Recruiting guide

How to track investment banking networking

Tracking networking isn't a nice-to-have — it's the difference between recruiting systematically and recruiting by memory. Here's what to track and when it starts to matter.

Tracking investment banking networking means recording, for every contact, who they are, what stage the relationship is at, and when you're supposed to act next. Below roughly 15 contacts, most students can hold this in their head. Above 20-30, it becomes impossible without a system — which is exactly the point at which most people quietly stop networking as hard, not because they've run out of contacts, but because tracking them has become the bottleneck.

What this looks like in practice

A minimal tracker is just a table with a status per contact and a date for the next action:

ContactFirmStatusNext action
Sarah ChenGoldman Sachs · IBDRepliedCoffee chat Thu
Marcus WilliamsMcKinsey & Co.SentFollow up in 3 days
Priya PatelBlackstone · PEFollow-up dueNo response after 7 days

That's the whole system. The hard part isn't the structure — it's keeping it current without it becoming its own chore.

The five fields that actually matter

  • Contact — name, firm, group, and how you're connected (alumni, referral, cold).
  • Status — a small, fixed set of stages (drafted, sent, replied, chat scheduled, chat done, follow-up due) so you can scan the whole list in seconds.
  • Last touch — the date of your most recent email or conversation.
  • Next action + date due — what you're supposed to do next and when. Without this field, everything defaults to "eventually," which means "never."
  • Notes — anything specific from the conversation you'll want to reference in a follow-up. See what's actually worth writing down.

Why the 7-day follow-up rule needs a system, not a memory

The standard advice is to follow up seven days after no response. In practice, almost nobody does this consistently by memory — two weeks pass, it starts to feel awkward, and the contact quietly drops off. A tracker with a due-date field and a reminder turns "I should probably follow up with them" into an actual scheduled action, which is the entire difference between the advice working and not working.

Where spreadsheets break down

A spreadsheet works fine for the first 10-15 rows. Past that, three things go wrong: the "last updated" spreadsheet becomes ambiguous, status updates get skipped because they require manually finding the right row, and there's no reminder mechanism — you have to remember to open the sheet and check dates yourself. A closer look at where this specifically falls apart is in MarketIQ vs. Excel for IB recruiting.

ChatGPT built the target list.

Manage the pipeline in MarketIQ — drafted, sent, replied, coffee chat scheduled — instead of a spreadsheet tab you'll lose by next week.

Build your pipeline

Frequently asked questions

How do I keep track of investment banking networking without a fancy tool?

A single table with the five fields above (contact, status, last touch, next action + date, notes) is enough on its own — the tool matters less than actually keeping the status and next-action fields current after every interaction.

What's the simplest way to remember who I need to follow up with?

Sort or filter your list by 'next action date' and check it on a fixed schedule (once a week works for most students) rather than trying to remember individual dates.

Should I track people I haven't emailed yet, or only ones I've contacted?

Track them from the moment you identify them as a target, with a status of 'not contacted' — that way your full target list stays visible instead of only the people you've already reached out to.

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