In this episode, Michelle explains why big, shallow networks fall flat and why a few genuine connections can change everything.
Ever feel like you’re “networking” nonstop but nothing real comes from it? In this episode, Michelle explains why big, shallow networks fall flat and why a few genuine connections can change everything. She digs into what makes a network actually useful, how to spot the people who matter, and why depth beats volume every time. If you’re done wasting time on empty coffee chats, this episode will feel like a reset.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15-plus years that I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners fall into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to center sequence.
Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
The Real Problem Behind Hollow Networking
And as you know, in every episode of this podcast, I like to answer a real question coming from a real entrepreneur or coming from the community where you're struggling with a real challenge in your business. And today's question is a typical one that I hear from so many of you, especially after enduring strings of connection calls that go nowhere, right? We talk about this a lot on the show, networking and how you do it effectively.
And here's the gist of the question that I hear over and over again. And that goes something like, I've been networking for years. I have 500, 1,000, 5,000, maybe over 10,000 LinkedIn connections.
I take connection calls. I do coffees. But when I actually need something, when I'm looking for a referral, when I want to explore collaboration, when I need even just advice, nobody responds.
Or worse, they respond with the generic, let's catch up sometime messages that never go anywhere. What am I doing wrong? Or, you know, is networking just broken?
If you've ever felt this way, and I'm guessing many of you have, and we've talked about this before, you're not alone. I see this pattern constantly in my work with entrepreneurs. People are doing what they think is networking.
You know, again, showing up, connecting, and yet the network feels hollow. It doesn't help when you need it. And this is showing up in a lot of different situations, right?
For those of you who are service providers who can't get referral numbers, you know, despite having what feels like a big network. Those of you who are going through situations where you see something positive that you think is going to happen, and then just people start to ghost you left and right. And most specifically, I see it with any kind of entrepreneur who just starts burning themselves out on these connection calls that end with the empty promises to each other.
I talk about these all the time, right? We spend time, get on Zoom, we're going to burn ourselves out to have these coffee chats. And at the end, we just kind of smile politely at each other and are like, okay, that was great.
You know, sure, if I run into someone, I'd be happy to refer to you. That never works. It just never works, right?
And so when this stuff starts to feel like it's on a path to nowhere, what do we do about it? And why does it matter? And let's talk about why it matters so much.
And you've heard me say this before too. So this show is just kind of reiterating some purposes, a lot of stuff that you've heard before, but I wanted to sink in for you. This is why it matters so much to me that you care about this.
Why Your Network’s Quality Shapes Your Business
And the reason is that I see over and over again that your network is one of the biggest unfair advantages you can have in business. And I often say that your business is the average of the quality of your network. Same way people will say you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Your business is the average of the quality of your network. And notice what I said there. I said quality.
I did not say quantity. And so in this season of the podcast, when we're talking about it mattering more, right, and doubling down on what matters, well, I'm always going to say that getting your network right matters more. And not only does that matter more just in the solo context of networking, but with all the things that you could get right in your business, your network is one of the most important.
It's maybe not the most fun thing you can do, but it is probably the most valuable. And that's because when you get this wrong, or even when you're just kind of getting it average, you waste years building a network that looks impressive on paper, but does nothing for your business. Or even worse, you waste years just not even paying attention to this and losing that unfair advantage that you can have.
Because when you get this right, your network becomes a compounding asset. And that's why I care so much about this, right? The right 20 connections can do more for your business than 500 shallow ones.
Those people are going to refer to you. They're going to stick around for years. You're going to build relationships together, and you're going to find compounding ways to help each other more and more as every successive year goes on.
And that matters. That's why your business is the average of the quality of your network, right? Because when you have a quality network, those compounding assets keep moving.
And when you don't have them, when you don't have that network that you can compound on, you're just starting from scratch every single time. And so it makes it harder to grow your business in any kind of meaningful way because you're always starting over. That's why I care that we get this networking thing right.
So let's fix this. Because if you're 500, again, you're 1,000, you're 5,000, you're 10,000 plus, I don't care how many connections you feel you have, whether on LinkedIn or just in whatever type of virtual Rolodex that you hold, if they aren't helping you, the problem isn't networking itself. It's how you're prioritizing doing that work.
And frankly, it's that you're prioritizing network width over network depth. So let's talk about how to tackle this. And some of this is going to sound familiar again because I just want to pound it in because it is so freaking important that I feel like the more we can talk about this, the more it normalizes it, and the more we all get busy working on it.
