Networking Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint Sometimes you have to slow down to go fast.

Years ago, I met a woman who had a reputation as the consummate networker. She had hundreds (if not thousands) of contacts, giving her a broad network made up of people from all walks of life. She was well known in the community as the go-to person if anyone needed anything. Then, one day she pulled me aside and dropped a bombshell: Her networking efforts weren't really paying off.

She went on at some length about all the groups she went to, all the people she met and how she had made so many contacts and was continuing to make more all the time but wasn't actually getting any solid business from her efforts. When I asked her how many networking events she went to each week, she said at least five, and sometimes more.

Why wasn't she seeing real results? Because despite her amazing talent for making contacts and gaining visibility, she was never really getting to the heart of what networking is all about — building relationships. She was so busy running around and making appearances that she wasn't ever learning how to actually "work" the networks she had created and develop credibility with them.