This year we’ve been focusing our blog here at Powerful Purpose Associates on helping engineers in their transition from engineer to manager. One critical factor in advancing from engineer to manager will be your ability to develop relationships and bring in new business to your firm. In fact, the CEO of a reputable engineering company recently told me that currently when hiring, they are looking for well-rounded engineers with these skills, whom he referred to as seller-doers.
I have found the following to be important in successful relationship building and subsequently business development:
- Attend networking events that will allow you to build relationships in your industry.
- Be a resource to your clients and keep them up-to-date on industry news. LinkedIn allows you to do this by posting information on your profile and in relevant groups.
- Get involved in the community where you work. LinkedIn may help you to identify local community groups and/or events that you can contribute to/attend.
- Identify business partners or other consultants that may have some synergy with you and your company. You can use LinkedIn’s advanced search to search by keywords and ZIP Code to find these key partners/contacts.
Some other benefits that LinkedIn can provide you in your transition from engineer to manager include:
- The ability to build a profile with targeted keywords that will boost the web presence for you and your employer.
- The ability, through your existing online connections, to get introduced to key contacts that you may not already have relationships with.
Do you want to learn how to start using LinkedIn effectively?
In my new Institute for Engineering Career Development I am giving a webinar entitled 7 Steps to Building LinkedIn Relationships that Will Help You Advance Your Engineering Career on February 28th. During this webinar, you will learn both the basics and some advanced strategies for leveraging LinkedIn. Even if you missed the webinar date you will receive the recording of the webinar upon joining the Institute.
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To your success,
Anthony Fasano, PE, LEED AP
Engineering Management Institute
Author of Engineer Your Own Success
Anthony, I think you are spot-on with your advise on building successful relationships that can lead to new business. I also agree that dynamic growth driven engineering firms are constantly looking for technically proficient engineers with people skills and who have the ability to lead others and grow business relationships. Since most of the engineering industry uses the “Seller/Doer” model for Business Development, the engineer trying to make that transition finds themselves conflicted in balancing the two roles expected of them. By definition when you are doing you are not selling and vise-versa. Only the most principled of managers can continually balance those two divergent tasks.
Most engineer/managers I have coached feel doing the work and meeting the client deadlines take precedent over selling; which is why that describe their marketplace as “feast-or-famine”. They will manage themselves and staff out of backlog before realizing now they need to be selling. Unfortunately, most engineering companies don’t help managers to become more disciplined in balancing the two tasks, because they have contradictory performance measurement metrics. It’s common knowledge that if you don’t meet your weekly billable hour targets, management will be on your case fast. But typically management does not scrutinize marketing hour targets the same way. That disciplined approach to accomplishing both seller and doer roles is one where managers need training and coaching by mentors or outside consultants.
Finally, I like your comments on using LinkedIn to help in building relationships that can help your firm win more business. Most companies have adopted some CRM software to help manage their customer relationships. The biggest issue with most CRM systems is that they are in fact large data bases that are subject to data-entry quality issues and are pull-technology systems, meaning you need to pull the information out of the system you want. LinkedIn is a great tool to help managers with developing the disciplined maintenance of their client network. First, your network takes on the task of maintaining data quality, since they are constantly up-dating their own profiles. Second, the system is constantly pushing new information out to you, making it easier to maintain contact with your network contacts and better yet link to new contacts using the old “Six Degrees of Separation” concept. Introductions to people you want to know by people in your network creates “warm calls”, eliminating cold calling. LinkedIn is a tool every manager needs to use in their business development efforts.
Robert – thanks so much for your thorough feedback! It’s good to see that others agree with my perspective on LinkedIn and while all of these points are important, I think one other key in using social media is your TIME MANAGEMENT! You must monitor how long you spend on these sites or else you can really eat up a lot of your day.
Thanks!
Anthony, I couldn’t agree more regarding time management. I see people every day spending hours and hours on Facebook and most of that time doesn’t produce a dimes worth of business. It comes down to prioritization on where you spend your time on these type social network sites and in choosing what, groups, blogs and individuals make the most sense for you to market.