Darine BenAmara | Canadian Small Business Women

Mar 21 2018

Network and Thrive

Even though it’s 2018 and much progress has been made, it’s no secret that professional women are still at a disadvantage in the workplace. The same is true of entrepreneurs.

The glass ceiling is holding strong

While progress has been made over the last decades and even more over the past few years, the glass ceiling is still stubbornly holding strong.

This is why networking, an important component of any professional’s career, is even more important when it comes to women – whether they want to climb the ladder to the C-suite or start their own business.

Networking is the most influential and efficient way to raise your profile in the business and corporate world. However, networking will only help you if done strategically.

At this point in history, men entrepreneurs (on average) are more successful than women entrepreneurs (on average) at growing their businesses. To be as successful as the men, you do have to do something you can do but that many women don’t: Build a strategic network

Top 8 networking tips for women

Be Yourself: If you are guarded, people will not get a sense of who you really are and it will be difficult to connect with you. Bring your smartness and uniqueness to light.
Be passionate about what you do: if your personal values don’t line up with the product or service that your company sells, you need to leave the organization or to do something else. How can you passionately talk about your business when networking if you are not excited about it. If you are not enthusiastic about what you offer, others won’t be interested in what you stand for.
Take it one step at a time:You won’t amass a huge network of contacts overnight. Researches have found that just ten minutes a day is all it takes to make a big impact on the size and quality of your network.
Do your research:The internet is a mine of information, and finding you have something in common with people you’re about to meet is gold. A quick online search can tell you that you went to the same university or have a connection in common.
Don’t avoid men: Many women have a tendency to go to functions that only other women will attend, which limits the benefits of networking. You need to think strategically and make as many valuable connections as possible to further your success. And the best way to do so is with women and men.
Help them to help you:It’s as important to be found as to find others. Having an up-to-date LinkedIn profile (including a professional headshot) makes you much more likely to be approached by new connections.
End as you mean to go on:You may only have one chance to make a good first impression, but you can undo all your good work if you make a bad exit. Say a proper “goodbye” and follow up the next day to make sure your new contact remembers you for the right reasons.
Follow-up: We know that the follow-up is key to cashing in on your networking efforts, but this is one of the greatest areas of missed opportunity because people don’t make time for it and then wonder why they didn’t get the deal.

Don’t just limit yourself to local, in-person networking gatherings if you want to see the best options and most opportunities in the field you’re playing in. Consider newer, more effective alternatives to networking that can take you and your business to unprecedented territories.

Women’s rights advocate and gender equality specialist, Darine BenAmara has dedicated her career to supporting other women. She is an international speaker, writer and advocate. Darine has significant international experience advancing women in leadership, leading global diversity and inclusion programs and advocating for women at work. Inspired by the many women she met, she designed “The Smart Woman”, an initiative helping women to overcome the challenges of networking and learn how to create smart connections to fulfill their career goals.

Connect with Darine on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Visit The Smart Woman website.

Feb 21 2018

7 Tips To Turn Your Contacts Into Powerful Connections

Business and personal success is all about making the right connections and finding the people who will lead you to new opportunities. However, many believe that success in networking is defined by the volume of exchanges (how many cards can you collect) when in reality there is little to no value in the quantity.

A lot of us are going about connecting in the wrong way. The real objective should be to connect with, learn from, and build real relationships with fewer people who are different than us and could challenge us to stretch our thinking.

Of course friends, family and acquaintances are important, but in business they can only get us so far. To reach our full potential we need to create meaningful connections with people who see things differently than we do, ask very different questions, imagine different possibilities, and challenge us to rethink the way we do the things that matter most.

Success in expanding a valuable list of contacts is solely based on the power of the connection you make.

How do you go about making and building powerful connections?

Ask yourself, who would be a valuable connection?

Challenge yourself to move beyond the questions “Who is my ideal client?” and “Who do I need to meet to pitch my product?” Instead, put the focus on why connecting with a certain person or group is important to all parties? How does meeting this person potentially impact everyone financially and socially? If this connection is made, what is the likelihood it can be maintained over the long term?

Ask yourself, what is my value as a connection?

It is important to know and understand your role. What can you bring into the relationship? What can you give before you can think about getting?

Ask for a strategic introduction.

If there’s a specific person you’re planning to connect with, do some Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn research to see if you have a contact who knows that individual directly, or at least knows someone who works for the same organization. If you can find it, a third-party endorsement will give you a powerful edge.

Follow-up and put it on a calendar.

