Archive for getting referrals from customers
Economic Changes Call for Tactical Adjustments
Posted by: | CommentsEspecially Now, Relationships Are the Key to Good Referrals
In these uncertain economic times, my experience tells me that there are still people out there who need your services. But because they are more concerned with getting the best value for their increasingly scarce resources, they turn to the people they trust to introduce them to professionals who deliver value.
Said another way, referrals are how good business gets done when times get challenging.
Who are your best referrers?
Have you thanked them?
Have you reached out to find out how you can help them?
Are you relying on a small group of people to refer you or have you systematically positioned yourself to be the recipient of your perfect referral over and over again?
Or are you still relying on a random stream of referrals?
I’ve been advising my clients to get proactive. Especially now. Because even if only 25% of their business comes from referral, if that business dries up and goes to someone else, they are in trouble.
Take action now!
1. Audit your last 3 years of clients.
Determine to the best of your ability where each piece of business came from. What did it add to your top-line revenues? What did it add to your overall profitability? What source stands out as needing immediate attention? If it is a person or a firm, what’s the current state of your relationship?
One client who did this exercise noticed that there were several distinct groups of people who referred him business. He broke them up into areas – real estate, import/export and invited them to a luncheon at his office. He introduced them all to each other and had them share what they needed to be successful – resources, contacts, etc. He shared the same thing – and his practice grew 30% in under 6 months.
2. Connect with your referral sources.
Cement your relationships. You know what needs to be done. Do it. Don’t put it off. In the current economic climate, those relationships can be the access to your very best clients – because those sources have social capital behind their recommendations and provide social proof that you are the attorney with whom they should be speaking.
I spoke on the phone this morning with another client who had changed firms and never reconnected with old sources of referrals. She shared that just by picking up the phone and reaching out to people who used to send her cases, she increased her business immediately – one sent her a new case that morning.
Connecting frequently and consistently is the key to staying top of mind. Enlist your staff to help you make this happen.
3. Actively reproduce your best referral sources.
Take a look at the characteristics of your best referral sources. What is their profession? Do they belong to a specific professional association? Get clear about which are your best sources and begin recruiting new ones just like them. LinkedIn® is a great resource for this project. If you don’t know how to use it – Learn.
Think about what would happen to your practice and your pocketbook if you added a zero to the number of people who actively refer you your ideal client. Come up with a project to build 20-30 relationships who can keep you and your firm busy and profitable.
4. Develop a regular touch strategy.
I know you are busy. All professionals are. But the most productive have systems in place that allow them to accomplish the repetitive tasks that create continuity in relationship. The old adage “Out of sight, out of mind” can wreak havoc on your referrability. Set – or have your staff set – lunches at regular intervals. Get a system to regularly send out birthday and anniversary cards. Involve your support staff in collecting and sending clippings of pertinent articles or snippets of what they read in on-line news. The key here is to stay ‘top-of-mind’ while you deepen the relationship.
5. Train your referral sources
You know what you do. But do your referral sources? Really? Ask them what they think you do. You’ll be surprised at some of the responses. If your sources don’t know what you do and who is best to send your way, chances are referral quality is poor.
Most importantly, get clear which problems you solve that keep your clients up at night – from their perspective, not yours. “I’m a intellectual property attorney” is very different from “I help the creative protect and defend their million dollar ideas.”
Draft a document which illustrates what you do (not just a list of services) and for whom. Clearly articulate who your ideal clients are and then share that with your sources. Encourage them to do the same for you.
Building reciprocity builds relatedness. Relatedness is a trigger for referrals.
6. Develop a stable of professionals that you can refer – and refer them.
Referrals out can be tricky for some attorneys. The concern about liability is one I often hear from my clients. However, reciprocity doesn’t work if you don’t refer out. One of my clients dealt with his concern this way – when he passes a referral he uses this disclaimer – “I recommend X – s/he’s done a great job for my clients in the past. You should do your own due diligence, though, as s/he’s not always a fit for everyone.”
You do not serve all your clients’ needs. You can position yourself, in their minds, to do so by developing a stable of reliable professionals who serve those needs which you do not, and educating your clients as to their availability. Listen for opportunities to refer. Be known as a resource for your clients AND as a referrer by your key sources.
