How to prepare for a networking event with Joe Apfelbaum

Hi, I'm Joe Apfelbaum, CEO of Evvy AI, your beautiful virtual assistant. And today I want to show you how to prepare for a networking event. Before a networking event, you want to make sure you know who's going to the networking event. And then what you want to do is you want to make sure to go through their profiles to identify which of those people you need to be following up with, building relationships with. So for example, I'm part of the EANYC. And tomorrow we have a lunch in Manhattan. Now, what I'm going to quickly do now is go through the list of the people that are going to be there. For example, maybe Tina Larson is going to be there. I want to make sure that I review all of the posts that she's recently posted so that I can engage with the post. And when I see her at the event, I know what she posted about. So I'm going to use this tool called Evy AI to help me be able to stay relevant, stay in front of her, stay top of mind. And maybe even ask her if she's coming to the event. But I can also check to see if she's coming to the event on the website directory. So whenever you're able to see if somebody's coming to an event, you want to make sure to go through the event attendees and identify if people are coming, if they're not coming, what the situation is. And if you can find out if they're coming or not, then you do that. So we have a website that tells you who's coming to the event. This is the website right here. It's called the Executives Association Dashboard. And I click on the event date. You see the event is going to be on East 49th Street and 3rd Avenue in Smith and Walensky. I have a yes RSVP for myself, and I see there are 62 confirmed guests. These are the— excuse me, these are the 62 confirmed guests. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take a list of all the guests. I'm going to copy it, and I'm going to put it into this tool called Claude. Now Claude AI, I'm going to instruct it and say, can you please review this list and put it into a numbered table? First, last, company, who invited them. And their industry. Make sure that you separate the guests and the members. If it says invited by, that means it's a guest. Thank you. Also indicate if male or female. Based on name. Okay, and here's the list. I'm going to press Enter and let's see what it does. Now this should make a numbered table. Now I'll create 2 numbered tables like this. Look at this, look at the way it's making the numbered tail— numbered. Um, so let's see, Rachel Kellner, she's coming. Look at the industry that they're in. So this is all the, all the members that are coming, and it's going to make me a separate table for all the guests that are coming. Isn't that amazing? And now what I can do is I can review this list with artificial intelligence to tell me all the information about each one of these members and each one of the guests. So what am I going to do is I'm going to put this into a sheet. I'm going to show you how I do this relatively quickly. I'm going to put this into a sheet like this. I'm going to copy this. Okay, copy this. Go to Sheets.new. Sheets.new will just open up a sheet for me. Okay, it's not properly giving me— oh, I don't know what I did over there, but it's not properly giving me the sheet over here. So I'm going to go to the end of the sheet. Okay. I'm gonna close this, open this up just a little bit more. I don't know what's going on over here, but let me try to Ctrl+C here, Ctrl+V. Okay, so now it did this properly. Now I'm gonna go here, I'm gonna copy this as well, and I'm gonna go here like this. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. That didn't do it properly. I'm gonna try it again. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. That didn't work. Okay, I don't know why sometimes it does it and sometimes it doesn't. I'm gonna try like this. Copy, paste. That didn't work either. You know, I don't know. What is going on in the kitchen? No, that didn't work either. Okay, so over here I'm going to say enrich, and I'm going to say yes, yes, yes. I'm going to basically just drop this down like this till here, and then what I can do is I can run a Make.com automation that will look up the person's first name, last name, and company name. You see that? I can run an automation that will go through all these people And find each one of these people's LinkedIn URLs. How cool is that? And then once I have their LinkedIn URLs, I can have it fill in all the rest of the information, how many employees they have, their email address, and everything else over here. So I'm going to go ahead and create that automation that does that relatively quickly. And I'm going to show you how I do that automation. You guys want to see that? I'm curious to know if you guys are interested. Just write interested in the chat if you're watching this live. And you're