Get More Business Through Referrals Now
The best way to get more business is to get referrals
. During a recession, I coached a construction company from two million in annual revenue to $22 million in $18 months utilizing my referral system. In the previous 18 months they were a $4 million dollar company. They were losing ground.
At one time, they had been trying to get referrals by saying, Who do you know that is about to do some new construction that you could refer us to? This got no results, so they quit asking. They assumed that if someone wanted to refer business to them they would have done it by now.
Through the process that Im going to share with you, we were able to get 279 names of people that could refer them to opportunities to get more business. We focused our attention on the top 16 most influential relationships and asked them to connect us with people who could benefit from their service. In just 6 months, they grew from $2 Million to $10 Million. And in 18 months, they had grown to $22 million annual revenue.
Thinking in Categories
I call this exercise the Wheel, Hub and Spokes. You can use this to get referrals from other businesses, whether they are your clients or not. And, you can use this exercise to show other business owners how to get referrals and get referrals yourself while doing it.
I want you to imagine for a minute that you are sitting down with a financial advisor and you are going to show them how to get referrals. Take a blank piece of paper and draw a big circle, like a wheel. In that circle, about a third of the size of the original circle in the middle, draw another circle. It should look like a doughnut. Were going to call this the hub. In the center of the hub, youll write the type of business you want to get referrals for. So in this example, in the hub well write financial advisor.
A financial advisor has many categories that they connect to on a pretty consistent basis. We want to think about some of the primary connections that a financial advisor has. For example, they might have a relationship with an estate attorney. So, between your hub and the wheel, draw a straight line that looks like a spoke. On that line, write the words estate attorney. Then, draw another spoke and write CPA and another spoke, write a property and casualty insurance agency. We can continue around the wheel adding several spokes with many categories.
If this financial advisor works with business owners a lot, add spokes for business categories. For example, a business broker could be a good person for a financial advisor to work with. You could also add companies who specialize in staffing, web, technology, payroll, and property management.
Then we might switch gears a little bit. What are some associations they might be connected with? Are they connected to any chambers of commerce? Next, you might add a spokes for clients and write what type(s) of business clients that they work with, focusing on the categories where theyd like to increase clients.
Getting Names from Categories
As theyre looking at various categories and you get clear about those, then you can dig into names. As an example, theres probably more than one insurance agent. They probably belong to more than one association. Work with them to write down the names of people representing the categories you wrote on the spokes.
Now do this exercise using your own company as the hub. You can use relationships that you work with as spokes, then go to each of those relationships and show them how to do this using their companies as the hub. As you help other business owners come up with sources for referrals, you can combine your lists of categories and names with other business owners and start working together. And when you help each other find common ground with people on your lists, and make personal introductions, imagine how many referrals that you could get.
by: Earl Kemper
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