As a professional, time management is a vital key to success. Part of managing your time is choosing with whom to spend your business hours. We all have the folks that we enjoy hanging out with but know that, professionally, it is not a very efficient use of our time.
Here is a good exercise that may help to take the emotion out of the process. Take a piece of paper and draw a dot in the middle. That’s you. Then draw a circle around that dot and draw another much larger circle around both of those. Inside the inner-circle, write the types of professionals/titles that ask similar questions of their prospects or professionals/titles that call on the same entry points. These are the professionals with which you should spend most of your networking time, including a monthly touch-point.
Inside the larger circle write the organizations, groups, and clubs in which you participate. These are professionals with whom you can build friendships and who will help you when they can, but opportunities for you are not things they come across every day.
The remainder of the page is for very nice people that probably cannot help you or your clients professionally.
Hopefully, this helps.
Pro Tip: Build a professional roundtable of your inner-circle and meet with them monthly. You will be amazed at the results.
Good luck,