting, credible and relevant?
4. Who else do I know who is going to be there?
5. Do they understand what I do and can they effectively introduce me to people there (and vice versa)?*

*For questions 4 and 5 you may need to put a call into your contact to update each other on what you are up to.

With a bit of luck doing this little bit of preparation should help you get so much more from your networking.