Are You Referral Ready?

Archive for the ‘Connecting with Your Business’ Category

Your vendors and suppliers are an important part of your business. You rely on them for specific products and services that keep your operation running smoothly from day to day. They are also an important and often overlooked part of your network.

• If you treat your vendors and suppliers as employees, you get one result. If you treat vendors and suppliers as customers, you get another result. But if you treat vendors and suppliers like the strategic partners that they are, you win an advocate for your business because they know that they stand to gain as your bottom line improves.

In the next week, talk to a few vendors and make sure they know how much you value what they provide. When the time is right, have a meeting with each one to brainstorm ideas on how you can improve your business.

If you build a strategic relationship with your key vendors and suppliers, they will understand that it is in their best interest to help you grow. Now you can benefit from their network and whatever other value they can offer. Working in partnership with others multiplies the effect while minimizing the effort for everyone involved.

Referrals are not all created equally.  A realtor could be referred to a single home buyer, or that same realtor could be referred to the human resource manager of XYZ company who oversees the relocation of 200 employees each year. That one relationship could lead to multiple referrals and thousands more dollars in business.

Business people spend more time trying to get a referral in the singular sense instead of building relationships with sources that will consistently feed referral business. Networking takes time and energy, so efficiency is always an issue. If your networking activity does not target referral sources, you work twice as hard for half as many referrals.

Use your existing network to gain an introduction to a prominent service provider in a profession that also serves your clients. When you know who and how to target, you are more likely to benefit from your network because your requests become very specific and easy to facilitate.

If you have a choice between a golden egg and a golden goose, go for the goose. A golden goose lays golden eggs all the time. It takes just as much time and energy to build that relationship, but the payoff is much more beneficial to you in the long term. By cultivating golden geese, you create the kind of network that can consistently generate referral business.

When you do business with a customer, you begin a relationship with someone whose needs can extend well beyond the scope of what you do. The CPA is in position to recommend a good financial planner. The financial planner is in position to refer a good estate-planning attorney. The estate-planning attorney is in position to refer the excellent lockbox services of a local bank. Your business falls somewhere along a chain that occurs naturally in the purchasing cycle and provides clues for building networking strategy.

If you don’t understand where you fall on the chain, you lose the opportunity to feed the chain and refer other service providers. Referral business requires an awareness of what forces bring customers to your door, and where they go when they leave. Without that knowledge and awareness, customers will find their own way. Rooted in the generosity of helping your clients, building relationships with service providers along the chain is simply good business.

Three major things happen when you build your network this way: 1) you position yourself to better serve your clients; 2) you build a network that you know you can consistently serve; and 3) you take responsibility for building a system to drive referral business to your door. That is a win-win-win solution.

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.

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.

Branding your business has many advantages, and among the most important is GETTING MORE REFERRALS.

Think about your own purchasing decisions and how loyal you are to certain products. Once your brand is established, it allows you to win “mindshare” as people speed up their decision-making processes and confidently choose your products or services above all others.

When there is a mismatch between your marketing message and what clients actually think, confusion is the result. You might have the highest quality product on the market, but if your potential clients draw a different conclusion based on your web site or business cards, their perception becomes reality. A confused mind says ‘no’.

Think about the brand associated with your business. Are you the fastest, the lowest priced, the most user-friendly, the most cost effective, or the most universally accepted product on the market? Whatever your claim, analyze the way your business cards, web site, blog, brochures, and office space support that claim. Look for consistency in the way your branding message is communicated.

When you brand your business consistently, you take responsibility for the way your products and services get positioned in the mind of the customer and you back it up with behavioral and visual evidence. Referrals favor the business that owns and communicates a distinct message.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is positioning your business to stand out among the competition in a way that attracts customers and word of mouth referrals. The core of that challenge is your ability to answer the question ‘Why should I do business with you as opposed to the other companies that say they offer the same thing?’

Now more than ever, consumers have choices. Without a compelling reason to do business with you, consumers are bombarded with reasons to consider their alternatives. Either you find a way to stand out, or you become invisible.

Write down three reasons why people should choose your product or service over the competition. If you can’t define your uniqueness in the market, you can’t talk about it and you can’t expect others to talk about it either. If necessary, ask a few past customers why they chose you over someone else. The answers might surprise you.

Referrals travel faster via word of mouth when they have what is called a stickiness’ factor. Your USP (unique selling proposition) is exactly the kind of stickiness that gets and keeps people talking about your business. Customers have a way of seeing past catchy slogans and half-baked promises. Knowing that the value you deliver is unlike any other competitor attracts customers who will surely share the experience with others.

The most common networking question is “What do      you do?” You WILL be asked that question more than once in your life. And when you are, how will you respond?

The way you answer that question can make a difference between making a good impression and making no impression at all, between being common and being uncommon, between being memorable and being forgettable.

When we answer that question with our profession (”I’m an attorney” or “I’m an accountant”), we lose an opportunity to make a connection that markets our business and creates a more lasting impression. If the goal is to stand out, answering in a way that lumps you in with every other attorney or accountant is not the way to do it.

How would you complete this phrase:

“I help people/companies ________”. Before you do, think about how a customer might fill in the blank for you. If the essence of marketing is  capturing the voice of the customer, you actually create a marketing opportunity every time you answer this question with that in mind.

Don’t be afraid to be provocative. For example, a realtor might say “I help people turn houses into homes”. A mortgage lender might say “I help people buy the American dream”. This is effective because answers like that compel other people to ask “And just how exactly do you do that?”, which means 1) they are engaged in your message, and 2) they are inviting you to continue the conversation.

Preparing and practicing your answer to the most common networking question is a fundamental Referral Ready conversational skill. In the process, you will learn to stand out and communicate value as perceived through the eyes of your customer.

You are at a networking function and someone asks you, “What kind of business are you looking for?” Referral Ready means not only having an answer, but having the best answer available at any given time. The question is a perfect opportunity to describe your ideal referral.

Not everybody is interested in helping you. People who don’t know you well enough might hesitate before referring you to someone they know. But other people can’t help you if you don’t know what you want. To the extent that you do, you never know what can happen. Rather than lose the opportunity, it is better to prepare to be successful.

Can you describe in detail an ideal referral for your business? Whether it is the name of a person (John Smith), the name of a business (XYZ Company), or a description of a specific type of customer (people who travel frequently), create a wish list of ideal referrals before attending your next networking event.

You never know who will ask or be able to serve as a resource for you. And you may never find out until you think about what you want and find a way to pass that information to your network.

Keep this question in your arsenal:  “How would I recognize a great referral opportunity for you?” Use it liberally.  Most people won’t have a great answer, some won’t engage at all, some will. But many will RECIPROCATE, which is precisely what you want…assuming you are prepared.

When you take a moment to think strategically about your business in these terms, you take responsibility for something most other forms of advertising simply can not deliver–choosing your next client.