7. Repeat this process
Referral development is a process, not an event. Relationships are not event driven and credibility is something that is built – over time. If you have three to five hours a week – think lunches and breakfasts – you can easily roll this out over a year long program. It takes some planning and discipline, but the payoff far exceeds the perceived pain.
It takes something to alter results you are currently getting. The biggest hurdle you will have to conquer is the belief that you “don’t have the time” or that you are “too busy” to do something different.
The most productive and profitable firms have handled these conversations and developed the skills and the networks to consistently land the right kind of profitable business.
I encourage you to do the same.
Raymond Chip Lambert
Network 2 Networth
Your Outsourced Business Development Training Partner
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Law Firm Marketing – Seven Steps for Using LinkedIn.com as a Business Development Magnet
Posted by: | CommentsOriginally published in the inaugural Edition of The Rainmaker Advisor – for attorneys
Let’s face it – you’re busy. You may even fall under the classification of “very busy”. When it comes to developing business, you are faced with all kinds of options: a website, blogging, networking, referrals from current clients. The question is often where do I start? And how do I manage the ethical considerations? Especially because I’m so busy.
My advice – start with what you’ve already got. Then leverage it.
Enter LinkedIn.com, a free online social networking site for professionals.
Unlike Facebook.com or Myspace.com, LinkedIn® focuses on a business demographic1:
- Average Age – 41;
- Average Years of Experience – 15;
- Average Household Income – $109,000;
- 46% of it’s users are Decision Makers;
- Executive from All Fortune 500 companies are represented inside LinkedIn®.
These are folks who use legal services.
I train my clients to view LinkedIn® as a technological backbone to place underneath their already existing network of relationships. With 21 million people using the service, you may be surprised to find that many of the people that you know professionally are already users.
Add three levels of depth (seeing who your contacts know, and who their contacts know) and a search engine to explore those resources, and you have an extremely valuable resource to leverage.
By having a systematic approach, you can use this free service to become a magnet for referrals, business opportunities, and profitable alliances.
Here are the Seven Steps for Using LinkedIn® as a Business Development Magnet:
1. Perfect your Profile
Your LinkedIn® Profile is an online hub for Business Development Objectives. A well designed profile lets your contacts, prospective clients, and prospective referral sources know who you are, what you do, and what you are looking to accomplish. Make sure that you spend plenty of time perfecting it. Fill out all of your education. Fill out your past employment and experience. People feel like they know you when you disclose those things. Because LinkedIn is a Social Media, you want to bring down the barriers that people experience to getting to know you and your firm. This step is critical.
2. Learn the system
The power of LinkedIn® is the platform. The social software allows you to do advanced searches, connect to your current websites and blogs, promote your profile to current connections and people who could be connections, answer questions of users who are looking for someone like you and your firm, etc. Understanding the capabilities of LinkedIn® will allow you to leverage them once you’ve built out your network in their system.
3. Reach out to people you already know and build your network
You’ve spent a lifetime making connections. You already belong to multiple networks: your firm, your law school, your alma mater, your professional organizations, your place of worship, the PTA. All of these people know people. They all have connections that have potential value to you. And you have connections that have potential value to them. By reaching out to your already existing contacts, you will quickly reproduce your existing networks and be ready to use the technology to explore the opportunities that already exist in your first level connections, as well as your second and third level connections. You will never know if you don’t build it.
4. Get strategic
Know exactly what you want to accomplish. Write out your Business Development Objectives clearly and concisely such that anyone who read them could tell if you reached them or not. Are they specific? Are they measurable? Once you are clear, consider that you have an enormous network of resources available to you via your LinkedIn® network. Now answer the following questions:
- · How are you positioned with the people in your network?
- · Do they really know what you and your firm offer? If not, why not?
- · How could you communicate that to them?
- · Does your firm have a newsletter? Put a link in your profile so people can subscribe.
- · Do you blog? Via your profile you can direct people to your blog so they can read more about you.
- · Who refers you on a regular basis and why?
