I’ve spoken before about being specific about who you need to meet. Now I’m going to discuss an approach to getting introductions to specific people. For this, I suggest the A-B-C approach.

It uses the basic principle of “Six Degrees of Separation.” Of course, if you are a good networker, you seldom need as many as six steps to get to anyone. Envision a target with an “A” in the center. Around the “A” is another circle, labeled “B.” And around the “B” circle is a final circle, labeled “C.”

Looks kind of like a target, doesn’t it?

These circles represent your contacts, both the ones you already know and the ones you want to know.

Look at your current contacts as your “C” contacts. These are the people who know, trust and are willing to make introductions on your behalf.

Then decide on the specific person (or persons) you want to meet: an ideal client, a perfect referral source, or the hiring manager at the company where you most want to work. These are your “A” contacts. Your goal is to leverage your C contacts to get introductions to your A contacts.

More than likely, you will need some intermediaries, and those are “B” contacts. B contacts are people who can introduce you to your A contacts. In some cases a C might also be an B, but often not. So you look at your C contacts to determine which are most likely to get you a step closer to A.

If you use LinkedIn or a similar social networking site, you have probably done this without thinking about it in these terms. On LinkedIn, there are people who are one, two or three steps away from you. If you do a search and want an introduction to someone who is three steps away from you, you send a request for an introduction to your first level contact. If your contact trusts you enough to send it on, it gets forwarded to the second level contact. And hopefully that person sends it on to the person you really wanted to meet. LinkedIn was, in part, designed around this very A-B-C concept.

The same approach works in face to face networking. Here’s an example. Let’s say during the a previous election cycle, I had wanted to meet Hillary Clinton. Who do I know who might have gotten me a step closer to her? Well, I know the owner of a heating and air conditioner company who has done work for a former senator in my state. That former senator might have been able to introduce me to Ms. Clinton. So I would have called my contact and let him know whom I needed to meet and why. If I have a good relationship with him (and I do), he should have been willing to introduce me to the former senator. And if that meeting went well, the senator might have been able to introduce me to Ms. Clinton directly, or might have introduced me to another B contact who could. And so it goes. Within two or three meetings, I could have had a direct line to her.

The key is knowing exactly who you want to meet and knowing your current contacts well enough to step your way to those ideal contacts. The last ingredient is trust. Without a certain level of trust, your contacts aren’t going to be willing to pass on your requests for introductions.

The system really does work. I was teaching a seminar on this topic, and I asked the participants to raise their hands if they had a specific person they wanted to meet. I chose a participant at random and told her that the people in this room were, for the moment, her C contacts. I asked who she wanted to meet. She said she wanted to meet a decision-maker at Marriott corporation. I turned to the room and asked if anyone could be her “B.” Several people raised their hands. Totally random group of people, and the system still worked.

It sounds basic, but networking really can be that simple. So who is your “A” contact? Maybe we know the ideal “B” contact to get you there.