Customer discovery interviews, and how many are enough
B2B customer discovery interviews: the sample size the research converges on, why your segments change that number, and the questions that get honest answers.
Read
Most requests for an introduction fail because they create work for the person being asked. Hand them a finished forwardable note, ask permission before you ask for the forward, and be deliberate about which contact you approach.
Most requests for an introduction fail for a reason that has nothing to do with the relationship. They arrive as a question the introducer cannot answer without doing work. "Could you connect me with someone at Almarai?" puts the whole job on them: decide who, decide whether you are worth the credit, write the message, and carry the risk if you turn out to be a waste of time. Faced with that, a busy contact does the rational thing and lets the message sit.
The fix is not a better subject line. It is to arrive with the work already done, and to understand what the introducer is actually spending when they press forward.
An introduction transfers a small amount of someone else's standing. The recipient takes the meeting because of who sent it, not because of what you wrote. That is the entire value, and it is why the request deserves more care than a cold email does.
It also sets the bar for the ask. If you would not be comfortable with the introducer reading your first message to the target, the request is too big. If you would not be comfortable with them hearing how the meeting went, it is much too big.
The instinct is to go to your closest contacts first. There is good evidence that this is the wrong default, at least for the kind of movement an introduction is meant to create.
Between 2015 and 2019 LinkedIn ran a series of randomised experiments on its People You May Know recommendations, covering around 20 million users, roughly 2 billion new connections, more than 70 million job applications and 600,000 jobs accepted through the platform. The results were published in Science in September 2022 as A causal test of the strength of weak ties, and MIT's write-up of the study is a readable summary of what the experiments actually found.
Two findings are worth carrying into a sales context. First, when tie strength is measured by mutual connections, usefulness follows an upside-down U: moderately weak ties produce the most movement, and the benefit falls away once two people share more than about ten mutual connections. Someone deep inside your own circle mostly knows the people you already know. Second, when strength is measured by how often two people message each other, the pattern runs closer to a straight line, with the weakest ties producing the most transmissions.
Be careful with how far you stretch that. The study measured job mobility among individuals on one platform, not B2B deal flow, and the authors were explicit that the effect varies by sector: weak ties mattered most in digital industries, while in more analogue industries stronger ties carried more weight. If you sell to construction firms or family-owned distributors in the Gulf, the strong-tie route is probably still your better one. The transferable part is narrower and still useful: the contact who feels like an obvious ask is often the one with the least new reach to offer.
Write two emails, not one. The first is to your contact and is short. The second is the one they will forward, and you hand it to them finished.
The note to your contact does three things. It names one specific person or one specific company, so there is no decision to make. It says why you are asking them rather than someone else. And it gives them an easy exit, in plain language, because an introduction given reluctantly is worse than none.
The forwardable part sits underneath, and it is written to be read by the target, not by your contact. It runs to about six lines. One line on who you are, one on what you do in terms the target's own business would use, two on the specific reason you are writing to them now, and one on what you are asking for, which should be a conversation of a stated length and nothing more. No attachments. No deck. If your reason to be writing is weak, this is where it shows, and the same discipline that makes a cold email get replies applies here with more at stake.
The specific reason is the part people skip. "We work with companies like yours" is not a reason. A change at their end is: a new facility, a new regulation, a hire into a role that owns your problem. Those are the trigger events worth acting on, and they are what makes a forward feel timely rather than opportunistic.
Send the forwardable draft with a question rather than an instruction: is this someone you would be comfortable passing on, and does the wording below sound like something you would send?
This looks like an extra step and it removes most of the failure modes. It lets your contact correct a wrong assumption about the relationship, which happens more often than you would think. It lets them edit the message into their own voice, which makes the forward more likely to land. And it converts a favour into a small collaboration, which is a different thing to decline.
It also protects you. If the answer is a hesitation, you have learned that this relationship is thinner than you assumed, and you have learned it before spending it.
Reply within the day, move the introducer to bcc in your first response, and say in one line that you are doing so. It signals that you will not be filling their inbox with a thread they did not ask to join.
Then close the loop once, whatever the outcome. Two sentences a week or two later saying what happened. People who get told what happened introduce you again. People who do not, do not, and this is the single cheapest thing in the whole sequence to get right.
If the meeting leads anywhere, the introducer's name will keep coming up inside the account, so treat them as a source of context on who is really in the room rather than as a one-off favour that is now spent.
Three cases, and the first is the common one.
Do not ask when you cannot name the target. A request for "anyone in facilities management" is a request to do your prospecting for you, and that work belongs in building the list yourself.
Do not ask the same contact repeatedly. Two introductions from one person in a quarter is near the limit for most relationships, and if you need volume you need a different mechanism. That mechanism is a referral partner programme, where the incentive and the expectation are agreed in advance rather than drawn from goodwill each time.
Do not ask when the introduction is a substitute for having something to say. An introduction gets you heard once. It does not make a weak proposition land, and a wasted warm intro costs more than a wasted cold email because you cannot get it back.
Khaled Badr makes a related point from the other side of the table, writing about asking your own network for help as the cheapest growth channel you have, which is a useful corrective if you have been treating your contacts as a last resort rather than a first one.
We cannot tell you a conversion rate for warm introductions against cold outreach. The figures circulating for this come from vendors selling referral software and we could not trace any of them to a dataset. Our own experience is that introductions convert far better and arrive far more slowly, which makes them a poor answer if you need pipeline this quarter and a good one if you are building for next year.
The weak-ties evidence is strong for what it measured and it was not measuring this. Treat it as a reason to look past your inner circle, not as a formula.
And there is a structural limit worth naming. Introductions do not scale, by design. A pipeline built only on them stalls at the size of your network, which is why they belong alongside outbound rather than instead of it, and why the sequence for a first ten clients uses both.
Send us the ten accounts you want in front of and the list of people who already know you. We will come back on which routes are real, which forwardable notes are worth writing, and where cold outreach is the faster answer.
Book a Free Consultation