In my Career Management 2.0 presentation I have a slide that prompts me to quote Keith Ferrazzi, saying that “if you want to be better than 95% of [your competition], all you need to do is follow-up.”
He says that 95% of people don’t follow-up. You can really stand out if you are part of the five out of hundred people who do.
In yesterday’s post (on how to get networking introductions), Hunter Walk’s point #4 is to make sure you follow-up with the person who made the introduction. In point #5 he says that you should continually follow-up with the people who give you introductions.
Why do 95 out of 100 not do this?
Because we are not organized…..!
You know how it is: we get too many business cards, we try to manage inbox zero (while having 2,000 messages in our inbox), we find out about new people all the time, we go to conferences, we see cool people on LinkedIn that we really want to have a chat with… after a while we are drowning in information overload, where it has accumulates to a point where it’s hard to remember who is who, and why anyone is important.
You think your email inbox is going to manage it all, but finding anything in Outlook will cause great intellectual and emotional distress. Searching for conversation information, contact information, and information to put the relationship into context will require that you look through 50 emails and try and piece it all together. It’s really simply undoable. Even with Gmail, the king of search. It’s really a matter of using the right tool for the job at hand, and an email client is not a relationship manager.
Unorganized, lost, drowning, we don’t follow-up. It’s too hard to figure out.
Even job seekers, who are hypersensitive to following-up, and really want to do this relationship thing right, get confused. It’s embarrassing when you can’t remember who someone is, especially if they totally remember you. It’s unprofessional to not know what people (especially recruiters) are calling you for. You sound disinterested, and probably like the wrong candidate.
JibberJobber is a job search organizer and a relationship manager for YOU. It is one more piece of the puzzle. It might be a fundamental piece, and definitely has been the missing piece. When I think of where JibberJobber fits in, it’s at the center of all of your other tools: job boards, email systems, networking meetings, phone calls, introductions, etc. All relationships, contacts, and many communications can come back to this central point – like a hub in your networking wheel.
What are you waiting for? Get organized, follow-up better and more, and get your career management under control with JibberJobber! To learn how, jump on a user webinar.