And so you have probably heard me talk a lot about ideal connection avatars and having only the right people in your network, right? You may have even heard me say that you should think of your network as a privilege someone needs to earn their way into and that they do that by showing up as one of your ideal connection avatars. And that's, again, a mindset flip that I want you to think about.
Someone needs to earn their right into your network, right? Because you may have even heard me laugh about the time waste it feels like when someone kind of considers their LinkedIn following to be their network. And when you do that, again, you're kind of prioritizing width over depth.
So I realized, like, let's go a little deeper here, give you a visual, give you a framework of why I think this way. We're going to sequence over strategy it, right? I'm going to go even deeper into how I see network science working, why it matters than maybe I've shared before.
And we're just going to call this little thing the network depth framework because if there's ever something I'm consistently terrible at, it's naming frameworks and tools something catchy. So we're just going to roll with the network depth framework. And what that means is that your network can either be deep or wide.
Same way some of you may have heard me talk about a product mix can be deep or wide. What does that mean? When it's wide, it's, you know, relatively generic surface level.
When it's deep, you're going deep with people, right? And most people approach networking with a width strategy. More is better, more connections, more LinkedIn requests, more coffee chats, more all the things, right?
We want to optimize for volume. And that's the situation we're talking about at the beginning where folks are talking about have all these connections, why are they going nowhere? By the way, this is the exact same conversation we're having when folks are saying, hey, I'm traffic marketing and it's going nowhere.
Well, yeah, because traffic marketing, what's traffic marketing? That's wide instead of deep. Anytime that you are optimizing for quantity rather than quality, you are going to struggle if you are a service-based provider, if you are an entrepreneur who has a business that relies on depth.
Understanding Depth vs. Width in Networking and Why It Matters
So we can look at all the different ways that you can kind of think in default into wide strategies, and networking is one of them, but product mix is another one, marketing is another one, right? And so, again, most people are approaching networking with this width strategy. But that's backwards?
Should we say backwards, out of order? The wrong question to ask is what it is. Because what you should be asking first, before you just launch into thinking all these people are your connections or launch into just trying to grab as many connections as you can, is you should be asking yourself, what kind of connections do I need?
And you may have heard me tell this story before. When I was running a startup, I would travel all the time. And because I traveled all the time, I had all the fanciest statuses with United Airlines, because I was out of Denver, and you just fly United if you're in Denver, because that's a base of operations for them.
And so I had really fancy status, and I'd always get upgraded to first class. And I tell you that because I was in D.C. one day, and I was at a conference, and I was running a table, so I just had collected all these business cards all day, as you just kind of do in those situations. And so when I got on the flight back, I had gotten upgraded to first class, and I was seated next to a very typical salesman.
And during the flight, I think it was a Friday evening or a Thursday evening, somewhere where I'm starting to think about the weekend. So I'm trying to organize my life while I'm on this flight home, right? And I pull out all these business cards, and I'm kind of rolling my eyes at them, because this was when I created all of my networking systems, and I knew what my priority was, that my priority was depth.
And here I have all these business cards that I know are just kind of worthless to me. And this salesman looks at me, and he's like, oh, my God, what a great day you had, because I'm holding this, like, you know, eight-inch thick stack of business cards. And I looked at him, and I was like, what?
I didn't say it, but I'm thinking, no, I had an awful day, because all I'm coming away with is this big old stack of business cards that aren't going to get me anywhere. And that's that default thing that we have, right? You leave a conference with a stack of business cards, and you're like, oh, man, I had a good day.
Well, not if that's not your goal. And so you want to think first in terms of what's the goal, right? Before you start racking all this up, say, what side of this do I want to build on?
Same way we ask first, am I a relationship marketer, or am I a traffic marketer? You should first ask, do I want to go for a depth strategy with my networking, or do I want to go with a width strategy with my network, right? If it's depth, it's fewer connections but stronger ones, connections that are mutual, intentional, actually useful.
And again, like I said, there's a direct correlation here about how we think about relationship and traffic marketing, right? Relationship marketing is about depth. So if you're a relationship marketer, and you're probably a relationship marketer if you're a service provider of some kind, then you're a depth networking.
And so your goal is fewer connections but the right ones, which can be a little bit of a mindset flip, right? But it does tie into everything that we talk about, like in networking that pays and a lot of the networking conversations that we have. So this now is going to start to feel familiar to you if you're familiar with my work, because what I want to talk about is how to think about network depth.
