Episode 22 - Don't Count the People in the Room
Hi, I'm Keith and welcome to Networking Nuggets. Today I want to talk about something that happened to me recently. I ran a networking session and only two people turned up. Now I could probably end the podcast there and give you this week's lesson straight away but bear with me because what happened next reminded me of something really important about networking. We have a tendency to judge networking events by numbers.
Keith:How many people are going? How many people attended? How many visitors were there? How many people did you speak to? How many business charts did you collect?
Keith:How many new LinkedIn connections did you make? And I understand why. Numbers are easy to measure. If 100 people attend an event it sounds successful. If six people attend maybe less so.
Keith:But I'm increasingly convinced that one of the worst ways to judge whether a Networking event was worthwhile is simply to count how many people were in the room. Because the number of people in the room tells you absolutely nothing about the quality of the conversations you're going to have. Let me tell you what happened. I've recently been running my first Connect four day networking challenge. As part of the challenge I wanted participants not simply to listen to me talking about networking but actually to practice it.
Keith:So I introduced something called Connect Conversations. I put people into breakout rooms and give them the time to talk but I give them a slightly different instruction from the one you might expect. Their job isn't to sell. Their job isn't to give each other a perfectly polished elevator pitch. Their job isn't even necessarily to find out whether they could do business together.
Keith:Their job is simply to be interested in the other person. Ask questions. Listen. Discover something. And on one particular day just two people joined the session live.
Keith:I'd prepared breakout rooms. Plural. That became slightly unnecessary but we carried on. I delivered the session exactly as I'd intended and when it came to the Networking section I put our two participants together and they started talking. When they came back we discovered something rather lovely.
Keith:Completely by chance these two people who had met through an online networking challenge lived only a couple of miles away from each other. They'd never met before. They'd joined the same online room from who knows how many possible locations and discovered they were practically neighbours. Now I have no idea where that relationship will lead and that's important. I don't want to turn this into one of those stories where every networking conversation has to end with a £10,000 contract.
Keith:Maybe they'll do business together. Maybe they'll introduce each other to somebody. Maybe they'll have coffee. Maybe they'll become friends. Maybe nothing much will happen at all and all of that is okay.
Keith:Because networking isn't only worthwhile when there's an invoice at the end of it. But think about what would have happened if I'd have them had looked at the room and thought only two of us this isn't worth bothering with. They'd never have had that conversation and I think we've all done some version of that. You arrive at a networking event you look around there aren't as many people as you'd expected and somewhere in your head a little voice says oh this is disappointing. But why?
Keith:What if the one person you really needed to meet is one of those five people? What if one of them becomes a fantastic referral partner? What if somebody in that tiny room knows exactly the person you've been trying to reach? Or they have the answer to a problem you've been struggling with? Or they simply become something you really enjoy knowing.
Keith:We can't tell just by looking at the attendance list. And the reverse is true also. You can walk into a conference with 500 people and leave having had no meaningful conversations or whatever. You can spend three hours surrounded by people and still not actually connect with anyone. So perhaps we need to stop confusing quantity of opportunity with quality of connection.
Keith:Of course more people potentially means more opportunities to meet somebody interesting. I'm not suggesting that numbers are completely irrelevant but they're not the outcome. The conversation is. And there's another problem with big rooms. They change how it's what I sometimes think of as networking tourism.
Keith:You know the sort of thing I mean. You talk to somebody for two minutes exchange details move on talk to somebody else exchange details move on and at the end you probably announce I spoke to 27 people! Wonderful! Can you remember any of them? Perhaps more importantly can any of them remember you?
Keith:Did you actually learn anything about each other? Because I'd rather leave a networking event having had three proper conversations than 30 exchanges of business cards. A smaller room can actually give you permission to slow down. You can ask a second question and a third. You can disturb the person behind the business.
Keith:You might find out why they started their company. What they're trying to achieve. What's frustrating them. What they're excited about. What they do when they're not working.
Keith:You begin to find the little details that make something memorable and importantly you give them the opportunity to discover those things about you too. That's where relationships begin. Something else happened in another tenet session that reinforced this for me. Again we had a very small live group. The participants went off for their tenet conversation.
Keith:When they came back I asked each of them a question. What did you learn about the other person? And they knew not vaguely they'd actually listened. They should tell me what the other person did what mattered to them what they talked about even when they had a dog. Even better they'd reached the end of their breakout conversation with questions they still had no time to ask so they agreed to arrange another one to one conversation afterwards.
Keith:Think about it. The purpose of the exercise wasn't 'can you sell something in eight minutes?' It was can you have a conversation that's worth continuing? And they did. Now to me that's successful networking. Not the number of people in the room.
Keith:Not how many pictures were delivered. Not how many LinkedIn connections appeared afterwards. Two people had a genuine conversation and decided they wanted another one. That's connection. And I think it's a useful lesson here for those of us who've all known Networking Events as well.
Keith:We can become terribly fixated on attendance figures. And yes of course I get it commercially numbers matter. If you're running the event obviously you need enough people to make it viable but don't allow disappointment about the number of people attending to affect the experience you give to people who actually showed up. If five people come give those five people a brilliant experience. If two people come give those two people a brilliant experience because they turned up.
Keith:They gave you their time and they deserved the experience you promised them. You also never know what happened afterwards. One of those two people might tell somebody went to this networking session it was brilliant! That person comes next time they tell someone else. Relationships compound.
Keith:Reputations compound. Communities grow. But they generally grow one person at a time. I think this also changes the way we should approach the Networking Room. Instead of walking in thinking how many people can I meet?
Keith:Perhaps ask can I have one worthwhile conversation? That feels very different. It takes away some of the pressure. You don't have to work the room. You don't have to shake 40 hands.
Keith:You don't have to collect enough business cards to wallpaper your office. You just need to talk to somebody. Be curious. Listen and I mean actively listen not passively listening just waiting for your chance to speak. See where the conversation goes.
Keith:And if that conversation naturally leads to another one great! Because that's how networks grow not through collecting people but through developing relationships. So here's this week's challenge. The next time you attend a networking event particularly if it's quieter than you'd expected catch yourself before you judge it. Don't think 'there's hardly anybody here' Instead ask yourself who is here?
Keith:Then choose one person. Have a proper conversation. Ask them something beyond what they do. Listen to their answer. Ask another question and see whether that conversation is worth continuing.
Keith:Because you might attend an event with a 100 people and meet nobody who changes your business. Or you might walk into a room containing six people and meet someone who changes everything. You simply don't know and that's part of what makes networking so interesting. This week's networking nugget is this. Don't count the people in the room count the conversations that matter.
Keith:Thanks for listening and I'll see you next week. If you found this week's episode useful make sure you follow or subscribe and if you want more check out Networking Nuggets on LinkedIn it's my weekly newsletter where I share deeper insights every Wednesday but also do check out my new book From Auckland to Connected available now on Amazon. Until next time keep connecting. Networking Nuggets is a Think of Something Publishing production.
