Whether you work in marketing, accounting, development, or operations, you’re a representative for your company.

And when you meet people at conferences, online, at a coffee shop, or anywhere else in the world, you may find yourself in a situation where a person X needs help with issue Y, because of Z:

• An acquaintance wants to know more about your product & pricing and could become a new client.
• Old classmate wants you to refer him to HR and could be a great hire.
• Client alerts you about a service outage, which could lead to lost revenue unless you inform the SRE team.

Relax. You don’t have to solve each issue yourself. Just route them to the appropriate people on your team.

First, send a quick heads up Slack / text to your target team mate, confirming that they are the right person to handle this issue. This is important because all intros should be double opt-in.

Once confirmed, send a short email that explicitly calls out X, Y, and Z:

subject: BigCo <> FooTech
to: jon@foo.tech, leticia@big.co

Leticia, please meet my colleague Jon, who’s in charge of Sales. He can tell you all about our product and how we can help you promote BigCo’s content to a broader audience.

Jon, Leticia is a classmate from NYU and the Content Lead at BigCo. She heard about us through the ReCode article.

subject: Fred Gibs / Jr. Engineer position
to: hera@foo.tech, fredg@gmail.com

Hi Hera, I’d like to introduce you to my friend Fred Gibs, who is interested in the Jr. Engineer role on the Advanced Tech team. I met Fred at PyCon and he’s contributed to React and a few other big open source projects.

Fred, Hera is the hiring manager for this role and can give you a better idea of the requirements & responsibilities.

I’ll let you two take it from here. Thanks!

subject: Fwd: Service outage
to: emergency@foo.tech, tech@foo.tech, accounts@foo.tech
cc: lonnie@vip.co

Hey team, Lonnie (cc’d) just informed me of a big service outage that’s affecting VIP. See below for details & screenshots. Can you please investigate this right away and keep both Lonnie and me in the loop? Thanks!

Easy, right? 3–4 sentences and an informative subject line is all it takes. 5 minutes, tops. I promise.