The Activity Workbook is the central place Builders will go to learn about and drive their team building activity and obtain information about fellow collaborators

There is a lot to learn and in the brief amount of time you have available during this get-start, are to guide your new person through the first few steps of the Agenda Sheet as shown in the following screenshots

The following screenshot shows some of the main sheets (or tabs) that can be accessed either from the bottom of the spreadsheet or from the Menu sheet. The best place to start is with the Agenda sheet.

Menu Sheet

Ask your new builder to click the menu link to take them to the Menu page

Explain Quick Access to the Tabs

Explain that we have quick access to the most frequently used tabs.

This saves having to scroll through the tabs at the bottom to find the tab you are looking for.

Links to other frequently used resources

Explain how convenient it is to be able to quickly find the links you are after!

As an example, explain how using the link to the “Virtual Introduction to the CC” allows them to quickly book guests in using Calendly.

It’s great to also be able to include your own personal links so that you can access all the links you want in the same place!

Now draw your new Builders attention to the following section of the Agenda

In the ‘Date to Complete’ column write “Done” beside the following items

• Create NBS Log-in
• Set a regular coaching time
  • It is important to set a regular coaching time when you can both get on the Zoom for half an hour or so
  • Explain that in the first 6 weeks or so you will be explaining the how-to’s of the process.
  • After that, your coaching session will be mainly focused on the people they have introduced and helping them get better tangible results
• Download an Activity Sheet – Done!

Fill out the Start Here Sheet

Ask your new builder to click on the Start Here tab

Briefly explain the first part of this tab

As part of their ‘homework’ you are going to ask them to answer the questions with a rating 1-10 so you can review it during next week’s session

Explain that we are most interesting in helping people think about what they would ideally like to achieve.

We are more interested in helping them achieve as individuals rather than helping their business or careers. That may be part of the current plan but once we get to Know Like and Trust them we will be advocating for them regardless of what they are doing.

And we have found that in most cases, 4 years from now most people would like to have more secure income and working less hours to achieve it. More time and money to do the things they’d really like to be doing.

Is this really possible?

When you have enough people advocating for you and you have easily understood highly leveraged opportunities it sure is.

Who really wants to be still chasing their next gig or transaction 4 years now?

Better to have many others promoting you so that gigs and opportunities are continually being presented to you – right?

Yes, we all have to “put bread on the table” but begin with the end in mind – work towards achieving the lifestyle you’d really like.

Next ask them to compare

“Building a team of team-building advocates”

With other things they may invest time and money in to get ahead

One option would be to spend say 3 years and $30,000 investing in obtaining a piece of paper (MBA or whatever).

What are the likely financial results of that compared with having 100+ credible people advocating for you?

So what is the time investment?

Well the important thing to understand is that you putting time in to get a result. For example, may be a good question to ask is: Should building my network be the cornerstone of building my business or career?

If so it would not make sense to say: I’m too busy building my business to spend time building my network would it?

The most important question in the Start Here sheet

With 5-10 hours per week it should be very easy to find 5-10 people in the first year who will come on board and duplicate your activity. And when they do the same, it’s easy to see the exponential growth over the next 3-4 years and the opportunities that will bring – right?

Take them through the final part of the perspective

Fill in their Profile Details

Ask them to go back to the agenda sheet and click on the link which takes them to the page where they can complete details on their profiles such as Photo, Link to LinkedIn profile, Industry, Positions held, About, etc

It is important that they do fill in this information as it is what will appear on the Fellow Collaborators sheet

Briefly visit the Fellow Collaborators Sheet

Demonstrate:

• How entering a search term brings up a list of rows
• How clicking on a profile displays that collaborators profile

Press the “Activate” Button in your Daily activity Sheet

Ask your new builder to go into their activity Sheet

Briefly explain that the Activity Sheet is where they record their Activity so that we can measure their Activity and compare it against the results we expect. That way we can pinpoint where we may be able to help them get better results.

Show your new builder the following

Now we need to ‘Activate’ your sheet.

The formula in cell A3 is =today() as shown in the following screenshot

This formula will keep rolling the date forward to whatever the current date is.
We need to set this to today’s date so that the dates in Column A will run forward from a fixed date (today).

To do this simply press the ‘Activate’ button

Your new builder will be asked to confirm some steps and the script should run.