- · Do you have enough of these people in your network?
- · Do the people you know have contacts that could be referring you?
- · Do you know the characteristics of the people who refer you?
Once you have the answers, look newly at the network you’ve built. You will see opportunities that you didn’t see before. They were always there. Now leverage them.
5. Use the system to manage relationships
The advanced features contained in the toolbars that LinkedIn® offers give you powerful tools to manage your interactions with the people in your network. Download them and learn to use them. You can keep track of birthdays and overlooked emails. You can get updates from the people in your network as their profile information changes. You can keep track of your searches. Via a scan of your regular emails, you can find new people to connect with and continue to build and cultivate your network.
6. Reach out to meet new people through your contacts
Once you’ve built out your network and cultivated deeper relationships with the people you already know, begin to browse their networks. Look to see if they know people that will help you achieve your Business Development Objectives. You can even do deep, specific searches to find experts, vendors, specific people, and specific companies. Using the built in features of LinkedIn®, reach out to those people through the people that you already know. Use some of that Social Capital that you’ve built up with people. You’ll be surprised how willing they are to help you achieve your goals.
7. Be Consistent
The key to any Business Development strategy is consistency. Schedule 10 minutes a day for the next 90 days to work inside the LinkedIn® system. Not only will you find it enjoyable discovering new sources of business, but you will also build a habit that will transfer into your day-to-day habits and translate into a profitable world of new opportunities.
Social Networking is not a new thing. Professionals have been doing it from the dawn of commerce. Social Networking Software like LinkedIn, however, provides an opportunity to take those networks you’ve built over a lifetime and put them to use.
By developing a systematic approach to developing your network, and a technological backbone to uncover the hidden connections contained in that network, you have the opportunity to set yourself apart from other firms, and produce the kinds of result that Senior Partners in the big firms produce on a regular basis.
In our next article, we’ll address privacy concerns, ethical concerns, and demonstrate how LinkedIn®’s system is built to handle this.
Meanwhile, enjoy building what will likely be one of the best Business Development
tools you will ever encounter.
Raymond Chip Lambert, of Network2Networth, is a Business Development expert who works exclusively with seasoned professionals to leverage their existing relationships through time tested Business Development strategies and online Social Media strategy thereby unlocking the value of their existing network connections. He can be reached at 602-635-4541 or www.network2networth.com.
1Linkedin.com-http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=advertising_info&trk=hb_ft_ads
What? Train my referral sources?
Posted by: | CommentsGetting referrals is a mysterious processes, right?
I’ve got a question in Linkedin Answers right now and the wide variety of repsonses is interesting.
They range from – You work hard, you do a good job, and you pray that people actually refer you – to – Have a script where you ask for referrals at the beginning or the end of your transaction.
I personally believe that the best way to get more referrals is to find people who are in the perfect position to refer you and train them to do that. And then reciprocate!
A friend of mine, Jordan Adler. works with Sendout Cards and is the top guy in the company. He’s developed a website, The Cool Buzz, where he actively trains the people in his network how to reproduce what he does.
Now I know what you are thinking – I’m not selling what he’s selling; my business doesn’t work that way.
Maybe.
Couldn’t you find industry partners who are perfectly positioned to refer you and build a resource center for them where they can see how you qualify people? Or how you deal with objections? Couldn’t you put your material online where they could get to it no matter where they were so they could easily position you with their clients? Couldn’t they do the same for you?
This idea so intrigues me that I am working on a resource center just like this for people who refer me. My website is undergoing a redesign with this in mind. I’ll keep you up to date as this happens.
Meanwhile – this is being done all over the internet. It’s called affiliate marketing. While this may be a bit different, the parallels are intriguing!
Consider putting a program together. Talk to the people who already refer you and see what they think. Don’t take my word for it. Try it!
The Missed Opportunity – The Danger of a Sales Only Mindset
Posted by: | CommentsDriving in my car this week, I received a phone call from someone who had me on one of their lists. I didn’t recognize the phone number and I was on another call, so I let it go to voicemail and checked it when I was fininshed.
