Your network of business contacts is everything in the professional world. It’s where you’ll turn throughout your career when you need a job, employees, investors, suppliers, partners, customers, and more. I’ve leveraged my network to fill all of these needs for myself and others, and there’s a huge array of tools that will help you identify, catalog, and connect with people so you can do the same.
Yesterday’s physical “rolodex” has evolved into a powerful digital asset. Let’s dive into how you can find, collect, and manage business contacts to catapult your career and return the favor to the people around you.
Table of Contents
- Business Contact Details to Ask For
- Who Exactly Is a Business Contact?
- The Importance of Business Contacts
- 9 Ways to Find Business Contacts
- The Best Way to Manage Your Business Contacts
- What to Look For in a Business Contact Tool
- Optimize Your Apps for Collecting Business Contacts
- How to Engage Business Contacts: 5 Methods I Use
Who Exactly Is a Business Contact?
Before we talk about how to find them, let’s touch on who constitutes a business contact. In my opinion, anyone in your personal or professional circle who could help advance your business or career is a potential business contact.
Don’t forget as you interact with and engage your business contacts that it will be just as important to focus on how you can be of service to them — your own long-term benefit is just a key criteria when determining who to add to the list.
The Importance of Business Contacts
Business is about creating value for people, and your business contacts are an important way to achieve that goal. A robust network of contacts helps you access crucial referrals, stay on top of industry trends, solve problems that get in the way of your career and company growth, build credibility that will help unlock new opportunities, and much, much more.
Business can sometimes feel impersonal when so many of us work remotely, but at the end of the day it’s still all about human connection. Besides being linked with beneficial outcomes like increased promotions or a higher salary, a 2018 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that time spent networking daily decreased emotional exhaustion while increasing daily job satisfaction, career optimism, and career satisfaction. In other words, your business contacts play an important role in not just your success but your professional happiness as well.
Convinced? Let’s talk about how to find new business contacts before examining some strategies to effectively engage them.
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9 Ways to Find Business Contacts
1. Referrals
Throughout my career, no matter what role I find myself in — sales, marketing, consulting, or mentoring — if I need a specific kind of contact, my current network is the first place I’ll turn. Referrals are powerful because they’re a warm introduction from a mutual connection, drastically increasing the response rate from potential business contacts and accelerating conversations in the right direction. Even if your network is small, reach out. You never know who your close connections might have relationships with.
2. Networking Apps
LinkedIn boasts the largest network of professionals that I know of, but it’s certainly not the only networking app. HubSpot has its own platform, Connect.com, while Meetup.com, Fishbowl, and even Bumble Bizz offer ways to connect with other professionals that you might want to explore.
As you dive into various options, I’d recommend that you focus on the quality of relationships over quantity. I know professionals with tens and even hundreds of thousands of “connections” on platforms like LinkedIn who see very little engagement or value from their audience. Focus on real relationships over vanity metrics and you’ll see a bigger impact over time.
3. Social Media
You don’t have to stick to platforms aimed at professionals to find business contacts. Facebook, for example, has a group for nearly everything. Join groups that are relevant to your professional skills and experience and engage with other people in the group. Contribute your own expertise to the group whenever you can. It’s much easier to passively consume content than it is to actively create it, but I’ve always found the biggest benefit of networking comes from using my experience to try and help others.
4. Trade Shows and Conferences
Industry-specific trade shows and conferences are a great way to meet professionals in your field.
If you’re attending an event, chat with fellow attendees at workshops or speaking sessions. I landed one of my biggest consulting clients when I put aside my shyness and sat down at a lunch table with a stranger. Check out the trade show floor and talk to exhibitors providing services to your industry, or buy floor space and set up your own booth to build a book of business contacts. In my experience, well-attended trade shows never fail to deliver a substantial ROI.
5. Educational Events
Whether you’re attending an online course to get a certification or traveling to an in-person event hosted by an industry professional, educational events are a great way to connect with other professionals and build business contacts.
As an added benefit, I’ve found that the people attending events specifically to learn and grow are more likely to be ambitious and career-driven, whereas attendees at a more general event like a tradeshow, while still good to meet, might not always have a choice in the matter.
6. Groups and Communities
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a national non-profit organization that represents the business interests of its members in more than 7,500 locations throughout the country. The Chamber of Commerce in your area can offer a powerful networking opportunity.
