SURAHMIN BUSINESS

Whether you are marketing a pharmaceutical or biotechnology product, medical device, hospital, or other healthcare product or service, an advisory board is a potentially valuable asset in helping you understand your target audiences, competition, market, and the position your brand occupies in the marketplace. There are numerous ways to use your board to your advantage, even if yours is an e-advisory board and meets only virtually.

Who should be on your advisory board?
Ideally, your board includes heavy users of your product, lighter users, and even potentially non-users. The members may be all one profession: physicians exclusively, for example. Or your board may represent multiple allied health professions. The goal is to get a balanced perspective on your brand from both users and influencers, both advocates and detractors.

What should your advisory board do?
Through meetings and/or online discussions, your board can advise you on the strategic and tactical direction of your brand. Your board members can share clinical insights as well as enhance your competitive intelligence by sharing insights into how competitors market their brands. Your board also can help you develop surveys (on your website, via direct mail or email, or via Sermon or other healthcare professional-targeted social networking sites) and moderate focus groups in peer-to-peer research initiatives. And as feasible, your board members can make presentations supporting your brand at national conventions, regional conferences, dinner meetings, advocacy group meetings, and online and offline seminars. Additionally, you may establish a dedicated social networking site (or password-protected sub-site on your website) where your board members-as well as non-members who opt in-can post case studies, and discuss treatment challenges and solutions.

What should you do with the information your board generates?
Advisory board activities generate content that can be edited, distributed, and “merchandised” to your target audiences. For example, create transcripts of panel discussions and focus groups. Videotape your board members making presentations. Share your survey results. Publicize these and other advisory board output through your website, an e-newsletter or e-mail campaign, YouTube and other social media vehicles, plus PR targeting the media.

How should you get started?
First, plan ahead. Decide what you want to do with your advisory board and what you hope to gain from their activities. Outline a proposed schedule of the board’s activities. Then determine the most effective way to form the board-whom to invite and how best to contact them. Extend the invitations, and get started ASAP. Your advisory board’s input can help considerably in your quest to understand the hearts and minds of your customers.

You’ve decided to take the plunge and get started in networking. You’ve decided what you want out of it. You know what to say when people ask, “What do you do?” You know where you want to go because you’ve thought about whom you need to connect with, what you can do for them and how they will fit into your network. You’ve made sure to always be ready with your business cards and you’ve got a good roster of networking events to attend. Once you get started and get over this initial preparation, you want to deepen your networking skills. Here are several to work on.

Polish your small talk.

We sometimes think that small talk, the light conversation style that includes the latest sports or weather or complaints about traffic is pointless. But it’s important in that it provides a bit of cushion when we first meet someone new. While it’s not good to beat around the bush or have pointless, meaningless conversation, we want to give someone a little bit of time to size us up. We learn about each others rhythms and styles before we do start going deeper in our conversation. We also find out what we might have in common and what interests we share when we engage in small talk.

Follow up with people you meet.

There’s a saying that “the fortune is in the follow up.” This is probably based on the statistics which show that salespeople rarely close a deal on the first contact with a potential customer. Or the advertising statistics which state that it takes seven exposures before someone even registers an advertisement. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish with networking, it requires more than one exposure to us. Follow up is our way of getting familiar with other people and getting them familiar with us.

Keep track of whom you’ve met.

When you need to follow up or get back in touch with someone you’ve met, it’s hard to dig though a stack of business cards, or paw through your desk drawers. A Rolodex, a database or any other way of keeping track of who you know is vital. It’s worth hiring someone to put them into a searchable system so you can always refer to them by name, company, what they do or how you met.

Elevator pitches are often considered to be a fundamental part of networking as a small business owner; however, a presentation which doesn’t immediately communicate “what’s in it for me?” to the audience is unlikely to be very successful. Despite this many entrepreneurs make this basic mistake and are therefore doomed to failure.

Elevator pitches were once only used by people who were starting their own business and looking to approach vice’s for funding. However, this kind of presentation is helpful for almost anybody who wants to market themselves and their skills, and is also useful to people who find themselves unemployed or recently out of college and beginning their job search. Networking pitches have also become a common tool in marketing and sales efforts, as well as a great public relations tool.

