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10 tips om beter te netwerken

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Ik was gevraagd om op 27 oktober wat tips te geven aan startende ondernemers over netwerken. Natuurlijk doe ik dat graag, maar deel ik die tips ook graag. Hier zijn dertien tips waar je direct je voordeel mee kunt doen bij elke netwerkbijeenkomst waar je naartoe gaat. Wil je meer weten, dan hebben we ook een training waarin we je leren om beter te netwerken. Vind je het lastig om zelf op mensen af te stappen? Dan kun je ook naar netwerkavonden gaan waar je geholpen wordt om die contacten te leggen. Zoals tijdens het effectief netwerk deel bij het Zeeland Business netwerk, waar ik ook regelmatig deze sessies begeleid.

Dit zijn de 10 tips die ik de startende ondernemers heb meegegeven:

1. Netwerken gaat om relaties

Niemand komt op een netwerkbijeenkomst om dingen te kopen. Die beslissing wordt daar dus ook nooit genomen. Daarbij is het belangrijker om een goede relatie met mensen op te bouwen, want een goede relatie levert op de langere termijn veel meer business op. Als je een goede relatie hebt, dan verwijzen mensen als vanzelf naar jou of doen ze zaken met jou.

2. Stel de 3 gouden vragen

Er zijn drie vragen die je aan iedereen kunt stellen en die iedereen ook wil beantwoorden. Dat zorgt direct voor een leuk gesprek. Die vragen zijn:

– Wie ben je en wat doe je?

– Waar kan ik jou mee helpen?

– Ken jij hier iemand die ik zeker nog moet ontmoeten

Het mooie is, dat als jij deze dingen vraagt, de ander als vanzelf ook die vragen aan jou gaat stellen. Zorg er ook voor, dat je voor jezelf duidelijk hebt hoe iemand jou kan helpen. Dat zorgt ervoor dat alles veel makkelijker loopt, maar ook dat je een concreet antwoord kunt krijgen op een concrete vraag.

3. Ga bij mensen staan die je nog niet kent

Het is natuurlijk verleidelijk om vooral bij de mensen te gaan staan die je al kent. Maar daar schiet je niets mee op. Zoek juist de mensen op die je nog niet kent, als je die leert kennen, is je avond direct geslaagd.

4. Kijk verder dan je eigen branche

Vaak zul je mensen tegenkomen die niet uit jouw branche komen en waarvan je in eerste instantie denkt dat je er niets aan gaat hebben. Ga toch het gesprek aan en bouw de relatie. Een goed Nederlands spreekwoord zegt “je weet nooit hoe een koe een haas vangt” en dat geldt zeker voor netwerken. Dit zijn mensen die misschien in hun eigen netwerk wel weer hele waardevolle contacten hebben voor jou.

5. Luister naar anderen

Luister aandachtig en oprecht geïnteresseerd naar anderen. Op die manier leer je zelf meer over de personen die je ontmoet, maar weet je ook hoe je ze in de toekomst eventueel weer aan anderen kunt koppelen. En iemand die door jou verder geholpen wordt, wil jou ook altijd graag verder helpen.

6. Zorg voor een kort en pakkend verhaal

Zorg dan je je eigen verhaal kort en krachtig kunt vertellen. Als jij jouw verhaal in dertig seconden tot een minuut kan vertellen, dan kun je er zeker van zijn dat je ook de aandacht van je luisteraars vast kunt houden. Een verhaal van vijf minuten zorgt er al snel voor dat mensen om zich heen gaan kijken en gaan nadenken over andere mensen die ze ook willen ontmoeten.

7. Vraag om toestemming

Als je iemand tegenkomt die je een opening geeft om je verkoopverhaal te vertellen, ga dan niet ineens helemaal los. Vraag eerst om toestemming. Dus een vraag in de trand van “Wij hebben een product ontwikkeld dat het probleem oplost dat jij nu net benoemd. Hoe zou dat jouw bedrijf verder kunnen helpen?” Dat is een open vraag en niet direct een verkooppraatje. Daarbij laat je de luisteraar direct ook nadenken over de mogelijkheden die jouw product voor zijn bedrijf kan hebben. Een “ja/nee” vraag stellen kan wel, maar wees dan ook bereid om “nee” te ontvangen. Mensen zijn ook eerder geneigd om zaken met je te doen, als ze je al vaker toestemming hebben gegeven.

