nermio
Try it free

Winning customers

After the networking event: from card to customer

Why most cards come to nothing, what to send within two days, and how to still know who someone was a year later.

About 5 minutes to read

Illustration: business cards landing in a contact list

The pile in your jacket pocket

A networking event produces twelve conversations and eight cards. Two weeks later you remember who three of them were, and what you agreed with none of them.

That isn't a lack of networking skill. It's what happens to information that lives only in your head: after three days half of it has gone, and after two weeks the card is a name with no context.

The evening itself is the easy part. The return is in the two days afterwards.

That same evening: three words per card

Before you go to bed, or in the car before you drive off. Three words per contact that will put you back in the conversation later: *looking for engineers, Leeds, knows Hollis.*

That isn't admin, it's two minutes. And it's the difference between a contact and a name.

Put it straight where you'll find it again. A photo of the card in your camera roll isn't a place — that's the same pile, just digital.

Within two days: one message

Not after a week, because by then they've forgotten you too. Two days is about right: long enough not to look eager, short enough that they still remember the conversation.

One rule makes the difference: mention something from the conversation itself. Not "good to meet you yesterday", but "you mentioned you're looking for two more engineers — I know someone who's just solved that problem".

And don't ask for anything big. No meeting, no quote. At most: shall we have a call sometime. A first message that asks for an hour of someone's time rarely gets answered.

What to record

Four things, and they fit in thirty seconds:

  • Where you met them and when. That's your opening a year from now: "we met at the event in Leeds".
  • What they do, in their words. Not their job title but what they're actually working on.
  • Who they know. Networking contacts are more often useful as a route to someone else than as a customer.
  • When you'll come back. A task with a date, even if that date is four months out.

The slow rhythm

Most networking contacts aren't customers and won't be for a while. That's normal and no reason to drop them.

Sending something they can use two or three times a year is enough to stay in view. Send something every month and you get filtered out; send nothing ever again and you don't exist.

That "something" needn't be much: an article that fits their problem, the name of someone who can help them, or simply asking how the thing they were stuck on turned out.

How you know whether it's working

Record where every new customer came from. One field, one choice from a short list.

After a year you can see whether networking works for you or not. That's a more honest answer than the feeling you come away with — networking evenings feel productive when they often aren't, and occasionally the other way round.

For a business with no employees, which is three in four UK businesses, that one field is the only marketing research that's ever going to happen. Which makes it worth the two seconds.

Sources