Are You Referral Ready?

Archive for the ‘Connecting with Your Network’ Category

With any professional endeavor, you get out what you are willing to put into it. This is especially true in networking organizations, where people make decisions about who they like and trust based on more than a title or a handshake.

People who seek only to gain visibility often join multiple chambers of commerce, trade groups, and professional or service organizations. The cost of this approach is not only measured in dollars, but in the ‘what’s in it for me?’ mentality that contradicts the founding principles of networking. To join and not show up, or to show up and not participate, is a recipe for wasting your time.

When you join an organization, join a new group that supports your networking goals. Get involved in a committee or project that allows you to build credibility with members over time. If you are honest about your level of involvement, your expectations, and the limitations of your time, the choices become clearer. Rather than settle for networking ACTIVITY, choose the path you think will lead to the RESULTS you want.

Participation in an organization is a way of demonstrating credibility and goodwill, both of which contribute to building trust with other people. Referrals are a byproduct of trusting relationships. Rather than simply JOINING an organization, PARTICIPATING in its cause doubles the benefit while fostering the spirit of service to others.

You are socializing when you meet new people, but you are networking when you intentionally seek to build mutually beneficial relationships. The difference is strategy.

A network will serve you best when you build it with people you can serve. If you leave networking to chance, you are not taking 100% responsibility for who is and is not in your network. Happy coincidences happen all the time, but strong networks are almost always created by design than by accident.

Find out how other people became successful. Become a student of choices and consequences. Surround yourself with people you intentionally want to be around. Once you realize the power of networking with intent, you can choose to either socialize or strategize. Because it is rooted in giving to others, networking with strategic intent simply enables the law of reciprocity to bring you more of what you want. Otherwise, you get what you get.

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.

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.

Do the people in your network know how to introduce you in person, on the phone, via e-mail, or in written communication? Personal introductions can be among the most effective word-of-mouth strategies if you train your network how you want them done.

Someone might know you, like you, and trust you enough to say good things about you when the situation presents itself, but that doesn’t mean they are actively looking for ways to get you the introductions you want. Handled improperly, an introduction can actually push potential business away. People like to buy, but they don’t always like being sold to.

Introductions are the difference between chasing leads and generating referrals. When you train your network how to make those introductions, you create a system whereby the message you want gets communicated and the prospects you seek actually come to you.

Help me help you!

Assuming you have a highly credible and trusting relationship with someone, chances are he or she will speak favorably about you to other people. But will they say the right things? Will they qualify prospects for you and open doors for introductions? Do they have the conversational skills to recognize and create opportunities for you? They will if you coach them.

An uneducated sales team can still open doors for you, just not as many and perhaps not always the right ones. Just as the key to sales is to spend more time with people who want to buy, the key to networking for prospects is to spend more time in front of those who are already pre-qualified and anticipating an introduction to you. The better you train your network, the more this occurs.

Train your referral partners to fluently use phrases that you listen for and conversation-starting questions that you might ask while you are qualifying a prospect for your product or service. For example, a commercial realtor might teach his referral parners to listen for these phrases:

• “I like my dentist, but I wish his office was easier to get to.” Chances are good that other people feel the same way.  An introduction would facilitate a discussion about the dentist’s satisfaction with the current location, and what alternatives exist should he or she want to move.
• “If we land that new contract, we’re going to have to hire more people.” Hiring more people often requires an expansion of space, and planning for that kind of growth is often done many months in advance.

On the flip side, the commercial realtor might consider teaching his/her referral partners these conversation starters as well:

• “Do you own or lease your building?”…the answer to that question opens a world of possibilities.
• “Are you planning on adding any locations in the future?”…because someone could be working on that for you right now.

When the right people learn how to listen to and start conversations on your behalf, you gain powerful networking benefits that multiply your potential results with minimal effort. If you take the time to train them, your sales force will become much more effective.

If you want to be Referral Ready, you need a strategy for building relationships that feeds your network and allows you to manage it systematically. Perhaps the most user-friendly system was advanced by Dr. Ivan Misner, the founder of Business Network International (BNI). His system is also known as the VCP model, which stands for Visibility, Credibility, and Profitability.