How does that tie into strong and weak tied network science that I'm always talking about, right? If we're talking about network depth, you're talking about having different categories of your network and understanding who should fit in those. You're talking about having kind of three levels of your network is what I would characterize it as.
And those are broken up into strong and weak ties. But I even break up your weak ties into two categories. So we have kind of level one of your network, which we'll call the beyond weak ties, like far width of your network.
Even if we have a deep network, there's a little bit of width to it. So your far weak ties, those are the folks who know your name and you've encountered them in some way, shape, or form. So you know what each other do in the vaguest sense.
Maybe you've met in an event or maybe you're connected on LinkedIn, although I would argue that most of your LinkedIn connections don't even qualify as a weak tie. Maybe you had one coffee chat. And if you reached out to them today, they'd say, remind me how we know each other.
So that's the first group of folks who are in your network. And that's as wide as you want to go, right? You don't want to go so wide if somebody doesn't know who you are.
How to Build a Deep, Sustainable Network
And then we have your weak ties who are getting a little closer to the center. We think about these as, you know, rings around a planet or Russian nesting dolls. We're getting a little closer to the center.
And your weak ties who are closer to the center, these are people who actually remember you and they would take your call. You've had a few real conversations. There's not a huge bond there, but there's some form of mutual respect there.
And then you have your strong ties. And, you know, I talk about strong ties a lot. These are the people who are closest to you and they know what you're up to like 95% of the time.
And those are the three connections categories that you're going to have within your ideal connection avatars, right? Your ideal connection avatars are those people like, okay, what is the profile of the person that I want in my network? But taking it a step further, I don't need thousands of those people, right?
I don't even need 500 connections. You don't even need 100. Like you probably need at max 50 to 60, like what I would call level two and level three connections in your business, meaning like the closer weak ties and the strong ties at any given time.
And honestly, I always tell people who are starting out because it's true that the right two, three or five connections will start turning your business around faster than trying to collect the wrong connections at a greater pace. So I would much rather you focus your time on finding your first two, three or five weak ties and maybe even a strong tie than you spend trying to build out any width in your network. Because I know and I have seen that those correct two, three or five people will do more for your business than having 500 vague LinkedIn connections who don't really know who you are.
And that's if your business is optimized for width instead of depth, right? If you are a relationship marketer, if you are the typical profile that we share of somebody who's doing this type of work where you're looking for quality leads and you don't need a ton of them, right? You need 10 great leads a year.
You need 100 great leads a year. You don't need 100,000. That means you're a relationship marketer and that means you are looking for a very quality network.
Again, people who have earned their way into your network rather than just anybody or anyone. And so it's easy to talk a good game. Again, the same way we talk about relationship versus traffic marketing.
It's very easy to tell yourself that you're doing good work if you're traffic marketing. Because you get your little to-do list, you crank out your content, you post that content and you can kind of pat yourself on the back and say, good job me. Like I did my job today.
You can also do that with traffic networking, what we'll call it, right? Like wide networking. You can go out there and you can connect with people on LinkedIn pretty easily and build up your following pretty easily.
Because most people aren't paying a lot of attention to who they say yes to when they're accepting connections. And so then you can set a little goal and you can pat yourself on the back and say, good job me. You know, I did my networking.
But what happens in both of those situations? What happens is that then at some point you end up having to be honest with yourself that nothing's coming of that work, right? Yeah, you were able to check it off your to-do list, which is great, but nothing is actually happening.
And that's where it gets a little tricky because the depth is harder, right? It requires intention. It requires saying no to some connections so you can deepen others.
It requires being really specific about who gets to earn a spot in your network. And it requires actual relationship building and not just relationship collecting. And so this is where I go back to a little bit of sequence over strategy because if now I've reiterated to you why you want to think deep instead of wide with your network, how do we think about that?
How do we build it? How do we go about it? And again, this is stuff that I've talked about.
Certainly if you're familiar with my networking that pays work, you have seen some of this. Because the right sequence and going and building it means that first you're going to identify who should be in your network. So before you do any kind of connecting, you are going to create something that I've called ideal connection avatars.
And we've covered these on previous episodes. I think it may have been even like early on, like episode three, and I've certainly talked about them since. So you can go and find that content and we'll try to throw that in the show notes.
But first you want to identify who should be in your network. Who gets to earn a spot? What's the profile of a person?
Who should earn their spot in your network? And then second, you go meet those specific people. So instead of doing what I did that day in D.C. when I sat in a conference room and just gathered random business cards of people that I was never going to follow up with. That's a very passive strategy. It's a very traffic strategy. What you want to do is instead say, who should I go meet and how can I make that happen?
