Are you neglecting the people who would take your call?

If I asked you how many people in your network would agree to a call or meeting with you right away, no questions asked, what would you say? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? More?

One firm owner I’ll call Chris told me her answer was twenty.

By her own admission, she knows she should be talking with them. But she isn’t.

That’s because her network isn’t just twenty people. There are hundreds of contacts Chris has collected over the years, even decades, of her career. When she thinks about staying in touch, she doesn’t see twenty people. She sees all of them. She sees hundreds.

Sound familiar?

I know you’ve heard plenty of advice about staying in touch with your network. And if you’re like me and a lot of firm owners, the problem isn’t that we don’t agree it’s important. The problem is that when we think about following up with people, they all tend to get lumped together into one overwhelming blob.

Former clients. Colleagues. Referral partners. Prospects you talked with two years ago. People you barely remember. They’re all sitting there together in your CRM. Indistinguishable from one another.

And the twenty people you could be talking with right now get lost among the hundreds.

I’m not going to suggest you carve out the time to get your lists in a nice tidy order. I wouldn’t want to do it either.

My point is, if the size of the job is keeping you from talking with those twenty people, there’s good news.

You don’t have to figure out what to do with hundreds of people before you start with the twenty.

Give yourself permission to separate them from everyone else.

These are the people who know you, trust you and respect what you do. They’re relevant to your business now and willing to talk with you.

They’re the names that come to mind when you think, “I really should call her,” or “I can’t believe I haven’t talked with him in so long.”

They’re likely to be one of your fastest paths to the conversations that can surface new business.

There are other people worth staying connected to, even if you can’t give all of them individual attention right now. And there are probably plenty of people in your network who are no longer relevant at all.

You can sort that out later.

Start with the twenty. What if you reached out to just one of them a day for the next four weeks?

You may be surprised at where it takes you.