Had a pretty productive day yesterday on the outreach side.
And one of the main reasons is because my network started to kick in.
What do I mean by that?
Well, when you’re trying to do sales, research a new industry, find a job, anything – there’s generally two forms of outreach: cold and warm.
Cold meaning you’re reaching out to someone who has never heard of you, and warm meaning someone has made an introduction or passed your name along to that person.
As you can imagine, warm introductions and outreach always goes better.
When I started looking into another revenue stream for Visto a few weeks ago, it started slower. Especially since I didn’t really know anyone in the industry we’re looking into, so I didn’t have many people I could call.
I did do some cold outreach, but it wasn’t overly successful.
Instead, it’s still always worth working towards warm intros. So what I did was reached out to anyone I could in my network and asked if THEY knew anyone in the industry.
Of course, since everyone has more important things to do than make intros for me, it didn’t happen overnight. But over the last 2-3 weeks, I was able to have some email, phone and text conversations with people I know who started reaching out to people THEY knew, to see if those people would talk to me.
And this week, a bunch of those requests landed and resulted in calls with people who already heard about me and so they were willing to take some time and provide helpful feedback.
While it’s not an overnight win – most wins in business don’t happen overnight anyway – it’s the most effective way to do these things in my opinion, because a warm intro will 9.9 times out of 10 lead to a far more productive call than a cold call.
Not to say you should ignore cold calling, but always put in the effort and play the long game to get warm intros.
Another reason to always be building your network, too…
Want to hear of another reason? Well, this week I had the cool opportunity to guest on a promising entrepreneurship podcast.
And I found it extra interesting for two reasons:
First, because it was for a Romanian podcast, and I always like talking to people from around the world (especially because I work in the immigration space).
I was given the opportunity thanks to an intro from someone in my network, as the podcaster was looking to interview entrepreneurs in Canada to branch out from his current niche of only interviewing those inside Romania.
Remember, your network is your networth 😉
Second, because we quickly came to realize that doing business is a pretty universal language. Doesn’t matter where you are in the world, a lot of the same principles apply.
Of course there are some differences, especially around how you might market and sell in different parts of the world, but a lot of the rest is the same.
He had some really interesting questions too:
- when is the right time to go all-in on a business?
- when is the right time to hire your first employee?
- how do Canadian entrepreneurs grow – personally and in business – over time?
- how do Canadian entrepreneurs balance work and life?
And more.
I enjoyed answering them and will share the episode once it goes live.
In the meantime, if you’re curious to hear my thoughts on any of those, or other business questions, make sure to join my email list and let me know.
Always happy to get questions because it allows me to help you even more, and also gives me easy content ideas – 2 birds, 1 stone!
Have a great day and keep grinding.
