John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the MarTech podcast, hosted by my friend, Ben Shapiro brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes, the MarTech podcast shares stories from world class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve BI and career success. Recent episode, one of my favorite extending the lifetime value of your customer. You know, I love to talk about that. Listen to the MarTech podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:44): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I'm doing another solo show. We're gonna talk about referrals. This is a wrap up. This is session number five of me covering the seven grades of referral fuel. If you haven't caught the other shows, you can find them at ducttape.me/podcast In the show notes. Uh, we'll link to all those shows. So you can kind of somehow put all five shows on referrals together. It kind of a, it equates almost to a masterclass on my thinking on the idea of referral generations. Hopefully you can check it out. Love to hear your feedback, love your and testimonials, uh, on the show. All right, this is, uh, number six of seven. So I'm gonna cover two of them today. This one, and, and actually both of these kind of are a little bit, they're not out there, but they're certainly not practice every day, but I think for the, the right business, the right person that really takes this and runs with it.

John Jantsch (01:41): So both of these ideas could be, be extremely, extremely potent. All right. So I did number six is to create your own expert networking club. Many folks are familiar with organizations like BNI, you know, where people get together and, and join a network of non-competing businesses. And they think about, uh, you know, generating referrals, uh, you know, from, from, and with each other. And those can be great for the right businesses. Those can be great organizations. The only problem is, is, you know, you're joining something that's already established. You really don't know who's there. Uh, you don't get to pick , you know, who's there. And so it's a potent idea, but what, what if you could control it completely? And what I mean by that is what would stop you from creating your own event? That was a regular, whether you call it a club or whatever you call, it is something that, that people would come to.

John Jantsch (02:38): So it might be like a monthly breakfast that, you know, I'm in, I'm in the marketing space. So I might know, create something, the monthly marketing breakfast, and I would just invite people locally. You know, maybe they'd pay for breakfast, but they'd come and they'd hear for the price of breakfast. They'd hear, you know, some small business topic and it, you know, it doesn't always have to be marketing in my case. Maybe I'd bring in some of my strategic partners. If you listen to last the, the last show on, on referrals, I talked extensively about strategic partners. So this would be a great opportunity for you to bring in those other professionals or folks that, that you work with and have them teach topics. So you're not just doing all the heavy lifting, you're really keeping it, really keeping it relevant, you know, keeping it, uh, potent for, you know, reason for people to come.

John Jantsch (03:25): Now, one example that that I've used actually in, in my book, the, the ultimate marketing engine was a woman who, you know, it doesn't, here's my point. It doesn't have to be related to your business. If there, if there's a topic or a reason to bring people together, that's going to be a value to them. Uh, it doesn't directly have to be related to your business. So the profile or the woman that I profile in my book, uh, actually was a real estate agent, but she was pretty good at marketing and learned a lot of these new, you know, digital tactics and things. And so she thought, well, I'll just reach out to entrepreneurs and see if they want to have me and, and other folks that I work with talk about marketing topics. And so she brought in entrepreneurs and businesses and, uh, around this topic of, of generally around the topic of marketing and they would meet, you know, monthly for breakfast started very small.

John Jantsch (04:11): I think the last time, uh, I talked to her, it was around two, 300 people would come to this thing. Well, she was not selling real estate. She wasn't talking out real estate, you know, is any of this, but she was clearly the one who benefited from, Hey, you know, I'm your host, you know, I'm bringing this together. Here's the next ex expert I'm bringing to you. So consequently, almost all of her business came when somebody, you know, who was in this club needed to buy or sell a house, guess who they thought of. So it really can just be a for you to, uh, you know, to, to build some authority, to build some influence regardless of the industry, uh, that you're in. Now. There's a couple things that, that I think, make some sense on, if you're gonna take this approach, you're gonna have to commit to it.

John Jantsch (04:55): I mean, it's something where you maybe go out and get, you know, your existing clients and the 10 of you, you know, meet for the first time and then you ask them to bring people. So it's something that you'll, you can't just say, I'm gonna do this one day and, and have it just magically turn into this, uh, incredible thing. It's gonna take an investment of time and energy and, and probably some resources in the beginning, but it could build to the point where it could be a significant revenue generator, uh, for your business. I think the people that have done this kind of thing, there's another organization that I profiled the book called cadre, which is in the Washington, uh, DC area. And it was the same thing. It was a, a financial advisor who, you know, just got tired of going to the traditional networking things that everybody said you had to go do in order to, to, to meet people in that business.

