Most of us have clients that we really love to do business with. It’s probably not all of them, but there are ones that we would like to get more of. Ones that we would love to duplicate, and for all of our clients to be very similar to.
There’s a fairly straight-forward method for seeing how to replicate those clients that we love doing business with.
What we need to do is take a look at our best clients that actually came from referrals. We need to first identify those people and how we got them, then we need to figure out how to cultivate more referrals along those branches of our referral tree.
Think for a minute about your best client that came from a referral. Or even several best clients that came from referrals.
Now think about where that best client came from. Start thinking about it from the standpoint of your referral tree. Trace the client back to where you had direct influence. Think about things that you had control over. How was that connection made?
If it was accidental, think about what you can do to make more “accidents” like that happen. What can you do to make those things more likely to happen?
If it was intentional, what’s the best way to replicate that? What did you do right last time, and what can you improve upon next time?
When you’re tracing back the history, look at more than just the people. Keep in mind events, conversations, places, methods of communication.
If you’re looking at multiple clients, you may get lucky and find some commonalities. There’s an even higher likelihood that those are the things you should be doing more of.
Regardless of whether there is overlap or not, you now have a list of things that have worked in the past, and they’re things that you had direct control over. Now it’s time to go out and repeat those activities.
And this exercise can be repeated on a regular basis. Sit down once a year or so and see what new clients you’ve got and where they came from. Then you’ll have a way to continually replicate your best clients.
© 2012 Sandler Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
