Your MVP Is Sitting on the Bench (Part 2)
How to build, nurture and maintain your most valuable personal asset
This is Part 2 of our post on building and nurturing your personal B2B network. In Part 1, we covered why building a healthy personal list of B2B contacts should be at the top of your to-do list. In this post, 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.
Get your $hit together.
The first step in building your personal B2B network is gathering all your contacts into a format that will be easy to download into your contact database. As a Mac user, I leveraged Numbers and created a spreadsheet as a starting point before building my database, but any spreadsheet program will do (Excel, Rows, etc.).
Start with your LinkedIn Connections. As I mentioned previously, not many of your LinkedIn contacts will likely have emails visible in their account. For me, it was less than 3%. That’s OK; it’s a place to start. For detailed instructions on downloading your LinkedIn Connections, follow the steps here.
Next up, pull the contacts from your phone and computer. I have all of my communications in the Contacts app on my Mac. For Windows, the process will be similar. Unfortunately, these are in vCard format as .vcf files. However, you can drag and drop them by selecting multiple contacts and dragging them into your spreadsheet.
You may have other sources of contact information, and now is the time to drop those into your spreadsheet. While Facebook, Instagram, and X (Twitter) permit exports, you won’t find any email addresses from your contacts from these networks, so I won’t cover it here.
Once your contacts are loaded into your spreadsheet, it’s time to clean it up. This is the fun part, but it’s about to get a little geeky up in here … 🤓
Please clean it up.
For my export, I found a ton of duplicates. Fortunately, once in a spreadsheet, this is easy to navigate. I ordered the contacts by last name and then first name. The video below shows that in action. You’ll see that I chose to use Google Sheets for my cleanup, but you can use Numbers or any spreadsheet application you like if it offers a Sort function. I created a simple spreadsheet formula to find all the duplicates for me. This formula looks at the next row and, if identical, flags it. Here’s what I used:
=IF(AND(A3=A4,B3=B4),TRUE, FALSE)
Here’s a little example that I whipped up to order some sample records and test the duplicate detection formula before I used it on my contact list:
You’re now ready to make sure that your emails are good. This is an essential move before entering them into your database.
You gotta check them.
Checking your emails before entering them into your database will help keep your account white-listed and bolster your reputation within the email database that you’re using. There are plenty of great choices for this process, and most are inexpensive. I paid $10 to verify my list of about 935 emails. I received 5,000 credits (1 credit per email address), so I have plenty left over for future validations.
For my list, I used DeBounce. I uploaded my contacts list as a CSV file to the service. From there, the service checked for bounce, disposable, spam-trap, and deactivated emails. Here are the results from my list
:
My contacts list was returned with valid and invalid address details. From there, it was easy to grab the good ones and dump the rest.
According to DeBounce:
30% of emails go wrong in just one year
If over 10% of your emails are wrong, then less than 44% are delivered
There are good reasons to go through this step. You’re now ready to move your contacts from a spreadsheet to a place that will make it easier to maintain them as part of your daily activity.
Choose a home for your MVP
Now that your contacts are in a spreadsheet, you have endless possibilities. It’s now time to find a permanent home for your contacts where you’ll nurture, grow, and maintain your database. Depending on how you plan to interact with your audience, you have a few good options to consider. Some of the most common include:
An email marketing platform
A newsletter platform
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform
Email marketing platforms like MailChimp and Constant Contact are great options if you occasionally send mass emails to your audience. These platforms offer design templates, personalization, and measurement tools that make staying in touch with your audience easy.
A newsletter platform, like Substack (the one I’m using), is an excellent option if you plan to build a community and need an easy-to-use platform to build out regular email communications to your audience. If you want to dive deeper into newsletters, check out The Ultimate Guide to Newsletters from Trends. There’s a ton here to absorb.
I chose Substack for this newsletter primarily because of its simplicity. The platform offers a web portal (for building a community), analytics, and campaign tools. It was easy to start up.
If you plan to start a business, give your future self a tremendous head start by putting your contacts into a CRM. There are some great options out there from companies like Hubspot and Salesforce.
I chose to place my contacts into the free version of Hubspot. The free Hubspot platform offers a good deal of capability at zero cost. As my needs shift, they provide additional capabilities, like automation, at reasonable prices.
The most important thing is to do something with your contacts that enables you to manage them and keep them up to date. All of the above options are good alternatives. You need to choose the one that best aligns with your needs.
Don’t be annoying.
Now that you’ve found a home for your contacts, it’s time to nurture and grow your B2B contacts list. The key to making this effort successful is to provide value and to follow some general guidelines. Here’s the approach that I take:
Give before you ask. It’s important to give back and provide value to your network. This approach will keep your audience reading your content and help you grow as your audience shares with their contacts.
Don’t overcommunicate. You’ve built a robust communications platform that connects you to your B2B audience. It’s essential not to take advantage of it. You are posting original content once a week, which is a good cadence for this audience. Other posts on social, for example, can be more frequent but are done intentionally. For a bit more on this, Hootsuite offers some guidance in this post.
Don’t constantly sell. It’s OK to sell into your personal B2B network - that’s probably one of the reasons you’ve built it. However, do it intentionally and sparingly. When possible, add value versus simply selling.
Do provide value. Most of your content should include exciting and valuable things for your network. Doing this will increase your open and engagement rates, and your audience will naturally grow.
Don’t auto-subscribe. Sending out emails and regular communications is OK. Emails should include an opt-out vehicle (most providers have this capability baked in). But if you're writing a newsletter, don’t auto-subscribe your contacts. Give your audience the ability to opt in.
Do use AI, but with “human-in-the-loop.” In an upcoming post, we will tackle automation and AI tools for marketing and salespeople. Some of the tools available are incredible and can save time while helping you acquire new contacts. However, use them intelligently. AI with human-in-the-loop is an excellent practice to follow. This means watching over what your AI and automated processes are doing carefully. Test automation with small groups first before launching to all.
Comment, Like, and Subscribe.
Hopefully, this two-part article on building, nurturing, and growing your personal B2B network has been helpful. Please comment below and share your experience. Next week, we’ll tackle a big one by leveraging AI to help you manage, nurture, and grow your fresh list of B2B contacts.
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.