@hunterwalk I’m a firm believer in the pre-intro – when do you think it’s not necessary? Might save me some emails down the road 🙂
— Devon (@Devon) February 24, 2012
Ah yes grasshopper, there are many posts about the art of email introductions but if you want to go deeper you must come with me as we answer the question, “when do i not need to pre-verify an introduction?”
1. The Good Friend Waiver – if someone is a good friend of mine I give them benefit of the doubt when making an introduction because they (a) have deep knowledge of what i care about and (b) respect my time and interests. Even friends sometimes need a little correcting nudge re: topic or velocity, but by and large they don’t need to waste time pre-clearing.
2. The Urgency Waiver – If things are moving quickly enough that a delay in reaching me via email, phone, etc would change the nature of the opportunity or introduction, I don’t mind getting a blind intro. Best practice is still to send an accompanying message just to me with the context of “hey, I didn’t check with you because XYZ. Hope that’s ok.”
3. The Repeat Business Waiver – If there’s a particular type of introduction we’ll be doing frequently, I’ll often clear the general notion and then leave it up to the introducer to use their own judgment. For example, friends who work as agency creative directors often want to introduce me to brand managers who are thinking about YouTube & social media in interesting ways. I love these introductions and they know they don’t have to clear them one by one because we’ve discussed this type of intro in general.