The essential hour top networkers spend each week

Did you have your individual mindset shift?

Was your world rocked with this paradigm shift?

Now, my enlightened ones, you are ready to start tending to your network in a way that top performers do!

This goes way beyond the Contacts app in your phone, that spreadsheet you've been keeping, or that LinkedIn account you think you know you can easily search through even though you can't (you know it’s a pain!).

This is no, “I'll get to it if I have time this week.” This is a business priority. If you're not dedicating time every week to managing your network, it's not going to grow.

Let’s talk through what this looks in practice. 👇

All of our clients know relationships are important, and almost all of them leave time on their calendar every week for meeting with people: breakfast, lunch, golf — whatever that is. Often, one of the first things I hear from them is, "Oh, yeah, I'm doing a lot of networking. I always have two to three lunches spots open that my EA knows they can fill.” 

What happens without active network management, though, is that anybody who requests their time ends up getting one of those slots.

Now, what happens when those clients sit down with us every week, look ahead and ask, “Who are the people I want to build relationships with?” 

That empowers them to fire off a couple emails and say, “Hey, would you like to grab coffee or lunch or dinner?” Suddenly, those empty slots are your calendar are being filled with the people that you intentionally want to connect with. 👏 That's a whole ‘nother ballgame.

This the benefit of active management of your network: you can either sit back and let things come to you, or you can take the reins. If you're just taking things as they come your way, you're being reactive versus proactive.

To be sure, this time spent actively managing your network isn’t the windows you leave open on your calendar for the (strategically selected) coffees and lunch meetings. This is the time you spend analyzing and maintaining your network with whatever system you put in place to manage it.

I'm not one for hard and fast blanket rules how about how this gets done (although I’ll give you some suggestions in a second). Generally speaking, you need to have a recurring time and place, and a bare minimum of one cumulative hour each week, where you are giving your network your full attention.

We dedicate 10+ hours to managing our clients’ networks per week, and even then the clients themselves are spending at minimum one hour of week collaborating with us on network management.

If you need to split that network management hour into two 30-minute increments, go ahead. If you need to schedule this time at night or on the weekend, go ahead. But if you're putting this down for late Friday afternoon, and you know that by Friday at 1:30 p.m. you're itching to log off… think again. This needs to be scheduled and treated like a priority — just like any other essential part of your business.

For example, we have a client that loves to tend to his network on Saturday mornings while he's at home. He sends out thank you emails to people on his team and people he's had great engagements with. For him, Saturday morning is an awesome time to do it. He looks back at his calendar and reflects on everyone he engaged with that week. This is what it looks like to implement an active network management practice that actually works for you.

In addition to figuring out time and place, there’s figuring out a process that works for you.

We have another client that will send us a voice note every time he leaves a meeting — he's the first to say that he's a talker who processes things out loud (not to mention that he's extremely busy). After he leaves a meeting, he will send us a 30-second voice note which we’ll use to update his network accordingly. That’s his/our process.

This can easily be automated: you can record a voice note, have it automatically transcribed, and then at the end of the week, you take all of those transcriptions and spend your hour turning those shorthand notes into meaningful updates in your network management system.

Looking for another automation? You could get in the habit of sending yourself an email with notes on a contact after an engagement. Then, set up a scheduled task via Claude Cowork that, at the end of every week, 1) sweeps your emails to see what you've said about contacts and 2) puts together a digest for you to review during your designated network management power hour.

I’ll leave you with one last example — this one being what it looks like for me to practice what I preach: I have a list of people that I know that fit my client profile, and I frequently review that list during my active network management time. I look at that list and say, “Okay, even if I haven't talked to that person in awhile and have no specific reason to reach out to them right now, let me take the time to reach out and ask them to lunch or coffee.” And of course, I never do it in a salesy way — the goal is simply to tend to the relationship, and to do so, I must provide value in my communication.

As an aside: the interesting thing is that a lot of CRMs will prompt people to do this on some sort of cadence. People will tell their CRM “Okay, this person is important. Have me reach out to them once a month.” But people can smell that routine check-in from a mile away. They know that you're just checking the box to check the box. I would rather not reach out to someone once a month with a “hey, checking in” and reach out to them every two, three months with something really interesting.

In closing — and your action items

Stop thinking about strengthening your network as simply the act of having another lunch or coffee. Strengthening your network is in 1) who you choose to share that time with, and 2) the additional time you spend in active management of your network at-large.

Before we part, I’m tasking you with setting aside the space this coming week to actively manage your network on the day, time, and in the format that works best for you. (Thank me later!)

If this is already your practice, or if feeling really ambitious, as you're managing your network each week, start to proactively reach out to the people versus being reactive, or at least start to try assigning the people in your network some level of priority. I challenge you to start to consider where and with who to spend more or less of your time.

Challenge accepted?

Nicole

P.S.: I was recently featured in VoyageMIA — take a look! 👇️ 

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