Develop Your Referral Formula: Part 2

Identifying targeted opportunities for referrals involves training your network of clients to know how to spot ideal businesses and individuals who could use your services. Transferring trust is the process of an existing client personally vouching for the quality of your services. Establishing a high level of endorsement is simply the result of delivering such high quality service that your clients will feel comfortable giving you the best endorsement possible when the time is right.While the transfer of trust and a high level of endorsement are simply the result of providing a top quality service for a client who enjoys making referrals, educating your clients about how to spot the perfect people and organizations for your particular services is significantly more complicated. This is because it is often difficult to properly identify prospective referrals for certain professional services. Most businesspeople do not frequently share the nitty-gritty details of their needs for things like accounting, healthcare or legal services with very many people. As a result, you need to be able to identify the right clients spot opportunities to make targeted referrals based on information that most people do not have access to.

In order to demonstrate, let’s imagine for a moment that you are offering legal services that are needed whenever business people are preparing for and executing mergers and acquisitions. No matter how much experience you might have, you will probably have a hard time generating referrals through organic means due to the fact that people in involved in M&A deals usually do not like to broadcast their intentions. Now let’s throw a couple of existing clients who are accountants into the equation. Unlike most people in your professional network, your accounting clients may have very frequent contact with associates who are quite open about their involvement with a pending merger or acquisition. If you were to spend some effort focusing on encouraging these particular clients to refer their contacts to your services, there is no telling where it might lead.

With this in mind, you might be able to envision how you could develop a similar strategy in order to create a finely-tuned referral engine for your own business. Regardless of what type of professional service that you happen to offer, there are probably only a handful of people in your network who have the type of insider knowledge necessary to identify to perfectly targeted referrals for your industry. By focusing on cultivating these particular contacts for the foreseeable future, you can start honing in on well-targeted prospects.