The power of networking on Performance Development – June 2018
Imagine the difference a best practice team of independent performance management experts could make to your business growth and customer experience journey by instilling performance-oriented thinking.
How do you find collaborative thinkers and experts in the 4 critical elements for sustained business success – Finance, Customer, Organisation, People?
Why I went networking – benefits for all
You will all know colleagues & friends who do not like to go out and meet strangers, let alone pick up the phone to prospect for potential sales. So, there I was back in December, with Christmas and a pile of urgent deliverables looming, when Sam, our website designer who was about to begin building the new insight engineers web site, asked me to get out of work early and travel into London with him to attend an evening networking event at The Yacht Club on the Embankment in London.
Looking ahead
Beyond the lure of free drinks on his tab all night and our mutual realization that his accrued surplus would disappear at the turn of the year, after 80+ articles, papers and newsletters to our long-standing marketing database, I’d run out of immediate ideas for our own marketing messages. Both of us also realized with the tsunami of noise about 6 months to go to GDPR, that more businesses would soon be thinking more about referrals and meeting people F2F.
Different interests in Performance Management coming together
And on the swaying ship, I met Rhys from GPi Pathfinder. We chatted about models of marketing thinking and the stresses clients talked about in landing growth, especially successful start-ups reaching the first pain-point of scaling above 20 employees.
That night, the seed of an idea for a group of professional friends focused on delivering performance improvement was planted, that we have been watering & cultivating for a few months.
We also met several other new-tech and e-commerce start-ups that night who invited us to other events in their sectors over the following months. Curious and open people wanting to meet quietly outside of their daily environment, sharing & seeking new inputs, ideas and support.
1 + 1 = 3
Common questions kept arising… who do you know who…? What did you do when …?
And the mantra of ‘givers gain’ became heard.
The information hungry wanted to know how market research on the customer could leverage understanding & growth.
The over-stretched wanted to know how teams could better align and work with other units.
The board wanted more help in understanding what their finances were really telling them, pro-actively, to help on problems and future decisions and the timing of both of those.
We were not expert in the latter, but at another networking event, we met Tom Mounty from Propel, Deloitte’s recently established financial arm for new start-ups & scale-ups. Cloud-based integration with cash burn and cash flow forecasting – plus introductions to backers/investors. Superb combo. What a band we quickly became; mapping out ideas during a collaborative session at the we.work in Holborn last month. In addition, enjoying a lovely lunch together at the Leather Lane Street stalls which I had never been to before.
No pain, no gain
The networking journey is easy to avoid and ignore – and you have to put time and passion into it. Not for all – yes. But beneficial if you do on many levels – yes!
We three clearly see the benefits of being prepared to network – and the benefits it has brought to our companies in working together on issues we could not do on our own.
The people we meet at such sessions are balanced, progressive and willing to share. There is a thread of searching for confirmation of the right route, but also a real desire for better approaches, new & sharper thinking, and an aspiration to tap into more resources off overhead. Oh, and to have a change of scene and some relaxed fun.
If you don’t want to get out F2F, at least you now know there is a team of like-minded specialists in these different areas of Performance Management, who have put the leg work in over the last 6 months and are now working together in their complementary disciplines. Please feel you can now call on us to contribute to (and pretty much guarantee) the continued growth of your business.
Best – Jeff
insights@insight-engineers.com
