---
name: relationship-link-sweep
description: Use when an established business has years of suppliers, customers, memberships and sponsorships and none of it has ever produced a link.
---

# Relationship Link Sweep

Most established businesses are owed links nobody has asked for. The reason they stay unclaimed is that the search team starts from a link tool, and a link tool can only show links that already exist, so relationships that never produced one are invisible. The records that reveal them sit in finance and sales: the payables ledger, the membership renewals, the software subscriptions, the sponsorship invoices.

## What you need first

- the payables and receivables ledger for the last two years, as a supplier and customer list
- memberships, accreditations, sponsorships and event participation pulled from finance rather than from marketing
- the software and services the company pays for, from the IT or finance spend list
- one internal sponsor senior enough to ask a partner contact for a favour

## Method

1. Start with payables. Every vendor you pay has an account manager and many run customer, partner or case study pages, which makes this the shortest route from a paid invoice to an earned link.
2. Repeat with receivables. Customers often run supplier, stockist or approved partner pages, and a client who is currently happy is the easiest yes in the whole programme.
3. Check every software vendor for an integration directory, app marketplace or partner tier, then check whether the listing you already have carries a followed link or only a logo.
4. Take memberships, accreditations and sponsorships from the accounts rather than from anyone's memory. Annual fees show up in the ledger years after the person who signed up has left.
5. For each relationship, record whether a public page exists, whether it links, and whether the link is followed or routed through a tracking redirect. Sort by which of those three is missing, because each needs a different email.
6. Route every ask through the internal owner of the relationship. The same request sent by an account manager gets actioned and sent by a search team to a shared marketing inbox does not.
7. Log refusals with the reason, then add a link check to supplier onboarding, membership renewal and sponsorship sign-off so the backlog does not rebuild over the next two years.

## What this produces

A relationship link register covering suppliers, customers, memberships and vendors, with link status per relationship and named internal owners for the asks.

## Where this goes wrong

- sending the ask from the search team rather than the relationship owner, which converts a routine favour into cold outreach
- accepting a logo with no link, or a link through a tracking redirect, and recording it as won
- chasing a place on a members directory that turns out to be noindexed, which trade bodies do more often than they admit
- running the sweep once and never wiring it into onboarding, so the same list has to be rebuilt from scratch later

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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/relationship-link-sweep