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Referrals, we all love them. But how do we create a system to get more of them? Steve Gordon has the answer.
My company, codeBOX, thrives off of referrals and I was convicted because in today’s interview I saw so many things I could do better. I thought that referrals were “part of the grind” of running a company. I have been working in a 1 to 1 ratio with clients to get referrals usually getting one or two in a passive way.
I have never figured out how to scale this, and create more leads from my current customer base. Steve shares a way to do this with a referral kit — more on this later.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Steve focus his referral system around two simple principles.
We covered the first point in detail, and I am excited to check out his new book to learn about the second.
Tweet: “High Dollar deals require trust – lots of trust” ~ @steve_gordon via @infusioncast http://ctt.ec/R3Vrv+
When I lived in orange county there was a insurance agent who had an incredibly effective, but sleazy way of getting referrals. When he would meet a client he would stalk there LinkedIn profile and see who there shared connections were. Then he would take note of who he wanted to sell to. At the end of the meeting he would ask “Do you know so and so?” and if you said “yes” he would dig deeper.
He would ask questions like if they were married or single, how much they make per year, and other very private and precise details.
He was very persuasive and I unfortunately gave him two of my friends names. I quickly received two phone calls telling me how they had been harassed by a insurance salesmen who said I GAVE HIM THIER NAMES!
This experience has stuck with me and made me feel dirty when I ask for referrals. I never want to be pushy or manipulative, and because of this I shy away from asking for referrals… even when I know I did an incredible job.
Steve teaches that there is a different way. One that elevates the status of the individual who is referring you. This strategy requires that you put together a referral kit.
A referral kit a gift to your clients network that makes you and your client look good.
I think that the best referral kit includes something personal, like a hand written note.
Steve recommends starting with a book, and shares that the process of writing the book doesn’t have to be daunting but simple. He talks about a client who turned a 12 page 8.5″ x 11″ document into a small 30 page book using a online print-on-demand service.
After you create your referral kit you must ask for a referral from your customer.
This isn’t a weird process and doesn’t feel shady. It allow you to have your customer seen as a expert in their industry.
Think back to the insurance agent in Orange County. If he would have come to me and said, “Hey, I have this book I created called “Why Web Developers Need Disability Insurance: How to get rich when you get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome”. You might think that title is funny, but the point is if he would have given me a option to help my friends, for free, I would have gladly taken him up on the offer. I want to help my friends.
There are so many valuable nuggets of wisdom in today’s interview (Steve blew my mind with the reverse interviewing technique he shared). I hope you take the time to listen
Referral marketing is more human than other lead generations tactics. It requires attention to detail, a desire to connect, and being valuable and helpful at every turn.
Today, July 15th, Steve is giving away his new book Unstoppable Referrals on Amazon Kindle for FREE. To learn more about the book and pick up the free kindler version click here.
Steve Gordon is the author of the new book Unstoppable Referrals and publisher of The Unstoppable CEO—The Leadership Journal for Growing Firms. The is the editor of three business newsletters and has published hundreds of articles on marketing and selling high-ticket products and services in high-trust transactions.
At age 28, Steve Gordon became the CEO of an engineering/consulting firm. Twelve years later, after growing that firm’s revenue by 10-times he started his second business, consulting 1-on-1 with businesses across 30 industries—including manufacturing, professional services, construction, and consulting—to design sales, marketing and referral systems for high-ticket/high-trust products and services.
To learn more about Steve visit UnstoppableCEO.net.
Unstoppable Referral Book Page: http://
Steve’s Homepage: http://stevegordonmarketing.com/
[transcript height=”200px”]
Joshua: Hey, everyone, Joshua here. Before we get in to today’s interview, I wanted to let you know about a special guide we put together just for you. It’s called the “Four Tools That We Use to Supercharge Infusionsoft.” This guide will lay out four different apps that we use to expand Infusionsoft’s functionality. To go get it, head over to Infusioncast.co and click the link on the homepage. Thanks for listening.
Voiceover: You’re listening to the Infusioncast Podcast, the only podcast that is made by Infusionsoft users for Infusionsoft users. Each week we uncover another strategy, tip, or mindset shift that will help you take your business to the next level. Here’s your host, Joshua Millage.
Joshua: Hello everyone and welcome to the Infusioncast Podcast where we focus on how you can turbo-charge your Infusionsoft application.
Our guest today is Steve Gordon. Steve is the author of the new book “Unstoppable Referrals” and the publisher of the “Unstoppable CEO: The Leadership Journal for Growing Firms.” He is the editor of three business newsletters and has published hundreds of articles on marketing and selling high-ticket products and services in high-trust transactions. At age 28, Steve became the CEO of an engineering and consulting firm. Twelve years later, after growing that firm’s revenue by ten times, he started his second business, consulting one-on-one with businesses across thirty industries including manufacturing, professional services, construction, and consulting to design sales, marketing and referral systems for high-ticket and high-trust products and services.
Steve, welcome to Infusioncast.
Steve: Hey Joshua, it’s great to be here and congratulations on the podcast. I’ve been listening to the first few episodes and it’s fantastic stuff. I know the Infusionsoft community has been sorely needing something like this, so I commend you for doing it.
Joshua: Thank you so much. That really means a lot to me. We’re just excited to get experts like you to share great information with the community. I have the first question here and I’m really excited to hear your answer. That is really how have you become an expert in referral marketing?
Steve: The hard and bloody way. As you read in the intro, I started out my career in a technical field and we were selling something that our end users who were land developers, this is in Florida, they would develop a thousand home subdivision and they needed our services to be able to do that. They didn’t exactly look at what we were doing as something that really added a lot of value to the equation. It was a necessary evil.
I started off in a business that we were selling something that people didn’t really want to buy but they had to buy it. Not necessarily a bad position, but everybody looks around and looks at companies like Apple. They got people lining up for iPhones. I can tell you, we didn’t have people lining up overnight because they were so excited about the latest greatest service we were offering. Most businesses aren’t the type where people are going to line up like that. You can read a lot of the books that are out there and get lots of great ideas about how to be like this rock star business or that rock star business.
The fact of the matter is that it’s not always possible for every business. Now, that being said, you still got to have a way to create demand. We found that, in that first business that I owned, that referrals were really are best source of new business. It took us a while to really realize that we could have some influence over that. Early on, I was too young to know any better. The phone would ring some days and other days it wouldn’t ring as much. We had plenty of business so we didn’t worry about it all that much. It was all coming from referral but we weren’t doing a lot to stimulate that referral traffic.
As I matured a little bit in my role, I realized that we needed to have a way to be a little more proactive about it. We applied all of the conventional wisdom, which is ask a lot more and follow-up with the referrals that you get forever. One of the reasons that we came across Infusionsoft, and I first got involved with Infusionsoft in, I want to say 2006, 2007, somewhere in that time frame. We’ve been using it for a long time and I’ve been using it across two businesses. That’s how I got my start in referral marketing.
Five years ago, I left that business and started consulting with other businesses that sold high-ticket services that required a lot of trust. We’re not talking about transactional sort of things, but we’re talking about professional services, consultants. I’ve worked with some manufacturing companies where they’re selling a really high dollar piece of equipment that has to work. Working with companies like that, the buyers for those sorts of things don’t look at the buying process as being this trivial deal. It’s not like if I’m engineering referrals for those types of businesses, it’s not like trying to get somebody to go to a restaurant, Joshua.
If I go and have a great dinner with my wife at a restaurant and I call you the next day and say, “Hey, you got to go try this restaurant.” Aside from you flying across the country to go to it because we’re on different coast, but aside from that, you don’t have a whole lot of risk. I mean what do you out? Fifty, hundred bucks if you get a bad meal, and chances of you getting a bad meal are really pretty slim. In other businesses where you’re dealing with highly personal transactions and relationships where you’re dealing with things that are very expensive, and so there’s a lot of downside risk to the buyer if it doesn’t go well. A lot of the regular ways that referrals happen that are talked about in a lot of literature just start to break down.
