Collecting Business Cards Isn’t Enough:
Seven Ways to Supernetwork Your Way to Success

By Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas

During your career you've heard or read lots of advice on networking, and chances are you've picked up a subtle, underlying message: More is better. Why else would you have left the last conference you attended with a briefcase full of business cards? Oh, you haven't reached out to any of those folks yet (or they to you), but you networked and that's what matters. And your online networking efforts are even more fruitful; you've got hundreds of LinkedIn connections just waiting to be cultivated.

This superficial view of networking just doesn't work. If you really want relationships that matter, stop aimlessly collecting business cards. There is a big difference between 'networking' and actually building a network of deep, loyal relationships.

Unless you're a nightclub promoter, calling, texting, and 'Linking In' with dozens of people every day isn't going to help your career. Neither is doing favors just to create reciprocity—so that people will owe you. In this age of social media, we've come to confuse quantity for quality. But supernetworkers understand that all contacts are not equal in terms of their career impact.

Supernetworkers segment—explicitly or intuitively—their network into these two pieces: the critical few and the many, and they adopt totally different tactics to stay in touch and manage them. Here are some tips on how to connect at the top and build deep, trusted relationships with those key influencers.

Know who your critical few are and cultivate them. Make a careful list of who you think should be your critical few and to build a regular staying-in-touch program for each of them. Who makes up your inner circle—those 20-25 key individuals who were going to really power your career and on whom you would also have a major impact?

Your critical few should include members, clients or customers, prospects, colleagues, personal mentors, collaborators—by which I mean other associations or individuals you may trade leads with and work with to serve a member. Plan to personally connect two or three times a year with each of the people on your list. Add value to them in different ways. Think about ideas and relevant content, network value (making a valuable introduction), personal help, and fun.

Build your network before you need it. Petri Byrd is the bailiff on Judge Judy Sheindlin's family court TV show. Judge Judy isn't any old show—it's the most popular daytime TV program in the United States. One might assume Byrd got his coveted job because of his acting skills and training. But the real reason is because he followed this essential law. Petri had never acted in his life. He worked with Judge Judy—as a bailiff—in Brooklyn family court in the 1990s. When he moved to Los Angeles, he heard she was starting a TV show and called her up. She hired him immediately. Petri had developed and maintained his relationship with Judge Judy years earlier—he built his network before he needed it. By doing so, he overcame what most would see as a huge disadvantage in getting a TV role.

You have to invest in other people before you ask them for anything, otherwise, you'll be seen as a freeloader. Cultivate your relationships over time, the same way you would tend a garden. Then, when you do need help, you'll find the people around you eager to lend a helping hand.

Follow the person, not the position. Truly important people—those who are at the top of their careers in any field—have often brought their advisors and trusted suppliers along with them over many years. While it is not impossible to break into someone's inner circle after they have achieved great success, it's also not an easy task.

Build relationships with smart, motivated, interesting, and ambitious people, even if they're not in an important job right now. Follow them throughout their careers. Before you know it, you'll know some very important, powerful individuals who can buy your products and services.

Stretch yourself by building relationships with people quite different from you. Research shows that our natural tendency is to choose others to work with who are very similar to us. But the most creative teams, the teams that solve problems the fastest, are eclectic and combine people with very different backgrounds and personalities.

People who are different from you often connect you into whole new networks that will complement your own. Who's the Steve Wozniak to your Steve Jobs—or the John Lennon to your Paul McCartney? If you put in the hard work it takes to accommodate differences, you'll be handsomely rewarded.

Make them curious. When someone is curious, they reach toward you. They want to learn more. They want to take the next step. When you evoke curiosity, you create a gravitational pull that is irresistible. Curiosity helps you get more of everything: more inquiries, more sales, more clients, more dates if you are single, more RSVPs for your party, and more friends.

Tell people what they need to know, not everything you know. Give brief answers to questions. Hint at things. Don't lecture a prospective member for 10 minutes when they ask you to describe your association. Develop contrarian or unusual perspectives. Be seen as someone who has refreshing points of view. Say the unexpected and surprise the other person.

Know the other person's agenda and help him accomplish it. Supernetworkers know that the key to connecting with others is an understanding of what's important to them. When you know what the other person's priorities, needs, or goals are, you can figure out how to help him or her. If you don't know their agenda, you're shooting in the dark or relying on some nebulous concept of charisma.

Whether at work or in your personal life, your first job is to understand the other person's priorities. Think about some of the key relationships you're trying to build—be they with your boss, your colleagues, or your board members or key leadership. Do you know what is important to them—really important—right now? Only when you understand this will you clearly see how you can help them and add value to the relationship.

Every act of generosity creates a ripple. A collateral benefit of selfless generosity is that it draws others to you. It creates an attractive aura around you—even though that's not the reason you do it. It is what characterizes the most influential people in history, individuals like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Andrew Carnegie, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is no way of knowing how your own generosity—to a cause or an individual—creates a ripple effect that influences many others. You end up touching many other lives, often without even knowing it. Supernetworkers, in short, are among the most generous people.

As you read this you might be thinking: Great. All my frenetic attempts at networking so far have been in vain! Not true. Just go through your contact list and ask yourself: Who will go out of their way to endorse me and introduce me to their network? Who will drop what they are doing and help me when I am in need? Who will tell others that they've never known someone as trustworthy and talented as me?

After asking yourself these questions, you may find that only five or ten people remain on your list, and that's a great start: A handful of deep, loyal relationships is always better than hundreds of superficial contacts. Quality trumps quantity every time.

Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas are coauthors of Power Relationships: 26 Irrefutable Laws for Building Extraordinary Relationships (©2014, Wiley).