Virginia Muzquiz

I am ready to go! Let’s do this.

Virginia Muzquiz

There are a couple of things.

I’m going to assume that you’d be talking about people who maybe are out and about, and working on connecting. So perhaps they are going to networking events, they’re going to chambers. They’re doing stuff to meet new people, but they don’t feel they’re getting referrals out of that.

Virginia Muzquiz

I think the biggest mistake is what Dr. Ivan Misner refers to as what he called the networking disconnect, and people confuse direct prospecting with the referral process.

Direct prospecting is when you go out and hand out your business card to everybody in a room and tell them that you’re great at what you do, and you’d love them to do business with you or to give you an introduction to somebody that could do business with you. It’s not effective because referrals are built out of relationships, and that requires that people know you, like you and trust you.

Virginia Muzquiz

What I tell my clients is when you go out networking, you need to go with a little bit of a plan. You need to go with, “What can I give?” which if you’ve read Love Is A Killer App. Read some books, get some knowledge, and be interesting to talk to.

What can you offer people that are in the room regarding great information or useful facts or some support?

You want to know what you need. What are the problems that you’re currently looking to solve that you can ask people, “Hey, do you know anybody who solves this kind of problem?” and then knowing who you want to meet and who in your world you want to give introductions to. Who do you want to promote while you’re out and about?

Virginia Muzquiz

If people are armed with a more of a plan and a little bit more of a strategy and something that’s a little less personally-focused and a little more other-focused, they can do a lot better regarding getting referrals.

Virginia Muzquiz

Yeah.

Virginia Muzquiz

Most people network because they know they should. They go to events because they know they should, and they do a lot of things because they think they should, but at the end of the day, the reason that you should do anything is that it’s going to benefit you and the world that you serve. If it’s not going to benefit the people in your world, then it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to go running around doing it.

I think it is essential to have a lot of clarity around who you are, what you do, who you serve, what your needs are, what you bring to the table.

Virginia Muzquiz

I also think it begins with personal development. Investing in yourself whether that’s reading or coaching or going to workshops and seminars or just, however, you’re investing in yourself to make yourself a more interesting, more viable person to know I think is a big part of it and then having a plan to share that.

Virginia Muzquiz

I believe that there are six essentials steps to learning how to boost referrals.

Virginia Muzquiz

One of them is to define your tribe. Define your target market, ‘nichetize.’ There are all ways of saying, but it boils down to:

• Who are you?
• What have you learned in your life?
• And, how can you surround yourself with like-minded people that just need to fix the problem that you happened to solve?

It’s about digging into who you are as a person and involves knowing your values, understanding what your real goals are, the impact and the legacy you want to have in the world, and getting clear on who wants those same things, and then serving that tribe of people.

Let’s face it. Most of us that are entrepreneurs or ‘solopreneurs,’ which is where I focus my work, is we don’t need tens of thousands of people. We need 50 to 100 just good clients in our hopper, and that’s enough for us to have a fantastic business.

If you’re going to invite 10, 15, 20, 40 people into a room, who are they? And how do they qualify to get to be in your room, and get to work with you?

Virginia Muzquiz

The next thing is developing your platform as a trusted authority. Experts get paid more, experts are more sought after, and experts deliver. How does one promote themselves as an expert? What’s the expert story or the hero journey? That, “How did I learn all of this? How did I get there?”

Virginia Muzquiz

Then, understanding what kind of a team you want to build around you.

A lot of people would call that a sphere of influence or a center of influence.

I’m looking for a team. I’m looking for a bunch of people that are solving problems that I don’t answer, and they have a similar value system, and the same mindset and they love my tribe, and they want to work with my tribe too. That would be my team.

And then I think the biggest mistake people make is there are two kinds of getting referrals. You can get referrals from your existing clients, which is incredible; raving fans, quality community. Or, you can get them from your centers of influence.

Virginia Muzquiz

If you’re going to boost referrals from centers of influence, then I’ve heard them called like golden geese and granny geese; just any kind of person that’s going to bring you multiple referrals. Those people need to be treated or need to be acquired and groomed to the way you would acquire or groom any employee even though what you’re paying them isn’t money. It’s going to be referrals, exchanged promotions, support, and information in business.

Virginia Muzquiz

You’ve got to have some tools for onboarding people, interviewing them, making sure they’re in alignment with your purpose, passion, vision, and mission, and that they share your values.

Virginia Muzquiz

Training them up tools for training them up, and that’s the other T, is you got to train people. They don’t know how to talk about you. They don’t know how to appointment set for you so teaching people in your appointment setting, processes, and in your promotional methods.

Virginia Muzquiz

Finally, tracking. I don’t think we all do a great job necessarily of tracking.

If I spend an hour with you, what happened as a result of the time we spent together? Because if we drank a great cup of coffee and ate a croissant, that was lovely social time.

However, if we didn’t walk out with some concrete to do’s and action items for one another, and don’t deliver on those requests, then we don’t ever get to create a team. We can’t build that community feel of people coming together to work towards a common goal, which would be to support the success of any given tribe that we’re focusing on.

Virginia Muzquiz

Yup. They’re all T’s.

It’s Tribe, Trusted Authority, Team, Tools, Training, and Tracking.

Virginia Muzquiz

Yeah.

Virginia Muzquiz

I have something called a ‘social capital scorecard,’ and on that scorecard, there are a variety of activities in there. Some of them are relationship building activities like, “Hey, how are you doing?” phone calls, writing a note to somebody, “Hey, I was just thinking about you. I was at the store the other day, and I saw these gummy bears that were champagne-flavored, and I have a person in my network who likes champagne so I thought that would be cute. I’ll send those to Dona. So I grabbed some champagne-flavored gummy bears and sent those out.” Those are relationship-building things.

Business building opportunities are any promotion. When I invite somebody on my podcast or when I promote someone in my social media, or I buy a bunch of tickets to an event that someone’s putting on, and give out tickets to strategic people so I can get those people in front of them. Those are all business building social capital points.

Then, of course, referring is another one. Finding clients and finding connections for other people is another way of doing that.

There are series of activities that you do along the way to build relationship and trust. Those are things that referral partners do with one another that create value for one another, and those things all have point values, and then you tally up all your points.

Ideally, what you find out, for example, is, how much ROI do I get on my investment of relationship building by looking at how much money is being produced by a referral partner, and how much am I pouring into them?

Virginia Muzquiz

Ultimately, here’s how to know how much ROI you get on your invested social capital time.

Let’s just say Luis was in my referral team, and you come on over in my referral team. I found out that every point that I put into him yield $10, but you give me $27. Then, I would know that if I spent more time or invested more social capital time with you, I might get a higher return on my investment for that time.

It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t work with Luis. It just says I might want to put more time into our relationship and building more business relationship, educating you more, learning more, and giving more to somebody who provides more value back for that.

Virginia Muzquiz

If you want to rev up your referrals and if you want a predictable funnel of referred prospects coming into your life on a regular basis, the strategic way to do that is to focus on building community and having clarity about what your community is about and what your community is going to do for one another.

Virginia Muzquiz

That would be one, and then the community piece. It is collaborating with others and creating community.

I think that should be the focus when we’re out networking.