Guest blog: Andy Lopata on planning your referral strategy

In many ways, an effective referrals strategy can be seen as a form of ‘passive marketing’. After all, if implemented correctly, you can have potential clients being told about your services and ‘warmed up’ to speak to you when you are busy working on other areas of the business.

Don’t get fooled though. There are still major costs involved in creating an effective referrals strategy, with many of them coming at the beginning of the process. Building a network that will support you takes investment, both financial and in other ways.

You need to factor in such costs as the time you spend building relationships, attending networking events, taking people out for meals or meeting them for coffee. There is the opportunity cost of other activity you could be undertaking alternatively, the patience to ignore potential immediate sales as you focus on building a longer-term relationship and the financial costs of some of your networking activities.

In order to ensure you do have long-term relationships with people who work for you when you’re otherwise engaged, you need to nurture that network once it’s established. Time still needs to be invested in staying in touch and maintaining relationships.

Find time to make calls and send emails that don’t appear to be relevant to the work in front of you at that time. Make sure you see your key Champions in person, for the occasional coffee or at networking events.

Social media is a fantastic tool for keeping you in front of your network, with status updates, the ability to post interesting links and blogs, and micro blogging with Twitter, you can keep people aware of you and what you are doing. It makes staying in touch with a large and diverse network so much easier than before, but you should be wary of allowing it to replace a more personal interaction.

In his book Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi talks about the importance of constantly ‘pinging’. According to Ferrazzi, “becoming front and centre in someone’s mental Rolodex is contingent on one invaluable little concept: repetition.”

Ferrazzi explains how people with whom you’re establishing a new relationship need to hear or see your name in at least three different types of communications, such as email, phone and a meeting, before there is substantive recognition. In fact, advertising uses this very principle, where a campaign message is reinforced heavily over a period of time using a wide range of different media.

Once you have gained that recognition, Ferrazzi advises that you need to nurture the new relationship with a monthly call or email. To transform that contact into a friend, you need at least two face to face meetings out of the office, while maintaining a ‘secondary’ relationship requires two to three pings a year.

Investing all of this time and effort in establishing strong relationships should ensure that you have a network of people happy and able to refer you effectively. It is important that you then focus on the long-term possibilities and continue to nurture that network.

Andy Lopata has been named by the Financial Times as "one of Europe's leading business networking strategists". As an exclusive offer for Business Sense readers, he is offering our readers his acclaimed book, Recommended: How to Sell Through Networking & Referrals published in July 2011 by Financial Times Prentice Hall, for a special price of just £12.25.

To find out more about how to pick the right networks, implement a successful networking strategy or how to generate more referrals, see Andy's website.