As I started working with a lot of these types of businesses and also with my background coming from one of those businesses, we really saw that that was the best way for them to grow is through referrals, but they struggled with it. I thought, “Well, I know the answer to that because I know a little bit about information marketing. We’re going to put on a workshop.” We’re going to put people, put butts in seats and we’ll put a couple hundred business centers into workshops, and we taught them all about referral marketing. It was great. They loved it.
Again, we taught them all the conventional wisdom. We taught them how to ask more often and we taught them when to ask. Here are the certain cues that that’s when you know you could ask for the referral, because that’s a question everybody always had. We said, “Here’s how you follow up” and we taught them how to do automated follow up and all that kind of stuff. About six months later, I went and met with twenty different individuals who had been through the workshop and I’ve said, “Okay, so what have you done? How does that helped you?” Because we weren’t doing this just for our health and just to make money, we were doing it because we wanted to have an impact.
One of them had done anything with it. I thought, “Okay, well, I mean we’re teaching this stuff that we know works. I’ve used it in my entire career. What’s the disconnect here?” We started digging in a little deeper and really found that there is a core group of people for whom asking for referrals is really easy. They just have that personality that it doesn’t bother them. For the vast majority of business people, asking for referrals makes them uncomfortable. What they do is they say, “All right, the way for me to get referrals is I’m just going to do a bang up job. I’m going to do the best job I can and people will notice. My clients will be happy and they’ll talk about me.”
That’s great. Yes, sometimes that does happen, but a minority of your clients are going to talk about you unless you do something to stimulate it. There’s just this barrier there for people doing what they need to do which is ask for referrals.
Joshua: It’s so interesting, Steve, like processing this as you said it, you’re right because you think about all the different ways to do lead gen and you do auto paid search or SEO and it’s like you in a robot. Like you pay the Google robot and he gets you traffic and hopefully that turns into leads and then sales and whatever. The referral process is so much more human. There is like all these psychological things that happen like, “Oh, am I good enough?” There’s probably self-image issues for some people. What do you think some of the key obstacles are that keep businesses from asking, and especially if they know they did a great job? Like the customer said, “Hey, I did a great job,” and they just freeze up and they can’t ask for any more business.
Steve: Yeah. What I heard from these business owners after this workshop was that they were uncomfortable doing it and they felt like I have this client, it’s like this asset I have in my business. They’re paying me a lot of money. A lot of times they were professionals and so the client might have them on retainer. Here’s this stream of money flowing into my business and I’m really scared to mess with it. If I go and ask, I feel like I’m taking one more thing from the relationship and I’m already taking their money. We can get into this whole head trash thing about yes, you’re delivering value and all of that. That’s all great. It’s wonderful to talk about. For some people, it does the trick and they get over it. For most people, that’s not a strategy for them.
I like dealing with solutions to problems rather than the theory of it because you can come up with and concoct any old theory that you want, and it probably works for somebody but I’m interested in solutions that you can apply broadly and that are easy to implement. You got to find a way to get them beyond this uncomfortableness and really, to do that, you have to understand where it comes from. It’s coming from the fact that if I’m going to make a referral that requires that high-level of trust, underlying that referral invisible in the whole process is sales pressure.
I work with a lot of financial advisors and most of them sell like insurance and annuity. Let’s talk about that as an example, because that’s a pretty personal thing. My buddy, John, who’s a long-term client, and I talked about him in the book and he’s a good friend as well, not too long ago he helped me get a million dollar whole life insurance policy. It’s been great, aside from the fact that I sleep with one eye open every night watching to see what my wife is doing, but it’s been wonderful. It have been very beneficial to me. Now, Joshua, I want to have you meet John because I think he can help you with that.
Now, if I have that conversation with you and I don’t really know you pretty intimately, then I’ve probably overstepped the bounds of our little social contract. Now, I’m asking you about a really personal thing, a pretty expensive thing. I’m telling you how wonderful an experience I had and how happy I am having bought it, so the expectation is that if you go and meet with John, that you had better be as excited and happy as I am. Otherwise, not only are you rejecting the sale from John, you’re rejecting me.
Now, do you want to be in that position?
Joshua: Mm-mm (negative), no.
Steve: No. If John has asked me to introduce you, I know all that stuff is going on. I mean I think about it consciously but I know internally that that’s my risk as the one making that connection. I don’t want to make the connection in that case unless I really know you very well and I really know John really well, enough that I can make that very personal introduction. I mean, after all, you’re going to have a conversation about what happens after you’re dead. Oh man, where the money goes. That’s not the only business where that’s the case.
There are an awful lot of businesses where people don’t necessarily want to reveal that they’ve gone to seek the help of a particular professional. There are all kinds of sticky situations and the way around that is to get rid of that sales pressure that’s underlying everything and just gumming up the works. What I did coming from the world of direct response, and I know we’ve got a lot of people who will listen to this that understand direct response, is it really just took what works well in direct response marketing and brought it into a referral process, because most businesses don’t understand direct response marketing. It would take them so long to wrap their heads around what it is that it wouldn’t work well, but they’d really get referrals.
They understand at a boots on the ground level here’s how I go get referrals, but how do we take the best of both worlds and put them together? The way to do that is remove the sales pressure by removing the sales meeting. The natural end result of any referral is that if I’m referring you to my friend John, you’re going to end up in a sales meeting with John. If that sales meeting goes well, you’re going to walk out of there with a lighter wallet than you walked in with. Unless you really trust me or really know him well, then you’re not going to be inclined to want to do that. We have to remove the sales meeting out of the equation. That can’t be the first thing that happens.
In its place … go ahead.
Joshua: Yeah, I’m just thinking through this. When you say remove the sales meeting, so there has to be … the first touch is not a close is what you’re telling me, right?
Steve: Now only that, the first touch probably shouldn’t be a one-on-one face-to-face introductory meeting. That’s the way most one-on-one referrals are set up. We’ve exchanged some referrals in the past and that’s the way, in each case, it’s worked. That’s the way most people do that. You’ve got to make that one-on-one call or the face-to-face meeting happen later in the process. By removing it-
Joshua: That begs the question then, Steve, I guess, and maybe I’m jumping ahead of you, but what do we do then? Because I think that’s the thing, most business owners were so … There’s a lot of us out there that we are hungry for new business so we just get in that mindset. When it’s nine to five, in between those hours, it’s close, close, close. If I’m hearing you right, you’re like take the … Stop stepping on the gas so much and be human.
Steve: Not just be human, I mean I’m all for making sales and I’m not saying any of this to discourage you to not make sales, but what I found is that you can open up a lot more new relationships if you make the initial step a very low barrier to entry. I mean because we’ve got Infusionsoft users listening to this, they’ll understand the idea of a lead magnet. In the book, I talked about creating what I call a referral kit. In that referral kit, in a lot of ways, it’s like a lead magnet. In referral kit, you’re going to package up you or your business. You’re going to package up some information that might help a prospect. In the book, I talked about the four parts that you want to have in that referral kit and then using that as the first step.
I might come to you and say, “I’ve put together this short report or I’ve put together this book or I put together this audio CD and I think it would be really good, Joshua, for a lot of your clients because we do complimentary things.” What I’d love to do is I’d love to give this to all of your clients. What I find again and again is that it’s so easy to get a referral partner or even one of your clients to say, “Yes. Yeah, let’s do that.” Because a lot of times they want to help you but they’re uncomfortable by the whole referral situation the way it’s normally done just as much as you are and they don’t want to be in that position.
If you can give them a really easy way to open up a line of communication between you and the people that are on their contact list that would be a good fit, you now have just created a way to get this really effortless direct access to oftentimes everybody in their database.
Joshua: I love that. You create a package that your partner can give out, which actually it’s brilliant because it makes them look even better. Like it places them at a higher level in their own customer base and then at the same time, it can help you build a relationship with them too.
