Making potential contacts

Create a contact strategy for the five types of contacts for potential new business relationships:

1. Satisfied customers. Clients are your best referrals and become advocates because they already know your work. Ask customers to introduce you to others.

2. Friends. Learn more about your friends' work and help them first. Then, when the time is right, ask them whom they might be able to refer to you.

3. Neighbors. Strike up conversations with people you live near. You'll likely discover common personal and professional interests.

4. People with similar interests. Professional trainers can join associations. Executives can join trade groups. All should consider joining civic groups and/or chambers of commerce to broaden the new-contacts net.

5. Happy, helpful people. People we meet by chance in unexpected ways - on an airplane, train or theater line, for example - can become powerful connections.

Life has a funny way of connecting us when we least expect it. Just be ready and make yourself available to the opportunity.