Ep #408: How Do I Use Networking to Get More Referrals?

Stacey Brown Randall: Hey there! Do you love referrals but hate asking for them? Well, then you’ve come to the right place. This is the Roadmap to Referrals podcast and I’m your host, Stacey Brown Randall.

Every week, I break down why you don’t have to ask, pay, be gimmicky, or network all the time to generate referrals for your business.

We take a science-backed approach with our methodology, frameworks, and strategies. The goal is simple, to help you take control of your referrals on your terms.

Welcome back! We are moving into the second part of our topic on getting more people to start referring to you.

If you didn’t listen to our last episode, that’s episode 407, I really want you to go back and start there. These episodes, there are three of them, they build on each other. You really want to start with episode 407 before you move into this episode, 408.

In that episode for 407, the first episode in this series, I broke down the five questions that you really need to be able to answer to put some context behind more people or new people referring you.

Having that context is really important because it just helps you understand what you’re really aiming for and maybe actually what you already have working to your advantage that you don’t know or haven’t paid attention to. It’s certainly going to help you with what we’re going to tackle today.

For this episode, I want to talk about getting more referral sources from the lens of networking, specifically how to use networking to get more referrals because this is another question I hear from folks all the time when they’re thinking about more people referring them or new people referring them.

One of the questions I am inevitably going to be asked is, okay, so how do I use networking to do that? How do I use networking to get more people to refer to me?

Now, most people hear about a networking group or they’re told about one, maybe they’re told to join a leads group and they attend, to check it out because you can’t really decide if something’s going to work or not unless you’ve probably checked it out, right?

And so they go to check it out, but the problem there is, is that they hear about this networking group and they hear about this leads group and they’re intending to check it out, but they don’t have the right plan, right?

They’re not armed with the right plan that they’re going to follow to assess if the group is even a good fit for them.

So sometimes I have conversations with people who have been in groups for like two or three years and they kind of, if they are honest with themselves, they kind of knew after year one that this wasn’t going to be valuable.

But they kept hanging around either because they didn’t have something else to fill it with or they weren’t sure, they thought maybe the next year will be better and then they get to like the end of three years and they’re like, why am I still in this group?

That’s okay, right? I mean that definitely has happened to all of us. It’ll probably happen to you at some point as well.

Now, networking can be great, so please don’t hear me say that, right? Please don’t think that I don’t think you should be doing networking.

Networking can be great for meeting new potential referral sources and heck, even clients, but of course our focus here is going to be on referral sources, but to save you time, hassle, and to spare you from depleting all of your energy, particularly for my introverts listening to this episode, you need to be strategic in two key ways.

Number one, you need to be strategic in how you’re identifying the right group, so your identification of the right groups for you to join, and number two, you need to be strategic in understanding how cultivation works, so let’s break these down.

All right, most important, before you run off to join a million leads groups or start attending networking events for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner possible, you need a plan and that plan will always start with your ability to identify the right groups.

This is not a let’s just go check it out and see what happens and three years later I’ll decide I’ve wasted three years, right? Which people do.

This is go and see if your ideal referral sources are hanging out at that group, at that event, are regularly attending, so to be able to have a plan to go to know, hey, are the right people in this room for me?

Are the people who have potential to refer clients to me hanging out in this group, hanging out in this room, or a part of this organization?

You have to start with knowing first, well, who is your ideal referral sources, and you have to have a profile of who your ideal referral sources are.

Now, I talk about this in episode 407 because asking the question of do you have a profile of who is more likely to be able to refer you is one of the five questions I talked about on the last episode and you’ve got to be able to answer that.

And what I mean by an ideal, a profile of an ideal referral source, the folks who are more likely to be able to refer you, what I mean is do they come across your ideal client with some level of regularity.

Not like one specific person is not really the profile we’re looking for, it’s usually like a blend, profiles usually like a blend of a few different types of folks.

So they may fall into a couple of different industries, or they may have a couple of different job titles or they may do a couple of different things, or they may be connected in different ways, but there is a profile behind who you’re ultimately looking for.

That doesn’t mean you won’t be surprised by people who are outside your profile that end up referring to you, right, you’re pretty amazing, that’s probably bound to happen, that’s a good thing.

But when we’re trying to be strategic and when we’re trying to apply this to, hey, I want more people referring me, who are they and where do I find them, and you’ve decided that networking is one place where you can find those folks, you have to have a plan.

You’ve got to approach this with a plan of like, okay, I’m walking through this door and I am looking for these types of my ideal referral sources, because they fit within this profile. A profile is not typically like narrowly focused. It’s a little bit broader than that.

So if you don’t have a profile, and you’re like, I don’t actually know if I know who those people are and I don’t know how to identify what my profile should look like, then you’re definitely going to want to join me for our April 20-minute teaching.

Because we’re going to tackle actually creating your ideal profile and yep, that’s right, we’re going to do it in 20 minutes. So you should definitely plan to join me if you don’t have this and you need it or you just want to like run it through what you do think is your ideal profile and just see if you’re right.

So you can sign up for this at staceybrownrandall.com/teaching, that’s staceybrownrandall.com/teaching, Stacey has an E. You’ll get the date and be able to sign up and all the things.

Okay, so when you walk through the door of that group, it’s about your ability to identify are the right people in the room. And you can’t identify if you’re hanging out in the right networking group or leads group or attending the right networking events if you don’t know who you’re looking for.

And that starts with a plan of having that profile of who do I need and when I walk through the door, they’re there or there are at least some of them there because then that’s who you’re going to want to make sure you spend time having conversations with.

And that brings us to the very second important piece that you have to know about using networking to generate new people, more people to refer to you, and that’s understanding how cultivation of that referral source or that potential referral source relationship really works.

