You’ve heard me preach on the benefits of tracking your networking practice. How many calls, one-to-one meetings, events, gratitude notes, etc, did you do today? By measuring, you can’t fool yourself into thinking that you are doing more than you are.
Now I’m going to recommend one other measurement
Track your results.
Some of us already do track our sales results — how much we sold last month, how many contracts signed, and so on. We should all be measuring this and more. By doing this, we can compare to our metrics for networking and we’ll know if what we are doing is getting the results we want.
So what sorts of things might we record? Much is going to depend on our goals, but here’s a short list:
- Number of sales
- Value of sales
- Number of sales calls
- Number of referrals received
- Number of unique referral sources
- Number of hours worked (this could be a positive or negative depending on your goals)
- Number of people in your network
- Number of employees
- Number of current projects
- Number of unique clients
I’m sure you might have some specific metrics in your business to tell you how you are doing at any given point in time.
Now, here’s the trick. If you ever notice an unusual dip in your “results numbers” (one not associated with a regular industry cycle), check back about three to six months in your networking measurements. See if there’s a corresponding dip. If there is, pat yourself on the back. You’ve just discovered your “networking latency” — the amount of time it takes for your networking efforts to bear fruit.
Remember, as with everything else, those things that are measured are those things which get improved. It might take you an extra five minutes each day, but the information gleaned will give you a tremendous amount of power in the long run.
Photo credit: kevinzhengli