Groups focused on entrepreneurship, investment, and even community service can also be great ways to meet new business contacts. As a mountain biker, I’ve met many important business connections through my local trail maintenance and advocacy group — not something I would have expected when I first joined to dig in the dirt!
7. Cold Outreach
Cold outreach is primarily thought of as a way to sell your product or service, but it doesn’t have to be limited to a sales pitch. Reach out to potential employees, mentors, or collaborators the same way you would a prospect.
Conduct some preliminary research to learn more about someone, identify a few things you might have in common, and give them a call or send them an email striking up a conversation.
To this day, some of my most meaningful mentors are people I approached out of the blue early on in my career, which is why I’ll always make an effort to respond when someone reaches out to me in the same way.
8. Alumni Networks
It’s easier to connect with people when you have something in common, so it makes sense that your alma mater can be a great source of business contacts.
Whether you attended school at the same time or not, you’ll likely have some shared experiences with people in your school’s alumni network. Reach out to potential contacts and see where conversations lead. Particularly as the price of a college degree continues to increase, you’re making a mistake if you don’t leverage that investment every way you can, long after you’ve walked across the stage and collected your diploma.
9. Everyday Life
There are two types of people in the world: those who talk to the person sitting next to them on the plane, and those who don’t. The former are probably going to have a bigger network of business contacts.
Strike up conversations with people you come into contact with and see if there’s any way you could help each other professionally. You never know how important a relationship could be to your career, so strive to have meaningful interactions with everyone you come across.
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Business Contact Details to Ask For
- Name
- Company
- Email address
- Phone number
These days, a name might be all you need to track down a digital profile and get in touch with someone. Still, in most industries a DM on Instagram isn’t viewed as the most professional way to reach out, so try to get an email address or phone number for someone you’d like to add as a business contact.
Pro tip: If you didn’t capture that information or you lost a business card during a busy trade show or networking event, do a quick LinkedIn search and message the contact there.
In my experience, conversations that start on LinkedIn usually end up continuing in another avenue like email, so you’ll want a way to view all the channels you’ve used for outreach with a contact in a single place. Enter the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
The Best Way to Manage Your Business Contacts
Finding new business contacts isn‘t the end goal — it’s just the beginning. You need to maintain both your business contact data and the relationship in order for the connection to be valuable over the long-term.
While you can try and manage your network of personal business contacts via a social platform like LinkedIn or in your email inbox, there are dedicated CRMs out there that centralize communications across a variety of channels and keep you organized, on task, and up-to-date, plus many of them include robust automation and workflows to do some of the heavy lifting for you.
To help you get a grasp of the most important functionalities, let’s talk about what you should be looking for as you consider various CRMs.
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- Pitch to investors.
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What to Look For in a Business Contact Tool
I’ve consistently used HubSpot’s CRM for contact management throughout my career, but there’s an abundance of options out there to explore.
Don’t let the “Customer” part of the CRM acronym fool you. These tools are excellent at managing all kinds of business contacts. Many solutions have popped up in recent years to serve specific industries, so you might want to consider if a dedicated tool addresses your needs better than a more general one.
Regardless of which direction you end up going, let’s talk about some of the main things I look for in a CRM. For me, HubSpot happens to check all of these boxes, but your use case may vary. Consider the following.
Customization
Different business contacts fit into different categories, so you want to be able to customize the CRM with various views, labels, or filters that help you segment your contacts in useful ways. A solution should have enough default categories to get you up and running quickly, but still empower you to shape the tool to fit your specific needs.
Integrations
A CRM is typically a big part of your company’s digital infrastructure, but it’s rare for one solution to do everything well. For this reason, your business contact tool should integrate with the rest of your tech stack to seamlessly track communications, schedule appointments, take payments, and more.
As an example, I’ve really enjoyed the integration between HubSpot and OpenPhone, which automatically logs calls and texts made in the business phone application to the specific contact record in the HubSpot CRM.
Automation
Managing your business contacts often involves a lot of repetitive tasks that, if performed manually, would take hours and hours of your valuable time. To me, automation is a non-negotiable part of a CRM, and it should be both powerful and easy to use.
In HubSpot, I use a workflow based on the Last Activity Date property to create a task reminding me to check in with contacts every so often. This makes it a lot harder for someone important to accidentally slip through the cracks when I’m at my busiest.
Mobile-Friendly Interface
Virtual meetings and digital social networks may be commonplace, but I still find you don’t always meet business contacts when you’re sitting in front of your computer. Your CRM should reflect this reality with a decent mobile app or interface that allows you to enter data, send messages, and stay on top of tasks for important business contacts.