Steve: Yeah. I got through the book a lot of the details on the mechanics of how to get it out there and some of the different formats you can do it in. We don’t have to go through all of those now. I mean getting it out there varies depending on the relationship you have with the person and how sophisticated they are. That’s one of the things that I found with this is that it really, in our world, because we’re all on the inside on this podcast, everybody is somewhat familiar with the idea of doing JVs. If you go out to regular business owners, this is not something they understand how to do and it’s something that they would very quickly back away from.
In a lot of ways, you’re taking the best parts of a JV promotion and you’re applying them here but without necessarily the money changing hands at the end, because I find that when you go talk to normal business owners, a lot of times they want to back away from that sort of thing. I think folks listening will see, “Yeah, there’s some similarities here,” but there are some nuances that make this apply more smoothly to folks who maybe don’t come from a strong marketing background.
Joshua: Yeah. Can you share just real quick one of the cooler referral kits that you’ve seen put together? Because, I think, initially people are like … I remember when I first heard this, I was like, “Oh, is this just an eBook?” or like, “How does this differ from just what we would put on our website?”
Steve: Sure. I mean you can trick them out and do all sorts of things. The ones that work best generally begin with a book. I’m actually sitting here in my office and I’ve got a client’s book that just came in and we used a couple of the online to help us produce these referral kit books. We’ll sit down and create a short little book, and in this case, this is actually another financial advisor. It’s a really, I think, a beautiful case study of how smooth this is. This guy, after when we started working together again, really a broad market and we’re getting niche down to working with … After looking at his client list, we realize his best clients were doctors who were still in their residency or just a year or two out into private practice, so they’re younger doctors.
For doctors, it’s a big deal to buy disability insurance because if they get injured, they’re toast; they’re not making any more money. That’s his market. That’s what he’s going to go after. We created a little book called “The Guide to Income Protection for Medical Residents and New Practicing Physicians.” I mean to call it a book is generous. It was like twelve written and a half by eleven pages and reformatted into a book size, so it was about maybe … I think we got it up to like thirty pages. It’s not a thick book.
We’ve had this thing created. He actually don’t even have copies of it yet. We just got the proof a couple of days ago, but for the last month, he’s been going around to meetings with his doctors clients and saying, “Hey, I don’t know if you know, but I’m coming out with a new book. It’s called “The Income Protection Guide for New Practicing Physicians,” and he gives them the title. He said, “It covers all the things that we’ve done together and I’d like to get this out to the people you know.”
Now, here’s the trick that makes this work. This is kind of an inside baseball trick. He uses something that I call reverse prospecting. In reverse prospecting, what he’s doing is he’ll go … I’ve told him to go to the website of the hospital and he can say, “Okay, I’m meeting with so and so and they’re an anesthesiologist, resident, so I’m going to the anesthesiology department before my meeting with this guy and I’m getting the list of all of the other doctors that are in that department.
He prints that out. He’s meeting with a lot of these people face-to-face. He’s printing that out and he’s putting it in front of them. He prints two copies, puts one in front of them with a highlighter and says, “All right, who on this list should get a copy of the book I’ll have in a week or two?” The first time he did this, it was about an hour after I’d walk him through the process. He said, “That’s great, I got a call coming up. I can go to the website real quick and get a list,” and he did. I mean he just printed it off the web. It wasn’t pretty. He emailed me right after that meeting, he said, “Oh my God, I got twenty referrals.”
Joshua: That’s a brilliant idea. I love that.
Steve: Yeah, and I mean this is a guy that was getting four or five referrals in a month.
Joshua: Wow.
Steve: The first meeting he got twenty, and I think he had the second meeting later that week, a couple of days later. He got another ten more. We had one of our consulting calls yesterday and he told me, “Yeah, I had a 6:30 breakfast meeting with another doctor, seven more referrals,” and he’s doing business from them. It’s a real basic blocking and tackling for a lot of business owners that might not be at a sophistication level where they’re doing lots of automation. That’s how it works on a basic level.
Joshua: I want to say one thing there because I think there’s some real gold in what you just said, and a couple of things is that you didn’t overcomplicate the book.
Steve: No, no.
Joshua: I think, so many people just get hang up on that. They’re like, “Oh well, screw that whole idea. I can’t even think about it because I don’t have time to write a book.” You’re like, this is like a generous … You said something like, “To call it a book is being generous,” but I mean, I think, the fact that you took a print off twelve page, put it into a book, that’s a game changer. Like the perceived value there is higher. Then having the sit-downs face-to-face with a doctor and saying, “This is what I want to give through you, on behalf of you to your friends,” that’s like a totally different experience. Then what I was having in my mind, I loved that. That’s like reengineering how I’m thinking about codeBOX right now. I love it.
Steve: Yeah, and I call it giving the gift of you. We’re packaging you up, packaging up your business and we’re making it easy now for people to give that gift. Now, you mentioned eBooks. You could do this with electronic stuff. I got some clients who just, I mean, writing for them is they would rather go have a root canal every day of the week than write anything. You can do the same thing with an audio interview. I mean the format that you put it in isn’t as important. We just finished up one for a construction company. He didn’t want to write. We outlined a little short set of questions and we did an audio interview and we put that on CD and used, I think we’re using DiscsDelivered.com, which I know a lot of folks in Infusionsoft and Glazer-Kennedy world will probably know that name.
Now, he’s got … This is a guy that would never run anything like Infusionsoft but he can pick up a phone nor or have his secretary do it and have these things automatically sent out one by one to people. It works in lots of different formats. It don’t have to be a book, but what we’re finding is the book is the most powerful version.
Joshua: That’s so cool. Steve, what are some of the tips taking all of this great information down to the Infusionsoft app. Let’s get nerdy and geek out for a second. How can people start to implement this in their app?
Steve: Okay, so let’s talk about scaling this. We’ve talked about how to do it on a guerilla level. Let’s talk about scaling this up now because if you’ve got Infusionsoft and you have a little bit of sophistication in your business, you can do this at a much larger level. You can start working, hopefully if you’re networking within the Infusionsoft community, you’re finding people who also have a level of sophistication and maybe are complimentary to you. Now, you can really start leveraging the tool.
One of the things that I talk about in the book is a different approach to attracting referral partners. In fact, I don’t even call them referral partners anymore. I think they really ought to be called promoters. I called it the Johnny Carson method of promotion. Hopefully … you’re a lot younger than I am, hopefully you remember who Johnny Carson is.
Joshua: I do.
Steve: He was the guy before Jay Leno of “The Tonight Show” and Carson really was the tastemaker for almost the whole world. A band would come on to Carson and if they were unknown before they went on “The Johnny Carson Show,” and if he liked them and people got to figure out if he said this or he said that, that meant he liked them or he didn’t like them, he was creating the taste for his audience, for the country. He did it by hosting music acts, comedians, actors, actresses, and he put them on the couch, I mean, presidents, you name it. He put them on the couch and interview them.
I think that the interview, like what we’re doing right now is a really powerful way to connect with and build relationships with people who can potentially promote you. What I talked about in the book to scale this whole process, like the first step is create this referral kit. That’s great once you’ve got it and there are a lot of guerilla ways that I talked about in the book to get it out and which we’ve just gone through. Now, if we want to just totally launch that, we need to go and recruit some people to help promote. The best way I’ve ever found to do that and to get people that have a good size audience is to do interviews, because most people are absolutely flattered to be asked to do an interview even if they do a lot of them.
You can do this on a local level, like within your community. I know Infusionsoft has a lot of users who are in those local geographically confined businesses. You can go to folks in your networking group or your Rotary group or your Chamber of Commerce and you can just go around the room and say, “Okay, I’m going to do one of these a month. Well, I got to have twelve people that I’m going to interview. Who am I going to interview? I’m going to find the ones who have that complimentary group of customers and group that I want to get access to.”
