Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net/OZPhotography
Last year, the movie “The Breakfast Club” celebrated its 30th anniversary.
For those who haven’t seen it (and I cannot image that is a lot of people), it is about 5 high school students from different walks of life who get sentenced to a Saturday detention where they find they have a lot more in common than they thought.
Why am I bringing this up in the context of referrals?
In our last Rainmaking Recommendation, we discussed Strategic Referral Partners, whom I defined as the companies and individuals who are already doing business, or know the people, with whom you would like to cultivate as a client.
I had also provided a short script you could use when contacting them to begin to create your relationships. But like most attorneys, you get busy and forget to contact them on a regular basis in order to continue to foster referrals.
Instead of just having a lunch once in a while, or calling them every few months, what if you met with your Strategic Referral Partners regularly? – and I mean regularly.
Gather a group of people who do work in the industries or with the people with whom you do (or wish to do) business and meet with them at least twice a month. Each one of the members of this group should have clients (or want clients) in the same niche as you; however, only one person from a professional specialty or vendor is allowed. For example, there should only be one accountant, one financial planner, one insurance agent, one IT person and so on. You want to find the people with whom the one thing you have in common is your ideal client. You can add other attorneys, as long as their practice area is not the same as yours.
Then, meet with them on a regular basis and find out what you can do to help grow each other’s business.
One of my favorite examples of this comes from a friend of mine: a very successful construction management executive who has been meeting with the same group of professionals for more than 20 years every Saturday morning for breakfast; it’s very early in the day so as to not interfere with other plans. As a result, many, many, many millions of dollars in business have been referred back and forth amongst the group. They have also become great friends as well.
It’s just a thought….
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