8. Maak een vervolgafspraak

Zorg er altijd voor dat je een stukje opvolging doet naar de mensen die je hebt ontmoet. Probeer binnen 48 uur contact met elkaar te hebben en als het contact zich ervoor leent, probeer dan een vervolgafspraak te maken. Dit soort contacten zorgt ervoor dat je elkaar direct beter leert kennen en de band wordt daardoor sterker. De kans dat je in de toekomst zaken gaat doen, dus ook. Ga het ook nu weer niet direct over de verkoopboeg gooien, maar bouw het contact uit.

9. Contacten waarin je niet investeert leveren niets op

Investeer in de contacten die je hebt. Doe ze niet af met een regeltje op de mail. Als jij tijd in je contacten durft te investeren, dan zul je zien dat die tijd zichzelf ook terugverdient, omdat jouw contacten eerder aan jou denken wanneer dat nodig is. Dat doen ze niet, of minder, als jij alleen maar de afzender bent van mailtjes. Dus neem de tijd om af een toe eens wat met iemand te drinken en pak regelmatig de telefoon. Daar wordt je netwerk alleen maar beter van.

10. Bouw een goede relatie op met iemand die veel contacten heeft

Eigenlijk is dit een beetje valsspelen, maar het werkt wel. Als jij een goede relatie hebt met iemand die heel veel mensen kent, dan komt dat hele netwerk ook direct dichter bij jou. Want jouw contact kan anderen weer naar jou doorverwijzen. Het is natuurlijk niet zo sterk wanneer je zelf een groot netwerk met goede relaties hebt, maar het zal zeker helpen.

11. Wees jezelf

Misschien wel de belangrijkste tip die ik kan geven. Wees gewoon jezelf. Jij en jouw netwerk hebben er niets aan als je je anders voordoet dan je bent. Wees dus gewoon jezelf en wees oprecht geïnteresseerd in anderen. Als je dat in de gaten houdt, dan komt alles goed.

Waarom ik denk dat crowdfunding heel goed kan werken voor jouw startup (Engels)

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I read an article on The Next Web today with the title: “Why crowdfunding isn’t funding anything at all“. The author, Yaniv Tross, reasons that crowdfunding is not that at all. He renames it as a group pre-ordering platform and puts it squarely in the marketing corner. And I disagree. Let me tell you why.

I strongly believe that crowdfunding could be great for your startup. You have to read that correctly. I do not believe that crowdfunding is the best way of getting investment into every single startup, but it could be great for yours. Or not. But you will have to read on to find out which is the case.

First off, crowdfunding is different from most other types of funding. Even though both versions include pitching your ideas, products or services, the actual transaction is very different. An investor is a professional. He will judge your startup on a completely different level than end users will ever do. And that, in my opinion is part of the great opportunity that crowdfunding is giving your startup. Lets face it, people that are into crowdfunding rarely do it because they love the team, or because they think you would be great at doing a pivot and building something completely different. Those are two arguments Yaniv Tross holds against crowdfunding. For me, those are solid advantages. It is a clear case of people voting with their wallets.

If you are connected to the startup world in any way, you will have heard about lean startups and minimum viable products. Crowdfunding might be one of the fastest and most effective way to see whether people are willing to spend money on your product or your services. You pitch it and you offer them to be able to take part in what you are achieving or are going to achieve. That, to me, is brilliant. It is not down to the whims of an individual investor, or a group of investors, but it is down to your end user to vote whether or not they think you are important enough to them to survive at all. In many ways, that is the ultimate test. Instant customer feedback, plus the marketing opportunities that go with it.

Depending on the platform you are using, crowdfunding might allow you to pivot sooner than you ever would have otherwise. At Kickstarter, you need to raise your full amount to be able to get it. At other platforms, like Indiegogo, you don’t have to. Even if you raise less than your goal, you can still continue and deliver on your promise. But the great thing is that you can now contact your backers to see what they liked about your product and where they found it lacking. It is market research that is paying you, instead of you paying an agency. With the added bonus that you have early adopters that can introduce their friends to it once it is at a level where they wanted it to be. Plus the added bonus of your early adopters feeling like the in-crowd. They know they have made a difference and that the product they are using is there because of them. That is empowering customers.

And lastly, crowdfunding is not about equity shares, legal structures and other troubles that most startup owners really don’t want to deal with. I know that you will have to at some point. But why rush it? The money you raise is related to the use of your product or your service. That is also where your passion is. And yes, raising more would mean that you have to include all kinds of extra perks. But those can be found in defining extensions to your services or having access to the team and its dreams. After all, if you are building a service or product that addresses your own needs, chances are that you have the same interests as your early adopters. So, use that.

As an added bonus, when you get crowdfunding in, you will have users. They will give you traffic and traction. And there is nothing like having a startup with traffic and traction when the time comes to really raise funds.

