The first and most important rule of gaining consistent referrals:

The first and most important rule to remember in asking for referrals, is offering referrals in return. If you cannot offer referrals in return, then try to consider ways to change that obstacle, so that you really do have something to offer your referral partners.  But until you legitimately can offer referrals, you can create a "patch" or "workaround", but remember, there is no true replacement to just giving good referrals to your referral partners if you want them to give referrals to you consistently.  Meanwhile, here a coupl ideas to patch you together in the meantime:


First, think of something you can offer in return. This last week, I had a referral partner that offered us a couple thousand referrals from her warm market. This caused me to pause, because we always give referrals in return to our partners that are of equal kind and quality. We also do so immediately when we can, and within a week at the most if it is a large order, and we don't have like kind and quality to return at the time.

I told our very generous referral partner that I wanted to share with her that we also have value to her in many ways that other than referrals.  For example, we do social media advertising, consulting services, access to our referral network, and also the ability to directly represent her services. I explained we could offer any of these for free in exchange for her referrals.  To all of these, she accepted, and felt that they were fair offers, and agreed to send me those couple thousand referrals immediately. I then shared with her that I was merely making a point...and that is that sometimes some of us don't have large quantity, deep warm market referrals to provide, but that in that situation, there is an option to barter, but only if the value of what is given for the referral is of equal value on both sides. This is a true win-win scenario. To this, she also agreed with me.

I then told her that I really do have a deep set of warm market referrals to give her, and I shared with her that I truly appeciated the specialized nature of the valuable referrals she was about to provide me. I asked her if she would mind if I offered her about 5,000 referrals, which is a subset of our warm market database...all of which were in her target market. She immediately accepted, and we exchanged those referrals, and are now both benefiting greatly from this transaction.

This brings me to the second way that you can prepare to be a great referral partner. If you don't have any true value to offer your referral partner in a bartering scenario...and remember the value must be perceived as true value by your referral partner, or there will be no referrals forthcoming from them. :) ....But you can create a truly valuable exchange plan by thinking in terms of the product that your referral partner provides while you are out there prospecting by yourself. Take that awareness and incorporate it into your own marketing/prospecting plan, and also increase the number of businesses that you target. You must do this in a way that also widens the scope of the services that you are promoting to include that of your referral partner(s). (This is why ISD is such a good referral partner...we do a business assessement to idenfity all the needs of a company, and then we refer out those services that do not fit our core monetized model).

I am reminded of an interesting exchange that happened during a consult that I was performing with a large, ranked insurance brokerage years ago. I will call the owner, Bob to protect his identity during this story. While I was sitting in conference with Bob, the secretary mentioned that he had a phone call from a prominent financial planner, whom I will call John. Bob asked me if I minded if he took the call during our meeting, to which I accepted. As the phone call progressed, Bob became very angry with John, and I discovered I personally knew John. As Bob angrily hung up the phone, he explained that John had "all the gall" to ask him to open up his warm book of business to give as referrals to the financial planner. I was saddened that John did not have the presence of mind to talk first in terms of Bob's interests, which would have been to share with Bob that he, the financial planner had the means to provide insurance referrals to Bob. I mentioned this to the Bob, and he agreed that this is what should have been done. To which I also gently replied to Bob that it might be wise for him to accept John's request for referrals on the condition that the financial planner bring equal numbers of referrals of like kind, quality and size to exchange for an incremental set of referrals that could eventially result in the entire book of business from Bob being delivered to John...but only on the continuing condition that the financial planner respond equally, and as such, would possibly double the existing book of business currently held by the insurance broker.

The insurance broker agreed wholeheartedly with this logic, but talked to me in terms of the 80/20 rule, in which he pointed out that only 20% of the networkers out there understand that you must give equally to get equally...and that in order to be able to give, the eyes of the referral partner must be opened to true opportunites for their referral partners.

For this reason, the insurance broker requested that our company be his referral partner instead of the financial planner. Since that time, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of net business have been transacted between our two companies over the last 8 years or so. So remember to have something to offer your referral partners, or you will have nothing to prime the pump...which so often results in futile and repeated attempts to pump the water that is truly there, but which will not be forthcoming without giving something simultaneously.

If you would like to be invited to our prospecting efforts in the Phoenix area, where you can multiply your prospecting results between 200% to 500%, feel free to add us on http://www.facebook.com/Biz2Business.b2b and we will send invites to our prospecting efforts or our "coffee meetings" around the Phoenix Area that Becky operates in order to connect you to our referral sharing programs.