Do you Know Where Your Geese Are?

9-4-16 geese
So, you have a business and you are good at what you do, so you get a few referrals . . .

but not as many as you would like, right?

Although I have over 10 systems I use to help clients systemize the getting of referrals, today we are going to talk about just one of them.

Geese

I guess, I need to back up a bit and tell you what geese have to do with referrals.

Let’s call your ideal client/patient/customer a “golden egg”

You want more golden eggs – we all do.

So which would you rather have – the golden egg, or the goose that laid the golden egg?

Who will be laying a lot more.

Of course, we all want the goose.

So how does this apply to getting referrals?

Easy

You want to find the people (geese) who know people who can be your golden eggs.

An example might help.

Let’s say you have a landscaping and tree service.

Instead of only going to leads group meetings where you are hoping to find potential clients from referrals from home business owners, the Mary Kay lady in the group, the lawyer, insurance agent or accountant who are there looking for small business or individual people as clients, how about this?

One of your geese – and you will probably have many – might be a landscape architect.

Those people are doing the design of landscaping, which presumably needs taken care of after it’s all installed.

Another might be the facilities managers for hotels, country clubs or other businesses that have property with trees on it they are responsible for maintaining.

So, the way to think about this is to figure out what groups or associations those people might belong to and hang out with.

Now, just to make your brain really hurt, you can go one more level up and look for the grandma goose!

What’s a grandma goose you ask?

Well, that’s the goose who knows and is connected to large numbers of your geese!

So, continuing with our example, the grandma goose could be the head of a local trade association or group of facilities managers or group of landscape architects.

Now that person would really be a find.

So after identifying and locating maybe 5 or 6 grandma geese for different niches where your geese live, next you need to find a way to meet with, get to know and build trust with those people.

You can do your research by checking out their LinkedIn or Facebook accounts to learn about them personally, find out their interests, likes, etc

One tip, if your grandma goose is the head of a local association, trade group or something, it’s actually best to target the former Chairman or CEO, not the current one.

The current person might be very busy, but the previous head has stepped down and is probably much more available and equally well connected.

How to develop relationships with these people will be the topic of another post – this one is long enough as it is . . .

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