Building Valuable Connections in LinkedIn. Step II

In the Step 1 ( read here ) I shared how to make an impact in the first step in establishing a connection. In this post, I will share my experience and learning how to build the connection further.

Building the connection:

After you have made the first stride in establishing the connection in LinkedIn, don’t just let the connection remain a number in your network. Building a meaningful connection in LinkedIn is the same as building a personal relationship. You need to give time and effort in knowing the connection, letting the other person also know you equally well, finding mutual interests, offering to help each other in any capacity you can and apart from just professional interests finding and maintaining a personal level connection goes a long way in sustaining the connection.

After your connection request was accepted by the other person, reach out to the connection to either meet personally or on video call. When you meet or speak, make sure you not just ask questions about the person trying to get as much information you can, but also share enough about yourself. Both of you should take away something about each other at the end of the conversation. If you only ask questions to know about the other person, you might feel you took away a lot but the other person left without knowing much about you and hence you really didn’t build a mutual connection. What topics you discuss is up to you and I will leave it to your abilities to drive a conversation. After your meeting send a note of thanks to the person for sparing her time to talk to you and what you learnt from your meeting.

This second step cements the foundation of your connection. The 15-30 min you might get to speak to the person, will decide if the other person considers you a valuable connection or not. If the first meeting went very well and you were able to strike a chord, you may also set up a next meeting or follow up on any key discussion topics. The other key take away for both of you from the first or preferably second session would be what I call "One to Two" (OtT) effect.

For each connection you speak to and get to meet seek their help in connecting you to two other persons you do not know. If you are reaching out to a person based on referral of your existing connection, you have a higher credibility and there is higher chance of the other person being interested in connecting with you.

My Approach:

A very helpful and important skill I learnt from former HKU CDO, was the way to drive a meeting with your connection which I shared above. I had the mindset that while meeting a new connection, I should ask and take as much information as much as I can. But if the other person walks away without knowing anything about me, then the meeting was a total failure. The other person will not remember me later on if I were to approach her again.

This helped me drive my meetings in way that was truly a conversation between both sides. Whenever I met a person or spoke to one after setting up a connection, I made sure that at the end of the meeting the person remembers at least one thing about me which could be relevant to his profession or some common personal interest. I also personally practiced the OtT effect to make more connections till today even to expand my network within the organization I work. At the end of a good meeting, I ask for help in referring me to at least two people who I could speak to, to learn more about a particular topic. One became two, two got me four, four led to eight and so on.

In the next and final part of the series I will share my learning on maintaining the valuable connections you build and continuing to expand your meaningful connections.

Please continue to reach out in this forum and I hope we continue to build great relationships and not just connections.Thank you for reading. Stay well. Stay strong.