What you do is you interview them and you say, “Great, I’m going to distribute this to all of my customers because I think they’d benefit from what you do and I think we ought to distribute it to all of your customers because when they hear me interviewing you, they’re going to think you’re a rock star.” If you do it well in your market, you can become Johnny Carson for your market where you’re the tastemaker, where you’re the one that’s bringing the valuable connections to people through these interviews that you’re doing. Once you’ve done that for somebody, really pretty easy, you’ve actually, in the process of interviewing them, you’ve trained them to now flip and interview you.
Joshua: That’s true. I haven’t thought about that angle, you’re right.
Steve: Even if it’s not something they do on a regular basis, it’s easy to propose. You can say, “Hey, this has been really great. The response has been wonderful. Let’s do this in the other direction. Why don’t you interview me? I’ll put together the questions and I’ll handle the recording or do all the technical bits of it and then we can send it out again and we’ll send it again to all of your people and all of my people.” They get like a double exposure to all of your people which they’re going to love and you get this extra exposure now talking about your stuff to that group.
At the end of that, of course, you offer your referral kit and give them away to respond. Because you’ve got Infusionsoft, you can say go to website or call and leave a message on My Free Recorded Message. You can use all of those normal tools that we would use in direct response marketing but it’s a way to bring those direct response techniques into referral marketing.
Joshua: Wow. You’re totally right. You know what? One of the things that I’ll share a little behind-the-scenes here is that we have our full scheduling. We’ve made a scheduling funnel for the podcast interviews. I can’t remember, Steve, if you were on that or not, but it basically shares all the information about the podcast, reminds them when the podcast is coming. We’re going to start snapping in text message reminders just to make sure everyone’s on point with the interviews coming up and even thanking them referring out.
Reminds me to write a thank you note, like the whole thing, and that has given me so much more mind share to be present on the interview, to ask good questions and to do all these. There’s a lot of … I’ll share that little map. Off this interview, I didn’t even think to do that. Because there’s so many ways you can use Infusionsoft to take care of the admin staff and really focus on creating such an incredible experience in the interview.
Steve: Let’s talk about that, because I use this strategy of interviews myself and I ran a podcast for about a year where I was interviewing other marketing experts all over the world and it was really instrumental in getting momentum going in my own business, and getting exposed to a lot more people in a very short amount of time. I did that very thing. I had an entire campaign mapped out inside Infusionsoft. Once someone … I’d usually connect with them through networking. I’d meet them at an event. I was in a mastermind with a lot of the folks that I’d interviewed. I connect with them in a way that was more one-on-one, but then once they agree to do an interview, we went, we did the scheduling and did it with AppointmentCore.
They went and picked the time when they wanted to be interviewed. We’d put in the publication date into a custom field which trigger all of the follow-up leading up to the interview with all the reminders and the things that we needed from them. Then afterwards it would kick in all the different links. We did all of that to the point that we even … and I’ll give a shout out to Ryan Chapman at FixYourFunnel.com. We used his tool to connect it all to Send Out Cards and send … Like after the interview, we’d send a Send Out Card with a box of brownies thanking each person for the interview. All of it was automated. I couldn’t have done it otherwise. We were doing one a week and I think you’re on that pace as well. There’s a lot of moving parts to it.
Joshua: I love what you just said too. It’s like the thing with our perspective on business at codeBOX is like we want to scale the human touch. We don’t want automation to make us more robotic. We want it to make us more human. This is one of those scenarios where I want the interviewee to feel incredible about coming on the show. I am ADD to the max, so I will forget steps if I don’t reminders, so Infusionsoft reminds me to do things, takes care of others things like we have the SendOutCards Integration also. I just love it. I love the fact that you can do that internal process.
I think a lot of new uses are not thinking that way. They only think of like lead gen funnels, web form … like there’s no web forms involved in this process. We use AppointmentCore too and Benji over at AppointmentCore has just created the most phenomenal scheduling product that I’ve ever come across. It integrates beautifully with Infusionsoft and you can now do text message reminders out of that. I mean it’s incredible.
There’s tools like that that I think that the listeners should really start to take advantage of, because imagine, like this campaign that we’re talking about doesn’t just apply to like a podcast interview. This could be the experience that you want for a new visitor to your practice if you’re a doctor or something like that too. It’s very … you can highlight, white label it to all this other scenario, so I love that and it just creates an incredible relationship.
Steve: Yeah. With my technical background, when I came across Infusionsoft and saw all of these things and now with all of the other pieces that you can plug into it and we’ve mentioned two of them, it’s so much easier now to scale this stuff. Because if you had to do it all manually … This is my 20th year in business. I started out of college in 1994. We didn’t have email. That’s how old I am. I don’t know if you knew that, but that’s how old I am. We didn’t have email like the first eighteen months that I was in business.
We had a fax machine with that thermal paper that crawled up on the floor in the morning from the jump faxes. Going from how difficult things were then to what we can do now is it’s just amazing to see the things that you can do and the value that you can create without a lot of effort. It takes some thinking upfront and the folks listening to this I think are in the top tier of business owners because they’re at least thinking this way. I worked with a lot of business owners who haven’t gotten there yet. I worked with some who have, but the vast majority of business owners haven’t even approached it.
When they begin to see what’s possible, they go, “Oh my God, this is incredible.” It takes them some time to wrap their head around all the different ways that things can be automated so that when you decide to do something, it now happens predictably and reliably.
Joshua: I love it, yup. Steve, we’re coming to the end of our time together and you’ve given so many incredible just ideas and ways that people can start growing their referral marketing, could you tell us a little bit more about the book that’s coming out today, actually. I know that you got a special gift for the listeners.
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. The book is out today. It’s called “Unstoppable Referrals” and we’re making it available today on Kindle for no cost, for free. If folks have listened to this and feel like, “Oh my god, definitely need to pay more attention to referrals,” go grab the book while it’s available free today on Kindle. If you don’t have a Kindle, don’t worry. You can read it on an iPad. There’s a free app for that on iPad, iPhone, Android, and if you don’t have any of those, you can read it free on your computer. Amazon has got a reader for that. If you prefer just to hold one in your hands, you can get that too. It’s also available in paperback toady. Unfortunately though, Amazon will charge you a couple of bucks to send that to you.
I encourage everybody to go get it. The way to go get it is we’ve set up a website that will take you right to the appropriate page in Amazon. If you go to UnstoppableReferralsBook.com, and that’s referrals with an S, so UnstoppableReferralsBook.com, and then that will take you right there. If you have to be listening to this after the 15th of July, then still, you can use that link and it will take you. That’s where you can get the book from Amazon.
Joshua: Fantastic. We’ll put all of these links and things in the show notes at Infusioncast.co/SteveGordon. Steve, what is one success habit that you have? I always love to close the shows out like this because I think it’s interesting. What is one thing you do on like a daily basis or weekly basis to make sure you keep pushing the line forward?
Steve: I shamelessly stole this from Dan Kennedy. I heard him say in a speech one time that he does one activity everyday no matter where he is or what he’s doing. He does one activity everyday to fill the pipeline and I’ve taken that up and done that now for a number of years. It’s like I’m afraid not to do it now. What I found actually out of that, which is, I think, the bigger success secret is that major progress comes from doing little things every day, just again and again and again. Most people think it’s the other way around, that the big progress comes from doing big grand things. That’s not been my experience.
Joshua: I love that and that reminds me of … We had Charles Gaudet on a few weeks ago and he mentioned an analogy. He said, “It’s like you got to think of it like boiling water. Water boils with a few little bubbles. Just bubble here, bubble there and those are the small actions, and then out of that comes this torrent of moving water and these big successes.” I think that’s a beautiful thing to end the interview with.
Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it and we’re so excited to check out your new book available today.
Steve: Great. Thanks, Joshua. It’s been a lot of fun.
Joshua: All right, have a great day.
The following podcast is a production of Infusioncast, the subsidiary of codeBOX, LLC. Infusioncast is no way associated or sponsored by Infusionsoft. The opinions and perspectives in this podcast are of the host and his guest and do not reflect or promote any view held by Infusionsoft.