interested in checking out how to do this. But as you can see, I'm organizing this list in a way that makes sense to me and that allows me to be able to communicate with these people in a customized way. Now I just want to make sure that this is correct, that this is all correct. Yeah, this makes sense. Megan, Catherine, Karina, Cam. I'm just going to do a Google search on this person right over here just to kind of see what comes up here. Okay. I'm going to quote this person's name here, see if we can't find them on LinkedIn. Interesting. Smart Building Systems. I'm just going to search a person's name like that. Yeah. Executive account person for CDW. Palm, Peace of Mind Technologies. So this guy's working for Peace of Mind Technologies over here. Interesting. How long has he been working there? He just started a month ago. So he's a brand new employee for Peace of Mind Technologies, which is a member of our organization. This person over here, he— oh, he works for Adler Windows. Yeah. Jeremy works for the American Immigration Council. Vincent works for Beech Hill Securities. Let's take a look at this person here. Beech Hill Securities, terrible LinkedIn profile. He's the CEO of this company. I'm gonna put it here. Karina Britta from Brooklyn Fiber by Robin Fisher. Do a quick search. Managing director of ITC Company. Uh, let's see where they're located. They're located in Bryan Capital, Mexico City. Interesting. Credit Suisse. Let's see if she has Robin Fisher as a mutual contact. It doesn't look like it, but it does look like an important person. Brooklyn Fiber. Interesting. Hmm. This is probably the right person. I'm going to want to connect with this person based on our mutual connections and who they are and what they're doing in the industry. Very interesting. All right. Buy right liquor. We don't need that. Catering Advisory. I know Paul really well. Not worried about that. AJ, what's this guy? Who's this person here? Oh, interesting. CEO of Century Management Services. It looks like it's a real estate development, real estate management company. That's cool. All right, so let me just check that out. Jason from Land Abstract. Let's see what that is. Cornerstone Abstract. Did I meet this guy? I may have met this guy already, but we're not connected on LinkedIn, so I'm just gonna go ahead and check this out. We got Sisto Martillo from design from John Rafferty. Uh, nice power user. All right, this guy looks Design 2147. Okay, I'm gonna close this, paste it. Okay, we got David Moskowitz from Food Trends New York. Okay, David Moskowitz from Food Trends New York. It also doesn't look very active, but he is paying for LinkedIn, which I like. Again, another opportunity for me to help this guy take his LinkedIn to the next level. Rachel Kellner invited this woman here. I'm gonna check her out. She looks like also she's not very active on LinkedIn, so I'm going to reach out to her as well. Stanley! Stanley's coming? No fucking way, that's amazing. I can't believe Stanley's coming. Stanley's my client. So glad Stanley's coming. That's really nice. Okay, let's see what this is. Lindsay, Lindsay Boss from Paycor. I think I'm— I think I talked to Lindsay already more than one. Maybe, maybe not. Did I connect with Lindsay? Do I know her? I'm not sure I know her, but she, she lives in Phoenix. It looks like I'm going to want to connect with Lindsay. So this is, you see how important this is to do this, to know who's going to be in the room and who's not going to be in the room. So you can build relationships with these people. Look at this payroll company over here. Amazing. He's a managing director at a payroll company. It's exactly who I want to meet. This guy probably has sales reps that you can sign up to Evvai. Megan, I know because she's my guest. She actually connected with me on LinkedIn. And then Catherine, I don't even see her on LinkedIn, but I'm gonna delete her last name and see if LinkedIn pops up somewhere here. I'm gonna quote it. Have you guys been digging? Huh, she's on, looks like she might be on Facebook. Let's see. No, it doesn't even look like she's on Facebook. Interesting. Okay, so I couldn't find her, but she is part of Venture House. Oh, look at that, LinkedIn right here. Let's look through Venture House and see if we can find her. I even forgot her name. What was her name? Her name is Catherine. I don't see Catherine from Venture House. Let me look through the employees of Venture House. Katherine, where are you? Where are you, Katherine? All filters. I'm gonna go down here and type in Kath— Katherine. Search. Nothing. No Katherine. Okay. All right, I'm gonna close this. I have a lot of people that work there, but she might not even be on LinkedIn. