Business Insight Zone

I’ve faced down a few stacks of collected business cards like that one in my time, and a friend asked me to talk about this subject, so I thought I’d share my process here.

1. Collect information at the event. Business cards are still useful, in their way. So is a pocket notebook to jot things down while you’re talking to a new person — including their basic contact information, if they’ve run out of cards. Since I’m a heavy Twitter user and often have a smartphone with me, I’ll follow a new acquaintance on Twitter right then and there if it’s appropriate.
2. When you get home, clear your desk and clear some time for following up.
3. On the newly-cleared expanse of my desk, I spread out the cards from the conference in neat rows. Something about doing this helps me to focus on each card individually, while keeping in mind how many follow-ups I have to do in the allotted time.
4. If I’ve collected a ton of cards, the law of averages suggests that there may be a few from folks I already know or (rarely) don’t care to know better. For speed’s sake, I sweep through the entire grid of cards on my desk and pull out all of these discards (dis-cards?) at once. I keep them in case I need to consult them later, but I file them away in a big plastic binder of a type that Kevin Kelly recommended a few years ago on Cool Tools. I don’t alphabetize the cards or anything — I just tuck each card into the next available slot. (The few times I’ve needed to go back to this binder for reference, it’s been easy enough to find the right card based on the mass of cards around it from people I met at the same time.)
5. Optional step for those as obsessive enslaved to instant gratification orderly as me: tidy the remaining cards into fewer rows. You’ll feel a nice little rush of instant productivity
6. I trawl through my social networks looking for the people whose information is on the remaining cards. I may follow them on Twitter, request to be a contact on LinkedIn, (rarely) request to be Facebook friends, add their blog’s RSS feed to my reader, or any combination of these. Typically I just open up all of these networks at once in a tabbed browser and rotate through them as I handle one person at a time across all networks.
7. After I’ve located a given person on each relevant network, I write them an e-mail or make some other sort of contact via social media. Easiest of all are the people who specifically asked for follow-up on some business issue: you write them an e-mail, remind them of your conversation, and let them know that you’re also following them on Twitter (or wherever) to make it easy to stay in touch. (This would also be a good time to make an entry in your CRM, if it’s relevant.) But even if there’s no immediate business reason to connect, you can comment on one of their blog posts or Flickr pictures, respond to one of their tweets, or, if you can do it sincerely, broadcast a tweet recommending them to your friends, like this: “Met @JohnDoe at the XYZ conference this weekend. Super-nice guy, a pro’s pro in project management, well worth following.” They won’t soon forget that.
8. Finally, you file away each card as you’re done with it. One of my favorite aspects of my process here is that it’s so easy to see your progress as the grid of cards on your desk shrinks and shrinks. (I told you I like instant gratification.)
9. Extra credit: set yourself a reminder to follow up with your favorites from the conference at intervals after the inital contact — say 10 days, 25 days, and 45 days. Don’t make it a mechanical exercise; use it as an opportunity to remember why you liked them the first time, and then really re-connect about something that’s important to you both.

Now, over to you: what do YOU do to follow up with the people you meet at a conference?

~

Photo by J Aaron Farr.

All going according to plan, I’ll put up a series of posts in the next couple of weeks about using social media in a job search. I’ve been thinking of this both because (a) lots of people use Hoover’s information to help them look for work, and, (b) since I spend my days immersed in the business uses of social media, friends who are looking for work sometimes turn to me for advice about how to use it better.

When I was talking to a friend about this earlier today, I ran into probably the most common objection I hear about professional networking. In so many words:

How do I build my professional network without imposing myself on others and pestering them for favors?

It’s a good question. Many people I know want to succeed in their careers, but don’t want to be seen as grasping or needy. So how do you bridge that divide?

Here’s what I conveyed to my friend — the same advice I’ve given a number of times before:

THE secret to networking for folks who are reticent to ask for help: make it about LEARNING from others and OFFERING help.

I believe you can be helpful even when you don’t have a job or many contacts — by answering questions, by promoting others’ good work, or simply by offering moral support. Plus, in my own experience and in what I’ve observed for others, you can often quickly develop contacts — and land jobs — based on your willingness to listen to others, learn from them, and offer help without any kind of quid pro quo.

What do you think? How do you build your professional network?

~

Image by Think London.

And why wouldn’t they? Folks in the Twin Cities know quality when they see it.

Researching Companies
The Internet is a marvelous resource for digging out facts about prospective employers. Just make sure to choose the right tools.

. . .

[C]onsider the results from a recent survey of senior human resources, finance and marketing leaders at some of the nation’s largest companies. In that report, leaders said the biggest single mistake job applicants made was a lack of demonstrated knowledge about their companies. That single miscue outpaced the second-place answer – a lack of preparedness to discuss skills and experience – by a ratio of nearly 3-to-1.

. . .

While information provider Hoovers (www.hoovers.com) has a comprehensive listing of public companies, it also provides good data about leaders, markets, financials and competitors of large and midsized private firms. . . .

Give it a read — plenty of good tips in there for job-searchers.

~

Related:

• Using Hoover’s in your job search — for free.
• JoblessJoe: when the going gets tough, the tough MAKE something.
• Hoover’s Jobseeker Reports

~

The easy answer is “Everyone.”

But maybe your C-grade sellers don’t need training. Maybe they need to be shown the door instead. (Tibor Shanto suggests as much in this post.)

Maybe your A-grade performers get frustrated by training that’s below their level but mandatory-for-everyone-no-exceptions. And maybe they have a right to be. Must it be mandatory? For every last person? If it’s not a compliance issue, think it through again.

But step outside the strata of A-, B-, and C-performers. What if some of your marketers need sales training? Or your engineers? What if your A+ seller is only a C+ public speaker, but wants to climb the executive ranks? What if you have a great HR person who would benefit from training in finance? Or vice versa?