John Jantsch (05:46): So he, he just started creating these monthly get togethers and he would bring in, you know, experts and authors and, you know, it was very, almost curated, you know, grew to the point where it actually is. It actually became, he actually sold his financial, uh, planning practice. And, and in is doing this full time now is, is running this kind of networking club that, you know, people are very, very engaged in as, as members of this. So, you know, it, it really, it it's an idea that could be a very big idea, but even, even as a small size idea, I think it really can do a lot of very positive things for your business. Now, I know some of the, in addition, I mean, I think these things work probably the best when people can physically get together. But I think also creating some sort of platform in like meet up and, or event bright, or even LinkedIn and Facebook, you know, events and groups, you know, having something so people can kind of in between these, uh, get togethers communicate as well.

John Jantsch (06:42): But I think that, that, you know, creating that kind of thing, there are many, many businesses that that can benefit from that.

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John Jantsch (07:41): All right, the seventh idea is something I call a referral mastermind system. So the idea behind this, and this is, I think this can work for a lot of types of businesses, but any business that has clients businesses as clients, uh, I will have that caveat you'd need to be selling to businesses for this to work. One of the things that most of those businesses want is more business is more referrals now, regardless of what you do, obviously it's very natural. I do. I'm a marketing consultant. So me going to, to clients and saying, let me teach you how to generate Earls for your business. I mean, that's a very, very logical thing, but you don't have to be, imagine that financial planner I talked about and they let's say they were working with businesses or law firm, it doesn't really matter. You're working with businesses.

John Jantsch (08:33): Well, all of those businesses, yes, they want what you do for them, but they also want more business. And so what if you create created a kind of monthly referral training for your clients and, and this, and in effect, it's not gonna really be this high level training in some ways, it's, it's really gonna be about you bringing them together to talk about and facilitate the, the idea of referral generation, right? In fact, you could do this in one, on one or, or certainly in groups, you could create some sort of compensation or point system where, you know, people are, you're teaching a referral topic, but you're teaching them a referral topic each month. You're, you're getting them together to talk about how to generate more referrals, or maybe just effectively talking about what they did that month to, to generate referrals. Maybe in some cases they would actually refer each other.

John Jantsch (09:26): In fact, in a lot of instances where if you're B, if your clientele is primarily B2B, that's probably going to happen, but ultimately what's gonna happen is they're going to refer business to you. You, if you, if you help somebody get more referrals, it is just sort of a, a human law of human nature. re recipro. I never can say that word reciprocity. There we go. You know, just happens. I mean, if you're teaching somebody how to generate more referrals, they're going to, to really reply and kind, and generally speaking, you know, you're the financial planner or you're the lawyer. Who's actually not only doing the legal work that you are hired to do. You're actually teaching them how to build their business. Who's not gonna refer that business. Who's not gonna want to bring people into your, you know, your referral mastermind group.

John Jantsch (10:16): So this is something that, you know, I just wanna plant the seed for this idea, but I, you know, this would be very easy. If you've already got a client base, this would be very easy to put together. You just create, you know, you just talk about it as almost a networking group or, you know, referral mastermind loosely. It's gonna be about teaching referrals or facilit facilitating, uh, referrals. You can pick up a book or two on, on the idea of referrals. The ultimate marketing engine comes to mind. I wrote another book called the referral engine, you know, pick up either one of those books and you'll have a whole curriculum for what to teach in your, you know, if you, if you take this idea and you know, you spend a few, your monthly meeting might look like you spending a, you know, few minutes meeting in greeting, then people just go around and share, Hey, here's a success I had then maybe for 20 minutes, you teach a key lesson.

John Jantsch (11:05): Then a lot of times in mastermind groups, it's very common to say, put somebody in a hot seat and say, well, here's, you know, let's talk about a challenge you're having. And then obviously if there's any way to share referrals in, you know, in, at, you know, or somebody can say, Hey, here's a referral I'm looking for. I, I think just these won't have to be that structured. I, I, I believe an experience that teaches me has taught me that, you know, just bringing people together with, even with a loose agenda is going to bear fruit. They're going to find, uh, that valuable. So it's, if that's the case, it's certainly gonna be worth the time that you invest in doing it. All right. So that's my seven grades of referral fuel. Hopefully you've got some, uh, extra tips and ideas out of the, we'll try to connect the whole series for you. There are actually five, this is number five of five. Hopefully you've had a chance to listen to the other four. If not, you can find them at ducttape.me/podcast. All right. Take care out there. And hopefully we'll see you someday soon out there on the road.

John Jantsch (12:07): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you've got employees, if you've got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It's called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.