Professional Networking: Best Tips & Tools To Elevate Your Professional Networking

"Success in business is all about making connections" - Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group. The richer your professional network, the stronger your competitive advantage becomes in your professional career or business. In this article, we'll reveal essential networking tips and tools for leveraging your professional relationships to achieve your goals.

Professional Relationship Radar

With so many new connections at work, events and tech conferences, we need to optimise our time in the most beneficial way. By using our proprietary framework Professional Relationship Radar, you can strategically cultivate professional relationships with the greatest impact to time investment ratio.

When meeting a new contact, we tend to make an initial judgement on the degree of opportunity or risk arising from our interaction:

Green - High Opportunity: significant mutual synergies can arise from collaboration, such as exchange of relevant knowledge, investment opportunities, warm introductions to potential clients, mentorship, job referrals etc. These relationships are reciprocal, where contacts are willing and able to create value for each other.

Yellow - Neither Opportunity nor Risk: very few immediate synergies for one or both sides. For example, you can be both brilliant professionals working in unrelated industries or simply be at different stages of your career. These contacts sometimes can become a high opportunity in the future.

Red - High Risk: some synergies accompanied by alarming red flags like unethical, unreliable, corrupt or manipulative behaviour. These red flags may either appear during your communication or be circulated by word of mouth. Cultivating these relationships may have undesirable consequences, for instance onboarding investors with questionable origins of capital can create problems with follow-on rounds.

When managing your professional network, mainly prioritise contacts in the green zone. Also engaging with contacts in the yellow zone can be exciting, broaden your perspective and sometimes lead to synergies in the future.

Top 5 Professional Networking Tips

By using our Professional Relationship Radar, you’ll know which types of professional relationships to prioritise. To unlock synergies and build meaningful relationships with high opportunity contacts, try out the following five networking tips:

1. Personalise cold reach-outs

If it’s not possible to get warm introductions to relevant people, you can reach out directly via email, LinkedIn or messenger apps. However, given that these professionals may be receiving an enormous amount of requests, keep your message personalised and to the point. Specifically, articulate why you’re reaching out to them and highlight mutual synergies. For example, sending mass emails to venture capital funds, without stating why you are approaching this fund and furthermore, why you are contacting this particular investor, will result in your email being reported as spam or even blocked.

2. Take notes

No matter how many professional networking chats you have in a year, it's essential to record the key details. Grab a notepad or notes app during your chat, or if you're caught empty-handed, spare a few minutes afterwards to jot down the valuable takeaways. For a more streamlined approach, consider leveraging a CRM software. To help you choose an ideal CRM, check out our article on Which Type of CRM is Best for You?

3. Follow up promptly

After a memorable conversation where you identified synergies, send a personalised follow-up promptly. This showcases great organisation skills, thoughtfulness and attention to detail. By displaying genuine interest, the follow-up feels less transactional and puts you on their radar.

4. Keep in touch

While having one-time networking conversations can be valuable, cultivating long-lasting professional relationships is where the real power lies. As Heidi Roizen, a Silicon Valley executive, explained in a Harvard Business School case, “If a relationship is built on performance and consistency, you can actually get by with fewer interactions and still maintain a very good relationship”. So, instead of scheduling a catch-up call each month, you can:

Engage on LinkedIn: when green zone contacts post on LinkedIn, express your support by commenting, liking and sharing. This reminds them that you’re invested in their success without being overbearing. If they’re announcing a big achievement, don’t hesitate to directly congratulate them.

Share valuable information: if you read an insightful article or spot an opportunity that is relevant to one of your contacts, proactively share it. Where possible, double check that they haven't already come across it.

Make warm introductions: there are two golden rules for setting up a successful warm introduction. First, make sure there are synergies for both parties, and no single person disproportionately benefits while the other loses time. Second, ask each person for consent to the warm introduction. These steps will prevent awkward situations, where one contact ignores the introduction or gives you direct feedback that it’s not relevant or simply the wrong timing. Tip: by using a CRM software or mailbox add-on tools like Streak, you can create templates for warm introductions. This will save time and keep things streamlined.

Show appreciation: when someone goes out of their way to support you, for example by offering a relevant warm introduction, don't forget to thank them and share a brief update on the outcome. Don’t forget to return the favour in the future.

Remember special occasions: set reminders to congratulate the most important contacts in your network on occasions like birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, anniversaries. Tip: add public holiday calendars for the countries where most of your professional network is based. This way you would avoid sending emails on regional holidays or at least forgetting to congratulate them in your email with a short line e.g. “Happy Women’s Day”.

5. Establish reciprocity

To cultivate a strong professional relationship, the support you provide and receive should balance out in the long term. By proactively offering help, sharing expertise or making relevant warm introductions, you showcase value and solidify your position in the green zone of your contacts’ radars. However, if you end up creating value for contacts initially labelled as high opportunity, who have the resources but turn out to lack the motivation to return favours, reconsider your time investment.

Essential Professional Networking Tools

Now that you have leveraged our Professional Relationship Radar framework and cultivated meaningful relationships with the five professional networking tips, test out some tools to further grow and organise your professional network.

1. Community-Building Platforms

Want to meet new people with shared interests? Looking to fill your social calendar with fun, yet professionally-beneficial events? Take advantage of these community-building platforms to grow your professional network:

Locals.org - app for UK tech meetups
Meetup.com - app for events for people with shared interests and hobbies
Eventbrite - follow relevant organisers to receive event alerts
Slack workspaces - join specialised Slack communities like “Women in VC” and install the Donut app to facilitate warm introductions
LinkedIn Events - find recommended Events via the My Network/Discover tab and opt-in for email notifications

2. CRMs for Professional Contact Management

The larger your professional network, the harder it is to leverage it without a CRM software. CRM tools can help you centralise, organise and supercharge your professional network to achieve your relationship management goals. There are various types of CRMs on the market for contact management, including no-code CRMs, personal CRMs, and industry-specific CRMs. Feeling lost already? Take a look at our article on Which Type of CRM is Best for You? to find your ideal solution.