The Ultimate Guide to Referral Networking: Ch.1

Chapter 1: Who are your top referral contacts?

When starting a referral network, you must categorize your referral connections according to their integrity, reliability, and success rate.

Integrity

Positive: This is how trustworthy your contact is, which means that they will provide a high-quality referral, possibly contacting the new client beforehand, as well as maintaining a close watch until you score a new contract from them. One of the byproducts of Integrity is that it leads to incentive-based services that you should offer your clients for a high success rate.

Detractors are contacts that give you many names, but do not get involved and might not even provide feedback to the client, which means you can only use them as a named reference only.

Reliability

Positive: This means that your contact is someone you can contact easily, will always find time to chat with you and will always do what they say. Creating a good level of communications is one of the most important issues in any success story. You have to find the balance between frequency and content. Where frequency is how many times you chat, and how quick you both reply as well as how certain you are of the content discussed.

Detractors are when some contacts are erratic, and you might get frustrated when dealing with them, especially after they have linked you and you need more information.

Success Rate

Positive: this is the number of successful results the contact has referred to you, which means it led to a contract. The success rate is under-rated as a factor since many consider the link to be enough, relying on their own ability to catch the new client. This is not a good approach. The competition is out there, and you will need your referrer to help you seal the deal. For example: if you are competing against another referred client, do not rely on your own abilities to score, use every trick in the book to win. This means, use your referrer to help you.

Family: While these are biased, they do provide the best starting platform to work from. Only you can know how each family member will help you, so make sure you filter out the ones you are certain will not help. Keeping them as contacts is one thing, but cluttering up our business referral contact list is another. Do not bring sentimentality into the equation, keep the list concise.

Friends: These are like family but without the familial connection. Sometimes this works out best since the client being referred will know that you are not family, and being a good friend is sometimes the best referral anyone can get. Friends are not just kids you grew up with, they can be retail and professional business owners you enjoy a chat with, or use their services. By keeping a close rapport with everyone you meet, you are turning them into “friends” that can become referrers.

Co-workers: If you already have work experience, then these contacts are highly important. Not all co-workers are competing with you, so make sure you pick the ones you know are happy to help. There is no point in asking someone you worked with to help get clients that would compete directly with their need for clients. Keep them as contacts to discuss professional issues, but not as referral points. One pitfall to look out for is trusting someone not to poach your clients.

Clients: Naturally these are the best referrers, especially if you provided a successful service. However, make sure that your client is ready to be a referrer. You will need to ask them to be pro-active, not act as a name drop, but as an active referrer to other companies that they are working with. The best way to get them to do this is to help them, by suggesting names that you either know or suppose that they have a connection to.

Social Media Contacts: This might take you by surprise, but you can actually create some very good online friendships with total strangers. This is done when you become active in a forum or a group on a social media site that leads to a daily discussion. Some of the social media contacts can become great referrers, all you need to do is reach out with a request.

Professional Associations: Another good place for referrals is if you are active in a professional association. You might think that another professional like yourself would not consider referring you to a new client. However, most professions have specialties, and if you are an expert at one specialty you’re your counterpart is lacking, it could lead to a mutual referral partnership, where you both refer clients to that need the specialty you both provide. The best examples are in the medical and legal field, where physicians have subspecialties and rely on referrals to increase their client base or lawyers that specialize in different areas such as criminal, family or tort laws.

Detractors are when many referrals peter out or lead to long discussions that go nowhere. In other words, you might spend hours chasing a new client with no success only due to a referrers laziness, so this factor is very important.

Building up an initial category will take time and experience. However, there are some basics to creating a start list, and these include the following types:

Conclusions

Building up a top-level referral network takes time, it takes a lot of thought into whom you place in the list. You must also listen to your gut instinct as well. When you start out, it will take time, a lot of trial and error, but do not fall into the trap of building up thousands of contacts of which only twenty are relevant. Categorize your contacts into levels of competence, and you will be halfway to success.