[/transcript]
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Referrals, we all love them. But how do we create a system to get more of them? Steve Gordon has the answer.
My company, codeBOX, thrives off of referrals and I was convicted because in today’s interview I saw so many things I could do better. I thought that referrals were “part of the grind” of running a company. I have been working in a 1 to 1 ratio with clients to get referrals usually getting one or two in a passive way.
I have never figured out how to scale this, and create more leads from my current customer base. Steve shares a way to do this with a referral kit — more on this later.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Steve focus his referral system around two simple principles.
We covered the first point in detail, and I am excited to check out his new book to learn about the second.
Tweet: “High Dollar deals require trust – lots of trust” ~ @steve_gordon via @infusioncast http://ctt.ec/R3Vrv+
When I lived in orange county there was a insurance agent who had an incredibly effective, but sleazy way of getting referrals. When he would meet a client he would stalk there LinkedIn profile and see who there shared connections were. Then he would take note of who he wanted to sell to. At the end of the meeting he would ask “Do you know so and so?” and if you said “yes” he would dig deeper.
He would ask questions like if they were married or single, how much they make per year, and other very private and precise details.
He was very persuasive and I unfortunately gave him two of my friends names. I quickly received two phone calls telling me how they had been harassed by a insurance salesmen who said I GAVE HIM THIER NAMES!
This experience has stuck with me and made me feel dirty when I ask for referrals. I never want to be pushy or manipulative, and because of this I shy away from asking for referrals… even when I know I did an incredible job.
Steve teaches that there is a different way. One that elevates the status of the individual who is referring you. This strategy requires that you put together a referral kit.
A referral kit a gift to your clients network that makes you and your client look good.
I think that the best referral kit includes something personal, like a hand written note.
Steve recommends starting with a book, and shares that the process of writing the book doesn’t have to be daunting but simple. He talks about a client who turned a 12 page 8.5″ x 11″ document into a small 30 page book using a online print-on-demand service.
After you create your referral kit you must ask for a referral from your customer.
This isn’t a weird process and doesn’t feel shady. It allow you to have your customer seen as a expert in their industry.
Think back to the insurance agent in Orange County. If he would have come to me and said, “Hey, I have this book I created called “Why Web Developers Need Disability Insurance: How to get rich when you get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome”. You might think that title is funny, but the point is if he would have given me a option to help my friends, for free, I would have gladly taken him up on the offer. I want to help my friends.
There are so many valuable nuggets of wisdom in today’s interview (Steve blew my mind with the reverse interviewing technique he shared). I hope you take the time to listen
Referral marketing is more human than other lead generations tactics. It requires attention to detail, a desire to connect, and being valuable and helpful at every turn.
Today, July 15th, Steve is giving away his new book Unstoppable Referrals on Amazon Kindle for FREE. To learn more about the book and pick up the free kindler version click here.
Steve Gordon is the author of the new book Unstoppable Referrals and publisher of The Unstoppable CEO—The Leadership Journal for Growing Firms. The is the editor of three business newsletters and has published hundreds of articles on marketing and selling high-ticket products and services in high-trust transactions.
At age 28, Steve Gordon became the CEO of an engineering/consulting firm. Twelve years later, after growing that firm’s revenue by 10-times he started his second business, consulting 1-on-1 with businesses across 30 industries—including manufacturing, professional services, construction, and consulting—to design sales, marketing and referral systems for high-ticket/high-trust products and services.
To learn more about Steve visit UnstoppableCEO.net.
Unstoppable Referral Book Page: http://
Steve’s Homepage: http://stevegordonmarketing.com/
[transcript height=”200px”]
Joshua: Hey, everyone, Joshua here. Before we get in to today’s interview, I wanted to let you know about a special guide we put together just for you. It’s called the “Four Tools That We Use to Supercharge Infusionsoft.” This guide will lay out four different apps that we use to expand Infusionsoft’s functionality. To go get it, head over to Infusioncast.co and click the link on the homepage. Thanks for listening.
Voiceover: You’re listening to the Infusioncast Podcast, the only podcast that is made by Infusionsoft users for Infusionsoft users. Each week we uncover another strategy, tip, or mindset shift that will help you take your business to the next level. Here’s your host, Joshua Millage.
Joshua: Hello everyone and welcome to the Infusioncast Podcast where we focus on how you can turbo-charge your Infusionsoft application.
Our guest today is Steve Gordon. Steve is the author of the new book “Unstoppable Referrals” and the publisher of the “Unstoppable CEO: The Leadership Journal for Growing Firms.” He is the editor of three business newsletters and has published hundreds of articles on marketing and selling high-ticket products and services in high-trust transactions. At age 28, Steve became the CEO of an engineering and consulting firm. Twelve years later, after growing that firm’s revenue by ten times, he started his second business, consulting one-on-one with businesses across thirty industries including manufacturing, professional services, construction, and consulting to design sales, marketing and referral systems for high-ticket and high-trust products and services.
Steve, welcome to Infusioncast.
Steve: Hey Joshua, it’s great to be here and congratulations on the podcast. I’ve been listening to the first few episodes and it’s fantastic stuff. I know the Infusionsoft community has been sorely needing something like this, so I commend you for doing it.
Joshua: Thank you so much. That really means a lot to me. We’re just excited to get experts like you to share great information with the community. I have the first question here and I’m really excited to hear your answer. That is really how have you become an expert in referral marketing?
Steve: The hard and bloody way. As you read in the intro, I started out my career in a technical field and we were selling something that our end users who were land developers, this is in Florida, they would develop a thousand home subdivision and they needed our services to be able to do that. They didn’t exactly look at what we were doing as something that really added a lot of value to the equation. It was a necessary evil.
I started off in a business that we were selling something that people didn’t really want to buy but they had to buy it. Not necessarily a bad position, but everybody looks around and looks at companies like Apple. They got people lining up for iPhones. I can tell you, we didn’t have people lining up overnight because they were so excited about the latest greatest service we were offering. Most businesses aren’t the type where people are going to line up like that. You can read a lot of the books that are out there and get lots of great ideas about how to be like this rock star business or that rock star business.
The fact of the matter is that it’s not always possible for every business. Now, that being said, you still got to have a way to create demand. We found that, in that first business that I owned, that referrals were really are best source of new business. It took us a while to really realize that we could have some influence over that. Early on, I was too young to know any better. The phone would ring some days and other days it wouldn’t ring as much. We had plenty of business so we didn’t worry about it all that much. It was all coming from referral but we weren’t doing a lot to stimulate that referral traffic.
As I matured a little bit in my role, I realized that we needed to have a way to be a little more proactive about it. We applied all of the conventional wisdom, which is ask a lot more and follow-up with the referrals that you get forever. One of the reasons that we came across Infusionsoft, and I first got involved with Infusionsoft in, I want to say 2006, 2007, somewhere in that time frame. We’ve been using it for a long time and I’ve been using it across two businesses. That’s how I got my start in referral marketing.
Five years ago, I left that business and started consulting with other businesses that sold high-ticket services that required a lot of trust. We’re not talking about transactional sort of things, but we’re talking about professional services, consultants. I’ve worked with some manufacturing companies where they’re selling a really high dollar piece of equipment that has to work. Working with companies like that, the buyers for those sorts of things don’t look at the buying process as being this trivial deal. It’s not like if I’m engineering referrals for those types of businesses, it’s not like trying to get somebody to go to a restaurant, Joshua.
If I go and have a great dinner with my wife at a restaurant and I call you the next day and say, “Hey, you got to go try this restaurant.” Aside from you flying across the country to go to it because we’re on different coast, but aside from that, you don’t have a whole lot of risk. I mean what do you out? Fifty, hundred bucks if you get a bad meal, and chances of you getting a bad meal are really pretty slim. In other businesses where you’re dealing with highly personal transactions and relationships where you’re dealing with things that are very expensive, and so there’s a lot of downside risk to the buyer if it doesn’t go well. A lot of the regular ways that referrals happen that are talked about in a lot of literature just start to break down.