Support
CRMs typically combine a lot of functionality into a single solution. That’s great, but it can also be daunting. I definitely recommend choosing a CRM with a robust educational library. Invest your time upfront to learn the ins and outs of a tool, and you’ll be able to follow best practices and get the most value out of the tool in the long run.
A CRM should also offer easy access to support personnel when you inevitably run into roadblocks. Many solutions only offer support at higher subscription levels, so do your research and make sure you know what to expect ahead of time.
Optimize Your Apps for Collecting Business Contacts
If You’re Using HubSpot
One of my favorite features of HubSpot is the ability to scan business cards on your phone, automatically capture contact information, and add some contextual notes about your conversation. It’s a seamless way to collect important information and get it into your CRM with minimal effort.
If You’re Using Google Contacts and Have an Android Phone
Try using Google Lens to quickly add business cards to your contacts. This is especially useful if you have an automated two-way sync between Google Contacts and another app, such as your main CRM.
First, check if Google Lens is already built into your camera app. If so, you only need to click the Lens icon in your camera app, hover over the business card, and click the search icon. You should then see an “Add contact” option, which pulls the name, email, phone number, and other visible information into Google Contacts.
If You’re Using Outlook
Try out the Outlook mobile app to scan your business cards with the built-in Office Lens functionality. All you need to do is open the Outlook app, select the search icon on the bottom bar, and tap “Create.” Next, select “Scan business card.” The app will then transform text into a new contact card, which you can adjust if necessary before confirming.
Pro tip: No matter what solution you use, make sure you’re using all the features and capabilities available to help you streamline the process of collecting contacts. When it’s quick and easy, you’ll do it. If it’s a pain, you’ll put it off until you’ve forgotten key contact details or important context from a conversation.
How to Engage Business Contacts: 5 Methods I Use
1. Offer to Help
By far the best way to engage new or existing business contacts is to offer your help. In my experience, too many people approach networking with a mindset of finding value for themselves. That might occasionally work out, but the best, longest-lasting relationships are invariably a two-way street, and you’ll get what you give in the end. Lend a hand, offer your expertise, or help someone get in touch with a contact in your network. When the time comes, they’ll remember and do the same for you.
2. Share Content
There’s a lot of noise out there — particularly since the recent boom in generative AI technologies. Anyone can input a basic prompt and upload “their” content, but true expertise and value can be hard to find. As a result, it’s more meaningful than ever to share quality content with your business contacts if you found it useful or you think they’ll benefit from it. In my experience, a simple “Read this and thought you would appreciate it” goes a long way.
3. Interact on Social Media
So much of success on social media depends on an algorithm, and initial engagement is often a key metric platforms use to determine how widely a post should be shared. Putting yourself out there can be scary, so support your business contacts by engaging with their content with a reaction, comment, or repost. They’ll notice the effort.
4. Grab Coffee or Lunch
Remote is normal, but it will never replace the real world. Schedule meetups with your local business contacts, or reach out to people when you’re traveling to their destinations for fun or work. Whether you’re meeting for a coffee or lunch, always offer to pay. People who are very successful financially are often tired of always being expected to foot the bill, and they’ll remember you did — even if it was for a couple coffees and a pastry.
5. Send Notes
You’ve probably seen the mass-produced ads in your mailbox that try to imitate handwriting. Companies use them because handwritten notes are rare and, well, noteworthy. When you sit down to write even a short thank you or simple note, it shows a little more effort and care than your everyday email.
Get 100 or so pieces of basic stationary with your name or company logo and commit to using it all in six months or a year. I don’t often make guarantees, but I guarantee that practice will have enough of an impact that you consider repeating it.
Strengthen Your Organization with Business Contacts
Your business contacts are an intangible but nonetheless important asset for your business and your career growth. A purposeful approach to contact collection and management will reap dividends in many different ways, which is why I highly recommend you use a dedicated CRM.
Once you’ve found the right CRM to manage your business contacts, you’ll never again lose valuable context for key relationships. Keep a record of all your past interactions, schedule future ones to ensure you stay in touch, and categorize contacts to leverage them more effectively — all with automation and integrations that make your life easier.
Free Business Plan Template
The essential document for starting a business -- custom built for your needs.
- Outline your idea.
- Pitch to investors.
- Secure funding.
- Get to work!
Download Free
All fields are required.
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