To confirm that the script has worked, check cell A3. It should now contain today’s date in dd/mm/yy format rather than the formula =today()

If not, re-run the script or in worst case just type in the date in dd/mm/yy format.

Now ask your new builder to go back to the Agenda sheet and mark this step as Done!

Click Here to remove LinkedIn Pending invites

Explain that this is a step for later but it’s near the top of the list because it is important for us to keep reminding ourselves about it

Make a calendar entry for our Weekly Workshop

As we know, the Workshop is where your new builder will see results, meet other collaborators and build relationships. It is also where they will learn so many valuable things and discover great opportunities.

It’s important for you to promote the Workshop as well as you can.

After attending their first workshop (in person or on Zoom), your new builder will definitely be sold on the value of the workshops!

The Soundcloud Playlist

Ask your new builder to click:

This will immediately take them into the all important NBS soundcloud playlist:

The NBS playlist consists of recordings ‘from the desk’, external TED talks and selected Connect Collaborative talks which will help your new builder understand the value of what we are doing, why it works so well and how to make it work for them!

Why don’t we just use Youtube?

Because unless you have the premium version of Youtube, it stops when your mobile phone times out.

Daily Listening

In addition to the carefully selected and sequenced talks of the NBS playlist we have hundreds of other great talks which can be accessed as videos from the Builders menu or as sound only from Soundcloud lists

Aligning Your (LinkedIn) Profile

The first real action step you will be helping your new builder take is to review their LinkedIn profile and possibly help them make some “tweaks” that will make it more attractive to others on LinkedIn to want to connect with them.

It’s a good idea for them to gain a glimpse of this by clicking the link shown in the above screenshot. This will take them to a page which is quite impressive and enlightening.

Then ask them to scroll down and click on the following image

This will take them to another page containing some sample LinkedIn profiles of fellow collaborators

However before moving forward with this, it is important for your new builder to take their time absorbing the following so that they fully understand what we are doing why and the perspective we are coming from

Let your new Builder know that the objective will be for them to view as many of the above as they feel they can by next weeks session. If they can get them all done, you can move on with “aligning their profile”

Let them know that most of the pages attached to these links are much smaller than the “aligning your profile” page and they’ll find them interesting.

Demonstrate this by clicking the following

This will display the following “light viewing’ short page

Scroll through this page to give them an example.

OK – it’s time to wrap-up this session and set up for the next

The above seems like a lot to get through. However, you can easily do it in 45 minutes if you don’t get too side-tracked.

By now your new builder is realising that we have a predictable, organised and systematic way of:

“Building teams of team-building advocates”

They are going to need to put in some consistent effort.

However, the results will be more than worth it and

In today’s economy, deliberate network building has become essential.

Ask them “how many of these agenda items do you think you could tick off by our session next week?”

In fact it’s great for them to write something like “Do by” in column B

Go at your own pace – get as much done as you can.
Our first steps will be to review and align your LinkedIn profile but it’s important to get the prior steps done first.

It is important for them to realise that when they are starting people, they will want the system to do as much work as possible for them. This will lighten their coaching load.

Remember: you only need few good people who will follow the process and you will end up with a very large team of team building advocates

Network Building vs Networking

Networkers attend events hoping to meet people that may be relevant contacts or obtain “leads” from others that attend such networking events.

On the other hand, our goal is to proactively build a self-expanding group of know, like and trust relationships rather than just network. In other words, your job is to consistently put “fingers to keyboard” to search for relevant others who also see value in consistently building their networks.

If you found 5 such people in a 3 month period who did the same, after 6 months this would result in 36 network builders including you.

We all have limited time. In order to make network building feasible, we follow a systematic approach and also commit to duplicate “mini-habits” (see the great video below).

As you help others that you have introduced build their networks, you build strong, invaluable relationships with them and the people that they introduce.

Add to this the people that you meet that have been introduced by others and you have the ability to achieve far more than you may have imagined possible through your rapidly growing extended network.

The process of building a network requires you to consistently invite people to meet with you on Zoom (or a phone) call so you can see if they are open to building their networks using our culture and processes.

From the outset, it is important to understand that, as valuable as building a network is, many of the people you invite will not be ready YET to make the commitment.

If you have one new guest attend a CC Introductory Zoom meeting each week you would have brought roughly 50 people per year.

If 50% of those decide to consistently engage in building their networks, you would have 25 people per year following your network building example.

How do you find the people to invite to an Introductory Zoom session?

Obviously, you can invite people you that you already know.

