There are two kinds of people in this world…
The well-connected and the well… not-so-well-connected.
And before you bemoan your lot in life and complain about how everyone else seems to have high-level connections to A-listers in your industry (and you don’t), let me let you in on a little secret.
No one is born with a good network.
Unless your first name is Barron and your last name is Trump…OK, then you are born with a good network.
(And yes, Donald Trump really did name one of his kids “Barron.”)
But for the most part, no one comes out of the womb with a gold-plated Rolodex.
You need to create your network – and you can.
I’ve done this multiple times in my career – from Washington D.C. to Hollywood to Silicon Valley to building my reputation as a thought leader online.
Each time… I knew no one. I built relationships one at a time.
You can go from ‘knowing no one’ to having strong relationships with many of the top influencers in your field.
… even if you know nobody today, even if you feel like you don’t have anything to offer, even if you don’t know where to start.
Now, let me share another secret behind how I’ve built relationships with key VIPs in various industries…
Introductions.
I don’t mean I go out and twist arms to get others to introduce me to new people – I mean I go out and introduce other people.
When you introduce other people to new and valuable people who they should know, a certain percentage of those people will return the favor. And your network will grow.
And grow. And grow.
If you want to get introduced to key players in your industry, then you need to start introducing others. (Click to tweet.)
I’m always on the hunt for new tools that make introductions easier and faster.
Because the faster you make introductions, the more you can make, and the more introductions you will benefit from in return.
Recently, I’ve been playing around with an amazing new tool: Entro.io.
I have referred to this on Twitter as the ‘Holy Grail’ of email introduction software because it allows you to create automated, double-blind introductions.
[Full disclosure: at the time I originally wrote this blog post, I had no affiliation with the company, but I recently agreed to be an advisor because I use the product so extensively and wanted to help see that they are successful.]
It’s a Gmail plugin that sits right in your Gmail and allows you to make introductions quickly and painlessly.
Here’s the typical problem: you want to introduce two people who you think should know each other.
But you’re not 100% sure they would welcome the introduction, so you need to ask them both first.
So you need to write up two different emails to both people. Then you need to wait for a response, and sometimes one of them doesn’t respond so you need to remember to follow up.
Then, finally, they both respond and you need to write up a 3rd email with much of the same information introducing both of them.
And of course you can’t remember the exact URL for one of them so you need to go search for that, and before you know it 45 minutes have gone by and you’ve been watching videos of cats chasing goldfish the whole time.
When you make a lot of introductions like I do, coordinating introductions is a huge headache.
Here’s a short video showing you how it works:
I’ve been in touch with the creator, Seth Gold, and I’m impressed with what he’s built so far. It’s not perfect, but they are improving and I suspect it will get much better in the months ahead.
UPDATE: Entro’s founder Seth created a special promotion just for my readers.� If you enter ‘smallbizrev’ in the promocode section when you sign up for a trial, you will get 60 days to try it out free.