When you are trying to grow your referral Network, you’ll get better results when you can be specific about who you would like to meet.

Note – I’ve written about this a couple of time – first in 2013 and again in 2017. The LinkedIn interface has changed a lot since then, but the basic concepts remain the same.

One way to do this is to be very specific about the visible characteristics of the people you would like to meet. I’m sure you’ve done this when describing your ideal client – “Owner of a business in the KC metro area, with more than 5 employees…” that sort of thing.

An even better way to be specific is to ask about individual people by name.

One of the great things about Linkedin is it makes other people’s networks visible to you. So you can “help them help you” by identifying the people they know that you would like to meet.

But most people who are active on LinkedIn typically have 100s of connections. How can you search through these connections efficiently to find the people you’d like to be introduced to?

Here’s how:

As I write this in 2019, the practice of using LinkedIn to search for people who meet your ideal prospect criteria and then spam them with sales messages appears to be in vogue. This post won’t help you with that. This is for people who still like to build their network through introductions and building relationships.