I was brainstorming with a colleague recently, trying to come up with ideas for providing rewards for people who provide referrals. Many professionals depend heavily on receiving referrals to grow their practice, but are often prohibited (or severely limited) from providing incentives or rewards to people who provide them with referrals. In this case, the amount of money that could be spent per referral was so low it may as well have been $0.
However, many professionals do have very strong networks. They can provide a lot of value to their referral partners by connecting them to other people in their networks. So we developed a strategy based upon this idea of providing rewards by connecting people.
The main idea is to contact different people in your professional network and have them provide gift certificates for their services that you can distribute. For instance:
· An accountant could give you a $25 certificate towards the purchase of a tax return prep
· An interior designer could give you a $50 certificate towards a design plan
· A photographer could give a gift certificate for photos. This is a nice tactic for “life event” clients, - those who purchase your services because of a life event, such as the birth of a child, marriage, college graduation, etc.
You get the idea. You can match up your ability to listen to people’s needs with the resources in your network to create more win-win-win opportunities for your network. It may also give you an excuse to meet some new business owners, restaurateurs, etc., and continue to grow your network.
This strategy of providing rewards to your referral partners while also rewarding others in your network came from combining several ideas that can be found in Referral Flood. Referral Flood is packed with ideas for creating high performing referral markting systems, so if this example doesn't meet your particular needs, you may want to check it out.