Entrepreneurs with businesses often differ about what they believe as the most important element, to get right although many professionals will reason that developing a solid business plan ought to be the initial step. A well-crafted business plan will lay out every detail and strategies, includes projections for revenue and spending, and will be reviewed at length by bankers and vice’s. However without a decent elevator pitch it’s very difficult to have the meetings you need to impress people with your business plan so I would debate that the elevator pitch is at least as important as your business plan.

Everyone is a potential client but that does not mean they want to be stopped in an elevator or conference floor by someone who is looking for work. Make sure you smile and be approachable you want to come across as a regular type of guy who is approachable. This provides more opportunity, especially at networking groups, for people to actually want to speak to you. It’s important that you let your enthusiasm show when delivering your pitch. If you can’t show enthusiasm for your own business how can you expect to get investors to be enthusiastic about it?

Your presentation should always aim to solve a problem for your audience if you’re listening to a pitch you are much more likely to want to have a meeting if you can see how the business could solve a problem for you. Make sure you always provide people with solutions and not just a list of services. If you are able to think quickly then it may be possible to tailor the problem you offer to solve to the nature of the business you are talking too.

When you first start networking – attending events, joining organizations, scheduling one on one coffees – you find that the more you do, the more you get. You begin to feel comfortable, you learn how to engage people better and you start getting business and referrals from your activities. So you do a little more and you get a little more.

Over time, it starts to compound and you’re eagerly looking forward to your next activity or meeting. Then you find your results leveling off. And you need to keep growing your company, or you need to rebuild after the last few years economic situation. But you’ve hit the maximum on the amount of time you can spend on networking. How are you going to increase your results? You might need less, not more networking.

Networking is a process of building long-term (preferably), mutually beneficial relationships through the exchange of ideas, information, resources and experiences. When you go to networking events you are usually working on only the going places and meeting people (or socializing) part of the process.

The true value in networking comes out in the exchange portion where you give value to other people by sharing with them information and resources. This isn’t always done at a networking event. Giving value usually happens in the follow-up after you meet someone or talk to them at an event and find out about a need they have. Unfortunately, follow-up is by far, the most neglected aspect of networking.

If all of your budgeted networking time (you do plan how much time you’re going to spend on networking, right?) is spent going to events, there is little time for follow-up. You’ll bring your notes to the office, set them aside for later in the week. But later this week, you’ve got another event. Another little pile of notes and cards are added to the stack. Three events and two weeks later, you don’t remember the good idea you had for the person on the bottom of the pile.

Pick one of your least interesting, furthest drives, least relationship-building networking events and put it aside for now. Spend that one or two hours that you’ve freed up into following up and staying in contact with the people you’ve met at the other events. Focus on going deeper with fewer people. The saying is that “the fortune is in the follow-up.” So is a stronger, more efficient networking strategy.

Bob Burg, author of Endless Referrals, taught millions of networkers to understand that in business, “All things being equal, people will do business with people they know, like, and trust.” You could easily say that the purpose of networking is to help other people get to know you, build trust with them and to prove what a likeable person you are.

Simply put, you’ll get more business if you are well-known, trusted and liked. While most of us would say that we like people who are “nice” or that others like us because we are “nice” we probably can’t put on finger on exactly what makes someone more likeable. Fortunately, Tim Sanders, author of “The Likeability Factor” has boiled it down to four simple factors:

Friendliness: which is what we think of as “nice” because it’s how we show that we like and are open to other people?

Relevance: how well we are able to show that we understand or connect with their interests, wants, and needs

Empathy: being able to see and feel from the other person’s perspective and feelings

Realness: showing our true selves and being authentic

Extroverts tend to be best at being friendly and real. They are truly happy to meet new people and see their friends. And they are good at expressing it. These are two of the actual characteristics of extroverts. They are usually real as well because they are open about their thoughts and don’t feel that they need to keep their ideas private. Occasionally you’ll run into a very fake extrovert who seems to simply want to dominate the conversation and push their agenda. Thereby proving that extroversion doesn’t guarantee being likeable.

Where most extroverts can greatly improve is by working on their relevance and showing empathy to others. Both these lacks spring from the same source. Extroverts are usually expressive about their own ideas, wants and needs. They can tend to see things only from their own perspective because they are good at articulating it. If they don’t slow down and work hard on their listening skills, they could miss the more subtle clues that other people – particularly introverts – are giving them. Two extroverts together can lock into a jolly, loud sharing time and completely miss the deeper connection with each other and with the introverts around them.