How to: Choose your Priority Contacts

With limited time in the day most people choose to focus and streamline their networking strategy so that they can easily fit it in alongside their other commitments.  As well as choosing the right networking groups this can also mean choosing a few priority contacts to focus your business development and networking efforts on.

What is a Priority Contact?

I use the terminology “priority contact” to talk about someone who is a key contact and someone I want to want to build a strong mutually beneficial relationship with. They may be a key client and I want to give them a rolls royce service. They may be a target client and I am seeking to build and strengthen my relationship with them or they may be a gateway contact or referer, someone who has the potential to connect me with others and help me expand my network.

How do I choose my Priority Contacts?

It may already be crystal clear to you who your priority contacts are. It also might not be. If you don’t know who your priority contacts are run through the following steps to help you identify a list of potential priority contacts:

1. Revisit your goals. What are your networking goals? Write them down.
2. Revisit your networking circle to identify who is already in your network.
3. Which of these contacts help you achieve those goals?

Identify and write your action list of Priority Contacts

Once you have a master list you then need to choose to where to focus your efforts so that they have the most impact. For example consider:

1. What is the current state of your relationship with each of these people?
2. Which of these contacts are best placed to help you in the short-term? In the long term?

Then you can place your initial list of priority contacts into more appropriate categories:

• priority contacts – contacts where it is clear that you should be giving them lots of love and attention.
• priority contacts (short-term) – contacts you should prioritise right now / for the short term before switching them into another category.
• priority contacts (long-term) – contacts where there is a clear benefit to build your relationship but you acknowledge that you are likely to be playing the long game.
• quarterly check-ins – where they aren’t quite there, but they are important to you and you want to maintain a ongoing relationship
• other – you are not sure how it will work out and you want to keep the relationship fresh just in case.
• next time – you should always be reviewing your priority contact list – they may not fit in with your networking goals for one reason or another but this might change and you want to keep them close just in case.

Full priority contacts you can then use the Priority Contact pages to finalise you networking strategy with each of these contacts including your networking activities and check-ins. If they are now on the priority list you will still want these other contacts to still feature in your overall networking strategy so you should still schedule in reminders for quarterly check-ins and other occassional activities.

Worksheets: Subscribers can download the Networking Circle and Priority Contacts List Worksheets for free.