How to Get Leads From Your Network

Finding Leads In Your Network

​K&J Growth (US & NZ growth marketing agency) is rebalancing its portfolio and looking to expand here in New Zealand.

To kick off their NZ growth, Kale (founder) employed an old tactic he used way back when K&J Growth was founded to get a couple of quick wins under their belt.

He recruited his network for help (leads).

Here’s how it works.

1. Export all of your contacts from Gmail or Outlook by doing this.

2. Sort your contacts list into three groups (Google sheets or excel works here)

• Cold: Someone you last spoke to a few months ago.

• Warm: Someone you’ve spoken to in the last month’ish

• Gold: Someone you talk to regularly.

Now starting with the gold list, work through the following steps.

3. First, use Chat-GPT (AI-powered search engine) to draft an email for your network using a prompt like this.

“Create a colloquial sales email wishing someone a happy new year and then ask them for a referral to people in their network who may need digital marketing services.”

4. Refine your pitch to make it a little more personal and sound like you, not a robot. Here’s Kale finished pitch, fire up Gmail and start sending.

A couple of pointers

• Start with your gold list - these are the people most likely to help you.

• Make sure your ask is specific, so people know what action you want them to take. Most sales emails need to be clearer to get an outcome.

• And personalise your intro - the same way you would when reaching out to mates for help on Facebook etc..
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Notes: Most of us are bad at asking for help. Yet it's an incredibly easy way to get a win. You'll be surprised how many people are happy to help.

Fostering Company Culture With Rituals

One simple but essential part of company culture is team relationships.

We don't all need to be best friends, but teams work a lot better and find a rhythm when they know a little about what makes each other tick.

And team rituals are a helpful way to get that ice breaking.

Like.

• At World Fitness, the manager shouts the crew a coffee every Friday morning, and they sit around and chop it up for 15 minutes.

• At K&J, the founders hold semi-annual retreats, bringing the team together for a few days in lodge-style accommodation, and do random tivs' together.

Let's say culture is a product of how people relate to and express themselves with each other.

While we can't dictate what will emerge from those thousands of interactions, we can do our bit to encourage them.

Notes: Companies without culture feel weird, cold and disconnected - it's like they have no soul.

No customer or employee wants to be part of something like that.

If you're looking for a way to bring people together start with a few simple rituals.

A Random Flaw In Human Systems

Here's a strange phenomenon we've noticed when building businesses.

When we create a monthly process and delegate it to someone, it generally gets done. When we delegate a weekly process -generally, it gets done. Even daily ones usually happen.

But any processes we ask staff to do outside those cadences is a coin toss.

Twice weekly - always becomes weekly, and thrice weekly often becomes not at all.

Even with all the tools available today like alarms, calendars, task managers and email reminders - our brains seem hard-wired to do things in certain rhythms.

And we have no idea why.

So instead, where we can, we don't fight this anymore. If once a week isn't enough, we change it to daily; if monthly isn't enough, we make it weekly.

And to be clear - it's not just our staff that follow this unspoken law; we've found we do it too.

Notes: Fighting human nature is a battle businesses can do without.

When you notice patterns like these - it's better to work with them than against them.

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