Fingers to Keyboard – Overview

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