Your MVP is Sitting on the Bench (Part 1)

Why every B2B sales, marketing and business leader needs to build, nurture and maintain their most valuable personal asset.

Cristiano Ronaldo, Portuguese soccer phenom, has 787 million followers and is the world’s top social influencer.

You may not have the network of the world’s top social influencer, Cristiano Ronaldo, who, at the time of this writing, has 787M followers and is considered soccer’s Most Valuable Player (MVP). But your network, though likely quite a bit smaller than Ronaldo’s, is your most valuable asset.

Is your MVP sitting on the bench?

Building, nurturing, and maintaining your personal B2B network should be something you think about and act on daily. It’s one of the few daily activities guaranteed to produce a healthy return on investment (ROI). Yet, most of us, myself included, have let it grow wild. We haven’t taken the time to nurture or even maintain it. We likely don’t even know how accurate our personal B2B database is.

This is part 1 of a 2 part post. In this first part, we’ll cover why building a healthy personal list of B2B contacts should be at the top of your to-do list. In part 2, we’ll cover how to save time by getting set up correctly, tools to help you do it, and nurturing your network in a way that doesn’t annoy them. In part 2, I’ll also introduce some of my favorite AI tools that make it easy to nurture your network.

2020 was a wake-up call for my MVP.

As awful as COVID was, compound that with losing your job. When COVID hit, I was at the Freeman company running a team focused on delivering innovative technology solutions for live events. I worked with smart, driven people like Dan Sherman, Mark Ledbetter, Wilson Tang, and Adrian Sanchez - all rock stars in the event tech space with unique talents. But that part of my career abruptly stopped when COVID-19 hit the scene. The live event marketplace stopped. Revenue from live events dried up quickly - no one was going to trade shows. Face-to-face marketing was dead for the foreseeable future. In June, I was released from the company and had to find my next big thing. It was the first time in my 25+ year career that I wasn’t working.

It’s not easy losing your dream job.

I spent a ton of time on LinkedIn. When I initially started my search, the path of least resistance was applying to job postings on LinkedIn. Applying to 10+ job openings a day felt super productive, but the return on my time investment was low. There was a ton of competition. Unless I connected with the target company, the odds were quiet for an interview opportunity.

Right now, 60% of jobs are found through networking, not online job forms.

My network came through. I had a solid list of contacts and connections loosely maintained on LinkedIn. Through the search process, I found that even colleagues I had not seen or spoken with in years were happy to connect and help. One of those friends was William Collins. William and I had worked together at Freeman, though not closely. We had barely stayed in touch since his departure from the firm a while back (my fault, not his).

This was long before I discovered the value of my network, so I wasn’t doing much to nurture and maintain my network. William introduced me to the team at Teknion Data Solutions (recently acquired by Resultant), leading me to my next dream job. The people I met there were exceptional - many of whom I will stay connected with throughout my life. The skills I learned were invaluable. All of this happened because I popped up on William’s LinkedIn feed one day while he was thinking about how to fill a role at Teknion. Powerful stuff.

I’m going to make a bold prediction about your future.

Well, maybe this prediction isn’t so bold considering the audience on xclr8. Our group comprises mainly sales, marketing, and business leaders hungry for knowledge and moving upward career paths. Given the audience, here’s my prediction for each of you:

I believe that within 18 months, you will experience one or more of these scenarios:

• You will take a new job that could benefit from your network

• You will advance in your current role by finding new opportunities through your network

• You will lose a job (sorry - but it happens to all of us) and will need to find your next one through networking

• You will start your own company (congrats in advance!)

• You will help a friend start their own business (good karma)

If you foresee any of the above (and for most of us, at least one of these will happen), you must have your network cleaned up and ready to go. Don’t wait until you need it to start this effort. Your LinkedIn network will play a big part, but that’s only part of what you’ll need to succeed quickly.

LinkedIn is only part of your MVP.

