For the most part, few attend these events with a plan, except hoping to run into someone who will buy their products or services.  If this is their primary motivation, it must likewise be that of everyone else in the room. This presupposition is why networking events can feel uncomfortable and/or tense.

For example, I recently attended a networking event where most of the attendees were sales professionals.  I coach sales professionals (and am one myself), so it was a natural fit for me to be there.

Following the event, I sent great-to-meet-you emails to the few folks from whom I’d received business cards, suggesting that we meet again to explore how we might support one another.  Here is one of the emails I sent. (I’ve “X’d out” any information that might identify the person.)

Hi XXX,

Just a quick note to say that I enjoyed connecting with you briefly at the XXXXX on Friday.  I’m looking forward to seeing you at the next one.

What are you working on next, and where do you need support?  Perhaps I or someone in my network can help.

Have a great week,

Tshombe

I owe this beautiful approach to my friend Michael Peak of PeakMystique.com.  A few years ago, we met each other on Facebook and he asked me what I was working on and how he or someone in his network might help.

I love being a resource for people, so Michael’s proactive giving approach to our new relationship was very attractive to me.  I now incorporate this in my interactions with others.

Here’s the response to my email:

Hi Tshombe,

Great meeting you as well Friday. I really enjoyed myself and look forward to the next one.

I am currently working with a business coach, but I appreciate the offer.

Talk to you soon.

This was very interesting to me, because he translated “What are you working on next, and where do you need support?  Perhaps I or someone in my network can help” as me offering to sell him coaching.

I think the typical, old school way of networking has heavily informed what leads to presuppositions like these, where offers to help are assumed to be thinly-veiled selling propositions.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being interested in sales and selling.  I’m reminded of Arthur H. “Red” Motley’s quote: “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”  We’re all in the business of generating sales.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in business.

However, the purpose of networking is not selling.

Networking is a marketing strategy, the impact (or purpose) of which is Outreach and Visibility.  C.J. Hayden’s great marketing program outlined in Get Clients Now! offers that “A broader view of networking is creating a pool of contacts from which you can draw clients, referrals, resources, ideas, and information.”

In other words, it is a narrow view to think of networking (and operate from that way of thinking) that networking is solely for the purpose of obtaining new clients.  In fact, I’d venture to say that an even broader, more expansive view of networking is for the purpose of ‘creating a pool of contacts from which you can connect others with clients, referrals, resources, ideas, and information.’

Can you feel the relief from that statement?  When you come from the place of “How can I support this other person in growing his or her business” rather than “How can I get this person to buy from me,” all pressure to perform or “be on” at networking events is diminished.  This is also helpful to those who may be naturally shy or tend to be wallflowers at networking events because the focus is on the other person.

Bob Burg offers a great question in his book, Endless Referrals, that you can ask people you meet at networking events:  ”How can I know if someone I’m speaking to is a good prospect for you?”

Of course, you want to have already connected with a new person and established some rapport with them prior to asking the question so it feels smooth and natural to both you and the other person.  It’s a wonderful way to illustrate your genuine interest in them, and it helps them help you to serve them in the best possible ways.

Can you think of other ways we can move from a culture of ‘what can I get’ to ‘what can I give,’ in terms of our approach to networking?

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Image:   Some rights reserved by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

I, for my part, am a Sun Worshiper, so I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the sun’s rays….especially given the LONG winter we’ve had here in the Pacific Northwest.

We were talking about taxes and how my parter and I were surprised, having recently moved to Portland, that income tax is assessed on ALL income, no matter where in the world it is earned.  For example, both my partner and I have employment outside the State of Oregon but because we live here, we must pay taxes on all of our income.

This was not a small surprise, thankyouverymuch.

The conversation led to my landlord (his name is Michael) relating to me a story that reveals how short-sighted entrepreneurs can be, rather than looking at the lifetime value of a client.

He was looking for an accountant.  My next-door neighbor recommended one in Lake Oswego, an affluent suburb of Portland.

Michael secured an initial appointment with the accountant, who, for an hour-and-a-half counseled him about how high the taxes were in Portland and that the first thing Michael needed to do was move himself and his business out of the City of Portland.

It was a lot to digest, so after the consultation he went home.

