• Tweet

• Tweet

I had a few people ask how I was able to pull together the star power for the Teen Business Summit. Of course, they meant how I was able to get speakers like Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Hall, and others. In this post, I’m going to talk about how I go about making connections with important people in the industry.

Identify Your Cause

Even before identifying who you want to connect with, you first have to have a cause that people will want to support. In the case of the Teen Business Summit, the cause is to promote entrepreneurship to the younger generation. We want to help teens create a better future. Very few people are going to say no to helping teens. Can you name someone who won’t?

Identify The People

Right after the cause is identified, we immediately listed the people who we thought would support it. Many of the speakers we already knew by conducting interviews in the past. Through these interviews, we were able to find out they had the same vision as us.

There are of course many others who also are aligned with our vision but we didn’t know them. The next thing is to figure out how to connect with them.

Research Best Way To Contact

With so many social media networks out there today, people are rarely on every single one. Some people may answer their emails more than they are on Twitter while it may be the exact opposite for someone else. In this interview I did with Guy Kawasaki, he mentions that the best way to contact him is by email and that he does in fact read every single one. He tries his best to respond to each one within 48-72 hours. So for someone like him, contacting him through email is the best way.

But to know that, we had to do our research. Gary Vaynerchuck on the other hand, responds much more often on his Twitter account than his emails. So when we learned that, we had members of Teen Business Forum message him on Twitter persuading him to be a speaker at the summit. So it’s different for each one.

However, email is still dominant so I would suggest to start with that.

Look For Opportunities

There may be times when opportunities come up that lets you connect with someone important that you didn’t plan to.

When those times come up, take it.

One example is how we saw an opportunity to get Guy Kawasaki to keynote. We hadn’t thought about who the keynote speakers were going to be.

But when the opportunity came up, we took it.

Other examples include introductions to connect with someone else. When someone offers to make an introduction to another person, always take it. Even if they may not be someone you see a direct connection with right away, you never know what that relationship will lead to.

Always seek to ask how you can help the other person (even if you don’t think you have anything to offer).

Get Referrals

This should probably be higher. If you identified someone you want to connect with, ask for referrals. Here is one example of several speakers who we asked referrals to. Suhas Gopinath is a very well known young entrepreneur in India. We have no direct connection to him. However, we know that one of our other speakers know him. We asked Rob to make an introduction. We first asked Rob if Suhas would be interested in participating in the summit. Doing this gives Rob the opportunity to evaluate whether it will be a good referral. If he had said Suhas would not be interested, we would have stopped.

Build Your Network Early On

This should always be your top priority. If we had not done the interviews, the summit would not be possible. We would not have the network to go to. As a young entrepreneur, this is the one thing that doesn’t seem to pay physical dollars but is so essential that I would say that you should meet at least one new person each week.