By Geoffrey Hyatt
How can we use LinkedIn for our firm? It's a question you may have heard from the managing partner, or you may have even thought yourself. It is a smart question with a not-so-obvious answer.
In the past three years, the majority of us have at least taken a look at the popular social networking tools on the Internet, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. These tools help us, as individuals, to map our unique, personal relationship networks. The process can be somewhat tedious to maintain, but it can be both personally and professionally useful. However, the network access is limited to your singular network; you cannot access the networks of your colleagues. Most regrettably, you cannot access the valuable combined network of your firm. Because these networks are structured for personal use, your firm has no rights or ability to access the data of its staff members who may use these tools.
However, your firm does have a relationship network of its own. It is where most of your clients originate. It is where you do your prospecting. It is a unique asset of your firm. In an up market or a down market, it is the asset that drives revenue, billability and growth. So, how does the firm get a LinkedIn-type view of this relationship network?
Taking Luck Out of the Equation
I know the importance of relationships in the consulting business. I worked for six years at The Boston Consulting Group, first in Munich and then in Boston. When a colleague needed to know who at the firm had any pre-existing relationship to a prospective client, he or she would typically ask several peers.
The colleague might also send an inquiring e-mail office-wide or firm-wide and hope it was read by whoever might be able to assist. These methods of "searching" the firm's relationship network are obviously inefficient, but much worse is that they are incomplete. They do not reliably reveal the best relationships for that prospect. They rely on effort and luck.
Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) systems enable a consulting firm to understand its entire extended relationship network. These systems, such as ContactNet (from Thomson Reuters), Visible Path (from Dun & Bradstreet) and BranchIt, actively scan, analyze and compile internal company data, including address books, CRM systems, e-mail traffic patterns, and time and billing systems to understand and map all relevant relationships. The systems are configured to fit the unique privacy requirements and culture of each firm. Dozens of leading consulting firms, law firms and financial services firms have deployed such systems across their global offices.
The ERM systems analyze data each day to identify relationships between the employees of the firm and their contacts. The system therefore builds a comprehensive database of the firm's extensive relationship network. Searching this database gives a complete and instant answer to the question: "Who knows this prospect?" Consultants no longer rely on serendipity to find the connections that can impact their success.