However, typically your existing personal contacts are quite limited and the real gold is in the people you haven’t yet met, rather than those you already know.

Our primary way of consistently finding enough relevant others is to search for good candidates on LinkedIn and invite them to connect with us.

Roughly here’s how the process goes:

• Search on LinkedIn using the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to create a list of the most relevant contacts.
• Capture up to 1,000 of the people from the list of candidates generated through LinkedIn into a list you can process over time.
  • Note that LinkedIn will only display a maximum of 1000 of the results from any search.
• Progressively examine each profile on this list to determine if you want to send them an invitation to connect with you on LinkedIn.
• Send those you select an invitation request with a note via the LinkedIn connection request process.
  • Make sure your connection request message includes a version of (use your own words please)
    • If (like me) you are also keen to proactively build your virtual network making our LinkedIn connection more “real” & authentic, let’s connect with a view to meeting on Zoom or by phone.
• Send a thanks for connecting message which includes words to the effect (use your own words please)
  • Hopefully (like me) you are also interested in pro-actively building your personal business network with like-minded others and making our LinkedIn connections more “real” & authentic?
  • If so, let’s connect via Zoom or by phone?

• If they agree decide on a time when you can have a 15-minute Zoom call (consider obtaining a free Calendly account to make it easy for them to book at time which suits them)
• If during this first Zoom meeting with your candidate, it’s clear that they are interested in building their network of Know Like & Trust relationships rather than just networking with the intent of gaining immediate transactions, invite them to attend a CC Introductory Zoom
• Check the CC calendar for available intro session slots using this link
• Book you and your guest(s) into a CC Intro session using this link
• Book a time to follow-up before or during the Intro session
• During the follow-up , ask the 5 Golden questions to ensure you have a serious network building partner (no point in investing your time with those who are unwilling to put aside a small amount of time each day to follow a simple and effective process to proactively build their network – easier to find someone else who is)
• Register them on CC.net & set up a time for regular coaching.
• Help them download an Activity sheet.
• Host them at their first and subsequent workshops.

Details of the process

Set-Up

• Adjust your LinkedIn profile to make your process as effective as possible.
• Set up standard messages and store them in TextBlaze to make it easy to send common personalised messages.

Searching for candidates on LinkedIn

• Experiment with some searches on LinkedIn to obtain a list of candidates.
  • Scan this list to see if the people on it appear good enough candidates – in other words, the sort of people you’d like to connect with.
  • If not, tweak your search some more to see if you can get a better list.
• Ideally, you need to have about 1,000-2,000 “results” in the list generated from your LinkedIn search.
  • Remember that LinkedIn only allows you to access the first 100 “pages” of results.
    • Which means you can only access the first 1,000 profiles (there are 10 profiles per page).
  • Also, remember that LinkedIn has “Commercial Limits” on the free version.
    • Among other things, this means LinkedIn limits the number of searches you can do per month (if you reach your limit, it will be reset at the end of the month). LinkedIn doesn’t tell us what this limit is, but we believe it is around 15 Searches per month.
• When you are happy with the results of your search, copy the URL of the search (from the address bar of Chrome) directly into the “Search Input” field of your “LinkedIn Search Export” Phantom.
  • Exactly how to do this is explained in the instructions contained in your “To Connect” sheet (see Cell A1)

Process the Profiles obtained from your LinkedIn Search URL

• This is done through Phantom Buster.
• Phantom Buster processes the LinkedIn URL you give it and places the results in a CSV file which you can then copy and paste into your Activity Sheet (PB csv) sheet.
• You can then process this file through your “To Connect” sheet
• The details of how all this is done is contained in the instructions which can be found by hovering over cell A1 of you “To Connect” Sheet.

Becoming Effective and Efficient

After you have set up and become familiar with your basic processes, it’s time to start working on improving your results as follows:

• Check your statistics to see how you are going against the expected averages.

• Your current results compared with the expected averages can be seen at the top right side of the Daily Activity tab as shown in the following screenshot:

Become good at finding the right people and coaching them to become effective

Overview

There are some people that you should not send an invitation to connect to on LinkedIn. While we are a community that is inclusive, some people wish to exclude themselves or they are not aligned with the principles and values of the Connect Collaborative. Remember you are are inviting people to meet with you, not attend an event but the reputation of the events you use and the people who attend those events create a real perception of your network.