Several days later, Michael received a bill in the mail for $250.  Shocked, he called the accountant’s office to ask why he’d been charged for a free consultation.  There must be some mistake.

“Only the first 1/2 hour is free.  After 30 minutes have elapsed, you are billed at our regular rate.”

“What?  Why wasn’t I informed?  Besides, it was you who kept me that long in the office.”

Round and round they went, and — completely disgusted and fed up — my landlord eventually sent them the $250.

What an unfortunate experience.  Caught up with demanding this one-time $250, it obviously didn’t cross the accountant’s mind to calculate the lifetime value of this client.  Additionally, didn’t he realize this was a referral?  Landing him as a client was practically in the bag!

I’m not saying that a professional should give away their expertise.  In fact, some folks are of the opinion that you should never (or very rarely, at most) give free consultations.

But, clearly mistake #1 was lack of clarity about what was free and what carried a fee.  Have you similarly run into problems because you were wishy-washy, unclear, or didn’t even know your own policies with regard to fee versus free?

Even if in this instance it had been Michael who had been mistaken, this accountant lost a potential client-for-life (including any referrals my landlord might’ve sent him) by failing to look at the larger picture.  By making Michael wrong and subsequently losing his business, the accountant made mistake #2.

Not only will my landlord think twice about listening to my neighbor in terms of who she refers, but she herself will probably be reluctant to send referrals to this accountant again.

Oops.  Mistake #3:  tarnishing the reputation of the source of the referral.

Had Michael actually told me the name of this accountant (as most people who have bad experiences with service providers usually do), even more damage would have resulted from his short-sighted Ego-driven behavior.

As it happened, Michael merely cautioned: “Don’t do your taxes with anyone in Lake Oswego!”

Where in your business have you inadvertently made similar short-sighted mistakes?

When you choose to be concerned about the dollars and not the pennies, you’ll naturally seek to honor and add value to your referral partners, to your clients, and to your potential clients.

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flickr image by Chris Halderman, Attribution No-Derivs 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license

That was fine.  Except that they went on to spend thousands of dollars on an external consultant who offered nearly-identical advice they also failed to implement.

Evidently this is not uncommon.

I’m reading John Jantsch new book,  The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself, where he describes just such a scenario.

He was hired by a company to design a marketing system for their new insurance agents.  John suggested that they stop telling these newbies to create a call “list of a hundred people they knew” (no matter how much or how little they knew them) and just phone them up to try to sell them.

Everyone in sales — and certainly everyone in Multi-Level Marketing — have been told to do this very thing.

The problem is neither the person selling nor the person on the other end of the phone (likely feeling dread, coercion, or even guilt because they don’t want to hurt your feelings)  enjoys the conversation.

I don’t know whether or not John Jantsch was a household name at the time the firm enlisted his help, but when he suggested new agents take the 100-people-they-know List and “instead of pitching them . . . introduce them to other business, services, and opportunities,” they fired him.

Guess that wasn’t exactly what they wanted to hear.

I’m thinking people don’t really “get” the Give-First Philosophy.  Maybe intellectually, they think they do.  But when the rubber meets the road, the default behavior is to push their products and services to whomever they think needs them.

The other day on a social networking site I belong to, a businesswoman new to the site introduced herself and what she was up to.  Suddenly, another service provider jumped in — he didn’t even say Hello or Welcome — to tell this woman (and presumably the rest of us) all about why she should buy advertising from him.

I call this Show Up and Throw Up Method, and just as it sounds, it’s not very attractive.

Even if this scenario doesn’t describe anything you’d be caught dead doing, it’s a real paradigm shift to go beyond The Golden Rule to what has been referred to as The Platinum

Rule.  Essentially, the Platinum Rule is ‘treating others as THEY would like to be treated.’

In tangible terms, this means that what a person wants may not even be what you’re selling, or even related to what you are selling.

At least not for the time being.

The challenge is to really get to know what your prospects and potential clients want in life and then offer solutions for that.  This may be something you can develop, but oftentimes it is another product, service provider, or resource.

Said another way, the question in all cases that we want to answer is ‘What does my prospect MOST want?’

On page 156 of John’s book, he gives a great example of what he’s talking about:

Suppose you are a CPA who works with small business clients, offers John.  What do they most want?

