How to Scale Your Referrals – In Just 7 Minutes With Steve Gordon

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:19 — 7.1MB) | Embed

Related Links and Resources:

If you go to www.unstoppableceo.net/sbs, they can go there and download the book, a short book, about 45-minute read, combine using a book and using a podcast to exponentially and continually expand your referrals

Summary:

Steve Gordon is the author of five books, including the Amazon Business #1 bestseller Unstoppable Referrals: 10x Referrals, Half the Effort, and Podcast Prospecting: How to Land High-Ticket Clients with a Podcast. He’s the host of The Unstoppable CEO™ Podcast and has appeared on over 100 podcasts. His firm helps digital agencies, consultants, and expertise-based businesses systematically attract more clients

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:25 Steve’s ideal Client: Our ideal client is any business where you're hired for your expertise; consultants or sometimes consulting firms. Anyone who is really delivering their advice and their expertise as their product.

1:53 Problem Steve helps solve: The big problem that they have is that selling your advice is very different in selling a product, because 'you' are the product. You have to be the salesperson typically and then run into a phone booth and put up your superman suit, come back out and save the day for your client. It can be very hard to make that transition from salesperson to trusted advisor. And so, what we do is we help our clients build systems that pre-sale their prospects so that when they arrive, have a sales conversation and they have already decided that you're their guy, they made the important choice and all you got to do at that point is work out the charms of the deal.

2:50 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Steve: If you're lying awake at night at 2 o'clock in the morning in the dark with a little cold sweat beating off out of your body and you're worried because you don't know where the next deal is coming from, then we maybe should talk. That's usually when it kicks in for people.

3:33 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Steve and his solution: The biggest is what I call 'dabbling'. When it comes to marketing and business development, people tend to hear about the latest and greatest thing, right now TikTok is on the rage, and before that it was Instagram, Snapchat or LinkedIn, you name it. Today there are more options for you that there have ever been in the history to promote your business. Your biggest risk is that you have an abundance of choice. What we see happen too often is that businesses get caught dabbling in a little bit of this and that, or a little bit of the other thing, and they never really master any those channels for business development. Most of the companies we worked with, they're landing very high-ticket engagements, they don't need a thousand or 10,000 clients in a year, they need the right dozen, two dozen or three dozen. And solving that problem is very different than trying to get that thousand or 10,000, so you can do that very effectively by focusing and mastering one or maybe two channels.

4:58 Steve’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): The best place to start is to focus on your referrals; that is to me the foundation for all of your marketing. And before you try to go and do anything more elaborate than that, get a system in place that drives referrals. And the one thing that you can do today is sit down and think about the types of information that you need to convey to a potential client to get them to a point that they want to meet with you or somebody on your sales team. These are things that you likely already have around. Compile that together or what we like to say 'package it' into what we called a referral kit. You might put that in a form of a short book, a webinar or some other form, but something that's easily pass on. That's probably the most effective thing you can do, because then you can turn around to your clients or to your partners and say "I just put together this great resource which solve particularly this problem for people, I know you know some people that are really affected by it, and I'd love to sit down with you and brainstorm who in your network might really benefit this. What do you say?"

6:35 Steve’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Continuing on the theme of scaling your referrals, we have a process that does that. Combine using a book and using a podcast to exponentially and continually expand your referrals. I actually written down all our entire process. It's a short book, about 45-minute read and I would like to do is give it away who's listening. So, if you go to unstoppableceo.net/sbs, they can go there and download the book and there are a couple of goodies that they can get as well. The book will really get them started.

7:39 What's the most important factor in marketing and business development? It's something that most people never really serious attention to. But if you really want to move the needle, all of the tactics are great and they are fine, but if you don't first focus on fixing your offer in getting the most compelling and irresistible offer that serves a bleeding net problem for the people you want to do business with, then all of the tactics are going to be wasted. When we work with someone, we always start there and then workout from there. I think that's the most important thing that people need to focus on.