I asked my coach Johnny this question a few weeks ago:
‘I feel that I have an overwhelming number of professional contacts. I have a ton of great relationships – but I let them atrophy over time. I can’t seem to find the right way to identify and keep in touch with the right people!’
Johnny’s response:
Karma baby. If you want to build the strength of your network – selflessly help folks out. It will come back to you in spades – but don’t do it for that reason – do it because you want to help.
Johnny had recent run a 30-day trial where he did 30 favors. He noticed one flaw – reaching out and saying ‘I am doing favors and you have been chosen – what would you like’ doesn’t work well. It often gets back a joke response, an ‘I’m all set’, etc. Better to get your own creative juices flowing and be pro-active about how you can help.
Personal Reciprocation Management System
This was a powerful idea – and it’s inspired me to created a trial of a ‘Personal Reciprocation Management System.’ Here is how it works.
Identify your Peeps
The first step for me was identifying who I wanted to keep up with professional and personally. I wanted to find the people who mattered – I could help them and they could help me. I found an excellent piece of software – ConnectedHQ - that helped me suck in and merge all of my email/Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/etc. contacts. I went through every single one and starred the key people. I came up with 112 of them – and I will allow this to grow a bit but need to keep it to a reasonable size for this to work – maybe 200 max?
Make a Contact Schedule
Twice a year feels like a reasonable contact period for these key people. So 112*2/50 weeks per year = 5 contacts per week – growing to perhaps 10 as the list grows. It took me about an hour to reach out to 6 people today, and I expect it will take another hour of followup on those contact points over the week.
So I filtered contacts in ConnectedHQ by time (who haven’t I spoke with in a while) and picked 6 people I could help now. I helped them out – then used ConnectedHQ to set up a 6 month reminder. I’ll do this every week until everyone has a reminder – then I’ll simply contact the people who come up by reminder each week.
Help Them Out
This was the key to it all. I had previously thought of implementing such a system as a ‘here’s what’s up with me, what’s up with you’ mechanism. There isn’t much joy or value there. During this exercise I helped each and every one of them move forward in their business or life. Small things count. Here are some of the things I did today or will think of doing in the future:
- Offer to make an introduction to someone you think they should meet.
- Provide some constructive commentary on a new venture, direction, of piece of content they have created.
- Pass on some piece of content or news that you think is critical for them.
- Pass on their content to your readership.
- Review their content.
- Introduce them to a potential client.
- etc.
Nothing on that list takes hours or days – that wouldn’t work. These are short, meaningful, and thoughtful actions that may help someone move forward.
It’s Hard – But Feels Awesome
This is going to be tough. It’s an act of creative thinking to come up with a way to help someone out that’s real, not contrived, and reasonably easy to execute on. But once you do – the feeling is pretty sweet. I just reached out to six people I know and found a small way to help them move forward. Fucking awesome.
Will this stand the test of time? Too soon to tell – would love to hear as others experiment with it.