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to email this list to all the members of the Executives Association to stay top of mind with them. So I'm actually going to open up my email client, and then I'm going to go through these one by one and save them to a list in Evvii and comment on all their posts. So how do you comment on someone's posts? It's really, really easy to comment on people's posts, but it doesn't look like this guy even posted. So that's totally fine. He hasn't posted. I'm just going to quickly go and see who posted and who didn't post. This person over here looks like they posted a month ago. And I definitely want to connect deeply with this person because they work for a payroll company and I'd like to work with that payroll company and help them with Evvy AI. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on this. Her name is Lindsay Lloyd. I'm gonna look for her cell phone number here. I'm gonna use Apollo to pull up her cell phone number. Are you burning the midnight oil? I'm actually not. I'm just, I'm gonna go to sleep in a couple minutes, but I wanna pull up her information. I see I got a cell phone number here. I'm gonna copy it. I'm gonna put it in WhatsApp now. See if I can find this person on WhatsApp. Send a message. That phone number is not on WhatsApp, so obviously it's not this person's cell phone number. But I'm going to send her a message, and I'm going to say, looking forward, looking forward to meeting you at EINYC. Tomorrow. Do you check LinkedIn often? Okay, I just sent her that message. Let's see if this person gets it or doesn't get it. Look at this post. I posted this post. I completely understand your perspective. What I found is opting for a glass of sparkling water with lime helps me stay focused. Let's see. You are so right. A thought-provoking post, I must say. While networking events offer ample opportunities to connect, consuming alcohol may indeed hinder the depth and authenticity. Okay, excellent. So I'm going to reply to Noah. You know it. And then Robert Parisi said, moderation and indulgence if you have room. Balance is key. Okay, there we go. Let's look at Robert Parisi's, um, recent posts. We're going to save his profile. We're going to make sure that we save him into Heavy AI Pro and also Posting Party. Recent activities. Let's see what happens. Let's see, 36 minutes ago he posted here. I'm gonna say boom. By the way, Robert, if you're watching this, I would recommend not doing the repost feature here. I would recommend just a regular post. And over here you posted inside this real estate communication thing. I can't comment on that, but I can comment on this huge opportunity. Hi Robert, this sounds like an amazing opportunity. I'm going to go ahead and comment on this just like that. Oh, look at that. He said, check out this video. If you're ready to take your LinkedIn to the next level, check out this tool. Amazing. Let's see. I'll leave a nice little comment on that. Okay, excellent. Let me see if anybody messaged me here. Denise messaged me. She said, hi Joe, I'm so sorry, I'm just seeing this now. Sorry for responding. I've been offline for a bit. Thank you for taking the time to wish me a happy birthday. No problem. Ed said, I see we've been connected for a while. Micah said some glowing things about you. I'm glad he's brought us together. Thanks, Ed. Who comes to mind that would be open to sharing? We'll think about it. Jen said, um, I'd like to catch up next week. I'm currently in catch-up mode. Sounds good. Anthony says yes. That would be great. Let's see, what is your cell? That's a very important question to ask people. What is your cell? Okay, this is a comparison tomorrow's event found below. Adam Stiller is doing the Spotlight. Okay. Uh, and I'm gonna write a— write an email about the guests now. So I'll show you what the email looks like that I would send out. So here's, here's the email box. I'm just gonna say, I'm gonna send it to members@enyc.com, and then I'm gonna say, guests for 12325 ENYC. Here are a list of guests coming tomorrow. Please take the time to identify the ones you want to build a relationship with. Before the event. Here are a list of guests coming tomorrow. Please identify the ones you want to build a relationship with before the event tomorrow. So I'm going to go here. I'm going to copy this list. I'm going to paste it in the email like that. And then I am going to hit Send, and that will just send the email to all the members. That's one way for me to stay top of mind with all the members of the Executives Association very quickly. See that? It saves me a ton of time, and it also helps me stay top of mind with all those people. Now, if you haven't joined our school community, if you go to app.eva.com, on the left side we have a community. I'm going to click on Community, then I'm going to click on Discover Our Community. And I want to quickly go into Facebook just to kind of see if anybody has commented on my video here, because I'm not being notified that people are commenting on my Facebook video. I'll go to my