NYC Elevate is a networking community organized to help our members make more money through structured collaboration and referrals.
Last week we had a great Elevator Accelerator training session where we discussed extended networking, inviting more guests, using Linkedin and how you can use these tactics to organically grow your network and your bottom line.
The first thing to understand is having the right mind set.
If you approach this exercise with the wrong mindset like focusing on getting more referrals, you’ll make this all about you and you will get zero referrals.
Instead, focus on helping people grow their businesses because everyone wants to grow their business.
So make this unselfishly about them.
Remember, someone introduced you to Elevate, and that is helping grow your business.
So have gratitude for that invitation, and pay it forward by helping other people grow their businesses.
And then you get a bonus.
If you help people grow their businesses by expanding their network, your business and your network will naturally grow because of that.
So here’s your action item:
Think about all of the referrals you get outside of Elevate, and then write down your top referral partner that’s NOT currently on the Elevate roster.
And now your mission is to help them grow their business.
Let’s use Sharon Becker, our Makeup Maven, as an example of how this should work.
Sharon loves working with Wedding Planners because they are a solid upstream partner for her.
So she’s goes to LinkedIn and does a search for “Wedding Planners.”
Her next step is to connect with each Wedding Planner and add a note with her connection request, which is something like …
Hi Mary, I work in the wedding industry and I’d like to invite you to our networking event next Wednesday on Zoom. There will be over 100 professionals attending and they often ask for referrals to Wedding Planners. Let’s connect here and I’ll send you the call in details if you’re interested.
Some of them will be interested and others won’t be, but that’s OK because Sharon is going to work the numbers.
And here’s the plan:
Every Wednesday before this meeting starts, she is going to search for Wedding Planners and she’s going to send out one connection request with this message. That’s right just one.
That means she’s going to contact 50 wedding planners over the next year.
Ten of them will attend our Elevate meeting.
Three will apply for membership at Elevate.
And one of them will be accepted and we will induct a new Wedding Planner.
So Sharon will have helped 10 wedding planners grow their respective business, and that means she will have built relationships with all of them, and the net result is that she is now the go to makeup artist for all of them.
And if she gets just one referral from each of them every year, that will be a massive bump in her income.
To wrap it up, if you think about your best referral partners that aren’t in Elevate; and then you reach out to them on LinkedIn and invite them to this meeting, I guarantee that you will build relationships with your top referral partners and I guarantee that you will make more money!