As I started working with a lot of these types of businesses and also with my background coming from one of those businesses, we really saw that that was the best way for them to grow is through referrals, but they struggled with it. I thought, “Well, I know the answer to that because I know a little bit about information marketing. We’re going to put on a workshop.” We’re going to put people, put butts in seats and we’ll put a couple hundred business centers into workshops, and we taught them all about referral marketing. It was great. They loved it.
Again, we taught them all the conventional wisdom. We taught them how to ask more often and we taught them when to ask. Here are the certain cues that that’s when you know you could ask for the referral, because that’s a question everybody always had. We said, “Here’s how you follow up” and we taught them how to do automated follow up and all that kind of stuff. About six months later, I went and met with twenty different individuals who had been through the workshop and I’ve said, “Okay, so what have you done? How does that helped you?” Because we weren’t doing this just for our health and just to make money, we were doing it because we wanted to have an impact.
One of them had done anything with it. I thought, “Okay, well, I mean we’re teaching this stuff that we know works. I’ve used it in my entire career. What’s the disconnect here?” We started digging in a little deeper and really found that there is a core group of people for whom asking for referrals is really easy. They just have that personality that it doesn’t bother them. For the vast majority of business people, asking for referrals makes them uncomfortable. What they do is they say, “All right, the way for me to get referrals is I’m just going to do a bang up job. I’m going to do the best job I can and people will notice. My clients will be happy and they’ll talk about me.”
That’s great. Yes, sometimes that does happen, but a minority of your clients are going to talk about you unless you do something to stimulate it. There’s just this barrier there for people doing what they need to do which is ask for referrals.
Joshua: It’s so interesting, Steve, like processing this as you said it, you’re right because you think about all the different ways to do lead gen and you do auto paid search or SEO and it’s like you in a robot. Like you pay the Google robot and he gets you traffic and hopefully that turns into leads and then sales and whatever. The referral process is so much more human. There is like all these psychological things that happen like, “Oh, am I good enough?” There’s probably self-image issues for some people. What do you think some of the key obstacles are that keep businesses from asking, and especially if they know they did a great job? Like the customer said, “Hey, I did a great job,” and they just freeze up and they can’t ask for any more business.
Steve: Yeah. What I heard from these business owners after this workshop was that they were uncomfortable doing it and they felt like I have this client, it’s like this asset I have in my business. They’re paying me a lot of money. A lot of times they were professionals and so the client might have them on retainer. Here’s this stream of money flowing into my business and I’m really scared to mess with it. If I go and ask, I feel like I’m taking one more thing from the relationship and I’m already taking their money. We can get into this whole head trash thing about yes, you’re delivering value and all of that. That’s all great. It’s wonderful to talk about. For some people, it does the trick and they get over it. For most people, that’s not a strategy for them.
I like dealing with solutions to problems rather than the theory of it because you can come up with and concoct any old theory that you want, and it probably works for somebody but I’m interested in solutions that you can apply broadly and that are easy to implement. You got to find a way to get them beyond this uncomfortableness and really, to do that, you have to understand where it comes from. It’s coming from the fact that if I’m going to make a referral that requires that high-level of trust, underlying that referral invisible in the whole process is sales pressure.
I work with a lot of financial advisors and most of them sell like insurance and annuity. Let’s talk about that as an example, because that’s a pretty personal thing. My buddy, John, who’s a long-term client, and I talked about him in the book and he’s a good friend as well, not too long ago he helped me get a million dollar whole life insurance policy. It’s been great, aside from the fact that I sleep with one eye open every night watching to see what my wife is doing, but it’s been wonderful. It have been very beneficial to me. Now, Joshua, I want to have you meet John because I think he can help you with that.
Now, if I have that conversation with you and I don’t really know you pretty intimately, then I’ve probably overstepped the bounds of our little social contract. Now, I’m asking you about a really personal thing, a pretty expensive thing. I’m telling you how wonderful an experience I had and how happy I am having bought it, so the expectation is that if you go and meet with John, that you had better be as excited and happy as I am. Otherwise, not only are you rejecting the sale from John, you’re rejecting me.
Now, do you want to be in that position?
Joshua: Mm-mm (negative), no.
Steve: No. If John has asked me to introduce you, I know all that stuff is going on. I mean I think about it consciously but I know internally that that’s my risk as the one making that connection. I don’t want to make the connection in that case unless I really know you very well and I really know John really well, enough that I can make that very personal introduction. I mean, after all, you’re going to have a conversation about what happens after you’re dead. Oh man, where the money goes. That’s not the only business where that’s the case.
There are an awful lot of businesses where people don’t necessarily want to reveal that they’ve gone to seek the help of a particular professional. There are all kinds of sticky situations and the way around that is to get rid of that sales pressure that’s underlying everything and just gumming up the works. What I did coming from the world of direct response, and I know we’ve got a lot of people who will listen to this that understand direct response, is it really just took what works well in direct response marketing and brought it into a referral process, because most businesses don’t understand direct response marketing. It would take them so long to wrap their heads around what it is that it wouldn’t work well, but they’d really get referrals.
They understand at a boots on the ground level here’s how I go get referrals, but how do we take the best of both worlds and put them together? The way to do that is remove the sales pressure by removing the sales meeting. The natural end result of any referral is that if I’m referring you to my friend John, you’re going to end up in a sales meeting with John. If that sales meeting goes well, you’re going to walk out of there with a lighter wallet than you walked in with. Unless you really trust me or really know him well, then you’re not going to be inclined to want to do that. We have to remove the sales meeting out of the equation. That can’t be the first thing that happens.
In its place … go ahead.
Joshua: Yeah, I’m just thinking through this. When you say remove the sales meeting, so there has to be … the first touch is not a close is what you’re telling me, right?
Steve: Now only that, the first touch probably shouldn’t be a one-on-one face-to-face introductory meeting. That’s the way most one-on-one referrals are set up. We’ve exchanged some referrals in the past and that’s the way, in each case, it’s worked. That’s the way most people do that. You’ve got to make that one-on-one call or the face-to-face meeting happen later in the process. By removing it-
Joshua: That begs the question then, Steve, I guess, and maybe I’m jumping ahead of you, but what do we do then? Because I think that’s the thing, most business owners were so … There’s a lot of us out there that we are hungry for new business so we just get in that mindset. When it’s nine to five, in between those hours, it’s close, close, close. If I’m hearing you right, you’re like take the … Stop stepping on the gas so much and be human.
Steve: Not just be human, I mean I’m all for making sales and I’m not saying any of this to discourage you to not make sales, but what I found is that you can open up a lot more new relationships if you make the initial step a very low barrier to entry. I mean because we’ve got Infusionsoft users listening to this, they’ll understand the idea of a lead magnet. In the book, I talked about creating what I call a referral kit. In that referral kit, in a lot of ways, it’s like a lead magnet. In referral kit, you’re going to package up you or your business. You’re going to package up some information that might help a prospect. In the book, I talked about the four parts that you want to have in that referral kit and then using that as the first step.
I might come to you and say, “I’ve put together this short report or I’ve put together this book or I put together this audio CD and I think it would be really good, Joshua, for a lot of your clients because we do complimentary things.” What I’d love to do is I’d love to give this to all of your clients. What I find again and again is that it’s so easy to get a referral partner or even one of your clients to say, “Yes. Yeah, let’s do that.” Because a lot of times they want to help you but they’re uncomfortable by the whole referral situation the way it’s normally done just as much as you are and they don’t want to be in that position.
If you can give them a really easy way to open up a line of communication between you and the people that are on their contact list that would be a good fit, you now have just created a way to get this really effortless direct access to oftentimes everybody in their database.
Joshua: I love that. You create a package that your partner can give out, which actually it’s brilliant because it makes them look even better. Like it places them at a higher level in their own customer base and then at the same time, it can help you build a relationship with them too.
