The challenge with LinkedIn nowadays is you're not actually that well connected to all the people you're connected to. Maybe you met them at a conference once, or had a sales call with them years ago, or maybe you accepted a connection request without thinking.
So when you look at all the paths you have, you might at first be overwhelmed by the scope and/or want to filter so that you see paths via your closest connections first. That's what the Supporter feature is for.
You can flag which of your connections are your top ones - i.e. the people who you always want to know if they're connected to your prospects. These are people who you generally have no compunction about asking for intros because they want to help you - they could be investors, advisors, mentors, friends from college, family, happy customers, etc.
When you flag someone as a Supporter, a few things will happen:
They will show up at the top of your list of paths - even if we've calculated a low relationship score between them and your target.
In Connections View, you can tap the 'Show Supporters' feature to only show your Supporters - this way you can just go one by one through those results and ask each of your Supporters for intros to the one / ten / fifty targets they're each connected to.
We'll also be improving the Supporters feature significantly in the future:
We'll recommend which of you Connections to flag as Supporters based on your & their backgrounds
You'll be able to create and put people into different Supporter groups: Mentors, Happy Customers, Investors, etc
This way you can view results by these groupings, create custom intro request templates for each one, etc
And much, much more