The natural assumption is that if they are your customers, they obviously want to be able to understand a balance sheet.  However, it’s only when you dig deeper that you come to understand that what they MOST want is “to get more customers and get home earlier in the evening.”

This is when you really begin to tap into the magic of The Referral Engine.  Armed with this knowledge of what you (potential) client want MOST, how can you give it to them?

In this example, how can you help your small business clients to get more customers and get home from work earlier?

Well, maybe you’ve learned through social media how to get more customers and really enjoy this.  “Why not help your customers set up a blog, learn how to use Facebook, or optimize their Web sites for local search?” asks John.

You get the idea?

How does this concept expand your mind about what is possible in your business?  How (and in what ways) will you give up the need to sell, and instead genuinely help your prospects, clients, and customers get what they most want?

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image by Kevin Lawver, used with permission under a Creative Commons License

I was reading in Paul McCord’s Creating a Million-Dollar-a-Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals.   It’s a compelling title because every business, whether in sales directly or not, would love to make a million dollar annual salary through referred business.

He illustrates that there are 2 main benefits to your clients when you work primarily with referred clients:

1. Because you do no have to spend as much time looking for new customers, you can better meet your client’s needs, and
2. You have more time to keep up with changes and innovations in your specific industry, which means you can serve your customers better by offering the most up-to-date solutions.

This is an enriched perspective on referrals, which are typically thought of as primarily benefiting the person receiving them. However, this view articulates the added value the client him- or herself receives, beyond simply the delivery of the product or service.

I don’t think I’ve run into any business or sales professional who doesn’t believe they mostly work on referral. Unfortunately, many of them cannot produce specific numbers to show that this is true. Nor do they have a clearly-defined process for receiving (and giving!) referrals, except what may be mandated by one of the formal networking groups out there, like BNI or LeTips.

As a point of entry, Paul McCord says that the professional who really does generate significant income from referrals needs to “be the part” by consistently educating and reminding clients the value they add to them by working primarily by referral. On page 65, he offers a checklist of basic business communications where, “as you change them to reflect your new referral-based business model,” you can check them off.

One of those communication channels is your office and cell phone messages. Paul McCord (page 59) offers a specific way to do this to reflect this additional value you offer your clients.

I’m duplicating the example here:

Hello, this is ____________ and today is (date); I’m either on the other line or meeting with a client. My clients and the referrals they send me are my most important assets, and I take great pride in my professionalism and their confidence in me. I’ll return your call today between ________ and ______ or ______ and ______. If you’re a new referred client, please leave your name, your number, the best time to return your call, and the name of the person who referred you. If you’re a client calling to refer someone, please leave his or her name and number and I’ll contact him or her today at one of the aforementioned times. Thank you.”

What do you think of this approach?

(photo credit: Mary Gaston, CC BY-SA 2.0)

When I’m talking about being magnetic with your marketing, there really is no complicated secret.

It really boils down to embracing who you are, shamelessly being yourself, and unabashedly sharing your unique personality with the world.

It’s about having fun, which is pretty easy when you‚’re being yourself, since that‚’s what comes most naturally.

When you give up self-judgment and insecure what-will-they-think mentality, you are free to be yourself.  This way, your best and perfect clients are naturally drawn to you.

It’s because they resonant with who you are, what you‚’re about, and what you stand for.  They’re attracted to you.

It’s your unapologetic uniqueness that makes you magnetic.

You might be wondering how you might apply this to your business.  If you are selling a professional service, like financial planning, real estate, mortgages, life insurance, etc., there are obviously tons of agents in your industry running around wherever you are in the world.

At any networking event or Chamber of Commerce meeting, you know this is true.

How can you be authentically unique?

How can you separate yourself from the competition in a way that is congruent with who you are and magnetically draws your best clients to you?

I was reading Ben McConnell‘s article on TOMS shoes.  I’d never previously heard of TOMS shoes (they’ve only been around since 2006), but it’s a great example of how the founder (Blake Mycoskie) embraced who he is and what he stands for to create magnetic buzz (and customers!) for his product.

You can read Ben’s take on TOMS shoes by reading his article, but basically Blake Mycoskie went to Argentina, fell in love with a certain style of shoe they wore, and decided to redesign them for the American market.

