What is the purpose of your groups?
Our purpose is clearly to help Danish businesses get better at networking. The data shows that over 88% of people in networks get nothing out of it, and that typically happens because they never follow up. Around 68% meet a lot of people but never follow up afterwards.
That’s exactly what we want to teach them. They need to be able to network, reach out to the right people and build the network they actually need around themselves, so they don’t waste their time. We work with education and focus, and what we build around the businesses is what I call their growth zone.
What challenge did you have before you started using Samli?
I’ve been part of various networks over the years, including BNI, which is one of the most structured. The advantage was that they had an app you could work with. The downside was that it was so hard to navigate, and there were so many things to register, that we drowned in it. Most people in networks hate administrative tasks, so we quietly dropped it.
My own challenge was that nothing happens between meetings when you’re in a network without an app. You forget things, and you forget the people you’re sitting with. You’re with 35 or 40 people and simply can’t remember them. Then you have to piece it together on LinkedIn, where you drown in posts. The people I was sitting with should have been top of mind, and they just weren’t.
What made you choose Samli?
What I like about Samli is that it’s simple and intuitive and easy to use. You can compare it to LinkedIn or Facebook and recognize the pattern, but without it becoming complicated the way it is everywhere else. I’d rather call it executable. It takes very few actions to get something going, and I think 90% of people in networks appreciate that.
What is the biggest value Samli has created for you?
It’s the quick access to documents. When I’ve taught something, I can share it right away, and everyone in the network can go in and find what we’ve covered and pull it out of the platform themselves. As a facilitator it makes life much easier, because then I don’t have to answer 26 emails and dig out documents and send them individually. People can get it themselves.
We can have the discussion directly, and they can ask their questions on the platform. Then I have it all in one place instead of spread across email, text messages, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Can you give a concrete example of how Samli has changed your everyday work?
Let me take the most recent example. I was at a meeting in Odense where I was teaching, and we were talking about how we could help each other. One of the participants is named Karina. She works with boards and wanted to share something on LinkedIn and get advice on what to write.
Afterwards she posted it on our platform, so we didn’t have to go searching for when and what she’d written on LinkedIn. We all had a direct link, could ask questions on the platform and take it from there. It was a quick execution instead of scrolling through an entire platform.
The whole value lies in follow-up between meetings now being simple and clear. You can always find people’s questions and requests for help, and helping each other is one of the most important things in a network. I’ve made a template for filling out your profile, so we quickly get an overview of where they come from, what they help with, and what their goals are. That makes it much easier to follow up and help each other.