Rather than hope that somebody crosses paths with me. And then you start to deepen those relationships. And then as you maintain those relationships and you come up with collaborations, that's when you start getting your compounding effects.
That's when you start getting your year over year benefit of what this looks like. So let's make this practical. If you're sitting here with a bunch of LinkedIn connections or you're just generally like kind of overwhelmed by knowing that you should have a better network, knowing that you should go for with, but you don't know how to start.
Here's how you start. Number one, audit your current network. Again, we have tend to start with these like spliced together networks of random people.
Now that this is on your mind and you can kind of think through who would my ideal connection avatar be, go audit your network, go find out who do you already know who fits that profile, who in your network has actually earned their way in. Those people become priorities. Those people become your weak ties and your strong ties that I was talking about, right?
And then you can make the decision to deepen your relationship with them. And then when you start to intentionally connect with those folks, because now you have realized that they fit your ideal connection avatar and they should be in your network and you've really trimmed the fat quite a bit with who's in the network, right? And now you just have those right connections.
Now you can go and intentionally connect with these folks and you can reach out to them with specific ideas that you have of how you might be able to collaborate, what you might want to do together. And this is all stuff that we've covered in other episodes, right? But you don't want to have those conversations until you know that you're talking to the right people.
And then at the same time, right, you just say no to people who don't earn a spot on your network. And I know that that sounds so flippant and it's not easy to say no to people, but it actually kind of is in this case because most people are going to be thinking about their network as just the quantity, right? They're going to be thinking about that wide network.
And so they're trying to connect with everyone and anyone. Honestly, if someone's trying to connect with you and you're looking at it and you're like, oh, I'm not sure why I don't really fit my profile. I don't think they're going to earn a spot in my network.
It's okay, just let them go. They won't notice. They're not going to take that personally in most cases because they are reaching out to so many people.
As are they won't even notice if you're not replying and you can just move on and continue to make sure that the right people are the people who you are prioritizing and you stop giving time to everyone else because you realize like it's not getting you anywhere. So why are we doing it, right? So let's sum this up.
Final Thoughts and How to Take Action
If you are a person currently juggling an ineffective network, here's what I want you to remember. Your network's value isn't measured by how many people you know. It's measured by how many people would answer your call, show up for you in some way, and frankly are a good fit to set you up for a collaboration or a partnership or something that is going to allow you to really move a networking system in the way that we want to move it with intention and with quality and frankly with revenue results because that's why you're in business, right?
And so to do that, I want you to focus on who should be in your network, who earns a spot in your network. And that means thinking through who are your ideal connection avatars, who should be a weak tie, who should be a strong tie and go build relationships with those people with some intention and stop trying to build relationships with anyone and everyone, right? We don't need to have those awkward coffee chats that I talked about at the top that end with this, you know, smile and nod of, oh, it's great to meet you.
And yeah, if I ever run into someone who needs your services, absolutely, I'll be happy to refer you. And you both know that's never going to happen. So let's get a little bit more intentionality into this.
And if you need support for this, I would be remiss if I did not remind you that Networking That Pays is always here. Networking That Pays is an evergreen course that I offer that's going to walk you through this process of understanding who should be in your network and then helping you connect with those people. And you don't even have to go into the course to start understanding more about all this.
I have a free training located at themichellewarner.com/freetraining. Again, what did I say about having terrible naming? This is just having direct naming.
So literally you go to themichellewarner.com backslash free training and there's an hour long training there that's walking you through the process of setting this up. If that is something that you're now seeing, you could use a little bit of help with. And that'll help you get self-started.
It talks about ideal connection avatars and all of this good stuff. So again, if you're a person who is having a few ahas here, I would encourage you to go check that out and start doing the work of rechanneling your brain in the right direction for having that deep network instead of a wide one. And with that, my friends, thank you as always for being here.
If you haven't yet done it, please subscribe and even rate the show whenever you're listening. It makes a huge difference in how others are able to find it. And I always just deeply appreciate any reviews that you're able to leave.
And if you do want to go deeper on building an intentional network, I would welcome you to check out my Networking That Pays course at themichellewarner.com. And again, if you want to check out that free training that precedes the course, go to themichellewarner.com slash free training and you'll be able to get a little bit of free direct steps in terms of how to get started on some of the things that we talked about here today. And with that, I will see you back here in two weeks.