The second thing that he discovered about himself while on this trip to Argentina was the compassion he felt for those living in poverty.

Already, you are probably thinking about how this story resembles your own story.  I’m going to use agents selling real estate as an example, but this can be applied to any of you in the selling professions, so when I refer to real estate or real estate agents in this article, just substitute your industry.

So, there is a reason you began selling real estate, and on the surface that reason may simply be entrepreneurial, as in the case of Blake.

This is a good thing.

Secondly, you may have tapped into a more emotional reason that resonates with who you are as a person.  Maybe you want to help single mothers discover the joy of home ownership.

Or, perhaps you’ve seen people interested in real property investing, and they are struggling with that.

Maybe you connect with the plight of those who have great credit histories, but cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel because they can’t come up with a down payment.

These are just examples.  They all boil down to the human need and desire to connect meaningfully to others and to do good work that leaves a living legacy.

Some call this need or desire in action giving back or paying it forward, and this “giving back” may be true for you.

But, I want to offer another view.  I think that at our core, each of us fundamentally is seeking self-expression of our spirit and of our personality.  Whatever we are doing, we want to express who we are.

This is true whether we are the seller or salesperson, or if we are the buyer.

And when you as an entrepreneur do that — dare to boldly express who you are through selling — you stand out to the best and most perfect clients for you . . . clients who are necessarily different from who are perfect for someone else.

Like a magnet, they cannot help but — they are compelled, as it were — be drawn to you.

But, back to our example of Blake and the creation of his TOMS shoes.

So, Blake took the Argentine shoe model, redesigned it, and decided that for every pair of shoes sold, another pair would be donated to children in third world countries who do not have shoes.

This was brilliant.

His entrepreneurial spirit coupled with a desire to express his personality through giving in this specific way resonated with his ideal clients, and they came in throngs.

At the time of Ben’s article (About this time last year — July 2008, to be exact — so the number is surely substantially higher by now), Blake has sold over 200,000 shoes since 2006 and has given away the same.

(Incidentally, another brilliant marketing component that he employed was the concept of customer interactivity.  His well-crafted strategy allowed people who resonated with his cause to also express their own personality and spirit.  They were able to ride on Blake’s enthusiastic coat tails and, by purchasing TOMS shoes, to participate in his philanthropy.  People LOVE contributing to something bigger than they are, and in this case, it didn’t cost them any more to do so.  Another key takeaway here is that buyers express their own identity through what they buy and through the charities they choose to give to.  Blake’s TOMS shoes offers buyers a powerful outlet for this expression.)

How might you follow Blake’s TOMS shoes example to stand out from the “sea of shoes” in your industry?

Are your proverbial wheels turning in your brain about how you can creatively imitate Blake’s story to create your own?

In the real estate market, many donate time, money and resources to Habitat for Humanity.  This is an amazing charity that does great work.

The challenge is that this charity may not reflect your personality or assist you in standing out so that your ideal clients can recognize you in the crowd of competition.

I think the first step is really getting clear on what turns your crank.  What drives you and excites you?

What is your personality, and how can you make that prominent in your marketing to magnetically attract your perfect clients?

I know I’ve only scratched the surface of this discussion.  I welcome your thoughts and comments, as together we both expand and hone into what it means to be totally and completely ourselves in our business and our marketing in order to attract and magnetize to us our ideal clients.

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Flickr image: “9/365,” by Hannah used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Every business person loves referrals because there’s absolutely no selling. They clients already think you’re the best because someone who they trust has told them so.

Unfortunately, most people (me included) don’t have a system or a plan for consistent, predictable sales success through referrals.

What’s up with that?

You are no doubt familiar with the email signature lines that read “I’m never to busy for your referrals!” or the business cards that say “I love referrals.” Perhaps they are in your email and on your business card.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about this. It’s just that it’s all about you.

What’s in it for your (potential) client?

Paul McCord points out that there are two main benefits to your clients when you primarily work with referred clients.  You can use these clear benefits as key differentiators between you and your competitors, who cannot make the same claim.

The benefits are

1. Since you don’t have to spend as much time looking for new clients (Most of your clients are referred to you), then you can better meet your client’s needs.
2. You also have more time to keep up with changes and innovations in the industry, which means you can offer the most up-to-date answers and solutions.

