NLP podcast extract: Ron Bates on networking

"I'm a managing principle with a small retained executive search firm called executive Advantage Group. Small as in I'm half of the firm - Michael Roffstein is the other half of the firm. I used to be a partner at Heidric And Struggles, which is the largest executive search firm in the world. I've over 40,000 connections on LinkedIn.

"Well, I've developed some pretty amazing relationships with people around the world, which I never would have, probably, not having access to a platform like that. And it's as simple as somebody shoots me a request 'can you help me with this, that or the other thing?' and I put a little time into seeing what I can do - and although it might be something simple for me to reply to, or to hook somebody up, or to forward them through my network, it ends up being something that's a big win for them - and not so much what I did, but the end result of them being connected through."

"And they're appreciative, so we start a dialogue, and I get to know them, and they get to know me, and before you know it one thing leads to another and now there's a relationship that wasn't there before."

"And then on the business side, the nature of my work, is that its a very personal service - so all the work that we win, we win not because somebody referred you into something, you win it because you stand on your own in front of the client and demonstrate your competency."

"But there are some cases where we might have been referred into an opportunity, so to that extent it's incremental to our business, but to no means is it something that's really driven our success. It's additive, like all of the different things one person tries to do in trying to pursue business"

"So again, leveraging the power of who other people know, not just who you know - what online networking does is it makes it extremely efficient, to be able to reach out to and potentially connect with huge numbers of people, because you're leveraging the power of the Internet combined with electronic databases - and what I mean by electronic database, is the database of the membership population of a given platform."

Listen to or read full Ron Bates Podcast:

Networking LinkedIn discussion

See all our NLP Networking discussions

Liam Beale
Business Development Manager
PPI Business NLP: NLP Training and NLP-based Business Training