Understanding your Contact Sphere is a key element in identifying the important people in your network who will help you build profitable referral generating relationships. A Contact Sphere is a group of business that compliment rather than compete with yours. For example good contact sphere professionals for a wedding planner would include a wedding photographer, caterer, events management company, florist, civil celebrant. For a web designer a contact sphere would include, SEO companies, content writers, IT, companies, graphic designers.
To often businesses operate on this Contact Sphere level without investigating if they could make these relationships even more profitable. There is deeper level of Contact Sphere relationship that really increases the chances of quality consistent referred business and that is identifying who in your contact sphere has the same target market as you. This would mean they are meeting the same type of clients you want to meet and vice versa. This obviously makes it easier to generate referrals for each other.
If we were to look at the web designer example mentioned earlier and find out a little more we may be able to identify stronger referral partners. If the web designer had new business start ups as their target market we could connect them with other companies that also had these as their target market clients. For example, an accountant who specialises in start up businesses, business start up funding providers, virtual or shared office providers, chambers of commerce etc. Because all of these business are looking to support start ups it would make sense to build strong relationships with them to increase you chances of success.
A great exercise to help you identify who deeper contact sphere relationships, is to work through your contact list and identify a list businesses that compliment what you do but don’t compete. Then after you have identified them you can further filter them by discovering which of them wants to speak to the same target market clients as you. A good way to measure this is to look at the number of referrals you have passed to each other of the last year. There is a good chance that those who have passed referrals with you more consistently are working with the clients you want to work with.
By putting in this extra level of effort you can really begin to build a network of key referral partners that will bring you a steady stream of referred clients and of course you could do the same for them.
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To your continued success
Dave