Why More LinkedIn Contacts Don't Mean Stronger Pipeline
In almost every workshop I run, someone asks me a version of the same question. "Shouldn't I keep accepting the networking invitations? Otherwise, won't I miss out on valuable opportunities?"
It's a fair question, and I don't want to be the guy who tells you to log off. I like LinkedIn. It's where I share my Minute to Win It videos, and it's a wonderful place to research someone before a first meeting. But somewhere along the way, a lot of sales teams started treating connection counts as a stand-in for pipeline. More connections must mean more opportunity.
My experience says otherwise. Technology has made it easier than ever to build a big network, and the business relationships inside those networks have never been shallower. A thousand connections who wouldn't take your call are worth less to your forecast than five people who would call you first.
LinkedIn networking pays off when it turns into relational capital, which I define as the distinctive value created by people in a business relationship. Until then, it does very little for revenue. Here's how to tell the difference, and how to point your team's time toward depth.
The false comfort of connection volume
Why the number feels like progress
Connection counts have everything a busy sales professional could want in a metric. They go up. They're visible. They take almost no effort to grow. Accept a few invitations over your morning coffee and you've made progress, at least on paper.
That's exactly what makes them dangerous. Growing a network feels productive in the same way clearing an inbox feels productive. It's activity, it's comfortable, and it rarely asks you to have a difficult conversation.
The confidence gap
The research I gathered for Business Relationships That Last found that 78 percent of business professionals overestimate the quality and strength of their relationships. Most of them find out when a competitor walks off with a client.
A large network makes that overconfidence easier to sustain. When you can see two thousand names, it's natural to assume a few of them are relationships you could lean on. Try the harder questions, though. How many of those people would take your call this week? How many have ever told you what they're trying to accomplish this year?
Life in the valley of acquaintance
Every business relationship starts as an acquaintance, and that's healthy. I recommend keeping roughly 15 percent of your relationships at that level so you always have new ones developing. The problem comes when acquaintances pile up and never move.
I call that the valley of acquaintance. Contacts who stay there don't advance their business, your career or the objectives of either one of you. They just add to the busyness.
When the tool starts using you
The other comment I hear is, "What am I supposed to do on this networking site, just keep responding to the automatic postings?" That's the moment a tool starts to overpower the person using it. Reacting to a feed can fill an hour without moving a single relationship.
Signs your team has fallen into this trap:
Connection growth or follower counts come up in performance conversations
Reps spend more time reacting to posts than talking with clients
Target accounts count as "covered" because of connections nobody has met
Why digital contacts are not real relationships
A connection is a courtesy
When someone accepts your connection request, they've extended a small courtesy. They haven't shared anything about their business, made a commitment or decided to trust you. Those digital relationships, ethereal really, are just lines on a computer screen until somebody invests the time to learn about the person behind them.
Relationships begin when goals get shared
A business relationship truly begins when the other person shares a goal, passion or struggle with you. I call that their Relational GPS, and people don't share it with someone they haven't yet judged to be credible. Credibility is the gatekeeper quality. Until a buyer believes in you, everything stays transactional.
Now look at how acquaintances typically behave:
They're willing to have a conversation
They're unwilling to meet after a few conversations
They're reluctant to offer help or advice
They hesitate to share any goals, passions or struggles
They're indifferent about returning calls and emails
If that list describes most of your LinkedIn network, you're in good company. It describes most networks, and that's exactly why the size of a network says so little about the strength of a pipeline.
What a college student taught me about friending
While I was finishing Business Relationships That Last in a local coffeehouse, I overheard three college students talking about their social media pages. I'd been wrestling with how online networking fit into building relational capital, so I introduced myself and asked for their take.
One of them said, "Eventually, you meet people in real life and then you request them to join. I would never 'friend' someone on Facebook prior to meeting them."
That's one data point, but the logic holds up beautifully in business. Why would anyone share their goals, passions and struggles with you before they've actually met you?
Max never had followers
My friend Max drove an old British taxi and had so many loyal riders that new customers had to book three or four weeks ahead. He didn't have a big list of contacts. He had friends. Three weeks after our first ride, he remembered I had an infant son who was probably still asleep at five in the morning, and he greeted me with a gentle tap on the screen door.
"It's the little extras that turn fares into friends," Max told me. You can't offer a little extra to someone you've never really met.
What meaningful relationship depth actually looks like
Three dimensions on the Relational Ladder
I describe relationship depth with what I call the Relational Ladder. Every business relationship sits in one of three dimensions:
Acquaintances know each other but share very little
Professional Peers value each other professionally and work together without any sense of hierarchy, whatever their titles
Respected Advisors seek each other's advice on issues well beyond the original reason they came together
A healthy portfolio has roughly 15 percent of relationships at the Acquaintance level, about 75 percent at Professional Peer and up to 10 percent at Respected Advisor. Most LinkedIn networks sit almost entirely in the first dimension, with a long tail of people you've never actually spoken with.