Fred Wilson over investeren, trends en kansen (Engels)

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LeWeb-FredWilsonFred Wilson is kicking off the talks at LeWeb. As a VC he is sharing the way in which he is looking at opportunites and how their firm chooses what to invest in. His first statment is one that I absolutely agree on. If you have ready the post I wrote before LeWeb, you will see that I wrote about the fact that I said that society changing is much more important for the next 10 years in technology than the actual technological developments are. And Fred came out and says that they do not think in technologies, but they think in trends. Tech is important, but to him trends in behaviour and society are a lot more important to base their choices on.

The first big macro trend Fred talks about is the move from burocratic hierarchies towards technology driven networks. It is no longer about the hierarchical structure. It is no longer about one person at the top making the decision, then feeding that down through the pyramid to wait for feedback to come back up to help him make more decisions. For a long time, that actually used to be the most efficient way to work. But now we see technology driven networks replace those hierarchies. As an example, Twitter replaces the newspaper. A newspaper is a very bureaucratic product. The content is decided upon by the chief editor of the paper and he filters and decides the content of the things you are reading. That makes it a slow process to produce the news and it also filtered based on the prerferences of the ediitor. And then you have Twitter that allows networks to decide what the news is based on the people they follow, the retweets they do and the way they interact with messages that make it news. News is created by the interest of the crowd and at great speed. The first place we have seen this was in the field of media. But we now see it in hotels with Airbnb and others. We see it with Kickstarter and others. It is in learning with Codecademy and others.

The second big megatrend Fred names is unbundeling. It is a bit about the first trend, but it is even more about how products and services are delivered. In the traditional world, it was expensive to get things packaged up and delivered. But now we are unbundeling that and you can buy products that are much more focussed on what you need. And you pay just for the things you need or want. The product is usually better as well, as it is created and provided to you by people that are doing the things they are best at. Which means that you get the economic news from the guys that specialize in economic news. Or the sports news from the people that are specialized in sports news.
Fred also names the banks as one of the examples of this. And I completely agree with him on that. In fact, back in 2009 I was on a table with a number of bankers in Zürich, Switzerland with a number of bankers and they stated that we would never be able to do without the banks. And at the time I told them that we could if we were to pick separate banking functions from separate startups through the internet. At the time they thought that I was kidding. And now Fred Wilson also states that the unbundeling of banking services has started. You used to go to a bank and then get everything from that single bank. Now you might do international payments through PayPal, get money for a project through Kickstater etcetera. You can now pick parts of what the bank has been providing you as a complete service from other service providers. The same goes for education where you no longer need to have the building and all the equipment for research, but you can also bring those things together from various sources and get to a better result than you could have before.

The third trend is that we are all nodes on the network. We are all connected to each other all of the time through our smartphones. Look at Uber where we are a node on the network and so is the driver. You can connect together and get a ride. Or get transportation. And that will change the way things and people are going to be transported in the future. And that is the same thing with many new services.

Fred obviously sees more opportunities. One of them is on money and new money systems like Bitcoin. Another opportunity will be the way devices are going to monitor our health and wellness and change the way in which we live our lives and improve on our health. Another opportunity is in big data. However, Fred has a very different angle than what we would normally hear. Fred calls big data the pollution of the information age. Our data leakage through online services is also what allows organisations to spy on us. And as trust and identity are big things, or at least should be, this is something that we ought to be aware of. If we would have realized at the start of the industrial revolution that polution would cause so much damage, we would have addressed it from the start. Yet we are allowing Twitter and Facebook our identity services on many other services. We are allowing data leakage that way. So Fred sees a huge opportunity for a identity system that is set up in the same way that Bitcoin has been set up. Not controlled by anyone, but a place where we are the one that controls our own identity and the related data. He has not seen that solution yet, but he is looking forward to finding it.

Guy Kawasaki over de toekomst en ondernemerschap (Engels)

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LeWeb-GuyKawasakiFor the first time, Guy Kawasaki has made it to the LeWeb stage. Fortunately, Loïc and Guy reached an agreement that he is going to be back next year. And that is a good thing as this session had great content and it also as a great laugh.
Guy looked back on the past 10 years and said that back then everyone said that myspace was going to be the operating system of the internet. And some 7 or 8 years ago nobody really thought we needed twitter. In fact, I personally remember a conversation I had with some Dutch early adopters back in 2008 when we said that Twitter was probably not going to be there in three years time. And as Loïc and Guy reminded everyone, Twitter is worth about 20 billion. And Guy went on saying that if we would look at his past at Apple, who would have thought that they would have become the most valuable company in the world. It is really hard to predict the future. That is hard for the next 10 monts, but impossible to do for the next 10 years.