It was a firm out of Kentucky that does business coaching for franchises. I thought, hey, this is a great opportunity for both of us – they do setup and sales and I teach long term business development. So I returned the call almost immediately.
Turns out they were working a conference list for an upcoming event and I was on the list (how – I do not know). He was prospecting me for attending their sales pitch at the event. I told him that I would not be at the event. I proposed, however, that there might be an opportunity for us to refer business back and forth (being the Business Developer that I am).
He shut off. He couldn’t even hear me. He was so focused on pre-selling conference attendees that he couldn’t hear an opportunity for business that was right in front of him.
He hurridly tried to get me off the phone so he could get to his next call and I obliged him.
As I hung up, it struck me how blind people can be to the opportunities that are in front of them at all times.
I invite those of you who are reading this to consider that there are so many opportunities to create relationships that could send you more business than you could handle, but that you are unprepared to see them.
Take the blinders off.
Get into conversations with people who have a similar client base and see if you can create a win-win relationship with people who deliver value that you do not. It could be the beginning of a business relationship that will transform your operation.
See you next post!
Raymond Chip Lambert
chip@network2networth.com
www.network2networth.com
The Fundamental Misunderstanding
Posted by: | CommentsI met with a person from my network yesterday that saw me speak at the Scottsdale Chamber. She is working on launching her management consulting business after a successful engagement with a previous employer.
Obviously she is very good at what she does – or she wouldn’t be stepping into the world of small business.
What I shared with her that I share with nearly everyone I sit down with is that there is a fundamental difference between sales and business development.
One of the most important pieces of any business is revenue generation. Pure sales is the most important activity one can engage in – yet most people I talk with are not comfortable with the process. “It’s so uncomfortable” is the refrain I hear most often.
While sales may be uncomfortable, there are a few things that you can do to make the likelihood of a sale more emminent:
- Be crystal clear about who your perfect client is and is not – Sales people make this mistake all the time. They spend time trying to sell to the wrong people – people without a budget; people who are not decision makers; people who are simply not a prospect. Knowing the characteristics of your perfect client makes your job much easier as you can qualify the people you are talking to. Disqualifying someone is almost as valuable as qualifying them because you don’t waste your time.
- Figure out where your perfect client comes together on a regular basis and be there – there is an old maxim in business: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. Just being where your perfect client comes together can do wonders for your sales results. You not only get exposed to prospects, you also can do some important fact finding: what are the issues that your product or service REALLY solves; what does that solution MEAN to your prospects. When you figure this out, you can get into harmony with your prospects and speak their language – not yours. Try it – it works!
- Talk to the clients you already have – It never ceases to amaze me how transaction oriented sales people can be. I learned this the hard way: when you are transaction oriented, you come off like a mercenary. People are wary of mercenaries. Get into relationship with your clients. If you’ve done a good job for them, they are happy to talk with you about growing your business. Don’t wait and hope that they will refer you – educate them about HOW they can refer you.
Business Development on the other hand is a completely different mindset. Not better, not more important – just different.
Sales people miss Business Development opportunities all the time because they are so transaction focused. A caveat here – sales people need to be transaction focused because often they are operating under a quota or goal – I’m not advocating that they stop. What I am advocating is that they begin to develop a parallel mindset of Business Development.
How one approaches Business Development is a bit like the steps above – but with an added eye to creating strategic relationships. Instead of only going for the transaction of the sale, you are looking for introductions to people who could consistently refer to your perfect client. You are also looking for people who could fill holes in your various networks.
Think about this – what would happen if you found three or four key people who could refer you on a consistent basis to your perfect client? What would your business look like if there were no holes in your support system – meaning you could handle more business without dropping the ball? That to me is the beauty of Business Development. It takes a little extra effort and an expanded mindset, but the dividends are remarkable.
Back to the person I was talking with – when we looked, she actually already had people in her network that she could approach to help her grow. I recommended that she book an appointment and ASK for very specific things that would position her to close more business.
I encourage you to do the same.
Now, there is a lot more to this conversation. I’ll be writing more on it as we go.
For now, I encourage you to, at the very least, expand your looking zone.
Raymond Chip Lambert
chip@network2networth.com
