Networking Up, Part 3: Coffee and Gossip
(Two earlier posts, Networking Up, Part 1 and Part 2, described how rainmakers network with executives, who are their seniors in age, authority and income. Here is another on the subject.)
Few of us can shanty up to a senior executive’s office and just pop our heads in to say hello. These are busy people and they have little time for casual visits. Gatekeepers bar entrance to those who might fritter away the executives’ time. So, even if you meet a senior executive during the course of your work, maintaining contact is hard. To do so requires knowing more things of substance to share with her than most of us do. And, if you don’t maintain contact, you will lose the relationship.
Carl whose slow, easy-going manner masked a fast, hard-charging mind, was easy to talk to and even easier to underestimate. He built relationships with senior execs and so a successful practice, also cross selling many of his firm’s other services. The execs learned that he was an astute observer of their organizations and so, worth talking to. He was well briefed on matters that were just beginning to filter up to the executive suite. His way of coming up with insights into client organizations, like many successful rainmaking techniques, was simple: He drank a lot of coffee and listened to gossip.
“People want to target the big guys in an organization and not waste time on people in lower levels. They forget that you can’t just buy a senior executive a cup of coffee and have a chat, but you can with someone lower in the organization. Those people will tell you what is going on and what you need to know to talk with someone higher up,” Carl explained. “Talk with enough of them and you can learn about anything you want to know.”
Of course, Carl isn’t the first to discoverer of this technique. In modified ways, it has been used by professionals for a long time. In some current cases, LinkedIn replaces coffee as the medium through which information is passed. But the underlying method is the same and forever being rediscovered, because it works so well.
Two years ago I was coaching a young German strategy consultant. When I asked him to make some calls, he refused, arguing that later in the week he had a meeting with the general manager of a major business unit of his biggest account. “I need to spend my time figuring out what I am going to say,” he protested. I asked if he knew people working in the business unit with whom he could gossip a bit. He did and agreed to call and talk with them. Half an hour later, he came back beaming; one of the people he had talked to had laid out an agenda for his meeting with the boss.
Coffee and gossip, that’s not a bad way to spend some time each day!