Guy feels that Bitcoin is a lovely idea. Even if for nothing else than that it is completely outside of the grasp of Goldman Sachs. There have been people questioning the Bitcoin because it can be used to fund illegal things as it is not traceable. However, Guy says that there are a lot of technologies that are coming up that will be enabling that. And they will have a balance where some of what they are used for will be for good, and some will be used for bad things. But all of that technology is important to have as that helps us grow and develop new things. And sometimes it can even evolve from something that starts without control and evolves into something that grows something that goes into a control situation. It is when we started with Napster which grew into a movement which has then helped a whole new industry grow. Including iTunes which is very controlled.

Loïc triggers the social media card stating that Guy is a social media powerhouse. Guy answers that his approach is very different from most ‘experts’. And he adds that he uses the term experts very lightly. Social media for Guy is a means to an end. He is not looking to make more friends and more relationships. He says that he has a wife and four kids and that is enough for him. He is not looking to meet new people and have more friends. Social media for Guy is about building a platform. He has embraced the public radio model. At NPR they provide great content 365 days a year and then they gain the privilege to run the telethon once a year. So, his model is to constantly provide great content. He also has a team constantly curating great content, so that he is constantly able to provide his followers with great content. And that also gives him the opportunity to run the Guy Kawasaki telethon, because he has earned the right to do that. That is why he is constantly sharing great content, so that when he publishes a book, he has gained the right to promote his book. Or a new Evernote function as he is an advisor to Evernote. He does read all the interactions and every response from the account is done by him himself. Nobody on the team does that. Guy also repeats all of his tweets four times eight hours apart. The reason for that is that he does not believe that everybody is going to be awake and looking at Twitter at the moment a tweet is posted. Plus, he is not assuming that people are going to be scrolling back through their timelines to find that one awesome tweet. And even though that might piss people off, his reasoning is that if you are not pissing off people on social media, you are not using it hard enough. Also, he has found that posting a tweet with a link four times, really does deliver four times the clicks. He is not using different links for those four links as people rarely see that same tweet and that same link twice. And with a smile he adds that if you see that same link more than once, you probably do not have a life.

Loïc asks Guy to share some tips on entrepreneurship with the audience. He believes that the most important thing an entrepreneur can do, is to make a prototype. If you build a prototype you may never have to prepare a pitch, powerpoint deck or a projection. Because at a pitch, everyone everyone says is that they are going to be doing 100 million in 5 years. If you say you will do 500 million investors feel like you are overestimating yourself and if you are saying you will do 25 million, they think they do not take yourself serious. So, the best thing you can ever do with an investor is to show them a demo that is already in use with actual users and signup numbers. His second tip is that the challenge for European entrepreneurs is to create a product or service that is so good that American entrepreneurs want to copy it. Not to make your own local version of a great American service, but to create something awesome yourself. And there are a few European startups that have made that status like Soundcloud or Spotify. The fun part was that then Loïc took this as an insult to European entrepreneurs where he felt that Guy was saying that European startups just copy American startups. Where Guy is just saying to look beyond the Americans and paying a compliment to the companies that did just that and are defining the playing field they operate in. And his third advice to businesses is to never ask anyone to do something that you would not do yourself. Because that will never work.

Guy shared that the richest vein for Sequoia investment is two guys of girls building something in a garage that are building something they want to use. That is very different from people that build something from a business point of view to earn money. Again, I personally agree with that and that has been a point I have been pushing since 2008. If you want to build a startup, make it something that you want to use yourself and that addresses a problem that you have yourself. If you are just doing it for the money, you will have a hard time making it.

A guy from the audience asked Guy what he thinks about an investor offering to invest money if the startups would move to their area. And Guy said that if this would be the decisive factor on whether or not you can get the investment, they ought to drop the investor and find another investor that will work with them However, he does offer a middle ground where you keep your developers local, create a Delaware corporation and a west coast head office in Silicon Valley. Because it allows you to have the best of both worlds for both parties as investors do not really want to fly for 11 hours for a board meeting. And that is a factor for Guy himself as well. He is not specifically looking for opportunities that are far away. His statement literally was “why fly 30 hours to loose money there, when you can loose the same amount of money closer to home”. Mich Atagana came back to that statement and asked Guy whether he thought that not investing further away from your home town is a potential for lost opportunity? Guy agrees, but from the investors perspective it is a slightly different issue. They do not know a thing about the financial laws for investments or IPO’s and then the board meetings are 30 hours away. That is just throwing up speed bumps while you are the one looking for investment. But he does agree with Mich that the next Google might be in South Africa for instance and an American investor would not know about it.