Who knows who

It’s the mapping and not the map that builds relationships, says Peter Mills.

Whether you call it relationship mapping or not, you likely do this in your organisation; it might be informally and not at all explicitly, or it might be in a very structured way. The mapping of relationships with other professionals, how the actual process can help foster commercial thinking within the business and how the outputs are applied, can bring potentially unexpected benefits.

We don’t pay referral fees, but referrals from other professionals are a valuable source of new leads; understanding and fostering connections is important to us. For some time now, we have consciously mapped our professional connections in a very granular way: who knows who, when did they last interact, and what is the tangible strength of the relationship. It is not particularly sophisticated; it’s basically a spreadsheet with coloured cells. It may well become more sophisticated in time, though that is not the main point.