profile, I'll like and comment on my own video. I'm going to say boom. Boom. Okay, 19 minutes ago. Oh, I'm doing this for 19 minutes. That's cool. Look at that, I have a new message over here. I have some notifications over here. Look at these notifications. People mention me in comments. I got a lot of notifications here. Okay, so let's go into here just to kind of see what people are saying here. Is this the right thing? Did I not check it in 2 days? Oh, that's crazy. Did you see my question, Joe? Okay, I'm gonna look into that. I'm gonna go here, uh, remove anything from the link after the question mark. I'm in the FBI meeting. This should have been posted, but I'm tired of learning the morning routine. Forgive me. Okay, so I'm gonna click on this. I'm gonna give it a like, and then I'm gonna go ahead and leave a comment on this post. I don't know why this is taking so long, but I'm gonna open up some of these other posts as well. And then I'm going to like it here. You see that? Thank you for attending. Hi, Tammy. Hi. Oh, Tammy's on, um, on YouTube, it looks like. Tammy's on YouTube. Let's go to YouTube and see what's going on on YouTube. youtube.com/joeapfelbaum. I'm gonna go to live. And let's just see. Oh, Tammy said hello. I'm going to say hi. Enjoying the Heavy AI webinar? Check out heavyai.com/webinar-replay. Okay, that's cool. All right, let me go back over here and let me check this out here. So, Say It With Solutions. Boom. I can't even post it because it's not— doesn't have a hole for it to post it. Oh, there it is. Now give it a little boom. Let's see what this one— John Stoker said being ghosted is not fun. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and click on this link here. I'm gonna hit generate. It's gonna generate a solid comment on this post. So I have to think about it and I hit comment just like that. I'll go on the same post over here, hit comment and boom. Greg, this is fantastic. Love how you're combining sustainability with practical solutions. Okay, let's see what this is over here. I see more people following me. That's wonderful. All right, so I did this, this, I did Eugene, Dr. Amin. Uh, let's see who else. Dr. Amin, Rick Clote. This person BC, I say post a link to a post, not your profile, please. Okay, I'm gonna go here. Let's see what we have. We have Glenn. I could use some love if you're reading this comment. Okay, let's open up Glenn. Here's my link. Evan Messman. Joe Apfelbaum. Kevin Williams, check out my post for today, quick read, anyone will benefit. Robert Mendelson. Boom Rick, thank you. Charlene Ranker. Arlene, post your actual post, please. Okay, Robert Parisi. Boom. I'm gonna click on Carlos Guardia. Joe Applebaum. Lisa Sanderson. Jane Lehman, Julie Shalom, Shulam. Let's see. And then Howard Gershman and then Christy Slack and Francois already did. Okay. So I already, so that means I'm going through all these links now in order for me to comment on all these posts. I make it really easy. I'm going to use Evie AI. And Evie AI is able to generate a comment on every one of these posts in a matter of seconds. I don't have to sit there and wonder, oh, what should I write? All this other stuff that's not necessary. I could literally just stay top of mind with all these people in a matter of seconds using Evie AI to literally write the whole thing down just like that. And then I just hit submit. So what this does Is this helps me save a ton of time. Now I can change my goal, my tone, and my persona to be able to change the message. And the message could be different, and it's going to be different because my persona is different than anybody else's. So I'm just going to say, it's amazing how much tax situation can change. Consulting a tax pro is definitely the way to go. Thanks for sharing the valuable insights. You see that? Different than everybody else's. Ever wonder why some professionals blah blah blah? I'm gonna go ahead and leave a comment for Julie as well. And I only have like 10 posts left to go, so this is a fantastic way of being able to leave comments on posts without really having to do the work of typing or even making a decision for what to be writing there. As long as it makes sense, you essentially just go ahead and do that. And this saves a ton of time. So I'm going to go through each one of these here. I'm going to like them and I'm going to leave comments on each one. You gotta do them one at a time. Jane, you hit on something really truly amazing. I close it, hit generate. Let's see, Carlos posted something over here. I'm gonna leave a comment on his post. Generate. Insert. You comment on his post. Insert. Comment on his post. Charlene. Comment on her post. Robert Mendelson. I was so happy to see him today at the event. He showed up at the event. It was very nice. I did have a long day and I'm ready to go to sleep. All right, I'm gonna hit generate. It'll generate a comment for