There is a widespread idea that networking is for people who find it easy to talk to strangers. It drives away a good share of the people who would most benefit from a network: anyone with a technical business, anyone selling something that is hard to explain in thirty seconds, anyone who leaves an event with a hundred people feeling drained.
The good news is that the part of networking that generates business is not the social part. It is the methodical part, and method is exactly what introverted people tend to do better than average.
What is tiring is not talking to people
It is talking to people without context. Striking up a conversation with a stranger without knowing what they do, hoping to find something in common, is draining for anyone. What tires you out is the randomness, not the conversation.
Notice the difference: a conversation with someone you already know distributes exactly the product your company manufactures requires no social skill at all. The subject already exists. You only have to say what you do and ask what they are looking for.
Three swaps that change everything
Swap quantity for preparation
Five prepared conversations are worth more than thirty handshakes. If you know who you will be talking to, two minutes on each company's website turn "tell me what you do" into "I saw you serve retail; so do we".
Swap improvisation for a script
People who improvise well are a minority, and it does not have to be that way. Have one sentence ready about what your company does, one about who it sells to and one about what you are looking for right now. Repeat it in the next conversations. Nobody notices it is a script, and you stop spending energy inventing the same thing every time.
Swap approaching for answering
Approaching is the hard part; answering is the easy one. Environments where someone posts a need and you reply "that is what I do" flip the effort: instead of looking for whoever needs you, you show up for someone who already said they do.
The part you cannot delegate
One thing has no way around it: following up after the conversation. That is where most commercial relationships die, not at the event. A message within two days, picking up something specific that was said, is worth more than any social ease on the day.
And it is written, in your own time, with nobody watching. It is probably the part of networking where people who consider themselves shy have the advantage.
Where this applies
Formats with a fixed schedule exist precisely to solve the randomness problem. At a business round, you receive the list of who you will talk to in advance, each conversation has a start and an end time, and nobody has to decide who to approach in the middle of a room.
If you want the full picture, the business networking guide explains why most of the effort never turns into business and what separates a network that brings in clients from a list of names.