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Just as your contacts are helping you, you want to try to add value to their lives. Maybe it’s offering to introduce them to someone else you’ve met who’s also originally from Boise or Berlin or Beijing. Maybe it’s providing them with a helpful connection (one friend who asked for my assistance in preparing for a job interview seriously impressed me with her networking chops when she later connected me with a prominent business contact she’d met at church). And maybe it’s just being an encouraging voice. I try to make a point of congratulating colleagues when I see they’ve been quoted in a magazine or the local business journal.

Another great excuse to keep in touch with your contacts is integral to the “viral” nature of your informational interviews. After you’ve met with someone, be sure to follow up with her—and the original person who referred you to her. Says Rebecca Zucker, the executive coach, “I always encourage people to go back to the people who were interviewed and thank them, and let them know, ‘Here are some of the things I learned, and I’d love to talk more with you as I progress’—make it an open feedback channel. You can tell them, ‘Here are two to three things I’m going to be working on.’”

Elizabeth Amini agrees. “The easiest thing is to be in touch around major milestones,” she says. You can send holiday greetings (“thank you for your mentorship this year”), updates on advice they gave you, and relevant articles (Elizabeth, while connecting with venture capitalists, put out Google Alerts on the companies they were backing and sent them interesting clips). Sometimes opportunities to connect simply present themselves. In the wake of the 2004 Asian tsunami, Elizabeth made a small, $10 donation in the name of each of her mentors and sent them a short note letting them know. “It wasn’t calculated at all,” she says, “but I got the most responses ever. People were so thankful.”

Conducting a slew of informational interviews might sound stressful, but key to enjoying the process is keeping it in perspective: “I like having lunch with people,” says Karen Landolt. When she felt demoralized in her job as a corporate lawyer, “it would give me something to look forward to. It was almost therapeutic, and how I got through my days: at least I get to have lunch with this interesting person.”

Making Connections You Never Thought Were Possible—Elizabeth’s Story

Elizabeth Amini thought she wanted to be a surgeon. But after finishing college with a cognitive science degree, she discovered during a hospital internship that medicine was a bad fit. After starting a graphic design firm and later working for NASA, Amini found herself, at thirty, unsure of her direction. “I felt really lost,” she recalls. “All my friends who were also pre-med had graduated from medical school and were practicing, and here I was, not knowing what career direction I should take.”

She vowed to use a strategic approach to find her calling. She made a list of possible professions that intrigued her and set out to obtain five to ten data points, such as informational interviews, for each one. The problem? She didn’t have many contacts in her target fields, so she had to get creative about succeeding through cold calls.

First, she’d search online to find the right person to talk to at each target company (she had identified large companies based in her city through online research). She’d type in the name of the company along with a phrase like “international business vice president” in order to get the right name. Then, she’d check the date (to make sure it was a current role and he or she hadn’t been promoted or left the company) and try to glean some salient information (for instance, that the executive was heading up an expansion into South America).

Next, she’d look up the company’s press office or investor relations department online to find the e-mail address of the contact person, which would allow her to deduce the company’s standard e-mail pattern (for instance, john.doe@company.com). She’d also continue to dig to learn about the executive’s preferred nickname. “When the name is Michael,” she says, “search on the web to see if they go by ‘Michael’ or ‘Mike.’ Otherwise, the secretary is going to think, ‘Nobody calls him that; you probably don’t know him.’” Finally, she’d call the main company line after hours to get the voice-mail directory in order to learn the executive’s voice-mail extension.

Armed with this information, she was finally ready to make her move. She could e-mail or, even better, call directly. “When you call and ask for an extension number directly, they never question why you’re calling the way they do if you ask for someone by name,” she says. Also, she recommends calling just before or just after business hours, when secretaries are unlikely to be at their desks, but hardworking executives may be around. “It’s important to realize the secretary is there to screen you out, so you want to avoid the secretary as much as possible,” she says.

It would have been easy for her to target low-ranking employees. But Elizabeth resisted the impulse. “Everybody tells you to start with people you know, one or two degrees of separation,” she says. “But chances are the people you know are in middle management, or maybe just a few years out of university.” If you really want to get to know what an industry’s like, you have to talk to seasoned veterans.

The CEO—the public face of the company—is bombarded with requests. That’s why Elizabeth started her initial research one notch lower, with the office of the chief operating officer, “because that secretary knows everybody,” she says. Her goal wasn’t actually to score an interview with the COO, which was probably unlikely. Instead, it was to get his imprimatur: “You can say, I know the COO is probably not the right person to talk to, but who is your best salesperson, or your rock-star marketing person? And then you can say the COO’s office recommended them, and they’re not going to blow you off.”

Elizabeth learned quickly that the typical request (thirty or sixty minutes of someone’s time) was usually rejected. Busy executives aren’t going to crack open their calendar for someone they have no real connection to. Instead, she would warm them up with context, letting them know the COO’s office recommended them and that she had read about them online.

Says Elizabeth, “If they have a book, read it, because no one writes to these people and says, ‘I read your book.’” Then tell them, “I was impressed by XYZ, and I’d like to ask you some questions about how you became so successful. Is it possible to schedule a ten-minute phone call? Or, if you’re free, I’d be happy to take you to lunch.” Most people will opt for the phone call, which seems easy in comparison to lunch, and now you have an appointment on the books.

Another crucial point is timing. Most professionals’ schedules are heavily booked for the next few weeks, so Elizabeth discovered if you ask for a calendar slot “in the next week or two,” you’re likely to get turned down. Meanwhile, asking to connect with them “sometime this year” won’t seem urgent and, even if they agree, may result in an eventual brush-off. Elizabeth suggests the best time frame to request may be “this month or next,” because there are likely to be unscheduled blocks still available.

Elizabeth often had to persevere through blow-offs or rejections. “One guy said I needed to talk to someone more junior, so I said, ‘I’d like insight from the most successful person in the department, and that’s you.’ ” That line won him over. Another person, in real estate development, screamed at her and said, “I don’t have time to talk to some f#*$@ student; I’m up to my neck in lawsuits!” and hung up on her.