Brian KavickyA Guest Blog by Brian Kavicky, Senior Associate at Lushin & Associates

Over the years, I have been a huge participant in formal referral groups.  Referral groups that are working well make getting introduced to people that can either use you or your services so much easier than cold calling.  However, that is really what they are supposed to do.  However, I am amazed that there are people that join groups so that they don’t have to sell.  It should be exactly the opposite—you should be maximizing your group so that you can sell.

How you sell is a predictor of how you solve.  If you went to a new doctor for the very first time and that doctor:

  • Didn’t make you feel comfortable because they spent so much time on small talk rather than talking about how you felt or communicating with you effectively
  • Didn’t properly diagnose your situation-or even ask some of the questions that you thought they should based on your medical issue
  • Prescribed you with medicines that you didn’t think you needed
  • Offered you brochures on their practice
  • Put pressure on you by asking who your other doctor was and how much he was charging you
  • Asked lots of questions that seemed to benefit them (How sick are you each year?  How much do you spend annually on your doctor?  How do you make decisions related to choosing your doctor?)

Would you go back?  What assumptions would you make about how that doctor practiced medicine based only on the things listed above?  It seems silly from the perspective of a doctor—but isn’t that basically what you are—a doctor of whatever you are selling?

What if you were referred to that doctor by one of your clients or someone close to you in your network?  Would you question their ability to properly identify a high quality doctor?  We are asking our referral partners to refer us to their clients and the people that they are close with in their network.  Then we blow it by messing up the sales call, not living up to the expectation that our referral partner made, and then in many cases, not closing the deal.  If we can’t close the sale when we are referred to a qualified prospect, we are basically communicating to our partner that we cannot solve either.

Think of it this way.  If you had a client that badly needed a pump company to solve some issues in their plant and you referred someone in your networking group to them—and they didn’t get the business—what other conclusion would you draw except to think….”maybe they really aren’t as good as I thought they were.”  After all, your client needed a pump company and trusts you.  It should have been as good as closed.

If you are getting referrals now, or used to get referrals until you had some deals that didn’t close, isn’t it time to make sure that you are representing your ability to solve based on your ability to sell?