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Your goal as a salesperson should be to have not enough time to make all the calls you want to make to clients, and to wish for more hours in the day. There's no need to have any idle time not on the phones or emailing, and networking is a great way to build and maintaining lasting relationships that can positively affect your sales. Networking is the act of meeting, interacting, and maintaining a relationship with other people and businesses. As a salesperson, it is very much important to build, maintain, and create your network to be as large and far-reaching as possible.

From this simple description you can see how vitally important networking is to increasing sales. For example, say you are a sales rep for a manufacturer of computer hardware. This month you're wallowing in excess inventory and you're having trouble getting your typical corporate client to buy the product. What you might do then is reach out to your network of friends, clients, and other companies and promote a sale on some of your excess inventory. Maybe one of your friends is located at a university that's looking to upgrade some of their computer labs. He (or she!) could write you back and say "This is exactly what we were looking for!" and you've got a sale that you otherwise wouldn't have had. If you happen to sell services, creating networks made up of large corporations that are the biggest buyers of your services is very important towards maintaining a high sales volume, especially if you have a quota to meet. Without the comfort of having high volume, big time corporate clients that you've built up through plenty of networking, your sales will become increasingly volatile and harder to predict.

Networking can also increase sales in another way through referrals. If you build up a relationship with Bob over at ABC software, then Bob happens to mention your name to his friend Jill who works at XYZ Widgets, and Jill calls you up and says she needs to buy a large amount of computers, well then you've just made another sale without having to do any work of finding and cold calling potential customers. That's why leaving a positive impression in the minds of your customers is one of the most important things you can do to build up a network of repeat clients, as well as clients that will happily recommend your services as a salesperson to their friends, family, and network.

As well as helping your sales when times are tough and getting extra sales through referrals, networking can help increase your sales in a third way turning a one-time competitor into a friend. If you happen to meet someone who works for another firm in the same industry as yours, and you become friends, instead of competing with one another to make sales, you could join forces and co-opt some deals together. The advantages of an agreement between two similar companies/salespeople is that one person might have someone who needs to buy parts that are not available, while the other might have parts but no one to sell them to. Then the two of you can cooperate on a deal together and create some synergy where none existed before.

As you can see, networking is extremely important to all salespeople and can help increase sales in numerous unexpected ways. I heartily recommend going out into your community and networking as an excellent way to build sales momentum!

Learn more about this author, Jon Menaster.
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