If two people know each other on a first name basis but not much else, they are at the Visibility stage. If they have actually scheduled and kept appointments together or done business with each other, they are probably in the Credibility stage. If they consistently find ways to refer each other business, they are in the Profitability stage.

Most people equate the networking process only with Visibility, spending more time and energy into building relationships than they do enabling those relationships to yield mutually beneficial results. The “work” part of networking is applying the entire VCP model to your current and future relationships. Visibility is only the beginning.

Now think about the people in your own network. Do you have a strategy to move the relationship to the next stage? What types of activities might best move a relationship from V to C? From C to P? What role does time play in the movement of relationships from one stage to another? In terms of your networking activity, at what stage in the process would you consider your time best spent?

With a process like the VCP model, you can do more with fewer and existing relationships than you can by randomly adding more people to an already crowded network. Success is in the system, not in the number of people you meet. Building relationships has always required the investment of time in other people, not just meeting them.

It’s not who you know or who knows you that makes the real difference. It’s how well you know the people in your network. This means it is important to have a mechanism for advancing and adding depth to your most important relationships.

Relationships take time to develop. What you do with that time is the difference between activity and results, between visibility and profitability, between a network of acquaintances and a team of referral sources. Left to chance, this process is called ‘net-hoping.’ Hope is not an effective business strategy.

Schedule time to meet one-on-one this week with two people whose relationships you particularly value. Make it a point to learn something new about that person, and take interest in their goals, accomplishments, skills, and networking activities.

Find a way to help that person tackle a tough business issue. Discuss ways in which you can both proactively refer business to one another.

Meeting one-on-one is a great tool to keep in mind for advancing relationships. Without adding anyone new to your network this week, you can increase your referral readiness by taking the time to learn more about the people you already know.

The return on your time investment in other people can only be as strong as the depth you are willing to achieve.

Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ecademy are just a few online social networking sites that allow users to connect with each other around the world.

LinkedIn is the #1 business networking site with 15 million active users. MySpace reaches 39% of all adults, and Facebook has the fastest-growing demographic in the 25+ age group with 30 million active users and 350 million users overall. Because the online landscape changes so rapidly, these numbers are bound to be obsolete by the time you read this.

Social networking will never replace what you can do face-to-face, but it can extend your networking capabilities to a degree never before imagined. Without it, your networking activity will never be operating at full capacity.

Review some of the sites mentioned above or ask around to find out which ones people are using. Sign up this week for at least one site, adding your profile and contact information to facilitate discussion with other people or online communities. Like any networking strategy, involvement is what drives results. Rather than spread your time and energy across several sites, choose one and become a fluent and diligent user.

Whether you are networking for referrals, a job, a new recipe, or a strategic alliance in another country, social networking sites can help you cross geographic and cultural boundaries with the click of a mouse.

Networking will always involve human skills that can not be automated, but a networking professional in today’s electronic age should have at least one online resource in the tool kit.

In the music industry, platinum status is reserved for those songs or albums that generate 1,000,000 sales or downloads. Gold status, on the other hand, designates sales or downloads of only 500,000 units. Guess which one allows the artist to make more money?

The golden rule says ‘treat others the way YOU want to be treated.’  According to Tony Alessandra, the platinum rule says ‘treat others the way THEY want to be treated.’ Because referrals require the transfer of trust, the platinum rule is preferable because it facilitates a stronger level of connection.

People respond differently to the importance of money, public recognition, or gifts. Your ability to connect with the people in your network is directly related to how well you know what motivates them. The golden rule will help you roughly 25% of the time. The platinum rule works 100% of the time because it is ‘other’ oriented instead of ’self’ oriented.

What are some things you can do RIGHT NOW to demonstrate the platinum rule with, say, three people in your network? Over the next week, follow through with the things on your list. A struggle to connect with people on their terms indicates a lack of depth in your relationships.

More than what you do or say, people value how you make them FEEL. To make stronger and more lasting impressions with everyone in your network, apply the platinum rule liberally. There is more money to be made in platinum than gold.

John Suarez

Chief Education Officer

Referral Ready, LLC

jsuarez@referralready.com