Do your contacts generate profitable work?

How many professional contacts do you have?

Five hundred? Two thousand? Five thousand?

How many followers on LinkedIn? How many names are sitting in your CRM? How many people have you met at conferences, dinners and networking events over the years?

Now ask yourself a rather more important question.

How many of those people generate the sort of profitable work you actually want?

For many established professionals, the problem isn't a shortage of contacts.

It is that remarkably few of those contacts ever turn into good quality business.

Are you talking to the right people?

Think about the last five pieces of work referred to you.

Were they the sort of clients you wanted?

Was the work profitable?

Did it make good use of your expertise?

Would you like another five just like them?

Or did you find yourself accepting work because it arrived, rather than because it was the work you actually wanted?

There is a considerable difference between being busy and building a profitable practice.

And there is an equally important difference between knowing a lot of people and knowing the people who can introduce the clients you want.

You may already know good contacts

Most experienced professionals have spent years building networks.

Lawyers know accountants. Accountants know wealth managers. Wealth managers know lawyers. Advisers meet one another at conferences, lunches, networking events and through clients.

Yet relatively few stop and analyse those relationships commercially.

Who amongst your contacts advises the sort of clients you would most like to work with?

Who has access to the decision-makers you want to meet?

Who regularly encounters the problems for which your particular expertise is valuable?

And perhaps most importantly:

Do they know that?

More contacts aren't the answer

When I took over as Head of the Private Client Department at Simmons & Simmons, the department was loss-making.

We became much more selective about the work we wanted and the professional relationships capable of producing it.

The department became highly profitable.

That experience has influenced the way I have thought about business development ever since.

The answer is not necessarily more networking, more events, more followers or a bigger database.

It may be about looking much more intelligently at the relationships you already have.

Why aren't they introducing you?

This is where it becomes interesting.

You may already know people who advise exactly the clients you want.

But that does not mean they will introduce them to you.

Why should they?

What would make them think of you when the right situation arises?

And what would give them sufficient confidence to put their own client relationship at risk by making the introduction?

Those are very different questions from simply asking how many people you know.

They are also questions which can produce surprisingly different answers.

Your next five good clients may not require another thousand LinkedIn connections.

They may already be within reach.

The question is whether you know which relationships are worth developing — and how to turn them into profitable opportunities.

If you are curious about how, get in touch. It could be worth half an hour of your time.