Depth shows up in behavior
You can see depth in the way people act. Here's how a typical connection compares with a real Professional Peer relationship.
A connection | A Professional Peer | |
When you reach out | May or may not reply | Responds in a timely way |
What they share | A job title and their posts | Business goals, passions and struggles |
Their strategy | Whatever is public | Aspects of it, plus some confidences |
Time together | A courtesy | Valued as much as their own |
Referrals | Unlikely | Will refer you on request |
Respected Advisors go further still. They ask your opinion on matters outside your original business together. They include you in their planning. They give you early warning when issues surface, and they send referrals your way without being asked.
Depth inside a target account
For sales leaders, depth matters most inside the accounts that carry the forecast. A few questions reveal it quickly:
How many people in this account would take your rep's call this week?
Who has shared a goal or struggle with your team in the last quarter?
If a competitor approached this account tomorrow, who would tell you?
Who would introduce you to a peer at another company?
If the honest answer to most of these is "nobody yet," the account is covered by connections, and the relationships still need to be built.
How to prioritize quality over quantity
Start with five names
Before anyone on your team sends another connection request, ask them to write down the five business relationships they most need to advance over the next twelve months. I call these the Fab 5. Two rules make the exercise work:
Name a person, never a company or the contact who introduced you
Attach each relationship to a specific performance objective
Five keeps it manageable. It creates real priority among the hundreds of people a client-facing professional touches, and it leaves room for a healthy mix, perhaps one brand-new relationship, two or three in progress and one or two at the highest level. In my workshops this simple step takes far more thinking than people expect, which tells you how rarely we connect our quotas to specific relationships.
Use LinkedIn as the on-ramp
LinkedIn networking earns its keep when it leads somewhere. Used well, it's an excellent first step:
Research a contact's background and professional profile before a first meeting
See who in your network knows the person and could offer perspective or an introduction
Use a message to set up a real conversation, and save your real questions for that conversation
Follow a good first meeting with a handwritten note, which will probably be the only one they receive that month
Then move each relationship off the screen as soon as it's ready.
Go deep in the communities that influence your buyers
Some of the most valuable depth sits outside the account itself. Earlier in my career, at a technology company, we realized the Big Six accounting firms were influencing our customers' software decisions, and our salespeople had almost no personal connection with the partners involved. It took many months of meetings, calls and social time with a small number of national partners to earn their trust. We eventually did business with each firm on a handshake, and that handful of relationships produced significant referral revenue every year.
A few deep relationships with the people your buyers trust will outperform a wide network of strangers every time.
Prune the valley
Review your acquaintances periodically. For each one, either invest to move the relationship up the ladder or stop counting it as part of your plan. You can stay friendly and accommodating, but there's no reason to spend pipeline time on contacts who aren't going anywhere.
What leaders should measure instead
The gap between belief and measurement
When I wrote Business Relationships That Last, I shared research showing that 88 percent of executives believed the strength of their customer relationships was the main reason they met their revenue goals. Yet only 24 percent of companies formally tracked the relational side of their client interactions in their CRM, and fewer than 5 percent focused on advancing business relationships as a strategy for making their forecasts.
Those numbers come from an earlier era of selling, and in my work with sales teams since, the gap has been slow to close. Leaders believe relationships drive revenue, then measure almost everything except relationships. Connection counts and activity volume fill the vacuum because they're easy to count.
Metrics that reflect depth
Add measures like these alongside your volume metrics, and over time give them more weight:
Fab 5 relationships each rep advanced up a rung this quarter
The mix of Acquaintance, Professional Peer and Respected Advisor relationships in each target account
People per key account who have shared a goal, passion or struggle with your team
Referrals requested and received, plus referrals that arrived unsolicited
Early warnings from clients that came before an issue escalated
Make relationships a standing agenda item
My friend Jerry makes sure the status and advancement of relationships come up in every sales meeting and every conversation his client-facing professionals have with their managers.
Try adding a few questions to your own pipeline reviews:
Where does this relationship sit on the ladder, and what moved it?
What did the client share with us that we didn't know last month?
Who else in this account should we be getting to know?
Assess, plan, improve, repeat
Relationships can be measured. The RQ Assessment we use at AchieveNEXT scores the strength of a person's five most important business relationships and suggests specific ways to advance each one. The real value comes from the cycle. Assess, build an action plan, work the plan, then assess again so you can see how far you've actually come.
LinkedIn networking can absolutely feed your pipeline. It does that when connections become conversations, and conversations become relationships your team can name, measure and advance. If you'd like to look at where your team is spending its relationship-building time versus simply collecting contacts, let's set up a call and refine it together.
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