Tracking intros as pipeline

If you don't track intros, you don't have an intro strategy. You have luck.

Most services firms treat warm introductions like weather. Some months they happen, some months they don't, and nobody can say why. The fix is boring and it works. Put intros in the pipeline, with stages, owners and dates.

Why intros vanish

An intro request lives in a text thread, a LinkedIn message or a hallway conversation. The seller asks, the connector says "sure," and then nothing gets written down.

Two weeks later, nobody remembers whether the connector sent the note. The seller doesn't want to nag. The connector forgot. The buyer never saw it. A warm path that might have turned into a $300K engagement goes cold without anyone deciding to let it.

That's the cost of not tracking. It isn't dramatic. It's quiet and constant.

The stages of an intro

An intro has its own small pipeline before it joins the main one.

It starts as a path. You've found someone you know who knows the buyer. Nothing has happened yet.

It becomes an ask. You've reached out to the connector with a short, forwardable note and a clear request.

It becomes a forward. The connector has sent the note to the buyer. You know this since they told you or copied you.

It becomes a response. The buyer has replied, to the connector or to you.

And it becomes a meeting. That's when it enters your main pipeline as a real opportunity.

Each of those is a stage, and each has a date. The gaps between them tell you everything.

What to log

For every intro, log the account, the buyer and their seat, the connector, how you know the connector and the date of each stage. Add one line on why you think this buyer has a problem worth solving now.

That last line matters. An intro without a reason is a favor. An intro with a signal behind it is a sales motion. If you can't write the reason, you probably shouldn't ask yet.

Keep it in the same system as the rest of your pipeline. A separate spreadsheet will die within a month.

What the data tells you

After a quarter, patterns show up.

You'll see which connectors forward and which ones say yes and never send. That isn't a judgment of the connector. Some people are busy, some don't like making asks of their network, and some only forward when the fit is obvious. Knowing that lets you ask the right people for the right accounts.

You'll see where intros stall. If they stall between ask and forward, your note probably isn't easy enough to forward. If they stall between forward and response, the buyer didn't see a reason to reply, which points at your hypothesis.

And you'll see which kinds of paths work. Former colleagues versus clients versus investors versus alumni. Some firms find their best intros come from delivery leads who worked alongside the buyer years ago. You won't know which until you count.

A scenario

Say your firm makes eight intro asks in a month. Log them, and you find three were forwarded, two got replies and one became a meeting.

Without the log, that month feels like one lucky meeting. With it, you can see that five asks never got forwarded. You check those notes and find they were all too long, written like pitches instead of short notes a connector could pass along in ten seconds.

You rewrite the template. Next month, more of them move.

Follow up on the stage, not the person

Tracking gives you a clean reason to follow up. You're not nagging the connector. You're asking about one specific step.

"Did you get a chance to send that note to their CFO?" is easy to answer. If they haven't, offer to make it easier. If they have and the buyer went quiet, see following up on an intro that went quiet.

And track the thank-you too. Every connector should hear how it turned out, whether it went anywhere or not. I wrote about that balance in keeping score without keeping score.

Intros are pipeline. Count them, stage them and review them weekly. They'll stop feeling like luck.