Are You Getting the Most from Your Professional Network? (PART I)
How can you better capitalize on social media and your network to gain a foothold at prospect companies?
Traditional mail, email and phone marketing techniques are paying smaller and smaller dividends. Cold calling and spam email are ways to make yourself unwelcome with many executives today. So how can you open a dialogue with the people that are important to your business? As I’ve said before, your professional network holds the keys to connecting with important contacts at companies that need your product or service. Unfortunately, getting their attention is increasingly difficult in such a noisy environment.
You need an added advantage that makes you a welcome interruption. Ideally, you’d like a warm introduction and you’d like to have some background on the person you will be meeting to find common ground, history and interests. I’m going to review some of the techniques that I’ve discussed in previous posts and demonstrate how they can all work together to give you the advantage you need.
So you have developed a picture of what your ideal customer looks like and created a list of suspects that you think match that picture. Where to start? As good a place as any would be LinkedIn, especially if that’s where your professional network lives. Since some recent changes, you can enter a company name right in the search bar on LinkedIn. Rather than having to change the type of search, i.e. people, companies, groups, etc., you can enter a company name regardless of tab or page you are currently viewing. Even better, You will see not only the company that you searched, but also the people in your network that are connected with that company. You will see not only 1st degree connections, but also 2nd degree connections, or in other words, your friends connections within the company. This is why it is so important to connect with people at a company early, regardless of their responsibilities, so that you have a view of the colleagues with whom they connect. People are quick to make connections with the people around them., so you might get lucky and find exactly the right person just 1 degree away. If not, that’s okay. We are going to use other tools to dig deeper.
What if you don’t have any 1st degree contacts within the company? That’s okay too. Do you have a 1st degree contact that has a 1st degree contact at the company, which would be a 2nd degree to you? Again, they don’t have to be exactly the person with whom you need to meet, but someone that understands the organization well enough to be able to direct you and potentially introduce you. If the answer is “yes”, get an introduction, electronic, by phone or in person. You will want to ask that person if they can answer a few questions and direct you to someone that help you determine if their company is the type of operation that should be talking to you. So, you are trying to turn one introduction into another that is closer to the mark. This might require more than one iteration to reach someone with whom you would hold a face-to-face meeting.
So what can give you a head start? How about a sight like InsideView? They offer a free subscription that will allow you to research companies and will give you lists of people, with title, that work there. If you combine this bit of intelligence with the last step of finding a contact within the company, you might be asking, “Do you know so-and-so in IT or logistics?” This might help to shortcut the process. The answer might be “no”, but they may know someone in that department to whom they can direct you.
Company websites list names, email addresses and phone numbers less frequently these days to avoid spam and unwanted telephone solicitation. However, another way that you might identify an individual is in press releases and job listings. Google the company’s website and look at news that has some connection to the person you need to meet. Press releases are useless without quotes from key management. If you want to meet someone in operations and the COO is quoted in a recent press release, you have your target. You can also look on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ company pages for revealing posts and news.
In Part II, we will look at ways to gain traction with the company and individuals once you secure the warm introduction. We will discuss the things that help to establish credibility and make you interesting to the people you want to get to know. Stay tuned.
by David Phillips
Connect to me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlphillips
