How to Intentionally Build a High-value Network – in Just 7 Minutes with John Corcoran

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Related Links and Resources:

If you go to www.smartbusinessrevolution.com you can grab an email template there that can help you figure out what language you should use when you're reaching out.

Summary:

John Corcoran is an attorney, writer, and a father, and a former Clinton White House Writer and Speechwriter to the Governor of California. Throughout his career, he has worked in Hollywood, the heart of Silicon Valley, and owned his own boutique law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area working with small business owners and entrepreneurs.

He’s the cofounder with Dr. Jeremy Weisz, of Rise25, LLC, an agency that helps B2B businesses to generate qualified leads and referrals and strategic partnerships using done for you podcasts and done for you lead generation using LinkedIn and content marketing. Rise25 also hosts in-person and virtual training for ecommerce entrepreneurs and professional services business owners.

He is also the creator of Smart Business Revolution and has interviewed over 500 guests for the Smart Business Revolution podcast, which he started in 2012.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

2:01 John’s ideal Client: I think an ideal client for us is similar to where we come from which is B2B type with a professional high client lifetime bio that is looking to make their time go further, save time, and use content marketing as a networking tool.

2:31 Problem John helps solve: We're recording this on Dec of 2020 and pandemic has been going on for 8-9 months and the common problem right now is a lot of people who were having trouble like they were getting leads and they were getting referral partners to lunches, dinners, coffees, conferences, face-to-face kind of stuff and all of a sudden you can't. So, that's a big category. People who are looking to continue business development, they need to get client or referral partners but they can't do it physically face-to-face. I've been doing a podcast for 10+ years now and it's an amazing tool for business development for referral marketing, strategic partnership, all that kind of stuff, so we show people how to do that. Even before and after the pandemic, it's a more efficient way to work because you can save time, you don't have to travel as much, you are home with your family, and you can meet and connect with more people more efficiently.

3:42 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to John: Lots of our clients are experiencing the marketing rollercoaster like they get busy-busy with clients so they don't do any marketing and then everything cuts lose down and then haven't done any marketing so they have to ramp it up again. So, there's a lot of people like that. They're just looking for something more consistent and predictable that's going to produce a stream of referral partners and clients on a consistent basis. That's the type of people that are frustrated with not having that and so we help people to put that in place.

4:32 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding John and his solution: I can totally relate to that because when I started doing the podcast, I tried to do it all by myself. Even when I started bringing other people to do audio editing and things like that, I oversaw too much of it and so I got stuck on the weeds on it. What really helped me was about 5 years ago, my business partner and I, Dr. Jeremy Weisz, he had been a podcaster for as long as I had, actually longer and have been helping other podcasters. When you're only putting out 7 episodes because I was too stuck on the weeds on it. He really helped me reinvent my whole process and the next year I put out 52. What I realized is that when you focus on the highest and best use of your time which is using the podcast as a tool for having great conversation with great people, referral partners, strategic partners, clients, then you're going to get much greater results. If you're listening to this and you are not selling like a 5-dollar widget or something like that but you have B2B offering of some sort. You have a high client lifetime value and the thousands, then you're going to get much better results if you stop focusing on the low types of tasks that you shouldn't be focused on. You let someone handle those pieces, they're probably going to do it better than you anyways. And then you can focus your time, energy and attention on using the podcast as a tool to have great conversation with referral partners, strategic partners, and clients.

6:08 John’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): Here's a simple one; oftentimes the first thing we think about is going out and meeting new people, how do I find new people, go on LinkedIn, go to conferences or whatever. But oftentimes, the most valuable people, the biggest champions we have out there are past referral partners. One thing I've done for many years now is I have a list of all of our clients on the wall, it's in my line of visions it's right behind my computer screen and I have the list of names of the client, I have the date they signed up and I have the person or the source where they were referred to us. If they came from a community, if they came from a group that we belong to, a conference, a person, the interview that I did, I've written it down. The reason I do that it's because I want it so top of my mind that I can just at a glance and see who are our best referral partners, who are our best strategic partners, who are our best clients. What I say to others is usually do something like that, or be thinking that directly that you know exactly who your best sources are. I talk to people all the time and say "who are your best referrals partners, who are your top 3 referrals partners" and they can't answer the question. That's really shocking to me because not only you should know who they are but you should be spending time and energy to deepen that relationship with those people because it will absolutely result in better impact for your business.

7:55 John’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): One of the things that people struggle with the most is just the initial outreach piece like "what will I say if I want to reach out?" Let's say there's someone that I would like to feature whether it's a client, whether it's a referral partner or strategic partner, whether it's someone I don't know or maybe someone I do already but haven't talked in awhile, what do I say, what do I say on that email? If you go to smartbusinessrevolution.com you can grab an email template there that can help you with that language, there's a bunch of different templates around 10 of them in there. That will help you figure out what language you should use when you're reaching out.

8:49 How do I get results? I've been doing a podcast for 10 years; I've seen a lot of people come and go on that time. People start, they do it for 6 months, a year and then they give up. They don't give up because they don't have the right microphone, they don't give up because they can't get good guests, they gave up because they're not getting results. If you're going to start a podcast or people interviewing on YouTube or other sources for a book or that sort of thing. I personally think that podcast is the best way to do it. If you're going to do it, how are you going to get results, and we allude that at the beginning and the answer is, you need to take yourself out of the process focus on the best use of your time and delegate to someone else who's going to handle the pieces for you so that you can focus on using the right strategy. Because there's enough work on that one piece, it's not easy to master that one piece but if you do master that one piece then you can create the resources for yourself so you don't have to do anything at the back end and you can get great energy from this process. That's what we do, that's how we designed our business to handle all that and happy to chat with anyone who wants to know more details.