After clicking with a powerful new connection, don’t drop the ball. Never ever wait for everyone to email back and forth for a date. It won’t happen. Drive the date, suggest the time, and get it on the calendar. This provides value to your connections.

Deepen the relationship.

Immediately following a conversation with a person of interest, dots down a number from one to ten on the back of their business card, indicating their potential to help you advance your business. For anyone who scores a six or above, adds a brief note about them, such as “three-year-old daughter, developing a new food services business, traveling to Montreal.”

The next day, send an email to the person, saying that you enjoyed the conversation, and reference one of your notes, like “Have a great time in Montreal!” You can also assist in some way, by sending a link to an interesting Montreal travel article or offering to introduce the person to a friend who works in the same field.

Maintain the connection.

Create a schedule for keeping in touch, whether you reach out to X number of people each week, or set aside X amount of time each day to networking.

Save your time and minimize connections that lack value.

If a connection isn’t of value and you cannot provide value, let it go. It’s best for both parties.

Finally, networking is like exercise and making powerful connections takes time and practice. You may fail a couple of times but don’t worry about it. In the end, you will find much better contacts and people who can benefit one another.

Connect with Darine on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Don’t forget to subscribe to The Smart Woman newsletter for more networking tips.

Jan 21 2018

Do You Have A Networking Strategy?

Do you ever have the feeling that you are wasting your time at networking events? Have you ever collected a lot of business cards that ended up on a shelf, in a drawer or in the trash?

Studies shows that 97% of businesses regard customer referrals as an important source of new business, yet only 3% of businesses have any form of strategy to generate customer referral based leads. Do you have a networking strategy?

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

We’ve heard it repeatedly. Networking has become one of the most talked about terms when it comes to career growth and business success. But networking is much more than showing up at networking events, shaking a lot of hands and collecting a bunch of cards. It involves relationship building and it can be a deceptively complex process.

Think about it. How many people do you know? How many of these people truly understand what you do? How many of them have directed prospects to you as referrals? And how many of those referrals have actually turned into business?

An underutilized power

Even women professionals who understand the importance of networking as a tool for increasing effectiveness seem to underutilized strategic networking. Not everyone you meet can help move your business forward, but everything you do can be driven by the intention to grow your business.

The purpose of strategic networking is to figuring out your future priorities and challenges and enlists the people necessary and gets them to support you. It means that you have to be proactive. The key to a good strategic network is leverage; the ability to gather information, support, and resources from different groups of people to create networks favorable to your business goals

Strategic networking can be difficult as it absorbs a significant amount of time and energy and this is one reason why many women drop it far down their list of priorities.

Why would you want a networking strategy?

Many of us take a misguided approach to networking. If you identify you networking goals and know the details of how you will achieve them, you will be far more likely to succeed. In fact if you don’t have a strategy, you will have to be very lucky to move your business forward.

According to McKinsey & Company, women’s lack of access to good quality networks is a main obstacle to their professional advancement, comparable in impact to lacking a mentor, or appropriate coaching and training.

As reported by Statistics Canada, female workers currently make up only 35% of managerial positions and represent 36% of small business owners (in 2014, 15.7% of SMEs were majority owned by women and 19.7% were equally owned by women and men). On average, women business owners are younger and have fewer years of management or ownership experience compared with male business owners. Canadian women business owners are less likely to engage in international trade compared to Canadian male business owners.

The reality is that men still dominate high-level leadership positions in most canadian workplaces. As a result, when women seek to build relationships with senior executives, most of the time they will need to connect with men. According to a study by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company, men have predominantly male networks while women have predominantly female. This pattern means that men are more likely to have the ear of senior executives in their organizations, and that women will need to connect with a male-dominated network to open new doors.

Approaching networking with a strategy is an essential part of your business strategy. It allows you to use your time and abilities wisely, to keep in mind what you are trying to achieve in the long run and help you to achieve it.

Network smarter, not harder

Make a plan, focus and be consistent. When you understand exactly what strategic networking is and step up to the challenge, you’ll find avenues of opportunity that you may have otherwise never discovered, and you will be making an invaluable investment in the steady growth of your business.

Women’s rights advocate and gender equality specialist, Darine BenAmara has dedicated her career to supporting other women. For the past 7 years, she has been leading initiatives on social and economic empowerment, and political leadership of women in Africa, North America and the Caribbean. Inspired by the many women she met, she launched “The Smart Woman”, an initiative helping women to overcome the challenges of networking and learn how to create smart connections to fulfill their career goals.

Connect with Darine on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/darineba/)

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