What are people actually using to track networking + follow-ups?
Non-target rising sophomore here recruiting for IB SA 2028.
One thing I’ve noticed is that networking at scale is honestly chaos:
- hundreds of cold emails
- LinkedIn messages everywhere
- spreadsheets tracking contacts
- forgotten follow-ups
- trying to remember who said what
I’m thinking about building a recruiting CRM specifically for IB recruiting that would:
- find relevant bankers automatically
- track all networking conversations
- remind you when to follow up
- help draft personalized outreach based on the banker’s background
Curious:
- What are you currently using to track networking?
- What’s the most painful part of the process?
- Would you actually pay for something like this if it genuinely saved time / improved response rates?
Excel
not gon lie as a fellow non target person w an offer, you probs wont get enough responses for it to be hard to track. Worst case its js in ur outlook calendar and u can see how long its been since you chatted w someone. Any extra organization was unnecessary for me
Facts I abandoned the excel in about a month lol, just star your good connects in gmail
WSO has an excel template which is pretty helpful. You can tweak it as needed, I still use it ~10 years later.
Link: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/resources/templates/word-templates/cont…
Just use excel to track all the bankers you’ve spoken to with a section for notes and last date contacted - don’t over complicate
Juniors don’t need something overkill like a CRM save your b2b SaaS passions for some sect of the old farts you’ll encounter after working on the job for a while
Every other week another kid thinks they’re a genius for creating one of these AI powered networking tools (myself included) but no one has actually scaled a product as it ends up creating more friction than it solves. Most importantly, the output usually reeks of AI or low attention to detail which essentially tells the banker that they’re not worth spending a couple minutes of your time drafting a real email. Filters will inevitably get messed up and send the wrong people the wrong message. In addition, there exist so many free tools out there like Apollo, Mailsuite, Google programmable search engine, Gmail nudges, etc that make one of these paid tools or even Linkedin premium unnecessary. Lastly, scraping and selling data from Linkedin is at minimum a violation of their terms and road to get you banned.
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