What I do every week to manage and grow my network 🏆

Last week was one of those weeks where I attended an event four nights in a row, plus a breakfast event on a yacht — and on top of all that, I’ve been prepping to speak at IGNITE! tomorrow.

So how do I actually manage all the contacts I met across those five events?

How do I determine the right next steps to move relationships (and business growth) forward?

I’m using my action-packed week as an opportunity to give you a look under the hood and see how a Network Management System (NMS) actually works in real life. Because I constantly have people tell me, “I totally agree with everything you’re saying, but when I sit down, I go blank, and don't really know what to do.” If you can relate, this one’s for you!

First, what it would look like without a system (hint, this is what most people are doing).

If I didn’t have a system, after a long week of events, I could sit down and go through the twenty people that I met, and just start sending follow ups like this…

Let's say that generic follow-up message returns five coffees / lunches, and fills up your calendar for the next few weeks. You feel good about your networking because your schedule is now packed with these people…but are they even the people you should be spending your time with?

Or are they just people who were nice to talk to, and open to having a follow-up meeting with you?

Taking a meeting because someone was open to it, is not a system for managing and growing your network.

Instead, here’s what it looks like with a system in place:

First, I sit down and look at my business goals, my ICPs (ideal client profile), and the list of the 20 people that I met and had good conversations with.

For example, I have two two ICPs (and a third rapidly emerging ICP):

• A CEO, Managing Partner, or Managing Director, who has an established or high-growth company, and understands that relationships are how business gets done, but is busy running their successful business. This person wants to be efficient with their time and have a system and a strategy just like they do for every other department in their business (along with a savvy leader running that department).

• A technology company that is building technology for networking, sales through relationships, or human connection in general, and they need of an expert to fill in the human pieces of the AI puzzle.

• The emerging third ICP is a CRO or CMO who knows the future is highly-curated, and wants an expert to sit between their sales, marketing, and ops team to run the company’s relationship ecosystem.

Second, I do my own ranking of all the people I met, asking: who are the people that exactly match my ICP? In this case, out of those twenty people I met, six are exact matches.

A word of caution: don’t confuse someone else’s interest in your work for being your ICP.

There were a handful of folks who were really excited by what I do, and who are already asking me to have coffee or lunch. However, I’m only about 50% certain they could be a match to my ICP. I might categorize this group as “need to learn more,” and if they ask for coffee next week, I’d likely push my availability a few weeks, and/or suggest a virtual meeting instead as a next step.

Before I had a system, I would have probably quickly accepted their coffee or lunch invitation because they were more eager to meet with me.

Instead, in my weekly active network management sessions, I'm going to resist the temptation of reaching out to the people who already invited me to something and go directly to my six matches first.  

For each of those six, I’m preparing a highly custom email in which I:

• Provide unique value

• Make sure I mention something that we discussed, and

• Insert a unique point of view or expertise that gives them an “Aha!" moment

(Note: This requires that you were practicing active listening during your encounter. You had to have made sure you weren’t talking too much about yourself, and that you were pulling out information that would serve you in a follow up.) Here’s an example of that kind of outreach in action. 👇

Recently, I met a CEO at a national logistics company who told me something along the lines of, “Wow, the work that you do is so interesting and timely,” followed by, “Man, we should talk about my advisory board because I have these rockstar advisors — really well known, successful, big names, know a ton of people — and we have this awesome financial incentive for them… and they're just not really not doing much for us.”

My follow up email to that CEO read as follows:

The CEO wrote back within 30 minutes, “You're so right. Let's get on a call about this.” 

This kind of outreach takes time. Writing to these six different matches is probably taking up a full hour — and I might not even get a response for a coffee or a lunch from all of them. Even so, that's still more productive than sending 20 generic LinkedIn messages, or accepting every stray invite.

A closing note.

If all of this sounds very manual in an AI world, I agree.

For my own company, I have an AI agent that sweeps my emails, meeting transcripts, and personal notes every week to feed it into my Network Management System. But to be able to do that successfully, you have to have an accurate source of record and a system for organizing it in the first place.

We build these systems for our clients so that we can build AI interfaces and agents on top of them. We are about to forward deploy agents for our clients so that they can be even more efficient with their system and guidance, while still retaining their voice and authenticity and all of this.

Why this newsletter, then? Because you need to understand what’s going on under the hood before you can automate certain parts of the process.

Thanks for reading.

Nicole

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📖 Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future: Just six chapters — must read! A thought-provoking look at two different types of lives we could all live because of AI. Start reading the e-book below. 👇