Guest AuthorCorporate executives have started planning in-person meetings and gatherings with customers and colleagues. In addition, as business travelers begin to hit the road again, many of us are now proactively figuring out strategies for making the most out of business trips. But we tend to overlook one crucial aspect of business travel — leveraging our connections and network to make the most out of business travel.
Traveling to a different city or country is a prime opportunity to build new business relationships and broaden our network. Business trips, industry conferences, and events can be excellent opportunities to connect with hundreds of like-minded people relevant to you and your business.
Here are our three tips to make the most out of your next business travel:
Network with new people
Quite a few conferences attract over a few thousand attendees. And you may not meet a high-value contact just by luck and chance. With time constraints during events, it’s essential to be strategic and identify the high-value people to meet with.
Typically a list of speakers, exhibitors, and attendees is published before any event. You and your marketing team should work on this list to plan a few meetings well in advance. So during events, you can seamlessly turn these lists of people or companies into actionable insights.
Intelligent Prospecting
Business people often travel across the country to attend a single meeting. Therefore, maximizing your travel time investment is crucial for anyone with a busy schedule.
You and your team should identify your next potential customers and how to get introduced to them in a specific region that you may not have known existed. See if you have any partners/investors/advisors in a particular region and if you can introduce someone to you.
This allows you to engage in quick outreach and secure the face-to-face meeting needed to build the relationship.
Quick access to Relationship Intelligence
It’s an awkward feeling to be caught unprepared. And we’ve all been there. So often, we forget the name of people we’ve met previously or any additional context. Showing that you remember a contact and can recall your last interaction with them will go a long way to establishing rapport.
You can also connect with a few people you are not in touch with for a while in a particular city where you are traveling. This will indeed reactivate some of your dormant relationships. So you should have access to all the critical information about your relationships and network during your business travel.
Business travel is time-demanding, but it is also incredibly lucrative. The actual return on your travel investment materializes when you harness your network while traveling for business.
Having the right relationship data and intelligence will highlight a direct path to your next big opportunity.
Author – Dr. Satish Patil, CEO, Mitibase Technologies
Aravind Sundaram
Guest Author
