How do you build business relationships before you need them?

Many business relationships only begin when there is a concrete need. We need a new supplier, want to reach a potential customer or are looking for someone who can open the right door. The problem is that it is often precisely when we would have liked the relationship to already exist. Building a strong business network is therefore at least as much about which relationships you create before you need them as it is about which contacts you have today.

Briefly summarized

Strong business relationships are rarely built at the moment someone needs to buy or sell something. They develop through recurring contact, shared experiences, and an understanding of what people around us are working on and can contribute. This makes continuity an important part of networking. The goal is not to have every meeting lead to the next step in a sales process, but to build a network that is there when a need, opportunity, or challenge arises.

There is a very human reason why we often start networking when we need something. As long as business is going well, our calendar is full, and our existing contacts are working, there are always things that feel more urgent than getting to know people we don't yet know if we will need. When circumstances change, however, the value of a strong network suddenly becomes very tangible.

Perhaps the company needs to find a skill it has never purchased before. A customer asks for something that is outside of its own business and you want to be able to recommend someone you trust. A new market needs to be developed and it would have been valuable to talk to someone who already knows it. Or maybe sales simply needs new ways forward.

It's often in those situations that you start looking through your contact list and realize the difference between knowing a lot of people and actually having a relationship with them.

The worst time to start building a relationship is when you need something.

There's nothing wrong with contacting someone you haven't spoken to in three years. Most of us have done it, and sometimes it works just fine. But there's a clear difference between reaching out to someone because you need something and being able to call someone you already have a close relationship with.

The latter conversation starts in a completely different place. You don’t have to first establish who you are, explain why you’re reaching out, or build trust from the ground up. There’s already a shared history and understanding of each other’s businesses, which makes it easier to both ask for help and offer it.

This is also why a strong business network cannot be built very effectively by collecting as many business cards or LinkedIn contacts as possible. The contact itself has limited value if the relationship never gets a chance to develop. It is only when we meet several times, continue a previous conversation, and gradually learn more about each other that the person goes from being someone we know to someone we actually know.

At Vasatorp, we see this difference quite clearly. It is not uncommon for two people to meet during a meeting without having any obvious business reason to continue the contact at that time. When they meet again a few months later, however, the first conversation is still there to build on, and after a few more meetings both have gained a significantly better understanding of the other's business. If a relevant opportunity then arises, the relationship does not have to start the same day as the business opportunity.

Continuity does something that a single meeting cannot

We often talk about networking events as individual activities. A breakfast, a lecture, a company visit or a round of golf have a start date and an end time and are therefore easy to put on the calendar and evaluate individually. But if the purpose is to build business relationships, it is not really the individual activity that is most interesting. It is what happens when the same people have a chance to meet again.

At the first meeting, you might learn what someone does. The next time, you learn more about the company and what they’re trying to accomplish. At the third conversation, you might come across a common challenge or discover that you know the same person. Over time, you build a knowledge of each other that’s hard to create in a single, intense mingle, no matter how well-planned.

This is also where relationships differ quite a bit from traditional sales. A sales process often has a clear next step, while a relationship can be valuable long before there is anything concrete to move forward with. Trying to squeeze a deal out of every new contact therefore risks making networking less effective, as you judge the relationship based on what it can provide today rather than what it can develop into over time.

This doesn't mean that networking needs to be aimless. On the contrary, there is much to be gained from knowing which people you want to get to know better and which industries or skills would be valuable to get in closer contact with. The difference is rather in the time perspective. You build the relationship now because you don't know exactly when you will be able to help each other.

A good network should work both ways.

There is also another side to building relationships before you need them. If the network only becomes important when we ourselves need an introduction, recommendation or business, the relationships quickly become one-sided. A functioning business network is built just as much on the ability to discover when you yourself can help someone else.

Sometimes it’s a simple introduction between two people who should know each other. Sometimes it’s a tip, an experience from your own business, or the name of a supplier who solved a similar problem. There doesn’t have to be immediate reciprocation, and maybe there never will be. But over time, a culture is created where people know they can turn to each other, and that’s when the network starts to become much more useful than a collection of contacts.

For businesses, it also means that networking becomes less dependent on how many potential customers happen to be in the room. A person doesn’t have to buy from you for the relationship to be valuable, just as you don’t have to buy from someone else to be able to help them further. The better people understand each other’s businesses, the greater the opportunity to recognize relevant situations even outside the network.

That's one of the reasons we believe that good business networking takes time. The trust required to recommend someone is greater than the trust required to accept a connection request on LinkedIn, and that difference can't really be streamlined.

Build your network while you still don't know what you need

That's perhaps the hardest part about long-term relationship building. We're used to investing time and money in things where we at least have a decent idea of ​​what the outcome will be. A strong network doesn't always work that way. You rarely know which person will be important, which introduction will lead somewhere, or which conversation you'll remember in two years.

But that's also part of the strength. A network built solely on today's needs quickly becomes limited to the problems you already know about. A broader network of people from different industries, with different experiences and other points of contact, can instead be valuable when something happens that you couldn't have planned for.

Therefore, it is perhaps wrong to ask which people you need to know right now. A more interesting question is which relationships would be valuable to have already on the day the conditions change.

Because when the new opportunity, challenge or deal comes up, it's really nice if the first step doesn't have to be to start networking.

About Vasatorp Business Club

Vasatorp Business Club brings together over 80 companies from different industries that meet regularly throughout the year, both with and without golf. Through continuity and many different types of meetings, we want to create the conditions for relationships to develop long before there is a concrete need, so that the network is already there the day an opportunity, a question or a new deal arises.