If you want to be more memorable and influential in a sea of other executives, separate yourself from the pack at every opportunity:

1. Elevate the thoughtfulness, strategic depth, and currency of all your conversations. Talk more about the latest trends in your industry, and cutting edge technology. Show thought leadership.
2. Demonstrate your ability to sell ideas, build consensus, and grow business. This goes beyond showing you are a good networker and relationship builder. Your community needs to know how well you can influence key decision makers, facilitate across departments, get results, and create revenue.
3. Create opportunities to network with business peers on a deeper-level than possible in a typical monthly networking event or occasional networking lunch. Increase the percentage of people in your network with heavy business influence.
4. Upgrade the quality of your interpersonal interactions. A salesperson I know never ends a conversation without asking “what can I do for you today?” He stands out amongst the thousands of sales people I know because of the way he communicates it. He really does mean it. His customers and network know it.
5. Improve your LinkedIn profile and activities. It says volumes about you. Whether or not you have self-awareness about your value to employers, and can communicate and sell your ideas. Whether you are interested in helping others in the industry, or just want their contacts. Whether you are willing to read and comment on someone’s blog or discussion in a LI group in exchange for reading your sales pitch. I believe most LI profiles are doing more damage than good to their owners.
6. Update your clothing and hairstyle, look less generic. Be more hip. Have a professional quality picture in LinkedIn.  Free, generic business cards are out. Even your email signature matters.
7. Lastly, once you have turbo-charged your brand, create “buzz” and sustain it.

The key is to establish and maintain your brand in terms that are as relevant as possible to current business needs. Your brand needs be memorable and easily repeated by your fans. (Most elevator speeches are not.) Your pitch needs to have focus and a theme offering synergy amongst skills. Emphasize how you are different, not how you are similar. Highlight what is most in demand in the marketplace.

If you don’t groom and maintain your brand image, you may have no recognizable value to the community or a very muddled image that makes people avoid you for fear of a poor return on investment. Establishing a positive brand in the industry for future contingencies takes time and is crucial to long term stability and growth. It takes little time to damage a brand and forever to repair negatives.

If you dread the thought of networking, you are not alone. Most of us can describe networking that is not effective:

Good networking is not a three martini lunch.

Good networking is not standing up in a crowd of strangers and announcing you are a sales manager looking for a contact at company X.

Networking should have two elements:

First, networking should be a long-term campaign to establish your value in the business community. It is about defining and establishing your brand – what makes you unique or different amongst people with somewhat similar backgrounds. It is about building awareness for your brand with an ever-larger audience. It is about keeping your value proposition top of mind over the long-term so that when someone in the community has need of your services, he/she remembers you are out there and reaches out to you. Your objective is to craft your message so that the right listener hears it and is appropriately impressed by it. If you do this well, someone will be eager to reach out to you when there is a problem for which you are the best solution.

The second element of networking is to provide the impetus to get someone to take action on your behalf such as calling someone up about you, or giving you an informational interview. That is easy if the listener understands your value and helping you makes him a hero with his boss. If you are not at that stage of the relationship yet, you can encourage support through quid pro quo. That means you offer to help the other person multiple times until the recipient of your largesse wants to do a favor for you in return. (This is called the Theory of Reciprocity.) In fact we know that the most effective offers of help are (in rank order):

1. Making your listener money or smarter (most effective)
2. Saving him/her money
3. Making him/her more efficient
4. Doing a favor for someone like a family member

My favorite networking activities:

• Discussing ideas of interest to both parties: Reach out to someone who is knowledgeable in your field and tell him/her you are writing a white paper or doing a study on best practices to do ______. An example would be spend time with someone whom is also interested in companies which have grown their businesses by making “green” products, things good for the environment. Tell him/her you will be interviewing a number of people on the subject. If he can give you 30 minutes over a cup of coffee, when you are finished talking to others with the same expertise, you will share back a summary of the conversations. A good professional will be very interested in learning something that makes him smarter or makes him money. Be careful not to share proprietary information or the process may backfire.
• Collect articles from the trade press, internet, and books that show you are up on the cutting-edge issues in your industry. Consider these “currency” with which you can open doors and influence people. Send an article every other month or so to your networking contacts by email. Even if they have already read the article, it establishes that you are knowledgeable and someone to stay in touch with.
• Call someone up on the phone to ask if he/she has heard that Company A bought Company B. You want to vary the methods which you reach out to people to keep it fresh and authentic. A phone call or in-person conversation builds the relationship most effectively. It helps you discover common interests like sports or children. Be careful to stay out of opinionated conversations about politics or religion which may become awkward. You want to build bridges with the listener, not put up barriers.
• Another valuable resource for networking is professional associations. One way to make connections in such an organization is to volunteer (no one will ever turn you down, and you may have the opportunity to create work products and try new directions that will enhance your resume and portfolio). Working side-by-side with people in your industry also helps establish your credibility and credentials while you gain valuable information. Offer to give a speech or write a newsletter article.
• Offer to open up your network of contacts to someone else to solve his/her problem. For instance, offer to help someone find the resource he needs in the professional associations you belong to.
• If you are very junior in rank to the person you are targeting, you still can be of value. I know an executive administrative assistant who offered to research the Internet for information for a Mexican vacation spot for a former boss. In exchange, the boss offered to call a CEO at another company on her behalf.

Now that you have done favors

Once you have established your value it is easier to say “By the way, I am looking for companies in need of a sales executive like me. Do you know any companies looking for someone with those skills? Do you know anyone I might call to ask the same question?” If you do not receive useful information back today, you may in the future. Note that you should not ask that person if HE will pass your name on, you are giving him some wiggle room. If you call on a regular basis to “check in” with good information (ideally 3-6 times a year,) you will develop a life-long exchange of information flow with that contact.

Be sure to add all new contacts to your database. Also keep notes of topics you discussed, when you met, and potential future networking possibilities. Some people set a goal of five or ten new contacts per week. Networking is all about numbers and quality of resources. You need to think of all networking opportunities as steps in a journey that will last for the rest of your life. If you do, you will find that those relationships grow and thrive. The contacts will be as useful when you are working as when you are not.