Your LinkedIn Already Has Contacts in Markets You Haven't Entered Yet

A SaaS founder I know spent six months trying to break into the hospitality market. She hired a consultant, attended industry conferences, cold emailed hotel groups. Progress was slow.

Then she scored her LinkedIn connections by industry. She had 43 contacts in hospitality — hotel operators, revenue managers, property management software people — that she'd connected with over the years and completely forgotten about.

Six months of struggle. Forty-three warm contacts sitting dormant the whole time.

Your network is more diverse than you think

We all have a mental model of who's in our LinkedIn network. It's usually wrong. We think of the people we talk to regularly — the handful who comment on our posts, the colleagues we still grab coffee with.

But networks accumulate over years. Every job, every conference, every introduction adds layers. That person from the panel discussion in 2021 who works in retail. The guest at your friend's dinner party who turned out to be a logistics operations manager. The person who reached out after you wrote something online, whose industry you never really registered.

Most of this is invisible until you look at it systematically.

How industry scoring reveals hidden connections

When you categorize all your LinkedIn connections by their industry or job function, you're essentially doing a census of your network. Suddenly you can see: 60 connections in fintech, 43 in hospitality, 28 in logistics, 19 in education.

If you're considering expanding into one of those markets, that's not a cold outreach problem anymore. That's a warm conversation problem — which is a completely different and much easier problem.

The questions you'd normally pay a market research firm to answer — who are the buyers, what tools do they use, how is the industry structured — you can get rough answers to in an afternoon by talking to three or four of those contacts. They'll tell you things no report will.

The hospitality founder story, in detail

Back to that founder. Once she saw the 43 hospitality contacts, she picked 8 who seemed most relevant based on their current roles. She sent short, honest messages — something like "I'm exploring whether what we do could apply to hospitality, and I'd love 20 minutes to pick your brain."

Six replied. Five took the call. From those five conversations, she got: a clear picture of the buying process, two introductions to heads of technology at hotel groups, one pilot customer, and a referral to an industry newsletter she'd never heard of.

Total cost: zero. Time investment: maybe 4 hours across messages and calls.

Compare that to six months of paid consultants and conferences.

What to say when you reach out

The key is being honest about what you're doing. You're not pretending this is a social call. You're not hiding a sales agenda. You're genuinely trying to learn, and you're reaching out to them specifically because you respect their vantage point.

Most people are flattered to be asked for their expertise. The response rate to messages like this is high, because it's not asking for anything hard.

From research to pipeline

The research calls often turn into something more. Once someone understands what you do and has told you about their problems, the obvious next question is "could this actually help you?" That's not a pitch. That's a natural conversation.

Some of those research conversations become pilot customers. Others become referrals. Even the ones that go nowhere give you information that sharpens your positioning.

The best part: once you've had a few of these conversations, you know which contacts to prioritize. You're not guessing anymore.

Apply this to your next market

Before you hire a consultant or buy a market report for your next expansion, spend 30 minutes looking at your LinkedIn connections by industry. Chances are you have more relevant contacts than you realize.

wait who? does this automatically — it maps all your connections into industries so you can see your network as a market map, not just a contact list. When you're ready to reach out, it drafts the message so you don't have to start from scratch.

The market you want to enter probably has a door. You might already have the key.