Create New Circles of Influence

When you start your new business you will start contacting everyone in your 'Circle of Influence'. These are the people you know or have known that resides in your database of contacts or rolodex if you're old school. This is a great start to building your new business but, to further grow your database, you may need to grow or create a new Circle of Influence. You need to be meeting new contacts who are the Approvers and/or Decision Makers in an organization.

Find out where they play golf (hobbies they enjoy), what clubs they are members of and what associations they belong to, what interests you share in common. Then get involved in one or more of these areas to create an opportunity to meet them and when you do meet you will share a conversation on a common point of interest. For example; how tough the greens were on the golf course today.

Now, this may sound like a whole lot of effort for only a possibility of getting my foot in the door. Please understand this; it's only an effort if you are pursuing this person rather than joining and getting involved in those areas that truly interest you from the beginning. Besides, no one likes to be pursued nor will you be respected if they feel like a meal ticket. So what this means is that you must sincerely want to be involved in these areas of common interests.

Creating new Circles of Influence is really furthering the topic of one of my ezine articles (click on this post title for the article); 'Get out of your home office and Run for Mayor'.