You know the drill. A hotel ballroom or a brewery back room. A name tag that says “Hello, my name is” in Sharpie. Two hours of shouting over background music, a stack of business cards in your bag, and the nagging feeling that you could have spent the evening doing almost anything more useful.
Then nothing happens. No clients, no partnerships, not much of anything. And you start to wonder whether networking works at all.
Networking works fine. A lot of networking events don’t. Here’s why, and what to do instead.
The format works against real conversation
Big mixers are built for volume. Lots of people, short exchanges, constant movement. That’s fine for meeting faces, but relationships need something the format doesn’t allow: enough time to understand what someone actually does and what they need.
Two minutes is enough to swap elevator pitches. It isn’t enough to learn that the woman you just met serves exactly the clients you’d love to meet, or that she’s been looking for someone who does what you do.
Everyone’s in sales mode
When a room is full of people trying to find clients, everyone is pitching and nobody is buying. The conversations get polite and shallow, because people are listening for whether you’re a prospect, not for who you are.
One meeting doesn’t build trust
Referrals and business come from trust, and trust comes from repeated contact. Most events are one-offs with a different crowd every time. Even if you have a great conversation, there’s no natural next time. Unless someone follows up, which most people don’t, the connection fades within a week.
Nobody follows up
This is the quiet killer. People collect cards, mean to follow up, get busy, and don’t. The event wasn’t wasted because of who was there. It was wasted because nothing happened afterward.
The wrong room
Sometimes the event is just a poor fit. Everyone there sells to the same customers you do, or nobody there is in a position to buy or refer. A lot of business owners keep going to the same events out of habit without asking whether the room has ever actually produced anything.
What works better
Smaller groups
Five to ten people in a real conversation will usually produce more than a hundred people in a loud room. Everyone gets to talk, everyone hears what the others do, and the connections that form are based on something.
The same people, repeatedly
A group that meets regularly builds familiarity. By the third or fourth time, you know what the other members do, what they’re working on, and who they’d love to meet. That’s when referrals start happening.
Conversation instead of pitching
The best networking rooms have a norm against pitching. It sounds counterintuitive, but people buy from and refer people they’ve gotten to know, not people who pitched them hardest.
Follow-up as part of the plan
Decide in advance that within a week of any event, you’ll follow up with the two or three people you most want to stay in touch with. A short, specific note is enough.
If you’re still going to big events
They’re not useless. A few things make them much better:
- Go with a goal. Not “meet people,” but “find two people who serve the same clients I do.”
- Have fewer, longer conversations. Three real conversations beat twenty card swaps.
- Ask, don’t pitch. Curiosity is more memorable than your elevator speech.
- Follow up within a week, or don’t bother going.
- Track results. If an event has never produced a client, partner, or useful introduction after several tries, stop going.
The WEN version
This is exactly why WEN runs Round Tables the way it does: small groups of women running real businesses, on Zoom, with no pitching and no presentations. It’s built for the kind of conversation big events make hard. If you want to know more about the format, read What Is a Business Round Table? or Why Small Group Conversations Work Better Than Big Events.
And for more on making the relationships themselves work, see How to Network Authentically.
