Are You Referral Ready?

More so than sheer size, diversity expands the effectiveness of any network. By focusing on this one aspect, your network serves as a bridge to other networks and allows you access to a wider variety of contacts.

Networks tend to form in clusters of people with similar interests, backgrounds, education levels, and economic status. Without consciously adding an element of diversity, your network will only open so many doors no matter how many people are included.

Accelerate the next time you meet someone in a different age group, race, or religion. Embrace a different musical taste, culture, or hobby. Celebrate your differences and challenge yourself to reach out, learn about, and help that person.

Whereas any network can help you open doors, a diverse network comes with more keys. Since there are only so many doors you can walk through anyway, diversity unlocks new possibilities and makes networking a richer and more rewarding experience.

Approachability refers to your ability to approach and be approached by others. It is a two-way street that generally defines how successful you can be in networking situations. We tend to gravitate toward people with high approachability, and it doesn’t happen by accident.

If you are hesitant to approach others, or people are hesitant to approach you, networking activities will always be a futile exercise to some degree. There is nothing more frustrating then standing in a crowd of people, wanting to connect with other people, and feeling as if you are invisible to everyone in the room.

Scott Ginsberg, a.k.a The Nametag Guy, is an absolute expert in this area. That he can make his living writing books and sharing thoughts about this topic tells you how much demand there is to learn about how approachability serves as a valuable business marketing tool.

It takes courage and practice, but the world belongs to people who dare to approach and be approached by others. If you want to be Referral Ready, take responsibility for improving the likelihood that the right people will cross your path.

One specific area of training you could provide your referral sources has to do with making mutual introductions. Armed with this information, both you and your referral sources make a commitment to opening doors for each other based on the words that work best for your business.

Even the best referral sources need motivation and continuing education about prospecting for your business. Even the most loyal referral sources have the right to expect that you might be working just as hard on their behalf. Without a mechanism for accomplishing both, the marketing potential of your referral sources is operating at 50% capacity.

An introduction seems like the most basic act, but do you really want to leave that to chance? Do you even know how your referral sources prefer to be introduced? Give them the tools they need to help make you more successful in exchange for tools that will allow you to refer them more business…which is always the best way to feed a referral relationship. When it is done this way, you demonstrate your ability to bring value to the relationship instead of just getting value from it.

The music business understands this concept instinctively. When your favorite artist or musician releases new material, you immediately purchase or download it without so much as hearing one note. You are that emotionally invested, and you want the connection to continue so you purchase tickets to see him/her in concert. Because it’s the music business, we call people like that fans. In fact, they are a special kind of customer.

The emotional connection between you and your fans takes time and effort to build. Keep in mind that consumers have become very demanding in terms of how companies market to them. They can smell phony from a mile away. One of the most trusted sources of purchasing information is word-of-mouth, and fans are the champions of word-of-mouth marketing (both positive and negative). Either you take care of your fans, or your competitors will.

Do your best fans have the tools to refer you to others? Are they being properly rewarded? Can they earn discounts on exclusive products or services? What motivates them to promote your product so strongly? How can you best support the relationship to maintain their loyalty?

Customers are price-driven. Fans are experience driven. Improve the experience to create more fans. Customers are surprised by good service. Fans automatically assume you will delight them. Provide service worth talking about to create more fans. Customers are indifferent to your company. Fans actively invest in their relationship with you–time, emotion, attention, and money. Invest in your customers to create more fans. Customers want you to sell them products. Fans want personalized advice and solutions. Get personal with your customers to create more fans.

Real estate and economic development projects indicate the future movement of commerce and consumer spending. Those projects could impact your business to some degree, and you can position yourself to gain referrals for future work well ahead of the competition. The real action happens behind the scenes.

By the time you read about some projects in the newspaper, brokers and bankers and architects and lawyers have been working for many months on various due diligence issues. You either learn to network with the few involved at the early stages of project development or you stand in line to compete with the many who come along later.

Regardless of your profession, you stand a better chance of being referred early in the project cycle. When you network and build relationships with key decision makers, you gain a competitive advantage by NOT having to compete. Word-of-mouth referrals favor the business that has connections before the details of an economic development project become public knowledge.

We all have friends, relatives, and professional contacts whose company we enjoy far too infrequently for whatever reason. When it comes to keeping score of our networking activity, greater emphasis is almost always placed on the addition of new contacts. New contacts are important, but budgeting time to maintain existing contacts is even more important.

The poet Rod McKuen once wrote ‘We can never have too many friends; only too many to properly take care of.’ Like a pot of boiling water, relationships can and will evaporate if ignored. It takes ‘work’, and blindly adding another layer to an already neglected network hardly seems like a strategy for long-term success. If your idea of networking is always adding more bodies, you reach diminishing returns much sooner.

Networking is not only building relationships, but maintaining them as well. Both require time and energy. Invest wisely in your existing network, and give yourself the opportunity to add new contacts along the way…but only to the extent that you are prepared to manage the whole process.

Have you ever asked yourself why you do what you do? Obviously you have other choices, but people respond positively to professionals with a true emotional connection to their work.

Think about the recently divorced woman who put herself through law school to fight for the rights of other women going through a similar experience. Her story resonates with people and with her clients. Her story wins business. If you don’t have a compelling story, you consistently lose business to people who do.

Simon Sinek reminds us that “people don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it…the “what” only serves as proof.”

When your emotional connection to your work becomes part of the way you market and talk about your business, you appeal to people on a very human level and differentiate yourself from other people in your profession who are simply going through the motions of “what” without daring to show the “why.”

Along with cash, benefits, and recognition, sales people respond to what kind of training is available when they evaluate opportunities. Think about your company, your referral sources, and what you have invested in them to help them become proficient at sending you business. As a result of the training you provide your referral sources, how motivated are they to continue bringing you quality referrals?

Untrained referral sources can still be effective, but always to a lesser degree than if you take the time to show them how to refer, whom to refer, and an easy or fun way to do it. Like any top salesperson, referral sources appreciate knowing what will make them more successful.

When you take the time to give your top salespeople more of what they need to be successful, you are investing in the relationships that drive your profitability. Your training strategy will pay off when you start acquiring even more of the kind of clients you want while lowering your marketing costs along the way.

Like a board of directors, a customer advisory board can offer direct feedback and insight into the company and its marketing strategy. Meeting with clients one-on-one has its benefits, but a group setting can be even more powerful. How many of your customers would appreciate being included on an advisory board? There is only one way to find out.

Listening to your customers is important. Making sure they FEEL listened to is even more important. For many people, a group setting provides a safer environment for honest feedback. By definition, any marketing strategy that does not include the voice of the customer will produce marginal results at best.

When you or your company turns free advice from customers into business strategy, marketing becomes a true reflection of what the people want. A customer advisory board allows customers to interact, and those genuine conversations fuel word-of-mouth referrals, customer satisfaction, and future sales.

Unless you are very new to business, you understand that not all customers are fun to work with. In fact, some are a real drain on your energy, your profitability, and your overall happiness. Your ability to attract the kind of clients you want starts with knowing and defining who they are.

As much time as you spend at work, you have the right to expect a certain degree of happiness. If your clients make that difficult, and you are in charge of deciding who is and who is not a client, guess where the problem is? As you grow in business, you become more discriminate. What used to be a search for new customers becomes a search for GOOD new customers.

If you can identify high pleasure, high profit clients, you can seek referrals from and market directly to these people to attract more of the clients you really want. You can also refer low pleasure, low profit clients to other service providers who are better suited to meet their needs. This will free up more time for you to service the clients you value more.