Probably everyone does need training — it just might not be in the area you think. And they need it even (especially?) when times are tight. Especially if you’re making do with fewer hands on deck, make sure they have the knowledge and skills they need to keep the ship sailing.

What are you doing to keep your organization’s skills sharp in tough times?

~

Photo by Rob Shenk, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Job hunting is hard enough — but this part’s a piece of cake.

Step 1: Go to our free “Generate Custom Lists” page. There, you can build a list of companies you’d like to target for your job search. You can refine the search according to U.S. metro area, U.S. state, or country . . .

[Click on images to see full-size screenshots.]

. . . by company size, in terms of employees or sales or both . . .

. . . and by industry, based on Hoover’s own tailored industry categories, or by SIC or NAICS codes.

Click the gold “BUILD LIST” button at the bottom of the page, and the search tool will return all the relevant results, sorted alphabetically. You’ll be able to view the first ten results in your search for free. Here, for example, we see the results for a search of software companies over $50 million in annual sales that are headquartered in Austin:

Step 2: View the individual records to find out more about companies that are relevant to you.

(Advanced tip: use a tabbed browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 to open each relevant record in a separate tab, then work your way through them one by one.)

Here, I’ve clicked on our record for Borland Software:

Note the circled areas: you can click through to read more about the company’s business, to get phone, fax, and URL info, or to see recent financials. (There’s lots more available, too — feel free to explore.)

Step3: Review job listings on each company’s record.

(Note that the jobs listed for a company may be for other locations besides the headquarters city.)

Optional Step 4 — not free but low-cost: If you know the industry you want to target, you can get a Hoover’s industry report tailored for jobseekers’ needs for just $15. Follow this link to find out more.

~

Easy enough, eh?

I’d love to know what you think of this method. Is it helpful to you?

~

It may be a case of spring fever.

Ever have one of those weeks when you work like crazy but finish very little?

*raises hand*

So, here are varied items of interest to launch you into the (U.S.) long weekend.

~ ~ ~

>> Three IPOs in the span of a week? Pinch me! – And not just three IPOs, which makes for a tidal wave of activity relative to what we’ve seen lately, but three successful IPOs. DigitalGlobe, SolarWinds, and OpenTable all made a good showing in their market debuts between May 14 and May 21, which may encourage other would-be public companies to come forward (or, at least, encourage those with NamesLikeThis).

From the end of last summer until this spring, the IPO market has been mired in an awful slump — worse than anything in many years. But maybe we’re seeing the right baby steps as the market gets its feet back under it.

Related:

• A (relative) flurry of activity in the IPO market.
• Silicon Valley, the IPO drought, and the culture of innovation.

~ ~ ~

>> Looking for work? Want to make a difference in the world? — Change.org has launched an initiative it calls Jobs for Change. Danny Moldovan, who heads the program, told me that “Our goal is to recruit more people into careers in service, and we’re currently working to build the largest database available of jobs in the nonprofit, government, and social enterprise sectors.”

The project is backed by several nonprofit groups and employs its own career advisers to offer advice to job-seekers. It also lists jobs in various categories. I know lots of job-seekers who are having to get creative with their career planning — who knows but what some of them will end up in the not-for-profit sector, earning a living  while trying to make the world a better place?

Related:

• JoblessJoe: when the going gets tough, the tough MAKE something.

~ ~ ~

>> Some of the biggest turnarounds happen the fastest. — That’s the punchline of an article at Slate’s “Big Money” site that centers on Sergio Marchionne’s turnaround of Fiat. To be honest, the article could have benefited from a lot more detail on the turnarounds at Fiat, H-P, and Boeing, but the moral of the story still hits home:

Just as bad management can erase billions of dollars of value (think of the $36 billion that Daimler paid for Chrysler), good management can create it, and often more quickly than you’d expect. One difference between the best CEOs and the worst is that the good ones work at a faster pace. Murdering a major company can take many years of painstaking ineptitude. Successfully turning it around takes much more skill but sometimes less time.

Go back and look at other great turnarounds, e.g. Gerstner’s at IBM, or Jobs’s return to Apple. They don’t happen overnight — but they don’t take ten years, either.

How long are YOU taking to turn things around for yourself or your company?

Related:

• Mark Hurd’s 3-minute management clinic.
• The turnaround CEO — what to look for.

~ ~ ~

>> Ursula Burns will succeed Anne Mulcahy as CEO of Xerox. — Three great things about this: (1) a woman is succeeding a woman running an old-school, business-to-business enterprise (I’m sure Tom Peters approves!). (2) Burns is the first African American woman to head a Fortune 500 company. (3) The succession comes as absolutely no surprise, since Burns has been groomed for this role for years.

Thinking of turnarounds, there was a time, not so many years ago, when Xerox needed one desperately. It got it, thanks to Mulcahy and Burns, and it looks to be in good hands going forward.

Related:

• CEO succession — successes and failures.

~ ~ ~

>> When the going gets tough, the really tough grow market share. — Cisco has talked openly about its ambitions to “move with a speed nobody has ever attempted” into dozens of new areas. This piece from The Register talks about the networking giant’s grand design, which is founded in its existing expertise in moving huge amounts of data traffic across wired and wireless networks.

Mostly, I just love Cisco’s chutzpah. It could sit on its laurels, quietly dominating one or more areas of networking. Instead, it’s taking advantage of (a) the market downturn, (b) its own technical prowess, and (c) a monstrous pile of cash to elbow aside competitors in areas likely to grow rapidly for years to come.

Pulling it off will take some doing — but if any company is likely to do it, it’s Cisco.

Related:

• Disorganization Negates Talent.

~

Photo by Brendon, used under a Creative Commons license.