Networking strategy - Part16

Establish a strategic marketing plan

1- List of targeted companies

Your source of information can be:

- Chamber of commerce. I got in touch with UbiFrance and FACCI

- Industry directory: as a Microsoft specialist I'm using  www.pinpoint.microsoft.com 

- Professional groups: on LinkedIn I joined groups related to Talent acquisition and Social media. Make sure to join the ones with the highest number of members

- Business association: RCSA, AHRI (Australian HR Institute), AI (Australian Institute of Management) etc

- Event organiser: Australian Talent Conference, Social Media strategists etc

2- LinkedIn as a directory

Search for the company in the search tab. From the home page, on the right hand corner click on the drop down menu to select "Companies".

You can take advantage of being there to follow the company. Go to the "How are you connected" section to click on "see all".

This gives you a list of targeted persons to fill your directory listing.

A trick I discovered is to sort by "members". Those persons you can directly message them for free: You don't need a Premium account for that!

Go to the section "Tips&Tricks" of my blog to the post "how to save Inmail in LinkedIn"

3- Identify the mutual connections

Associate your targeted contact with potentials introducers from your networks. This will help you:

- realize how close you actually are from people you would never have thought it could be possible

- identify the key persons within your networks by sorting out how many occurances they get from their role classification

- clarify your approach. Instead of sollicitating your 1st degree connection for an introduction at every single time you want to reach at a new person, you will have all the targeted contacts associate to this 1st degree connection. Thereby, you will be able to ask all in once.

As well, you will understand the possible interactions between the members of your networks and understand how to leverage them in a smart way.

In fact, you have to make as easy as possible to the person that offered to help you. Having a big picture will allow to highlight some networking interactions your 1st degree would not have thought about. You can then suggest him to take a particular action.

4- Involve your 1st degree connections

Even if you can reach directly at your targeted contact, let your 1st degree connection, at least, know that you are going to do so.

Might be that he would:

- regeard you to someone more appropriate, which will save you time

- offer to promote you at your target contact

- be in touch at the moment with your targeted contact and you would not like to interfere and embarass him with discovering on the spot that you are chasing in its networks

- be at odds with your targeted contact. That also can happen. I let you guess how "efficient" it could be to start your message mentioning the name of your 1st degree connection.

Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Author - Kevin Simonnet