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How to Gain Introductions to New Client Groups

Written by: Christine Sutherland

Article Overview: Every business person realises the value of a third-party introduction. But how many have a strategy in place to actively seek out and capitalise on advocacy arrangements? It's not easy, and it takes time to build the amount of trust these relationships require. Read on to see how we've taken all the hassle out for you!

How to Gain Introductions to New Client Groups

Every business person realises the value of a third-party introduction. But how many have a strategy in place to actively seek out and capitalise on advocacy arrangements? It's not easy, and it takes time to build the amount of trust these relationships require. Read on to see how we've taken all the hassle out for you!

These Facts Should Galvanise You into Action!

When researchers analyse sales to see where they originated from, they generally find that well over 70% of them come from referral. And when they look another layer down, they find that the overwhelming majority of those referrals come from ... friends and family!

Those referrals come not from casual acquaintances, but from people who know you intimately. Not only do these people know you, like you, and trust you, but they also understand what you do well enough to refer intelligently.

These are in most cases the very people you're too busy to spend as much time with as you'd like. This is why referrals often drop off as a business grows. Your friends and family presume you're too busy and stop marketing you!

And these top referrers are also all the "unmet friends" that you've felt too guilty to take time out from "work" to actually meet, and get to know, and form authentic relationships with. "Unmet friends" who have huge databases of potential clients for you, if only you had time to meet them!

We understand these pressures of business. After all, just like you, we're in business too. That's why we've incorporated the ADVOCACY function into our Speed Business Networking meetings.

How it Works

Step 1

Before anyone can refer you, they need to know WHO is suitable for you as a client. After all, they'd feel stupid or ignorant referring you if they didn't know whether or not you could help the person they're referring.

So the first thing we do is a mini-education session where you make sure that everyone in the group knows exactly who your preferred client base is.

Step 2

The next thing they need is an intimate knowledge of you and your business. How else can they possibly avoid being severely embarrassed by recommending you to a friend who probably won't get along with you, or recommending you to someone whom you're not actually able to help?

So in addition to helping you to educate fellow guests about your preferred clientele, we help you get across the message of what kind of person you are, and precisely what client challenges you are able to solve.

Step 3

Finally you need to start building solid relationships with new business friends. These don't often happen instantly, although certainly that's possible, just as "love at first sight" can also work very well! More often, in business as in life, quality relationships build over time.

We help here also by setting the scene for follow-up meetings so you can fast-track the process of building those strategic alliances. At Speed Business Networking you'll meet business friends who actually want to help you build your business, more easily.

Strategic Alliances and Joint Ventures

These are more formal types of strategies to gain introductions to new client groups, gained through the exact 3-step process outlined above. You'd be amazed at the creative, co-operative alliances that form as a result of good networking, including brilliant cross-promotional strategies that leverage sales efforts exponentially.

Once you've experience that, you'll never attempt to grow your business alone ever again!

Peer Mentoring - The Single Most Important Reason to Network

If you network correctly (see the free download "Speed Business Networking - The Manual" on the speedbusinessnetworking.com site) you'll certain gain many, many referrals, as well as forming highly-beneficial strategic alliances and joint ventures. However there's an even more important reason to network, and that's in order to give and receive mentoring. The amount of business expertise contained within a group of people is awesome to behold, and all that can be yours if you use networking activities to gather around you your own private, trusted "mastermind" group.

This is a group of your closest "business buddies" whom you know you can trust absolutely with your deepest business secrets, and who contribute their expertise and their contacts openly and generously for the benefit of your business. And you do the same for them!

In the whole history of business, I am unaware even one case of business success where the owner has succeeded alone. In every successful business I have ever known about, or read about, a formal or informal mastermind group has been in place. In view of that, it is insane to try to go it alone! That would be like saying "Well what I'm doing has been proven inadequate time and time again, but nevertheless I'm just going to keep doing it." How clever is that?

The major difficulty for small business in forming these types of groups is time. We've attempted to solve that once and for all with the availability of a locked, 100% confidential brainstorming forum that people may enter only with permission of the group founder. Speed Business Networking provides this on-line forum facility as a free service to its members.

This means you can now access your Mastermind Group from your office or home, in complete privacy, and in the convenience of your own time at your own computer. Just click on "How to Join" on our web site in order to register, and send me an email at info@speedbusinessnetworking.com to ask for your own private, locked forum. It's that easy.

Even better, if there's a business challenge your group wants help with, you can put an anonymous request to the rest of the group to come up with ideas and options!

As a member of Speed Business Networking, there are a wealth of resources to help you work through these questions, and leapfrog to success using proven strategies.

Wishing you the greatest success
Christine Sutherland

PS: Mark Walsh, president of VerticalNet, says that business people who avoid on-line strategies are “like dinosaurs that gather together to eat the last leaves."

Don’t be a dinosaur, take the plunge into on-line business communities and reap the benefit, not just today, but for your future!

Your Simple Steps to Easy Business Development

1 Download the free ebook “Speed Business Networking – the Manual” to understand a much more effective (and more fun) approach to utilising networking to get real results. Your business community is your key to success if only you know how to build it, not only for referrals, but for advocacy, strategic alliances, and generous sharing of expertise.

2 Join My Speed Business Network as a free member and get quick access to a vast array of business development tools and resources, including help to carry out your own schedule of informal networking for warm referrals, so that this strategy really delivers for you.

3 Diarise just one hour a week to work on your business with My Speed Business Network, where you will LEARN and USE far easier, faster ways to take your business to that next level, enjoying more success than you ever dreamed possible, with far less stress than you have experienced up till now.

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Related Forum Posts
Re: On Which Social Media Sites Are You Most Active? - It's great to hear how you're using it Bill - the strength of Groups is discussion so for anybody who wants to primarily use it for discussions you should look at Groups. The limit I believe is 5,000 members. If you want to do anything other than discussions then you definitely want to set up a Page. Good luck everyone!
Mastermind Group - Is this the same as Evan's Mastermind Groups?
Mastermind Groups - Hi Guys I just wondered whats the 'Mastermind Groups' section about on the forum?
Successes at My Space - [quote:37w3bsp7]do you mind sharing some of your successes with MySpace? [/quote:37w3bsp7] Hi, Evan Actually the successes I was talking about was with the Groups feature - there are soooo many groups there of interest to me, from the fiction to the sciences, that I've joined them all. I don't find Facebook's Groups stuff to be user-friendly at all. I will say that the more I browse, the more I just shake my head at what people do there (as well as on Facebook, of course). Profile pages where the text of everything is illegible, either because they have a dark, illustrated background - which looks nice but makes it impossible to read anything, or because they choose weird colors - one person I saw yesterday used light red text on a dark green background. And when you read their blog entries or even the text on their profiles... it's like they can't put together a coherent sentence, let alone spell any of the words properly. And I don't think they parse other people's writings very well, either... Well..end of rant I'm just annoyed because it's Labor Day weekend and I'm sure everyone's out in the fun and the sun instead of being at home surfing the web [and in particular my site]!
Re: How Do You Fight Spam? - There are several ways in which you can stop spam: Client side: you can configure your email client to move spam to the junk mail, and you can do this by blocking their domain, some clients will even allow you to block ip blocks. Server side: you can set your server to have a white list, that can control spam before it gets to your inbox.


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