It’s actually pretty simple.
When you ask for an introduction on LinkedIn, you are asking one of your connections to introduce you to one of his or her connections.
But if you are like most LinkedIn users, you have a decent sized network of connections where you really only know maybe 20% of those people well. The other 80% are people you met at a trade show one time, or they are someone that you worked with three jobs ago, or you connected with them for any number of reasons, but the reality is that you never really developed a relationship with that person.
So when you go to ask a connection to perform an introduction, there is an 80% chance that that connection is someone who doesn’t really know you that well. And they aren’t that comfortable providing the introduction. To them you represent risk: someone who may make him or her look bad. Of course you are not going to make them look bad, but as your connection doesn’t know you that well, they don’t know that.
Even worse, if you do find someone in the 20% you know well that seems willing to provide an introduction, there’s an 80% chance that they don’t know the target person you want to be introduced to that well themselves! The same thing holds true for them as it does for you: they only know 20% of their connections reasonably well. The possible introduction you wanted falls flat because your connection has no credibility with the target person.
So you started off all excited because you discovered a pathway through a connection to someone you really want to meet. But the odds of this working out in the end are only 20% (that you know your connection that well) of 20% (that they know your target that well).
That’s a measly 4% success rate. Heck, that’s barely better than a cold call.
So what can you do about it? Lots actually. Because understanding the “why” sets you on the path to figuring out the “how” to work around the limitations, and even use these limitations to your advantage.
Most people focus on the 80% failure rate and just give up. They should be figuring out what makes up the 20% and how to find them.