So there’s a couple of things you got to keep in mind, but here’s the most important one. You do not cultivate a referral source, maybe not even the start of that referral source relationship at that event, at that networking event, at that one meeting of that leads group that you’re attending.

That’s not the time or place, right? And I can hear like the leaders of all networking and leads groups like nodding their head like that’s right, that’s right, right, that’s not the place to like start trying to like really get to know that person.

That’s not where your cultivation starts. That’s where your identification of hey, these four people have potential. You definitely want to talk to them. You definitely want to have a conversation with them.

You want to make sure that they know who you are before they leave. That’s important. So it’s like a little piece of starting there

But the true cultivation to get that person to a place where they’re actually going to start referring you is going to take you building a relationship with them. And that means cultivation of those potential referral sources, while you may be meeting them in that group virtually or in person, you may be meeting them in that group.

Cultivation will happen outside of that group. They’ll happen outside of those meetings.

You can sit in a virtual Zoom room with 15 other people every single month for an entire year and still not cultivate any of those folks into referral sources because that’s not where it happens.

Yes, they can hear you tell a story about how you help someone and maybe that’ll make them think about you for 24 hours or 48 hours, but not four weeks later, right?

Not 30 days later when they actually come across that opportunity. They’re not even like clued into thinking, oh, I know someone who could help you. That’s not even on their radar.

So it’s really important you remember that cultivation happens outside of the group. And that, my friend, is where the power of one-on-ones come into play.

And so this is another thing for you to keep in mind. You’re gonna have to be willing to have conversations with people if you want to build relationships with them and that then have the potential to become referral relationships. That’s just the way it works.

Can you meet someone and in that moment they have an exact client in mind for you? Yes, but that is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

And if when it happens, sing your praises, be so thankful, be grateful, but do not expect that’s going to happen because you showed up and stood in a room or you showed up and sat in front of a Zoom room with 20, 30, 40, 50 other people in it.

So it’s really important you keep that in mind. This is the power of a one-on-one.

Which means, if you don’t have a profile of who your ideal referral sources are and you’re like okay I guess I’ll do a one-on-one with everybody in this group, that’s a lot of coffees and maybe that’s great, right?

Maybe you’re down for seven million cups of coffee, but you have to pay attention to this in terms of the logistical lift that you’re asking yourself to do and do you have time for that?

I tell my clients all the time when they’re going through the training that we teach, it’s one of our foundational trainings that we teach on how to identify and cultivate new people to start referring you that we are strategic first.

We will make mistakes. We will, what we call inside, we will kiss a bunch of frogs on the way to meet the princes and the princesses that will ultimately be able to refer to us.

But if we’re going to kiss a bunch of frogs, we want to make sure we’re at least trying to be strategic with that part. And that’s the same way you approach networking.

You’ve got to be willing to have the one-on-ones whether you’re going to meet for coffee, right? I don’t care if it’s virtually in person, it doesn’t matter, but you have to be willing to form relationships.

This is the piece of referrals where people are like everything about referrals sounds amazing and now I got to do some real work.

Yes, it’s no different than any other marketing and prospecting activity that you do when you’re trying to figure out what exactly how exactly it works.

Think about this in relation to running ads, right? You decide you want to run some ads. Well, you’re going to be told by that ads manager that you hire and pay for if you don’t know how to do it yourself and not only you’re going to be paying them, you’re also going to have to create 10 different designs, assets, the graphics for those ads.

You’re going to have to create like 10 of them and then 10 different versions of copy and then you’re going to put it out there and you’re going to just let it run and you’re going to let Meta figure out which ads are going to win and which ads aren’t.

And then you’re just going to pay for that experimentation time. And so in that first month or the first couple of weeks or whatever eventually you’ll get to that winner and then they’ll start running that ad and you’re just going to keep paying for it but you’re still experimenting until you get to that winner.

And then you have to decide if the winning ad is actually producing the leads you want on the back end. That’s all still work whether you’re doing it yourself and figuring it out or you’re paying someone thousands of dollars a month to do it for you.

Referrals, when it comes to getting new people to refer you, there is still a level of work involved as well. It’s just different and you’ve got to decide if that’s something you want to do.

I have a client that’s in my coaching program that the main focus for him is generating referrals from people that are already referring him and the clients that he has.

He doesn’t want to meet new people. That’s cool.

If you’ve got enough folks that are already referring you and we can get more referrals from them and then you can cultivate your clients into referral sources and that’s all you need to do, great.

You don’t have to do the piece of getting new people to refer to you that are outside of like that client base, right?

But for most folks, you’re going to need new people referring you. And they’re not all going to come from your clients, because if they were going to refer you, they’d probably already be doing it. Or you maybe don’t know what to do to get those clients to refer you.

So it’s really, really important you keep that in mind. Number one, you do not cultivate a new referral source at a networking event.

You have to move that outside of that group and that then, my friends, is the power of a one-on-one meeting those people, starting to build a relationship with them.

Please make those conversations more about them than they are about you. You should do less talking unless you’re just asking questions, right? And there’s a whole process behind how that works.

And there’s a whole process behind what we teach our clients to how to actually generate that person to the place where they start thinking about referring you without you ever asking and ever offering to pay.

And you’re not even like hinting and like trying to like, let me just slip this in here, right? I’m going to imply that you should refer me.

None of that, none of that, my friends, but it’s all going to start with your ability to have a relationship with that person. And networking can be great for that if you have a plan. Very, very important.

Okay. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to come back next week because we’re going to tackle the last part of this topic of you needing more people referring to you.

You can access the transcripts. And of course, any of the resources mentioned like episode 407 and how to sign up for our 20-minute teaching that’s happening in April on the show notes page for this episode at StaceyBrownRandall.com/408.

Thanks for making it to the end until next week, take control of your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.