Steve: Yeah. I got through the book a lot of the details on the mechanics of how to get it out there and some of the different formats you can do it in. We don’t have to go through all of those now. I mean getting it out there varies depending on the relationship you have with the person and how sophisticated they are. That’s one of the things that I found with this is that it really, in our world, because we’re all on the inside on this podcast, everybody is somewhat familiar with the idea of doing JVs. If you go out to regular business owners, this is not something they understand how to do and it’s something that they would very quickly back away from.
In a lot of ways, you’re taking the best parts of a JV promotion and you’re applying them here but without necessarily the money changing hands at the end, because I find that when you go talk to normal business owners, a lot of times they want to back away from that sort of thing. I think folks listening will see, “Yeah, there’s some similarities here,” but there are some nuances that make this apply more smoothly to folks who maybe don’t come from a strong marketing background.
Joshua: Yeah. Can you share just real quick one of the cooler referral kits that you’ve seen put together? Because, I think, initially people are like … I remember when I first heard this, I was like, “Oh, is this just an eBook?” or like, “How does this differ from just what we would put on our website?”
Steve: Sure. I mean you can trick them out and do all sorts of things. The ones that work best generally begin with a book. I’m actually sitting here in my office and I’ve got a client’s book that just came in and we used a couple of the online to help us produce these referral kit books. We’ll sit down and create a short little book, and in this case, this is actually another financial advisor. It’s a really, I think, a beautiful case study of how smooth this is. This guy, after when we started working together again, really a broad market and we’re getting niche down to working with … After looking at his client list, we realize his best clients were doctors who were still in their residency or just a year or two out into private practice, so they’re younger doctors.
For doctors, it’s a big deal to buy disability insurance because if they get injured, they’re toast; they’re not making any more money. That’s his market. That’s what he’s going to go after. We created a little book called “The Guide to Income Protection for Medical Residents and New Practicing Physicians.” I mean to call it a book is generous. It was like twelve written and a half by eleven pages and reformatted into a book size, so it was about maybe … I think we got it up to like thirty pages. It’s not a thick book.
We’ve had this thing created. He actually don’t even have copies of it yet. We just got the proof a couple of days ago, but for the last month, he’s been going around to meetings with his doctors clients and saying, “Hey, I don’t know if you know, but I’m coming out with a new book. It’s called “The Income Protection Guide for New Practicing Physicians,” and he gives them the title. He said, “It covers all the things that we’ve done together and I’d like to get this out to the people you know.”
Now, here’s the trick that makes this work. This is kind of an inside baseball trick. He uses something that I call reverse prospecting. In reverse prospecting, what he’s doing is he’ll go … I’ve told him to go to the website of the hospital and he can say, “Okay, I’m meeting with so and so and they’re an anesthesiologist, resident, so I’m going to the anesthesiology department before my meeting with this guy and I’m getting the list of all of the other doctors that are in that department.
He prints that out. He’s meeting with a lot of these people face-to-face. He’s printing that out and he’s putting it in front of them. He prints two copies, puts one in front of them with a highlighter and says, “All right, who on this list should get a copy of the book I’ll have in a week or two?” The first time he did this, it was about an hour after I’d walk him through the process. He said, “That’s great, I got a call coming up. I can go to the website real quick and get a list,” and he did. I mean he just printed it off the web. It wasn’t pretty. He emailed me right after that meeting, he said, “Oh my God, I got twenty referrals.”
Joshua: That’s a brilliant idea. I love that.
Steve: Yeah, and I mean this is a guy that was getting four or five referrals in a month.
Joshua: Wow.
Steve: The first meeting he got twenty, and I think he had the second meeting later that week, a couple of days later. He got another ten more. We had one of our consulting calls yesterday and he told me, “Yeah, I had a 6:30 breakfast meeting with another doctor, seven more referrals,” and he’s doing business from them. It’s a real basic blocking and tackling for a lot of business owners that might not be at a sophistication level where they’re doing lots of automation. That’s how it works on a basic level.
Joshua: I want to say one thing there because I think there’s some real gold in what you just said, and a couple of things is that you didn’t overcomplicate the book.
Steve: No, no.
Joshua: I think, so many people just get hang up on that. They’re like, “Oh well, screw that whole idea. I can’t even think about it because I don’t have time to write a book.” You’re like, this is like a generous … You said something like, “To call it a book is being generous,” but I mean, I think, the fact that you took a print off twelve page, put it into a book, that’s a game changer. Like the perceived value there is higher. Then having the sit-downs face-to-face with a doctor and saying, “This is what I want to give through you, on behalf of you to your friends,” that’s like a totally different experience. Then what I was having in my mind, I loved that. That’s like reengineering how I’m thinking about codeBOX right now. I love it.
Steve: Yeah, and I call it giving the gift of you. We’re packaging you up, packaging up your business and we’re making it easy now for people to give that gift. Now, you mentioned eBooks. You could do this with electronic stuff. I got some clients who just, I mean, writing for them is they would rather go have a root canal every day of the week than write anything. You can do the same thing with an audio interview. I mean the format that you put it in isn’t as important. We just finished up one for a construction company. He didn’t want to write. We outlined a little short set of questions and we did an audio interview and we put that on CD and used, I think we’re using DiscsDelivered.com, which I know a lot of folks in Infusionsoft and Glazer-Kennedy world will probably know that name.
Now, he’s got … This is a guy that would never run anything like Infusionsoft but he can pick up a phone nor or have his secretary do it and have these things automatically sent out one by one to people. It works in lots of different formats. It don’t have to be a book, but what we’re finding is the book is the most powerful version.
Joshua: That’s so cool. Steve, what are some of the tips taking all of this great information down to the Infusionsoft app. Let’s get nerdy and geek out for a second. How can people start to implement this in their app?
Steve: Okay, so let’s talk about scaling this. We’ve talked about how to do it on a guerilla level. Let’s talk about scaling this up now because if you’ve got Infusionsoft and you have a little bit of sophistication in your business, you can do this at a much larger level. You can start working, hopefully if you’re networking within the Infusionsoft community, you’re finding people who also have a level of sophistication and maybe are complimentary to you. Now, you can really start leveraging the tool.
One of the things that I talk about in the book is a different approach to attracting referral partners. In fact, I don’t even call them referral partners anymore. I think they really ought to be called promoters. I called it the Johnny Carson method of promotion. Hopefully … you’re a lot younger than I am, hopefully you remember who Johnny Carson is.
Joshua: I do.
Steve: He was the guy before Jay Leno of “The Tonight Show” and Carson really was the tastemaker for almost the whole world. A band would come on to Carson and if they were unknown before they went on “The Johnny Carson Show,” and if he liked them and people got to figure out if he said this or he said that, that meant he liked them or he didn’t like them, he was creating the taste for his audience, for the country. He did it by hosting music acts, comedians, actors, actresses, and he put them on the couch, I mean, presidents, you name it. He put them on the couch and interview them.
I think that the interview, like what we’re doing right now is a really powerful way to connect with and build relationships with people who can potentially promote you. What I talked about in the book to scale this whole process, like the first step is create this referral kit. That’s great once you’ve got it and there are a lot of guerilla ways that I talked about in the book to get it out and which we’ve just gone through. Now, if we want to just totally launch that, we need to go and recruit some people to help promote. The best way I’ve ever found to do that and to get people that have a good size audience is to do interviews, because most people are absolutely flattered to be asked to do an interview even if they do a lot of them.
You can do this on a local level, like within your community. I know Infusionsoft has a lot of users who are in those local geographically confined businesses. You can go to folks in your networking group or your Rotary group or your Chamber of Commerce and you can just go around the room and say, “Okay, I’m going to do one of these a month. Well, I got to have twelve people that I’m going to interview. Who am I going to interview? I’m going to find the ones who have that complimentary group of customers and group that I want to get access to.”
