Hi there, happy Thursday!

Welcome to issue #38 of the Network Wrangler.

Today’s newsletter is a bit of a longer read than typical, but I think it’s worth the extra time, as I’ve received variations of the titular question many times. So let’s dive deeper into how intensely you should be working on your connections.

How Much Time Should You Spend Networking Weekly?

A little less than a year ago, I was in Helsinki, Finland. It was beginning to flurry outside, and I was launching into the Q&A section of my workshop on networking. We’d covered a lot of ground, and I was feeling good about the ground we’d covered so far.

But I knew there was that lingering question coming. It always comes up, it’s just a matter of who’s going to ask it.

Then, the hand I’d been expecting slowly raised up into the air at the back of the room.

I called on its owner, and she cleared her throat.

“But how much time is this all going to take?”

It’s the million-dollar question. What’s the appropriate amount of time to spend on networking efforts each week?

Trust and goodwill are the foundations of the social capital that energizes relationships, and they aren’t built overnight.

Instead, it takes a concerted and consistent effort to build up that social capital that will fuel all the network effects that we can leverage into referrals or opportunities or inspirations or innovations.

When it comes to networking, you clearly reap what you sow. There’s a direct correlation between the time you spend on it and what you get out of it.

And, as with anything big and daunting (life changes, anyone?), it makes sense to break it down into smaller pieces and pick the next best thing you can do and do it.

Let’s look at three different scenarios and how each plays out in terms of the amount of time you should be investing in networking.

By Quantity: Starting Anew or Starting Over

Are you making a major life pivot? Looking for a new job? Looking for a new place to live? Congratulations, you’ve been gifted the opportunity to build your network into unfamiliar places.

At this point, when you’re just starting out, it’s most important to measure the quantity of your efforts to build your network.

Keep in mind, there are no defined targets. You can’t just “do this much networking, and you’ll achieve your goal,” but you need to be making progress if you expect there to be any return on your efforts.

You do need a network, and you need to build your network and maintain it before you ask for something from it.

Therefore, you need to be networking consistently and continuously. If you’re starting from zero – i.e., you have not kept in touch with a single person, except in your immediate work area – then progress in building your network is any positive number starting as soon as you can, for as long as you can.

Progress is simply measured by quantity. You have two goals here: to connect with more people and to keep going. Set an appointment on your calendar for every week labeled “How many outreach efforts have I done this week?” If the number is more than zero, that is progress. Keep going.

By Quality: Reigniting Your Existing Network

Let’s say you already have a decent-sized network, and you’re simply looking to breathe life back into it again. In that case, your efforts should be focused on improving the quality of your relationships, not the quantity. Of course, this all assumes you know what you’re trying to get out of your network (leads? referrals? jobs? friends?) and from whom.

If you haven’t yet figured out what you’re trying to achieve from networking, get that work done first, or you’ll be wasting your time doing anything else.

Great, you already know who you want to have strong relationships with, so I recommend spending no less than two hours a week (that’s 20-30 minutes per business day) actively maintaining your network with these connections.

The activities you’ll spend your time engaged in look like the following:

• Personalize your business communications: These are the one or two personalized sentences in your regular business messages that elevate the interaction from a transaction to a connection. Ask about a recent trip. Inquire about their kids. Refer to the latest update from their favorite sport team. Any of these demonstrate you see them as more than the task at hand.

• Celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, and achievements: These are the easiest things to track in your calendar or CRM (Dex, anyone?) and are the perfect excuse to reach out and touch base to mark the occasion. Yes, they are lightweight, but it puts you front-and-center in their mind knowing you didn’t let the date go unremarked.

• Setting up check-in calls/coffees: Just as it says: ask for a short amount of time (15-30 minutes) in their calendar just to check in. In-person is great, but don’t let the tyranny of the shared table get in your way: catch-ups can be just as good done via ZOOM or phone call. It’s all about getting the time together.

