Activate Accelerate Session 5
This Accelerate session was mainly another housekeeping session about upcoming Accelerate events and requirements. Firstly, we discussed mentor matching, which is one of the exclusive perks of being in Accelerate. Mentor matching is where your director finds mentors or experts in the fields you’re working in to help guide you on projects, give you help, and act as a mentor for you. It’s a good opportunity to make more connections and find people who are excited to help you with your projects and aspirations. We have our mentor matching session booked for next week, and I’m really looking forward to that.
The next thing we discussed was our weekly meeting requirements. Weekly meetings are an important requirement for Accelerate, where you need to have one external meeting every week. People tend to overlook the impact that meeting one new person every week can have on their network and progress. Over time, all those meetings you have had compound, giving you a vast network of people to reach out to, get connections from, and even ask for help from when needed. In Innovate, when I was doing Velocity, only in the end did I realize why I was able to expand my network as quickly as I did, which was because of those external meetings. In order to make sure everyone was doing their external meetings, we spent our time in our Accelerate session building out our own Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) and looking at different CRM tools to use. CRMs are used to organize all the different contacts and people you meet and reach out to (like a digital rolodex). It’s like a database where you can make notes of who all these people are, your “relationship” status with them (outreach, meeting booked, meeting completed, etc.), and have different tags or takeaways for each of the people (e.g. “Good contact for biotech projects, raising capital.”). It’s a good way to track all the people you’ve reached out to and keep note of how they may be useful to you in the future. No connection is a bad connection, but what’s important is making sure you can find them when needed.
As for weekly Accelerate guides, those will be starting again next week because this week is focused on outreach and filling up our CRMs and calendars with new potential connections. And that was the end of this session. Overall, really short overview, but it was packed with a lot of useful information about outreach, weekly meetings and networking, and new info for mentor matching.
