How to Make Powerful Connections

Your next connection might be the one that leads you to the promised land of opportunities. These three tips on making powerful connections could bring in millions to you and your business.

Relationships Matter

The other morning I opened my LinkedIn app and was looking at the notifications. My son peered over my shoulder and noticed a birthday notification of one of my connections. This is a fairly common occurrence with social media apps.

The difference today was the ensuing comment from my son. He asked, “How do you know that person?” This remark forced me to thoughtfully examine the origin of this relationship, and by extension, what the power of that connection meant to me.

Here’s what I discovered:

Origins

This contact was someone that I connected with while I was ramping up the first of my businesses about twenty years ago.

Tipping Point

This contact was a “tipping point” for me. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point”, talks about how certain connections we make are more influential than other connections. While several connections may be simultaneously made, these connections are all not created equal when it comes to their influence.

Gladwell takes us back to when Paul Revere was riding across the countryside, informing the public of the marching British. Word spread like wildfire.

However, at the same time, there was another rider who headed in the opposite direction, pronouncing the same message but with nary the effect that Paul Revere had. Revere was a “tipping point”. The other rider was not. Our connections act the same way.

One Contact Can Lead To Many Connections

Just like we do when tracing our lineage through family trees, I did the same with this contact. He put me in touch with another contact with whom I did business. This new contact switched jobs a few years later and brought me in again.

Through this engagement, I met two other people – both of whom eventually moved on to other companies. And, you guessed it, brought me into each one of their companies.

This led to three more connections that either produced new projects at this company or completely new engagements at new firms. Over the course of several years, that original connection led to almost $1M in projects!

This exercise was eye-opening and reaffirmed for me why we need to remain consistent and persistent with our activities. Every single day, you should have the mentality that the next connection you make could be the one that leads you to the promised land of opportunities.

The more connections we have, the higher the probability that we will lock into those people that can act as a tipping point for us. Here’s how you can immediately increase your reservoir of powerful connections.

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Make Millions With These 3 Tips:

1.   Block out time on your calendar to be intentional with your outreach. Better yet, block out several chunks of time.
2.   Mine your connections for more connections. Keep building and extending your network and stop trying to sell to every person you come in contact with. Focus on building strong emotional connections first. This will always lead to business, sometimes sooner than you think.
3.   Always end the day with at least one more call. That contact I mentioned earlier? I made that connection because he was my LAST call one day.

You never know what connection will lead you to your next opportunity, which will lead you to the next opportunity, and so on and so forth. It starts with activity. Reach out to the impactful people you’ve made connections with!