Need a Reason to Ping Someone When You’re Networking?

Developing a professional network of trusted contacts who you can reach out to for help with a job search or career guidance is a great milestone to achieve. The next relationship-building skill to learn and gain confidence in is maintaining relationships and keeping yourself top of mind. 

In this relationship-building masterclass, career strategist and executive coach Doug Lester shares insights into how to recontact and reconnect with people in your professional network. He shares that many of the business professionals he has worked with have asked, “What do you say when you’re reaching out a second, or even a third time, but you don’t have a specific ask?”

Leveraging his background as an executive recruiter and his current role as a career mentor, Doug introduces a simple yet effective technique for seamless re-engagement — using a pretense. 

The Power of a Pretense

If you’re searching for a job and want to reengage a contact, coming up with an opening line can be difficult. What can you say that won’t seem mercenary or too self-centered? 

As a recruiter, Doug needed to recontact people in his network all the time. He learned to note meaningful details about his networking contacts’ work and lives. He would then open his outreach by sharing relevant news, industry insights, or even personal anecdotes tailored to his contacts’ interests. Doug clarifies that, “In the end, what you end up sharing, it isn’t overly important. But what is important is that something other than your job search or career advancement prompted the outreach.”

It helps keep you from seeming pushy, needy, or even desperate. While the person you are reaching out to may be aware of the pretext for your outreach, the important piece of the initial interaction in reconnecting is showing an interest in them personally. Doug highlights that this method can be made even easier when using a personal contact relationship management (pCRM) tool. 

Harnessing Personal CRMs for Enhanced Networking

Implementing pCRM tools in relationship-building strategies can help create a path for more meaningful and impactful relationships. In his masterclass, Doug highlights Covve’s personalized CRM feature that empowers users to curate a custom news feed for each contact. This dynamic resource serves as a wellspring of relevant content, helping to nurture relationships through meaningful conversation starters.

While Covve’s AI-driven text generation streamlines message creation, Doug underscores the importance of personalization. The AI feature in Covve assists in helping users find news related to a specific contact’s interests and structure initial message drafts. 

This helps make finding just the right pretense for each contact that much easier, making every reengagement less stressful and more personal. Still, Doug encourages further personalization of message drafts generated through Covve to give them an authentic touch.

Doug shines a light on Covve’s advanced features—including the customizable news feed and AI text generation—which together revolutionize networking cultivation. These tools help alleviate apprehension and make networking a more intuitive and natural part of our lives.

Finding just the right pretense using Covve, its news feed, and AI-generated text, means you will never be at a loss for what to say when you want to stay top of mind and are reconnecting with contacts in your network.

Watch Doug’s full video here to level up your relationship-building capacity.