As the MC repeats every event, the Connect Collaborative is fiercely independent so that you can build your network.

Who should I add to the ‘Exclude’ list?

You are creating your own, personal Hub around you so obviously don’t invite people who you don’t want to meet, but the Exclude list should include:

1. People who you have communicated with who express a strong aversion to being invited to the Hub (sometimes again) i.e. “can you guys please leave me alone”. Often, this will be people who have a complete misconception of what the Hub is about and, or have never attended. While it is worthwhile clearing up any misconceptions about the platform and your intentions, your job is not to convince them of anything and it is important to respect their wishes.
2. People that you believe it would be unwise for others to invite to the Hub (don’t be overcautious – check with your coach). Recognise that people who have rejected your invitation to meet you doesn’t mean that their timing won’t change in the future and they will be grateful that someone contacted them again.
3. However, it is OK to exclude someone who is extremely rude or negative in their conversation – fortunately, they are only a tiny minority – let’s all do our bit to keep our culture as positive and uplifting as it can be!
4. People who are already attending the Hub and are Active Network Builders i.e. on the NBS and attending the workshops, and they don’t want to get snowed under answering invitations to connect.
   Note: If this is you, please feel free to put yourself on the Excluded list by following the simple instructions below

Also, before connecting with people attending the Hub or other collaborators on LinkedIn, consider these important points:

• First, speak with the person they are connected to i.e. their primary relationship. They can facilitate an introduction and you will demonstrate to them and others that you are respectful of all the relationships in the room.
• If they are actively building their network, you can find their details on the Fellow Collaborators Sheet (along with the name of their coach) and then you can reach out with an email or give them a call.

How to add yourself and others to the Exclude list

To add people is relatively easy and can be done through the Fellow Collaborators sheet. After opening the FC list, go to the Exclude tab

Then just enter the details in the appropriate cells and columns as follows:

How to upload a list of Excluded profiles to Linked Helper

When you open the Exclude tab of the Fellow Collaborators sheet, highlight / select the cells of the “Profiles” column (only) you wish to add and copy (ctrl+C). Open your Chrome browser and LinkedIn with LinkedHelper and select “Collect, Select & Invite 2nd & 3rd contacts” from the options menu as shown in the screenshot below:

In most cases, you will be collecting profiles from your Boolean Search and storing them in your LinkedHelper “Default_List”, however, if you are using another list (that you have created using CREATE NEW then choose that list. Select whichever list is appropriate to exclude the profiles from (you can add to multiple).

When you have selected the list, left-click the “View Collected” option as shown in the following screenshot; even if you haven’t collected anything into this list yet.

Now select the “Excluded” tab at the top of the new screen, as shown in the following screenshot:

and left-click the “Upload Profile URLs” option as shown in the following screenshot:

When you have done that simply paste (ctrl+P) the profiles you copied from the Fellow Collaborators, Exclude list into the text box as shown below.

Finally, click “Close” as shown in the following screenshot, and you will return to your Linkedin Page.

Important Notes

• When you paste, it will include the column heading “Profiles” but Linked Helper will automatically ignore this. It will also ignore all the blank rows pasted that you copied, so all you have to do is literally copy and paste!
• In some cases, you will already have a list of profiles that you have already added to the Linked Helper excluded list. No problem – Linked Helper will nicely combine the new list you have just pasted with existing exclusions
• When you run a new collection process from your Boolean search, those that you have already added to your excluded list will not be collected from LinkedIn; they will simply be ignored.
• If you have already collected a profile and then add this to the excluded list (by way of this CSV upload), Linked Helper will not send an invitation to connect to this person, even though their profile is in the “Inviting Queue”. It will simply skip it and move onto the next.
  Note: Manually excluding profiles that you have already collected is very good practice as it helps to improve the quality of your connections. For example, if you have collected many students, the connections of those students tend to include other students and you may not want that! Manually scanning your collected list also gives you ideas about how you can automatically exclude people with a better boolean search
  

Please – Regularly upload the Excluded List

Other Collaborators will be continually adding names to the “Exclude” list in Fellow Collaborators. So it would be great if you could regularly update the Excluded list:

Consider setting a calendar invite to remind yourself to upload the Excluded list and also remove LinkedIn pending invites every 2 weeks.

Note that you can also set an email notification with calendar invites so that you will get an email to remind you to complete these tasks. They won’t take long – it’s really fast once you get the hang of it.

That it!