You will be able to turn the people you already know into a sorted list of possible buyers and introducers.
Someone tells you to start with the people you know. You open your contacts, scroll past your aunt, your old football kaki and a plumber from 2019, and close the app again. Nobody there looks like a buyer. Or worse, everybody does, and you feel awkward about all of them.
Both reactions come from doing two jobs at once: listing people and judging them. This lesson separates those jobs, so your network turns into something you can work through instead of something you avoid.
The first pass is a list, with no decisions. Open a spreadsheet and pull names from every place you keep them: phone contacts, LinkedIn connections, email, the chat groups you are in, your alumni groups from school, poly or university, old colleagues from every job, your NS batch, clubs, your religious community, your running group, your condo or estate chat. Most people who do this properly end up with a few hundred names, far more than they would have guessed.
Do not skip anyone because they seem unlikely. The reason you write first and judge later is that your judgement, mid-scroll, is unreliable. You skip the quiet former colleague who now manages three clinics. You skip your cousin's husband, forgetting he runs a logistics firm. Once the names are all on the page, you can judge them calmly against the profile you wrote in lesson 1.4, Write your ideal customer profile on one page.
Now go through the list and give each name one tag: buyer, introducer or neither.
A buyer is someone who matches your profile themselves. For Darren, the adviser, that is a former schoolmate who just had a baby. For Mei, the bookkeeper, it is the friend from her old office who left to open two bubble tea outlets.
An introducer is someone who does not fit the profile but knows a lot of people who do. Mei's best introducers turned out to be a sales rep for a point-of-sale system, a commercial property agent who leases shop units, and a former colleague now working at a bank's business banking team. Not one of them would ever hire a bookkeeper, yet each talks to F&B founders every week. Darren's include a friend who teaches antenatal classes and the HR manager at his previous company.
Neither covers everyone else. That is most of the list, and that is fine. Tagging someone as neither does not mean you lose touch with them. It means you do not spend prospecting time on them.
If you are unsure, tag by what you know today and move on. Speed matters more than precision at this stage, and you will learn more when you talk to people.
A buyer is one possible sale. An introducer is a doorway to many. A point-of-sale rep who mentions Mei to one founder a month is worth more over a year than almost any single client, and the introductions arrive warm, because they come from someone the founder already trusts.
Introducers also tend to be easier to talk to than buyers, because you are not asking them for money. You are asking them to keep you in mind. Many of them like being the person who knows someone useful. The rep looks good when Mei sorts out a client's messy books; the property agent looks good when a new tenant's accounts are in order for the bank.
So when you sort, look hard for introducers. They are often the people who sit next to your buyers in the chain: suppliers, landlords, accountants, HR managers, event organisers, people who run communities your profile belongs to.
Here is where most network prospecting goes wrong. A friend who has not heard from you in two years gets a message that goes straight to a pitch, and feels used. Or the message is so vague that they do not know what you do or who it is for.
Start by letting people know what you now do and who you help, with no request attached. A short message to an old colleague might read: "Hi Jun Wei, been a while. I left the bank last year and now do bookkeeping for cafe and restaurant groups, mostly ones with a few outlets. How are things at your side?" That is it. No link, no offer, no "let me know if you know anyone". People remember a clear description of who you help, and the ones who know someone like that will often say so without being asked.
Before you send anything that promotes what you sell to a Singapore phone number, read module 5. Knowing someone personally does not by itself take a marketing message outside the Do Not Call rules, and lesson 5.1 explains when a check is needed.
Make your messages specific to the person, and space them out over weeks. Twenty personal messages land better than a broadcast to two hundred.
You do not need to tag your whole network today. The activity below asks you to go through the first fifty names from your phone and LinkedIn and tag each one. Fifty is enough to see how many buyers and introducers you already know, and to notice which groups they tend to come from.
Export or scroll your phone contacts and LinkedIn connections and tag the first fifty names as buyer, introducer or neither.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).