All for One: 10 Strategies for Building Trusted Client Partnerships

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Strategy Two: Developing Relationship Capital

Building the Vital Relationships That Drive Your Career and Your Firm

How do you develop a vibrant professional network that will support a successful career? Where should you focus your relationship-building efforts if your goal is to ultimately develop a handful of trusted client partnerships? These are essential questions for any service professional. They are also directly relevant to our task of creating an all-for-one organization. Ultimately, it is the combined impact of all of your professionals' individual networks that help to support and grow your Level 6 clients. As we see in Chapter 7, network leverage can become a key source of value to these institutional clients.

The advent of social networking technologies and other ways of staying in touch with large numbers of people have definitely made this subject more interesting but also more confusing than ever. I'll use myself as a case study. Right now, I have a mere 41 connections on LinkedIn, a web-based professional networking tool. Yet through those 41 I can, according to LinkedIn, get warm introductions to 1,275,300 people among the tens of millions who subscribe to the service. Is this relevant? Should I spend more time focusing on these million-plus professionals who may want to meet me? Pundits often cite “Metcalfe's law,” developed by Robert Metcalfe, as they exhort people to create large numbers of personal connections. His law states that the value of a network ...