Follow-up and Scaling-up

By now, you understand the process of building a solid referral strategy. The week to week process we’ve gone through is focused on two key objectives:

• helping you to learn and build a systematic and repeatable process for building relationships that turn into referrals for you
• turning your activities into habits… meaning daily and weekly steps that continue to produce the results you’re seeking at the levels you want. 

The keys obviously are found in the steps you take to follow-up with people and follow-thru on every connection in regard to building on each contact in a mutually beneficial collaborative way. 

Effective follow-up means:

1. Always delivering on what is promised
2. Being organized and on-time
3. Doing what you say you’re going to do

Then, effective follow-thru is:

1. Continuing with the nurturing, collaboration and managing the relationship
2. Being consistent in everything you do
3. When you show up you bring your highest and best to each engagement   

These are foundational to most everything we do yet reinforcing it here is aimed at helping stay focused on the most important factors that will lead to a lifetime of personal and business success.

Here in week 10, you’re ready to move your referral strategies on to a steady track. You understand the power of focused engagement on a few people and how to make that engagement personal, sincere, relational and collaborative.  You’ve tested and tried different connecting and getting in-touch methods and have the experience in seeing how people  (your “A-list”) have responded.

Now its time to look to scaling-up your referral activities. You’ll start by assessing where you are and what’s worked for you and your business with your initial “A-list.” Then its time to develop your plan for where you want to go.

In looking at your “A-list” its time to remove non-responsive individuals and likely you’ll have new people you’ve identified that you want to initiate the nurturing process. From here on you should be keeping a dynamic list of folks you’re working with and have the experience of reaching out, getting in touch and tracking your steps with everyone as appropriate.  

Here also is where you may decide to expand your focus to increase the size of your focused referral list. Every business and professional is different as to how their business operates, how many people they have the capacity to engage with, their business goals and capacity and so much more.

As an example after becoming very effective at getting referrals one of my clients only has capacity for one or two new clients a year so he has a small group that he focuses on, pays great attention to present clients to ensure the highest retention and has a waiting list for when there is an opening in his calendar to bring in a new client. He prefers to run his practice personally and not build an organization that he might possibly pass of new clients to for delivery.

Others in different industries have expanded their “A-list” to 40 and even 50 people and have retained assistance to help research, track activities and even help with the staying-in-touch efforts.

So. weed out the people who didn’t show responsiveness, add new people and then determine where you want to take this new skill set you’ve developed to meet your goals. 

Over and over you heard the urging to turn these engagement steps into habits.