How To Stay In Touch With Professional Contacts

I’m always on the lookout for articles about networking. Here are a few snippets:

Maintaining a strong professional network offers many benefits. You can learn something new, help others, exchange information, and even open the doors to your next big opportunity.

I’ve been a big believer in networking since the start of my career. One of my first jobs after college came through an alumnus from my university. Many years later, the first job I had after moving to London came through a colleague’s friend, who got my resume directly into the hands of the hiring manager. Even now, most of my client engagements come through my professional network.

Creating a strong network doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires time, effort, and intention to build and maintain healthy relationships. It starts with first understanding the different types of contacts in your network and then creating simple habits to stay in touch with them.

3 Types Of Contacts Exist

If you were to take a snapshot of every single person you’ve ever come across in your life, each person would fall into one of three, mutually exclusive categories at a time. First, cold contacts with whom you have no ongoing regular contact. Second, warm contacts—the people you’ve been in touch with recently. And finally, hot contacts—those you’re in active back-and-forth communication about something relevant to one or both of you.

It turns out most people in your life have become cold contacts. No one can stay in touch with every single person out there. But unfortunately, going from cold to hot is difficult. Just think about a long-lost colleague or friend who hasn’t been in touch with you for years but suddenly reaches out because they need something from you. This sort of behavior doesn’t tend to land well.

Make A Habit Of Keeping Key Contacts Warm

The reality is that you can’t keep every contact warm. However, certain categories of contacts should probably be at the top of your list, including former managers and colleagues, recruiters, those working at companies of interest, mentors, mentees, alumni, and other influential individuals in your sector with strong networks themselves. You need a way to keep these key contacts warm, especially when you don’t need anything from them.

One way to consistently keep certain contacts warm in your network is to make it a routine so you can do it without it involving too much effort or friction. Much research has been done on habit formation, and books like The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg or Atomic Habits by James Clear indicate that forming new habits involves a cue, routine, and payoff. It turns out that the cue is often the most important part of forming new habits.

If you’re not used to regularly keeping your contacts warm, creating clear cuing mechanisms can help you more effectively manage your network.

LinkedIn Notifications Can Trigger Reconnections

Some of the simplest ways to cue yourself to reconnect with people are built into LinkedIn with notification prompts, which you can turn on by doing the following:

1. Go to your Notifications settings and select “Connecting with others”
2. Toggle on “Allow connections related notifications.”
3. Turn on the types of notifications you want to receive. Three good places to start are: 1) Updates from your network, 2) Updates from people you know, 3) Birthdays and job anniversaries

Then, you’ll automatically receive notifications (push, in-app, and/or email) whenever someone posts or shares something, has a birthday, starts a new job, or crosses a work anniversary milestone. You can also set a recurring appointment with yourself with a direct link to your LinkedIn Notifications tab, when you see these updates from connections in your network.

Focus On What You Can Control

When reconnecting with people, remember that some people will respond while others will not. Some relationships will get rekindled, while others will not. Be prepared for your attempts at warming up a contact to result in exchanging a few pleasantries, followed by the connection fizzling out again.

Don’t worry. It happens all the time, and it’s okay. Try not to take it too personally. In the worst-case scenario, you’ve done what you can to warm up a contact, which is all you can control. Whether the other person responds in kind is completely up to them. In my experience, most people are not the best at staying in touch.

Keeping your network warm doesn’t always amount to anything in the near term, but you never really know how things will pan out. Sure, you could get lucky when an opportunity suddenly arises after reconnecting with a cold contact for the first time in years. But more often, the best opportunities emerge from a series of consistent efforts you’ve made to stay in touch with someone over the years, often in ways you could never have predicted.

Want to know more? Head on over to the full article here for more ideas and perspectives. Afterwards, why not drop me an email to share your thoughts at [email protected] ; or call me on 0467 749 378.

Thanks,

Robert