COVER CONTINUED ... HOW MUCH MORE MONEY WOULD YOU MAKE? It’s not like you’re asking for the world. 40 referral partners would only be 4 percent of the chiropractors in Idaho. The other 96 percent could hate you and it wouldn’t matter, because you’d be getting daily referrals — even multiple referrals per day. Let’s say the average settlement was $10,000 per case, and one-third of that went to you as the attorney. Let’s also estimate that each referral partner could only send an average of two cases per month. Your gross profits would be $266,640 per month. Most attorneys would be thrilled with even half that number. In your business, what’s the average annual value of a customer to you? What if you could get 20, 40, 80, or even 100 more of those customers per month? What would it do for your business and your life? THAT IS THE POWER OF THE REFERRAL PARTNER. I do a ton of work with a company called Infusionsoft. In April, they added 1,200 new customers with over one-half of their new business coming from referral partners. All the big companies use this strategy, but most of us smaller guys don’t, which is crazy. I hear from people on a semiregular basis who want to be referral partners with me, and one major mistake I see is their approach. I currently have one guy who is working hard to be our partner, but in all the wrong ways. He called me 7–10 months ago, and at first, he said he wanted to send us business. Great! I jumped on a call with this guy, and we had a good conversation, but what he really wanted was for me to refer him … the old bait and switch. Do you think we referred him “If you want partners, you need to GIVE first before you RECEIVE.”
to anyone? Nope! Now, I totally screwed up and didn’t take notes in Infusionsoft, so a few months ago, he called in again. My executive assistant, Karli, saw the notes about him being a potentially good partner. I had time, so she booked him on my calendar. I took the call, realized what had happened, and ended the call rather quickly. All he still wanted to do was chat about himself and how we could earn money by sending him customers. THIS APPROACH IS ALL WRONG. If you want partners, you need to give first before you receive. You need to send a referral or provide something of value to help them before you ask. You have to build a relationship. There may come a time when people are beating a path to your door to be your referral partners, but that won’t be for a while, so be prepared to help a lot of people. After you’ve built that relationship, watch the referrals roll in. Whatever you do, don’t walk in asking for referrals from them first. It is lame and won’t get you far with most people. This is not an overnight success strategy, but personally, I like it the best. If you can create a marketing strategy that is difficult to replicate, your competition will never catch you. If your marketing strategy is to use Facebook ads that anyone can do, it is easy for your competition to replicate that and copy you.
On a side note, here’s what I love about newsletters: They’re hard to replicate, and your competition doesn’t know you’re using them. If referral-partner marketing sounds like it could be a win for you and your business, head over to DailyReferrals.com. I have an on-demand training video you can watch for free where I walk you through more details of creating and marketing a referral-partner program.
–Shaun
P.S. The same techniques I’ll show you in the video on demand (VOD) can be used to secure high net worth and marquee customers. There is a small twist you need in order to make that work, but I’ll go over that in the video. If that is the category of customer you sell to, this VOD will be valuable to you.
P.P.S. Don’t worry if you’re a doctor, lawyer, or financial advisor who can’t give out gifts to referral partners. I’ll cover what you need
to do as well as how to crush it with this
strategy. Access the VOD at DailyReferrals.com.
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