Managing and Growing Your Referral Base
What has this got to do with your profession or business? Everything, actually.
With few exceptions, you only get business if people know about you and your offerings. Almost invariably, the best way to have people know about you and your offerings is by word of mouth. So, if you want to get the best kind of clients or customers, you need the best kind of people sending them to you. It’s that simple.
The obvious corollary to that rule is that you should know as much as possible about your referrers– not in a creepy, invasive, J. Edgar Hoover way, but simply to enable you to be a better friend to your referring friends.
Unless you have a much, much better memory than the rest of us, you need some system of keeping track of your referring friends and something about them. This is not anything sinister like data mining, it’s just about helping your memory keep track of useful details.
Some businesses invest in ultra-sophisticated CRM (Customer Relationship Management), some keep a simple ring binder on the desk. Google Contacts is free and easy to use and customize. The choice is yours, provided that you’re able to easily and effectively access the data which is stored in it.
There are a handful of things to bear in mind:
1. More is better than less. Storage is cheap. Collect as many names as you can, and as much data as you can on each contact. You never know when remembering their kid’s soccer championship will solidify a relationship.
2. Look for and include social media. Like it or not, Facebook and LinkedIn are where people live, and Twitter is, well, Twitter. These media can tell you a great deal about a potential client or referrer. (You don’t need to live on these platforms, just access them when useful.)
3. A picture really is worth a thousand words. It’s not hard to find a contact’s mug shot on their website, LinkedIn, or Google search.
4. A video is worth a thousand pictures. Before you meet someone for the first time, there’s much to be said for seeing them in action on a website video, Youtube, or imbedded in their LinkedIn profile.
5. Be respectful and generous. Take time to build in everything you like about your contact, and what is important to them. Nothing builds rapport quite like asking how their kid’s broken arm has recovered.
6. Be honest but be cautious. If there is something sketchy or dicey about this contact, flag that for yourself, prudently. Bear in mind that your database may get hacked or leaked or otherwise go public, so you need to avoid defamatory language. “Bob is a lecherous, lazy, ignorant, drunken boor” may be what you think, but not what you should enter into the database. Wiser to flag Bob as a Code Green. (Of course, one has to ask why Bob would even be on your list.)
7. Don’t let the data get mouldy or dusty. As well as being useless, outdated data can lead to embarrassing situations.
8. Like everything else in professional life, little things done steadily and repeatedly yield great results. A referral database is always a work in progress.
(Are your referral efforts giving you the results you need? Let’s chat!)