My expert interview today is with Jim Bear from The Referral Stream.
If you depend on referrals in your business, you're going to love this.
Kevin Donlin: Jim, I'm so happy to talk with you today. Your tips on getting more referrals work like crazy and I literally put them in the bank every week, in the form of new business that I would have otherwise never received.
If there's time, I want to talk about the $30,719 in revenue you helped me get from ONE referral, but without further ado, welcome to our interview!
Jim Bear: Thanks!
Kevin: One of your concepts is called, the referral partner. You want to introduce people who may not be familiar with it?
Jim: The gist of referral partners, is learning to network with the right people who can send you clients on a regular basis.
How many times have we been in those networking events where there's a room full of people and it's like, okay, who do I spend my time talking to and who's going to send me business out of this room and sometimes it's a filtering process that just takes a lot of time to do that.
So the model that I like to use when we're out networking is to think of yourself as the orthodontist and go out and find a dentist, because a dentist is a great referral partner for the orthodontist.
If you understood who your "dentists" are, these are professionals that are going to know about your next client before you do and get to some other questions we're going to roll out when we get together on the 14th of June. We're going to dive deeper on that concept so you know when you're out networking who you should be spending time with in a group networking setting and even on a one-to-one networking setting.
Another way of thinking about this is it was brought to my attention the other day when I was shopping at Target. They have some of their boxes if you go to like the furniture section or the sporting goods section, the really heavy items, they've got a picture on that box and it's called a "team lift." It's a picture of two people lifting this box and what they're trying to communicate to the consumer is "Don't lift this on your own, this is too heavy – ask one of our Target personnel to help you lift this." In fact, they'll bring two people out to team lift it, probably right out to your car.
And when I saw that, I thought, "You know, that's really a referral partner in networking." If you can network with professionals who will do some of the heavy lifting with you, it's so much easier than trying to do everything on your own. So we're going to drill down deeper on that on June 14th and talk about who you should be team lifting with in your networking efforts.
Kevin: That's a fantastic idea. Just as a takeaway people can realize not all networking contacts are created equal.
Jim: No.
Kevin: And when you know who you're looking for in terms of referral partners, it's like putting on 3D glasses. Whoa! Things change, and you can spot the people you should really be networking with.
In fact, using your ideas about referral partners, I have received $30,719 in revenue from just one person I met a year ago. This person is my ideal referral partner, he's my dentist, if you will, to my role as orthodontist. This guy has happily sent me almost $31,000 and counting and I get leads and projects from him almost every week. It's been absolutely fantastic.
And it's all because of what I learned from you, Jim. I now look for people upstream of me who see my clients before I do and it's an absolute night and day change in my networking. Because instead of looking for little onesy-twosey projects, I've got this one referral partner, and it's like having an oil well in my back yard. It's just pumping out revenue day after day. I have you to thank for that.
Meanwhile, if you want to more clients like your best clients, my free Client Cloning Kit can help. Grab your free copy now, while they last.
Nice!
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