Where are your referrals going?
Today I had the pleasure of coming across a terrific article by Biznik member Mark Silver (who, interestingly enough, calls himself a Business Tenderizer) about what he deems "the Bermuda Triangle of Business Referrals."
I'm sure you've experienced this - I certainly have. Your clients adore you, and send you this lovely e-mail about how they've referred so-and-so to your business because they think you're the bees' knees (really - do bees have knees? Am I spelling it wrong, or is that really how it's spelled? Anyhoo...), but nothing ever comes out of it. No calls. No e-mails. Or worse, the people who DO call or e-mail are The Wrong Sort - those folks who have a great idea, but not enough money to actually afford what you could do for them.
So what do you do? You make it easy for your clients to refer The Right Sort to you, and make it easy for The Right Sort to get over the fear, uncertainty, or other things that might be preventing them from actually calling.
My friend Joanna Scaparotti of My Solutions for Stress was a great example of this. She does Reiki and wellness coaching for busy professonials, and I'd been getting fairly frequent Reiki sessions with her for a few months, after which I got an e-mail titled: "Where can I find more people like YOU?"
The e-mail went on to not only tell me how fabulous I was as a client, but it also shared the specific traits that she was looking for in potential referrals, and gave me an easy way to get folks in contact with her so I could share referrals.
Even though this was an e-mail sent to multiple clients of hers and not just me, Joanna's tone in the e-mail was professional, it was personal, and it made me happy to offer her services to anyone I came across who fit her profile.
To read the full article, click here. To learn more about Joanna, click here.
As for me, yeah - I know I've been a bit lax on the blogging thing, and I promise that I'll get better soon. Fortunately, I've had a ton of work in, and I'm working on getting deadlines out the door for a while. But no worries - there's more in the pipe for the blog.
4 comments:
I love what you've said here. It's so true how much our intention can influence what comes our way...Katy
Hi, Dani
Great post. One of the challenges of trying to help other people is that they often don't know who the "Right People" are for themselves. Usually their definition is so broad that I really can't help them.
As an example, I've had real estate agents tell me that they do "residential real estate". That's so broad that it means nothing to me. If they told me that they specialized in young families relocating to Ann Arbor who were looking for homes in a historic neighborhood, that's more likely to twig an idea of who I might be able to refer to them.
What do you think?
Hey Dani, thanks for sharing this! You're the bees knees (yeah, I don't know how to spell it either . . . )
@all:
Thanks for the comments!
@greg:
I agree with you - one of the biggest challenges I face when working with entrepreneurs is that they get so worried about making enough money that they refuse to pick a market they work well with and stick to it - not realizing that doing just that will actually bring them success.
Post a Comment