him. I'll read it. Looks good. Moving on. And with each one that I generate the comment, as soon as the comment gets generated and I insert it— great insights, Robert. It's amazing how blah blah blah. And now I can close it, and then I can— I just have a couple more left, and then we're done, done for the day. But as you can see, I have things that I need to do this month. I'm working on personalized check-ins, asking about the goals for the year. Okay, I'm just gonna delete half the comment and And boom, post it and move on. You see how I'm leaving comments on all these people's posts? Save me a ton of time. Look at this. And look, he has 13 comments and 19 likes on his post. Most people don't get this type of action on their posts unless they're part of some type of, some type of group of people or they have relationships with people. You know, these, you're building real relationships with these people. These are all Heavy AI network clients, people that are in Heavy AI that are adding value. Look at that. Incredible. Howard, Francois, Dr. Amin, Rick, Charlene. Powerful stuff. What a beautiful story. I think that having a group of 45 people doing this together could be a little difficult, but if you have a group of 5 or 10 people that support each other's posts on a regular basis— like, everyone should have 10 people in their world That they know they can rely on to get a comment on their post from. Do you have 10 people in your world that you know that are super active on LinkedIn that are very happy to leave comments on your posts? Think about that for just a moment. Who are the 10 people in your world that would be thrilled to leave you a comment on any of your posts? I got like 2 more to go, and then I'm done. And you can see how long this is taking me. This is not taking me hours and hours of work, and I can have other windows open on the other computer screen to be able to do this much, much faster and not even think about— I'm going to generate. This is loading the page. Insert. Loving the productivity hack. I'm going to close this now. I'm going to generate. Dr. Amin, communication is really key. Okay, boom, done. So I just commented on all the posts in the posting party, and it only took me a few minutes to do that. You see that? Now I'm going to go through the rest of the EANYC guests. AYC members. But this is an important question that a lot of people don't ask their clients. It's like, what is your, what is your post? He said, very awesome that you're in the Marketers Cruise. I've been on a few times in the past and built amazing relationships back then. Family became a priority. Now that my son is 6, I may hop back on in 2026. I'm going to say that's awesome. Let's see who Joseph is here. I may hop back on in 2026. Okay, let's see what he says. Hit save. Yeah, NYC, guess, uh, what's the date tomorrow? 1/23/2025. I just named this, um, the spreadsheet. It's so cool that Stanley's coming. I'm so happy to see that. And now I'm going to open up the DM here and I'm going to send Joseph a direct message and I'm going to say the following. I'm so very happy that you have gone on the cruise in the past. I'm curious to know what years you've gone. Do you happen to have the digital directories for those years? I'm going to press insert. Then I'm going to press send. And I just sent him a message, but I didn't have to type any of it up. Evie AI literally typed it up. You saw that? That is just fantastic for me. Um, so tomorrow I'm gonna kind of build the relationships with these people and get to know them a little more. Uh, but for right now, I'm gonna go to sleep because I'm gonna have a long day tomorrow starting really early. Look at these amazing folks here. Building relationships with these people is key. And showing up to the events and networking and taking selfies with them. That's how you build those relationships. And then the next event is going to be February 6th. It's going to be at Bad Roman in Columbus Circle. Then after that is going to be February 20th at the Union League Club. And then we have a social event on the 27th. Um, that's gonna be to be determined where. And then we have an event on March 6th. Then we have another social event on the 20th of March. And then we have, let's see, and then that's it. There's nothing else. So we got just March. We just got January, February, March. Interesting. All right, it is what it is. Hopefully you found this valuable. Hopefully you enjoyed this. If you do enjoy watching me here live— hey Cody! Oh, Cody's on, on YouTube. Cody, come check us out on LinkedIn or put in your LinkedIn URL in the chat if you can see this live. I'm gonna press this little smiley face. So check this out, I have templates in Evie AI. I'm going to go to templates, I'm going to search birthday. Happy birthday message. Today is 1/22, so I'm going to hit update template birthday 1/22. I'm going to hit copy. That