Archives for January 2018

The “trick” to Generating More Referrals

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Your best clients come from referrals, don’t they?

Think about it. Referred clients are:

  1. Easier to close, because they come to you pre-qualified
  2. Generally higher-end buyers
  3. Practically free

What’s the trick to generating more referrals? I won’t keep you waiting any longer. Here it is:

ASK.

Yes, simply ask for referrals.

I know what you’re going to say next… “But Mary, if people love what I do… do I have to ask? They know I’m in business. They trust me. They’ll call when someone needs me, won’t they?”

The truth is, NO. In general, they won’t. And just for fun…

Here’s a pretty embarrassing example from someone who should know better.

Me.

I’m like you. My clients love the work we do, we have great rapport, they trust me. And I’ve been making the mistake of not asking. For at least <cringe> the last year.

Lately though, as I’ve watched my referrals expert Adam work with our clients to build their referral generation systems, I started thinking I might be missing out.

So I posted a reminder note on my computer and put in my marketing plan to, at the end of every client call, ask for a referral.

The results have been remarkable.

Every time I’ve asked, my client has paused and said something along the lines of, “Actually, yeah, I should connect you with this guy I talked to last week.”

Imagine if I hadn’t asked. Imagine what I’ve missed out on over the last year.

Don’t miss out on business that is literally yours for the asking!

2017: Successful? Yes. Peaceful? Not so much.

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Walking along the beach on New Year’s Day, I reflected on how I felt exactly one year earlier: filled to overflowing with a sense of wonder and possibility.

Feeling inspired last January, I picked up pebbles on the beach, wrote a blog about them, then mailed them out across the country.

My intention was to remind us all to keep that sense of wonder and possibility with us throughout 2017.

How would you rate your success with that intention?

I give myself a B minus.

I took plenty of time off for friends, family, roller coaster and otters. And grew the company by about 25%.

But a consistent sense of wonder and possibility? Not so much.

In between the fun time off and the accomplishments was a lot of fretting. “Am I going to get this done? When can I take a breath? Am I doing the right things? What if I never get another client?”

I can track all of this fretting to a serious lack of space for thinking. For exploring. For analyzing and creating. For wonder and possibility.

This year, I want to get an A+.

So for 2018, I budgeted and protected time for wonder and possibility. I shared my calendaring process for the year in this recent blog, because I do not want to repeat the intermittent crazy of 2017.

I want to know… how’d you do?