Who do I even reach out to?

You’ve decided to build your network on purpose. You’ve even got a rough picture of the twenty people you’d choose. Then you open LinkedIn, the cursor blinks in the search box, and the whole grand plan comes down to one embarrassingly practical question:

What do I actually type?

(If you’ve jumped straight to this piece, good - you’re at the search box and you want an answer. You’ll get one. Just know it leans on an idea from “Choose, Don’t Collect” - two minutes there, and everything below lands twice as hard.)

Here’s what almost everyone types: their buyer. The accountant searches for small business owners. The insurance broker searches for people who look like they need insurance. It feels obvious - search for the people who might pay you. And the results are, well, fine: a long list of strangers who might buy something, someday, who owe you nothing, and who get connection requests exactly like yours every week from everyone else running the same search. That’s not a network. That’s a prospect list wearing a network’s clothes.

The shift is this: you’re not searching for people who might buy. You’re searching for people positioned to trust and recommend you.

Three things, and you’re looking for all of them at once. Capable - genuinely good at what they do, because you’ll be putting your name behind them too. The right attitude - they think in relationships and introductions, not transactions (you learned to spot this in the last piece). And embedded where your future clients live - their working week runs through the rooms your buyers sit in, even though they’ll never buy a thing from you themselves.

Let me show you what that looks like, because I found my best example half by accident.

My most successful campaign ever is aimed at fractional executives - CFOs, COOs, marketing directors who work across a handful of businesses at once. Run the old frame over a fractional CFO and you’d scroll straight past: not a buyer. But look again with the right frame and they light up. A fractional works inside five or six businesses at a time - they sit in the middle of a web of exactly the small and mid-sized companies most of us serve. They can’t be across everything themselves, so they lean hard on people they trust - fractionals recommend each other, and the specialists around them, more than almost any group I know. The word “fractional” in a LinkedIn headline isn’t a buyer signal. It’s a node signal.

And when I reach out to them, the note - you get 300 characters - isn’t about what I offer. It distils what I’ve learned about their world: the feast-or-famine see-saw, the way work moves between them on a recommendation. They instantly get it. Years of experience compressed into a note that takes them ten seconds to read - that’s the gold. The approach on the call that follows is just as simple: let me find out about what you do. You’re reaching out on the strength of what they do and who you could point their way - not what they might buy.

I can hear the objection: “reaching out to people who’ll never buy - isn’t that a waste of time?” It would be, if relationships went nowhere. But a properly built relationship knows exactly who to introduce you to - that’s the whole point of choosing people embedded where your clients live. And for what it’s worth, the practical problem with this approach isn’t silence. A colleague of mine, three weeks into exactly this: 180 reach-outs, replies from more than one in five, meetings stacking up back to back. The problem you’ll actually have is keeping up.

So this week, before you type anything: write one sentence describing the person positioned to trust and recommend you - what they do, where they sit, what they’d need to see to take you seriously. Then go to the search box and type that - not your buyer.

The search finds them. What makes them take the call - and what you say in the twenty seconds after they connect - is where we go next.