Networking and Referrals

Network, network and network, just do it right, because if you don’t you may as well be spending your time on the golf course playing by yourself.

That is from my book, and I stand by both halves of it. Networking is the most time-consuming way to market a business and one of the most effective, and those two facts live side by side. The owners who get burned are the ones who do half of it: they show up, hand out cards, and never do the part that produces the business.

Two kinds of rooms

The first distinction is where you are. A networking group, a chamber breakfast, a referral club: these are rooms where people came specifically to meet other people for business. Everything you do to make that easier works for you. Wear the name tag with your name as large as it will fit; it looks a little silly, and it is the reason someone approaches you without the fear of forgetting your name halfway through the conversation. Carry more cards than you think you need. If you pass someone a lead, write it on your card so they remember where it came from. And if you already know someone in the room, work it together; an introduction made by a third person, with a word of vouching, is worth ten cold hellos.

The second kind of room is social: a wedding, a game, a school event. There, the tactic reverses. You are there to make connections with people, so leave the pitch at home. The best networkers I know barely mention what they do in these settings. They get to know people, they pick out the few who might genuinely be a fit, and they arrange to meet those people later, where business can be the subject. It is a filter that offends nobody. The salespeople I have trained do not think of themselves as on or off the job; they simply never overlook a person in front of them. That is different from working all the time; it is refusing to walk past an open door.

Find a group and become a resource

If you are going to network seriously, the structure is simple and almost nobody follows all of it. Find a group that meets on a regular basis; the repetition is what builds trust, not the single meeting. Then meet with everyone in that group one on one, outside the meetings, over coffee or lunch. Meeting someone once will not produce business. The one-on-one is where it starts.

Then change what you are there for. Become a resource for the people you talk to. Promote others as well as yourself and make connections between people who should know each other. Learn who they know, because the person across the table is rarely your customer; it is their brother-in-law, their neighbor, their biggest client who is. Do not underestimate anyone. The quiet person who seems to have nothing to give you may be the one who sends you the most work, and I have seen that more times than I can count. Make it personal, so they are a business friend and not a line in a contact list. And if you are going to do this as a serious channel, study it; there are people who built entire businesses on nothing but networking done well, and they wrote it down.

Many people quit before the return arrives, because it arrives slowly. The others fail because they treat it as a one-way street, there to take business rather than to connect people. Which of those two would you rather be known as?

Word of mouth is earned after the sale

Referrals are normally the best leads you will ever get, because someone else did the introduction and vouched for you before you arrived. Your networking group will produce some. Your family will produce some. Your customers will produce the most, and that is where the real work sits.

A senior sales executive once explained it to me in a way I have never forgotten: the sale is the last step of the marketing. It is the only step the salesperson is directly involved in, and it is the step that decides whether everything the marketing did was rendered useless. The little extra time you spend with a customer, the follow-through, the way you handle the one thing that went wrong, that is what determines how much business they send you. Businesses have gone under on reputation alone, and the internet has made word travel faster in both directions.

So how do you get more of it? If your customer believes you are looking out for them, that you are on their side and not just on your invoice, some will recommend you without being asked. Most won’t, because nobody asked them. So ask: “Who do you know that could use what we just did for you?” Make it easy by giving them a card or a text to forward. Then stay in touch after the purchase, a monthly email, a call, for some trades a visit, without overstepping. Make an impression without imposing. And pay attention to the number of referrals you get; it is one of the most honest measurements of how you are doing. Talking to your past customers directly is an even better one.

This week

Find one group in your area that meets weekly or every other week and go to the next meeting. Before you leave, book two one-on-one coffees with members whose customers might be your customers. At each coffee, spend most of the time learning who they know and who you could introduce them to. Do not pitch.

What this costs you

A serious networking commitment is three to six hours a week: the meeting, the one-on-ones and the follow-up. Group membership ranges from free for informal groups to a few hundred a year for structured referral organizations. The return usually takes months to show, which is why so few people stay long enough to see it. Nobody can do this for you, so of all the channels in this track it is the one you cannot outsource.