What you do is you interview them and you say, “Great, I’m going to distribute this to all of my customers because I think they’d benefit from what you do and I think we ought to distribute it to all of your customers because when they hear me interviewing you, they’re going to think you’re a rock star.” If you do it well in your market, you can become Johnny Carson for your market where you’re the tastemaker, where you’re the one that’s bringing the valuable connections to people through these interviews that you’re doing. Once you’ve done that for somebody, really pretty easy, you’ve actually, in the process of interviewing them, you’ve trained them to now flip and interview you.
Joshua: That’s true. I haven’t thought about that angle, you’re right.
Steve: Even if it’s not something they do on a regular basis, it’s easy to propose. You can say, “Hey, this has been really great. The response has been wonderful. Let’s do this in the other direction. Why don’t you interview me? I’ll put together the questions and I’ll handle the recording or do all the technical bits of it and then we can send it out again and we’ll send it again to all of your people and all of my people.” They get like a double exposure to all of your people which they’re going to love and you get this extra exposure now talking about your stuff to that group.
At the end of that, of course, you offer your referral kit and give them away to respond. Because you’ve got Infusionsoft, you can say go to website or call and leave a message on My Free Recorded Message. You can use all of those normal tools that we would use in direct response marketing but it’s a way to bring those direct response techniques into referral marketing.
Joshua: Wow. You’re totally right. You know what? One of the things that I’ll share a little behind-the-scenes here is that we have our full scheduling. We’ve made a scheduling funnel for the podcast interviews. I can’t remember, Steve, if you were on that or not, but it basically shares all the information about the podcast, reminds them when the podcast is coming. We’re going to start snapping in text message reminders just to make sure everyone’s on point with the interviews coming up and even thanking them referring out.
Reminds me to write a thank you note, like the whole thing, and that has given me so much more mind share to be present on the interview, to ask good questions and to do all these. There’s a lot of … I’ll share that little map. Off this interview, I didn’t even think to do that. Because there’s so many ways you can use Infusionsoft to take care of the admin staff and really focus on creating such an incredible experience in the interview.
Steve: Let’s talk about that, because I use this strategy of interviews myself and I ran a podcast for about a year where I was interviewing other marketing experts all over the world and it was really instrumental in getting momentum going in my own business, and getting exposed to a lot more people in a very short amount of time. I did that very thing. I had an entire campaign mapped out inside Infusionsoft. Once someone … I’d usually connect with them through networking. I’d meet them at an event. I was in a mastermind with a lot of the folks that I’d interviewed. I connect with them in a way that was more one-on-one, but then once they agree to do an interview, we went, we did the scheduling and did it with AppointmentCore.
They went and picked the time when they wanted to be interviewed. We’d put in the publication date into a custom field which trigger all of the follow-up leading up to the interview with all the reminders and the things that we needed from them. Then afterwards it would kick in all the different links. We did all of that to the point that we even … and I’ll give a shout out to Ryan Chapman at FixYourFunnel.com. We used his tool to connect it all to Send Out Cards and send … Like after the interview, we’d send a Send Out Card with a box of brownies thanking each person for the interview. All of it was automated. I couldn’t have done it otherwise. We were doing one a week and I think you’re on that pace as well. There’s a lot of moving parts to it.
Joshua: I love what you just said too. It’s like the thing with our perspective on business at codeBOX is like we want to scale the human touch. We don’t want automation to make us more robotic. We want it to make us more human. This is one of those scenarios where I want the interviewee to feel incredible about coming on the show. I am ADD to the max, so I will forget steps if I don’t reminders, so Infusionsoft reminds me to do things, takes care of others things like we have the SendOutCards Integration also. I just love it. I love the fact that you can do that internal process.
I think a lot of new uses are not thinking that way. They only think of like lead gen funnels, web form … like there’s no web forms involved in this process. We use AppointmentCore too and Benji over at AppointmentCore has just created the most phenomenal scheduling product that I’ve ever come across. It integrates beautifully with Infusionsoft and you can now do text message reminders out of that. I mean it’s incredible.
There’s tools like that that I think that the listeners should really start to take advantage of, because imagine, like this campaign that we’re talking about doesn’t just apply to like a podcast interview. This could be the experience that you want for a new visitor to your practice if you’re a doctor or something like that too. It’s very … you can highlight, white label it to all this other scenario, so I love that and it just creates an incredible relationship.
Steve: Yeah. With my technical background, when I came across Infusionsoft and saw all of these things and now with all of the other pieces that you can plug into it and we’ve mentioned two of them, it’s so much easier now to scale this stuff. Because if you had to do it all manually … This is my 20th year in business. I started out of college in 1994. We didn’t have email. That’s how old I am. I don’t know if you knew that, but that’s how old I am. We didn’t have email like the first eighteen months that I was in business.
We had a fax machine with that thermal paper that crawled up on the floor in the morning from the jump faxes. Going from how difficult things were then to what we can do now is it’s just amazing to see the things that you can do and the value that you can create without a lot of effort. It takes some thinking upfront and the folks listening to this I think are in the top tier of business owners because they’re at least thinking this way. I worked with a lot of business owners who haven’t gotten there yet. I worked with some who have, but the vast majority of business owners haven’t even approached it.
When they begin to see what’s possible, they go, “Oh my God, this is incredible.” It takes them some time to wrap their head around all the different ways that things can be automated so that when you decide to do something, it now happens predictably and reliably.
Joshua: I love it, yup. Steve, we’re coming to the end of our time together and you’ve given so many incredible just ideas and ways that people can start growing their referral marketing, could you tell us a little bit more about the book that’s coming out today, actually. I know that you got a special gift for the listeners.
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. The book is out today. It’s called “Unstoppable Referrals” and we’re making it available today on Kindle for no cost, for free. If folks have listened to this and feel like, “Oh my god, definitely need to pay more attention to referrals,” go grab the book while it’s available free today on Kindle. If you don’t have a Kindle, don’t worry. You can read it on an iPad. There’s a free app for that on iPad, iPhone, Android, and if you don’t have any of those, you can read it free on your computer. Amazon has got a reader for that. If you prefer just to hold one in your hands, you can get that too. It’s also available in paperback toady. Unfortunately though, Amazon will charge you a couple of bucks to send that to you.
I encourage everybody to go get it. The way to go get it is we’ve set up a website that will take you right to the appropriate page in Amazon. If you go to UnstoppableReferralsBook.com, and that’s referrals with an S, so UnstoppableReferralsBook.com, and then that will take you right there. If you have to be listening to this after the 15th of July, then still, you can use that link and it will take you. That’s where you can get the book from Amazon.
Joshua: Fantastic. We’ll put all of these links and things in the show notes at Infusioncast.co/SteveGordon. Steve, what is one success habit that you have? I always love to close the shows out like this because I think it’s interesting. What is one thing you do on like a daily basis or weekly basis to make sure you keep pushing the line forward?
Steve: I shamelessly stole this from Dan Kennedy. I heard him say in a speech one time that he does one activity everyday no matter where he is or what he’s doing. He does one activity everyday to fill the pipeline and I’ve taken that up and done that now for a number of years. It’s like I’m afraid not to do it now. What I found actually out of that, which is, I think, the bigger success secret is that major progress comes from doing little things every day, just again and again and again. Most people think it’s the other way around, that the big progress comes from doing big grand things. That’s not been my experience.
Joshua: I love that and that reminds me of … We had Charles Gaudet on a few weeks ago and he mentioned an analogy. He said, “It’s like you got to think of it like boiling water. Water boils with a few little bubbles. Just bubble here, bubble there and those are the small actions, and then out of that comes this torrent of moving water and these big successes.” I think that’s a beautiful thing to end the interview with.
Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it and we’re so excited to check out your new book available today.
Steve: Great. Thanks, Joshua. It’s been a lot of fun.
Joshua: All right, have a great day.
The following podcast is a production of Infusioncast, the subsidiary of codeBOX, LLC. Infusioncast is no way associated or sponsored by Infusionsoft. The opinions and perspectives in this podcast are of the host and his guest and do not reflect or promote any view held by Infusionsoft.
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