Actual article date: Jan 14, 2014

Many of us have attended networking sessions some time in our lives — It could be a planned formal networking session at a 3-day convention, an evening session at the cocktail party with a few tables, or even an informal chat-me-up session at a birthday party. But whatever the setting and occasion, the procedures involved in the traditional way of networking have not evolved over the years.

The traditional way of networking, conventional networking, or guerrilla networking as we call it involves the following steps:

1. Enter the venue

2. Look for a target

3. Make introduction

4. Exchange business cards (remember to carry enough!)

5. Next target

Now given this day and age, is this method for networking the most effective?

Most people might presume that the more people you meet, the better. We couldn’t agree more. However, we soon realised that the follow-up rate from the delegates we met was appallingly low. Did you know that less than 28% of business cards exchanged at events are actually followed up on? (CIBTM 2013) Were people meeting too many delegates that they couldn’t remember us? Or perhaps they simply didn’t like us? Thankfully, we found that this was the case with many other delegates as well.

This shortcoming in conventional networking at events was echoed by Monroe Mann, co-author of Guerrilla Networking. As mentioned by Mann: “People do traditional networking by just pushing their way in and giving out business cards thinking that’s what’s going to make progress”. I guess we were all wrong.

But hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should eradicate guerrilla networking. I’m saying that something else should be done to minimise this loss of networking effort and to increase our return on investment (ROI) spent attending events.

Instead, what we propose is focused networking, which is as follows:

1. Have background information of the attendees before the event

2. Filter out relevant contacts

3. Making quality meetings that are mutual — We call that a handshake, a mutual agreement between 2 delegates to meet and network.

Introducing our flagship product, Match©, a one-click access web app that cuts away all the clutter and lets you achieve what most delegates want with minimum fuss — only meeting the people that you want to meet. Yes, it is as simple as that! We increase the ROI and make it simple for you by automatically sorting out the most relevant people that you want to meet. This list is sorted out according to your indicated interests and industries of the people that you want to meet. Hundreds or thousands of delegates’ information are managed by RevRank™, which not only sorts out the most probable people that you would like to meet, but also ranks them for you in order of relevance.

According to Monroe Mann, “Networking isn’t about just banging on doors over and over. If you have nothing to offer to other people, it doesn’t matter how persistent you are.” As such, our in-built scheduling function addresses this challenge as it allows for meetings to be requested and accepted — a mutual agreement between 2 delegates whereby both are able to benefit from the connection.

With Jublia Match©, we aim to revolutionise how networking is done. We aim to streamline the process, increase your ROI and allow you to engage with people that you want to meet.

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