There’s no one silver bullet in marketing and sales. Great networkers leverage their platforms to build, nurture, and grow their networks. If you’re in Sales, you are constantly networking. If you’re good at sales, you’re leaning on your friends in the marketing department to provide you with the rocket fuel that makes it easy to reach out and connect with your best prospects regularly.

If you’re in marketing, you’re running social, email, blog, newsletter, and video campaigns driving inbound activity for your sales team. If you’re good at marketing, you’re ensuring you keep your client and prospect database clean.

Why would you not do the same for your personal B2B network?

So, let’s go beyond the coveted LinkedIn Network and talk big picture.

Social media is the pretty girl at the dance.

While social media is the pretty girl at the dance right now, email is still the tried and true, proven workhorse. With an email address, you can start building your own personal CRM - a place for your well-managed and cared-for network to live. This is your starting point, and having it in place is essential.

You might consider placing your contacts in an email campaign tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact. Or, if you plan to do more than the occasional email outreach, maybe the free version of Hubspot (more on this in part 2). There are good reasons to choose any of these platforms. The bottom line is that you need to give your personal network a place to live outside of your phone or computer, which means that you need to build a CRM. This process starts with the mighty email address.

This approach is essential for another reason - scale. With walled garden networks like LinkedIn, you have strict limits on what you can do. Have a fantastic piece of news you want to share? You can post it, but LinkedIn decides who sees it. And what happens when your post falls to the bottom of the network feed? Nobody sees it. You can try sending messages, but there are strict limits on volume, even when you use automation tools. Email gives you scale, and if you’ve maintained your network, email is going to provide you with the best chance of reaching your contacts not run by your social channels.

Houston, we have a problem.

So, email addresses are essential. Great. This shouldn’t be a big deal. You have all of your contacts on your phone and computer. You have your LinkedIn Connections.

How difficult can it be to download your contacts and LinkedIn connections to start building a home for your personal network?

After 30+ years in the workplace and an above-average ability to create a personal network, I thought I was in good shape. Here is my situation:

• My phone and computer had 2,189 contacts collected over the years. This was a “rich” mixture of personal and business contacts. While the majority of these contacts had phone numbers, many did not have email addresses. To compound the problem, I had no idea how many of these contacts had valid contact information. Messy.

• My LinkedIn account had 3,980 Connections. It's not too bad - I’ve been at it on Linked In for almost 20 years. Turns out, I joined on Dec. 12, 2003. It’s hidden pretty well, but if you want to check on when you started your own LinkedIn account, follow the instructions here.

  

Unfortunately, of my 3,980 Connections, less than 100 had email addresses, and even fewer had phone numbers. You can see on the screenshot above from my LinkedIn profile that I removed my email address in 2017. Very few people make that downloadable.

One hundred email addresses from nearly 4K LinkedIn connections was disappointing. But that’s OK, it was a starting point. In the second half of this article, I’ll share how I’m getting more email addresses and building my network.

Next up was pulling the contacts from my phone. Here, I had 2,710 contacts. While many had emails and almost all had phone numbers, I had not maintained these well. There were hundreds of duplicates, and downloading them into a spreadsheet was a problem.

Net result? Of the 6,679 contacts that I thought I had, I ended up with about 480 that had email addresses and were suitable to load into my CRM.

My network is not in the same league as Ronaldo’s. However, I needed to start somewhere. Next up, how to get going …

How to set, nurture, and grow

In part 2 of this post I’ll share the tools I used to download, de-dupe, validate, and grow my network. In addition, I’ll cover how I used a free CRM to house my network and give it a home. I’ll also share a bit about the tools I use to nurture my network without annoying them.

If you’ve gone through this process recently, please share. Leave a comment and share your experience with the group.

Thanks for reading - Part 2 is now up and live - give it a look!

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Reach out if you’d like assistance building and nurturing your network. I focus on growth marketing and go-to-market activations, including Content Development, Email Campaigns, Social automation, CRM Optimization, and analytics.