they be willing to make an introduction? LinkedIn is also helpful here, because you can easily see if your colleagues have connections to, for example, other marketers, Comcast employees, or specialists in Argentinean culture. And don’t forget alumni networks, whether they’re from college, grad school, or former employers.
Recalls Landolt, “When I was making a transition, I was at a huge firm with 450 attorneys and a turnover rate of about 70 percent. There were attorneys all over who had worked there, and I used the network, because we’d been through the same war. We didn’t know each other, but I’d talk to current employees at the firm and ask, ‘Can you introduce us?’ And they’d say sure.”
Try This
Write down your one-sentence positioning statement that you can share with others. (If you have multiple possible goals, create one for each.) An example might be, “I’m exploring a transition from intellectual property law to entertainment law,” or “I’d like to learn more about how others have handled moving from manager to vice president, and what skills are necessary.”
Spend an hour at a bookstore (online or real-world) searching for titles that intrigue you. Make a list of at least a half-dozen books you plan to read. Buy them now, or request them from the library.
Write down a list of ten people you’ll ask for an informational interview. E-mail three of them right now.
Make a list of the five to ten questions you intend to ask, so you can get the maximum value from your informational interview. Don’t forget to include questions that help you learn more about the person as an individual, so you can identify ways to stay in touch and possibly help them in the future.
Step 5: Keep the Connection Alive
Write your thank you note; it does make an impact. Elizabeth Amini, an online entrepreneur, recalls that after one informational interview, “a year later, when I went into that office, my thank you note was pinned to the wall.” But, while most people treat informational interviews as stepping stones to job leads or onetime data infusions, the real goal is turning a thirty-minute meeting over coffee into a relationship. One of my favorite business books from the 1980s is Harvey Mackay’s Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. Mackay ran an envelope company—the ultimate commodity business—yet was able to prosper by differentiating his firm through great service. He mandated that his employees use “The Mackay 66,” a list of questions that they should answer about their customers, not through a onetime interrogation, but by getting to know them over time.
During your informational interview, in addition to facts about a person’s job, you ideally want to form the building blocks of an ongoing relationship by finding out key details you can follow up on. Maybe they’re just back from a vacation to Fiji, or you both like the Dodgers, or your kids went to the same school. That’s your starting point, so make a point of sending them interesting travel articles, shooting them a note when their team makes the playoffs, or inviting them to sit with you at the school fund-raiser. With each interaction, strive to learn more about them so your relationship becomes more three-dimensional. The process of learning someone’s hometown, college, names and ages of children, favorite hobbies, favorite restaurants, previous jobs, and long-range goals provides a raft of opportunities to connect with her over shared interests and keep up a dialogue.
Step 6: Master the Follow-Up
Just as your contacts are helping you, you want to try to add value to their lives. Maybe it’s offering to introduce them to someone else you’ve met who’s also originally from Boise or Berlin or Beijing. Maybe it’s providing them with a helpful connection (one friend who asked for my assistance in preparing for a job interview seriously impressed me with her networking chops when she later connected me with a prominent business contact she’d met at church). And maybe it’s just being an encouraging voice. I try to make a point of congratulating colleagues when I see they’ve been quoted in a magazine or the local business journal.
Another great excuse to keep in touch with your contacts is integral to the “viral” nature of your informational interviews. After you’ve met with someone, be sure to follow up with her—and the original person who referred you to her. Says Rebecca Zucker, the executive coach, “I always encourage people to go back to the people who were interviewed and thank them, and let them know, ‘Here are some of the things I learned, and I’d love to talk more with you as I progress’—make it an open feedback channel. You can tell them, ‘Here are two to three things I’m going to be working on.’”
Elizabeth Amini agrees. “The easiest thing is to be in touch around major milestones,” she says. You can send holiday greetings (“thank you for your mentorship this year”), updates on advice they gave you, and relevant articles (Elizabeth, while connecting with venture capitalists, put out Google Alerts on the companies they were backing and sent them interesting clips). Sometimes opportunities to connect simply present themselves. In the wake of the 2004 Asian tsunami, Elizabeth made a small, $10 donation in the name of each of her mentors and sent them a short note letting them know. “It wasn’t calculated at all,” she says, “but I got the most responses ever. People were so thankful.”
Conducting a slew of informational interviews might sound stressful, but key to enjoying the process is keeping it in perspective: “I like having lunch with people,” says Karen Landolt. When she felt demoralized in her job as a corporate lawyer, “it would give me something to look forward to. It was almost therapeutic, and how I got through my days: at least I get to have lunch with this interesting person.”
Making Connections You Never Thought Were Possible—Elizabeth’s Story
Elizabeth Amini thought she wanted to be a surgeon. But after finishing college with a cognitive science degree, she discovered during a hospital internship that medicine was a bad fit. After starting a graphic design firm and later working for NASA, Amini found herself, at thirty, unsure of her direction. “I felt really lost,” she recalls. “All my friends who were also pre-med had graduated from medical school and were practicing, and here I was, not knowing what career direction I should take.”
She vowed to use a strategic approach to find her calling. She made a list of possible professions that intrigued her and set out to obtain five to ten data points, such as informational interviews, for each one. The problem? She didn’t have many contacts in her target fields, so she had to get creative about succeeding through cold calls.
First, she’d search online to find the right person to talk to at each target company (she had identified large companies based in her city through online research). She’d type in the name of the company along with a phrase like “international business vice president” in order to get the right name. Then, she’d check the date (to make sure it was a current role and he or she hadn’t been promoted or left the company) and try to glean some salient information (for instance, that the executive was heading up an expansion into South America).
Next, she’d look up the company’s press office or investor relations department online to find the e-mail address of the contact person, which would allow her to deduce the company’s standard e-mail pattern (for instance, [email protected]). She’d also continue to dig to learn about the executive’s preferred nickname. “When the name is Michael,” she says, “search on the web to see if they go by ‘Michael’ or ‘Mike.’ Otherwise, the secretary is going to think, ‘Nobody calls him that; you probably don’t know him.’” Finally, she’d call the main company line after hours to get the voice-mail directory in order to learn the executive’s voice-mail extension.
Armed with this information, she was finally ready to make her move. She could e-mail or, even better, call directly. “When you call and ask for an extension number directly, they never question why you’re calling the way they do if you ask for someone by name,” she says. Also, she recommends calling just before or just after business hours, when secretaries are unlikely to be at their desks, but hardworking executives may be around. “It’s important to realize the secretary is there to screen you out, so