Two Things to Never Do to People Who Introduce You to New Contacts
Introductions aren’t just a nice thing to see from your contacts — they are the lifeblood of a business
According to Google, around 65% of new business opportunities originate from referrals and recommendations.
In my business, after legacy clients (those I had before I founded Harbeke Marketing), one-on-one referrals make up the next biggest chunk of my revenue. In fact, referrals dwarf my next revenue source — LinkedIn visitors — by over 29 percentage points.
Thus, I treat any introductions as getting a Wonka Golden Ticket. You should, too.
Why introductions are as good as gold
As business owners, we are deluged with offers over email, LinkedIn, etc. Many of the offers that reach our inbox are created and sent by AI — and an increasing percentage of them will be over time. While you’ll often see the “sender’s” photo and signature, you can tell pretty quickly that a human element is not present, in the name of automation and casting the widest net possible.
Manually sent introductions — by a human to other humans — are the antithesis to the above. Someone you know from your network made the choice to take their time to summarize who you are and your need(s), and align it with someone they know — and their need(s) — in the interest of either a need-based transaction, or simply to provide you with another contact (and their network) to help you grow your business.
In the part I bolded above, look at all the pieces that have to fall in place before an intro arrives in your inbox:
Someone in your network respects your skills and background (it’s a gift when anyone who’s not family thinks of you, in my book)
This person chooses to reach out to you
This person chooses to take the time to compose and send a message (this is an opportunity cost for them, as they could use the same amount of time for something 100% in their own self interest)
Some (not all) senders will take even more time to compose one or multiple paragraphs on each person being introduced, providing you with more context on why a new contact is someone you should get to know
So the next time you receive an introduction, take a moment to appreciate the process that took place to generate the message you’re looking at.
When it comes to your part, there are right and wrong ways to react. Let’s look at some scenarios for the latter.
Here’s what not to do when someone in your network introduces you to someone from their network
Fail to reply to the introduction thread (over email, LinkedIn DM, etc.). On the one hand, you’re busy. But on the other hand, if you value referrals — and your relationship with the person who made the intro — then it’s up to you to be organized enough to, for example, mark a new introduction message as unread to prompt you to revisit it and respond when you have time. I will sometimes schedule on my calendar to respond to an intro to ensure that I honor the time my network connection took to introduce someone to me that he/she/they think can help me in some way. The point here is that NO intro messages should go unanswered, full stop. (Note: copy/paste response templates are your time-saving friend here.)
Give negative feedback to the person who made the introduction when your call with your new lead doesn't go as you expected. Here’s what happened with me that prompted me to include this point. At a networking event this past summer, a CPA told me that she was looking for help to market her practice. Over LinkedIn DMs, I connected her with someone in my network who is a marketing strategist. Then, a few weeks later when I was on the phone with my marketing strategy contact — talking about something else — she referenced this intro and shared how disappointed she was that the person I introduced her to (the CPA) tried to sell her on her services and wasn’t interested in talking about learning from or working with my connection. This surprising criticism of this intro I made has caused me to pause when considering whether to introduce other contacts to my marketing strategist connection.
TL;DR for the above point: Think big picture and be judicious when approaching those who send you intros regarding a needs match to what you offer. There may be times where the “introducee” has a different agenda than what they tell your connection who made the intro — one of many factors your connection can’t control.
If you want to be a master connector…
Switching gears, a chief benefit of placing a priority on making your own introductions is that more people from your network will think of you — and more often. This is true of both people already in your network, and your network newbies who benefit from the new connections you make for them.
Also, the more intros you make, the more you increase the odds of creating what I call an introduction virtuous cycle with a particular connection. This is where it becomes a race to see which person — you or your intro-prone contact — will send the most intros. The con of this is that you will spend time reviewing your network to make more intros to this person. But IMO this con is always outweighed by the pro of many more intros sent to you that will benefit you over both the short and long term.
A great strategy to meet new connections and immediately suss out their need — which you can use to introduce them to your network — is virtual networking. For more on this, check out the #2 point in this blog post.