• Soliciting/sharing feedback on past advice: Never underestimate the power of a well-placed follow-up to share what you did with a piece of advice you were given. Even if the outcome wasn’t what you wanted, that feedback is valuable to the person who gave it to you. First, you are setting yourself apart from the countless people who solicit advice but never circle ‘round to share what they did with it. Second, what came about because of the advice is so helpful to the person who gave it so they know whether it was any good (or needed to be updated/deleted. Third, it advances your connection into even deeper discussions because you’ve proved you value their input and strengthened your bond.

By Returns: Harvesting Your Network for Maximum Gains

There’s a rather well-cited study based on a survey of 12,000 business owners that found that those entrepreneurs who averaged 6.5 hours per week on networking activities (like those above) generated 50% of their business and leads off said networking efforts.

These businesspeople found greater success than the others by caring for and feeding their networks and relationships. In fact, this same study showed negligible returns on effort for those business owners who focused on other the aspects of their business and reported less than two hours of networking activity each week.

Put another way: relationships beat transactions.

Trust and goodwill are part of the social capital that energizes relationships, so if you want to succeed in business, you need to focus on these networking efforts more than any others. Since you’re at this advanced level of networking, you know who you need to target and why to bring more opportunities to your business.

Use a 1, 5 and 10 approach to determine your targets

While no one can say that any specific amount of effort will yield a specific result, use this formula as you create your funnel to determine your targets for leads and referrals:

• 1 new contact on average per day.
  If you bunch your outreach, this means 5 new contacts per week, or 20+ per month.

• 5 leads active at any one time.
  If your goal is to find new business, you should be talking to contacts at at least 5 companies at the same time. You should be connecting with people at more than one place at a time, and then at least be connecting to people at other companies, who may be influential enough to get you a solid lead or referral.

• 10 prospects to research at any one time.
  When you hear about an interesting opportunity at one company, try to find 10 similar opportunities to research and try to network into. At the very least, knowing what else is out there will make you more competitive for the one lead/referral in play. But more likely, your focused research on similar prospects will yield more live leads. By targeting 10 to research, you give yourself enough volume to get five (or more!) in play as prospects.

At this point, you are reaching out to a new connection on average every day. You are also following up and moving these relationships to referrals or opportunities. And then, you are following up on these opportunities to do more research and interviewing.

Expect all this activity to take 10+ hours a week.

This all falls squarely into the results of the study mentioned at the start that showed the optimum amount of networking time for a business person is 8-10 hours per week if you want to generate the majority of your work/sales off referrals.

Which category do you find yourself at today? Are you in a quantity game? A quality game? Or is it all about the returns?

It’s very easy to jump between categories, depending on your goals for your networking.

And if you don’t have any networking goals yet, I’d recommend you spend a couple of hours this weekend drafting some up.

The Feedback Loop Framework

I’m a big fan of Shane Parrish and his weekly FS Blog Newsletter which comes out on Sundays. I subscribe to the free version, and it’s packed with great stuff.

One of my favorite sections is his Mental Models, and he recently did a deep dive on Feedback Loops. I find this model is highly applicable to networking because of how complex a system our networks are.

Here’s what he has to say about feedback loops, followed by my own thoughts about how they apply to networking…

Applying feedback loops to your networking efforts, you’re able to see just what activities you’re undertaking are leading to the outcomes you seek.

Are your connection emails going unresponded to? Pick a different medium to reach out through (phone call, LinkedIn message, etc.)

Are your efforts to deepen your relationships falling flat? Try including more personalized questions in your communications, or if that’s not working, try providing more value to your connections in novel ways (sharing articles of interest, inviting to relevant events, etc.)

The point is you should be constantly monitoring the impact of your efforts when building and managing your networks. Do more of what works, and stop doing what doesn’t.

What’s something you’ve tried before that has worked well? Do more. What hasn’t really worked? Toss it in the bin and don’t do any more of that.

What other mental models do you think apply well to network wrangling? Drop me a note and let me know!

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