Networking Is Not Working

Stop Collecting Business Cards and Start Making Meaningful Connections

By: Derek Coburn

Narrated by: Derek Coburn

Over the last few decades, networking has devolved into an endless series of cattle call events full of open bars and closed fists. Perfect strangers, after a long day at the office, agree to show up and bump into each other, randomly exchanging business pitches for business cards. Needless to say, traditional networking isn't working anymore. For successful 21st century business people, large networking events and the mountains of business cards they produce have become a waste of time and valuable resources. It's time for a new, modern approach to networking. Born out of author Derek Coburn's frustration with having spent thousands of fruitless hours attending traditional networking events, this book offers fresh, effective, unconventional strategies for growing and nurturing a powerful network. These strategies grew Coburn's revenue by 300% in just 18 months and can have a major impact on your business. You will learn how to:

• Become the Ultimate Connector
• Become the Ultimate Resource
• Identify and develop relationships with world-class professionals
• Enhance the value you deliver for your best clients
• Position yourself for more quality introductions to ideal prospective clients.

Once you implement the networking strategies in this audiobook, the quality of your clients, your business, and your life will improve dramatically.

©2014 Derek Coburn (P)2014 Derek Coburn

Packed with actionable insight

This book is a fantastic reimagining of networking. It lays out practical and accessible steps to drastically change your network.

Highly recommend!

Join a BNI

The concepts are all good, but honestly you can do all the work or just join a BNI chapter. What he describes basically IS what BNI is. So save the energy and join a chapter and put the concepts into practice.

For building a client base

I give this 3.5 stars. Some of the actions aren't for the average person, like inviting a diverse group of highly successful professionals to a lunch (your own network event) to meet other successful individuals and help each other in their careers and businesses. Most of the actions are for building a client base, such as getting to know a wide variety of experts (a good accountant or a good attorney) so you can refer them to people in your network when they are in need of such services. They'll remember your help and the person who gained a new client may refer new clients to your business. Also, you can make it easy for your network to recommend you by sending an email indicating if they know someone in need of (trigger event like getting married or having a baby), you can assist by providing (a value like financial planning services). Your friends and network connections aren't thinking about the work you do. But by identifying the trigger events, they might know someone in those situations, which will trigger them to think of you for the service you mentioned.

Decent nuggets but his voice...

The author has excellent nuggets in this book; however, I really wished he would have used an narrator other than himself. His voice is not good for the narration of books. Professional narrators exist for a reason.

Overall Insightful Read

Liked:

I like that Derek outlines the basics quickly and provided lots of context. The information around why networking events don’t traditionally work resonated with me.

Disliked:
Although I am knocking it before trying it, I feel at this point in time that arranging dinners, lunch meetings with 10 plus people would not be effective, and I’d be seen as “someone trying too hard”.

Overall:
For me, being my first book on the subject, I did get value out of the material.