copies the birthday template. Then I'm going to go into Evie AI right over here where it says learning hub, quick links, birthdays, and I'm going to quickly message all these people that have a birthday with this template. On 122, you see that? I message these people just like that. And then I'm going to choose the belayed one. So I'm going to go back here to templates, birthday. No, that's the wrong one. Happy belated birthday. I want to have— bless you, have the best year ever. So I'm going to go back over here. Happy belated birthday. I see I missed your birthday yesterday. Did you do anything special? Send. You see that? So I'm going to send this for yesterday. Wow, a lot more people had birthdays yesterday than today. And then I want to say the last one, I'm going to say this week. Happy belated birthday. I see I missed your birthday this week. Ctrl+C. Okay, see the way I'm sending these people messages? January 19th. It's pretty incredible what this can turn into. Unable to send messages. I don't know why it didn't allow me to send a message to them. Maybe I sent it too quickly. Oh, look at that, Dr. Rao. That's cool. Might be going too quick. Let's see how many more birthday messages we had here. Wow, all the way back to January 12th. All right, I missed all these birthdays. I was on the cruise and I wasn't prioritizing doing this. Okay, January 18th. I think it was this week too. No, today's the 22nd, so it's got to be this week. I'm gonna say last week on the 17th. The 17th is probably last week. Instead of this week, I'm gonna say last week. Last week, I was on a cruise with 400 entrepreneurs. Nice. I see I missed your birthday last week. I was on a cruise with 400 entrepreneurs. Boom. Look at that. Yes, it does take a few minutes to do this, but I'm looking at each person's name and thinking about our relationship and how I know them and what I need to do with them. Or if I don't know them, taking a look at what they're up to. Is often important to identify if there's an opportunity. I'm gonna go back and look at all these people's profiles because it's all gonna be in my messages, my recent messages, especially the people that reply. Now, if people don't reply to me, too bad on them. If people get upset because I send them birthday messages, too bad on them. I'm doing my greetings. I have a process called the greeting, feeding, and meeting process. And through this process, I'm able to connect with people, build relationships, get to know them. Imagine each one of these people was somebody that was in your life in a meaningful way, like real people, real people that you want to get to know, real people that you've connected with, not just strangers. Like random people on the internet that you're wishing happy birthday. No, these are— some of these people have been watching me for 5 years on LinkedIn. And all of a sudden they get a birthday message from me like this. Wow. That's, uh, that's for, for a lot of people, that's one of the most impressive things that they see is like, wow, you made the time to go and send these messages. And as you can see, I'm not using automation. I'm looking at each name over here. Unable to send message. It says on the bottom there. Okay, that one it sent out correctly to January 14th. I got to get all the way down to January 11th. We're almost there. This is not spamming people because they literally opted in to show their birthday on LinkedIn. Oh, look at that, Sergey Cook. He's a big affiliate of Evai. Jen Peterson. I literally missed all these birthdays because I, I just, I had an AI that was doing this for me and I just said, you know what, let me just do this manually because I want to see who it's actually messaging. I want to go through these people and be like, oh, look, it's Sergey. It was Sergey's birthday. Oh, look at Oliver. I need to connect with Oliver. I haven't spoken to Oliver in a little bit. You know, this helps me be able to remember people as well. So, here we go. Let me click on this guy's profile. This guy is a licensed agent at New York Life. So, I'm going to go ahead and send him a happy birthday message like this. That's pretty cool. He has not responded to my message recently. That's okay. I'm eventually going to disconnect from everyone that's not responding to me because it just doesn't make any sense for me to be messaging people over and over and over and they just don't respond to me. It's better to die from a dream than to live a nightmare. That's true. All right, let's see what, um, this guy Edgar Rodriguez said to me. Look how many messages I just sent out. Thank you, Joe, he said. Wow, powerful. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to go to sleep now. Thank you for watching this. Then thank you for spending a couple minutes with me, building a relationship, seeing what we're up to. If you haven't checked out Evy AI, definitely check it out. It's evyai.com.