By Mike Muhney
No matter who you are or what you do, your life revolves around other people. Not only do our lives intersect with others, the professional and personal aspects of each one of our lives are becoming more and more blended. As a result, most of us need a shift of perspective in order to realize the full value of our orbital network.
Always looking to enhance my own relationship paradigm, I appreciate it when someone else not only identifies this need but also articulates it in an even more elegant manner than I. Best of all a fresh perspective can help solidify the concepts I’ve been mulling over and cause an indelible impression from which I can draw upon to help others. Perhaps these thoughts existed all along, but creating a “positioning” statement based on these concepts has never been easy.
I had the pleasure of watching a video interview of Mari Smith discussing her new book, The New Relationship Marketing. She stated that we should no longer look at the world as Business-2-Business, or even Business-2-Consumer. Rather, she said, we live in a People-2-People world.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll relate to my reaction to a conclusion so evident, so obvious…so common “sensical.” I shook my head and thought, Duh! Of course!
Why P2P Is So Essential, and Profound
Whether you’re a small, local merchant providing dry cleaning services, for instance, or a major market presence with a household name, success comes down to relationships. For some of you, this will conjure up images of sales people pursuing leads to close deals. If that’s where your thinking stops, you couldn’t be more incorrect.
In today’s world of hyper-connectedness, we must be all the more diligent to build and nurture the network of relationships necessary to succeed in a very competitive marketplace. Whatever you do, however you do it, you must be relationship-centric. The rise in popularity of social networking doesn’t exonerate and of us from the necessity of developing, maintaining, and deepening personal relationships. One-to-many is only a starting point. It isn’t the goal.
Start discounting the importance of the quality and effectiveness of your relationships and all the money, time, and energy that goes into building and maintaining a reputation, brand, or image might well be destroyed before you realize the extent of the damage. As they say, we do not really know the true value of water until the well is dry.
Over the course of the next few articles we will take a further look into the elements of achieving connectedness with others. It reaches far beyond what you might mistakenly assume you do not need. When it comes to relationships, especially those that make or break your business-driven results, be aware that if your relationships are “almost right” they can turn out to be very wrong.
Mike Muhne is the Co-Founder & Co-Inventor of ACT!, and currently is CEO & Co-Founder of VIPorbit Software, He can be reached at [email protected], or visit www.viporbit.com.
