The Secret to Successful Networking: Making Close Friends

Who are you more likely to help out, a friend or an acquaintance? In networking, it seems to be about how many people you know. The number of people you have in your Rolodex is the metric of how well connected or networked you are. However, in my experience this is the completely wrong approach. If you build “acquaintance relationships” with everybody, then when it comes time to ask on someone for a large favor, how many of these acquaintances do you think will help you out?

Instead, I recommend taking an alternative approach to networking where you spend your time focused on building meaningful relationships with fewer people. Sure you may not know as many people as someone else, but when it comes time for you to call on someone in your network for a favor, they will be the ones who come true.

Another thing I have found is that by building a close relationship with someone, you gain access to their network. They will recommend you to their peers and these peers will have an instant trust in you and your ideas because you are being recommended by someone they trust. In this scenario, you can actually build a larger network than if you were just to exchange contact details with everyone you meet and your network will actually have trust in you and your abilities, a win-win.

So instead of trying to meet as many new people as you can today, look at the contacts you have already made and try to strengthen your relationship with them.