Both of these benefits add value to your clients, and you want to remind them of this often and consistently.

In fact, Paul McCord says in his book Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success Through Client Referrals, that every communication you have with a client or potential client should mention that you work on a referral basis.

One way to do this in a comfortable, dignified way is described in his book on page 59.  The suggestion is to create an outgoing message on your office and cell phones that say you work by referral.

Here’s that example:

“Hello, this is __________________ and today is (date); I’m either on the other line or meeting with a client. My clients and the referrals they send me are my most important assets and I take great pride in my professionalism and their confidence in me. I’ll return your call today between ________ and _________ or _________ and _________. If you’re a new referred client, please leave your name, your number, the best time to return your call, and the name of the person who referred you. If you’re a client calling to refer someone, please leave his or her name and number and I’ll contact him or her today at one of the aforementioned times. Thank you.”

What do you think of that?

Of course, you might modify it to reflect you and your personality, but it gets the point across of the high value you place on referrals, and you’ve consciously positioned yourself in the marketplace as different from your competitors.

Then, why do most people seldom receive referrals from their friends and family?  When was the last time your mother, brother, next-door neighbor or bowling buddy passed along a referral to you?

I just read an article some time ago about this very topic by Dr. Ivan Misner, a bestselling author and the founder of Business Networking International (BNI), which it the largest business networking organization in the world.

He hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that with family and friends, relationship grow out of personal associations, such that it may not even occur to them to refer business to you.  It just doesn’t cross their mind — even if they know what you do — because their association with you, or the context in which they interact with you, is always personal, not business.

What is needed is a system, where we consciously train others how to refer.  And train ourselves.

In Dr. Misner’s article, he refers to the reticular activating system (RAS).  This is a portion of the brain that is thought to be the center of arousal (consciousness) and motivation, and responsible for helping us filter our world so that we can focus.  We’re constantly bombarded by stimuli from all areas, and without RAS, this would be overwhelming.

When we actively teach our referral partners what to listen for in conversations with others (Misner offers the example of listening for the word “backache” in the case of a chiropractor), we help to activate their RAS so that they filter out all other noise.

Akin to the example in Dr. Misner’s article, I think of the game we used to play as kids riding in the car.  Maybe you know it?

Remember Slug Bug?

Every time we saw a Volkswagen Beetle (Bug), we had to yell “Slug Bug!”  It was amazing how many we spotted, when just moments before we started playing the game, there appear to be none in sight.

What was different?

It was the focus of our attention.  The game registered the reticular activating system.

We likewise can increase the number and quality of our referrals from our friends and family by “training (y)our referral sources’ reticular activating systems to hear the things that are relevant to referrals.”

Suddenly, they see opportunities to refer you everywhere, where before their attention just was not on helping you find more qualified business.

This shows it’s not enough to simply tell people “I love referrals”.  Instead, create a system that teaches everyone how you want to be referred and communicate with them regularly and consistently.

In this way, they’ll find it easier and more natural to refer potential clients and qualified leads to you.

Doesn’t everybody love referrals?

On the other hand, how many times have you received a referral, only to find out that you were essentially wasting your time (and that of the referral) because they weren’t a match for you.  They weren’t your ideal client; they weren’t your “magnetic match.”

So, it’s not just any ol’ referral we’re after.  We love quality and qualified leads and referrals.

And the best way to do this is to manage how referrals come to us and from whom.

Master marketer and creator of Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch, says you do this by building strategic partner networks.  These are businesses and entrepreneurs who serve the same target market as you do (in the case of real estate agents, this would include mortgage brokers, financial advisers, staging professionals, etc.).

But here’s the kicker.  You need to handpick these professionals; you know and trust that they will give your clients and others you refer to them VIP treatment.  You get what you cultivate.

You could say that you and your strategic partners have a magnetic connection already and you know that your clients — who love you! — will also love them.

In this way both you and those in your strategic partner network receive quality leads and referrals.

How does this work?

It, of course, requires planning, nurturing, and developing a system, but it’s well worth the effort.  You might say that quality referrals are the lifeblood of your business.

John personally explains just how to do this in this short video clip.  I think it’s phenomenal.

What do you think?  How and when will you begin implementing this powerful strategy in your business?